Steve Station!

The Story of Arby: the French Boy
First published: October 16, 2009

Arby was an orphan; Arby was a street urchin.

Arby, being the big-city 'mouse' that he was, spent most of his waking hours hustling tourists and foreigners for enough pocket change to buy chocolats. Arby did love his chocolats...

On one particular day when Arby did not feel up to conning and grifting he asked one of the nuns at the orphanage, "Other 'mouse children' have mommies and daddies, why do I not?"

"We've been through this a hundred, hundred times. There is nothing wrong with you, Arby."

"Yes, fine. There's nothing wrong with me, but from where do I hail? What were the attributes of my real, natural guardians?"

"I am sorry," the sister said, "...not much is known of them. We found you in a large tin fashioned for preserving glazed-hams."

"Very well, thank you."

And, Arby set out to learn more. He went to the government records office and hid in a niche of the boiler-type sewage room until the records building was closed and evacuated for the day. Once the building was completely empty for the night, with the exception of Boris the security guard, Arby weaseled and jimmied his way out of the 'hiding niche.'

Next, he made his way to the official records room. The very first drawer in the very first file cabinet was labeled with the letter 'A.'

He opened the drawer and the very first folder in the long series of folders was labeled 'Arby.' He opened the file and was rather startled and a little spooked to learn that he had no parents and was a product of asexual-spore fertilization from some secret government experiment. A secret government experiment to clone thousands and thousands of 'newsies.'

He read on a little further to learn that the experiments were still in progress to this very day. The experiments were being held in a lab in another building nearby. Arby clumsily slammed the drawer shut audibly enough that Boris heard and came a-runnin'.

Arby heard Boris' footsteps in the hallway and weaseled and jimmied his way out of the window thereby eluding Boris and his blackjack billy-club. Boris shined his flashlight out the window looking for the perpetrators.

Arby made his way to the building where the cloning-lab was, pried open a window and writhed in the opening in his regular jimmy-weasel fashion. Made his way down to the basement where the experiments were being held. Next, Arby opened the door to the basement lab, only to be grotesquely horrified by mutated reverberations of himself. There were nearly one-hundred Arbies (let's call them the 'Arb-dittlies'), all of them in cages, all of them looked like him and all of them street-urchin newsies. Some of them were in plexiglass boxes with respiratory holes, some of them in metal cages, some in tanks, others chained to the wall. The all appeared to be asleep.

Meanwhile Boris was in the quad between the records building and the lab building. A small ground-window revealed activity in the lab where Arby and the other Arb-diddlies were located. Boris decided to investigate. He went down to the basement, flung the door open, and switched on the overhead lamps. This awakened all the arb-dittlies, and the began to yell, "Extra, extra..."

Boris looked over the clones looking for the intruder, looking for Arby. Still they chanted on, "Extra! Extra! Read all about it." Arby noticed some shackles on the counter and held on to them as if he was imprisoned like the others, with the idea that if he looked like the others the nightwatchmen wouldn't suspect him.

"Extra! Extra! Read all about it," they repeated incessantly.

Boris interogated one of the clones. "Who are you? Have you seen any prowlers around campus or in the building?"

The arb-dittlie freak replied, "My name is Scoop Robinson, and no I have not seen any unusual goings-on this evening."

After a couple of hours of interogating everyone in the lab including Arby, Boris switched off the lights and left.

Next, Arby left, returning to the orphanage to tell the sister what he had learned.