So, in the previous chapter, 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.
As Friendly Lurker asked:
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?
Well...
"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 meat hook 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 meat hook, 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!"