To stay warm, I had to arm-wrestle every lemur within a 10-mile radius of myself to build a coat using my own eyebrow hair as thread and my magic toothpick as a needle. It worked long enough to keep my body heat together instead of clustered around me like a bad dog fart. I stomped for fifteen hours through the tundra until I found the Prophet of Maelstroms, a slappy little bandoleer of Amish origin handcrafted out of an old tuna can, a Woody Woodpecker™ yo-yo and what appeared to be either an oversized jack or a small caltrop.
“Ahh, wise and purple Queen of the Dust Bunnies, you have done well to survive the first two trials. But here it gets much harder, my young gringo padawan.”
“I have rhythm and I have music, there’s nothing you can take away from me!” I shouted into the mountain valley.
“I bet I could think of something,” said the Prophet in an almost hauntingly tacky way. Half of his tuna label was dangling off the can, showing a sad little dolphin being harpooned in the face by an ex-navy-seal-clubber.
He turned on a betamax and the most horrible music started to play… a cross between a Barney sing-along and Slipknot. I felt the horrible feeling in my blood, as if it had all been drained and replaced with a gelatinous substance like the Dr. Scholl’s rubber shoe sole things I liked to poke at pharmacies.
“Aaarrgh! I give up! I give up!” I said, flailing my arms wildly around me.
“Well, your dignity seems to be about gone, but you still have love for the fine arts. See, you can’t know anything until we beat the love out of your system. Go get caught in a love triangle between a rich momma’s boy and an evil genius and return to me when you’ve lost the concept of love.”
This was the tricky part, but I was a really big nerd so luckily I knew the answer without killing anyone… well, except for nine or so people, according to the book that was written later on account of those events. It was all unintentional. For me, that is. But I would sound like a bigger nerd writing fanfic about it so I’ll let you go guess which story it is. Hint: not Robinson Crusoe, although that’s another really good one I recommend. He’s a good friend of mine. Real name’s Tim Anderson, Wimbledon Lane, London.
Having lost all concepts for love and anything I previously held dear to me, I trekked back to the Prophet of Maelstroms, in which he said:
“The Meaning of Life? Gimme tree-fiddy.”