Work Text:
Reboot 5
First it’s the forking alarm. Whoever the heck Real Eleanor Shellstrop was, she must have really loved clowns, geese, and ash-kissing. Who in their right mind wants to be woken up by a goose honking?
(When she mentions it to Michael, he misunderstands and says he can change it so a real goose wakes her up in the morning. No thanks.)
Apparently, a lot of the residents love geese, so the river behind them is infested with geese who never. Stop. Honking. The solution, of course, is to just kill them all, but Chidi said it would be “morally bad” or whatever, so she lets them be.
Eleanor learns to let go of a lot of things with Chidi’s help over the coming months. She’s so grateful for the kind nerd (though she would never admit it). Living in The Good Place is hard, especially when she has to be nice to all these nerds, and follow all these stupid rules, and listen to Glenn and Anthony’s stupid faces talk about their stupid lives. But still, something else is off, and she can’t quite put her finger on it. Until one day, when everything clicks together with startling clarity.
Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason have their picnic ruined by a particularly tenacious goose who steals their picnic basket and shirts all over Chidi’s shoes after flapping its wings at him to make him drop his sandwich. They are as far away from the lake as they possible, and yet these stupid forking geese are always able to target them. Eleanor is pretty sure that geese didn’t have teeth like that on Earth, but then again, there weren’t any birds in Arizona, so she can never know for sure.
“Might as well call this place The Goose Place, am I right? These geese never stop coming. It’s kind of creepy, actually. They keep following us around, like this one ex I had who didn’t stop following me around until I got a restraining order. I never saw him again, apparently he moved back in with his mother and had to move to Florida. Yech. Sorry, Jason.”
As Chidi freaks out while Tahani is being chased by three more geese trying to eat her dress as Jason is happily attracting more by feeding them bread, Eleanor comes to a realization.
“Holy shirt,” she realizes, THIS is The Bad Place!”
Snap.