The newsreel continued on. But Chi ordered Packerhound to stop the feed. Packerhound hit the pause button, leaving Slink Arrowheart’s face, slithering and arrogant, up on the screen.
“That’s it,” Chi said, pointing a rake up at the Collundrome owner’s shifty mug. “We are going to fill that vacancy; we are going to debut our message at the Pan-Galactic Prom Show as the opening act.”
The other Poison Nickels and Packerhound all looked in random directions.
“We haven’t had enough time to practice,” Gnasher said.
“I’m not finished writing the songs,” Goorn said.
“The Pan-Galactic Prom Show is an all-universe-class event,” Packerhound said. “Getting in will be tough and you guys are, pardon my expression, nobodies.”
Chi moved across the room, raising one of his rakes to emphasize his point. “Don’t you see, we can use that to our advantage. We might not have the musical talent of some of the big acts out there, but we have a back-story that can break even the hardest heart. We will hit them with truth--with our story. We are a race on the brink of extinction, all we want is to send our message out across the stars.”
“Sounds thin to me,” Gnasher said.
Chi pointed a rake up at Arrowheart’s likeness. “All he wants is a story. All we have to do is give him one. He wants war? We have war. He wants underdogs? That’s us.”
“But what about the music?” Goorn asked.
Chi flicked his spicules and stood as tall as he could. “Remember The Beatles? How they invaded the western half of Earth with their sound? All we need to do is copy their sound. Remember their song, Help?”
“I hate to break it to you, but everyone in the universe knows who The Beatles are. And everyone practically has Help memorized,” Packerhound said.
“I know we can’t copy The Beatles. But from my research I learned that there are other less known bands that invaded the western hemisphere along with The Beatles. Bands that we can perhaps cover with less risk of discoverable creative infringement.” Chi turned to Packerhound. “Do you know of a musical act called the Dave Clark Five?”
“The Dave Clark what?” Packerhound asked, arching his eyebrows.
Chi pointed a rake at Packerhound. “Exactly. And if you haven’t heard of them, then I’m betting nobody has heard of them outside a small contingency on Earth.” Chi turned to Winkle. “Access the historical records. Go through the song registry of the Dave Clark Five. Find us a song that emulates our story and sounds like The Beatles.”
A smile came to Packerhound’s face; he was starting to follow Chi. “We can use the Blood Drive’s mini-video studio to produce a Poison Nickels demo.”
“We’ll fill it with heart,” Chi said.
“With war,” Gnasher said.
“And with soul,” Goorn said.
Chi raised two of his rakes and looked over his small company of friends. “Slink Arrowheart won’t be able to resist; the Poison Nickels will debut at the biggest intergalactic party in the universe.”
“I will access the records,” Winkle said.
“And I will ready the video studio,” Packerhound said.
“Beetles,” Chi said, “this is the moment that we begin broadcasting our message to the galaxy. This is the moment that we begin to bring our kind back from the brink of extinction.”
Everyone nodded in solemnity.
Rob Griffin plays guitar in the Funk Toast Band. Read his full biography at the end of this chapter.
Rob Griffin
Best known for his work as an oral foundryist, Rob spent much of his early years making nails by chewing a combination of manganese, chromium, vanadium, and tungsten. The mantra in the oral foundryist industry, “there’s a lot a man can do with a few alloying elements and a bottle of Everclear,” is attributed to Rob. It wasn’t until the mid 90’s that Rob considered that oral foundryism might be an art form. He began submitting his work, at first steel ponies and model bi-planes, to galleries along the East Coast of the United States. His work became a boon in the metal art community. Soon, Rob found himself swamped with commission requests. This led to Rob’s second and possibly most famous quote: “I don’t chew for money; I chew for passion. And even my gambling debts won’t cause me to compromise my art.”
Chapter 3
Gnasher felt like an idiot in the costume Packerhound had given him. The Poison Nickels were members of an elite warrior class back on Hull and here they stood, frocked in so much color and splendor that the whole scene threatened to burn Gnasher’s eyes from their stalks.
Stig had loaded his exotic instruments onto the chroma green stage in the video studio. As the Poison Nickels stood behind their instruments, Packerhound adjusted the settings on all five of the studio’s cameras, high-end devices Gaar had looted from an intergalactic bootleg hyper-wave station. He mixed the color levels, trimmed the apertures, and checked each camera for exposure and focus.
Unlike Gnasher, Winkle loved the long robe Packerhound had given him. He spun behind his instrument, causing a bell of fabric to expand around him. He couldn’t erase the smile from his face. In a way, he felt guilty for having any pleasure at all with his race so close to extinction. But even in the war-riddled ice caverns back home, he had made it a point to find pleasure in even the most dire circumstances. So he spun again and watched the fabric, so brightly colored, twirl.
Packerhound stepped behind a control station where he could remotely adjust the cameras on the fly and edit the video feeds from each of the devices in real time. He had, with the help of Winkle and Chi, gathered a collection of shots, footage from planets that resembled Hull. They’d found scenes of devastation, of smoke billowing from burning forests, of fire shooting from cavities in the rock, of weapons being loaded and discharged, of furry creatures that looked similar to Voles crawling all over each other to get at husked out carrion. At first, Packerhound had worried that the series of shots Winkle and Chi had selected would be too morose. But Chi insisted that they needed to get as close to the truth as possible.
Packerhound tested each camera by working a series of joysticks on the console. He made a few adjustments to the sensitivity settings. He loaded the background footage to replace the green field all around the Poison Nickels. The studio worked perfectly, keying out the Poison Nickels and placing them in a convincing environment of war, boiling pots, weapons, fire, and chaos.
After reviewing the discography of the Dave Clark Five, Packerhound had argued that the Poison Nickels needed an uplifting song to contrast against the clips of war and devastation. In the end, Packerhound and Chi had settled on Everybody Get Together, a song that promoted love and peace.
Next, it came to Stig to re-engineer the song to make it resemble the sound he expected to come from the Poison Nickels. Stig isolated the vocal tracks from the Dave Clark Five rendition and remixed the back tracks, using some of Dave Clark’s instrumentation, but mingled it with sound from the instruments he had created, the instruments the Poison Nickels would actually play should they get the gig at the Collundrome.
After a few days of prep, even Gnasher found a small amount of confidence that what they were doing was not a complete waste of time. But he still hated the wardrobe that Packerhound had selected.
“In order for this to work, you must play your instruments with some amount