The Huge Smash

In The Beginning Everything Was Frozen.

   It gleamed pale green and blue in the dark, with greyish overtones. Clouds of cold air slowly wafted from it.

   ‘What’s all this then?’ came a voice out of the darkness.

It was met with an elaborate though invisible shrug. ‘Dunno. Something frozen, looks like.’

A shape moved closer to the big lump of Frozen Thing. A dark shape against a darker background. The place wasn’t big on lighting. A forward-poking motion suggested a nose being stuck out in front, to have a better look, because, as is well known, the nose is the paramount organ for vision.

   ‘What’s it smell like?’ asked the second voice.

   ‘Hmmpf,’ sniffed the first voice. ‘It smells like Cold, if you ask me.’

   ‘Right,’ said the second voice. ‘Fancy that. Who would’ve thought.’

   ‘Yeah ...’ There was a sensation of a sideways glare from Voice 1 to Voice 2. ‘Fancy that.’

   ‘Anyway,’ said Voice 2, ‘what are we gonna do with it?’

   ‘I dunno.’ There was another clearly audible if invisible shrug. ‘How should I know?’

    Voice 2 coughed in an understated sort of a way. ‘Erhurgh. Because ... you know everything about everything?’

   ‘Says who?’ said Voice 1 belligerently.

   ‘Says you,’ supplied Voice 2 helpfully. ‘All the time, if you remember?’

   ‘Ah yeah.’ There was a pensive silence. ‘Now that you mention it.’

   ‘So?’

   ‘So what?’

   ‘So what are we gonna do with this thing?’

   ‘Buggered if I know.’

Eyes grow accustomed to the dark eventually. The darkest night fades into a mild pale dark-grey after spending long enough in it. In the gloom it was now possible to make out features that were connected to the voices. Voice 1 belonged to a bloke of middle-aged appearance, with a beard and an eyepatch over one eye. His other eye was currently screwed up into a squint, subjecting the Lump Of Frozen to close scrutiny. A big nose stuck out from underneath the eyes, at the moment with a big blob of snot dangling from it.

   The nose turned towards the bearer of Voice 2. This appeared to be a bloke of fairly large proportions, dressed in a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His arms bulging out of the sleeve holes suggested he had been doing some serious working-out, together with, quite possibly, some serious steroids. The incongruousness of such light clothing in a Frozen Environment did not seem to strike either of the two characters, who seemed both quite relaxed with the conditions.

   ‘Right.’ Big Nose turned to Arm Bulge. ‘Well, let’s look at this logically and reasonably.’

   Arm Bulge nodded. That sounded good.

   ‘What’s the issue here?’

   Arm Bulge shrugged. ‘Dunno. The thing is cold?’

   ‘That’s right.’ Big nose nodded. ‘And what else?’

   ‘Er ... we don’t know why?’ Arm Bulge ventured.

   ‘That’s right.’ Big Nose enthusiastically bobbed his head up and down in encouragement. ‘And ... do we know what it is?’

   Arm Bulge shook his head mournfully from side to side. ‘We don’t.’

   ‘And how do we feel about that?’ Big Nose’s voice now took on a crooning and soothing quality.

   Arm Bulge straightened up and jutted out his chin. ‘It pisses us off.’

   ‘Right, right.’ Big Nose was stroking his beard now in an almost meditative way. ‘And ... this is important now, mind you ... what do we do with things that we don’t know what they are, and that piss us off?’

   That was an easy one. Arm Bulge straightened up, rolled his shoulders and flexed his biceps. There was a distinct impression of straining fabric, with a negotiable option on ripping. ‘We hit them!’

   ‘Now we’re talking!’ Big Nose slapped his right first into his left palm. It made a sound like two slabs of meat on a butcher’s chopping board. He nodded towards Arm Bulge’s waist. ‘You got that thing there with you still?’

   Arm Bulge looked down at his own waist, and grinned. ‘I do,’ he said, and pulled a huge hammer out of a belt around his hips. It had two massive square heads, and no claw, because nails had not been invented yet. It declared firmly that the primary function of All Things Hammer was to smash stuff hard.

   Big Nose scratched his left ear. ‘Remind me again, what do you call that thing?’

   Arm Bulge looked put-out. ‘I thought you knew everything about everything? Don’t you remember I told yo―’

   ‘Yes, yes, never mind all that for now,’ snapped Big Nose. ‘Just tell me again, all right? I’ve had a lot on my mind lately.’

   Arm Bulge held his hammer proudly out in front of him, and gazed upon it lovingly, if in delusion. ‘My hammer,’ he declared, ‘the best one I have ever made ...’ Big Nose rolled his eyes. ‘... is called Mjolnir!’

   ‘Ah yeah, that’s right.’ The bloke with the big nose and the eye patch finally rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, and absentmindedly wiped the accumulated snot on the back of his pants. ‘Mjolnir. You did say. All right, now, let’s get on with this thing.’ He jerked his head sideways towards the Frozen Lump. ‘Hit that thing and smash it to bits, so we can see what it is, and go do something else.’

   ‘Rightio, too easy.’ Arm Bulge, whose name was Thor, spat into the palms of his hands and rubbed them together. It made them look noticeably greener than before. ‘Right, here we go. A one, and a two, and a three ...’

WHACK!

   The hammer Mjolnir bounced off the face of The Frozen Lump, almost flew out of Thor’s hands, and narrowly missed decapitating Big Nose, who ducked just in time.

   ‘Is that it?’ said Big Nose, more commonly known as Odin, archly. He looked down his big nose with his one good eye. ‘Doesn’t look to me like it did anything.’

   Both blokes craned their necks towards the surface of The Frozen Lump. Odin rubbed it with his sleeve. A minuscule chip had been taken out of the ice. He glanced at Thor next to him, who was shaking his hand surreptitiously. ‘Hmm. You’re gonna have to do better than that, I reckon.’ He gave his companion a tight little smile.

   Thor scowled. ‘Hah! Just getting warmed up. Watch this!’. He swung the massive hammer again.

THWACK!!

   This time Thor managed to retain control of his hammer, though obviously with great effort. In spite of the freezing conditions drops of sweat shone on his forehead.

   Two heads leaned forwards to inspect the damage. They peered at the Face Of Ice. They turned to look at each other. They turned back to the Ice.

   A tiny chip had been taking out of the Face. It lay at the bottom of The Lump, and sparkled quietly and inobtrusively in the darkness.

   ‘Bloody hell,’ muttered Thor. He lifted up his no-hammer hand and massaged the shoulder of his swinging arm. ‘They don’t make them like that anymore.’

   ‘Right. Pretty hard going, is it?’ Odin smirked. ‘I thought you liked hitting things? Do you want me to have a go?’

   Thor scowled at his mate. ‘Get stuffed. I’m gonna crack this bastard. You watch!’ He rolled his shoulders backwards, tilted his head from left to right, and started to flex his biceps and triceps. ‘Just let me get warmed up a bit mo―’

   ‘Ooo! Hihihi! Can you do that again?’

   Thor and Odin’s heads swivelled around. Behind them were standing three apparitions. They presented as being of fundamental female shape, which was not hard to discern underneath their extremely flimsy garb, which appeared distinctly out of keeping with the freezing temperature of the setting. This didn’t seem to bother them, although Thor couldn’t help but notice that there seemed to be hard things pointing forwards at their general chest level. This didn’t bother him overly either.

   ‘And who are you?’ he asked, lowering his hammer arm, not without relief and gratitude at the opportunity of being able to do so with an apparent socially acceptable excuse. ‘And what are you doing here?’

   The three female shapes giggled in three part harmony. ‘Hihihi ... hihihi ... hihihi.’ It didn’t sound unpleasant, Thor reflected. He glanced over at his mate. Odin seemed preoccupied with studying the apparitions’ clothing, or, more to the point, their lack of it. Thor didn’t feel he could hold that against him.

   ‘We were just ...’

   ‘... passing through ...’

   ‘... we’re nymphs ...’

They said. In three part harmony. Thor stuck his finger in his right ear and drilled it around a bit. These voices were doing strange things to his head, and, if he was honest, to other body parts as well.

   ‘Ah. Right. And ... uh ... what do you want?’ Thor asked uncertainly.

   They giggled again.

   ‘we just want ...’ said the first one, in the mid-range.

   ‘... to watch you ...’ said the second one, in the upper register.

   ‘... flex again.’ said the third one, in a deep bass voice. Odin looked at that one suspiciously and frowned.

   Thor felt his face growing hot and changing appearance, although, of course, this could not be seen in the dim half-dark. He felt obscurely relieved at this, though he couldn’t quite work out why. He pulled himself up to his full height and puffed his chest out. ‘No worries,’ he said, trying to hold his breath, suck in his gut and talk at the same time. ‘It’ll be my pleasure. Watch this!’

   He started swinging the hammer Mjolnir above his head in erratic but impressive arcs. The veins on his arms bulged. His thighs swelled. His arse stuck out at a precarious angle.

   The nymphs giggled again, this time from behind hands held over mouths. They also rubbed their knees together and made squirming motions with their hips.

   ‘Don’t think about them,’ Thor thought to himself. ‘Ignore them. Focus on the job. And a one; and a two; and a thr―’

   ‘Oi! What’s all this, mate?’

   Thor stopped in mid-swing, lost his balance and dropped his hammer on his foot. Behind him he could hear Odin bursting out laughing, joined by, he noticed sourly, the three nymphs. He swore under his breath, grabbed his foot and hopped up and down. ‘Hhnnggghhhnnngggrrrr ... bloody hell.’ Thor ground his teeth and looked towards the source of the noise.

   Where his second swing of the hammer had taken out a small chip from the Face Of The Frozen Lump, a tiny head glared at him. It was green, had pointy ears, and looked mightily pissed off.

   ‘What now?’ Thor snarled between clenched teeth. ‘Who the hell are you?’

   The little green head stared daggers at him, and shouted, ‘Who am I? That’s a bit rich, isn’t mate?’ A skinny green arm popped up underneath the head and waved around randomly. ‘I live here, that’s who I am!’ A tiny little hand balled into a fist, which the creature shook threateningly at Thor. ‘Who the bloody hell do you think you are, turning up here and trying to smash my front wall to the shithouse! What are you on?!’

   Thor, at six foot four a good hundred times bigger than the green person, leaned back. The tiny fist sailed past him harmlessly. This only seemed to further infuriate the little person.

   ‘You vandal! Hoon! Barbarian! Filistine!’ the green man screamed. ‘I’ll flog you, you bastard!’

   At this point Odin stepped in and thrust his big nose forward. Behind him the three nymphs giggled behind their hands, looking alternately from Thor to the green man and back again, and then bursting out in giggles again.

   Odin held up his hands in a placatory gesture. ‘Hang on mate, hang on, just relax, all right?’ The green man took a deep breath, preparing for another rant. Odin stepped forward and clamped his hand over his mouth. The green person bit down, hard.

   ‘Ow!’ Odin sucked his hand. Droplets of blood were forming on his skin. ‘You mongrel. What did you go and do that for?’

   The green man sneered and spat out a minute mouthful of blood. His teeth were very pointy. ‘Screw you, arsehole,’ he said, and pulled a bit of skin out from between his teeth. Odin looked at his hand. There was a noticeable gap of skin there. ‘Get stuffed. What do you think you’re doing, hitting my place with hammers like that?’

   Odin took a discreet step back, out of biting range. ‘We’re trying to find out what this thing is, and what’s inside it,’ he explained in what he thought was The Voice Of Reason. ‘We just saw it and it looked weird, so we thought we’d smash it to find out what it was.’

   ‘Oh yeah? You smash things to find out what they are?’ the green man said with contempt. ‘That’s what you do, is it?’

   Odin tugged his left earlobe and nodded reflectively. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Pretty much. We smash it, and then we see.’

   ‘Really.’ The green character had calmed down a bit now. He looked at Odin as if he smelled a shit, which wasn’t far from the truth. It had been quite a while now since Monthly Bath Day. ‘So what do you do when you find something, you smash it, and then find that it was actually something great but you destroyed it? Ey?’ The green man stuck out his chin in challenge. ‘Then what, ey?’

   Odin shrugged. ‘Then nothing. We go away and find something else to smash. No biggie.’

   The green man opened his mouth while going red in the face. Seeing another rant coming his way, Odin headed him off. ‘But who are you anyway? And what are you doing inside of this Frozen Lump?’

   The little green fella let out his breath again, and deflated. ‘Uh ... my name is Tom.’

   ‘Tom? Nice name.’ Odin pointed at his own chest with a finger. ‘I’m Odin. I Know Things.’

   ‘You do?’

   “I do.’ Odin nodded. ‘That’s what I do in life.’ He swung his arm around and indicated Thor, who had picked up his hammer and was weighing it lightly in his hand, while eyeing off the wall of Frozen Lump on either side of the green head. There was a dodgy gleam in his eyes. ‘This is Thor. He likes to smash things.’ Thor inclined his head solemnly and bared his teeth.

   ‘Right. And what about them?’ The green head tilted sideways in the general direction of the three female shapes.

   Odin shrugged. ‘I have no idea,’ he admitted. ‘They’re just some randoms that turned up out of the black.’ He looked around reflectively. ‘And into the black, I should say.’

   ‘Right,’ said the little green man. ‘Well, pleased to meet you, I’m sure.’ He didn’t look like it.

   ‘No worries.’ Odin squinted with his one good eye. ‘So what do you do anyway then, Tom?’

   Tom wriggled uncomfortably in his peephole in the ice. ‘Uh ...nothing really.’

   ‘Nothing? Seriously?’

   The green man looked caught out. ‘Yeah, nah ... not really. I just sit around with all my mates, doing nothing all day. It’s a bit boring, actually,’ he added. ‘And, funny thing ...’ he scratched his neck.

   ‘Yeah, what?’

   ‘Well, my mates are all called Tom too, and there’s heaps of us. Shitloads.’

   ‘What, in there? Inside in the frozen thing?’

   ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

   ‘Really?’ Odin stroked his beard, something he always did when he had no clue what was going on or what he was supposed to do. His beard was very well-stroked. ‘Well, there you go―’

   ‘Aaaaarrrggghhh!!!!’ Thor stormed forward and shoved Odin out the way. He swung his hammer around his head violently, shouted ‘take this, you green runt’, and landed onto the Frozen Lump a Blow Of Ages.

   CRACK!!!

   For a few heartbeats nothing happened. Everyone held their breath.

   Then a hairline crack appeared around the peephole where the green man had ducked out of the way of the hammer. Another one sprouted diagonally across from it, then another, then another. The cracks deepened and widened, blooming across the Face of the Frozen Lump, travelling in all directions now. The cracks started running, faster and faster.

   Behind Thor he could hear the nymphs gasping, They were obviously impressed. His chest swelled with pride. Further down other things swelled with something else.

   The cracks in the Face of The Frozen Lump now ran as far as the eye could see, which wasn’t very far in the dark, admittedly, until a deafening boom crackled through the air. A huge gaping hole opened up in front of the group. A flash of something blindingly white and bright ripped overhead, and all of a sudden they could see very clearly indeed. Odin noticed, not without some satisfaction, that the nymphs were, in fact, dressed very scantily indeed, and definitely not with an eye on the climatic conditions.

   The hole widened further, another boom resounded, and, with a second flash of the bright and white thing, the little green man was catapulted through the space above their heads, and disappeared into the far distance, which was now much more visible.

   ‘Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyy ...’

   The green man vanished.

   Odin turned to Thor. ‘Was that Tom?’

   Thor shrugged. ‘Yeah, must be, ey. It definitely looked like him.’

   There was another roll of loud noise, and a flash of bright light.

   Another green person shot through the air over their heads.

   They watched it disappear into the yonder, which now displayed a colour neither black nor white, something none of them had ever seen before.

   ‘And that?’ said Odin, sounding non-plussed. ‘Was that a Tom too?’

   Before Thor could open his mouth to reply, a series of detonations sounded from inside the erstwhile Frozen Lump, now more Smashed Lumpage.

   Another green apparition flew over their heads.

   ‘And that ...’

   Another one, this time flying off into a different direction.

   ‘... was a Tom too, I figure.’

Another one flew past. Then another, then two, then three, then a group of ten or more. Next a flock of what seemed to be more than a hundred.

   Finally, with one last giant rumble and flash of light, the whole of the Frozen Lump exploded, propelling hundreds and thousands and millions of little Toms in all directions.

   ‘Bloody hell,’ said Odin, taking a step back and ducking. Thor pulled his head in a bit, and the three nymphs shrieked and fled behind his back. Thor did not mind the sensation.

   As they stood and watched, their surroundings became brighter and brighter. In front of them now was a squirming, flying, whirling, wriggling multitude of Toms, all smashing and crashing into each other with nowhere to go. Every time they collided a new flash came forth, and every time it looked different.

   Odin nudged Thor with his elbow. ‘See that?’

   Thor, more interested in what was happening behind his back with the three nymphs looked up. ‘What?’

   ‘See those flashes there?’

   ‘Uh ... yeah? Maybe?’

   ‘See how they all look different?’

   ‘Ah yeah, nah ... maybe? Why?’

   ‘Well I think that’s a new thing that we’ve just discovered.’

   ‘Seriously?’

   ‘Yep.’

   ‘So what is it then?’

   Odin, Knower Of All Things, stroked his beard, with satisfaction instead of confusion for once. ‘I reckon ...’ he said slowly, ‘I reckon ... it’s ... colour.’

   ‘Colour?’ Thor sounded bemused. ‘What’s colour?’

   Odin pointed into the middle distance where hordes of Toms were frantically crashing into each other, setting of sparks in every direction. Heat rose up from their collisions. At the feet of the two blokes the left-over lumps of exploded ice started to hiss and then slowly melted. Puddles of a wet substance formed around their feet. Several of the Toms looked like they were getting so hot from rubbing and smashing together that they started to melt and fuse into each other, taking on different shapes all together.

   From above their heads droplets started to fall down. Odin held up his hand and caught a few. It seemed to be the same stuff as what was pooling around their feet. On an impulse he brought his hand to his mouth, and sucked the wetness of it. It didn’t taste unpleasant.

   Odin turned to his mate. ‘You hit that thing hard,’ he said thoughtfully. Thor grinned. He now had his arms around all three of the nymphs. Bulges were popping up everywhere, in the most random of places, although not so much, it needs to be said, on his arms anymore. “Yep,’ he said happily. ‘I smashed the shithouse out of that thing. That little fella was really starting to annoy me.’

   ‘Well, you didn’t miss it, that’s for sure.’

   Thor beamed. ‘Yeah, it was a big hit. Huge.’

   ‘You smashed it, didn’t you.’

   ‘I did. It was a huge smash.’

   ‘Hmm.’ Thoughts, unfamiliar and unprecedented, rolled around the inside of Odin’s head. ‘Yes. It was a huge smash. Or even,’ he said, suddenly feeling unaccountably formal, ‘a Huge Smash.’

   Thor sniffed, and pulled the nymphs a bit closer. Their giggles were coming from strange places now. His head was glowing with one of those new colour things that Odin decided would best be called “red”.

   ‘Anyway, hurhum,’ Thor looked at his finger nails and then looked up at the expanse above his head, which they would later agree would be called “blue”. ‘What do you reckon we should do now? There’s nothing left to smash. And,’ Thor looked shiftily under his arms at the squirming nymphs. ‘I sorta feel like we should, uh ... make a move or something.’ His face coloured with the phenomenon that in due time would be dubbed “purple”.

   Odin looked him up and down. ‘Yes, I imagine you would certainly like to make some sort of movement.’ He looked up at what they would eventually agree would be best referred to as “sky”. A flash of inspiration lit up his brain. ‘I reckon we should go and invent mead.’

   ‘What’s mead?’

   Odin shook his head ruefully. ‘I have no idea. Let’s go and find out.’