S4 Ep. 18 - Heartbreak Fridge

Freddie Wong (0:00)

Dungeons and Daddies is a rowdy, horny, violent podcast for grownups. Content warnings can be found in the episode description.

Anthony Burch (0:08)

Many years ago and many light years away, there sat a planet called Earth. This was not necessarily unique in and of itself. Life grows in very rare, very specific circumstances. It is to be expected, then, that any given developing planet's population might evolve along similar lines to the populations of other similarly life-sustaining planets. This has resulted in at least three planets throughout the universe known as Earth, each containing countries named Germany, Russia, the United States of America, and so on, each having invented ice cream and ice cream scoops and the sport of throwing heavy balls at a collection of oblong white cylinders. Only one of these Earths, however, ran afoul of spirits beyond the ken of that Earth's denizens. Only one of these Earths saw bowling teams stand between their planet's survival and the creeping darkness, and only one of those Earths saw that bowling team fail at the final hurdle. And so, in the waning hours of this particular Earth's lifespan, a spaceship swooped down. It picked up a young human male, the severed head of a metallic housewife, and a formerly human, former soda jerk. This spaceship, named Lumos and run by the last remnants of a dying moth-like species, held what might soon become the last survivors of this particular Earth. Three days after leaving Earth, a stray beam of solar radiation hit the ship's engine matrix and changed to zero into a one. Such a glitch was a fluke and an unfortunate roll of the dice. This minor malfunction in the ship's engine cascaded into a series of irreversible failures, plunging the moths and the human and the housewife and the soda jerk into complete darkness with an unlimited supply of recycled air. The moths used their emergency coms to request assistance from someone, anyone. But that now silent ship held every remaining moth in the galaxy, and these moths had no planet to go home to, much less get help from. And so the dark, silent ship drifted through the indifferent void. And then the moth's food ran out. And then they died, leaving what could generously be called three humans alone in that dark. Their human food lasted longer than the moth food, and so they lived a while longer.

And then their human food ran out. And the young human boy, who was actually the son of the zevred head, sorry for not mentioning that before, considered the possibility that his mother might have to watch her last remaining child starve to death.

And so, one day, not that you could consider it a day given the total darkness, the soda jerk walked into the room that held the housewife and her son just in time to hear the housewife, the person he loved most in the universe, die. Well, die might be an exaggeration, shut down. With the press of a button, the son ensured his mother, the person he loved most in the universe, would not have to watch him die. He did not give the soda jerk this same consideration. The human boy had seen what it looked like to starve to death, and the human boy did not want this for himself. And so one day, the soda jerk, who did not need to eat, given what his body had become as of late, called out to the boy and heard no response. The soda jerk searched in the darkness with what might generously be called his hands, and he smelled the blood before he felt it. And his screams echoed through the now empty ship.

He considered turning the housewife back on just so he would not be alone. But he decided it would be too cruel to welcome her back into a universe with no real humans left. He considered falling the human boy into oblivion, but he had made a promise to his friends, who were almost certainly dead by now, that he would survive, that he wouldn't kill himself like he knew he should have when he had the option to do so during an opportunity to save his world.

And so he sat in the dark empty spaceship and waited for it to crash into an errant asteroid or be pulled into a star or whatever death might inevitably come for him. But he did not wait long because three days after the sun and the mother died left the Soda Jerk all alone, the ship was rescued. It was purely a fluke that a passing cargo ship saw the moth's tomb and decided to investigate. Dumb luck, a roll of the dice.