Toki walked along the mazelike halls of Mordhaus, humming cheerfully and heading for the room where Judy Explosion stayed when she visited. He poked his head in her room to find her packing her bags and suitcases. "Judys, where you goings?," he asked in alarm.

"I'm going to visit my Mom, silly," she tells him. "I told you the other day, remember? I haven't seen her for a while, what with college and working on Planet Piss with Murderface." At his downtrodden expression she asks him if he would like to come.

"Wowee! You wants me to meet your Moms?," he was ecstatic. He hated when she was away. "I go get packeds!," he rushed to his own room, began grabbing bags and clothes. Oh, can't forget Deddy Bear! Then he stopped...he'd meet Judy's mother and he didn't know if she would like him. He wouldn't know how to behave, and fuck, his own parents had hated him. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea...

"Are ya ready, Tokipants?," came the girl's southern drawl. "The limo's ready."

He jumped, startled, and tried to think of some reason why he suddenly couldn't go...saw her watching him expectantly, dressed in conservative sweater and skirt and looking positively hawt nonetheless. Her thick ebony hair was tied in a ponytail and green eyes lit up with warmth when she saw him. "Uh--uh, jah, almost dones," he said. Damn, he couldn't do it after she'd invited him so nicely. Plus, he was curious. Curious how 'regular people' families behaved. He was sure nobody ever chained bubbly, spunky Judy in a dank basement for days at a time.

The girl said good-bye to her father and the rest of the boys, Ofdensen lingering with his arms around her after their good-bye hug of course, and Murderface pouting because he wanted to hurry and finish the new Planet Piss cd. Nathan's sometime girlfriend/Ofdensen's assistant Katrina cooed over her and hugged her, telling her to be careful on her trip.

The rhythm guitarist was uncharacteristically silent during the ride to the airport, his cherubic face troubled. "Uh, Toki? Is something wrong?," Judy asked gently. This wasn't like him, he was normally full of chatter and mirth.

"Oh, wells," Toki stammers. "Do you thinks your Moms will likes me?"

"O'course she will! She'll love you!," Judy assures him. "She'll wanna take time off work and feed you some good cookin' like meatloaf and corn bread and green beans. And she'll have a good time cause you're funny."

"What if I do's somethings stupid? I always doings somethings wrong."

"Relax, Toki! Just be yourself," she took his hand and squeezed it in reassurance. "I've never seen you this nervous before."

"Is this corns breads in the shapes of a corn?," he asked, forcing himself to smile.

"Haha, no it's made out of ground corn, you know, cornmeal. It's better than pickled herring, that's fer sure!," she teased him.

"No ways, that's the best," he teases back, but his heart wasn't in it.

He thought about his childhood, of going without food for days at a stretch as punishment for some real or imagined wrongdoing. It seems he was punished simply for existing, everything he did and liked was wrong and sinful, his very existence a mistake. Aslaug, his father, was a fanatical Christian priest in a country that was mostly indifferent to Jesus at best, believing in trolls, elves and dwarves at worst. Anja, his mother, had been a devoted nun in a puritanical nunnery. She'd balked at the treatment of the young maidens, forcing them to sleep on boards and throw themselves naked in the snow for having impure thoughts, and one night the young Anja ran away.

She had no knowledge of the outside world, really, and was terrified of cities, so she headed for a church some miles away for succor. Aslaug Wartooth was the pastor of that church, and he was locking it up for the night when he saw a bedraggled, tear-faced nun on the doorstep babbling incoherently. She collapsed in his arms, feet bleeding from walking several miles in her indoor nun's slippers. Aslaug helped the wretch inside. When she calmed down she begged his help, offered to work for him or the church, and took off her nun's habit to wipe her face. A cascade of thick, light brown hair fell to her waist.

Toki Wartooth was concieved that night, that dreadful, sinful mistake. The pair would be the laughingstock of the whole community, having flouted their high morals and spartan lifestyle that they preached at everyone. Worse, they were damned to Hell for all eternity for giving in to the sin of the flesh. The reverend and former nun quickly married, discovering they didn't hate each other, but they surely didn't love each other, either. It was the only way, they reasoned, they could make things right. Perhap's it was God's will that they should meet and produce a child.

Then little Toki arrived and grew into a bright, artistic, energetic child. A heathen, Satan-loving, ungrateful, disobediant, sinful child, in their eyes. Would their misfortunes never cease! He was utterly disinterested in the religious drabble they tried to pound into him, and pound it turned out to be as both mother and father lost their patience time and again with their adorable and intractable demon child. Anja secretly wondered if Aslaug was Lucifer himself, sent to seduce the good and innocent, and she looked at Toki's round face and big, dark blue eyes and hair like her own, so darling, so very full of evil! She took every opportunity to strike that innocent face, leaving welts and bruises in her wake.

Toki grew his hair long, wore rock band t-shirts, skipped school at every chance, and somehow got hold of a guitar, an instrument of the Devil, by the time he was 12. Every day brought new agony and ecstasy as he taught himself to play and enduring being ritually scourged by his father for his sins. He found he could go six days without food, hanging in his family's basement, talking to the rats. But he endured.

The limo came to a stop; they were at the airport. "C'mon, Toki, time to hop the plane!," Judy said.