Disclaiming things: I could say I own this, but that would make you think I was a crazy person. 0.0
So I don't own these characters. Hell, I don't even own some of these lines.
My dignity. I threw that in a wood chipper a while ago.
The (this isn't even a prologue, is it? More like a random gurgle from the foaming mouth of a mental patient.) A Small Village--Norwich Teasdale Brunswick Bruxville Cheddar Cheas England Our date is very much irrelevant to the story, wherefore upon something largely world-altering and veritably inuring to the fundamental wellbeing of a well-run society… …Was not going to occur.
A man, dressed in naught. The naught was some kind of textile around his body. It was absurdly detailed. He carried what appeared to be a purple phallic symbol.
Or gun. Or crossbow. Some article with which he intended to shoot someone.
He was accompanied by a young man in similar clothing. He had with him…a guitar. Not a guitar. A guilles-tar. (It sits heavily on the mind mind that this description could be wrong.)
This is a pun.
They didn't seem to be heading anywhere. More like, they were traveling in some rigged or debauched scene structured around something they'd seen in a movie, more than likely, and were attempting to reenact.
Let's observe. A high wall, which is a setting.
Of course, this is a Checkov's gun. Something lurks behind that wall.
That something is an old woman.
And now for something completely violent.
"Fascist!!" Cried the be-hatted lady, who wore baby blue, a color that didn't suit her, not at all.
The man addressed, a popular video game character, spun around. His golden eye, which was either the result of nefarious intent or some pure evil that is left completely unexplained, or in some manner a reference to the eagle-eyed assassin of Bond fame, widened in ostensible horror as the old gremlin of a woman and her pointy hat flopped onto the wall and aimed a piece of willow wood chipped into a pointy rod at the trunk of his body.
That ostensible horror quickly turned to fury, as ice melts on an oven top, and he aimed his phallic thingamagig, only he pointed at her head.
"Hag!" He bellowed. They quickly shot off whatever said unexplained magical energies they possessed at one another. On one hand, the old woman expelled glittery pink, which missed the target completely, in a sense.
It did do what water tends to do to certain fabrics marketed by Mattel.
On the other hand, he shot the poor thing's head completely off, and it landed, like a charred, withered and quite depressed pumpkin, in a Harry Carry plop into a haystack, with Olympic form that was overall not very dignified, and certainly didn't earn her even a measly five points.
The gunman's companion nodded, in a sort of slowly arrived at approval.
"Yeah, muthafucka." He said.
In powder blue, the man with the purple phallic object grunted. It was very manly.
KINGDOM SORTS
Prepare for all you hold Dear to Bleed Out of Your Ears
Ch. 1, or WTF (muthafucka exclamation point)
The arroyo was orange, the dust sweeping idly like some massive gentleman with a broom and arthritis and possibly a limp, across the dry, dry, very dry dust. Yes, dust swept across dust. Such is the deep metaphorical toxin entering your limbic system. You will concur in a minute.
The car was white, rust tinged. A convertible. The car adjacent to it was black. Possibly a sedan.
Actually, it was nothing even remotely like that. In all true horror, it was a PT Cruiser. Matte black finish, but not homological to the country.
The silence within was punctured by the sounds of gunfire. Not within the PT Cruiser however, but within the saloon-resembling church that stood beside the PT Cruiser. They were probably in Texas, as there was a saloon-resembling church.
The floorboards of the front entrance to the saloon-cum-church had creaked as snakeskin boots passed over them only moments before.
"You think I'm…sadistic, don't you?" The floorboards within the church squeaked under the weight of the snakeskin toe. The boot wearer's accompanying robes seemed a bit out of place, unless the padre had decided that honky tonk was more than appropriate for a wedding in potentially Texas.
The figure was limned by the darkness, but his face, oh his face, was ANON.
Below him lay a figure in a white wedding gown scarlet tinged, and Jenova tinged…with blood. White hair curled in the heat and the floorboards. It was as if a Kabuki actor had been shot repeatedly in Sarah's dress from Labyrinth, goblins refusing to attend her wedding because she didn't play 'Dance, Magic Dance' down the aisle.
The man above the languishing, possibly dying kabuki actor shifted his weight. He held a colt in one hand, his fingers so terribly close to his obscured face, as if contemplating what he had done, or, more importantly, trying not to shoot himself while contemplating this.
On the ground the bride, or bridal kabuki actor, whichever works for you, coughed scarlet gobs of blood. A very wet cough, like a cat eructating a hairball.
The gunman knelt beside her, cocking his head to the side. In silhouetted profile, he did kind of look like David Bowie.
"Honestly, this is me at my most…" The gun barrel came to the bride's unseen temple. Or kabuki actor's. The jury was hung on this one. But we didn't do it. We swear.
"Masochistic." He uttered, oh so dramatically. He puckered his lips. "Blam."
In the background, organ music carried over the tableau, and slowly, solemnly, in respect for the not-near-deceased-but-getting-there, the robed figure stood again, head bowed, looking a tad guiltily to the side.
He swallowed tearfully. Another figure began to sing. It was very moving, very tear-inducing.
"Let me go onn…like a Twister in the Sun/Let me go ooonnn/Big hands I know you're the…" The sharp report of a pistol firing into the singer's frontal lobe interrupted the dulcet music.
Crying, biting his lip to hold it back, the robed man in the cowboy boots turned around.
"Why'd you go and interrupt the stylings of popular singer Axel Rose?" The murderer whined, face scrunching up childishly.
The man holding the violet-hued phallic symbol, who might be of some remembrance to you, or holding a "remembrance day parade for old age pensioners", as the adage goes, no medals taken out and polished, not even metaphorically, waved his gun around a bit dramatically and commenced scolding.
"Firstly," he growled. "He is not Axel Rose. He's just Axel." Finger pointing at the ruined, freshly made cadaver, he flashed his hand before his face, constructing out of it a peace sign that was not so peaceful.
"Secondly," he hissed. "That song isn't even BY Axel Rose! I don't even know who it's by!"
"Thirdly," he turned his fingers into a trident of death, then waved his arms around the room as if frantically rowing for Ben Hur. "You don't even KNOW these people!"
"So how the FUCK can you possibly be MASOCHISTIC? Ya freakin' sadist!"
Lip trembling, the man with the gun decided to reflect on that. After a moment of long soul searching, he sniffed, and came to a conclusion.
"Xigbar, we did meet them in the grocery store, and they made fun of me."
It was only a few hours before. The shop in question was a supermarket as the term is generally recognized in the day of this chronicler. Only this shop, unlike most supermarkets, was located in a fantasy universe, and was something that fantasy universes so surprisingly lack. Fantasy universes are unfortunately well behind the modern commercial scene. It is a tragedy that every mother of five brave sons must encounter when she's looking for the milk to make the cookies that will feed her children and let them grow strong enough to encounter that dragon and vanquish it. Because no supermarkets exist, this mother must suffer children with weak bones who are unable to vanquish dragons and must sacrifice four of her five young sons to the tragedy of narrative causality.
Because there are no supermarkets. You might well do to reflect on that.
A white haired, tall drink of water was standing in line, dressed in a wholesome sweater and a handsome kilt skirt with knee high socks banded with pinkim flower pink, and fancy silk bows tied in the long tresses of his hair. He was a well tanned, handsome fellow, very leggy.
Beside him stood his attractive mum. Her apron was blue with yellow polka dots and a ruffle around it and a pocket for shoplifting meat products. Her hair was long, black, faded in strands, her face scarred by daddy's domestic abuse, and her own war campaigns in faraway lands. She covered it well with an eye patch, because she was not a sissy kind of mommy who would disguise such things with makeup. Oh no.
"Now Xemnas, dear. Only one candy bar when we get to the checkout line." She advised, smiling prettily, however thinly she did. A smile most women her age use to confront things such as diapers and puppy-produced stains.
"Why, mommy?" Xemnas whined, twisting his back into a question mark. His big gold eyes were owlish under his white as snow bangs.
"Because you'll be fat," She said sweetly, clawing a jar of pickles off the metal shelf. "You'll be a fat, fat cow."
Mommy pushed the cart away sharply. Xemnas' mouth opened, in hurt surprise, eyebrows scrunching up over his nose. A nearby boy toyed with a plastic transformer.
You know that kid in class? The one you all hated. Crew cut, buck teeth, Down's syndrome face. Clearly inbred, even if you did have to fish around for the evidence.
That was this child, and he was playing 'airplane' with a transformer. At first it was the toy…but no. It was a real transformer, the thing that provides power to the building.
As stated before: inbred.
The power did go out to the building. Mommy let out a grunt of 'dagnabbit', and punched someone.
"Haha," Said the biological mistake. "Mommy said you'd get fat."
"Shaddup, Demyx. You cut the power to the building. Stupid head." Demyx started pouting like that Mikey child from that cereal commercial you no longer remember.
"Am not!" He crowed.
"Stupid head! Stupid head! Stupid head!" Xemnas chanted.
"Wehhhhhh!" Demyx blared. Mommy was having none of that.
"Shut up both of you! I mean, if you don't cut that out, I'll pour extra Crisco on your burn wounds! Anyway I won't do it in public, so as not to call attention to the abuse, which I will inflict on you once we get back home. Abuse is a problem caused by rage and aggression and generally unfulfilled in life which so happens to be common because people are fueled by anger, and are angry cruel people, who torment others in a cycle which has history of inflicting its worst on the next generation, because people, even--yanno what? Fuck this. We're getting to the point."
"Let's go to the checkout line." Mommy said after catching her breath. The two followed, ashamed. Mommy was so mean sometimes! It's not like it was her temperament or anything, but she got in these alcohol fugues where she'd just kick the crap out of you for not making any sense. No reason, too.
As they entered the line, Xemnas bumped into a woman accidentally. A woman who was dressed like a stripper. Xemnas had never seen a stripper before, but he knew a skanky ass ho when he saw one.
"Wotchwhear yer goin' little girl. How you dare bump ugly with Rosa the Crimson!"
"I didn't dare; I wouldn't dare; and I didn't." Xemnas stammered. He scrunched an eyebrow.
"Isn't Rosa the Crimson fairly redundant?"
"Silence batshit insane one! You chit of girl cannot make it in Deep Ground! You are nowhere big cleavage. Also, you have fat moo."
"She called you fat." Demyx giggled. Xemnas bit his lip, pouted. He was so darn pretty, and all were mean to him.
"Uh, she's calling you out," Said a helpful bystander, in a serious voice, which was very helpful-sounding and very necessary. Sometimes Xemnas needed those hints. He was very thankful that the man made such a useful observation on his behalf. "Are you going to take that?"
"No," he sulked, turning his chin down, looking quite dangerous and pretty. "I'm not."
He snapped his fingers once, twice, thrice, aligning his neck along the bias of the movement. Though sulking, his intimidation factor would have been high. He wished he was participating in a LARP. Then he would have been a schoolgirl with a deadly katana.
"Bring. It. On."
"…And that's how we know them." Xemnas concluded. In wake of his explanation, people were struck by a loss of words.
"I really explains things in detail, don't I?" Xigbar seemed to be adjusting his jaw. He did that rather a bit like Kermit the Frog, but perhaps that was coincidence.
"Yeah. You do. Only one problem with that." Lightning fast, his fingers grabbed onto Xemnas' collar and moved violently, which some would consider not quite the goal of trying to instill a sense of reasoning. Hit by cosmic rays, cosmic leakage from an astral plane that was scientifically disproved of, and generally killed more often than your ordinary brain cell carrying meat packet, Xemnas' brain matter was probably precious little, and therefore exceedingly precious indeed.
"That all happened in YOUR FUCKING HEAD!!" The thunder died off. The spit gobs, however, did not.
Xemnas tried to wink past one.
"Ohhh." Realization dawned. "Okay! So, what does that mean for us?"
Xigbar chewed the inside of his cheek.
"Uh…" Began a voice, high pitched and obviously still innocent of the fluffy rabbit annihilating features of Xigbar's disorderly violent personality. Xigbar crumpled, as all were disposed to do, in the wake of Roxas' mindlessly special specializing in special preciousness. He was that special, he was.
"You know what? Let's just forget it. Get a car, and never look back." He desisted in the wrinkling the lapel of his leader's robe, promptly turned and huffed back toward the bat winged doors.
Crossing the ruined corpse of his comrade; he decided to yell at it.
"Axel! Get the hell up, and stop playing dead like the rest of the corpses!"
"Aw, but I wanted to exploode." Axel pouted. Like an undead marionette he rose, smiling all the while like a concussed piece of French toast with little eggy eyes and a syrup mouth heading toward a plastic receptacle.
"Shut up, or your getting this pole gun thing lodged in places you don't want it to." After a split-second of deliberation he yelled, as if this proved some manner of point, "I'm Goddamned Xigbar!"
Axel shrugged indifferently and turned into Xigbar's path.
Blood spewed out of Axel, going everywhere, and his body fell down like a discarded terry cloth fraggle.
"M'okay." He replied, raising a thumb from the floor.
Exeunt omnes, because they had. Minus the critically injured or dead ones.
Xemnas, Xigbar, Demyx, Axel and Roxas uniformly took the dry and dusty steps, robes swishing, hems getting dusty.
From his vantage point in the PT Cruiser, Saix, sporting sunglasses, gave a faint nod and proceeded to roll down the driver's side window.
"You took your time." Xemnas flailed an arm, lovable mischief maker expression welded on his feline face.
"I wanted to."
En route to a destination unmentioned, though it would not be unfavorable of it to receive littoral utterance on the medium before you, Xigbar, in the passenger seat, leaned over toward Saix to whisper in his elfin ear almost conspiringly. He meant it to be threatening. It came off as somehow erotic to a subset of the fan base.
This is the only mention we will make of the fan base.
"Why a PT Cruiser?" Xigbar groaned. Saix sighed, attempted a one-shoulder shrug.
"I don't know. Perhaps it was because the keys were unavailable on all of the other dismembered corpses you piled waist-high in that parking lot."
Xigbar decided to let that percolate.
"So, why didn't we hotwire that convertible? It was a goddamned Monte Carlo. It would have been better than this." He slumped back in his seat, folding his arms. He waved a hand imperiously. Sat forward.
"I mean, it's a bloody clown car! We could probably have asked Luxord, Lexaeus and the others to pile in!"
"Do I look like a car expert?" Saix wondered coldly.
"You look," Spat Xigbar, holding onto the door for dear life, or with deadly menace. "Like a friggin' Vulcan."
"And you…" Saix paused for a second thoughtfully. "…Look like Seagall."
Xigbar looked as if he had tasted the bitter sheath of the betel nut.
"That was low, man! That…was low." Lower lip flattened into a liver-shaded roll of flesh, Xigbar sunk further into the slightly concave tan of the polyester seat cushioning. He kicked one of his skinny legs.
"Xaldin told you to say that, didn't he?"
"Ha-Ha! Well now we call this the act of mating…" A look of apprehension crossed Xigbar's massive, vaguely fire ax-shaped head.
"Oh, hell no." He sneered. Fingers pointing outward and moving spasmodically, Axel bounced around in his seat to the limits of seatbelt asphyxiation. He knew all of the words. He invariably knew all of the words.
"Sweat baby, sweat baby, sex is a Texas drought/Me and you do the kind of stuff that only Prince would sing about."
"Christ. Why?" Xigbar shrieked, hands balling, teeth combing the Cruiser's clean air in anguish. "I mean, WHY?"
"I don't know. He's a troglodyte?" Saix offered darkly, driving robotically as he would the many leagues on.
Axel threw one hand into the air after the other, blissfully oblivious.
"Yes I'm Siskel yes I'm Ebert and you're getting two thumbs up/You've had enough of two hand touch you want it rough you're out of bounds/I want you smothered want you covered like my Waffle House hash browns…" Swinging back and forth from the shoulders up, he truly resembled a fraggle. A sexy, sexy fraggle, with a ludicrous fetish for boys who would complete his Axel Rose paradigm.
Roxas was special, yes. Special to Axel particularly, who wanted them to be special friends.
"Would you cut that the hell out? Please!" Xigbar screamed.
"You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals/So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel…"
"…I swear to God I'm warning you…" The gritted teeth of the sentence seemed to bite every last molecule of air in the car.
"Do it again now!/You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals/So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel…"
"I'm not kidding!" He lunged for Saix's claymore, which rested between the two seats like a frilly prop out of a sparkling unicorn fantasy piece. "You see this?"
Directing Axel's attention to the two-handed saber rattling was a futile endeavor.
"Love the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket/Like the lost catacombs of Egypt only God knows where we stuck it--"
Xigbar manically rattled the sword against the console, and Saix's eyes retroactively turned toward the motion.
"--Hey that's--"
A sound like a guillotine slicing through cabbages, and a rouge spatter that covered much of a window.
"Hey-what-was-that?" Roxas stammered. Something had hit the hatch dully, rolled around a bit, and was a dark spot from where he crouched below it.
"It's cherry syrup." Xemnas announced gleefully, smile tainting his lips. He was lost in admiration for the 'portrait of a bloodbath in scarlet and slight yellow' that had been painted all over him and the window.
"Um. What was that bump? What's this red stuff?" Roxas carried on. It was shock, surely, disbelief, perhaps, that induced this.
"Ketchup." Xemnas was sing-song happy about it, telling of the mid-afternoon cartoon programming he liked to watch.
He ran one long, surgically ideal finger down the window smear, in awe of the creativity of mankind.
"Hey, check out this silly putty." Demyx announced, juggling something that might have been once part of Axel's esophagus.
"Whooh."
Kneading the gelatinous mess in his fingers, he blinked dully, and looked around. Evidence sitting right beside him notwithstanding.
"Hey. Who turned off the awesome music?"
Xigbar leaned conspicuously on the console, blood dripping off the end of the claymore he still held in hand.
"I DID." He sneered. "And hopefully? I did it FOREVER."
"You know, that was harsh. And that was my blade." Saix sighed. Xigbar's eye revolved, like a loose plastic eye with a jiggling pupil, sighting and taking in the weapon in his hand.
"Oh."
"You're cleaning it off." An unstated, 'shoot me' was implied, but Saix was judicious enough to know that one of them would have done just that.
Roxas was not very happy. He was in an undisclosed location, yes, previously disclosed, underneath the cover of the hatch, which was not the same thing as the trunk. There was a gap there for air, but he had to crouch.
Something warm and sticky was dripping onto him, and as he felt the road shift beneath the car's bed, so too did a weight shift above him.
It rolled slightly to the right, exposing a Dan Brown book cover rendition of the Mona Lisa, only with Axel representing the enigmatic lady, his hair askew; the scene below the hatch being more something along the lines of a child looking up through the floorboards at something too awful to name, almost directly copying a Tim Burton movie.
"Hey, Axel's…oh, oh my GOD. His eyes. His eyes are looking at me."
Saix and Xigbar traded accusatory glances.
"That's just sick!" Roxas wailed. "Sick, sick sick!"
"Yeah. You know what also is sick in the head? Our leader. This would've NEVER HAPPENED if we didn't have to pick up his pills!" Xigbar shouted in reply. He rearranged his rear end, collapsing deep into the seat.
Xemnas held the medication directly in front of his face. He shook his orange cylinder of pills like a maraca, going cross-eyed.
"My hippocampus grew three sizes this day."
"Keep telling yourself that." Saix shot aside to Xigbar, who promptly hit the seat, the dashboard, and the window with his fist.
"Are you saying I fly off the handle?" He sputtered. The flurry of his arms was like snow falling on a television set in time-lapse.
"Oh no," Saix assured him thinly, arching his brows. "Decapitating Axel for singing a song you didn't like--"
"People who sing that song…they have it COMING." Xigbar rasped. He held up a finger. One trembling finger.
"Dude; eat your bran flakes." Demyx inputted. He wobbled the esophagus like a slinky. "Woah. Jelly."
"Is that his blood?" Roxas panted.
"His blood is leaking on my uniform! My uniform! It's seeping through!"
Roxas hit the hatch accidentally in his attempt to escape.
"Well, he always did want to get his bodily fluids on you, Roxas." Xigbar told him sarcastically, in his driest, nastiest voice. Saix looked aside at him, eyes harboring librarian-level stern disapproval.
"Oh God that's not--" Roxas gulped. He was unable to finish that sentence, Axel's jaw taking that moment to puppet like a ventriloquist dummy.
"Get horny now." The hatch rocked several times with Roxas.
"Waaaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeeh!"
End Chapter One. Next Chapter: No Need for Churritos--Tonight we Dine in Hell!