Illustrations by Alison Berry
Guest art by John Wilkins
Episode 15: Raisin of Existence
As rarely – but thankfully – happened sometimes, Hana’s homeroom class was asked to draw whatever they wanted in lieu of any real lessons. Hana drew a black cat with wings. She could not stop thinking about Agnacious and the Catons and drew the picture unconsciously, entirely unaware of what it was she was actually doing. Beside her, Henri was wearing a pink pencil crayon down to a nub. Nobody even had to see the paper to know what – or rather who – he was drawing. James, on the other hand, still had a blank piece of paper in front of him and did not seem inclined to have it meet his pencil.
‘Aren’t you going to draw something, James?’ Hana asked him after realising what she had drawn and crumpling up the paper.
‘What do you mean?’ James asked in turn. ‘I’m already done.’
Hana rolled her eyes. ‘Is it a cow in a snowstorm?’
‘No, of course not,’ he said cheerily, picking up the paper and waving it around. ‘It’s your dandruff! Well, in a snowstorm, of course.’
Hana punched the paper out of his hand.
‘What was that flying cat you were drawing?’ Henri asked.
‘Oh, you missed out on a lot, Henri,’ she told him almost regretfully. ‘When I went camping I met an ancient robot and a giant red bear, and then James and I had to punch all the fat out of the way king, and then we caught James’ old cat spying on us in a bird costume.’
‘That all sounds unnecessarily silly,’ he commented.
‘Yeah, but it happened. What have you been up to?’
‘Apparently not punching the fat out of cats. Why didn’t you tell me about all this?’
‘Because you’ve been away playing baseball.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Congratulations, by the way,’ James said, trying to mask his bitterness. Hana congratulated Henri as well; the news was all over the school that their team had won both games and that it was all thanks to Henri.
‘Thanks, but it’s the entire team you should be congratulating. All I do is hit balls with sticks.’
James rolled his eyes at Henri’s modesty.
Just then the windows began rattling with great intensity, shaking with such vigour that all of the students became frightened, thinking the glass would break at any moment. Their teacher’s curiosity was piqued, as one might have judged from his thick, raised eyebrow, and he got out from behind his desk and went to the windows to inspect them.
He expected the cause of the sudden burst of violent activity to be merely a strong gust of wind, and on this account he was correct. But there would have been no way for him to expect what the wind seemed to be bringing with it: as many snowflakes as might fall in the middle of winter, dense and unrelenting, covering the world in a yellowed white.
‘Well, isn’t this peculiar,’ their teacher said to himself, and that was when the windows shattered, sending shards of fine glass all over the classroom floor. ‘Children, get in the hallway!’ he ordered the students with a shout. They did so, screaming, before the snow filled the room. He quickly followed after them and slammed the door shut, his head and shoulders covered in the same yellowed white that seemed to be taking over the school grounds.
Other classes in the school were finding themselves in a similar situation, pushed to the halls by the insane winds and unexpected substance.
‘It’s snowing!’ one of the students called down the hall.
‘No it’s not!’ another called back. Sure enough, the flaky yellow-white substance made no signs of melting and was dry to the touch, though some had a greasy sheen to them. There was a hubbub as the students tried to figure it out, but Hana already knew: it was dandruff. The school was being flooded with dandruff.
‘Uh oh,’ she said. She grabbed James and Henri by their sleeves and dragged them to an empty corner. ‘I think something really bad is happening,’ she whispered to them.
‘You “think”?’ James asked.
‘Well, I’m pretty sure this isn’t my dandruff.’
‘Why would it be your dandruff?’ Henri asked.
‘Uh.’
‘Because she hasn’t washed her hair in a while,’ James told him.
‘Um . . . yeah,’ she said. She was thankful that James saved her but kicked him in the shin all the same.
‘So what could be causing all this dandruff?’ Henri asked, though he did not expect Hana to actually have an answer.
‘I have an idea, but it doesn’t really make much sense,’ she replied. ‘Remember how I mentioned I met a robot when I went camping? Well, this robot . . . this robot has a pretty severe case of dandruff, and he can make things out of it. He’s the only one I’ve met who can do this too.’
‘Too?’
‘I mean, he’s the only one I’ve met who can do this, too. I forgot the comma.’
‘Go on.’
‘But he said he was going to watch over the city to make sure as few giant whatevers get into it as possible. This – this whole storm of dandruff – doesn’t seem like something he’d do. I thought he was supposed to be a nice robot.’
‘Okay, so what could be causing it?’ Henri asked again. They seemed to be getting somewhere and nowhere all at the same time.
‘I honestly don’t know,’ Hana said. ‘But I’m kind of scared.’
‘Then how about we get out of here and find out?’ suggested James.
Hana looked around them: all of the students and teachers were very much distracted by the sudden storm of dandruff and would not notice if they snuck out.
‘Okay, let’s check it out,’ she agreed. ‘But if it turns out to be like a giant raisin or something then I’m coming back in.’
‘From everything that’s happened to you lately I wouldn’t doubt it,’ Henri said.
Hana sighed. ‘You’re not supposed to say that,’ she said.
Henri shrugged. He opened the hall door while Hana and James shielded him from view, the burst of fresh dandruff covering their legs in white.
‘Go, go!’ Hana half whispered, half shouted as they hurried out the door, working together to push it shut behind them.
They stood alone in the school courtyard as dandruff flakes touched upon all surfaces. Everything was white and yellow and smelled musty, and they wondered just what could possibly be more disgusting. Then they stopped wondering because they were only grossing each other out even more.
‘It definitely looks like Hana’s head exploded,’ James noted.
Hana was too mesmerised by the scene to even punch him in the shoulder. ‘Something bad must’ve happened,’ she said.
A strong gust of wind threatened to throw them all in the air but they held onto one another to anchor themselves down. After that there was barely any more wind at all, and the falling flakes thinned out until the sky became pure again. The storm was over.
‘What a mess,’ James said as he kicked a large clump of dandruff. ‘I wonder where they’re going to put all this stuff.’
‘Is it just me or is this silence kind of eerie?’ Henri asked. Everyone stopped what they were doing and expected to see something like Hana’s giant raisin manifest in the distance.
The ground began to shake, bringing dandruff down from the trees and the roof of the school. Henri and James both covered their heads but Hana did not bother, knowing that it would not have made any difference. A rumbling louder than her hungry stomach filled their ears, enveloping them in a tremendous force of sound. A murder of crows exploded out from the line of trees beyond the school’s field, drawing their attention through the ceaseless rumbling, and there, rising slowly over the horizon, was a gigantic, wrinkly, dark purple mass. They stood in awe as they watched it, unmoving and unblinking, all three at an utter loss for words.
The giant raisin was about the size of a thirteen-floor apartment building, though Hana doubted anyone would ever actually want to live in it; it was also somehow completely devoid of dandruff and did not make any movement towards the dandruff-covered field.
For Hana, raisins were definitely more disgusting than dandruff; she felt that they ruined everything, from muffins to trick-or-treating to chocolate, and now this raisin was trying to ruin her life. She tightened her hands into fists.
‘There’s your giant raisin,’ Henri said. ‘But it doesn’t seem to explain all of this dandruff; it’s not like it’s cascading off it or anything.’
Hana realised he was right: the raisin and the dandruff were two entirely separate elements, with the raisin not venturing any further than the peripheral of the dandruffed area.
A figure shot up from behind the line of trees and hurled white objects at the raisin while dancing about the air. The figure was green and blue with grey hair, and the objects it threw seemed to come out of nowhere.
‘That . . . that’s Daniel Druff!’ Hana shouted, pointing at the figure that was the size of a hornet in the distance. She turned to Henri and grabbed his arm. ‘That’s the robot I saw when I went camping!’
‘“Daniel Druff”?’ Henri repeated.
She paused stupidly for a moment and then nodded.
‘Is he throwing his dandruff at the raisin?’ James asked.
‘It looks like it,’ Hana said, squinting. ‘Maybe that’s where all this dandruff came from.’
They watched Daniel Druff’s assault on the raisin for a few minutes. It did not seem to affect the raisin in the slightest. There was some movement in the trees below the battle scene and Hana could make out a great red shape lumbering through them, heading further into the copse until it disappeared completely.
‘I think that was the bear,’ she said.
‘What?’ James asked. ‘There’s a bear?’
‘Well, it’s gone now. It was in the trees. I think it was the bear that was with Dan when I met him.’
‘The one that ate a mad scientist over a hundred years ago?’ James asked.
‘That’s the one.’
‘I guess I really did miss out on a lot,’ Henri said.
A light humming sound came from behind them, steadily picking up in volume as they watched the scene. They did not give it much notice as it seemed like a typical background noise, maybe a plane that was passing by. Then there was a loud and nastily wet cough, and the trio turned around to see the way king sitting in a pink chair that was hovering about five feet above the ground. Below him was the red lobster.
‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ the way king said, despite it being early afternoon and Hana being a girl. ‘By now you must have noticed the giant raisin looming over your education facilities.’
The three of them nodded.
‘It appears that all of the monsters you have encountered so far – and all of the ones that went unseen by you – have been making way for this one great horror. Raisins, as you well know, are the bane of existence: they infiltrate everything that is delicious with the sole intention of corrupting it, of making life miserable. Try as we might to pick the raisins from our muffins and cakes, the flavour lingers like a malicious ghost. The monstrosity ahead of us was formed from all of the flicked raisins that littered the city streets. Everything else was a distraction – this is what they plan to destroy us with.’
The trio looked back at the raisin with even more terror than before.
‘But what’s with all this dandruff?’ Henri asked.
‘It is a protective field crafted by Daniel Druff to prevent the raisin from venturing any further. From what I have gathered, the raisin is allergic to dandruff.’
‘That makes sense,’ James said sincerely.
‘And now I must do my part to defeat the raisin,’ the way king told them. ‘The lobster will remain here and lead you to safety if things look grim. Take care now, young ones!’
The way king began hovering off towards the raisin but Hana called him back. ‘But what can you do?’ she asked.
He patted the chair’s unassuming armrests. ‘This chair can do a lot more than fly,’ the cat hinted cryptically. He left them at that.
The trio looked down at the lobster. It was not very interesting to look at, however, so they returned their attention to the scene of the giant raisin, where the way king had already arrived. The way king zipped around the giant raisin in his pink chair and fired off lasers from the chair’s armrests, burning off chunks of raisin here and there, while Daniel Druff hit it with a dandruff hammer that was twice his size.
‘We should go help,’ Henri said. Something then slapped the side of his head and he quickly glanced all around him to see what it was. He looked down and saw a small, white, rectangular card lying by his feet. He picked it up. NO, the card read. ‘“No”?’
‘What do you mean, “no”?’ Hana asked the lobster. ‘We have to go help! Look at how awesome that is!’ She pointed excitedly at the scene in question, where the cat was still shooting lasers at the raisin’s wrinkled outer skin and Daniel Druff was attacking it with various massive dandruff weapons.
‘I thought you hated stuff like that,’ James said, taken aback.
‘This is something else entirely,’ she explained.
‘As much as I’d like to help, I can’t think of anything we’d be able to do in this situation,’ Henri said.
‘Well, if we can’t go over there to help then we’ll just have to help from here,’ Hana said.
‘But what can we do from here that we can’t do over there?’
‘Oh, uh, you know: I’ll just have to use my . . .’ She then glanced at James for some kind of approval. He gave an ambiguous shrug which was good enough for her. ‘I’ll just use my secret dandruff powers to put something together and attack the raisin with it,’ she said all at once, timidly pushing the tips of her index fingers together.
Henri smiled. ‘I pretty much had that figured out on my own by now,’ he said.
‘Phew.’
‘So what are you going to do, Hana?’ James asked.
She looked thoughtfully at the dandruff-covered tarmac around them. ‘Maybe I can use Dan Druff’s dandruff to my advantage,’ she said. ‘It looks like I have a lot to work with here. What do you think, Mr. Lobster?’
The lobster produced a card with a picture of a thumbs-down on it. ‘Really?’ Hana asked. ‘What’s so bad about it if we do something all the way over here?’
The lobster handed out another card, this one with OTHER WAY printed on it. ‘I don’t think I understand,’ Hana said sadly.
‘I think it wants you to turn the card around,’ Henri offered. Hana turned it around and, grinning, returned the thumbs-up to the lobster.
‘All right! Now we just need to figure out what to make.’
‘Maybe you can make a giant dandruff muffin and try to trap the raisin inside it,’ James suggested.
‘That’s not bad,’ Henri said.
‘I don’t think there’s enough dandruff or time for that,’ Hana told them.
‘I guess you don’t have to do anything too complicated,’ Henri said. ‘You could simply make a large dandruff missile and set it on a trajectory for the raisin’s core. That would be suitably epic, if this raisin is indeed the last monster you have to deal with.’
Hana nodded. ‘We’ll go with that,’ she said. ‘The first thing I made was a spaceship, so a missile can’t be all that different. I’ll just have to really pack in the flakes to make sure the burst is messy enough.’
She dropped to her knees and began raking in piles of dandruff with her fingers. James and Henri watched on in a mixture of excitement and disgust as she began putting together a freehand facsimile of a missile made out of the ancient robot’s dandruff. As it was being put together they realised it was going to be much larger than any of them expected. The finished missile was about the size of James’ house.
Everyone applauded when it was deemed complete by its creator and she wiped dandruff and sweat from her forehead.
‘Too bad we don’t have, like, a monkey or something to put inside of it,’ James said.
‘That’s a horrible idea!’ Hana told him. He then looked down at the lobster and it raced around to Hana’s legs, protectively holding up a blank card.
‘Missiles are different from space rockets, James,’ Henri explained. ‘A monkey – or a lobster – would not survive impact.’
James shrugged.
‘Okay, are we ready to fire this thing off?’
Everyone nodded. The lobster counted down the takeoff with a series of cards: 3, 2, 1, and then Hana sent the missile flying with a push from behind. The trio cheered it as it flew uncertainly towards the raisin, wobbling and wavering but generally heading on the right path. Sometimes a bird would temporarily perch on it before realising what it was sitting on and flying away.
The missile hit the middle of its target at the exact same moment that Daniel Druff slammed a giant dandruff mace into one side of the raisin and the way king shot twin lasers into the other. For a single moment the entire world seemed to go white, and not a sound could be heard until a pattering welled up around the trio. They felt something like pellets falling from above and bouncing off their bodies, some of them falling so fast that they cut their skin. The white soon faded away and they could clearly see the black and purple rain of raisins that was falling all around them. The gigantic raisin was gone.
‘We did it!’ Hana shouted triumphantly.
‘You’re the one who did it, Hana,’ Henri told her.
‘No, it was your idea to make the missile. Everyone helped in their own way.’
‘Except for James,’ Henri said jokingly.
‘I wouldn’t have come all this way without James.’
The way king and Daniel Druff then landed in front of them with something curious in their custody: sitting in what looked to be a black escape pod was a green cat with a large, brussel sprout-shaped head. If its drooping mouth and capital V eyebrows were any indication, the creature was not all that pleased. Hana burst out laughing at the sight of it.
‘Oh, this is so stupid!’ she said, wiping away tears of laughter.
‘I would like to introduce you to Scorlax, leader of the Catons,’ the way king said.
Scorlax spat a stream of green slime onto the trio and lobster until his mouth became clogged by a dandruff ball. The trio made faces as they shook their arms and bodies in an attempt to slop the slime off of them.
‘Gross!’ James cried, and Hana and Henri loudly expressed similar sentiments.
‘Sorry about that,’ the way king said.
‘Scorlax came from an invisible planet that exists just outside of our solar system,’ Dan Druff explained. ‘I was here when he first crash-landed on our planet, and the impact is what gave me – and in a way, you – my dandruff powers. His large brain gives him the ability to bring out the worst in people, and the only thing that can dampen this ability of his is dandruff. So by accidentally giving me my power he was also sealing his death warrant; because of this he fled, and I spent my entire life searching for him. That was what brought me to this land. For five years I waited for a sign of his existence, but as none was to be found I started up this city instead, where I would lie in wait. Nothing happened, and I was eaten by the bear. Since then he has been sending intruders into the city; these turned out to be distractions, to lure me out of hiding if I was still alive and to destroy you before you caught wind of his intentions. His intentions were to wipe out humanity with the giant raisin and replace all people with the Catons, a group of cats whose history originates in Scorlax’s crash. However, this was an absolutely ridiculous idea and now we have him in captivity. I thank you for your assistance, Hana.’
The trio were dazed. ‘How did you figure all that out?’ Hana asked.
‘Oh, the bear acted as a telepathic link between us as we fought just now,’ Dan Druff said. The giant red bear poked its head out from the far-away forest as if on cue. ‘He doesn’t want to come out and startle everybody.’
‘Okay, great, everything makes sense now,’ Hana said. ‘Sort of. So I guess I’m part alien.’
‘You may be part alien but you’re still mostly dandruff,’ James said.
‘I think what James means to say is that you’ll always be Hana, no matter what,’ Henri said.
‘But yes, you are mostly dandruff,’ the way king said.
Hana sighed. They heard sirens in the distance. ‘I guess you guys need to get out of here,’ she said. ‘I don’t think anyone is going to like a robot, a cat in a flying chair and an alien hanging around the school. Come to think of it, I wonder what took them so long.’
That was when a white cat bounded onto the scene, stood up and shook its whiteness off. Underneath was a black cat they knew as Agnacious.
‘Hallo!’ the chipper cat greeted them. ‘How did I do? I set fires all over the place to distract the trucks. Everything clear here?’ She then noticed the nasty green cat that was being held captive. ‘Oh, look at that horrible creature! Is that really what I was working for? I sure am glad I became a traitor!’
‘So you really are a good guy, Agnacious?’ James asked uncertainly.
‘We-ell, I don’t know about being a guy or being good, but I definitely am Agnacious.’
‘I guess that’s good enough,’ he said.
The doors behind them were slowly opening, pushing large mounds of dandruff onto the whitened tarmac.
‘Guys, I think you need to get out of here!’ Hana shouted at the bizarre assemblage before her. ‘Go on, shoo! And thanks for everything!’
Daniel Druff bowed low and then picked up Agnacious. The way king fired a celebratory laser against the school’s wall, and then the lobster latched onto the pink chair with one of its sharp red claws. Hana, James and Henri waved as the strange beings flew off, taking Scorlax with them. The doors behind them opened as soon as they were left alone.
‘What happened here?’ their teacher asked them. He was sweating profusely and appeared to be out of breath. The schoolchildren that poured out of the school seemed to be in a similar state, though soon they were cheerily making dandruffmen and dandruff angels in the fields of white and purple.
‘I think the end happened,’ Hana said, but James shook his head and tapped the ground with his baseball bat. Apparently he thought it was just the beginning.
Loud popping sounds sounded above them and they looked up to see fireworks lighting up the sky; the fireworks, however, were made entirely out of dandruff, and the intricate designs that the dandruffworks left behind formed a congratulatory message for Hana. She felt tears of joy well up in her eyes but James wiped them away when he noticed them. He smiled at her and her eyes filled up with more.
To Be Continued In The Untitled Saga of Hana: Volume 2
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Episode 8
Episode 9
Episode 10
Episode 11
Episode 12
Episode 13
Episode 14
Episode 15
Volume 2
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