Young Writers Society

Corrick crossed his arms.

"I hate this, I hate you," he pointed at the stupid dog, "and I especially hate you," he pointed at the dumb man making chicken puns. He settled on the other man, who has not really moved. "I don't know about you, yet."

"And don't you dare ask me if I'm too chicken to make puns, either." He seethed.

"BOOOOOOOO!" Mel yelled to Corrick, turning her attention back towards the game. What a mean, grumpy man.

Carter's smug smile grew. "You're a real comedi-hen, aren't you? Glad I'm not the only one willing to make a specktacle of myself, even though the rest of you are fowling quickly behind. Pick up the pace and make more yolks, we're running out of time. The cluck's-a-ticking!"

“Oh, that’s it!” Jerica spat. “I have HAD it with this place!”

She was a good person — she didn’t deserve this. This— this punny hell. She’d take a thousand arrows before she listened to another second of this horrific music or Carter’s progressively worsening puns.

She stood and walked behind her chair, towards the curtain at the edge of the stage. This competition — and everyone in it — could go die in a fire for all she cares. She was leaving. Now.

The invisible force that had dragged her across the stage earlier grabbed her again and pushed her back into her seat. She flipped off the other side and crouched, starting in the opposite direction than the last way she had tried. The force grabbed her again and shoved her towards her seat.

She didn’t sit this time. Instead she grabbed the edge of the chair and used it as leverage to push back against the force. The force pushed harder. She all but wrapped herself around the back of the chair, arms and legs working together like an octopus clinging to the couch for dear life.

Suddenly the force hit her even harder, seeming to come up straight from the bottom, and flipped her over the back of the seat and back into the chair. She huffed, making no attempt to look dignified as she slouched in the chair to sulk. “If I can’t leave, can someone just stab me already so I don’t have to listen to the court jester anymore?”

"THAT'S RIGHT CARTER MY BOY!" Lordy shouted as Jerica did back-flips in the seat beside him.

Once she finished complaining, Lordy turned to her, "You know, if I've learned anything from being in a bad situation, and trust me I've been in a lot of them, it's easier when you just sit back and enjoy the ride. Things usually seem to work themselves out in the end."

He reached into his coat pocket for his flask and stretched it out towards her.

"I'm only doing this to make the rest of our time here less awkward," Lordy said, "Don't get too eggcited."

After listening to the human Carter and the human Corrick exchange their so-called PUNs, Simon finally understood that PUN was an acronym that humans used to reference "Play un Words." That was probably Latin for play on words, but Simon was not well versed in Latin as it had gone extinct over 1,000,000 years ago.

"We find ourselves in the chicken coop," Simon began. His voice sounded like a drone, he noted, and so he tried again to match the inflection of those around him. "The chicken coop. Because we are cooped up on stage."

He was not sure if that was the correct usage of the word coop. He decided to press on anyway. After counting the number of suspected PUNs, Simon noted that Carter was substantially ahead in terms of this competition, so he moved his entire body to face him.

"You seem to have gotten a leg up on me. I hope not to fall feather behind. That would be bawk-ful." Simon replaced the onomatopoeia with an actual chicken noise. "I believe I am in need of a roost."

Corrick heard a pun from the side stage. "They're not even a part of this, why can I hear them?"

If his survival depended on making chicken puns, dear Hearts, let him die.

Jerica felt more of the soul drain from her body the longer he talked. There seemed to be no end in sight. The dog had claimed the round was 5 minutes, but it’d already been 2 hours.

She deflated as she looked at Lordy. What was she even supposed to do with him? She wanted to snarl at him — he certainly deserved it for being so patronizing. But... rum.

“I just don’t see.” She took the flask and took another drink and handed it back to Lordy. “Why you’re all okay with this abominable challenge.”

"...All right, you can call me Hilly," Hildegarde said to Mel. "And yes, this is definitely more fun than fighting each other to the death."

She watched the pun contest with a raised eyebrow. Most of the puns were completely groan-worthy, but some of them had made her chuckle. Simon's especially — who would have ever thought a zombie-construct-thing would have the intelligence to make a pun?

"I'll admit, I don't think I've deliberately made a pun in years. It's usually my friends' job to say ridiculous things until the other person is irritated enough to explain their evil plans. What about you?"

"YEAH! GO SIMON!" Mel cheered after he made her laugh. Somehow, the puns that made the least amount of sense were the funniest. He also said it with a scarily dead-pan voice and face that would normally be uncomfortable, but with the music and dancing chicken background, it only made it funnier.

She then turned back to Hilly, leaning a little closer in case she had bad hearing. She briefly wondered if her yelling was even that loud for her.

"Hmmmmm," she hummed for a while, finger on her chin. She was thinking over her question, but she kept getting distracted by the thought of little old Hilly fighting. Oh, what she would give to see her fight and beat up a scary dude...

"I think it's the opposite for me," she finally answered, focusing on her answer as she quickly thought through her current situation. "Minus the evil plans, though, but that's an entertaining idea. Anyways, I think I'm the one who can say ridiculous things to my friends just to get them to talk. Grumpy people, am I right? I should write down some of these chicken puns. I'd be unstoppable."

"Oh no my dear," Lordy said, taking his flask back from Jerica, "Whether I'm okay with all of this is neither here nor there. The way look at it, I'm stuck here whether I like it or not, so why don't I just try to like it? Save the confusion for when I'm back in Wonderland."

He took a long sip from his flask and he felt how depressingly light it had gotten.

"But anyway, they should be done soon. I think our friends are running out of hendurance."

Simon noticed that the human Corrick did not seem to be having the same amount of fun as the human Carter. After a couple of calculations and "Google" searches, with a variability of chicken searches thrown in, Simon learned that humans do not like to feel left out. Perhaps Corrick felt ignored.

Without moving his actual body, Simon moved his head to look at Corrick and updated his facial expression to "Sad Sympathy." He then said, "Don't be so hard-boiled on yourself, Corrick. This round will be over-easy soon."

Humans also tended to laugh at ridiculous movements of the body, so Simon added in a rendition of a so-called "Chicken Dance" that his android body could handle, finally updating his facial expression back to "Happy."

Corrick wasn't even trying, and Simon, the stiff-necked, creepy one, seemed to finally be catching on. And his puns were terrible - which was the whole point. Carter needed to up his game.

"Granted, you have tailent, but you're not going to wing this round," Carter said with a good-mannered smile. "I'm not fly-tened by competition. You haven't even seen my beak performance, yet. There are more nesty puns still yet to be said."

He then turned to Corrick, grinning.

"You may not be a chicken, but you sure are a real downer. Like Simon said, don't be such a bad egg. Look at it from a different perspecktive, hen-ny. Omlettin' you know, when you're in the chick of things, it's better to take a new ap-poach and look on the bright side sooner than laid-er. It's just good farm."

Corrick let out a deep growl. "Say one more. chicken pun. I. Dare. You."

Carter looked at Corrick with a mocking pout.

"Your mind must be clucking scrambled, with your rotten-egg attitude."