Free Scurvy Goonda by Chris McCoy Page A

to get cavities.
    Why the Mona Lisa didn’t have any eyebrows.
    And then—
PHHZZT!

XX
    SMACK!
    Ted’s body broke a branch in a massive tree, causing leaves to spray in every direction and snapping him out of his daze just before he hit the ground with a dull thud.
    For a long moment, he just lay on his back, looking up at the tree that interrupted his fall.
    “What… the heck … was all… of that?” Ted asked the tree, but the tree didn’t respond, though it could have if it had wanted to.
    High above the tree’s branches, he could see a small dark vent that appeared to hover in mid air, poking out of the sky like the end of a pipe. A crude catapult built of vines and wooden planks stood near the base of the tree. BACON—HO! had been carved into the side of the catapult. Ted looked back and forth between the vent in the sky and the catapult. Scurvy had often talked about using catapults in sea battles. Had he launched himself with this one?
    Ted climbed to his feet and checked in with his body—bending his fingers, shaking out his legs, jogging in place—to make sure everything was in working order. He was definitely battered, but nothing felt broken.
    Knowing that he was going to live at least a little while longer, he turned to survey this strange place. To his surprise, itlooked a lot like the world he was used to, except that everything just seemed a bit
different
.
    He was standing at the top of a hill. Beneath him was a meadow with wild grasses the color of seashells. In the distance he could see the outline of a forest, but the trees seemed too tall to be located next to the low-lying meadow. Edging the forest was a thin strip of pinkish-bluish sand that might have been a desert. Everywhere Ted looked, one type of landscape abruptly stopped and a completely different one began. It was as if Ted were trapped in a terrarium meticulously constructed by ambitious children.
    The sky was huge and blue and mottled with white clouds that looked the same as they did back home, but it seemed as though the atmosphere had somehow become confused and had allowed the night to stick around. There were stars everywhere, twinkling bright in the middle of the day and forming constellations that Ted had never seen before. These weren’t the same stars he had looked at all his life—or if they were, he definitely wasn’t seeing them from the same angle.
    On the horizon, he could see what looked like thousands of spotlights, all pointed directly upward, blasting blindingly golden beams out into deep space.
    “Hello?” he yelled. “Anybody out there?”
    Whoosh!
His words hadn’t even echoed, but as soon as they left his mouth it was like he’d hit a switch that completely electrified the meadow. Some
things
began racing through the field. He heard the
whap whap whap
of grass rapidly being knocked down, and the somethings sped off in the direction of the pinkish-bluish desert.
    “Don’t be scared!” yelled Ted. “I’m just lost!”
    Then a strange-looking man came floating toward him through the meadow.
    “Um—hello there?” said Ted.
    The man said nothing.
    “I think I took a wrong turn,” Ted explained, but the man just kept coming. “I fell from that vent hanging in the sky.”
    The thought crossed Ted’s mind that the man might be deaf, and he briefly considered trying to communicate with him via sign language, but the only sign he remembered from his second-grade class was the one for
I love you
. It seemed inappropriate to make such a sweeping romantic statement to a freaky stranger.
    As the man drew closer, Ted noted that he was wearing a well-tailored three-button suit, like something a mortician might wear. His face was handsome and youthful, and his eyes were very, very dark.
    “Hi?” said Ted when the man was hovering about ten feet away, but this time, the man actually did something. He smiled.
    The smile, slick and clearly well-practiced, caused a bolt of fear to shoot up Ted’s spine. Ted