A Preposterous Portfolio of Parodies: Free Selections from Spoofs of The Hobbit, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Star Trek and More

  ***

  The captain hurried off for a bubble bath with a glass of wine, Hamlet for Numbskulls, and extra duckies. He was just leaving his dressing room when all the alarms shrieked at once. Rubbing his hearing aid, Guitard picked up the phone. “Bloody teenagers!”

  “No, Captain, it’s me,” said Chief Engineer Georgy Porgy.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Sure, Captain. Except more anomalies have appeared and some are sucking us in.”

  “Any damage?

  “Only to your model train set.”

  “Mon Dieu, that’s a collectable! Stoke the engines. Add more antimatter!”

  “Sir, you know the engine doesn’t work that way.”

  Guitard paused. “True. Then give some extra nibbles to the hamster.”

  “The one on the little treadmill that really powers—”

  “Shhh.” Guitard motioned for silence, even though he was speaking to a speaker. “We use wrapped drive here. Not hamster power. We don’t want to look silly in front of the Fungi.”

  “I think that boat sailed after they saw Waiter singing, sir.”

  Guitard hung up and began making a collect call to the bridge (which was just outside the door, but leaving would require him to change out of his fluffy bathrobe). All at once the ship exploded.

  All right, that’s an exaggeration. It didn’t so much explode as engage in a full-body sneeze. The deck shuddered under Guitard’s feet, beginning like a single step-dancer’s practice routine and escalating until an entire herd of elephants seemed to have joined in. Guitard grabbed at his beloved wall-mounted fish tank, and winced as it tipped over on his head, showering his bald head with temperature-controlled, chum-filled saltwater. A fish wriggled perplexedly in his ear. “Ahh!” Guitard hit the floor hard, eyes tearing from the saltwater and none-too-clean tank.

  He clambered to his hands and knees, and, wincing, crawled forward cautiously, only to thud headfirst into the bookshelf. The resulting tremor upset a pair of bowling balls settled precariously on its top. They plummeted onto his head, first one, then the other, until Guitard was sure he could see an orbiting ring of Starship Tastipizes. (The captain had never bowled before, preferring fencing and cheese tasting, but at times like this there are always bowling balls at the ready.)

  Guitard staggered to his feet and dashed for the door, rubbing saltwater from his dripping eyes as his head throbbed in agony. He suddenly stepped, of course, on the single rake that he’d been using to skim leaves from the top of the fish tank. Its handle whacked him in the skull with a characteristic doioioing. “Mph!” Now Guitard had a welt on the front of his head to match the twin lumps above.

  Groping blindly, he activated the door opener and staggered onto the bridge. “Waiter! What’s happening?”

  “Destruction of the universe in the next twenty minutes, Captain.” He and Georgy Porgy were standing at the bridge’s engineering station, tapping futilely at the pictures of buttons. On the flatscreen, another batch of anomalies was forming. Blue swirly ones, gray swirly ones, orange swirly ones. One had stripes. “They are destabilizing space, rather like wearing a hole in a trampoline.” Waiter paused. “In space.” He wasn’t good with metaphors. “I would posit that these anomalies are concentrating around the underwear on my head. As proved in the twenty-second century by the famous fraternity president and physicist Eric Xexxenberg, wearing underwear in this manner can weaken the fabric of reality, as if we’d poured on too much stain remover and then blown a hole in space-time with it.”

  The captain’s headache was approaching a hole in space-time itself. “Deal with this. I’ll be in the infirmary.”