For Some Odd Reason (pt. 5)

Ratchet Loses her Head and Finds her Hat


Ratchet returned to her neighborhood, in rather deep thought concerning most everything that'd just happened to her. The whole thing made no sense. Why the heck would she have survived? It wasn't like she was imbibed with...well, maybe she was.

She didn't like to imagine what abnormal occurrences might be caused by her recent strangeness and its source. She was just wondering what could have done whatever had been done to her when she walked head-on into the stench she'd only briefly encountered before. At the least convenient moment possible, she saw her hat.

It was sitting basically where she'd been standing, a good hundred feet off, in the middle of a crater that had created foot-wide cracks in the street and smashed a half a dozen houses completely flat. Trees were now collections of flimsy, twig-like shaves of charred wood, separated forcefully along their grains. The feeble breeze made the fragile arrangement sway and rock. It also blew Ratchet's hair behind her, causing it to rise and fall with the wind. Ratchet spent roughly a tenth of a second rolling her eyes before she was bodily carried away by it.

If it hadn't been that she had brothers well capable of tearing out a hair a day from her less than perfect scalp, this painful new force would have made Ratchet scream aloud. As it was, she merely winced and watched the ground disappear beneath her. Ratchet vaguely wondered if she'd survive such a rapid ascension, being that air pressure would be changing so quickly. As she looked down on her thoroughly blasted neighborhood, she noticed that the crater was square-shaped, and thoroughly unattended by the fire department or police.

Ratchet was sometimes slow to realize things, and thus, slowly did she realize she was no longer breathing air. On the other hand, she was breathing. Ratchet assumed her intermittent superpowers were kicking in, and looked around. Earth was already could easily fit into her field of vision with no trouble. The moon was slightly to her right as she rose. In a rather depressed and annoyed tone of voice, she thought, "Now I'm never going to finish my Algebra."

To her surprise, her comment went entirely heard. She raised an eyebrow and thought, "If hats were toast." Not surprisingly, this time, she heard herself aloud, though her lips didn't move. At this moment, she both noticed her hat was missing, and found it. For her, it wasn't important how abnormally things were starting to happen, now. It was important, however, that her hat was somehow racing toward earth, slowly beginning to glow a slight pink color. Ratchet didn't notice this until it hit her head on. The battered fedora had stopped dead in mid-space right ahead of her. As she'd been chasing it (she didn't bother spending brainpower wondering how), it was with rather a crunch that she hit it. Her wince of pain quickly translated into a perplexed and suspicious look.

"Have you been eating liquid metal?"

The hat looked doleful and unused.

"Well, I'm glad. I've heard nasty stuff about that kind of thing. Anyway, how'd you gain so much weight?"

The hat continued looking doleful and began twitching its brim.

"Come on. Out with it."

The hat paused its twitching and spun on the spot. Whatever Ratchet had expected, she had been entirely wrong. Despite this, she accepted what she saw without pause.

The fedora had a face. Undeniably, a face isn't something that can conveniently exist on a hat, when, originally, it existed on humans, but the resemblance was stunning.

By intricate sewing and the strangest selection of threads, the hat had a face to end all non-human faces. Its eyes were made from a combination of large and small buttons, combined with eyebrows and lashes made from seemingly stiff thread.

The mouth was even harder to describe. The tear in it that had occasionally provided Ratchet some physical reason to confide in such a thing as a hat was now embroidered and sewn with carelessness and abandon. It looked like someone had threaded thread again and again around a hem to give the strangest appearance of lips. Ratchet was sure she'd be the talk of the town after Halloween if she used it this year.

To top it off, it talked.

"Well, do you think I'd just leave myself flattened like that on the ground? Did you think I'd let you leave me in the middle of blood, guts, and that abominable stench? I thought you loved me!"

Ratchet would have been taken off guard, had she not been kidnapped, imbibed with intermittent superpowers, and robbed by a who knows what of her best and only hat.

"You think I abandoned you!? Was it MY fault that I was completely knocked unconscious by God knows who?! Was it my fault that..."

"Yes," it said.

Ratchet paused.

"HOW!?" she bellowed, noticing only briefly that the rim of the fedora was now bristling and quivering.

The fedora gave her a withering look, and pointed out frankly, "You're dreaming, you complete moron."

Ratchet snorted.

"Dreaming, am I? How do you know you're not dreaming?"

The fedora rolled its eyes and laughed aloud.

"Me, dreaming?! I'm beyond such nonsense. What do you think being on your head all these years has done to me? Dream--what nonsense," it snorted.

Ratchet looked back at earth, possibly ten thousand miles away...how would she know, she'd never actually put her head into math...

She turned back. The hat had its lips pursed, and was trying hard to glare at her. For a split second, she realized the hat was having a very hard time being angry at her. She sighed.

"Well? Are you going to help me? I haven't the slightest idea what's wrong or what I can do about it."

The fedora's eyebrows raised, and it floated over to her head.

"So far, the only resolution necessary is me to be once again, on you. We can work on your silly neighborhood after that."

Ratchet sighed and put the hat on. It seemed as if she'd just eaten something comfortably warm when she was inches from hypothermia. Warmth coursed through her body and she noticed she was breathing air again. She shook her head in a perplexed way and walked off through space. She'd always wanted to see if the Great Red Spot was more or less turbulent than it looked.


!Noah!