Bob, Bob and the Rise and Fall of the Vegetables by Claire
24 Jul 2016
As Bob the Dog waited impatiently for the space ship to arrive at Mars he floated over to the space computer and started to type up a story. This is how it went:
Bob and the Broccoli – Brussels Sprout Space Invasion
Hi, I’m Bob the Dog and this is a story of how I saved Planet Earth.
As my good friend, Bob the Pirate, and I were walking home, Bob suddenly stopped and said, “I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go eat my dinner.” I wanted to ask, “Why not?” but since I am a dog it just came out as a bark. “Because for dinner I’ve got Broccoli and Brussels-sprout puree.” We were silent for a while, until I found a crystal-gem necklace. Bob put it on me and there was a big flash!
“What was that all about?” I asked. Bob just looked at me.
‘Did you just speak?”
“I think so.”
“There! You did it again!”
“Oh well, that’s weird!”
“I think it might be the crystal.”
“But what if your owner finds out?”
“Oh! I almost forgot! He’s a geologist.”
“You’ve got to hide it somehow…”
But before he could finish, Bob’s mum came down the street, fuming. “Bob, eat your Broccoli and Brussels-sprout puree, NOW!!!”
Bob started to shake. He looked down at me. His eyes were telling me to do something, so I did. “Excuse me Mrs Bob’s Mum, Bob is my best friend and he doesn’t want to eat Broccoli and Brussels-Sprout puree”. Bob’s mum froze and started sweating. She dropped the plate of the gloopy paste and started to run away.
Bob ran back to me and patted my head. “Thank you! Thank you, thank you!” I looked up at him and asked him, ”Why don’t you like Broccoli and Brussels-Sprout puree?”
“Because it is gross and it gives me tummy problems.”
“Oh, come on. It can’t be that bad can it?”
“Try it for yourself then.”
So I licked the mixture from the ground and I felt like I was going to puke!
“How about you throw this stuff away?”
“Ok!”
So we picked the horrid stuff up went to the town’s dumpster and threw it away.
“Mission complete!” we shouted happily.
But what we didn’t know was that there was radioactive waste in that dumpster. The Broccoli and Brussels-sprout puree had grown eyes, arms and legs. It climbed out of the bin and somehow sent out rays from its head to another planet and that is when it all started.
* * *
A week later as we were scoffing our faces with ice cream, a spinning cube in the sky landed on the ground and exploded. But we didn’t notice, we were stuffing our faces with our special deluxe chocolate ice cream. A thought occurred to Bob. Suddenly Bob asked me, “Bob, how did you hide your crystal-gem from your owner?” Before I could answer, a flying blob in the sky spat a big, hard piece of broccoli at us. “Run!” I shouted.
Unfortunately, Bob didn’t hear me. He got knocked out by the broccoli and turned into a potato. “No!” I shrieked. Bob faced me. His potatoey eyes blinked at me and then he turned into a carrot. “What?” I shrieked, “You can turn into a carrot too!”
I was really upset so I ran away. When I arrived home I decided that I needed to protect my owner, David. But where was he? After looking around with no hope, I decided to lock all the windows and doors until he came back.
He never came back in human form. He came back as a celery stick. I wailed “Why!?” Suddenly there was a deep, booming, unfamiliar voice. The voice said, “You threw me away so you shall suffer!”
“Wait, what?”
“Oh right, but it was your idea. I’m the Broccoli and Brussels-sprout Gloop!”
“Well how do you know all this? You had no eyes, nose or ears!”
“DO NOT QUESTION ME OF MY KNOWLEDGE.”
“Why Not?”
“Because I said so.”
“Fair enough, but can I ask you a question?”
“OK.”
“What vegetable will I turn in to?” I asked.
“It depends on what vegetable is your favourite.”
“But I don’t have a favourite vegetable.”
“What! You DON’T?”
“No. My dog food doesn’t have vegetables in it.”
“DON’T YOU DISTRACT ME FROM TAKING OVER PLANET EARTH!”
“Oh, OK, sorry.”
After a while of thinking, I realised I had to SAVE THE WORLD.
I was running to the door to let David in, but he made an angry face at me (I think because it’s hard to tell if a celery stick is angry) and then he started shooting out balls of gloop from his hands that were celery-sticks. Fortunately, before David had turned into a celery stick, he had installed unbreakable glass, so the slimy gloop balls bounced of windows and flew away.
But something caught my attention. There were flying saucers. Literally. There were plates flying in the sky, and on top of them were mutant veggies with mean faces. Very mean faces. But I had to SAVE THE WORLD! I had to sae the world from the vegetable invaders.
Suddenly there was a beep from under David’s bed. ‘Weird,’ I thought. Very weird. Funnily enough, David’s bed split in half and disappeared into the ground. Without thinking, I looked into the hole the bed left. And I jumped into the hole. Big mistake.
At least that was what I had thought. I landed on a bed. David’s bed. I looked around me. There were people around the bed, looking at me inquisitively. Suddenly there was a big booming sound. Everybody left me and went somewhere else I didn’t know about.
When I looked around again, there was a woman with a clipboard and her blackish-brown hair was tied up in a ponytail. I think she tried to make her hair neat, but it was still messy nonetheless. Before I thought about what she did, she asked me quietly, “Are you the Bob the Dog?” I just stared at her, and I squeezed a ‘yes’ (because I still had the gem crystal necklace on) out of mouth, and gradually we got into conversation of how the world was getting ruled by vegetables.
***
“But I can only cure one person,” she said. “ONLY ONE PERSON?!!!” I shouted, shocked.
“Yes,” she replied, sheepishly.
“I thought you were a scientist! Let alone the current boss of the CSIRO?!”
“I know, but my job is hard.”
“I understand.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For understanding how hard my job is.”
“That is classified information. I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine.”
“So, who do you want to ‘save’?”
“Hmmm … BOB THE PIRATE!”
“Bob the pirate … let me look him up …”
At the snap of her fingers, a computer on a table came from under the bed, making a hole in David’s bed.
“Whoops?” apologised the CSIRO boss.
“It’s fine, I’ll just pretend it was me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
Then, in an instant, she was typing up words into the computer, the sound of tapping keys filling my mind. After a while, she looked at me with a bright expression on her face.
“FOUND HIM!” she shouted. She spun the computer around to me and showed me a potato-carrot thingy that was flying around.
“He is now here.”
“Wait, what?!”
“Turn around.”
And, yet, there he was, grabbing the bows with his carrot hands. “But, how!?” “The Bob you are seeing now is really the Bob on the computer is him fire minutes ago.”
“Well, I want to ask more, but we have got no time.”
“Good thinking.”
Then she zapped Bob with a pencil (somehow) and he turned back into a human. I was so happy, I jumped into the air, and when I landed I started tap-dancing.
“Bob,” the CSIRO boss shouted,
“SAVE THE WORLD!”
“How?”
“GRAB THE ‘LASER MACHETE GUN MADE FOR THE MIND’ that is on the broken bed!”
“OK! ON IT!”
I sliced Bob out of the cage with my laser machete gun and Bob ran behind. Before we knew it, Bob and I were on ‘the surface’, a.k.a, we were in the park that we go to on weekends.
***
After some time of shooting and slicing vegetables, the radioactive gloopy broccoli-and brussels sprout puree appeared and shouted at us, “You shall be vegetables … FOREVER!!!”
Then he swiped down and took my weapon away from me. But before it could do anything more, the CSIRO boss appeared from a red puff of smoke and zapped the creature into ice cream. As a result, everyone turned back to normal. And all the alien vegetables that everyone forgot about turned into nothingness.
Everyone carried on with their normal lives, and the boss of CSIRO, Bob, and I ate 20,872,528 tonnes of ice-cream each from the gloppy broccoli-and-brussels sprout puree.
And that is how I strangely saved the world.