Nestled along the banks of the Negbegammonkton river, is the small Midwestern City of Tuplen. Its residents pride themselves on their ability to recycle and follow local ordinances relating to smoking (not within 10 feet of a minor) and drinking (anytime after 7). Tuplen boasted the very beautiful campus of the former University of Tuplen, recently renamed Synex University – Tuplen and two malls (one with a wide variety of local shopping, the other with an Office Warehouse, Synex Auto Parts and a Hot Sam). This mall was on route 121 of the Tuplen City Bus system.
The driver of Tuplen City bus 121 was a man named Tarquin. To most residents of Tuplen, Tarquin was bus 121. Tarquin was a very strange man. He liked to collect the discarded plastic rings from around milk bottles. As a result, he drank a lot of milk. One day, he drank a bottle that he’d had shipped to him from the west coast (“Purple rings – very novel”), but it has been shipped by a very unscrupulous farmer and it had been sold after expiration. After that and shipping, the milk was no longer good. Tarquin missed his first ever day of work in 15 years while being taken to the hospital. It was on this day that tragedy struck his route.
The bacterium was virulent and the doctors had never seen this kind spread as quickly as it did. Within five days time he would be dead if they didn’t do something. The doctors used Synex-brand Kwikkeey-Freez suspended animation on Tarquin and began to work on the bacteria. The hospital soon lost funding and its frozen patients were left on ice, as it were.
Eventually, diseases were cured and bacteria were tamed. Human rights groups protested to open the vaults of the old hospitals and get those old bodies out of the vault. One by one, they were woken and cured. But poor Tarquin, no one had cured his disease; the doctors worked and worked for years. More specimens were taken and finally modern medicine found the cure, which involved Half and Half, pop rocks and jumper cables. It had only been 497 years.
Tarquin was offered a job driving the new buses around the bustling Megalopolis of Tuplen. He agreed and was assigned to the new buses even though he had no idea how to start them or where anything was. Soon he was back in his old routine. He did manage to get one day off a year for vacation. May 15 – the day he went into the hospital. It was on this day as he was crossing the Tuplen city bridge that tragedy struck yet again.
Tarquin did not realize it at the time, but his life and death and destiny was tied to one man. Tarquin did not know this man nor would he ever meet him, but Tarquin’s fate and that man’s fate were linked by cosmic forces that only God, Time or Melissa Monroe could explain. This is the story of that man: Dean Codle.
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