|| -------- -- -----  A E R I E   O B L I V I A N A . singular book of text wandertainment by Frank Edward Nora ------------------- ----------- PILN OF SCREW RIDGE--CUP 1--"PILN" --------  ||  Severe Repair  ||  Piln of Screw Ridge  ||  -------> (Cup SRsr001, Created v2 (6/7/99), Copyright 1999) = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = More than anything a hermit crab named Statue Alvarez helped her. Hey Piln, we're arriving at the shopping center where you first met him. "Okay, thanks Mary." Piln said as a woman walked away. A calm silence came to the shopping center. A distant jet plane overhead and cars on a nearby parkway were dreamy white noise. Piln sat in her motorized wheelchair, eight years old, twisted by a cruel disease. She was daydreaming when she caught sight of something in her peripheral vision. She turned her wheelchair around and saw it--a little hermit crab crawling along the edge of a wall, directly away from a corner. She watched the little thing, fascinated as it ambled along. All of a sudden, the crab disappeared from where it had been and reappeared on her arm. She felt it's legs on her flesh as it crawled along, but she was strangely calm. "I've had enough." the hermit crab said in a cute, nasalm cartoony voice. Then he stopped, near Piln's elbow, and stared up at her. She didn't respond. A car drove by, and she looked up at it, then back at the hermit crab. "My name is Statue Alvarez. I have a lot of stories to tell. I was like you once." the hermit crab said. Piln still had nothing to say. "I could heal you right now." Staue said. "Make you whole. But I wouldn't commit such a crime. Not now. I've changed." Piln narrowed her eyes. "Where did you come from?" she asked. "I come from a wish, a wish I made. I wished for power. I was like you, crippled. I gave up my body, I got this new body. Very powerful, but absolutely a hermit crab, no way to change." "I think I would do the same thing." Piln said. "I know. But I would have been better off staying the way I was. I could have died and had it that much better in my next life. Now, I don't know if I'm ever gonna die, and I've hurt a lot of people with my capricious ways. My jealous ways." "Why can't you heal me?" Piln asked softly. "Look around you. I'm sure there are girls you envy furiously. Look at them. I could show you the reality of them. I could show you their whole future. They are helpless, drifting things. Had you not your problem, you'd be just like them. I could show you the you who never had this problem." Piln was still frozen in fascination, but Statue's presence on her arm still held some horror for her. She was considering asking Statue to get off her arm when she felt something on her other arm. It was a little robotic hermit crab. "I am Mecha Statue Alvarez." the robot said in a cartoony robotic voice. "This is what I have to say, go ahead and cure her, man." "Who the hell are you?" Statue said, with genuine surprise in his voice. "I am Mecha Statue Alvarez. I come with criticism. Your plan is to teach Piln a lesson, you have already begun teaching her a philosophy. You believe in this philosophy very strongly, and though she will resist at first, Statue, she will eventually come to see things your way. And she will have an epiphany. She will think, oh, how wrong I have been. Thank goodness for hermit crab Statue Alvarez for teaching me the right way. The wisdom of it. But it is a false wisdom, you. This is a bad course of action. I have come to put my two cents worth in." "Piln," Statue said in a serious tone, "I don't know where that robot is from. I thought I had escaped from my former life." "I am not of your former life." Mecha Statue Alvarez said. "I am something totally new. Look man--you have done some great evil. Don't use this girl Piln as a cruch." "That is not what I'm doing, robot." Statue said. "It is. So here is what I am saying, alright? You cure her, and I will give her an idea for a video game, called 'Video Devil Junior'. This game is massively popular in many alternate realities, but it hasn't been developed here yet. Piln could introduce the idea, and make a lot of money. And Piln is beautiful. She's a beautiful child, and she will make a beautiful adult. Rich and famous and beautiful. This is what I propose. And I tell you, there is nothing wrong with this idea." Then, both hermit crabs disappeared, the real one from her left arm and the robotic one from her right. She used the joystick on her motorized wheelchair to check her immediate surroundings, but there was no sign of them. -------> ------------------- ----------- -------- -- -----