Mega-Bear vs. The US Air Force, Part Two

The police didn’t even bother showing at first; they left the job in the hands of the supposedly-capable animal services. Armed with beltloads of tranquilizers, and some reserve firearms in case of problems, they certainly seemed to be more than up to the task of one bear. As they hunted through the forest, the feelings of dread began to build regardless of this. The tracks, easy enough to follow, seemed to follow a shifting pattern that denoted – at best – extensive neurological damage. Realizing they would be lucky if they were dealing with a mad bear, many of the team began to ready their pistols.

Among these nervous men was one Hunter Nash. Many people tried to tell him his name was ironic, given his position, but he either openly or inwardly corrected them – his name was coincidental. To be ironic, he would have to be the hunted. This thought went through his mind at the moment and he knew, desperately glancing into the woods in search of this crazed bear, his name might actually become ironic.

At last, though, the tracks lead to a clearing – one of the grilling zones in a larger picnic area – and the bear is spotted, slumped over with dozens of empty picnic baskets surrounding him. Silently taking aim, the team deploys as it has been trained: two agents get in position with a heavy net as three more members take aim with their tranqs. The shots are fired, bringing the bear out of his gorge-induced stupor, and he panics and begins to run, knocking over the grill, embers spreading on the ground. As the animal control agents make chase, the embers grow into a steady flame which winds to the woods. The bear turns at the smell of smoke, more tranqs being shot into him. Standing on two feet, a roar, as terrifying for its contents as its volume, erupts:

“Only you. Can prevent. Forest fires.”

Stunned by this impossible event, the team nevertheless finds their bodies moving, driven by a will deeper and more primal than their own, going through the proper measures to put out the small blaze.

Hunter, having fallen behind, comes upon the scene with no small amount of bewilderment. Not one to ask questions, though, he races on after the bear, now switching to the live rounds. As he takes running shots, at best grazing the bear, he begins to lose sight of the animal until he has to resort to slowly tracking him, knowing the bear has to be several hundred feet in front of him now.

A whirring sound grabs his attention. An engine – impossible, he thinks, there’s nothing out here but woods. Paying no respect to this detail, though, a bush plane lifts off into the sky within view of Hunter. Flying the plane, and breaking the man’s view of what is possible and not, is a bear, wearing a scarf, aviator jacket, and hat.

As the plane flew into the sky, the stunned Nash stood still for some time. It’s not every day that your reality is broken. Finally, seizing upon some last vestige of stability before his psyche truly fell apart, he radioed to the police. Quietly, he explained the situation, assured the man it was in no way a prank, and eventually got him to do what he had called for – the National Guard was alerted. The Air Force began their first-ever bearhunt.

Mega Bear Vs. The US Air Force, Part 1

It was a beautiful day when Shawn Clay walked into the office. In fact, it was the first truly pleasant day of the summer, having, till then, been a mostly drab affair. Judging by the haggard look on his face, Clay’s mood had not yet caught up with the weather. “Any more sightings?” he called into the park office without looking to see if anyone could answer him back.

“Yeah, some hikers came in a little shaken a few minutes after I opened,” answered Ursula. Some people liked to joke about how fitting it was for a woman named Ursula to be working as a ranger at Bear Trail park, but she hated those people almost as much as she did her overly coincidental name. “Sounded like it was B-17 again.”

“B-17? You know, up until this last month he was always an average bear; he never cared to be around people much. I wonder what’s gotten into him?”

Ursula frowned at the numbers on her screen. Clay was a man given to worry, so she didn’t want to bring this to his attention yet, but not only had overall bear sightings increased 300% in the last month, but they were virtually all either unknown bears or almost certainly B-17. They hated having to put an animal down, but if this were to continue, their options were limited. Clay collapsed in his chair, wondering to himself if those two hunters from last month had had anything to do with it. They had come to the station, rambling and screaming about the perfect bear, and from he had been told when checking in on them had hardly stopped since. The story had caused some local commotion, but had been mostly forgotten already. “The perfect bear...” he muttered softly.

“Don’t start in on that nonsense again,” hastily spoke Ursula. “Bluejay’s wild stories never haunted you before and I don’t want you turning superstitious on me.” Bluejay was one of the few local Native Americans left, and he was also Clay’s best friend. Though Bluejay was not given to superstitions himself, his grandfather had been something of a historian and folklore collector and had prided himself on distilling nearly all of the old legends and stories into Bluejay from a young age. One of these stories concerned the perfect bear, or, more accurately translated, the all-bear, and his pact with humans to leave them be if they were to do likewise with him. The story had stuck with Clay due to the bear sightings and the boredom that comes with being a park ranger during a rainy season. Ursula continued her interruption of his meditations: “Did you get all the picnic areas ready? It looks like we’ll finally have some today.”

“It wasn’t tough. The storms hadn’t done much but drop a branch or two, no real damage. It’ll be a great day for people.”

The rest of the morning passed without incident. Neatly at 11, several families began to arrive, colorful tablecloths and blankets aplenty, making their way to one of several designated areas in the park for a nice afternoon lunch. However, almost as rapidly as they had shown up, people started running back to the station, panic in their eyes. The complaint was universally the same: as soon as they’d set up, a bear came out of the woods right at them. Knowing this time B-17 had crossed the line, Ursula and Shawn told the people to go wait in their cars or go home, after they had collected their information, and that they’d make sure to get any abandoned possessions back to them. Leaving Ursula to deal with the panicked picnickers, Clay surreptitiously grabbed a shotgun and walked out to the picnic areas. What he saw their caused a knot to grow in his stomach, knowing he wasn’t dealing with your average bear here. Picking up his walkie-talkie to contact Ursula, he viewed the scene before him: every single picnic basket was gone.

Mega Bear vs. The US Air Force -- Part 0 (Introduction)

A bear lumbered through the forest. This was no normal bear -- or maybe it was. You see, this was the most bear-like bear of all the bears in the world. There were no characteristics that were in any way unbearish. In fact, one could say this was the platonic ideal of the bear, except for one thing: no person had ever seen this bear, nor had the bear ever seen a person. It's very difficult to be identified as an ideal if nothing that can think knows you exist.

This changed one day. Hunters saw this ideal bear and, wanting such a magnificent beast for their den, took aim. Smelling something amiss in the air, the bear saw them and, rearing and letting loose the most bear-like of all roars, the hunters quaked. Some primitive part of their brains clicked into place, knowing instinctively what this creature was. This was not just a bear -- this was the archetype of bears, the bear that haunts our collective unconscious, the very bear that has inhabited every nightmare about bears since the dawn of thought. As the hunters cowered, their fear made this bear perfect, ideal, and the universe knew it.

The universe operates on a handful of principles which, for the most part, maintain stability. One important part of this stability is keeping out intruders, crossovers from other, nearby universes, which interact with ours in the medium of thought. When these intrusions happen to occur, as is wont in an imperfect system, there are ways (which deal with the impossible, so we'll not go into that here) the universe's laws will affect it in order to send it back.

This bear was now a being of such an impossibly bearish nature that it was sensed as an intruder, as belonging to the universe of ideals and archetypes. However, this was not entirely true, of course, as this bear, though impossible, really was just a bear; but who's going to argue with the laws of the universe? The bear is torn through the universe, in an attempt to place it into the ideal realm, but it did not fit there. Stuck in limbo, for an infinite amount of no time at all, with no universe to call its own, the bear tore across all the possible universes, all fiction, all history, all culture, all myth, and was spat back into our universe, but leaving behind it a greater trail of damage than has ever been caused before or since. It was no longer just the ideal bear, though; no, it was far, far more than that. As the hunters ran, not knowing what they were seeing, the bear roared a roar not belonging of this world. For this bear was now every bear, a monstrous amalgamation of every bear that has ever been imagined or feared or loved. This was the Mega Bear.

Coming soon...

Prepare yourselves, gentle denizens of the internet (known as the possibly 3 people who read this). For...Mega Bear is coming.

Natural Disaster

"Looks like rain."  Two Mexican surfers looked over the gulf at the dark storm clouds rolling in from the east.  There had been news of an oncoming hurricane, but it wasn't scheduled to come in for another few days.  Unbeknownst to these poor surfers, Hurricane Cristobal had picked up speed and was upgraded to a Category 5.  Out of nowhere, the hurricane appeared, almost as if it knew exactly where it was going.  It appeared to be making a beeline straight for...the San Martin Volcano.

Because the volcano had been dormant for hundreds of years, small villages built up around it, living in blissful ignorance of this fateful day.  As Cristobal neared the coast, a strange thing happened...any animal within 20 miles of the San Martin Volcano started running inland, as if they knew something terrible was about to happen.  Villagers everywhere saw this strange event and wondered what could be coming.  They would soon find out.

As Cristobal rushed closer to the coast, it triggered a fault line.  Plates slid past each other quickly like two fat people squeezing by each other in the aisle in the grocery store.  This unclogged the conduit of San Martin Volcano starting an eruption.  Lava erupted from the volcano with a blast.  As this is happening, Cristobal finally reached land.  As some hurricanes do, Cristobal spawned tornadoes, like minions sent out to do his bidding.  One headed for the erupting volcano.  Somehow, the tornado made it up the volcano, heading straight over the crater and lava flow.  Amazingly, the tornado began to pick up the lava, swirling it around in a cyclone of lava.  Thus, the lavanado was born.

The fearsome lavanado made its way down the mountain toward the city, leaving a path of firey destruction in its wake.  It was as if a herd of rampaging buffalo had passed through. Only those buffalo were made of lava. And, also, were rotating at approximately 150 mph.  Villagers ran for their lives at the sight of it.  Even the strongest men wept and cried for mercy to any god that would listen.  But none were spared the wrath of the lavanado.

Tales of the lavanado's destruction would be passed on from generation to generation.  As time passed, the story slowly turned to legend, until no one actually believed in the existence of the lavanado.  So they live in peace, not knowing, that at one moment, the conditions could be right again...for the lavanado.

Man Vs. Gravity and Ice

A man I working his way up a sheer ice face with a group of wealthy clients. One of the clients slips and starts to fall; as the rope that connects him to the next man up pulls tight, that man loses his grip. As the chain continues and the rest of the clients begin to fall one after another, the man takes off his gloves and punches his bare fists into the ice to hold himself there. When the tension reaches the rope attached to his belt, he does not move; unfortunately the rope cannot bear the weight and snaps off of his belt. As the man does not wish the clients to die (as he gets paid half after he brings them back), he dives down in an attempt to beat the clients to the ground. When he reaches the first one he grabs him and pulls the client up to accelerate himself downward even faster; he does this with each successive client and gains sufficient speed to gain a few seconds on them. As he approaches the ice below he lets loose a yodel that would shatter the eardrums of a normal man. This yodel has such intensity at the resonant frequency of the ice crystals that the ice below liquefies into a lake. The man then proceeds to hit the lake with enough force to break the surface tension for the clients so they do not hurt themselves landing in the water. He swims around and gathers the clients onto his back to run them the ten miles back to camp.

The Most Awesome of Eating Contests, pt. 4 (Finale)

At long last, the end of the contest had arrived. The judges, carefully selected for not only their status as gourmands, but also for their appreciation of the awesome arts and overall durability (awesome food can be its own challenge), had been gathered. While the first opponent is carefully portioning out the Caspian sea wolf sauté, the second is nowhere to be seen.

Meanwhile, over a mile away, the man wonders about how to deliver his blue whale in a sufficiently awesome manner. Sliding down the volcano, he realizes his answer. As he lands below, he delivers a series of precise punches to the side of the volcano, the reverberations causing at first a slow rumble, but soon increasing, now independent of the punches. Quickly sprinting up the side of the volcano, he leaps onto the blue whale kabob as gas and lava erupt, blasting him (and his dish) into the air, giving the whale meat a final, cajun blackening. As the pieces land for miles around, approximately one lb each land on each plate in front of the judges, as the man himself comes flying down, clutching onto a blasted portion of the kebab stick. As it lunges straight into the ground, it deflects greatly at the end, slowing as if preparing or the final catapulting of the man, as it perfectly breaks, placing him gently on the ground.

There is some delay in the eating, as one judge fainted from the awesometicity of the display and had to be revived. After that, they tasted it.

The flavor itself defied words, language as a whole, experience all together. The best description, then, would be to give the reactions. One judge began to weep, knowing that after that first taste their life had peaked, never again to reach that acme of existence. To another, it proved the existence of a Supreme Being, as science could never explain away that utter joy, that exuberance, contained in even the smallest portion. The third appeared to have gone catatonic for specific reasons unknown.

It seemed an insurmountable task to outdo it. The man, though, had confidence in his sauté -- a confidence that can only be shared between a man and his wolf sauté, a confidence which has before now gone unappreciated, unlauded in the chronicles of man. From here on, that confidence will not go unfeared.

Serving the dish in the glued-together remains of the wolves' skulls, the sauté bubbled slightly as it seemed to possess an aura all its own. Though the taste would have been nice to describe, it will become clear that an accurate description is impossible for this dish as well, though for different reasons.

It was first carefully spoon fed to the now-catatonic judge. At first there seemed no reaction, then it seemed he was drooling it out without moving. However, it soon became apparent that it was, in fact, dribbling from the bottom of his mouth where it had burnt a hole through his jaw. Before consciousness could be returned, the dish consumed the remainder of the jaw, and through a bizarre osmosis, traveled through his blood vessels and, in conflagrant glory, burst his entire body into flames. The other judges, now slightly hesitant to try, but knowing their honor depended on it, simultaneously took a bite. As the hardier one raced toward the volcano, hoping to intercept the lava en route in order to take a drink to cool his mouth, the other sat perfectly still. Slowly, his head began to shake, more and more violently, until finally it exploded outward. There, where once was his head, sat a glowing ball of energy. It began to float upward and both men could have sworn that they quietly heard, in some strange form of language that transcended traditional senses, "Delicious."

Seeing that, truly, they were both winners, as they were clearly the greatest beings on the planet, the two men silently came to an agreement, nodded their assent to each other, then raced towards the lava and dove in, racing each other to the top of the volcano.