Hello, South Park! Yeah, another super-short from the maniacal mind of Mayflower - fear for your lives. Like my last one-shot, I had to debate for a long time as to whether or not I should post this, but hey, who would I be to deny my readers anything, even if my stuff sucks? :D Regardless, I think it turned out alright - there's a serious intro for fans of the serious stuff, there's a South-Park-style ending of epic WTF-just-happened for fans of the comedy. Anyway, I'll keep my rambles short. Enjoy!

LAWYERBOT SAYS: "Stop making me defend South Park!"
South Park, both the city and all of its inhabitants (c) Comedy Central
Comedy Central (c) Trey Parker and Matt Stone

All characters and events in this fanfiction, even those based on real people, are entirely fictional.
The following story contains coarse language, and due to its content, should not be read by anybody.

CONTINUITY WARNING:The following fanfiction takes place somewhere over the course of episode 1508, "Ass Burgers". You may want to familiarize yourself with the events of this episode before reading. Or don't - what do I know, it might make the story more fun if you have no idea what's going on.

I am going to KILL him.

I disappear from school for two days, and what happens? Stan becomes a fuckin' alcoholic. Alright, granted - probably should've seen it coming. I mean, Stan's always been kind of an ass and an emo kid, and Stan's dad and uncle take the cake for...well, second-worst drinkers in town. (The McCormicks will always and forever hold THAT crown.)

I'm still gonna kill him, though.

He's been to my house. He's seen what it's done to my parents. Hell, he's seen what it's done to his own fucking dad! I don't care how depressed and fucked up he is, you'd THINK he'd figure something - ANYTHING - out instead. Sure, I ain't preaching to a choir, I know I'm a deadbeat and a druggie and a perv and have my fair share of booze every once in a while. But that's just it - I don't have shit to live for, I'm just here as a fuckin' prop. Stan's got a hell of a life - captain of the football team, smart, knows what he wants in life, has a girlfriend (sometimes)...I mean, I'd fuckin' kill for a life like that. And he's gonna throw it all away on a bottle of cheap whiskey? All because he's a little bummed out?

Yep, I'm gonna kill him.

xxx

I eventually found the bastard stumbling around the streets late at night, singing...well, something that probably would've been recognizable if he were sober. His hair was messed up like crazy, even underneath his poofball hat, and there was a huge stain down the front of his jacket. (Probably spilled booze from missing his mouth.)

"Stanley Marsh, what the fuck do you think you're doing?" Yeah, I sound like his mother, but hey, I listen when I hear Mom shriek 'Kenneth McCormick', drunk off my ass or not.

Stan looked up...kind of. "KENNY!" he giggled, stumbling over and throwing his arms around me. Now I have a pretty tough stomach for the smell of booze, but dear God, if it were anyone else, they'd be contact-drunk. Jesus. "Kenny, where have you been? I thought you died!"

"Stan, shut up and snap out of it!" I growled, pushing him off of me. "Dude, look at yourself! What the fuck?"

"Aw, come off it, Kenny," Stan laughed, giving me one of those "I'm drunk, that means I could take you" shoves on the shoulder. "Life's a party, buddy! Come on, chill out!" He stuck his bottle into my face, almost smashing it into my nose. "Wanna drink? I know you wanna drink, dude!"

"No, I don't wanna drink, dude!" I snapped, fighting to push the bottle away. (The one time my hood comes in handy - I think Stan would've broken one of my teeth if my mouth were exposed.) "Stan, put the booze down for a second and look at yourself. What got into you? What are you thinking?"

"Kyle doesn't love me anymore!" Stan sobbed out of nowhere, taking another swig of whiskey. "I don't know what to do with myself, Kenny!"

"You could start by getting rid of this!" I snapped, wrestling the bottle from his hands. "Stan, you're better than this! You're supposed to find me stumbling around drunk in the alleys, not the other way around!"

"Kenny, I need that!" Stan growled suddenly, clawing wildly to get his bottle back. "Life doesn't suck anymore! I don't want to go back! I need to convince everyone that we're in the Matrix!"

Beautiful, we crossed off 'stumbling', 'slurring', 'sloppy drunk', 'happy drunk', 'crying drunk', 'angry drunk', and 'what the fuck are you talking about drunk' in about five minutes. Stan's one drunk assault away from landing himself in rehab. "Stan, stop it! Just stop it! This isn't making your life better - it's making it worse and you know it!"

"Shut up, Kenny, you don't know me!" he cried, taking another long drink of his whiskey when he dragged it out of my hands.

"Stan, I'm one of your best friends!" I screamed, slamming him up against the nearest wall I could find - ANYTHING to make him shut up and listen. (I learned pretty quick that the only way to get a drunk to listen was to scream and beat the shit out of them.) "I know you better than you know yourself right now! I know that you've got a great fuckin' life, and there's no reason for you to be fucking drinking! I know Wendy would KILL herself if she saw this! I know you've always said you're not gonna turn into your fucking dad, but look at what's happened!"

"Shut up, Kenny!" he cried again, wrestling himself loose. "God-dammit, I'm not a drunk!"

"You are, so!"

"AM NOT!"

"ARE SO!"

CRASH!

Alright, cross 'assault' off of the list. My first reaction was that I'm way too used to taking a broken, half-filled booze bottle to the side of the head, but then the sharp stabs of glass and burning of alcohol in a fresh wound and all of that other screaming agony kicked in soon enough. I dropped Stan, then barely felt him trip and stumble over me right before I blacked out.

"Stan, what the fuck? What did you do?"

"Lookit, I killed Kenny! Heh...Aw, I'm sucha bastard..."

xxx

I killed Kenny.

I killed Kenny.

I. KILLED. KENNY.

Hangover or not, I could barely get those three words out of my head. I can't remember a single fuckin' other thing that happened yesterday (though I woke up to a few hints as I puked them all over the floor), but for some reason, that one minute still comes through nice and clear. Kenny screaming at me in the streets, me screaming back, taking the whiskey bottle and smashing it into his head, seeing all of the glass slice his face open, laughing about how I got to kill Kenny when Kyle found me...

Dear God, I killed Kenny. If I hadn't already puked three times, I'd probably be upchucking at the thought. I KILLED one of my best friends. ON PURPOSE. And it wasn't even quick and painless - I smashed glass into his brain and left him to bleed on the street.

"Stan, you okay?"

I practically tumbled out of my bed, totally caught off-guard by Kyle's voice. When I looked up, I saw the guys at my door - Mom must have let them in. "What're you guys doin' here?"

"We're here to check on you, dude - you were seriously fucked up last night," Kyle pointed out.

"Yeah, you look like hell, Marsh, ain' gonna lie," Cartman added in with a laugh.

"No shit I look like hell!" I panicked. "I killed Kenny last night, of COURSE I look like hell!"

"...Dude, how drunk WERE you last night?"

"Yeah, Stan, I'm standing right here."

Wow. In all of my freaking out about killing Kenny, I barely noticed the orange parka hiding out behind Kyle. He waved when I looked his direction, as if glad to see that I acknowledged him, but I was just dumbfounded. Didn't I KILL him last night? "But I...and he...and there was...with the thing and..."

"Look, Stan, maybe we'll just let you stay in bed," Kyle said nervously. "You're probably still buzzed from last night."

"No, I'm not, I swear!" I clamored.

"Yea, you weren't drunk last night 'n Kenny's a zombie," Cartman joked. Kenny added to it by lumbering towards Cartman with his arms outstretched, grumbling something about brains.

...Come to think of it, my head was pounding pretty bad. Maybe I was just drunk-imagining things or something. "Alright, I guess you guys are right."

"Just stay in bed and relax, okay, man? Seriously, you're getting more and more fucked up by the day," Kyle tsked, heading out the door.

"Kahl, when're you gonna start bein' a drunk asshole so we can kick you out of the group?" Cartman asked, following close behind.

"In your dreams, fat-ass!"

Cartman and Kyle's bickers echoed down the hall, and Kenny went to follow.

...Only to stop and shut the door in front of him, then turn back towards me, pulling off his hood - he only did that when he really wanted to be heard. "You remember?"

"Remember what?"

"Us fighting in the alley. You bashing my brains out with the whiskey bottle before you passed out on top of Kyle."

My hungover brain took a second to process what Kenny was saying. "Wait, wait, wait - that actually happened?"

"Oh, it happened, dude," he nodded, sitting down on the edge of my bed. "It happened a hundred and four times, actually. This is the first one you remember."

"A hundred and four? B-But I don't...I didn't...Okay, wait, one of us is drunk right now, who is it?"

"Well, it's definitely not me, and I'm hoping it's not you."

"Kenny, be serious!" (I mean, the lack of hood was already his way of being serious, but whatever.) "I-I mean, if I actually, like...really..."

"Killed me?"

"How are you still alive?" I finally spat out.

"Same way as always - through some kind of black magic curse that I can only hope to understand." He shrugged that off WAY too casually.

"Kenny, you're talking crazy," I laughed nervously. "Y-You can't seriously be back from the dead, y-you're just messing with me, right?"

"Stan, you remember," Kenny demanded...almost a little desperately. "I know you do. Don't take this away from me, I've finally gotten someone on my side! Someone finally realizes that I'm not just bullshitting about Mysterion being immortal - granted, it's my best friend turned to drink after a spiraling depression at ten fuckin' years old, but I'm taking what I can get!"

Suddenly, it clicked. He's done this a hundred and four times before? Let's make it a hundred and five. "...Prove it."

"What?"

"If you REALLY came back from the dead, and I REALLY didn't dream that up, prove it."

Kenny gave a sharp sigh, then got up. "First off, you can't dream when you're drunk - it's that weird science no one can figure out, but you read about on Snapple caps. Second..." He opened up my window and stood up on the windowsill, pulling his Mysterion handgun out of his pocket and pointing it at his temple, right where I broke a whiskey bottle over his head the other night. "Get dressed and meet me in my room. If you remember this, I'll see you there and have my proof. If you don't, this conversation never happened."

"Kenny, what are you doing?"

"My room, as soon as you can, got it?"

"I got it, I got it!"

Bang! He pulled the trigger, then fell backwards and crash-landed in my front yard, spilling his brains all over the muddy snow waiting for him.

"Oh, my God, Kenny!" I shrieked, running to the window - as if he would be alright after that. "You bastard!"

...Wow. Kyle and I say that a lot, don't we?

For a second, I didn't know what to do, but then it came to me - get dressed, run to the McCormicks. If Kenny wasn't crazy, he'd be there. If he was, well...I definitely had some explaining to do to his parents.

xxx

"Oh, hey, Stanley...what's up?"

"Hi, is...Kenny home?"

Mrs. McCormick stretched with a groan, rubbing the hangover from her eyes. "Yeah, he's upstairs, sleepin' - go bug 'im, he needs ta get up anyway."

Sleeping? He was at my house twenty minutes ago. I'm pretty sure I ran by his corpse on my way out the door. Jesus, maybe Kenny WAS being serious! Mrs. McCormick stumbled back to the couch, where she was probably sleeping when I started knocking, and I headed upstairs to Kenny's room.

...Well, I'll be damned. There he was, curled up in his bed, dead asleep, face hidden by a freshly-washed parka hood. Not a spot of blood anywhere, no sign of a bullet wound or bottle to the head.

"Kenny? You alright?" I asked quietly (though it was a little being scared and a little still having a migraine).

Kenny groaned, shuffling a bit before cracking his eyes open. "Stan, you're here!" he jumped, bolting out of bed upon seeing me.

"Yeah, but I didn't just shoot myself and fall out of a second-story window!" I pointed out. "How the fuck, dude?"

Kenny shrugged. "Long story?"

I fell back on his bed. "Well, you finally have my attention - get talking."

xxx

I told him everything. My very first time dying when Frosty tried to take over South Park, saving the world from Satan when Kyle's mom shot up Terrance and Phillip, the PSP war, going missing after turning into a vegetable, all of the research I had been doing ever since BP summoned Cthulu during our superhero phase...

Every last death. Every single painful, agonizing, rat-feeding explosion, shredding, shooting, stabbing, and whatever else South Park's thrown at me. God, it felt SO good to get all of that out of my system.

And it felt even better that Stan would remember this tomorrow.

"But there's one thing I don't get, dude," Stan said after a pause when I finished rambling.

"Only one?"

"Ignoring all of the obvious stuff. Why am I the only one who caught it? And why now?"

"I think Cartman knows," I frowned. He's definitely mentioned it before, but everyone else probably blew it off as a joke. "But he just ignores it. As for why you, why now, I don't know, dude."

Stan was quiet for a while, like he was thinking about something. (I gave him his silence - thinking after drinking is damn near impossible.) "The Cynic Society," he finally said.

"Come again?"

"I got caught by these guys the other day - they're working out of the Asperger's Center," Stan explained. "They're the Secret Society of Cynics - according to them, the entire world's fucked up, but nobody notices it most of the time. Only the cynics see the world for the bullshit it really is."

"And?"

"I got diagnosed with being a cynical asshole last week. You haven't died since then, have you?"

"Not counting yesterday and today, no."

"Exactly. What's the difference between the last time you died and right now?"

"The fact that you're a cynical asshole?"

"Exactly! I finally see the world for the bullshit that it really is! And one of the bullshit things that I didn't notice before was the fact that you're constantly dying!"

...It all made sense. Of course! "Alright, Stan - we're goin' to the Cynic Society."

xxx

Yesterday, I really hated these guys. I could've sworn that they were just another crack-ass, bull-shit South Park idiocy, thrown at me for no good reason other than to make my life miserable.

Now they might be the key to figuring out a curse my best friend's had on his shoulders for years.

"Hey, guys?" I called into the room timidly, guiding Kenny inside. "I...brought a friend today."

Everyone looked up. "IT'S THE ORANGE PARKA, RUN!" the leader shrieked, causing everyone to scream spastically and run in circles.

"HEY, HEY, HEY!" I snapped. "What the fuck, guys?"

"You found the orange parka!" one of the agents whimpered from behind a flipped table. "The orange parka is the matrix's bringer of death - misfortune follows wherever it goes! We could all get blown to hell at any second!"

"Oh, come on!" Kenny whined.

"Waitwaitwait," I interrupted. "You guys KNOW?"

"Of course we KNOW - we know everything those devilish bastards are up to," the lead cynic answered, shaking his fist at the sky. "Your friend in the orange parka is their personal scapegoat - every time they want a laugh, they kill him, then revive him in a few hours so they can do it again later."

"Who's 'they'?"

The cynic leader dramatically turned towards the window, the bright Colorado sunlight lighting up his sunglasses. "The creators of the matrix."

xxx

Alright, let's be fair - I have a history of doing really stupid things that get me killed. It's practically in my blood. So when the cynic society sends us on a test run of a matrix escape portal that they designed, I wasn't exactly that scared. (I mean, Stan warned that they could still be a bunch of drunken idiots, but hey, I've dealt with those one too many times before.)

"You sure we should be doing this, Kenny?" Stan asked yet again.

"Dude, you heard them," I pointed out yet again. "They know what's going on. I need to figure out what's behind this once and for all - I can't just walk away!"

"Easy for you to say," Stan tsked quietly. "You'll just pop back to your room if this kills us."

"Yeah, but at the same time, it's a lot more likely that I'm going to die than you."

"...Yeah, I guess that's true."

"Alright, boys, this should drop you off directly into the headquarters of the great creators," the leader's voice rang in over the intercom as the crap, rickety portal in front of us fired up. "Get in, find what you're looking for, and get out - they're capable of things much greater than you can hope to comprehend."

Once the portal started fully running, it lit up the room with an eerie bluish-gray glow. "Godspeed, boys," the leader came on again. "You'll need it."

"...Stan, if you're scared, I can take it from here," I pointed out, my vigilante background kicking in when I saw the look on his face.

Stan swallowed heavily, then shook his head. "No, I have to know what's going on just as much as you do."

"Then let's go?"

"Yeah, let's go."

Stan's glove grabbed mine (and you could tell how scared he was by how tight he was holding on), and I led the way as we jumped into the portal.

xxx

The ride was HORRIBLE. Matrix-y G-forces were pulling us every which way, and there were ghosts and zombies and evil chanting and James Hetfield in the background - it was a nightmare. (Kenny seemed less bothered, but after I noticed, I remembered he mentioned going through something similar after lighting himself on fire and having his heart replaced with a potato after we saw Asses of Fire.)

Finally, the portal dropped us (...literally) on the floor of a small meeting room, next to a table filled with a bunch of conversing adults all talking about Mexicans.

And when we dropped in, they all stopped to stare at us.

The two in the front of the room, one with messy black hair kinda like mine, the other with a blonde Jew-fro not unlike Kyle's, looked especially horrified. "My God, they found us," the older noirette gasped.

"I told you leaving the cynic society in South Park was a bad idea!" the blonde snapped, throwing his stack of papers at his partner.

"Well, then we'll just have to go back and add to the last episode to make sure they get slaughtered in some kind of ridiculous battle at the end!" the noirette argued.

"WAIT, HOLD ON!" I snapped, getting everyone's attention. "What's going on here? Are you two the creators of the matrix?"

The two heads of staff looked at each other nervously. "Uhm...no, of course not," the noirette chuckled. "I'm Trey, that's Matt, and we...uh..."

"You're the assholes that are constantly sending things to kill me!" Kenny snapped, jumping up on their table to get face-to-face with them. "What the fuck? Do you think it's funny? Do you get some kind of sick laugh out of it?"

"Trey, they're onto us!" Matt cried. "Do something!"

Thinking fast, Trey doodled a picture of Kenny with his head exploding on the giant wipeboard...And then Kenny's head exploded, right before a bunch of rats rats climbed out from under the table and started gnawing on his corpse.

"Oh, my God, you killed Kenny!" I couldn't help but shriek. (Jesus, is it really this much of a catch-phrase?) "You-"

"Us bastards, yeah, yeah, we got it," Trey interrupted. "We've only done it a hundred-and-six times."

"But...why? How could you do that?"

Matt scoffed. "Kenny's a prop - who cares, he'll just turn up again later."

"Besides, we kind of stopped," Trey defended. "I mean, apart from the Coon arc, it's been forever since Kenny died."

"So how long have you guys been doing this?" My head was spinning - how much control over South Park did these guys have?

"Fifteen years-ish?" Matt shrugged.

"Look, Stan, this isn't the-" Trey started.

"How do you know my name? Who are you guys? How did you make Kenny's head explode?"

"Stan, you can't handle the truth!" Trey snapped. "It's just too much!"

"Try me!" I shot back, jumping up on the table (carefully stepping over Kenny's corpse) and staring them down myself. "I can take it - I'm with the cynic society! I can see all of the world's bullshit for what it is!"

"Stan, there IS no cynic society," Trey explained. "We were tired at the halfway point of the last season, and there was a lot of crappy stuff in the world for us to make social commentary on, so we took it out on you."

"...Social commentary?"

"Yeah - South Park's a TV show, and you, Cartman, Kyle, and Kenny are the main characters. It's a pop-political-social satire, it's just us using you guys to make fun of stuff."

"And it's awesome," Matt added with a chuckle.

I was dumbfounded. Really? All of the bullshit, even from way back in third grade when South Park started getting weird...it was just these two assholes using us to entertain people? My entire life - EVERYONE'S entire life - it was all a lie.

The cynics were right. We ARE stuck in a matrix.

"Now get back to South Park," Trey commanded, getting up and continuing to doodle on the wipeboard. "Don't worry, at the end of this drinking arc, everything's going to go back to normal and no one will ever mention anything about it ever again."

"Wait, what? B-But-!"

Unfortunately, before I could start arguing, I saw what Trey was doodling - it was me getting sucked into another portal. And, of course, one appeared right under my feet as soon as I saw it, sending me hurtling back to South Park.

xxx

Stan rejoined with Kenny upon returning to South Park, and after retelling the whole story, the two decided to take a walk.

"Wow, that's pretty heavy shit, dude," Kenny said quietly, still trying to process the idea that there really was an omnipowerful god that killed him just for shits and giggles.

"I can't believe it, dude," Stan groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I mean, life just seems so meaningless now, y'know? Nothing really matters, I'm not going to accomplish anything - I'm just doomed to grow up in this twisted matrix and live my life making an idiot out of myself for others. What are we supposed to do now?"

"Nothing."

"...Wait, what?"

"We don't have to do anything," Kenny repeated. "We just gotta keep livin', y'know? You can't make your own destiny - sometimes it's just handed to you, and that's what you have to work with."

"...Yeah, I guess."

"So should we go find Kyle and Cartman? The two probably ended up murdering each other while we were gone."

"Actually, I want a drink. ...Make that a lot of drinks."

"...Y'know what, fuck it, so do I - I'll join ya."

Hey, hope you guys enjoyed! I promise, my next story will be a little longer and a little more serious. (Warning, I have a history of not keeping promises.) Thanks for reading!

§ Tucker's Mayflower, signing off! §