He hurriedly fit the freed tooth into his collar’s hole. The lock clicked and the collar dropped off. He immediately felt better, his positive emotions restored. Arwin grinned. He reached for the collar and tried to extract the tooth he’d used. “It won’t come out,” he said, puzzled.
The mooner’s face clouded with fear.
Arwin shrugged sympathetically. “Sorry. Looks like we’re going to need more. But that’s good for you. You’ve got a mouth full of bad teeth. Though you might need dentures after this.”
The mooner howled and whined as Arwin extracted all his rotten teeth. He passed out from the pain more than once, only to reawaken with the next pulled tooth. It left the mooner with about six good ones. And a very bloody orifice. At his insistence, they left him alone and he sat in the dirt, thoroughly wallowing in a blue funk, tears streaming down his chubby face.
The other three blue collars quickly freed themselves. All seemed to feel immediately lighter in mood as hope and independence returned.
Arwin held the remaining teeth up. “Let’s free the others and then get out of here.”
They raced back to the work area. Even before arriving, smoke blurred their vision. They pulled up at the edge of the area in horror. The fire had grown exponentially. Bright orange flames now covered half the forest surrounding the work clearing. It was incredibly hot where blue trees had gone up in flames, worse than typical fire. The flames had even turned blue there.
Arwin protected his face with one arm. Blue flame on wood burned at about fourteen hundred degrees celsius, if he remembered science class correctly. At that temperature, just about everything it touched would be destroyed. Even some metals would melt. He looked for what workers remained in the area. Blues and whites both were huddled together in the white gazebo. White collar workers were using some kind of water magic to hold the fire off, but they fought a losing battle.
“It’s too late,” a blue collar worker next to Arwin insisted.
“We have to help,” Arwin insisted back.
Jacque put a hand on Arwin’s shoulder to restrain him. “The fire will get us.”
“Gotta try anyway.” Arwin sprinted towards the gazebo. He was fast. He braved the edge of the flames and soon reached the men inside. “Here!” he told them, thrusting the blue teeth their way. “Put them in your collars! Unlock them!”
Those men who weren’t in blind panic grabbed the teeth and freed themselves. As soon as the magic ceased compelling them to stay, they turned and ran, selfishly abandoning their fellows for the hoped-for safety of the forest.
Arwin noticed that some of the white collar supervisors had similar collars, though these were more subtle and stylish, as if that helped the whites prove themselves better than the blues. He realized that, while many of the white collar workers were obviously here voluntarily, some of these men were just as trapped in the system ruled by the blue bloods and their manipulative ways. He tried to use the mooner’s teeth on a white collar, but the white devices must have run on white tooth technology; blue teeth were ineffective. There was nothing he could do.
“Get out of here!” he urged the white collar workers but they refused to flee. “Why do you stay?”
“We have to!” one shouted back, flinging a water bomb at the fire. The bomb exploded, clearing a patch of flames for one brief moment. Then the flames swamped back over the spot. “It’s our job! We can’t abandon our posts. We’re not paid by the hour. We’re on salaries!”
“Even if we did, the blue bloods would never forgive us!” another howled. “We’d never get promoted again! We might even get fired!”
Arwin shook his head. Those selfish nobles and their compulsion methods were about to condemn all these men to their deaths. He desperately tried to pull the collars off by hand, while simultaneously screaming at the remaining blue collar workers to use the blue teeth he’d brought them, but it was no use. The few remaining blue collar workers were beyond rational thought. They huddled in fear, incapable of even saving themselves.
A hand grabbed Arwin from behind and hauled him backwards. It was Jacque. “Let’s go!” he screamed in Arwin’s ear, barely heard over the roaring flames.
Arwin had no choice. It was run or doom themselves like the others. He and Jacque ran for the one side of the forest not yet burning. They caught up to the others, everyone in wild-eyed panic as they tried to escape.
They tried, anyway, but it was no use. The fire quickly circled around through the forest, cutting off their only route. The group came to a panting halt.
“What in the blue blazes?” one man asked, pointing ahead.
Arwin and the others looked.
From within the flames, and entirely unscathed by them, probably protected by magic, rose a monstrous computer monitor, the CRT kind common in the nineteen eighties or early nineties: big, heavy and ugly. It was the size of a small movie screen with a shell of hard, beige plastic. The screen was uniformly blue in colour.
“No... No...!” a man screamed in denial, backing away. Others followed suit.
“It’s the blue screen of death!” cried Jacque. “Run away!”
Sure enough, the only thing written on the screen were the words ‘BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH’ in white letters above an icon of a window. Then those words faded away and were replaced with ‘A problem has been detected. You must be shut down. The problem seems to be caused by the following:’ followed by an incomprehensible string of characters and words and computer gobble-de-gook signalling a stop or exception error. The screen advanced.
Men howled with fear and ran.
Arwin stood rooted, unable to believe what he was seeing. He watched the monitor float through the blue blaze towards the men. Blue death rays shot out from the screen. Each man screamed once when struck, then froze and toppled to the forest floor, dead.
The fire surrounded him and there was nowhere to go. People were dying and he had no way to save them. Arwin felt helpless.
The blue screen of death turned and oriented on him.
Arwin needed to escape. But what could he do? Negativity crashed down him once more. He struggled to fight it off, battling the notion that he should just give up on his life. He wanted to live. He had to be stronger.
Blue death rays shot out from the monitor.
Arwin moved aside at the last second, using every ounce of his athletic ability to prevent the rays from touching him. He scrambled around the edge of the forest, dodging blasts and trying to stay alive. Yet, what was the point? The fire was everywhere now. There was nowhere to run. He was trapped.
Or was he?
Arwin dove for cover behind a thick spruce. Peering around the trunk, he studied the oncoming screen. It was massive and implacably hostile. He paused. The only course of action one could take with those old computers when they had a problem was to restart them. Could he do the same to this magically technological monster?
Arwin’s eyes searched the edge of the machine. A death ray flashed and he threw himself to the ground to avoid it. Then he saw it. There, on the bottom right of the screen: a button labeled RESTART!
This was his chance. Arwin shot forward, feet plowing up dead needles and soft soil in his haste.
The blue screen of death, not expecting prey to come at it, overshot its mark with its next shot.
Arwin dodged and feinted. Blue rays flashed, but each just barely missed, only singeing his arms and legs. Ten meters. Five. He ran on.
A blue ray caught Arwin in the chest. He screamed, hand outstretched, and felt a sizzling heat shoot through his body. But he’d stayed on his feet and his forward momentum kept him on course. His frozen hand hit the RESTART button. Arwin’s vision went black.
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