Jericho

by Crushric

Chapter 29 — Black

Chapter 29: Black

“I would stroll through the gala, and everyone would wonder, ‘Who is that mysterious mare?’”

Stitches.

“Y’know,” the owl-like man with the off-white surgical mask said to me, “most folker seem to get like babies when they need shots or get threaded.”

I only looked at the man with my one eye, gritting my teeth as he worked. “I’m not like most folks,” I said to him. “Most folks would probably cringe at the idea of a doctor working for a bunch of murderers and rapists and wearing dirty scrubs sewing up their eye with a doubtlessly dirty needle. I’m only half sure you’re sewing the correct eye up, really. Also, I’m pretty sure that you never went to an accredited medical school.”

The doctor finished his work, not being gentle as he finished the stitches. “Well, I’m sorry we don’t have access to much medical alcohol.”

“And I’m going to be sorry when I get lockjaw,” I said dryly, my ass feeling sore from sitting on this rusty examination table.

He put his hands on his hip. “Hey, you trying doing your best in my shoes; I’m a damn dentist.”

“Great,” I replied, looking around at the faded baby-shit-green walls of this dimly lit square room, “and I suppose you’re also all for open-heart dentistry?”

“Well, there was that one time I did something like that,” he said a bit sheepishly. “There was kind of a reason they took my license away before Olympia fell.” The owl-looking man adjusted his glasses. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give for some of those mystical medicines from the Rike, back where you must be from.”

“Meaning the extract of the Doktorkäfer and the Balsam von Gilead.”

He twirled around. “Yes, yes, that. The Balm of Gilead. What I wouldn’t do for a super healing drug that wouldn’t kill you nar as soon as save you. Ah, I once saw it in action, the Balm of Gilead; man’s leg was nearly cut off, and nar a bit of that stuff had him right as rain. Of course, this was erstwhile, when I served under General Black Jack Parishioner.”

I cocked a brow as I stood up, putting my shirt back on. I’d taken it off because the doctor here had no anesthesia or painkillers—feeling pain, it seemed, was currently highly in-season around Blackgard—and getting blood on my shirt was not on my agenda. Nor was burning a woman alive and then getting taken to a back-alley dentist-come-surgeon, for that matter, but the universe seemed keen on giving me tetanus today.

“You were a Carolean?” I asked, putting on my eyepatch. “How’d you end up here, then?”

The doctor gave me a weird grin. “Well, let’s nar say that there’s a reason the good general only has one eye now instead of the two he woke up with that fateful morning.”

“Riiight,” I replied, slipping on my holsters and gunbelts. “And just when can I see that witch? She told me she wanted to see me.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be too eager over her,” the doctor said. “Between you and me, I hate that way she looks at me; it’s the look of particularly ambitious proctologist with obsessive compulsive disorder.”

“I was literally just thinking that exact phrase,” I said, crossing my arms. “Stop reading my mind, you damn dirty psyker.”

He snorted. “Dude, it’s common reaction to her when folker see her. I swear to the Founding Fathers, one moment she has these demure little womanly fingers, the next moment she’s wringing her hands together with the world’s longest fingers, and that’s always when she has that obsessive-compulsive proctologist look about her, like she wants to stick her world’s longest fingers up your ass and check for drugs.”

I was struck with the mental image of a butterfly’s wound-up tongue, and before that thought could get any further, someone knocked on the door. Thank God. That last thing I wanted to do was to think about was a butterfly’s tongue in my—oh goddammit, I thought about it!

The doctor motioned his head to the door, and I dutifully went with it, walking slightly stiff-legged, still reeling from that horrific thought. The Warden’s Hand was on the other side of the door, the hallway beyond her the off-baby-blue color of a pediatrician’s office, if that pediatrician was a pedophile who positively lived for the old “turn your head and cough” routine, which explained why it looked so decrepit.

“Um, hi,” she said. “Been wandering where they’ve let me wander after I got patched up.” She tugged at her bandana. “Turns out they’ve built a literal blood fountain, even saw a few kids splashing around in it. Can’t imagine how much hepatitis they must have.”

“Faith keeps the illness away,” came a gruff voice to her side. I leaned to the side to see a bulky Blackguard standing there, warhammer slung across his back. “Through faith, we are strong, kept righteous. The contrary opinion is the prattle of profligatory heathens.”

“Yes, and with the power of miracle prayer,” I said in a voice like a deranged mother trying to drown her kids in a soup can, “you too can banish the demons that infect you and cure all wounds, mayhap even rid yourself of that rod so firmly lodged in your ass.”

The man grunted. “I’ll be sure to ask the Old Ones about that when I reach High Haven. As for now, you are healed. You will follow me. Deviate from this course and you will die. Painfully.”

A strange urge gripped me. I raised a hand and opened and closed it in a manner that pantomimed a talking mouth. “Ooh, look at me. I’m a big strong man with a hammer who enjoys groping females smaller than him.” Dropping the hand, I stepped up to the man. This close to him, he had to look up to meet my gaze. “Rest assured, for I will thee kill.”

He looked back up at me, unflinching. “You may offer to fight me like a man in honorable combat after this day, for the priestess wishes your presence. When that day comes, we may duel over who goes to High Haven first.”

I snorted. “Such a thing do I doubt. Best outcome for you is that my mortal coil is ended and I end up feasting in the halls of Walhalla with my forefathers. Although, I doubt that there is any Heaven for the likes of me”

The man rolled his eyes and he walked past me, gesturing for us to follow like cattle stuck in a frat house. The Warden’s Hand and I followed him in silence, my eye never touching her. I was becoming slowly surer and surer that this had actually been some sort of school at one point, especially when we came across the lockers. In one of them, there was a skeleton with glasses and a poindexter shirt stuffed thereinto.

When I saw that poindexter dead, I went off the path and up to the body. “Nerd!” I hissed quietly, taking his glasses and throwing them down the hall. After that, I went back to following the man. “This place seems fairly intact, compared to everything else,” I observed.

“It should,” the man said in a tone like a warthog trying to copulate with a rusty can with jagged edges. “House Skybane, descendants of Geremiah the Great and the true heirs to Evesland, placed a high priority on public education and the safety of our children. All schools were built as if they were shelters, and most all schools still stand because of that. When the sky fell that day, many people crowded into schools, and those many people often survived with only minor injuries.”

Were I a commander, like General Eisenhauer or Falkenhausen, the knowledge that people were crowding in schools would have simply meant that the artillery, die Haubitze, should be told to concentrate nerve gas attacks on the schools for maximum civilian casualties. If the enemy didn’t have any civilians to operate the factories and provide new troopers, the enemy war machine collapsed. Nothing wrong with mass nerve gas attacks on populated civilian centers, therefore.

As we passed through a set of doors and into an outdoor courtyard with a hugely overgrown oak tree, the Warden’s hand spoke up. “I’m sorry, Gunslinger. This is all my fault.”

I merely put a hand on her shoulder, saying nothing. Honestly, though, her phrasing was more pleasant than mine. And I sure wasn’t going to try to disagree with her and attempt to convince her it was all my fault.

“You’re… handing this much better than me, too.” She tilted her head slightly. “I’m a bit jealous, y’know?”

“Well,” I said slowly, calmly, “it wasn’t the first time I burned a girl at the stake.” The Hand said nothing, just looked at me. “But, I will admit, this was the first time the hoo—er, the hand that lit the flame was mine and mine alone.” When I saw the question bubble frothily to her eyes and then move to her lips, I answered before she could ask. “Back in the Reich, I worked for the Reichskriminalamt. I worked alternatively on investigating supernatural incidents and hunting down the worst of the worst, such as serial killers, serial rapists, and witches.”

I flashed her a distant smile. “You know, I still fondly recall the time that my then-girlfriend knocked on my door and wanted to stay the night—she was having some sort of trouble at home—and when I let her in, she saw what I’d been doing. That is to say… well… imagine just walking into the house of your lover, probably expecting to be welcomed open-armed and probably intercourse, and instead you find him half-naked surrounded by pictures of brutally mutilated dead girls whose murders he’s trying to solve.” With a chuckle, I shook my head. “I was fairly adroit at getting into the mind of a serial killer, they said.”

“I… I’d heard that Toitschers burned witches and stuff, and I’d just assumed that it was nar a myth. Even when the Confessionist converts in the coastal cities tried to burn that girl the other week, I figured that they had bought so much into the myths that they’d made fiction into fact.”

“Nope,” I chirped, looking up at the greatly overgrown tree as we passed under its canopy. “We’re all for burning witches. As the prophet said: ‘The way of the spell is dangerous. Only through the mind can one hold holy the world. He who has forgotten this has forgotten this truth the face of his Father.’” I adjusted my hat. “This is the zweite Säule des Konfessionismus, the second Pillar of Confessionism, as a the M—as the Woman Laurentia said. We interpret her words to mean we have to kill those who used magic, instead of, say, simply using it with caution.” I shrugged. “I once read a book that suggested that the Woman Laurentia had preached cautious control over magic and was herself a powerful mage, and so I was just making fun of… eh… never mind.”

“Right, right,” she said as we went through a set of doors and back into the school. In this part of the school, there were actual people wandering about. Blackguards moving around from classes, even one class filled with children being taught what I could only presume was math, since math was the most evil of studies. After a Blackguard woman holding a small child in her arms walked by us, the Warden’s Hand swallowed.

“It was my mother’s,” she let slip.

I glanced over at her, watching a toddling little thing flail around at a rubber ball nearly as big as it. “Your bandana, I take it?” The toddling thing fell onto the rubber ball with weirdly stiff articulation, like a porcelain baby ball. It made my skin crawl to watch.

She nodded. “It’s all I have left of her. I couldn’t leave it back there.” She looked around with a slight grimace on her face. “A few years ago, the Blackguard raided a part of New Pegasus—this was nar before the Warden showed up. They…” She took a long, hard breath. “They took my mother away from me and nearly killed me. I managed to get away only because I stabbed one of them in the neck and ran.”

“And so your dear mammy is dead, I take it.”

She jerked to her to me. “Mammy? How did you…?”

“Is this not how she sometimes referred to herself in her dialect?”

“It is, but—”

“In any case, she’s dead, correct?”

“No, not dead. Worse. She’s a ‘divine helper’ of the Blackguard. A slave. Forced labor. Honestly… I only tagged along because… I dunno. Something about you feels kinda familiar, you know? I just have this feeling like I can trust you, that you’re the only one who can save my mother. It’s stupid, it doesn’t make any sense, it’s illogical, but, well, so is a legendary gunslinger straight out of the storybooks my mother read to me practically falling into my lap and willing to be the chivalrous hero all little girls dream of.”

After a moment, she said in a softer voice, “At this point in my life, when a knight in dusty coat comes along, I’m just desperate enough to think he can right what went wrong and get her back.” She sighed, looking away from me. “After Dad died when Olympia fell, she’s the only family I have left. I… I just wanted to be right there to embrace her and be embraced by her when you inevitably free the slaves.”

The man ahead of us snorted. “Divine helpers work and die for the legacy of the Old Ones. We should all be so lucky to die building something.”

“Bullshit!” she spat.

“Were your mother lucky, she would be dead and ascended into High Haven. The Old Ones were kind like that. Imagine, being sent to High Haven for the one good thing she did in life, for she clearly did no good raising you.”

The woman’s eyes erupted with fire. “Oh, you son of a whore!” she barked, raising a fist to the man. “You do not talk about about my mother like that!”

Before she could hit him, I grabbed her wrist. She struggled uselessly against my unrelenting grip, like a seagull caught in the mouth of a very hungry pelican. The woman grunted and ordered, “Let me go! Dammit! Let me go!” Struggling for her right fist, her eyes darted around before her left fist made best friends with my cheek.

As my head twisted from the blow, she suddenly stopped struggling, becoming as still as the weird toddling child who was still lying on the ground by his ball and who I was pretty sure was dead.

Slowly—purely for dramatic effect, I admit—I turned my head back to and the horrified expression she now wore. “Do you feel better now, girl?” I asked in a calm voice, and she failed to respond. “He just wishes to invoke your ire. Indulge him not; you only satiate his will.”

“Your man is much smarter than you are,” the Blackguard said with a lopsided grin that just made me want to jam my thumbs into his eyes and give him a scar on his cheek in the shape of a banana.

“The Gunslinger speaks true, at least,” came the voice of the witch. We all turned to see the woman in black and her plague mask. “Brother Boethias, let them alone. They are now under my watch.”

Boethias, as I supposed was his name, briefly knelt down and said “Yes, ma’am” before walking off to wherever girl-groping guys with giant gavels slung over their back went off. Probably to do something manly to prove that his warhammer wasn’t just there for overcompensation. That kind of overcompensation was the exact reason why I always preferred smaller weapons to bigger ones.

The witch gestured to the door behind her. “If you would step into my office, lady and gentleman.” After a moment’s hesitation, the Warden’s Hand walked into the office. When I didn’t move, just stood there with fists balled, the witch chuckled warmly. “Come then, Gunslinger, let us hold palaver within. Don’t tarry. I will at least be brief.”

“Yes,” I said with a hint of sarcastic smarminess, “let us hold palaver—whatever that means—with a dark lady in a post-apocalyptic high school principal’s office in a world whose Ragnarök, I am starting to suspect, was caused either by cupholders, mimes, or French maids.”

“More like our end was when Elkington took out all the members of the royal house of Olympia, brought them before Olympia's citizens, and brutally had each royal family member beaten to death. All members of the ancient Skybane family died that day,” she replied evenly. “They saved the King for last. Elkington put a burning cigar out in the king’s eye before the dear King Elkington personally beat him to death for all to see that he was superior. Some say it was with his own fists. Others claim Elkington beat King Hawke to death with his own rubber ducky just to prove some obscure point.”

Doing some ridiculous to prove an obscure point? Yep. Totally sounds like the Elkington I know and love. Not so much the “to death” part, though, but whatever.

“Ah, and there’s no asking for a plea bargain when the crime is regicide, I take it?” I shook my head. “No, I think this whole world’s problem runs deeper.”

“And therefore did the angel mark you as his own, Gunslinger,” she remarked.

Sighing, I stepped into the dingy room, found a chair in front of the desk, and sat down. The Hand had the chair next to mine, and it looked more comfortable. Dammit, the witch was right when she told me I shouldn’t have tarried!

“You know,” I said as the witch took a chair on the far side of the desk, “I can’t help but get the weird feeling that this entire future conversation would be much easier if we all stripped down to our undergarments and discussed it as we had a pillow fight.”

“I’ve never had a pillow fight,” the Warden’s Hand said, and I flinched back from her.

“You’ve never had a pillow fight? Egads! Quickly, witch, let us shun her, forever leaving her to dwell in the shame of having never gotten mostly naked and beat someone else with a soft object.” I relaxed my posture as I put a finger to my chin. “Only, my pillows were always filled with spoons and knives, so I’m not sure my pillow fights counted as pillow fights proper or as attempted murder.”

“Right,” the witch said with a dismissive wave of the hand. “So, I said I would be brief, and so shall I be.”

“She said,” I added under my breath, “before launching into a three-hour rant about her disdain for the rising prices of dairy products.”

“I want you to help me kill the Black Man.”

I blinked. “Well, talk about an unforeseen plot twist. What’s the catch? You want to put his eviler, rapey-er son in charge?”

“No. I solely wish to be rid of that crazy bastard, as would the rest of the Blood Knights and a fair few other chapterhouses. Not enough to form the majority, even though the Blood Knights are biggest chapter.” She leaned back, folding her hands together, fingers interlocking. “The Black Man is mad if he thinks that detonating the Cœur is the way into High Haven. We let the gift be destroyed; there is no way they would reward the Skyborn’s failure to protect this gift from Elkington. So, we want you to help me take over the Blackguard, bringing peace to this war-ravaged city for once.”

“Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting to transpire here at all,” I said.

“And what did you expect?” she asked coolly.

I shrugged. “Honestly, I expected something to the effect of, ‘I wish for you to visit the shrine of the patron saint of dodecahedrons, pray to him for guidance on how to attach a Flammenwerfer to a knife, challenge the dwarven king to a game of basketball, and then bring me the secrets on how to acquire and use a pair of boobs +1.’ You know, standard affairs.” If something is important to a culture, they tend to have many words to describe. And it seemed as if I was learning a new slang term for those sacks of fat on a woman’s chest every hour, so many that I had to start keeping a cheat sheet in a pocket listing all the accepted slang terms for them for ease of reference. Honestly, it was like everyone here was literally obsessed with them.

Honestly, if I thought about it, it wouldn’t have been hard to kill the Black Man. At least, it would’ve been if I hadn’t lost my ace in the hole. That is to say, my Plan A was to just send C into Blackgard and wait outside until the screams stopped. Although, on the other hand, knowing C as I did know, he’d probably go in there and teach them all the invaluable RPG character feat of Improved Tax Evasion—which was totally a thing, no matter how much my Spielmeister told me otherwise.

“Well,” the witch said, “I assure you that this is what I need you to do, why the angel sent you unto me.”

And so she launched onto an outline of the plan, a few maps, some timing, and other details that could have been much easier summed up in a single, if lengthy, sentence. Sneak into the heart of Blackgard, provide deathly distraction, help get the the rebels into Blackgard, then take out the Black Man myself. When I explained to her that her plan could have been summed up as thus, she dismissed my version as stupidly up to chance.

For no reason I could grasp as I sat there, eyes glazing over as I thought about how great some pancakes would be right about now, the witch excused herself, insisting that the Warden’s Hand leave the room with her, but for me to remain.

“Alright, girls, you two have fun,” I said in a distant voice. “But if my companion gets harmed, witch, I’ll bring all of you to a brutal death. Individually. And make you all watch as I do so one-by-one. Drowning, perhaps. Seems like a plan.” After some bickering on their parts, I was on my own, still rather phased out. I was at least pretty sure that the Hand would be fine.

As I was wondering about the witch, what her game was, and whether or not she was actually the Blue-Eyed Lady who haunted my visions, a voice from behind me said, “You know, she’s not me, right?”

I didn’t need to turn around to recognize the speaker. “What a coincidence. I was just thinking about you, Blue-Eyed Mare.”

“Well, in this world, it’s become disadvantageous to me to be here as a mare,” she said.

Slowly, I turned around. She was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, wearing a navy blue jacket belted at the waist above her faded denim trousers. Her blue eyes shone like sparklers set alit in the middle of a pile of nerve gas-killed children. “Howdy, Gunslinger, as people are calling you now.”

“Yay,” I said flatly. “Even my hallucinations call me that silly-sounding title. I don’t suppose you’re here for a reason, are you? I mean, I’d love to chat, but you’ve got business on your mind—I can see it in your eyes.”

“Oh, you can, can you?” she asked, raising a brow.

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied. When last I saw you, you were helping me up after that one crystal stallion nearly ripped my testicles off. Before that, you pushed me off a castle ledge into the sea on some imaginary word. Before that, you and the bedside in Caval and the swamp near Caval. By the bedside and in that castle, there seemed to be… personal interest in your eyes, not business.”

She poked her tongue into her cheek. “True, but can you blame a girl for keeping track of her investments?”

“I’m an investment? What kind?”

The woman waggled a finger at me. “Nuh-uh-uh—spoilers.”

“Yes, because my life is just a comicbook where knowing the upcoming plot ruins all the twists.”

She smiled in a way that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It was the kind of smile that many, many had seen last before they died, somehow I just knew that. And knowing it only made me want to stare into the smile longer. “Oh, no. If you know how it ends, there’s a fair chance you might hurt what’s in your best interests to leave unmolested. So, come on, have a heart and let it alone.”

“Ha,” I let ooze dryly from my mouth. “Me having a heart is like Cards having a shot at actually getting laid—things which belong in the realm of fantasy.”

She shrugged as she walked towards me, her steps slow, methodical, with purpose, like the flops of a walrus on the hunt for a penguin to eat. “Well, suffice it to say that you should really consider the witch’s quest and go slay the Black Man.”

“Oh? Who are you, my conscience?” I scoffed. “In case you forget, O conscience, when last we spoke, I beat you over the head with a rubber chicken named Bungles the Whiffled One. Do you forget? So, you get back in that coffin I buried you alive in, and you stay there, touching yourself and not bothering me.”

“Conscience?” She shook her head, putting a cold hand on my shoulder. The sensation said that hers were hands that had killed before, or mayhap hooves that had killed before. “I’m just the little voice egging you on today, mostly because I’m curious and want to see where this all goes, but also because I’m fairly certain there are a bunch of goodies to find up in Blackgard.”

“Hmm,” I grunted. “Honestly, I was probably going to go up there anyways. If I don’t kill enough bad guys every so often, I start getting the shakes.”

Except that you don’t.

Silence, heathen!

“So,” I went on, “I need to keep up killing evil-doers that I may keep hold onto my sanity. Besides, I still need to fully find a way to repair the Code. It’s held together by tape and colorful bits of string I stole from a seagull. Only by sacrificing unto it monsters may I stave back the monster within.”

She cocked her head as she sat down in the witch’s hair. “Oddly poetic of you.”

“I know. God, it sounds pretentious. I mean, wow. Now that I think about it, am I brooding?” I grabbed a potted plant on the witch’s desk and tossed it onto the ground. “There. No one can brood with a dying plant in the room. That’s a science fact.” I look up from the plant to the the woman as she fiddled with her belt. “Are you still here? Usually, the voices in my head vanish the moment something actually interesting happens.”

“Oh, I’m a voice in your head?” She unbuckled her belt. “Ah, dammit,” she murmured, and tried to fix it up to make it tighter than it had been.

“You know, unless this is about to turn into one of those really uncomfortable porn magazines with those hackneyed plots, I think you should go.” I glanced around. “I mean, you said the thing that my subconsciousness wanted to say, and if you loaf around here any longer, you’re probably going to end up living on my couch and eating all my potato chips. And the last thing I need is some good-for-nothing deadbeat hallucination eating all my potato chips again.”

“Good-for-nothing, huh?” she asked, stopping all work her belt. She punched the side of her fist into one the desk drawers before she opened it. And then she tossed some weird, gray-with-red-highlights—

“Is that some kind of Voixson?” I asked, leaning towards the woman.

“Well, I couldn’t say. Some good-for-nothing dead hallucination eating all your potato chips couldn’t ever likely find something so worthwhile as a Voixson, could she?”

Years of life with my old girlfriend had prepared me for this one moment. “I’m sorry I insulted you, I humbly request your forgiveness, and will buy you expensive flowers at some point in order to display my culture’s traditional token of apology and romance. Now, give me it.”

I reached forwards, but the Blue-Eyed Lady snatched it away, hugging it to her breast. “Nuh-uh-uh,” she said with a little pendular movement of the finger. With a pout, she went on with, “Your words were oh so mean, Fool, I don’t know if I could ever forgive you for them and give this to you.”

Signing, I facepalmed. “Look, I apologized. What more do you want, for me to get down on my knees and give you oral sex?” I leaned forwards even further. “You think I’m kidding? For these damn things that somehow get people to reveal their innermost thoughts where just anybody could reach them, I’d totally do it. I’m a slut for Voixsons. A dirty, dirty girl willing to prostitute himself for working Voixsons.”

She leaned back in the chair, a look of grave consideration on her face. It reminded me of the look of a stallion trying to decide whether or not she should spend his remaining week’s paycheck on food for his hungry children or to spend it on beer, and the beer was winning. Which was the exact moment when said stallion realizes that this money could also buy him a giant novelty rubber chicken he could use to finally beat his wife with again. Things hadn’t been the same for him ever since those anti-wifebeating laws had been passed.

“Wait, a dirty girl willing to prostitute himself?” she finally asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Voixsons turn me into hermaphrodites as well. It’s a very terrible, terribly veritable disease. Now, are we going to have to do this the hard way as I cry all the way through while knowing I get my Voixson, or no?” I paused to think. “Although to be fair, I have no idea how the reproductive organs on werekindred even work, like if they can even perform and receive oral sex. I mean, yes, I think I overheard one bloke order me to blow him at one point, but for all I know, werekindred get off to people with bad breath blowing into their noses. And given that werekind females have those huge sacks of unpleasant fat upon their chests, I wouldn’t be surprised if the nose thing was the preferred form of quick intercourse to them. Sadly for you, I believe in oral hygiene, and pride myself on good, kissable breath at all hours.”

“You know, I might be willing to part with it on one condition that doesn’t involve you on your knees. A favor, yes, just not in the same vein as what you’re getting at.”

“I’m listening, ma’am.”

She set the Voixson down before me and told me what she wished of me before she vanished into the dark recesses of my mind.

|— ☩ —|

“The hour is come,” the witch’s voice crackled through the amusingly bad audio quality of the Voixson that I’d come to lust after so. “The angel spoke to me. At first, I didn’t know what to make of it: I just found little origami animals on my desk that, upon further inspection, turned out to be folded letters. Slowly, they encouraged me to write back, and so I left a letter. Now… now I know much, know how the Black Man is mad and unstable, know of the angel’s plan, and know that I wish to be a part of it. He will send to me the Marked One, and I will play my part with the Marked One. He told me of how to tell who the Marked One is, how he looks, how he shall come as a gunslinger. But until then, I will play my role as priestess of the Blood Knights. And on the day we sacrifice a virgin to the Old Ones, then come will he, the Marked of Kane.”

The recording crackled, and then she spoke again. “The newest letter states that no matter where I put this recording, the Marked One will find it. I have decided that since I can’t fight fate, I might as well just keep it here, then leave the Marked One alone in here to listen to for his pleasure. So, um… Salutations to you, Marked One. I presume that it was… will be… is… good to meet you.”

Once again it clicked. Now, I could hear distant violin music as she spoke. “Update. It’s been three months since the angel wrote to me, and I start to worry. The Black Man trusts me fully, and so long as I don’t look into the inky black wells of his eyes, I don’t think he’ll ever find out. He’s thankfully dense to what I have been doing these months. He told me he thinks that he will finally get the Cœur to go ‘supernova critical’ either today or tomorrow. The holiday virginal burning is a month away, but I’m going to jump the gun and burn the chosen girl today. Hopefully, I’ve not screwing this all up. Marked One, since you’re listening to this, I want you to know that I… I may have…” The recording crackled “…touched myself thinking of the day we’d meet, so I’ll probably be thinking of that when we do meet.”

A sudden wave of discomfort rose and fell under my skin, erupting into blooms of weird. Something about the idea of a girl thinking about the time she was fantasizing about me as she watched me burn a girl at the stake just did not sound pleasant. Like, as pleasant as using a live cobra for a condom.

Crackle and click. Yay me. Even more of this creepy thing. There came from the speaker a little giggle. “He came! He came! Oh, I, um—my, I’m nar so—ha! Everything worked perfectly!” The witch gave a girlish little squee. “Hey, so, um… Marked One—no, no, no, Gunslinger— just so you know for when you save the world and all, I… um, I’m totally single.”

It ended. There was only one problem. It had ended after “Everything worked perfectly”.

“Hello,” I squeaked up at the witch as she stood there on the far side of the room.

She smiled at me. My God, I could finally see her face as she held her plague mask in her hands. What’s worse, I had no idea how to arbitrarily judge her depending on whether or not she conformed to my rigid standards of beauty.

“Hello yourself, Gunslinger,” she purred back at me.

“Hello, Gunslinger.” After a second, I said, “See? He never responds to me, the jerk.”

She giggled. “Yhar, I can so see it.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “Oh, look, an audio device. I’ll just put this back where I found it before I bumped into your desk and it magically ended up on top of the desk where I listened thereto. There we go. Stay safe, strange device.” I stepped around the desk, the witch holding eye contact with me the whole while.

“Just remember what I said,” the witch encouraged with a wink.

I swallowed. “Right, so. I’ll just go down into the scary sewers underneath the streets on this flying city, sewers wherein I’m sure to catch dysentery and probably leprosy, then I’ll do the thing with the whatnot and kill the Black Man, okay?”

“Gotcha, Gunslinger.”

“Okay, then. I’m just going to scoot on past you and out the door. Have a nice day. Or night. Or whatever time of day it is. I can’t seem to remember.”

“Well, I’ll be thinking about you,” she purred as I slid past her. “Especially now that we finally got hot water once again running in the showers.”

Oh God, I did not want to know that!

The worst part of that wasn’t the mental image per se, no, but just what the mental image would look like. The worst part was that the more I looked at her, the more and more the look in her eyes reminded me of Cherry Berry. Either I got out of there right now, or she’d cuff me to a radiator, probably touch my genitals with her cold, feely hands, force me to look at her hall of horrors, then walk away with promises of returning soon with romantic candles or something.

I bowed my head slightly to her. “My lady, I regret to inform thee that I cannot engage in coitus. Cannot, not will not.” Before she could ask, and I could see the question on her face, I held up a hand to silence her. The image of my sword hacking a filly near in two filled my visions, as did the image of me killing all those other children, their parents… even that baby in its mother’s arms. “Would if I could, for thou art a lovely Frau, but I cannot. Because I’m so… unclean, my soul is ugly, covered in black growths and cancers from my sins.”

“In truth, dear Frau,” I spoke softly, “I serve the angel because I am a monster, and this is my penance. In accordance with the third Pillar of Confessionism, true penance is earned only through the shedding of blood and flesh freely for others.” I looked down at my boots. “I am a filthy, unclean sinner, dear lady, and I would not subject anything to the monster that I am unless I can wash away the innocent blood on my hands. I am no good man, ma’am, but I am the best that I can be. And if I am never redeemed for my sins… then I will never let it be said that I didn’t fight as hard as I could for redemption until that fight ground me back into the dust whence I came, until the days whens when it is my flesh consumed.”

Stiffening my muscles, I watched as the witch extended a hand, softly grabbed my chin, and pulled it down. I allowed my head to fall closer to her, and smiled. “Truly, I know now why you are the gunslinger, such chivalry and nobility to your twisted soul. I can see it in your eyes. You’ve the eyes of a corpse that’s too ferocious to ever acknowledge that it has died.” She closed her eyes. “And no matter what you do on your quest for penance, you only commit more sins, is that right?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “And I do so because I believe that maybe, just maybe, I can save the world and my soul. But if I can’t save my twisted soul, then I will at least know that for all my evil, for all the horrors I committed to protect the world, I will have martyred myself, content in the knowledge that my evil allowed the innocent to remain innocent, and made the wicked suffer.”

She smiled, opening her eyes. “That… I can see that too. You are kept alive and going purely by a sense of dark romance, the romantic notion that you can save people.”

“Yes.”

The witch reached her neck up and kissed my chin. “There is no man as noble as you in this world or any other, Gunslinger. Never forget that. Never forget that no matter what you do, whom you kill, you are still a good man, a better man that any who have come before you.”

She let my chin go, and demurely put her hands together, staring at me. Then she politely nodded for me to leave. But before I moved, she still said with a wink, “I’ll still be thinking of you in the shower.”

Hastily, I stepped around the corner, found the door, opened and ducked through it, and was finally outside in the commons. Taking a breath, I wiped the sweat off my brow. Well, aside from her still doing… that, that plan actually worked.

And how much of it did you honestly believe?

Enough so that I didn’t technically spew out pure bullshit.

Just a frothy mixture containing both bullshit and truth, then?

Over in a corner of the large commons, in a place that appeared to be a raised cafeteria partially in its own room, I saw the Warden’s Hand wave to me.

Like a beaver eager to exploit his underpaid sweatshop slave children, I trotted over to her, thinking of the request the Blue-Eyed Lady had spoken to me of because it was anything but thinking about the witch taking a shower. As I stepped up the few steps and into the large cafeteria, everything became quiet. There had been mothers with children, lovers together, folks attempting to find mates, people arguing and loudly ordering food, glasses clattering, and forks and knives clanking upon plates. Hell, there’d even been a crying baby who was now silently leering at me. Now that I stood here, everyone seemed to forget what they’d been doing and were looking at me as if I could all remind them how eating food was generally good to one’s wellbeing.

Slowly, I raised a hand to my hat’s visor, tugged thereon with that wanderer’s greeting, and said, “Servus, Männer und Frauen dieses Platzes.” I looked over to the Hand. “Lady, we are to leave this place and prepare for what the witch asked of us.” I glanced around. “Actually, what are you doing over here?”

The Hand pointed over to an empty table with a tray of food thereupon. “You were in so long that I decided to have a bite to eat. I even picked you up something, and as soon as I sit down to eat, I spy you slinking out of the witch’s office. Seriously, what were you doing in there?”

“Offering the voices in my head oral sex in exchange for a Voixson,” I said at a mile a minute.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing,” I replied, shrugging. God, shrugging with these shoulder was totally different than the old ones I’d had as a pony. Then it occurred to me that eating food was probably a good thing, since I did sort of need it in order to use healing items without dying. The only thing was that everyone was still staring at me. “Stop leering creepily at me—God curse your fathers’ faces!”

And they did, for what it was worth, all pretending not to stare at me as they tried to eat. I grabbed my companion by the hand and dragged her over to her table, saying, “I should eat lest I die out there.”

As we ate, I could hear a livebox somewhere that was playing music. The song died out as I shoveled an unappealing, duck-tasting, sludge-like vegetable into my mouth. Soon, off in the distance, I could hear the voice of Big Bag-a-Wolf from that hidden livebox. “A little bird came to me today from the city of New Pegasus, where folks are saying a storybook character’s been seen, a living legend straight from Geremiah’s court come to save the world: a real-life gunslinger, dual revolvers and all. They say he’s taller than a tree, scarier than sin, and’s a Toitscher of all things. Now, I don’t know if those rumors are true, but I hope they are. With all the terrible shit that’s been going on these days, what the world really needs is just one last gunslinger to set things right.

“This has been a Livebox Free Evesland news update with me, your host, Big Bag-a-Wolf. And now, back to the music!”

Well, I thought, that’s the story of how I saved the holidays, started my heroic legend, and ruined a family all in the same day. After that thought, I finished eating and readied myself for killing the Black Man.

|— ☩ —|

I curled into a ball on the cobblestone road as I crawled out of the manhole. “Oh God, tentacles don’t belong on a goat,” I whimpered as the Warden’s Hand covered the manhole back up.

“Why did that witch ever think,” my companion said through pantings, “that was a good idea?”

“Probably for the same reason she’s touching herself to me in the shower right now,” I replied, looking around at the ruinous piles of concrete surrounded the manhole. It was like we were sitting in the center of a tiny coliseum, only instead of being cool, it was utter shite. And there were no tiny gladiators to watch.

“Wait, what?” she asked, the bleating of the goat barely audible through the heavy steel manhole cover. Then she sniffed herself. “Oh, Founding Fathers, I smell like pee.”

“We just crawled through a sewer, dear girl,” I replied, scooting up to a large slab of stone. “Pray that you don’t catch at least seven disease that result in you becoming utterly unfornicatable for the rest of your life.”

“I don’t like that idea at all!”

I fiddled with my visor. Looking around, I was pretty sure that this was the super secret back entrance to Blackgard. Or maybe it was the local pharmacy. How the hell was I supposed to know? Everything in this city looked the same. Then I burst out with, “And I don’t like the prospect of a tentacle goat fondling my genitals, but that didn’t stop it, now did it?!” Rubbing my arms, I said quietly, “That didn’t follow the normal monster routine at all. When a monster has tentacles, it has to attack and almost rape the girl, and the guy is supposed to save her—not the entirely other way around.”

The Warden’s Hand, who’d been dusting herself off, paused. “Wait, are you saying that you wanted me to get violated by that thing back there?”

I looked up at her. “Um. Would you be willing to take a raincheck on that answer?”

“Oh, Fiddler play thee,” she spat, crossing her arms and glaring at me.

“Well, excuse me for not wanted to be sexed up against my will for the second time this week!”

“What?”

“And by God, if you tell me that all men are inherently slutty and can’t say no, I will throw my boot at you.” Groaning, I stood. “Now, can we get out of this bowl-like thing of concrete surrounding this manhole? I don’t want some giant to come by and pour his milk and sugar-frosted cereal all over me. I do not go well with sugar-frosted cereals.”

We made our way up the concrete embankment, me taking lead. I felt like a monkey, the way I made to move my body to climb up. Now, all I needed to do was eat ticks out of my companion’s hair and I’d be a proper ape. But, alas, werekindred probably had no more in common with apes than ponies did, so no climbing trees and crazy lesbian monkey sex for me.

When we reached the top, the Warden’s Hand gasped. “Oh my Fathers, we’re actually in Blackgard—look, there’s the slave quarters!”

I looked out. This place, it seemed, had once been a massive castle complex centered around a fat sort of tower with a fortress at its base. From the top to the tall tower shot up a weak blue beam of light. The Hand was pointing to a large series of barracks connected to each other in an area of the castle surrounded by tall steel fences. At this late but not entirely night hour, I could see enough, but that was hardly what I wanted. If only heat vision were thing.

“How can you tell it’s the slave quarters?” I asked.

“The sign says so.”

“Huh,” I said, looking at the large sign that read ‘Slave Quarters: A family friendly working environment—negative one days since last triple-homicide!’ I presumed that ‘negative ones days’ meant that someone was planning a triple-homicide for tomorrow. Nothing more family friendly that a premeditated triple murder. “By what crazy cliché did I possibly miss that? And, for that matter—hey, wait, where are you going?” I asked, watching her half-slide, half gallop down the hill of debris and towards the quarters.

“That’s where Mom is!” she called back.

“Stupid girl, this is not the plan!” I hiss, following down the embankment until she reached the backside of the nearest building. “We can rescue Mammy after we shoot and kill anyone who would doubtlessly shoot her dead, okay? If you save her now, the fact is that the world will deign to kill her now, whereas afterwards it would be cool with her freedom. Do you not know this, mare?!” I blinked.

Wrong word, stupid!

Before I could correct my final word, she spun around, her back against a wall, and stared slack-jawed at me. “Geremiah’s blood, Gunslinger, where did that come from?”

“Why are you looking at me like that? I was just chastising you for…” I tilted my head. “Is mare a terrible insult in your language?”

She blinked. “Yes!”

“Keep low your voice,” I hissed. “I have no idea who’s around here, and around this building is a road where there are probably Lords-only-knows how many Blackguard.” Then I said, “I am deeply sorry, ma’am. I did not know it was an insult.” In fact, I’m surprised it’s even a word at all in this world.

“Then why did you call me it?”

“Because, in reality, I’m not a man; I’m actually a very tiny, much cuter horse from another world,” I said with utter seriousness.

“What, like a pony?”

“Well, yes, pretty much,” I replied, pretty sure that her definition of the word was not at all like mine.

“I always wanted a pony,” the Warden’s Hand added with a shrug.

Pointing at her with a jabby finger, I said, “We can deal with the slavery of my tiny pony people later.”

“Because that makes sense,” she spoke dryly.

“Exactly. That’s why I called you a mare; I misspoke and used my own terminology.”

The corners of her mouth twitched. “Did I also mention that I always wanted a unicorn?”

I rubbed my forehead. “Hey, after that bomb blew my horn off, I’ve been trying to become a unicorn again.”

“Oh.”

“Hmm.”

She leaned back against the wall and laughed like a banshee. “Oh man, that is the stupidest excuse for cussing a girl out that I have ever heard in all my years!”

I smirked. Sometimes the best lie was the truth. My hands went near my guns as I looked around to make sure no one was watching me or the laughing woman. Between the anthill-like debris wall leading to the tentacle goat’s manhole and me wasn’t much space. Further down, the rows of ruined-but-patched-up buildings went on, the windows on some of the building spewing out light like popping zits on a fat whale’s hairy back. Yes. A whale.

In that moment, I became aware of a distant sound of voices. Not in the sense of people speaking as they walked, but more akin to the sounds of people I’d heard back in the Blood Knights’ cafeteria. It seemed to be coming from down the rows of buildings. This in mind, I decided it was best to try to find a way to do the first thing the witch had wanted me to do, besides getting nearly raped by a tentacle goat: create a really big distraction by blowing some shit up so that the witch and her allies could quickly take everything over and defeat the loyalists before the loyalists even knew they were supposed to be the loyalists. I informed the Hand of the plan, and I was prepared. There was, according to the witch, only one place that would explode enough to cause a distraction and double as the signal, which was Blackgard’s armory. Of course, why the witch assumed that people would run towards an explosion was beyond me.

To get to the armory, we had to creep down this little back alley between a wall of broken concrete hill and these buildings, getting nearer and nearer to the sound of voices. The armory, which apparently had an entirely unreasonable amount of explosives therein, was off in that direction.

Creeping that way made the voices steadily grow louder and louder, loud enough that I could actually make out what they were saying and the context. According to the voices, the three-story building they were coming from was apparently Blackgard’s biggest, only(est) tavern which served cheap the best hooch in all Evesland. Of course, there was also a matter of the random song the entire tavern broke into as we passed.

“There is a bomb in Gilead

To make the wounded whole;

There is a bomb in Gilead

To heal the sin-sick soul.”

I reminded myself that this tavern would need to see a bomb itself; clearing out so many Blackguard at once over here with a bomb would be just dandy, like the feeling of burying several small animals up to their necks in beach sand and letting the tide come in and drown them. That was, for the record, the reason why the local zoo soon thereafter forbade me from ever again “borrowing” their elephants. Ah, early childhood.

“Damn Blackguard heathens,” the Hand muttered as we walked around past the back of the tavern. “Nothing ever good came from people who worshipped the Old Ones, and now look what those bastards have become. It’s sickening, y’know?”

“This cult isn’t new?” I asked, pausing to glance at her.

“No, of course not. Really old cult. Older than the worship of the great Founding Fathers.” She shook her head. “Thank the Fathers for Geremiah; if he hadn’t come around with the gunslingers of yore, the cult of the Old Ones might’ve come to dominate Evesland.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “According to the Glaubensbekenntnis des Konfessionismus, the first Pillar of Confessionism: ‘There is no God but God, His agent is the Machine Spirit, and His messenger is the Woman Laurentia.’ That is the Creed of Confessionism.”

“You mention your faith a lot,” she said as he passed another small alley between buildings, catches glimpses of the dimly light street through it. “I take it you’re a rather religious man, then?”

At this point, the wall of concrete ruin around the goat’s manhole was no longer creating a space between the back of the buildings. Here, there were only grassy lawns with some trees. I liked trees. Trees were nice. I had a pet tree once, but then I cut it down and turned it into a stake to kill a vampire.

“Mayhap in some regards,” I said, glancing around the trees here. More of the buildings around here than back whence we’d come were dilapidated, in ruinous states. In fact, the building here was one such structure, and it had three stories. And the window was clearly unlocked, which is why I had to break it open with a rock, reach my hand inside, and then lock it. I was a very compassionate, neighborly sort of guy like that. “I merely find the tenets of faith to be… a good backbone for trying to be normal. And although the fourth Pillar may preach tolerance, we shouldn’t dwell too much upon faith, lest I look like a zealot, which I’m not. I’m just well-versed in the reasons why my culture has the moral values it has.”

I jumped up and squeezed into the window, offering my companion a hand. We went up to the broken third floor, where I found a ladder to the roof. It was messy up here, but I could see things I hadn’t been able to see from the top of the concrete pile. Namely, the big sign illuminated by firelight which read, “Armory!” And then, under that: “Great steel to help you steal your meal from those under your heel! Ask us about our Wholesome Family Values discount package for the family looking to start their career in the Blackguard! Weapons and armor now available for boys and girls age three and up!”

“Well,” I said, “at least I now know where we’re going.”

|— ☩ —|

“Welcome, welcome!” the man with pink irises called out from behind his counter. The walls were covered in sets of armor, shields, and all manners of weapons meant to kill a man dead. Display racks forming aisles only added to the super assortment of all things deathly or to protect a body from meeting a deathly end.

“I told you this was a terrible idea,” the Hand said quietly to me. “Why the hell did we come in through the front door?”

But I ignored her. “Ah, hello, good fine gentleman sir fellow man.” I put a hand on my companion’s upper back and nudged her forwards to get her to walk through the store and up to the pink-eyed man’s counter.

The man looked us over, pausing at the Hand’s red bandana. “Hmm. Yinz must be new here to the Blackguard, right? Lookin’ to pick up some of our customary black bandanas, yhar?”

“Amongst a few other things,” I said with a smile. “We were looking into your Wholesome Family Values discount package.”

“Ah, you’re parents?”

I gave the Hand a knowing glance. “No, not yet. Expecting. We only just found out.” As I put a hand on her exposed stomach—stupid chainmail bikini!—the Hand gasped quietly, but she seemed to calm herself as I rubbed the exposed flesh. That calm seemed to completely die when I asked, “Would you like to feel?”

“Nah, but I thank ya,” he replied in a jaunty tone, even bouncing once or twice.

Putting my arm around my companion’s shoulder, I said, “So, since the missus and I are looking to start out a family in the Blackguard, we figured we should start here.”

The man paused, cocking a brow. “So, let me get this straight: fresh out of the vagina, you want to basically teach your little ones about wearing armor and killing folker?”

“Yep. Pretty much.”

“Why,” he exclaimed, his eyes downright sparkling and glittering like so many starts, “I’ve never seen such a commitment to wholesome family values before in all my years!” He pointed a bony finger at the Hand. “You, madam, have a superb taste in men! A man so unlike any I’ve ever seen, so tall and handsome and committed to raising his children as no man before him has been! Why, it’s enough to make me—oh, by the Old Ones, I am crying!” With a sniffle, he rubbed his eyes. “By all that is good, such beautiful and compassionate souls as yourself will surely have babies more beautiful than any child before—such a union of love as I have never seen, a commitment to all that is good in the world as nobody has before them!”

The man spun around like a ballerina before slamming his hands on the counter. “Why, for such folker as you, it would be a travesty—nay! A sin most depraved for me to charge you money for the things you need for your wholesome family-to-be! Take whatever you like, please, please!” He crouched down, then came back up with three black bandanas. “Here, for you, your gorgeous missus, and the baby-to-be.” He winked. “Armor, swords, axes, pikes, sharp bits of rock—anything at all, you nar name it and I’ll scrounge you up.”

“Do you have bullets?” I asked, and the man paused.

“Bullets? Now, there’s a request ya don’t get most any of all days.” He tilted his head. “What kind of bullets we talkin’ about here?”

“The kind for this,” I said, hitting a hand on my hip. The act pushed back part of my duster, revealing the revolver on my hip.

“Sonofa… That’s a real proper rapecannon, it is!”

“A… what now?”

“Yhar, y’know,” he said, staring and marveling at it, “a big ol’ gun of doom and destruction. A rapecannon, as ’twere.” He pulled out a pair of glasses and asked to see the weapon up close. After a moments hesitation, I unloaded the gun and handed it to him. The Warden’s Hand elbowed me, and I responded with an even harder elbow back at her.

“Yes, yes,” the man said, his pink eyes seeming to drink the gun in as he turned it over in his hands. “The craftsmanship in this weapon is beyond that of any firearms left by the elder Union,” he said. He poked his tongue into his cheek, a pensive look on his face. “It’s as if it’s directly of elder build. I’ve never quite seen its like.” He quinted, looking at the bullets in my bandolier. “You must be… royalty.”

“Beg your pardon,” I said dryly.

“Yes, yes. Such ornately respectable weaponry would only be found in the possession of royalty of the highest caliber, much like the legendary shattergun rifle hight Skybane, which the Black Man now wields, both a weapon of extreme potency and the symbolic crown of a kingdom.” His eyes narrowed. “Your skin, so brown. You are a Toitscher, no doubt. And with your wife, you’ll have lovingly interracial children. Yes, and you’ve a weapon more fit for a king than I have ever see. Hmm…” He tilted his head. “Thus, all this together, you must be… the Prince of Teutschland.”

“The day I ever wear a crown,” I scoffed.

“I admit, I know little of the Teutonic monarchy but for the legends of their enormous power, the comeliness of their line of kings, and the madness that runs in them which makes them as great as they are. “He gestured a pinkie finger at me. “And you have proud, noble features if ever I saw on a man’s countenance.”

“I have come to service the Old Ones and, by extension, the Blackguard,” I said in a calm, firm voice. “Ask not more of me than as much as I have offered. Now, the bullets.”

He set the down down on the counter. “I shall see what I have for you, Prince Gunslinger,” he said, and then vanished off into a back room whose only door was a black curtain.

“Is that true?” the Warden’s Hand asked. “I never noticed it until now, but… it all does kinda make sense. You’re a prince?”

I offered her a half-sneer, half-laugh. “Right, a prince of the most powerful state on this earth spends his days traveling the world, shooting bad guys, saving the day, and before that was a national agent for the Reichskriminalamt. Gee, if that’s all it takes to be a prince, sign me up.”

She gave her a vaguely harsh look. “You’re pointedly not denying it. Even I can see that.”

“Of course that’s what I’m doing; the entire notion is ridiculous. And last I checked, Pendergast wasn’t the last name I identified with,” I shot back.

“What even is your name?” she asked. “As your newly pregnant wife, don’t I at least get to know whose name replaced my maiden name?”

“Ah, yes, the classic marital symbol representing the ancient patriarchal roots of marriage—the changing of the last name to indicate property.” I smiled. “Although, in my personal opinion, females who don’t want to change their name fully when getting married are bitchy and unwilling to comply with social norms, but that’s their choice to make. It shouldn’t matter what your name is so long as you love each other.”

“That’s kinda sweet in a weird way,” she replied, glancing nervously between me and the curtain wherebehind was the pink-eyed arms dealer. “But just tell me your damn name already. Why are you trying to hide so much shit from me all of the sudden?”

“If you keep up that tone with me, woman—” I shook a fist at her “—I will punch you straight in the baby.”

“Well, fuck you too,” she spat.

“You’re pregnant; we already did that together.”

“In your dreams,” she scoffed.

“More like in yours,” I replied. The Hand seemed to fluster slightly as she stumbled for a counter; before she could, I explained, “Because I, for one, take care never to dream. It’s only a good night’s sleep for me if I do not dream.”

“Ah, here I come!” exclaimed the pink-eyed arms dealer, as he half-skipped out of the backroom, a small box in a hand. He set the box down on the counter. “Here, this came in today from the Drawers.”

If I had my pony ears still, they’d’ve perked up. According to the map King Elkington had given me, through the Drawers was the quickest way from the ruins of Olympia to Sleepy Oaks, and thus to where Stronghold was. Also, Cards was there, so there was that. Apparently, as the Tin Mare of Hoofington—assuming that epiphany I had earlier was correct—she wasn’t doing too good. Probably had caught an adorable case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder like a bitch.

“How many bullets?” I asked, but he just smiled at me like a bear smiles at a pile of salmon. “There’s more thereto, I take it?”

“Yhar, there are,” he said, probably in that way just so he could rhyme. “See this here?” he asked, pulling out a bullet from the box. There was something off about the tip of the bullet, a different color than the ones I had. These ones were orange-red with tiny off-white arrows on them. “These ’ns ain’t normal bullets. No, see the color and the arrows? That means they’re javelins bullets. Pinnacle of the Union’s gunmaking millennia ago, these things hit another thing, explode inwardly, letting the rest of the bullet into the wound. Oh, and that rest of the bullet, once inside the wound, explodes.”

I just stood there. “So, you’re telling me that it explodes.”

“Yhar.”

“And then explodes again.”

“Yhar.”

“Can it do that? Can it really explode twice?” I asked, standing nearly on the tips of my toes as I leaned forwards.

He nodded. “That is what I am saying,”

“Oh my goodness,” I said woozily, knees feeling weak, “that’s just such a great idea—I mean, I just-just-just… Just thinking about the prospect of that gives me, like, an erection.”

The Warden’s Hand shot me a glance, but the arms dealer said in a sultry voice, “A wholesome family erection?”

I pointed a finger at the Warden’s Hand, jabbing her in her whorishly exposed stomach. “Hey, there is a baby in the room!”

He put the bullet in his hand back into the box with a smile. “Hey, the kid’s gotta learn someday.”

“Hmm,” I hummed, stroking my chin. “You have a point there. Best start ol’ Junior here young, right?”

“See?” he laughed. “This is why you’re clearly going to be the best, sexiest father ever! Why, if all men were half as dedicated to you, we’d probably have far less sex in our media corrupting our youth.”

What.

I grabbed the box of bullets and peaked inside. Shit, thirty-six of these sonsabitches. I was a happy man trying not to get a wholesome family erection just thinking about all the chaos I could reap with this crop of javelins.

“Don’t suppose there’s more bullets like this, are there?” I asked with an air of hope. Maybe he’d have bullets that turned people into other people? Aw, if I could get bullets that turned people here into pony Cards, I’d take them all, tie them together into a big raft, and use her as a boat! And what if I shot Cards with that bullet, what then?

“Nah, sir,” he said. “We had a few paralyzing stun bullets at about your caliber size—also from the Drawers—but about an hour ago, some short broad with huge titties came in and bought ’em all. Dunno why, but I didn’t care to ask. She was kinda cute, though, in that way that only a short gal who could totally tear your balls off can look.”

He glanced away for a moment as if in deep thought, and when he looked back, he had a revolver pointed at him. I thumbed back the hammer and said, “Sorry, mate, but—”

His pin eyes suddenly burned with such radiance that I wanted to shield my eye and squint. “An armed robbery?!” he shouted with what did not at all sound like anger. In fact, it sounded more he… no, wait. He did just totally squee. “Why, what a great day today is! A wholesome man with family values tied to him where-so-ever he may go.”

“What,” I intoned.

“Why, this is a wholesome family armed robbery!” he yelled, jumping up and down. His smile was far brighter than it should have rationally been. Where the hell did he get his toothpaste from? Because I sure as hell wanted some. “You’re teaching the little fetus to commit his or her atrocities before he’s or she’s even been born! Truly, you are the greatest of—”

“She’s not pregnant,” I said flatly, and he just deflated. And I mean, just deflated. Even his hair seemed to flatten.

“What?” he asked in a voice that was almost heartwrenching.

“Hell, we’re not even married,” the Hand added helpfully, and the guy acted like he’d just been punched in the stomach by a particularly tenacious penguin.

“I… oh. By the greatest of the eldest of the Old Ones, I have been lied to,” he whimpered. Then taking a breath, his crossed his arms behind his back and tried standing up a little taller. “The look in your eye says it all: you’re gonna kill me.” He swallowed, facing down the barrel of my gun. “So be it. At least I get to die by the bullet of such a kickass gun.”

“Actually,” I said, holstering my revolver, “no, I’m going to stab you to death!” In a flash, I pulled out my sword and vaulted over the counter. The man jumped back enough so that I didn’t tackle him.

“You are an evil, evil man!” he shouted. “You don’t have any wholesome family values!”

“Yeah, well, when you get to Hell, tell them that I send you there.” I swung my sword, carving a lowercase j into his body. “You’ll get a group discount!” With a final flourish, I made the lowercase letter in a properly stylish J by adding the top cross thereto, and pretty much decapitated him.

After wiping the blood from my sword using the black bandana meant for our not-real baby, I clasped the blade with both hands and held it out in front of me. Then I moved it all over the place, not swinging it but just playing therewith, moving it to all sorts of odd places, testing the flexibility of my hands as I chanted in a monotone, “Sword, sword, sword, sword, sword, sword.” I even pronounced the W on the word just because I could.

“What are you doing?” the Hand asked, her fingers digging into the countertop.

I blinked and stopped. “Sorry, it feels neat to hold a sword in your hands.”

“As opposed to in your mouth?” she scoffed.

I considered this. “Yes, actually. How oddly fitting. Indeed as opposed to a mouth.” Sheathing the sword, I looked down at the corpse and the slowly growing pool of blood thereabout. “You know, ma’am, even though all you’ve really done is tell me neat background details and put me in an awkward position where I had to burn a girl alive—oh, and you also saved me from the tentacle goat—I feel as though this has been a very good first date.”

“A first date?” she asked in a rather surprised voice.

“Well, since you’re still my cover wife, I figure I might as well fake date you, buy you a fake dinner, and then fake sleep with you to keep up appearances.” I pounded a fist into a palm. “Even though this entire relationship may be entirely based upon a lie, it’s probably still a more functional one than my last real long-lasting relationship.”

The Hand cocked her head, focusing her dusty eyes upon me. “It is?”

“I think so, at least.” I hopped over the counter. “Sometimes, my ex—Maiya was her name. Very weird name because it had a Y therein, not a J. Our J makes the sound of your Y, and apparently her name was French, so she had a Y spelling. Anyways, sometimes Maiya would walk around my house angry, and I wouldn’t know why.”

I walked over to a stand and grabbed up a piece of black combat armor. It had a label which read “Security”. It looked to be rather small, and a part of me wanted to keep it in case it was in Cards’ size—a little tag identified it as the “My First Combat Armor—ages 10 and up!”—but I didn’t keep it because I was lazy.

“Anyways, when she wouldn’t tell me, I would just trip her, you know?”

“Wait, what? Why would you do that?” The Hand glanced at the corpse. “And shouldn’t we be blowing this place up?”

“Ja, ja, das werd ich,” I sighed, and went back over the counter. As it happened to be, there was a really neat box labeled ‘Explosive: Keep Away from Children!’ which had been crossed out and replaced with ‘Box of Concentrated Wholesome Family Values’. Opening it, I found the box full of explosives—err, of ‘wholesome family values’ of a kind which I recognized from the Reich. So, I went about taking the explosives therein out and scattering them around for maximum carnage.

“Anyways,” I went on as I worked, the Hand taking sticks of it herself and helping me, “I’d trip Maiya so that I could say, ‘Well, I don’t know what you were angry about before, but I know what you’re angry about now. Why don’t you tell me about as you put a bag of ice on your knee? Mayhap this will make you a little more pliable with telling me about why you’re angry in the first place, hmm? Because, I don’t know about you, but I’m over here trying to solve this and bring a serial killer to justice!’ And that was why our relationship lasted so long.”

“Because you were abusive?” she asked dryly.

“No, because we had excellent communications skills, like I just told you about. Plus, I’m pretty sure I was the chick in that relationship.” I grabbed her hand and led her outside, a stick of wholesome family values in my free hand. “On the count of seven, run.”

“Seven?” she asked. “Why seven? That’s a weird number.”

“Because multiples of seven are my lucky numbers,’ I replied. I got out a match and lit it, preparing to light the explosive’s fuse. “Okay—one, ten, fourteen, eight, Thursday, Viktor Hugo, seven!” And I threw the fuse-lit stick of wholesome family values into the store. “Now run like an inept wizard in a fantasy world!”

When I was far enough from the explosion, I stopped running. Instead, I walked very slowly, calmly, making sure not to look at the explosion for maximum coolness. As the Hand turned around to ask me, likely, “What the shit are you doing?”, the armory exploded. Several times. First the stick I threw, then in succession for the rest of the wholesome family values, and then several more massive explosions from boxes or something that I hadn’t seen.

At this distance from not facing the explosions, I could see light from a fireball turning the dusky twilight into broad daylight. A wave of heat and shockwave washed over me, both coming from too distant a source to burn me or rupture my organs, although I did feel a slight headache. The Hand flinched at the sight, but I only laughed at how ludicrously cool I—and then a flying, burning box hit me, sending me tumbling around the ground.

Finally, when I stopped rolling on the ground, a fresh cut of my cheek, I groaned. The Hand almost casually walked up to me, squatted before me, and said, “Let me guess: you meant to do that.”

“No,” I grunted. “What am I, stupid?”

She offered me her hand. “Well, I was trying to say it gently, but if that’s the conclusion you draw, I won’t correct you.”

I could hear the shouts of men and woman accompanied by distant marching towards us as the Hand helped me up. “Now,” I said, “the rest over here is up to the witch and her renegade chapter houses. For us, we need to storm the central castle of Blackgard, take that tower, and shut down the Cœur. Are you game?”

“Man, I’m so sick at this game that I’m coughing,” she said with a laugh, and I had no real idea what that meant. I took it as a yes, though.

|— ☩ —|

From inside the dark interior of the building, we watched through the windows as a troop of Blackguard storm by. The men and women out there had swords, axes, shields, and all manner of black cloth around their patchwork armor. We’d take refuge in this building in order to avoid having an oncoming troop of Blackguard see us. That was when it occurred to me that if we’d taken those black bandanas from the pink-eyed arms dealer, we probably could have just walked around like it was nobody’s business without being stopped. Hindsight was a bitch like that. Just think of all the horrible tiny mistakes I would solve if I had a time machine…

“Oooh, come to momma!” the Hand purred, and I turned around to look at her. Now that I looked, this place seemed like a store, and the Hand was scrounging around back behind the countertop.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “The castle is right there.”

“Hmm?” she hummed, poking her up up from behind the counter, a large syringe thing in her mouth. She spat it out into her hand and said, “Gunslinger, check it! We jumped into a pharmacy or something. Look, see?” The Hand held up the big syringe. “It’s a stimpack. And-and look here!” She put up a big, scary-looking syringe which had been taped together with two small glass bottles filled with an off-orange ichor. Little tubes ran from the bottles into the syringe. Just looking at it all made me strangely itchy. “It’s a thing of schotl! With this baby in your system, you’ll just regrow limbs faster than the axolotls it was named after.”

She laughed. “Ah, look—a dose of kamikaze! Healing and combat drugs, Gunslinger. Do you know how useful these things are?”

I remember exactly what I’d told that one Juggernog vendor in Songnam. So, like with him, I flashed the Hand a winning smile and a thumbs up and said proudly, “Winners don’t do drugs.”

“Well, then I’m a loser,” she said, and stuffed handfuls of strange things into her bags. I watched her ransack as much as she could before she went over to the back door. “Dammit, it’s locked. Gunslinger, can you open me this door? I’m sure that back here’s where the good stuff is.”

I stood there, still giving her that winning smile and thumbs up.

“Oh, c’mon,” she whined. “Even Elkington’s Caroleans use some of these combat drugs from time to time. I guarantee you that many of the Blackguard here use them. Plus, what we don’t need to use, we can sell for a damn pretty penny back in New Pegasus.”

“Which is why we, the forces who don’t use drugs, will always prevail!” God, did I ever wish right now that I had whatever that super shiny toothpaste was that the pink-eyed arms dealer had been using. Had my teeth been sparkling, ooh, I would have looked so much cooler. Plus, I had to make up more cool points after getting hit with that flying box.

“Oh, you’re honestly willing to risk yourself over some silly moral issue?” she scoffed.

“Yes,” I said, “yes I am. Now can we stop wasting time? Apparently, the Black Man is about to blow the Cœur up any day now, and if he does, then I’ll die, and I’ll never get to do that thing I came here for. So I might as well save the world before I go off to save the world from some other entirely random thing. Stupid Korweit, always sticking his insectoid bits into all the pies.” I sighed. “Let’s go, dammit. I don’t wish to stick around here long enough for the Black Man to get any explosive ideas, okay?”

I walked up and crept out the window, the Hand reluctantly following behind me. The tower with the castle for a base was straight down this fairly well-maintained cobblestone road. At the heart of the castle was the Cœur, I knew. Really, this seemed fairly simple. Get in, find the Cœur, probably catch cancer from the Cœur, deactivate the Cœur, and then get out.

It being simple was exactly why, as we walked up the stairs to get to the castle’s big front doors, I knew I was probably going to get hurt. A lot. And probably get a bruises somewhere in my anal canal, if I was lucky. If I was unlucky, well… the Cœur would simple be a werekind Cherry Berry sitting in a chair, eating popcorn until she sees me and instantly falls in love with me. God, I was never getting over the mare, was I?

As we opened the doors—which were totally unguarded, a sign that yes, whatever was beyond the doors was so scary that it didn’t need guards—I kept thinking about how I needed to have no fear. Fear was my greatest enemy. My second greatest enemy was my bladder. Of course, this wasn’t for any practical reason, just that I was trying to think of something really cool to say to the Black Man when I shot him in the mouth.

This first room was large with several trees and other plants in it, as well as a koi pond. Yay, koi fish. There were a few doors around here, but only one would have led closer to the Cœur. Oh, and speaking of the bladder, I asked the Hand to looked away for a short while—you have no idea how hard it was to extrapolate your unit from your pants with hands for the sole purpose of pissing in a koi pond just to be spiteful, and because screw the Blackguard and their living feng shui-friendly sense of design. I’m pretty sure one of the fish died right then and there.

With that accursed thing out of the way, we went through the doors taking us closer to the heart of the castle. It did dawn on me then, as I looked out into the massive throneroom we were now in, that I was going to have one hell of a time trying to figure out how to even take a shit with this body. These were important questions! The last thing I needed was to suffer from constipation pains because I couldn’t figure out how this body was supposed to use a toilet.

Gazing at the great columns that helped to hold up this room’s massive vaulted ceiling, a thought popped into my mind. Suffice it to say, I had to kill the thought; no matter how nicely I asked, I was pretty sure the Warden’s Hand wouldn’t let me watch and take detailed notes as she went to the bathroom. And for some reason, that thought left a weirdly salty taste in my mouth.

At the end of the room was, of course, the great big throne whereupon the Skybane line of kings had once sat. Now, it was empty. Gilded and fancy, yes, but empty. And then came the ringing. It was like a jaunty tune of a bell rapidly being struck, the sound dying out before the bell could truly play, but the sound of that ring ring repeating over and over for whole seconds before experiencing another whole second of silence.

The Hand and I exchanged glances, before she pointed up to a strange pedestal in the middle of the room and said, “It’s coming from there.”

I squinted at the pedestal whereupon there was… a thing. It looked sort of like a very flat bell shape with a pair of bullhorns atop it, only the bull horns almost ended in little bell shapes, but the bells were different from the main body of the thing. With a cautious slowness, I crept up to the thing, the Hand lagging slightly behind. It kept ringing.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I dunno,” she replied. “Pick it up; maybe it’s important.”

I grabbed the base of the bell and picked the thing up. It kept ringing. “Well, this isn’t working.” But then I noticed that the horns seemed like they’d come off, like they were only just resting there, unattached. I set the maid thing down and picked up the horns mid-ring, and the ringing stopped. “Well, that worked,” I said, and put the horns back on the bell.

“It did,” the Hand added as I put the horns back on and went to walk away. But then—ring ring ring. “We stand corrected.”

Frowning, I picked up the horns and said, “Stop ringing.”

“No,” came a weak little voice from the horns. The Hand jumped back at this, but I held fast.

“Listen here!” I yelled at the horizontally held horns. “I am the Gunslinger, King of the Intergalactic House of Pancakes—watch your tongue, or I’ll have it cut from your head!”

“Put your mouth up to the lower part of the device, and the other bulb up to your ear,” it said, and after a moment, I figured out what it was trying to ask me. “Ah, yes, much better,” oozed the voice from the device, straight into my ear. It sounded like the sound of grinding bones but from beneath a barrel, a barrel which was also on fire and filled with sad clowns.

I quickly explained to the Hand what was going on, as I saw it, and she remarked, “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day. Like that tentacle goat.”

“Which,” I said, “was exactly why I quit my summer job at the petting zoo.”

“Now then,” the voice from the horns said, “I have seen your coming to this place, Gunslinger.” The way he—the voice was certainly masculine—said my title made me want to take a sponge bath. Only instead of water, the bath would involve lots of sharp rocks covered in maple syrup. “Behind the throne there is a door. It is behind the blue wall curtains. This door leads to the Cœur. And come, Gunslinger, I want you to come to it, want you to gaze into it, and I want you to see what it has to tell you. It told me that you would kill me, but that I might survive long enough to kill you too if I am strong enough. What secrets holds it for thee?”

The horns clicked, and when no more creepy voices came through them, I put them back onto the bell.

“So, do you know who that was?” she asked.

I shrugged as we walked for the throne. “Wrong number.” It took me a second to realize that remark made no sense, that I’d meant to say address instead of number, but what was said was said.

We found our way to the throne and the curtain therebehind. The door there led to a steep spiral staircase that I practically had to crouch there—they were not built with tall men in mind. After what seemed like forever, we came to a door at the end of the stairs and opened it.

Whatever I had been expecting, this wasn’t it.

This metal room was giant and circular, a rotunda-like thing built around a giant water-blue sphere of light. This sphere was encased away from the accessible parts of the rotunda by a series of claw-like apparati and some sort of glass tube. Tubes, like those strings in the livebox but in all shapes and sizes, ran all across the room from the sphere’s container. From where I stood, the only way real way to the sphere was through a heavily armored sort of decontamination chamber. Around the whole room were boxes of all shapes and sizes, plus little safely walls scattered about that easily could have been vaulted over.

Of course, there were also the three goats in the room. They turned their heads up to me, bleated like beavers in heat, then went back to ambling about. Even though I didn’t see any tentacles on them, I whipped out my revolvers and proceeded shoot them all dead, giving each a badass one-liner. “There is no tin can—Bleat this—Your living privileges have just been revoked!”

Reloading the gun, I stepped into the room proper. This one place looked like it had been directly lifted from a science-fiction comic book that I had somewhere in my bags. Was it the one where Kapitän Teutschland has to go fight the alien menace using nothing but his hooves, some wit, and the hobo he gutted and turned into a hang glider? Because it was a well-known fact that when the alien menace eventually comes to take away all our babes, it would be up to the Reich to save the day and win back our chicks.

“You see that being glowy thing?” I asked, pointing at the sphere, which I was sure was the Cœur.

“Uh-huh,” the Hand said.

“It’s just so big and shiny and bright and I must kill it!” I looked around the room. There were a few door-looking things around the elevated parts of the floor, elevated bits with chairs around odd devices I had no words for. I figured they were scientific instruments for the betterment of exploding yon doomsday device. “And I think I have to go into it.”

The Hand hesitated before saying, “Dad used to mention that the Cœur was hazardous, which is why the Old Ones put it in that container, to keep it from poisoning the world.”

“Well, enervation didn’t bother me back in Chausiku’s lab in Songnam, nor did it bother me in Sleepy Oaks,” I said. “So, I’m sure that whatever’s in there… will probably cause me to grow an eyeball on the tip of my penis, allowing me to finally spy upon the secret world of the mouse.” When she gave me an odd look, I explained, “It’s a running joke I have, a penis with an eyeball on its tip, which I can then use to poke into mouseholes and spy on mice.”

“What.”

“I know, right?” Approaching the edge of the Cœur’s container, I could see there was a little lip around the Cœur inside its container, likely so people could walk directly around it for something. Directly past the hugely thick doors into the Cœur’s chamber, I could see, a little stand with all sorts of sliders and levers and button—oh God, a big red button! Must press!

I nearly galloped over to the door into the Cœur. A big lever got the first door to open with a hiss of stagnant, ancient air. The Hand called for me to stop, but by that time, I was inside the decontamination chamber, and the first door was closed. A white cloud shot out of the walls and washed me over, lingering there for what felt like a minute before sucked away. And then the door into the Cœur proper made itself ajar.

As I walked up to touch the big red button, I heard a crackle and a pop from above, from what looked like the horn-speaker of a Voixson. “Ah, Gunslinger. So you’ve finally come.”

I blinked. That was the same voice as the one that’d spoken to me from those horns. “Okay, look,” I said reasonably, “if the next words out of your mouth are something to the effect of ‘I masturbated whilst thinking of finally meeting you’, I’m out of here. Just out.” I groaned. “Because I am just done. I’m a one-eyed man covered in scars who takes good care of his teeth—would strangers please stop touching themselves to me before they’ve even met me!”

“Then I think you’ll be happy to know that I’m a eunuch, Gunslinger,” the voice said in a tone like a mare trying to seduce her love interest with nothing but a pair of socks and hoofcuffs. “I cut it off because agents of the Gods, the Old Ones, need not gender, and they needn’t allow sex get in the way of the universal plan. The Wheel of Time must turn, after all.”

“Well, all that means is that…” I began, and froze as I saw something in the Cœur’s watery surface. The sphere was floating above the ground perfectly, suspended by its own means, and there was something inside the Cœur, moving, as if alive. As crazy as it was, I was pretty sure it was a horse. When I squinted and looked closer, feeling a vague heat on my face, I called out, “C? C, is that you? How the hell did you… You know what, I’m not surprised. Remind me again why I decided to leave you alone back by the hospital, not take you with me?”

Insane as it was, my right arm suddenly really wanted to touch the glowing sphere of very likely death. Or, well, I wanted to touch it, but my right arm was sort of expendable. I pulled back my sleeve and gasped at all the tattoos. Had I really been accumulating so many of them? Looking at them all made my stomach crawl. Wait, no. My stomach didn’t crawl. Looking at the arm made something crawl on my stomach from within.

Suddenly, I recalled the feeling from when I’d been gnawing my hoof off to escape Cherry Berry, that sensation of C’s arm burrowing roots into my body. And, though this was less painful than that, the feeling was not dissimilar. What was it that C’s letter had said to me, the one I read back in Hoofington?

My flesh is stronger than yours. My flesh attached to you will kill you, given time.

Yes, those words exactly. Pausing, I mulled those words over, mulling them. Then it dawned on me. C’s arm was slowly taking over my body, wasn’t it? Those roots there extending from the arm and wrapping around my organs. That was how I would die if Snechta’s healing spell in the Calêrhos book couldn’t give my horn, eye, and make me a new arm. They would suck the life out of me like roots suck water out of the ground

At this thought, I laughed. Maybe the witch was right about me having a sense of dark romance. After all, were I anypony else, I didn’t suspect I’d go through life with so many different right arms. So, I looked at the first tattoos the arm had.

“शान्ति शान्ति शान्ति Shantih Shantih Shantih ” and the Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata in “दत्त दयध्वम् दम्यत”.

Peace! Peace! Peace! Give. Sympathize. Control, I thought. And if C’s arm was killing me as it was, where was the harm in killing myself another way by reaching my right arm into the Cœur?

|— ☩ —|

While I’d been expecting something horrible, this wasn’t exactly it. I could feel my body where it was, as it was, but my eye didn’t quite agree. Before me was an alien sight and locale, a view of something strange and probably seizure-inducing.

It was a throne, of course, and in that throne was a unicorn stallion. The stallion was wearing what looked like a cross between a military uniform and a formal dress outfit, white gloves on his forehooves, a red sash running from shoulder to hip, a crown of thorns on his head, and eyes closed but a menacing little smirk of his face. He looked like a teutscher king of old, before King Viktor destroyed the actual crown and throne, declaring such objects to be the tools of tyrants. Only, he was sitting sort of sideways, one leg thrown up over the chair’s armrest, the other of the ground as he gripped in his hoof the hilt of his majestic sword, its tip burying into the ground. It was cool, but would totally dull the blade’s tip to death. I could see, slung over the tall back of the throne, two massive revolvers in their holsters with a bandolier of ammo.

The stallion in the throne opened his eyes, and only then did I notice that his left eye was a different color than his right; it was a milky silver-white in color, a deep little white scar running vertically down from the eye. So too was his right arm a different color, darker in hue than the rest of his body.

In a moment, I realized that this damn buck was me, but not me, like The King card that Felicitat’s oracle had drawn me, the same one the witch had drawn. And in the distance, I heard dark voices singing slowly to dramatic and scary sound of a twisted orchestra.

“Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein—

Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein—

Fest steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein!

Fest steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein!”

Or, in Equestrian:

“Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine—

Dear Fatherland, no fear be thine—

Firm and True stands the Watch, the Watch at the Rhein!

Firm and True stands the Watch, the Watch at the Rhein!”

The scene before me flickered, and suddenly I was gazing at a great wasteland. Only… no, it wasn’t a wasteland, not like the great Wasteland to the east of the Titanberge, the mountains that divided the Reich from the rest of its continent. This was once a great city, likely the greatest of cities. The wasteland couldn’t erase the city of Zentrum. But now, here in the Reich’s capital, it was hardly more than rust and stardust.

Again flickered the scene, and now I was the stallion sitting in the throne, my body just as I had seen it. Before me now was what had once been the Zitadelle, the massive fortress at the heart of the Reich whence the Pendergast line of kings had ruled Teutschland for nearly a thousand years. It was in ruins, and I could see out from holes in the wall.

“On the other side of this castle there is… was a city… the greatest in this world,” the Blue-Eyed Mare’s words rang out from the back of mine, the words she’d spoken to me when first we met properly, after I’d cut my infected right arm off. “And then the Good Stallion came.” Indeed, the Blue-Eyed Mare had said this was what happened to her world, and even though she was a figment of my imagination—albeit a very persistent one—her words made me feel uneasy at this moment.

I sighed. “Okay, so, let me get this all straight. This deathly Cœur of pure magical murder is basically telling me ‘Hey, do you know what would be a cool alternate universe? This!’ I mean, is the Cœur that lonely? Because I’d be more than willing to play a game of Dunkelheit und Drachen therewith. I can be the battleship and you can be the shoe.” I paused, then added, “And Cards can be hooked up to a milking machine to provide us with valuable, energy-refueling milk.”

Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw myself standing there with sunglasses and biting my bottom lip as I held up a glass bottle of “Cards Milk—the only milk made with real tears!” Cards was standing behind me, hooked up to one of those milkers, and crying. “New and coming soon,” a random sign read: “Cards Yogurt! Now with even more shame and penis envy in every bite!”

With that in mind, I made a mental note to order for Cards a milker. Knowing her and her socks, she’d find it a fun distraction until she learns of my master plan. But then that begged the question, “Where do I find a mail-order dairy farm catalog at this hour?”

A sudden voice snapped me out of my awesome thought. It was strong, masculine, and seethed with boundless kindness and mercy. “I must apologize for being so late. When last we spoke, I said we’d speak next in the flesh, not through origami cranes. I suppose it was my error not to mention that the flesh wouldn’t necessarily be yours. Nor particularly mine, for that matter.”

I looked around the ruined throneroom. A part of me knew that voice and knew it well. My jaw muscles clenched as I saw something move out of the corners of my eye—God, it felt so good to have eyes in the plural again! Keeping to the shadows, the figure of a stallion stepped out from behind a large, broken column.

Figuring that there was no place like in a psychedelic vision to speak in a jive, I called out, “Yo!”

The figure stood still in the oppressive shadow of the broken column. “Greetings indeed.”

I took a breath. “You know, it has been a long time since I heard your voice.”

He didn’t move; and in the shadow, I could make out no definite features, not even if he were unicorn, pegasus, or earther. Hell, he could have been an alicorn with bat wings and a forked tongue for all the difference it made. The only thing I was sure about him were his eyes; no, not the color or even the shape, but there was something within them which glittered with unfathomable intelligence and unshakable faith and generosity, the kind of eyes so instantly trustworthy that the very last thing you ever wanted to do was trust in those eyes.

“Has that long time been too long or not long enough?” he asked as if discussing the weather, unaware that the weather forecast for the next three days was just the word ‘LAVA!’ in big, scary capital letters.

“For you, is there a difference?” I replied. “You appear from the shadows and give me a vague suggestions, and that suggestion bears fruit a short number of months later as I enter the town of Ponyville, Equestria. Then, as I try to figure out why, exactly, I came to this godforsaken hellhole, guess who gives me a little origami crane?”

“I?” he offered, and I nodded.

“And then, after I lost a good deal of my face—horn and eye, really—some Blue-Eyed Mare shows up, hands me a bag of bullets for the guns I cannot use, and claims they’re a gift from you.”

He shrugged. “My idea of a joke—give you something you’d kill for in a context wherein it had no immediate use, knowing full well that it’d come in great use later along the metaphorical road.”

A wide grin spread across my face, equal parts eager and ‘angry Cards on her period’. “So, why have you been messing with that witch? What have you here been up to, hmm?” I tilted my head, leaning a bit on my sword like a walking stick, if that walking stick was made of pure steel murder. “Wait, no. I know you. You’ll never tell me, will you? You’ll give me some roundabout answer, since you won’t bother explaining me your master plan.”

The stallion looked around with what seemed like bored disinterest. “Gee, and here I had hoped to hold palaver with the Gunslinger.”

Yawning, I lurched up and out of the throne. My bones all felt old, almost achey; it wasn’t just with a feeling of having not moved, but more like… like what I’d imagined arthritis would feel like. “Then let us hold palaver, but speak true and quick—I’m pretty sure this is all some psychedelic hallucination and I’m going to wake up in a hospital, but with Cherry Berry firmly grasping my cock.”

The stallion stepped forwards, out of the shadows. Only, he didn’t. The shadows followed him, as if light itself feared him. That was probably a bad sign, really. “I wish to say to thee two things.” Despite the shadows, I was sure that he cocked a brow. “But first, allow me to ask if you would like these two things stated simply or in ludicrously obtuse terms.”

“Simply, please.”

He smiled in a way that could have probably instantly seduced Celestia, thereby allowing him to face the horrors of the clittorcock. “See? If I were a bad guy, I’d speak in nothing but annoying riddles and half-truths that no one can understand save for myself and the kids at home.”

I shimmied my shoulders around. God, they were sore. “Er, hold that thought as I dance in place over here for a moment.” There, that pleasant sound of popping joints. “I’m sorry; as you were.”

“Point one: you should really wash and scrub heavily your right arm when this vision ends. Trust me,” he said in a friendly tone. Then, the amiable demeanor seemed to collapse in an authoritarian but unhostile air of power. “And whatever you may think, whatever you may want to believe in him, know that I have known him longer than you could possibly comprehend. And though I honestly doubt it will help, I’m willing to say it here regardless.”

I frowned. “I don’t quite follow.”

“The fact is that I am only here to keep tabs on this one, and be that as it may, he’s found you, and that is no minor concern for me.” He took several hard steps towards me. “Whatever you do, always remember one thing: that C is a liar!”

Without any real semblance to a warning, the vision before me vanished.

|— ☩ —|

I was back in the Cœur’s room, and my arm was out of the blue sphere of trippy visions. “Worst psychedelic vision ever,” I moaned.

My right arm stung mildly, and I figured that, as he had told me, I should probably wash it. There was no telling what kind of quirky germs were in giant glowing blue spheres capable of blowing up the world. I looked into the distant glass of the Cœur’s container and saw a reflection. Quickly, I gasped and spun around.

“Did you enjoy the vision the Cœur showed you?” that same voice from the speaker asked. But beyond the glass windows I could see several figures in dark clothings, with swords and axes and shields. The only one without such a weapon was the tall man in black.

His hat was a beltbuckle black hat, his shoulder-length hair neat and black; the man was clad in an open black trenchcoat, his black scarf, black shirt, numerous black bandoliers filled with bullets, black gloves, black pants, and black boots thereby visible. He even had his extra black sunglasses, beside it being indoors and technically at night—the douchebag! Really, the only thing that wasn’t black about him was the pale, deathly complex of his skin, in the very few places it was visible, and the off-white color of the teeth in his wide grin.

Holding it just so it rested on his shoulder, the Black Man held a long gun with a small lever around the trigger, a hardy-looking stock to keep it steady. I searched for words to understand just what kind of weapon it was, and I thought back to how the pink-eyed arms dealer had called the Black Man’s weapon a shattergun, a rifle. Specifically, he’d called it “Skybane”, which, now that I thought about, was the same name as the royal house of Olympia’s had been. So, did that mean that House Skybane was named after that rather cool-looking gun? If so, then House Skybane was actually pretty metal.

“Ah, so you like my shattergun?” he asked, his voice coming in through the speakers. “Don’t act like you weren’t; I saw you eyeing it.”

“Well, if it were a lady,” I said, “I’d treat it to a nice dinner, engage it in passionate intercourse, and then never talk to it again.” Of course, as I spoke, I noticed the Warden’s Hand. She was on the ground before the Black Man, slowly scrambling backwards across the floor and away from him. The other warriors alongside the Black Man looked eager to pounce and violate the Hand, but they seemed unwilling to make the first move.

With all the care of a mother hen trying to hide her chicks from the farmer’s secret police, the Black Man pulled out a big and almost glowing-green bullet. I watched how he loaded it into the weapon and readied it to fire, and I watched and studied how he held the weapon when he went to fire it, and I watched with interest as four wisp of green-black fire coalesced around the edge of the barrel, looking like exceedingly taught bowstrings—and I did nothing as he fired straight into the Hand’s chest.

The bullet left a visible green contrail as it exploded out the other side of her chest, her screaming echoing up through the speakers overhead. But she didn’t die, oh God no. She thrashed out on the floor, screaming and bleeding like an epileptic fish out of water. With horror, I realized that the bullet’s entry and exit wounds were giving off a green-black light, and that I could hear her screams through the massively thick glass around the Cœur.

“Catch me if you can, Gunslinger,” the Black Man said in a calm voice, and briskly walked off through a door in one of the elevated portions of the room. The rest of the men stayed behind, jaunting and jeering at the Hand as she screamed and thrashed.

My right hand felt wrong as I looked at the big red button. Presuming the builders of this place weren’t literally drop-dead retarded, that big red button wasn’t the “Blow Up The World” button. I hit the bottom like a hammer, and a distant humming sound I hadn’t even noticed until now slowly died down. The glowing sphere slowly descended downwards, but then a panel next to the big red bottom opened up, revealing a pad of numbers from 0–9 and a little paper note.

The note was a picture of a man pulling down his eyelid and sticking his tongue out, the words next to it reading “Thank you for pressing the Blow Up The World button for me, Gunslinger! Unless you enter the proper code soon, the Cœur will explode!”

Oh, Goddammit—so the Old Ones were drop-dead retarded.

Very, very calmly, I looked at the door nearest me. A sudden feeling of having my organs clamped in a vice rose in my chest and gut, but I paid it no mind as I entered the decontamination chamber. When I keeled over and vomited out a mixture of luncheon and blood into the chamber, I paid it no mind. And when I realized that most of my right arm was now burning, covered in burn marks that resembled lunar craters more than any burn I’d ever seen before and which did not heal, I paid it also no mind.

When the decontamination finished, I stepped out. There was a man standing right there, waiting for me. “You shoulda stayed home, Gunslinger!” he shouted. Or at least, that was what I was pretty sure he was going to shout if I hadn’t thrust my sword through his jaw and into his brain without so much as a cocked brow. My hand was closer to the sword than my guns, you see.

“For the Grapist chapterhouse!” some bastard shouted at me, and when he got close enough, I sighed, rolled my eye, and stabbed him in the stomach.

“Really?” I asked. “You’re the Grapists?”

When another Grapist came at me, I parried, kicked him in the shin, and stabbed him through the eyes while the pain distracted him. That was three down, and about four more to go. “Come on, gents,” I said, “I’ve only had hands for two days tops. How am I so much better than you?” That got the other four on my case. “Oh wait, I forgot why I’m so much better than you all—I cheat”—and I whipped out a revolver, cocked it back, and fired, killing one instantly. I fanned my left hand over the revolver in order to quickly cock the gun and fire it three more times. When it was over, I said, “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you never charge at a man known as the Gunslinger. Odds are, he’ll just shoot you.”

God, did my right arm and hand hurt. It felt like I was being blistered and burnt under the hateful eye of the sun; in fact, there were blisters like a particularly nasty, nasty sunburn. Always use sunblock, kids! And now… hang on, now that I looked at it, I was pretty sure that this arm was supposed to have some hair on it. Not at all like the arm I had as pony, but some. Now? Not so much.

“This is probably bad,” I said with a sigh.

Then I heard the Hand groan. It had probably been meant to be another scream, but her voice just oozed that she was nigh dead. Quickly, I rushed over to the woman and knelt down beside her in the pool of her own blood. The hole in her chest was indeed glowing; really, there was absolutely no way she was even possibly alive with a wound that massive, but the fact was that she was alive, and I could ask why later.

So, I did the first, most irrational thing that came to mind: I decided that sometimes winners really did do drugs, and dug into her bags. And there! The thing of schotl. Of course, the problem was that, as shitty as her armor was, it did a good job of making it very hard to find somewhere to stick the broad a needle.

“This is going to look very weird, but I promise you: it’s for your own good,” I said, and went about remove her top. Straps and laces were the only thing that kept the chainmail bikini on, and once those were removed, off came her breastplate. Ah, and of course, those annoying sacks of fat on a female’s chest. The bullet wound was just between them, likely having broken her sternum, but, against literally every odd, hadn’t killed her.

“I am a total sellout to our consumerist, drug-loving culture,” I groused as grabbed one of her breasts, pushed it out of the way, and injected the drug directly into her chest. A part of me remarked on how soft breasts where, since I’d been expecting them to sort of feel like sandbags for whatever reason. Within three seconds, I saw the flesh of her breast grow back, which was a lot faster that I would have thought, but I wasn’t complaining.

More and more of her flesh healed before my eye. Then she shuddered and spasmed, no small amount of saliva oozing from her mouth. I found a stimpack and injected her therewith, followed by me reluctantly pulling out one of my last few healing potions and pretty much dump it into her wound and straight into her heart.

“Okay, so if you die on me,” I warned, “I will be very cross with you! I might just have to bend you over my knee and spank you!”

The Hand actually sputtered out a deathly species of laughter. “Y’know,” she said quietly, “I’m pretty sure that’s an enticement, not… not a threat, Gunslinger.” She snorted. “Especially since… ’specially since ya did take my top off.”

“Hey, that was for a good reason and you know it!”

With a little smile on her trembling lips, she said, “Didn’t stop you from leering at and touching them.”

“Now, hold on just a—!” The sudden sensation of lead speeding by my head faster than sound followed immediately by the thunderous roar of a really big gun made me dive away from the Hand, landing behind a wooden crate.

I looked up to where the sound had come from, and there was the Black Man on one of the elevated parts of the room, cocking back the lever on his gun and expending a spent round. “Okay, so I got bored of waiting.” He vaulted over a guard rail and onto the floor proper. “Hey, and how are you liking that thing I did to your girlfriend, eh?”

“Well, I’ll be honest here,” I called out to him: “I don’t very much appreciate it. Also, I’d say ‘she’s not my girlfriend’, but I’m old enough not to care about such schoolyard bullshit. And also because saying ‘she’s not my girlfriend’ is just begging the universe to force you into a relationship.”

“It’s a magic bullet of decay,” he spoke. “Whatever it hits, it rots slowly, painfully, but does not kill instantly. Oh no. If you’re taking me down this day, I’ll make killing me absolute hell on you and your friends.”

I pulled out a gun, remember the face of my father, and peeked out again to fire. Of course, he wasn’t there. I sighed hard. “You’re behind me, aren’t you?”

“Yep.”

“Shit.”

I spun around, only to get bashed upside the head with his riflebutt. “That was for pissing in my koi pond!” he spat. Staggering back, I realized I’d dropped my gun, but by then, he’d kicked it away. When I reached for my other gun, the Black Man slugged me straight in the throat and just tackled me to the ground. And because the universe hated me, that gun went flying off somewhere. Probably into another dimension, the same place where all dropped pencils went.

“Gotcha, Gunslinger,” he cackled, pulling out a knife that was probably ninety-five percent tetanus. When I moved to try to grab my own knife, he grabbed my reaching hand and brought his knife down. Down and down and, apparently, used it to cut my shirt in half.

“Hey!” I coaked. “I don’t know how many shirts I have!”

“Oh, and look at all the shits I give,” he replied as I tried punching him in the face, twisting and writhing to try to get an angle. “Hey, how about something symbolic before I really kill you?”

“I thought you said I was bound to kill you this day.”

He shrugged. “I won’t lie: sometimes the future the Cœur gives is just utter bullshit. Very likely bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless.”

Suddenly I felt cold steel in the flesh of my right breast. I screamed as I felt the Black Man sawing at the flesh around the nipple, and he laughed. The feeling of cold, jagged metal severing muscle and flesh and veins and nerves and then a wet schloschk sound as he grabbed with his hand and tore off what the knife didn’t cut. Smiling, he held it up for me to see. It wasn’t just my nipple, nor the off-color area around it, but all the skin in a jagged two-inch radius around the nipple, plus the nipple.

So, great. There was now a giant, gaping wound in my chest that, while not very deep, hurt like shit!

I punched his face again, but he failed to react. That’s when I thought mayhap I could gouge the bastard’s goddamn eyes out! On the next fist-to-face love affair, I jabbed my fingers under his sunglasses and into his—oh by Laurentia’s permanently blueballed-by-virginity vagina while the Archangel Thor tries to randomly seduce her, what the shit was that?

It wasn’t an eye, that was for damn sure. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I could feel my fingers curling and digging into the inner lining of his eyesocket, but not eye. Instead there was this cold, almost smoke-like feeling and… something inside his eye just licked me.

Still smiling, the Black Man carefully removed his sunglasses, putting them into a pocket. The Black Man didn’t have eyes, no. They were black holes of smoke wherefrom waved little tendrils of shadows and blackness and evil and probably Neighponease porn.

“You know,” he said, his voice as smooth as liquid silk, “there’s a reason why they call me the Black Man, and it wasn’t originally my sense of fashion, no.”

With a roar, I gripped the inner wall of his eye as hard as I could and threw him off me. He tumbled, but that was enough for me to scramble to me feet and pull my sword out. When I swung, he held up Skybane, and the weapon utterly blocked my blow without so much as a scratch. I felt blood leaking down from my severed breast down my naked stomach, soaking into my pants. And when I swung my blade again, I felt blood spit out of the wound when he sidestepped the blow with ease.

He laughed as he sidestepped the swing, the force of missing knocking me of balance. Taking all the care of a rhino in heat, he stepped up to me before I could right myself and jammed two fingers into the bloody wound on my chest. The bastard smiled as I yelped in pain, and he smiled even more as he kneed me in the stomach so hard that I dropped my sword.

Were it not for the fact that I was now struggling to breathe, I would have said something to the effect of, “Stop knocking weapons out of my hand—now I’ll never get the sword’s security deposit back!”

Really, though, all I did was gasp as he hooked his fingers and pulled them out of my breast, tearing out stringy chunks of red. But, it wasn’t the flesh-rending agony that prompted me to gasp, no. It was his eyes, how the black tendrils slithered and reached out for me. I had to look down to see his eyes due to my height, but I… I couldn’t look away.

“All things are born in blood, sweet mockingbird,” he hissed with a maniacal grin. “In blood there is pain. From pain comes beauty. Stare into the gifts the Cœur gave me when it rotted out my eye.” The tendrils reached further and further out to me until I was sure they were going to caress me. “Yes, I can see it now, sweet mockingbird. There is great pain in your soul…” The maniacal grin slowly died. “No… no… that’s not possible.” His lips curved down into a deep frown. “You-you are no man! You are not of this world! You are a demon in the flesh of a man, and that demon hight J—”

A great crash nearly knocked us both to the ground. He only barely kept on his feet as he spun around to face the Cœur. I, however, dove away behind one of those tiny little walls that decorated the room. When I peaked over it, however, I saw whence the crashing had come.

The apparati around the Cœur had sprung into action, and now, almost like massive mechanical arms, they moved around, grabbing strange glass canisters that were sticking out of the ceiling. They moved the canisters into slots all around the Cœur’s container. Several strange T-shaped pedestals shot out jets of steam, gears sticking out of the walls cracked and turned with a terrible grinding sound, and sideways pillars throughout the room suddenly began moving and thumping at the ground hard over and over again like chisels being smashed with hammers. Everything felt hotter as steam rushed out from pipes, far more consistently than those four pedestals.

The Cœur was coming to life.

Suddenly, the little wall I was hiding behind quaked and rose slowly into the air. I rolled off and watched as what I’d thought was a small wall became the top of a mechanical mess that looked like a steel weeping willow, only with blue-striped tubes of metal instead of leaves. Before my eye, the blue stripes pulsed with light at a slow, rhythmic beat. From what I could see, the rest of the little walls were now the tops of other kinds of mechanical trees.

Remembering that I could gawk when the world wasn’t about to explode and that good God did my breast hurt, I reached into my pack and pulled out a glass bottle made red from the liquid within. With a quick motion, I popped the cap open and brought the bottle to my mouth. I swallowed, already feeling the psychosomatic effects of the healing tonic.

Then the bottle exploded. Because the universe hated me.

I flinched back from the shattered glass, spitting out what more of the tonic I had in my mouth. Someone pulled back on a lever to a satisfying clicking sound, and the sound of a bullet casing hitting the ground. Jerking my head around, I saw the Black Man holding a glowing red bullet and loading it into his rifle.

“Miss me?” he asked.

My breast felt hotter than hot. Feverish, really, not so much sexy. I hoped it was the effects of the tonic; there was no way I’d swallowed enough to actually heal myself. “You know,” I said, “yours was the bullet that failed to hit me; I should be asking you that.”

“I wasn’t aiming for you.” He held the shattergun up. “But I am now.”

Shit.

Tendrils of white flames like taut bowstrings whipped around the gunbarrel, just like with that bullet of decay. But like hell if I was going to get hit by that thing.

Like a particularly fat porpoise, I dove behind the metal tree and flopped onto the ground in the moment before he pulled the trigger. The sound wasn’t like a gunshot; it was more as if someone had loaded a particularly miffed eagle into a cannon and then fired the cannon. I watched as a giant phoenix-shaped ball of white fire flew straight through where I’d just been standing, so hot and bright that I had to shield my eye from the damn bird.

“Ha!” I shouted. “You missed again!”

“That’s where you’re wrong, sweet mockingbird,” the Black Man said calmly, and pointed to where his shot had gone.

“Huh,” I said flatly. “Well, that’s probably the antithesis of good.”

There, on the far, far end of the room, the massive screaming phoenix had hit the wall and bounced itself off the wall and back towards me, murder in its burning eyes.

I did the first, most logical thing a buck in my position could do: I got naked.

Well, it was only my top—quick as I could, I removed my duster and ruined shirt. The shirt could go sodomize itself for all I cared as I let it fall it the ground. “Toro! Toro!” I shouted, because it was the sane thing to do.

Crouching down nearly into a ball and feeling the bird’s heat already drying my eyeball, I draped my body with the duster as best I could, covering more of myself than the duster normally could have, more akin now to a blanket than the coat it was.

I closed my eye, gritted my teeth, and felt the bird ram into me with the force of a thousand angry bees carrying a thousand angry sledgehammers. Already burning and blistering, I felt the skin of my right eye split open and crackle until it went numb, my left arm only now blistering as the fire washed over me. My back got singed and burned too, but nobody cared about my back. Stupid back.

It was over fast, and just as it had from the fire I’d started in Songnam, the duster’s flame retardant abilities had… Well, I was alive, at least. Probably cooked enough to be served as “Well-Done Ponyburger”, but alive. By the Archangel Thor, I swore that the blood on my chest was boiling, burning as it literally gave off steam.

I stood up, feeling bits of that healing potions work their metaphorical magic on my back and arm, reducing the burning itch to a dull pain. Bits of the materials I’d used on it to patch it up over the years were now literally ash and char, the leather itself blackened and smelling faintly of steak, but I wasted no time in putting it back on. Oddly, my hat was fine.

“Most impressive, little mockingbird,” the Black Man called out. I saw now that he was standing up on one of the elevated parts of the room.

“How the hell did you get up over there so fast?” I asked, ignoring the hot red blood running down from my breast.

He shrugged. “Oh, it’s a habit of mine. When folker aren’t looking, I quietly sprint really fast around the room to make it look like I can teleport and be anywhere.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “So is that how bad guys do it?”

“Yhar,” he said. “But it requires good cardio—you need be running all around without having to pant, else folker will wise up.” The Black Man smiled wide as he pulled out his shattergun and loaded bullets into it. “For the record, Skybane holds twelve shots in it. I just like loading singles of the magic bullets into this here shouldershooter for extra dramatic effect. You have several seconds before I’m reloaded.”

Ave Laurentia, just how many words do these people have for just that one type of weapon? Rifle, shattergun, and now shouldershooter.

I glanced around and spotted something. The Warden’s Hand was crawling across the floor, a trail of blood leading from her to where she’d once been shot, where there was a glowing green-black chunk of something on the ground—something to do with the bullet of decay, I supposed. By the Hand was a little pedestal that gave off a burst of quick steam, then fell steamless, the air above it wavy from extreme heat.

My eye took a peek at my naked, wounded breast, then looked back at the topless Hand, her naked breasts dragging under her as she crawled. I sprinted as fast as I could towards her, trying find another Trank der Genesung.

“Girl!” I shouted, sliding down next to her.

Weakly, she looked up at me, pointing off in the distance. “G-gun…”

“Shh, it’s okay,” I cooed. “I know the Black Man is loading his gun—now drink. You need this more than I.” I popped the top off the pink Equestrian healing potion and brought the bottle to her lips. She drank greedily. “If you die here, it’ll look bad on my record. I can’t lose any more companions. Were you to die, I’m pretty sure the companions’ union would organize a strike against me.” My eye fell upon her still-bleeding wounds as I wondered why the healing things before hadn’t healed her, and why said healing poultices hadn’t at least clotted the wound.

When the Hand took the bottle in her own hands, I let go thereof and went over to the steaming pedestal just next to her. It was tall, hot, and thick. Easily thick enough, I hoped, to stop bullets. Taking a deep breath, I once again proved that the best, most logical option in every situation was a full-on mid-battle strip tease by shedding my bandoliers and duster onto the ground, my bags following suite.

The pedestal rumbled, and I could feel a wave of heat wafting out from the vent thereatop. “Hey, ma’am.”

“G-gun,” the Hand muttered, pointing off away from me.

“I just want you to know that if I scream like a bitch here, it’s because this is probably going to hurt like shit.” The top of the pedestal now glew red, and according to the sound, here came the steam. I exhaled all air from my lungs, grit my teeth, and bent forwards, putting my bleeding right breast on the vent. At first, it only hurt like that phoenix had. Then came the steam.

In mere seconds, I had cauterized the wound.

It had sizzled and popped until it was more steamed than well-cooked broccoli, until the blood itself had turned to steam, until I burnt the opened flesh to the point where all the bleeding bits were roasted shut. Oh, and I had screamed like a tiny little bitch so hard that even Cards would have probably called me a pussy, beaten me up, and stolen my lunch money.

My legs practically gave way as I slid to the ground, my back against the pedestal. A bullet whizzed up past my head, but my attention was on my chest. It looked like a severely burnt chicken breast, black and charred where it should have been red and bleeding. Of course, the steam’s heat had mostly just supercooked the metal which had, in turn roasted me, so there was that. Taking a breath, I knew that I wasn’t yet done; the wound wasn’t bleeding anymore, but it was still open to the air, easy to infect. So, trying not to wonder if I’d go good with a side of mashed potatoes, I grabbed my ruined shirt and fastened it to myself, particularly atop the open wound. Hands, it turned out, were very good at manually tying knots, more so than any hoof, and within moments I had my chest wound covered, albeit poorly.

As I sat there, I didn’t hear any more gunshots. Why? I didn’t know, but I’d bet money that it was because the Black Man was just practicing being dramatically slow. Or mayhap he figured I’d cauterize the wound and he couldn’t get an erection unless someone was screaming. Either option seemed just as likely.

A part of me hoped he wasn’t taking aim at the Warden’s Hand, but then it dawned on me that while he couldn’t hit me back here—then a bullet hit the floor next to me with a spark. Then another and another, to either side of me. When I watched the hit, I noticed something. The bullets were hitting at angles, and they bounced off the metal floor. There was a chance they could bounce up and hit me.

“O mockingbird,” the Black Man called out, “you may hide, but you cannot escape me! You are not of this world, and such as you belong not in my world!”

Great! a thought angrily cogitated. He hates you so much now that you’ve inspired him to new levels of creativity!

“Shut up, me!” I hissed, unwilling to expose myself to the man by reaching for my duster or bags. Readying my body to spring and sprint, I waited for a bullet to hit the ground to my right. This bullet bounced and I could feel it just graze my ankle. With all my might, I jumped up and ran to the right where I knew he wouldn’t be aiming.

A bullet flew right on past my head as I ducked behind a mechanical tree. I’d been counting his shots. He’d fired now eight shots. Four more and he’d have to reload his shouldershooter/shattergun/rifle whatever. So, if I was here and safe from his bullets now, would he fire at me? A few moments later and I got my answer in the negatory. Now, my problem regarded how I’d find a way to make him shoot four more bullets. Of course, that was assuming he didn’t stop to reload right now. And when you assume… Wait, if I was the one assuming with myself, did that make and ass out of me and me? Double ass? Hmm.

Sitting there, I noticed blood on the floor near me. My nipple and the flesh around it was just sitting there on the ground. Anyone could have come along, taken it, and used my flesh for some sort of dark ritual. Also, there was a part of my body just sitting there, which was freaky. Really freaky. The nipple was stare staring at me—nipply!

I blinked, and realized something else. Off to the side, still behind the tree’s cover from the Black Man’s shattergun, was a very dead goat, its head a few feet away from its body thanks to the magic of bullets. The head bounced and rolled around as the angled pillar near it thumped the ground. As I watched the mechanical arms around the Cœur grabbing glass canisters from the ceiling, so too did they take out other cannisters from the Cœur—ones now filled with a glowing teal liquid—and set them into slots in the ceiling, I had a sudden idea. Under the hiss of all the steam and machinery, all I had to do was—

“I admit, I have no patience.”

My head jerked on its own. There was the Black Man and his shattergun, his eye tendrils slithering in the blackness of his eyes as if with eager anticipation. “Hi,” I said weakly.

He aimed the gun at my gut. “Low, actually.”

“That’s what you think,” I growled darkly. Looking directly at him, I smiled and pointed over his shoulder. “Now!”

“What the—?” he demanded, spinning around.

As I leapt up and tackled him, I shouted, “No one, bitch!” He didn’t spin around fast enough this time.

The Black Man grunted hard as we crashed together on the ground, me riding his back like I rode C—and the thought of how horribly sexual that word-choice sounded was was almost enough to make me pause. When he tried to get his gun up to me, I grabbed his arm, bent it backwards towards me, and bit a chunk out of his wrist.

“You taste like nothing in particular!” I barked as I spat out a chunk of manflesh. He, however, just screamed and dropped his gun, which I kicked away. Then I realized that if I’d picked the shattergun up, I could have shot him dead with it right then and there. Good going, me.

I wonder if this world has good strawberry banana smoothies.

That isn’t helping, me.

I grabbed the Black Man by the hair and repeatedly slammed his face into the ground, not entirely sure what I was accomplishing but feeling good about myself for doing it. He clawed and jerked around, grabbing the air as if something could save him. Now, though, I needed to find some suitably poetic way to kill him. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the Warden’s Hand still crawling around for no good reason, although a mental image did cross my mind of her being chased by a pack of invisible goats dead-set on violating her so as to restore the natural order of things wherein tentacles monsters only molested females and not males.

Then a goat head hit me square in the face.

“No, no—my anus is exit only!” I shrieked, flailing backwards. “My pen is not nor shall it ever be in a goat!” I realized that it was only the head of a goat, and not a goat itself, only when the Black Man rammed into me and pinned me on my back. Again. Because I was an idiot.

“You know what?!” the Black Man spat. “I’ve had it with your shit, mockingbird!”

“I only mock to cover up my spectacular insecurities!” I retorted, and he slugged me in the eyepatch.

“And I am done with your cocky bullshit!”

“Hey, if all you want is my cock, I’ll be happy to sleep with you here and now if it means I get to shut off the Cœur—as all the ladies say, I’m very talented with my mouth.”

He pulled out his knife. “Enough of you, Gunslinger, you abominable freak from another world!”

“Well, I’ll give you part of that,” came the voice of the Warden’s Hand. I heard the sound of my revolver being cocked. “His ass is outta this world.”

“What,” the Black Man and I stammered.

The Black Man’s head exploded. Twice. First his face just sort of evaporated, and then his brains just sort of turned into a fine slurry of mist and gray matter which painted the metal green behind him, each with its own unique explosions of wholesome family values.

“And, unfortunately for you,” she went on, “I kind of need that ass to shut down the Cœur and save my mother.”

I scrambled back from the now-limp corpse. Propping myself up, I looked over whence the Hand’s voice had come. She herself was sitting up, back against some sort of pedestal, a maniacal grin on her face as she held my gun in her hand. Now that I thought about it, she was sitting pretty much exactly where she’d been pointing to.

Oooh, so that’s what she’d meant by “gun”. Huh.

I cocked a brow at her. “That was the line you used?”

Panting, she set the gun on the ground. “Well, I needed a one-liner fast. It was the only thing I could think of.”

“To clarify, my ass was the only thing you could think of?”

“I… I’m only making this worse on myself, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” I replied, “pretty much.” Then, betwixt her bare, blood-covered breasts, I saw that her bullet wound was still open, still bleeding. “Are you okay?”

She laughed mirthlessly. “Fuck no—do you know how fucking much this fucking hurts?” Tightening my lips, I poked at my cauterized chest wound. “Oh, right. Well. Yhar, I could see how that could hurt more.

Standing up, I asked, “Hey, did you unload my gun and reload it with javelin rounds? Because I’m pretty sure his head exploded a few too many times for normal bullets.”

She shrugged, then winced. “Yes and no. I put a javelin in it, but this… this was that gun you fired earlier. You know, so it wasn’t fully loaded and… stuff.” The Hand broke out into a coughing fit as I searched the Black Man’s body for bullets.

I took the man’s bandoliers and rifled through his pockets for my bullets. All in all, I had netted myself some fifty-eight bullets for Skybane, which was now mine. It was mine by right of picking it up first, and it was also mine because it was now slung over my back. Sadly, though, I couldn’t find any more of those magic bullets on the Black Man’s body.

With my shiny new shattergun, I went over and got my gear back from the steam pedestal, but stopped at my bloody nipple. The damn thing, with its areola and brown flesh thereabout, looked so lonely. Worse yet, this was a a lot of flesh, the metaphorical and somewhat literal pound of flesh that a great many mares and stallions would have done anything to have had—even unattached, it was still a part of my body. To have that was to hold power over me; to have it would be to be able to subject me to black magic. There was, as per usual today, only one option.

I bent down, picked up my nipple, and looked it over. Steeling myself, I gave the nipple a silent goodbye before opening my mouth and consuming my flesh. The texture was okay, a bit chewy, a bit unchewy, and it it was cold. Within moments, it was done, and I’d had my flesh consumed.

I took out an Equestrian healing poultice and drank half and poured the other half into my cauterized wound. I was never going to repair my breast and get that nipple back, but mayhap if I was lucky, I could at least get a badass scar out of this deal, and not a nasty, infected burn wound forever more. When I was dressed and had my gear on, I trotted casually around the room until I had my weapons back, and then I went over to the Hand to retrieve my final revolver.

The Hand groaned when I knelt before her. “You know, I’m trying to stay awake, but it’s not working. Help?”

I looked around. “Can you walk?”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s why I dragged my fathersdamned tits around here till I got fucking tit burn!” She looked at my arms and blinked. “Shit, the fuck happened to your fucking arms?”

“When we get out of here, I’m going to have to buy you a dictionary.”

She coughed. “Ugh, why’s that?”

I offered her a little smile. “Because I’d like to teach you that there are other words out there besides ‘fuck’.” I reached my left hand out and put it on her forehead. “Well, I’ll be honest. I have no idea how hot or cold a werekind’s forehead should be, but I’m pretty sure you’re running a fever.” I gestured to several patches of reddened skin on her cheeks, breasts, and stomach. “It’s mostly concentrated around your breasts, since that’s where you got shot, and probably where that magic bullet’s, er, magic hit you hardest.”

The Hand bit her lip. “I… I don’t wanna fuckin’ die here. Not here. If I die, I wanna see Mom at least one last time. I-I-I—”

I gently pressed two fingers against her lips. “Shh, shh, shh, worry not thereabout. Just stay awake, stay alert, and stay golden while I go shut down the Cœur, okay?” I took my fingers from her lips. “I wish to hear an affirmation.”

“I… I gotcha.”

“That a girl!” I checked my revolver and loaded it back up to six bullets. “I’ll be back for you, but first I’ve to turn off the Cœur.” Which I have no idea how to do.

I went to stand, but she grabbed my arm. “Wait!” she said, her voice quiet. “I-I never even… I never told you my name.”

Looking into her dusty orange eyes, I offered her a soft smile. “I already know your name, Lightning Dust.”

The stunned look on her face was priceless as her hand went limp, letting free my arm. With a nod of my head, I stood. It was a short walk from there to the decontamination chamber with all the bloody vomit thereinside. A minute spent in the chamber later and once again I found myself in the Cœur’s little container room. There was this weird little beeping voice that probably meant that shit was about to explode, which made sense, given that it was going to explode.

I took a deep breath as I looked at the Black Man’s mocking little note. “Yes, well, who’s laughing now? It is me, for I live and you were killed by a topless woman.”

The little keypad next to the note looked worn out and used. Beneath numbers two through nine were three faded letters, starting with “ABC” and ending with, on nine, “WXY”, with no Q or Z anywhere to be found. Touching a number at random made a pleasant little beeping noise, and when I kept pressing, they made more such sounds. On the seven push, it made an angry cackling noise. I tried it again, and on the seventh number it crackled angrily. Somehow, I got it in my head that this meant that I had to enter a seven-digit sequence of numbers correctly before the Cœur shutdown on me.

Overall, that meant that there were… uh… shit, I didn’t know math, but there were probably more possible combinations than I could have possibly entered in one lifetime—and I probably had less than ten minutes, tops. An arbitrary assumption, yes, but since my ass was apparently ‘outta this world’, where was the harm is making myself into two of these asses? Of course, that assumed that the act of making myself into two asses would make those two asses copies of the one I already had, so… uh… did this now name me a quadruple ass?

“So,” I said to myself, “a seven-digit code and I’ve only got ten minutes before the world blows up. Let’s get to cracking! Zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero.” It crackled angrily. “Well, at least we learned that it actually was a seven digit combination. How’s about one-zero-three-five-six-eight-nine-one? Nada. Hmm… Then it must clearly be three-five-eight-nine-seven-zero-five. Nope.” I entered several more codes to no different effect. A sudden and very strong sense of déjà vu body checked me so hard that I had to take a step back, putting a hand to my head.

“I think,” someone started to say, and I leapt straight up into the air with a pathetically girlish shriek.

Trying to gather myself back together, I spun around. There, standing inside the open decontamination chamber was my friendly and only occasionally man-and-pony-eating steed. “C!” I exclaimed.

“Howdy, mate. What’s up?”

“Whence came you?”

He looked around and flicked his tail. “Quicksave.”

“What?”

“As I was trying to say, I think that those numbers actually stand for something. A word, I think.”

Heart still pounding from that startling, I looked down at the keypad. First, I was struck with the fact that I had no idea what a keypad actually was, nor had I ever heard the word until my brain had just pulled it up mere moments ago. Second, I had noticed the faded letters under the numbers before, but hadn’t thought much thereof. “Yes, I see it. What’s the keypad?”

“It’s that thing with the numbers and the buttons and it does stuff.” He pointed a hoof at the keypad. “See? How many times do I have to explain it to you?”

“You’ve never…” I shook my head, looking back at the keypad. “You think it’s a word, the code?”

“Or words, possibly.” He whinnied. “I’d offer a hand, but, well…” He struck out a leg and slammed a hoof into the ground. “I am a horse.”

As I looked back at C, I felt a chill run down my spine. The Cœur’s vision had told me to be wary of C, and, really, he was kind of a face-eating monster—not being wary of him, even treating him as a friend, was probably stupid.

My vision again fell upon the keypad. Seven letters. A word combination. And a random leap in logic made my pretty sure that each number correlated to one of the three letters therebeneath. So, knowing that, I could spell out words. I asked C, and he basically told me that yeah, I was right in my leap of logic.

Still, I needed a word. Maybe it was… Olympia? “Six-five-nine-six-seven-four-two.” It crackled in that same harsh way. “Any suggestions?”

C hummed. “Zyzzyva,” he offered, and spelt it out for me.

“This thing has no Z’s,” I said.

“Oh yeah. I forgot. Hm…” He tapped his chin in a way that I was pretty sure his body wasn’t designed to be able to do at all, his arm twisting and bending and stretching unnaturally. “Judging?”

Five-eight-three-four-four-six-four. “Nope.”

“Jazzies?”

I gave him a flat look. “This thing has no Z’s, C. Do you even know what you’re doing?”

He scoffed. “Of course I do! You can also trust me, for I am C!” He lowered his voice. “And yes, I did just say that to rhyme. So, what about we try…”

But I was no longer listening. I was too busy being thunderstruck. “You can trust me, for I am C”, he’d said. That’s what he’d said, and it was just bouncing around in my head. Back in the Cœur vision, my angel—or, at least how I perceived my angel—had said not to trust C, for “C is a liar”. I couldn’t trust C, but here I was, taking his words here. So I looked back at the keypad. “C is a liar, C is a liar” kept running through my head. “C is a liar! C is a liar!”

I reached out and typed in a code. “Two-seven-two-five-four-two-seven.”

The keypad beeped happily, the alarm-sounds dying down, and the machines outside the room suddenly slowing down to a crawl before finally stopping. It was over. The code had worked. The Cœur was shut down, and the great heart of Olympia was no more. At least, I made sure it’d be no more when I drew my guns and shot the panel with all the buttons into oblivion. The debris fell into the glowing sphere of the Cœur, and that was that.

Somewhere, I could feel the angel’s dark smile slithering into my brain, shining down on me from wherever it was that angels who told you to murder bad people hung out.

I watched as the Cœur lifted itself back up above its little pit in the ground. From behind me, C said, “Hey, that code worked? Honestly, I was just guessing with ‘quiggly’, but, hey, whatever works, right? Now all we have to do is actually shut it down.”

My heart sunk. “Wait. That wasn’t shutting it down?”

I turned around to see C frowning. “Didn’t you read the note? You pressed the ‘Blow Up The World’ button, not the off button. In fact, you sort of shot the control panel where the off button was. So, now we gotta do it manually.”

“What?”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t always resort to violence to solve your problems.”

“Oh, sod off,” I groused. “Just tell me how to turn it off.”

He shrugged, yet again in a way that I was pretty sure his body wasn’t meant to bend. “Well, since you destroyed the control panel, the only way to turn it off would be to forever shut it off by reaching into the Cœur and, er… basically, there’s a tiny thing at the center of the Cœur that you must pull out.”

“Uh-huh,” I grunted. “And how do you know this?”

“I read the walkthrough,” he said, and there was a moment of silence.

“Are you screwing with me?”

“Yes, yes I am screwing with you.” He smiled. “But my point stands.”

Sighing, I gesturing to the floating sphere of doom. “Well, go on, then. Hop on into the Cœur and get the whatchamajigger.”

C stepped out of the decontamination chamber and onto the little lip surrounding the Cœur, the blue light reflecting in his eyes as if his eyes were perfect mirrors. “Yes, that would be the logical thing to do, since I pretty much would be unfazed by the horror of the Cœur. But no, fuck you; I don’t wanna do it.”

“What?” I exclaimed, stamping a foot. “Why not?”

He shook his head like a dog trying to dry itself of sulfuric acid. “You have to do it all on your own, Gunslinger—because that’s just the more dramatic thing to do.”

“Oh, you utter cocksmothering bastard! I’m probably going to get cancer and die horribly from this and… Huh.” I shifted my weight. “Well, now that I think thereabout, I can’t fault you on that logic—it’s about as airtight as anything can possibly be.” I took a breath. “So, do I just… what, reach in and feel around like I’m trying to grope a girl in the dark?”

“Essentially, yes,” he said with a nod.

I moved to reach into the core as I had before. “If this kills or seriously and forever injures me, I’m going to come back from the dead and haunt the shit out of you.”

He smiled wide, so wide that it ripped his cheeks open, exposing the sides of his teeth. “Don’t worry,” he spoke in a dark tone that sounded perfectly honest, “if this ends badly for you, I’ll free the slaves outside—maybe eat alive one or three of the evil-looking ones—and then bring you and your lady to the localmost hospital. You’ll be fine, alright?”

“Right, right,” I muttered, and I reached into the watery blue glowing sphere of murder world-ending horror, because it was the only, most dramatic option.

And then everything went to shit in a handbasket.

The very last thing I recalled thinking about was what the angel had told me, what I had entered as the code to the Cœur. Two-seven-two-five-four-two-seven.

“C’s a liar.”

Author's Note:

Footnote: level up!
New Perk: Wholesome Family Values — You are a model upon which all men/stallions should look and aspire to! Because of this, you know do +25% damage with all explosives! This bonus also affects damage from explosive rounds. Make sure to teach Junior how to accidentally shoot his sister from an early age!

[This chapter is long is long is long and took two+ weeks to write. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.]

[Oh, and next chapter, we have a very special guest star, and some of us might know her from a certain fic in the fandom; we’re picking her up because she’s amusing and because I’m a friend of the author. Yes, I know you (you know who you are) think I have too many characters, but I’ve learned nothing from my mistakes.

[Ach, and one last thing. Siffer drew this amateur Lyra, which he would like to dedicate to you, Myriad of Failure. And also to you, pawndidater2 Keep being awesome, Myriad! And keep being mad enough to doodle about stuff, pawndidater2! (And stop blueballing us with that promise of a fancy Gunslinger Werekind!Jericho~). Cheers to all people mad enough to be inspired by this weird little thing I write to draw something!]

[On last thing. I write on Google Drive, and I encourage my editors to leave snarky comments that are funny to read as they edit. What would you say if I released the Google Drive version of Jericho with all those comments available for you to read/add your own?]

Comments

[Unimpressive Vagaries]

3569757

Lovin' the new cover art! Will Luna ever actually appear in the story?

[TheLordSiffer]

3574967
Bro what you talking about? Luna has made several appearances throughout the story.

You see, the truth is, Luna is actually... Cherry Berry

What a twist!

[Midnight Rambler]

Lel, haven't actually read the new chapter yet, but just for the new cover art, have this:

[Philobrony]

Now if only a joke had been made about leering being a frog.

[Luminous Lead]

Family-values armoury. Witch's Voixson. Autocaniballism. So many great moments. :D

I have to say, I totally expected the Hand to be called out as Cards, not Lightning Dust.

3574967 Aside from Selena and the Blue Eyed Mare, it's possible that we won't get any incarnations for her. Maybe there'll be a reveal near the end and Jericho will get a case of Heroic BSOD.

[ChaosSapphire]

This chapter made me hard...

[Jason Brony]

I wonder, do you have a plan for this story or are you just making it up as you go on?

Either way, you are a genius.

[Such Forbidden Colors]

This fic can never have too many characters!

Our first Angel sighting. It was very interesting seeing Jericho talk with this powerful and mysterious figure. Come to think of it, Jericho spent a lot of time talking to otherworldly beings today. He's so popular with the demigods.

Everyone is hot for Jericho. Jeez. Girls in this story are either murdered by him or are infatuated with him. Cards, however, is neither. Cherry Berry was both.

I'm noticing that just about everyone who tries to talk to Jericho have to ignore about half of the things he says. Even the Angel has to shrug off a Cherry Berry comment. Which leads me to wonder, what would a conversation with Jericho be like if the other being actually took everything he said seriously?

Lastly, I really enjoy your characterization. Even the Big Bad, who almost murdered Jericho and Dust, gets that adorable line about sprinting around the battlefield so that he seems more threatening.

[The Mop Is AFK]

Alright this was a really solid chapter and also if you would answer a question how long is the equestria girls arch gonna last its funny and i love it but i miss cards and other ponys Still love the story though

[Faldo]

the fic is really good but with progressing plot it is getting extremly difficult to understand the plot because it reads itself like a bad drug trip please to the author make it a little bit more easier to read most the time it extremly confusing

[TheLordSiffer]

3575093
Well, there's actually gonna be another one made, with an even more dynamic and awesome Luna!

3575396
Yush. Yush. Yush!

3575476
What, Cards? 'Fraid there's no way that would happen. 'Sides, what made you think it was Cards?
And, well, Blue-Eyed-Mare and Selena and such, well. At the very least let me state that, were Luna to be either one (I'm guessing it's the blue-eyed-mare, myself), then the reason for introducing them early on—and without Jericho, specifically, knowing that Luna is Luna—is very important. Because, y'know, he'd probably stab Luna for being an unholy abomination, were he to know she is right off the bat. Also, comment more, ye dingo. We miss you.

3575483
This comment made me hard...
Open wide, Flutters!

3575919
Well, sometimes I ask Crushric to come sit down with me and discuss how the story is gonna progress, but this is mostly in terms of the very general point to point plotline. 95% of what you see in this chapter was probably procured from his brain on he spot.

3576715
Jericho is very popular with them ol' deities. Keeping in mind that the Angel and C are this story's Great Old Ones, Jericho is on a pretty good foot with the Powers That Be.
As for a character that believes everything he says? Don't you think it'd get a little dull once said character tries to stab his/her eyes out because he doesn't want to catch syphilis?

3576814
Considering this is Crushric, and he has a way with making things longer... I would estimate between 60k words and 100k words. We also miss the ponies, man. We also.

3578350
I don't understand your lack of understanding. What is it that you do not understand? I need to understand what you do not understand so that I can understand what the problem is, since I have absolutely no issue understanding what there is to understand. Do elaborate.

[The Mop Is AFK]

3578567 actually I really do miss the ponies but I'd proabablt be content with just a human cards that would be hilarious especialy knowing Jericho and his author would make some giantdebacle that would be funny and awesome while also slightly disturbing all at the same time

[Cavalorn]

113586
100 weeks later and I still think that I liked the old plot more.

edit: holy crap thats a lot of time

[phlamingsoul]

3580489

Three reasons, three answers to all questions in the universe:

Science, women, and cancer.

Pick your favorite!

[Crushric]

3574967
Ah, well. If you're asking this question, I can't say. If you already knew the answer, I also couldn't say.
3575093
A good song. Now then, I await from thee one of thy normal comments. Love to read those, yes I do.
3575396
Damn 5–6 is really good and catchy. Blackout's especially. I wish that said song were longer—we need us a drawing of Blackout being badass-evil with a much longer version of her theme playing. What program do you use to make this?
3575476
Lead! Wow, it's been a while since we've seen ya, huh? And so you find all those little bits hilarious? Glad to hear. I was trying to be... something with all them, and the autocannibalism helped me to scar our friend here and then add another line to help build up to Act II's brutal climax, speaking of "thy/my flesh consumed".

3575483
Um... go on...
3575919
Both, actually. Chapter 29 was started with only small points in mind, "witch wants to turn against Black Man," "Dust gets cripplingly injured", "Cœur shut down". Everything else (including /how/ those 3 things occurred) was made up on the fly as I wrote.

3576715
Hey there, familiar face!
Aye, I just enjoy littering my world(s) with interesting characters, whether or not they stick around for long.

As for the supernatural beings, we ain't had enough of them. At this point, they're needed enough. Although, I wouldn't call the Blue-Eyed Lady a demigod per se. Just, keep in mind that she and our friend struck up a deal which will have to come up big later. As for C, just remember:
"C is a liar."

Everyone is hot for Jericho.

Somewhere along the way (chapter 11), Siffer and I decided it'd be okay for our friend to be considered very good-looking on the condition that it only make life worse for him. (I have this perpetual phobia that Jericho is a Gary Stu, and so... well, I am afraid he's a Gary Stu).
Like, if he were to be considered "hot", it would be on the grounds that mares would objectify him as a sex object, not as a person, and our narrator doesn't care for much wild intercourse, therefore this would all be shit for him. (I am still so, so terrified that this makes him a Gary Stu)

Which leads me to wonder, what would a conversation with Jericho be like if the other being actually took everything he said seriously?

As I take it, those who know our friend generally know can tell the important bullshit from the other stuff, and will often choose to ignore it when our friend's being weird.

Lastly, I really enjoy your characterization. Even the Big Bad, who almost murdered Jericho and Dust, gets that adorable line about sprinting around the battlefield so that he seems more threatening.

By some miracle, I appear to be good at characters. I don't know how or why, but I am, if readers are to be trusted. A part of me also felt that, unless the Black Man had some cute lines like that, he'd be dull and boring, so I made him a bit cuter with those lines, and folker seem to like him better all the more therefor.

3576814
How long will be this arc? I don't know.
Hopefully not too much longer. Want moar poneh.
3580672
Trust me, werekind!Cards is like the Cards we know, but... she's not the Cards Jericho's abused so hard. This Cards might actually like Jericho. How horrible!

3578350
Yes, what about the plot is confusing? I make plot points all very clear and make sure, when I have something I ain't noted in a while, to remind the reader about who and what everything is when I have the appear again. I literally don't know how I could make it more simple without sacrificing depth and weight. Please, tell where what parts confuses thee.

3580489
Cœur came, actually, from an accidental self-mispronunciation of core, which I jokingly said as "Kör", which sound the same as Cœur. Cœur, as you know, can mean "Core" (in the senses of a nuclear reactor), and that's more how it's meant here. Also, as the French core, I can freely use the word "Heart" and "Core" therearound, so it was kept as the French term to give me more mobility and word flexibility.

3580910
Holy Hell—a rare original reader!
Salutations, ye olde reader (I know I remember you well, way back from the first draft of Jericho, when this story was a load of ass). And, who's to say that this new plotline isn't just adapted from the old one, and that the interesting bits of the old one won't return? Honesty, this new style and behavior of the narrator is far better and more interesting than it ever was before.

3582356
The answer is 42, ya goof!

[Philobrony]

3582432
Musescore, of all things.
Open-source, 100% free, and the soundfont I'm using, in addition to being on the front page of the website, makes it sound better than $600-$700 programs.
Linky.

[phlamingsoul]

3582432

'Tis not! 42 is the answer to the ULTIMATE QUESTION, which is not necessarily all questions in the universe.

It may have been 42 women, though, that named it le Coeur instead of simply the Heart...

[that1dude]

Besides the ultraviolence and the grimdark humor, my favorite part of Jericho has to be all the references. Keep 'em coming!

[Bionicgeth]

3582432 Hmm, I don't know, can a Butt Monkey (let's face it, with how much fate messes around with him and how often he gets seriously injured, I think he qualifies.) qualify as a Gary Stu? Probably not, since I'm fairly certain a Butt Monkey is the antithesis of a Gary Stu, Since Gary Stu's are never really challenged by their situation, I believe was the definition. One of them, that is.

Well, let's see what else Jericho loses this time, besides his nipple/breast. I wonder what will happen with the Witch (For kicks, have Jericho walk in on her pleasuring herself, I would love to see him freak.) Onwards to The Drawers next, I suppose, unless Jericho receives yet another quest/distraction/Strawberry Banana Smoothie.

Once again, brilliantly insane chapter from a brilliantly insane author. Crushric, never change. (Unless it's for the better*.)

*This is quite subjective

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

So, is this a re-imagined blackjack with the dealer as a guardian angel?

[Luminous Lead]

3582432 3578567
Yeah, life's been a bit of a bummer lately, and I broke my finger in October, got the pins out late november, and am currently in physio. It's not summer any more, so with the term ramping up to its conclusion, short comments have been the necessity lately. Enough about me though.

I often find myself unable to predict just where the story is going (not necessarily a bad thing, mind you), and the transition to the were-world where we suddenly have duplicates of previously established characters (so Jericho can kill them twice?) is putting me suitably flatfooted when I try to keep up.

What, Cards? 'Fraid there's no way that would happen. 'Sides, what made you think it was Cards?

It's somewhat ambiguous when she's being introduced, but a lot of it was just my inability to remember some of LD's defining backstory/characteristics.

dusty-eyed woman from across the tavern [...] her opal-colored dress slightly sparkling in the light [...] some sort of long blood-red bandana around her neck

Sure, her eyes may be described as "dusty amber" (within reasonable human limits, so they didn't grab my attention), but she's wearing a "blood-red" bandana (Cards has red in her mane) and an "opal-coloured" dress. Some may think of opal as a teal-ish colour, but since it's an amorphous silicate it can have a huge range of colours. My basic definition of opal (as a colour), therefore, is the cheap white grade. So, what the intro paragraph told me at this point was that the Hand had normal(-ish) eyes (don't remember seeing any crazy colours in the were world at this point), wore white and decorated with red.

After your life first went to shit—shitter than it’d been under your abusive father, that is—how’d you get over the alcoholism here?

Cards, too, suffered under poor parenting and turned to alcohol.

She's also the first major female character that we spend a good deal of time with, has significant local authority, and awkwardly hits on him every now and then.

As my English teacher in highschool once told me "If you look for something, you'll usually find it, whether it's there or not". So, with my prior assumptions in mind, it didn't surprise me that the Gunslinger found Security armour (you know how in some RPGs you tend to find relevant armour and weapons soon after picking up a new character?) and thought of Cards, nor was I surprised that the Hand wanted a Unicorn.

It seems that this wasn't the way the trail was meant to be lead, however, and I can see that in hindsight.

And, well, Blue-Eyed-Mare and Selena and such, well.

Selena is implied related to Blueblood (Celestia's nephew), but outranks him and seems to have significant government authority as well (she wasn't asked for a ticket at the Sleepy Oaks train). Jericho only seems to run into Blue-eyes when Selena's somewhere far-off (and only AFTER Selena scrutinizes him and gets interested). Selena enters Songham as Jericho leaves it, just when they're expecting a Princess. She's familiar with ancient songs, hasn't been addressed "Miss" or "Ma'am" in ages, tenses up when her name is compared to Luna's (same meaning), spaces out at the implication of parents, and laments that the moon doesn't get much notice. Now, she may just be totally obsessed with it because it's in her name, but it's a whole load of "coincidences" that wouldn't be necessary for the story. The fact that she has cyan eyes only strengthens the connection.

Because, y'know, he'd probably stab Luna for being an unholy abomination, were he to know she is right off the bat.

Or have one of those clittercock fights he's was obsessing over in anticipation of Celestia. He only stabs/shoots people in the face (like the Blue-Eyed Mare) when they won't leave well enough alone.

[Crushric]

3583605
References? Well, I made, like... one specific one in this chapter. Like, just the one that I can think of...

3585997
You'll find no such thing. Cards... just read the A/N; her looks and name are entirely coincidental. Her personality has nothing in common with Blackjack, let me assure you. No Dealer, either—unless you count the Blue-Eyed Lady and her tarot deck later on, wherefrom our narrator is identified as "The Fool". The Blue-Eyed Lady is sort of a Dealer, I guess, although he's so far been seen as benevolent, if weird. Some readers think she's actually Luna.

3583796
Team Jericho's official policy is "Fuck Jericho". We will ruin and mutilate him because it amuses us. We will make his life hell. And throughout, when I mention someone thinking our narrator is kinda hot, I fear that I've crossed the Gary Stu line. To fix with, I must mutilate him more! So, were here like to make it so that our hero never has it easy, that he is always suffering, that his pain fuels our pleasure.

(For kicks, have Jericho walk in on her pleasuring herself, I would love to see him freak.

Last night, when Team Jericho was discussing this comment, I came up with a little story thereabout. Suffice it to say, even my editors were creeped out, and the story ended with "Jericho going 'Nope!' and leaving his adventuring days behind him for all of ever, as this was just too goddamn much."

But, I will keep up the insanity!

3586614
You broke your finger? God, that has to be some nasty shit. I'd rather break a three toes than break a finger.

I often find myself unable to predict just where the story is going

You and me both, mate.

It's somewhat ambiguous when she's being introduced, but a lot of it was just my inability to remember some of LD's defining backstory/characteristics.

You forgetting—is this entirely my fault, the root of this problem?
As for opal, LD's coat is officially an opal-color.

Cards, too, suffered under poor parenting and turned to alcohol.

And, here, Cards' father wasn't abusive per se; it was her mother; but her father didn't help Cards out, and so was abusive only by proxy, even though he loved Cards, for he loved his wife more.

Selena, Luna, and Blue-Eyed Lady bit.

:Evil smile: Mayhap you are right, and mayhap you are wrong. I cannot say for certain myself. Nevertheless, this was really fun to read, your comment. I love reading theories of my readers (often because they sometimes know what I'm doing more than I even know)

[Luminous Lead]

3586871

You forgetting—is this entirely my fault, the root of this problem?

Your chapters tend to be pretty long, so I only end up reading when I know I'll have a block of time, which usually ends up being night. When I should be sleeping. As such, I'm not always on the ball while reading and I tend to miss things. So no, it's not really your fault.

As for opal, LD's coat is officially an opal-color.

I understand that, I'm just saying we have different definitions of opal. I think we've had this conversation before, too

And, here, Cards' father wasn't abusive per se; it was her mother; but her father didn't help Cards out, and so was abusive only by proxy, even though he loved Cards, for he loved his wife more.

I know. I was just explaining why it seemed to fit Cards. Obviously it better fits that conversation they had 16 chapters ago where Dust is pouring out her heart and Jericho is pointedly ignoring her in order to bake a silk pie (see how well I can remember during solar hours?).

Given the level of main character involvement (Jericho dealing with Cards' crazy parents, vs Dust expositioning while being ignored), Cards' parent issues were a much more visible part of her character than Dust's and came more readily to my mind when Gunslinger brought up parent issues before the Hand.

[Azure Beat]

So, if any of you met Jericho, what is the first thing you'd do?

3583796 Yes, a butt Monkey could. . . But Jericho isn't one. And I think he could fall in to Gary Stu territory. The simple fact that he never suffers for his decisions puts him really close to that. Really, the line between sociopath and Gary Stu is really fine. See Eragon for an example of that.

[MariusIoannesP]

When I was far enough from the explosion, I stopped running. Instead, I walked very slowly, calmly, making sure not to look at the explosion for maximum coolness.

Cool guys don't look at explosions!

The length of this chapter only adds to how annoying it is that this barely seems like an MLP fanfiction. It hangs on by the thread by the revelation that the Warden's Hand is in fact this universe's Lightning Dust. Normally I don't read fanfics set in such an alien environment to the show. In the cases that I do, they at least have ponies in it. If this were set in the world of Equestria Girls, it would still be tangentially related to MLP. But of course, Jericho shooting up a high school would be in bad taste on multiple levels.

Having said that, I at least like Werekind as an alternative name for humans. And the revelation about C is nice twist. And at least now, he can make jokes about breasts. I will continue to read but I really hope Jericho's little detour will come to an end soon.

[Always Breakfast]

You repeated the entire way of the spell and second pillar bit almost verbatim within a handful of paragraphs for...no discernible reason.

but there were probably more possible combinations than I could have possibly entered in one lifetime

You could reasonably do it in about two years. It'd be a (MIND-NUMBING) career with rather long hours for that stretch, but well within physical capacity!

[SIGAWESOME]

He put his hands on his hip. “Hey, you trying doing your best in my shoes; I’m a damn dentist.”

It could be worse you know. He could be a veterinarian. Or a proctologist...

looking around at the faded baby-shit-green walks

I am pretty sure that is an ISO requirement for small 3rd World/Wasteland/Post-Apocalyptic/Downtown Detroit jerry-rigged field clinics.

Turns out they’ve built a literal blood fountain, even saw a few kids splashing around in it. Can’t imagine how much hepatitis they must have.

Know your ABCs!
Be the first on your block to collect the whole set!

since math was the most evil of studies

With the proper equations, you can create all sorts of interesting things.

like a seagull caught in the mouth of a very hungry pelican

Pelicans are right propper bastards.

Probably to do something manly to prove that his warhammer wasn’t just there for overcompensation. That kind of overcompensation was the exact reason why I always preferred smaller weapons to bigger ones.

Indeed. That is why I carry a little bandoleer of pushpins.

(I use pushpins throughout my shift. We (my fellow co-workers and I) create little bandoliers out of foam tape to conveniently hold them together in groups of 20. I forgot to take mine out of my pocket when I travelled home for the holidays. The fking jobsworth at the airport security queue just about had a conniption when he saw that...)

I am starting to suspect, was caused either by cupholders, mimes, or French maids.”

Even worse: French maid mimes.
Ever see a lardy, bearded mime with a name like "Hugo" dress up in a sultry maid's outfit and mime making out with you?

<Shudder>

Others claim Elkington beat King Hawke to death with his own rubber ducky just to prove some obscure point.

I am pretty sure the cause was Hawke allowing mimes into the kingdom in the first place...

I’m fairly certain there are a bunch of goodies to find up in Blackgard.

Them's the magic words...
Mention a one of a kind, high level drop and they will move heaven, earth, and possibly 4 religion's worth of hells to get at it.

tentacle goat

Poor Shub-Niggurath...
Still struggling to get her alimony and child support cheques for her thousand offspring, lost her home when a floating city crushes the forest, and now Jericho the Scary Psychopath comes traipsing through unwelcome and uninvited? No wonder she is a bit testy...

I presumed that ‘negative ones days’ meant that someone was planning a triple-homicide for tomorrow. Nothing more family friendly that a premeditated triple murder.

The local Don is very contentious about his Family's well-being. As a former Switzer auditor he insists that all acts of violence be scheduled in advance with all the prerequisite planning, procurement, and procedure forms filled out, reviewed, approved and filed.

I just stood there. “So, you’re telling me that it explodes.”

“Yhar.”

“And then explodes again.”

“Yhar.”

“Can it do that? Can it really explode twice?”

On last thing. I write on Google Drive, and I encourage my editors to leave snarky comments that are funny to read as they edit. What would you say if I released the Google Drive version of Jericho with all those comments available for you to read/add your own?

Sounds like a fun way to inconvenience several K's worth of bytes...

[Crushric]

3588220
All the same, very interesting to hear your thoughts and opinions on this matter.
3589192

So, if any of you met Jericho, what is the first thing you'd do?

Two words:
"Fucking. Run."
I know that, for a fact, if he knew I was the writer and thus the one causing him so much pain and distress, he'd murder me.

As for your note of Marty Sue-ness, that's something I'd like to discuss a lot. Your raise a strange point, since our narrator does "suffer", just never in the emotional sense. He is seemingly incapable of such distress, save for when he killed Sleepy Oaks; but I make sure to compensate by destroying his flesh and making him bleed. He gets his legs savagely clawed by a griffon (which he has scars from), then he falls 2 stories and punctures a lung (wherefrom he still has breathing troubles, then he mentally breaks down, then I stab him a lot during a fight he only "wins" because the skinwalker shows up to help, then he gets his face (eye and horn) blown off, then I tear his hooves apart and drive him insane with blood poisoning; he hacks off and cauterizes his own arm, then I give him a new one that refuses to harm ponies and is also slowly ripping his or organs apart; this is followed by him impaling his arm on a metal snag and gouged out his empty eyesocket, leaving a nasty scar that will always now be there; and, as you might be guess from his experience with the Cœur, he probably has all sorts of radiation turns, poisoning, and cancer, which are going to screw him up.
Since he cannot suffer emotionally, this is what I do to him: mutilate and defile his flesh.
I hardily disagree with your thought that "Gary Stu" and "Sociopaths" are very closely related. Arguably, his sociopath here is our narrator's single greatest character flaw, one which he is utterly incapable of overcoming, and will likely utterly destroy him. A Gary Stu sociopath is character who is so poorly written that they lack normal human emotions or empathy but are noted otherwise to be perfect.

Please, do discuss. I'd love to hear more from you on this matter~

3589312
Whoops. Removed first entry of that Pillar business. That was from before I moved it; guess I failed to move it after all, huh?
Also, you're probably right. But when has this story cared for math? Our narrator cannot math, ya silleh poneh.

3589221
Oh, yes. I made an implied allusion towards that.
But, the choice was made to fux with a new sort of sorta pony-based world with all new mechanics in order to flesh certain things out. And because school-shootings are bad. Personally, all that really matters is that we have our same characters (EG, our narrator and mayhap Dust), since they are what really keep this fic going (humor of the narration, I'd like to thing is a big part of this story).
Also, as for the world proper... well... I one day hope to essentially take everything I've learned from Jericho and basically convert it into it's own piece of original fiction. Of course, mostly our narrator and the Reich would continue one, all other pony stuff being erased. The world that is L17 of Calêrhos is sort of a test idea of that world—with the Teutschen being Latinos, the world green but suggested to be after the apocalypse, and all sorts of magical badassery to have. Honestly, were you to pick this up as its own book, set in this sorta world but still with Jericho as our narrator and "Hero", would you even bother reading on? (This is not a rhetorical question.)

3590942
Er, fixed the typo.

Pelicans are right propper bastards.

I don't know how, but I watched that video, and ended up clicking on a related video, and now I'm stuck watching a series about the beasts that existed before the dinosaurs up until the dawn of modern man's dominance over all those lesser creatures.

Even worse: French maid mimes.

Ever see a lardy, bearded mime with a name like "Hugo" dress up in a sultry maid's outfit and mime making out with you?

And then along came Maid!Discord. My friend and editor, Amacita, who is also and EQD pre-reader, tells me that within minutes of that scene having aired, the EQD was getting clop in its inbox about FrenchMaid!Discord.

What? You didn't like the show allusion?

Sounds like a fun way to inconvenience several K's worth of bytes...

Is that a yes? (Hello, made-only-for-myself index page totally ripped off from Project Horizons!)

[MariusIoannesP]

3592471>>3592471 Very close to "probably not" but still a very strong "maybe". I just like characters that speak German and that are even vaguely Christian.

[SIGAWESOME]

The last thing I needed was to suffer from constipation pains because I couldn’t figure out how this body was supposed to use a toilet.

(Cannot believe I missed this on the first read-through).

Are you familiar by any chance with the 16th century French novel Gargantua and Petagruel? The author's bawdy, risqué humour seems right up your alley...

Jericho's concern reminds me of a partucular chapter where the novel's protagonist undertakes a comprehensive study to discover the best material to wipe his arse with (priceless tapestries, sequinned scarves, live pigeons, and stray cats all come into play here).

Who says Renaissance literature has to be stodgy and boring? This is like 4chan as written by learned Greek scholars...

[Always Breakfast]

3592471
I was pretty sure it was a refactoring artifact, but yeah.

[Seoman]

Oh, I got the perfect video for this little word: Grapist

Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein—
Fest steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein!

"Fest und treu steht die Wacht" Proper sentence structure is important to Jericho!
ad "magst ruhig sein": At first I was going to correct that too, but pronouncing "ruhig" as "ru-hig", with two sillables instead of (the colloquial) one, it works. Or you could toss in a "du", for "magst ruhig du sein". Either one isn't perfect, but okay. I couldn't find a better rhyme with "Rhein" that fits... (maybe "Ruhe sei dein"? idk)
That chapter was so long (and good), I split reading it in two parts, and after reading the first half, forgot that I still had some Jericho to sweeten my day until now!
Also this sketch feels like condensed Jericho: WKUK
Have you seen that show? Some of their sketches could definitely be Jericho's imagination...

[Dragonburn98]

Welp, my computer caught fire so commenting has been relatively challenging. I smell a distinct lack of large comments that no one reads.

Chapter 29: Black

I'm looking forward to the rape scene

Stitches.

I got those once, my asshole was never the same afterwords.

“most folker seem to get like babies when they need shots or get threaded.”

A testament to the equestrian education system. Wait, does equestria have an education system?

Most folks would probably cringe at the idea of a doctor working for a bunch of murderers and rapists and wearing dirty scrubs sewing up their eye with a doubtlessly dirty needle.

Where else are porn stars supposed to get their boob jobs. Accredited plastic surgeons? Don't make me laugh.

“Well, I’m sorry we don’t have access to much medical alcohol.”

All doctors work better when under the influence of alcohol its a scientific fact.

“And I’m going to be sorry when I get lockjaw,”

Better tetanus then deepthroating large horse penis caused lockjaw.

baby-shit-green

Baby shit is white, I know from experience. That firmly cements my theory of human evolution. Human's evolved from pigeons. The more you think about it, the less everything makes sense.

open-heart dentistry

Open-heart dentists actually get payed a large amount of money. That's not including their malpractice lawsuits of course.

Well, let’s nar say that there’s a reason the good general only has one eye now instead of the two he woke up with that fateful morning.

What's with this universe and one-eyed people.

I swear to the Founding Fathers

A man bowing down to Abraham Lincoln as he fired his patriotic LMG into a crowd of communist zombies popped into my head. Abe wasn't even a founding father.

butterfly’s wound-up tongue

Butterfly's taste with their feet. If one lands on you run. They might acquire a taste for human flesh.

can’t imagine how much hepatitis they must have.

Don't worry, only vampires catch hepatitis,"I'm sorry son, but now that you're a vampire a heap a titis are going to be thrown your way. When that happens run. These mortals can be persistent,"

“Faith keeps the illness away,”

Europeans in the 14th century would disagree.

in a voice like a deranged mother trying to drown her kids in a soup can

In case you were wondering what that sounds like, imagine a walling banshee standing next to a cat with its dick caught in a blender.

Rest assured, for I will thee kill.

Jericho threatened to kill an elevator once. It was never the same after he ripped its heart out. I'd run.

like cattle stuck in a frat house.

Cows know how to party. They don't even notice when bitches grind up against them. Just the same stoic expression. They're hardcore.

I went off the path and up to the body. “Nerd!” I hissed quietly, taking his glasses and throwing them down the hall.

Bitch got told!!!!!!!! Now you've upset another ghost. Prepare you anus for their ghostly cocks

“I’m sorry, Gunslinger. This is all my fault.”

It really is bitch, if you hadn't gone back for your bandanna you would have gotten away. Hell, i doubt bandannas are rare. Even when things hold sentimental properties they aren't worth your life

it wasn’t the first time I burned a girl at the stake.

"It got kinky real fast, and well.... I couldn't control the fire"

serial killers, serial rapists, and witches.

You're forgetting imperial ethereal vizierial serial cereal killer rapists. Those guys are the worst.

imagine just walking into the house of your lover, probably expecting to be welcomed open-armed and probably intercourse, and instead you find him half-naked surrounded by pictures of brutally mutilated dead girls whose murders he’s trying to solve.

"This isn't what it looks like!" "You're trying to solve the murders of these girls right?" "Oh well... yes. Man I don't really know what else this could have looked like."

since math was the most evil of studies

I still have calculus induced nightmares.

Something about you feels kinda familiar, you know? I just have this feeling like I can trust you

"It's like we're connected on a deeply personal level. Like joined below the waist!"

becoming as still as the weird toddling child who was still lying on the ground by his ball and who I was pretty sure was dead

What's blue and thrashes around on the floor? A baby playing in a plastic bag!

—purely for dramatic effect, I admit—

That's a sign of a true badass. Doing things only because they add DRAMA. Which is probably the only reason Jericho puts up with all the shit he goes through.

Probably to do something manly to prove that his warhammer wasn’t just there for overcompensation.

If you can lift and effectively wield a massive weapon, I believe you've proved your manliness.

in a world whose Ragnarök, I am starting to suspect, was caused either by cupholders, mimes, or French maids.

The true bringers of the apocalypse. All nefariously evil in their own right.

Others claim Elkington beat King Hawke to death with his own rubber ducky just to prove some obscure point.

He obviously insulted the high council of rubber duck believers. Divine wrath was impossible to avoid.

I can’t help but get the weird feeling that this entire future conversation would be much easier if we all stripped down to our undergarments and discussed it as we had a pillow fight.

Congress could actually pass legislation if they attempted that.

forever leaving her to dwell in the shame of having never gotten mostly naked and beat someone else with a soft object.

And that's how Jericho lost his virginity.

I want you to help me kill the Black Man.

RACIST! Why aren't we killing the white man or the semi Hispanic Asian gentlemen who lives down the street!

Honestly, it was like everyone here was literally obsessed with them.

Now that I think about it, looking at an outside-in perceptive. Objecting sacks of fat occasionally filled with milk seems strange, but you know... bewbies are kewl.

he’d probably go in there and teach them all the invaluable RPG character feat of Improved Tax Evasion—which was totally a thing,

"Roll a seven to tie an IRS collector to a share and stroke his face with your fat wad of cash,"

Even my hallucinations call me that silly-sounding title

Talk about first world problems.

Nuh-uh-uh—spoilers.

BITCH WE'RE 29 CHAPTERS IN! WE AT LEAST DESERVE A HINT AT WHAT YOUR MOTIVES ARE. Besides to eventually have sex with our hero

Me having a heart is like Cards having a shot at actually getting laid—things which belong in the realm of fantasy.

So... you're saying Cards has a chance right? If not i'm really not following.

O conscience, when last we spoke, I beat you over the head with a rubber chicken named Bungles the Whiffled One. Do you forget? So, you get back in that coffin I buried you alive in, and you stay there, touching yourself and not bothering me.

Last time my conscience doubted my choices I force fed him donuts till he died of diabetes. Twas' a fitting end, that bastard was always telling me to touch little boys.

really uncomfortable porn magazines with those hackneyed plots, I think you should go.

Then you notice the creeping tentacles coming out of the ground.

Well, I couldn’t say. Some good-for-nothing dead hallucination eating all your potato chips couldn’t ever likely find something so worthwhile as a Voixson, could she?

I refuse to believe that happened. How the hell can someone projecting themselves mentally manipulate the actual world. I refuse to believe someone is on equal footing with C.

I’m a slut for Voixsons. A dirty, dirty girl willing to prostitute himself for working Voixsons.

These are the moments I live for in this story.

Which was the exact moment when said stallion realizes that this money could also buy him a giant novelty rubber chicken he could use to finally beat his wife with again. Things hadn’t been the same for him ever since those anti-wifebeating laws had been passed.

A giant floppy dildo bat would work better.

Voixsons turn me into hermaphrodites as well.

Whenever i touch bananas my dick folds inside out and I become a woman.

I may have…” The recording crackled “…touched myself thinking of the day we’d meet, so I’ll probably be thinking of that when we do meet.

Thanks for sharing... I guess. Jesus the nerve of some people.

just so you know for when you save the world and all, I… um, I’m totally single.

“Especially now that we finally got hot water once again running in the showers.

I wish I knew if the witch was hot or not. That would make everything so much easier.

I’ll still be thinking of you in the shower.

As will I.... wait no BAD BAD WITCH. Stupid magical suggestion. Yes, definitely what it is...

Like a beaver eager to exploit his underpaid sweatshop slave children

Yes, because beaver labor isn't as cheap as Chinese child labor.

Offering the voices in my head oral sex in exchange for a Voixson

Actually one of the least strange things Jericho's ever said.

Man, as much as I'd love to continue with the last 3/4's of this chapter I have time restraints. A 20,000 word chapter takes some time to go through. Time I was too stupid to allocate. Anyhoe, I'm really liking the mirror world so far. Mildly disappointed that Jericho didn't go to high school. That would have been a blast, but in the end this was much better. Great story keep writing blah blah blah you know the rest. Hell, I might edit in the rest some time tomorrow.

[Crushric]

3592490
Well, those two things wouldn't be changed.
3592556
I think I have heard of this book before.

Who says Renaissance literature has to be stodgy and boring? This is like 4chan as written by learned Greek scholars...

Oh, you have no idea how dirty and depraved our ancestors were.

3598041
Actually, this is one time when your proper German is actually irrelevant. I was actually quoting one of my favorite old timey orchestral songs, Die Wacht am Rhein
This song and I have a little history, mostly dating to a few years ago when I first picked up Hearts of Iron: Darkest Hour and then the Kaiserreich mod. Oh, to play as the German Empire in 1936 as the rest of the world collapsed around you. This song played, and that German Empire did greatly inspire me to have Teutschland as in is in Jericho.

3599483
:gasp:
It's you! It's you! Siffer and I have missed you, mate! We've missed your long, amusing comments, Dragonburn98!

I'm looking forward to the rape scene

...why?
Is it because of Project Horizons or something?
You know, one of these days, I'm gonna lose my mind and write a short story wherein Blackjack and Cards meet, and then it all goes downhill from there—starting with Blackjack beating Cards near to death because she's pretty sure that Cards must be an evil, if pathetic, clone. Then Jericho can show up too as he tries to figure which one is Cards, and then shoot the other one, but then decides that Blackjack is cooler and shoots Cards anyway. Who's with me?

What's with this universe and one-eyed people.

Bitches love badass sexy males with eyepatches. Rarity be all over dat.

Butterfly's taste with their feet. If one lands on you run. They might acquire a taste for human flesh.

Aye, say true!

BITCH WE'RE 29 CHAPTERS IN! WE AT LEAST DESERVE A HINT AT WHAT YOUR MOTIVES ARE. Besides to eventually have sex with our hero

Everyone wants to sleep with Jericho. Especially his father.

So... you're saying Cards has a chance right? If not i'm really not following.

I'm saying she's a perma-virgin. Her hooves are her only friends in this cruel, cruel world.

These are the moments I live for in this story.

And I live for the moments when people tell me stuff like this.

just so you know for when you save the world and all, I… um, I’m totally single.

What? Something wrong with this?

I wish I knew if the witch was hot or not. That would make everything so much easier.

As if our narrator could tell. But, for the sake of arguing, let's say she's actually really cute. Probably with straight red hair and a little beauty mark on one cheek.

Man, as much as I'd love to continue with the last 3/4's of this chapter I have time restraints. A 20,000 word chapter takes some time to go through. Time I was too stupid to allocate. Anyhoe, I'm really liking the mirror world so far. Mildly disappointed that Jericho didn't go to high school. That would have been a blast, but in the end this was much better. Great story keep writing blah blah blah you know the rest. Hell, I might edit in the rest some time tomorrow.

God, it was still read to hear from you again.

Mildly disappointed that Jericho didn't go to high school. That would have been a blast, but in the end this was much better.

Well, shooting up a school was in bad tastes, and here I could explore a lot more and have whacky fun. This is the kind of world I'd write in were Jericho a purely original work (Jericho staying as himself personality-wise, though).

Oh, and when you do read the rest, post post a new, separate comment, so that Siffer and I will know. Great seeing you back 'round these parts!

[Seoman]

3601407
You're right, played like this, it does sound good. I couldn't really imagine it in my head, but it works well. Especially while hearing the orchestra along with it

[Dragonburn98]

3601407

We've missed your long, amusing comments, Dragonburn98!

Please, call me by my spirit name Flying Eagle Penis

post a new, separate comment

....
THIS TIME I'M ACTUALLY GOING TO FINISH! GOT THAT PARIS HILTON, YOU CAN'T CONTROL ME! Now... where was I? Oh right, oral sex, head voices, the usual Jericho spiel.

God, shrugging with these shoulder was totally different than the old ones I’d had as a pony.

But everything else just come naturally, just wait till he has to tinkle.

since I did sort of need it in order to use healing items without dying.

I thought C's arm negated the need for food before hand?

that’s the story of how I saved the holidays, started my heroic legend, and ruined a family all in the same day.

Wow, I never knew Jericho was the original star of Home Alone.It all makes sense now.

Oh God, tentacles don’t belong on a goat

Cthulhu's true form.

Oh, Founding Fathers, I smell like pee.

A fantastic image of Abraham Lincoln pissing gasoline onto the dead corpses of Nazi communists, which are even worse then fascists, then lighting them on fire with his beard. Maybe I'm a sleeper agent designed to counter the communist influence! What if Founding Fathers are my trigger words?! It all makes so much sense!

That didn’t follow the normal monster routine at all. When a monster has tentacles, it has to attack and almost rape the girl, and the guy is supposed to save her—not the entirely other way around.

Felicitat's magazine lied to me!

Wait, are you saying that you wanted me to get violated by that thing back there?

Yes that is exactly what I'm saying. It's like you can read minds!

I do not go well with sugar-frosted cereals.

I bet you go good with pine cones and sweaty gym socks. With a hint of three day old horse spunk thrown in there for flavor.

so no climbing trees and crazy lesbian monkey sex for me.

I have yet to see that show on animal planet yet. I look forward to the day it airs.

Slave Quarters: A family friendly working environment—negative one days since last triple-homicide!

"Come to Blackguard today, and remember to bring your children along with you. We treat all slaves patrons equally,"

Is mare a terrible insult in your language?

Calling someone a mare would work better for "whore" then stupid. Get it? because horses are ridden all the time! You're right, that was pretty fantastic!

“Keep low your voice,”

Jericho's really mastered Equestrian.

I’m actually a very tiny, much cuter horse from another world

Yes a much cuter horse with a missing eyeball, horn, arm, and left testicle.

We can deal with the slavery of my tiny pony people later.

I'll take three and a half. The stuffed head can go to my niece for her birthday.

Did I also mention that I always wanted a unicorn?

Bad Dust! We need racial diversity in the group.

That was, for the record, the reason why the local zoo soon thereafter forbade me from ever again “borrowing” their elephants. Ah, early childhood.

How the hell do you borrow an elephant from a zoo? You know what, don't answer that. The journey is half of the reward after all.

Trees were nice. I had a pet tree once, but then I cut it down and turned it into a stake to kill a vampire.

I had a pet rock once. I used him as ammo for a sling. It was worth it though, I soon became king afterwords.

And the window was clearly unlocked, which is why I had to break it open with a rock, reach my hand inside, and then lock it.

I'd like to see bandits try to break in now... Oh wait.

Weapons and armor now available for boys and girls age three and up!

Yes, now my son can start fighting before he can effectively run away. If a rabid wolf dog hybrid eats his leg so be it, being a cripple builds character.

I’ve never seen such a commitment to wholesome family values before in all my years!

It brings a tear to my eye too mate. Such commitment, such morally righteous family values!

By all that is good, such beautiful and compassionate souls as yourself will surely have babies more beautiful than any child before

My 250,000 word spin-off story agrees 100%.

Your skin, so brown. You are a Toitscher, no doubt. And with your wife, you’ll have lovingly interracial children.

I'm crying... tears of intense pain... the pain brought on from much laughter....brought on by intense pain.... pain caused by over the top joy... over the top joy brought on by this entire section.

As your newly pregnant wife

I'm just waiting for cards to pop out and Jericho to commit suicide.

I will punch you straight in the baby.

Oh yes, the baby, the mythical part of the body relatively two inches to the left of the spleen.

Can it do that? Can it really explode twice?

If Call of Duty has taught me anything, it's that everything can explode twice.

A wholesome family erection?

Incest is fun for all the family.

Why, if all men were half as dedicated to you, we’d probably have far less sex in our media corrupting our youth.

Let us just marvel at the beauty of that sentence.

And what if I shot Cards with that bullet, what then

yes. Yes.YES! YEEEEESSSS! MAKE IT HAPPEN!

Why, this is a wholesome family armed robbery!

This man has his priorities straight. Crazy Blackguard weapon salesmen for world emperor!

and he just deflated. And I mean, just deflated. Even his hair seemed to flatten.

This makes me sad.

With a final flourish, I made the lowercase letter in a properly stylish J by adding the top cross thereto, and pretty much decapitated him.

This makes me even more sad. That guy was like my favorite character. We had a personal connection, and now he's gone! THE HORROR!

Well, since you’re still my cover wife, I figure I might as well fake date you, buy you a fake dinner, and then fake sleep with you to keep up appearances.

JERICHO'S GAY! IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!

I walked over to a stand and grabbed up a piece of black combat armor. It had a label which read “Security”.

You're dead to me.

I stopped running. Instead, I walked very slowly, calmly, making sure not to look at the explosion for maximum coolness.

Why you ask? BECAUSE DRAMA!

I only laughed at how ludicrously cool I—and then a flying, burning box hit me, sending me tumbling around the ground.

Never thought I'd find realism in a story about magical talking horses killing each other then teleporting to an alternate universe and instead killing humanoids.

I remember exactly what I’d told that one Juggernog vendor in Songnam. So, like with him, I flashed the Hand a winning smile and a thumbs up and said proudly, “Winners don’t do drugs.”

Don't do drugs kids! But you can kill each other if you want. I'm fine with that.

he Cœur would simple be a werekind Cherry Berry sitting in a chair, eating popcorn until she sees me and instantly falls in love with me. God, I was never getting over the mare, was I

That would be fantastic. It would prove this world was designed to kill Jericho.

you have no idea how hard it was to extrapolate your unit from your pants with hands for the sole purpose of pissing in a koi pond just to be spiteful

Tolerate other beliefs asshole. It's preached by your religion after all.

I was pretty sure the Warden’s Hand wouldn’t let me watch and take detailed notes as she went to the bathroom

Of course she wouldn't mind! Go ahead ask her.... ask her. What's that? You need donated testicles now?

I am the Gunslinger, King of the Intergalactic House of Pancakes

*House of Waffles.

There is no tin can—Bleat this—Your living privileges have just been revoked!

Looks like these goats just got...
(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
Bleated.

It’s a running joke I have, a penis with an eyeball on its tip, which I can then use to poke into mouseholes and spy on mice.

He then turns to the camera and winks.

शान्ति शान्ति शान्ति

My Hindu friend just started laughing like a maniac. I think you broke him. What's so funny about peace anyway?

And Cards can be hooked up to a milking machine to provide us with valuable, energy-refueling milk

I doubt cards' milk tastes good. Probably really sour and bitchy.

My idea of a joke—give you something you’d kill for in a context wherein it had no immediate use, knowing full well that it’d come in great use later along the metaphorical road.

What an asshole. I thought angels were supposed to be nice!

See? If I were a bad guy, I’d speak in nothing but annoying riddles and half-truths that no one can understand save for myself and the kids at home.

The angel is Jericho. Jericho is all. Jericho is life!

that C is a liar!

DRAMA BOMB! Not really, we all saw that coming.

I’d treat it to a nice dinner, engage it in passionate intercourse, and then never talk to it again.

Well shit. That's harsh mate.

The bullet left a visible green contrail as it exploded out the other side of her chest, her screaming echoing up through the speakers overhead.

WHAT THE FUCK!

Thank you for pressing the Blow Up The World button for me, Gunslinger! Unless you enter the proper code soon, the Cœur will explode!

GOD DAMN IT

When I keeled over and vomited out a mixture of luncheon and blood into the chamber

HOLY CANCER BATMAN

For the Grapist chapterhouse!

Where's my handy dandy grape whistle when i need it the most!

‘she’s not my girlfriend’ is just begging the universe to force you into a relationship

HE HAS SPOKEN THE WORDS OF PROPHECY.

oh by Laurentia’s permanently blueballed-by-virginity vagina while the Archangel Thor tries to randomly seduce her, what the shit was that

I've been waiting for one of these.

something inside his eye just licked me

Yeah.... no.

I got naked

Well that's how i solve all my problems.

“Yhar,” he said. “But it requires good cardio—you need be running all around without having to pant, else folker will wise up.” The Black Man smiled wide as he pulled out his shattergun and loaded bullets into it. “For the record, Skybane holds twelve shots in it. I just like loading singles of the magic bullets into this here shouldershooter for extra dramatic effect. You have several seconds before I’m reloaded.”

This man is fantastic! To bad he has to die.

To clarify, my ass was the only thing you could think of?

I really can't think of what to say anymore.

I bent down, picked up my nipple, and looked it over. Steeling myself, I gave the nipple a silent goodbye before opening my mouth and consuming my flesh.

Yeah, he's actually insane. Anyone who argues against that fact is well stupid.

I already know your name, Lightning Dust.

Well Jericho's going to sacrifice himself. It was a good run, but i guess all good things have to come to an end.

You have to do it all on your own, Gunslinger—because that’s just the more dramatic thing to do.

It's like a Mexican soap opera up in this piece!

if this ends badly for you, I’ll free the slaves outside—maybe eat alive one or three of the evil-looking ones—and then bring you and your lady to the localmost hospital. You’ll be fine, alright?

That'd be a sight to behold. A horse rescuing the slaves then delivering them to the local hospital.

“C’s a liar.”

Fuck you. Hard. In the ass.

GOD DAMN. This chapter was fantastic, one of my favorites to be truthful. This story just keeps getting better and better and that always brings a tear to my eye. Keep up the phenomenal work.

[On last thing. I write on Google Drive, and I encourage my editors to leave snarky comments that are funny to read as they edit. What would you say if I released the Google Drive version of Jericho with all those comments available for you to read/add your own?]

DO IT! I love you guys on a deeply homosexual level. Anything the all powerful lords say is a blessing to us mere mortals.

[Crushric]

3606016
Wow. Did you know that you, my friend, are the very first to ever comment upon Jericho's last name? Seriously, kudos for that.
But, well, Faust is a German/Teutonic name, just like Doctor Faust of the story he is named after. And is Jericho of her blood? :Shrug: Draw your own conclusions.
Ave Laurentia, after all. Hail to the Prophet, heh...

3601857
Aye, Die Wacht am Rhein is totally awesome, in my opinion. I like to think of it as one of Teutschland's national anthems, as it might use a few, because there are too many awesome ones to just choose one.

3604459
Yay, you're back. Siffer loves you, we love you, and Jojo is not a horse.

Please, call me by my spirit name Flying Eagle Penis

No

I thought C's arm negated the need for food before hand?

The perk states that this is only the case if and only if C's arm is injured and is healing at the moment you drink the potion.

I have yet to see that show on animal planet yet. I look forward to the day it airs.

"Airs again". It's already been a think. Even watched it occur it anthropology class. Hawt lesbian sex is canon for Bonobos, and so hot human lesbian sex is totally cool, thus.

Jericho's really mastered Equestrian.

Or mayhap speaks slightly archaically. AKA, as German word-for-word sounds like in English.

My 250,000 word spin-off story agrees 100%.

... go on...

I'm crying... tears of intense pain... the pain brought on from much laughter....brought on by intense pain.... pain caused by over the top joy... over the top joy brought on by this entire section.

Oh, is that so? And here I was, thinking this wasn't even one of the funnier lines.

Let us just marvel at the beauty of that sentence.

Hmm... marveling...

This makes me even more sad. That guy was like my favorite character. We had a personal connection, and now he's gone! THE HORROR!

In theory, he may still be alive somewhere in Equestria. Say, in Cloudsdale.

You're dead to me.

Why? Explain yourself! Explain yourself!

Never thought I'd find realism in a story about magical talking horses killing each other then teleporting to an alternate universe and instead killing humanoids.

I'm a hardcore fan of realism. And also magically talking ponies killing each other. God, they're so cute~

Looks like these goats just got...
(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
Bleated.

Jericho, sipping tea: "Indeed."

शान्ति शान्ति शान्ति

My Hindu friend just started laughing like a maniac. I think you broke him. What's so funny about peace anyway?

You have a Hindu friend? And he laughed at this? Go on with that story, please. I'm intrigued.

I doubt cards' milk tastes good. Probably really sour and bitchy.

How do you know that? Now, Jericho must sexually and sensually milk the Cards to find out.

The angel is Jericho. Jericho is all. Jericho is life!

Um. Though it's no longer canon nor do I want it to be canon, were this the Beta!Jericho of old... well, you have no idea how accurate this statement here was technically was.

The bullet left a visible green contrail as it exploded out the other side of her chest, her screaming echoing up through the speakers overhead.

WHAT THE FUCK!

Magic bullets. You got a problem therewith?

oh by Laurentia’s permanently blueballed-by-virginity vagina while the Archangel Thor tries to randomly seduce her, what the shit was that

I've been waiting for one of these.

Is that so? How come?

This man is fantastic! To bad he has to die.

I try to make all characters cool and worth existing, even if they are only to die.

I really can't think of what to say anymore.

Oh God, no! Why?! Why?! Speak to me!

“C’s a liar.”

Fuck you. Hard. In the ass.

Why? Do you see a problem with this entire thing, mate?

GOD DAMN. This chapter was fantastic, one of my favorites to be truthful. This story just keeps getting better and better and that always brings a tear to my eye. Keep up the phenomenal work.

Aww, you're making me blush.

DO IT! I love you guys on a deeply homosexual level. Anything the all powerful lords say is a blessing to us mere mortals.

As you wish. I gotta go back and allow the comments to be. There are none between chapters 2–7, I believe, due to a problem. (By the time you read this, I'll have likely fixed that.) There are none on chapters 15 and 16, for I did a thing. This version, however, is before I did that thing (it's chapter 15 and 16 as one huge chapter), and so has all the comments. Feel free to comment thereupon and gaze at my neat-o comments~

[Jojo Salatcia]

3607893
I'd like to be a horse.

[Seoman]

And now: The the-angel-has-other-stuff-than-Jericho-to-care-about ending:

The very last thing I recalled thinking about was what the angel had told me, what I had entered as the code to the Cœur. Two-seven-two-five-four-two-seven.

“Brb, Jericho, ICQ.”

What are other abbreviations/sentences that would have worked for Jericho?
Jericho's motto: Can't save a kid, blow up shit
Applejack's drunk talk: A Pony's a little horse, ah reckon
Jericho's opinion: "Alicorn Princesses" are just huge bullshit

[SIGAWESOME]

3592471

What? You didn't like the show allusion?

I thought it was funny. The :facepalm: was me groaning at yet another way to work that pun.

3578350

the fic is really good but with progressing plot it is getting extremly difficult to understand the plot because it reads itself like a bad drug trip please to the author make it a little bit more easier to read most the time it extremly confusing

>>SIGAWESOME

whinge... whinge... too many characters coming and going... story plot is going all fractal... whinge...

I feel your pain Faldo. Significant Other and I have something in the works for helping this. A fan project if you will...
Hopefully it will end up as some awesome pretty cool decent not too terrible fan art to boot.

[IkioStar]

3607893 ...I have a poll for you, because you gave that wonderful response. Share it among your followers and spread it around....please? Ganondorf Poll Dancing.

[Crushric]

3608662
no
3608704
Acronym madness!
Those could work, mayhap. Of course, they'd be far less dramatic. Ye kenn drama, aye? It's just what needed be done.

3610954
:tilts head:
Well, if I recall to do it. I mean, I've been meaning to do a blog post about "chapter revisions I made", but I've even neglected to do that. God, I'm terribad.

3609220

I thought it was funny. The :facepalm: was me groaning at yet another way to work that pun.

Well, we need a few references to remind everyone that, despite the werekindred, this is technically a ponyfic.

A fan project if you will...

Hopefully it will end up as some awesome pretty cool decent not too terrible fan art to boot.

Oh oh oh? Damn, now I'm pumped and excited. Let's hope that whatever this thing is, it might include my friend's OC (she whom I've mentioned) from the next chapter might appear. After all, this friendly mare has her own story.

[IkioStar]

3611400 So which did you vote on?

[Crushric]

3611576
Gender-bending tentacle rape & Cthulhu, of course,

[IkioStar]

3611628 I wonder who picked the 'your mama' option.

[WrathOfGod519]

Do you roll dice and dress up whilst writing this? Fucking extraordinary mate.

[MessoriaAQ]

Oh yes. That new cover artwork is amazing. I love how Jericho's horn is simply protruding out of a hole as though he'd skewered his hat.

Cardsie~

[Ver0Nightmare]

And once again it is BEAUTIFUL!
P.S. why must Cards get all the hate?

[Crushric]

3616756
The secret revealed!
:jumps through window:
:is roleplaying as the Gunslinger:
3617167
Cards. Worst Pony or Worst Pony?
And also, because the artist wanted it that way, yo.
3618414
Thanks, the artist will appreciate.
And because, as we all know, Cards is Worst Pony.

[IkioStar]

I'm finally done getting up-to-date, you cock-sucking bastard. It took 5 days to read all this. I hope you're happy, Crushric, because I'm not. So many things don't add up in your fic, but I kept reading it, and will keep reading. There were way to many words per chapter, there were a few spelling errors per chapter, and your jokes are repetitive to the point they stop being funny, and then are forgot, only to be re-brought-up, and become funny again. It's like you imagine your own jokes as a dead horse, and intentionally write them so that they read as if you're beating them over the head with a creatively-shaped crowbar/mallet. I want you to get to the point, finally meet Luna for Luna, and I really want him to finally succeed in his goal of leering creepily at Princess Celestia's overgrown clittorcock. And then get fucked in the face with it, because he was arbitrarily turned into a mare just before that. Unlike so many other fanfictions I read, I want him to talk to the Mane Six, because I'm sure that'll turn out wonderfully, and he'll leave them with post-traumatic stress disorder, flinching and/or crying at the mere mention of the name '[Redacted]'. There are literally, many 'things' you can do with this fanfiction, and I love it. It earned favoriting status a while ago, but now that I'm fully updated, it can finally go in there, so I can get to work reading other fanfiction. Thank you, Crushric, for letting me read such a fantastic story, and review/criticize it. It was my pleasure to do so, and I think I'd like to see the Cherrypillar actually revived in the fanfic, if for no other reason than to have that joke stay around.

Toodles,
ISA