My first attempt at a Charlie story. And I agree- they are such fun to write XD I'm not amazingly sure I'm that happy with it though, but maybe that's just me.

There was another version of this, which had Charlie coming to Sheffield, but I thought that was too contrived, and I couldn't think of any decent jokes about Ryan Air, so I changed it.

I wrote this one because piercings are close to my heart, lol. Or close to my nostril, anyway XD

I'ma dedicate this to SisiDraig for inspiring it with her forum, and to Britania Control 1.0 for coming up with the title.

I'm hoping to write more of these, which will hopefully be better than this one.

Discalimah: Emily does not own Charlie. Emily does not own her partner. Emily is the property of her partner XD

Charlie Pierces His Own Face

One day, Charlie was bored of strutting around Seattle, so he stopped on the corner of one of his favourite streets to do some peoplewatching. Charlie liked to watch people; he liked to wonder which ones had Hoovers and which ones had Dysons and which ones had cheap non-brands; and he liked to wonder which ones liked Alice Cooper and which ones liked prog rock and which ones liked rubbish dance or chart music, and which ones would rather watch a movie; and he liked to see which ones were on 'Frasier', and which ones might be Tom Selleck.

But today, it wasn't much fun, because the people out today didn't look very interesting, and Jane Leeves had moved away anyway, so there wasn't any chance of "bumping into" her again.

But then, just a few metres down the street from him, Charlie saw a girl with pink hair. Wow, he thought. Her hair is the same colour as my skin. I have to go and have a closer look.

As he got closer, he noticed something else, and stood there staring for about ten minutes, fixated with her left nostril.

"Are you alright?" she asked, her accent clearly indicating that she was not a native of Seattle, though this didn't seem to stop her from accepting a drooling twenty-six-stone blob of anthropomorphic bubblegum as being completely normal.

"You have a piercing in your face," said Charlie.

"Yeah…" said the girl. "Erm, I have to go now. I'm waiting for my girlfriend."

She inched away from him, and stopped about ten metres down the street.

What an odd person, Charlie thought.

Then, another woman appeared, and she had lots of piercings in her face. In seconds, Charlie was standing next to them again, and a small crowd had gathered around the man Charlie had slithered over, who was twitching on the floor, somewhat squished, and covered in bits of melted bubblegum.

"Wow!" Charlie cried, taking in the second woman's lower lip, stretched earlobes and the multitude of silver studs running up, and inside, her ears. "You have loads of piercings in your face! I want one! I want one exactly like yours, from the same place by the same person with the same jewellery!"

"These were all done in Barnsley," said the woman with lots of piercings in her face.

"Shit that," said Charlie, who didn't know where Barnsley was. "I'll just do it myself. Somebody get something spiky."

"That's not a good idea," said the woman with lots of piercings in her face. "It'll probably get infected. I mean… if bubblegum can get infected."

"And if you get it done in a proper studio, they'll numb you first," pointed out the girl with the pink hair.

"Shit that," Charlie said again. "I've been drinking since half past seven in the morning; I'm numb enough already."

And with that, Charlie ripped a spiked piece of railing away from a wall and shoved it through his own septum.

"That actually didn't hurt as much as I thought it would," he reflected out loud.

Then he collapsed.


Charlie strutted around Seattle with his piece of railing through his septum for a few days, and found that it was a lot more fun that strutting around Seattle without a piece of railing through his nose. People were starting to look at him in the street again, like they did when he first arrived, and they still weren't used to seeing a giant bubblegum creature, at the time still shaped like a Hoover. Charlie began to feel popular again, and he rediscovered his love of being a popular bubblegum creature strutting through Seattle.

I wonder what would happen, he thought one day, if I stretched the piercing.

So he took out his piece of railing and replaced it with a slightly thicker one, and then strutting around Seattle became even more fun, and he got more admiring stares than ever before. So he replaced the thicker railing with a poster tube, then a table leg, then a medium-sized branch, and then a bollard, until eventually, Charlie's piercing stretched to two feet in width, and he took to strutting around Seattle with a section of tree trunk through the middle of his nose. Now people stopped walking suddenly to stare when Charlie appeared, and sometimes they walked into each other, or into lamp-posts and things because they were looking at his amazing piercing instead of where they were going.

But the section of tree trunk was too heavy for Charlie's gooey bubblegum body, and one day his septum fell through and everyone thought he was on cocaine.