Disclaimer: BLARG! No more of these, I say!
Chapter 2: Dysfunction Junction, What's Your Malfunction? (A.k.a. Meeting the Family)
The girl stared down at Antonio's prone form, aghast. "Oh no, I killed him!" She'd barely made her hyperbolic diagnosis before flying down to the floor, looking torn between bursting into tears and fleeing the scene, large eyes whirring madly in their sockets as they glanced from Antonio to Abel to Laura before finally coming to rest on her brothers.
"Look, I'm pretty sure that dad's fine-Began the shorter of the two, but she had already gone rigid, a look of desperation in her eyes.
"No," she murmured quietly. "There's only one solution…" The girl lowered her gaze towards the floor, fringe momentarily shadowing her eyes. Suddenly, she flung her head up, revealing the hollow, deadened expression on her wan face. "I must eliminate all witnesses of my crime," she said tonelessly before stepping towards the understandably freaked out Abel and Laura, claws raised and triangular teeth bared.
Before she could commence with the witness-elimination, she was stopped by the timely landing of her brothers, who proceeded to gently cuff her upside the head with thong sandals that they had apparently summoned out of nowhere.
"No, bad Priscila! No killing random bystanders!" The taller, dread-locked teen reprimanded.
Priscila let out a whimper. "Aww," she said sadly, and received another whack courtesy of her shorter, wavy-haired brother.
"You need to apologise to the humans," he added, pointing at the seemingly frozen Laura and Abel.
Looking embarrassed at her faux pas, Priscila turned towards the two of them, blushing. "I'm sorry! I got scared because I thought I gave my dad a heart attack-that's happened to some people when I've appeared out of nowhere-And I didn't wanna get taken away on involuntary manslaughter charges in a foreign country! I mean, have you ever seen the show Locked Up Abroad? But really, I just lost sight of myself for a minute, I wouldn't really have killed you, so please, don't call the police and-She blinked curiously upon catching sight of the blank look on Abel's face. "Oh no, I killed this guy, too!" Priscilla wailed.
Laura chose that moment to snap out of her stupor. "Oh, he's not dead," she assured Priscilla. "He's gone into what I like to call a paedo-fugue." Looking disgusted, she jerked her thumb towards Abel, who was still staring intently at Priscila, who merely looked confused. "Ugh," Laura grumbled, palming her forehead. "If I were to give him a CT-scan right now, I'd be arrested on charges of child porn…" Face set in a glare; she reached over and slapped the back of her brother's head, snapping him back to reality.
Glowering at her, Abel rubbed the spot where she'd struck him. "What the hell was that for?"
"For being a dirty paedophile."
"Hey, I'm an ephebophile. Get it right."
"I reiterate: Ew."
"Excuse me for liking them younger."
"I'll excuse my hand upside your head."
"How kind of you. Do you see me knocking your preference in bed mates?"
"Hm, let's see…Oh yeah, every fucking minute since I first introduced you to Antonio."
While the two of them continued to bicker, Priscila turned towards her brothers. "Pst," she whispered. "Carlos, Enrique, grab dad while they're distracted!"
Nodding, the two of them grabbed Antonio, Carlos taking his arms and Enrique his legs before pushing themselves into the air with a mighty flap of their wings and hauling him up between them, Antonio's head striking the floor with a thud as it bounced back and forth due to a lack of proper support.
"Damn it Carlos, grab his head!" Enrique chastised. "You're gonna give him a case of adult-onset shaken baby syndrome!" He added irritably.
Momentarily forgetting that he was holding onto his father, Carlos released his hold on Antonio's arms in order to flip his brother the bird with both hands. "Sit on my fingers and rotate, Enrique," he snapped. "Why don't you grab dad's head instead of bitching at me to do it?!"
"That…Has a bit of a double meaning," Priscila noted, looking rather uncomfortable.
Carlos' eyes widened in realisation of his accidental double-entendre. "Ugh, fucking gross!" He shouted.
"Way to get me thinking of dad's junk," Enrique added in a flat voice, letting go of Antonio's ankles as though he were made of hot iron.
Antonio, who hitherto had been hanging upside down in mid-air like an oddly-shaped disco ball whilst suspended by his ankles, fell like a rock at roughly the speed of smell and hit the ground with a loud, fleshy thump where he lay sprawled in a tangled pile of limbs like so much unstrung puppet, still unconscious, most likely due to all of the minor head injuries he'd just received in the past several minutes.
Enrique ran a hand through his hair, frowning when Abel and Laura turned away from their argument in order to stare in his direction. "Uhm…Hi," he attempted. "We're here to, uh…"
"Conduct a survey," Carlos continued smoothly. "We're here from the local university's sociology department to…" Having used up the last vestige of his cock and bull supply, Carlos gave what he hoped was a subtle version of the capricious little hand wave that was the universal symbol for 'help, I've run out of bullshit.'
"Uh…Test the effect of nudity upon strangers?" Priscila finished.
Silence reigned as the undisputed king of the next few moments; the tense atmosphere shattered mere moments later by a very loud, very contrived sneeze from Abel. When everyone turned to stare at him, he shrugged their questioning gazes away, drawling "Sorry about that; I'm allergic to bullshit." He shoved his hands into his pockets and nodded towards Antonio's unconscious figure. "What do you want with my sister's idiot fiancée, anyway? You planning on sacrificing him or eating him or what?" Abel asked disinterestedly while Laura gasped in the background.
Enrique's eyes thinned into slits. "Oi, we don't eat people!" He said indignantly.
"Yeah," Carlos added, "we're just here to meet our dad! And maybe visit the nearest Red Light district…"
Laura, who hitherto had been silent, shoved past Abel, who muttered something unintelligible under his breath at her when he was almost sent pitching over the dining table. "Your…your dad?" She asked weakly.
Priscila nodded, barrel curls flopping about her face and hands folded towards her chest. "We didn't mean to cause any trouble. And I'm really sorry about your dishes, Mister Tall Spiky and Scowling; I'll give you the money for them, I swear," she told Abel, who stroked his jaw thoughtfully at her offer.
Seeing the wheels in his head churning, Laura once again reached over to dope slap him, this time hard enough to almost send him careening forward.
"The fuck was that for?" Abel grunted.
Laura shot him a withering glare that would have sent him to a penis-stabbed grave if looks were indeed capable of killing. "I know that look of yours," she hissed. "It's the look that says 'I'm going to get a better deal out of this, and by better deal, I mean acquaint my wing-wong with this underage girl's hoo-ha."
Abel shook his head in disgust at her summary of his intentions. "Wing-wong? Hoo-ha? Seriously? You've condensed-incorrectly, by the way-the contents of my mind in such a way that a four-year-old would laugh at it." He slouched against the wall, looking suddenly bored. "Besides, this isn't about me. This is about the fact that your Latin lover currently snogging the floor over there has three illegitimate children that are apparently the result of a union between him and a goat," he said flatly.
"Oh yeah." Stepping over Antonio, Laura planted her hands on her hips and gave the three teens a bright, disarming smile. "So," she said casually, "I'm Laura, your father's fiancée. The pervert currently entertaining highly illegal thoughts over there in the corner is my older brother, Abel. What are you kids' names?"
The three of them looked uncertainly at one another before Priscila and Carlos grabbed Enrique and shoved him to the front. "Why am I the proxy?" He complained as his siblings continued to push him towards Laura.
"You're the oldest," Carlos told him.
"The tall man watches me," Priscila whispered, looking rather frightened. "
Carlos scratched his head. "Huh. He does kinda have the look of a skull fucker, doesn't he?" He wondered aloud, cringing when he found himself the newest recipient of Abel's glare.
Enrique slapped his forehead and groaned. "Ugh. Priscila, stop being creeper-bait. Seriously, you have sexual harassment victim written all over you. And Carlos, let go of the skull fucking already. Until I see someone shove their dick into someone's eye socket and start pumping away like a jack hammer, it doesn't exist. God."
Turning to Laura, he said "Hi. We're Enrique, Carlos, and Priscila. No surname available in any human languages. Fifteen years ago we were conceived by our mother fucking that guy currently lying on the floor-our mum's a succubus, by the way-while he was drunk on a holiday in the Caribbean. Nine months later, we fell out of her cervix in the order that I gave our names in, were raised by our mother until our Alufiend-that's succubus and human male spawn, for the record-puberty, and told to seek out her baby daddy in order to decide whether we're gonna stick with the dark orgy of madness that is living in the monster realm or live in the slightly less dark orgy of madness that is the human world. Either way, as vulnerable teens, we're pretty much fucked. Anyway, we derive our energy from sex, holy objects don't work on us, we're actually Catholics, not Satanists, and we have no known food allergies. Whether or not we're available for parties and bar/bat mitvahs depends on your definition of 'tricks.' Thank you and good night."
Laura pulled out a chair, threw herself into it, and crossed her legs, ignoring the sound of Abel's fury that she'd once again defiled his floorboards. Wearing her best psychologist face, she pulled out a notepad from the pocket of her jumper. "Okay. I've honestly heard stranger stories. So, you're my fiancée's illegitimate…Alufiends, is that right?"
Upon receiving nods of confirmation, Laura scribbled the word down onto her notepad, underlining it several times. "All righty, then. Alufiend children. Honestly, the fact that he has children I previously didn't know about is all right, albeit not ideal; I like children and teens, albeit not to the unhealthy extent that a certain someone-Here she shot Abel a dirty look-does." Laura leaned forward, looking somewhat nervous. "My main concern is, and please don't be offended, but…Does your mother still have feelings for Antonio? Please, it's something that I need to know for my own well-being."
Enrique, Carlos, and Priscila all gave one another side-long glances while letting out the occasional cough.
"Er…"
"Yeah…"
"Uhm…"
"Our mother has about as much feelings for our father as she would a turkey baster full of semen. So I'm gonna have to go with no," Carlos volunteered.
Laura blinked. "Wait, so any feelings she might have towards him are relegated to the amount of affection one would feel towards an anonymous sperm donor?"
Carlos smiled at the look of surprise on her face. "Yeah, human men are pretty much just walking talking refrigerators/sperm banks for most succubae, to be honest. I mean sure, you get the occasional inter-species marriage, but that's the exception to the norm. Mostly, it's just a wild but emotionally derelict bout of slap and tickle, emphasis on the slap," he said informatively, as though he were giving a lecture at a university.
An expression of the utmost joy came over Laura's face, and she leaped to her feet, grabbed the three confused teenagers, and began to spin them around in circles like a malfunctioning waltzer.
"Oh, thank God!" She cried happily. "I thought I was going to have to stage a gladiatorial-style fight to the death with your mum over Antonio! Or at least be one of those horribly resentful step-mothers who treat her husband's children from a prior relationship with thinly veiled contempt due to insecurity and petty jealousy!"
"Why are people so fucking weird?" Enrique muttered as he struggled to keep himself from reviewing his lunch menu all over Laura's blouse.
"Yeah, mud wrestling would've been way hotter…You know, if our mother wasn't involved," Carlos quickly tacked on. He and Enrique fell silent, waiting for Priscila's two cents, and when it never came, the two of them grew concerned. Their anxiety spiked when a cursory glance revealed that not only was she no longer caught up in Laura's death grip along with them, but Abel, whom his own sister had decried as a creeper, was also no longer in the vicinity.
"Uhm, Miss," Carlos began.
"Please, call me Laura!"
"Yeah, uh, Laura…Priscila's gone. So is your brother. Also, you're spinning around two naked teenage boys. Just thought I should throw that out there."
Immediately, Laura stopped spinning, releasing the two from her hold. "Oh," she said. "I'll have to find you some trousers." She raised a finger into the air. "But that'll come later…One moment please."
Walking over to Antonio, she hefted him up by his collar, rolling her eyes at still finding him to be unconscious.
"Mm, yeah. Yeah Laura. Pour…Pour that confectioner's sugar all over those stroopwafels, you beautiful lady that I'll be marrying soon," Antonio muttered in-between snores.
Enrique and Carlos' faces took on the expression of someone who's just been hit in the balls with a sack full of concrete.
"…What the…I don't even…What?" Enrique muttered to himself as he stared at his father with something akin to the sort of dumbfounded amazement that one might give to a giant octopus tentacle suddenly bursting through the wall and murdering everyone in a grotesque display of kill-fucking.
Carlos placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. "It's okay," he assured his brother, "I'm wondering all sorts of weird shit too right now. Things that were never meant to be. This must be what being a cartoonist feels like," he added, sounding awed.
"I think we can all agree that we'll never speak of this again," Laura told them before lowering her lips to Antonio's ear and clearing her throat several times.
"Ahem. There is a fifty percent chance that your long-lost teenage daughter is about to get her garden watered by a man thirteen years her senior. Who also happens to be your future brother-in-law. The other fifty percent still probably involves his penis, and fuck you for making me mention my brother's penis. Think about that for a moment."
Less than a second later, Antonio had jumped to a standing position, albeit with his eyes still half-closed. "Mm. Teenage daughter. Brother in-law. Thinly veiled innuendo. Uh-uh." He swayed on his feet several times before his eyes snapped open, bulging from their sockets. "Oh. OH." Antonio's face twisted into an expression reminiscent of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream before he knocked aside several chairs in his mad sprint towards the staircase.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ! DON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE I DID!"
Carlos and Enrique glanced at one another as Laura took off as well, eyebrows raised bemusedly.
"You know, I resent being called a mistake," Carlos grumbled.
Enrique nodded fervently. "Yeah, mum always calls us her happy little accidents. And why're they freaking out over that Abel guy's tonsil tickler, anyway?"
Carlos shrugged. "Must be a human thing, worrying about other people's junk."
Xxxxxx
The pages of the newspaper crackled as Abel, slouched cross-legged in an overstuffed chair positioned beside his bed, turned to the weather forecast section before jerking his head towards his bathroom door. "You done in there?" He called dispassionately.
"No," Priscila said.
"What's taking so long?"
"I don't know how to put on clothes."
Abel rolled his eyes upwards, mouthing the words "Aunt Greet's back fat, Aunt Greet's back fat," for a full five minutes before he managed to regain his bearings. Inhaling deeply, he strode towards the bathroom door and turned the knob.
Much to his consternation, Priscila was just as naked as she'd been ten minutes ago, which was bad enough in itself. Worse, however, was the fact that she was for some reason more interested in the contents of his medicine cabinets than in the pile of clothing that he'd instructed her to put on earlier and which was still neatly folded on top of the toilet tank.
"Hello Mister Pointy Hair," she greeted him without ever turning around from her inquisition of his toiletries.
Abel ran a hand through his aforementioned hair, more than a bit bothered at her lack of ability to clothe herself, and not too chuffed with the nickname, either.
"Put down the electric nostril groomer and come over here," he ordered, forcing himself to look up at the ceiling rather than at the nude teen frolicking around his bathroom.
Priscila quite literally bounced towards him as her wings fluttered with the exertion of keeping her air-bound.
…Fuck my life. "Okay," Abel said aloud, "if you can't dress yourself, I suppose I'll just have to dress you." Shit, my man-tackle can be used as a coat tree right now. "Lift your arms, please." Down Little Abe, jail bait equals prison time in real life…
Staring steadfastly at everything but the naked girl, he tossed the clothes on her at random, careful to avoid touching anything that might alert child services before stepping back to admire his handiwork. "…Godverdomme."
All of his work had been for nought. The shirt was only half-way on, the lower half bunched over her still-exposed breasts whilst the upper half was somehow covering her mouth, and nose and the shorts were perched at a jaunty angle on her head. Moreover, with her wings being obstructed by the shirt, Priscila had been rendered unable to fly and had fallen into a graceless heap on the floor. Combined with the look of discomforted bemusement on the visible parts of her face, the overall effect was simultaneously pathetic and comical, yet almost endearing in its profoundly ridiculous manner. Sort of like an incontinent kitten, or a B-grade sci-fi film with a budget consisting of a baggie full of acid tablets and a note that said 'Use your imagination.'
I need a fucking drink. Or ten. Steeling himself once again with arousal-slaying thoughts of his Aunt Greet on a nude beach, Abel gritted his teeth, crouched down, pushed the girl onto her back, and lifted her legs with one hand while holding the shorts in the other. Just as he was about to start sliding them on, he was rudely interrupted by the bathroom door being flung off its hinges and narrowly missing flattening his skull in a shower of splinters and bone fragments.
"And to think that I just had this bathroom renovated last month," Abel deadpanned. Despite the inferno of rage currently roiling inside of him, he managed to maintain his usual aloof air, if only for the sake of confusing Laura, who was standing in the gaping hole where the door had formerly been, looking scandalised. "So, how can I help you?" He asked in a pseudo-polite voice.
"ABEL!" Laura screamed, red-faced and looking as though she were ready to send him to the nearest monastery as a ceremonial eunuch.
"Sup?" Abel drawled in an exaggeratedly protracted manner.
"WHAT'RE YOU DOING?!" Laura thundered.
Abel shrugged. "Oh, you know. Just figured that in between my daily scheduled puppy kicking and wheeling a loaded canon towards the local orphanage to open fire on those pesky parentless children wasting my tax money, I'd molest a teenage alu-whatever who doesn't even have the basic life skill of dressing herself. A man's gotta have his hobbies."
Laura planted her hands on her hips and glared at him. "Are you being sarcastic?"
"What gave it away? Was it the canon? It was the canon, wasn't it?" Abel said dryly. "Thanks for lowering your voice, by the way; the ringing in my ears is almost completely gone now."
"Then what are you doing?" Laura asked snappishly, choosing to ignore the jab at her previous loudness.
"Dressing her."
"Dressing her?"
"Dressing her."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"Really?"
"Yeah, really?"
Hands still on her hips, Laura began to tap her foot as well, looking disturbingly like an archetypical sit-com mother. "And why exactly would you take the time to dress Priscila?"
"For both of our sakes," Abel replied simply. "A naked teenage girl roaming around a twenty-eight year-old man's house is never a good idea."
"Unless it's a crappy rom-com film," Priscila, whom had until now been watching the siblings as though they were a mildly amusing comedy duo, said from her spot on the floor. "Man, I'd like to shove a brick up the arse of whatever dickmunch wrote the screenplay for Gigli; watching that movie took years off of my lifespan."
Abel levelled a strange look at her. "How do you know about things like television and films and yet you don't know how to dress yourself?" He demanded.
Priscila pushed herself up onto her elbows. "Clothing isn't necessary for our day-to-day lives, but entertainment is eternal," she said solemnly. Then she brightened. "Plus, you save a ton of money on clothes when you go around in your birthday suit all the time."
Laura swung her eyes onto Abel as though he were a ball-bearing and had been magnetized. "You're thinking about adopting the nudist lifestyle to save money, aren't you?" She said flatly.
Abel blinked. "What? No," he answered while wearing a 'shit, she's onto me' expression.
"Thank God, I'd have to blind myself. Well, I guess this was all just a misunderstanding and you were actually being somewhat altruistic instead of cree-ARGH!" Laura threw herself to the side, barely avoiding being knocked into the toilet by a blurry figure speeding through the spot where the door once stood and instead winding up in the much-less-awkward position of falling into the tub and accidentally ripping the shower curtain down along with her as she grasped for a hold to break her fall.
"What is this, destroy Abel's bathroom day?" Abel shouted before being bowled over by a wild-eyed Antonio. "Either you're trying to hump me or punch me. If it's the latter, I'm sticking your head in the toilet. If it's the former, I'm sticking your head in the toilet and breaking my foot off in your arse."
"Not my hitherto-unknowing-of-her-existence-until-today's little girl, you fiend!" Antonio yelled, and in a surprising fit of strength managed to grasp Abel's shoulders and pound his head against the tiles.
"Au. Au. Au." Abel grunted each time the back of his head became acquainted with the floor. "What the fuck is wrong with you? You didn't get the vibrator that you wanted for your birthday?"
"Keep your erection to yourself!" Antonio snarled as he continued to attempt to reduce the other man's head into a vertical smear on the tile. "No watering my teenage daughter's garden!"
"That's cool, I'll just spelunk the bat-infested cave that's your mother's gaping twat."
"ARGH!"
"That's gonna leave a mark…And by spelunking, I mean I'll drive a lorry through it."
"DIE ABEL!"
"That last one meant that your mum's vagina is huge due to years of overuse."
"DON'T EXPLAIN THE JOKE! I'LL FIGURE IT OUT ON MY OWN!"
Laura, who had managed to pull herself out of the tub, shook her head in disgust at the immaturity on display in front of her. Much to her surprise, Priscila was on the opposite end of the spectrum, looking utterly bored with the pandemonium.
"This doesn't concern you at all?" Laura asked her.
Priscila shook her head. "Compared to Carlos and Enrique's fights, this is a sporting game of cricket."
Stunned, Laura plunked down on the edge of the tub, holding her chin in her hands. "Wow. What are their fights like?"
"Let's just say that the group of nursery school children who wound up seeing the last one emerged from the ashes with the knowledge of their own mortality wedged firmly in their tiny child hearts. But, they got complimentary peanuts out of it, so there was that," Priscila stated.
"…Okay. Should we break these two up?" Laura said after a moment of letting that strange little anecdote sink in.
Just then, Carlos and Enrique burst into the room, looking excited. "No way, this is the good part; they've degenerated into petty name-calling!" Enrique said.
Laura groaned and dropped her head into her hands. "Ugh. Fine, just pull them apart if one of them gets their hands on a nail gun," she sighed, waving her hand tiredly.
"Sweet," Carlos declared, and fist-bumped Enrique. "Wanna take bets?"
"With what money, numbnuts?"
"Who're you calling numbnuts, dick for brains?"
"Oh hell no, I will mess your day up, bitch!"
"Bring it motherfucker!"
And with that, the two brothers descended into a throw-down, rip-roaring, penis-length-impugning fight, which, combined with that of Antonio and Abel's, momentarily caused the ground to tremble from the erections of previously slumbering and now awakened war gods prodding lasciviously against the local tectonic plates at this erotic gift of battle. Except not really, it was just the slightly shaky foundation of the house. There were plenty of strange insults being hurled around, though, many of which indeed call into question the masculinity of those involved.
"Your junk looks like a wotsit and two peas!"
"Anyone who you trick into giving you a blowjob has to use a microscope and a pair of tweezers to even find the man-clit that passes for your dick!"
"You tongue-punch your mother with that mouth? Because I DO!"
"You might wanna save your breath with the insults…After all, you'll need it to blow up your date tonight!"
"Your mother's stroked more wood than a furniture polisher!"
"I could lop a steak off of your mum! Tell me, do you catch her drippings in a pan or do you just leave her outside and hope that the local wildlife doesn't mistake her for an uncured beef shankle?"
"You talk some good shit for a guy who looks like a half-shaved Chewbacca costume; then again, horrible malformations like yours always occur when they're mothers get pregnancy discounts at liquor stores!"
"Yeah, well…YOU SMELL!"
Laura stood up. "I'd be all about the homoeroticism of this if it didn't involve my brother and technical step-sons. That just makes it uncomfortable. And now's the time for me to end this before they short out their brains in an attempt to think up more insults," she said. She nodded towards Priscila, who had taken the opportunity to learn how to dress herself…Using toilet paper. "Close enough. Can you help me round these idiots up?"
"Finally, I've been wanting to do this all day," Priscila declared. With that, she promptly released a massive stream of black fire from each hand, aiming them directly at the unruly combatants. "FIRE AND YOUR FACES!" She said while wearing a look of the utmost delight.
"It's always the shy one who winds up being batshit insane," Laura noted. Then she blinked. "Wait, why aren't they charred, blackened husks?" She added upon seeing that everyone wasn't even mildly singed and were using the fact that they weren't covered in burns to continue throwing punches.
"It's faerie fire. All the appearance of fire with none of the burning and ensuing screaming. Why, do you want burning and screaming? Because I can do that," Priscila offered, raising her hands higher.
"No, no, this is fine," Laura said quickly, waving her hands.
Priscila hung her head. "I never get to burn things."
"Tell your mum to shine her forehead, I wanna be able to see my dick reflected in it later tonight!"
Laura's eye began to twitch. "Never mind what I just said. Burn them. Burn them all to hell."
"Yay," Priscila cheered. "It's fucking fire o' clock!" That being said, she raised her hands in the air and blasted a torrent of crackling black flames up into the air, the ozone screaming against the unnatural fire, which, much to the dismay of everyone that wasn't its wielder, formed itself into the shape of a gigantic hand giving the middle finger. "Fire-fuck all of you!"
Laura pinched the bridge of her nose. "Why me?"
A/N: This has delved into the realm of the stupid. I'll save it…Maybe.
