Most would never go into a bright light but that was exactly what Lynn did, piloting the truck.
Well, pretending to pilot the truck.
She kept turning the black steering wheel left and right, jerking it back and forth, and he didn't like it. Jerking his steering wheel was similar to pushing and pulling someone's legs and #7890_0008 was trying to focus. He was driving, and there was a passenger! Safety is his first priority!
Especially when driving through the gaps between multiple universes and realms.
This gap was pure was pure white, but whenever Lynn faced forward, from the corner of her eyes she could see the outside worlds. Sparkling lands of purple that smelled like lavender perfume, another one filled with fountains, and strangely, another that was just fire.
She wasn't laughing anymore, and Lynn kept her hands at two and ten o'clock on the steering wheel and faced forward.
"I can't drive, but this is pretty cool," she admitted.
Rapid beeps came out of the truck, which was his form of laughing. Lynn blushed, her face warm, wondering why a truck was making her feel embarrassed. She turned and pressed her face up against the window to see that slowly, the expanse behind them was slowly fading away into black, flickering like an old cathode ray television.
She took three deep breaths.
"Hey, I don't wanna be rude, but uh, go faster," Lynn said quietly.
#7890_0008 refused.
The speed limit in most non-residential zones is 45 miles per hour! Safety of the passengers is a huge priority!
The dark expanse, creeping closer, the sound of static increasing had no effect on #7890_0008. He knew where he was going and didn't take kindly to back seat drivers. Even though she was in the driver's seat!
Lynn's toes curled and she started to rub the dashboard, complimenting the car, telling him that he was so cool. Especially when he could drive at a solid 70 miles an hour. That's what what she found super cool.
The truck didn't take the bait.
He kept going, steady, at the same speed, refusing to speed up. He kept trucking along, towards a singular, tiny, dot, with a murky, purple light filtering through.
"Go faster," Lynn pleaded.
The radio started changing stations, erratically, the dial switching quickly back and forth on it's own. The black knob would sometimes switch between AM and FM, and many times would pause on talk-shows, and commercials. After finding the right rhythm, #7890_0008 spun the radio dial at just the right moment.
" No!" said a commercial about cars.
"It's not," sung a top ten singer.
"Safe!" shouted a baseball announcer.
"Oh my goodness, you can talk," Lynn shouted.
"Oh god, yes," moaned a woman from the AM radio.
Lynn let go of the steering wheel and gave the radio knob a look, knowing that he was making a dirty joke.
"Boys! Ugh. And it doesn't matter if you drive slow! I won't be safe if I'm dead if you keep this up!"
This was all the truck needed to hear, because now he had a new mission.
"I'm never going to give you up, let you down," Rick Astley crooned over the radio, as the truck strapped down Lynn so hard she struggled to breathe. The truck went from 45 to 70 in the blink of an eye, and Lynn let out a piercing, high-pitched scream. The closer they approached the dot, the bigger it became, and she didn't want to look ahead.
She turned her view to the rear-side mirror and was met with what looked like...
Tentacles?
Long, purple and pink so large that she couldn't see the main body of which it belonged to. The flickering went faster, and it prodded through the veil, squirming it's way through the divide, trying to curl its suction cup covered appendage around the truck.
Lynn wasn't screaming, but was now disappointed to leave, absorbed into the purple light. Like a straw they were sucked in, slowly, and Lynn felt her eyes push in deep into her skull, her ears pop, and strangely, swore she felt someone holding her hand. She closed her eyes, relaxed that this disembodied hand was there.
"Wait, who's holding my hand," she mumbled.
Her eyelids swung wide open and she was greeted by the smell of moss, trees, and the sounds of frogs, crickets. There was no one else in the truck, and when she looked out the front window, the landscape was encircled by a purple, heavy haze.
"You looked scared," said a vampire's hissing voice on the radio.
"So I," said a chirpy weather lady.
"Held," the sports announcer interjected.
"Your hand," a pretty, bridal commercial for over priced rings said, completing the choppy sentence.
Again, Lynn was feeling embarrassed, being coddled by a truck, but he was more than happy to help. She loosened her too tight seatbelt and pressed the window button to lower it down, looking out the left front window. Taking in a deep breath, closing her eyes, she let out a deep and heavy sigh.
"Man, I've missed this place. How'd you know this is where my house is," Lynn asked the truck.
"I know everything because," an angry brimstone pastor screamed over the radio.
"I've got the magic in me! Magic, magic, magic," the singer B.o.B belted out.
Lynn clapped along to the song as the truck slowly made its way through the mud, through the wispy, low hanging clouds. Lynn grinned from ear to ear, because she had accidently made an amazing spell yet again! She had also seen the fabled Kraken. Well, what she believed to be the Kraken.
Lynn had many theories, many of them verging on the tinfoil hat and magnetized eyes side of theories, but now she had proof!
Her mind was racing, trying to come up with new spells as they approached her home.
It was not as she left it.
Her cozy little cottage, in the middle of her swamp, that she modeled to look like a giant mushroom with a purple cap was filled with squatters. The lights were on and they were inside, using her stove, her magic stove with the cute little runes on it!
"Not today, buster," Lynn said in a huff.
"HASHTAG GIRL BOSS," the segment about women's empowerment chortled.
"That's right!"
Lynn got out of the truck and the door slammed shut on it's own. #7890_0008 waited for her a bit far down, but left his headlights on, just in case. You never know these days.
She opened her purple backpack and took out her oar, grumbling about how the property value of her cottage was plummeting by the second. After she put the backpack on again, stomped down the moss covered black and white brick path, she knocked on her own front door.
Lynn was furious that she had to knock on her own door, and that they took their sweet time coming to her front door to answer to let her inside!
The squatter finally answered the door and it was a short dwarf with a long beard, a pink apron that said Kiss Me, I'm Imersian, and only blue shorts. He looked up Lynn, her angry face, the oar in her hand, and came to only one logical conclusion.
"Are you from the swamp-owner's society," the dwarf asked. "We already told you we refuse to leave!"
"And. Why. Is. That?"
He repeated, word for word some line about jurisdiction and property lines, and that the ownership had transferred. He then swung the door wide open, and showed many dwarves, inside, bustling about. Smoking, drinking, dancing, a party in full swing.
"You wouldn't kick out all these good dwarves, would you ma'am?"
She did.
She didn't have to use magic either.
Lynn was taller and bigger than them, she had a giant oar to use as a weapon, the element of surprise on her side. She pushed down the party host that had greeted her at the door, and started smacking innocent dwarves, gnomes, and giant that had dwarfism, but was just a regular sized person.
Her cottage was one, very large, round space, so she didn't have to move very far to smack them, and there wasn't much room to hide with so many people inside. She wasn't sure how to make herself seem threatening so she tried to say something scary.
At first, she thought to say, I'm going to hit with my truck, but thought that was too violent. Next, she thought that she could say I'm going to fuck you up, but it was too unoriginal. She blurted out something wrong entirely, her wires getting crossed.
"I'm going to truck you up!"
Confused party guests had no idea what she meant, who this woman was, and why she was screaming about this being her house. No one had been inside that cottage for seventy years!
The disorientation and madness heightened once bright lights flashed through the front windows, loud beeps became louder, and suddenly, the threat was real.
"She's going to truck us up," cried out the tiny giant. "Run for your lives!"
They scattered likes roaches, skittering away as fast as they could. No one could push out of the singular entrance and exit fast enough. The truck was a few feet away from the door trying his hardest to be scary as well, playing the most terrifying thing he had ever heard.
"Bring your used automobiles, scrap, metal, and used items down on over to Charlie's Junkyard," the radio blared. "$200 for good quality items!"
The horror. Scraping a perfectly fine vehicle!
Murder for cash!
#7890_0008 was shaking while playing such a horrible display of violence and he knew it worked because all the dwarves ran and never looked back. Pushing over each other, squeezing out of the exit, the mailbox shaped like a giant leek was pushed over on its side, breaking in half.
"Get out of my swamp!"
She waved the oar, back and forth, even after they had left, feeling brave when she hadn't done much, when the truck had done most of the work. Sweaty and tired out, Lynn turned to look at her partner in crime and patted his front hood, thankful for him coming to her aid.
"You're so sweet. You're like my best friend," she mumbled.
He said nothing, very shy and bashful, and Lynn took this as him not wanting to be friends any longer.
"I know I'm a loser, having a truck for a friend."
"No, no, no," the radio sang. "Stick to the stuff you know!"
She rubbed his front hood and sighed, again feeling silly. You can't be rejected friendship by a truck, right?
Right?
"Do you want to stay and help me with something? I know you can go anywhere, but there's something important I need to do, people I need to help."
"I'd do anything for love," Meat Loaf sang. "I'll never lie to you, and that's a fact."
"Aww..."
Lynn never had a best friend before, and didn't mind that it was a truck any longer. She was worried that she was imagining it all.
"I'm so glad this isn't like, you know, me going crazy! Sometimes I like to name my stuff, like my hats, so I thought I was just like, you know, projecting on to like, a truck!"
#7890_0008 said nothing.
Lynn stared at the truck warily, and the silence made her uncomfortable. She tapped him several times, and he said nothing, and now she was nervous, because this entire time, she had been imagining it. The Kraken, the trip, the truck. Maybe she never left her mushroom shaped cottage and was still on her sofa, high on flurple haze again.
"Oh goodness. Oh no. I knew it. I'm going crazy!"
The truck said nothing, because it was a truck.
"I'm gonna-"
"I got you babe," Sony and Cher sang.
A moment of static between Lynn's blood pressure rising left another silence, and she was still afraid she was having auditory hallucinations.
"You're a clown," Sony and Cher sang. "I got you babe!"
The chorus repeated, over and over.
I got you babe!
Lynn covered her face in embarrassment again, a truck had pulled a prank on her, and she turned to go inside. She searched the ground to find the two pieces of her mailbox to stick together again, and then was confused when she found them.
"My address 947 Snail's Trail, not 945 Snail's Trail," Lynn said. "Can't believe they went so far to even fake my address!"
They did not.
She stole her neighbor's house, and would only realize it in the morning because the toilet and shower in the bathroom was too small for her to use, made for dwarves.
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Songs used in the Chapter
Never Gonna Give You Up- Rick Astley MAGIC -B.o.B.
Stick to the Status Quo- High School Musical Cast I Got You Babe- Sonny & Cher I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)- Meat Loaf