//------------------------------// // Entry XX: Sexposition by Kildeez // Story: Kildeez and Sifty's Shameless Self-Insert Adventures in Equestria! // by kildeez //------------------------------// TWO WEEKS EARLIER I have to say, for the opening to a horror movie, Sifty’s digs wouldn’t do too bad. Not even a cheesy one like you’d see on the SyFy channel alongside classics such as “Sharknado 3” and “Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf.” I’m talking “The Conjuring” or “Insidious” level shit here. Opening shot: fade in on a creaking, old house, the eaves wrinkling with age, paint chipped and in desperate need of a new coat, windows covered in dust, lawn yellowing and unkempt. Until a group of sexy young coeds decides that the place would be the perfect spot for a kegger, despite the rumors that Old Man MacCready’s ghost still roams the halls fifty years after he murdered those orphans… Nah, bored with the idea already. “Welp, no time like the present,” I enthuse, grasping the picket fence and lunging over it. As I come back down, I wince and look at my hand. A splinter stands up out of the palm. Yeah, this place has definitely seen better days. “Th-this is the place?” Cypher whispers. “Yeppers!” I reply cheerfully, offering a hand up to help both him and the princess over after I yank the splinter out of my flesh. Still smiling, I whip out Shelly and check the chamber to make sure a fresh shell is loaded. “And who knows what the hell is waiting for us in there! Isn’t it exciting!?” “No…” he whimpers. “My marehood is already quivering in anticipation,” Chittery replies smartly. “That’s the spirit, you filthy pervert!” I cry, bounding across the field like a gazelle spotting a lion on the African savannah. Whooping, I stop just as one sneakered foot lands on the creaking wooden porch, allowing a final, contented sigh before I clench the shotgun close to my chest, the metal creaking in my grip. The front door squeals a complaint as I step through, shotgun levelled, sweeping tactically from side-to-side. A few steps in, I wave to Chittery and Cypher, who follow close behind with horns glowing, ready to cast a shield or a quick stun spell if needed. Unsurprisingly enough, Sift’s old digs are totally Spartan, the bareness on the walls only periodically interrupted with a weapon bolted in place or a porcelain cat on a shelf or a Nightmare’s head on a trophy plate. “How homey,” Chittery muses, scanning the walls as she steps in behind me. “We sure this guy wasn’t just a serial killer?” “Oi! Show some respect,” I grumble, sweeping Shelly past the next open doorways. My eyes dart everywhere at once, trying to absorb everything at the same time without growing new eyeballs. Yes, I have tried it before. No, it’s not as useful as it sounds. The human brain is hardwired for one point of view: a narrow cone of vision directly in front of us. Sure 360° vision sounds awesome, but try and walk and orient yourself within that cone, and you just wind up tripping over shit and almost blasting your mom in the face with a ton of birdshot. Aww, don’t give me that look, Chryssie would’ve been fine! Maybe looked like she’d gone into a paintball match wearing nothing but a sundress and a bullseye over her face, but fine! “Clear so far!” Chittery chimes from the room next to me. “Okay, I say we keep our guards up until the whole place is clear,” I shout. “We do that, then bed in the living room for tonight, clear?” “Clear!” The changelings shout behind me. I smile. You gotta love working with military. I nod to them both. The three of us take our own tour of Sifty’s house, room by room, each floor at a time. Cypher’s at my side while Chittery watches our backs, because of course she does. Any excuse for catching some flank/ass. Whatever, at least I know she’s good at it. We don’t see anything during our tour de force through Sifty’s old digs, but of course where the Nightmare’s concerned, that doesn’t mean a damn thing. “Alright,” I announce, strapping Shelly to my back while gazing around the concrete walls of Sifty’s basement. “That’s everywhere.” Cypher lets out a long sigh of relief as the glow off his horn fades. “So we can relax.” “Not quite,” Chittery points out. “We still haven’t found Mr. Nut Diddle, nor have we found any sign of what happened to him. Which means we still need to be on the lookout for whatever might have taken him.” Cypher bites his lip. “I-isn’t that pony’s name ‘Peanut Brittle’?” “Is it?” She grins lecherously and licks her lips. “My mistake.” “Fer Chrissakes, woman,” I growl as I head up the stairs, towards the light. “Just five minutes without an attempt at either of our dicks, please? That would be…” Something rushes past the open door. Something black, a total blur that I can’t even make out, but definitely there. In a flash, the shotgun is in my hands again, and I stomp up the stairs, raising it even as I elbow my way out into the light, shotgun levelled. “Fucking come out!” I scream. “I know you’re there! Don’t think you can fuck with me! I’ll rip your goddamned head off!” “Kildeez!” I turn to the side, and there’s Chittery, horn aglow, eyes peering behind me. Watching my back again, it just brings a smile to my face. “What was it!? What did you see!?” “I-uh…” there was the million-dollar question. Just what did I see? A rushing shadow in the dark? A… …a monster, a thing bent on killing you and your friends. Act now. Destroy everything now, before they get to you, before they make you like the mare in the Black Mamba, you remember that one K? You remember how… Shut the fuck up. “Nothing,” I reply, holstering my shotgun again. “Nothing at all. Trick of the light, had to be.” Chittery eyes me for a second, then stands down, her horn extinguishing. Cypher pokes his head up after us, his reactions apparently a tad behind both of ours. “What the h-hell was that!?” He stammers fearfully. “Nothing, Cyphy,” Chittery says, eyeing me suspiciously. “K got spooked by his own shadow, is all.” “O-oh,” by the look on his face, I can tell he’s not exactly convinced either. “O-okay, should we-we setup camp?” I finally note the elongating shadows in the hallway and the rosy hue from the windows. It’s been a long day, lot longer than I thought. “Alright. Be nice to have a roof over us tonight.” Cypher grins at us both. Chittery and I return the grin for him, though mine is a little more pasted on, since the whole time I have to ignore the sensation of dark, feral eyes on the back of my neck, all while repeating to myself: not me, I’m fine, I’m okay, that’s not who I am… --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chittery takes the couch, of course. Cypher and I busy ourselves gathering up pillows, blankets, and anything else we can salvage to make the floor cozy. Still, the entire time we work making the plain linoleum comfortable, I can’t help but smile. This will be the first time I’ve slept with a roof over my head in weeks. And with cool weather to boot, no need to even switch on the AC, we just crack one of the windows looking out on the dying lawn. “What’re you looking at?” I turn to see Chittery all cuddled up in a little blanket on the couch, peering at me expectedly. With her soft, massive eyes peering just over the cover, I’d say she looks cute. Adorable, even. I smile easily at her. “Just thinkin’ Sift is gonna need some serious fertilizer when he makes it back,” I reply, my smile fading. “If he makes it back.” Noting my plummeting mood, Chittery’s quick to react: “What was he like?” She asks suddenly. I arch an eyebrow and take a seat on the floor, using a pillow as my cushion. “I already toldja, remember? Showed you when we first met?” “No, you only showed what he looked like,” she shoots back. “But who was he? Sifty the human, I mean.” “I hear ya,” I reply, finally catching her drift. My eyes slide closed as I review everything I have stored up on Siftstone, trying to summarize what I see, piece together a few constants. Problem is, I keep coming up with some blanks. “Honestly, even now it’s hard to say. He was really good at keeping himself walled-up, y’know? I think the ponies managed to break through that wall once, but once they got too busy and started ignoring him…” “The walls went right back up, stronger than ever,” she nods sagely. “You got it,” I smile and lean back, my eyes rolling up to the ceiling in a way I hope looks coy and thoughtful, but probably looks like I’m begging God to let me know why my partnership in this apocalypse needed to go from a stone-cold badass warrior-swordsman to a warped changeling scared of its own shadow and a nymphomaniac royal. “Still, every now and again I would catch a glimpse of something.” “Oh? Like what?” She asks, giggling at my attempt to look all wizened and shit. I pause, my eyes drifting down to her. Her giggling stops as her eyes lock with mine. “Strength,” I state, my smile shrinking but still there. “You probably already figured that out, but yeah, he had that old Balkans strength in him.” “Balkans strength?” “It’s this area back on Earth filled with dozens of ethnic groups that all hate each other, squeezed together by centuries of invasion, retreat, genocide, and colonization. The Balkans are the best way into Europe from Asia, you see: two massive continents where the Balkans are the only land bridge that isn’t underwater or ball-shrinkingly cold. It’s the best route for trade, and for invaders from either the European or Asian side. So, for example, the Turks come in, slashing and burning to get at their prize in central Europe, and the Serbs run like hell to get away, which leaves the land empty for the Albanians to spread from the hills and introduce themselves as yet another faction in a region already filled with Croats, Bosniaks, Russians, and what have you.” I give a derisive snort. “Lather, rinse, repeat for the better part of a thousand years, and you got a melting pot where everyone has been throwing the better part of their courage and ingenuity in finding new and exciting ways to rip each other to pieces for centuries.” “Th-this is one of those wars you were telling me a-about, isn’t it?” Cypher asks, his hooves propping his chin up like a schoolboy receiving his lesson. “You gotcha,” I cock my head in his direction and flash a winning smile. Someone’s been listening. “Now, Sift wasn’t born in the Balkans, but he did have a lot of blood there, and the way he acted, you’d think he must have gone through some of the worst wars that region’s had to offer these past few years. I figure some of that has to do with those walls he had around himself, and the raw strength keeping ‘em up.” “But if he wasn’t over in that area…” Chittery frowns, “…what happened to him that made him put those walls up in the first place?” “Your guess is as good as mine, hot stuff,” I shrug, splaying my hands. “He was always real guarded around me, and once I let slip that I knew who he was without him telling me, the walls only got higher. But that strength was always there, even when you’d think it shouldn’t have been, like when he was sleeping, or when we stopped in one of the towns left empty.” “Oh?” “Yeah. Everywhere we went, he would treat the things left behind by the ponies with the utmost respect. He’d handle them like they were relics from an ancient civilization. And still, I’d look over and that old hardness would be in his eyes. He’d be looking over a photo of some lost pony family, and his body language would say: ‘I’d be giving these ponies hugs and belly rubs if they were here,’ only his eyes would still say: ‘and if a Nightmare showed its ugly mug I’d sacrifice everything I had to put it down and keep them safe, all for them.’ Do you understand?” Chittery looks me over, those wide eyes shimmering with something I can’t quite place, but does look familiar on her face. “Yeah, I think I do,” she whispers. Reflecting back on her time looking over Pinkie Pie while she slept, I figure Chittery might be talking about herself. But those eyes…no, those eyes are locked with mine, as if she’d been gazing into them all along and I’m only now noticing. A tiny smile curls at the corners of her lips. I smile back. She leans forward on her hooves. Surprisingly, I find myself mirroring her, drawing in. She closes her eyes with a pleasant smile. I close mine. We draw in, the woody, oaken smell of the room being replaced with sweat, chitin, and a rather nice undertone of saliva and… Cupcakes? I open my eyes. Cypher looks up at me as if I were a bear, his body suspended in the light glow of Chittery's magic. “S-sorry,” he insists. “She said she’d never sleep with me again if I didn’t do it.” “Aww, what the fuuuucckkkkk!?” I scream, throwing myself back and wiping at my mouth while Chittery rolls on the couch, laughing her little black ass off. “The look on your face!” She shrieks, hooves wrapping around her stomach to ease the laughter. “Totally worth it, you clopper freak! Totally!” I grimace down at her, my fury building. But no. I will not give in like that. I’ll come up with something a whole helluva lot better, and something that came to mind during our little conversation might help me do just that. “Alright, little miss smart-flank, your turn!” “Ooh!” She coos, fluttering her eyelashes prettily. “I get to smooch Cypher, too?” “No,” I grin, a wicked one this time. “I had my storytime, so now it’s yours: what’s with you and the little pink ball of hyperactivity?” At that, her laughter stops dead. She sits up, cringing under my gaze. “Now’s not…” “Don’t give me that,” I growl mercilessly. “Now’s the perfect time, and you damn well know it.” She sighs, sitting up with her hooves propping her against a pillow. “Fair enough,” she says, shaking her head. “I kinda had this coming, didn’t I?” “’Kinda’ nothing, girly,” I sit back down, folding my arms over my chest and smirking triumphantly. “Fine, fine,” she waves a hoof as she sits up on the couch. “I guess it’s only fair. You guys should probably know, anyway.” Cypher and I stay silent. Whatever it is the Princess is talking about, we’re not going to interrupt it. She’s obviously got a lot to unload. “Back when I was still a teenager, my sister banished me from the Hive for a while,” she sighs, rubbing a hoof against her temple. Obviously, this story requires her to go to a very painful spot in her past. My smile fades. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea… “Oh right!” Cypher pipes up suddenly. “I r-remember that day!” “I should hope so! It was the day after you caught me with the showerhead!” She grins with a little wink, earning another one of Cypher’s obligatory blushes. Her smile doesn’t last long, though. “I was young and inexperienced. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for a tiny stroke of very good luck, I probably would’ve died of starvation within the first month.” “And that bit of luck was…” I motion for her to carry on. Her gaze breaks away from me, drifting over to the window. “Crumble Pie, an elderly mare living on the bounds of the Everfree,” she replies, not looking at either of us. Cypher and I sit there, dumbfounded for a second, when the pieces come together in my head. “Hold on, Crumble and Pinkie!?” She nods. “Not bad, Doofus, not bad at all,” she faces us again, her chin quivering, her eyes shimmering in the fading light. “Crumble Pie was Pinkie’s grandmother. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time, and nopony knew that Pinkie was gonna grow up to be a damned national hero, but Crumble was a kind mare, and even with me looking like my normal, sexy, but young and freaky changeling self, she recognized a kid in need and took me in.” “Wow,” Cypher whispers. “She must’ve been a saint.” “She was,” Chittery whispers. “I would disguise myself as a visiting friend when the Pies came over with Pinkie and her sisters, and she treated those mares with more love and care than you’ve ever seen a pony treat anyone. She did all the grandma things with both them and me: baked cookies, taught us how to sew…” “You keep using her in the past tense,” I point out, now sitting up. “What happened to her?” Chittery droops immediately. Her chin sinks to her chest, her gaze drifting to the pillow directly in front of her. “Like I said,” she whispers. “I was young and inexperienced. Do you guys know about the risks of a changeling that overfeeds on its targets?” I frown. I do remember Chryssie telling me a thing or two about overfeeding on love. The creature I chose could suffer a whole host of nasty effects over time. Even passive feeding: plucking the love right out of the aura around a loving creature, could have its side effects, especially if I ever did it around any elderly, because their weak hearts made them especially vulnerable to…complications… “Oh no,” I whisper, my fingers trailing over my face. “Y-you didn’t…you couldn’t!” Cypher gasps, apparently realizing what I just had. “I did,” Chittery whispers, her chin still on her chest. “It happened so fast. Just a normal night, us reading by the fireplace, I was sort of sampling on her love like it was a fuckin’ bag of potato chips, and suddenly she just…dropped.” At that, Chittery looks up, the words spilling out of her mouth almost as fast as the tears from her eyes. “I looked up from my book, and she was on the ground by her old rocker. I tried to bring her back but I was only barely starting to learn how to control magic and I only knew a little CPR and I beat on her chest until…until I felt her ribs break. It didn’t do any good.” We’re all silent for a while. It’s just us, the creaking of the house settling, and the occasional bird that wanders into our little pocket dimension. My mind goes blank; it’s Cypher who finally breaks the silence: “So wh-what happened then?” “Well, Pinkie still needed her Grammy-Pie, and I still needed to eat,” Chittery smiles thinly at us and looks up at last, wiping tears from her eyes. “Win-win, you know?” Another few moments of awkward silence, then without thinking, I dart to my feet and close the distance between us, wrapping my arms around the changeling. Cypher joins me in a second, cuddling us both close with his tendrils, minding his blades so he doesn’t accidentally slice us. “You were a kid,” I whisper. “You couldn’t have known.” “She saved my life,” she whispers back, her tears soaking the front of my undershirt. “She saved me at my lowest point, and I murdered her and took her place.” “Y-you were a kid,” Cypher offers up a gentle hoof, and sometimes, that’s all you really need. Chittery sniffles a little bit more, but the worst of the crying is behind us now. She pulls back, wiping at her nostrils with the back of her leg, any stray mucus getting caught up. “Thanks, guys,” she whispers, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, you two are the first ones I’ve ever been able to tell about this.” “No kiddin’?” I ask. “Huh. That’s pretty awesome.” “Wh-what happened later?” Cypher asks. “How’d you survive the rest of y-your time in Equestria?” “Simple, I became Crumble Pie,” Chittery shrugs, as though it were obvious. “I was the granny Pinkie still needed. I did all the loving things Crumble had done with me: I coddled Pinkie by the fireplace and read to her on cold nights, I told her she could do anything when she would come to me in tears because life on the rock farm just wasn’t working the way it should’ve been…” At this, she giggles a little through her tears. “…I even taught her a few tricks to beat back the worst of estrus when it started happening to her, and as a teenaged mare myself, lemme tell you, sometimes it was hard not to rip off my disguise and run into the village to throw myself at the first cock I saw.” “Is everything about sex with you?” I laugh gently. “Yes,” she replies with a tiny giggle. “Have we not established that?” We all embrace just a little too long to be considered just friendly. But really, I’m already starting to think of these two as a bit more than friends. I’ve fought with them both, and they’ve proven themselves to be capable. What’s more, we’ve bared things to one another that mere acquaintances could never learn. I can’t help but smile contentedly to myself. Yeah, a couple of good friends sounds nice to me right now. There’s only one thing to spoil it. “Chittery, please take your hoof off my ass,” I insist. “Sorry, can’t blame a mare for trying.” “Actually, I can, so if you please…” “Ugh…fine…” she grumbles, giving me a final squeeze and a pat before sending me off on my jolly way. We all sit there awhile, just glad to have sympathetic ears for our troubles and trusted eyes for our backs. Although not for our backsides. I’ve already moved my ass as close to the wall as I can, and Cypher has followed suit. Guard your black cherries, people. “Hey,” Chittery points out. “So that’s massive, revelatory dialogue for me and you, but what about the new guy?” I blink, and then my eyes light up. “Oh yeah! Cypher!” The Nightling looks around, eyes wide as though he were a deer caught in headlights. “Wait, me?” “You see any other blade-wielding sex machines around here, hot stuff?” Chittery purrs as I roll my eyes. “Yeah man, you,” I point at him, my elbows propped up on the floor. “C’mon, what’s your story? You know something about the Nightmare we all don’t?” “N-no I…” he frowns. “Y-you guys, I don’t have a-anything like that. I’m sorry. It was pretty much just: ‘rrr…train up your fighting skills or the ponies will get you,’ or ‘rrr…train up your powers or we’ll feed you to the veterans.’ J-just training and training from the moment I crawled out of my transfiguration sac. There’s not much more to it, and everything from before the transformation is still fuzzy and blurred.” “Wow,” Chittery grumbles. “Sounds boring.” Cypher pauses, and looks out the window at the setting sun for a second. “Y-you know what? It was!” He chuckles and shakes his head. “It really was. But I didn’t have anything else t-to relate it to without my memories, s-so it didn’t occur t-to me how boring things really were. The only th-thing I had to look forward to was my first field r-raid.” “Oh yeah?” I sit up in my spot, eyeing him. “Y-yeah,” he replies. “After a couple months, n-new converts got to go out in the field on a r-raid, with supervision from some of the m-more fully-converted.” “Give you guys a taste of blood with proper supervision to make sure you only saw what you were supposed to see and felt what you were supposed to feel,” Chittery says, her muzzle wrinkling with disgust. “How effective,” I grimace. “You see it all the time with tyrants and warlords back home. They do it at a young age: makes sure the next generation will have even more loyalty to the state. I gotta say, that’s damn smart. Hideous and cruel, but damn smart of the Nightmare Collective.” “Y-yeah, i-it was pretty much just e-eat, sleep, and fight to t-train ourselves. N-never even occurred to most of us that there could be…” he blushes and turns to Chittery. “Could be…” “More?” She offers. Still blushing, he smiles and nods, only for the smile to fade almost as quickly as it appears. “W-wait, I almost forgot.” “Forgot?” I sit up straight, watching him carefully. “Forgot what?” “Th-there was some time to m-myself,” he shrugged. “D-during the first few weeks, after we were allowed t-to rest, I’d sometimes sneak up to one of the higher parts of the n-nest and just…sit there. There was a tunnel leading outside, and I-I’d just sit in the alcove and…listen.” “To the birds?” I asked. He shook his head. “Not a lot of those l-left, but…there was wind…and sun, I remember how warm the sun felt.” His lips curved up into a massive smile. “So warm. Made my pony fur feel like I was covered in a blanket, but after a few weeks the o-others found out, and th-they beat me and locked me in a cave for a couple days with no food or water, a-and told me they’d do worse i-if I did it again.” “That must’ve been when the Hive’s link to your mind was strengthening,” Chittery points out. “At that point, you wouldn’t have been able to hide anything from them.” “I-I guess,” he sighs. “I l-listened to them, and within a couple days, I actually s-started forgetting how nice the sun felt a-and how good the wind was in my ears, which I guess, looking back, was p-probably the Collective making me forget.” I nod again. “Almost certainly. The purity of nature as it exists would’ve acted as a connection to your past, which the Nightmare couldn’t allow if they were going to make you into another mindless husk to do their bidding. The Nightmare wanted you to worship their own, corrupted version of nature, not the pure kind you could see outside your nest.” “Y-yeah…I think I g-get that now,” Cypher looks out the window again, just as the sun slips out of view. He sits like that for a while, watching the last remnants of sun turn into purples and yellows and reds, the blackness of Luna’s night revealing the stars above. Even more than back home, what with the lack of light pollution. I can see galaxies spinning above us, comets shooting overhead, probably light-years away. I can see red giants and white dwarves together, intermingling in an eternal ballet, spinning such an impossibly vast distance away that to even comprehend the distance can drive a man insane. Most of all, I see a sky like my own, in a world worth protecting, from one to another. “G-guys?” Cypher asks suddenly, his voice even tinier than usual. “Hmm? What is it, Cyphy?” Chittery asks, propping herself up on her couch. “Th-thanks for saving me,” he whispers, one of his bladed tendrils delicately wiping a tear from the side of his face. “Thank you so much.” Chittery and I say nothing. We just sit there in silence, watching the sky outside the window, trying to see what Cypher must see, trying to understand what it must be like to almost lose that beauty forever, to almost forget it in favor of becoming a mindless puppet. I’m not sure when we drifted off to sleep. I imagine it must have been some time after that, though. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And in the dead of night, something with yellow eyes, razor-sharp teeth, and five spindly legs crawled from one of the upper corners of the room and descended on a single, silvery strand of webbing. The creature might have looked like a spider were it not for its perfectly-round body and lacking number of legs. As it was, it simply skittered across the floor, coming to a stop at the couch where Chittery slept. It waved a spindly leg before her face. She didn’t even stir, her breathing continuing steady and even. The creature smiled to itself, giving it an appearance not too unlike a child’s attempt at a spider for a Halloween decoration, if not for the red, shimmering eyes and crooked, uneven fangs. The sleeping spell had worked perfectly, just like it had been promised. Now it was time to feed. “Let’s see what we can find here…” it hissed, it’s voice more like a whispering draft on the air than actual speech. It wafted a spindly leg, and the changeling’s mouth dropped open, a white mist oozing from her mouth and into the creature’s. After a moment or two, she tossed and turned on the couch, readjusting herself in her sleep, albeit with a quiet whimper and a look of distress on her face. “Hmmm…pony domination, both as a fear and a fantasy, fear of rejection…meh…” the thing sighed and turned away. Sure, it was a good start, but he’d been hoping for something different from a royal. Ah well, the males on the floor looked promising. The stallion was…interesting, even if his fears had turned out completely banal. His stream had come out a tinted gray, but that was the only thing notable about it. Fire, torture, pain, though underneath it all, a sense of duty that overrode all that. Still, hardly anything to build a real fantasy on. Next. Now here was something interesting: stood on two feet, yet colored like a changeling. Same claws, strange weaponry unlike anything else it had seen in this world, but let’s see what it had to offer. Upon opening its mouth, a rainbow-colored stream poured out, cascading past its fangs. The creature nearly fell back, the things streaming into its mind…the memories…the alien worlds…the concepts…the things this man had done! The creature’s brain hurt just trying to drink it all in! Oh. Oh, and there was this. In the darkness, the creature rubbed its legs together. It now had material to work off of for months to come! Part of it wanted to wake this thing up just to thank it! But that would be going against the will of the hive: the Collective was very clear that everything was to be done to keep this trio from ever reaching Canterlot, and that any Nightmare caught aiding them would be cut-off (though that raised some questions about the changeling/Nightmare mix and how it was still alive). Still, at any rate this would prove to be a most interesting night. The creature raised its legs and searched for the right words, waiting until they came on their own. It grinned in the darkness. It liked this phrase, and it loved the creation that followed. “Leave it to Beaver…” it whispered to itself, legs shaking in anticipation. Yes… Oh, this nightmare was going to be so much fun!