Moonwater Labs Presents…The Helium Balloon Beach Chair*, An Ollie Tale
An Ollie Bug story that begins with the indisputable fact that spiders do not fly. Spiders can do many marvelous and impressive things. They can spin webs and hang from them in a menacing manner. Although very scary, they’re really using the web to get better TV or radio reception. They can jump and bounce which is preferable for a good quick scare rather than staring out at you from a twitchy web. They can climb and creep and crawl which is good for sneaking about the kitchen at 3am in search of a cookie or a sandwich.
Despite all the things spiders can do, they cannot fly.
It is an accident of genetics that this intelligent and versatile creature was overlooked in the lighter-than-air-travel department.
This does not sit well with one of them in particular. Having an odd number of legs is trouble enough when it comes to balance and navigation. Not being able to soar the lofty heights is just another level of functional insult.
Ollie Bug, Spider of Adventure would really like to fly. A lot. To this end he has invented all manner of flying devices. There was the day he launched the popcorn powered jet pack which became known as The Great Unpopped Kernel Deluge. Then came the spring loaded sneakers which not only tore up the garden but also sent Oliver into the trees. There was also the watermelon catapult repurposed as a spider launcher. That became known as The Spider Splaterer after it launched Ollie into the wall of the observatory.
Today Ollie had the ginormous idea of securing a handful of helium balloons to a beach chair he found in the garage. He chose a colorful assortment of balloons and strapped them to the chair which was now called, “The Sand-Based Air Repurposed Cockpit”. As luck would have it, Ollie always kept a full tank of helium on hand just in case. Of course, during the “Gasseous Injection Phase” (which you may read as: filling the balloons) he and his friends indulged in the obligatory inhaling of helium so that the club house sounded like a small army of chipmunks arguing about who gets to go next.
The chair lifted higher with each new balloon filled. The little ground crew of Ticklebit and Artemouse guided it out of the club house and Ollie strapped himself in.
Soon he found himself floating over the meadow in his successful invention (sometimes they do actually work).
There was just one tiny problem; Ollie didn’t factor in steering or landing his new craft. A few hours after his disappearance over distant hills, Gordon, who can fly quite naturally being a dragon, was called in to retrieve our lost pilot.
Where he ventured to, why he wore a tropical flower-print tiki shirt and who his new talking pineapple friend, Phil, was is a story for another day.