Of Mice and Monsters
Lauren Taylor was a talented young girl with big dreams. She desperately wanted to be a successful visual artist, so she abandoned her small family farm in southwest Iowa and moved to Boston, Massachusetts to study aesthetics at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Idealistic, cute, and fun, Lauren made friends easily, and quickly found herself in the hanging with the hipster party crowd. These "creative types" liked to drink, chain smoke, and dance at mod clubs. Her new "friends" loved to have a good time, a pastime that occasionally included kicking over trashcans in front of cops, peeing in public, and tossing empty glass bottles off rooftops.
One night after a box-o-wine block party (wine in a box with a plastic spout), Lauren and her box-o-wine buddies got drunk and courageous, so they decided to break into MIT's animal lab and free all the imprisoned mice. Their liquored-up mission was understandably clumsy, but ultimately successful: sneaking past narcoleptic security guards, they shimmied through an overhead air duct and then released 178 squeaking white mice. Lauren, being the sentimental artist that she was, decided to keep one of the fugitive furballs as a pet. She called her new critter Algernon.
Lauren set up Algernon in a spacious, empty Gallileo Wine box, along with wood chips and a pile of Duplo Legos. Lauren mostly treated her creature well, but sometimes used him as a party trick: her friends thought it was fun to occasionally blow "fun" smoke in the box and let Algernon sip from capfuls of wine. Algernon always preferred the pink flavor; but don't worry, Lauren only gave Algernon fortified wine products.
One night, the party got out of hand and Algernon got loose. Three days later, Lauren discovered the disoriented mouse in the attic under a pile of half-finished canvases, and Algernon appeared to have a tumor forming on its backside. Lauren was alarmed, but not nearly as shocked as when she came home two days later, and found Algernon the size of a human, with pink hair instead of white. Even more surprisingly, a large human ear was embedded into Algernon's back.
Lauren tried to take care of Algernon for several weeks, but feeling suspiciously like Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors, she found caring for the ravenously hungry mutation difficult. Helpless and confused, Lauren took Algernon for one of those ominous "rides in the car" and dropped the goliath mouse off on the doorstep of the benevolent Dusto Bunny. When Dusto Bunny discovered the sad creature skreaking on the threshold, he adopted the mouse as his own, trained her for fighting evil within Kaiju Big Battel and renamed her Eargernon to reflect her new identity.
