Space Pauline was driving her spaceship through space. She’d picked up a trio of party girls from Lyon en their route to a music festival on a space station near Saturn. They were drinking 8.6 and discussing their love lives in the backseat of her spaceship.
As the one in the middle was going into about the time she saw her ex at the Transbordeur like two weeks after that incidient at the Sonic, Pauline noticed a distress beacon from the nearby intergalactic communications station.
“Oh look” she said. “A distress beacon from the nearby intergalactic communications station! Girls, would you mind taking a detour to investigate?”
The party girls paused their conversation for a moment, nodded to indiciate that they’d be okay with the detour, and then continued disucssing the story about the DJ they ran into at the Sucre the Sunday after they saw him mix at the Petit Salon on Friday.
Pauline docked her spaceship at the intergalactic communications station and went indside to investigate.
“Thank goodness you’re here, Space Pauline, intergalactic adventuress!” said the station manager.
“We need someone to restart our power generator! But to restart it some one needs to do 20 burpees, Every Minute On the Minute for 10 minutes!”
“ohmigod I love burpees!” said Pauline, smiling from ear to ear. “I can totally help you with that!”
“Awesome!” responded the station manager. “Here’s the burpees platform. When you’re ready, I’ll start the timer and you have to do 20 burpees every minute on the minute for ten minutes to restart the power generator”.
“okay!” responded Pauline. Pauline got on the burpees platform.
She nodded to the station manager, and the station manager started the timer.
First beep. Pauline started her first burpee. She dropped to the floor like a peregrine falcon diving in on a prey. By sheer force of will and masteryful technique, she accelerated herself from standing still to hurtling towards the floor at 98.7% of the lightspeed in the blink of an eye. The nanosecond her hands and feet touch the floor in a picture perfect pushup position, she leaps back to her feet and starts skyrocketing towards the ceiling faster than a rocketship to the moon.
The first burpee is blazingly fast and beautiful. Everyone who sees it feels their eyes start to ear up as the overwhelming beauty of it hits them.
And then she does it again. And again. And again. Somehow, each rep seems even more perfect than the last one. Defying even the laws of physics, she just keeps on going faster.
The clock rushes to keep up. The speed of light makees an effort to up the pace so as not to slow her down. Two thosand years later, historical astrophysicist, normally a very fractious group, will univerally agree that there is a permanent warp at that part of the space time continuum as a result of those burpees.
As the clock says 9.02, Pauline finishes the 20th burpee of her final set. Her feet gracefully touch the ground for the end of the last rep. She smiles.
The clock starts flashing and then reads 10.00, and the power generator starts working again.
“You did it!”, the station manager joyfully exclaims.
“It was my pleasure”, Pauline responds. “I love burpees.”
She heads back to the car, where the trio have finished the 8.6 and started leisurely working their way through the first gram of ketamine.
“I fixed the communications station!” she tells them.
They pause their conversation to ackownledge her great feat with some well earned congradulations, and then resume their profoud disucssion of at what point exactly did No Gender parties sell out?
As they head towards the party, Nina, who got there two hours ago, and has been looking at her phone for the past minutes wondering why the message she sent half an hour ago is still market “sent” but not “delivired” sees the message status change. Delivered. And now Read.
In the backseet of Pauline’s car, someone says
“ohmigod look at what Nina sent me.
ohmigod look who it is. Oh my god. Look who is there.
It’s HIM.”