Chapter 18 — Drown
Chapter 18: Drown
“Do you like my mystical orb of fate’s destiny? I just got it. Cool, huh?”
Eyes.
The I’s have it. Your eyes, ’tis said, are the windows into your soul. I always wondered if that meant that the souls of the blind were kept in the dark. That must have been annoying. Not only couldn’t you see, but also your soul was perpetually stuck in the world’s worst nightclub of thought. In my case, I was always wondering what happens when you looked into my eyes. If you believe what the nice mares all said, they seemed to unanimously agree that I had nice eyes. Hay, back during school, I remembered with a faint smile, if ever a filly looked into my eyes, she’d always tell me I had nice eyes. Although how exactly you can have “bad eyes” was beyond me. Unless bad eyes were a sign of some condition, like a disease, in which case, you mares should feel bad for discriminating against the sick.
And as I looked into the violet eyes of “la Prophétesse” Felicitat, I could only wonder what she saw in my one remaining eye. Whatever it was, it was enough to make her practically cower into a ball as she stared up at me. I had expected her to piss herself like Cards had when we’d met.
Somewhere in the background, I could hear a record player playing a song. The singer, I realized, was Sapphire Shores, the mare who’d performed the duet with Duke Elkington.
“Harajuku Girls, you got the wicked style:
I like the way that you are—I am your biggest fan.”
“Please,” Felicitat said in a pleading voice only barely above a whisper. “Please, sénher, leave me alone.” She gritted her teeth, and a trickle of blood leaked from her nose. A blood vessel in her eyes popped before my very eye. God, that phrase sounded weird when you only had one little fleshy orb in your skull. Note that the orb is the whole eye, not just the front of it where the colors were.
“But, my dear,” I said in a voice like syrup, which oddly gave me the craving for some non-evil waffles, “I am told that you can see into the future. Spoke they true?”
“Aye, they speak true, in a manner of looking at things.” The noseblood lapped her chin and dripped onto the wooden floor with a satisfying smack. That somehow gave me to urge to bitchslap Cards, which was slightly worrying.
“And why are you so scared of me?”
“You burst down my front door and started demanding I answer questions and stressed me out so much that my nose is bleeding,” she finally replied.
“Okay, given, but aside from all of that. What’s this le mauvais étalon business?”
“Because,” Felicitat murmured, limbs as shaky as her voice, “I can see the words written across you. Not literally, but you’re all wrong. A black void. I can’t feel you.”
“Well, I don’t like be groped by strangers, but that doesn’t make me a bad pony.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.” Now both nostrils were bleeding.
I stomped to her, and she pressed herself against the wall. “Then what did you mean, Fräulein?” Somewhere in the background, her goose was honking and hissing at me. “Because I got a lot of time to listen. I mean, I don’t really have any plans. Although I suppose I could, like, come back around five and take you out for dinner if that’d make it easier for you, because right now you’re—” Felicitat blinked, took a deep breath, and fell limply to the ground like a dead hooker. Not that I would know, but I’ve read books. “Well. That happened.” I looked up. “I should raid the icebox and eat all her food while she’s out.”
|— ☩ —|
“Huhruh,” I greeted through a mouthful of what I believed was some sort of cake-like substance. Felicitat, whom I’d dragged onto the couch in her living room, just looked at me. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt the Blue-Eyed Mare staring at me too, like she was inside my head, which made sense for a figment of my infected imagination. I swallowed the mouthful. “So I ate all your food and drank all your drinks. I hope you’re not mad, but I hadn’t eaten in days and also I just wanted to spite you—hope you don’t die of hunger.”
“I wish not to converse in Equestrian,” she said in French, resting her head and looking up at the ceiling. At least, I was pretty sure the last word was ‘Equestrian’. I hadn’t heard it before, but given the context, it made sense. “Vulgar.”
“Well, tough forced enslavement of minors to work as sex slaves,” I said, and chewed on an old piece of celery laden with peanut butter. Yum! “My French is a lot rustier than my Equestrian.” I swapped to as scary a voice as I could, saying in Teutsch: “Of course, we would always speak in the tongue of the Fatherland. It is a most agreeable language for discourse, wouldn’t you say, Fräulein?”
“Wha-what?” she asked, lips quivering. Tied over in the corner, her goose honked uselessly. “What did you do to Honkers?”
“Nevermind him,” I said with a casual wave of the hoof. “Tell me, Frau Felicitat, what is your problem with me?” She opened her mouth, but I cut her off: “If it involves a sob story about having no friends, leave all that sad stuff out because I don’t care.” And she closed her mouth. “Figures,” I sighed. “Parents dead?” She nodded. “Socially awkward beyond all reason?” Nod. Rubbing my eyes, I groaned. “God, what is wrong with this country? Is nopony here even remotely normal? How old are you.”
“F-fifteen,” she replied.
“You father didn’t rape you, did he?” I prodded, and she vigorously shook her head. “Good, that makes two of us. Not getting raped by your father is the first step to not being a complete messed-up pony. Gets worse if Mommy touches you. Glad we don’t have to deal with that. So, are we ready to talk?”
She gritted her teeth and looked hard at my eye. “I can feel. It’s why I don’t like ponies so much. I can, like, feel what they’re thinking. Not exact thoughts, just… feelings. I always know in my heart exactly what everyone around me is feeling. I get a feeling from them.”
I stared off into the distance like a fool who’s stared too long at the sun after he saw his mother naked and realized he had the hots for Mommy. “Ein Empath? You’re an empath?”
The mare gave a weak squeak. “I guess.”
Something smelled odd. In fact, I actually sniffed the air. Wait. Was that me? How long had I gone without a shower or a bath? …Ew, it was totally me… “And so why do I frighten you? How do they relate?”
“You are a darkheart,” she said with a kind of hesitance like telling your girlfriend she looks fat, not sure if she’s actually asking your honest opinion or just doing a girl thing. In my experience, she never wanted your honest opinion. And that’s the story of how I broke my cheekbone that one day. “It taints your very existence. Everything you say is a lie, everything you do is a lie, because everything that you are is a lie hiding what you are—and you don’t even know it.” Her eyes moistened. “Even in monsters there is blackness, but you are hollow. Empty. Full of nothing. Abyss.”
I yawned. “Yeah, yeah, tell me something I don’t know. It’s what I am without a whole Code.”
Felicitat’s eye twitched. “You scare me because even when you knowingly lie, you believe the lie. It’s as if you are at once incapable of lying and a compulsive liar. You are more paradox than flesh.”
Rolling my eye, I groaned. “Listen, hotlips, I’ve heard this same schtick from a hundred different psychics enough times to know it’s utter malarkey. Next you’re going to tell me that, like, inside my hollowness lies a true monster. Or, inside my heart is where I can find substance to fill up my hollowness. Or, to continue this session, please pay five Bits, thank you for your business.”
“It’s true, I don’t really know, because I can’t read you. Only guess.” She bit her lip. “That’s not possible. I can’t read you. I can’t! But I’m a good guesser.” Felicitat shivered, her rate of speech hastening like a jackrabbit hopped up on Kokain. “I’ve seen many, but you are unique. Impossible to miss. I can’t feel you as I can a normal pony, but I can feel your lack thereof. You’re a living, breathing blindspot. Unnatural. Your very presence makes me want to run and hide! Because I can see it written upon you, and what is written says le mauvais étalon—the Bad Stallion. But it’s as if I can’t see you because you are two separate entities sharing the same mind—!”
I put my broken hoof over her mouth. “Easier there, pilgrim,” I said in a calm tone, affecting a Southern drawl. Mr. Welch once told me that Southern Equestrian accents generally sounded friendly to others, that it helped put them at ease. But instead of being put at ease, she actually sneered, taking me aback.
“Not only do you look like one of those colonial brutes, you sound like one!” she hissed in a low tone. The white curtains on the window behind the couch swayed as if for effect, but it only made me think about just how little feng shui this room had. No wonder this girl was so unhappy. If I lived in a place decorated by somepony with no sense of design, I’d always be angry and scared too. Pink couch with baby-shit-green pillow? Ew.
“Yes, well, you’re a stuck-up bitch with people problems,” I casually offered. I leaned over her, and went on in that same drawl. “Well, pilgrim, now I want you to tell me why they call you a prophetess.”
Her breathing quickened. “You mean to kill her, don’t you?”
“Depends on who this ‘her’ is, pilgrim.” I tipped my hat for effect. She didn’t say anything, sucking in on her lips in defiance. I lowered my voice but kept the drawl. “Listen here, missie, if you don’t tell me who this ‘her’ is and everything else I want to know about her, I will press the point on my fractured hoof into your violet eye just to see how much pressure it’d take to pop it. Do not test me, girl!”
But as an empath, Felicitat must had an almost supernatural sense for detecting lies and idle threats. She stared into my eye; even without psychic powers, you can often tell a liar by looking into their eyes, the way their eyes move to indicate what kind of thought or memory you’re using. Eyes were also a great way to gauge emotion, which was why eyes were so absurdly important to equine socialization. As she looked into my eye, I looked into hers. She knew that I wasn’t lying.
“She…” Felicitat began slowly, shaking under my hard eye, “is the oracle.”
|— ☩ —|
I stared at the oracle’s shrine. It was a bit into the swamp near where her house was, down a little path that passed where I had collapsed a few days ago. The pulsing red veins, still rock-hard, burned like fire, or a really bad STD. Thank God that I always used protection because I was a smart stallion. But this thing? The centerpiece of the shrine had once been a mare; now it was just a skeleton tied to the top half of an ancient wooden cross, her—the hips and facial structure were decidedly feminine—arms had been tied behind the Kruzifix as if she were trying to cheekily hide a lover’s present behind her back.
My eye scanned the little stone chapel, hardly enough room for five ponies to stand in, even if they had to stand uncomfortably close to each other. So, I supposed that there was just enough room in here for a compact orgy, so long as everypony used protection. Still, I’d’ve imagine it’d take a special kind of pony to be able to get it on as an ancient corpse stares as you, not at least without asking the dead mare if she wasn’t to tag-team. Did the undead require protection during that sort of thing?
If not for the door that Felicitat had opened up, I could have mistaken this small place for just a weird rock formation, it was so covered in vines and moss. Still, this place just didn’t have a good vibe to it. That crucified corpse didn’t seem like a good sport.
“How did you find this place?” I asked.
“I… I just did. I found the oracle; she was hungry, weak, and dying. I cared for her, and in return she showed me this place… showed me how to finally become somepony ponies loved and wanted and needed. We’ve… been best friends ever since.” She sniffled in the way that a child did after their father made them watch as he mercilessly mauled their pet rabbit with a bag of steamed turnips. There was nothing she could do, she knew it, but yet refused to acknowledge it.
“Oracle,” I said, tasting the word. “Orakel.” I looked at her. “Does it give its advice freely, or does it charge a deathly price?” The mare didn’t reply. I grabbed and shook her. “Dammit, girl! By all the angels in Heaven, tell me! What price does it demand of thee?!”
“Nothing! It does not—”
The back of my broken hoof was a lonely hoof, mostly because he wasn’t my masturbating hoof. So, in his search for love, he kissed Felicitat upside the cheek and knocking her screaming to the ground. “Lie not to me, witch!” I roared. “None but the unholy can the future see! Speak’st thou to me of sorcery, witchcraft, Bruchmagie!”
She rose an arm to defend herself, tears streaming down her face. “No, no, it doesn’t! I swear! She’s my friend!”
“She?” I spat. “Thou hast clearly to me dealing with a demon been.” I blinked. “I appear to only be able to speak in weird, half-sensical archaisms when dealing with demons. Should probably see a doctor about that. A the rapist, mayhap.” I reached over and grabbed my sword in my teeth, pulling out in a motion I hadn’t performed for what felt like an age. To the crucified skeleton I went.
“No!” she screamed, throwing herself in front of the shrine and me. At her screams, a faint blue aura emanated from the skeleton’s eyes. “I won’t let you hurt her!”
I was about to very rationally explain my reason to her, but then I realized I had a sword in my mouth, so there went that plan. Yeah, I could’ve put the sword away, but that I’d’ve been defenseless. So, this was a problem. I watched as the blue light grew in size, giving me flashbacks to the skinwalker.
She was whole now. Not Felicitat, but the ghastly, glowing, blue image of a pegasus mare. It was a type of demon, alright. The kind that, as a Special Agent of the Reichskriminalamt, I had been tasked with finding and destroying. The branch I was assigned to was also the one partially responsible for rooting out, trying, and burning witches. Supernatural stuff was fun to hunt down. If I knew my demonology, and I did, this thing was physical enough to kill with steel, but no physical enough for me to cook into a fine stew.
“Felicitat?” it asked in a sweet, almost hypnotic voice. It was the voice like an old mare who had the habit of molesting the children she lured into the bushes.
Screw it. This was worth it. I spat my sword out, precariously holding its hilt with a hoof. “Listen here, you great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies: I am going to purge that monstrosity from the face of God’s green earth.”
Felicitat looked at the demon floating behind her and nodded. “Vai!” She looked at me. “Eat your own penis, you crazy freak!” The demon seemed to become more translucent, and then it darted into Felicitat’s body. “If you want to kill her, you’ll have to go through me first! I won’t let you kill my only friend!”
“It’s a demon! A spirit left behind from Anderwelt!” I seethed. Somewhere off in the distance, a flock of birds took flight. “You unknowing cow; you let it into your flesh! This is a demon of the tongue—a demon of no true form to call its own, only a kind of raw, rape-focused sexual glare with the lense of prophecy.” I sheathed my sword. “The price it demanded of you was sex, wasn’t it?”
She blinked. “No!”
“For every prophecy it spoke to thee, it demanded your flesh to pleasure its non-existence!” I accused, and she said nothing. “Stupid girl. A demon is incapable of higher morality, doesn’t even know right from wrong, is little more than pure emotion!”
“You won’t hurt her—I won’t let you!”
I took a moment to think. God, what was it so hard to think?! Stupid infection. Stupid fever, Stupid—
Whispery blue contrails seeped from Felicitat’s ears, mouth, and tear ducts. “Please don’t kill me,” came the voice of the demon. “Don’t kill her. Please. I… I can help you… both of you…”
“Both of us?” I asked. It was a bad idea to give a demon of the tongue even the chance to speak, but as it spoke, I had time to think through my fever.
“Yes,” it said. “The bad stallion and the one in your mind, the sorceress.” It came out further, contrails still coming from the mare, its eyes staring into mine. Reaching a hoof out to me, I saw that the demon was holding a card. The words on the top of the card labeled it as The Sorceress. Upon the card was the image of a mare in black robes holding a sword. Her long mane seemed to flow almost by magic as she took off a plague mask to reveal her blue eyes, which looked at me with an expression that I couldn’t quite tell if it meant either come hither or you’re mine.
The demon flicked her wrist, and the card changed into a new one. The Gun. Within the card’s image were two weapons like the ones the angel had given me; they were crossed like swords before the face of a battered and bloodied-looking pegasus mare closing her eyes as if in prayer. With a flick, the demon placed the card into the air, where I saw it floating alongside The Sorceress.
“The High Priestess,” the demon said, showing me a card depicting a mare in robes sitting there with a staff. Oddly, it looked as if her body was made of crystals, not flesh and fur. Another card. “The King.” Sitting upon a throne, leaning forwards and holding a sword as if it were a walking stick, was a stallion. His right arm was a darker color than the rest of his body, the crown on his head bloody, and his single remaining eye stared ahead with a homicidal vigor. “The Murderer.” A red-eyed mare looked out at me from the card with a look that wasn’t entirely sane. Her black-with-red-streaks mane was a mess as the unicorn mare held a knife to her own throat, smiling widely at me. I don’t care if I die! I could almost hear her screaming. “The Liar.” An alien face smiling so wide that it exposed even his molars, the eyes both insane and oddly seductive, eyes you just wanted to trust. It reminded me exactly of the skinwalker.
Each of the six cards now floating in the air before me. I looked at them all. “So?”
“No, there’s one more, the most important of all,” it said, and drew another card for its invisible deck. “The Hanged Stallion.” He was hanging upside down from a single hindhoof, his body limp as the raging conflagration below him seethed up like a hungry chick eager for its mother to vomit food into its mouth. The shirt he wore was a dusty no-color, his black pants tattered but intact. His right arm was darker than the rest of his body, the sword and guns—I supposed the cards called them—were falling from their sheaths and into the fire. Worst of all, he had been a unicorn before his horn had clearly been blown off, probably destroyed in the same event that reduced the hanging stallion’s left eye to a stitched eyelid without any eye beneath it.
“Seven cards in all,” it said. “A representation of who… of what you are, what you will be, and those around you who will shape you, Hanged Stallion.” It paused, then added, “Tu pendu. The dice of God are always loaded. It is a force you cannot escape: zhah, as the Old Ones called it.”
A smile crossed my face. Ideeeea! “Interesting jabber and mysticism, but I’ve had enough of your prattle, demon and witch.” The smiled widened. “You think it’s your friend, Felicitat? That it’s not just using you? Okay. We’ll test that theory out.”
“What does—” she tried, only to scream as I grabbed a hoofful of her long, silvern mane. In an instant, the demon gasped and vanished into the mare alongside its mystic cards. As Felicitat kicked and screamed and cried, I dragged her outside. A thought of what I was doing must have dawned on her, the way she was trying and failing to dig her hooves into the dirt, and then into the mud above the waterline of the swamp.
“No, what are you doing?!” she shrieked.
“Very simple,” I said with a calculated calmness. “I’m going to drown you”—and I shoved her face into the water. A moment later, I brought her head up, letting her gulp for air. “Here’s how it’s going to work, witch. You’re just old enough where I don’t consider you a child, at least not in the context of what evil you’ve wrought, so no moral backlash. So I’m going to drown you. If the demon truly is your friend, she will evict herself from your mortal body, allowing itself to be killed and sparing your life.”
“No! No! You can’t do this! You can’t!” She thrashed uselessly against my grip.
“If I’m right, the demon stays in your body, does not sacrifice itself, and you drown, killing both of you. Either way, the demon dies, and I win. Any questions, little French witch?”
“Yes!”
“Good. Now repent, thou bitch,” I said with a detached coolness, and slammed her face into the water. It was impossible not to hear Felicitat scream from underwater, short-lived though it was. There was only so much air in a pony’s lungs. For once, I prayed to God that I was wrong.
I’ve heard tale of children holding their breath to make their parents obey them. Theory was that as you hold your breath, your face changes colors, and your parents panic and do what you want because they don’t want you to die. Of course, the idea was ridiculous. You couldn’t hold your breath until you died: either the overbearing urge to breathe beats you over the head like a dog beats that painting of a porpoise you hung up in his doghouse, or you go unconscious and your body breathes on its own. I once knew a filly who tried that. She hilariously died of a brain aneurysm that very day. The two events were actually unrelated.
The point I’m trying to make is that if held underwater, you will not suffocate to death, you will literally try to inhale water. That’s what drowning was. It was a very personal way of killing someone, but still much faster than strangulation. God, that was the worst, most inefficient way to kill somepony.
Even though I knew I wasn’t wrong, I still hoped that, just this once, everything I knew was wrong. Hoped that maybe the demon would come out. So, God, please let me be wrong.
I was not wrong. Stupid reverse psychology God.
With a splash of water and a tremendous, strangling gasp for breath, Felicitat’s head came out of the water. She coughed and sputtered. I swallowed a lump in my throat as I held onto her. The demon had called my bluff… only, it wasn’t supposed to be a bluff. But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. There was a line in the sand, and I was a one-eyed pony with no depth perception anymore, but even the black pit that pretended to be my heart wouldn’t let me drown her. I could feel the Code looming above me, the tape holding it together creaking and groaning with every second I held Felicitat underwater.
“Release her, demon,” I growled, trying to pretend I myself wasn’t shaken up.
A ghastly little voice hissed, “Never! She is mine!”
Gritting my teeth, I could have sworn that I was being watched by blue eyes. The gritted teeth turned into a grimace not unlike the way eels sometimes seemed to grin after death and before the pot. I had backed myself into a corner, there was no getting around that. Gah! Why couldn’t I think?!
Brain, you have failed me!
So I shoved her face back into the murky water. I recalled that the swampwater did not taste all very nice, it was like eating the ocean, just shoveling it all into your slobbering gob. There was a reason I didn’t drink water. Fish fornicated in it! (Except that I actually drank water all the time.)
For a moment my mental cogs just stopped, jammed up with what I wanted to assume was the unholiest of unholies: peanut butter-flavored jelly. C had given me something before he took the mares. A dreamlike slowness to my actions, I brought Felicitat’s head from the water and threw her onto the ground, her legs splaying out in a whorish sprawl as she sputtered and hacked and coughed.
With blank eye, I reached into and fumbled with a pocket and pulled out a jawbone, a jaw of the Devil’s Backbone. By the great Archangel Thor in the halls of Walhalla, I knew there was a reason I was lugging around a somewhat-chewed demonic jawbone. It wasn’t just because I was creepy and like hoarding pieces of dead bodies; jawbones infused with powers from Anderwelt were always so useful against demons without proper flesh. Much like a towel, never leave home without one.
Clutching the jawbone in my left hoof, I held the bone out to the mare. “In Nomine Patris, et Prophetae, et Spiritus Machinae—I cast thee from her flesh!” I roared, and the mare’s eyes glowed.
“I can’t see! I can’t see!” she squealed. Well of course she couldn’t see; how in the nine Hells were you supposed to be able to see with glowing eyes? The demon within her, I saw, was slowly becoming whispy blue contrails which seemed to be on a general course for the jawbone. But it wasn’t enough…
Quick as a fox chasing the promise of learning the secret to seducing the hound’s wife just to play mind games, I performed das Kreuzzeichen with the jawbone in hoof: from forehead, to the heart, left shoulder, and right shoulder.
The demon screamed bloody murder in its high-pitched, feminine voice as it was visibly torn from Felicitat’s body. “No!” it howled. “I’ll end her pathetic life before I let you take me from her!”
“Time flies, knells call, life passes, so hear my prayer! Birth is nothing but death begun, so hear my prayer. Death is speechless, so hear my speech! Demon of lust, I banish you from her—hear me and obey my command!”
With a single tearing motion, the off-blue, spectral demon was ripped from the mare’s body. Emitting a high-pitched, warbling sound, its blue essence was sucked into the jawbone held in my hoof. Driven by pure instinct, I threw the jawbone to the ground and stomped it into countless fragments.
No more oracle. Its new shrine had been destroyed. Yay. Time to celebrate with cheesecake. I liked cheesecake. Covered my teeth in plaque and made me need to brush afterwards, but I liked it.
“Wha’… what just…?” the little mare tried.
“That was a defiled jawbone,” I said casually, poking at the scattered bone fragments. “When dealing with demons of the tongue, such as your so-called ‘oracle’, sometimes the best way to deal with a creature of Anderwelt is to exorcise it into a mystical object from Anderwelt. In laypony’s terms: I fought fire with fire, yet never sullied myself with char or ash.”
“You… you mean she’s…?”
“Dead? Yeah, pretty much.” I shrugged. “Hey, do you know anywhere around here where I could get a nice strawberry-banana smoothie? I’ve been in the mood for one all week.”
“Je-jo-je-jo—”
“Stop speaking your crazy broken French and get back to the matter at hoof: smoothies. You know, if you know a place, I’d totally take you there and buy you one too.” I nodded. “It won’t be a date because you’re kind of too young and I don’t wish to be seen at a creep. Wait about a year, turn sixteen, and you’re technically free to date creepy ponies old enough to be your grandfather, but not right now. I mean, not that I’d really want to date you, what with you willingly consorting with demons and more-than-likely letting yourself be literally sexually violated by the demon in exchange for so-called ‘prophecies’.”
Felicitat broke out into tears, her head already soaked with swampwater, her nose bleeding. For all the waterworks, she somehow did it with more dignity than Cards. At that thought, I frowned. Why did my thoughts keep going back to Cards and, by extension, Lightning Dust? Looking around this little peninsula in the swamp and at the small, overgrown shrine, I wondered if, just maybe, I actually sort of missed the girls in some way, shape, or form. Of course, that was ridiculous. Me missing somepony? Be not ridiculous. Perhaps it had something to do with Cards just having a neat color scheme. Or maybe it was just because Cards’ patheticness always made me feel better about myself. That seemed reasonable.
I looked at my arm. The infected veins were almost glowing with hatred; it felt… weird to articulate the limb because the veins were still as hard as a rock. “Well, now what?” I asked the sky. Something moved in my peripheral vision. With a start, I jerked my head left. There was nothing by empty swamp. But I had sworn that blue eyes had been staring at me. I looked down at the sobbing girl. “Would you like to be walked home? It’s the least I can do for… destroying your world in my attempts to save your life.”
She only curled into a ball, stroking her tail as she sobbed.
“Sheesh. Aren’t you just a barrel of laughs today? I swear, something must really be bugging you, Miss Debbie Downer. Because that’s what you are, a Debbie Downer. And nopony likes a Debbie Downer.” I licked my lips. They tasted funny. “You know,” I said, “I always wondered what it’d be like to wear lipstick. Does it make your lips taste funny from the point-of-view of the wearer? I hear that most mares actually end up eating a lot of lipstick because they lick their lips and stuff. What do you think?”
“How,” she sobbed, “how can you joke at a time l-l-like this?”
“Pretty easily, actually,” I replied, rubbing the side of my face. “I mean, I just killed a demon and saved your life; that’s cause for celebration in my book.” I frowned. “Speaking of books, if I wrote a romance novel, do you think that ‘Me Having Sex with & Being Raped by Hot Mares’ would sell good just on the name?” She only stared at me. “No? How about ‘Kiss My Sister’, subtitle: ‘How Sis Slipped and Repeatedly Fell on my Penis: An Explanation for Mother’? Taboo always sells so well.”
“Do you realize what you did to me!?” she shrieked so suddenly and loudly that I flinched. “I’m nothing without her! Before her, I was just some freak everypony hated because they didn’t like me prying into their hearts! Then I found her, helped her back to health, and she made me the most important girl in the valley. So what if her price was… lustful? She was still my friend!”
“It was not your friend,” I said. My tone was hesitant as I picked my words, like the voice of a boy trying to carefully explain how he accidentally impregnated his sister.
“Stop calling her an it, you pig bastard!” Felicitat snarled. “I could feel her femininity, touch it, even, as it touched me. She wasn’t evil, she was good; she saved lives and helped make our comté the wealthiest comté in the whole valley!”
I shook my head sadly. “Since you’re so good with emotions, tell me: what did you feel when the demon refused to leave you?”
It was like I’d driven an icicle through her skull, her rage not dying but settling. “Hatred,” she said calmly. “It was like a blind hatred, a cornered rat bearing its teeth and snapping. I… we honestly believed you were going to kill me… us…” So had I. “She was unwilling to give a single inch for me, even though she believed that you wouldn’t hurt me if she let go.”
I sighed, offering her the closest thing to a sympathetic look as I could, not sure what she’d interpret from it. “Those who consort with demons are always bound for evil, as is the fate of all who dabbled in the occult, in magic. No matter what they say, demons are evil. Just look at ponies like Waltharius.” At his name, I felt a surge of hatred and confusion to my gut. It vanished just as soon as it occurred, leaving me confused. Why had I felt that all of the sudden for a stallion who died nigh a century before I was born?
“Wahl-tah-ree-oos?” She blinked. “The other one is upset at his name. The other one is familiar with the name.”
I ignored that bit of weirdness. It was the result of me dying of infection, most likely. “Ja, Waltharius, the so-called ‘Gute Mann’, ‘the Good Stallion’.” I closed my eye and thought about history class and how best to summarize without going too deep into details that she likely neither cared about nor would recall. My first thought was to dig into my bags and pull out my copy of Kapitän Teutschland and flip through the pages. When I got to the right page, I tapped the picture for her. “This buck.”
In the photo, the dark stallion with glowing red eyes sat in a throne. His armor was like a cross between plate armor and robes, a hood covering his face in darkness, enhancing the glowing eyes and shining smile that radiated menace. The bat wings on his back did not compliment his unicorn horn. “I am the Good Stallion,” he was saying and I translated into Equestrian for Felicitat, “I am the angel, I am madness, I am the word, I am the law, I am the key, and I am the door. But call me Waltharius.”
Putting the book away, I said, “To the south of the Reich there is a continent called die Südlande, the Southlands. It’s very creative, you see. Die Südlande were a continent covered in duchies, baronies, petty kingdoms, and huge tracts of unsettled land where tribes of zebras and ponies made their living. A little over a century ago, a stallion named Waltharius came to prominence in the center of the Südlande, the so-called Herz von Midlothian, since it was the center of the Kingdom of Midlothian. There’s a Schlachtschiff named after it, I think.”
I walked over and knelt down by the mare. She let out a yelp and scurried away from me and into the little shrine like a beaver in heat. Wasn’t sure if beavers could get heat or if they were always fertile, but the way her tail dragged in the dirt just made me think of a she-beaver. In fact, now that I looked at her long tail, I was struck by the thought that I had no idea how Equestrians kept their tails so clean when I’d clearly seen a few dragging around on the ground, they were so long.
Before I walked up and joined her in the shrine, I scanned the swamp for any bogtopi. I was not in the mood for a surprise claw-given prostate exam. Satisfied that my anus would remain an exit—I had once been told by Father that my mother had once seriously considered getting a mutilation of the phrase “Exit Only” above hers—I went into the shrine.
Felicitat was cowering at the foot of the crucified skeleton. When I came up, she didn’t flinch or cry; she only looked defeated. Her eyes said simply: ‘Go ahead. Do with me as you will. I’m just flesh now.’ But her mouth said bitterly, “Without her, I’m just a freak, a stupid girl who will never find happiness or fulfillment in life.”
Sucking lightly on my bottom lip, I sat down next to her. “And what do you consider to be a happy, fulfilled life?” My tone had softened considerably, as if I were trying to impersonate the sound of silk. Which, come to think, I actually knew about, since I had once met a semi-sentient silk monster who constantly yelled about its fetish for leather, and thus me by extension of what I was wearing back then and right now.
She sniffled, rubbing her eyes. “I always wanted to find Mr. Right, get married, have a couple of foals. You know, just like any good mare.” God, her voice was worse than caffeine-less coffee.
Like any good mare? I thought with a puzzled frown. What odd phrasing. So there is a sort of expected role for a mare in Equestria, that of a mother. Interesting.
“I mean,” she went on, likely more for herself than for me, “I’m a good filly, I eat my vegetables, help ponies out. Celestia! I’m still a virgin, even.”
I blinked. “No, you’re not. If the demon took you, that sort of ends that thing.”
“She was a girl,” Felicitat replied, eyes wettening. “You can’t lose your virginity to another girl. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Can’t lose your…? What? I sighed. Okay, weird Equestrian culture. I guess you require a penis and penetration to end virginity as they see it. Also interesting. Says a lot. “So you acknowledge that the price the demon took of you was sexual in nature.”
She looked at me, then at herself. I tried to imagine it was a generic looking down, and that she wasn’t staring at her sex. Stupid nudity. “Òc, éra…” She shook her head. “Aye, it was.”
Silence reigned Queen Bitch for a moment. Lacking anything to really say, I tried to steer the conversation back to wherein I was the one in the moral right and she the victim I’d saved.
“Look, the point I was trying to make was,” I went on, “the stallion Waltharius Pendrick rose from nothing and became history’s greatest villain precisely because he dabbled in magic, because he compacted with demons, lost any sense of morality and became an anti-messiah dedicated to his own fanatical beliefs that magic was perfectly normal and moral. He preached utter drivel about the ‘magic of friendship’, a deceptively named doctrine that stated that together as friends, as brothers, as sisters, as comrades, they could overcome anything, and that those without this magic needed to die. What was worse, he was thought to be perfectly sane, just that he fanatically believed that his ‘coalition of friends’ was the only way to live, that you needed to accept the vulgar heresy of fate and to resign yourself to that magic.
“But at the time, he was a simple raider with dreams of glory, perhaps even a terrorist on his best day. Yet he preached of liberty, a Teutschland-inspired democracy—which is why many believe he was an errant Teutscher—and an end to ‘class-based slavery’. But worst of all, he preached that magic was okay, that he would end centuries of mage-phobia partially inspired by the Reich. He advocated teaching magic to all who would hear it, to end the tyranny of magic-haters; in essence, to consort with demons. Mind you, this was in a day they only the Reich held witch hunts and public crucifictions of magi; most courts in the Südlanden had court magicians; but ots public use was nowhere, nowhere, near as tolerated as it is in Equestria. Quickly, his group of raiders turned into a popular revolution, and the Kingdom of Midlothian—by far the richest, wealthiest, most powerful state in the Südlanden—fell to the Good Stallion.”
I glanced at the mare to make sure she was listening and not doing something stupid like crying again. To my pleasure, she was looking at me, and she nodded with an “And then?”
It was all I could do to keep from smiling. This was a story my Reich and I were rather fond of, since we were the big damn heroes at the end of it all. “Well, within a few years, his army was the largest in the region, and he conquered nation after nation and tribe after tribe on his quest. With each conquest came new followers, new magi, new warriors, and more demons that they brought into this world from Anderwelt. To his followers, he was a messiah. To intelligent people, he was a monster and a terrorist, a mad tyrant who wanted to conquer the world. Or, as I said in history class that got me in trouble, ‘He was a stallion who just needed to get laid by someone other than his father’.
“His reign of genocide, murder, mass-yet-horrifically-organized rape, more murder, raiding, and piracy was all driven by him and his magic. For every spell he toyed with, his evil and depravity grew. He tested his magic on those who hated magic, tried to enlighten them with his ‘magic of friendship’. Waltharius built schools to provide free education and indoctrination to a generation of children, too, so he really did believe in his utopian version of the future.” I shrugged and looked around the little shrine. “It all thankfully came to an end by the hooves of King Viktor of Teutschland near a century ago, who personally slew both Waltharius and the Emperor of Nippön.” I rubbed my shoulder. “Any questions?”
Felicitat only stared at me, the blood from her nose having dried. “You’re not an Equestrian, are you?”
“Nein, das bin ich nicht,” I replied, and gave her a brief summary of what I was and of the Reich. A bunch of blah blah blah; a spiel I’d given enough times in the past week. I finished with a reference to the Viktor: “By 4117 ADN, the war was over, the forces of science and God had prevailed over the forces of magic and depravity.”
“ADN?” she asked.
“You… you don’t use that calendar?” I shrugged like some kind of dwarven hamster. “Fair enough, I guess. ADN stands for Anno Domini Nostri—the Year of Our Lord. It marks how long it’s been since the Mare Laurentia, the Prophet, was born. Tell me, what Calender does Equestria use?” Something plopped into the water somewhere off in the distance.
Felicitat shrugged. “I don’t know, we just use the calendar. We’re in right now the An du Lune of the Seventh Age. An du Lune because the Seventh Age began when Nightmare Moon was defeated and Princess Luna returned from the lunar prison to rule alongside her sister once more.” I barely avoided a sneer. Just how much of that was fact and how much mere myth? “Not that it matters how many years it’s been since Princess Luna came back.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked in High French.
“Your accent is odd,” she replied in French.
“But understandable. I could say the same to you.”
She gave me a half-sneer, half-smirk. Then with a sigh, she again looked glummer than a plum who’s just learned that plums did not ever, in fact, have sex. “On the one hoof, I’ll never meet the Princess,” she said back in Equestrian. “On the other, I have no life without the oracle.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” I asked. “You keep telling me you have no life, but you never really explain what that means.”
Felicitat shot the low ceiling of the shrine a mirthless smile as she slid down and onto her back. “Did you know that the oracle’s helped me save lives before? Òc, it’s true. I once got a vision of a heavy object falling from a window and onto Médge Lothaire’s son.” He has a son? “I told them about it, and we barely managed to stop Péire. If we’d been a second slower, a heavy péira would have fallen out of a window, and Péire would be dead.”
“Where is Péire now?” I asked.
“He went off to Songnam a few days before you got here, wanted to join up and become a Carolean to help protect his town and ponies like me.”
“I thought this place wasn’t under Elkington’s control,” I said with a frown.
“It’s not, but the comtes here are all on friendly terms with Elkington. A few years ago after Nightmare Moon’s return, there was a lot of damage in the valley from the river flooded and when a few swamp beasts washed up into the various towns.”
The image in my mind flashed to a bogtopus with a surgical mask and gloves on its claws, Felicitat tied down face-down to a table, gagged for good measure. “Okay, Miss Felicitat,” Doctor Octobogtopus said, “we’re just going to stab your genitals and see if you’re pregnant. Oh, and I’m not a doctor, but I play one in the local theater.”
My mind snapped back to reality as Felicitat went on. “Duke Elkington spent a lot of his personal treasury repairing this damage and improving the valley by building a dam. So when we got news of Elkington’s call-to-arms, a bunch of stallions in the valley—many of them the sons of the valley’s comtes—got together and left for Songnam.”
Something smelled fishy about that, and it wasn’t just my ungodly stench. By the Prophet’s holy virginity, I needed to take a shower. I smelt like the juices of a dead whale vagina. Out of anyone I’d ever met, I think I could safely say that I was an expert on that topic. Sometimes we have to do shameful things to avoid the rain.
“But if it weren’t for the oracle, he’d be dead,” she concluded.
I cocked a brow. “Do you not recall how, in the end, the demon of lust was perfectly ready to just kill you out of pure spite?” She didn’t respond properly, just gave a little whimper and looked away. “I call it a demon of lust—Dämon der Lust—because that is what I believe it was, a dark representation of desires brought forth from Anderwelt. In my country, for pacting with it, you would have been very publicly crucified.” I glanced at her forehead. As with everypony I’d seen here but Lothaire and his wife, she was an earther. “I’m willing to understand that you Equestrians simply do not understand, much like children, so it would be wrong to punish you too harshly; as my teacher of Geschichte und Moralphilosophie said, ‘’Tis wrong to spank a baby with an axe.’ Make sense?”
“Not really…”
Shaking my head, I tried to hold back any negative and possibly racist thoughts again Equestrians. They were so much like children in a way. “You know,” I said aimlessly, “there was once a time where they used to say that spanking children was wrong, that it ruined them in a way. A rather ridiculous school of thought, and one my father had clearly never heard of.”
“But,” she replied slowly, “it is wrong… isn’t it?”
The only response I gave was to shrug and sigh. “Somehow, just somehow, I knew you’d say that. I’ll not discuss it any further. You keep your flawed parenting methods, and we’ll keep our flawed parenting methods.”
We sat there in silence. For once in as long as I could remember, I didn’t think it was the best idea to destroy the silence. Felicitat seemed content to lying the floor in a little half-ball, stroking her tail. I let out a set, looking out through the rotten doors and up at what I could see of the sky. The thought of pegasi like Lightning Dust up there messing with the clouds somehow made my stomach ache. Weather did as weather does. It was a wonder Equestria wasn’t crawling with demons. Since they weren’t everywhere, odds were that I might very well have found the only two in Equestria. I didn’t really know.
Taking a nasal breath, I remembered that I didn’t smell very nice. “Felicitat, would you like me to walk you home? It’s the least I can do…”
|— ☩ —|
“Ah,” I sighed with a smile, looking at the shivering mare curled up on the couch. “I don’t know about you, but I love using ladies’ conditioner for my mane,” I said, rubbing a hoof through my hair. “Just look at how soft my mane is! Oh, and I used all of your condition when I was in your shower. Hope you don’t mind.” I put my hooves on my cheeks and jostled them. “Because I’m worth it!”
“Yeah,” the mare groused, “you should become a model.”
“Odd,” I replied, putting a hoof to my chin. “I’ve been told that before by a girl, way back in high school. Of course, she was a compulsive liar and I knew it, but she laughed earnestly at my jokes, so I didn’t push her off a roof. Also, she had a cute butt, so all the guys would have murdered me if I hurt her.”
Felicitat grunted. “Why are you still even here?”
“One: Because I figured you were too upset to really care about me using your shower and most of your soap. They came in such nice glass bottles. Made me wonder how often ponies dropped their bottles of soap and ended up needing a trip to the hospital. And two: because is it really so hard to believe that I care?”
Yes.
Shut up! Nopony asked you.
The little mare just stared at me. She furrowed her brow as she looked at my shirt. “Why does your shirt have words writ upon it?”
“Why?” I asked. “Don’t you mean a question beginning with ‘what’?”
She shook her head. “Aye, aye, that. What do they mean?”
I smiled. “I like music. Always have, ever will.” I pointed to the three symbols lined up horizontally across the black shirt: the cross, the burning heart with barbed wire strapped across it, and the skull. “Glaube. Liebe. Tod. In Equestrian, it means ‘Faith. Love. Death’. Important themes, I suppose. Also an album I like.” I pointed to the large onomatopoeia written above the symbols. “Composed by these guys. You like Sapphire Shores, I take it.”
Felicitat nodded. “Aye. Her recent album, L.A.M.B., if you ask me, is just really cool. Nopony has her style, even if she does like pushing boundaries just to be controversial.”
Common ground at last! “Controversial? How so?”
“Well, her recent album had a rather raunchy song. Raunchiest one ever, really. Got to the top of the charts, so I hear, and has been there for two weeks.” She looked away. “No doubt thanks in huge part to the stallion she performed the song with, Duke Elkington.”
I felt a glass pane somewhere deep inside me shatter as if some clichéd hero were smashing through it, only to realize that this a terrible idea, and so ended up losing an eye due to glass shards. “The Smile Song?” I intoned.
She nodded. “Yeah, that one.”
“I watched it performed live by Duke Elkington and Sapphire Shores when I was in Songnam a few days before.” I offered. Her eyes positively lit up for just an instant. It didn’t take an idiot to know that she wanted me to go on. “And the Smile Song is what you consider raunchy?”
“Well, yeah. You heard and caught all of those sexual undertones, right? You’re not supposed to sing so… so openly about that sort of thing.” She nodded as if resting her case.
I object! “Well, maybe I’m just jaded,” I replied. “On just one—one—of the albums I have with me, there’s a song regarding underage brotherly incest, lace-and-leather bondage intercourse used as an allegory between pony and God, a song about a father who rapes his daughter until she kills him and writes that very song in his blood, a song about a girl not allowed to see sunlight and I don’t even want to go into what graphic sex is mentioned therein, and finally a song whose brutal beat and message can be summed up as ‘Your face is ugly. I’m going to anally rape you’.”
She gaped at me.
“You think I’m kidding?” I laughed. “Because I’m not. And no, it’s not the one I have on my shirt.”
“Con de Celestia, what kind of horrible country are you from?”
I laughed so quickly that I actually snorted. “Well, that wasn’t vulgar of you.” Brushing my hat to the side, I smiled, leaning back in the chair.
She, however, narrowed her eyes and stared at my head as if studying a particularly interesting can of whoopass. “That mark of your head…” she said, barely audible. “No, it can’t be…” Her eyes widened and she gasped. “You’re a unicorn!” Felicitat shouted, pointing at my forehead.
“Was, technically.”
“But-but-but-but how?”
I tapped my eyepatch. “Same way I lost my eye: I walked into a door like a battered wife. Doors are one of my many one weakness, you see. Happened, like, four days ago. Wait, no. How long was I with Médge Lothaire?”
The little mare sat up, still covering herself with her blanket. “I just—just that I… You were in his clinic for four days.”
I tried to whistle, but I couldn’t whistle. Who was I kidding? “Then it happened to me about a week ago today.” I shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do about it, so I might as well smile and be happy that it wasn’t worse, right?” I glanced over to the room’s doorway leading into the little foyer where the front door was. At least I’d taken the time to repair her door. Again, just some ‘least that I could do’ stuff. Although, to be the fair, the front door was the only thing standing between me and Honkers the goose, even if he was trussed up better than a pelican with a bondage fetish.
Felicitat rubbed her forehead. “Just… Ow… I can’t imagine what could do that.” She gritted her teeth. “Reminds me of the story of that one stallion who got his horn blown off by a magical lock.”
Nodding, I recalled the story that—was it Lightning Dust?—that Lightning Dust had told me when I had asked about that box in the back of the Sleepy Oaks sheriff office, the same one that had held that bit of cute armor for Cards. Apparently, the magical lock could blow horns off. I felt a pang of irony that I’d made Cards open the lock for me precisely because I didn’t want to lose my horn, yet here I was, Whappo the Hornless Unicorn—coming to a freak show near you today. Hey, kids, make sure to throw all your popcorn and peanuts at him; he hates it! Make sure to thank his trainer, Cherry Berry and her whip.
As I pictured that in my head, I found myself thinking, Goddamn naked ponies in tophats.
“I heard that they managed to sort of fix him,” she said, and my train of thought crashed into an orphanage, burning hundreds.
“What do you mean?”
“Um, ’twas just a story I heard about that,” she said with a hesitant hoofwave. “Probably nothing.”
“It was something and you will explain it,” I ordered with so much venom that my tongue tingled.
The curtains behind her swayed slightly as Felicitat spoke. “Well, I heard something about that unicorn that got his horn sort of repaired in the Crystal Empire.”
“Crystal Empire?” I asked, cocking a brow and tilting my head.
Felicitat twiddled her forehooves, seemingly unwilling to look at me. “Well, I don’t think that’s its name anymore, since you can’t be an empire without an empire or an emperor. We here in the valley call it la Principauté de Cristal nowadays, but I think—”
“I don’t care about names; I care for the story.”
“Well… far to the north some time ago, an ancient, mystical state emerged from the ice and snow, a nation long ago vanished or… something. I don’t really know. Point is, it’s now ruled by Equestria, and its ponies are an odd lot. I hear that they don’t personally manage and control their own weather—”
“Get on with it,” I said with a grunt
She blew a puff of mane out of her face. “Well, I, uh—you see, I just heard that some buck who got his horn blown off by one of those magical locks got it repaired and all-better-ed by some ponies in the Principauté de Cristau.”
I cocked a brow. “And that’s all you know?”
“That’s all I know,” she replied without skipping a beat. Felicitat looked at me like how beaver eyes a venus fly trap, wondering if the plant would eat or protect its beaver eggs. “But it’s probably not even true. He was the only unicorn I ever heard of who lost his horn and lived, but I never really believed it until I saw that you… and thought that maybe it wasn’t just a myth. I mean, I thought that a unicorn died without their horn, period. Really, to tell you the truth, I don’t know anything about having a horn because, well, because it wasn’t a body part I was born with.”
Thinking hard, I stood up. Equestria was a land of magic and horror in equal measure. And if I knew my magical fantasy lands from countless hours playing tabletop roleplaying games, it was that all myths and legends were true in magical fantasy lands. Ignoring how this wasn’t fantasy, that is. Well, if it was, I was having a pretty boring dream. Not nearly enough clowns were trying to teach me the meaning of love.
A flash of warmth made me glance down to my infected arm. With the short sleeves of my shirt, the inflamed red was advertising my diseased state like how a nice, dry cave called out to an adventurer caught in the rain, a cave which later turned out to be the vagina of a giant whale of some sort, and no amount of showering ever got rid of the smell or the shame of having not entirely been displeased with the situation. There weren't many stallions who could safely say “I once slept in a dead whale’s vagina” aloud in this day and age.
Felicitat blinked. “You did what?! Oh Celestia, I think I’m going to puke.”
“Huh,” I said flatly. “Did not mean to say that out loud. I should probably learn the difference between my inner and outer voice, huh?”
“H-how do you get from ‘broken horns’ to ‘I once slept in a dead whale’s cunt’?! That’s not normal!”
“Which part isn’t normal, that I said it or that I did it?”
“Both!” She violently shook her head with horror. Or labor pains. It was hard to tell. “Normal ponies do not think like that—they do not go from ‘broken horns’ to ‘whale cunts’ within mere seconds of each other!”
“It’s improper for a lady to use such language, you know.” I have her a sagely nod.
“But—I—you…!”
I gave her a blank look. “You know, now that I think about it, ‘How I Came To Sleep Inside The Vagina of a Dead Whale’ is also an ideal name for my upcoming romance/pornographic novel.”
“I-I-I-I… I have no words. I do not have words.”
Putting a hoof to my mouth, I said with a puzzled frown, “You know, that’s the third time I’ve been told that very same thing this week.” Felicitat did not reply, only stayed there on her ugly-colored couch. As I’ve probably said before, I had learned the hard way that a minute of stunned silence was not an open invitation for me to go on.
So I set my hat back on right, put my duster and bags on, and steeled my nerves. My business here was done, but I’d need steeled nerves to get past Honkers the goose, who was still menacingly sitting outside on her pond. Now I was ready to resume my quest, whatever it was. Probably had something to do with this so-called Crystal Empire. Of course, I had to find out exactly where that was first, but details, details. I made my way in silence to the door.
“Where are you going?” Felicitat asked.
Without turning around, I said simply, “Away.”
“You’re just going to leave me here?” she demanded.
“Yes. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted always since the moment we met?”
“B-but what am I supposed to do?”
I adjusted my hat. it felt different without the horn. “Become a marine biologist,” I suggested. “Biology is the field of science where all the babes go. You become hotter just by knowing marine taxonomy.”
“This is serious,” she said in an icy tone. “You come into my life, wreck it, and just leave?” The mare spat out a mirthless chuckle. “A life without the oracle is still no life. I’m doomed to poverty and social ostracization for who… for what I am.” I thought that maybe I heard a teary sniffle.
Fixing my duster’s collar, I replied, “See you later, alligator. In a while, crocodile. Forget not me to write. My address is anywhere but here.”
I didn’t look back as I opened her door and stepped outside, mostly because I was staring the goose down. But by the grace of God, Honkers was asleep. I didn’t think I would survive another goose attack. The bastard was pure evil.
At a weird urge, I looked around, half-expecting to find somepony watching me. Though there was nopony there, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the Code was hovering behind me. Why was anypony’s guess. I hadn’t murdered Felicitat. All was good for the moment… right? So I just stood there with the door half-closed behind me, lost in thought and fever.
A hero was a person who helped others at their own expense, wasn’t it? My heroic tithe was usually a literal pound of flesh. Heroes did good. And as a certain teacher of mine once said, “Good is merely that which pleases us.” I felt my jaw clench at that. The Kodex wasn’t fully healed, and it threatened to break at the slightest provocation. When it broke, I became a monster—worse, I stopped being funny. Or at least self-amusing. So long as I could cackle like a laughwolf at my own thoughts, I’d be happy. But that was hard with a broken Code.
But… but what if there was no single heroic sacrifice I could make that would repair the Code? That was a thought that wouldn’t leave me. I took in a sharp intake of breath as I swore I saw somepony standing in the shade of the great oak on Felicitat’s property. Of course, it was nothing. Fever madness, wee! But as I stared at the shady spot, I couldn’t help but wonder about what a normal heroic figure would do in this position. More importantly, what would the Code… what would he say I should do.
Looking down at my infected arm and broken hoof, I wondered. It was because of him that I was who I was today. It was he who helped me create the Code. Of course, the Code thus ensured I was a hero of sorts, that I never strayed so far from the metaphorical face of my father that I become a monster more than a hero. So with him, the face of my father, and the Kodex hovering above me, I realized something.
It was just like Father would say. “Der Herr ist ein Schatten über deiner rechten Hand.” Or, “The Lord is a shadow over thy right forehoof.” With every step towards evil and selfishness I took, the further I got from being funny. And the idea of not being funny could go get serially raped by some kind of squid. For a brief moment, I wondered if the ponies of Songnam were familiar with terrifying pornography involving tentacles, because of all the Nippönische living there. Shaking that thought from my mind, I took a breath, remembered Father’s face, and went back into the house. To appease the code, I had to sacrifice myself. The price of myself was… was my flesh consumed…
I found Felicitat laying on her couch, under her blanket and crying like a baby separated from its mother’s nipple by a barbed wire fence because its mother was terminally evil. It took her a moment to notice me standing there, and she poked her head out from the blanket. Her violet eyes drowned in seas of red crisscrossing white surrounded by the blue of her fur.
“Es tu…” she whispered.
I knelt down by her and spoke softly. “Look, I know I’ve been a real pain. And an ache in the ass.” Not to mention a milky drip from a soggy dick. “I get that. Really. You’re pretty much going to die without your patron demon, ignoring how messed up you must be deep down inside because of all that.”
Felicitat cocked her head to the side, just staring at me.
“So I thought that maybe I could help, actually.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, rubbing her eyes and sniffling. I had to remind myself that despite everything, she was still just a girl. No, not that she was female, but that she wasn’t yet a proper mare, and was emotionally immature. God, these Equestrians were seemingly more sexist than I could ever hope to be. Why I’d hope to be sexist, I didn’t know.
“Well, you know how you’re an empath, right?”
“Mmm-hmm,” she weakly hummed.
“I started wondering about that. Can you instantly tell a lie?”
Felicitat nodded. “Yeah. I can just sort of know when somepony’s lying.” She shrunk away a little. “But not with you. You’re—”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s well and all, but I’m not the point here.” I shook my head. “I imagine having a downright physic ability like that leads to a lot of neat little talents, right?” Like knowing exactly what to say in order to get that really weird threesome with you, some boy, and Honkers that you probably always wanted.
“Uh-huh.”
“And just who is everyone’s favorite Duke who’s constantly on the lookout for useful ponies?” I asked.
She blinked. “Duc Elkington.”
His name sounds weird in French. “Duke Elkington, yes. From all I know of the stallion, he’s on the hunt for all ponies of talent to work with him, no matter if you’re a freaky zebra good with dark magic or pony with the weird-as-hell name of ‘Pudge Farks’. I think that he’d have incredible interest in a filly such as yourself.”
The girl just looked at me.
“And as it just so happens to be, one of the two ponies in this room have personally met with, talked to, and worked for Duke Elkington. And after all that pony did, I think Duke Elkington would be very… attentive to anything that pony says.” I smirked. “He and I have a little repertoire. Mostly because with the Backbone dead, I am his foremost enemy whom he hates with, and I quote, ‘perfect hatred’.”
“Wait. I-if he hates you, then why—”
“He and have a very love-hate relationship,” I explained. “Sometimes he tries to kill me, other times he takes my penis in his hoof and firmly grasps it.”
Felicitat blinked. “Wait. So that’s why he’s single?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, I’d heard the rumors, but I never thought…” Her eyes darted down and to the side in thought.
“What are you talking about?”
She licked her lips. “Y-you know, the rumors that Elkington’s… uh… a coltcuddler.”
“A what?”
“Uh, you know, that he’d into other stallions, the rumors say. He’s literally the single most available bachelor in the entire kingdom; I hear every noblemare wants him, and that he gets countless marriage proposals in the mail every day. N-not to mention that, from what I’ve seen in the papers, he’s a total hottie. Most mares would probably kill to be his duchesses. But after over a decade of ruling, he’s still single. Hay, I don’t even know the guy, but if he proposed to me, I’d be dumb not to accept it. B-but if you’re the reason that—”
I cut her off with a sharp gesture. “Look, I was young and needed the money. Also, I was strapped to a hospital bed and had a switchblade up my ass.” I glanced to a little spider mocking me from the corner of the room. So I stepped away from her without explanation, killed the spider, and went back to her. “Sorry about that. Destiny had to be wrought. Anyways, Elkington’s rapetrain might have been lastweek. Oh, and he’s not gay; he actually just has a secret, absurdly creepy and stalker-like crush on Princess Celestia,” I added casually.
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah. Last week I was young and needed the money. Now I’m old and rich. Funny how that works, huh?” I shrugged. “If it makes you feel any better, I only cried for five minutes but my butt stopped hurting.”
The girl actually inched her face towards mine. “I-I wanna say you’re lying, but the utter conviction in your tone of voice freaks me out. Then again, I’m pretty sure with your voice, you could convince Princess Celestia that there is no such thing as the sun.”
“Actually,” I said, “I wanted to seduce her in order to see if she actually has a giant clitorcock.”
“Wha’?”
“Yeah, I imagine that it looks like a really long, really sad pink hat just sitting in a hammock. Only it’s not a hammock; it’s her labia!”
“What are you—I don’t even…”
I jumped up and pointed an accusing hoof at her. “Welcome to the real world, Felicitat! I’m your guide. Now pack your bags with everything you want except food and shampoo because I used and ate it all, respectively.” I blinked. Said it backwards, didn’t I? “That’s right. I used your food and ate your shampoo,” I said, kicking over her little coffee table. “I don’t know how things work, girl!”
Her jaw just went limp.
“Ooh, hey—is there a legal age of adulthood in Equestria? Is it, like, sixteen or eighteen? Because I just had the idea that maybe I could legally adopt you and then just immediately abandon you in a Songnam orphanage.” With starry eyes, I gasped. Trotting off into the next room, I didn’t stop talking. “Aww! I could totally adopt Cards and we could form the world’s second worst family—after her normal family, that is. Oh,” I went on, my voice becoming progressively more childlike, “and you and Cards would be sisters and could have a creepy and technically incestous relationship that I openly disapprove of but secretly take pictures of to sell to my creepy old friends, and that’s how I make my fortune.”
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So, Awesome
Cards was in the Tarot Cards?
Huehuehuehuehue.
Sorceress
Gun
High Priestess
King
Murderer
Hanged Stallion
= seven cards?
I think one card is missing? The Hanged Stallion is obviously the questioner, so you do need six others to do a basic spread. If we ignore that...
Sorceress covers him = general environment.(reminds me of justice: equality and righteousness)
Gun crosses him = obstacles (if it's the two of swords, conformity, friendship, courage)
High Priestess crowns him = best possible result (Secrets, mystery, wisdom, science)
King beneath him = resources he has to work with (emporer is stability, power, protection)
Muderer behind him = things in the past that are leaving the stage (seems like it might be the devil? savage violence, extraordinary effort, predestined actions)
Hanged Stallion before him = immediate future/present (sacrifice and prophecy)
So, the cards are telling him that Equestria is a good place but its good traits are against him. But he's made a deal with a powerful noble that can help him, and his time of ridiculous physical violence is behind him. Instead, he has to sacrifice in the hopes of finding wisdom.
Almost sounds like a certain game by Codemasters
Those last two paragraphs... Wat
3203989
Er, I can't count. After Murderer, there ought to have been:
It's there now.
Question: is his occasional delve into Elizabethan English simple part of his erratic and verbose speech pattern, or is Luna dirtily fondling his mind when he's not looking?
3204297
Actually, he's more-or-less literally translating from German into English. Word-for-word, if you were to translate German into English, it sounds as exactly as Elizabethan as Jericho was speaking here. The "I know not" and "Knowst thou?" is proper German as "Ich weiß/kenne nicht" and "Weißt/kennst du?". Knowing Elizabethan English actually makes it much easier to speak/understand German.
But I think Jericho explains it best himself:
3204316
Ah, thanks for the info!
You know, they say knowledge is power, so I'm going to become an intelligent person and take over the sun. Yes, the sun. Then because of my erudition I will have found a way to colonize said ball of flaming gas, and will harness its energy to make myself immortal.
Then I will offer the highest bidders the secrets of immortality; and they will give me all their money even though I don't need it but simply because I'm incredibly avaricious. Since I'm a man of my word, I'll tell them the secrets, then immediately have them killed and spend all their money on cheap booze and building orphanages for all the children I'd just made parentless; because they all clearly had single parents, since that seems to be the 'in' thing nowadays. Being single parents, not the orphanage thing. Though now that I think about it, helping orphans is kinda 'in' too...
Then after accidentally unleashing a elderich abomination from the heart of the sun, I'll be forced to sacrifice oversized gummy bears in order to appease its gluttonous appetite.
...
Because... Physics...
...
Crap, I lost my train of thought again...
So a new companion with a tragic back-story. Nothing new there except for the psychic powers, which could be an interesting angle and mechanic for the continued story. The two mind/souls thing has confused me as hell and has me believing the mystery mare who is popping in and out of the place is actually NOT a figment of Jericho's imagination.
Also the mention of a way to heal/reattach his horn excites me (Not in that way sicko.). I can't imagine his reaction to the mad way the crystal empire/province functions.
So as always an excellent chapter. Keep up the magnificent work.
3204427
I'm pretty sure I know who the second mind is. Just look at the description of the card if you hadn't figured it out previously.
I don't know what the cards mean and, quite frankly, i don't give a flying seahorse on a unicycle.
But anyway, will Felicitat replace lightning dust? Will this story ever make any sense? (probably not..) why am I asking you these questions?
Find out next week on Jericho! (a.k.a 'the story that makes absolutely zero sense 99.999999999999% of the time') (a.k.a 'a mad-pony with a f***ing sword')
This was so wrong, yet I was laughing every minute of the "dead whale vagina" bits. Do you have any idea how HARD it is to explain why you're laughing to your mother when it's something like that?!
I've noticed that both cards that seem to be Jericho, they describe his right arm being a darker colour. Is that some sort of blood-poisoning thing, or does he become a cyborg? Because that would be... somewhere between WTF and AWESOME.
The Sorceress is a crystal pony, right? Seems like there's a connection with the story about a horn being restored there.
3205019
She meant "thou hanged stallion"
Jo is Occitan for "je". She was stuttering the same word in French and Occitan. You'll likely see bunch of wrong-looking French that's not actually French but Occitan. EG, Contessa instead of Contesse.
An du Lune. It was a play off An du Seigneur. I have this really weird error thing wherein I keep spelling an as au.
Crystal? Would not it be cristal?
And while we're at it, does this bastardized/Celestia'd version of the Our Father make any sense?
Which I said meant:
I still treat what little French I can gleam as if it were Spanish, though, which I am much more familiar with.
And aye, Cards has red eyes.
You Bastard! Stop releasing chapters so fucking fast! I need to do other things but this story always takes top priority! (Don't take that seriously I'm glad you release chapters fast and am 100% willing to loose sleep reading them)
Editing is to main steam new comments are in right now
Yay! It updated
Reminds me of a Terry Prachett quote: "When you look into the abyss, it’s not supposed to wave back."
The more I think about it the more it seems that Jericho, for all his snarky sociopathy, is hollow and empty inside (if that makes any sense). If eyes are supposed to windows to the soul, then staring into Jericho's would be like peering into an empty facade. It is not as if his building was abandoned, or damaged beyond repair in a horrific accident, or even boarded up to cover a dark, gruesome secret. He seems to have absolutely nothing what so ever inside him.
Even Jericho's words and conversations seem affected; they appear to be hollow and empty as he is. Not because he is trying to dissimulate a dark ulterior motive, but rather because they are merely parts of Jericho's facade which can be dropped and changed at a moment's notice. (Actually this is beginning to sound like a changeling. Mr Welch's influence perhaps?)
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that he has completely given himself over to being an agent of the Kodex?
An empath and a changeling... The mind boggles at the possibilities.
*blink* *blink*
Whoah.
I was not as far fetched as I thought. Great job with the characterisations there!
Tell me about it! Crucified skeleton? How tacky!
That is so last decade! You get much better feng shui if you impail the corpse on an altar.
Typo there...
The blue sex demon may be too small for a porridge, but what about some tapas? (and maybe a shot or two of Dusk kumis from chapter 11).
I see what you did there...
Jericho should take a good hard look in the mirror...
Everything he described to Felicitat, he has exhibited to some degree.
- Amorality? Check.
(So long as the Kodex is not broken)
- Sexual price? Check, check, check, double-check, check, and check!
(He has just recently realised and admitted how focused his mind is on sex)
Did Jericho ever verify who his "Angel" was? He may want to look into that, especially now that Felicitat is going on about his dual voices and personalities. After all, the demons and angels described in most (if not all) religions only differ in intent...
Please tell me this happened when he was in the infantry and the next day got the EOD chappies in his battalion to stuff the whale's bits with a 500 kilo dynamite dildo and then blow it up!
Awesome chapter as usual!
Jericho's has a train of thought that can be derailed by anything heavier than a feather.
Also, I'm giving up on pointing out all the Stephen King references, a few steps closer to the Dark Tower universe and you'll have to put a crossover tag on the story.
Called it. It was too obvious, Crushric, I've seen way too many stories where The Hanged Man appears. Classic hero card (despite the fact that I honestly wouldn't consider Jericho a hero, not even an antihero).
On the other hand, half of those cards weren't actual tarot cards, unless Equestria has a completely different deck then we do, which is possible, I suppose.
Also, The Smile Song has sexual undertones? These Equestrians read into things more than I do.
3204494
No sense? And here I was thinking it was a sensical story told from the POV of a crazy pony.
3204504
Aye, sometimes the things that go on in my mind are horrific.
As for the arm... well... that would be telling.
3205177
My speed is random but will do what it will. I await your new comment, mate.
3206315
Like I said, I took a swagger of Dark Tower Juice. While themes are similar, the mechanics are all wrong compared to the awesome that is King, and how they're used is also different. I just saw King's stuff and thought about all sorts of different implications he never considered, then messed to hell with all of that because I liked the ideas but wanted to do something different with 'em. I'm an utter bastard at that, finding neat ideas from everything, blending and tearing them apart with new stuff, and then seeing what kind of frothy hell comes out of that that is at once recognizable upon the palate and yet different and not something you should put into your face hole.
I planned chapters 15-18 in that sort of mood. Should be the end of that burst of influence. I dunno, I guess I could have a train named Jayne the Payne Train, an animated-by-Twilight-Sparkle, horror-themed steam locomotive whose sole want in life is to murder ponies but cannot because she is a train who falls in love with Jericho, but that would be... something.
Maybe one of these days I'll write a Dark Tower fanfic wherein I replace Roland with Jericho and just let everything collapse from that point in. Probably not, but it'd be fun to think about what The Dark Tower would be like if Roland was Jericho.
3206880
Aye, so what does the Hanged Man mean if you're not a hero, then, hmm? Now we're messing with my take on the matter.
Check back on chapter 13, Smile. Note how Sapphire Shore's Smile Song went between her and Elkington.
3205184
Aye, Year of the Moon. An du Lune was a play off An du Seigneur. In this context, does An du Lune not work?
Con de Celestia was a literal version on an Equestrian swear which swears by the most vulgar name for Celestia's genitals. Having been ruled by a Modern-English-speaking nation for at least the better half of a millennium, I figured it wasn't unreasonable for the Occitan ponies to have literally borrowed some Equestrians curses.
3205825
That was interesting to read, so it was, so it was.
Jericho is as Jericho does, Jericho has as Jericho ain't. Thanks for the compliment!
Aye, but worst is the monster who think himself the hero.
Nay, that business is still on the agenda.
Fucking hell, it's 1 AM, everyone's sleeping, and I can't stop laughing!
Woo, another companion with a tragic backstory and no friends! I can't wait to see how Jericho will confuse (and arouse?) her with his non sequiturs!
i.imgur.com/pmAAsId.gif
Stares are so useful for regrowing a patient's eye
I think the concept of clittercock swordfighting is going to haunt me every time Celestia shows up in MLP from now on.
Yay, we got us a new companion! But she's French!
Frankly, these Cards kind of confused me and 'twas too late to think about them. I might take a look when I'm not sleep depraved.
A (ein) Schlachtschiff. Schlachtschiffe is the plural.
Why isn't it "Der Herr ist ein Schatten über deinem rechten Vorderbein"? That'd be way funnier.
3201981
I believe it was a little taken from the song "Miststück" from Eisbrecher.
3207302
Bro, Crushric tends to post the chapters for me between 21:00 and 23:00 (MET). I'm the screwed one here.
3207302
In Jericho, the rule is "Your backstory was be this tragic to join".
3207366
Gonna be honest: I ain't entirely sure how to interpret that.
3207452
Ach, you can see how ingrained saying "eyes" is in my vocabulary. So unnatural to have just one, yo. Gotta fix that.
Fear the theoretical clitorcock. Fear it well.
Whether your comments are as Spartan as this or like your old, analytic comments, it's always great to see you 'round these parts. At least I know that I haven't done something to terrible wrong yet, therewith.
3207457
She's Occitan, which is technically not the same thing, so it's all cool.
Well, I look forward to hearing what you see in them.
Ya know, I knew it was the plural, but I did not read it after I wrote it. It was a C&P from my document with the names of ships in the Armada, and I forget to take the E off Schlachtshiffe from the document.
Case ya hadn't noticed, I weirdly use Faust und Hand in the context of a pony's forehoof, and Fuß in contexts of the hindhoof. In-universe, because of the Bible. Also, it might came from Vater Unser.
Damn Crush you're a machine. Churning out updates like no-ponies business, without skimping on the quality. Keep em coming!
Oh and....whale vagina....really? Jericho would rather insert himself into a dead whale than stand in the rain? -.-'
3207301
Ugh,
BlaineJayne is a pain.I've actully done something like that in my own little medicore fanfic. Instead of the Dark Tower, it was heavily influenced by Firefly, but not so much that it warranted a crossover tag. I just used a few themes and phrases from the show, like replacing the word "fucking" with "rutting", as well as capturing (or trying to anyway) the overall "feel" of the show.
(Why yes, I do like shamelessly self-promoting myself.)
3208065
Don't take it seriously, I don't discriminate any countrymen or religion.(I hate them all equally.)Aww, look at the brigt side! Y'all have the second coolest hats after prussia! My grandpa has one of them!
th06.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2012/036/8/4/french_vinyl_scratch_by_cool77778-d4otdc2.png
3207868
Well you got me interested, so it worked.
3208047
Con, from Latin Cunnus, sexe de la femme, which is what it means in French, says here. As a term for idiot is noted there as the third definition, after sexe de la femme and rapport sexuel. While it might not be as vulgar as the English one, again, the Occitan ponies are in an English-speaking nation, so is not a bit of influence therebecase reasonable?
And I don't understand how the gender of a year can swap (always "el año en español"), but okay.
3207486
It is a list of my reaction in non-chronological order.
...Just consider that you got me to react, you still have my like and fave, and I'm calling all therapists "the rapists" now.
The fact that my mom is a physical therapist makes it that much funnier.
3208182 Heh heh heh...
i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/172/417/1315624431566.jpg
Note: It's about two chapters along and I plan on releasing new chapters around 8k-10k words log once a month or so.
(Well, my promise to edit my old comment was broken when I threw up all over my desk..... I think i'll try out one of those huge ass comment blocks that all them young whippersnappers are doing these days to make up for it.)
I always get the strangest erection....
Wow, she's like an armadillo, can she shoot blood out of her eyes too?
It does when you turn around and kill them afterwords.... asshole
That's Jericho! *Audience applause, title card pops up, credits roll*
Jericho's ten step guide to reforming Equestrians, on sale now at your local book store! Only 1000 bits and the blood of a virgin.
"My name is Button Mash....."
He wouldn't be empty if daddy raped him, that's for sure!
You sick monster! Why, WHY DID YOU DO THIS!
Jericho, a smart stallion who always thinks with his head.
Remember children if a bush wants to give you free candy don't approach it!
Straight from the head again!
Oh fuck no, you bastard. Don't you dare bring shitty fortune telling into this!
I was right that shitty card trick wasn't accurate, Cardsy should be "Terrible Prostitute" and Luna should be "Pretty Pone Princess".
An action movie set in the 1600's would be pretty kick-ass "Thou shall be thoroughly fucked when I am donuth with your mother"
I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Is peanut butter jelly even a thing? Oh god it is, someone needs to die now!
They laughed when I took that one thing to become a pastor, now look at me. Performing exorcisms like its no big deal.
This right here..... Is probably the greatest thing I've ever seen/read/heard. One of these days I'm going to write down everything Jericho's ever said, call it the Jeribible, and hand it out to homeless people. Bam instant cult following.
I know a guy who purposefully hangs out with legally retarded people so he can instill himself as the alpha male.
I ate my mom's lipstick when I was a child, It tasted like spoiled asscream.
I'd buy seven copies of both, give my mom and sister three copies of each, and keep the last ones for myself.
Kinky, I need more details.
I've always wondered that too, sure they have spas and the like, but what if you're to poor to go to one every time your tail gets filthy. Well I guess they can bath too. Probably not very convenient to have to go home every one to two hours.
Straight out of Japan.
You've got to be kidding me! Fuckin Equestrians and their kinky hoof fetishes.
I've been lied to....
Rule #34 if it exists, there's porn of it.
Sometimes I think the entire writing team needs to see an army of the rapists
My point exactly.
100% agree, you get all the bitches when you have soft hair.
People say I have a weird taste in music, I can officially say I've never heard a song about a little girl being raped by her father.
We laughed at the Romans for having a door god....
You need help...
Damn orphans, always slowing down my train with their soft lonely bodies.
Kiss My Sister is definitely a better porno title.
This seems to be a reoccurring theme.
I'm going to have to disagree, the more evil Jericho becomes the crazier he gets. Crazy=funny=great story=Jericho
Is having sex with animals considered bestiality in the pony world?
Excuse me, I need to wipe the water off my keyboard.
Excuse me, I need to wipe the piss of my chair.
Well I hope that shitty attempt at a hugeass comment block is not as shitty as it looks to me. Great chapter, the story definitely needed a comedic break, after the thing that happened in that place. Now we need a name for Jericho's future posse, Jericho and the funky bunch, The Backstreet Bitches, Sticky Waffles, Emotionally Distressed Squad, Jericho's Slutty Hoes, Anti-Equestrian Foundation, and maybe the Horse Fuckers.
Once again, thanks for this great story that I can spend three hours spluttering and laughing, like a mentally retarded beaver hyped up on cocaine, at.
3208600
We have. The
unfortunate ones who survived had to see the rapists of their own. They have been trained and are now ready to die for the Chosen.3208600
Well, that comment was awesome to read. They're the in-thing because of how awesome they are. A joy to read was it.
3215182 Euh, I'm tired right now; can you add those to the page?
This chapter was so beautiful~!
Seems like ol' GB is finally getting back into the groove. Whoo!
If Jericho doesn't get his horn back I will personally castrate you and the entire writing team. Actually, no. I'll hire a team of quintapi to do it for me while I eat peanut butter flavored jelly and laugh. That's right. Quintapi and peanut butter flavored jelly.
3220375
The fuck's a quintapi and how well could I fuck it?
3208600
That. Yes, that, keep doing that. No, not that, that, y'see? Good.
Your comments feed the black, entertainment-devouring hole in my heart. And give Crushric boners.
How on earth do you write this stuff? You have my respect for how wacky and strange yet non-nonsensical it can be.
3227915
How do I write it? Well, I just write whatever pops into my head. Often times, I literally just have Jericho repeat things I've said, like the line about spying on mice with an eye-penis. That was something I just said one day.
3231722
We need more people in the world like you.
Jericho, I think I might find more twists in your mind than a Kilometer long screw.
I think I might go through each chapter and copy down your author's notes to use in a screwed up RPG with my friends. Can I please? 
