| It all started in a little town called Elephant not very far from a nuclear
power plant. In the town they had a secret laboratory, a zoo, a kindergarten,
a school, mayor's house, a swimming pool, 175 houses, 342 citizens and a lot of
empty rooms. Their main source of income was tourism. The main tourist attraction
was a young elephant called Muffy. But he was not very pleased with his life in
the zoo. He just couldn't stand the parrots in a nearby cage. They always made
fun of him because he only had one tusk. The other one was cut off by some poachers
back in Africa. So he decided to escape.
He waited for more than a year before he finally got his chance to escape.
The weather on that day was extremely bad. The rain was falling for so long and
so persistently that the lions had to swim in their cages. No wonder his keeper
forgot to lock the door. Muffy only had to push against the door with his trunk
and he was free. He walked out the zoo slowly and as quietly as an elephant can
because he couldn't run in such weather and he didn't want to be heard.
Next day the whole town was looking for him. The workers from the zoo wanted
to put him back in the zoo. The kids from the kindergarten wanted to catch him
and make him their little pet elephant. The kids from the school and their teachers
wanted to catch him so they would become famous and their town would attract more
tourists. The famous town hunters wanted to become more famous by catching an
elephant. The mayor wanted to have the remaining tusk for his living room. The
local travel agency seized the opportunity to attract more tourists with safari.
So Muffy had only little chances of staying free. He was very lucky not to have
been caught on the first day of his freedom.
After a few days of hide and seek he hid in a huge strange looking barrack
at the edge of the town. It was very late in the evening so he couldn't see anything.
He fell asleep. At the middle of the night he was woken up by a strange noise.
It sounded like an alarm clock. He looked around but he still couldn't see anything,
until a very powerful light suddenly appeared through the window. He could see
the whole sky was lit up. Then he saw a huge strange cloud of smoke on the horizon.
It was shaped like a mushroom. It was so ugly he had to turn around. What he saw
shocked him even more. There were cages everywhere he looked. He thought he had
somehow gotten back in the zoo. He was horrified. He wanted to run away. He started
running but he crashed into some cages and broke them. Rabbits started jumping
all over the place. One of them jumped into a little aquarium and knocked it over
so the contents fell on Muffy. Another one jumped on a table. On the table there
was a little bottle containing some liquid of a strange yellow color (you thought
I was gonna say green, didn't you). It flew up to the ceiling and fell down right
on the poor elephant's head covered with starfish. The bottle broke and the contents
poured all over Muffy. The transformation began. He didn't feel a thing. He fainted
as one of the rabbits knocked over a cage of white mice.
He dreamed someone saying "We should call it George after my uncle, who lost
his ears in a bicycle crash."
He woke up much later with a horrible headache. He looked around and all he
could see were vertical stripes. He thought he only imagined them. But he couldn't
get rid of them. He needed quite a long time to find out they were bars. He was
trapped in a cage. His first thought was that he was back at the zoo. But wasn't
his cage bigger? Maybe the small cage was a punishment for running away.
He suddenly realized he was thirsty. No problem. There was water at one of
the corners of the cage. He lifted his trunk to dip it into the water, but it
remained in the air. He stared at the water. He didn't believe his eyes. What
kind of exotic animal was this in his water? It didn't look like anything he ever
saw. It didn't even look like anything I ever saw. Was he in a "Candid camera
goes to the zoo" show? He didn't care. He finally dropped his trunk in the water
and took a deep gulp. The image on the surface disappeared. He thought it was
just a hallucination. But not. When he stopped drinking and the water stopped
making waves, the image returned. He remembered a sentence: "After eliminating
the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." With
the help of this thought he concluded the image in the water had to be him. It
took him a long time before he could accept that. Why were his eyes so big? Where
were his big fluffy ears? Why did he have wing-shaped arms? Why was he pale-blue?
Who cut off his beautiful tiny tail? Why was he star-shaped? And where the mouse
was his tusk? He couldn't answer any of these questions. Neither can I. He could
see there was a board hanging on the outside of the cage. He wondered what it
said. With his trunk he grabbed it and turned it so he could read: "George the
STARFISH ELEPHANT."
Soon afterwards, the cage opened at the top and a huge snake, with five smaller
snakes sticking out of its head, moved into the cage and the five smaller snakes
wrapped around him and lifted him in the air. He recognized what it was: a hand,
a giant hand. And where there is a giant hand, there must be a giant. And it was.
Actually there was a whole giant room filled with giants in giant white robes,
sitting on giant chairs behind giant tables. Everything was giant. Especially
for someone who used to be an elephant. This was it! He USED TO be an elephant.
Starfish elephants must be smaller, as big as mice. Only he was small, nothing
around him was really giant. He was so small, that his own mother would run away,
because she would mistake him for a mouse. Small as a mouse! That was more than
an elephant or even an ex-elephant could cope with. He was overwhelmed with this
thought. His ego was just too big for such a small body. Black thoughts blocked
his senses so he didn't even know what they were doing to him. He didn't notice
they were taking pictures of him with a digital camera. He didn't notice he was
under careful examination, didn't see the experiments they were doing on him.
He didn't even register hours of testing, moving on ground, under water, jumping
in the air because of hot flames under his feet, blowing peanuts out of his trunk
like bullets, drinking strange liquids and all the other stuff they did to him.
But there was something he noticed. A sharp pain on his shoulder and a moment
later something splashing out of his left shoulder together with awful pain coming
all over his body. He couldn't stand it. It was unbearable. He thought: "Stop
that, I'll be small, just stop hurting me." Finally the pain was no more. He felt
calmness coming over him. He was free.
Suddenly he caught himself staring down from the ceiling on the strange people
in white robes running like crazy around the table with a strange animal on it,
just like the one he saw somewhere before. But where? Reflection on the water.
Oh, no! It was him. He was dead. He remembered reading about near-death experiences
in a magazine someone had dropped into his cage after being hit from behind by
an escaped rhino. He looked around to see where the dark tunnel with a very bright
light at the end of it would appear. He found it. But there was something unexpected
coming out of it. A beautiful pale-pink female elephant with white wings where
her ears should be. He knew she wanted him to put her trunk around hers, although
she didn't say a thing. But he didn't want to go with her. He didn't want to be
dead. He didn't want to go to the next level of existence, because he didn't believe
in reincarnation. He had still things to do in this level of existence. Getting
home to Africa and having children were just two of them. So he ran away, right
through the wall, like ghosts do.
In the next room he saw a tall skinny man with spectacles and a pony tail sitting
on a chair at a big desk. On the desk was a light gray box with colored lights
on it and lots of black ropes sticking out of it at the back. There were three
more such boxes, two a little bit smaller rounded boxes with nets on the front
side making strange noises, and one more square with a picture on one side. He
was surprised to see the picture changing. The ropes tied the boxes to each other,
to the wall, and to a strange device on the table. It was a board with little
things sticking out of it, which the man kept pressing inside the box, but they
wouldn't stay in. He wanted to help the man, but his trunk just went through the
board and through the table. At that moment he noticed there was a mouse on the
table. He panicked. But the mouse wasn't moving. It was tied to one of the gray
boxes. But he still wanted to get away.
Then the picture on the screen suddenly changed. There was a picture of him
on one side and "George the Starfish Elephant" written on the other. The picture
disappeared and there was another one. It was him in a strange environment. He
didn't remember being there before. He quite liked it. His image on the screen
was running, jumping, shooting peanuts, moving through fire and water and doing
all the things he didn't remember doing when he was upset because he was so little.
He couldn't stop watching it. He wanted to really be there. Suddenly he felt strangely
drawn to it. He did want to be there, but not just on a flat screen. He tried
to get away, but he couldn't. He pressed his legs to the floor, but they just
went through it. He was helpless. Slowly he was drawn into the screen. "Nooooo...,"
he cried, but nothing could help him now.
Suddenly he found himself in a flat, 2D world, which was made up of small dots.
He looked at himself and he was also different, flattened and little dots all
over him. Fortunately this time he didn't feel a thing. He was just a ghost. Then
he started to feel something. He was alive again. He was moving, jumping, shooting
peanuts and doing other funny stuff without even knowing how and why, he only
knew he was enjoying it. He noticed that his actions on the screen were caused
by the man in front of the screen. He was very sad when the man stopped moving
him around and switched off the lights in the flat world, as he found himself
in total darkness. He became very depressed. But he was happy again on the next
day when the man turned the PC on, started the game and moved him around as he
always wanted.
He asked the man in front of the screen, if he could make more copies of the
game for the humans of all ages to play with him and made them and George the
Super Starfish Elephant happy. I did my part of the bargain, now it is up to YOU
to make George and yourself happy by playing and, if you're good enough, winning
the game and release a part of George from the digital world.
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