Episode 2: Sascha Martin's Time Machine

Hello.

You’re in Episode 2 of Sascha Martin’s Ripping News.

Yes, you’ve known the humiliating horrors of his Gobbly Goo.

You’ve watched him rise to infamy aboard his runaway rocket-ship.

Now, turn back the clock and meet the majestic, mountainous, monstrous, menacing, malcontent, massive-mawed mega-masters of mayhem mightily munching more than might seem possible, in a time before dieticians roamed the earth.

All aboard, if you dare, for Sascha Martin’s Time Machine!

Sascha Martin’s Time Machine was shiny, dark, and flat, and Mary Alice Cooper said, ‘We’ll never fit in that!’

‘Well, of course not.

Don’t be silly!’ Sascha answered with a wink.

‘This will build a field around us, and we’ll go in that, I think.’

Sascha pushed a special button. Necks were craned and faces peered, and when nothing seemed to happen, children groaned and others jeered.

Then the teacher, looking past them, said a very naughty word, and her trembling finger pointed where a big, humungous bird was standing, head against the ceiling, full of avian surprise.

Then a look of calculation lit its beady, hungry eyes.

Oh, it’s Bullockornis planei, said Aggie (always reading), as the creature sent her flying with her confidence receding.

But she prattled on regardless, as she flew across the room, ‘And it also has a common name: the Demon Duck of Doom.

‘I suppose because it’s very big and quite the carnivore.’

Then she hit the wall and tumbled, briefly silent, to the floor.

‘We should prob’ly run away now,’ Aggie finished as she stood.

Then she scuttled out the doorway just as quickly as she could, with the Demon Duck behind her, clacking beak and eyes agleam, on a path to intercept her and consume her, it would seem.

But it smashed against the doorway, far too big to wriggle out, so it snapped a bit at Aggie, then it started freaking out, throwing desks across the classroom, crushing chairs beneath its feet, pecking absently at children, far too angry now to eat, ripping keys from the piano, tearing paintings from the wall, hurling books and pens and pencil cases, anything at all, as a barely noticed flash of light surrounded Sascha’s hand, and it made a sphere, and Sascha made it bigger on command, till it hovered all around him and his best friend. Luca B.

Mary Alice couldn’t stand to be excluded.

‘Wait for me!’ And she leapt inside the bubble, and the bubble let her pass.

‘Mary Alice, don’t! I have to make it bigger for the class.’

‘Gee, it’s lucky we’re in here!’ said Mary Alice.

‘We’ll survive!’ As her classmates ran around the room and tried to stay alive.

Sascha told her to be quiet, but she didn’t want to hear.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘we didn’t travel to the past.

‘You brought it here!’

‘Yes, I know,’ he said with gritted teeth.

‘I’ll send it back again.’

Sascha wound a dial, hit a switch and pushed a button.

Then, in the middle of the classroom, shedding mega fleas galore, stood a creature like a tapir that was buckling the floor.

‘Palorchestes,’ Aggie stuck her head inside again to say, but her classmates ran her over in their haste to get away, as the Demon Duck, its prehistoric tantrum going long, threw a table at the tapir, and the tapir, which was strong, smashed the doorway and departed,

Now the opening was wide, through the hats and bags and jackets that were hanging up outside.

‘Sascha, follow them!’ said Mary Alice Cooper.

‘This is fun.’

So they navigated through the wall and hovered in the sun.

Down below them, in the playground, Palorchestes ran amok, with its bottom being bitten by the dogged Demon Duck.

Sascha tried again to send them where they’d come from, in the past, but instead, another beast arrived, bemused and truly vast.

It collided with a classroom.

Little faces peered outside.

‘That’s Diprotodon,’ said Aggie, and the faces went to hide.

Sascha tinkered and he tutted. ‘What about this button here?’

But with every move, he made another megabeast appear.

There were savage, fierce koalas, there were possums looking cruel.

There were big, disgusting spiders spinning webs around the school.

There were kangaroos and bats and all the buttons jammed in place …

Then the past began appearing at an even faster pace.

There were crocodiles like bendy-buses, bigger though, increased.

There were hover-bees like helicopters, little ones at least.

Mega flies as big as muffins,

Mega ladybugs and lice,

Mega roaches, mega beetles, mega rats and mega mice.

And a mega praying mantis, swaying gently on the roof, darting now and then to grab a bite, but otherwise aloof,

While above, the great mosquitoes buzzed ferocious in the sky.

Any one of them could easily have drained a kindy dry.

Then a flock of gorgeous butterflies, so big you heard their wings, made just everybody stop and sigh, to see such lovely things.

Then they all went back to screaming, running back and forth like chooks.

In the library, mega silverfish were eating all the books,

As a 20-foot goanna climbed, apparently unfed, to attack the praying mantis that was swaying overhead,

And a peckish python, perilously pilfered from the past, poked its tongue at all the panic-stricken people pushing past.

It was fire engines long and it was many children thick,

And it went in Mrs Barnum’s room, and golly it was quick.

Kids erupted through the windows, dropping screaming to the ground, where a mega-toothed marsupial pursued them like a hound.

‘That’s Thylacoleo,’ Aggie said, but no one seemed to hear.

So she made a sign and pointed, standing dangerously near.

Mary Alice gave a giggle, cause for once she wasn’t bored, sitting snug inside her bubble with her iPad on record.

‘Oh, we’re much too far away,’ she said.

‘Get closer!’ with a pout.

Then the bubble burst on something and they all went spilling out.

Down they crashed amid a swarm of mega-ants and broken eggs, and a horde of hairy horrors started running up their legs.

Mary Alice screamed blue murder, and she stamped and slapped and wailed, as she tried to get the creatures off, but never quite prevailed.

Meanwhile, Luca caught a dandelion floating on the breeze.

It was mega, so the dandelion lifted him with ease, and he lent a hand to bring his best friend, Sascha, safe aboard.

Mary Alice held her arms up, flushed and desperate, but ignored, as the boys observed her screaming and considered for a spell.

Then they sighed and grimly nodded, and they rescued her as well.

Luca had to hold her iPad while she swatted at the bugs, till she’d finally dispatched them all with eeks and oohs and uggs.

Then she gave the boys a telling off for giving her a fright, and she settled down to capture all the drama with delight, as they wafted on the thermals and the currents of the air, over all the rack and ruin and the wreckage and despair, high above the seething playground, the infested buildings too, and the poor, unhappy children stuck in piles of mega-poo;

All the terrified survivors in their crannies and their nooks, all the mucus-dripping teachers giving Sascha dirty looks, till at last they fell to earth in Sascha’s garden, at the back, where they heaved a sigh and dusted off and went to have a snack.

Well, the creatures stopped arriving when a day or two had passed, as the strain of all that physics drained the Time Machine at last.

Then the school was sent on holidays.

The cleaner needed time:

There was such a lot of mega-poo and spiderweb and slime. And of course they had to catch the mega-fauna that remained, so the school would close for several weeks, the principal explained.

People took away the Time Machine and promised to destroy it, but scientists were rumoured to be trying to employ it.

There was talk of a Tyrannosaur, amok without regard, and a Stegosaurus eating someone’s flowers in their yard.

But while others couldn’t leave behind the recent, distant past, Sascha Martin looked ahead and was progressing very fast, on a freaky new invention, kind of dangerous but cool, and he hoped to have it ready for the first day back at school.

The end.

But only until a new beginning.

Join us next week in Episode 3, when Mary Alice trashes Sascha’s wimpy words of warning and lets fall the all-encompassing, not-so-ripping secret of his latest news.

Sascha Martin’s Super Ball.

Can Planet Earth ever bounce back?