…wondering what the hell happened to their GMC conversion van. It was much nicer than the P.O.S. they’re currently driving. Suddenly the First’s cellphone rings. He answers it. Their secretery, back at the base, informs them that there’s been another split in the timeline. Both Bryant Gumble and some bank clerk have 26F. “Jesus Christ,” the First moans, “not again.” As soon as he hangs up, the phone rings again. The First answers it. The caller is none other than Jesus Christ. “Stop taking my name in vain, will ya?” “Oh, uh, sorry.” “OK, you’re forgiven, but watch your language. By the way, Odin stole the GMC. He and Olivia are parked in a dark alley behind the K-mart around the corner.” “Thanks, Big Guy. Bye.”
The First then tells Seven, who has replaced Six as driver, to…
…go back to the 7-11 where the callow 19-year-old is still on duty, ostensibly to buy stuff but actually to get 26F returned to the till, as part of a greater plan.
But as they approach the counter there, a huge van pulls up. Instead of alien creatures, nine very normal women get out. Well, normal as human beings go, but they are quite distinctive.
Buxom Sally Mears and her three friends, Betty Idelson, Vera Tedson and, of course, Olivia Short. The clerk reacts.
The other five women, all with wedding rings, are Eloise Sharp, the driver, in expensive clothes; the tall, buxom Jane Bradley; the near-Dolly Parton clone Mary Blonda; the uninhibited, scandalously-dressed redheaded Loora Oranjeboom; and the tiny, hourglass-shaped bespectacled Louise Brown. Their husbands wait in the van.
Seeing these nine women approaching him, including his secret crush Olivia, the clerk promptly…
…creams his pants. Good thing he’s wearing that longish tunic thing they make him wear at 7-11. Flustered, he goes to the back to make sure he’s clean. As he rushes by, he accidently snags his watch on Loora Oranjeboom’s blouse. Tugging franticly, he manages to tear himself free, also tearing off Loora’s flimsy sheer white blouse. Her large (44DD) breasts are barely held in the Victoria’s Secret Silk Nothing Sheer Bra she is sporting. In fact, her nipples are showing above the pink fabric because she still doesn’t know how to properly fit a bra when trying them. “Oh well,” she thinks to herself. The chill air of the open soda/beer cooler works it’s magic on her cooler
An unremarkable looking man wearing a fetching outfit of black ribless cords, off white cotton long sleeve shirt, and black/red patterned tie, along with black western boots festooned with ivory spurs. His dark blonde hair is gelled up a bit on his hatless head. Loki smiles at the wonderful sight before him, namely, Loorna. She looks positively godlike herself with her alabaster skin, green eyes, long straight red hair, and absolutely perfect face. Her ass is out of this world, too, especially in those fade Lee hipsters.
“Hi, Loki…I heard you recovered just fine!” (Loki had, in fact, been seriously injured in a car crash almost a year before and spent eight months in traction and therapy and only just before this thread was begun was he able to walk unaided.) She continued, “Pete [Loora’s husband] asked about you.” (Pete Oranjeboom and Loki had been in the Service years before and saved each other’s lives.)
There was no question but that Loora–especialy with her blouse yanked off–was quite the fetching sight. But so was the unmarried, unencumbered Vera Tedson, who could outdo Loora as a siren, with her sexy low voice and polished poise. All the attributes Loora had, so did Vera, except her hair was raven-black, not red. Vera sidled up to Loki in a way that would put Mae West and Lauren Bacall to shame, even as he and she were carrying on an animated conversation with Loora, and her husband Petrus, who just stepped in and draped his heavy flannel shirt over his wife’s ample bosom, and rested his arms over her bosom as well.
Meanwhile, Mary Blonda wanted to buy some Junior Mints, a Uno Bar, and Martinelli’s apple juice, and, as the characters One through Seven observed, was just about to receive 26F from the till. The worried beings hastened to avoid this by sleight of hand, so Mary and the clerk would be none the wiser (lest they expose the beings), so…
Number Four (Shaq) proceeds to “accidentally” tip over the magazine rack. The clerk (who just arrived from his other job at the bank) swears fluently as he goes over to pick up the magazines. While everyone is distracted, Five slips a tentacle out from under his costume and snags 26F. Being a good sport, he puts another $5 bill into the till so the clerk won’t come up short at the end of his shift.
The Team slips out of the 7-11 and fires up the '87 Dodge Caravan. Or rather, they try to. It won’t start. Fortunately, One remembers his call from Jesus, so the Team runs down the street to the K-mart. Hopefully, Odin is still there with the GMC.
Meanwhile, Bryant Gumble (who has the other 26F) is still riding around in the taxi. His driver, a recent immigrant from Uzbekistan, is totally unfamiliar with this area, and is now hopelessly lost. Finally, Bryant orders the cabbie to stop and he gets out. Bryant looks around, and discovers that he is…
…in Uzbekistan. In the year 1922. Bad place for an egoistic journalist with a chip on shoulder about the race issue in national television. Actually, Odin just wants him out of the way for a while. Bryant is perfectly safe. OK, let’s just say he won’t die.
Back to now and where ever we are.
Odin has traded the GMC conversion van for a 1964 Ferarri GT 250 California convertible. It is so choice. If you have the means, get one.
He tells Seven, "Get in, Darlin’ " in an exaggerated Texas drawl.
…cell-phone holster. She has started to call the Auto Club about the van that won’t start when Eloise and Mary approach. “Don’t bother calling Triple A,” she says. “We can handle it.”
She and Mary get in the back of Eloise’s big van, and come out a few minutes later in coveralls, tailored to fit their shapley figures just fine. They carry toolboxes and prowl around the engine compartment. Eloise tugs at some wires, manipulates a wrench, and scans some parts professionally.
“Go try to start it now, Mary,” she says.
Mary does. It turns over now and sounds better than ever!
The team thanks Eloise and Mary profusely and hands each of them a $50 bill. Eloise adds, “You had some grounded wires. You’ll want to have that van checked over throoughly within the week.” Eloise uses mechanic’s hand cleaner on her hands and arms, then changes back into her expensive dress; Mary cleans up too and puts her tight jeans and blouse back on. They return to their group.
Meanwhile, Louise, the petite Velma-like mother of three teenage boys, spots something on the ground. It’s 26F, which has fallen out of Seven’s cell-phone pouch.
She picks it up and looks at it closely. "Stan! she says to her husband. “I think this is the bill I peeled off the truck tire a few months ago!”
Stan looks too. “You’re right,” he says. “Who had it last?”
“Well, I saw a woman with a big ‘seven’ on a gold brooch she was wearing,” says Louise. But Seven is nowhere in sight; Louise gives it to the clerk, saying someone with a Seven brooch apparently lost it. The callow kid behind the counter never noticed a brooch, with the coquettish Olivia being present and all. So he put it in a large baggie with the information Louise had given him about it.
As the nine women and five husbands prepare to leave, Seven recognizes that the fiver is missing, and that the fourteen people in the Sharps’ big van don’t have it. The team uses a tracking device to find it and…
…find themselves involved in a low speed police/celibrity chase on the main highway of what ever the fuck city they are in. It gets hard to keep up with, even for Gods and ultra intelligent pandimensional beings like The Team.
Odin and Seven find themselves on the same highway, and Odin pulls up to the light blue 1997 Ford Explorer, which has faded so much that it looks like a white Bronco from a distance, like say, from a news helicopter following the action.
Odin tells Seven to ask the man driving just where they are. Seven motions for the retired football, no, foosball player, a lanky red headed man named U. K. Samson, to roll down the window of his Bronc…, er, Explorer.
The helicopter following the action, by all appearences for the local news station, was reported stolen earlier by said station. They didn’t report it to the police, they reported it as a story, totally missing their one chance to recover it, for now it is piloted by…
another five dollar bill, an evil twin with the same serial number backwards, which has spontaneously sprung into existence and become sentient as a strange side effect of all of the above. We’ll call him F62.
Although this mutant bill is certainly the smartest piece of currency in all of history, it hasn’t yet mastered helicopter operations. F62 has a horrifying agenda. It wants to destroy the Franklin Mint!
Anyway, F62 is losing some distance, because as I said, he isn’t a very good pilot. Also, he is distracted by…
…the poor visibility resulting from the need to handle the wheel, the accelerator, and other important controls; easy enough for a human, difficult indeed for an evil mutant $5 bill, let alone a genuine one.
Then a loud bang is heard. The left rear tire has blown. F62 properly veers over to the right shoulder, and the van stalls on the off-road area.
F62 has no knowledge of how to deal with a blowout or a stalled engine. Through his mutant powers, he notices a van coming down the freeway, about 200 yards distant. It’s Eloise Sharp’s huge van, with the other thirteen people still inside.
F62 is in a quandary. Should he try to flag Eloise down (heaven knows how!) and risk his imposture being made known, or should he say or do nothing, let Eloise drive by, and pace back and forth wondering what to do?
Meanwhile, a glitch was detected in the Team’s tracking device, which now homes in on 26F, still in the 7-11’s till.
Back to F62 and Eloise…
F62 decides to let Eloise drive by. F62, after all, possesses powerful telekinetic powers. This is how he was driving the van, and he’s also using them to fly the news helecopter. He brings the helecopter down and climbs in.
As the helecopter flies away, Odin and Seven come back to take a look at the van. They realize that this is the very same GMC van that Odin had stolen from the Team, and then traded in for the Ferarri. It has leather seats, a five-disk CD changer, and a Playstation.
Knowing that the Team would love to get it back, Seven sets about changing the blown tire (she also knows how to handle a stalled engine). Meanwhile, Odin takes a look in the back. Inside he finds an object that F62 forgot to take with him. It is an object that is vital to F62’s plan to destroy the Franklin Mint. It is…
…a gift set of silver-plated plutonium spoons! The spoons are carefully arranged (widely spaced, to be exact) in a beatiful wood-tone gift box. Odin gives a cry of recognition. "Ye! It is the…
There’s a general hubbub in Eloise’s van: She is quite a sharp-eyed person (so is her husband Jack, who sits to her left) that the stalled van, with a blown tire, has no driver or other people present, at least so far as they can tell.
Joe Bradley and Stan Brown, two big, husky ex-Marines, suggest to Eloise that they might want to double back and investigate this. They do, and park about 100 yards back of the van. Joe and Stan approach cautiously as Jack and Eloise, both first-class marksmen with automatic pistols, watch from the driver’s seat (Eloise likes to sit on Jack’s lap :)), and the others in the van keep an eye out too.
The Team, of course, doesn’t want Stan and Joe to blow their cover; attacking them would do that quite easy. So, they discuss how to throw the ex-Marines off the trail and not attract suspicion.
Meanwhile, 26F has been handed in change to a tall clunky girl, one who has actually dated the callow clerk at the 7-11. She is a UFO buff and has a strong interest in the supernatural.
Meanwhile, back on the freeway, Stan, Joe, Jack, and Eloise, all quite smart cookies, see…
…the rip in spacial-temporal fabric that allows the chopper to suddenly be hovering over a sign that says, " US Route 1, Franklin Mint". They see the chopper as it leaps through the rend in time and disappears with a slightly foully-odored puff of smoke roughly the size of Encino.
F62 swings by 4th and South Streets in Philly for a large Jim’s Steaks cheesesteak with extra fried onions and a Frank’s Wishniak Black Cherry soda. It munches contentedly whilst hovering over the mint at 2,500 feet.
On the floor of the helicopter, between what would have passed for F62’s feet except for the logistical nightmare that results from a lack of feet, was the Other Box. The Golden Spoons of Farn were merely a ruse. Two of the spoons had been stolen from a home in Lafayette, Louisianna where they were in fact, Rue Ruse Spoons.
The box on the floor was none other than the Sarcophagii of Spatulae. Within it were the Nine Spatulae of Blevin. Only with the Nine Spatulae of Blevin could F62 overcome the awesome security of the Franklin Mint, and once and for all proclaim what was rightfully his- the…
[Straight Doper Hat On] * In the interests of fighting ignorance, the impartial hosts feel the need to point out that no paper United States Currency is printed at the Franklin Mint. Only U.S. coinage is created there. Paper currency for OTHER nations is printed at the Franklin Mint.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled fantasy, already in progress over many of the local Straight Dope Stations. [/ Straight Doper Hat Off]
…authentic, original Civil War Chess Set. The very first set produced at the Franklin Mint, the one with Ken Burn’s autograph engraved onto Lincoln’s backside. F62 was a major Civil War buff. He could name all of the generals in both the Union and Confederate armies (at least, he could if he had a mouth), and he had to have this chess set. F62 finished his lunch (God only knows how he consumed it), and prepared to execute his plan.
Meanwhile, back on the freeway, Seven has finished fixing the GMC van. She thanks Odin for the ride in the Ferarri, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek, and starts the engine.
The Team climbs into the GMC van, abandoning the crappy old Dodge. Joe and Stan draw their guns and demand some answers. The Team is ready for this, however. Number Three holds up a remote control and pushes a button, and the Dodge Caravan explodes in a huge ball of fire. Joe and Stan have flashbacks to 'Nam, and dive into the ditch on the side of the road. Everyone in Eloise’s van ducks for cover. Noone is hurt, but by the time Eloise & crew can gather their wits, the Team and Odin have fled the scene in their respective vehicles.
Meanwhile, the UFO buff girl who has 26F has gone shopping…
quickly proceeded to put the bill into the old pickle jar he was using to save up money to buy the new Madonna Box Set from the JukeBox Record Shop. He went to bed that night dreaming of dancing to his new CDs. But meanwhile…
[/ Straight Doper Hat Off]