A story featuring
BFG as OGR
JRT as Jennifer
Martin Barrett as detective Robes Pierre
Baldini as the Carrot Cake
Admin Jaap as The Tester
and the real GuzziRider as the Thief
with John O'Sullivan's Centauro as The Ghost of Times Past, which doesn't seem to actually feature in this story
and BigJ as The Next Big Thing
The Buel appears as a Spelling Mistake
The Orange Guzzi Rider couldn't sleep. His bright brown eyes searched the night sky through the tiny gap between the curtains. He saw nothing but darkness, and a few dots of stars. He went to the window and opened the curtains wide. His freshly brushed orange fur shined softly in the pale light from the distant crescent moon. Suddenly a blue fireball dashed over the treetops.
"Jennifer! Wake up! You've got to see this!"
"What is it?" asked Jennifer hopping towards the window. She was slightly smaller than the Orange Guzzi Rider. In the moonlight her coffee brown fur appeared to be a rich black, and the orange spot on the back of her neck sparkled.
"It doesn’t look like anything I know," replied the Orange Guzzi Rider.
Robes Pierre lifted his head from the Orange Guzzi Rider’s furry orange robe where he had been nestling. His perky black ears grazed the ceiling. "It’s time to enlarge the house again!" he bragged. "I’ve been growing. I get to dig!"
Then he crouched down and pushed his boxy brown nose out their bedroom window. "It doesn’t smell like anything I know." He straightened his perky black ears. "And it doesn’t sound like anything I know." He wagged his tail excitedly.
Robes Pierre was their pet pitbull puppy. When he first dashed into their cozy Guzzi Garage at the top of Spineframe Hill, he had been the same size they were. But ever since he’d been growing, and as he grew, he made their home bigger and bigger.
The buel fireball zoomed closer and closer. "How beautiful!" said Jennifer.. "I hope it doesn't hit our house! Or hit the carrot patch! We're in the middle of harvest time!"
The buel fireball broke into thousands of small blue spots glowing in the night sky, all falling to Earth. "Oh, Guzzi! They're landing near your warehouse," said Jennifer.
"So they are," said the Orange Rider. "I wonder if people would buy them."
Jennifer laughed. "Must you sell everything? You are such a silly rider sometimes!"
The Orange Guzzi Rider hugged her. "I love selling things and so do you. After you design the marketing campaign for our latest carrot cake, we can decide if we want to sell those buel fireballs."
The buel sparks subsided to a dim blue glow in the distance. "I think the fire is over now," yawned Jennifer "Let’s go to bed."
The next morning the Orange Guzzi Rider’s first words were, "I can’t wait to see those buel fireballs." Then he put on his neatly pressed orange suit, and strapped on his orange motorbike helmet. "I’m off to investigate," he said.
His wife, said, "Not without eating some fresh warm carrot cake, first! How will I be able to convince our customers to eat if you go out of the house with an empty tummy?"
The Orange Guzzi Rider bumped noses with his wife. "You just like to watch me eat."
"And I like to help you sell things." Jennifer Rider bumped her husband’s nose.
The Orange Guzzi Rider had been thinking so much about those buel fireballs, that he hadn’t noticed the sweet smell of carrots, honey and cinnamon that filled the kitchen. Jennifer Rider heated up a caseful of their fresh new carrot cakes and set them on the breakfast table. She would need to eat dozens of them before she could design a new advertising campaign to make Orange Guzzi Rider Carrot Cake the most popular cake in the world.
The Orange Guzzi Rider ate a whole carrot cake and grabbed another one as he headed for the door. He strapped his orange motorcycle helmet onto his head and then lifted the faceplate to put the delicious, mouth-watering spicy carrot cake in his mouth. Mrs. Rider knew the Orange Guzzi Rider from the days when he was an ordinary scura rider. That was before he became a carrot farmer and refused to eat anything he hadn’t grown himself. He ate so many carrots that he turned orange.
"Mmm, Jennifer," said the Orange Guzzi Rider. He kissed her before lowering his face plate again. Then he licked his lips to get the last of the carrot cake crumbs off his whiskers. "Eat as many of these cakes as you like. The more you eat, the sweeter your advertising words will be."
The Orange Guzzi Rider hugged his wife. Then he went out the kitchen door of his guzzi hole and kick-started his orange motorcycle. The he remembered that the nancy-boy V.11 didn't have a kick-start. He'd bent the footrest! Oh well.
"Come on, Robes Pierre," he called. His faithful dog jumped into the orange trailer cart on the back of his motorbike, and grabbed the safety bar. It was early in the morning, and the farmers were just getting started with the irrigation. The motorcycle roared across the misty carrot fields. Mr. Rider showed up unexpectedly sometimes to check on his workers and to pick some fresh carrots.
"Stop Mr. Rider," said Robes Pierre. "I smell something."
"You are always smelling things nobody else can smell," said the Orange Guzzi Rider. "Is this something good or something bad?"
"I don’t know," said Robes Pierre. "But I smell that fireball that we saw last night." He jumped out of the cart and started sniffing around the field. Soon he found a singed black tassel, and brought it to the Orange Guzzi Rider. He wagged his tail happily.
Mr. Rider sniffed the tassel. He didn’t smell anything unusual, but it was warm. He trusted Robes Pierre’s nose because dogs have a better sense of smell than bikers. But he liked to have things explained to him, so he could understand them for himself. "The fireball we saw last night was buel. This is a black tassel."
While the Orange Guzzi Rider had been examining the fringed black tassel, Robes Pierre collected a pile of them.
"These weren’t here yesterday," said Robes Pierre. "And the only new thing that happened in the night was that buel fireball."
The Orange Guzzi Rider thumped his back left foot, which he did when he was trying to figure things out. He rolled the tassel around on the ground, examining it from all sides. The black tassel felt very tassely and fringey. He picked it up and turned it back and forth between his paws. In the sunlight, it had a harley sheen. Then he said, "This tassel had a blue fire. Wood has an orange fire. But after the fire, what’s left is black." He paused. "And nobody is going to want to buy small black tassels. But, since these are not ordinary tassels, we could put up a sign telling folks that a meteor landed in this field. Tourists might pay to see that."
"First we need to harvest these carrots," said Robes Pierre. "If you want, you can call them Meteor Field Carrots, and see if people will pay extra."
"That’s a wonderful idea," said the Orange Guzzi Rider. "I’ll ask Jennifer to design a special label for them right away."
"Good," said Robes Pierre. Then both Robes Pierre and the Orange Guzzi Rider looked around the field – the harvesting crew was hard at work. Men and women in orange overalls and construction hats drove tilling and harvesting machines that picked and washed and bagged the beautiful orange carrots. Robes Pierre tilted his nose into the air.
"I smell more people than I see….," said Robes Pierre.
"I don’t see how you can count with your nose," shouted the Orange Guzzi Rider, as he kickstarted his motorbike engine. (Yes, again.) "We’re late for opening the warehouse. Let’s get back on the road."
"There is somebody here that I can’t see," insisted Robes Pierre. "And he’s eating carrots."
"Who would hide in a carrot patch?" asked the Orange Guzzi Rider.
"Thieves," said Robes Pierre. "Carrot thieves."
"Nonsense, thieves steal jewels, not carrots. It’s getting late."
"You really should listen to me," said Robes Pierre. "I’m right. I’m right. I’m always right!"
"We are not stopping," said the Orange Guzzi Rider. He pulled back the throttle and leaned forward to reduce his wind resistance. Then he headed towards town, like a furry orange ball zooming across the fields, down the roads and up a hill towards his office and warehouse. His perfectly ironed orange aerostitch flapped behind him, and Robes Pierre held on tightly to his safety bar.
"You will listen to me one day," growled Robes Pierre. His tail curled under him as he sulked in the orange trailer cart. He refused to wear the faceplate on his helmet because it covered his nose and prevented him from smelling.
A line of orange trucks with the Orange Guzzi Rider’s OGR logo were already waiting for them to open the warehouse. As soon as he parked his motorcycle, Robes Pierre ran off to the airport to oversee the packing of OGR’s daily shipments. And the Orange Guzzi Rider loped over to his warehouse.
The Orange Guzzi Rider grows carrots in the Great Plains of Ireland. He grows them on the sides of mountains. He grows them on the seashore . He even grows them in the cold wastelands of Ulster. And everywhere he grows them, they make customers happy. Nobody can buy just one bag.
The carrots from the Great Plains of Ireland are crunchy and sweet. The ones from the seashore are juicy and tart. The ones from the wastelands are bigger, softer and taste a bit like apples. Whatever the flavor, the customers keep coming back for more.
A Guzzi Forum Tester, wearing an official OGR apron with the OGR logo on it was waiting in the Orange Guzzi Rider’s office, holding a freshly picked, and freshly bitten, carrot from the meteor field. He stood, scratched his tummy, and then said, "I wish to report that these carrots are maximally delicious. In fact, I would say they are your best yet!"
The Orange Guzzi Rider climbed up onto the platform in the middle of his office and sat at his specially made small desk. He always liked to look Administrators in the eye when he worked with them, and since he was only 15 inches tall, he had platforms built all over his warehouse to place him at their eye-level. As soon as he was seated, he called up his carrot report file on his orange computer and logged in the words "best yet." Then he added, "a meteor landed last night."
With the tester’s okay, the Orange Guzzi Rider was ready to send carrots from the meteor field to the market, just like he did with all his other maximally delicious carrots, packed in orange crates with his picture and logo on every box. His wife Jennifer had designed both the picture and logo, and they won marketing awards for attracting the most customers.
Robes Pierre bounded into the Orange Guzzi Rider’s Office. "None of the warehouse staff is on duty. And somebody has taken most of the carrots without paying for them!" He wagged his tail urgently.
"I found another tassel. It was under a shiny badge that said 'FatBoy'!
There was a note with it that read,
'Got what's left of the new bike that I ordered in from 2006. Pity it was a bit burnt up on delivery. I salvaged what was left of the tassels and went home with a load of your carrots instead. Scrumptious.
Yours,
The Real Guzzirider.'
! WHO could it be !
