Disclaimer: South Park – watch it, love it, don't make any money off it.
Consistency
Author's Notes: Another distraction from "Rules to Live By." I blame my job for the delay on that one.
Enjoy!
Kyle couldn't quite remember when the weirdness started. By the time he turned eight, he'd become so accustomed to random shit happening in South Park – from bizarre weather accidents to surprise visits by various celebrities – that he tended not to pay much mind to it.
Then he met Jesus. Most people would have been thrilled to meet the son of God, even if they were Jewish. But the circumstances were not conducive to celebration – Jesus had miraculously appeared, in the form of a midget, to help him and Stan fend off a snowman which had come to life as a vicious perversion of Frosty. A few days later, he ran into Jesus yet again – now a full-grown adult – during what was supposed to be the final showdown between Christ and Santa. Eventually, the messiah and Ole Saint Nick decided they could both represent the Spirit of Christmas, and became fast friends.
From that point on, life in South Park seemed to get ever stranger. Third grade was wrought with misadventures from aliens placing an anal probe in Cartman's ass (and he did NOT want to think about that one too long) to an epidemic of fart-induced spontaneous combustions to the creation of a hell-fearing cult that was broken up by (guess who) Jesus, all with a few near-death experiences thrown in for fun.
"Maybe," he said hopefully, as he watched Cartman being sent off to Mexico by Jesus, "next year will be different."
Kyle supposed that he and his friends had brought the strange events of his first day of fourth grade upon themselves. After all, they were the ones who decided the course load was just too much to handle, and approached those Star Trek geeks about building them a time machine to go back to Mr. Garrison's third grade class. In retrospect, he couldn't figure out why they missed that year so much – after all, it had rather sucked. As usual, Kyle (not without justification) blamed Cartman.
Once Timmy got back from…wherever he'd been…Kyle prayed fervently that day had merely been a fluke, and once they had become settled in their new place in the school their lives might finally settle down. Then that goddamn cyborg, alias "Bill Cosby," showed up pretending to be a fourth-grade student, and stole Cartman's trapper keeper in order to keep it from gaining consciousness and taking over the world.
"Damn!" Kyle shouted in exasperation as "Bill" ran off with the folder, metal spikes tearing through his hands. "I thought fourth grade was gonna be different."
When Kyle learned that Mr. – or, rather, Mrs. – Garrison had been promoted to teach fifth grade, he was crestfallen. He was sure he'd be able to escape that sadistic, unstable excuse for a teacher this time, but soon became resigned to the fact that he would probably have to endure his/her southern twang for at least one more year.
The first few days went fairly smoothly – after all, at least they didn't have to wait for the teacher to learn their names before getting on with the curriculum. Then, one Thursday, the building had to be evacuated so that they could escape the wrath of a mutated bunny rabbit that had escaped from a local medical lab and was holding a serious grudge against the better part of humanity. Kyle, however, with his uncanny ability to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, was taken hostage by the Uzi-wielding rodent, and was held in the art supply closet for almost seven hours.
(Other than the hatred for humanity, Kip – for so the bunny was called – wasn't a bad guy. Turns out he was a big fan of Guns N' Roses.)
Luckily for Kyle, his best friend had a well-known reputation for being fairly animal-friendly. Stan went in as a negotiator, and managed to secure Kyle's release in exchange for several bushels of carrots and a one-way ticket to New Zealand.
"Hey, man, are you alright?" Stan had asked his understandably shaken-up friend as they watched the bunny drive off toward Denver International.
Kyle just shook his head and sighed. "I thought fifth grade was gonna be different."
Kyle was far from surprised when he learned that Mrs. Garrison had been promoted yet again, just in time to teach his sixth grade class. He just sauntered up and asked her whether she was getting sick of teaching the same snot-nosed brats year after year. She shrugged and said that one group of annoying children was pretty much the same as the next, and explained that she would rather not have to learn new names if she didn't have to.
She was not amused when Kyle asked if that wouldn't be easier than learning a new curriculum every year.
They were in the middle of a particularly painful pre-algebra lesson (as Garrison was having trouble figuring out what, exactly, the sixth graders were supposed to learn) when disaster struck, this time in the form of an oddly familiar taco-shaped, ice-cream-crapping alien who claimed to be fleeing two other aliens whom he saw sucking each other's jagons (whatever the hell that meant) and were now seeking to silence him, permanently. Sympathetic souls that they were, the boys decided to help him find a hiding place – especially once he made a reference to Cartman's anal probe, indicating that he knew a lot more than the boys originally thought. So Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny excused themselves from class while Kyle looked up the coordinates of the utopic planet of Marklar, which he had luckily thought to keep, and wished Taco Man luck as he flew off into the depths of outer space.
"Mm mmph?" Kenny asked, noting the pensive expression on Kyle's face.
"Nothing," Kyle replied. "I was just hoping that, maybe, sixth grade would be different."
The day the boys moved on to junior high, Kyle entered the building with his fingers crossed. Surely, now that they were no longer being held hostage by the accursed place that was South Park Elementary, their lives would have to turn around for the better. The responsibility for dealing with the various supernatural or otherwise highly improbable events which plagued their town would have to shift to younger, more energetic, less jaded (see: gullible) children, while Kyle and his friends could focus dealing with the only slightly less disturbing phenomenon of puberty.
Sadly, cracking voices and peach fuzz turned out to be no guard against the goddess Chaos. South Park was soon invaded by a cult of rabbit-worshipping nutjobs – who had been too extreme for even PETA and had broken off from them – led by none other than Kip, the mutated lab rodent.
Of course, Stan and Kyle were sent as interlocutors, since they clearly had experience dealing with this sort of thing. And, because they sure as hell weren't going to face a bunch of pissed-off eco-terrorists (led by a genetically altered bunny, no less), they dragged Cartman and Kenny along with them.
In the end, all they wanted was for rabbit stew to be taken off the menu of the local diner. Kenny rolled his eyes and mumbled that the negotiation process could have gone a lot quicker had they just said what they wanted to begin with, rather than swarming the town and taking over the mayor's office.
Kenny, of course, didn't think of the repercussions as he poked fun at the gun-toting rabbit.
"Oh my god!" cried Stan a few moments later. "They killed Kenny!" He turned toward Kyle, waiting for the appropriate response.
Kyle, however, just wasn't feeling up to it. "I really thought junior high was gonna be different."
The first day of high school was filled with a sense of foreboding. Kyle entered the building – which, really, was only slightly larger than their junior high had been – accompanied as usual by his three best friends. They went into the auditorium to receive their school-wide welcome from Principal Herbert Garrison (who managed to hunt down some other poor bastard's discarded balls when he decided he really was just a gay man after all).
The boys had only been in ninth grade for fifteen minutes when one of the chairs spontaneously came to life, and ate the unfortunate soul who had been sitting on it (Kenny, of course) before setting the building on fire. It turned out that the chair was none other the shape-shifting Taco-Man alien, who'd crash landed on a warlike planet just one light-year from Marklar and had been held in captivity for three years and forced to participate in gladiator-esque contests. For some strange reason, he blamed South Park for this turn of events, saying that Kyle had apparently underestimated the distance to Marklar, meaning Taco-Man didn't think to refill his fuel tank before he left.
Three days and seven separate government-led emergency responses later, Taco Man was finally carted off to a federal lab somewhere in the New Mexico desert for further tests.
Kyle stepped into the pile of smoldering ash that used to be South Park High's auditorium and looked up, addressing Jehovah directly. "Was it too much to hope that high school would be different?"
Senior year was filled with similar escapades – including one involving Will Smith, the Son of Skuzzlebutt, and a very pissed off Uncle Jimbo – and Kyle resolved himself to the fact that he probably wouldn't be able to escape the bizarreness of South Park until he actually moved away for college, and even then it was probably a tossup.
So it came as no surprise as he and his friends sat among the ruins of the local video store, watching a giant robot slowly melt down until it was nothing but molten lug nuts and scrap metal.
Kyle was nursing his injured arm when Stan offered to "kiss it and make it better." Kyle laughed and said, sure, go for it, not expecting his best friend to actually carry through with the offer. However, he did, and one thing quickly led to another. Before Cartman and Kenny had even noticed what was happening, Kyle had Stan pinned to the asphalt with both hands and was partaking in a rather inappropriate public display of affection. He was caught off guard, however, as Stan started to chuckle uncontrollably.
"What?" Kyle asked defensively, pulling away slightly. "What's so funny?"
"Well," said Stan with a smug expression – at least, as smug as one can look while being forcibly held to the ground by someone noticeably shorter and skinner than oneself – "at least this is different."