Drabble Wednesday is back with more wacky adventures of Frankie and Joni.
For the Birds
“Who shot the robin? Not I.”
“Shhh, they’ll hear you.” I nudged Frankie and peeked out from behind the virtual bushes. No sign of them. “What possessed you to arm a flock of robot chickadees?”
“Not I, said me. Programmed the wren, not the chickadee.”
“Then who—uh, oh.” I remembered.
“It was you! You shot the robin, uh, chickadee, whatever.” Frankie grinned. “You screwed up the program. You screwed up the program.”
“Shut up. I just downloaded a game on the same server. Maybe they got mixed together.”
“Oh, I get it. Now it’s angry and armed birds.”
“Exactly.”
Game Over
I stared at sparks flying off the shorted vid wall. Frankie shouted and cackled beside me.
“Hoo wheee! Pop goes the weasel, baby!” He laughed manically. “Fireworks!”
“That was the memory chip, wasn’t it?”
“Yep. And the hi-res holo function. So much for the new interactive Space Marines scenario.”
“Is there anything we can salvage? Or do we start over?”
“Hmmm. You know…”
“What?” Hope bloomed. “Did you think of a way to fix it?”
“Oh no. The game is toast. It’s just—well, this place would look better with puppets.”
It took everything I had not to smack him.
Puppets, or What?
“You’re telling me the puppets got up and walked away?”
Frankie nodded his head with all the vigour of bartender shaking a martini. “They’re alive! Alive!”
“You’re crazy. Puppets just don’t—” I stopped talking, staring at the guilty look on Frankie’s face. An angry flush crept up the back of my neck. “What did you do to the puppets!”
“Well, I sort of implanted a robotics chip in them. I wanted to see them dance.”
“You… you…”
“But the weirdest thing isn’t that they left. It’s that they took my suit with them.”
Oh, I have to lie down.
Be Afraid of the Dark 
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