This one's to you, cornwallace. Also, this story is pretty much a poorly executed ripoff of Explicit by Swiper. No swiping who, incidentally, is the coolest writer on Fanfickshun dawt net in addition to cornwallace.

I rest my case.

Falco's Inbred Child

"So here's the thing, Falco," I sez. I'm sitting crossed-legged on a chair in the office room in my grandma's apartment. My grandma's not doing too well. She might kick the bucket sometime soon. That's why I'm here. Flew right over from Teckas to Caliphonea. To, you know, be a good grandchild and take care of my grandma before she, uh, kicks the bucket. But instead of doing that, I'm sitting in her office, writing fanfiction. Because I suck, and am a horrible person.

"See, I gotta write this story," I sez. To Falco, not my grandmother. "For a friend of mine. His name's cornwallace."

Falco doesn't really care about the things I sez, because he's Falco. By which I mean, he's a video game character and doesn't really exist on this planet. Sorry, to all you furbreeders who might have thought otherwise. But I talk to Falco anyways. He's pleasant company. Sometimes I talk to myself, and pretend that someone else is listening. Sometimes I talk to people, and it's as though I'm talking to myself because no one is listening. So, there's not much of a difference either way.

"What the fuck have you been smoking?" Falco sez. To me. Not my grandmother. She's taking a nap, in the intensive care unit of the hospital a few blocks down. She's also pretty deaf, so even if Falco said what he just said right in her face, she probably wouldn't have heard him anyway.

I glance at the joint squeezed between the index and middle finger of my right hand, held to the level of my face.

I've never actually smoked weed. I mean, the first time I knew what a joint actually looked like was back in grade 9 of grade school when I had to help make props for a school play. There were joints in the play. I had to figure out what a joint actually was, and what one looked like. I ended up ripping open some tea infusers and rolling up the freed bits of tea in some wax paper. My classmates were really happy with my joints. I was also pretty fucking happy as a result, because before then, everyone viewed me as this sort of outcast. They still saw me as an outcast after the play, but no matter. I had my moment of glory there. Except, the stage was pretty far away so the audience didn't end up being able to see clearly all the extra details I put into making my joints realistic. It was a bummer. But anyway, before that time in my life, the word "joint" simply meant to me the physical area of junction when two parts meet. Like bones, for example, if we're talking about the joints in the body. Anyway, now I'm the wiser.

I take a deep whiff from the joint, which is either real or symbolic or both depending on to what extent you believe me and the details of story. Either way, I'm not a very reliable narrator.

"Anyway, Falco, uh, never mind that," I sez. "So now, back to this story, this story I gotta write."

Falco's impartial to this entire exchange, it appears. He's sitting cross-legged, on the small couch near the desk in the same office room in my grandma's apartment. His wings are spread out behind his head. The expression across his pixelated eyes is one of pure boredom. He's staring at me, in the blank way that video game characters stare at you because they're not real.

"So, uh," I sez, "This story, it's gonna be called" – another whiff of the joint – "Falco's Inbred Child."

Falco nods, slowly. He continues staring at me, but not really. Fucking people, and anthromorphs too. They only care about themselves and their little world. I'm no different, but neither is Falco, who in this fic is an extension of myself. Hey, if you want Falco to be an extension of your own self, go write your own fucking fanfic.

In fact, life is like a bad fanfic. I'm pretty sure I stole that line from someone somewhere. Probably cornwallace. Cornwallace might have stolen that line himself from someone else along the way. Plagiarising and rehashing, that's what postmodernism is about, after all. At least, that's what one of my teachers said in a literature class, back when I still did school. Sometimes I wonder how fanfiction fits into the literary movements of human history. Is the existence of fanfickshun dawt net some looming harbinger that the 21st century literary world should tumble into an irreversible downward spiral?

"Anyway," I continue. "I'm a little stuck in this story of mine, this story about your inbred child. The problem – the problem is, Falco, who's gonna be the mother?"

I'm really stumped over this one. Because, in order for Falco to have an inbred child, there must first be someone with whom he can breed with in order to produce said inbred child. But what's it like, Falco's family tree? Canon offers no answer. None of the games or comics or other Star Fox publications ever mention Falco having a mother or father or sibling. At least, not in my knowledge. And in fanfiction, the writer's got the final say. My lack of awareness of a fact, canon or not, is directly equivalent to said fact not existing. Indisputable. In fanfiction, you're God.

Falco shrugs a feathered shoulder in encouragement. He did so because I made him.

I suppose I could go with some unknown sister, or long-lost cousin. If I wanted to get even more controversial, maybe it could even be his mother that Falco ends up knocking up. I mean, moms can be pretty sexy. Heck, even better: a grandma somewhere up the family tree. A damn sexy grandma, while we're at it. One that's not dying, like mine is. Can't body shame someone just because they're a bit older or their skin's a bit saggier. That's ageist. Anyway, what you might be asking is: if she's a grandma, how is it biologically possible for her to have a child with her grandson if she's most likely already gone through menopause?

Let's do the math. Falco is somewhere between 17 to 19 in Star Fox 64. It's an appropriately fertile age, and 64's not a bad context. If anthromorphs undergo pubertal development at a similar age and pace as humans do, both his mother and grandma probably started ovulating at about age 12 to 13. But if both his mother and grandmother had precocious puberty, which after all runs in the family, they could very well get pregnant at around 9 to 10 years old each.

According to that last calculation, that would make Falco's mother between 26 to 29, and Falco's grandmother anywhere between 35 to 49. That's still plenty fertile for most female humans. The number can't be that far off for anthromorphs either, right? Even better, perhaps late menopause is a concurrent condition that also runs in the Lombardi family.

To top it off, being raised by a teen mother who was also raised by a teen mother herself could very well explain Falco's bitter, gritty personality. We are the result of our environment and upbringing, are we not?

"Sure, I'll take that." Falco shifts a bit on the couch from where he mumbled said reply of approval. Despite the heavy pixilation and boxy, hexagonal shapes, I make out the muscles of his sculpted thorax and abdomen. He's got no shirt on, by the way. Because that's how I imagine him, you furbreeders.

Now, all I have to figure out is what this sexy grandma of his looks like, so that I can write up some explicit sexual scenes. Now, back to Falco's inbred child – the product – should its conception be deliberate or accidental? Should I choose the former, the metaphoric door would be opened for some intensely moving love story. "Oh my little Falco," his grandmother moans, her loose and voluminous breasts bobbing up and down with each hump. "How happy you make your dear granny!"

Of course, I could make the story into a horrible saga that accidental pregnancies oft occur in. Maybe Falco rapes his own grandmother, without knowing that the sexy, albeit older avian whom he had chosen as his victim that night, was in fact his genetically related elder? "Fuck," Falco curses through clenched beak. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." The natural light streaming through the wide windows of the hotel room illuminates the form of the much older avian gagged and tied to the bed, still knocked out by the chemicals he put in her drink the night before. There was no mistaking it now. It was her.

"Fuck."

Or maybe Falco does rape his grandmother knowing very well who she was. Did you know that abuse of the elderly is a widespread social issue? Perhaps I can go another direction altogether: the grandmother rapes Falco. Either way, I want "Falco's Inbred Child" to end with the horrible, tragic death of every important character involved.

Falco shifts uncomfortably on the couch, apparently sensing the direction in which my thoughts are headed.

I do tease this last idea, the one where Falco is raped by his own grandmother. It's a rather tempting one no less. It's original, I like to think. But unfortunately, people are unoriginal. They like the familiar. And what's familiar in this world is the sexist assumption that female characters, grandmothers or not, are reducible to sex organs on legs. So maybe it's better that I make Falco the one who rapes his grandmother. It's a cliché, one in accordance to the patriarchal world we have been nursed in. And that's why I should use it.

I inhale deeply. This stuff I'm smoking is some pretty good shit. Whether I mean this as a concrete action or a symbolic gesture, that is once again up to your interpretation. Now all I have to plan is the graphic scene where the inbred avian child is born from the grandmother's lubricated and expanded vaginal orifice. That, and what horrible genetic diseases the child gets to suffer from, being inbred and all.

"Well, whatever you come up with, it better be fucking good."

Falco's sharp and scathing voice jolts me back into the present moment. Casting my gaze towards this quirky not-quite-real form breathe in and out, I contemplate: how innocent, how K+-rated he appears at this current moment. But soon, he will be engaging in some very awful activities in my mind's eye, moved and spurred on by my imagination. All to entertain me and you. Now, if my dying and nearly blind grandma read the fic I was about to write, it'd probably put her out of her misery right then and there.

All of a sudden, without warning, a strange and oppressively powerful wave of anguish overcomes me. I start to cry.

"Woob hoob."

That's the sound I produce. The commonly used onomatopoeias cannot better express the sound coming out from the pathetic mess that is myself.

Falco just keeps staring at me, pixelated eye now swelling with hatred. The blue avian lounging on the couch is none other than a projection of my inner self. My inner self hates me as much as Falco does right now. Which, I have to say, is a lot.

At the same time as I sob and wail, I let loose string after string of keyboard strokes on my laptop. The thing has been falling apart ever since I cracked the screen against a potted plant in my house last year, way back in Teckas. This is yet another external projection of my mental state, by the way. Pain and suffering are a compelling muse.

And so I write. I pump out all two thousand, nine hundred and seventy-eight words of "Falco's Inbred Child," the one and only chapter that has and ever will ever come into existence in the history of my fanfiction-writing career. That right there symbolizes the ephemerality and irreversibility of life. What can you say? Life sucks. It's what cornwallace and I bonded over. It's why this fic is dedicated to him.

See, fanfiction is nothing but a coping mechanism. An outlet. An extension of yourself; a reflection of life and its joys and horrors. As I cry and type, my grandma is undergoing the process of dying in a hospital a block away. It's sad, bluntly put, and true. My grandma's gonna die, just like the rest of us. Like each and every one of us.

Each and every one of us is gonna die, just like my grandma.

When we are born, we're like this huge blank slate of potential. Anything can happen. But with each passing year, time makes its marks upon this slate. The newborn infant has no awareness of death. To it, the world is but an extension of its eternal self. The breast or artificial nipple that feeds it exists to satisfy it, and that is all. But come childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age, and our egocentric illusion of eternality is progressively shattered. The child has become a full human, poignantly aware of its own sad mortality.

And this newfound angst and grief about our lives not being eternal, well, we explore it and work through it via various mediums. In the case of people like me, and maybe you, that would be through fanfiction.

Death. Dying. It's a great subject, because it's universal. It hits every human hard. Unless, that is, you're in denial. In that case, the mention of death slips this little crack of doubt into your subconscious mind. Death, yep – death is what awaits you and I and everyone else, every single fucking person or living creature you have ever had any semblance of feelings for under this cruel, imprisoning blue sky.

Except for Falco, of course. Still on that couch, staring at me. Coarsely rendered blue feathers, all ruffled up. Hatred abounds in the silence between us. Falco can't die, because he's not alive. He might have the appearance of aliveness, but that's a mere illusion. He's alive when we want him to be alive. He's dead if we want to, if we play badly in Star Fox 64, or if we write some horrible fanfic in which his head explodes or something.

I look down at the joint. It's nearly burned to the end now. "Fuck," I sez. But no one cares. Not even Falco.

Ah, Falco. Just look at him. That stupid mass of pixels taking up mental space in this computer room that belongs to my dying grandma. He's got his life cut out for him, from start to finish. When you turn on the gaming console, there he appears in all his glory. Turn off your game, and his existence comes to a complete halt, to resume only when the fancy takes you. Falco and the Star Fox team are programmed for success. Even when you play the worst pilot ever and ruin the entire mission, all you gotta do is restart the game. You can try an unlimited number of times until you win.

As for me, well, I've fallen off the track to being somebody. I've slipped through the safety net of society. Socioeconomic factors have doomed me. And since I only have one life, game over means game over for good. My shield is too low to carry me, shaking and stumbling, to victory.

Suddenly, Falco's head explodes. His brains open from the inside out and silently combust into a huge mass of black and red pixels with a force that causes bits of him to whiz past every object in my dying grandmother's office room including the bookcases, the laptop with the cracked screen, and myself and also the couch which has now been set alight by the exploding brain-pixels and so the remainder of Falco's now headless body too burns away such that nothing is left of him or his brain or the couch or his pixels within the span of exactly sixty-nine milliseconds. All because I willed it.

What can you say? Life is like bad fanfiction. It sucks.

Way back when I was born in the heart of Teckas, I was this blank slate full of potential. Radiant, beautiful, ready to take on the world as I wailed and screamed, freshly squeezed out of my mother's cunt.

And now I just sit here in Caliphonea while my grandma lets loose uncontrollable torrents of urine mixed with feces on her deathbed, a morphine drip easing away the pain that overcomes the few moments of consciousness that she is still capable of experiencing. Eyes vacant, I type up yet another fanfic that few will read and even fewer will give a fuck about.

Pass me another joint, now will you.

(One review left = 1 joint for the author, whether metaphorical or real or both. You decide which.)