The Moral Ascension of Kenny McCormick

Prologue: Imagination

Is it any wonder that he loved it? He loved to jump around in the dark with no regard for anybody's safety, like there was no consequence if he fell and hurt himself because nobody could fall after him or worry over him because he was all alone- a free agent. There were no repercussions for anything when he wore the cape and the hood.

When he was Mysterion, Kenny McCormick was absolutely free.

Well, okay, he wore underwear on the outside of his tights, so he was a little constricted, but he had been talking free as in free on an emotional scale, not a physical one. His balls were still beginning to itch, though, and it annoyed the crap out of him- he couldn't just scratch them; Mysterion would never scratch himself there in public- that was a real Kenny thing to do and if he did really Kenny things as Mysterion and really mysterious Mysterion things as Kenny, that would wreck the whole purpose of his heroic alter-ego and jeopardize his amusement with it.

And that would just suck. Kenny and Mysterion were meant to be two different entities. He knew that consciously splitting himself in two was one of the first steps to going crazy (there were many paths going that way, after all!), but what else could he do?

See, isn't it just so much fun to play pretend and let your imagination consume you? Kenny McCormick knew that, in a weird way, the infatuation he had with being his alter ego was akin to the one other people had with drugs. He knew it well 'cause he'd done them- but that didn't really matter to him because, unlike the unknown quality of certain illegal substances, he could be anything if he used his own brain and he'd never have to set foot in Imaginationland- neither the real one nor the hallucinated one. Instead, he just used some real imagination to cloak himself in the dark mantle of "a hero his town needed" and do death-defying feats like they were actually something amazing and not something that Kenny McCormick could perform on a daily basis with no risk of lasting consequences. What's more, other people paid attention.

As a hero, he hid from hoards of attention-givers who could find him without him ever leaving the shadows. As a boy, he basked in the lack of concern for himself by others in broad daylight.

Screw Miley Cyrus- Kenny had the best of both worlds and he didn't even have to sell his soul to the Disney Corporation get it. Good thing, too- that mouse is a freaking asshole and the purity rings he hawks are shit. Mickey may have inadvertently gotten one of Kenny's many lives, but he had never laid a gloved hand on his soul.

His soul.

Did Kenny even have a soul? Who knows! A soul is supposed to be the one thing about a person that is of real eternal worth because it exists beyond the limit of the flesh. Not that anybody's got any hard proof that they exist, not even Kenny- the only hard thing he had was some hardcore porn. All that could illustrate was some awesome flesh that he was rather bummed would one day cease to exist.

He was especially bummed about that because, no matter what, Kenny's own flesh did not cease to exist- he could not die. He was immortal.

Thusly, fascinations of the flesh leads us back to the earlier discussion- if Kenny's body was immortal, what was the point of his soul? His flesh would outlast it, at the rate it was going, and then what? Would he be stuck in an afterlife with individuals who had serious boners for spiritual connections while he was the only asshole stuck there with a real boner- emphasis on real- for connections of the flesh?

Man, it would suck royally. Real damnation without relief, regardless of whether he went to heaven or hell.

So, Kenny has a body. Mysterion has a heart. Nobody knows if either has a soul, or whether or not the theoretical soul is a separate entity from that made of man-meat (or little ten-year-old-boy meat, whatever) or just the same thing that can take on several forms, like a fudgecicle can become fudgesludge and then be fudged up in your bowels and excreted as a gas. It's all still just the same fudge, just different.

Kenny didn't know and Kenny didn't care, and besides their imminent immortality, that was the one thing he had in common with Mysterion- Mysterion only cared about his "purpose".

It would have all been fine that way if Eric Cartman hadn't forced Kenny to give up the ghost- so to speak- of Mysterion and reveal himself, because then Mysterion lost the mystery part- and as cool as the name "Ion" would have been to take up from what was left over after "Myster" had been stripped (What? There wasn't a "y" to take away, so "y" bother with it?), it wouldn't have done any good because Kenny and his other half were just rolled into one no matter what name he took. The secret was out and the symbiotic relationship of Mysterion-and-Kenny collapsed. That ruined everything.

Cartman is such an ass.

And then Kenny got antsy and started asking himself these annoying metaphysical questions ("What is my purpose?" was bad enough on its own!) that make him go batshit crazy because they are irritating as hell- and Kenny totally knew how irritating Hell was because he'd been there, too. Mysterion with the heart had infused with Kenny's body (thanks, asswipe Cartman) and unfortunately, neither of them had had half a mind to invest a brain into the other, so they hadn't a damn clue as to whether or not the entity of themselves had a soul or not. So much for putting two-and-two together.

Oh, and thanks to Bradley, he still didn't have a damn clue as to why he could not die. The little shit hadn't even left a trail of cereal crumbs to follow, so Kenny was left totally stranded in limbo.

'Cause that's what South Park was, sometimes- limbo! Never go up, never go down- never leave the town. South Park was it. South Park was Kenny's whole little world.

He could play pretend here, and he could look at porn here, and he could play with friends here, and he could never leave here. It was like Shangri-La, except he aged and the townsfolk weren't all young and gorgeous- Eric Cartman was real ugly, for example, and Wendy Testaburger was real flat.

…What was going to happen when Kenny got so decrepit as to die of old age? Would he be doomed to forever drift off and come back and then die again? Would he be stuck in a continuous cycle of that instant that his brain shuts down before his body fails, like a continuous sleep draped in white? That's a real nothingness. Kenny had experienced it before during his slower deaths. Was that the eternity awaiting him?

Eh, it didn't really matter. He was just all pissed that he couldn't hide his identity in Mysterion anymore because, at the time, that was his new, big thing.

The Coon- Eric Cartman, rather; you'd have to be a moron to not know the answer to the question, "Who is the Coon?"- had managed to ruin all of his fun and it infuriated Kenny.

Come to think of it, Eric Cartman had been hitting up Kenny as the victim of his shenanigans with rising frequency as of late. Could it be that he was growing tired of Kyle Broflovski?

Well! Kenny was just going to have to be a much better nemesis than Kyle was. Cartman was conditioned to outright confrontation from the fiery redhead, but he hadn't dealt with Mysterion-Kenny's passive-aggressive retaliations very smoothly.

So, theoretically, if Ken never had flat-out battles with the oppressive (in both weight and presence) other boy, he would piss Cartman off so much. Not only would that be damn hysterical, he could beat the fat asshole that way. So long as Cartman failed in the end (not even making a kid emotionally scarred forever by flawlessly having his parents killed and mixed into his chili had given him success- Eric had to face the fact that he was half-ginger and he'd accidentally killed his own dad), Kenny would be victorious. Any other weird shit that hit the fan would be inconsequential because there is nothing Cartman could do to Kenny that Kenny had not already done to himself.

He was like Chuck Norris in that respect. If he mastered the roundhouse kick, giving Cartman the time of day might even become unnecessary- Kenny's awesomeness would far exceed Eric Cartman's deviousness without the impoverished boy ever having to do anything.

Unfortunately, Kenny was not Chuck Norris, so maybe the (useful as it was) passive-aggressive stance alone was not the way he could go. Combating Cartman was like combating AIDS- you had to switch drugs unexpectedly so that your body did not become dependent on one while the virus became immune to it. Kenny would be both belligerent and nonchalant as it suited him, never letting Cartman get a good grip on how he reacted. He'd be Uno's wildcard, so to speak- and he'd be the last uno standing.

Fatass wasn't the only one who could speak broken Spanish!

Even so, though, switching medicine doesn't eliminate HIV. The virus just sleeps inside, suppressed and unable to escape, but ready to spring forth and destroy you as soon as your guard is down. The virus was like Cartman in that once it got a hold on you, it would never let you go and you never know it's there until it is too late to prevent it.

Somehow, the HIV scenario was all too reminiscent of not only the toxicity of Eric Cartman but of the potency of the implication of the possible existence of Kenny's lost soul.

There are way too many unknowns in Kenny's life for his liking.

The best thing Ken could do to prepare for the questionable event of his spiritual awakening, then, was to be ready for both the discovery of his soul and its possible torment at the hands of Eric Theodore Cartman.


Hey, all! I actually don't know if I'll continue this, but it sure does feel nice to be back writing South Park- writing KENNY, no less! My head is also in The Legend of Zelda and Durarara! right now, so chapters for any of my stories will come out in an order with no rhyme or reason. Please notify me of any typos or gross misunderstandings (and minor wordplay confusion- I rely on puns and cheap gags and a childlike thought process to get my points across, so I realize this isn't going to be flawless) so I can better myself at writing in a simple style with a simple plan- I want to amuse you even in the "dark of night" with Kenny.

Thank you for reading, and please feel free to review!

Also: WHO'S EXCITED THAT IT'S YEAR OF THE FAN? MEEEE! Can't wait for that behind-the-scenes documentary thing! Like, seriously!

I don't own South Park.