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“Mo?”
“What? I’m busy imagining the future.”
“Yeah, but it’s important, listen, you see-”
“How could it possibly be more important than this? I’m working on a way for all of us to get out of this mess we’re in.”
“You mean the forest being on fire?”
“Congratulations, monkey found a brain! Good monkey. Now, you shut up and look at what I’m holding.”
“Two sticks?”
“Three sticks.”
“You just added that one.”
“Exactly. My friend, this is a ladder. Lah-durr. You can pronounce that very naturally, I’d expect. And it is going to be our salvation.”
“Gosh that’d be nice, what with the burning flames at all sides of us right at this moment. How?”
“Well, we’re going to use it to climb over this mountain. Then we’ll get away easily.”
“Mountain’s awful high, Mo.”
“Yeah? Well mister smarty-pants, you know how high I could reach this morning? HERE. This branch! And only if I jumped. And now if I get on my ladder-”
“Need a hand?”
“-no, no, I’m fine – THERE. See? Twice as high!”
“Wow!”
“And that was in just a few hours, and guess what? The next step only took me half the time to build.”
“Gosh.”
“Exponential advancement, monkey for brains. That means ‘getting faster,’ I’ll have you know. At this rate I’ll have this ladder taller than the mountain by the evening. I bet we’ll go to the moon with it next week.”
“That’s awful impressive Mo. Say, how we going to get down from the mountain anyways?”
“What are you, an idiot? That’s easy. We’ll just slide down or something.”
“And it looks cold up there, won’t we freeze?”
“Nah. We’ll just uhhh grow fur coats by cutting off the dead ends of our hair. Sure. That’ll be easy.”
“What’ll we eat?”
“We’ll create miniature lichen farms on each other’s backs using spit as a substrate, simple as Sahelanthropus. What the hell is your issue anyways? Shit, you never think about the real, worthwhile problems, like doing all the math on exactly what angle you lash each rung onto this thing, or checking tensile strength of vines by snapping ‘em against your wrist. You’re as bad as all the others.”
“Huh?”
“All ‘will this work.’ Of course it will! I thought of it, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but Mo, you burned down half the forest by inventing fire last night and then passing out before telling anyone how it worked.”
“That was absolutely all your fault. I invented fire and handed it to Bluh, and it was on each and every one of you sheep to know better than to let him stick it into a tree for ‘safe keeping.’ Gormless fools, where would you be without people like me?”
“Who knows, Mo?”
“Me. I know everything. Just you wait there, in just three minutes we’ll be on top of the mountain. Now hold the ladder for me as I add this next rung: this sucker’s REALLY gonna light a fuse.”
“Hope so, Mo. Smoke’s getting fearful thick.”
“Just like you then. You know, I bet we could fix this fire by pushing the top of the mountain down on top of it, once we’ve climbed up the ladder. Trivial solution. Wonder why nobody’s done it yet, the lazy idiots.”