7th day of Christmas: Shipping

By Sir Wintrust - Published 2019-12-19

We had everything we needed to have a proper camping. We pulled out tents and supplies, we made a campfire and burned anything that would be considered evidence. Our captive had long since stopped screaming, and now was rather passive. It was time for an interrogation.We put him in the cave, and we finally took him out of his bag. We took out Gerald Fitz’s homemade lie detector, so we knew when he was telling the truth. We asked him his name, but we were off to a rocky start. He denied that he was the actual Santa Clause, saying he was, to our understanding, a fake, decoy, Santa Clause. We looked to the lie detector, and it moved from “Definitely Lying” to “Lying”passing through “Fibbing” “Not telling the truth” and “Secretly a lizard in disguise”. The lie detector made it hard for us to trust him, so we asked calibration questions, what is 2+2?, who is the current President?, what is proposition 422?, What did Odin himself whisper in the ear of his dead son Balder? What kind of pie is empirically the best? These questions and more were answered by the “Not Santa Clause” when we came to an uncomfortable realisation, we may have fallen for a decoy. Every question he asked said it was a lie, even when responding to things that are true. The only rational conclusion is that he was a robot designed by our actual virus-spredding murder, and he was simply a fake. The whole abduction was too easy, we were expecting more turrets, guards and more security. We were expecting a nuclear bunker and a military base. We asked him about the location of his maker, his programmer. He questioned if we were referring to his parents, and we responded in the affirmative. He gave us the location of his parents, no doubt his Mr and Ms were our quarry. We had to decide how to release him. He was of no use to us now, but as long as he was not safely returned we would have a target on our back by his goons, so we strapped him to a paramoter and we flew him halfway across the country, before releasing him, nice and far away from our base. He scampered off back to civilisation; that is one crisis averted. Thanks to his intell, we knew where to go next. We went to the most christmas place in the world. Uzbekistan. 

We chartered passage on shipping ship. It was a ship that shipped ships, more specifically shipping ships. We slipped aboard that shipping ship shipping ship, and shipped ourselves across the sea. It was rather tight, being shipped on a shipping ship shipped by a shipping ship shipping ship. It was tight and well regulated. We could not bring much, other than what could be fit in a diplomatic pouch and what we could hide across the shipping ship being shipped by a shipping ship shipping ship. We wondered what was, watching warm winter waves wash wet water wide with wild world-wide winds whipping whiskful wildlife webbed with wealthy wing. We arrived at the port city of Karachi, Pakistan. We would pay attention to the rich cultural heritage of the region, backing in a people so different yet so the same. But we were on a mission. We picked up some oars and began to row. It was not very effective but after a few hours we swore we had started to move. We realised we would need stronger words to lift this great beast along the land. We bought several large cranes, using their buckets to row. It was still not enough. We got diggers, cars, trucks and all manner of heavy vehicles. We pulled and pulled and dragged the boat onto the moorings. We then had a breakthrough, instead of halling the larger vehicle. We would keep the same setup, but only hall a small rowboat. If we wanted to find the sleigh rider, we had to think like the sleigh rider, so we made ourselves a sleigh, a row boat pulled by no less than 50 vehicles. We charged across the deserts of Pakistan, before rushing straight into Jammu Kashmir India China Pakistan that little bit everybody thinks they own, before turning right and heading through Tajikistan. Weirdly enough, the ride was peaceful with nobody questioning the small armies worth of vehicles driving through some of the most disputed territory in the world dragging a small rowboat bring oared by a determined group of writers. We raced across the sand dunes of Gurbantünggüt Desert, before realizing we were somehow many many miles of course, it was the x-mas man’s magic that bewitched us. We eventually arrived in a grand house in Uzbekistan.