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Chapter 12 (Finale)

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Although it was the end of the documentation altogether, the foxes and wolves wearing the purple and green uniforms went ahead and introduced us to the men that were the principals of the high schools in question, so they could tell me their perspectives on the bullying scenes.  “History tends to repeat itself,” one said, “because the same thing happened at all three schools.  The kids here witnessed the bullies in each case threaten a different kid because the kid being threatened is a straight A student, and has vested interests in many things related to math and science.  I don’t think it helps that the kid being bullied in my case has a habit of using big words instead of using normal words.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Instead of saying, ‘Get us out of here,’ he would say, ‘I think that a precipitous departure would be prudent at this particular point.’  The boy likes to use alliteration and assonance in his vocabulary.  He’s a nice kid, though.”

“What were the threats, then?”

“If the smart kid doesn’t fail the test under pressure, the bullies will beat him to a pulp.  All bullies were punished accordingly, and CNG later killed them and their parents.  They learned it from their parents, of course.”

“So the parents of the kids that reported the bullying just made the assumption they were also being punished, but didn’t ask for any details, correct?”

“Yes,” the principal confirmed.  “They just went into a ‘how dare you’ monologue, as I like to call it, and then pulled the CNG out.”

“What was your reaction to it?” Dark Wolf asked the parents of the foxes and wolves, since they were just reporting the actions.

“We applauded them for doing the right thing, but we were crying at the same time,” one couple replied; they were Bill’s parents.  “God gave us this amazing gift with an amazing talent for playing the saxophone; a heartless mercenary wanted to take him away!”

“No point in weeping about it,” I said as I tried to console the wife, who had burst into tears upon completing that sentence.  “Your son’s had a good life so far, and has a whole life ahead of him.  Why are you hyper-obsessing on the day he almost died?”

“I’m sorry,” she apologized.  “This is a subject that gives me nightmares about it to this day.”  It took a while for her to calm down, but she did, and she gave me a hug while doing so, which felt awkward.  I felt compassionate, though, and so I hugged her back, assuring her, “You’ll be fine.  You’ll be fine.”

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The following weekend was the weekend where Circus Delights put on their big parade and show for the guests.  The animals wore their uniforms for the show, since Landon the Labrador (the Ringmaster of Righteousness) wanted to acknowledge them, and congratulate them for becoming allies to the G-52s.  Multiple shows had to be performed, though, due to the sheer number of animals that were documented.  One was held just for the scouts and scoutmasters as a result; the next was done for the marching band and drum corps animals, including those in the patriotic uniforms, as well as those who were wearing their own circus ringmaster outfits.  The third was done for just the military and first responders, while the fourth was done for the animals in fancy dress and the other categories that remained (i.e. the fast food employees; all fast food restaurants in question closed their stores for the day to allow their staff to watch the circus).

The circus also handed out ear protectors to the crowds in case some of them didn’t handle loud noises all that well (and a number of the bear cub scouts fit this), particularly since the finale act was Chad the Coyote Cannonball getting shot out of the cannon.  While he usually flew onto a safety net, the decision was made to launch him onto a series of crash mats here, in order to allow for the pyrotechnic effects that the circus wanted to use for both the launch and the landing.  One set of fireworks accompanied the launch, while the other accompanied the landing.

Some people started to cry at the sight of it, but Chad made the successful flight, and when he hit the crash mats, it trigged a massive confetti and balloon drop from the ceiling.  The orchestra liked the “Win the Lot” cue from “$ale of the Century” so much, they decided to play it again here, but the purpose was also to celebrate the triumph over the CNG crisis.

“That balloon and confetti drop was for you!” Landon said to the audience as the whole troupe took their bows.  “I know it’s frustrating because you lost your humanity, but the fact is, having heard the stories from you that I’ve heard—and I am a G-52 myself, by the way—I can conclude that all of you ultimately contributed to CNG’s demise, as well as the ultimate demise of its successor, IC2.  Thus, the balloons and confetti you saw drop there was all for you!”  The audience cheered and applauded accordingly.

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The grizzly bear scoutmaster that ran his household like a boot camp later took his two sons on another nature walk, but didn’t command them to march in step or go into any bad habits.  It’s clear that the habits were still there, since he was marching.  His sons humored him by keeping their paws in step anyway, and silently mouthing to themselves, “Left!  Left!  Left, right, left!”

The walk was in Fife-Eche Forest, so one of the sons took a guidebook with him in case the other son or the father had any questions.  Since the father did play drums himself, he summoned a military field drum and played a few beats on it so he could see for himself, since the guidebook’s first page was devoted to an insect known as the Drumming Dragonfly.  (These are dragonflies that flap their wings in such a way, it resembles drumsticks beating on a drum.  When the bear played his drum, the dragonflies flapped their wings so that it was copying his movements.)

The father and his sons later enrolled on the musical payroll system to help income continue to flow in, since the dad lost his job and had trouble finding a new one.  (The company he had worked for had its main building destroyed in the last big tornado we had, but before they could build up again, they were bought out, and the people who bought them out unfairly chose to lay off many staffers.)

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The animals on the numbered lists that had ended up half-naked from watching TADD were introduced to the Golden Fife & Drum Corps afterwards, since Drummer Dog 1 (David Olson) had played the title character on the show, and he answered all their questions about why the show chose to portray its animal characters that way, as well as how the show was made, since it was an expensive show to do, combining live action and CGI animation.  (The new version is entirely CGI for budgetary reasons.)  They met in Dark Wolf’s large band room that serves his castle.

“What you have to remember is that the show was based on a children’s book series, new books of which are still being published,” David said, “and the artists chose to draw the animals that way.  The D.A.R.E mascot, Daren the Lion, is the same way.  Yet the more people who claim to be social justice warriors—all of whom CNG eventually killed off for disturbing the peace, by the way—tried to get us cancelled, the more everybody else wanted to watch it.  Go figure.”

“Well, we are very familiar with the books; they helped to teach us music also,” said the wolf in blue (see number 198).  “In any case, I think we’re starting to feel better about the whole thing, because all of us felt very embarrassed about it.”  (Because the golden retrievers in the Golden Fife & Drum Corps were appearing this way, they had the animals appear this way, so we had the top parts of the uniforms, but the legs and feet were exposed.)  “I ended up as a digitrade wolf at first, which is why it made me this way at first.”

“Well, you were wise to play it safe by having the full uniform, even though you were still parading on your paws,” David replied.  “However, we asked you to appear this way so that you’d get a better understanding of why the authors did this, and why the show took a bold step of having us continue to dress this way.  In the end, the rabble-rousers were punished, and people now understand that in the animal kingdom, you can get away with this sort of thing, but humans don’t have that luxury.”

“Our point of calling you here also,” Drummer Dog 2 added, “is that while we are sorry that you lost your humanity, and felt embarrassed upon appearing like this, the most important thing is that you were brave enough to admit it when you were documented, and as weird as this sounds, it ultimately protected you from the ones going after you.  It’s so sad that it had to end the way it did.”

“I agree,” said the wolf.

“In the meantime, listen to our fife and drum rendition of the national anthem.”

“Yes, sir,” said the animals.  After finding the giant American flag on one of the walls, they positioned themselves in the right direction, then snapped to attention and gave it the military salute as the dogs played the anthem.  Afterwards, the animals continued the Q & A session, and also took some tips from the dogs on how to better themselves as musicians.

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Meanwhile, all the animals that did not receive the headgear from “Uniforms ‘R’ Us” yet finally got it in the mail.  As promised, I also stopped by the main store to investigate the problem with the system, and the managers led me into the back office so that they could should me the records they normally didn’t allow anyone else to see.

“It’s all fixed now if it makes you feel better,” the general manager said, “but because we hired your technology specialist (T2) to fix it, he added his own color code.”

“T2 likes to color-code certain things; it makes his job as our tech guru and inventor that much easier,” I said.  “So what do these symbols mean?”

“The whole thing started when the tabloid terrorists hacked into the system and started changing everything around.  Obviously, they didn’t know that they were doing, because their intention was to steal everyone’s money, credit card numbers, etc., and put us out of business.  All they ended up doing was changing the order to being a partial order instead of the whole thing.  There was no way for the staff to know that this was happening.  Thus, if you see an orange circle next to the customer’s name, it means the hackers changed it on their own.”

“What’s the blue star for, then?”

“That just means the system glitched out on its own.  Do you remember all those brief power outages we had last month?” (The winter weather’s winds blowing in excess of 50 MPH was causing the power to randomly shut off, forcing the electric companies to be on round-the-clock patrol until the whole thing stopped.)

“Oh, yes; that was driving me nuts.  It cut into the servers so that people couldn’t use the G-52 app when they needed.”

“It was cutting into our servers as well.  Again, our staff wouldn’t have known that the orders weren’t correct, but each and every one of them were very grateful that the customers were not angry.  They were just all confused.  Everything has been fixed now.”

“That’s good.  That’s just what I wanted to hear.”

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The guests with stuff that was missing also sent me photos of themselves, before they received the missing items and afterwards.

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I do not know if we will present a ninth wave or not, because eight waves is a lot more than we thought we would be presenting, but it does go to show just how big a deal it was, and just how biased CNG had been when it was doing all these transformations.  We owe a big thank you to all the participants in all eight waves.  I know that it was boring for the most part, but the fact is that you did do us all a great service.  Why?  Because by doing this, crazy as this sounds, you helped the nation’s crime rate go down drastically, and in some case, your actions saved many lives.  I am therefore proud to say you are all allies to the G-52s, and I am certain you’ll contribute much more to making our world a much better place to live.

Thank you all so much.  Get yourself a good night’s sleep now; you’ve earned it.  Good night.

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THE END