Crash and Burn

Crash and Burn
Chapter	36 of 127 (list of chapters)
Published	March 25, 2007 (2007-03-25)
Page count	4
Major characters	Lucy, Yashy, Chirpy
Minor characters	Lily, Carol, Mike
Locations	Lucy's house, Neighborhood sidewalks and streets
Collected in	Volume One, Omnibus 1
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A mysterious chat message, one careless click, and suddenly Lucy's computer is playing something she would rather die than let her pets see. Can she shut it down before Yashy and Chirpy wander in?

Synopsis

Lucy is at her desk checking her email, where the usual "Lucy, join my social network" spam from "Your Friend" is waiting. She gleefully tells the sender exactly where to go, which earns her nothing but a curt "stfu" in reply. Then a chat window pops up from an unknown "huzzla8410", pushing a video link. Lucy clicks it and wanders off to the kitchen while it downloads. There she finds Lily rooting through a box of Coocoo Charms as big as she is, hunting for the prize inside. Lucy teases her for being babyish, and Lily wants to know whether Lucy's "endless love triangles" are any better. Lucy stalks off in a huff, and Lily dives headfirst into the box.

When Lucy gets back with her juice, the download has finished, and what's playing on her screen leaves nothing to the imagination. "THAT'S.. A PORN VIDEO!!" To make matters worse, the computer has frozen up completely — the cursor is dead, Ctrl-Alt-Delete does nothing, and shaking the machine doesn't help either.

Lucy hollers for the absent Lily, then hears Yashy and Chirpy chatting their way toward her door. In the middle of all the panic, she even catches herself actually watching for a second. "Wow.. She's really into it.." She's suitably horrified with herself a moment later.

Pulling the power cord out of the wall ought to end it, but Lucy pops back up to find the video still going, and keels over backward. Plan B is to bury the computer under quilts, until she remembers that her mom carted off every quilt in the house, plus the beach towel, for washing that very morning.

Yashy, meanwhile, has decided to walk into the next room purely because she figures it would be suspenseful. Her grand entrance finds Lucy perched on the desk, waving sheepishly and blocking the screen with her whole body. When Yashy gets suspicious, Lucy jumps up and hoists the entire computer over her head, snapping the cord in the process. She announces she's "Taking the computer for a walk!" Chirpy is fairly sure computers don't take walks, but at least the screen finally goes black.

Yashy's education takes a sudden leap forward.

Lucy barely finishes celebrating before the printer whirs to life. Jamming the cancel button gets her nowhere, so she smashes the whole thing on the floor in front of the flinching pets. One printed sheet slips free of the wreckage anyway. Yashy grabs it, goes bright red, and demands, "Where the hell is he putting that thing?!" Lucy can only curl up into a ball.

The next day, out walking with Mike, Yashy is clearly still chewing it over. With no context whatsoever, she asks him, "Have you ever tried that on her, Flea?" Mike is baffled, and Lucy stares at the ground and begs him not to ask.

Character dynamics

• Lucy and Yashy & Chirpy — Lucy has always kept her pets carefully in the dark about anything adult; just one chapter earlier, she and Mike were shouting "Airplanes!" to convince Yashy that a lunch conversation wasn't about "Mom's private parts". This chapter puts that habit under the worst pressure it has ever faced, and Lucy loses. Yashy walks away scandalized enough to spend the whole next day mulling the printout over and grilling Mike about it, while Lucy is left too mortified to explain anything. It's all played for laughs, though, and the "Ma"-and-kids dynamic comes out intact.

Trivia & observations

• Veronica's commentary notes that this chapter is a remade version of a comic she drew before Bittersweet Candy Bowl existed.
• Coocoo Charms is one of Veronica's long-running fictional brands. Her commentary on the same page mentions another, the soda Blasto, which hadn't shown up in BCB at the time but eventually turns up on-panel in Paulo's hands.
• The malicious message arrives over AIM. Oliver's commentary calls the page "iChat nostalgia. Or AIM nostalgia, pick your flavour!"
• Per Veronica, the laundry flashback is Carol's second appearance ever, and like her first (way back in Gaming Rivalry) it's a flashback. As of this chapter, in fact, she had never appeared any other way: "She's not dead, I swear!" She still wears her pearl necklace, which Veronica jokes is "cramping Daisy's style".
• Veronica's commentary on the panic page says the chapter shows Lucy isn't as stoic as she's been trying to be lately: "She can still be an anxious, emotional mess. Just like any ol' teenager!"
• The final gag, per Veronica, has always amused her because Yashy asks her question with "ZERO context, absolutely NO information". She adds, "Poor Mike, once he knows context he'd probably grab Yashy and fling her across a stadium."

Related chapters

• Under Pressure: Just one chapter earlier, Yashy loudly scolds Mike at lunch over how he's been talking about "Mom's private parts", and Lucy and Mike scramble to convince her they were really discussing airplanes. It's the same cover-up job Lucy is doing here, pushed a good deal further.
• The Burden of Parenthood: Yashy's habit of lobbing blunt questions at Mike goes all the way back to this chapter, where she asks whether he's been making "Mom" abort every day. Her closing question here is that gag still going strong.
• Birthday Double-Team: The pets-versus-porn joke soon gets a rerun from the other side, when Chirpy accidentally opens a misplaced adult magazine and innocently asks, "Is he hurting her?"
• Out of the Frame: The side story that follows this chapter. Lily keeps up her knowing streak there, smugly informing the assembled cast that they're "the side characters nobody cares about".
• Gaming Rivalry: Yashy first calls Mike "Flea" in this early chapter, and its childhood flashback is the only place Lucy's mom had appeared before now.