Never Hitchhike Drunk

Let me tell you, there are some cargo haulers out there who can make Space Lightning out of anything that can ferment.

And freeze-distilling that stuff in Kelvin-scale temperatures gives it one hell of a kick.

And my brewer in chief decided to drop me off somewhere light years away from my destination.

A planet in the middle of a generations-long war.

By the time I got there, they’d been killing each other for millennia and just about the entire planet was an immense graveyard. I say ‘graveyard’ but it was more along the lines of ‘garden’.

See, both sides elected to honour their dead with sort of… tree things. If you can imagine a hybrid of a carrot, pumpkin, broccoli and Yggdrasil as a ‘tree’. They looked like trees and that was good enough for me.

There was only one town left and it had a thick wall in the middle that passed for the spaceport. And administrations building. It was there that I discovered, in my hangover haze, that both sides were no longer fighting over any kind of moral issue. They were fighting over land in which to live.

All those trees left zero territory for housing or farming.

I went for an escorted tour and someone informed me that they were edible from root to leaf.

“Well,” I said, “Why don’t people eat the insides and live in them, then?”

You could hear a pin drop.

I wasn’t quite sober, yet, so I assumed the tour was over and ambled back to the hostel room that was literally a hole in the wall.

And when I woke up… I was not only saviour of the planet, but also the mayor of the now-expanding Broccolopolis.

I have my very own Ygdrassil-manor with an indoor pool, though. It’s not all bad. And they make a killer tree-sap brew here. Want to try some? No strings attached…