Chương 23: [That Time I was Killed by Throwing a Copy of the 2009 DVD of Pixar’s ‘Up’ Across a Room]

Pixar's Up was first released on DVD on November 9th, 2009. This won't be important later I just thought I'd point it out. Anyway, in the last chapter you might recall that Jake decided to throw his copy of said digital media across the hospital room in a fit of justified, yet petulant rage.

Given that they had the atrophied upper arms of an entombed Egyptian mummy, you might think that the immediate result of that throw would be to have the box limply crash against the opposite wall and lay uselessly and inert on the ground adjacent to their cell phone. However, that's not quite what happened. You see, as it so happened, the very moment he threw the DVD case, the door to his hospital room was opened so he could enjoy a visit from all twenty-seven of the hospital's Emotional Support Seagulls.

And while twenty-six of these seagulls were just barely trained enough to avoid pecking the eyeballs out of the patients they were sent to cheer up, the new bird on the block still had that naturally rebellious streak that defines all gulls. They also had a voracious appetite for bagels, and while the 2009 DVD box for Pixar's Up did not look like a bagel, their intuition told them that something bagel-adjacent might be inside.

So while twenty-six of the gulls immediately did their job by screaming at Jake and shitting on his bed sheet, the rebellious one swooped over, grabbed the DVD box mid-flight, and flew out of the standard-issue seagull-shaped windows that every hospital has. The seagull was quite pleased with itself and decided to celebrate its heist with a hearty 'guffaw'. Unfortunately, to guffaw, a bird must use their beak, which was otherwise occupied with the 2009 DVD box of Pixar's Up.

Faced with the crippling indecision of releasing a celebratory laugh or keeping their hard-won prize, the seagull fell out of the sky and landed in the hospital's outdoor heated pool and died immediately. For what it was worth, the seagull did go on to be reincarnated in a litRPG world where the power system was based off of eating cold French fries under public benches. So they thrived. Regardless, this left the 2009 DVD box of Pixar's up floating in the mouth of a dead seagull in 78.

8 degree Fahrenheit water, which you will note is not the ideal environment for digital media storage. This was immediately noticed by the hospital lifeguard, who immediately dove in to rescue the disk before it could suffer any damage. Tragically, it proved to be too late for the disk within the box. After exhaustive surgery, the doctors at the hospital confirmed that the 2009 DVD of Pixar's Up was officially brain dead.

As the disk had no next of kin, the hospital quietly and humanely euthanized the disk and sent it to the Cremation Department so the DVD could be burnt. So now they had two broken DVDs. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

They took the original broken DVD and sent it to Arlington National Cemetery to be buried with honors for its role in killing a seagull, while the copy they burnt at the Cremation Department was returned to the box, which although waterlogged, was still a perfectly functional DVD case that would be a shame to waste.

Take a moment to note that it happened to be "Bring your Kleptomaniac Niece to Work Day", so it wasn't even a minute after they put the DVD case on the shelf that it was stolen by another emotional support seagull. It would be intellectually and scientifically dishonest to try to attribute this theft to any greater intention — gulls just be gulls after all — but since there wasn't any malice behind the decision it also meant it didn't feel the need to laugh at its own cleverness.

It got significantly further away before dying to an unrelated lightning strike from an apathetic and bored god. So the gull and the now charred 2009 DVD box of Pixar's 'Up' with a copy of the original broken disk plummeted out of the sky and landed directly on top of a 30-year old woman who was in the process of trying to re-create her childhood living room, exactly as she remembered it when she was 13 years old and her parents had a hobby of buying DVDs of Disney and Pixar movies on the day of their release.

Every Disney and Pixar movie except Up. So she had no real use for the DVD and she gave it to her twin brother, who happened to be a truck driver. Now, truck drivers are the most heavily policed job in the world, given their disproportionate roles in getting people Isekai'd. Which was starting to be a real problem since Jake was absolutely not alone in his desire to escape this post-capitalist techno-feudalistic hellscape to try his luck in a pre-capitalist vanilla-feudalism hellscape.

Complicating things further, kids, animals, and all manner of innocent creatures who can only be rescued with a dramatic leap in front of the truck are drawn to the grill of his vehicle like moths to a really sexy moth of their preferred gender. So he was stressed. He needed a way to unwind. And getting this charred, seagull-corpse smelling 2009 DVD case and accompanying burnt disk of Pixar's Up was just the ticket he needed to finally get the emotional relief he desperately needed.

So you can imagine his immense disappointment when he popped it into his PS4 and found that it didn't work. This was what finally pushed him over the edge. Devastated beyond my ability or interest to communicate, he ejected the DVD, placed it back in the box, and carried it to his truck.

He drove his truck straight back to the hospital where our protagonist was currently recovering, and in his rage, used a nearby loop-de-loop that was supposed to be used by anthropomorphic animals to catapult his truck directly into Jake's room. How did he know Jake was to blame, you might ask? Naturally, Jake put his name on the box when he first got it in 2009. How did he know where Jake was, you may wonder? Obviously, the truck driver was a werewolf and followed the scent of the first gull to find his mark.

Come on, keep up. Anyway, the truck barreled through the wall, slammed into the bed, and exploded in a fireball that demolished half of the hospital. And because half the hospital was destroyed, nobody could help Jake when he had a brain aneurysm a few minutes later. So he died.