Coxa's Bad Mane Death · 7:49am Jan 2nd, 2020
So, in the last chapter of Nope I posted, the part about Coxa was a rather obvious parody of the opening of the Nintendo 64 game "Conker's Bad Fur Day". However, squirrels are treated a bit differently by Death, in that world.
So, if cats have nine lives, and squirrels have as many lives as they think they can get away with, what does Coxa the Changeling have?
"Coxa! Coxa! You're DEAD! Dead as a dodo. Deader than a..." The booming voice stopped in confusion, and a small robed bipedal skeleton walked out of the shadow, discarding the megaphone on the way and scratching his skull. "Hang on, hang on," he continued in a squeaky voice, and summoned a piece of parchment into his hand. "Coxa? I thought this said 'Conker'. You're not on this list at all!" As the parchment disappeared in a puff of smoke, he looked up at the figure standing in the middle of the room. "What's going on here?"
"Heeeey..." Coxa said, a nervous grin on her face. "If I'm not on the list... I can just, like, go, right?" She tiptoed away from him.
A small but decidedly sharp looking scythe slammed into the ground in front of her.
"Oi! Not so fast!" the skeleton grumbled. "So, what are you, anyway?"
Coxa looked at her body. Huh. Even in this realm, her alicorn disguise remained intact. She gave the skeleton an awkward grin. "Oh, I'm... an immortal alicorn!" she said. "So I don't really, eh, die, as such. I just, pop in here and you let me right back out!"
The skeleton squinted at her. "Yea, I don't think so, smart arse! Spill it."
Coxa sighed and dispelled the disguise. "I'm a changeling."
"Okay... let's see now." In a puff of smoke, a book appeared in the little guy's skeletal hand, and he started leafing through it. "Chinchilla... no, that's too far. Ah! Changeling! Not native to this world, and thus... ugh. Bloody hell. And thus... special rules apply."
The little robed skeleton looked at her. "So, anyway. I'm Gregg. Gregg the Grim Reaper. And don't you laugh! Anyway! Changelings... right. So you kind of... are you kidding me?" He looked up and glared at Coxa, before looking back at his book. "A-hem! You kind of... shouldn't die at all, as long as you got enough... love. As you know, the bloody floating chocolate polluting this place, despite being so callously discarded, was apparently made with love, blah blah blah... oh."
Gregg pointed his scythe at a meathook on a pillar behind Coxa. Stabbed onto the hook was a beating fleshy mass. "Right. Hearts. Pony hearts, apparently." Gregg shook his head. "That doesn't make any bloody sense at all. I mean, sure, with squirrels you had those tails, but, they're at least squirrel tails, so they serve as some kind of memento mori. But hearts? From a different species, no less? That's just bloody gruesome!" He briefly checked his book again. "Filled with love? Ugh. Whatever!"
He pointed a bony finger at the changeling. "Don't see this as an endorsement to go eviscerating any ponies you come across! It's purely these things you see hanging around on hooks, got it?"
Coxa looked at the beating heart impaled on the meathook, and made a disgusted face. "Wow. That's just freaking nasty..."
"Yea, it doesn't even end there. At least with squirrels, I can pluck the bastards out of the world and put them back at a point before the start of whatever they were doing. Set them back before whatever killed them, you know? Grinds 'em down eventually. But changelings apparently just... knit themselves back together. On the spot. No harm done." He grumbled to himself. "This is bullshit. Even worse than cats..."
"So I just.. take this disgusting beating bloody heart and go on my way?" Coxa asked, visibly dreading even touching the thing.
Gregg shrugged. "Apparently. I hope you fall into a meat grinder or something; see how long it takes you then to keep regenerating before you run out of bloody lives." He squinted at some finer print in the book. "Ugh. Unless you... are magically transformed into a mammal, apparently. Like, a bat or something. Because mammal revival rules clearly state you always have to be set back on safe ground." He chuckled. "Yeah, what are the chances of that happening?"
Coxa smirked, and a green fire swept over her chitinous form. Out of the fire stepped a pony with bat wings.
"Oh come on!" Gregg protested. "That's cheating! That absolutely shouldn't-" He grumbled and read on in his book, only to look up and glare daggers at her. "Take your damn heart and get the hell out."
Coxa just smirked, and tilted her head. "Well?"
"It counts, okay!" the little guy yelled at her with an exasperated voice. "So next time you fall into a ravine, or get stuck underwater, or end up in a bloody meat grinder, sure, just go ahead! Pick whatever is most convenient for you! Bloody changelings..."
He turned around and walked into the shadows, mumbling to himself. "Even worse than cats and squirrels, this. Bloody cats, with their bloody nine bloody lives... they piss everywhere..."
Much later...
Coxa looked at the big brass bourgeois boiler stomping towards her. This was it... she ran out of chocolate love, and ran out of those icky love-filled pony hearts. This was truly the end, for her...
She frowned. Unless...
She transformed just before the hulking metal beast trampled her.
"Got you now, stupid black cretin!" Gregg smirked as he walked out of the shadows, towards the center of the little death realm. "Got nothing more up your sleeve this time, do you?"
He looked at the cat-transformed Coxa sitting in the spotlight.
"Oh, you bloody bastard!"
Do the lives refresh whenever she changes?
5178887
No, but cats, as a rule, have nine lives, so in cat form, she's apparently able to claim those eight remaining ones
Also, Gregg hates cats. With a passion.
Hah! :D
5178888
He shows up later swiping at the catfish with his scythe.
On the same note, I've been saying "feck off, on your bike" for literally twenty years and nobody gets it. Such a great game to have only sold 30k units on the N64. Absolute classic nobody played, like Gex.
A fitting evolution for Coxa the First
5178991
If you mean the cat form... it's not permanent. It's just, Gregg implied before that, when transformed, the revival rules of what she's transformed in at least partially apply to her. So, whenever she dies when transformed into a cat, she uses up her fixed non-renewable set of nine cat-lives. In any other form, she uses up the pony hearts.
This does, of course, mean that at this point, until she finds more hearts, she needs to be very, very careful not to ever die in non-cat-form, because that'd just take her final normal life, and would mean the end for her
5179087
After a long time of care, when that last cat life is going to be used. She can turn into a squirrel. Then Death will just send her somewhere in the past. I can see Coxa knocking on Nope's door. "Remember me?"
5179132
Nope will actually not remember her, since she was one of the first two changelings; they were sent out before Nope was woken up.
5178888
I always wondered if that was a sort of reverse homage to Discworld or if it was just a bizarre coincidence.
5179289
Doubt it. Gregg just hates cats because they're the classic example of an entire species that's nonstandard in terms of dying.
More like, yet another thing Discworld makes fun of, I guess.
Can these Nope side stories be collected up as chapters of a compilation story, instead of being scattered across your blog posts and comments? They're too much fun to let disappear, even if they're non-canon.
5179823
I linked them in the author's notes under the chapters, so they are easily found when just reading through the story. I think that should be enough, no? And then they're linked to the relevant part. Pieces like this one wouldn't make much sense on their own, after all.
Lol