Transistor Radio – Cloud Cult
It is a little known fact that intelligent life is, in fact, alive and thriving on several other planets in our very own solar system. The reason scientists have failed to discover them is simply that they have not wished to be seen…until now.
A peaceful morning in Everytown, America. Children are lined up waiting to get on the school bus like any other day. Today, however, is not quite any day. As the door to the bus opens, they realize the driver is no longer the lovable rascal, Dennis “Doofus” Simpson. Instead, staring at them from behind the big wheel is Zorro! The children step back in consternation only to realize Zorro has bounded out of the van brandishing a sword. “On the bus, puny earthlings, we set sail immediately.” The children do not go to a particularly good school or else someone might have noticed the bus is not currently equipped with any sails. But that is neither here nor there.
Fearfully, the kids get on one by one until only little Joey remains. Do you remember Zack from Saved By the Bell? Joey looked nothing like him. He did get beat up a lot, though, which had drained him of all fear. Compared with the daily threat of losing his Magic playing cards money to the school bully, Zorro’s sword was nothing. He refused to get on the bus. Zorro certainly was not going to stand for this. He had a schedule to keep, after all. His sword flashed three times, cutting an entirely predictable Z across Joey’s shirt, causing the sour patch kids that had been safely contained in his shirt pocket to spill onto the ground.
Now Joey was a man who knew what he liked and he LIKED sour patch kids, so this naturally made him burst into tears and run away. Zorro was getting bored with the story by this point so he let Joey go and returned to the bus.
What he didn’t know, though, is that the sour patch kids were MAGICAL. Where the landed, they began to quickly grow in a manner reminiscent of Jack in the Beanstalk. Except this time, instead of plants, they produced giant replicas of the hungry hungry hippos. Zorro tried to drive away before they became too big, but since he was more used to riding horses than driving buses, he didn’t know about keys and things, so the bus didn’t move until it was swallowed up by the purple hungry hungry hippo, which certainly didn’t care that it was never explained why Zorro was from another planet or what he was doing kidnapping children in a school bus. It was pretty pissed about the tense changing halfway through, though. Hippos are like that sometimes.