The 13-Story Treehouse    

PART 2

Andy finds Terry in the underground lab. Terry has made a machine to measure the water for the sea monkeys. Too much, and they could drown; too little, and they could suffocate. The machine drips slowly, drop by drop. Finally, after a lot of drops later, the jar is full of water.

Terry says he needs to purify the water. Andy asks how long that will take. Terry says 24 hours. Andy says, “What? But 24 hours is a whole day!” Terry is delusional and says that there aren’t 24 hours in a day. Andy says that if Terry wastes any more time with his stupid sea monkeys, he's gonna slam the jar so hard onto his head that it will get stuck for the rest of his life. Terry thinks about that and states that he wouldn’t like it very much.

Terry skips the purifying step and must give a level scoop of sea monkey food to the sea monkeys. Andy asks, “Does that mean you have to build a level sea monkey food scooping machine?” Terry says, no need—the box came with its own sea monkey food scooping utensil.

Terry puts in two scoops of food, and one sea monkey eats both scoops—and the rest of the sea monkeys. Then it starts growing and growing and growing until it's too big for a jar.

Then it's put in a beaker. Then a bucket. Then the bathtub.

The sea monkey is revealed to be a mermaid named Mermaidia, who Terry falls for—hook, line, and sinker. But Mermaidia is actually a sea monster who wants to eat both Terry and Andy for brunch.

Andy records Mermaidia singing about how ugly she is and how she wants to eat both Terry and Andy, and he shows the recording to Terry. Mermaidia instantly finds them both after Andy shows the recording to Terry, so Andy and Terry run to the elevator. Andy comes up with an idea to shrink Mermaidia using the banana enlarger as a banana shrinker by reversing its polarity.

After Andy and Terry get to the underground laboratory and Terry reverses the polarity of the banana enlarger, Mermaidia follows them. After getting into the elevator, Mermaidia slithers her way toward Andy and Terry—but Terry fires the banana shrinker at Mermaidia, and she shrinks until she’s no more harmful than a jellybean.

Terry and Andy go back to try to write their book, but Terry is too glum to work. Andy then pops popcorn with the lid off with Terry and drinks lemonade in the lemonade fountain to cheer Terry up. Terry and Andy then burp—very loudly, mind you—and as Terry feels better, he goes to get some bubblegum off the gum reel. Then Terry starts chewing and burping, which traps him in a bubblegum bubble filled with burp gas.

Andy tries to save Terry by swinging on a vine. But his swing was good, and he gripped on thin air. So Andy decides to practice his golf swing to save Terry, but he misses on his first swing. His second and third swings were also misses, but the fourth was a bullseye, which popped the bubble—which was both good and bad. Good because Terry wasn’t flying away in a bubblegum bubble, but bad because Terry was hurtling toward the ground without a parachute or even a crash helmet.

But the marshmallow machine fires marshmallows at the ground, which saves Terry’s life. Without any more distractions, Andy and Terry write a book about a finger superhero named Superfinger. Superfinger helps the helpless—people who are lost, and even people whose noses are blocked. Everyone loved Superfinger.

Superfinger soon investigates a rock concert because some people might need their ears blocked. He then sees his favorite guitarist, Jimi Handrix (a reference to famous guitarist Jimi Hendrix), who started a guitar solo so epic he didn’t have enough fingers to play it. So Superfinger jumps at the fretboard of Jimi’s guitar, and the crowd goes wild. They played for the rest of the night and well into the day too.

To be continued…….