Flash Farto on the Planet of Cake!

On the far distant, plutonium-rich Biggins, planet of the fiercest wobblies in the entire Bobble cluster, our brave, Star-Wanderer hero, Flash Farto arrives on an island of cake surrounded by a shimmering, simmering sea of hydrobucolic acid. Flash and his gorgeous assistant Honey Crevice are captured at spatula-point whilst sunbathing and forced by the elderly Tuna King Shadowfold to retrieve four of the five mythical, mystical, seemingly lost operating buns to a sugar machine called the Ethical Brain of the Wobblies, of which he is the keeper, 34 regular, M&S, special offer, all pants must go.

The threat hanging over them is “agree to assist, or die horribly and watch their magnificent spaceship destroyed”.

‘Operating buns?’ drawls Honey sceptically, teasingly toying with the hem of her microspacesuit with an elegant nail. ‘Are you for real, Shadowfold?’
The great Tuna King nods and lifts his robes to prove it. ‘You look a kinda sponge finger man to me’. Honey puts the elegant nail back in the toolbox.

‘Of course I am real, my child’. He replaces his robes and steps towards her. ‘Have a feel if you do not have faith in me’. Honey runs screaming from the room racked with the dry heaves and gags thankfully out of sight. Flash is so annoyed, his teeth begin to squeak, but Shadowfold is unperturbed.

‘These wondrous items have been hidden for centuries, spread all over the entire planet’ croaked the wheezy old geezer.

‘That’s all very fascinating, I’m sure, but what has this rambling cobblers got to do with us?’ Flash enquires and is told that unless the two travellers seek out these buns, hidden in different, perilous locations around the planet to prevent them falling into the hand of the evil Prince Mince and his Acidian warriors, who plan to seize the bun machine and use its originally benevolent belly-influencing power for their own sinister purposes, that they will never leave the planet of the Wobblies and will face a fearful life of eternal slavery in the moan pits of Fissure, home of the vile stench rats, without tea or cake and made to wear wet socks every day until they diiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeee...

Prince Mince is an evil dictator and has been insanely fuelled by the lust for power ever since he became a monopod in a freak ping-pong accident. Mince’s other leg was eaten by a flangette, who was a surprising poor loser and is a sorry tale all its own which accounts for his becoming so utterly evil.

‘I don’t like the sound of that’ murmured Honey nervously, as she stumbles back into the room, hoping nobody heard her fart.

‘Neither do I’ whispers Flash from under the table, pinching his nose to hold out the whiff. ‘Particularly the “perilous” part’.

‘What? Worse than the eternal slavery in the moan pits?’ asks Honey, flicking a wisp of breadcrumb from her shoulder.

‘Ohhhhhhh’ groans Flash. ‘I’d forgotten about that bit’ and an unpleasant whiff of his own forces him out from under the table.

Shadowfold manfully rams his hands on his hips and stalks the room, telling how the machine has been modified to overcome Mince and the Acidians and can be reactivated, so the buns must be recovered from various spacebakers around the planet. ‘The machine has been modified to overcome Mince-‘

‘Yeh, we read that part’ smans Honey and opens another bag of dry roasted nuts.

‘Then GO!’ shouts Shadowfold dramatically, pointing at the door. Flash and Honey shrug, then try the door which appears to be locked.

‘Oh… sorry… her-hmmm… then GO!’ he cries again, pointing to the other door. Flash and Honey leave tutting and shaking their space bonces. In the next room, they are furnished with sprawling Biggins gowns to enable them to blend seamlessly in with the rest of the populace.

‘So is everyone on your planet humanoid?’ asks Flash, standing hands on hips and crouching down repeatedly, bending his knees outwards. ‘Remarkable freedom you get in these gowns…’

‘Oh yes’ replies Shadowfold, reclining coquettishly on a nearby bush. ‘Except 98% of them are 3 feet tall. We taller ones are known as the Elders' he crows proudly.

Flash grunts in dismay and flings off his gown. Shadowfold winces and leaves the room. ‘Three feet? You mong, how are we gonna blend in seamlessly then? You want to cut our bleedin’ legs off as well?’ Shadowfold pretends not to hear and puts some nice Phil Collins on to calm himself. He certainly didn’t feel this coming in the air tonight.

Terrified by faced with no real choice, Flash and Honey depart on their quest, now resplendent in matching gold catsuits (5’11” (wide) and 5’8” (slinky)), are reluctantly transported from place to place by Shadowfold's handheld, sausage-like iced fingers.

Their first stop is an abandoned bus shelter on the edge of a cliff with a mysteriously open adjoining door into a retro menswear shop.

Immediately Flash is forced to change his catsuit when at the rear of the shop, a paper wall collapses suddenly and they are confronted by the statuesque, poorly defined brain eaters of Plasmafon. Honey shrieks and a rusting metal cage falls from the ceiling, trapping the Star Travellers.

‘You will have such delicious brains’ screeches one of the Plasmafons.

‘Who me?’ wails Flash in trouser-staining panic.

‘Let’s hope they just want a snack’ drawls Honey.

‘We have other plans for youuuu…’ cackles the second Plasmafon to Honey.

‘Yes, I have heard that line before actually?’ sneers Honey. ‘God, this is worse than that low-budget French planet we landed on last time’.

‘Not so fast, Plasmafons’ yells Flash bravely.

‘How do you know we’re called Plasmafons?’

‘Hey! They don’t call me the King Of Space for nothing, you know. Inspired guesses are my middle err… names’.

‘Nothing to do with the van outside then?’ chuckles Honey.

‘Now! Plasmafons, hear me’ threatens Flash menacingly.

‘That big green van just outside the shop?’ she laughs, pointing out of the window. ‘The one with WE ARE THE PLASMAFONS written on the side in big yellow letters with the pictures of the chuckle brothers here underneath?’ Flash sighs deeply and rubs his fingertips into his eyes in frustration.

‘Yeh ok, Honey, you’ve made your fucking point’. Honey squints out of the window trying to read the smaller print on the bottom of the van.

‘Tired of brains ruining your life? Call Terry and Paul Plasmafon… we put the mmmmm in lobotommmmmmmy’.

‘Catchy isn’t it?’ shrieked one Plasmafon. ‘I thought of that?’

‘Terry and Paul? That really your names?’ Terry and Paul nod what little head they possess. ‘Not very scary, is it? Terry and Paul?’

‘Honey, shut your trap and let me deal with this please?’ moans Flash, then thrusts out his medal-laden spacechest to address their captors. ‘Plasmafons…’

‘Call me Paul’ said Paul. ‘It’s shorter’.

‘Whatever. Plasmafons! Do you know what this is?’ asks Flash reaching into his catsuit.

‘Flash, I’ve told you before, that line never works’.

‘Not that’ mumbles Flash and pulls out a small piece of card.

‘Errr… a business card?’

‘Exactly! A business card for the West Ham United supporters club’.

‘So?’ ask Terry and Paul together.

‘Ring that number… join the club and you will have literally hundreds of simple brains to feast on’. Terry and Paul shrug what little shoulders they have and press a button raising the cage and releasing the space heroes.

‘Oh and is there a bun in here somewhere?’

‘There was one somewhere’ muttered Paul, opening a cupboard full of dead fish. ‘But I think we gave it to the Church’.

‘Bugger’ spat Flash and he and Honey raced to the St. Colin’s bring-and-buy sale where Flash was forced to swap his Lighthouse Family CD’s for the bun.

‘Thank fuck for that’ muttered Honey, slipping on her ipod and racketing up some Blink 182.

At stop two, the eerily familiar Rathbone Street market is the stop and Honey and Flash become besieged by the screaming vest-and-pants clad groupies of the spacerock band FUNCH, who are fronted by a saucy, silvery shiny couple who look exactly like Flash and Honey and avoid having to pay an additional pair of actors for that scene.
Flash then has to handle the siege of the screaming FUNCH girls single-handedly while Honey retrieves the bun alone from the butchers-cum-fancy dress shop and drags Flash from a pleasure worse than death before they retrieve the third bun from the windy, icy wastes of the snow caves of the Calf Witch, who has hidden the Bun in a time proofed wardrobe of dazzling emerald. The wardrobe is guarded by a lecherous and murderous rapper known only as The Loin. Flash confronts him single handed and as he manfully rips off his shirt for battle to the death, he forgets his new suit is a bib n brace affair and his trousers fall down. In the ensuing hilarity, the Loin stops pulling shapes and doing those weird rapper finger gestures and suffers a fatal heart attack and Flash and Honey easily retrieve the Bun from the wardrobe before departing.

‘That was the toughest of all my adventures’ puffs Flash as they depart. ‘The Loin, the witch and her wardrobe…’

Honey groans at the dreadful pun and promises herself to get a new hero pronto. Finally in the city of Flatua, with three of the fours buns safely in Flash’s lunchbox, Flash is falsely accused of assaulting a dwarf with a herring and our heroes come face to face with the scheming Chancellor Henry Penguin who agrees only to release Flash if he sacrifices Honey on the ceramic ceremonial altar in Penguin’s bedroom.

‘Stick it up your hole, Penguin’ blasts Flash from his cell, quickening the easily impressed Honey’s heart, before finally remembering the FlashBlaster hidden inside his secret pouch, expertly woven into his own skin by the master tailors of Roveypovey, multi-flapped dodecapods of the slimeworld Schlump. With one blubbery, uncomfortable and rather cumbersome motion, Flash blasts the cell door into a big melty, radioactive mess and after almost sliding on the sudden and unexpected pile of penguin shit beyond the puddle, releases Honey, kisses her passionately knowing they are on the cctv cameras of Penguin, who has activated an escape hatch and slid down a shiny steel tube directly into the super pad chair in his office.

Flash squeezes Honey’s arse, gives her a wink and with a flash of finger and a sigh from Honey, they are free and heading back to Shadowfold aboard a steaming StarJet that goes pphhhnrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, their mission complete.

The buns retrieved, Flash and Honey joyously return to the island of cake, BUT there they discover to their horror that Shadowfold has been killed and replaced by Prince Mince!

The villainous rubber-clad grebo tricks gullible Flash into handing over the final 'Super' bun and as he reveals himself with a triumphant ‘AHH-HAAAA!’ and a wrench of his gimp mask, Honey screams and all her clothes fall off in the struggle. Flash however, in a rare moment of intelligence and forethought, passes a fake plastic bun instead, which he picked up as a souvenir at his own trial in Flatua and when Mince tries to use it the machine explodes, killing him and the Acidians, blasting a hole in the floor, dropping them all into the heaving shimmering, simmering sea of hydrobucolic acid, where they die a gruesome, gurgly, 3-D death.

As the smoke clears, Flash strides to the hole and sucks his bare stomach in until Honey notices how handsome and brave he looks. They embrace.

‘Oh Flash, you are wonderful’

‘Shouldn’t that be my line?’ sighs Honey.

‘In about twenty minutes it will be’ smiles our brave hero. They clamber from the ruins of the palace hand in hand and leave. Minutes later, the blazing conflagration destroys the atomic engine at the heart of the palace, flattening it utterly, leaving Flash and Honey all alone on the beach.

‘Ermm… shouldn’t we be getting back to the ship?’ asks Honey. Flash nods eagerly. ‘Then should your hands really be there?’ she asks as her space catsuit slides to the floor.

‘Trust me, I’m a space hero’ mumbles Flash. Honey closes her eyes and hopes Flash is true to his word…