RedSoxFan274
Baseball. Hockey. SBM vet. I drop in unexpectedly.
I have broken away from the "Squidward vs. Wander" thread because this fanfic is so spectacularly long... and also because it has very little SB connections. Also, I want a place to post new ideas in the future even if they are only straight WOY and have no SB connections whatsoever. Again, this story has some, but very few:
The Story of Nail Yakuponder, and How His Cousin, the Nomad Eryll William Jesperson, otherwise known as Wander, Revived His Career
* First name credit futureauthor13 at fanfiction.net, middle and last names credit, well, uh, me, even though I have no idea where they came from. I originally came up with the birth name for Wander of William Jesperson, for no other reason than that I thought it fit. But now that I have read the aforementioned user’s fanfic, I think I like Eryll better now, but I’m moving “William” to the middle name and keeping the last name. Thus, in this and any and all future writings, Wander’s birth name will be referred to as Eryll William Jesperson. If you don’t think it fits, well—it’s called “fiction” for a reason. :p
So… with that out of the way… the account with which I will now regale you is of events that occurred approximately three months after the family reunion. It was very early in the morning, and Eryll William Jesperson* (okay, I’ll stop bombarding you with that name now)—Wander, rather, was awakened, even earlier than he himself would have arisen, by a SLAP. Initially, he thought little of the noise and stayed curled up inside his hat. He was beginning to drift off to sleep when the SLAP sounded again. The SLAP itself was not particularly loud, but it sounded distant and its echo bounced off of the sides of the mountains on the rugged planetoid which Wander and Sylvia were visiting, and it reverberated for many miles. This was the third morning they had spent here, seeing as they had run out—again—of orbble juice and had become stranded on the planetoid while undergoing a very long, exhausting, and exhaustive process in an attempt to procure more. They had finally acquired some late the previous evening, but were too tired to leave at that point. They agreed to set out in the morning. On the first and the second mornings, this mysterious SLAP had not been heard. After about ten minutes, the SLAP had sounded about a hundred times. Surprisingly, Sylvia had not been awakened by the SLAPs, which were growing louder and louder each time. Curious, Wander waltzed out of the cave in which he and Sylvia had sheltered themselves to get a better look.
Suspended relatively low in the sky was Lord Hater’s ship! But it was still so early in the morning that there were no signs of measurable activity anywhere on board; all of the watchdogs were still asleep. As soon as Wander emerged from the cave, the SLAPping had stopped, and he thought it was over. He was just about to turn back when it sounded again. This time, Wander could barely make out some figure perched on the ship’s roof. The figure was too small to be Lord Hater, yet too large to be a watchdog. Wander squinted and noticed that the figure looked to be… orange. “Is that…?” He stifled the thought that had nearly come to the forefront of his mind and said to himself, “No, it couldn’t be… could it?” It was then that he made out a blue hat on top of the orange figure, and his suspicions were confirmed. It was one of his cousins! And not just any random cousin, it was the youngest cousin, the only cousin who had missed the reunion three months prior—Wander could not fathom that encamped out on Lord Hater’s ship was his very own cousin, Nail Yakuponder!
Wander’s mind raced. He wasn’t sure if his cousin had been taken prisoner because he was Wander’s cousin, or if Lord Hater or a watchdog had mistaken Nail Yakuponder for Wander. At any rate, he felt bad that he hadn’t gotten to see Nail at the family reunion as had been planned. So he decided to float upward and say hello at the very least. He opened the fresh bottle of orbble juice and ascended towards the top of Hater’s ship. When he got there, he realized what the SLAPping noise had been—Nail Yakuponder was smashing the daylights out of a puck with a hockey stick. He had a bucket of about three or four hundred pucks, it must have been, standing beside him. Because he was on the top of Hater’s ship, which was curved like a skull, the pucks had nowhere to go. They just fell off into the canyons below. And so every three seconds he would remove a new slab of black rubber from the bucket and shoot at it with all his might. Of course, Wander knew that Nail Yakuponder was his hockey-playing cousin, just like Koji Uehander was his baseball-playing cousin. Like Ponder, Squander, Bonder, Monder, and Koji Uehander, Nail Yakuponder had expatriated to Earth, and only came back into outer space for very special occasions, such as the reunion.
Wander simply stood behind his cousin for a few whole minutes, watching more and more pucks fall off the edge of the ship. He noticed that his cousin seemed riled, though—he was shooting at those pucks like he was mad at them. Eventually, Nail Yakuponder stopped, out of breath, and turned around. His body went ashen at the sight of his cousin. He regained his composure and, before Wander could say anything, he spat, wearing a very angry face, “What in the name of Martin Havlat are you doing here?!”
Wander could do nothing but smile and say, “I could ask the same question of you.” Nail Yakuponder was shooting pucks off the edge again, his back turned. “What do you think I’m doing here? I—”—SLAP—“have joined forces”—SLAP – “with the most powerful leader”—SLAP—“in all the galaxy.”
Wander was so shocked subconsciously that it didn’t even show up on a conscious level. His own flesh and blood working for Lord Hater?! “Are you… sure he didn’t take you prisoner?”
Nail turned around again and flashed a very fierce look at Wander. “If you think I’d been taken prisoner, wouldn’t you think I’d be rotting in a cell and not able to go wherever on this ship I want?”
“Well, I don’t know, I got taken prisoner on this ship once and I was still able to go wherever I wanted.”
Nail paid no attention to him, still using his Easton to send pucks off the edge of the ship. At one point, he hit a puck so hard that his Easton broke, and he slammed it down in pieces, cussing to himself.
“You know…” Wander began hesitantly, “…you missed the family reunion a few months ago.”
At this point Nail Yakuponder exploded. “Don’t you think I know that?! Don’t you realize that’s why I’m here?!”
Wander looked dumbfounded. “I thought you’d be back on Earth by now. I thought you had to get back to play the Calgary Flugelhorns.”
“Flames.” Nail sighed. He was a little surprised at himself that the worst enemy of his new overlord was standing right behind him and that he hadn’t done anything to alert anybody of his presence. “Okay, do you want to know how it all went down? Do you want me to go there? Do you want me to rail against your entire family?”
“If it’ll help explain why you ended up on this soul-sucking pit of darkness.”
Nail sat down and began to sharpen his skates. “You didn’t grow up with your cousins, so I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. But they were my brothers. And they were all born before I was, fourteen of them on the same day. I’m way younger than all of them. When we lived together, it was a madhouse! Fourteen big kids running around screaming and yelling and raising Cain and laughing at this one little kid—me. All those cousins—gosh, that Ponder, Squander, Koji Uehander—especially that Vonder—they were all into baseball, and they looked at me like I was a loon when I didn’t want to play any baseball games. They treated me like an outcast. They’d go off to that nearby planetoid, what’s the name of it—”
“Fenwaylandia?”
“—Yes, Fenwaylandia, and they’d spend hours and hours and hours running around in squares and getting dirt on themselves. It made no sense to me whatsoever. And they’d look back at me in the house and laugh at me all cooped up in my room, reading for hours and hours about Earth and that subsection of Earth they call Canada and about cities like Vancouver and Ottawa and Toronto and Edmonton and Calgary and Montreal and Quebec City and Winnipeg. They made me into a total outcast, and for many years I never forgave them for that.” He looked up at his unusually quiet cousin to see if he had anything to interject, but Wander motioned Nail Yakuponder to continue.
“Then, because they were so much older than me, they all moved out when I was still little. And it was just me and my mother—your aunt. And we moved for a few years to this other planet, many miles off, called LakePlacidGretzkyHoweHextallMapleLeafGardenslandia. Small planet, but covered in ice. Winter all year long. And I finally got along with the other kids there! The local kids, they took me in, they taught me about hockey, and nobody gave two shakes about baseball or wondered why I wouldn’t play it! I finally had a sport that I liked! I fit in for once!”
The two sat in silence for a short while.
“And then you grew up and moved away,” Wander said.
“Yes, then I grew up and moved away. Turns out, once they taught me how to play I beat all the locals at their own game! They said I was the best they’d ever seen! And I was told to go Earth, everybody told me to go to Earth! ‘It’s where they invented the sport!’ they said. ‘The universe’s most premier league is on Planet Earth!’ And I played for a couple of years in Sarnia and blew everybody out of the water and then Edmonton drafted me! They drafted me! If you truly want to understand why I’m here, Wander, you have to get this through to your head: throughout the entire galaxy and the entire universe, there are only thirty teams that stand out higher than all the rest! And I was on one of them!”
Wander suddenly noticed the usage of a certain word. “‘Was?’” he ventured.
“Yes, Wander, ‘was.’ And do you want to know why I’m not anymore?” Nail dug a rusty CCM out of his floppy blue hat to replace his Easton and began shooting pucks again, still telling Wander his story as he went. “Well, I’ll tell you why not. I finally had found my place. I was on top of the world. I scored 17 goals in 2012—13, and in a truncated 48 games, not even 82! The Edmontonians, they loved me! And so do you know what I did? I forgave your cousins and my brothers for all the misery and torment they had put me through! I laid awake one night feeling so glad that I had finally brought myself to forgive my own brothers! And then, the very next day, Vonder calls me up! He says, “‘Hey, Nail, I know it’s been a while since we’ve seen each other, but the rest of the brothers and your mother and your cousin Wander and I are planning a family reunion at the old house, would you like to come?’ And I thought, perfect! I can finally show up and be with my brothers and feel happy again, because I had risen above all the taunting and all the laughing! So what does Vonder say, he says, ‘We’re all gonna meet up on the fifteenth.’”
Wander suddenly realized where this story was headed.
“And so I show up that afternoon, and nobody’s there! And I think to myself, ‘Of course! They’re still pulling pranks on me! There’s nobody here!’”
Wander began to say, “We were supposed to be there, we got stranded on another—”
“And Vonder had his own little spaceship. He was supposed to be my ride. So I wind up having to take orbble juice all the way back to Earth and it takes me a month to get there. Do you want to know what happened in that month? We went 0—12—0. We dropped to the bottom of the standings. The front office calls me in, they’re yelling and screaming, saying, ‘Nail, where were you?!’ and it turns out they’d brought in some guy from the minors to fill my place for a month, and they’re so angry at me that they demote me to Oklahoma City. So I say to myself, ‘Minor setback,’ right? I tell myself, ‘I’ve scrounged my way out of the minors and I’ll do it again.’ No. I was so disheartened that I had some of the worst games of my entire career. I couldn’t get my energy back. My plus-minus was -37. I scored a couple of goals… for the other team. And so eventually I get demoted from Oklahoma City to this little desert town called Bakersfield. My plus-minus there was -58 and I scored four goals for the other team. And then do you know what they do? They kick me off the roster and rip up my contract and send me out on the streets. I started selling Kohos at a sporting goods store, but because it’s a little hick town in California nobody buys ‘em, so the store goes out of business and for three weeks I’m sleeping inside my hat under the 99 overpass at Ming Avenue.” He had run out of pucks and was slumped over crying now.
Wander enveloped Nail Yakuponder in a hug, which annoyed him, but he was too distraught to break out of it. “Your cousins did it. Your cousins still treated me like dirt and conspired to ruin my career!”
“Well,” Wander began, “they do have an alibi.” Wander explained how he and his cousins had inexplicably fallen through the depths of space and landed on Earth that day, and how they had spent the night at an octopus’s Easter Island head before being able to return, such that the house was vacant for at least twelve hours. Nail Yakuponder refused to believe him. All Wander could say was that it was the honest truth, and the two were silent again for a while.
“So how did you end up here anyway?” Wander said eventually.
Nail was calmer now. “Lord Hater came to Planet Earth, disguised as someone named, uh…gosh—Alex Rodriguez, some name like that—and he recruited people there. His ship sputtered out in the desert near Bakersfield and needed repairs. That’s when we met. He did capture me at first, he did mistake me for you, but when he realized I wasn’t he said he could use me, as a relative of yours, to try to gain information on you and where you were likely to be. So… I didn’t voluntarily join up with him, I just… didn’t mind it, I guess. I was still so mad—I am still so mad—at my family… I guess I wasn’t thinking, I just wanted to get back at them. That’s why this ship is here, Wander. I told him what planets you frequented, he dragged it out of me. Not that I even knew that you’d be here though, because I just gave him names of planets you went to and that was it. I don’t even know what planet we’re on, I don’t even care, I just come up here and litter the ground with pucks all day.” He didn’t say he was sorry, but his voice seemed apologetic.
More silence.
“You know, Wander, I don’t hold anything against you. You’re my cousin, not my brother. You didn’t grow up with me, taunting me mercilessly. You always try to help people. So…” Nail turned his impending words over in his head, wondering whether or not he wanted to say them. “…so get yourself the heck off of here before the watchdogs start to wake up.”
“Well, what are you going to do?” Wander asked.
“Gosh, I don’t know. I think I’ll just hang around here for awhile until they get around to Earth’s part of the galaxy again. I’ve been sitting here doing nothing for three months, just totally numb. I ought to get back to life…even if my career is over.” He stared off into the distance for a moment. “Just wish I had some more pucks though,” he said, holding up his empty bucket. Wander then reached into his not-what-you-want-but-what-you-need hat and pulled out a fresh bucket of five hundred hockey pucks. In Nail’s case, it seemed what he was wanting and what he was needing, according to the hat, were synonymous.
“Thanks,” Nail Yakuponder said, smiling for the first time since the encounter began.
Wander looked to his right and saw a large volcano steaming in the distance.
“Hey,” he began, “bet you can’t hit that volcano.”
Never being one to back down from a challenge, Nail Yakuponder set the puck down gently, swung his arms back so far that the CCM nearly smacked Wander in the face, and unleashed a cannon that clinked off the side of the volcano and actually made it rumble a bit and spew out a little lava. “Hah!” they shouted in unison, and the two furry orange men embraced. “He shoots, he scores!” Wander screamed, and the two laughed.
Then Nail Yakuponder gave a shush and whispered, “Hey, the watchdogs are about to get up, get yourself the heck off of here, cousin, get yourself the heck off of here.” Nail felt much better now. Even if he hadn’t made peace with his brothers, he had managed to make peace with his cousin. He even began to somewhat believe that Wander and the cousins had unexpectedly left. Maybe Vonder’s phone call hadn’t been a prank after all?
As for Wander, he had disembarked the ship and was in the process of floating back down to the cave, when he was struck with a thought. “Of course!” he said. “Why didn’t I think of it before?!” He abruptly steered the bubble back towards the ship.
Nail Yakuponder turned around and saw his cousin at his back again. “What in the name of Travis Zajac are you doing here? Peepers is running around the ship doing his morning check, he’ll be up here eventually! Get off! Save yourself!”
Wander didn’t listen. “What if I told you that there was a place I knew of where there was a hockey league with players so abysmal that if you went there you would get promoted before the first whistle of your first game?”
Nail was still watching out for Peepers, but he relented. “I’m listening.” He set another puck down and launched it into the volcano again, and looked back and gave his cousin a grin.
EPILOGUE: Wander eventually took Nail Yakuponder back to planet Earth, to a little town in the middle of the ocean he knew of called Bikini Bottom, where the local team was so horrendous that they hadn’t won a game in six seasons, they regularly mistook frozen burgers for pucks, and they had to rent out the frozen floor of the Krusty Krab restaurant just to get in practice. Hailed as its new hero, Nail Yakuponder led the Bikini Bottom Urchins to their first Mid-Pacific Underwater Hockey League championship in seventy-six years. The Urchins, it happened, were affiliated with a low-level land-based minor league team called the South Carolina Stingrays, and Nail was promoted there. By the end of the 2014—15 season, Nail Yakuponder had been promoted again, this time to the Providence Bruins, where he scored 55 goals. Yakuponder appeared in his first game back in the National Hockey League in November 2015. He won the game for the Boston Bruins in a shootout, downing the evil New York Rangers (Hater had actually been making one of his trips to Earth again that day, this time disguised as Henrik Lundqvist). In 2017, Hater made another trip to Earth, this time disguised as Jonathan Toews. Hater, disguised as Toews, made it to the 2017 Stanley Cup Finals against Yakuponder and the Bruins. Yakuponder brought the Cup back to Boston in overtime of the seventh game, erasing bad memories of 2013, when the Bruins had lost the Cup with two Blackhawk goals in 17 seconds. Now one of the league’s elite, Yakuponder had made up with Ponder and Koji Uehander, because they often spent time in Beantown. However, he still had yet to meet up with his remaining brothers. Eventually, a bad general manager came to Boston and dealt Yakuponder to St. Louis in exchange for Alexander Steen. While playing for the Blues, Yakuponder had a couple lower body injuries and was less productive, but he managed to meet and make up with Vonder. Ahead of the 2020—21 season, Yakuponder became a free agent and selected to return to Edmonton, where he was welcomed back as a hero. Yakuponder and the Oilers made up for the 2005—06 season by getting revenge on the Carolina Hurricanes in six games, bringing Lord Stanley’s Cup back to the NHL’s northernmost city for the first time since the Gretzky era. Throughout the 2021—22 season, Yakuponder suffered bad injuries and announced his likely retirement at the end of the year. But a slew of new, young players, mentored by Yakuponder, became talented and caught fire, and the Oilers became back to back Stanley Cup champions by downing the Washington Capitals in seven games. Yakuponder recovered enough from his ails to be on the ice during the final game. As the clock ticked down and he rejoiced with his teammates, he glanced into the crowd and thought he saw someone… familiar. He thought he had imagined it until he had a closer look.
Sixteen furry orange men were going wild in the stands.
The Story of Nail Yakuponder, and How His Cousin, the Nomad Eryll William Jesperson, otherwise known as Wander, Revived His Career
* First name credit futureauthor13 at fanfiction.net, middle and last names credit, well, uh, me, even though I have no idea where they came from. I originally came up with the birth name for Wander of William Jesperson, for no other reason than that I thought it fit. But now that I have read the aforementioned user’s fanfic, I think I like Eryll better now, but I’m moving “William” to the middle name and keeping the last name. Thus, in this and any and all future writings, Wander’s birth name will be referred to as Eryll William Jesperson. If you don’t think it fits, well—it’s called “fiction” for a reason. :p
So… with that out of the way… the account with which I will now regale you is of events that occurred approximately three months after the family reunion. It was very early in the morning, and Eryll William Jesperson* (okay, I’ll stop bombarding you with that name now)—Wander, rather, was awakened, even earlier than he himself would have arisen, by a SLAP. Initially, he thought little of the noise and stayed curled up inside his hat. He was beginning to drift off to sleep when the SLAP sounded again. The SLAP itself was not particularly loud, but it sounded distant and its echo bounced off of the sides of the mountains on the rugged planetoid which Wander and Sylvia were visiting, and it reverberated for many miles. This was the third morning they had spent here, seeing as they had run out—again—of orbble juice and had become stranded on the planetoid while undergoing a very long, exhausting, and exhaustive process in an attempt to procure more. They had finally acquired some late the previous evening, but were too tired to leave at that point. They agreed to set out in the morning. On the first and the second mornings, this mysterious SLAP had not been heard. After about ten minutes, the SLAP had sounded about a hundred times. Surprisingly, Sylvia had not been awakened by the SLAPs, which were growing louder and louder each time. Curious, Wander waltzed out of the cave in which he and Sylvia had sheltered themselves to get a better look.
Suspended relatively low in the sky was Lord Hater’s ship! But it was still so early in the morning that there were no signs of measurable activity anywhere on board; all of the watchdogs were still asleep. As soon as Wander emerged from the cave, the SLAPping had stopped, and he thought it was over. He was just about to turn back when it sounded again. This time, Wander could barely make out some figure perched on the ship’s roof. The figure was too small to be Lord Hater, yet too large to be a watchdog. Wander squinted and noticed that the figure looked to be… orange. “Is that…?” He stifled the thought that had nearly come to the forefront of his mind and said to himself, “No, it couldn’t be… could it?” It was then that he made out a blue hat on top of the orange figure, and his suspicions were confirmed. It was one of his cousins! And not just any random cousin, it was the youngest cousin, the only cousin who had missed the reunion three months prior—Wander could not fathom that encamped out on Lord Hater’s ship was his very own cousin, Nail Yakuponder!
Wander’s mind raced. He wasn’t sure if his cousin had been taken prisoner because he was Wander’s cousin, or if Lord Hater or a watchdog had mistaken Nail Yakuponder for Wander. At any rate, he felt bad that he hadn’t gotten to see Nail at the family reunion as had been planned. So he decided to float upward and say hello at the very least. He opened the fresh bottle of orbble juice and ascended towards the top of Hater’s ship. When he got there, he realized what the SLAPping noise had been—Nail Yakuponder was smashing the daylights out of a puck with a hockey stick. He had a bucket of about three or four hundred pucks, it must have been, standing beside him. Because he was on the top of Hater’s ship, which was curved like a skull, the pucks had nowhere to go. They just fell off into the canyons below. And so every three seconds he would remove a new slab of black rubber from the bucket and shoot at it with all his might. Of course, Wander knew that Nail Yakuponder was his hockey-playing cousin, just like Koji Uehander was his baseball-playing cousin. Like Ponder, Squander, Bonder, Monder, and Koji Uehander, Nail Yakuponder had expatriated to Earth, and only came back into outer space for very special occasions, such as the reunion.
Wander simply stood behind his cousin for a few whole minutes, watching more and more pucks fall off the edge of the ship. He noticed that his cousin seemed riled, though—he was shooting at those pucks like he was mad at them. Eventually, Nail Yakuponder stopped, out of breath, and turned around. His body went ashen at the sight of his cousin. He regained his composure and, before Wander could say anything, he spat, wearing a very angry face, “What in the name of Martin Havlat are you doing here?!”
Wander could do nothing but smile and say, “I could ask the same question of you.” Nail Yakuponder was shooting pucks off the edge again, his back turned. “What do you think I’m doing here? I—”—SLAP—“have joined forces”—SLAP – “with the most powerful leader”—SLAP—“in all the galaxy.”
Wander was so shocked subconsciously that it didn’t even show up on a conscious level. His own flesh and blood working for Lord Hater?! “Are you… sure he didn’t take you prisoner?”
Nail turned around again and flashed a very fierce look at Wander. “If you think I’d been taken prisoner, wouldn’t you think I’d be rotting in a cell and not able to go wherever on this ship I want?”
“Well, I don’t know, I got taken prisoner on this ship once and I was still able to go wherever I wanted.”
Nail paid no attention to him, still using his Easton to send pucks off the edge of the ship. At one point, he hit a puck so hard that his Easton broke, and he slammed it down in pieces, cussing to himself.
“You know…” Wander began hesitantly, “…you missed the family reunion a few months ago.”
At this point Nail Yakuponder exploded. “Don’t you think I know that?! Don’t you realize that’s why I’m here?!”
Wander looked dumbfounded. “I thought you’d be back on Earth by now. I thought you had to get back to play the Calgary Flugelhorns.”
“Flames.” Nail sighed. He was a little surprised at himself that the worst enemy of his new overlord was standing right behind him and that he hadn’t done anything to alert anybody of his presence. “Okay, do you want to know how it all went down? Do you want me to go there? Do you want me to rail against your entire family?”
“If it’ll help explain why you ended up on this soul-sucking pit of darkness.”
Nail sat down and began to sharpen his skates. “You didn’t grow up with your cousins, so I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. But they were my brothers. And they were all born before I was, fourteen of them on the same day. I’m way younger than all of them. When we lived together, it was a madhouse! Fourteen big kids running around screaming and yelling and raising Cain and laughing at this one little kid—me. All those cousins—gosh, that Ponder, Squander, Koji Uehander—especially that Vonder—they were all into baseball, and they looked at me like I was a loon when I didn’t want to play any baseball games. They treated me like an outcast. They’d go off to that nearby planetoid, what’s the name of it—”
“Fenwaylandia?”
“—Yes, Fenwaylandia, and they’d spend hours and hours and hours running around in squares and getting dirt on themselves. It made no sense to me whatsoever. And they’d look back at me in the house and laugh at me all cooped up in my room, reading for hours and hours about Earth and that subsection of Earth they call Canada and about cities like Vancouver and Ottawa and Toronto and Edmonton and Calgary and Montreal and Quebec City and Winnipeg. They made me into a total outcast, and for many years I never forgave them for that.” He looked up at his unusually quiet cousin to see if he had anything to interject, but Wander motioned Nail Yakuponder to continue.
“Then, because they were so much older than me, they all moved out when I was still little. And it was just me and my mother—your aunt. And we moved for a few years to this other planet, many miles off, called LakePlacidGretzkyHoweHextallMapleLeafGardenslandia. Small planet, but covered in ice. Winter all year long. And I finally got along with the other kids there! The local kids, they took me in, they taught me about hockey, and nobody gave two shakes about baseball or wondered why I wouldn’t play it! I finally had a sport that I liked! I fit in for once!”
The two sat in silence for a short while.
“And then you grew up and moved away,” Wander said.
“Yes, then I grew up and moved away. Turns out, once they taught me how to play I beat all the locals at their own game! They said I was the best they’d ever seen! And I was told to go Earth, everybody told me to go to Earth! ‘It’s where they invented the sport!’ they said. ‘The universe’s most premier league is on Planet Earth!’ And I played for a couple of years in Sarnia and blew everybody out of the water and then Edmonton drafted me! They drafted me! If you truly want to understand why I’m here, Wander, you have to get this through to your head: throughout the entire galaxy and the entire universe, there are only thirty teams that stand out higher than all the rest! And I was on one of them!”
Wander suddenly noticed the usage of a certain word. “‘Was?’” he ventured.
“Yes, Wander, ‘was.’ And do you want to know why I’m not anymore?” Nail dug a rusty CCM out of his floppy blue hat to replace his Easton and began shooting pucks again, still telling Wander his story as he went. “Well, I’ll tell you why not. I finally had found my place. I was on top of the world. I scored 17 goals in 2012—13, and in a truncated 48 games, not even 82! The Edmontonians, they loved me! And so do you know what I did? I forgave your cousins and my brothers for all the misery and torment they had put me through! I laid awake one night feeling so glad that I had finally brought myself to forgive my own brothers! And then, the very next day, Vonder calls me up! He says, “‘Hey, Nail, I know it’s been a while since we’ve seen each other, but the rest of the brothers and your mother and your cousin Wander and I are planning a family reunion at the old house, would you like to come?’ And I thought, perfect! I can finally show up and be with my brothers and feel happy again, because I had risen above all the taunting and all the laughing! So what does Vonder say, he says, ‘We’re all gonna meet up on the fifteenth.’”
Wander suddenly realized where this story was headed.
“And so I show up that afternoon, and nobody’s there! And I think to myself, ‘Of course! They’re still pulling pranks on me! There’s nobody here!’”
Wander began to say, “We were supposed to be there, we got stranded on another—”
“And Vonder had his own little spaceship. He was supposed to be my ride. So I wind up having to take orbble juice all the way back to Earth and it takes me a month to get there. Do you want to know what happened in that month? We went 0—12—0. We dropped to the bottom of the standings. The front office calls me in, they’re yelling and screaming, saying, ‘Nail, where were you?!’ and it turns out they’d brought in some guy from the minors to fill my place for a month, and they’re so angry at me that they demote me to Oklahoma City. So I say to myself, ‘Minor setback,’ right? I tell myself, ‘I’ve scrounged my way out of the minors and I’ll do it again.’ No. I was so disheartened that I had some of the worst games of my entire career. I couldn’t get my energy back. My plus-minus was -37. I scored a couple of goals… for the other team. And so eventually I get demoted from Oklahoma City to this little desert town called Bakersfield. My plus-minus there was -58 and I scored four goals for the other team. And then do you know what they do? They kick me off the roster and rip up my contract and send me out on the streets. I started selling Kohos at a sporting goods store, but because it’s a little hick town in California nobody buys ‘em, so the store goes out of business and for three weeks I’m sleeping inside my hat under the 99 overpass at Ming Avenue.” He had run out of pucks and was slumped over crying now.
Wander enveloped Nail Yakuponder in a hug, which annoyed him, but he was too distraught to break out of it. “Your cousins did it. Your cousins still treated me like dirt and conspired to ruin my career!”
“Well,” Wander began, “they do have an alibi.” Wander explained how he and his cousins had inexplicably fallen through the depths of space and landed on Earth that day, and how they had spent the night at an octopus’s Easter Island head before being able to return, such that the house was vacant for at least twelve hours. Nail Yakuponder refused to believe him. All Wander could say was that it was the honest truth, and the two were silent again for a while.
“So how did you end up here anyway?” Wander said eventually.
Nail was calmer now. “Lord Hater came to Planet Earth, disguised as someone named, uh…gosh—Alex Rodriguez, some name like that—and he recruited people there. His ship sputtered out in the desert near Bakersfield and needed repairs. That’s when we met. He did capture me at first, he did mistake me for you, but when he realized I wasn’t he said he could use me, as a relative of yours, to try to gain information on you and where you were likely to be. So… I didn’t voluntarily join up with him, I just… didn’t mind it, I guess. I was still so mad—I am still so mad—at my family… I guess I wasn’t thinking, I just wanted to get back at them. That’s why this ship is here, Wander. I told him what planets you frequented, he dragged it out of me. Not that I even knew that you’d be here though, because I just gave him names of planets you went to and that was it. I don’t even know what planet we’re on, I don’t even care, I just come up here and litter the ground with pucks all day.” He didn’t say he was sorry, but his voice seemed apologetic.
More silence.
“You know, Wander, I don’t hold anything against you. You’re my cousin, not my brother. You didn’t grow up with me, taunting me mercilessly. You always try to help people. So…” Nail turned his impending words over in his head, wondering whether or not he wanted to say them. “…so get yourself the heck off of here before the watchdogs start to wake up.”
“Well, what are you going to do?” Wander asked.
“Gosh, I don’t know. I think I’ll just hang around here for awhile until they get around to Earth’s part of the galaxy again. I’ve been sitting here doing nothing for three months, just totally numb. I ought to get back to life…even if my career is over.” He stared off into the distance for a moment. “Just wish I had some more pucks though,” he said, holding up his empty bucket. Wander then reached into his not-what-you-want-but-what-you-need hat and pulled out a fresh bucket of five hundred hockey pucks. In Nail’s case, it seemed what he was wanting and what he was needing, according to the hat, were synonymous.
“Thanks,” Nail Yakuponder said, smiling for the first time since the encounter began.
Wander looked to his right and saw a large volcano steaming in the distance.
“Hey,” he began, “bet you can’t hit that volcano.”
Never being one to back down from a challenge, Nail Yakuponder set the puck down gently, swung his arms back so far that the CCM nearly smacked Wander in the face, and unleashed a cannon that clinked off the side of the volcano and actually made it rumble a bit and spew out a little lava. “Hah!” they shouted in unison, and the two furry orange men embraced. “He shoots, he scores!” Wander screamed, and the two laughed.
Then Nail Yakuponder gave a shush and whispered, “Hey, the watchdogs are about to get up, get yourself the heck off of here, cousin, get yourself the heck off of here.” Nail felt much better now. Even if he hadn’t made peace with his brothers, he had managed to make peace with his cousin. He even began to somewhat believe that Wander and the cousins had unexpectedly left. Maybe Vonder’s phone call hadn’t been a prank after all?
As for Wander, he had disembarked the ship and was in the process of floating back down to the cave, when he was struck with a thought. “Of course!” he said. “Why didn’t I think of it before?!” He abruptly steered the bubble back towards the ship.
Nail Yakuponder turned around and saw his cousin at his back again. “What in the name of Travis Zajac are you doing here? Peepers is running around the ship doing his morning check, he’ll be up here eventually! Get off! Save yourself!”
Wander didn’t listen. “What if I told you that there was a place I knew of where there was a hockey league with players so abysmal that if you went there you would get promoted before the first whistle of your first game?”
Nail was still watching out for Peepers, but he relented. “I’m listening.” He set another puck down and launched it into the volcano again, and looked back and gave his cousin a grin.
EPILOGUE: Wander eventually took Nail Yakuponder back to planet Earth, to a little town in the middle of the ocean he knew of called Bikini Bottom, where the local team was so horrendous that they hadn’t won a game in six seasons, they regularly mistook frozen burgers for pucks, and they had to rent out the frozen floor of the Krusty Krab restaurant just to get in practice. Hailed as its new hero, Nail Yakuponder led the Bikini Bottom Urchins to their first Mid-Pacific Underwater Hockey League championship in seventy-six years. The Urchins, it happened, were affiliated with a low-level land-based minor league team called the South Carolina Stingrays, and Nail was promoted there. By the end of the 2014—15 season, Nail Yakuponder had been promoted again, this time to the Providence Bruins, where he scored 55 goals. Yakuponder appeared in his first game back in the National Hockey League in November 2015. He won the game for the Boston Bruins in a shootout, downing the evil New York Rangers (Hater had actually been making one of his trips to Earth again that day, this time disguised as Henrik Lundqvist). In 2017, Hater made another trip to Earth, this time disguised as Jonathan Toews. Hater, disguised as Toews, made it to the 2017 Stanley Cup Finals against Yakuponder and the Bruins. Yakuponder brought the Cup back to Boston in overtime of the seventh game, erasing bad memories of 2013, when the Bruins had lost the Cup with two Blackhawk goals in 17 seconds. Now one of the league’s elite, Yakuponder had made up with Ponder and Koji Uehander, because they often spent time in Beantown. However, he still had yet to meet up with his remaining brothers. Eventually, a bad general manager came to Boston and dealt Yakuponder to St. Louis in exchange for Alexander Steen. While playing for the Blues, Yakuponder had a couple lower body injuries and was less productive, but he managed to meet and make up with Vonder. Ahead of the 2020—21 season, Yakuponder became a free agent and selected to return to Edmonton, where he was welcomed back as a hero. Yakuponder and the Oilers made up for the 2005—06 season by getting revenge on the Carolina Hurricanes in six games, bringing Lord Stanley’s Cup back to the NHL’s northernmost city for the first time since the Gretzky era. Throughout the 2021—22 season, Yakuponder suffered bad injuries and announced his likely retirement at the end of the year. But a slew of new, young players, mentored by Yakuponder, became talented and caught fire, and the Oilers became back to back Stanley Cup champions by downing the Washington Capitals in seven games. Yakuponder recovered enough from his ails to be on the ice during the final game. As the clock ticked down and he rejoiced with his teammates, he glanced into the crowd and thought he saw someone… familiar. He thought he had imagined it until he had a closer look.
Sixteen furry orange men were going wild in the stands.
