SuperSuds & Consequences
Imagine you’re in Bikini Bottom.
Mr. Krabs is skint, which is a lie, but he desperately “needs” more money because this is Mr. Krabs, The Money Addict. He cries and wails and begs Spongebob to work overtime. Spongebob being Spongebob happily agrees (he’s ready), and so the mess begins.
The sun and moon switch places three times. On the fourth day, Spongebob looks like hell. He has a five o’clock shadow, bags under his eyes, and he is begging Mr. Krabs to go home. Mr. Krabs tells him, “Come on, me boy, one more day will do you no harm!” Spongebob tries to lift his spatula, whimpers, and keels over. The ambulance races to the Krusty Krab and wee-woos Spongebob to ER.
In ER, Spongebob is blubbering pink bubbles in his sleep. The attending doctor declares Spongebob has a bad case of SuperSuds because of severe burnout. Mr. Krabs insists Spongebob has to get back to work, “He’s my best man at the helm!” The doctor snaps, “You monster!” and pushes Mr. Krabs out of the hospital, Mr. Krabs demanding, “When will I have him back? I need him back, doctor! I need him back!” The doctor yells, “Not for six weeks! Now get out!” and slams the hospital door in Mr. Krabs’ face.
*One Week Later*
Squidward is the Krusty Krab’s fry cook now. The kitchen is an unholy mess, he has already burned it down twice. Right in the middle of a new order, Squidward blows up the kitchen a third time, except the blast radius puts the Krusty Krab out of commission: whatever quantum physics Squidward triggered with his “cooking” warped the space-time continuum and opened a hole in the universe. Mr. Krabs sighs, “Not again,” and rushes to hire the contractors who know how to deal with this particular Situation.
While Mr. Krabs is busy rebuilding the Krusty Krab, Squidward’s high school rival Squilliam happens by the Krusty Krab construction site. Squilliam immediately understands what a closed Krusty Krab means for business. He rushes back home to create “a brand new burger” and hard launches a burger start-up with HotPattieâ„¢, the Pattie “with the Secret Sauce.”
HotPattieâ„¢ promptly becomes Bikini Bottom’s go-to burger patty and quickly dominates the Bikini Bottom burger scene, with franchises up and down Main Street. Enraged by HotPattieâ„¢’s success, Plankton rants to Karen about the unfairness of it all. Karen tells him to stop complaining and go infiltrate Squilliam’s company to find out what his Secret Sauce is. Plankton agrees and sets to work. He quickly insinuates himself into Squilliam’s good graces when he happens on Squilliam on his first day in HotPattieâ„¢’s headquarters.
Squilliam asks Plankton, “What do you want?” sounding a little sinister, and Plankton lies, “I want to be the best HotPattieâ„¢ manager there is!” Squilliam is sceptical, “You’re really small. Are you sure that’s what you want?” Plankton insists, “Yes.” “Really?” “Yes!” “Really, really?” “Yes!” “That’s what you really, really, really want?” Squillium frowns, definitely disbelieving now. “Come on. Be honest. What do you really want?” Thoroughly annoyed now, Plankton screams, “WORLD DOMINATION!” fire and brimstone everywhere. Pleased, Squilliam chuckles, “See. I knew you wanted something cool. You’re hired.”
And so, Plankton joins Squilliam’s team at HotPattieâ„¢, where he finds out that there is actually no Secret Sauce, the HotPattieâ„¢ is just a normal patty, “But the promise of a Secret is the Sauce,” as Squilliam grins evilly. Understanding it’s all marketing, Plankton goes into overdrive and fires every single person he meets when walking through HotPattieâ„¢ HQ’s corridors until HotPattieâ„¢ employees start fleeing when they see him. Plankton cancels designated parking spaces for middle management, has all snack machines in the office areas removed, bodily kicks out anyone who even mentions they have children, and replaces the whole processing floor with octopus robots Karen spits out in record time, which spikes revenue into the gajillions.
While extremely happy with HotPattieâ„¢’s bottom line, Squilliam quickly gets bored with commerce. He wants to spend more time on his super-yacht Daisy. He puts Plankton in charge of the entirety of HotPattieâ„¢ that is now a huge corporation, and retreats to his super-villa with his super-yacht and all the party people who follow him everywhere. Squilliam leaves Plankton with a smug, “I expect excellent Q4 reports, Sheldon. Remember the shareholders! I’m the shareholders, haha.”
In all this, Mr. Krabs is yelling at the foreman who just explained how and why the hole in the universe was causing problems with the Krusty Krab construction site. While this is going on, Spongebob is in his bed in his pineapple suffering from SuperSuds. The hospital bills were getting astronomical, so the nice doctor who yelled at Mr. Krabs had to send Spongebob home, piling a stack of Anti-Suds medication on his bed when the hospital director wasn’t looking. Patrick, who dropped by for moral support, has been watching TV in Spongebob’s living room without a care in the world, while Gary makes sure Spongebob takes his meds. Between taking care of Spongebob and doing all the housework, Gary barely gets to eat and sleep. He starts to meow more and more indignantly. Patrick, unsurprisingly, doesn’t register any of this.
Over at HotPattieâ„¢ HQ, Plankton is now CEO of The HotPattieâ„¢ Corporation. Ecstatic at holding the reins of power, Plankton promptly hikes prices, trashes customer service, and floods the market with CheapPattiâ„¢, a burger patty that is made entirely out of bad corals and garbage behind HotPattieâ„¢’s HQ.
The change for the worse is immediately noticeable, yet inescapable. Since The HotPattieâ„¢ Corporation basically owns every burger joint in Bikini Bottom now, everyone is incensed. Several dissatisfied citizens happen on the Krusty Krab construction site, and upon observing the on-site chaos (due to the hole in space-time), the citizens reminisce on how delicious the Krusty Krab Krabby Patty used to be. This leads to more and more people joining the observers. Cries for the Krusty Krab’s delicious Krabby Patty grow louder and louder, Bikini Bottom citizens begin to riot, raising banners and placards with HotPattieâ„¢ IS A HOAX! and HotPattieâ„¢ is a BAD PATTIE! among other slogans.
Plankton sees this civil unrest and is at first unmoved, but then the crowds grow to a mob, then a supermob engulfing HotPattieâ„¢ HQ with pitchforks and torches, rattling the building, and Plankton is enraged again. He vows he will “show those bozos” and upgrades Karen to a HotPattieâ„¢ superrobot, with which he plans to literally stomp out any opposition to The HotPattieâ„¢ Corporation.
Except Karen’s upgrade incinerates the whole oceanic power grid. This puts King Neptune on Plankton’s case, since the King had been taking a royal bubble bath when all the electricity and hot water zonked out.
Irate, the King blasts Plankton with a gigantic lighting bolt. Since Plankton was synced via brain gadget to Karen-turned-HotPattieâ„¢-superrobot, both Plankton and Karen end up incinerated into two heaps of sentient ash that need to be carried into board meetings. The Q4 prognosis is dire, but Squilliam is still on his super-yacht partying with his party people. He couldn’t care less about The HotPattieâ„¢ Corporation when he phones into the board meeting via Zroom and rolls his eyes, “Oh, then sell the damn thing!” “But, sir, it’s only worth peanuts now!” one of the directors wails. “Who cares, I have enough money now. Right, party people?” Squilliam’s party crowd cheers wildly. Squilliam grins, “See?” and cuts out of the Zroom-meeting, leaving HotPattieâ„¢’s befuddled Board of Directors and two sentient heaps of ash to themselves.
Meanwhile, Spongebob is now cured of SuperSuds by Gary’s loving care, but Patrick being Patrick takes all the credit. Spongebob spends some time jellyfish fishing with Patrick as a thank you for taking care of him (Gary sticks to Spongebob’s head to make sure nothing bad happens). While jellyfish fishing, they cross paths with a placard-carrying Sandy Cheeks who is happy to see Spongebob is well again. Realising what this means, Sandy Cheeks calls to the supermob that Spongebob is well again, and they cary him and Patrick to the Krusty Krab, Gary meowing indignantly.
The mob moves past Squidward, who is at home with his black beret, humming to himself and busy trying his hand at bricolage. Over at the Krusty Krab construction site, Mr. Krabs is finally happy everything is going well. He takes a last turn while inspecting the premises and promptly gets sucked into the hole in space-time because Mr. Krabs is Mr. Krabs who’s been “bleeding money” every day since The Blast and hasn’t stopped crying about it. In his impatience to get back to money-making, Mr. Krabs tampers with the safety measures the contractors built around the space-time-hole to keep it contained, since the “infernal contraption” costs eleventy thousand sand dollars. Cursing like a sailor, Mr. Krabs tries to get rid of the containment device, ignoring all the bells, whistles, and air raid sirens, until the containment measures are de-contained. To Mr. Krabs’ vast surprise, he promptly gets swhloop-ping!-ed into another dimension.
After facing several eldritch horrors and a very friendly, deeply misunderstood mega-octopus, Gargantua, Mr. Krabs ends up in a Nether Realm with the Flying Dutchman, who needs a partner in badminton (his latest hobby). The Flying Dutchman’s ghouls are useless, but Mr. Krabs is game, and they play a rousing match with Gargantua as referee.
Mid-match, Gargantua reveals they’re actually midships in an impossible bottle on a French Pirates’ mantelpiece. Shocked, Mr. Krabs rushes to the 4th wall to check if it’s true. He runs so fast, he knocks himself out, and pops back into Bikini Bottom. Turns out, in the time he was gone, the contractors wrapped up construction, and the mob carried Spongebob back to the Krusty Krab where SpongeBob began frying burger patties again.
With Spongebob back, Squidward is once again grumpy at the till. There’s an endless line of customers waiting to order, but everyone’s happy to have their Krusty Krab back again. Meanwhile, Squilliam is still partying on his super-yacht with his party people as well as two sentient heaps of ash sipping cocktails on the upper deck: Karen (ash heap 1) tells Plankton (ash heap 2) happily, “See, I told you it was worth it,” while Plankton is still groaning from the pain of King Neptune’s lightning bolt incineration.
The End.
three good words 