Hi!! I don't know if anyone has drawn this before (sorry if they have!! I couldn't find any evidence of it) but I have recently been plagued with the question of "what if Machete and Vasco were in Bluey?"

Well. Now we know.

To my knowledge, the only Bluey dogs who wear clothes are the ones in uniforms. TECHNICALLY Machete's outfit could count, but I left it out because it's not typical of a main character. He must be naked 😔

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“We’re all working together; that’s the secret.”- Sam Walton

Well here I am. Writing, on what little scrap paper we have. All because Fenten told me it would be good for after we’re all dead and somebody else finds our stuff. For a window into our lives or something. What life is like after the megastronic war. It was actually called “HOW THE FUCK DID WORLD LEADERS MANAGE TO DO THIS” on the news stations and in the papers, but I like to call it the Megastronic War. Sounds cooler. In case you somehow didn’t know, the Megastronic War is what happens when you mix steroids, cocaine, America and Russia into a mortar and pestle, crush and then stir vigorously.

You see, “somebody” high on cocaine (the Russian Czar, Slavic Restanyan) accidentally hit the big red button that launched a Tsar Bomba at Montana, USA. This pissed off the Americans, for reasons unknown to anybody because nobody really cares that much about Montana, and so they started nuking the person they thought was responsible: North Korea. At this time, North Korea had dissolved and was only North Eastern Korea, an unofficial country with no power whatsoever, that had resorted to selling steroids to drugged up Columbians. They, in turn, paid for it by selling opium to the Chinese, who sold cocaine to the highest Russian powers. After Americans nuked North East Korea, the Columbians got annoyed and stopped supplying the Chinese, who nuked Columbia and Oklahoma in response. Really, the enemies don’t know where to hurt America. After this America released a hellfire of nuclear bombs and cluster nukes onto all of the included parties, starting the Megastronic war and getting all other countries involved through various alliances and deals.

Almost the entire world died that year. The entire population of America now fits into Yellowstone National Park. There’s 30 of us, 10 men, 13 women and 7 children.

There are now 30.1 people. Two hormonal teenagers couldn’t keep their hands off each other and got a bit too busy.

We all work to keep this little base of ours running; I usually stand guard and build stuff that we need, Janice usually takes care of the children, Tom is our fisherman, Karnesh is our lovely hunter, and that’s all the people I care to mention for now. I’m honestly a little scared of Karnesh, but don’t tell her that. If she’s still alive when you find this that is. In short, we all do our part to make sure the gears of society keep running among this odd group of people.

Occasionally our scout, Jasper, will find a new person that we haven’t met before and has survived the wilderness on their own. Once we’ve checked to make sure they don’t have parasites or diseases we can’t remedy, we let them into our camp with open arms and open hearts. That’s how we found Karnesh, and also how we found Fenten.

Now I’ve mentioned Fenten twice now and I haven’t even introduced her. She is essentially the brains of the whole outfit, and while she is not the leader, she takes great care to make sure our actual leader, Jackson, doesn’t do anything stupid enough to kill us all. She’s also an attractive young lass of 23, and single. She likes long walks on the lakeside, pinecone coladas and getting caught in the rain (when it isn’t acid rain of course). Does it sound like I’m absolutely smitten yet? If so, that’s because I am. She’s wonderful and absolutely fantastic, if I had any visually artistic capabilities I would try and draw out what she looks like, but I don’t so suck it up and deal with it. My smittenness may be the only reason I didn’t try to argue when she told me to use all this paper to write out my thoughts for potential future readers.

Life in Boulderstone is usually pretty quiet. Occasionally we find a mammoth of a beast to take down, which requires the entire team, excluding Janice and the children, but including pregnant Dackyl and baby daddy Shawn as she isn’t far enough along to justify taking her out of the hunting party just yet.

One time, Jasper found a gigantic buck, with two sets of razor tipped antlers, muscles like you wouldn’t believe, and a tail long and dextrous enough to be considered a fifth limb. It took us only a day to find, perhaps because it was too big for the trees it tried to go through, or maybe the forest was too small for it. Either way, it was one bastard to kill. We found it in a clearing large enough for 200 men. We took up roughly half that space with twenty people and a Mammontian buck that could feed us for three months if we stored its meat beyond the treeline of Mount Holmes. Mammontian is a word we created to classify any seemingly normal species that has since grown to extreme proportions in one way or another due to the radiation outside of the park.

The only problem with that idea of course is that it would require someone to walk all the way there everyday. Why don’t you take a guess at who got that wonderful job? It was nobody. We ended up moving the entire camp closer instead, and before you call us all crazy and frivolous, I’ll ask you a question. Do you know how hard it is to feed a group of thirty people for three months? Especially when some of them are teenagers!?

Back to the hunt.

How does one take down such a large beast, while keeping the meat in good enough condition to eat? The answer is simple: at the base of its skull, sever its spinal cord, like the old bullfighters. Then again, saying and doing are very different things. First, we had to position someone in a place where they would be able to either climb its neck or land on the not-razor-part of the antlers and hang from there to get to the base of the skull, along with some sort of blade large and sharp enough to cut through the cord itself. This job was handed to Karnesh, the expert on such affairs. So while Karnesh, master hunter, climbed the two story tree with her machete, we took the buck’s attention by peppering it with pistols we found in various abandoned camps of very optimistic people. Why people just left their guns in camp, along with plenty of ammunition, I will never know, but they did. These bullets barely made it into the skin of the beast, as a splinter would on me, mildly annoying the beast into seeking utter destruction of the source. When we finally did our job right and put the beast into just the right position for Karnesh to stop being a coward and jump on it, not to say I would have done it any sooner, she somehow swan dived from the branch and caught the base of the second set of antlers. From there she took her machete from the holster on her hip and drove the tip into its flesh slightly left of the center as far as it could go and jerked the handle left, cutting straight through the spinal cord, ending its life cleanly and humanely.

Meanwhile, the other 19 of us were frantically trying to not to be trampled by its massive hooves or hit by its fifth limb of a tail. This is what happens when you annoy an animal four times taller and seventy times stronger than you. I almost died four times, not including when Jerry almost shot me in the head while aiming for it’s chest.

When it hit the floor, the resounding thud hit me like a clap of thunder, and we got to work field dressing it, saving the hide for later when we will make it into clothing, tarps, and blankets for everyone to use. I’ll spare you the gruesome details because it was truly disgusting and I’d rather you not ruin the only paper I was able to find. Our leader, Jackson, lives in the hollowed out skull now, because we couldn’t find a good place to put it.. It’s actually roomier than you would think.

Three days after we moved to the mountain, some neurotic teenagers decided that instead of asking one of us for assistance about the mushrooms they found, they’d try them out themselves. It’s been a week. They’re still high. They’ve been less productive than a sloth on sleeping pills while taking substantial hits from a bong.

Regardless, I’m running out of space on my paper. To keep this ending short, we keep working as our own gears in this living machine of new society, and it looks like it’s going to be a decent life now. Thanks for reading about humanity’s continued survival.

I incorporated New Historicism through the rampant corruption in politics, globally and locally, and the large international drug trade. I also incorporated New Historicism with the current global political environment in which current countries, such as North Korea and America, are threatening each other with nuclear missile launches. Similarly, I included the idea of people valuing their gun rights as they carry different types of guns along with them as they went camping, for self defense or hunting purposes. Examples of formalism in my story would be the jumps through time as it is told from the perspective of one man reminiscing on how his band of people have survived, and he wrote it as a stream of consciousness, while leaving some small room for an update or two as he went along. Due to the story being written as a stream of consciousness from the protagonist, the sentences were shortened and seemingly incomplete at times, giving off the feeling that he was directly speaking to the reader, giving an insight into the speech patterns of this period of time. On the mythological front, different archetypes throughout the story include “Protagonist” as being the Regular Person, someone everyone can relate to who just wants to belong to a group and not be left out. As such, he commonly is the one to advocate for the inclusion of newly found people. The scout, Jasper, is the explorer as he is often away from the central group for weeks at a time, looking for new things that might be useful to the group, proving his autonomy. This gives him the chance to not be trapped within the limits of their community, giving him freedom. Fenten fits the idea of the Sage as she primarily uses the knowledge of old to advise the leader in the right directions to assist the group in its survival. With her help, Jackson overcomes his weaknesses as the leader, to keep order within the group and keep a “Lord of the Flies” environment from developing.

I came up with the idea for my story from a free hand drawing I made. It was of a man sitting on a wooden patio, drawing a tree on some paper by the riverside. This image is not included as any art that would inspire the story as I unfortunately threw it out a few weeks ago, and did not take any pictures of it. The premise is that the story details how the man gets to that point of his life, living in reasonable comfort in the forest, and this short story is about the relatively early period in his new life. As I wrote it, I also took inspiration and knowledge from real world events and tensions, as well as old customs (bullfighting) that would assist the protagonists along their life’s journey and missions.

The main purpose of the story is to show that even in the face of the most extreme adversity, as shown by the conditions they were put under due to the war and having to learn to live off of the land, that people will still be people. This is to say that people will always continue to have interests, flaws, and hold onto whatever happiness they find. Too often it is found in movies and tv shows that once an apocalyptic event occurs, the protagonists, or the survivors, magically become flawless and know the perfect solutions to most problems while somehow not keeping a firm hold on their humanity. In this case, however, all the characters have their normal human flaws, such as the leader, who is a bit of a numbskull, or Karnesh who has trouble in social situations (as detailed with how “Protagonist” is slightly afraid of her). The primary theme of this story is that with a concerted effort, it is possible to traverse adversity, so long as everyone does their fair share. Even though everyone has their flaws, they can be overcome or overlooked, at least temporarily, to achieve a goal through collaboration. As the quote above the story explains, the secret to their survival is that they are all working together.

The relevance of the quote before the story is that it essentially explains the theme. Every person has their place and their role in this newly created society, and that is how they survive. The war that started the whole necessity for a new society was started because the leaders and people of the world did not work together for a better future. Instead, they always kept looking for the chance to kill or otherwise disadvantage their fellow man. The new generation will instead work together to survive this world, and try to better each other instead of destroy each other.

Mysteries of the Q Files

Chapter 12: Party Preparations

“You are paying for these accessories from your own quickly diminishing savings, young man,” Trick’s mother told him.

“If we solve this case, I want my allowance tripled,” Trick haggled.

“No son, there will be no negotiating. As it is now, if you solve this case, your father and I might not murder you in cold blood for what you’ve done.”

“Are you recording this Naomi? Since she’s pulled the murder card, I think that justifies me using blackmail.”

“No one just gets away with blackmailing the FBI, much less their mother, Trick,” Naomi said with a satisfied smile. “But I can start recording if you want. It’ll be great to play at your funeral.”

“Oh, there won’t be a funeral. Just a dark night burying him under the flowerbed, which he keeps forgetting to water and weed by the way,” Susan Brown said with her own satisfied smirk.

“My mother and a my partner in crime teaming up against me. This is going to end terribly,” Trick muttered.

They were driving to a clothes store so that Trick and Naomi could dress themselves for the parts they were about to play. He settled on dressing up as characters from the show Supernatural. It would pass of as costumes at the party and then when they met with the outcasts, they could act like nerds, and Supernatural was a show that enough of a normal following that they probably didn’t risk getting excluded for their taste in series. They would dress in flannel and frayed coats. He and Naomi had also agreed between themselves to have knives on their person just in case. After the vampire attack, they were beginning to feel the reality of this case even more. He was proud of his new friend, that she wanted to tough it out and solve the mystery.

Even if Naomi was siding with his mom, there was still hope for her yet.

“Fine! I’ll pay for it myself,” Trick groused.

“My clothes, too,” Naomi added.

Trick threw her a nasty look as his mother said, “That sounds like a very gentleman thing of you to do, Patrick. I think naomi here is just the kind of good influence you need in your life.”

“I’m happy that you are enjoying this,” Trick said sourly.

“Immensely,” his mother said crisply. “So tell me, what exactly are the two of you looking for in at these two gatherings that you are getting all dressed up for?”

Trick sighed. “I think there are two motivating factors behind these kidnappings and attacks. The more I think about it, the more certain I feel that the cool kids did something to anger the less popular kids in town. They embarrassed them through some terrible prank or attack, something along those lines. These kids want to get back at them, they don’t just want to get even either, they want complete and utter revenge. Now then, the girls who were taken do share a similarity in who they wanted to date. The jerk who got taken by a different creature was also a part of the same circle. That vampire could have gone after all the people at that table, just like the wolf could have easily killed all three girls at the party. But instead the targets were specific. Someone is using the established pecking order to pick their targets. This suggests one of the popular kids. Maybe one of the popular kids is being used by or working with the kids who were humiliated to take out their revenge.”

“That sounds too complicated for a bunch of teenagers to put together,” Susan said.

Trick raised an eyebrow at her as Naomi spoke up. “That is why I think there might be something off about this town. Has Miles looked into what I requested earlier? What kind of renovations have been done in this town. Something crazy might have been unearthed.”

“She’s looking into it,” Susan assured her. “But there is a lot that we are working on at the moment. She’s busy and focusing on what she and Agent Conturbatio are doing. I’ll admit, I don’t like the way that man wants to use you kids for this investigation, but I have the feeling that everything will be taken care before school starts again on Monday.”

“Why do I have the feeling that your certainty has very little to do with what we’re doing,” Trick asked, feeling suspicious.

“I just don’t like that we are sending you into possible danger without knowing more.”

“Then why do you think the case is almost solved,” Trick fired back.

“Agents Miles and Conturbatio have their own special lead. We’ll know everything soon enough, and after that, we’ll have this case wrapped up.”

So they’re keeping stuff back from us. That’ll make things especially dangerous from this point on.

At the clothes store Naomi and Trick beelined it for the Loners R’ Us section. These were the types of clothing that people only wore when they wanted to appear edgy or tell people to get lost. This was far from Trick’s usual style choice, but when in Rome. Naomi came up to him after only ten minutes in stylishly ripped jeans with a hanging flannel shirt and a long, frayed jacket with plenty of pockets.

“I thought girls took forever to choose their outfits,” Trick said.

“I’m obviously not like every girl and nor am I a stereotype, Patrick, you’ll do well to remember that,” Naomi retorted.

“Duly noted.” Yup, definitely hope for you, Naomi.

Trick chuckled and quickly chose his own outfit. He had seen a few episodes of Supernatural, and he kind of liked Dean’s character. He tried to make himself look like the cool guy, but he was missing the signature jacket. Oh well, he wasn’t that big of a nerd. They then went and each got six knives a piece. Trick also got a machete to hide across his back. Just in case. Not because it felt totally cool or anything.

How did a small town like this get cool stuff like this? Then again, there are weirdos walking around in lettered jackets. So dumb… That went out of style long ago!

Trick also kept in close touch with his informant. He had let Rachel know all about the kidnapping and from her figured out some interesting things. If the Sphinx was holding information back, then so would he. Everything about these popular kids came down to dating. More so than most places he had seen, who you were in a relationship with, gave you the status you enjoyed. Everyone who had been kidnapped so far was trying to climb the social ladder. Seriously, this town was unreal. Hence being over prepared with knives.

Knowing what kind of social spiderweb he was about to get himself and Naomi into, Trick wondered if he should be more worried about the monsters or the teens with whom he was about to be rubbing shoulders.