The Great Park Story

With Amy Franceschini

For a long time, El Toro has been a very lively piece of nearly flat land, laying beneath foresty hills and above the vast Pacific Ocean. Everyday and many nights, men and machines were moved strategically through El Toro’s hot sandy earth, exercising great maneuvers to intimidate hostile minds and experiment with amazing weapons. A fearsome fence protected all the people living outside this zone, that they would not run accidentally into the experiments and get lost between the highly coordinated activities. 

Not only on its sandy surface, were men preparing for a severe and dreadful future– from El Toro, soldiers took off high into the air as pilot warriors, dreaming of saving people and countries with their powerful art. But then, no war came that had to be defeated, and the soldiers finally moved on, leaving their homes, their long running fence and the old, waking control tower behind. 

With the peaceful silence that laid itself upon the land, it seemed that all life had left El Toro. There were no more rattling helicopter blades slicing through the air at night. No more hectic screams of armored men. No more shaking grounds in the nearby town. It all was so quiet. And yet, there was life.
In the shades of the machines, in the dust of weapon powder, in the tunnels beneath the open fields, life had flourished over the decades, which had slowly transformed El Toro into a great park.
 Adapting in a very curious evolutionary process to their peculiar and protected environment, plant and animal life started developing their own wonderful forces, which carry the potential to fight environmental risks and indeed, save people and countries.

 To our misfortune however, the plants and animals of El Toro are largely ignorant to their powers. Having evolved under conditions of central control and broadcast commands, they will keep roaming about without taking a single action for rescue. What they need, are instructions to move. 
But how do we go about making contact with those creatures and possibly find out how to make use of the powers they have?

Many of the features are yet to be discovered and tested, however the few I have learned of and saw actually working during our first survey of El Toro, we are happy to share here with you:

Mini Bull Bombs
The most prominent animal that comes to sight on El Toro is a species of miniature bulls. Due to their constant diet from the battle training grounds, the bulls’ poo is highly explosive. Unattentive walking around the field can therefore be lethal.

Flower Rockets
Rather guided by coincidence than scientific deduction, we discovered the magic features of these flowers: When throwing the bulls’ dynamite dung accidentally into an open blossom, the plant snapped close and started shaking up and down in tense intervals, when suddenly taking off into the sky. We believe that the flower must have learned from the rocket launches conducted on the base. What surprised us even more, was that the flowers would orbit the earth as satellites, sending signals to us when spotting endangered areas on the planet.

Metal Toads
The first danger that the satellite flowers encountered, was the high amount of trash floating around in space. Pieces of worn out shuttles and stations had formed dangerous clouds of metal outside the earth’s atmosphere. For the risky cleaning job, our water control recommended the use of ‘Metal Toads’. Metal Toads had been discovered residing at the swamps of El Toro that are saturated with metal wastes. In the stage of tadpoles, the toads shine really like bullets.
We launched the toads in space in a suitable leafshuttle. A special valve mechanism allows the toads to have their magnetic tongues stretch out to capture the metal scrap. However, by sending more and more toads to space, the accumulative magnetic force of all the toad tongues together resulted in a distortion of the earth’s magnetic field, creating a lot of confusion among the planetary orbits.