Mine and Dine is the 6th episode of First World Pig War Angry Birds, an inter-species conflict that has been raging non-stop for more than half a decade. It was said in the Chronicler Pig’s annals of the Underground Campaign that “the pigs stole the eggs once again, and attempted to escape underground“. Sounds convincing at first glance, but doesn’t tell the whole story.
As far as I know from my limited observation of pigs in protected, human-managed facilities – like farms, pigs just about do nothing apart from eating, sleeping and wallowing in mud. There must have been some prior motivation for the Bad Piggies to take up the pickaxe and to do no small amount of snout-breaking labour to create a new subterranean existence. In short, the piggies have no business poking around trying to tunnel through solid rock and face whatever dangers lurk beneath in the Underworld.
But one day, an Unknown Piglet deposited the above pigture in our mailbox, which appeared to be some sort of scan from a ground-penetrating radar system. After close scrutiny to determine if the image is some Photoshop fake, a special task force was formed to create a new generation of mobile mining machine to spearhead pig-kind’s exploration of the deep unknown. It is crucial that our great Bacon Nation lay claim to the unguarded egg deposits before the Angry Birds remembered hiding them there in the first place.
Swiftly reaching for napkins and pens whist gorging themselves upon hamburgers and soda, mechanical designers rapidly drew up a number of huge and unwieldy contraptions that resembled oil rigs that could move around (slowly) on land. But with limited time and resources, plus the need for rapid deployment ruling out the “oil rig on land” concept, meant that the designers quickly found themselves back on the street browsing for new jobs on their iPorks.
Eventually, after resorting to soliciting design proposals from elementary school art students, a suitable design was found that could be developed into an operational system with minimal risk and low cost, the only funding required for this article being a packet of potato chips.
A prototype was rapidly put together after “borrowing without permission” about a dozen crate engines from the local Chevrolet dealer, and through no small amounts of high level sorcery in lieu of creating an actual gearbox of mythical strength, oodles of unchained horsepower and a mountain of earth-moving torque was soon channeled to rotate a mighty drill bit coupled to a universal joint like a super-sized version of Jeremy Clarkson’s V-8 Food Blender of Awesomeness +5.
But because this is not Top Gear, but Pork Gear, where everything is even more Ambitious but Rubbish and with the added aroma of freshly grilled bacon, we were not done with our relentless pork-suit of over-engineering everything under the Sun. I decided that this mobile drilling rig should be capable of doing what no drilling rig in the world could do – fly. But only near the Capitol of course, we don’t want the outer Districts to get their snouts on such technology.
Despite the deceptive serenity of the above-pictured composition, flying the contraption was a chore more tedious than clearing out the attic after multiple decades of residential occupancy. With the Royal Fatness King Pig himself acting as counterweight for the considerable mass of the drilling equipment when on the ground, balance whist airborne was a huge issue as the King Pig outright refused to keep still, instead lolling around from side to side with the majority of his incredible bulk sticking out the side of the vehicle like it was his first time aboard a ROFLcopter. It caused all sorts of issues with in-flight stability, and if said incredible bulk were slightly larger, it would be wreaking havoc on ocean tides as well.
We needed a solution, and fast, because the Rotund Royalty’s infamous temper tantrums are only exacerbated by his short attention span, like he were a 5 year old piglet trapped in a Fat Pig’s body! He must not realize we are just wasting his time!
Thankfully, we gleaned inspiration from an old song that just happened to play at that moment on the radio. While we did not have 99 red balloons to create a catchy German music video with, we managed to get his attention by relocating the balloons just above his head. Happy at last, he was eventually lulled to sleep by the monstrous roar of over four thousand wild American horsepowers. With the enormous green counterweight finally stationary as its designer intended, the drilling rig turned ROFLcopter finally flew straight and true, arriving without fanfare at the Field of Dreams experimental weapons research proving grounds.
Meanwhile, a converted satellite owned by the Piggy Island Chair Force fired a simulated egg projectile at hypersonic velocity into the ground, embedding it over thirty feet into the earth. This simulated egg served as the target for the drilling rig’s field test. Locating the objective with ground penetrating radar systems, the rig then utilized the Global Pig-sitioning System to hover and land precisely above the target and like a butterfly bursting forth from its chrysalis, shed its cumbersome flight systems to transform into a majestic shrine to the deities of horsepower never before seen in the wake of the 1973 Oil Crisis.
This time for once, there was no epig failure, only the oinks and squeals of celebration as the world’s first air-mobile drilling rig proved to be a wholly successful design despite its inherent complexity. But who should volunteer to go down under to retrieve the egg? Comment below.
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Chronicler’s Notes:
To be fair, the Bad Piggies have had demonstrated a level of industrial capability equivalent to early 20th Century Earth, what with all the heavy construction machinery featured in Angry Birds Toons and no small amount of varied engineering talent; the metal required for such an advanced level of technology all comes from mining metallic ore. The piggies would have had decades if not centuries of mining expertise to get this far in terms of industrial might, thus seeking shelter in existing mineshafts to evade Angry Bird attacks can be considered a plausible course of action.
But this realist approach to storytelling would merely result putting people to sleep. Seriously, which news outlet today isn’t sensationalist in nature? Bacon journalism is all about generating ridiculous ideas to trick King Pig’s Office into releasing funding to satisfy our desire to build the most insane and impossible machinery ever known to pig-kind, hence, chronicling the glorious exploitation of underground egg resources! Underground eggs! Stealing without threat of aerial retaliation from the Birds. OMG! Want!
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Author’s Background:
With its five-year mission to boldly eat what no pig has ate before, the Pigineering Department’s specialty is wasting Corporal Pig’s immense defence budget on ridiculous machinery that serve little purpose other than to look awesome and cause pollution. Suffice to say, the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t exist in Piggy Island!
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King Pig should go and fetch the egg, after all he wanted to eat eggs.