I’d like to tell you about a special time me , my father and mother spent together several years ago. I may have embellished some of the facts, only slightly for dramatic tension, these embellishments are very small and hardly noticeable so you may not even detect any form of exaggeration. Thank you!

It was a Thursday, I had returned from a tedious shopping trip, I’d parked my rocket powered jet pack in the hovering platform outside my bedroom and handed the shopping items to my favourite house droid. As I slipped out of my antiperspirant onesie, I happened to catch sight of a man flying down the street with a cat on his head. I put a drone on guard in case this meant cats were at war with us again.

I teleported down stairs to see my mother and father taking their afternoon constitutional perambulation in the holospheres, todays walk was ‘Gentle hill, with views of Pompeii burning’. I hooked into my holoshpere and joined them on their walk, save for I sat on my mobility scooter to prevent my ankles the horror of movement.

As we walked/sat up the gentle green hill, listening to the birds tweeting, the wind billowing in the trees, the hundreds of people being burned alive, a thought crossed my mind and came out of my mouth. “We should enter Caravel! “

“Oh Paul, what an excellent suggestion, you are very clever and brave and most would say handsome too, you smart little man” I said. Mum and Dad didn’t agreed with me, but they wanted to enter Caravel too! So I booked us three places for a week on Tuesday and gave myself a crisp pizza cake as a reward.

We had 8 days to prepare for Caravel, so to get us all in a fit condition for it, I created a preparation schedule for us all which reads as follows

Tuesday (today) – Apply ointments hyperbolic 4 and 7, wash the unfloatable unicycles, speak with Crimravii about ankle protection, extend Cecil’s left shin 4 Klinkoids, if possible ask Mum about being allowed to view the rules of Bivmivirum and watch the reprimands on the telly.

Wednesday – Apply ointments Creaso 54 and 2.5, file letters B, C and 54 with the department of justice and hope, enter hyper sleep for 20 minutes, have a nap for 50 minutes, go to the toilet and brush my teeth.

Thursday – Have a wank!

Friday – Conditional 7 should be applied, put Cecil in his travel cot, wash the clams and de wash the fear charms.

Saturday – Watch cookery programs all day

Sunday – Take Cecil out of his travel cot, clean his bum, put him back in.

Monday – reprogram all the house droids to murder anyone who comes in the house while were away. (Make sure to add our remaining family/friends to the list of unkillable people, there must not, repeat, not be a massacre like last time!).

Tuesday – Parade the prarvule, de apply any remaining ointments, fill in forms 5,7,39378b then enter Caravel! (HAVE A WEE FIRST!).

Though after half an hour eating constituent crisp snacks, my mother told me not to bother with such a list system as they had been outlawed by the unicheif. All lists, notes, inventories and directories were now illegal and punishable by leg waxing. The public libraries were in utter disarray! So I just said we would have to do some stuff over the next few days.

And for the most part we did, though Dad felt it necessary to write the words “untouchable noodle clamps” on both his fore arms and skin. To this day, I don’t know why!

By Thursday we had been given permission to enter Caravel, waves of nerves swept over my body like Traimilo particles on an Attraxing warship. I took liniment 7 and fell into a deep omni sleep.

While slumbering I had a vision, a thousand drones marching on the streets, banners in hand, firing their weapons at all the humans lining the roads. People fell, as the weapons payloads hit them, people moaning and wailing. The relentless march of the droids continued across the planet, taking humans down where ever they were. Shot after shot after shot. The streets ran red. A world taken over by an army of sex droids, spraying their slippery red love juice all over everyone, causing untold pleasure the second it touches skin. A world of pure pleasure. Then I woke up. I ordered my house droid to clean my sheets.

God I hope that comes true one day, one of the droids had a nipple showing!

In the afternoon I tumbled dried the cat. Then fixed its urine circuits, it kept pissing everywhere.

Parliament man 4 rang up Mum, her ability to enter Caravel was in question as her ankle supports were only mark 3.4 and obviously you need at least a mark 8.6. So we had to get them upgraded.

We traveled to sector three, in zone 15, of district 92 at constituency 329 in the neighbourhood of 4. It took ages, even via trans warp rocket pants. I slept most of the journey, which is a shame because I hit four people on the way, but as the law states “If you’re not conscious, you’re not culpable”.

We waited bloody ages to see Doctor Bad Cheese, the only ankle specialist of any note. Four quick slices and insertions later and Mother had ankles of mark 39! They put mine to shame!

Cecil got very jealous of her new ankle parts and got himself some too. So it’s just me that will have to go through Caravel with slightly dodgy ankles, god help me if I slip!

We decided to take the Prentillan car home, slipping into sedative seats I thought about Caravel, everything I had heard about it filled my mind with wonder, but also fear. I can’t believe Mum or Dad have managed to live this long and not decided to enter it. Oh just think of the memories if we make it all the way through. I fell asleep thinking about what protective clothing I might need.

Time passed and eventually it became the night before we were to go. Everyone had packed their clothes and favourite holographic vision clamps. Cecil fixed axillary 7 to his transmottic eye. Then we sat down for our last meal, Cecil had frozen fire on a cloud of sapphire hope, with a crystalline entity’s soul on a bed of temporal lava, mum had wisps of fragmented Saturn cloud, roasted within an endless fountain of myth, gossamer shards and toasted imagination. I had three pizzas!

The night time! We all slid into the somnia tubes and were deposited in our beds suitable dressed and dosed with sedative 4. But even with this I found sleep hard to come by. The sedative enhanced my dream lobes and I watched as my dreams were projected on the inside of my sleep pod. I dreamt we all entered Caravel, it was a giant enclosed dome, filled with buildings and forests and we had to try and make it to the other side while fighting off deadly plants and animals. This of course couldn’t be further from the truth. Though in the dream only I survived to the end.

While my body rested and my mind played its bizarre games and I watched the imagination in front of me, outside my pod house droid 7 went about its nightly business of cleaning my mess up. Unbeknownst to it, everything it knew was about to change. As it was suckling away my pizza crusts and phlegm excretions, by pure happenstance, a life orb was dropped from one of the roof tubes, entirely by accident. It landed in house droid 7’s AI pouch. Instantly consciousness was transferred and house droid 7 became truly sentient. Unfortunately the second it realised it was alive, an over whelming depression swept across its soul at the realisation that while alive, it was not organic and could never love another of its kind and procreate, so it ripped out its brain circuits and committed suicide. Double unfortunately this started a fire in its veryunobtanium core, which seconds later exploded , starting fires in sectors 3 to 19.

Dad and Mum were ejected from their sleep pods into the garden, a safe distance from the fire. I got stuck in the tubes and had to use my wings and hooves to free myself. We stood on the geomech lawn, the grass warming our feet, as we watched the house expand and contract to contain the fire.

By 6 AM the house had healed and we went back in, 2 hours till Caravel. Everything in the house was new, fresh and clean. We ate the required palliatives and sat with our luggage as we waited to enter. At 8 AM on the dot, the Trimpallia bells sounded, the walls of the house expanded, the droids stacked neatly atop one another, I took Cecil’s hand, he took Mothers, we stepped deftly forward 8 paces, began to chant the sacred words of Caravel

“Oh Caravel

Lest us enter yea

Partake we do

A Bivmirrum untertoe

Let the cillica seal!”

And with that we took a side step into the Prillams and entered Caravel!