ALL CHARACTERS AND EVENTS IN THIS FAN FICTION — EVEN THOSE BASED ON FICTIONAL PEOPLE — ARE ENTIRELY MADE-UP. ALL DANTE REFERENCES ARE RESEARCHED… POORLY. THE FOLLOWING STORY CONTAINS LEWD SEXUAL HUMOR AND DUE TO ITS LONG INTROSPECTIVE MONOLOGUES IT SHOULD NOT BE READ BY ANYONE. _|_|_|
Stan
There is something to be said for the term saving grace. Growing up in South Park, it wasn't a term we tossed around all that much—it was mostly something I heard from the local priest, Father Maxi, and from a worried mother here and there—so it wasn't something any of us readily had an idea of. I was convinced, however, that if there were an embodiment to the term saving grace, it was, almost too literally, Karen McCormick.
Karen was not the Guardian Angel on the team for nothing. She had committed herself to that divine persona long ago, in honor of her brother, for his being so protective of her for so long. I had gotten to know Karen rather well, over the past few years, and knew that she was the very essence of a guardian angel, especially when it came to Kenny. I'd hear her offering to be the one to run errands, for example, in their day-to-day routine, and had gotten calls from Kenny during previous summers home asking to hang out because his sister was commanding him to be bored and go have fun.
So when, to the horror of all of us present, a great black Shadow leapt from Damien's envelope and enveloped Kenny, Karen was the one to step up and take charge, once she had settled her own panic.
Kyle and I held Kenny back from chasing after the phantom messenger the siblings had seen, and were able to turn him around and bring him inside, where he fell back onto the sofa and did nothing but sit with his head hung in pure shock for nearly half an hour. After the first five minutes, Karen sent Kyle back into the meeting room to file the letter that she had received but not opened, and instructed me to comfort Red.
I took Kenny's girlfriend into the kitchen and had her slowly drink water, which was more or less what Karen was doing for Kenny at the moment. When I sat beside her at the kitchen table, Red grabbed tightly onto my arm and stared me straight in the eyes.
"What was that, Stan?" she asked me, full of fear and concern. "Kenny beat his curse! It's gone! That can't be it, right? Please say it's not."
"I wish I could give you a straight answer," I said calmly, patting her shoulder, "but it seems just as impossible to me, too."
"It might be a trick," Kyle announced from the doorway. He walked in and sat on the other side of Red. Setting a hand on her other shoulder, which got her to turn and look at him, Kyle continued, "Karen is talking Kenny through it right now. It seems like his shadow has been tampered with, but I'm not sure yet if it's the Shadow."
"How are we going to know?" Red wondered. "I'm so scared for him, guys! I don't want Kenny to have to deal with that kind of pain again, this is… it's just…"
Disgusting? Terrible? Impossible? Red probably had too many words to describe the situation, but none that could do so accurately. I nodded, though, hoping to give her at least some solidarity in her concern.
In reality, I was petrified. Kenny did not deserve to be fucked with like that. Not the guy who'd worked for seventeen years to rid himself of his Immortality, no. Four years of peace only to get fucked over? I wasn't standing for it, I knew that much.
The next twenty minutes that passed were too quiet. Kyle shuffled in discomfort with it, and Red nearly broke down three times, but caught herself before she could. I listened in, every now and then catching Karen's supportive tone soothing Kenny in the other room. When she finally called us back in, Kenny was at least sitting up straight, though he was still staring, down at his clasped hands now, his eyes perceiving nothing.
Karen had Kenny's envelope in her hands, and she was kneeling on the floor beside him. I guided Red into the armchair, and gave Karen a little nod to let her take the lead in the conversation. To begin, she held up the envelope.
"Kenny isn't Immortal," she announced. Kenny winced, all the same. "That's what I've figured from this note. He's not Immortal anymore; that guy Damien sent this as—"
"A warning," Kenny finished. His voice sounded raw and hollow. It was quite possible that, in our absence from the room, he'd been crying. I wouldn't be surprised if Karen was the only person who ever saw Kenny cry anymore. Little worried him lately, but he was the kind who would not want to be seen crying around his friends or girlfriend.
His sister was his saving grace.
"Or a challenge," Kenny went on. "Or both."
"Are you—?" I started.
"Am I what, all right?" Kenny nearly snapped. Only his eyes shifted to look at me, while his head stayed tilted down. "No. This is bullshit. 'Some curses never die,'" he said slowly. "That's what the radio told me. Fuck this. Fuck all of this."
"We're going to figure it out," Karen assured him.
"Anything we can do?" Kyle offered.
Karen beat Kenny to it: "Find Cartman," she requested kindly. "Get everyone looking. We need to figure out how we're going to be doing things from here on out."
Kenny nodded stiffly, then finally cast a forlorn glance over at Red. I felt my chest clinch, not wanting this Shadow to cause a rift in anything, be it League affairs or personal lives. "Hey, Kyle?" Kenny asked when he found his voice again, again shifting his focus.
"Yeah?"
"Level with me. You can sense things, can't you?"
"I—well, I mean, yes and no," Kyle explained calmly. "It's the same as before."
"Can you sense people? Like, to go out there and just fucking lock onto Cartman? Get his fat bastard ass over here faster?"
I could see Kyle shiver, and caught his meaning when he looked to me for help with his answer. On and off since he had received his letter, Kyle and I had been taking at least a few minutes a day to exercise his ability. Kyle was a very detail-focused person, if a bit short on patience—he'd made remarkable progress, since the onset of his current headaches.
It had started out with the first letter. He'd started complaining of brain cramps that day, and as days went on, lights did react, more so than they had in the past four years, to his shifts in mood. At the height of his capability, Kyle had been able to lock onto objects and move them around at will. But even then, he was limited to inanimate things. I gave him a knowing shake of the head to indicate that this was territory he'd never even discussed with me before.
Kyle turned to Kenny and said, with sympathy for the situation, "Sorry, Kenny. I can't read people. I can read objects, and just when they're right there, dude. I'm not fully psychic."
"Okay," Kenny said numbly. He stared down at his shadow. "Can, um… can you guys go? Like, go help look, like Karen said. However you can. I need to—"
"No, sure," I said, saving Kenny from having to search for things to say when clearly he just needed his space. And the two people who constituted his most immediate family.
It was perfectly understandable, why Kenny wanted to be alone. Or, at least, in smaller company. I sent out a mass text explaining that we'd hit a bit of an emergency situation and to contact me immediately should anyone see or hear from Cartman, and that Kenny had received a foreboding letter. Another meeting was inevitable, which was good, but worrisome.
We were going in circles.
That fucking GSM was leading us around and around in circles, and it was only a matter of time until dizziness and fatigue caused us to relent a little. There was only so much we could take on, but without understanding, there was little hope for pressing forward and breaking out of the spiral. We appeared to be making progress, but I couldn't help thinking that every forward step we took came right along with a clue that raised more questions than connections we had made.
It was awful seeing Kenny so miserable so suddenly. Worse, knowing the best that I could do for him, or for Karen for that matter, was to leave. I cared for Kenny McCormick like a brother.
He had insisted, before, that we—that the League—were his family. I took that to heart, and felt pride and honor in that. We had created something pretty incredible in our League.
So why did things feel so tense?
I hated feeling disjointed. Kyle admitted to the same, once he and I had made it to my car to begin our own leg of the search for our missing member. It didn't seem real, that Kenny would have his powers back. I trusted Karen that his Immortality was gone, but Damien had really done a number on Kenny by sending the Shadow.
I had no idea what to expect once we heard from Cartman again, either. We weren't going to get anywhere with both of them in inconsolable shock. The person that Cartman went to with troubles was his mother, but that wasn't seeming like an option for him for the time being. He used to be close with Butters, too, but they hadn't been talking lately, meaning his second line of defense was a no-go, too. And while Kenny could benefit from time both alone and with Red and Karen, Cartman would be doing himself the worst disservice by only having himself to talk to.
I like to think of myself as an observer. Let me rephrase that: an observer who gets shit done. I don't sit back once I know something is going on. It bothers me when I can't help. No matter how well I know a person, I like making myself available as someone to talk to. Kenny and Cartman I knew very well, the former more than the latter, sure, but I'd listen to Cartman if I knew he was trying to deal with something serious he couldn't take on alone. I just plain like helping people.
Cartman would probably, Kyle and I speculated on our drive, deny help for a while. After all, his mother had told him something—well, I'll say it: almost like something straight out of the Necronomicon. The one indisputable fact was that Liane Cartman had slept and procreated with both a Cthulhu Cultist and the devil himself. Whether she was aware of either of those things was yet unknown, but it made for a more than disturbed family history for one of the very first League members.
Not wanting to get too much into it without fully understanding, Kyle and I kept our eyes out while making nervous conversation. Kyle was the one to bring it up, at the first red light before we made it into town. "Stan?"
"What's up?" I wondered.
"Sucks about Kenny," Kyle noted.
"No kidding. I'm fucking disturbed."
"I'm terrified," he admitted.
"So am I," I breathed out.
We kept quiet for a minute. "Stan?"
"Uh-huh?"
"It's not gonna kill him, is it?"
"Fuck, I hope not." I shivered. "Kenny's had enough death."
"We all have."
I eased up on the gas, when Kyle's tone turned grim. Neither of us had meant to reference my own brief death, or Kyle's brush with it, but the topic was inevitable. Our primary concern with one another was keeping each other safe. Safe and whole.
We'd just seen something all too like Cthulhu's Shadow—serpent shape and all—devour Kenny and seep into him, reviving one part of the curse he'd been born with and sine beaten. There was no such thing as justice if curses could just be revived. Son of the devil or not, I was fucking pissed at Damien Thorn. As was Kyle. As were Kenny, Karen, Red—everyone would be, once they'd all learned about what had happened.
We were dealing with something that had more power than any of us were ready to comprehend. Sure, we had some strong abilities on our side, too, but while the Old Ones had more or less come with a guidebook, in the form of the Necronomicon, Hell didn't have rules.
Right?
"Sorry," Kyle said.
"It's okay."
"You sure?"
"It's okay."
"Okay."
Silence, until the next red light. "Stan?"
I would have laughed at his repetition, had this been any other conversation. "Mmhmm?"
Kyle hesitated in elaborating this time, but eventually settled on asking, "Do you think I could?"
"What?"
"Do, you know, what Kenny asked."
"You mean—"
"Read people."
Already over-thinking, not to mention needing something occupying his mind beyond thoughts of death and shadows, Kyle opened the glove compartment and pulled out a little black fork wrapped in plastic and set it on the dashboard. Any time he could take to practice, I suppose. I glanced over, curious, and proud of how well he was handling his want to re-strengthen his psychic quirk.
Taking in a deep breath, Kyle held his right hand a few inches above the fork. "Come on, you fucker," he muttered at it.
It was true that Kyle could 'read' objects. Back when we did talk about it a lot, mostly senior year of high school, the term he had coined for it was re-arranging gravity. What he was able to do broke the laws of physics; defied Newtonian logic. He'd described it to me before, though very little lately. Objects gave off a 'pressure' that, I assumed, living beings didn't… or that his mind was not sensitive enough to, and that his mind could re-direct with enough focus.
Sure enough, the plastic fork lifted a couple of inches off the dashboard. I grinned, while Kyle fixed his conversation. On a breath, he splayed his fingers and the wrapper on it split open. Holding his hand as steadily as he could, Kyle guided the fork back a few inches toward him off of the dashboard, then let it drop, catching it in his free hand.
"Well," he managed to joke, "at least we know I've got cutlery covered. People're the next step up, right?"
I let myself laugh a little, despite the fact that we both knew we were only using humor to hide our nerves. In support of his abilities and ideas, I reached over and lightly squeezed Kyle's wrist. "Do you think I could?" he asked me again, quieter this time. I brushed my thumb over his knuckles a little, then returned my hand to the steering wheel as Kyle put the plastic fork away.
"I mean, what do you think your limits are?" I asked him.
"I dunno, I guess, just… I don't know, but I just get this weird feeling like… whatever's going on, Damien wants us to be completely ready for it," Kyle said. "That last fight we had with the GSM, dude? I think that was a warning. Just, like, to see what we all can do. I mean, I'm psychic. I—am psychic," he repeated, as if to convince himself, "I'm just outta practice. What if I can, and I've just never trained it? I'm game for working through the rest of it, but… yeah, I have that quirk. I do, it's there, you were right, it didn't go away. But Kenny was the Shadow, and I guess 'was' wasn't good enough…"
He was onto something, almost to the point that I forgot we were supposed to be out on a search. I cast a glance around. Nothing but the usual traffic.
"Kyle," I asked, "what do you think is really going on?"
Kyle sighed, and turned his attention out the window. I stole a glance at him while keeping my eyes otherwise on the road. It's interesting, watching Kyle think. It's like you can see the twists and turns he's making in his mind, connecting and disconnecting, trying out one idea and then ruling it out. "Honestly," he admitted, "I kinda feel like we're being tested."
"Ugh, I'm done with finals," I commented.
"I'm totally serious, though," Kyle insisted, smacking my shoulder for my grim attempt at humor. "Think about it." He slowed his words as he connected his own rationale. "I mean, this group resurfaces after, what, eleven, twelve years of silence? The Shadow coming back, Stan? Everything's all… I don't know."
"Too familiar?" I offered.
"Yeah," Kyle said warily. He drummed his fingers nervously against the window, then, uncomfortable with his own speeding thoughts, shifted around in his seat, tucking his feet up on to the dashboard, then immediately dropping them, crossing his legs one way and then another. "We're being called out. Individually. I don't like it."
Something about the logic of that made my heart skip a beat. "You think?"
"Based on the letters… plus, just… if we all heard different things on the radio…" Kyle trailed off, and I gave him time to work through his ideas on his own.
While we were met with a necessary silence, I slowed my speed and kept my eye out for Cartman's annoying-ass car. Honestly. Of course he'd gotten the very car he'd wanted, and of course he'd take it for pleasure rides day in and day out since his fucking sixteenth birthday. His mother babied him and would probably go on doing so until she lay on her death bed. Not that there's anything wrong with a mother truly loving her son, but Mrs. Cartman had an interesting way of going about it.
Her coddling was sometimes a cover-up in disguise. As currently seemed to be the case. If what Kenny and Cartman had heard from her was true, then Damien Thorn was the dead child of a tryst between Liane and the devil himself. It was common knowledge that Satan was gay, though—six specials of the eternally-running Jesus and Pals had proven that if anyone had their doubts—so there either had to have been something experimental, uncanny, or just plain planned going on for him to have sought out Liane Cartman in her younger years.
Damien, from what I remembered of him, was a Biblical little asshole, who threw firey fits whenever we'd teased him at school. We couldn't have given two shits back then if he was the actual devil's son or not. We were eight years old, and the world was a weird place. Back then, we just went with it.
As life had drawn us into the League, however, 'weird' became more relative, and we were faced with fewer supernatural annoyances and more very real dangers. I thought back to the moment when Kenny had opened the letter that had shrouded him once again in something much too close in form and function to the Shadow of Cthulhu for anyone's comfort.
It couldn't have been the real thing. Right? It had to be a trick. As moments went by, I began investing more and more in Kyle's notion that we were being tested. It might take some convincing for Kenny to accept that, but it made sense to me. Damien, or Scott Tenorman, or both in their own way, had concocted a way to single out our vulnerabilities, and was introducing them to us, one by one, at the most inconvenient moments.
Any moment would have been inconvenient for Kenny, though. The Shadow couldn't just reappear like that. No—I'd seen him beat it. Most of us were witnesses to that. R'lyeh was gone.
So what the fuck was happening to bring such nightmares back to life?
"Ugh," Kyle moaned, pulling me from my own thoughts. "I've got the worst headache."
"…Yeah?" I guessed.
He didn't respond for a moment, which clued me into the fact that, yes, it was one of those headaches. He'd been getting them, recently. During finals, Kyle had started to complain of headaches, but he's rather prone to migraines, so neither of us tried to think much of it.
After all, things were moving forward for us. Living together was, as we had expected, exciting but challenging. We'd need our space and then go off our heads without company and then need space again. Normal stuff. Predictable stuff. Simple but fantastic, because we understood. Facing everyday challenges and learning from them was delightful.
So, needless to say, when something like a headache came up, we wanted to treat that just as normally as anything else. The best way for both of us to handle the subject of Kyle's psychic ability was, when we weren't ignoring it, to bring it into conversation gradually. To discuss it as something natural—which, I kept insisting, it was—and treat Kyle's 'pressure headaches,' as we'd nicknamed them, the same way we dealt with our usual ones. Which was usually just to not add any more stress onto ourselves, or Kyle would overdo it, and I would close myself off.
"We can take a little break," I offered.
"Can we?"
"Sure thing."
To keep on our mission, though, we chose to coffee up at Tenth Circle. We both disliked the paintings the Goths had allowed Wilcox to hang on the walls in there, but we had to give them another look over, in case something would come to light.
We passed our orders to Henrietta, who looked like she knew something wasn't quite right, but we didn't get a chance to say anything to her, as her co-worker approached the counter, flicked his red bangs out of his face, and (weirdly) almost smiled. "Ugh," he coughed, "I am so flippin' overjoyed to see you."
"Funny," Kyle returned, "I don't remember ordering sarcasm."
The Goth just glared and said, fatly, "I'm serious, asshole. I'd take any one of you super-conformists right now. Your little friend over there's been sobbing into a cup of Jasmine tea for hours. I've been waiting for one of you to come in and get him outta here."
He nodded his combed-down bangs in the direction of a corner table near the window at the front of the shop. Sitting just out of view of the street, underneath another new Wilcox arrival, was Butters. He was indeed nursing an enormous mug of tea and nervously stealing glances at his phone. The gloomy shop owner was clearly exaggerating on the sobbing, but Butters did look out of sorts, if not frightened.
"Thanks," I managed, involuntarily flashing a smile that the Goth haughtily ignored. "We'll go talk to him." Kyle paid, waving off my offer to do the same, then angled himself away from the painting of mirrors that hung on the wall on our way over to Butters's table. "You okay?" I checked.
Kyle nodded. "I just really hate that painting," he said. "I don't know why."
"Huh. Well, we don't have to stay long," I said encouragingly. Yeah, out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Kyle nodded again. As we made our way over to where Butters sat, I glanced back over my shoulder at the painting. Was it the distorted logic? The lack thereof? Kyle wasn't big on visual arts outside of graphic design, but he'd never shown a profound disliking for something as simple as a scene of mirrors, not in recent years, at least. Was it the off-centered red one? I couldn't quite tell. I mean, yeah, the painting was scary as anything, but it wasn't exactly an eyesore.
I got my mind back on the immediate present; when we approached, Butters' phone buzzed. He gasped and grabbed it up, then let out a dissatisfied groan and set it back on the round black table. "Hey, dude," I greeted, calmly enough.
"Waaahhh!" Butters nearly leapt out of his seat, alarmed even at my evenly-voiced hello, which in turn shocked me and Kyle back a step. "O-oh, hey, fellas," he said sheepishly, once he'd taken a breath to calm himself down.
"Man, Butters, you all right?" I wondered.
"You're higher-strung than Tweek," Kyle noted.
"Sorry."
"No need to be," Kyle shrugged, "it's fine, but like… what's up? What's going on?"
"Oh." Butters sighed, and looked down at his phone. "I, uh… can you guys sit a minute?"
"Sure, yeah," I said, pulling a chair out for Kyle before sitting myself. "We've actually kinda got some stuff to talk to you about, too, so this really can't be long."
Butters blanched. "Oh, jeez."
"Nothing about you," Kyle assured him. "Just some… I dunno, shit going amiss all over the place."
"You're tellin' me," Butters said, wide-eyed. "I tried callin' Sally, just to hang out, pick her mind, you know." Kyle and I nodded. It was strange to think about someone we'd kind of known, back in elementary and high school, being a part of the GSM. "Nothin'. So I call Heidi, and she hasn't heard from her, either. Her parents're outta town, an' there's no missing person report, but…"
"Shit," I breathed.
"Yeah. And all Heidi knows is: Sally got a letter."
That much, we'd more or less seen coming. Kyle's and Red's letters both had mentioned that further information would be given upon compliance to join the Movement. Curiosity had won out for Sally Turner, so it seemed, and now the girl was among the recruits working on that mysterious, and mostly unmentioned, Carnival.
The speculation was that the goggles—thanks to the ones Butters and Cartman had retrieved—gave orders and maps. (And 'the speculation' was primarily Ike's, usually a trustworthy one and therefore, as far as the rest of us in the League were concerned, perfectly viable.) Everyone in the GSM had particular assignments, and, based on our most recent outing, were charged with leading us out all over town.
We were struggling with why. Why join, first of all, and why try to separate us only to bring us dead ends? Not that what we found in Tenorman's room was anything remotely close to a dead end, but I wasn't exactly ruling it out as a red herring, either.
(Which would not even be remotely funny, but not below them. Ugh.)
"How long ago?" Kyle wanted to know.
"Did she get it? I dunno, I'd guess around when you and Red got yours," Butters told us. "All's I can say is, I'm sure glad neither of you responded."
"Yeah, no kidding," Kyle sighed. Under the table, he grabbed onto my hand, and I squeezed lightly, for support. "I'm kind of… really put off by the fact that Yates opened his. If he responds, we might be fucked."
"Who's fucking who, now?" I glanced up to notice that Henrietta had dropped in on our conversation, the drinks she had made, slowly as was her usual pace, for me and Kyle in her hands. Henrietta was a woman who rarely let on that she was curious, but when it came to League affairs, an interesting side of her shone through. She liked being helpful, and we more than appreciated that.
"Cops suck," Kyle translated, taking his drink.
"That isn't news," Henrietta scowled.
"Damien is," I told her.
"Who?"
"You don't know him?"
"Should I?"
I looked from Kyle (wildly confused) to Butters (utterly distanced) and back to Henrietta (oblivious as fuck). "Do your—co-workers?" I wondered, finding a word other than 'friends' to describe the other two Goths.
"If they know, I'd know. And I don't."
Interesting, but none of us made the obvious comment. Well, obvious to us, anyway. The Goths had made it quite clear before that they were not Satanists. After the Cthulhu Cult, they weren't really anything, as far as I knew. I kind of envied them that way, a little, and could relate. They really just plain did not care. They believed what they wanted when they wanted, and did not concern themselves with any labels beyond 'conformist' and 'non-conformist.'
The idea that one of them might know of the son of the devil was not one that we felt ready to bring up to any one of the Goths. Though, truth be told, if any of the Goths knew Damien, it would be the one closest to him.
Assuming he'd gone to Hell.
I hadn't really thought about that.
There used to be four in the Goth group. A kid in Ike's grade rounded out the dark quartet, until his deep, bloodthirsty involvement with the Cult of Cthulhu had been the end of him. If the souls that had perished in R'lyeh had gone anywhere, Hell seemed like the one and only option. I wasn't sure how the afterlife truly worked, though. I'd seen Purgatory after I had been shot and killed; I'd seen R'lyeh both dead and alive, and had some experience with the Spaces Between.
But Hell? That was different territory. Henrietta, having worked so closely with Kenny on figuring out his bygone Immortality, would have known more than I. Mental note to ask her later: made. Assuming I could still wrap my head around things later in a logical manner.
"Well, then, keep your ears open to the name," I suggested when the other two were struck completely silent.
"Damien?" Henrietta repeated. "Fucking conformist ether-vampire name. That's like calling yourself 'Lestat.' Over-fucking-done."
"Maybe," I shrugged, "but I think you'd know this guy was the right Damien if you met him."
"Sure." Henrietta stepped back as if to leave, but stalled herself. She did not look concerned, necessarily, just… not as cold as she tended to be. "Something happen?" she wondered, without sounding even slightly eager for an answer.
"You, uh… might want to dust off your R'lyeh notes, if you've still got 'em," Kyle instructed her.
Henrietta's eyes narrowed, and her black-painted lips flattened, then creased. "R'lyeh," she said doubtfully.
"Just in case," Kyle clarified. "We'll… fill you in. Something's not quite right, right now. Speaking of which," he added, sliding his seat back from the table to stand, "we should probably go."
"Window's open if he needs it," Henrietta made sure we heard before she took her previously feinted leave. She still preferred communicating with Mysterion over any of the rest of us, which was nothing I considered arguable. They'd done their research, and besides, the other Goths could stomach Mysterion better, too, still in secret awe of the fact that he had been the Shadow.
As soon as Henrietta had gone back to her post, my phone went off, with a text from Clyde. In a fully-worded message—which may have taken the guy a while, sorry Clyde, but it's true—he'd informed me that the group was gathering, and that Token had found and retrieved Cartman (from, I later learned, the library, which was the last place he had figured anyone would find him, but a place that Wendy, Kyle and Token all frequented and was therefore within our searching grounds). Kicking and screaming, most likely, he'd made his way back to the base, where he and Kenny were going to have 'a talk.'
We couldn't waste any time, though, just in case things got too heated between those two. While it was true that Cartman couldn't quite hide his fear of Kenny's League authority, he still took every opportunity to be his pompous, difficult self and try to pull focus. I wasn't sure about the pulling focus part of things this time around, but Cartman probably had a lot he wanted to get off his chest.
I offered a ride to Butters, who, after another glance at his phone, agreed. As Kyle was setting to work filling Butters in on the events of the afternoon, despite his having been a recipient of the mass text, I forced myself to get a good look at the painting that had been hung up above the table.
On a smoky grey background was painted what looked like the cutaway of a museum display. On a pedestal at the center of the painting, only about one foot by two, was the statue of a woman holding a set of scales. On both sides of the scale were red, numbered dice: the die on the left showed only one dot, while the one on the right showed six; the right side was lower.
At first, I figured it was a painting of Justice, generally painted and sculpted with a blindfold. But this woman was very much aware of what she was holding. Her face was fully exposed, and she appeared to be staring directly at the viewer. The expression on the Greek-inspired statue in the painting was almost more haunting than the red dice.
It was like she could see our current problem, and was enjoying watching us twist in discomfort about it.
The plaque beneath the painting read, FRAUD.
The opposite of Justice? That was my first thought.
I kind of had to wonder what exactly Wilcox's methods were. Was every one of these a dream? A fit? He had Wrath and Fraud represented together along with a vision of Limbo. The man must have known Death in a much different way than Kenny ever had. Than most people had. To Wilcox, it was both final and perpetual; that was what I walked away from those paintings thinking.
Try as mankind might, nothing can ever truly destroy nightmares.
– – –
Karen greeted us at the front door when the three of us returned to the base, and hurried us outside to the field, requesting that we let her and Kenny continue having a private word with Cartman for a little while.
We had more space now than we once did, due to our constant want to improve upon our attacks and arsenals. There were enormous trees that Kyle was able to scale in order to get good air with his glider for short-range flight, a shed that Token kept stocked with his own arsenal as well as backups for Wendy, Ike and Timmy: the 'armory,' he called it. Craig, Butters, Cartman and Kenny kept guns in there as well, as did Clyde, whose marksmanship had improved exponentially each year.
There were three target ranges, now, and Clyde nodded over to us from one side of the field, where he had a target set up hundreds of yards away, nearly to the edge of the woods. In his hand was a newly modified sniper he and Token had been working on since fall break. Clyde's preferred weapons were his .45-sized stun and tranquilizer guns, true to his Mosquito alter ego, and this sniper was no different: it shot darts, rather than bullets, giving him rooftop advantage as well as direct field proficiency.
As we walked further in, Clyde set down his sniper and jogged up to us, saying as he ran, "Guys… crazy fucking weird shit going down right now."
"You're telling us?" I said, feeling winded despite having been keeping an even pace. "Dude, we watched Kenny open that letter. Why're we all out here again?"
"Because Kenny's flipping his shit at Cartman and doesn't need an audience," Clyde said, more or less repeating what Karen had worked her way around kindly saying upon our arrival. "Gonna bet fatass is flipping his shit right back."
"Ugh," Kyle complained. "This could not get any…"
"Weirder?" Clyde offered, at the same time I suggested, "More fucked up?"
"Both, everything, and even more than that," Kyle decided. "Also, I mean, I get that Kenny kinda likes taking on missions alone, but hello? We need in on this stuff, too. I'm really fucking worried."
"Same," I stated.
"Guys, everyone's worried," said Clyde, keeping as calm as he could. "Which is why we've gotta keep distracted. And in practice. You can use the targets over there," he added, pointing us off to my immediate left. "Trust me. The best thing we can all do right now is give those guys their space, and keep ourselves occupied. The more rational both of them can be when we go in, the better."
"Did you see Cartman?" I wondered. "Like, is he—?"
"Pissed as all get out? Yes," Clyde nodded. "Me and Token had to restrain him for a few minutes. Check it." He pulled down the collar of his t-shirt, revealing a fist-sized bruise that was already starting to change color. "Got me twice. I forgot how fuckin' bad his punches are."
"Jesus Christ," Kyle commented.
"But really, he's mostly just pissed, and doesn't know what to do."
Beside us, Butters, who'd been keeping silent, started kneading his knuckles together. "Is it true?" he wondered. "The Damien thing."
"Based on the shout-fest that's going on in there, yeah," said Clyde. "Anyway, guys, get to work, okay? It's the best we've got right now."
We couldn't really argue. As long as the opportunity was there, and as long as we knew we'd be kept up to date soon enough.
Token offered up a firing range to me and Kyle, where the guys must already have been anticipating us joining in on the session, not knowing how long we'd all be out there while Kenny and Cartman ate each other alive. Two makeshift tables (two sawhorses each, with planks of wood between them) were set up: one for me with my spare drill guns, and one for Kyle with extra blue hurling discs of Token's. I had no idea how many of those Token had made, or how he managed to have so damn many, but I never underestimated his family's assets, so I didn't question it. It was a help to all of us, anyway, that he had multiple weapons, shields, and backup armor.
"You wanna give it a go first?" I offered Kyle.
"Um… I can't guarantee my accuracy right now, so you might wanna move back a little," Kyle warned me.
"It's all good," I said. "I'm glad you're game for working through your quirk like this."
"Might as well," he shrugged.
Kyle sucked in a deep breath, narrowed his eyes, and thrust his right hand out to the side, so that his arm was a perfectly flat, straight line, from shoulder to fingertips. Gritting his teeth, he then sharply splayed his fingers, then gathered them into a fist. As soon as he'd done that, the heavy hurling disc rose from the table and hovered to about half height, about five inches from Kyle's hand and five inches up from the table.
He let out a voiced breath, brought his hand back as if to throw a baseball, then followed through with that same sort of action. Rather than serving up a pitch, though, the hurling disc followed his exact angle. It hit the far edge of the target and latched in. We'd both forgotten that Token's discs had a pretty sharp metal edge.
"Shit!" Kyle yelped. "Anyone behind these targets might wanna seriously move!"
"Uh… or we could switch to tennis balls?" I suggested. "You know, go back to basics. Or rocks?"
Kyle gave me a smug look. "Rocks, Stan. That's so much safer than the equivalent of a flying pizza cutter."
"Yeah, you're right. I'll go grab the buckets."
What had worked from the start still worked now. Tennis balls were an easy weight and size for Kyle to be able to read, and what he needed at the moment was an exercise in consistency. To get the hang of reading similar objects before switching things up on himself in order to go from one to the next with a breath and a thought.
It really was impressive, and I loved being his support. Kyle curled his fingers in and back out a few times over the two small buckets of tennis balls I'd set down in front of him. His weaker point was lifting an object at rest; he'd done it with the plastic fork in the car, I was confident that he could do the same with these. He needed a couple of tries, but when he quickly flipped his left hand from palm down to palm flat up, a tennis ball followed the jerk of his hand and shot up to about five inches above his palm.
Kyle smiled in spite of himself, but lost concentration. "Fuck it," he muttered.
"You just need to trust yourself," I said, patting his back. "Breathe."
He nodded. "Breathe," he repeated.
"You've got this."
"Tennis balls," Kyle muttered. "I moved boulders, once."
"And you can again, Kyle, I know you can. Baby steps."
"Yeah…" (Then again, even 'baby steps' was a relative term to Kyle: according to his mother, he was that stubborn kind of baby who'd speed-crawled everywhere until one day he just started running. I was not at all surprised, and sometimes quizzed my brain to see if I could remember that at all, since it brought a funny image to mind regardless.)
For the next several minutes, I passed on target practice for myself and focused on keeping Kyle centered and focused on re-directing the fuck out of gravity. I instructed him to start with his non-dominant hand, knowing that he'd feel more accomplished once he switched from left to right and had a stronger handle on things. I tossed him a few to begin with, and he was still able to stop objects without a problem.
We'd been practicing at his house or mine here and there, yes, but he got too nervous anywhere but the actual training field. Here, however, his confidence built itself up minute by minute, trial by trial, until he was raising up five tennis balls on either side of him and aiming them at the dead center of the target.
While he was so wrapped in concentration, I slipped a hurling disc into the barrel of tennis balls on his right. His hand jerked in reaction to the different weight, and he glanced down at the object he'd just lifted, briefly, then grit his teeth and, with another voiced breath, hurled the sharp weighted object across the field at the human-shaped target, slicing it from the 'shoulder' down at an angle. Then, as if he had it on a string, Kyle yanked his hand back, pulling the disc through the air with it, only to throw his hand forward again. The disc hit home, sticking right through the center of the bulls-eye.
I tossed another disc in the air in front of him, and Kyle stopped it without looking at it first, then drew his right hand back again and sent the disc flying up in an arch and back down into the 'head' of the target. "Oh, shit, oh, shit, YES!" he exclaimed when I pronounced the target pretty well defeated.
Kyle turned to face me, grinning ear to ear at his accomplishment. "Thanks, Stan!" he said brightly. He set his hands at his temples, though, and not to wipe off sweat. I made a note to find advil for what I assumed would be a lingering headache. "Holy shit, that felt awesome."
"It was," I said, grabbing him into the hug that he sprang at me with. "Still got it, Kyle, that's fucking amazing."
"Dude, I never, ever thought I'd be able to do that again."
"Believe me yet that it's a part of you that nothing can take away?" I asked with a slight laugh as we pulled back.
"I mean, I've been convinced," Kyle said, "I just, like… I dunno, I didn't realize my brain was a faucet."
"A faucet?"
"On, off, on, off… full power or nothing, you know." Kyle shrugged. He stretched his arms up over his head, only to bring his hands back down onto his thicket of red curls again as he groaned, "Ow, ow, ow… fuck…"
My heart skipped. "What?" I asked frantically. "What's up?"
"Major mental ow," was his answer. "Man, I wanna keep going, but if I do I might faint."
"Please, don't."
Kyle brushed his hands back through his hair a couple times, then folded his arms and ticked his head to look at me on a quirky angle. He let out a small, no-harm-done laugh, and said, "Don't worry. All I'm saying is I'm pretty horribly outta practice. Thanks for being patient with me."
"Are you kidding me?" I said, grinning broadly. "Out of practice nothing. Kyle, you're gonna have this back before you know it."
"Let's hope it's before anything too crazy can happen," he admitted nervously.
"Too crazy like what?" came a voice from behind us.
The two of us turned together to see that Craig was joining us, from having been working on a twin sword technique against both Wendy and Ike on the far right side of the field, both of whom were always game to be clashing actual steel, rather than trainers. Craig was an expert swordsman, but he couldn't very well whip out his real twin blades on the streets of South Park the way he had against an undead army in R'lyeh, so he'd gone through a few different non-lethal blunt objects of similar lengths and weights over the past few years. And, of course, kept up with his true swordsmanship out on the field.
Just in case, he said.
Currently, though, Craig was also carrying with him was a pair of thick black, lace-up boots and a coil of braided rope, with three round weights tied to the end. He was also, I noticed more accurately as he drew closer, wearing a very dark pair of sunglasses… and Craig was a guy who normally didn't mind squinting on a bright day. As usual, too, he still wore that damn blue chullo hat, even in the late spring warmth. Craig was pretty tight, apparently, with his younger sister, though, and as long as she kept buying them, he kept on wearing them.
"Dude, you were in R'lyeh," Kyle pointed out. "You know as well as any of us what we mean by 'crazy.'"
"I mean, like, did something happen," Craig corrected flatly.
"Not yet, as far as we know," I said. "What's up? You testing something out?"
"Yup. You guys, too?"
I glanced at Kyle, who nodded, then gestured back to the targets. "I kinda have to get back in practice on my aim when it comes to this quirk thing."
"Oh." Craig surveyed the targets for a moment, then turned his attention back to us. "You done?"
"Huh?" Kyle wondered.
"You done with the targets?"
"Yeah… you need 'em?"
Craig shrugged. "I was gonna try somethin' out."
I gestured toward the boots he was carrying, and asked, "What's with the shoes, dude?"
"That's what I've gotta test out." Craig brushed past us, and let his coil of braided, weighted rope fall to the ground. He slid out of his sneakers and brushed the aside, then sat down in the grass to pull on his new pair of boots, the soles of his feet facing us. He didn't take his sunglasses off for a second. "You can look at 'em if you want. Might help you get it."
"Huh?" I asked.
"Look." Craig lifted up one foot off the ground; he meant for me and Kyle to take a look at the soles. When we both realized we might as well give the boots a look, I noticed that the bottoms of those boots were not rubber or even steel. They looked like granite. Some kind of finely-sanded grey stone. There were treads marked in, as they would have been on any old lace-up boot, but a more intricate pattern was carved into them as well.
I felt like I'd seen it before. That particular hieroglyphic pattern…
"Craig, man, what's with the symbols?" I had to know. "Your shoes look like a cave wall or something."
"Stone slab."
"What?"
"Not a cave wall," Craig corrected me. "Stone slab."
"Um, okay."
"Question's still why, though," said Kyle, shrugging as the two of us stood back. Craig stood as well, and diverted his eyes from us. "Like, what're we supposed to get?"
"You'll see."
Craig reclaimed his discarded weighted weapon, gathered up the end of the rope in his left hand, leaving plenty of slack, and spun the other end with his right hand; the three round weights clacked together a couple of times, but then whipped through the air with ease as Craig let the weighted end fly toward the center target. The weights wrapped with a slight snap around the 'neck' of the target and caught, allowing Craig to yank down on the rope and bring the whole object to the ground.
"Okay," he remarked. "That works."
"Dude, that thing's awesome!" Kyle complimented him. I nodded in Craig's direction; Kyle caught my meaning and the two of us joined our teammate, I on his right and Kyle on his left. As Craig started gathering the rope back up, Kyle asked, "What is that thing, anyway? I feel like I've seen stuff like that before."
"Saw 'em when I was visiting my sister over spring break," said Craig. "I figured I should kinda go with it."
"Go with it why?" Kyle wondered.
Craig just sighed.
Hoping we weren't being annoying by asking him too many questions, I went with a different one: "Where's your sister again? Sorry, dude, I just feel like we don't catch up with you too much."
"It's cool. Stand back a little."
We did as he asked, and Craig whipped the weighted end of the hurling weapon around again, this time much faster than before. He then shot down onto one knee and threw the weights out again toward the base of the target to his diagonal left. The weights wrapped right around as before, and he was able to pull the target down and loose the weights in the same yank of the rope.
"My sister did that student teach abroad thing," said Craig, as if his training was a natural part of our nice, normal conversation.
"Oh, Ike did that, too!" Kyle noted. "Where'd she go?"
Craig gathered up his rope again, and slowly stood back up as he answered, almost guiltily, "Peru."
Oh.
I get it, I thought but did not say. Peru was a touchy subject for Craig. I could imagine him trying to get his little sister to choose anywhere but there to travel; if I were her, maybe he'd've convinced me, but Craig's little sister was pretty resilient, and the two knew each other well. Possibly too well, if she had insisted upon going to Peru.
And it was huge on Craig's part to have visited. He'd already re-lived a bit of that ancient Incan prophecy we'd discovered he was linked to, back when we were kids and accidentally wound up in Peru… in R'lyeh, as at the base of an Incan pyramid, Craig had been able to—bear with me—shoot lasers from his eyes. None of us knew why; just that it had something to do with guinea pigs and the ancient Incans.
"This thing," said Craig, holding out his coiled weapon, "is a boleadora, but the Incans called it ayllo."
"Dude, I thought you were still kinda sore about Peru," I noted.
"Just the situation," Craig answered. "It was dumb. I dunno, though. I got thinking about R'lyeh and figured it might be worth a shot to try out a couple things. So I went back, I visited my sister, and we did this tour thing with a guide and stuff."
"So, hold up," Kyle said, trying not to laugh, "are you gonna go with a theme on us, now?"
"Not totally."
"Dude, you should finally name yourself," Kyle went on. His tone read that he was still more or less joking. "You could do something like Wendy and Bebe, y'know? Did you learn any Incan down there?"
"A little. I can't really pronounce it," said Craig, "so that'd be pointless." He glanced back over at the targets, and dropped the ayllo to the ground. "I kinda was thinking about a name, though."
"No shit?" I wondered, trying not to grin. Kyle and I exchanged a quick glance, both of us on the same thought: Kenny's gonna love this. Kenny—well, Mysterion—was mostly fine with Craig just being referred to by his real name, but he, and even Clyde, had been pushing for quite some time for Craig to just go ahead and code name himself. It was a security thing. Bebe didn't want her name spoken out on the field, so she'd chosen a code name, and if we had to refer to Red, we'd just say 'intel,' but that was rare. Craig saw field action as much as the rest of us, though. Sooner or later, if he stuck with the League, he'd need to make that step. "What made you decide?"
"First of all, it's still kinda lame," Craig noted. "Also cuz nothing sounded right. It's still kinda weird. I'm twenty-one and I'm just now getting more into this thing you guys were doing when you were nine."
"So what?" I shrugged. "Craig, we need you on the team."
"Cool."
"So… what're we gonna call you on the field now?" Kyle prompted.
Craig looked down at his feet. He then squared his shoulders, made sure that his feet were flat on the ground and that he stood in a solid position, then cast his gaze on the targets again, and said, "I'm thinking Endgame."
I let out an impressed whistle. "Catchy."
"You think?"
"Sure thing. But why Endgame?" I wondered. "It's really…"
"Final," Kyle finished.
Without another word, Craig corrected his stance again. This time, he stamped his right foot down hard onto the ground, and then his left. He sucked in a deep breath and lifted his sunglasses. Kyle and I both immediately leapt back, mostly out of shock and partly to avoid any aftermath of the blast that suddenly happened. Just as in R'lyeh, just as in Peru, the moment the sunglasses were off, Craig's exposed eyes sent out a bright blue beam, which then completely incinerated the third and final target.
Once the blast had occurred, Craig slid the sunglasses back on. "That's why," he answered. "I figure that's pretty final, too."
As I waited for my breath to catch up to me again after having the shock of seeing that again, I managed to recall Craig's explanation of the lasers from R'lyeh: his eyes were fine when closed or shrouded, but over-stimulated in open air or natural light. That's how it had been when we'd all gotten a bit of a taste of extra power down in that other dimension, but in Peru, there had been—
"Holy shit!" I exclaimed. "Dude, is that why you carved that thing on your shoes?"
"Yup," said Craig. "I found that same site with my sister and took a photo. I copied the thing onto my shoes and it worked. It's just that one symbol I've gotta stand on, I guess. I still don't get it. But whatever. When Ike pulled the decal image, I remembered I was working on these. So, oops for not doin' it earlier or something, I guess."
I understood his need for the stone soles, now, too: he couldn't very well just draw or paint the symbols on any old pair or he'd risk the pattern getting scuffed. Rubber soles would eventually wear out. All of us had invested a lot in our equipment, or gear, our identities; those portable tablets of Craig's seemed like a signal that he was in the League for good.
Having those four years essentially 'off' made it easy for many of us to say that we could move on. That we could keep the League going on the side while going on with our lives. The thing that we simply could not forget, though, was that the League was our lives. Always would be.
Kyle, I realized, must have come to that conclusion earlier in the day. Prior to heading into R'lyeh, he'd considered his quirk an annoyance, and wanted more than anything to rid himself of it. Once we were in the thick of things, however, he couldn't let it go, and was distraught when he thought that it had left him for good.
"WHAT THE FUCK, DUDE?" Clyde came racing across the training field and nearly drove Craig down with a congratulatory punch on the shoulder. "What the shit was that, man? You been holding out on us?"
"Did Craig just shoot that laser?" Wendy cried out from the other side of the field, where she was still acting as a sparring partner for Ike in a swordfight.
"Yup," Craig called over, as he sat down to remove his boots.
"Where was that yesterday?" Clyde egged him on, wide-eyed.
"Hadn't finished the shoes. Don't crowd me, man."
"I'll crowd all I fuckin' want, bro, that was sick!"
"And you're twelve."
"Shut the fuck up, and use that shit on the field," Clyde laughed, helping Craig up once the boots were off.
Craig pointed over to the targets. "I just did."
"Whatever," Clyde shrugged it off. "But… fucking damn, guys. Between Kyle getting a handle on, uh—"
"Telekinesis," Kyle shrugged. "We can just call it that."
"I like 'gravity rearrangement,'" I encouraged him, nudging his arm.
"Anything that works," Kyle said with a not-quite-modest grin.
"Yeah, so between that and—Craig, dude, just—fuck!" he laughed.
"That was pretty amazin'," Butters commented, starting to go about cleanup.
"Yo, Butters, cool it with always picking up after us," Clyde called over to him. "You're one of us, not the maid."
Butters gave a slight smile. It was hard for there to be a real compliment passed between him and Clyde, still. Which I understood, primarily because Butters had the hardest time letting things go. "It's all right," he said, so as not to sound desperate. "I like to clean up." It translated to, I still owe you guys, all over the place, but nobody made mention of that.
The back door opened, and Karen stepped out to collect us for the full discussion. It was a tough call, once we'd gathered around the table, careful not to disturb either Kenny or Cartman, who sat on opposite ends of the long table—thus putting Cartman out of his usual seat and comfort zone—which of them seemed to be having a harder time processing current events.
Cartman sat slouched back, his arms folded, casting a powerful glare across the table. His eyes did not move, nor did they seem to blink. Kenny was standing, hunched over his chair, drumming his fingers along the back. The dry erase marker was tucked behind his right ear, and behind him, in enormous letters along the whiteboard were the hastily-scrawled words, THE SHADOW.
Kyle and I slid silently into our usual seats. Trying not to look at either Cartman or Kenny, I looked instead at Ike, who was attempting not to show his own worry as he powered up his tablet for note-taking.
"How's it going, man?" Clyde asked Kenny once he'd taken his own seat.
Kenny lifted his head, gave Clyde his attention, then addressed all of us. "I needed that. Thanks, guys," he said to begin. "Last time anyone has to be outta the initial loop, I promise."
"We understand," I said, speaking for the group. "How is it going, though?"
Looking drawn, Kenny turned to write Damien as the first order of business underneath his own returned affliction. "I'm just gonna get right to it. This much we know," he said. "Damien Thorn is back in South Park. Scott Tenorman," he added, putting the Ginger leader's name on the whiteboard beside Damien's, "has been 'transferred,' and letters are being sent out. I'm willing to bet that Red and Kyle got the generic letter as kind of a warning shot. Things might get personal if you guys get more. Craig, Wendy, your dads both have red hair, so I'd watch out for letters if I were you, too."
"Timmah," Timmy grumbled.
"Dude, you still haven't gotten one?" Clyde asked him. Timmy shook his head and leaned to one side of his wheelchair. "All the better for you to pull one over on them, though, right?" Clyde tried, encouragingly. Timmy smiled a bit, and waved one hand side to side to indicate, yeah maybe. "Speakin' of Craig, though—" Clyde went on.
"Oh, God," Craig mumbled.
"What about Craig?" Kenny wondered.
"Fucker's got a laser trick like you would not believe," Clyde laughed. "We've got ourselves a new attack regimen in this guy."
Kenny gave Craig an odd look. Craig sighed. "Peru," he said for the hundredth time. Kenny understood immediately, and scribbled Craig's name down on a different end of the board, probably to remind himself that this was a topic to bring up at a later time. With so much coming at us all at once, I could understand Kenny's want to narrow the subject. Craig seemed more than pleased to not be the center of attention, as well.
"I hadn't even thought of that, though," Wendy confessed, to keep things moving the way Kenny wanted. "My dad does have red hair, but I didn't think…"
"We figured," Karen said, "that Kenny and I had gotten letters because of our mom. There's still the possibility that mine is generic, but I'm not about to find out."
Kenny added GSM to the board, which gave me the feeling, once again, of going in circles. The whiteboard had been erased from its earlier bullet points, but nothing seemed to have changed. Just morale, pretty much.
"And yeah, they're really personal," Kenny scowled. "Ask Stan and Kyle. Right, guys? You saw it, when I opened that letter."
We nodded simultaneously. Had we ever.
"Um, excuse me," said Cartman, lifting a hand, "but that asshole sent my mom a letter for Mother's Day. This fucking sucks."
"Putting it bluntly," Karen said.
Kenny underlined Damien's name. "This guy's gonna be a problem. He sends me a personal letter? Gonna fucking bet that I've got some personal shit to say to him, too. Motherfucker. Clyde?"
"What's up?"
"Can I get you really seriously on Yates's ass?" Kenny instructed him. "We can't have the head of Park County replying to that fucking letter, dumb as that guy is. Otherwise, Damien's gonna have the run of the county really fucking soon."
Clyde nodded his agreement to the task.
We continued tossing ideas around from there. Spinning circles. I was starting to think I might start having nightmares about nothing but being dizzy from information that I feared would get me nowhere.
To be honest, I am kind of prone to nightmares, nearly in the same way that Kyle is prone to migraines. I tell myself that it's nothing, even though they come most poignantly on or around times that remind me of experiences I'd had either in R'lyeh or otherwise against supernatural forces before. I always have nightmares on Halloween. In the doldrums of January. Here and there, this and that.
Kyle knows. He picked up on it rather fast, and honors my want not to talk about it, just as I honor his touch-and-go attitude about his quirk. He's an expert at changing the subject, always bringing up more pleasant memories or suggesting we find something interesting and different to do in order to create new ones. When he's not around, and I start getting worried about things, I pick up my guitar, just to drown out other thoughts in my head.
Not that I ever hear the music anymore, the flute melody that Chaos once played through South Park to conjure up Nyarlathotep's madness, but I used to hear a line or two of it in my dreams, which was how I'd known they were nightmares. I'd hear a tone or two and wake up freezing. I told Kenny about it… ugh, maybe all of once, but I felt that, as long as Kyle could help talk me through them, they were just post-traumatic nightmares, not prophecies or anything. And I hadn't wanted to bring up unnecessary pain in Kenny's own heart and mind about the events that had transpired around then.
Now seemed like a more reasonable time to bring that fact up, which I knew I'd have to do before I took any more stock in Wilcox's paintings. I hadn't had any nightmares lately; hadn't dreamt much at all, really, which was kind of nice. Oh, I'd fallen asleep worried, sure, I mean, we were still in the middle of that odd struggle against the GSM, but I'd wake up, more often than not, next to Kyle, who'd smile to remind me that, all League things considered, I had a damn good thing going.
I didn't want them to start. One can rely on substances (preferably legal) to shake bad thoughts, but can't exactly take anything for nightmares. There's no way I know of to chose what to dream at night.
But I had a feeling I'd be seeing spirals. That I might wake up dizzy. That I'd worry in my sleep about what other people were dreaming about. Like Karen and Kenny—how the new Shadow was affecting them. Like Red, caught in the middle of both the Shadow plight and the Ginger insurrection. Like Kyle, whose mind I could pick during the day and whose calming breath helped me rest. Who had just begun questioning possible new direction his own innate ability might be able to take.
While I was in my waking hours, though, all I could currently think about was how oddly unprepared we were. The GSM had caught us off guard, and now it seemed that Damien would start narrowing things down, getting more specific with each of us. How he'd slithered his way into the GSM was a mystery, but nothing we could count as an odd move on his part.
"I don't get it," Red said after we'd hit another wall and fallen into another spiral. "If Damien's the one sending the letters, why would anyone join?"
"Well, I mean, we didn't even know till now," Kyle pointed out. "I'm just gonna play the 'you and I have more common sense than your average mob member' card, though."
"True enough," Red agreed. "I'm getting kind of freaked about Tenorman, though. Where's he fit in?"
"Hey, guys," Ike interrupted. "Everyone's favorite radio program's on. Shut up a little, eh?"
He held a hand up to silence the room, while Karen, sidling up beside him, turned up the computer's volume so we could listen to the broadcast.
"Listeners of the town of South Park."
Shit. Judging from Kenny and Cartman's similar sudden reactions to the voice that crackled in over the air, that was Damien's own voice making the announcement. He certainly was having his fun with us, wasn't he?
I vaguely recognized the oddly cheerful music in the background as the suite from Carnival of the Animals. Wendy had taken me to a concert once, in middle school, at which the suite had been played. Her own pursed-lips silence proved that she recognized the song, as well, though whether or not that particular date was of any present interest was hopefully neither here nor there.
What interested me was Damien's choice to directly address the issue of the Carnival.
"In anticipation of our coming Carnival, we have been playing a game. A bit of a secret sweepstakes, if you will."
Kyle held his breath. He was right.
"Our volunteers have been working round the clock to bring this town one hell of an event."
"I bet," Kenny scoffed.
"But before we can begin, we must, of course, reward those of you so dutifully listening to our program. Some prizes have already been awarded—"
"That ASSHOLE," Kenny snapped.
"—to the few most worthy of their respective winnings. The best, as they say, is yet to come."
There was nothing but the fading out of Carnival of the Animals for a moment, and then a scream. While everyone in the room winced, some of us, myself and Kyle included, covering our ears, Damien's voice came on again, nice and loud, so that everyone had the opportunity to hear him shout, "Fill what void remains, Mysterion! If you can find it!"
Then, the transmission crackled out completely, and the room was dead with silence.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
We were being had. Every last one of us. Had by a child of Hell. Whether or not he needed any of the rest of us, he definitely had his sights set on Kenny—on Mysterion, on the Shadow—for something bigger than we'd expected.
Damien had risen to play some kind of game with the Shadow League, using re-awakened nightmares as a means of catching us off our guard. He was calling things like the opportunity to join Tenorman's Ginger army, Kyle's quirk, and Kenny's curse prizes. I was starting to wonder whether or not the Carnival was mostly just a metaphor, rather than a physical place.
This was just an 'attraction.' Our summer thus far had been filled with nothing but sideshow curiosities. The letters, for one. Liane Cartman, for another.
It was looking pretty likely that, if the Shadow wasn't the main event, some new nightmare like Cthulhu had to be.
God, Kenny was keeping his anger about his revived powers bottled up well. He may still have been in shock. He probably would be for a while.
Noting this, Clyde stepped it up as team captain—oh, here I go again; I've quit playing and I still think in football terms—and turned to the group at the computers. "Signal, or anything?" he wondered.
Ike frowned at his tablet screen. "Yeah," he mumbled. "Kinda figured."
"What?"
"It's a mobile signal. They're transmitting from the helicopter."
"That makes it easy to catch these bastards," Kyle complained.
"Gripes the asshole who can fucking fly," Cartman muttered.
"Oh, fuck off," Kyle retaliated, at the same time Kenny barked, "You are not in a position to talk right now."
"You don't think I'm pissed at my mom?" Cartman hollered, leaping out of his chair and leaning over the edge of the table. "Goddamn bitch lied to me and kept shit from me my whole li—"
"Join the fucking club!" Kenny roared, going red in the face. His girlfriend set a hand on his arm carefully, in hopes of cooling him off somewhat.
Cartman, unfortunately, was the town's best provoker of unwanted conversation. "I am the club, motherfucker!" he snapped. "This is all bullshit!"
"Calm down," Wendy groaned.
"Calm down yourself, bitch!"
"Excuse me," Token defended her against Cartman.
"HOLY FUCKING SHIT. EVERYONE SHUT UP!"
Clyde's commanding tone did the words justice. As if he'd simply pressed mute, all noise in the room ceased. Cartman's jaw still hung slack as he prepared another prickish comeback, and Kenny's skin was still tinted an angry red from his outburst. For the most part, I saw looks of guilt around the table, as others (myself probably included) tried hard to show their lack of involvement.
"Thank you," Clyde said, evening out his tone. "Now, look. I really don't like what I'm seeing at this table. Aren't we a team, guys? I mean it. Look around."
Met with some hesitation—Craig—we did.
I felt awful. Not because I was one of the ones instigating the present argument… maybe because I was steering myself out of it. God knows I've seen enough of people arguing in my life. I'd always felt pretty lucky when it came to my friendships. I mean, take something like me and Wendy. We hardly even had to have the 'are we still friends' conversation after we broke up. We just knew we were, and we always could be. Or my friendship with Clyde: we'd been football co-captains, roommates… and he'd been a little upset when I decided to quit after our most recent season, but it was water under the bridge. Kenny—Kenny had saved me from death; I still kinda owed the guy.
But I don't like fighting with any of them. I couldn't bear to lose anyone around that table.
Even though that kind of thing happens. It happens, and I hate it. We had a great group, and it was painful to just be arguing about something that could, with work, be overcome.
Underneath all of the arguments, all of the talk of curses and Damien and Cartman and R'lyeh was a fear that clenched all of us, but that none of us had yet addressed that summer, due to how helter-skelter this Carnival thing had forced things to be: the League's future. Once Karen left town; once some of us would take jobs outside of South Park.
Or the question of if we would stay. Stay, to continue the League, or leave, keeping it in our lives in some way, but otherwise moving on to other things. No, we had not addressed any of that. Because Damien had reared his awful head and was individually targeting everyone in our well-knit group.
Clyde had every reason to bitch at us.
"We are a team," he reiterated. His intensity was enough to tell me that, whatever happened to the rest of us, South Park was definitely going to be seeing plenty of Mosquito in the future. Clyde was a team-minded guy. He lived for things like this. And, like many of us, had almost died for it, as well. "We didn't get here by being separate groups. Remember? We're a League. We're the Shadow League. Stan gave us a good name, guys, and the Shadow's resurgence may be something we weren't expecting, but it's happened, and we owe what we are to Mysterion. We are fucking allied under the Shadow, so damned if I'm going to just sit here listening to you guys wank at each other!
"We need to prioritize," Clyde went on, smacking a fist down on the table. "That's how we get shit done. So yeah. Maybe we're all gonna drive each other—well, you know… we're just, we're gonna argue." Nice save, there, Clyde. "For fuck's sake, we've been doing this for years. But Jesus, guys. Let's handle this together. All right? Otherwise, the bullet points on this board mean shit all nothing. Now are we going to yell about cow shit like the Greeley debate team or are we going to get to WORK?"
I almost wanted to applaud. (Hell, I had half a mind to suggest him as a future mayor if I were more convinced he could shut the fuck up sometimes about his sexual exploits, but that's another story.) Clyde had a way with words. Sure, sometimes he had to shout them, but he damn well got his point across. He was a natural leader, and not only did Kenny recognize that, the League did. There had been a point, a couple years ago, when Cartman had voiced a complaint along the lines of, "God, Clyde, who died and made you leader?" To which Kenny had reminded him that he had, about two hundred times. Which shut Cartman up, and nobody had anything bad to say about Clyde since.
When his words hit home visually in everyone, Clyde nodded to the group, relaxed, and said, "Thanks. Now we're gonna get somewhere. Let's start at the top. The Shadow."
The board now read: THE SHADOW. Underneath that, Damien. Tenorman/GSM. Location? Then, Liane Cartman—Jack Tenorman—Cthulhu.
"Oh, look," Kyle whispered to me as he slouched back in his seat. "It's fatass's family tree. What the fuck."
"Mmhmm," I half-agreed, not wanting to get caught talking shit after Clyde's speech.
"All right," said Kenny. "First thing's first. This Shadow might not be the same as the one I was bound to before. Which would be a really fucking good thing. Not that this is in any way good, but whatever. But it's definitely a warning of some sort."
"We're being tested," Kyle re-stated, giving the group his opinion. "We've gotta be."
"Tenorman made reference to R'lyeh, kinda, on the asylum walls," I added.
"Ike, we got full visual on those?" Kenny asked, raising his voice.
"Archiving them now," Ike assured him.
Kenny scribbled down tests, games, prizes. "The fuck even is this, Damien?" he growled at the board. "This is fucking chaos."
"Oh, jeez."
Kenny turned to look toward Butters, who had gone from kneading his knuckles to chewing on an end of his hair. Because of his frequent cross-dressing and switching of personal pronouns, Butters liked to keep his hair to his shoulders. But the boy was giving himself some pretty bad split-ends. "I didn't mean that," Kenny said quickly.
"No, but—well, I mean, it's kinda true," Butters said, already a nervous wreck. "I-it is a chaotic thing. What's happening. And—w-well, I just—"
"Butters, say something fucking useful for once," Cartman snapped.
"I'm getting to it!" Butters yelled back. "All's I'm trying to bring up is that if Damien's treating this like some kinda game, who's to say he's not gonna play dirty? Always makin' us deal with things in the past that hurt us? I mean, Kenny, you got that power back, and that's horrible. And Cartm—E-Eric, he dug so deep he went right for your mom, and I'm real sorry to hear that."
"Sorry that he's fucking half-brothers with Satan's kid?" Kenny shouted.
"Maybe I just feel sorry for everyone!" Butters defended himself. "That's all."
Kenny looked like he was ready to say more, then sighed, letting his anger subside. Especially when it looked like Clyde was about to bang his proverbial gavel again. "You're right," he said instead of continuing into an argument. "Thanks. Yes. This isn't gonna be easy, and yes, Damien's going for the throat, it seems."
"So where's Tenorman even place on here?" Token wondered, to provoke further thought on the overlying issue. "Other than, you know, his dad being a Cultist and the whole 'kill everyone but Gingers' thing."
"Other than that… Tenorman is either being played, or…" Kenny offered. He cut himself off.
None of us wanted to say it, but we were dealing with the devil's son, here. Damien had to have some kind of motive for returning to Earth after so long, and collecting souls didn't seem too out of the realm of possibility.
The stillness was solidarity. We were all in immediate agreement that Tenorman may well have sold his soul for something. Revenge against Cartman? Possibly. But that seemed trite, even for someone whose life was built around a horrible grudge.
"I'm willing to bet they're both after you," Kenny said dourly, looking at Cartman. Cartman did not raise his eyes. He didn't say a thing. He only so rarely went into shock so bad that he had nothing to contribute, so the rest of us in the room were forced to accept that he really had no idea about anything we were currently faced with. "Tenorman and Damien."
"You think?" Karen prompted.
"Well, let's think about this," I said. "Guys, what if this is all a test? I mean, let's get this kinda basic to start, right? Yeah, Damien's here, and yeah, this is disturbing as shit, but…"
"Can you guys go back a second?" Ike asked. When Kenny asked for clarification, Ike said as an amendment, "Like, how many years out are we talking? When'd he first come here? I don't have that down."
"Third grade," said Cartman, his voice dull. "Fuckin' asshole tried to sabotage my bi—"
Kenny's marker squeaked across the board as he spun in shock from the realization. Kyle and I tightened our grip on each other so hard we both winced. Yes, it was disturbing to think about, but it at least gave us something else to work off of:
When Cartman's birthday had rolled around that year, his mother had thrown him an outrageously lavish party, which we all more or less expected. Liane Cartman would probably be paying off loans for trips and parties forever (unless the funds all came from her not-so-secret benefactors), and she had really spared no expense that year.
Because she had thrown him a carnival.
I thought back to the paintings, now of all times. Fraud, Wrath—sins… Damien… both Limbo and R'lyeh had been represented in the works of Wilcox and his ancestors. Something connected Hell to that place beyond the Gate in a dimension separate from yet once linked to our own. The Shadow had been the vessel for the Old Ones, Cthulhu and his ilk, said within the Cult to provide those old gods to rise and bring madness to the world.
After madness would surely come something more Apocalyptic.
I glanced at the board again. Liane Cartman was the link between a representative of the Cthulhu Cult and the dictator of Hell. There was a child on either side of the spectrum—and one right in the middle.
"Cartman…" Kenny said, his voice shaking as badly as his hands had been at the board, "you're an outlier."
"I'm not a liar. He really was here on my—"
"An outlier," Kenny stressed. "A… you're a missing link."
Something clicked in Cartman's head—what, I don't even want to venture to guess, but he'd been convinced of something. Convinced that he had importance in a matter that he'd already been linked to. That Kenny and Karen had been tied to since birth. That even Clyde had a place in, way back in his bloodline, and that all of us had been entangled with.
"Cthulhu is dead," Kenny continued, crossing out Cthulhu on the board. He looked at it, then scribbled on it further, bearing down hard so that the word was barely discernable between the extra marks. "Therefore, Cthulhu's Shadow is dead. Whatever the hell this is…" He shuddered, and held out his hand. The shadow of it curled and formed again below him, on the table. I shivered. "Whatever this is, it's… it feels different. It reeks of R'lyeh, but something's off, too."
"Do, um… do you think this Damien guy has access to your… you know, your files or something?" Karen asked her brother, each word spoken more nervously than the one that preceded it. "You had a lot of deaths, Kenny. And I, um… I think about the afterlife a lot, awful as that is."
"How so?" I wondered, before I knew I'd spoken.
Karen drummed her fingers on the table, looked up at Kenny, then at the scribbled out word Cthulhu. "I just wonder what it's like for the people in charge of it," Karen admitted. "Like, the rules of Heaven and Hell. R'lyeh, according to you guys, didn't have rules. Hell must. Like, there've gotta be files or something. I can't imagine there aren't. What if everyone lives on a track, and we're just adding to our file while we're alive? I'd be willing to bet, Kenny, you've got a bunch of different files."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, and like… was there a link between Hell and R'lyeh?"
Kenny wrote down Spaces Between on the whiteboard. "I wouldn't rule it out."
"Can you get to the part where I'm an outlier?" Cartman spoke up.
The sibling pair scowled at him, then shared a sigh that prompted things to continue. "So what I was saying," Kenny explained, crossing out Cthulhu once more for good measure, "is that we never really, you know, sorted you out. As in, the Cult tried to use you once, too. It didn't work out.
"If Damien's older than you—and… honest to God, dude, your stupid fucking mom…" For once, Cartman did not argue. Which, oddly enough, sent a chill around the room. "Anyway, if Damien's older… ugh, I don't even want to be talking about this shit, but, maybe his 'older sibling' status had something to do with why Jack Tenorman couldn't give you the same curse I ended up getting."
"You mean—"
Kenny grit his teeth, and I swear I could hear them gnash, all the way from the other side of the table. "What I think I'm saying is that you couldn't become the Shadow because you were meant for something else. The Cult couldn't have you because Satan's already got something in mind."
Oh goody fucking joy.
I could practically feel Kyle's blood rush beside me. He looked like he was halfway between a laugh and a scream, but too full of thoughts provoking each to muster a sound. In a way, we'd been waiting to learn something like this our entire lives. Growing up, Cartman was a little devil in his own right, a downright self-made anti-Christ, who made life miserable for Kyle. And Wendy. And Butters. And—just about everyone who wasn't him. Kenny and I put up with him for the most part, but he was always a dick, and pushing the limit, and pushing and pushing and never getting caught.
If I could read minds, I just knew that Kyle's thoughts in that instant were, I fucking knew it.
So, though, were Cartman's thoughts. Only for a much, much different reason.
Mr. Ego just got another boost.
"Oh, who's the one with the creepy prophecy now?" he gloated.
"How the fuck are you happy about this?" Kenny had to know. "Jesus. UGH. Where's an actual fucking hint to this shit when we need it?"
Cartman was the tie between R'lyeh and Hell, while Kenny had been the link between R'lyeh and Earth. All I knew was: we had to keep that guy in our sights and on our good side. He'd mellowed out in recent years, sure, even enough for us to count him as more of a friend, but if the universe was just begging for us to mistrust him—
WE SHALL BUILD THE NEW BETWEEN.
That was what Scott Tenorman had written on the wall of his room at the South Park asylum. Kenny and I had it right on the money, too: Spaces Between. The gaps between R'lyeh and our world were still open.
Whatever Tenorman may have sold his soul for, it wasn't going to be something pretty. "The paintings," I said to remind the group. I couldn't let the thought go. "Kenny, that's our lead. I think that whatever 'game' this is that Damien's telling us we're playing, there's something in the paintings."
With no hesitation, Kenny wrote Wilcox—gallery thing on the whiteboard. "Right," he said, then clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth a few times. "You're absolutely right, Stan. Right. Guys, we're up against some weird shit right now, but this is where we're gonna get our answers."
"Some fuckin' art show's gonna tell me how I'm important to—" Cartman started.
"Shut. Up." Kenny's shoulders tensed, and he spoke the words very profoundly, so that they would not instigate, but so that he remained calm. "We are going to work on it. Maybe it took fuckin' Henrietta to remind me that I've gotta be patient about certain things, but if we wait for this, it's going to pay off.
"June sixth. Mark the date, guys," Kenny said, writing down the date in huge letters. He scowled at the board when he realized that he'd written 6/6. One to go. He shook his head. "We're all going to that gallery opening, like it or not. I've got a feeling I know who the guest of honor is."
No kidding.
We continued hashing shit out until we were dead tired. Preliminary assignments for the night of June sixth were passed around, and Ike kept track of everyone's ideas. It was good that we were, just as Clyde had been insisting, working as the team we all knew we could be, even though there was still strain in the air, and would be until we figured out exactly what part Cartman was meant to play in the mythos we thought we'd left behind us.
When the others had left the base, Kenny demanded that Cartman stay for more of a talk, and to go over the old notes about R'lyeh, but while Karen tugged Cartman off to the side to start going through the file cabinets, Kenny caught up with me and Kyle, handing off to me the portfolio of Wilcox's works he said he'd received from Henrietta. I regretted not staying at the coffee house to talk to the Goth longer, earlier that day, but there was only so much that could be done.
"I want you to see these," he told me. "Sorry if it brings up anything bad for you, but… I don't know, dude, I feel like you're the one to take on shit about the paintings. I can only keep my head in one place right now, guys, I'm sorry."
"Hey, I understand," I told him.
"You're handling this awfully well," Kyle added as a compliment. "You really think the Shadow's different?"
Kenny ran a hand down the spine of the leather-bound portfolio and leveled out his breath. "Cthulhu is dead," he said firmly. "I killed him, and I watched the Shadow destroy itself. This thing's got me by the lungs, sure, but I think that's cuz the ability's tied to my breath. I'm not putting a stopper on what Damien might be capable of. Being the Shadow was hell for me. He did this to make us think."
"As long as you're convinced, dude," I said, smiling to show my support. "Whatever you do, sleep, okay?"
"You've gotten sick over this shit before," Kyle reminded him. "Don't let Cartman hog the attention and make you lose rest."
Kenny's mouth twisted to the side, and then he cracked a grin. Finally, he let out a full, real laugh. While we stood there, confused, Kenny grabbed us in around our necks, and pressed his head between our shoulders. "I liked you guys better when you were my bros and not my dads," he let out with his next laugh. "But thanks, guys, I mean it." I let myself grin while I could. In being friends with Kenny, I'd take whatever the hell family label he wanted to slap on any of us. Clyde was right: we were a team. We had to keep things solid.
We exchanged a few lighter words in departing, and I left with the portfolio tucked under my arm.
"How's your head?" I asked Kyle as we slowly walked the path that would lead us back to the Blacks' luxurious garage to claim my car.
"Fine, but forget me for a second," Kyle said. "How're you?"
"Huh?"
"We haven't talked about it in a while, and you looked kinda pale when Kenny gave you that book, Stan," my boyfriend said softly, taking hold of my free hand as we slowed our pace further. "You had pretty bad dreams for a while after R'lyeh. Anything lately?"
I managed a small but nervous laugh, and squeezed his hand. "You sure you can't read people, Kyle?" I asked.
"Finding people on a radar isn't the same as knowing what you're thinking about," he said, taking the comment slightly literally. "I already hate those paintings enough. I don't want you getting nightmares you don't need."
"Thanks," I told him. "I am kinda getting worried about that, too, though."
"So let me know, okay?" Kyle walked a little closer, and leaned in to kiss my cheek. I hadn't realized how shocked and numb I'd been feeling from the Damien conversation until that simple, sweet action warmed me. "We're in this together."
Always had been, always would be. We'd seen each other through more than our share of troubles, so we'd take this mission on as a unit, too, working the only way we could.
We stayed up late together that night, stretched out on the floor of my room with the portfolio of paintings in front of us. Unease settled in with every twisted image of one of the Old Ones that Wilcox had filed into his personal gallery.
We stopped after seeing Wilcox's representation of the Shadow, knowing we'd get no sleep at all if we continued on to study his current visions of sins. After all, we did have a gallery party to attend, fairly soon. In the meantime, we decided, we'd brave the awful chills we both got from the nightmares within the frames and study the real paintings in the meantime. We couldn't react too harshly until we had all the facts. Facts hanging on the walls of the Goths' gallery space.
The gallery event was only days away, and we were going to use them to our full advantage. Maybe there was no way to stay a step ahead of a devil, but we'd had it with being played. If Hell was coming for all of us individually, we had to prepare for it, and fortify ourselves. Someday, we'd free ourselves of nightmares. If we had to win Damien's Carnival game to do it, well then, so be it.
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Authors' Note:
South Park is -c- Matt Stone and Trey Parker!
All right! Getting closer now~ ^^ More on both Dante and Lovecraft references to come, too. When we first started working on this story—mid-Cthulhu Fhtagn—we started noticing the huge trend in carnival themes... (And not just in South Park; a lot of music we both listen to has recently kinda gone the carnival route… and when writing an SP story, we'll probably be making the odd reference… plus, probably some inevitable superhero references here and there, as before, as well as the fact that—I totally should've mentioned this earlier—we may at least inadvertently reference the fact that this is a sequel, haha... XD) Even though in the early seasons the guys' birthdays were unclear, we had to keep to that part of canon for this. :3 We're having fun with this so far, but I'm getting excited for what's coming up with the gallery event; I've been waiting to get to writing out that part. ^^
Thank you so much for reading! And to those who have faved, followed, and left comments thus far, yay! We'd love to hear your thoughts, it's always encouraging to keep us on our toes as we hope to improve as writers. ^^; Our hope is to deliver a good story, and while these early chapters may have a hint of confusion to them, there are answers and connections very soon to come.
Next week we'll go into multiple narrations for the first time; just keeping things moving along. Gonna be seeing Damien again, soon too… ^^ See you next Wednesday, July 25th! :3
~Jizena, and Rosie Denn
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