Mumbles and the Last Game

Mumbles picked up the seemingly insignificant scrap of paper that blew randomly against his feet and unfurled it to read it’s strangely-lettered message: “You are one who is chosen,” it said.
“Ha, fat lot of good that will do me now that the Earth is Dying!” he thought sarcastically, as he brushed the floppy forelock out of his dark, brooding eyes.
Suddenly, the sky opened with a scream as hundreds of floating platforms appeared.
“Whoa,” thought Mumbles. “Whoa.”
“Greetings, people of the Dying Earth,” came a booming, armadillo-like voice, “we are the Betelgeusian Lifeboat Patrol, here to rescue The Chosen from your Dying Earth! All those who received the ‘you are one who is chosen,’ notices, please arrive at the nearest teen center at exactly noon tomorrow. You may bring what you wish, but, importantly, you must carry no electronic items, and such games as will weigh no more than 5.5 lbs., in your enlightened imperial system of weights and measures!”
“Great,” thought Mumbles, “I’ve spent my early and mid-teens collecting more than 5.5 lbs. of board games, and now I’ll have to leave behind at least several of them!” Mumbles knew that the sarcastic attitude he used with teachers and authority figures who did not understand his floppy forelock and dark, foreboding eyes would not work with space aliens. Still, he had a funny idea, one last joke for a Dying Earth.
The next day he arrived at Riordanvale’s dilapidated teen center. “Mumbles is God,” was spray-painted next to more graffiti reading “Teens Only,” and “The World Descended into a Fascist State and Then Started Dying and All I Got Was This Teen Center Full of Conformism.” Mumbles admired his handiwork. Soon it, like the earth where he’d spent his youth with a single mother who had to raise kangaroos for meat just to keep Mumbles and his sister Whippoorwill in reasonably fashionable sneakers, would be gone forever.
Mumbles watched the brown and chunky water flow down the once mighty Native Dog Creek. He might be leaving his world soon, but at least he would leave it a slightly funnier place.
Furtively, he hid a satchel containing exactly 5.48 lbs (to allow for some weight increase due to water absorption) of excellent German and American board games underneath the picnic table where he’d once made out with Anaspasia Ivanov, the teenage Russian countess who was only using him to get back at her father, oligarch Vladimir Maleevich Ivanov, whose control of the world’s petroleum supply was, ironically, partly responsible for the fact that everyone now lived on a Dying Earth.
“Ha, if Anaspasia could see me now,” thought Mumbles as he played with the fidget spinner he’d painted to look like the face of 19th century utopian socialist Henry de Saint-Simon, whom Mumbles had had to learn about from forbidden books that the old librarian had lent him since reading about politics was totally forbidden on the Dying Earth.
“You called?” said Anaspasia, turning about on her satin heels to allow Mumbles to admire her perfectly applied lipstick and eyeliner.
“Anaspasia? What? How?” said Mumbles without his usual sarcastic tone.
“I, too, was chosen,” said Anaspasia, as she fumbled with the deluxe edition of Settlers of Catan she kept in a hand-crafted wooden chest.
“Catan!? How could you! We need grown-up boardgames with full balance in late play scenarios!” said Mumbles wisely.
“So what did you bring?” smiled the ever impish Anaspasia.
“Ha! You’ll just have to wait and see!” said Mumbles, regaining some of the confidence he’d built by playing dynamic characters in an on-line role-playing game with older teens.
“Approach the lifeboat!” came the booming, armadillo like voice. Mumbles snickered and slouched forward, his floppy forelock hinting at brooding times to come.
“Please present your boardgame,” said the surprisingly armadillo-esque creature that guarded the entrance to the lifeboat.
“Here it is,” snickered Mumbles with his infamously sly giggle. He pulled back a sheet of kangaroo skin to reveal a near-mint copy of Full House: The Board Game.
“Ha! Well done,” said the armadillo-ish Betelgeusian, “now onto the lifeboat with you.”
“Just a second,” said Mumbles, “my actual game stash is just over there, underneath a bench that sags heavy with the weight of memories.” He glanced briefly, but meaningfully, at Anaspasia.
“Sorry,” said the armadilloform alien, “all aboard,” and he shoved Mumbles through the portal.
“No!” screamed Mumbles as he watched the bench grow smaller in the ascending vessel’s tiny window. “NOOOOO!”
“So,” said Anaspasia, “can I interest you in some Catan? I have the Cities and Knights expansion!”
“Oh my God,” said the usually atheist Mumbles. “Oh. My. God.”
Thanks to Epidiah Ravachol and Michael Cooper for story prompt
