He got distracted by the latest hot romance novel
Passengers aboard commercial flight IC0712 from LA to Sidney were mildly flabbergasted to find themselves in Earth’s thermosphere last weekend.
“I was really confused,” said Amber Rockland, a passenger aboard the plane. “I took a nap and was woken up by people screaming. It was so rude. I hate it when people scream in terror when you’re trying to sleep. I also saw Mars outside the window.”
According to radar signal from a nearby satellite, the plane flown by pilot Ace Baron never stopped inclining after it left the airport until it was pulled into orbit. This impressive feat has left engineers and scientist all over the globe frozen in a state of intermediate awe (with the exception of one scientist in the Arctic Ocean who is actually frozen).
As it turns out, this feat was achieved entirely by accident. While the flight attendants were tending to the passengers, Baron spied a copy of C.C. Skillet’s latest bestseller The Cutlery Crucible in on of the flight attendants bags and started reading it. Baron got so into the book that he forgot to take it out of incline.
“I get really bored sometimes,” Baron said. “Like really, really, bored. People think it’s bad having to fly from LA to Sidney once but they don’t think about us pilots who have to do it all the time. That book called to me like a message from God to pull me out of my insanity and show me the light.”
For the uncultured swine who have yet to hear of it, The Cutlery Crucible is a steamy romance novel about the young princess of Spoon, Seraphina, and the daring knife assassin, Kuterson, who sweeps her off her feet right before she is due to marry the Duke of Forks, thus starting the infamous Civil Ware War.
“This book changed my life,” Baron said. “I use to just be a less than mediocre commercial pilot. Now I’m a less than mediocre commercial pilot who defied the laws of physics. I learned so much from that spunky spoon princess. You have to do what you want, damn it—not what society expects you to do, even if that means neglecting your duties to read a romance novel about a spoon and a knife. I’ve reached nirvana because of this book.”
As of right now, flight IC0712 and its passengers are still orbiting the earth and will continue to do so until NASA finds a way to fix this disaster. Unfortunately for Barron, the sequel to The Cutlery Crucible, Pride and Pottery, came out yesterday and he won’t be able to read it until he gets back to earth.
“I was actually pretty okay with floating out in space,” said stewardess Jenny Cook. “No screaming children or whiney husband. But Ace has been a crying mess since he realized he wouldn’t be able to read the next book. Every time I try to talk to him he starts to cry and locks himself in the cockpit. The book wasn’t even that good.”
NASA is currently at a loss for how to retrieve the plane from orbit, but they have come up with several ideas on how to deliver Pride and Potter to Baron in hopes that getting the book to him will drastically improve the life of everyone aboard IC0712. The more promising of these ideas is to create a genetically engineered talking dog that is capable of withstanding the pressures of space to bring the book to Barron.
NASA has been researching the creation of space-resistant animals for the past decade in hopes of using them for test flights. Recently a group of biologists lead by Christina Brainly successfully created a mouse that could survive without air for ten minutes. Brainly and her team believe they are ready to move on to a more complex organism and see delivering the book to be the perfect test for their experiment.
“I’ll be honest, there is absolutely no reason for the dog to talk,” Brainly said. “We just thought it would be really cool and we figured that if we’re going to genetically modify a dog we might as well make it talk. Once we get him out into space we can breed him and make big bucks off of people interested in owning a talking dog.”
Brainly and her team have decided to go for a “real life Scooby Doo” approach to the project. They’ve selected a Great Dane to begin experimentation on and are planning on playing with the genetic code of the dog’s vocal cords to give it a voice reminiscent of the famed cartoon character.
“I always wanted my very own Scooby Doo,” Brainly said. “And I’ve always wanted to see an episode where Scooby Doo goes to space. Now with a million dollars and twenty slaves—I mean grad students—to do my bidding, I can make my girlhood dream a reality.”
Project Scooby Doo is already underway with plans to have a talking dog launched into space by next week, however, the project has come under scrutiny by animal rights activists who are against sending a sentient being into the cold vacuum of space.
“Everyone needs to calm down, Scooby can take it,” Brainly said. “People are losing touch with what really matters here: getting a smutty romance novel about silverware to a man stuck floating in the atmosphere.”
Maddy Martin is a first-year writing major and is pretty jealous that some random pilot is getting a free copy of Pride and Pottery. You can reach them at [email protected].