There had been no crime, none that he'd known of. There were no cries of anguish, no injured shrieks. He hadn't charged out into the street to do a heroism, he hadn't charged out at all, only walked a shuffling gate from his front stoop towards the city park, hoping the bagel guy with the good pumpernickel ones was still open and selling and not towing away his little cart all shut up like last time. Hoping, but not rushing. It was a good bagel, not the end of the world; the world couldn't end on a Wednesday.
At the corner and then beyond a bit, maybe the bagel guy didn't show up today for some reason? His usual spot didn't show any spots from drippings, condensation or axel grease or anything else. Weird. The Pouch, frustrated but only mildly so, turned to walk back to his place and had gotten to the edge of the park when he heard a noise that sounded like his name and he turned and saw a brief flash and then nothing.
He woke up, it seemed to be much later. He was low to the ground even though he thought he was sitting and he wasn't alone. There were other pouches, he was only one pouch, this was him?
"What happened to me?" he said, only to hear a number of responses all different but all similar, all questioning him, telling him that they were the real pouch and he was just one of the many pouches that had somehow all been blown apart, their living leather living on even as individual pouches.
"Hey, everyone, follow me!" one of the pouches said, racing into the now dark park.
"Why should we follow you?" one of the other pouches asked, "who made you boss?"
"Nobody made me anything. Anybody else have an idea?" said this pouch. No one had any other ideas so one by one they picked themselves up off the ground and began following him down the paved path that lead deeper into the park.
There was small talk among the pouches, nothing all that interesting, mostly grumbles about what a hassle it was to be a single pouch, not only because of the severely limited carrying capacity, but also the loss of a feeling of individuality; all the pouches were pretty much the same and none of them had any special claim to status or uniqueness.
"Anybody got anything interesting in them?" one of the pouches asked all the other surrounding pouches as they continued their slow slog deeper into the park.
"I've got a pair of nail clippers," said one.
"I've got some nail clippings," said another.
"Anybody got any money? We might want to split a beer or something later," one of the pouches said but nobody replied, either because none of them had any money or the ones who had the money weren't planning on sharing. There were some minor clanking sounds as the group of them walked, but maybe those were just the nail clippers or some other metal implements without any real value.
The pouch who was in the lead, who was in some sense leading all of the other pouches, walked off the paved path over to the side of a statue and waited for all of the other pouches to catch up. Waiting for the last stragglers to catch up, the pouch who felt pretty certain that he was The Pouch, a feeling he assumed they all shared, looked up at the statue. He'd been in or near this park everyday for years, but for the life of him, he couldn't remember this particular statue. It wasn't clear what exactly the sculptor was going for with this form. Perhaps it wasn't human at all. There was a nonzero chance that some being from another planet was being commemorated here, or a being alien in form from this very planet. As was his usual, the Pouch suspended judgement until such time as he was able to gather more information and with that make a properly informed decision.
"I think we'll find some answers in here," the pouch who had been leading them all said, reaching out to the edge of the plague on the statue and pulling on it just a bit, at which point the plague swung open like a small door, revealing darkness inside.
Just then, the pouch who considered himself the Pouch looked at the statue again. With the small door open, it sorta looked like it could maybe be a weird spaceship. That would explain some of the oddness of the design. Once you were in space, aerodynamics meant a lot less, there was a lot less air to cut through. Also, in some of the more recent hard sci-fi he'd read, and also in some of the half chubb sci-fi, there was the notion nowadays that something like gravit could be achieved by the space ship's thrust, pushing down on everyone inside. So instead of a ship being oriented like a boat or a plane, everyone's heads would be pointing at the front of the ship, up would be the direction of the ship's travel and down would be the thrusters providing the thrust. With that perspective, the statue very much could be a space ship. Also, this was a real shit spot to put a statue, but a real good place to land a spaceship. If that ship had smaller internal compartments, it would be hard to abduct a full sized human but you could probably get an assortment of pouches in there pretty easily. It was a lot harder to try to reassemble a normal person once you'd cut them apart, but a bunch of pouches could be stitched back together pretty easy.
Speaking of stitching, the pouch who considered himself the Pouch reached back to feel along his back to check out the seams that had been ripped to separate all these pouches from each other. There was no ragged cut, no evidence of cutting or chopping at all. Instead, along the place that he imagined he'd been attached to the other pouches there was a strange emptiness. Looking at the back of the pouch in front of him, he saw that the lines on his back had a weird misty sparkle to them. He stepped forward and tried to touch this seam, only to feel the edge of himself he was using as a hand pass into this odd region entirely, which caused another pouch somewhere to giggle and exclaim something about getting tickled.
So, the pouches were not really separated, or rather were joined by some strange... portals for lack of a better term. It made sense to the pouch that thought of himself as the Pouch. Any normal person so divided would freak out and lose their minds entirely. The fully segmented nature of the Pouch meant that these subdivisions could be more easily understood and accepted. He'd not thought before how much each pouch must have been contributing to his mental processes. He'd read about how the human biome impacted their thinking process, so perhaps it was the same with the pouches? He must be the brain pouch, or at least the pouch that did the most specifically cognitive processing. All of these other pouches were more like team players. If he kept them happy, they would go along with whatever he planned.
If he was the mind of the loose pouch federation commonly referred to as the Pouch, who was this pouch who had lead them this far, who had knowingly opened this secret door and beckoned them all to enter, without having, yet, entered himself? Now this was a question to be explored immediately. First, the pouch no longer thinking of himself as the Pouch, but only the executive function of the Pouch looked around to figure out which one of the pouches might be the gumption pouch, the pouch where stubbornness came from, the spine pouch, the balls pouch. That didn't take long, there was one pouch standing out on the edge of the group shaking itself slowly in a way that looked like a slow head shake. Luckily it looked as though the pouch that generated caution and reserve, though also irrational feat, was at the front of the group, essentially blocking the process of any other pouch into the open door.
The executive function pouch waddled over to the resolve pouch and said, "You gonna let this pouch tell us what to do? Any pouch should be in charge, should be you. Settle this like real pouches, go fight one on one." The executive function pouch had some idea of how to motivate the resolve pouch after years of experience. The resolve pouch took the bait immediately.
"Hey, who do you think you are telling us to do anything? Anyone here should be deciding what we do, it's me!" said the resolve pouch, shoving other pouches out of its way while it strutted towards the front of the group. Once there, it slammed the door shut as a provocation. The way the flap of the other pouch shifted, it was clear that this act had angered it, but it didn't want to react too swiftly or too rashly.
"I'm not telling anyone to do anything, I'm simply pointing out a fun mystery I thought we could explore now that we're small enough to fit through that door," said the pouch that had lead them all this far into the darkened park. "Again, I ask, who else among you has a better idea of something we should do? I'm all ears," said this pouch.
The executive function pouch hadn't stood idle while his pushy pouch brother pushed his way to the front. He'd managed to locate the vice inclination pouches that had found a joint on the ground while walking through the park and were passing it around in a small circle.
"Hey you guys, this asshole up front is trying to get us all to go on some kind of adventure. Why don't we go to the bar? That would be an adventure. I bet if we spread out and search the ground we could find a coupla bucks. Definitely enough for a few cold cans at Corner Bar." Even mentioning Corner Bar, so named because of its peculiar floor plan, little more than a hallway around the corner of an old decaying mass of building, it was only possible to see half the bar at any time and so many a friend had failed to meet up with their friends there simply because they forgot to check both sides. This spot had been the location of many hazy memories that made the executive function pouch cringe with regret, regretting also the memories that were surely lost that began there and ended up far away and even more embarrassing. If the Pouch woke up somewhere with no idea how he got there, it was always a safe bet that he'd started out at Corner Bar.
"Dude, you know what," one of the vice pouches said while exhaling an impossibly large cloud of pot smoke, "we should go to Corner Bar. The thought just came to me."
"Bruh, we could gather up money from the ground if we fan out," said the pouch next to him.
"Man, we should like stick together, though," said a third pouch. It was just about now that the confrontation at the statue/rocketship's plaque/door was coming to a head and the stranger pouch had yelled asking if anyone else had any ideas.
"Yeah, yeah man, I got an idea. Corner Bar, Corner Bar, Corner Bar." This chant was slowly taken up by more and more of the pouches standing around. It was clear that the pouch who had been leading the mass of other pouches had lost control of the situation. The pouches all began walking back the way they came, heading for Corner Bar. The executive function pouch kept watching the other pouch, waiting to see if he would fall in line, would join the march towards alcohol fueled oblivion, or if he would try another angle.
The other pouch quickly shuffled to the front of the procession, but was promptly trampled and walked over. Getting up, unable to control his rage, this pouch that was not like the rest of the, the executive function pouch had some suspicions and these were immedately proven true as that pouch morphed into a small alien creature, shaking with absolute anger. It reached into its waistband and pulled out some type of device. It began fiddling with the controls, giving the executive function pouch time to run over and jump through the air. Opening his flap while in flight, the executive function pouch engulfed the little alien and then constricted, crushing the little device. It then exploded, but it was a small explosion.
In the morning, or sometime after, the Pouch woke up in a shopping cart two neighborhoods over. Every movment hurt his head and he couldn't tell if he was tired or sick or had too much stuff in his pouches to move easily. Finally escaping the shopping cart by tipping it over to the side, an approach which included a painful impact onto the sidewalk and a loud horrible clangor of shopping cart on the same sidewalk, but at last free, he was able to drag himself up and then towards home. Looking through himself as he walked, there were tons of napkins full of scribbled nonsense, all of them from Corner Bar. Not sure why he kept all the empty cans, likely some recycle plot was hatched. He stopped to unload all of these into the nearest recycle bin. One pocket didn't have an empty smashed can, but a small angry alien who also appeared a bit hungover and also a bit scorched as if by a small explosion. The alien seemed to wake up, shielding its eyes from the morning sun, it raised its other hand in a fist and yelled something in some alien tongue. The Pouch laid the little alien down under neath a park bench where he was unlikely to be stepped on and walked away hearing the shouts.
Man, who knows what happened yesterday. Hopefully that alien didn't represent some sort of interplanetary incident that would lead to some type of war of the worlds. There was something, too, a little extra blurring around the corners of his mind, something more than the hangover which was very much in effect. It was almost like his brain was a little scorched. Maybe the alien guy was involved. Who knows. Who could know. The best thing to do was to get home and lay down and probably put on some very quiet music to ride this out. Maybe grab a bagel on the way home. There was that one guy by the park most days. He had some really good pumpernickel bagels. Yeah, that was a good idea. What's the worst that ever happened to a guy running out for a bagel.
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