Ridiculust Ch. 17

"What has four wheels and flies? A garbage truck," he said, and the groans of the audience seemed to propel the bugs up a lot faster. Roger gave him a thumbs-up and continued,

"Birds and bats, the bug buffet is open. Like the sign in the church buffet said, God helps those who help themselves!" His voice had achieved a strange resonant quality that seemed to be everywhere. There was another hush over the crowd as they watched the lights dancing among the tree tops and overhead and the bats that were there also noticed and started flapping and flying through them. They were soon joined by others, many others, and also by insect-eating birds like swallows, birds that normally slept at night, but which had heard the call for free food and had come, somehow unimpaired by the darkness of the summer night. As they zoomed and careened in the air above, somehow not colliding with each other, eating the stars, the full moon rose huge in the east, casting its light upon the crowd, and the people on the stage, prompting a collective intake of breath.

"Now," said Luisa and Arthur together, "we are ready to make some magic." The Purple Chimps launched into Bonnie Tyler's energetic 'I Need a Hero'.

"I never would have thought of feeding the bats," said Sarah loudly over the music. "I would have just annihilated the little bloodsuckers like we did last night."

"Oh, my valiant Warrior," said John, wrapping an arm around her waist. Debbie shook her head.

"You caught him, Jeannie. His heart is as big as the moon up there."

"Huh," said Joe thoughtfully, "I think I can actually feel the moon pulling at me somehow." The crowd was up on its feet dancing to the music as the Purple Chimps gave it their all, and the six of them could feel something beginning to stir, but they could also feel the moon, somehow stirring feelings inside of them.

"I wonder if Artemis around somewhere," Jeannie mused, looking around.

"I don't see any Artemis, but I do see Trina," said Debbie, pointing down in front of them. Sure enough, there she was a few rows back, boogying her bulky and somewhat underdressed body with surprising speed along with a person that she recognized as Lenny the delivery man. Seeing that she'd been spotted, she waved and blew a kiss. "Hi Trina!" she shouted over the noise. "Sarah really loves the Pink Magic!" She hastily dodged a punt that probably would have propelled her off the stage. Trina laughed and waved.

"You're lucky she didn't hear that," Sarah growled as John held her back slightly. "And you still owe me for this morning!" The song had ended to wild applause and they had to lower their voices. Trina actually had heard, and could also feel that Lenny was ready for another tip.

"Owe her what?" asked Joe, pretending to not be interested.

"In exchange for letting me make love to Roger this morning, I promised to eat her into oblivion while she tries to ream me into unconsciousness with her Pink Magic," Debbie replied, staring directly into Sarah's brown eyes and seeing a furnace ignite. "But you'll have to decide whether to use it or your tongue on me."

"Maybe I'll stuff it into your little rosebud asshole and ream you out both ways," Sarah shot back, seeing Debbie's eyes widen with a sudden memory of how Sarah had totally ruined her. Then both their eyes widened when they remembered that Debbie had come back two nights later with her Double Dragon and totally ruined both of them.

"What about us?" asked Joe, seeing how both of the women's erogenous zones were glowing brightly. The Purple Chimps has started one of the contemporary love songs that was only vaguely familiar to them, "I'll Always Be Yours", which they were ignoring.

"You two will go off and do some manly stuff, bowling or golf or whatever," Debbie replied forcefully. "This is between us girls." John leaned over and whispered,

"But we'll come back when we think it's over and take advantage of them." Joe grinned as their crotches started to glow. They had both witnessed what Sarah had done to Debbie that night.

"These are the women you got involved with?" Jeannie asked Roger, who looked embarrassed.

"I figured that if I kept them busy with each other, they'd forget about me," he replied over Pat's crooning of the song, which was coming to a close. He cringed as twin basilisk stares impaled him. "But we really should pay attention to what the band is doing," he said hastily, trying to redirect them. "I think that they're getting something going. I can feel it." The song had appealed to Anna's target demographic, as the younger people and some of the older ones in the audience were glowing a bit.

"Now for the more chronologically enhanced members of the audience," said Arthur dryly, getting some chuckles, "we shall get you started with one of the classics on our play list, 'Time After Time' by Cyndi Lauper. We'll project the lyrics on the wall here so you can follow and sing along."

"And remember, there's a very good reason why these songs are classics and have lasted the test of time," Sarah said in her loudest teacher's voice.

"Yes Mrs. Burns!" chorused some of the teenagers, getting some laughs.

"If you don't behave, there will be problems," said John, equally loudly. "Math problems!"

"Yes Mr. Burns!" some teenagers and post-teenagers chorused automatically. A shocked silence fell as the people realized who he really was. He stepped forward and a shocked Emily managed to shine the spotlight on him. "Yes, folks, I have returned from the dead, though I wasn't really dead at all," he added. The intensity of the response overwhelmed everyone on the stage. The Purple Chimps had already met him in the aftermath of the impromptu lunch concert, but nearly everyone else was unaware of his return. Since he had touched the lives of many of them in his role as a Math teacher at the school, his loss had hit them hard, and his miraculous reappearance set off a storm of emotional cheering that hit an unprepared Roger and Jeannie hard, making them stagger, desperately clutching each other for a few moments until they regained their equilibrium. Brian and to a lesser extent Louisa, both of whom were glowing brighter than the others, also felt it. John stood at the edge of the stage waving to the crowd, with the spotlight making the tears on his cheeks glitter, until he stepped back and made downward motions with his arms, which got the crowd, now glowing brighter, to quiet down.

"This song is one of Sarah's and my favourites. I would be honoured if you would sing it along with us." He waved at the band and they started to play. This time it was Sadie and Louisa who sang.

"Lying in my bed, I hear the clock tick and think of you," they harmonized, with their respective Caribbean and Hispanic accents working together. Ned had turned on the projector that Anna had brought to Julia's and had managed to get the lyrics from her karaoke site onto the back wall of the stage. They were a bit distorted by vertical exaggeration, but were mostly visible.

"Roger, you have to sing with me so that I don't sound awful!" said Sarah, wide-eyed.

"OK," he responded, beginning to feel the strain. "Let's all hold hands and try to link together to help contain this energy and not lose it." They joined hands in their circle, closed their eyes and felt the energy break loose from Roger and Jeannie as they reached out somehow to absorb it. They all then joined in with the song, with Sarah and Roger's voices combining as they did before into a half alto, half tenor range, Jeannie providing alto and John a strong tenor, and Joe providing a bass that was somehow warm and comforting. Debbie's clear soprano soared over them all. Their auras began to brighten and merge together as the song progressed.

"Damn, but I wish that I had a camera on the stage to do crowd shots," Debbie Warren muttered as she slowly panned the camera back and forth and Leslie provided a murmured commentary for the audience. "They never told us about bringing the teacher back from the dead."

"They didn't have time," Leslie replied as the program shifted to a commercial break. "Yikes!" She had turned around and saw that two pairs of plump raccoons and a young fox had parked themselves about ten feet away along the crest of the hill. One raccoon chittered quietly at them, turned to watch the stage and snuggled up to what was clearly its mate.

"I wonder what their story is?" Debbie muttered, turning the camera back to the stage after hearing a cue from her earpiece. "Look, they've all lit up, and their colours are merging!"

"I don't think that we can contain this energy. It's too much!" said Roger, feeling like his head was going to explode as the song faded out and the audience cheered and applauded. "We need to think of some way to store it." They were all glowing as one now, with all of their colours flickering around them.

"A flywheel could be a way," said John, visibly strained. "If we could create one, or some sort of equivalent, we could direct the energy onto it like a fire hose to get it to spin and store the energy as some sort of magical kinetic energy."

"My husband, the Physics teacher," said Sarah with a grin.

"Put it in the middle of the grove," said Debbie. "It's circular, and it will make delivering the energy to the trees much easier."

"Sounds like a plan," added Joe. "Think of a dense, dark stone like basalt," he said, running through all of the materials he had used in landscaping.

"Sheep eat their meals with baa-salt," said Jeannie, and suddenly a lot of the force on them vanished. There was a bright white flash from the direction of the grove that attracted everyone's attention. "He corrupted me!" she exclaimed defensively as the others looked at her and giggled.

"He corrupted me too," Debbie replied dryly. "But it's so gradual and sneaky and loving."

"That worked," said Roger, surprised, closing his eyes. "I can see it in the grove, floating over the ground. Can you feel it?" They closed their eyes and in their mind's eyes, could see it, a jet-black disk four feet high and ten in diameter. "Now we need to start it spinning." He tapped into the power that they were naturally connected to and flung a line out to rest on the right edge of it. "A tractor is magical. It can go down a road and turn into a driveway. Oof!" A surge of power went through the line, hit the flywheel, and gave it enough of a push to start it rotating.

"Are you guys OK?" asked a worried Ellen, which the whole crowd heard because she'd forgotten to turn off her wireless microphone. Everyone's glows, especially those of the six, had dropped dramatically. Roger gave her a thumbs-up.

"We figured out how to store the energy to give to the trees," John shouted back. "You guys pull out all the stops! We won't explode on you!" That got some relieved laughs.

"The Purple Chimps are awesome!" Joe added to the crowd. "Give them a little more love!" The audience responded with cheers and applause.

"Up next, ladies and gentlemen, is an old classic, one that we played with great success on Friday night," said Sadie, and the band started to play Foreigner's 'I Want to Know What Love Is'. The six of them paused until they felt that they understood the mechanics of directing the flow of energy from the crowd through the conduit to push the flywheel, which was slowly but steadily spinning faster.

"I feel like I'm in the middle of a rushing river," said Joe as they started to dance with their life partners. "It feels so cool and refreshing. I could dance like this forever," he said, looking into Debbie's bright blue eyes and holding her closer. "I never thought that I would ever be able to do this again."

"Come on, everyone, sing with us!" Ellen encouraged the audience.

"I wanna feel what love is," they all sang, rather raggedly, but they could feel the energy level ramping up a bit. "I want you to show me..."

"I think I feel what love is," Debbie purred, pressing herself against the hardness in Joe's pants, "and I definitely want you to show me," she added with a growl, standing on tiptoes to give him a kiss that left no doubt whatsoever about what was going to happen when they got home.

"Aren't you supposed to leave room for Jesus?" snickered John, who certainly wasn't leaving room for anything between him and Sarah. Debbie stuck her tongue out at him and they all laughed.

-=-=-=-=-=

"It's about time you showed up!" Leslie Frost muttered as a man, about five foot ten with blonde hair cut in a ragged style, bright brown eyes and a large black case a metre square staggered up to them, breathing heavily. He was dressed in a black T-shirt with the station logo and black pants and shoes. It was a small lull in the concert as the band took a break and the feed of contemporary, love-related tunes was put on. Couples were still dancing, but many were also taking the chance to rest and use the port-a-potties. A bar of multi-coloured light reached from the left side of the stage (from their perspective) straight into the grove of trees in the distance. The six wizards were standing in that corner, talking.

"Bloody traffic," growled the man ill-temperedly. "I was only ten minutes behind you out of the studio in Toronto, but I kept getting caught up in one damned traffic fuck-up after another all the way here. Even out on the country roads off the highway, people managed to get into crashes!" Ignoring the raccoons and the fox, who were watching with interest, he laid the case on the ground, opened it up, carefully removed a large drone and put it on the ground next to the case. He then extracted its controller, closed the case, and placed it next to Debbie's camera. Finally, he flipped switches to activate the drone and controller.

"Hang on, let me tie my camera into its feed," said Debbie, rapidly tapping and swiping on a large tablet until the screen showed a black image. "You may fire when ready, Gridley."

"That joke never gets old," snickered Leslie.

"Neither will you if it doesn't stop," Fred muttered as the whine of the propellers rose to a high pitch, then abruptly silenced as the noise counteraction generators kicked in, and the machine took off. It had a high-resolution camera with night sights, a strong zoom lens and also a directional microphone. It could be programmed to hover or move in a pattern. "Where do you want it to go?"

"Put it over the grove of trees, maybe about 200 feet up to get a good view. Follow the bright light beam and see where it goes," said Leslie.

"Can do," Fred replied, staring intently at the screen in the centre of the controller as he smoothly sent the drone up and away, its blinking navigation lights being the only part of it visible. The screen was about the size of a large cell phone and the controller was modeled after ones that are used for video games. Within two minutes, it was parked over the centre of the clearing and the rapidly spinning black disk below was illuminated partly by the thick bar of multicoloured light that was accelerating it and partly by the small but intense spotlight of the drone.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Leslie into her microphone after a cue from her earpiece as Debbie swiveled the camera to cover her, "the Purple Chimps are returning to the stage for the second half of the concert. We now have a drone over the centre of the grove of large trees and the beam of magical light appears to be causing a large black disk within it to spin faster and faster. We think that it's a flywheel of sorts, storing the loving energy from the audience that will be needed to heal the trees." Debbie shrank the image from the drone and put it into the top left corner of the image from the camera. "So far, the concert has been a success. The approximately two thousand people here are all having a great, loving time. Let's settle in and see how it finishes."

"That flywheel looks like it already has enough energy in it to heal an entire forest," said Fred as Debbie turned the camera back to the stage. "If they discharge all that energy at once, there is going to be one hell of a bang."

"Maybe it will blow out another wave of loving energy," replied Debbie, eyeing him speculatively, but he was intent on the drone's controls and didn't notice. He slowly circled it around the perimeter of the grove. Each angle was just as uninteresting as the others and he soon drifted back to a point about halfway between the grove and the stage where he could keep an eye on both.

"Keep your hands off him, Debbie," snickered Leslie. "He might actually be useful."

"So funny," he retorted, then looked over and saw the raccoons and the fox. "Say, which of these is your familiar?"

"None of them. There was no room on the broom with Debbie, me, and the gear."

"Have you two actually fucked yet?" Debbie demanded as the raccoons snoozed and the fox looked on with interest in the semi-darkness. "This is getting tiresome. We've got a job to do here." Fred was about to make a scathing reply when he felt something cool and moist bump his leg. He looked down in surprise to see the fox standing next to him. Having gotten his attention, the fox rubbed its head on his leg like a cat, in an obvious invitation to be petted. As the other two watched in surprise, he tentatively bent down and stroked its fur.

"Wow, it's so soft!" he exclaimed, giving its left ear a good scratch. "But why are you doing this?" he asked the critter, who darted out of his reach and demanded attention from Leslie, and finally Debbie before returning to its place beside the raccoons, sitting on its haunches and watching them. "If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that the furball doesn't want us to be arguing with each other."

"I actually feel a bit more relaxed," Leslie admitted. "Fuzz therapy works."

"I can't help thinking Roger is involved somehow," Debbie speculated as they suddenly turned their attention to the stage because of a sudden explosion of sounds, lights, and activity from the left front that rapidly culminated in four of the wizards appearing on the stage, followed by Roger after they zapped him. Fred was staring at his drone controller's screen and laughing.

"Replay that on your screen," he told Debbie. Leslie had gone to the camera controller tablet and Debbie maximized the drone window, tapped some on-screen controls to rewind, and they watched the drama unfold from the aerial view. A lot of the dialog was unclear because the directional microphone wasn't on to catch it, but they were able to see the fun start with Roger zapping a port-a-potty with no line in front of it. They were both snickering and wide-eyed at the light show and activity that followed shortly afterwards.

"This is going to be more interesting than I expected," said Leslie. "Let's get this one on the air." She contacted Bill and as they went through the clip, Debbie and Fred continued watching the stage.

There had been three more songs after 'I Want to Know What Love Is" and before the intermission, all of them more recent tunes that had little pull with the older folks but which got the younger set energized. Roger, Jeannie, Sarah, John, Joe, and Debbie could feel that they had already stored up more than enough energy to heal the trees.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we will now have a twenty minute intermission," announced Pat Marshak. "Get some rest, we have some more for you." There was enthusiastic applause and cheering as Arthur, Brian, and Sadie put their guitars on their stands and they all waved as they made their way off of the stage. Ned resumed the feed of contemporary music and joined them.

"The energy level has dropped off enough that only one of us is needed to keep it going," said Roger. "You guys go take a break, and please bring me back a coffee. A large one."

"Cream or sugar?" asked Sarah as the others figured out how to disengage themselves.