Part 26

a raging, paralyzing case of gut rot. Bo's rotund hoagie boiler, it would seem, had finally had enough. It endured, unceasingly, a miserable and arbitrary pattern of hoagie enjoyment, intertwined with seemingly infinite periods of grease-soaked reminiscence of said hoagies. The young monk's tummy-tums would have no more of this nonsense, it decided. Bo doubled over and collapsed. The last words to escape his wanton lips before everything went black could faintly be heard, "i regret not a single sandwich..."


Yogurt. Blackness. Darkness. Milk.
Nothingness. Kix. Void. An ambiguously dead/alive cat.

Has our hero's unscrupulous disregard for dietary health finally caught up with him?

Not if Kangaroo Jim has anything to say about the matter.

A sudden rush of pain overwhelmed Bo's senses who, quite frankly, were perfectly content existing in a vacuous plane of numbness. This made it all the much more difficult for our hero's battered and abused mind to cope with all the sensory information he was once again experiencing.

Needless to say, it didn't do Bo any favours as his eyes gradually focused on what hovered atop him. A large bald-eagle, with white leather tassels in place of feathers, large cubic zirconia in place of eyes, and a pair of Pringles chips arranged in the vague shape of a beak in place of a...beak.

The majestic animal proceeded to gracefully devour it's own salty beak, slap Bo across the face swiftly, and take a sip of the coke it just ordered.

Bo was having a bit of trouble putting all this together, and with all the grace and style of  piece of roadkill stuck under a car carrying two teenagers making out for the first time, mused rather loudly, "What the FU-" "Fun, fun, fun!" Kangaroo Jones announced, tearing off his makeshift surgeon outfit and adding, "Yes, sir, performing a quadruple-bypass and emergency stomach flush in a questionably hygienic environment with nothing but basic bartending tools on a Friday night is my idea of fun, fun, fun!" It is worth noting that this was said with all the seriousness that someone willing to perform open heart surgery in the middle of a sketchy bar, wearing a giant eagle mask can possibly muster.

Bo, understandably, was still groggy and his mind was working as hard as it could (not so hard) to fill in what seemed to him to be an eternity's worth of blanks. After a long while, Bo finally summoned the courage to speak. "Is this-" "Yes," Jim "Tom" Jones blurted out, "You'll be fine. I'm sure that's the question you were going to ask," and in a moment of inexplicable Kangaroo Klarity, Tom "Jones" Jim made his best attempt to further the plot line through insightful dialogue.

"My dear boy, I'd love to explain to you how I was able to perform a complicated surgery, successfully, under the worst conditions possible, but I am afraid that there is yet work to be done! We must decipher the meaning of this shopping list! It starts with milk, an-"

Bo gasped loudly, memories of his delicate dance with death rushing back to him. "Milk! I've got it! It isn't a shopping list at all. It came to me while I was dead...dying...err..or whatever. It was all so clear to me after everything went black. It is a list of ingredients, for a powerful potion. We must put all these ingredients in a box - and close the box. Inside, it will have precisely a 50% chance of being the correct formula which will serve as the necessary component to lead us to the missing jar. We will not know whether it is the correct formula until we observe it."

"Great googly moogly!" Timmity "Kangaroo Tune" Jonesey exclaimed dramatically, "That's just crazy enough to work! So, where do we get all these seemingly random items necessary for a complex quantum physics experiment?"

A dark and foreboding look cast across Bo's sweaty face. With a deep sigh, he uttered the words...

"Wal-mart."