WAITING FOR OCTOBER: TO THE MOON
E2.5: “Bem”
by D.J. Sylvis
ANNOUNCER (Deej): There is a world – one of many that touches ours – known as October. One of the archetypes; one of the realities that is a source for our stories. It is not difficult to reach, if you know the way – you can experience their wildness for yourself, adventure there, and live, and love. But be wary – perhaps more than any other existence, here there be monsters …
Note – there may be advertisements inserted at this point in the episode.
ANNOUNCER (Robin): You’re listening to “To The Moon” – a Waiting for October miniseries.
SCENE ONE
SOUND: Moonbase background (fairly generic; see what we’ll be using in E3; ongoing)
SOUND: A bunk squeaking a few times (see E3)
BEM
Keep quiet. I need to be able to hear if he walks toward the door. Good thing they all wear those big-ass boots.
SOUND: Bem fiddling with one of the wall panels (ongoing)
BEM
And they all make the same dumb-ass mistakes. If you knew how many times I’ve been locked in a bunkroom and broke out again … you have to keep them guessing, look for a weak spot. They aren’t really good at keeping things enclosed. And if you play your cards right, it can be the best way to find out their plans.
(after a moment)
Not my first abduction, obviously. Back in the day this used to happen all the time. Milamo and Hodag wouldn’t know – they were babies during the worst of it. They only saw things after the stories had spread, when the lore was at a high point and all the tropes were set in stone. Back at the beginning – the Moon wasn’t even the Moon, not yet, not really.
(after a moment)
What it was, I can’t really tell you. Maybe it was just a light hung in the sky for atmosphere. Maybe the whole sky was just a backdrop, they never said. And I was too busy at that point to be asking questions.
(brief pause)
Dammit, no luck on this side. I’ll check the corners – that’s where they’re most likely to miss something. Watch your feet.
SOUND: We hear them moving across the room and scrabbling a bit
BEM
Back then, I didn’t even know where we were starting. Or what it was made from. We woke up inside the Moon, not on it. Those that looked up in their world and started to wonder, they didn’t think anything could survive on the surface. So, until they got more creative, that was likely to be true. We came to be in the tunnels, lit by glowing water trickling down to the Lunar Central Sea. We only knew day from night by the changes in temperature.
(they chuckle a little)
We were farmers though, even then. We found algae, moss, we cultivated mushrooms. We raised mooncalves – those were the days, you haven’t lived if you’ve never had a mooncalf steak cooked just to perfection.
(after a moment)
The tunnels are still down there, too. The Astros never found them. That garden Hodag’s so proud of, that was where I first came to the surface. He’ll never know how far down that cave goes.
(they sigh)
Nothing here, either. I’ll let it be for a while – wait and see if he heard my claws scratching.
SOUND: They move back to the bunk and sit down
BEM
When the stories did start to spread and grow – the science fantasy, the space operas – things started to grow out there as well. And we grew with them. After our time in the tunnels, everyone had their own ideas on who to be and what to do – we spread out far and wide and every monster started their own individual life. We didn’t live in packs like the Wilds, or converge like the Constructs based on how they were built – every one of us was different and proud of that difference. Which … was a blessing and a curse, in the long run. You see how far my family has spread, and what it took to bring them together again.
(they sigh)
It was good for a while. Even Hodag was happy – this was all basically a forest back then, he’d disappear in the morning and I wouldn’t see him again until dinner. And Milamo – with those legs, none of us could keep up. If it weren’t for her music, we’d never find her. There was a time where we all had everything we could ask for. But it wasn’t a long time, and things went crater-shaped way too quick afterwards.
SOUND: They get up again and pace around the room a bit
BEM
When the first few Astros – or teams of them, they definitely arrived in packs – when they first crash-landed not too far from here, we thought they needed help. We figured someone down below must have noticed us and wanted to say hi. And it turns out a few folks, like your friend Shelley, were starting to think that – but they didn’t have the narrative on their side. The Astros had the force of a million pulp paperbacks, and EC comics, and Saturday afternoon matinees, and kids in spaceman costumes building rockets out of cardboard in their backyards. And moon monsters weren’t the good guys in any of those kind of stories. When we rolled up on them, we barely had a chance to knock on the hull before they started blasting away and spouting dramatic monologues about the New Frontier and how humanity would prevail. Which, being as it was a human creative urge behind the whole thing … it wasn’t long before we were caught up in their chronicles.
(after a moment)
Nothing personal, this must have been well before your time. But you folks could be a little more careful what you dream our world into.
SOUND: With a sigh, they sit down on the bunk again
BEM
At least we could fight back; that wasn’t against the story. They expected it of us – we were supposed to be dangerous, almost but not quite unbeatable. But I was a farmer! Tripodero was a poet! We had to learn those expectations fast and fall in before we got written out altogether. Wandering the lunar forests roaring challenges into the night, falling on the Astros mid-exploration, leaving claw marks on every fuselage … when all I really wanted was to sleep in my own bed with the Moon to myself and my kids.
(brief pause)
I tried to keep them out of it. I did everything I could to put the fear into them – locked them in at night, sent them back down to the tunnels, taught them to run at any sound of trouble. But you can’t teach kids anything, especially when you’re falling into a trap every week or two – that particularly annoyed me, like I’d ever do something that foolish on my own … but it was what it was. Like I said, not my first abduction. It made it hard to keep track of those two, and I kept coming back to find they’d landed in messes of their own. It was goddamn frustrating. Does that light fixture look weird to you? I think I can reach it from here …
SOUND: Some scratching and tinkering while they continue
BEM
Don’t get me wrong, we all had to adapt – turns out that’s the moral of the thing. But I was afraid they’d turn out to be the lesson and not the ones learning it. And it was getting harder and harder to hide as the Astros learned our tricks – they cut down the trees, drained the lakes so we couldn’t swim into their depths. Finally, a few of us couldn’t take it any more and went on a trip to see the Endlings. Right, plural. There were still a few of them back in those days.
(they sigh)
This isn’t working either.
(brief pause)
We dug the tunnels back out, kept going deeper, and found them to air our grievances. It was hard to focus to have a conversation – they were a blur of changing forms and composition, they’d snap into focus to address us but before we could respond, they were back in motion. We had to shout our side of things and hope someone would listen. After a while, I grabbed a hold of the Endling who seemed to pay the most attention and talked to them about options. Turned out most of them were too excited about the Astros and all these new plotlines to consider the collateral damage, but at least this one cared about potential solutions.
(brief pause)
I like to think they’re the one who stayed. They said they thought things might branch off soon into another world; the stories were solidifying into their own genre, developing their own semiotics and tropes, and if we could just hold on a while longer … which was not the most satisfying answer after all we’d gone through! So I asked if there was something we could do to hurry that process along. That made them all group up together again, which was almost unbearable to be there for … the lights, the sound, the spinning! But it ended up in their asking if we could help them with the archetypes for alien life forms.
SOUND: They pace back and forth again before continuing
BEM
It wasn’t ideal. To be honest, when we came back and talked it over, I fought against it. Monsters – good, honest monsters – moving on and becoming a part of those stories? But there were those who wanted to go and those who were at least willing … and it meant the rest of us might make it to whatever kind of Moon that Singularity left behind.
(brief pause)
Talk about adaptation. But it got us through and I thought things were safe, until recently. Enter this whole mess. And you bringing Hodag back to the old homestead.
(one more sigh)
Hell, I can’t blame the boy – I did teach him to run. It shouldn’t have surprised me when he just kept on running.
SOUND: We hear footsteps outside the door
BEM
Okay, just play it cool for now. I’ll keep on looking later on.
SOUND: We hear the door starting to open
SOUND: Background fades out
(The episode ends.)
ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to Waiting For October: To The Moon! Our slightly sci-fi, but still monster-world miniseries. This episode was produced by D.J. Sylvis, Tina Case, and Robin Regalado. D.J. wrote the scripts; Trace Callahan wrote the music and did our dialogue editing; Caroline Mincks did our sound design. Our To The Moon cover art is by Clare Bernik.
This episode featured Sarah Rhea Werner as Bem. If you don’t know where the name “Bem” comes from, do a quick Wiki search on “Bug-eyed monster.” Next time, we’ve got the thrilling conclusion of our Lunar miniseries – keep the edge of your seat warm until then!
