4: The Tale of Behemoth Bob
Welcome to the world of Edison City, where the never-ending battle against the forces of evil includes everything from the Owl Bandit taking over the subway line downtown to the Antichrist trying to rewrite history aboard the HMS Titanic. Anything and everything is a possibility here, including flying sharks. Especially the sharks.
If you’re new here, catch up with the Edison City Index:
For the previous episode, in which Mr Superlative copes with being trapped inside Muldavna by mostly getting plastered and also accidentally killing the wizard Vencentus the Mighty, go here:
And now, the adventure continues!
It is a common misconception that a Very Large Monster is also a Very Dumb Monster. In fact, many monsters are quite as intelligent if not more so than humans; they just don’t care enough to notice. Or, as in Behemoth Bob’s case, they do notice, but they don’t like it.
Behemoth Bob had really liked when the dinosaurs were around. Now those were great, he’d thought. Real fun guys, you know? Wonderful conversationalists. Also really good about just being in the moment. Behemoth Bob could tell you: if you’ve never sat down next to your neighborhood Allosaur and just gazed at the sun setting in the rosy clouds, man, you haven’t lived.
Then the meteor’d come along, the big turd. Ruined all his good times. Somehow he’d slept through the whole thing, but when he’d woken up the whole entire planet was all cold and dark and he figured what the hey, might as well go back to sleep and try again, and when he woke up a second time he had a massive headache, which was not at all helped by the pack of little furry fellas on two legs that were hooting and throwing sticks at him. Which was how Behemoth Bob learned that the dinosaurs were gone and the mammals had arrived.
He didn’t like it. So violently didn’t he like it that the pack of little mammals which had been hooting at him were just about entirely wiped out. Behemoth Bob almost went right back to sleep again, so upset was he by this incident, but instead he decided to work out his feelings by going around to all the little mammals’ friends and stomping on them.
Scientists still debate today what caused the extinction of the Neanderthals, whether disease or climate change; it wasn’t any of that, really. It was Behemoth Bob going on a tear because he missed his dinosaur friends, was what it was.
After that he went and sulked under the ocean for a millennium or two and thus missed the slow inexorable rise of humankind proper. By the time Behemoth Bob got done sulking and decided to come on back up and see what was going on now, things were very much different than they had been when he’d gone off. The mammals, he was dismayed to see, were still fooling about with sticks, only now there were lots and lots more of them, and they were doing wildly more complicated things with the sticks, and things with metal and fire too, and running about in larger and larger groups, and a lot of the groups were getting into fights with one another.
He tried to go off alone again on some islands up north, nice and rainy where no one would bother him, but some of the little guys followed him and one of them actually managed to stab him rather painfully in one of his massive legs. Behemoth Bob was really ticked off about that. Even the other little mammals hadn’t stabbed him, only thrown things. He got better, though; the Ninth Legion of the Roman Empire, not so much.
He would’ve gone around stomping on all the friends of the legion he’d inadvertently wiped from history, but by now he saw that there were far too many of them, and they’d got organized, and it’d be too much work. So he grumbled about it for the next several centuries, hiding away in the dark recesses of the world. He missed the sunsets, even missed the Allosaur, but what could you do? Stupid meteor. Stupid turd meteor.
After a while, he settled down on a coastal stretch near where a river flowed into an ocean, in the western part of the world. There was a flat bit with some tall grass populated mostly by a flock of birds, gulls and cranes mostly, that he became especially fond of. The birds didn’t seem to mind him much. Indeed, as they sang and called to each other across the grasses and the water, it almost reminded Behemoth Bob of those long, long ago peaceful days when he could rest his massive bulk on the sand beside the Allosaurs and watch the setting sun….
He got so comfortable there, unfortunately, that he fell asleep just for the pleasure of it, and in the passing of time birds built nests on and around him, dirt settled on him, and before too long he could be very easily mistaken for a largish hill, or a small mountain that had run away to hide from its older mountain siblings. When Behemoth Bob woke up yet again, the birds were gone, the nice placid flats he’d admired were gone, and an entire city had risen up in its place, a city full of those selfsame two-legged mammals that had bothered him before, only now there were even more of them and they were all running around in lots of little metal machines and making a shrieking torrent of noise.
Behemoth Bob rose up in all his titanic wrath, the dirt falling away from his sides and tail like small landslides. He’d put up with a lot from the little mammals over the millennia, he really had, but this time, this time he’d had just about enough. He gathered his colossal bulk together, bellowed forth a roar that shook the very skies, and charged.
"It is a common misconception that a Very Large Monster is also a Very Dumb Monster."
I presume Bob is of the class of being dubbed "Bug Eyed Monsters" (BEMs, for short) by the fans and writers of science fiction.