July 29 - The Unicycle Gang

Most of the girls who went to Sandra Day O'Conner All Girls Kindergarten lived close enough to the school to walk there. One day Mr. Samuelson, a teacher at Sandra Day (as they called it) with a background in science, came up with the idea to give the girls power generating unicycles to commute to school with.
He had outfitted the unicycles that were used in the girls' PE classes with power converters that would generate electricity every time the unicycles were pedaled. The electricity was stored in battery sized power cells that could then be removed from the unicycles and used to power the school.
It was a win/win situation: The girls had a fun and healthy way to commute to and from school, and the school had a renewable source of clean energy.
The problem came when Mr. Samuelson started organizing contests and competitions to boost productivity. Each class was divided into teams consisting of seven girls, and the team that could fill the most power cells within X amount of time would win a pizza party.
Things started out amicably enough, but it wasn't long before one particularly enterprising group of girls started borrowing some of the extra unicycles after school and taking them to neighborhood playgrounds, where they would chase down the other kids--the girls had become quite fast and skilled on their unicycles--and force them to pedal the extra unicycles and generate more power for them.
Unlike the Sandra Day girls--who had learned how to ride unicycles in PE class--the other neighborhood kids didn't have the balance to stay up on a unicycle. That, along with the girls' worrying about the kids riding off with the unicycles, was what prompted the girls to come up with the monkey bar solution: a makeshift unicycle harness that was dangled from the top of the monkey bars.
During that spring, every day after school was a terrifying time for the pre-schoolers in the once safe neighborhood near Sandra Day. One moment the kids were carelessly swinging, sliding, and playing. The next, a gang of unicycle pedaling, dodge ball toting psycho tots had shown up and was corralling them into the sandbox and forcing them up to the top of the monkey bars for five minute pedal shifts.
Threats were doled out. Don't talk. We know where you live. Before long, the playgrounds were empty. The pre-schoolers stopped coming, but by then it didn't matter to the Unicycle Gang. They had more than enough power cells to win their pizza party several times over. But more importantly, they had a taste for power.
The only problem was that the other kids in the neighborhood knew about them and never left their homes anymore, so the girls had to branch out into new neighborhoods. Every day after school they hopped on their unicycles and pedaled furiously to increasingly outlying neighborhoods where they held unsuspecting kids hostage and forced them to power up the spare unicycles they carried with them.
Sometimes they placed them on monkey bars like before. Other times they forced two kids to hold a unicycle off the ground while a third kid pedaled it. Whatever the case, they generated a lot of power.
With the pizza contest finished and Mr. Samuelson's mind occupied by other things, the girls were able to keep a lot of the extra energy from the unicycles for themselves. For every three power cells they gave to Sandra Day, they kept one for themselves. Before long they had enough to sell to a power station. They used the money from the sale to purchase a portable PlayStation 4, which they played nonstop before figuring out that it could be a huge money maker.
Short on memory, the girls' erstwhile victims from the neighborhood spent their after school hours and milk money at the makeshift arcade the girls set up in their tree fort.
Before long they had enough money to buy a portable snow cone machine, which in turn brought in more money. And when kids couldn't afford to pay for their time on the PS4, they worked off their debt by riding one of three stationary power generating unicycles they set up in the garage. A second PS4 came next. Then a third. Then more stationary unicycles.
The girls' enterprise grew, and they controlled it ruthlessly. They always pedaled around together, beaming random kids with dodge balls to keep them in line. The other kids in the neighborhood feared them, but what could they do? The unicycle gang had a snow cone machine, three PS4 machines, an air conditioned tree fort, and crazy games from Japan that nobody else had, so they kept going back.
One day, in a rare moment of clarity, one of the addicts on the stationary unicycles realized that they far outnumbered the gang members. Moreover, after spinning for hours every day after school, they were in pretty good shape. He hatched a plan wherein he and the others would steal the unicycles and . . . that's as far as the plan got, but at least it was a start.
The time came, the boy gave the signal, and the others scurried for cover as the girls pelted him with dodge balls. His co-conspirators had rolled over on him, sold him out for extra time on the PS4.
From then on, the girls tried to limit the amount of time that their power generators spent together unsupervised. They also cultivated a network of informants and moles and played the generators against each other.
Their empire grew: seven PS4s, more games, a second franchise. Girl Scout troop 54 was enlisted as extra muscle and a reliable source of cheap cookies.
The school year ended and the girls all went to different elementary schools in the fall, but that only served to expand their power exponentially. New recruits were brought in from each of the schools the girls attended. At the height of their power, the Unicycle Gang had 42 members across town running four tree house arcades, and generating hundreds of dollars in revenue every month.
It didn't last.
Their fall came not in one climactic moment. There were no betrayals, no back stabbings. They weren't victims of their own hubris. Their descent into irrelevance was gradual. The kids in their neighborhood just moved on.
They got burned out on PS4 and snow cones, and joined Little League. They discovered ponies, took piano lessons, joined the Boy Scouts, and found other things to do. And by about a year after they had come to power, the Unicycle Gang had almost completely disbanded.
Ask them about the Unicycle Gang now, and most of the kids from that time will claim that they don't know what you're talking about. But there was a time when the Sandra Day Unicycle Gang was the most feared prepubescent gang in town.