“Looks like a megatherium up there,” says Dickens, leaning over his handlebars and pedaling furiously.
“What if there were some sort of Catskills-esque response to that?” says Thackeray. “Like ‘no, it’s just that my wife, because of my constant emotional abuse, feels called to heavy drinking, so there’s a good chance that what you’re seeing is in some way the result of the sloppy cooking that’s a side-effect of her tragic alcoholism.’ Something like that, but megatherium-specific. And possibly referring to a ‘roast.'”
“I don’t know,” says Dickens. “What if there were?”
Dickens and Thackeray have taken the opportunity afforded by the ice age to ride their bicycles across the Bering Strait and visit their sensei, who lives in the woods in Wisconsin. He lives in a little house there. Dickens and Thackeray are looking forward to their visit, during which they plan to sit around and have tea, sometimes taking breaks to fend off wave after wave of tireless adversaries. It’s what they always do when they visit their sensei, and they find that there’s an easy rhythm to it, a rhythm about which they don’t really have to think. They may also get some reading done. But in the meantime, here’s a megatherium.
As they pull up, Dickens and Thackeray get a better look at the megatherium, which is, very deliberately, chewing on some sassafrass as it lounges, looking a little sullen.
“Then I probably would have used it instead of that elaborately self-referential and actually more or less just rhetorical question,” says Thackeray as they skid to a collective stop in the vicinity of the megatherium, who turns to look at them, its face expressionless.
“It’s really great to see you again,” says the megatherium. “Dickens and Thackeray, right?”
It turns out that the megatherium remembers them from their years training with the sensei, which is really awkward for Dickens and Thackeray, who can’t place it at all, and then when Dickens finally does he realizes that this was the megatherium that they knew as “The Megatherium Everyone Hated,” and before he can catch himself he lets this slip, after which there’s a long pause during which he, Thackeray, and the megatherium just stand there, Thackeray looking shocked, Dickens with his eureka-ish expression slowly fading, and the megatherium kind of squinting at them, getting grimmer and grimmer.
“Jesus, Dickens,” says Thackeray.
The megatherium roars, gets up on its hind legs, extends missile launchers from its shoulders and terrible rending energy-claws from its knuckles, and prepares to charge, but Thackeray, having seen this coming, more or less, says the secret word and, with a flick of his wrist, encases the beast in a block of ice.
“Jesus, Dickens,” says Thackeray. “Jesus.”
“Yeah,” says Dickens. “Huh. I really can’t apologize enough for that one.” He looks at the ground, extremely solemn, but then he finds he’s unable to keep it up, and, grinning, punches Thackeray on the arm. “But did you see his face? I mean, The Megatherium Everyone Hated. Dude! He was just so awful! Remember that time we were having the picnic with the other megatheria, and we kept moving around and eventually had to make ourselves invisible, and he still found us, and then he ate all the pie and didn’t say a single amusing thing? I mean, Jesus.”
“Oh, man,” says Thackeray. “That was just too much.”
Dickens and Thackeray do a little self-congratulatory dance then, in front of The Megatherium Everyone Hated, still encased in its block of ice, and then they exchange high-fives, get on their bikes, and ride away.