"Sir Cornelius, Lost in Space" by Anna Simmons

Before you read this story, let me warn you that it could be true. It all depends on your sanity, your imagination, and how often you hallucinate. It is the story of a creature named Sir Cornelius Abalone Fropwirdth the Third, and his quest to find his leader, and himself.

            I found him in the dryer. He was eating my socks. Over a period of time I got to know him better, and he gradually learned to speak English. He lived in relative peace and happiness, until one day I got a strange letter in the mail. It was addressed to ‘Sr Cnellyz.’ I gave it to my strange friend, and he ripped it open with the spike on his nose. He looked at the paper for a moment, gasped, and his scaly face paled in stupefied amazement. He showed me the letter; however, I could not make out the meaning of the inscrutable writing. He explained that his king, Sir Oswald Haberforth Jaywalker Fropwirdth the Twelfth, had been abducted by aliens. Sir Cornelius had been chosen to save him. At first, this was a bit confusing, because I had not known that Cornelius even had a king, but after a bit of explanation, I let him go.

            And that’s where the story gets good. We join our hero (that would be Sir C) as he is just leaving the inner solar system. He has just realized that his warpozoomer is damaged and he is going much slower than he should be. We wait for a few years, as he crosses the outer bit of the solar system. This is the boring part of the story. Trust me, it gets better. So unless you like waiting, you can now skip forward to a few years later, on an unknown planet in the next paragraph.

            This planet is not on any charts or maps, due to the strange and secretive nature of its inhabitants. Among these unique individuals, though, it is commonly referred to as “The Planet of the Phranqz.” An outsider is likely to wonder why these people are so strange, and what on Earth, or off of it, a ‘Phranq’ is. Earlier, I called these people unique. Perhaps that is a bit too strong a word.

            You see, every single living being on the entire planet is named Frank. To be quite frank with you, everything else is called frank also. They only eat frankfurters. And the money they buy them with? Their native currency? Why, francs, of course!

            Now, when Sir Cornelius arrived at this planet, he felt very incongruous and out of place. Not only was he not named Frank, but he also had no idea how to speak Frankeyz. He was literally at a loss for words.

            Luckily, the Phranquians are simple creatures, and it did not take Sir Cornelius long to learn their native language, as it consists mostly of the word ‘frank’ and a lot of pointing at things.

            So, Sir Cornelius walks into the vestibule of the nearest One Stop Space Ship Dents, Dip and Chips Shop to have his vehicle repaired. “Frank?” he asks the owner. The owner nods and franks. Soon, Sir Cornelius’ ship is repaired and he can now set off at a normal speed, heading through the galaxy to who-knows-where. But he is not alone.

            Little does he know that a stray cat (er… that would actually be a Frank) has followed our hero on board his ship and is now his only companion on the long, dark journey through space. And she was a petulant and tempestuous creature that would do anything to get her way.

            Many thousands of miles from The Planet of the Phranqs, Sir Cornelius found a rest stop. It was floating on an asteroid in the middle of the Nowhere system, with a sign that read, “Welcome to Who-Knows-Where.”

“Well,” Sir Cornelius told the hissing cat, “I guess we’re lost. Even they don’t know.”

“Franco,” the cat insisted and nonchalantly sat down in a corner and began to wash herself.

“What do we do now?” Sir Cornelius wondered, as the fickle cat sat up, then lay down, then paced, then went to sleep, then woke up and stretched, and then finally started attacking Sir Cornelius’ legs.

Now, I am going to tell you something that might interest you while our hero is suffering horrible privations- and an angry cat- somewhere near the middle of Nowhere. Despite his gallant nature, he isn’t actually our hero. The cat is. Although the finicky feline would never pay homage to another living thing, put herself above everyone else, and was not obsequious in the least- or most- bit, she would still be the one to find King Oswald. She would not do this of her own volition, but it would do it all the same. So we may call Sir Cornelius our hero, but it is the cat who saves the day.

But that comes later.

Right now, as you may recall, Sir Cornelius and Franq the Cat are stuck on an asteroid, waiting. All of the faithful viewers of their show on Phranquian National Television are waiting (although Cornelius doesn’t know that he even has a TV show). Meanwhile, King Oswald is closer than anyone would have thought, waiting. You see, this story involves quite a lot of waiting. Any possibly true story involving deep space does. And so, even though King Oswald is relatively nearby, the happy ending is not.

So you’ll just have to wait.

Sorry.

All right, back to the story. By this time, Sir Cornelius and his companion have left Who-Knows-Where and are headed out of the dismal area. Heading, in fact, to one far more dismal, to a planet known only as The Dark Place. And even this was an understatement. What they would find is beyond imagining, darker than the negative of a photograph of a polar bear blinking in a snowstorm. And that is dark.

A polar bear has a nose, however, and in the negative of a photograph, this nose comes out as the one bright speck in a sea of blackness. For this reason, we could say that it would be good advice for Sir Cornelius and the cat to follow not only their own noses, but also the opposite of someone else’s.

When they arrived on the dark planet, Cornelius and Franq could not see anything. It was very dark. They got off of their spaceship and set off in opposite directions. The cat went to the right and fell into a large pit. It got up, stumbled off to one side and unknowingly walked straight into an underground river. It struggled for a few moments, and then finally gave up and let itself be carried along by the forceful current.

Sir Cornelius, on the other hand, walked off to the left. He did not realize that he was in a forest until he ran headlong into a tree. He walked around this tree and immediately smacked into another. Every way he turned, he bumped into one tree or another, with no change in the size of the trunks or the feel of the bark. That is, until Cornelius ran into a tree that had fur.

Meanwhile, as this story is being told, Franq is getting tired of floating, and wonders where she will end up. She does not have much longer to wait, but has no idea of this, and falls asleep. When she wakes up, she finds that she is on dry land and that she can see. This noted, she unconcernedly goes back to sleep.

As the cat was being disturbed from her nap, Sir Cornelius had disturbed something else’s nap. This thing was huge and very furry, and if there had been any light he would have been pure white. He was, in fact, a vegetarian polar bear named Robert B. Shkwid, but Sir Cornelius had no way of knowing this. So, as Cornelius bumps into Robert he does not expect that Robert is friendly, and had exactly the kind of nose that would help, not only for seeing him in snowstorms, but also for finding lost kings.

As I said before, the cat is the one to find King Sir Oswald Haberforth Jaywalker Fropwirdth the Twelfth; however, R.B. “Bob” Shkwid and Sir Cornelius also have to find him, for the reason that Franq is a wholly uncooperative being. Never trust a cat to tell you anything. They won’t.

If Sir Cornelius was startled by his chance meeting with Bob Shkwid, Bob was even more surprised to wake up and feel a large scaly thing knock into his front paws. Both jumped. Both panicked. Both ran away and hit their heads on trees.

In the brightly lit cavern, Franq yawns and sits up. She blinks. Then, noticing a strange creature in her view, she decides to investigate. The creature looks much like Sir Cornelius, except that he has a more regal appearance about him. Another difference, and a way that the cat could tell that this creature was not her traveling companion, was the fact that he was tied up, and she saw that he had been for a long time. Franq the cat had found King Oswald.

Just then, the aliens returned. The million fans on Planet Phranq all held their breaths. Fortunately, they did not yet seem to notice the cat.

Above ground, in the blazing dark, Sir Cornelius and Bob the bear were rapidly finding out that they had little reason to fear each other. Soon, they found that they even had a common goal: they both wanted to find the aliens. We already know why Cornelius wanted to find them, but not why Bob did. To answer this question, he wanted revenge. The aliens had landed their spaceship in his vegetable garden, destroying it.

So Bob and Cornelius hatched a plan. Or tried to. Their first goal was to get out of the forest. That proved to be easier said than done. One of the biggest problems with getting stuck in a giant forest, particularly when you can’t see anything, is getting back out.

Luckily, Bob and Cornelius eventually found their way out of the woods and into a large pit of sand. “Well,” Sir Cornelius remarked to Bob, “ At least we can’t hit our heads on anything anymore.” This proved to be untrue, because before Cornelius had even finished his sentence, Bob hit his head on something and fell down. The thing he hit his head on happened to be the aliens’ spaceship, and the sandpit was sadly all that was left of his garden, but that is not the point.

The point was actually a lever lying half-buried in the sand. When Bob fell, his nose hit the lever and pushed it to one side. Suddenly, a large hole opened in the ground, and both Sir Cornelius and Bob fell in.

They landed in a brightly lit cavern containing a king, a cat, and two angry aliens. “My lightroom!” Bob exclaimed when he saw it, “It’s where I develop my photographs!”

“Prebosnark?” asked one of the aliens, “Wabna goun hrooli?”

“Deemo pud,” answered the other, “Chaffa wunkrep bleckbleck.”

No one else had any idea what the two-headed green blobs of slime were saying, but the answer became obvious as the strange creatures drew unusual-looking guns out of the horns in between the eyes on their left heads. Sir Cornelius thought the guns looked familiar, but could not quite figure out why.

Then, literally in a flash, he realized what the guns really were. The aliens shot at Bob and Cornelius, and a huge flash of dark went off. Cornelius exclaimed, “They’re cameras!” The aliens laughed and left.

Cornelius and Bob quickly untied King Oswald, and brought him back up to the ground above. There, they saw that night was falling. It quickly became light out.

“Well,” said Cornelius, “all’s well that ends well! I know what to name this planet, too! It is hereby called Tenalp Sdrawkcab!”

“Frrrrrrank!” The cat agreed, as the million Phranquian viewers cheered.