SquidgeWorld Archive

"But how do you turn it off if something goes wrong?" Kon asked naïvely, staring at the Cosmic Treadmill. Not that he had any idea what they'd use it for now that the 30th Century had been rewritten yet again, but... Bart thought for what was probably five minutes of subjective time. "Well, what you want to do here is this," he said, pointing to various as-yet-unnamed parts of the treadmill. "You want to attack it at its most vulnerable spot, come at it from this angle and locate the automatic flip-flop override device here, which in turn will defuse the anti-gyroscoptic pre-interface thrust chamber and the endromatic centrifugal anti-gravity shield deflectors, then you simply deactivate the axial gyro pre-subinertia photomegatronic oscillator that you see here-" Kon's head was bobbing around like balloon on a string trying to follow Bart's only-just-too-fast motions - he'd given up on following Bart's explanation after the first word he didn't understand. His face looked much as it would if someone were to perform the Monty Python fish-slapping dance on him - in other words, completely bewildered, befuddled, and bemused. "Huh?" "You pull the plug," Tim explained with typical Bat succinctness. Though even he seemed a bit rattled at Bart's meandering elucidation. Glaring scathingly, Bart hissed testily, "That's what I said." Kon whimpered and ducked his head, brain on overload. Tim just rolled his eyes and tried to pretend that he understood what Bart had actually said, as opposed to what he meant. Obviously, Bart shouldn't have memorized the thesauri in the San Francisco Library.