After seeing last week's episode, I am forced to acknowledge that the one true Cartman pairing is Cartman/Everyone... boy's gonna follow in his momma's whorish footsteps. Odds of story ending in an orgy are up!
Martyrdom: It's Not For Everyone
02. Dante Could Have Never Fathomed
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"What the fuck was that?"
Kenny is on his knees in his poorly lit bathroom, his head bent under the bathtub faucet and his hand on the knob above him, adjusting the temperature of the water that is gushing out over the back of his skull.
His vulgar exclamation was directed toward Uriel, who is seated on the toilet, watching him. Uriel clears his throat.
"Kenny," he says, trying to sound as regal as someone can sound while sitting on a toilet in a cramped, dingy bathroom, "I think it is time I revealed to you the true reason I am here."
"The other angels voted and kicked you out?" Finally hitting the right combination of hot and cold, Kenny removes his hand from the knob and combs his fingers through his wet hair, washing away the largest chunks of brain and fractured skull. He then goes to work massaging his skin; Kenny is face down, staring straight at the drain, and he digs at his hair with his fingernails until the water swirling down it loses its red tinge.
"No!" Uriel huffs, indignant. "I'm here to protect you."
"Bang up job you're doing, then." Kenny shuts off the water, stands, and towels off. He looks at his reflection above the sink and runs a hand over the back of his head, feeling smooth, unmarred skin.
If Kenny is thankful of anything, it is that no evidence of his continuous deaths is left on his body. He knows that he would look like something slightly less than human by now, if it did.
The nature of how, exactly, Kenny is restored to life has always been odd and inexplicable - even to him. But for your convenience, we will give you two basic laws: 1) it took at the very least a day to come back, usually a week, at the very most a few months; 2) he faded back into the world the way a movie would fade to a new scene, looking as if his death had never occurred - and as far as the world was concerned, it hadn't.
You'll notice we are using the past tense. The nature of Kenny's resurrection changed quite abruptly during his middle school years and, lacking any other explanation, Kenny had always attributed it to puberty. Suddenly, Kenny came back within mere hours of dying, reanimated in the same body, still unblemished but now covered in the gore of his most recent demise. Kenny'd been quite disturbed the first time it happened, when he was shocked to regain consciousness by the highway, blood still in the snow and several pounds of internal organs strewn across his lap.
Kenny threw up, and then Kenny scrambled to his feet and sprinted back to town until his legs were sore. He grabbed hold of a fence post, paying no mind to the barbed wire, and clutched the furiously beating heart under his ribcage that he had seen ripped out in the snow.
Sure, Kenny had died literally hundreds of times before, but he'd never seen the result of death. Death had always been strangely sanitized to him.
Now, he is used to it. While Kenny looks in the mirror, he is only annoyed about getting blood on his shirt.
"Kenny, you're a prophet," Uriel blurts out.
Kenny laughs. "Good one."
"I'm serious!"
"Uriel," Kenny says, stretching his hands out, "look at me." Uriel looks, from the bony frame to the messy hair to the faded, torn, blood-strained clothes. "I barely completed high school and gave up on college after less than a year. I eat fast food for four out of five meals. I probably have more morphine in my system than blood. Do I look like a prophet to you?"
"Well... you are. That's why I'm here. That's why that man shot you. His name in The Mole and-"
"His name is Mole?"
"Well... yes-"
"What sort of sadistic parents name their kid Mole? What, did the condom break and they wanted revenge?"
"It's an alias."
"So he picked it himself? That's even weirder. Why not Cobra? Were all the good names already taken?"
"Kenny, would you please focus? The Catholic Church sent him to eliminate you because of what you mean to 21st century religion."
Kenny snorts. "Uriel, I'm no saint."
"Prophet."
"I'm not that, either! Religious icons are supposed to be, like... virtuous and shit."
"Kenny," Uriel says, placing the tips of his fingers together and looking at him seriously, "you could single-handedly change what every man, woman, and child on this earth thinks of religion. One word from you could send the Buddhists from their temples, Shintoists from their shrines, Muslims from their mosques... and Catholics from their church. And that's not going to fly with Ben Proutly, so he hired someone to get rid of you."
"Who?"
"A very holy man, very invested in the church. He's in line for the Papacy."
"This is fucking stupid," Kenny says.
"It is not! Kenny, you're the last intermediary. You've lived with the numinous on his plane and you perceive the workings of the afterlife more clearly than you do the workings of this life. If ever there was a man deserving of the title Prophet, it is you."
It is true that Kenny knows things about the afterlife that no one else would dream up. He's spoken to God and Satan, seen Heaven and every layer of Hell; Kenny knows that God is a Buddhist, knows that God thinks Pope jokes are very funny, knows that God created the universe one day when he got high; Kenny knows that Hell is less about torturing its residents and more about inconveniencing them, knows that it is a Mecca for intellectuals/singers/writers/philosophers/comedians/playwrights/revolutionaries/activists/innovators, knows that Jagger has no idea how right he was.
"Knock off the thesaurus-speak, Uriel," Kenny says. Uriel pouts. "This IS stupid. What am I going to do, drive around town with a megaphone, shouting the truth to the masses? And why is the Church suddenly coming after me now? And don't they realize killing me is the least efficient way to get rid of me? And if 'protecting' me is so fucking important, why'd they send you?"
You do not see the plot holes. You do not see the plot holes. You do not see the plot holes...
Instead of answering, Uriel tears up. "I'm doing the best that I can! You just don't understand what it's like to be ridiculed whenever you try to offer suggestions..."
Kenny rolls his eyes, tears off some toilet paper and hands it to Uriel, who daps at his eyes and blows his nose. This is, for the record, the correct protocol when you have a biblical figure weeping in your bathroom. We doubt you'll ever be so inconvenienced, but better to be prepared.
"So," Uriel says once he's calmed down, "the Church has found you here. We have to leave."
"But if I miss a mortgage payment, they'll foreclose on my house."
"This is more important!"
Kenny sighs. "Fine. Though I don't see why." You may not, either. That's okay. Confusion whilst reading this is natural, nay, expected. We recommend less thinking.
"Good. Do you have any family you could stay with?"
Obliviously not, as we explained in Preamble. Kenny snorts and Uriel says, "Oh, right. What about friends?"
"I don't have any friends."
"Everyone has friends."
"You don't."
Uriel gets teary again but manages to compose himself. "There must be someone."
"I have a dealer."
"Um..."
"Craig's all right. Of course, once I crashed at his house and woke up to find him frisking me... he said he was trying to steal my wallet, but everyone knows I never have any cash."
"Um... How about old friends from school?" Uriel suggests.
Kenny's face screws up. Cartman is dead (he assumes, but you and we know better) and Kyle... he does not want to see Kyle. They experienced a falling-out the last year of high school, which Kenny refers to as The Broflovski/McCormick Split, Version 2.0. Okay, so they'd never been best friends the way their dads had, but Kyle liked hanging out with Kenny because they could do all the things Stan was morally opposed to, like drugs and graffiti and ditching school, and Kenny liked hanging out with Kyle because he thought he was a genuinely cool dude. But then senior year rolled around, and family pressure got to him, and he completely blew Kenny off because he was a "bad influence."
"There's Stan," Kenny finally says. "He gave me his phone number and address when he moved to L.A., but I haven't heard from him in a year."
"To Los Angeles, then!" Uriel declares, standing up and whacking his head on the cabniet above the toilet. He clutches his head and says "God Damn it!" and Kenny smirks.
"Didn't know archangels were allowed to talk like that."
Uriel coughs. "We'll travel by the fastest means possible."
"FedEx?"
"... Okay, the second fastest means possible. One employed by messengers on the next plane to travel from Heaven to Hell with only a little jet lag."
"... An airline for angels."
"Well, yes, if you want to take all the magic out of it."
Unfortunately, Uriel doesn't consider that Kenny's mortal body isn't equipped to handle this sort of travel, and his body is in shreds five minutes into the journey. Uriel is stuck trying to explain to the woman in customs why he's lugging around a corpse.