Toadfish Monastery

Quote from: Darlica on July 15, 2010, 01:26:57 PMThat makes perfect sense in a Lovecraftian world, the less sanity you have, the less will the sanity loss that you will suffer by facing an Old One or their offspring affect you.

The sanity loss isn't so much Lovecraftian-related (there's a wee bit, but mostly she's shielded from the worst effects,slightly by her leviathan but primarily by the fact that her mind, like most Captains', has become very flexible when it comes to things like this) as it is lifestyle-related.

Yes. More Call of Cthulhu than UA.

I'm rather unable to pin down just how bad it is on the "OMFG CTHULHU WILL EAT US ALL AND WE ARE DOOMED AND THE UNIVERSE HATES US" scale.

Marie manages to go toe-to-toe with horrible Lovecraftian monsters, and win.

On the other hand, she's about as mentally healthy as one of that egg in the old This is your brain on drugs commercials, if the egg had been thrown on the ground and stepped on repeatedly before being thrown onto the oven.

Should you ever read a horrifying story about the consequences of a Prince's desire to see what happens when He does just that, know that it's all your fault. 

/goes off to write the idea down.

No doubt there's a Prince doing that in Chicago.

No offense taken at all. In fact, I positively love Unknown Armies, and the idea that maybe i'm just tired would fit well into it has made my day.

Also, again, feel free to throw out questions (and, as well, any ideas as to where you think this may be going, once it's a bit further in and you have the lay of the land, since I'm trying to give specific impressions and encourage certain theories, and I'd like to know how well I'm succeeding, and whether or not the game is being given up sooner than I'd expect).

Transcript Two begins

MARIE GRAYSON: Hello, Doctor Thurgood.
SHEILA THURGOOD: Hello.
MG: Have you been well?
ST: Very good. How have you been, Marie?
(pause)
MG: I've had a bit of an unpleasant surprise this weekend, but it's all par for the course, I'm afraid. I'll manage, and laugh about it, a year from now.
ST: Would you like to talk about it?
MG: No, that's quite alright. Thank you for the offer, but it's entirely my own matter to deal with. I'm afraid that you'd only muck things up, if you don't mind me putting it bluntly. (pause) My favorite color isn't blue, by the way. It's orange. I just figured I'd clear that up. Everybody thinks it's blue. Damn my name.
ST: Could you tell me about your father?
MG: Sure. I am most certainly not harboring a secret desire to kill my mother and take her place as my father's wife, regardless of what Freud thinks.
(pause)
ST: I'm not entirely sure it was Freud who said that. Oedipus complex, certainly, but I don't he was the one who came up with the Electra Complex.
MG: My aunt is... an interesting character. I like her. I think it's because of her face.
ST: Her face?
MG: She has this utterly, utterly unremarkable face. So very ordinary. You would forget it in an instant if you saw her in a crowd. But the way she's got her hair— it hangs just below her ears— frames it so that it looks positively brilliant. (MG chuckles) Brilliant. I like that word. Brilliant. It's like water, flowing out the mouth. Brilliant. (MG chuckles) Sorry. Where were we? Ah, yes. My aunt. Her face sets the tone, I think.
ST: What do you mean?
MG: She just looks like this utterly unremarkable person, and then there are all these little tiny details that make her into something... Something very interesting.
ST: That's how many people are.
MG: No. Most people only turn out to be even more unremarkable, if it's at all possible for them to do so. My aunt doesn't really like new people. I don't know why. I don't remember anything happening in my life, so it must have been before. Perhaps she'd simply heard too many of those stories about strangers as a child, and she never grew out of the fear. Aunt Mandy is quiet, when she's with somebody she doesn't know. She has a way of just sitting there so calmly, so statuesque, that she almost seems to suck out all the sound in the room. Whenever she talks to anybody, even me, she just stays still, so very still, like this...
(short silence)
MG: ...until you're done talking, and then she talks, in turn, and then she goes statue-like again. It's creepy. But wonderful. I love it. These little quirks of hers. She plays the piano, and she sings, and she's a master, we all tell her, but she doesn't have the confidence to do anything about it. She won't even do any singing in the church choir.
ST: You go to church?
MG: Of course. The... Evangelical Covenant Church, actually. Not the... Not the usual sort. We just... sort of fell into it, you could say. We go more for the people than the doctrine.
ST: Of course. What do you think of the soul, Marie? What do you think it is?
MG: The soul? I... (MG chuckles) Oh. I see. Right. It's hard to describe. I don't believe in an immortal soul, though. Perhaps it does last a long time, but even if it does, it certainly doesn't last forever. (pause) I believe that the soul is a sort of extension of ourselves, rooted in our biology. Maybe that's the best way to put it. Our souls develop as our bodies do, and they most likely are extinguished when our bodies die.
ST: Then what is the soul? What does it do? It is us, so to speak? The part of us that says "I," Marie?
(pause)
MG: Perhaps. (pause) I guess I could describe it best as being the Ego, or the Super-Ego, or whatever. One of the two. I haven't read Freud in a long while. But among the many other things it does, the soul restrains our Id. A person with two souls is no better off than a person with only one, but a person with no souls lacks all desire to restrain his urges, except so that he might be able to indulge in them more effectively. A restraint born out of cunning, not conscience. Souls can get sick. Souls can get stronger, especially the more it is tested without failing. Souls can be ripped out of you, and other things can be put in their place.
ST: Is that was you believe happened to John?
MG: Imagine that his soul was a person, and his body was an automobile. It is not a perfect analogy, since cars cannot move on their own, but... (pause) John's soul restrains him. It keeps the car going on a certain course. The Horror Artist ripped him out of the car, and had this been all it did, John would have continued his life, but concerned only with indulging his desires. Which would not be an inherently bad thing.
ST: It wouldn't?
MG: If a person really has a desire to do something which we would consider to be good, that person will still have the desire to do it, even without a soul. Losing the soul doesn't make a person evil. You can be a saint, even without a soul. It just takes that person and scrapes off everything but the Id, and cores out the sense of self, the sense of "I." (pause) That's as close of an explanation as I can give, but even most animals have something sort of like a soul.
ST: Interesting. Could you tell me about your brother?
MG: Howard's eleven. He has these thin little glasses that are always slipping off the edge of his nose. He's a bit small for his age, and I think this is why he's so quiet and shy. He's oddly intelligent, when it comes to some things. Relationships, feelings, and bugs. Very observant, especially when it comes to people. (pause) And bugs. We've had some conversations, here and there.
ST: About what?
(short silence)
MG: About me, mostly. I'm... I'm not exactly close to the rest of my family.
ST: I thought you—
MG: I lied. Honestly, couldn't you tell? (MG sighs) There are five children in my family, aged eleven and under. You're right. I don't talk to my father all that much. I have no idea what he does in the factories now, but whatever it is he does, he does it fifty hours a week. Once a month, he's gone for the weekend, doing drills with the Guard, plus another two weeks in April and two in October. He nearly kills himself trying to make sure to always have dinner with us, and then always have enough sleep so that he's fully alert in the factory. Mom sells shoes. Aunt Mandy is a bank teller. They both work a lot of hours, and while there's always one of them at home, it's rare that there's the both of them, before it's time to start making dinner. There's shopping to be done. There's cleaning to be done. I don't know the last time Aunt Mandy has been able to sit down and play the piano. Maybe it was a few months ago. Is it too much to ask that the seventeen-year old girl take care of herself?
ST: And what do you do?
MG: I take care of the garden, and I go to school, and I make money. (MG chuckles) I find it to be a point of pride that, for several years now, I've been able to feed myself only on what I myself have earned, and that I've usually been able to put a little bit more towards what the family in general has. (pause) I'm not just self-sufficient. I actually make a surplus. I'm a contributor.
ST: That's important to you.
MG: One of the few things that are. We don't really talk too much. There never seems to be enough time, and we're always so tired. I usually just read, when we have dinner together. Somebody says something, and I respond, if it's directed at me, and life goes on.
ST: Why don't you put the books away, and actually talk to them more?
MG: So that we don't find out that we don't have anything to talk about, anymore. I've grown up, and they don't entirely realize how I've done it. They don't understand how I think, or what I've gone through, and while that's the clichéd statement every teenager is required, by law, to say, it's true, in my case. Maybe Father has had some similar experiences, but if he's ever been hurt the way I have, physically, it certainly hasn't even been this young.
ST: How have you been hurt?
MG: I've had bones broken. I've had crushed glass rubbed into my skin. I've been burned. I've been stabbed countless times.
ST: I...
MG: Something wrong, Doctor Thurgood? Perhaps we could go on to the ink blots? Would that make you feel better?
ST: Maybe we should—
MG: What time is it?
ST: It's been about twelve minutes, Marie.
MG: Thank you.
ST: So, I'll hold up the ink—
MG: Yes, yes, I know. 
ST— Well, I'll hold up the cards one by one. Just tell me what comes to mind.
MG: It's a face of some sort. No, more like the... like a sort of bony plate over the top of a head. Not a human head. More... canine. Four eyes. Ears or short horns or something, on the side. Next, please.
(pause)
MG: Another face. His chin is red, and there's more blotches of red paint over his eyes. It looks three-dimensional, his face. Splotches of red all over his cheeks. Before you start thinking I'm a psycho, I think it's paint of some sort, not blood. His chin is a bit spiky. Two little prongs or whatever coming down from the bottom. I want to say that they're sensory appendages, or something. No teeth. So he's old. Do you see the... the spiky things?
(short silence)
ST: I believe so. But let's keep the discussion until afterwards.
MG: Of course, Doctor Thurgood. Next, please.
(pause)
MG: Thank you. Two women, bending slightly over some object. Their heads are pointed, almost. Their chins are, that is. But their heads look kinda masculine. They might be ripping the object apart. There's a sort of film thing between the two pieces. Their legs are very stiff and straight. There's some sort of flying animal— no. It's a bowtie. Sorry. Oh, and those red splotches are a pair of falling monkeys. I think they were dropped. They seem like smart monkeys. They wouldn't have just fallen. Unless it's a display. It looks like a show, kinda. They seem rather bored with it, not frightened, like they would be if they had been dropped. Next, please.
(pause)
MG: A dragon. A short-necked dragon. Very short-necked. I find it very hard to believe that Rorschach didn't make this one intentionally. All the details are just right, even the shading for where the eyes should be, and those little things trailing off the nostrils, and the spikes coming off around the eyes. I can't tell if those are tails or legs, at the end, though. I don't think it has legs at all, though. It probably spends its whole time just, you know, in flight. Like those birds. You know what I'm talking about, right? The birds?
ST: I believe so.
MG: Well, you're full of the same answers over and over, aren't you?
ST: I am trying not to affect the test.
MG: Next, please.
(pause)
MG: Thank you. A pretty butterfly. A pretty black butterfly, but there have to be black butterflies, too. It has a sort of fake head, on the other side, but it's so close to the body that I can't figure out how it would be a help at all. If something tried to bite it, it would still tear off half of the body with the fake head-and-antennae thing. Next, please.
(pause)
MG: Thank you. One of the crappers, I think. An elilogog. It's got the wings, and the cilia, and everything. Well, no tentacles, but nothing's perfect, right? It sort of gets too thin, as it goes up. (pause) Next, please.
(pause)
MG: I feel almost like a machine, going through that "Next, please. Thank you," routine. This one's a pair of apes or monkeys or something. Maybe gorillas. Silverbacks. "Humans" was on the tip of my tongue, but the faces are, I don't know, too stretched out, or protruding too far. You know what I mean. They're facing each other, and they're so fat that their bellies are just hanging out, and touching each other. Their eyebrows are very high up— perhaps they have very large eyes?— and they're engaged in a staring contest. Next, please.
(pause)
MG: Thank you. A seashell. Many different colors, of course. A sort of rainbow seashell? There's got to be some sort of scientific name for that. It also looks sort of like a faceplate. The blue splotches cover the eyes. So whatever is wearing it has to have some means of seeing through the mask. Or something. Perhaps that's all it is. Enhancing equipment. It really only looks like its covering the eyes and the mouth and the ears and such, and then some extra, to strap everything together. Well, that's got to be the nose. So perhaps it's not as human as I thought. That would be an oddly-shaped nose. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to get perspective with most of these blots, so that might explain why the nose looks weird. It seems that the mask opens up in the front, splitting in half. Next, please.
(pause)
MG: Another dragon. Perhaps the same one as before, but I doubt it. The sides of the mouth aren't quite right, but it looks more stylistic than a representation of an actual lack of cheeks, or whatever those would be. It's just staring straight ahead, out of the picture. On the top of its head but, to the back, there are a pair of horns. Next, please.
(pause)
(indistinct noise)
MG: It looks like somebody dissected a yuggoth. All the parts are just... spread out on the table. So very colorful. I don't doubt that's what a yuggoth would look like, if you opened it up. The wings must have been ripped off. All I can see are the manipulatory limbs. The left mass of blue could be the head of a lizard. There's this one really dark dot that looks like an eye. The right splotch of yellow looks like a canary, with a really big eye. It's irritated at me for some reason. Or maybe it's just irritated at the world. The two middle streaks of yellow could be birds, too. Ostriches or emus. The green below it could be a weird mustache. And the orange bits could be odd carrots. Maybe squashes, somehow. The white could be the head of a strange-looking tarantula with a sort of frill standing up over its head, like one of those things that dimetrodon had. A sail, that's the word. And really big fangs. Like knives. But really, it's a dissected yuggoth with all the wings torn off.
ST: That's all there is.
MG: Well, that was more interesting than I'd thought it would be.
ST: Indeed. (pause) You mentioned quite a few odd things.
MG: Oh really?
ST: I'm not familiar with some of them. Like the cr— the elilogogs.
MG: Can't swear, eh?
ST: It's not proper, Marie, to do it so flippantly.
MG: Damn right it's not, Doctor Thurgood.
ST: Marie...
MG: You were just about asking for it, you know. A lot of us call them crappers because that's why they're important. Nowadays, they're dead, except for a few stragglers here and there. But back in the day, billions of years ago, they were spread all over the place. Now, what do you think happened? (chuckles) They defecated, or did something close enough to it— I don't know if it needs to be done in some particular fashion to qualify for the term— and they had trash, and rotting food that they'd throw in whatever sort of thing passed for a dumpster, for the elilogogs. And that's what we grew from. That's where life sprung forth from, here on Earth, and uncountable numbers of other worlds, all through the entire universe. One of the nice side effects of this is that, in many cases, you don't have to worry about not being able to eat anything, on another world. (pause) You could call them the Old Ones, or the Predecessors.
ST: That's a very... interesting story. What about the yuggoths?
MG: The yuggothr, actually. You add that "r" sound at the end, when it's plural. It's just a happy coincidence that the plural of elilogog adds an "s" like our language does.
ST: So what are the yuggothr like?
MG: Angry, bitter, paranoid. Nasty, but most of them have a good sense of humor. (laughs) Talk about alien psychologies all you want, but there are two universal languages that everyone understands: Mathematics, and black humor. (pause) Damn, that sounds racist. I mean dark humor. Void... Now you're going to write down that my problems are all related to racial insecurities or something...
ST: I know what you mean. Morbid humor. Gallows humor.
MG: Exactly. Thank you. The yuggothr are fatalists. They're pretty much resigned to what's coming.
ST: And what is that?
MG: Death. Extinction. I mentioned it before. They're the ones who served Him Who Is Not To Be Named. They were all Its Captains.
ST: You're throwing out too many confusing things at once. Who is that? Why are you switching between "Him" and "It" when you're talking about the same person? What do you mean, they were its captains?
MG: Its Captains, doctor. Honestly, one would think that you'd never developed the ability to hear when something's capitalized. Capital "I" in "It," like if we were talking about God and He— or It— was gender-neutral. Him Who Is Not To Be Named is one of the Princes, great big nasty things that are hard to understand, and which frequently come in conflict with each other. A full-out fight would break their playground, though, so They use us as proxies, when they aren't using us for other things. Or as They use us for other things; the Princes are mighty good multitaskers.
ST: And the Captains?
MG: I'm a Captain. The girl who saw possibilities, she was a Captain. We've all had one of our souls torn out, and replaced with a shard of the Prince we serve. The thaulsaunt, the knughst, the Chosen, the chutan, the Knights. We're the biggest and the baddest of the Princes' pawns. We're used to being limited to only a few spatial dimensions, we know how to stay hidden and below the notice of people like you, and we come up with stupid plans that our Princes never would have thought of, and which, against all odds, somehow manage to work. We're more capable than any number of cultists, and this is our home turf, and we're not about to be outmaneuvered by a bunch of pathetic leviathans who think they can just steal a body— if they even bother to do that— and then do as they please.
ST: Leviathan?
MG: The Princes are big leviathans. The biggest. There are littler ones. The... The thing that was using John... (pause) That was a leviathan. They're not native to this universe.
ST: I see...
MG: Hey, I'm out of here in thirty-odd weeks. What do I care if you think I'm insane? How much longer have I got?
(pause)
ST: You're just a little bit more than twenty minutes in, Marie.

SHEILA THURGOOD— Well. Yesterday was... eventful, to say the least. Intriguing. That might be a better word for it. Yes. Intriguing. And very confusing. I'm certainly going to have an interesting time with Miss Grayson.

She was asking about the time quite a few times. I guess it's not all that out of the ordinary. She didn't want to be here, after all. Besides the matter of her uncle, who apparently committed physical abuse against his wife, Marie seems... not close, but not distant, either. A good enough relationship, I would think. What teenager is best friends with her parents?

She is very close to her sister, though. Her closeness in that regard more than makes up, I think, for any distance elsewhere in the family.

I did indeed check up on her uncle's records, and no, there weren't any marks on him that implied physical harm, besides the obvious ones signifying the entry and exit of a bullet. Was this an attempt to get me off-balance? I do wonder. She was provoking me a few times, poking me, so to speak. Testing the waters. I think she was trying to get a feel for me just as I tried to do the same for her. If she'd driven me off in exasperation, I don't think she would have been exactly disappointed, either.
Marie doesn't really seem all that close to people outside of her family. The girl says she has friends, bur she's slipped a few times, saying something and then quickly changing to something else. Her mixture of past and present tense at one point, when talking about her friends, intrigues me as well. I admit that I don't really believe what she says, about having friends.
There are so many things she's said which are just so confusing. Half of the things she's saying, I don't know if she really believes these things, or if she's just playing with me, trying to see how I react.

(pause)

I'm starting to think that this delusion of hers runs a lot deeper than her boyfriend's death. If I'm right, her belief that her boyfriend was possessed by some sort of monster— the Horror Artist, I believe she called it— is merely one piece of many, and fits neatly in a much larger pattern.

She doesn't really seem to be all that out-of-the-ordinary. Really, my comments about her clothes were born more out of that coat she has, and the military boots, than the rest of it, although her jeans were unusually scruffy. The skullcap is just standard fashion amongst the youth nowadays, despite how odd I think it looks. She was very neatly groomed, but that's to be expected. Her father is a militaire, a reserver, after all. I must say, that's a very nice improvement. I look back on my own generation, at that age, and I have to admit that I'm a little bit ashamed. We weren't exactly very proper-looking. Of course, whoever happens to be listening to this tape will no doubt have seen that firsthand. (ST chuckles)

Marie has a cool— almost cold— and confident demeanor. She didn't really give away much with her facial expressions. Even when she laughed, there was barely a smirk on her face. There were a few times, when she seemed stressed— perhaps distressed is a better word— and she seemed to just "freeze." She would only talk, and look out of the corners of her eyes, as if she were trying to keep a watch out for something. I don't think she's really totally conscious of it. She usually talks with her hands, like a lot of people, but her gestures are sort of cut off. They don't go as far as they do with most people. And it stops entirely, when she freezes.

Something interested I noticed, just a peculiar little thing which I found oddly amusing, was how she shakes her head. She does it with small, rapid movements, barely moving her head more than an inch. It almost looks like she's shivering. (ST chuckles)

She's cold. She doesn't appreciate naivety, and she doesn't really care for couching things in... I don't know how to put it... In fairy tale terms? She's realistic, practical, I think. A bit too much, perhaps. She's worried about her humanity, and caring about people, which is very good. I'd be worried, if I was forced to wonder if I were dealing with a sociopath, but she seems to be alright. She's just distant from people. It's a defense mechanism. I think she's lost some people, or seen too many people hurt.

The dream she mentioned, it started when she was twelve, and she's always twelve in that dream, if I was understanding her correctly. I'll double-check next week. I wonder if it has some sort of rebirth symbolism, perhaps something important happened to her when she was twelve, a sort of rite of passage for her. Or perhaps she's simply had a very odd, probably terrifying, dream off and on for the past five years, and I'm simply reading way too much into it.
She talks about souls, but she doesn't seem to believe in a life after death. I'll have to ask her what she considers the soul to be, or what she means when she talks about the soul. Perhaps she's just using it as a metaphor.

(pause)

Marie doesn't seem to be entirely concerned with matters of legality, and while it's not entirely clear as to whether or not she herself would do something illegal, I don't think she really cares if, in the course of doing something questionably legal— or even unquestionably legal— she helps someone else carry out an illegal act.
She mentioned "Captains." I wonder if she's perhaps part of some sort of organization? Perhaps she is involved with something illegal. Youth gang? Or just a gang?

(pause)

Shortly before we ended, she muttered something. I still can't make it out entirely, but I've listened to the tape a few times, and it sounds like she's saying "I've changed my eyes a dozen times in the past hour, and you haven't noticed once." I'll have to figure out what she meant by that.

Her grandfather has appeared in the conversation, dancing around the edges. She seems reluctant to talk about him, and I'd wager that the only times she mentions him, it's an unintentional slip.

I'll play along with whatever stories she comes up with. I think I'll have more success trying to position her so that she sees how they're wrong, for herself.

End of Interlude One

Bowie's the Goblin King, as my dear appy Pistachios would be all too quick to point out, and death's but an illusion for him.*

*Although if she were pointing this out, there'd also be some more attention paid to how hot he is, etc etc, and also some questioning as to whether or not you knew of some good Sarah/Jareth smut. But I am not Pistachios, and so you are spared this.**

**Although now, while I may not be interested in Bowie/Jareth himself, I -am- very interested in seeing a Dark Crystal/Labyrinth crossover.

When you go "Is thaaaaat..."

Yes. Yes it is. It is he.

And he is just as much of a bastard as you think he is (or possibly more, if you're underestimating just how much of a bastard he is).

---

It was around five o'clock, on an unusually chilly Saturday, that it started.

The sound of a great many flutes preceded his arrival, as she went along the sidewalk in Downtown, still on Patrol, and a few minutes away from a reading break.

"We-e-ell," said a voice behind her, dragging the word out into three punctuated syllables. "If it isn't the Star-Eyed Girl, my fav-o-rite Cap-tain in allll Chicahhhgo," it continued, pronouncing every singly syllable as precisely as possible, and drawing out several of them, his tongue clicking audibly with nearly every word.

"Hello, Mr. Messenger." Marie sighed, and turned around to face the Black Man, a title which had caused some confusion with certain people when it had been used. While he did usually take on more African features, from his skin to his eyes to his tongue and his teeth and even his clothes he was as black as night, and it was from that (or so Marie understood; she may have been wrong) which he got the title. It was like someone had sculpted a tall, slim man out from tar. Although, his sunglasses had gold rims.

A black, ropey creature was draped over his shoulders, and wrapped around his neck, like some sort of snakelike, hissing scarf, and the creature's single umbrella-like wing dangled over his right shoulder, hanging by his back.

"Oh. Are you not haah-py to seeee me?" Messenger grinned, and sat down on a wooden bench, tapping the space beside him, in a beckoning gesture for Marie to sit beside him. She wasn't entirely sure if the bench had been there a minute ago. Things always appeared when Mr. Messenger needed them, and once they appeared, they had always been there.

She sat down. She didn't really have much of a choice.

"I've seen you eleven times in my life, and each time, you've brought bad news," she responded, trying to ignore the sound of flutes. It was Beethoven or something.

"Now, now, now... I'm huuurt. I really am. I've given you warnings, Blue Star."

"I would really appreciate it if you would stop calling me that. I haven't been Blue Star for several years now."

"You never stopped being Blue Star. You will never stop being Blue Star, deep down in that spot where you're missing one of your souls/essences/bindings." Like a leviathan was speaking, she heard multiple words and meanings all at once. "You never stopped being what you are. You simply started reacting in a hostile fashion whenever people called you by that name, but I, oh I... I'll still call you by the name, even a hundred years from now."

"God forbid that I should still be forced to see you, when I'm one-hundred-and-seventeen. If I ever live that long. Tell me why I haven't killed you?"

"Because I'll be hitting my big one billion mark, this next March," responded the Black Man, "and that means I've got faaaar more experience than you. I could kill The Redlight if I so pleased."

Marie snorted. "You're so full of crap, Messenger. You're not a day over forty million years."  Whether he could kill The Redlight was not brought up for debate. She wouldn't have been able to argue convincingly against the idea, when she herself believed that he could do it should it prove entertaining for him.

"Mebbe," responded the Messenger to Him in the Gulf. "Mebbe. It does get so hard to keep track, after the first ten million or so. You go through quite a few calendar systems by then. Mebbe I'll keep a little eye on you, make sure you last long enough to see for yourself, eh?"

He pulled out a black cigarette the inside of his pocket, and pressed it against his finger before it was stuck in his mouth.

"Why do you do that? It's not like it actually, you know..."

"Says you, Blue Star."

"I swear, you call me that one. More. Time. And I'll—"

"Ah-ah-ah," he said, waving his finger slowly. "Don't make threats you can't carry out... Blue Star."

She closed her eyes, and counted to ten. And then she kept on going, until she hit eighty-four. "How do you look the way you do? You can't possibly be human."

The flutes were playing that hound dog song by Elvis now.

"Do you want the truth, or a lie?" She stared at him. "Stupid question, I know. I'll give you the answer you need, though, whether it's a lie or not." He grinned, baring his pitch-black teeth. "I keep all my fleshy bits on the innnn-siiiide and it's my leviathan that the world sees."

"Why do you talk to me so often?"

"Cause I like you, Blue Star," he said, and she had to restrain the urge to hit him. It would only get her killed. Unless he thought it was funny. Then he would merely laugh, and that would only infuriate her more.

"Why are you talking to me now?"

"I heard about your lossss, Ma-reeee. Take my con-do-len-ces. They're false as fool's gold, and just as worthless. He did you well, and you were far more entertaining, once you met him. Cheers, my good sir!" he called, waving to a passing man. The man nodded a hello, and moved on. He did not, of course, notice anything at all odd about the Black Man. If it was possible to ignore or explain away a situation, it was done.

"That can't possibly—"

"Yer right. I also come to give you a warning."

"Of course. You never bring good news."

"Now that's not true. I brought you whiskey, last time."

"That's not news, Mr. Messenger. The deg slaver in Chicago, that was your news, and the me-deg still have it out for me, I'll let you know."

"But you saved those poor pe-o-ple, in the end."

"While you were entertained."

The Black Man smiled. "Of course! But yes, yes, I do indeeeed come as the bearer of less-than-entirely-pleasant... neeeews."

"Big surprise."

"Oh, don't be like that." Mr. Messenger stood up, and shook his head. "A king approaches this world, and His sign is yellow."

"Can you possibly be any more cryptic?"

"I can tryyyy, if you'd like, but I have a feeling that you were not se-ri-ous-ly ask-ing."

"Gee, whatever gave you that idea?"

"I do not, unfortunately, know all the facts," admitted the Messenger to Him in the Gulf. "I do, after all, regularly wander around the universe, and it's far larger than you think it is, with many layers. I don't have nearly enough time to know everything about e-ve-ry-thing. Do I know more about this king, though? Yes. Oh yes. I know very much. But it is not nearly so en-ter-tain-ing to watch you, if you know everything from the beginning." He paused. "And if you fail, this is only one world, and you were obviously unworthy of my at-ten-tion. Tax-iiii!" he called. "A century is a long time, a decade is a long time, even to many Princes. Immortality does not mean that the days pass by any quicker, only that you have more of them, and a shard is not simply the Prince it came from but in miniature," said the Black Man, before he disappeared into the vehicle which had pulled up.

Marie swung her legs back and forth idly, wondering if there were any Captains she knew how to contact, who were still alive, and sane, and not trying to kill her, and while the answer was not "no," it became such once she went on to decide if she could trust the names she came up with. Perhaps once she knew more about this "King." Probably not, though.

Eventually, she said "Thank you," and then wondered why she said it. Not because the Black Man wouldn't have been able to hear it, but because he would have known what she'd said, no doubt, even had she not wasted any breath on the words.

I put this up on Dark Lord Potter today, since maybe i'm just tired did not, ahem, hit off too well over there (and I can certainly see why, even if they're the first to think it horrible*), and I thought that I may as well put it up here, too. I'll try not to put too much stuff up here ever. I'll certainly never put a fic up here when there's maybe i'm just tired and a second fic being actively reviewed, but even so, tell me if I'm starting to push things a bit much.

*And please, be brutally honest even down to the littlest detail which you don't like. Sometimes DLP just has different tastes, and other times they're the only folk who are calling it like it is.

As a side note, since Glory's name is a tad close to being a Sueish-sounding name, now that I think about it: It was actually drawn from a list of actual names, back from when you could call your kid Abstinence or Tribulation or He-Came-Into-This-World-To-Save without your kid hating you for life because of how humiliating it is. Given her background, the name seemed like one which would be rather preferable to, say, Meek Cheshire or Peace-of-God Cheshire.

Anyways, here it is. Take it apart, dissect it brutally, and tell me how it's a piece of horrible crap. I have another story which almost got accepted by a publisher (it was too long, and they had too much of that particular genre) but I think that this one is better.

___

She had to knock for nearly two minutes before he appeared at the door, looking exasperated and with a young child attached to his leg. A thin man with mixed features, mostly Middle Eastern but with a tinge of chestnut, Jacob looked like he couldn't have been more than forty years old, but Glory Cheshire knew that his appearance couldn't be trusted on this matter.

His cheery grin would have been infectious, had Glory been coming here for a more jovial purpose.

"I'm sorry about the wait, miss. How are you doing today? Brr... It's an awful cold that's out today, isn't it?"

"I'm doing fine," Glory answered.

"And you are...?" Jacob leaned his head forward.

"Glory Cheshire." She blinked. "And you're Myriad-officer Jacob Bindan of the Yellow Army."

He drew his head back, and looked behind him before he responded, in a hushed voice. "What are you doing here? I still have a year of lea— Oh God. Oh." Jacob's left hand moved of its own accord, but of course he wouldn't have any weapons on him. He had been playing with his children just now; that wasn't the best time to be carrying a gun or knife.

"Don't pray to people you outrank, Myriad-officer," Glory responded, frowning at him, and she looked down at the young girl, still tugging on her father's shirt in an effort to get him back to their game. "Your father and I have some business to discuss. You go run and play now, okay?"

The little girl just stared right back at her, until her father put a hand on her head, ruffling her hair. "Go on, Sarah. I'll... I'll..." He swallowed. "Go tell your mother that I just got picked up. It's an emergency, and I'm sorry that I couldn't tell her."

"Okay papa!"

Jacob closed the door behind him, and he and Glory were all alone in the cold and the falling snow. He shut his eyes. "Can we do this somewhere else?"

"I just tried to get rid of your daughter so that she wouldn't have to see, Myriad-officer. I'm not going to leave your corpse on the front step for your wife to find." Glory started to walk off.

"Thank you," he said, before he began to follow after her.

"I'm slightly surprised that you're not trying to kill me. I always am. I'll never get used to it, I think."

"We don't operate all that differently, Mi— I suppose you don't have a rank I can use?"

"Military man to the end, Myriad-officer." Glory smiled. "I was a sergeant before I got drafted into the special corps. If you must, it'd be nice to hear someone call me that again."

He nodded to himself. "Right. Sergeant Cheshire." There was a hint of a smile on her face when he said that. "If you operate anything like my people, there's got to be at least seven other people who could snipe me out right now. I'm usually quite humble, but it would be foolish to deny that I'm important. I'm actually quite surprised that you found me. And that you managed to remove anyone who was assigned to keep an eye on me."

There was a fork in the path they were walking along, and Glory took the one which led into the woods near Jacob's house. She removed a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and handed one to the myriad-officer before she lit two of her own, and then placed it back. "Last smoke before you die. It's harder to kill like this, you know."

"Excuse me?"

"Killing like this. All close and personal. Having a chat with the person you're going to kill, moments before you're going to do it. Assassinating isn't normal warfare," Glory explained as she looked at the trees. "I'm a warchild," she continued, speaking softly. "I was, aheh, I was conceived in the trenches outside Crisseroon, about two hundred years from now, and a decade later, objective time, I was born in a Green Army hospital while my father was dying half a mile away in Big Barrel.

"I was disassembling guns soon after I could walk, and it's harder for me to sleep in perfect quiet than amid the sound of screams and gunfire, because gunfire was something you had to deal with in the trenches, but my mother's platoon spent the sixth and seventh years of my life in a jungle where silence meant that there was a predator in the area, and I never lost the instinct that associated silence with possible danger. I still have a habit of talking just to make noise, so that I don't get unnerved. My aunts and uncles were Gygax Platoon, and half of them weren't human, and I had siblings enough, even if none of them were blood kin. It wasn't a bad life. Mom died when I was twelve, and when I was fighting off in the Deller Ridge I met another instance of her. What are the odds? She never had me, never even met Dad, got into the War in a completely different manner, and we talked for twenty minutes before my group had to move on. She wasn't really my mother, but she was still proud of me, and that was..."

Her lip trembled for a fraction of a second, and the myriad-officer barely caught it. "'Bittersweet' is probably the best way to put it." She swallowed. "I don't want to do this, really. Part of me is glad that I got put in the specials, because I can serve The Green so well, and Dad would have liked that, but... a bigger part of me wants to fight like my parents and my dad's parents did. I miss the old platoon. I miss fighting on the Fringe, where we're never supplied well enough and half of everything is scavenged. I feel like I'm betraying them in some way, going beyond what they did. It's a whole different battlefield that we fight on. It's hard to kill people like this."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I want to be..." She shook her head. "You're going to die. We both know this. I can give you a few minutes to come to peace with this before we move on to the formalities, can't I?"

"I don't mind." He lit up the cigarette with the proffered Bic and inhaled slowly.

"Why do you fight?" she asked him.

"Excuse me?"

"We all have our reasons. Barely any of us kill specifically for The Green or The Yellow. Too few of us know enough about the War to possibly be patriotic or whatever term you'd like to use."

He inhaled again before he answered. "I blundered my way into it. I was already military before I joined the Yellow Army. They say that they still don't know how the battle wound up on my world, although I suspect that it may have just been a test on their part. My world wasn't due to enter the War for another forty-eighty years. But they saw what I could do, even when, without warning, I was up against weapons and monsters nobody on my world had conceived of, and two weeks later, my commanding officer is telling me that they got a request for my transfer to a different base. Next thing I knew, I was getting my introduction into a war across time and space."

"You've been on leave for long?"

"A little more than a year."

"She had your eyes," Glory pointed out.

He folded his hands behind his back. "This world, and this period, happens to be valuable to The Yellow. They have timepaths running up and down all over this century and the next. I made a deal with my superiors, when they recruited me, and with every fifty years of service, I get two years of leave here, starting one month after I last left, subjective to my wife's time. She thinks that I work occasionally for an intelligence agency, so it won't be totally unexpected if she gets a notice of my death."

"Smart."

"You're tired," Jacob observed.

"I prefer to kill people with a jury-rigged rifle, not a ceremonial handgun."

"How long have you been fighting, Sergeant Cheshire?"

"Twenty-eight years since I picked up a rifle," Glory answered. "I don't know how many people I killed when I was poor bloody infantry, but they don't ask you to remember their faces. I don't feel bad about not keeping count. I've carried out eighty-nine assassinations that I can remember, and there are two-hundred-and-twenty days since I joined the specials for which my memories can't account, because not even I had enough clearance to know what I was doing on those missions. It's funny how everything becomes so painfully precise with the specials. I don't try to keep count. Even so, I somehow manage to do it."

"I think that I fought against Gygax Platoon a few times in the past, Sergeant Cheshire. They would have been part of the Chamber Regiment, yes?"

Glory nodded as she nursed her cigarettes. She was on her third pair now. "I'm surprised that you know that."

"I always had a head for details. I could even name off a few of the squads in Gygax if you gave me time to think about it. I fought Chamber a few times over my many centuries. Every last member was a credit to The Green. And you're a credit to Gygax Platoon, make no mistake about it, Sergeant Cheshire. We get asked to do things by the Colors, and often they're things we aren't fond of. But you have an important job, one that's indispensable."

"Why are you doing this?"

"My men— and women and beings of various other genders, when they had genders— looked to me for an intelligent word on more than one occasion. And not just an intelligent one, but a wise one. A comforting one. I wore many hats, and one of those hats was being the provider of words to settle their minds. I see no reason to not help you, even though you're soon to kill me. After all, when it comes to it, the only difference between you and me is the color of our uniforms on the battlefield. When it comes to it, we're both just as clueless about what the War is being fought for. Just like everyone else, we have to come up with our own personal reasons for fighting it."

He turned to her. "It's not your fault, or mine, that we're where we are right now, with me soon to die, and so there is absolutely no reason for me to not attempt to give some comfort to a good soldier. I would have been honored to have had you under my command."

"Thank you, I suppose."

"Think nothing of it."

Glory looked away, looking into the trees. He wasn't too far off when he made his guess on the numbers. There were twelve people, actually, all through this area, both to make sure that nobody could interrupt the assassination, and to make sure that the good myriad-officer, should he suddenly decide to make a futile attempt at resisting, would have more bullets than brain matter in his head in the second that he tried to attack his appointed executioner.

The pair of cigarettes in her mouth had been burnt down to stubs now. She let them fall to the ground, and pressed a boot down on them. "You've been responsible for dozens of successful campaigns. You've been a myriad-officer of the Yellow Army for eighty years, but the lack of promotion isn't due to a lack of opportunity. On the contrary: you were offered a promotion no less than seven times before they got the picture and stopped asking, and each time, it was turned down because you felt that you wouldn't be able to handle a larger command as well as you can handle what you have right now. Brilliant, simply brilliant, but that brilliance peaks with about a thousand people under your command. You can handle more than that well enough, but not as well as with just a thousand."

She closed her eyes for a second, inhaled, exhaled. "We sent twenty thousand crack troops to take a starport town and with your help, a single myriad, a single force a thousand soldiers strong, made sure that a small town of twelve hundred people would be immortalized forever in the minds of both armies, but especially The Green's, as the killing fields of Canterbury. The Yellow knows as well as we do just how important you are. We spent fourteen years figuring out where you were and how to get to you."

The myriad-officer smiled sadly. "Canterbury? I never heard of it. I suppose that this is why I'm dying today."

"Only four hundred of our people survived those killing fields and we still didn't get the starport. You pulled an Atlantis out on us and, if anything, you did it better in Canterbury than we did in Atlantis. We needed to take the town in order to keep The Yellow from reinforcing that region. We needed to keep those reinforcements away so that we could take that region, so that we could split the continent down the middle. Once we took the continent, we would have taken nearly the entirety of that world's industrialized zones. Our victory on that world, Brahe, would come with the taking of Canterbury, and after that..." Glory sighed. "With that foothold, and another three hundred years, we could have taken an entire spiral arm in that galaxy."

"How long from now?"

"The killing fields began five years from today, subjective to your time. You would kill all but four hundred of us over the course of two months." Glory lit up another pair of cigarettes and inhaled deeply. She let her breath out slowly. "Now? Brahe's a meat grinder. Neither of us can afford to give up there. We may win yet, but literally millions of soldiers will have died to do what would have, without you, needed only two hundred thousand deaths. We thought that that would be the worst-case scenario, but we never knew that they had slipped Myriad-Officer Jacob Bindan into Canterbury."

"Thank you, Sergeant Cheshire. For letting us do this away from my family."

"The only difference between you and I is the color of the uniforms we wear on the field of battle," she repeated back to him. "This is standard protocol, in the end; when there's nothing you can do to stop it, the least we can do is not kill you in front of civilians if we can manage it."

"Still, thank you."

A pause.

"An operation like this is going to have three components," Jacob said. "We're the first one. The second one is laying down a temporal anchor, so that no matter what The Yellow does, no amount of time travel will change the fact that, on this day, I was terminated by your side. The third one is a distraction, a diversion. An assault on a scale large enough to give The Yellow no choice but to divert their forces from trying to stop my death, and the temporal anchor, in order to keep this entire world under their control." Another pause. "An entire planetary invasion, all for the sake of a single assassination. Of course, you'll be leaving once you're done, unless you were intensely successful. Where are you attacking?"

"We're setting up sun-bombs in Angelou City and Trilhaum. One of them will go off in..." Glory looked at her watch. "Two minutes ago, actually."

"No." He looked about ready to take her neck in his hands, even though he would die before he could move them a foot. Only his absolute stillness was keeping the others was sniping him out right now, no doubt.

"Don't worry. No more than one of them is going to be going off. Prematurely. Not nearly at full power and, again, only one. We don't want to boil this world any more than you do. But The Yellow, even though they know this, won't be able to risk it. Maybe we accidentally put The Psycho in charge. Maybe one of them will accidentally go off, and with the first one already detonated, the second will have an exponential effect. So they will choose between you and this whole world. They will choose between Canterbury and this world."

"They'll... choose this world."

Not simply a statement. A plea to be reassured that, as valuable as he was, they wouldn't choose him. He had his children on this world, after all.

"They'll choose this world," she told him. It was true, after all.

"Thank you, Sergeant Cheshire."

"Are you ready?"

He nodded. She put out her cigarettes and stowed them in a pocket for later.

The gun which she pulled out was a three-chambered revolver made from the sort of alloys which could only be made in zero gravity. The bullets were inscribed with prayers, written in a font so small that the naked eye would barely be able to tell that they were there.

"Myriad-officer Jacob Bindan of The Yellow, you have done honor to your Color. You have done great things. No soul, Green or Yellow, could reproach you for your deeds. You could have done no better than you have done in your life." She pressed the gun to his forehead. "We honor you by giving you a clean death, and giving you the reason for it, and it is an honor for me to be your executioner. Go forth and prepare a place for us, if there is a world beyond this which we have not reached."

There was a sound like thunder, and the myriad-officer fell to the ground.

"Doco le verish, da Jacob Bindan," she muttered and then she turned and walked away. Past the crew moving in to verify his death and send word to activate the temporal anchor. Past the snipers set up to make sure that everything would go cleanly. Past the little road leading to the little house in which he had lived, and where his wife and his children lived, and did not yet know that he was dead, and were just now learning that a city of tens of millions was bathed in flames.

Within the hour, Glory would be on her way home again, home again, centuries and timelines and galaxies away, and be fast asleep, dreaming of her own young son, and of a time when she didn't have to talk to people before she killed them.

As I recall, David Bowie is not alive, in fact.

Oh. Is Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog not considered a trustworthy source of information on this forum?

I won't definitely be able to access the computer tomorrow, so here's an update early.

---

ST— What do you do, during the day? Do you have any sort of schedule that you adhere to?
MG— I wake up at the stroke of five o'clock, and I take some bread out of my stores, and supplement it with whatever else I have at hand.
ST— Your stores?
MG— I tend to... acquire things, during the course of the week. Food, little trinkets, extra ration stamps. My jobs, you know.
ST— What jobs have you done?
MG— I did some babysitting, once, back in Newport, but it wasn't, really. It was more like "let's-pretend-that-Marie's-babysitting-and-pay-her-a-few-nickels-so-she-feels-like-she-earned-them." There was somebody else in the house the whole time, and no, it wasn't some guy in a clown suit in the kid's bathroom, using the upstairs phone to freak me out. Besides that? Odd jobs. Took out trash, walked dogs, pulled bodies out of the water— hey, get that incredulous look off your face, doctor, I'm not kidding, and it pays damn well, too. I've thrown newspapers at people— sometimes really at them, when they've made me angry, or I'm just plain angry at everybody in general— and I've picked up trash in the street, and once I helped to build half a house. Odd jobs.
ST— (ST chuckles) Indeed. Although I hope you don't pull bodies out of the water anymore. That—
MG— Sounds illegal? It's not. (pause) So far as I know, anyways. The guy who was hiring, he was for the city. Sure, the way they got in that river was no doubt illegal— although I suppose that at least a few of them committed suicide— but you have to have somebody fish out the bodies. It's unsanitary, just leaving them there, and you can't exactly expect the gangs to clean up after themselves.
ST— I assume you've had similarly odd jobs besides that?
MG— Oh, yes. Perhaps I'll tell you more about them, if I get exceedingly bored. You would be surprised how much you can get paid, as a thirteen-year old girl, to stand on the corner and— damn it, doctor, not that. You could let me finish before you start getting that horrified look on your face, and I'd certainly have appreciated you not instantly assuming that I'd go and whore it out. I'd stand out on the corner and act as lookout. Lookout. Not whore. Lookout.
ST— I get your point. I just—
MG— Yes, yes, half your patients are probably whores. I get that. It'll do you some good to remember, though, that I am not like the rest of your patients. I'm entirely sane, for one thing, or at least as sane as I could ever be. I like bacon, but I don't eat much meat. I save most of it for my siblings and cousins.
ST— Back to your daily routine, then?
MG— You really need to keep up, doctor. Honestly, is it that hard to keep track of a conversation? We took a little detour, and now we're back on track. You're welcome.
ST— I'm only going to take so much lip from you, Marie. You're not going to snap and turn into an emotional wreck at the slightest sign of irritation on my face, so don't think I'm going to simply let you talk like this forever.
MG— Why do you do it now?
ST— Because you're venting. You're talking more, did you notice that? I could barely get any expression out of you at the beginning, and right now, talking like you are, you're letting me get another look into your head.
MG— Right-o. Sure. I usually try to get in at least a chapter of whatever book I'm reading at the moment— Tom Sawyer right now, for the seventy-fourth time— and then it's time to finish up any homework I have for school. Or start my homework, rather, which is how it is, most of the time. I do my chores in the victory garden we've got going. The garden's my responsibility. It doesn't take as long as they think it does, though. I've got a routine. Then I study, and then I'm out the door for school, or a walk around the neighborhood, if school is out. If I took a walk, and it's a weekend during the school year, I take a nap, to take the edge off of my exhaustion.
ST— Exhaustion? Why are you exhausted?
MG— I don't get much sleep. When I get sleep, I sleep fine. It's just getting that sleep which presents the problem. I do some reading, after my naps. I used... I see friends, on these days, too. In the afternoon, whether it's a school day or it's the middle of break, I go on Patrol.
ST— Patrol?
(pause)
MG— (MG chuckles) I guess I'm still playing Detective Blue, even at seventeen. I spend three hours making my way through this city, checking the places that usually turn up... interesting things, and any other places which have been interesting, lately. I keep an eye out for anything odd— including jobs— and then, if I haven't run into anything, I head home. Most of the time. Half of the time. It's dull. I usually take fifteen minutes to read, three or four times during Patrol.
ST— If it's dull, why do you do it?
MG— It satisfies a need.
ST— What do you mean?
MG— I just need to do it. I feel good, after it. And I... I do jobs, then. Any odd jobs I've come across. (pause) Most... (pause) Half of the time, I'm home, and so I eat at home. I like talking to my family. Sometimes I help Mom and Aunt Mandy make dinner. Or I just make it myself. The other half of the time, I've brought some bread along— I put it in this pocket— and perhaps some other things, and I supplement it with a little bit of whatever I've collected so far that day. I read, then. At those times, when I'm eating at home, I'm usually on a roof somewhere. I like to look at the city from above. (pause) Maybe I haven't really missed that trait of my mother's. I just don't climb trees, in order to get above the ground.
ST— What do you do after dinner?
MG— I follow up on anything I think it important. If it's really important— a good job, or something— I ditch Patrol altogether, but in most cases, I'm of the opinion that I need to make sure nothing else crops up in the meantime, you know? I'd hate to lose a job just because I'm focusing too much on another. My day is pretty much over by half past nine o'clock, and I head home. I usually get back just a little before ten, and then I do schoolwork, and turn in at the stroke of midnight. I don't even bother to get undressed. (pause) Before you get around to that question, if I could wish for anything, I'd wish for three extra hours in the day. (MG chuckles)
ST— What's your favorite game?
MG— Tic-tac-toe.
ST— I certainly didn't expect that answer.
MG— Nobody does. Nobody does. I love how it's nearly impossible to win. Pretty much the best you can hope for is to force a draw. But every so often, when your opponent overlooks something... That's really nice. I win far more games than I've ever lost.
ST— What about your least favorite?
MG— Checkers. It's the most pointless game ever devised.
ST— Some might say that about tic-tac-toe.
MG— Tic-tac-toe keeps you paying attention. You slip up once, in a hundred-round game, and you'll have lost the whole series, because nearly every game is a draw. You can't miss anything, not even once. But checkers? It's the most pointless game ever devised. You move a bunch of little chips and jump them over each other, and, and... It's like chess, for people too stupid to remember how to use more than one kind of piece. I can't help but think that it was invented by some poor fool who was trying to teach his four-year old how to play chess. The kid can't remember all the pieces, and he keeps on stacking pieces on top of each other, and finally his father just goes "Screw this. I've got a—"
(pause)
ST— Marie?
MG— What time is it?
ST— (ST sighs) You can go now, Marie.
MG— Thank you. (pause) Oh, right. "I've got a new game. It's called checkers." Goodbye. I suppose I'll see you next week, if I haven't been killed by then.

End of Transcript One

MG— I get along well with most people. With other people, I just keep my mouth shut, most of the time, and I don't say anything, and we do very well, ignoring each other in peace. Everyone wins. But Isabelle... If there's anybody in particular that frustrates me, there are a few others, but Isabelle takes the prize.
ST— Why?
MG— It's her naiveté, you see. She reminds me of... Well... (pause) But she never grew out of the phase where she believed that "True Love" existed.
ST— You don't believe that?
MG— No. Did I love John? Yes. I would have killed for him. But I'm just as aware as the next person— okay, more aware, probably— that it's just all a bunch of hormones and firing neurons and instincts and probably some conditioning in there, too, making me connect "happiness" with "John Fallman." There's nothing special about it, there are no soul mates.
ST— That's rather... cold.
MG— Come on, doctor. Of all people, you, a therapist, should know what I'm talking about. Maybe it's cold, but it's also true. Isabelle? She's arrogant. She's none too clever. She always makes a fool of herself, and she always gets in the way. She's boy crazy. She's a suck-up. She doesn't like being told what to do. She likes Italian food, and she likes rock and roll, and those are points in her favor— even if I only like the latter because it's surprisingly nice to waltz to— but she also likes any boy who'll talk to her. (pause) But I could deal with her, if this was all she was.
ST— But?
MG— She's the damn school bicycle, doctor, and it's a wonder she hasn't gotten pregnant yet, and the most amazing thing of it, the thing that makes me want to knock her senseless and leave her to wake up in a vat full of Welcome-to-the-Real-World, is that she's not even doing this crap for the sex. She actually thinks... (MG laughs) She actually thinks that whoever she's laying with, this night, actually loves her, and that this one is The One. The only thing you need to do to get her skirt off is to talk to her a bit, pretend to care about her, and make her think that you actually give a damn about her. If I didn't like men, I could probably do it. She's going to end up with four kids, and a husband who ditched her for good after six years of ditching her for the night, for whores and booze, three times a week. That is why I can't stand her. That is why her naiveté makes me so furious at times.
ST— Would you describe yourself as being compassionate, or self-involved?
MG— I'm compassionate with my family, certainly. Especially little Zelia. But the past... Over the past few years, I've grown up. I've matured. The past few years have taught me that I can't help everybody, and they just need to solve their problems alone, sometimes. I'll help when I can, but I really don't care, when I can't help them. (pause) I used to feel a lot for people, you know, but over time... I guess I faked indifference, even to myself, so I wouldn't eat myself up inside, and it's turned into real, honest-to-God authentic indifference and lack of giving-a-care. I find it hard to care about people as more than a general concept. I do things for this city— and just the city— just as many times as— maybe more times than— I fight for the people living here, nowadays. Will I help somebody if I've got the time, and I'm not too busy doing something else? Sure. But I do it because it would...
(short silence)
ST— Marie?
MG— I do it because that's the human thing to do, not because I actually want to do it.
ST— Are you afraid of losing your humanity, Marie?
(long silence)
MG— Yes.
ST— Why?
(long silence)
ST— Alright, then. You don't have to answer. But fear is a human thing, too. You're still human, Marie.
MG— Fear is a lukkoth thing, too.
ST— Excuse me?
MG— (MG sighs) Never mind. Let's move on. Don't you have something else for me? Or have we wrapped up all thirty-and-such sessions already?
ST— How do you sleep, Marie?
MG— Well, first I close my eyes, and—
ST— I trust you're not going to turn into an emotional wreck when I tell you to stop with the crap, so shut up, and stop with the crap. You know what I mean.
MG— (MG chuckles) I didn't know you had any bite to you, Doctor Thurgood. Or bark, for that matter. (pause) I don't have any trouble falling asleep. I'm tired, every night. No insomnia or anything. A few times, I've fallen asleep before my head hits the pillow. Don't you dare try to get me on some meds for narcolepsy, though. I don't have any problems there. And it's not like the drugs would work.
ST— Hm. Do you have to wake up early at all?
MG— No.
ST— No bad dreams at all?
MG— I didn't say that. I have bad dreams. (MG sighs) I was walking outside, by the street. It's dark. Just a little bit before eleven o'clock. I was hit by a car. It seems I was hit by a car. You know how you seem to know all sorts of things in dreams. I'm twelve years old, even now. I'm lying on the street, and I don't know if I have a single bone that hasn't been broken, and I'm cursing my stupidity, because what sort of idiot walks around late at night, and I'm bleeding on the ground, and...
(short silence)
ST— And?
MG— And It appears. My Prin— The Redlight. Bleeding, empty eye sockets, and ash-gray hands coming out of tattered sleeves, and a voice like glass being scratched across a blackboard, but it's like a thousand buzzing flies, in my dreams. It tells me that It needed someone to protect the city, as It sleeps. I take the deal It offers me. (pause) It rips out one of my souls and replaces it with a tiny shard of Its own self, and the leviathan in me squirms, assuming control of the parts of me that are broken, and repairing what is now its own flesh. And all that time, it whispered in my ear, in a voice that sounds like a mix of The Redlight's and my own, that it would protect me, just as I protected the city. And like the fool I was, I believe it.
ST— You... mentioned souls in the plural. Do you have multiple souls, in this dream?
MG— Everybody has multiple souls, Doctor Thurgood. Well, women do. And a few guys. It's all got to do with biology. Crazy, messed-up biology. Maybe non-Euclidean biology. (MG laughs) It has to do with the X chromosome. Or something. Women have two souls. Most of the time. You know how it is. K'k't'k sometimes have a dozen. It doesn't matter, most of the time. You die and you're dead. Souls aren't all that useful, in multiples. It really doesn't matter, except for when one gets torn out.
ST— Have you been having this dream long?
MG— Since I was twelve, or thereabouts. It's a sort of on-and-off thing. I'll have it every couple of nights for a few weeks, and then I won't have it at all for the next three or four months, unless I do something stupid. Then I'll get it again for another night or two. Like a reminder. "Don't be an idiot, girl."
ST— What sort of childhood did you have, Marie?
(MG laughs) It was nice. Really nice. I hunted for the Green-Eyed People in my grandfather's coat, and I played card games with him, and looked for Greeks whose last name wasn't Pavlou, until we moved away from Newport when I was just barely eight. In Chicago, I played solitaire, and I still built pillow fortresses outside, because Mom was still bugging me about getting some fresh air. We had a lot of pillows. A lot. You've got no idea how many we had. It was ridiculous. (MG laughs) In my fortresses, with a flashlight, I'd read. And things went south when... Well, stuff happened.
ST— What happened?
MG— Things. It's fine. I'm the portrait of being fine.
ST— What's your first memory?
MG— I was four. It was my grandmother's funeral. My father's mother. There are only glimpses of it, here and there, and nothing else in my memories for a long time. But that's the first thing I can remember. My grandmother was lying in a casket, looking so peaceful. So peaceful. She'd died of cancer.
ST— Do you know what kind it was?
MG— No. I never asked. I never saw a reason to do so. I never really knew the woman. Sure, she was my grandmother, and she probably gave me milk and cookies or something like that, whenever I came over, but I don't remember any of that. I have no emotional investment in her or anything. So what reason is there to force my parents to bring up old wounds? It'll only hurt them unnecessarily.
ST— You're still human, Marie. You care about people, see?
MG— I never said I didn't care about my family. I'd kill for them. I'd torture someone slowly for Zelia. It's other people, people like you, that I don't give a damn about unless I make an effort to do so.
ST— If you weren't human, you wouldn't care about your family. Take it one step at a time.
MG— That's how you lose it, doctor. I've seen it time and time again. Take one step away from humanity, take another, and another. Listen to your leviathan, whispering in your ear as you sleep, weaving fond fantasies in your dreams as you sleep, telling you what you want to hear, giving you approval, telling you that everything's alright, telling that it's going to be okay, it'll protect you, it cares about you, and it's lying, the bastard, but you don't care about that, because the world would be so nice if it wasn't lying, if you really could trust it, and when you do your job, Holy Spirit, it feels so good. (MG sighs) And you take little steps away, because that's what you need to do, to keep on going. Sometimes the leviathan takes you by the hand, and leads you away. Most of the time, you just stand at the top of a high building, looking down at the streets so far down below you, lights like little fireflies, and you can't help but think to yourself how pathetic they all are, going about their lives, without a single suspicion as to what the world is really like, how terrible and cruel it is, and how wondrous, yes, because it is wondrous, too.
ST— But they don't see any of that?
MG— No. You're all blind. (indistinct mumbling, see "post-session thoughts") I used to be really scared. I'm not, anymore. I've grown up. I'm not scared anymore. I'm a little worried, but that's okay. I'm okay. I'm fine. I'll be alright. And all you people, you're all so blind, and the worst part of it is that you don't have to be. You aren't blind by your nature, or because somebody ripped out your eyes.
ST— Why are we blind, then?
MG— You're blind because you choose to be. You're blind because you think— and rightly, I have no choice but to admit— that you'd be a lot happier if you didn't see all these extra things. So you don't see them. My grandmother's funeral isn't really clear, though. Just snatches, here and there. My first real memory, the first one that's clear as day, is from when I was six. It was a rally.
ST— Sgoldstino.
MG— Of course. We were losing France, and we all knew that Portugal was going to be next, and that would be it. The Bolsheviks would have Europe, except for that dinky little glorified airstrip of a country. And if France fell, all they'd have to do is cross the channel, and even that would be gone. (pause) I was six. I didn't know about half of what was going on. I knew that Russians were bad, and we'd been fighting them since the Thirties, but really, I was six. I didn't understand. Except... I knew everyone was scared, and so I was, too. And then there was Sgoldstino, standing there on the platform. He looked so wise, so powerful. He was so sure of what he was doing. He knew that we would win the war, that all we had to do was pull together. Sgoldstino was scared, too, you could tell, but that just meant he was human, like the rest of us. Because the important thing wasn't about whether he was scared or not. It was about whether he was still doing anything or not.
(long silence)
ST— Marie?
MG— I'm worried, a little bit.
ST— About what?
MG— On the one hand, I know it has to be done. If we want to have any chance of beating them, we have to do it. We have to manage our resources. We have to ration. Pretty much every guy I know is in the Guard, and most of the ones who aren't in it are just too young to enlist. (MG sighs) I won't complain if we do away with money entirely, and the only way anyone gets anything is with the stamps. I won't complain if they stop making it a choice between not enlisting and being able to vote, and they just force everyone to enlist, or start up the program with the women, too. (pause) But I can't help but worry that we're going to have to be like them in order to beat them, and when we win, are we going to go back?
ST— The President says we will.
MG— I know. I know. (pause) But things can go wrong, Doctor Thurgood.
ST— Tell me about Zelia.
(short silence)
ST— Marie?
MG— She... She adores me. Idolizes me. If you gave her the right clothes, and the right haircut, she could easily pass at some sort of displaced-out-of-time five-year-old me. She's like my little identical twin, who just so happens to be more than a decade younger. She already has her hair in a crew cut, just to look like me, because Mom got tired of freaking out whenever she saw Zelia with the scissors, trying to give herself the haircut she wanted. She wears Howard's t-shirts, so that she has baggy shirts like me, and she's got a pair of boots I sto— got for her.
ST— You stole a pair of boots?
(pause)
MG— It depends on what you mean by "stole," doctor. The guy who was wearing them was dead as a doornail. She looks so adorable, trying to walk around in those big old oversized boots, determined to wear them everywhere she goes, and never, ever trip over herself. She trips anyways, of course. She's hyperactive, and don't you dare give her sugar after six o'clock, and she's independent, and she loves to run around, and climb trees. Like Mom did, back in the day, when she was young. I never saw the point in trees. Green-Eyed People and Greeks certainly weren't going to be hiding up in them, and if they were, I'd be able to see them.

EDIT Portugal and France were in the wrong positions. I moved them to their proper place.

One thing to be figured out is what the consequences of expulsion from the Cult of Fashionable Gentlemen are. We've determined, though, that refusing a direct Challenge to Walk-off would result in losing the powers of your Relics Moste Fashionable. This is one of the reasons why Kabuli sent in his soldiers to kill Yang Wang, instead of going in after the man himself; had he done so, Yang Wang could have issued a Challenge to Walk-Off.

Generally, the winner of a Walk-Off takes the Relics Moste Fashionable of the loser. However, the Challenger can instead dictate what will happen if he wins. The Challenged then replies with what will happen if -he- wins, and the Challenger may, if these terms are unacceptable to him, withdraw the Challenge to Walk-Off. For example the Sorcerer of Style, Abu Khan, requires that his opponents offer up their scalp should he win. The terms may otherwise violate the Code.

It has also just now been determined over IM that the Challenge to Walk-Off summons up a group of ghostly Fallen Gentlemen to judge the competition.

One of the Popes might be such a judge.

Quote from: Aggie on July 09, 2010, 10:15:42 PM
o.O

....but not necessarily in a bad way.  Could actually work as a low-budget indie flick, for cult consumption.  Anything too slick might seem a little too Kill Bill.

/realizes that he needs to actually finish watching those movies

Still, there'd actually be less violence than it seems like, at first. Only Kabuli (who broke the Code) and the pimp's two men (who aren't Fashionable Gentlemen, despite their looks, and so aren't bound by the Code) would actually be capable of dealing in a violent fashion (fortunately for everyone else, they can figure out ways to protect themselves, either through ingenuity or their Relics Moste Fashionable).

Quote from: Sibling DavidH on July 09, 2010, 08:49:54 AM
I really like this.  Also, a play makes a nice change from the more usual narrative.  When are the squidlings going to make their appearance? 

Here and there. I'm afraid that it'll be a bit until anything EXCITING happens, but you should notice a familiar face on Monday, during the prose interlude.

Also, it's not a play. It's just that this portion of the story (as with many other portions) is a transcript of a recording.

---

And Transcript One resumes...

MG— I like Mrs. Catton.
ST— Excuse me?
MG— My school. You wanted me to talk about it. Mrs. Catton. My history teacher. I like her.
ST— Ah.
MG— She tends to get very focused on things. Give her a good conversation— I find that Rome, especially Byzantium, does the trick best— and she'll forget about everything else. Half the time, she doesn't even notice that the rest of the class is leaving. The rest of my class gives me a bit of respect that I'd been missing before, for being the one who usually takes the fall.
ST— The fall?
MG— I'm the one who draws Mrs. Catton into the "zone," as we call it.
ST— Do you do it because you think that the rest of your classmates like you better because you distract her?
MG— (MG snorts) I honestly don't care what they think. It's not that bad. I like our discussions. Sometimes, I think that she's not as madly focused as she seems to be. We still do pretty okay on the tests and quizzes, and if she never has the chance to hand out homework, she doesn't have to spend any time grading it, now does she? (pause) And perhaps she'd rather talk with one interested student than lecture to thirty bored kids who would rather be anywhere than her class, or school at all, for that matter.
ST— Do you do well in school?
MG— Mostly. I find mathematics, by Mr. Jefferson, a bit hard. It's all intuitive jumps for me, and I can never quite do it longways. I'm used to systems which make less sense, if that makes any sense.
ST— No, it doesn't.
MG— Well. Mr. Jefferson does what he can to help, but he's not especially patient, and really, I don't blame him for being irritated with me at times.
ST— What is your family like?
MG— We're very close. My mother can be a bit of a tease, but she means well. She just doesn't usually notice when she's hit a sore spot.
ST— Has she ever said anything that hurt you?
MG— Not really. She sells shoes right now.
ST— What about your father?
MG— He's with the April-and-October Army Guard. He just got back from two weeks of training to find out that his little girl had killed her boyfriend, and was being put in therapy. Father sounds like one of those people who's swallowed a dictionary. It's a family trait, I think, although I certainly haven't inherited it, so it seems to have stopped with him and his brother. But my grandfather was like that. I remember that. I remember a time when he seemed like he knew everything there was to know. I never exactly got shown otherwise, actually.
ST— Has he always been with the Guard?
MG— Can you not be?
ST— You can be active, Marie.
MG— (MG chuckles) And now I feel exceedingly stupid. No, he's never been active. He probably would have done it, when the Bolsheviks invaded Spain, but I was three at the time, and he decided that raising me would be more useful than being just another body on the front lines.
ST— What does he do now?
MG— Factory work. Planes, I think. He switched over to it only a few years ago, and he doesn't really talk much about it.
ST— Or do you not really ask much about it?
MG— He doesn't talk about it.
ST— So your oldest sibling is eleven?
MG— Howard? Yes.
ST— How did you feel, when he was born?
MG— Are you asking if I was jealous or something?
(pause)
ST— That wouldn't be an unexpected feeling, but I wasn't asking about that specifically.
MG— He was a tiny crying lump that ate, cried, and crapped. Mom watched over him, but what did I care? I was busy making pillow fortresses in the backyard because Mom wanted me to get some fresh air, and playing detective in my grandfather's coat, searching for the Green-Eyed People.
ST— The Green-Eyed People? Who were they?
MG— I don't remember. Maybe they weren't anything special at all. I had forgotten about the whole thing for the longest time.
ST— You've always been a loner, haven't you?
MG— No, not at all. I admit, I didn't really have much of a social life in Newport, but when we moved here, I had friends. Lots of them.
ST— "Had," Marie?
MG— Had, have, whatever. I'm fine. It was a small town. (MG sighs) Look, Doctor Thurgood. I have friends. I talk to people. I'm not some sort of freak who holes up in her room all day and night and doesn't talk to anybody at all. Newport was full of old people and annoying people, and I was too young to think old people were people, and too young to have enough patience to deal with the annoying people. So I played by myself. Nothing wrong or odd with that. Look it up in whatever textbook you learned your psychology nonsense in.
ST— No. Nothing wrong or odd. You're entirely correct. I was just remarking on the tense you used. What sort of music do you like, Marie?
MG— Anything you can waltz to. And you can waltz to a lot of things, if you've got a good enough imagination. John was so-so, but I had enough imagination for the both of us, when it came to it. (pause) I suppose your papers—
ST— No, but I still know. John Fallman. Your boyfr—
MG— So. Questions, right? That's what we're here for? You ask, I tell. Not the other way around, right. Questions. Now.
(pause)
ST— Why don't we go back to Newport for a little while? You seem to have fond memories of it. I think that might be better for both of us.
MG— Sure.
ST— You were talking about the games you'd play. Did you just wander around your house as you searched for the Green-Eyed People?
MG— And the Greeks. Don't forget the Greeks. I looked for them, too.
ST— But the only Greeks were your neighbors.
MG— Yes. (MG chuckles) The Pavlous. I eventually asked them about their great-great-great-great-great-grandfather's experiment with dogs, and asked if he'd done anything with Schrödinger's cat.
ST— Excuse me?
MG— Pavlou, Pavlov. I was young. I got things mixed up, and Pavlov was a thousand years ago to me. Like with Rhode Island and Rhodes. I spent a full minute just saying "great" over and over and over again until I finally said "grandfather." They were most horribly amused. My father was very interested with Schrödinger's cat idea. I just thought that it was a horrible thing to do to a cat. Did you know that Pavlov died the year after Schrödinger started talking about his paradox? I know somebody who carried it out, although it was with lizards, not cats. She didn't care about lizards. When she went to the box, she saw a dead lizard. But she also saw a living lizard. And, apparently, several lizards which were dead and alive to varying degrees, or changed from dead to living and back again in a cycle lasting a few seconds. She saw all the possibilities, she told me, all at once, sometimes shifting back and forth, here and there, and sometimes she'd respond to things I was going to say but decided not to.
ST— Who was this?
MG— I don't know. We kept our masks on. We always keep our masks on. She was two years older than me. I think she's dead now. There was this creepy house, where we lived in Newport.
ST— Excuse me?
MG— You were asking about where I played my games. I'd wander through the whole town, but the creepy house, that was Detective Blue's secret base. It was old. Really old. Nobody had lived in it for, oh, must have been.... Fifty years? The thing was falling apart. We'd tell each other stories about it.
ST— Who would?
MG— The neighborhood kids. They were annoying as anything, but still, when somebody was telling one of these stories, everybody else kept their traps shut, and the kid who was talking wasn't annoying so long as he kept telling the story. We were terrified of that old place. But I still snuck in all the time. Nobody would bother me there.
ST— How much of a factor was that in your decision to go into the house?
MG— Not as big as you'd think. It was scary, whenever I'd hear the stairs creak, but it was such a good scare. I always loved it. There were all sorts of games I played there, all by myself. I could be Detective Blue and play another game at the same time, after all. I was very good at multitasking. (MG chuckles)
ST— So why did you like it so much, if it wasn't because you could be alone?
MG— It was so old. There was a history there. You could feel it. It felt like my...
(short silence)
ST— Like your grandfather?
(short silence)
ST— Where do you go now?
MG— I go to drug dens, Doctor Thurgood, and I threaten to put holes in junkies' heads if they don't tell me what I want to know. I go to seedy apartments, and I break up screwed-up events that make it look like somebody was getting the wrong idea about the proper relationship between a man and a goat. (indistinct noise, thought to be fake gagging) I stand at the top of fifty-story skyscrapers besides some sort of many-limbed, dragon-winged snake with a lobster for a head, talking to him about all sorts of crap as it and I wait to check the imports coming in from Neptune. We talk and we talk, and I realize that I'm pretty damn lucky, all things considered, because my world isn't gone, and the human race hasn't been reduced to eleven thousand refugees, all hunted by Him Who Is Not To Be Named.
(long silence)
ST— Do you feel like your life is in order?
MG— Not really, I guess. Things are really chaotic. It's all a mess. There was this one time I just found myself standing on the roof of our house. I still don't know how I got there. Maybe I was so tired that I didn't really notice what I was doing, or something. Probably. Maybe I was sleepwalking. Maybe my leviathan took over the piloting job. That possibility worries me. I'm not always all there. The only time everything snaps together is when I'm fighting.
ST— Do you want children, Marie?
MG— Of course. Well, I want children. I don't know if I should, or if I'll ever be able to.
ST— Why?
(MG snorts) Just because...  But I want children, yes.
ST— If you could keep only the things you could fit in one suitcase, what would you pack?
MG— My grandfather's leather coat, food for a week, Gordon Pym, Les Misérables, The Raven and Other Poems, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, At the Mountains of Madness... Oh! Hygienic items. I can't forget those. A few blank notebooks, too. And pens, of course. I don't think I'd be able to fit anything else in.
ST— So you like H. P. Lovecraft, then?
MG— Some of his stories. He was pretty funny, sometimes.
ST— Funny?
MG— To be honest, doctor, I've seen loads worse.
ST— Would you mind giving me a bit more detail?
MG— Yes.
ST— So who's your favorite author? Poe or Lovecraft?
MG— Only those choices?
ST— You mentioned Gordon Pym, and a collection of Poe's poems, and then two of Lovecraft's books. Unless you prefer Hugo?
MG— You're a reader?
ST— A bit. You look surprised. Although it doesn't take a reader to know who wrote Les Misérables.
MG— Well, you're actually half-worth something. And tell that to my classmates. All they did, when I asked them about it, was mispronounce it as "Less Miserables."
ST— You judge people on whether or not they read?
MG— And know literature, and so on. Yes. Partially. Why not? It's a very good system. Perhaps there are some people worth knowing who don't read, but I've never met someone not worth knowing, among the ranks of the obsessive page-turners. Even if they were jerks, they were still interesting to talk to. Lovecraft isn't really my favorite author. It's a toss-up between Edgar Poe and Samuel Clemens. I liked The Count of Monte Cristo better than anything else that those two wrote, but I didn't like anything else that Dumas wrote, so while The Count is my favorite book, Dumas certainly can't claim to be my favorite author.
ST— So do you normally dress like this?
MG— I go for things that are simple and will last, and then out of those things, I go for the cheap. Well, the boots weren't exactly cheap, but these things will probably outlast me. (pause) That'll be easier than it sounds, though.
ST— Why do you say that?
MG— I don't know how long I'm going to live. I don't exactly... (short silence) Look, are the Russians currently kicking our asses in Portugal, or are they not? Yes, Sgoldstino says it's all going to change, but really, it's not going to change for a good many years. At best, we're keeping them contained, so long as you don't give a rat about whether or not they take Portugal. Maybe in another ten years, the tide will have turned all the way, and we'll be able to start beating them back.
ST— Do you... like President Sgoldstino?
MG— Do you really have to ask that, doctor?
ST— It's a bit unclear as to whether or not you have something against him. You mentioned how he says the war is going to—
MG— Okay, okay, yeah, I see your point. Asking if I'm a schizophrenic is probably going to get you a 'no'— maybe not, though, but it depends on which personality is in control at the time— but if it doesn't get you a negatory, you know where my problems are.
ST— I'm not... (ST sighs)
MG— Yeah, I know that's not what you meant, but if I gave any other sort of answer, I'd be insane. But no way, no, no. You're not finding madness in my politics, Doctor Thurgood. Republican, all the way. Does anybody still call it anything but the Party, anyways? (pause) Void, doctor, Mr. Jefferson at school is a damn Democrat, and even he calls it the Party, and voted for Sgoldstino for the man's past three terms. So yeah, I'm a Party girl, all the way. (MG laughs) J. J. Sgoldstino for President, all the way, can't wait to vote and put my little slip of paper in there, with all the other millions and millions with his name on it. Honestly, why do we even vote for President anymore? Four terms down, last one had eighty-eight percent in his favor, and that statistic included all the people who were counted as "abstaining," since they didn't bother to vote. Probably because they knew Sgoldstino would win anyways. Let's stop wasting time and paper, and do the voting when he dies, right? Or when the Russians get their faces planted in the concrete. (short silence, MG laughs) I still can't believe it.
ST— What?
MG— This situation is ludicrously improbably. Less than fifty years after Winthrop banned the Jews from immigrating, we got a Jew for President. (MG chuckles) Sarah, from school, is still trying to come up with ways to explain how Sgoldstino isn't really a Jew. I didn't know people were still doing that, but then I hear Sarah, not two months ago. Latest one is that he was switched at birth by accident. But damn, who cares? J. J. Sgoldstino for President, and the Party for Congress, hell yes. (MG laughs)
ST— Is there anyone you don't get along with, at school, or at home, or somewhere else?
(pause)