The Easter Funny

2024

1 April

William Wettle was giddy.

It didn't happen often. It happened so rarely, in fact, that he was always caught off-guard. The feeling took time to identify. Was it gas? Was it nausea? Was he under the influence of some malign… no, no, it was none of those things. He was simply, temporarily, in a good mood.

Things that put him in a good mood, as would logically follow, also didn't happen often. One of the rarest triggers had nevertheless been pulled on this chill spring day in April which had otherwise seemed entirely unprepossessing, its two coincidentally-coinciding holidays aside. Something marvellous had happened as he'd stepped out of the subway at Grand Bend, spotted the car they'd sent to pick him up, and fished out his phone to check for any last-minute messages.

There had been one, from Harold Blank. His best friend. His worst friend. The president, if not hardly the founding father, of the Making Fun of William Wettle Fan Club. A man who prided himself on his intellect, despite possessing a humanities doctorate, and who loved little more than lording it over his accident-prone colleague. Harold Blank had sent him a text message, and wonder of wonders, within that text message Wettle had found a lovely little accidental Easter egg. A typo.

It hadn't had much room to hide.

Wettle had tried three times during the hour-long ride from Site-43 to Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin to show that glorious error to the agent in the driver's seat. The man had glanced in his direction the first time, winced, and fixed his gaze back out the windshield again without comment. The second time, he'd merely grunted. He hadn't even acknowledged the third attempt. Wettle couldn't remember if he'd offended this particular agent, whose name tag said 'Nicholas Ewell', on his last trip to Sloth's Pit; he barely remembered the trip itself, bound up as it was in an event both too embarrassing to want to dwell on, and not nearly as memorably embarrassing as several which had occurred since. So he contented himself with cradling the phone in his lap, observing the visible evidence of his friend's cognitive fallibility, and drafting up potential responses.

"How's this," Wettle said, typing on his phone with short, thick fingers.

He hit SEND. It lacked a certain something, and he felt like there was something wrong with it besides, but… well. It wasn't bad.

Ewell grunted again.

The message greyed out. Loss of signal, perhaps. Well, that was acceptable. Now he could do better.

"Okay." Wettle scratched his beard. "Let's go deeper. He meant to type Easter Bunny, because it's Easter. He typed Easter Funny, which isn't anything. What would the Easter Funny be, if it… was?"

This occupied the time until they crossed into Sloth's Pit proper. Wettle always had a hard time wrapping his head around the concept of humour.

"Aha!" he shouted, and for a moment admired the agent's resolve in not leaping out of his skin, before continuing. "The Easter Funny is the holiday mascot for every time Easter lands on April Fools' Day!"

The fact that it was even possible for this to happen had never crossed Wettle's mind, even if it had already happened before in his lifetime. He didn't know that it had; he just didn't know that it hadn't, either. Many things happened around, in front of, even to him that he didn't notice, so it was possible. But it had happened today, sort of.

"Easter Monday isn't really a thing," Wettle mused. "It's just a federal holiday. The real deal is Sunday. That's why they think it's fine to send us out on this bullshit, right? We're not federal employees, we're…" He reached for a word higher up the totem pole than federal, and failed to find one. "…yeah. Still, it's part of Easter, even if it is the ass end. That's the angle. That's the angle." His fingers resumed their narrow hunt-and-peck.

He muttered each word as he stabbed it into existence, though there was a minor deviance which he didn't notice at the end. It was closer, but it still wasn't perfect.

It still wouldn't send, either.

Ewell exhaled heavily, and looked out his window.

"What do you think the Easter Funny brings?" Wettle asked him. "Chocolate… jokes?"

"We're here." The car swung into the approach to Site-87, perched on its hill overlooking the town where tales came to literal life. "You ready for a walk?"

The tortuous route required for them to access the bottomless pit did nothing to crumple Wettle's spirits. It was Ewell's job to lead, since you could only find the thing once, and Wettle had found it once already; he'd wondered whether this would mean that he'd get lost and be eaten by a hodag or a goat man or whatever, but no, apparently the fact that he was still confused and disoriented when they stumbled into the clearing had been enough to satisfy the precondition. The agent took the drones out of their briefcase while Wettle continued to crow on what was by now the only topic his mind had room for.

"I bet the Easter Funny brings chocolate eggs with little notes inside. Little notes with jokes on them. Like fortune cookies, only… not." Wettle found himself strolling to the plunging edge of the pit, and stepped back again. "Only the chocolate has laxative in it, right? Or maybe they just choke on the paper, because they didn't get the joke. Ha, ha. Because April Fools'."

Wettle did not care for April Fools' Day. In his unique condition, it meant watching a variety of pranks intended for other people falling flat, then generally bouncing back and knocking him flat.

"Or maybe it's a stand-up comedian. No, wait!" Wettle assumed an illustrative t-pose. "A hang-up comedian! Like Jesus. A big bunny nailed to a cross, who tells bad jokes. Joke's on you, Jesus bunny! There is no bunny god."

Ewell was putting batteries in the drones. Wettle walked over, and knelt beside him. "There's no bunny god, right? That's not a thing?"

"Do you have your tablet?" the agent asked.

Wettle frowned. He didn't understand the purpose of this experiment, even though he'd dutifully signed off on it. The Director had passed it down, with a strict set of requirements, and he wasn't paid enough (even after all his years of excellent service) to bother interrogating the man's motives. They were going to confirm that the famous bottomless pit was still, indeed, bottomless. It had experienced a brief period of bottoming-out during Wettle's time in the limelight, back in 2022, and apparently the brass wanted to make certain it had merely been a fluke.

Their methodology for doing so was obviously flawed, and he had protested, but as usual his concerns had been swept aside without so much as an explanation. He was the Deputy Chair of Replication Studies at Site-43, and although the confusing phraseology suggested otherwise, there was no-one above him in that particular food chain. He wasn't a real Chair, but he was the undisputed king of doing things twice, three times, and more. Only these days he didn't do the doing himself; his bad luck anomaly was almost always sufficient to disqualify him from personally carrying out the tests. Since the 7000 effect had been documented he'd been stuck on supervisory duty only, to avoid contaminating the results.

And yet, here they were.

Wettle removed his tablet from his labcoat pocket, only almost dropping it into the pit as he did so, and nodded. "Go for it. But I'm not gonna stop talking."

Ewell tossed one of the drones into the pit. It sank below sight. The other man fiddled with a small control box as Wettle tracked its progress on his screen. He sat down on the grass, set the tablet down beside him, and pulled out his phone again.

He chuckled, then stopped. "Fuck!" Still the message would not send. He checked his connection. It was fine. He looked up. Clear blue skies. Maddening. Almost enough to wear off the buzz from witnessing a Harold Blank typo out in the wild.

Almost.

Harry refused to admit that he was capable of making an error such as this. One time he'd even invented an anomaly just to weasel out of Wettle's righteous mockery. This should have been his chance for revenge. It wasn't fair. Even by his standards, it simply wasn't fair.

The drone was still falling. Wettle wrinkled his nose. "I wonder if the Easter Funny likes being the Easter Funny. I bet it's really tragic, being the butt of a joke like that."

Ewell tossed in a second drone. They were meant to compare the relative trajectories and positions, to confirm the anomalous nature of the hole's depth. Wettle gave the new readout less than a quarter of his attention.

"Maybe the Easter Funny wakes people up in bed by telling them bad jokes?" He'd just remembered that some people insisted April Fools' Day ended at noon, which would seriously reduce his theoretical holiday avatar's window of opportunity. In his experience, of course, April Fools' never ended at all. "Maybe it pees the bed for them. Maybe it's a big, stupid bunny that pees in your bed. Maybe that's what the Easter Funny is. That sounds about right." He spat on the grass. "That's the kind of—"

Suddenly, he was standing up. There was something fuzzy all over his face, even more so than usual. He couldn't see, and then, awfully, he could. A massive, narrow, beady-eyed leporine face glared down at him, and then a vast and clawed paw swept across his jaw, and stars blossomed in the noonday sun.

"STOP TALKING!" the giant rabbit shouted, kicking Wettle in the stomach at the moment he struck the grass. "STOP STICKING ME WITH ALL YOUR BULLSHIT! It's bad enough I only get to exist maybe four days every CENTURY, you're gonna make me piss on people's BEDS?" Another kick. "Feed paper to children?" Another kick. "Fucking CRUCIFY me?!" Another.

Wettle's vision swam, but he could still clearly see the rabbit pick up the tablet, and Wettle's phone, and the briefcase full of drones, and chuck the entire mess into the pit, and then follow them down. He was almost certain he saw the creature pirouette as it plunged out of sight, flashing a single taloned digit at them both in a farewell salute.

Ewell removed his earplugs, and walked over to offer Wettle a hand. "That was pretty funny," he smiled.