The Jadedvisalian

Welcome to the 2nd season of Stan Prolongo. Story written by Justin Lowmaster from The Space Turtle Blog. Voice of Stan Prolongo provided by DAVe Avila from The Jen and DAVe Show. If you have a podcast and would like to use Stan Prolongo for content in your show. Please do 2 things for us. Cut of only the ending credits and link back to this site. Thank you!

I now had two bone spiders. A large one from the huge fish, and the small one from the librarians desk. I realized I had never asked her name. I looked at the desk and saw her nameplate. “Collette.” The obvious thing to do was go shopping.

I needed cover, so I headed out towards the countryside to the river. There I visited the rusty van. Mosley the homeless man had what I needed; a grocery cart. I’d have taken one from another store, but they all had those devices that made the wheels lock up if they got too far away from the store. Mosley’s was taken long before that. I knocked on the side door of the van. Mosley leaped around from the side of the van and came at me with a knife. He laughed like a hyena who’d taken crazy pills.

“Come here and steal from me!” he says. “How about I steal from you instead! Give me your money!”

I said I would be keeping my money if he was going to be all threatening like. Before I could say why I was there, he attacked.

He thrust the knife but I jerked sideways and avoided the blade. He swung and I ducked. This went on for a while, him attacking, me blocking. I ended up tripping in a hole and Mosley jumped me and held a knife to my neck and took my wallet.

“Two bucks, you fought that hard for two bucks?” he says, looking in my nearly empty wallet.

“I thought you were going for the $200 in my shoe,” I says. He went for my shoe and I kicked him in the face. He staggered back into the van and he dropped his knife.

“My nose!” he said, sounding like someone had just kicked him in the face.

“Listen,” I says. “I’m going to borrow your shopping cart.”

“No, you can’t,” he tells me.

I hold my foot up to his face.

“I mean yes, you can, just don’t …”

I tip over the cart and dump everything out.

“… dump everything out.”

I pushed the cart back to town and headed to the site of the new grocery store.

I began rolling the cart through the metal framing and avoiding drying cement.

“Hey yous!” yells a voice.

A man in a construction hat comes my way.

“What are you doing?” he says.

“I’m with the grocery cart commission. I’m making sure this location obeys all the regulations for shopping carts.”

“Yeah, ok, but I mean, why aren’t you wearing a hard hat?”

“I forgot?”

“Those yahoos are supposed to give them to any visitors. Hey, shouldn’t you be escorted?” He looked at me and reached for his walky talky.

“Let me borrow your hat.” I says and I grab it from his head.

“I need that!” he says. I knock him over the head with it. He falls over and I hide him in a stack of sheet rock. Then I replace my fedora with the hard hat, wearing it just so. I kept searching the location for clues.

Clues found me when a small hoard of zombies began chasing me. I picked up a nail gun and aimed for a head.

The zombie put up his hands.

On a hunch, I asked “Did Araneae put you up to this?”

They looked at each other, then scattered. I pushed the cart towards one and knocked him over. I pinned him down the the front wheels of the cart.

“You aren’t real zombies, are you?” I says.

He shook his head.

“Tell me what is going on, or I make all these wheels wobbly by running over you repeatedly.”

The zombie took one look at the cart wheel by his face and sang.

“This guy, he calls himself Araneae, came to us and says we need to scare the people away from here. We overheard him talking to himself, he does that a lot, about making this whole town pay for what they did. I don’t know what he means, though.”

“Why are you working for him?”

He looked dumbfounded.

“I, I dunno, I thought I had too.”

“Did you want too? Why did you think you had too? How did he contact you?”

“We read about a zombie flash mob and showed up. He was there, and, he started talking, then, I can’t remember what happened next, but next thing I know, I’m door knock ditching and shambling about the city, making people think that odd things are happening. I think there are others too, doing other things.”

I ask if he’s seen lots of spiders.

“Well, Araneae likes em, so, yeah.”

“Bone ones?”

“Yeah, I see them all over. Hey, is there one one me?”

He began frantically checking his body. I took the cart off him and helped him up. There on the back of his neck was a small bone spider. Its legs dug into the skin. I pulled it free.

“Ow!” He looked around quizzically. “Where am I?”

“Do you remember what you’ve been doing recently, or where you’ve been?”

“No.” He looked at his watch. “Two weeks! I don’t remember the last two weeks!”

“You mean you can’t lead me to Araneae’s secret lair?”

“Araneae? No, I just met him, well, two weeks, I’ve gotta get outta here!”

“Wait, your other zombie friends, they are under the control of these.”

I help up the tiny spider.

“What?” He touched the back of his neck, a look of realization in his eyes. “So that’s what … lets find them!”

Stan Prolongo by David Avila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

 

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Welcome to the 2nd season of Stan Prolongo. Story written by Justin Lowmaster from The Space Turtle Blog. Voice of Stan Prolongo provided by DAVe Avila from The Jen and DAVe Show. If you have a podcast and would like to use Stan Prolongo for content in your show. Please do 2 things for us. Cut of only the ending credits and link back to this site. Thank you!

I sat down to put some serious effort into the clues I had. A card with the word Araneae from the late Mothman impostor and a bone spider from the back of the giant carp. I had an idea these two things were connected, although I didn’t know why. My first destination was Wikipedia, the oracle of all things fandom, with a few pages of useful facts thrown in. I looked up Araneae and found it meant spider. I looked for all kinds of information on bone spider carvings. I used Google, Bing, and even tried Wolfram Alpha. Nothing. While at Wolfram Alpha I typed in ‘Stan’ and found there was a statistical chance I was 51 years old.

Before I pounded the pavement, I still wanted something else to work with. I looked up Spiders and Visalia. I found an interesting article about the new grocery store being built. The construction site is over top a buried mausoleum. In the place of the dead rested the body of Baron von Eighlegs, a lover of spiders.

With a solid fact to work with, I headed out to the library. I looked around the city archives but anything related to the baron could not be found. Three volumes were clearly missing. I walked up to the librarian. She was a cute lady with black rimmed spectacles. I asked her about the missing volumes. She told me they were kept in a special room with the rarest texts because they contained original documents from Visalia’s history. She looked me over carefully. I started to look her over carefully, but she gave me that evil eye only librarians can give. She asked who I was and why I needed to see them.

“Stan Prolongo, private investigator,” I says. “I’m interested in learning about Baron von Eighlegs.”

She gave me another once over. “I like your new shoes.” she says. “Let me show you the books.”

She led me to a back room and unlocked the door with a large silver key. The room’s light dimly illuminated ancient books and tomes. She warned not to read just any old book. Some were dangerous. I thought she was just being silly until I heard one growl at me when I walked past. Finally I found myself at a small table with the three books. I had to wear white cloth gloves. I asked the librarian that if I wore a top hat if she would be looking for a sharp dressed man. She just gave me a sarcastic smile and told me to leave the books on the table when I left and to check out before I left. She left me alone to research.

After several hours I found that the Baron had sailed from Anansilvania to America in the late 1800s. He lived alone right on the spot where the grocery store was to be built. He was also buried there by his only son. An odd thing was, the location was also an old Indian burial mound. Disappointingly, I couldn’t find anything else of interest. Maybe I could ask the librarian for help. I left the books and went to find her. She was missing. On her desk I found a tiny spider, carved from bone.

Stan Prolongo by David Avila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

 

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