Ashley and Not-So-Silent Missy in: Is That A Duck

" ...There was blood upon the risers, there were brains upon the chute, intestines were a-danglin' from his paratrooper suit! He was a mess they picked him up and poured him from his boots, and he ain't gonna jump no more! Gory gory what a hell of a way— "

"Why are you singing that? And why are you singing it so cheerfully?" Vista asked. The two of them were on patrol and Ashley, without any prompting, had started singing something incredibly grim and gory with an incredibly upbeat version of the battle hymn of the republic's melody.

"Because I feel like it," Ashley said as she jumped across a rooftop, "and because that's how the version I first heard goes. It's called Blood on the Risers and it's an air force song from dubya-dubya-two to serve as a mixture of black comedy to soothe people's nerves and as a cautionary tale to make sure absolutely everything is prepared properly for the paratroopers. As far as I can tell the earliest versions were kinda somber but I first heard it as part of Seamus Kennedy's salute to the troops which basically was a bunch of good-natured ribbing." At Missy's cold stair, Ashley continued. "Like, when he's doing the coast guard he does the theme to Popeye the Sailor and does Drunken Sailor for the navy."

"...And your parents let you listen to this?"

"...No. My Grandpa did and Mommy would always get mad when she found out... and Grandpa was the man who taught me that I could say aiteann instead of the C-word if a woman was being a Karen and I probably wouldn't get in trouble so I think that's all you need to know."

"...A Karen?"

"Uh... Do you not have that slang here? Uh... Entitled, Narcissistic, probably bigoted middle-aged woman who demands to see the manager becuase someone who doesn't even work there refused to check the back room for a product that the store doesn't even carry, physically attacks people or steals from them to get their way, and threatens to call the police on you for assault or theft if you defend yourself or take back what she stole?"

Vista stopped and shuddered.

"Are, are you okay?"

"I'm sorry, it's just... I just had a flashback to working Mall Security for Black Friday last year," Vista explained. "Eight different stereotypical soccer moms demanded that I take off my 'ridiculous costume,' " Vista said in a stereotypical entitled woman voice, "and get something down off a shelf for them in a store halfway across the... Fuck, man. Then there was the guy with a swastika tattooed to his arm who yelled at me and Clock for not beating up every black person who came in becuase 'they're obviously gonna steal' so I shrank his underwear and now he sings falsetto."

"Yes," Ashley nodded agreeably, "that's the appropriate thing to do to a racist cúl tóna."

The two girls continued to patrol in silence for a bit before Ashley piped up with "Have you seen the movie Clerks? Does it even exist here, or...?"

"Yeah, we got it in a cultural exchange with Aleph in 2000, and... No." Missy said. "There's no way. There's no way that... No good parent would let someone your age watch that movie, there's no..."

"You know, it was supposed to end with Dante getting shot to death in a robbery?" Ashley asked with a smile. "The whole movie was building up to it, too. That's why there was so much emphasis on how it was supposed to be his day off and the conversation on how Empire was the best Star Wars becuase it had a sad ending and stuff. Focus audiences thought it was too depressing though."

"Oh my god, you did see it... You had terrible parents."

Ashley stopped abruptly and turned to Vista. "YoU tAkE tHaT bAcK, nOw!"

As Ashley was genuinely pissed, Missy retracted her statement. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry it was a joke!"

"Okay then."

"When did you get so scary? That voice of the legion thing didn't use to be so..."

"I got addicted to alien cannibalism and now I'm a minor Lovecraftian deity," Ashley deadpanned.

"Okay, yeah, and I died and went straight to the bottom level of hell for three seconds after I got all of those gamma and cosmic rays," Missy snarked right back.

Then the two girls laughed.

"So, why did you bring up Clerks?" Missy asked a little later.

"I don't know, our conversation made me think about it for a second."

"Fair enough... So, are what are the urban legends in your world like? You have Hook Hand man or anything like that?"

"Well, one I've heard of a couple of times is that there's a Private Investigator named Howard and, get this, he's a duck! I don't believe it though, not for a minute."

"Oh, Bullshit! You live in a world where Dracula is real and people just don't stay dead but a talking duck is too much for you?"

"Well, for one, there's no record of his existence anywhere, which is really strange since he allegedly ran for president once..."

And the patrol, uneventful, continued on like that for the rest of their shift.