Oh Give A Home, Where The Cataloupes Roam...
"Why is there a watermelon there?" asked New Jersey, still not used to the strange goings on at the Banzai Institute. (Poor soul, he hadn't even been there a whole day.)
"Tell you later," whispered Reno, and they both slunk away down the corridor in search of Lectroids.
The watermelon sighed quietly to itself and thought, "Here we go again!".
It had had a long hard journey, sneaking lifts in one truck full of fruit after another, only travelling across open country by night; as by day a lonely watermelon shuffling slowly along the ground attracted far too much attention from hungry animals and incredulous humans.
The melon had originally come from a plain old ordinary watermelon patch. Not so ordinary was the highly secret government research plant situated beside the farm. There was also nothing ordinary about the chemical waste of a highly dubious nature which one night had accidentally leaked out onto the watermelon patch. The result it had on the growing watermelons was remarkable, although the melons were the only people who knew about it.
Somewhere deep inside their pink watery flesh, intelligence began to develop. Soon they could communicate amongst themselves by telepathy, and through sheer force of willpower, move along the ground, although this took long hours of practice. Some melons pushed themselves too hard. Their green skins ripped open when they travelled too fast over rocky ground, and they died horribly, their pips spilling out in a mushy heap.
Soon the melons began to fear for their future. Although they could move and hide themselves to escape from being taken away and eaten, the average life expectancy of a melon is not a long one. The melons knew that new melons would grow from their seeds after their death, but would their offspring have the same intellectual capabilities? And even if they did, how long would it be before someone noticed that one of the melon patches was always suspiciously empty when harvest time came? The melons probed the minds of the humans around them and came to the conclusion that the most intelligent person on the planet was someone called Buckaroo Banzai. Maybe he could help.
So the melons elected one of their number (who had the thickest skin and so could travel farthest) to leave the melon patch and go out into the world in search of help. And the melon struggled on for days and weeks, until at long last it found itself in a fruit bowl in the bunkhouse in the Banzai Institute.
As soon as the melon arrived, the Hong Kong Cavaliers realised there was something strange about it- probably because of the way it was able to jump up and down (they're one smart bunch of guys). So they immediately began to study it, plugging it into machines to try to examine the strange brain waves which seemed to be emanating from the melon. But every time the melon thought that they were on the verge of a breakthrough, something more important seemed to pop up: Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers had to rush off to save the world for the umpteenth time, and the melon was left alone yet again.
It could easily pick up their thoughts, but they couldn't seem to understand it. Maybe, thought the melon, these "human beans" as they called themselves, just weren't close enough to plants to communicate. It pondered over this for a while and then remembered that it had heard people mention a life-form that was part vegetable, part human. Maybe one of those would be intelligent enough to listen to what the melon had to say.
Happy at having thought of a new plan of action, the melon rolled out of the lab, then over the hills and far away, in search of a couch potato.
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