Chapter 44 - Road Trip

Deep in the chip mines Aaron’s plan was coming together. All the supplies were gathered he just now had to wait. As soon as the next hideous snack came up this tunnel Aaron would offer it a rather generous sounding compensation to take his place as a guard from the snacks below. Little would the creature know that in reality the compensation was much less than you could get at other jobs with similar levels of skill requirements and personal safety hazards. With the task of guarding the tunnel taken care of by the relatively low paid snack, Aaron would be free to take his stash of chips and leave the chip mines in search of a more exciting and healthy endeavor.

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The road before Joe was unlike one he had ever seen before on the back side of the page. He couldn’t quite determine what was so odd, for the road looked exactly like a road should be but at the same time it looked completely wrong. Despite the strange feelings that everything was completely wrong yet totally normal, Joe was sure if he squashed together the feelings they would cancel each other out and result in mutual annihilation which would allow him to continue his journey no longer conflicted. The feelings did in fact destroy each other but the resulting blast severely wounded his sense of direction but Joe did not notice as the pain center of his brain was also momentarily stunned. Now that the road no longer seemed completely wrong in a totally normal way Joe continued on towards the store that held the fly swatter of ultimate power, or at least he thought he was heading that way, thanks to his damaged sense of direction he had veered off course and was now heading off towards the edges of known civilization, beyond which nobody knew what, if anything, was there. Thanks to his incorrect path Joe was making much better time than before, and was set to arrive at his destination much sooner than before. The fact that the destination he was destined for was not the one he was determined to get to did little to deter him, for this direction was much more delightful to drift in and with his damage sense of direction it defiantly felt like the correct path to take. Joe continued to walk oblivious to the shift in the scenery, the sidewalks had disappeared, the road had changed to a mixture of gravel and dirt and the sky itself was looking much more distant, as if this place was so far out in the middle of nowhere anything else of significance could be located too close to it. After traveling for quite some time Joe became hungry. A quick search of his knapsack found nothing that looked both editable and like food (although there was one stone carved sandwich with a bag of rock shaped crackers) and thus Joe was forced to stop ignoring his surroundings and investigate in attempts to locate food. The landscape around him was rather bare, he had traveled far enough that all previously identifiable features were far out of view. The only unidentified thing in sight was a strange tower with an angry looking half circle on top shooting out flames. Joe was unsure what such a tower represented, but there seemed to be a small building next to it which seemed to be his only chance of finding food lest he miss lunch and be all hungry the rest of the day.