Gremlin Risitas — The Phantom Peroxide Incident
The mission briefing was simple:
“Find the hydrogen peroxide.”
Except there was one tiny operational flaw.
The peroxide did not exist.
Not misplaced. Not hidden. Not in the kitchen. Not in the bathroom cabinet. Not behind the cereal. Not inside the forbidden junk drawer dimension.
The house launched a full-scale search operation for an item that was never even deployed to the map.
Meanwhile my room got hit like investigators were searching for classified documents.
Drawers disturbed. Objects moved for absolutely no tactical advantage. Lamp switch spiritually assassinated.
All for an item that was apparently a mythological consumable.
So there I am:
- coming off work exhaustion,
- trying not to lose my cool,
- staring at my room like a raccoon insurance adjuster after a tornado.
And after all the chaos?
After the searching? After the psychic damage? After the emotional side quest?
My brain finally loaded the forbidden realization:
“I literally could’ve added peroxide to the Walmart order.”
That’s the part that broke me.
Not the room. Not the disrespect. Not the goblin energy.
The realization that the entire household entered a chaos dungeon over a $1.97 item that could’ve been quietly summoned by the blue grocery rectangle.
And suddenly everything became spiritually hilarious.
Because now the whole event feels like one of those ancient Greek tragedies rewritten by raccoons:
- nobody communicates,
- the objective never existed,
- collateral damage everywhere,
- and the protagonist ends the story holding a Walmart app like forbidden technology.
Meanwhile Jerry “The Ankle-Biter” Silverhand reviewed the incident report and simply wrote:
“Conclusion: The peroxide was the friends we psychologically damaged along the way.”