Chapter 14 - Why the hell did you hoard?

Dr. Ratine frowned as he looked at the package and card in front of him.

The card read:

Hi dad,

I heard from auntie rose that there was a Toblerone shortage where you are. As your dutiful son, I am kindly sharing a portion of my reserves with you.

Enjoy!

Sora

If this package had arrived a week ago, he would have been over the moon. However, right now he wasn’t even happy that his son was thinking about him.

Well, it’s because he could clearly tell that the hand writing on the card wasn’t his son’s. It was his daughter-in-law’s. This wasn’t what concerned him though.

The problem was that his son had a secret stash of toblerone! Toblerone had a worldwide shortage because the MSRA was hunting for an extremely dangerous criminal who was addicted to Toblerone! What if he went after his son in order to avoid being caught by the MSRA?!?!

No!

He, Dr. Ratine would not allow it!

Tossing his keys up and then catching them with finesse, he stood up.

“Hey google, play Autobots by Steve Jablonsky.” He said.

His body filled with purpose, he began packing everything in the RV, ready to roll out.

…

“Lizzie, why is 20% of my toblerone stash missing?” Sora Ratine glanced at his wife with suspicion.

“What do you mean only 20%? I sent half of your stash to your father!” Lizzie, who was cutting carrots stopped in alarm.

She had gotten rid of half of his stash. Not just 20%. Was he hiding more somewhere else?

The husband and wife had a stare off.

She forgot about the second stash! I shouldn’t mentioned it, shit!

Where the hell is he hiding the rest of them? He can’t even eat that many, he’s just wasting space! But where?

Just as they were about to start a debacle again a furious knocking sound was heard at their door.

“Who could that be?” Lizzie whispered. It would be wrong to say that she wasn’t concerned for her safety whenever she heard such furious knocking. Thankfully Sora was here. It’s not that he was a tall, buff, macho man or anything. He was rather skinny, but she felt secure with him because he was fast and had long arms. Really fast. On their second date they had been threatened by someone who held them at knife point from behind. After getting himself between her and the robber, Sora disarmed and then apprehended the robber.

Generally speaking, other than his toblerone hoarding habits, he was a really nice guy. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have married him, obviously.

“I’ll check, just stay here. It’s probably nothing serious,” Sora walked towards the door while slowly placing his hand on the pocket knife he always carried around.

Once he looked through the peephole though he was a bit surprised.

“Dad?” He said as he opened the door.

“No time, hurry up and pack your things. We need to run,” Dr. Ratine gasped for breath.

“NOW,” he said sternly seeing Sora not responding.

“How about your come inside and explain what’s happening first. You look like you could use a glass of water,” Lizzie said as she came to the door after hearing it was her father-in-law.

“No time. You know what, forget it. I have everything in my RV. Just get some essentials like water and some food. We don’t have time, we have to go now!” Dr. Ratine said while panting.

A little kid pressed all the buttons up to the 15th floor on the elevator when he got on.

Practically dragging his son and daughter in law into their bedroom so they could pack he quickly went to the bathroom and grabbed rolls of toilet paper, soap and other toiletries and stuffed them into a bag.

“And don’t pack any Toblerone. I don’t know when that lunatic could show up but you are in a shit ton of danger. The kind even the government might not be able to protect you from.”

Lizzie looked quizzically at Sora whose eyebrows were furrowed.

“I’ve never seen dad this serious before. Let’s do as he says,” Sora whispered before grabbing a duffle bag and stuffing some clothes, his laptop, ipad, steam deck and vr headset into his bag.

Seeing all that tech Dr. Ratine was about to dissuade him but decided not to at the last minute. They would be better off if Torra did hack into their devices and decided that they weren’t worth the effort to pursue.

After getting everything ready in a record time of 9 minutes, the trio headed down to the RV. No one spoke for almost an hour until they were out of the city.

“Dad, can you tell us what the hell happened exactly?” Sora asked.

Dr. Ratine sighed. Even though they were out of the city, he still didn’t feel quite relaxed or safe.

“The government is hunting for a scientist named Torra who’s trying to turn everyone into birds or something and he has managed to elude them for years. He’s a single guy whom the government has an entire department chasing after.

And he’s addicted to toblerone so they created a worldwide toblerone shortage to catch him.”

“What? That’s ridiculous.”

“They caught me and put me in a prison with every inch of the floor wall and ceilings having some kind of security measure built in. They have technology that is science fiction, and the only whiff of this guy they’ve caught is his toblerone addiction. If he creates a program to track down toblerone to avoid the trap, wouldn’t he end up at your hoard!”

“Why did you ever have to hoard so much toblerone!”

“I told him it was a bad idea. Now there could be a mad scientist chasing us for it. Thanks Sora,” Lizzie chimed in sarcastically, only half believing her father-in-law but taking this opportunity to jab her husband.

Sora wanted to cry. However seeing how seriously traumatized his dad was, he had no choice but to temporarily believe him.

Little did they know that this paranoid debacle was going to put them right in the middle of the battle between the MSRA and my epic self.