Episode 15: Sensai Garden Gnome Fails His Followers... Again.

It came to pass once more that Discriminant Boy felt, well, as if he was missing something. Something vital. Something terrible important. (Besides the obvious.) He also felt like a bit of a fool. (That's almost too easy, isn't it?)

He thought, with some difficulty it must be admitted, and eventually came to the conclusion that his function in life was utterly unfulfilled. He felt that the Fates had pushed him from his insular home in the Zeroth Dimension in the weird, wacky and depraved Negative Dimension for a reason. He had been thrown into the path of evil, and fought it. He had been given a guru, a love interest, a sidekick, a mode of transport and a rather interesting and complex developing plot.

There was something he ought to have dome with all of this.

Success would have been a good something.

Now, not many of these characters would know success if it jumped up and proved Fermat's Last Theorem to them in twenty five words or less, but some of them had heard of it, as a distant rumour as it were.

Another one who had some notion of success was Sensai Garden Gnome. It wasn't something he came across terribly often either, but it was an abstract concept worth noting. A guru would achieve success if... if... if...if he taught and so on, and his pupils benefited. He didn't feel like any of them had. Perhaps he couldn't expect each and everyone of them to save the known universe from slow death by entropy, but keeping the Wet Willie Glee Club in Molong wasn't an unreasonable expectation.

Discriminant Boy and Sensai Garden Gnome moped around so much in their mutual cloud of failure that even Spike Boy got sick of the pair of them and resorted to leaving them and amusing himself for a change. This involved spending several hours unsuccessfully trying to lick his forehead. He couldn't.

At least one thing was there to help in the pursuit of success. Discriminant Boy had been under increasing pressure to do more study, past papers, revision questions and so on. Even Hyperbolia had capitulated. But not our zero. Damn it, his powers were increasing!

The Cesspool was surrounded by a veritable forest of lemon trees at this time. Discriminant Boy was dangerous to be around. If he wasn't concentrating, some weird and magical things would happen. Sunlight had been seen in the corridors of the Cesspool. Even in the pools. Whiteboard markers had mysteriously started to function. Pool assemblies were held at a time convenient to all. Incredible!

Sensai felt the time had come to once again shepherd his students out into the wide world, to once again make an attempt to Save the Dimension.

They set off early one morning. They abandoned The GrumbleBum early in the piece, deciding that walking to Pizza Hut via Tokyo would have been considerably faster. They arrived prepared for battle, except for Spike Boy, who wanted lunch instead.

The Wet Willie Glee Club were never prepared for battle and always prepared for lunch. When the Good Ones appeared on the scene they were in the middle of a rather splendid barbeque, complete with a fire that had required half of Pizza Hut to fuel it.

It was a magnificent food fight. The Good Ones quickly discovered that tomato sauce is messier than lemon juice, but The Wet Willie Glee Club likewise discovered that lemon juice stings more. The stinging was deciding the match and the WWGC was in retreat.

Until The Glee Club produced an object entirely foreign to the Negative Dimension. A startling innovation, a powerful weapon, one which unfortunately did in Discriminant Boy's powers with the force of a calculator squared.

The Personal Computer had arrived.

Windows 95 was particularly hard on our misbegotten zero. The MMX chip didn't help. It was fortunate the Negative Dimension doesn't have an Internet Service Provider, otherwise it would be curtains for The Good Ones.

Hmmm. Author's note to self: Time to update your choice of operating system or at least the hardward specs?

Sensai Garden Gnome advised them to fight on. Bad move. He advised them to work, to push themselves. Worse move. He advised them to be optimistic. Terrible move.

He advised them, as a last resort, to think.

Disaster.

They stumbled home in utter, complete defeat. They were exhausted almost beyond their capacity. They were, in short, stuffed. Again.