Thank God for Fantastic Easter Special... I honestly had no idea where to go with this until that episode aired.
This is a longass chapter, but there was a lot to cram in. The other chapters will be shorter.
Martyrdom: It's Not For Everyone
04. There Are 500 Ways to Kill a Man... Unless He's Chuck Norris
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Kenny coughs. He lifts a hand to his mouth and wipes the bloody drool away, then works his index finger around inside, scrapping fragments of teeth and hunks of tongue off of the walls and roof of his mouth, then spitting them out onto the sidewalk.
"Oh, sick!"
Kenny glances up and at Wendy, who looks horrified. Unsurprising. Wendy has never been up close and personal with the gorier aspects of Kenny's condition before, and it's a little much to take. Kenny decides to defuse the tension the only way he knows how: by telling an uncouth joke.
"Sooo Wendy, you got to fire a shot in me, do I get to fire a shot in you?"
Wendy gives him a disgusted/scandalized look. Kenny looks to his left and sees Stan—who is supporting him, one hand under Kenny's armpit, the other holding Kenny's arm around his shoulders—roll his eyes. Clyde Cline is on the other side of Stan, snickering, because Clyde is every bit the pervert Kenny is, but gets laid less often because of the extra stomach flab. Kenny's eyebrows shoot up.
"Clyde? You're in on this?"
"Yeah," Clyde says, shrugging.
"How come?"
"Nothing better to do in South Park."
"I hear that."
"Would you stop chatting him up?" Wendy asks huffily.
"Yeah, Kenny, quit being nice to our kidnappers!" Stan protests.
"Fine. God, you both always have to have it your way," Kenny huffs. "Why'd we crash, at least?"
"Clyde swerved to avoid a squirrel," Wendy says, giving him a pointed look.
"What? Roadkill makes me cry."
"Everything makes you cry."
"I'll have you know I've stopped crying after sex!"
We are going to skip over the trip to Vatican city because it is long and uninteresting. The airlines refused to let them on with a gun—Wendy cursed post-9/11 protocol—and they ended up on a cruise line. Kenny and Clyde spent the time playing limbo, dancing in congo lines, and sucking tequila from the belly buttom of a Chilean transvestite. Stan and Wendy stayed by the bar, sipping mai tais and giving their companions disapproving looks. "Damn Stockholm syndrome," Wendy said, and Stan said, "Don't they realize they aren't on the same side?" and then they clinked their glasses and toasted to unreasonable friends.
See? Boring. Nearly as boring as golf.
When they arrived they were thrown into the same cages Stan spent a night in on Easter '07, and that's where we'll pick up.
"Don't even think of escaping," Wendy says. She points to an intimidating-looking man who steps out of the dark like a supervillain from a comic book that's abusing the shadow technique. "Romper here's in charge of the ninjas, and he's been teaching them the ancient art of stomping."
"That's stupid," Stan says.
"You're stupid."
"Clyde!" Kenny says, gripping the bars, "you aren't gonna leave me here, are you? We congoed! Does a limbo stick mean nothing to you?!"
"Sorry Ken," Clyde shrugs. "I'm just backing the winning horse."
"I understand," Kenny says solemnly. Stan pinches the bridge on his nose.
"Kenny, would you just shut up?" he snaps and Kenny, looking abashed, sits down and does so. Stan takes to pacing, wondering if praying to Jesus would help. After all, the last biblical figure ran anyway when he needed help.
"... Look, Stan," Kenny says after a long silence. "I'm really sorry, ya know? But you don't have anything to worry about, 'cause they're really only after me-"
"Dammit, Kenny, I don't want you to get hurt, either!" Classic Good Guy Syndrome. Stan's got a bad case of it. It's incurable, but some people with it can still lead normal lives.
Stan isn't one of them, clearly.
Kenny, as you know, isn't a good guy. Drug addicts with illegitimate children they never see rarely are. So Stan's concern for his well being, even after he got Stan abducted, makes Kenny uncomfortable. Kenny fishes his morphine from his pocket and pops the child proof cap off.
"... what's that?"
"What?"
Understanding dawns. "Damn it Kenny! You told me you were clean!"
"... I did?" Of course he did. Another symptom of the disease: when Stan found out about Kenny's drug problem, he worked months to get Kenny off of it. In the end Kenny felt so badly about all the time Stan was wasting on him that he lied and told him he wasn't using anymore, and hid all his pills. When Stan left for LA he appointed himself Kenny's sponser and gave him his number in case he ever had to talk him out of a relapse.
Things would have dissolved into a fight if Clyde hadn't reappeared at that exact moment and unlocked their cell.
"What're you doing?" Romper Stomper demands, and Clyde ignores him.
"Mr. Proutly apologizes for the treatment you've received and invites you to dinner to show his hospitality," Clyde reads off of a card, holding the door of their cell open.
"What?"
"Mr. Proutly apologizes for-" Clyde begins to reread the card.
"Never mind," Stan says, exasperated. Clyde leads them to a dining room and long table with a delicious-looking spread. Clyde and Wendy even pull out Kenny and Stan's chairs for them. Stan looks across the table at Kenny, hoping to share a mutual expression of suspicion and concern, and is more than a little annoyed to find that Kenny is already stuffing his face.
"Where's Proutly?" Stan demands.
"He'll be here after dinner," Wendy says.
"Oh God, Stan, you have to try this. It is so fucking good."
Stan ignores Kenny. "I'm not eating anything. You could have poisoned it."
Kenny chugs his wine.
"We didn't make dinner," Wendy says, frowning. "Heidi and Shelly did. And I wouldn't poison you, Stan-"
"Shut up."
"You shut up!" Wendy says, offended.
Stan, however, stares. "Heidi and who?"
"Shelly."
Stan stares for a long while. Then he repeats, "Shut up." Wendy huffs and crosses her arms.
"Stan, seriously, this is delicious. And you've got to be hungry," Kenny says, mouth full. Stan looks questioningly at Clyde, who shrugs.
"You could wait and see if Kenny keels over... but really, if we wanted to kill you, we'd have just shot you... or had Romper stomp on you."
Stan's stomach growls, and he finally digs in. And it is delicious. He and Kenny eat until they're stuffed, and then they hear footsteps coming down the hall. Wendy (who was slouching against a wall) and Clyde (who was cleaning his ear with his pinky) both stand up straight, and Stan cranes his neck to see who is about to walk into the room. Kenny, who is in the process of unbuckling his belt for thirds, couldn't care less.
... And we hope it comes as no surprise to you who Ben Proutly is. If we can't pull off the obvious, we figure we will fail mightily at trying to do subtly.
It is a surprise to Stan. If his stomach weren't so weighed down with food, he would have fallen out of his seat in shock.
"CARTMAN?!"
"It's Proutly now," Eric Cartman—rather, Ben Proutly, but we will call him Cartman because that is how Stan and Kenny (and Wendy and Clyde, for that matter) think of him—says. He pulls out a chair at the head of the table, sits down, and folds his hands. It's a bit odd to see Cartman in a priest's getup. "Well you guys, long time no see-"
"I saw you two years ago when you I let you crash on my couch and you stole 500 dollars when you left!"
"God, Stan, you never let anything go, do you?"
"That was my gas and food money!"
"Well, I took the money and entered a beauty pageant-"
"A beauty pageant," Stan repeats incredulously.
"Did you win?" Kenny asks curiously, speaking for the first time.
"Kenny!"
"What?" he asks innocently.
"As a matter of fact, I did," Cartman says smugly. "I sabotaged those other bitches and got a check for $25000. I partied for a while, then one day I ended up in a hotel room with that mob boss that had killed twenty-six hookers. So the government put me up in witness protection, and now I'm living the sweet life," Cartman says, grinning. "I've got so much money I use it for toilet paper."
This is a brief, sanitized version of Eric Cartman's early twenties, and we will delve deeper for your benefit:
First, you should know that Cartman is very much his father's son, minus the vagina. At the age of nineteen he was having gang bangs at The Drunken Barn Dance, posing for Crack Whore Magazine, negotiating a contact for a Scheiße movie, and very routinely dressing in drag. However, you must remember that Eric Cartman is much more intelligent and conniving than Liane Cartman could ever hope to be. He was making serious money while successfully hiding his more outrageous behavior from his friends. Sure, they knew he was a bisexual with a definite tilt toward men, but that was sort of a given.
So yes, Cartman "ended up in a hotel room with that mob boss that had killed twenty-six hookers" because the mob boss had the expectation Cartman was going to blow him, but Cartman recognized him as the serial killer the moment he walked into the hotel. The truth of the matter was that Cartman orchestrated the entire thing: fed him drinks, deceived him quite easily, then bashed his face in with a lamp.
"You told Wendy to spy on me!" Stan shouts.
"Yes."
"And you recruited Clyde for... whatever the hell you're doing!"
"Yep."
"And you sent an assassin after Kenny!"
"No I didn't."
"What? ...Yes you did!"
"No, I didn't," Cartman says, scowling. "Why would I do that? The poor asshole'll just come back. It's a waste of resources."
"Hey, I'm sitting right here, asshole." Kenny sits up a little; because of all fuss made about it, he's actually gotten curious. "Then why was Mole at my house?"
"Ooooh," says like all has been made clear to him (and it has). "Mole. Well, he's a loose cannon and he just hates you. I didn't order him to do anything, he just went and shot you because he was pissed."
"Why does he hate me?" Kenny wonders. "I didn't even know what he looked like!"
"Well, he's British. Who knows why they do the things they do," Cartman shrugs.
"He's French, Cartman," Wendy says. Stan jumps a little. He forgot she and Clyde were still in the room.
"Whatever, Britian, France, Spain it's all the same soccer-worshipping cult," Cartman says with a careless wave of the hand. Wendy rolls her eyes but looks like she's trying to hold back a girlish giggle. Stan stares at her. She looks infatuated, and it's not a look he's used to. Poor Stan. Nice guys finish last.
"Aren't you supposed to be generous and shit?" Kenny raises an eyebrow. "How do you part with money?"
"It's hard," Cartman says solemnly. "But my financial advisor assures me writing a few checks to starving Africans and terminal children will pay off in the end."
"Financial... advisor...?"
"Sure, I'll call him in," Cartman says, attempting to be casual, but clearly gleeful. Clyde leaves, and soon returns with a companion.
Stan would have been more shocked had it not been for Wendy and Cartman. Now he is only numb when he says, "Kyle? What are you doing with Cartman?"
Kyle calmly adjusts his grip on the stack of folders he is carrying. "Oh, I have my reasons."
And those reasons will be relieved, but not quite yet. We assure you, it is so utterly lame that, when it is revealed, you will be wishing that we'd left it up to your imagination. For now just know that Kyle was the only one who sought Cartman out and asked to join—everyone else was recruited.
And while we're on the subject, here is how the others were recruited:
When Romper Stomper turned eighteen he was released from juvie and set loose in the real world. After growing up in prison he had no real life skills, and soon fell into a life of robbing connivence stores to get by. Romper has a conscience, however, so he would often go to churches and confess. A year ago, when Cartman was first put into witness protection as a priest, before he even left for Rome, Romper happened to come into his confessional. Romper was quite glad to see him, because Cartman was the only familiar face he could look forward to. When Cartman's Grand Master Plan first began to formulate he invited Romper along, and Romper was more than glad to accompany him.
Cartman went to see Wendy on her 21st birthday party, which was coincidentally thrown the day before he left for Rome. Cartman had always been the primary reason for the off-again part of Stan and Wendy's on-again/off-again relationship. There had always been something between Wendy; whether you want to call it attraction, or admiration, or hate, it was mutual. Wendy spent the majority of high school waffling between Stan and Cartman, and on her birthday she quite definitively chose Cartman... with some Stan on the side. Cartman let Wendy in on his plan, and asked her to keep an eye on Stan, as he was the most likely person to interfere.
Clyde took Cartman up on his proposition because, as previously mentioned, Clyde was bored out of his mind in South Park. When Cartman left he took the party with him; Liane again became the reigning Dirty Slut Queen by default, and frankly she was getting on it the years. Heidi came along for similar reasons, but Cartman also promised to help her get revenge on a certain someones. Shelly—who joined the army after she was expelled from college for beating up the football captain and started drilling new recruits—joined because she liked the sound of Cartman's spiel.
There are a few more in Cartman's crew, but we won't say anything just yet so that we don't spoil their dramatic entrance. And as for Mole? Well, timing is everything. Or something like that.
"You'll never get the papacy, Cartman!" Stan snaps. "That position belongs to the descendant of Peter Rabbit!"
"Oh, yeah. Like it's so hard to take something away from a rabbit. Because they're so ferocious and their claws are so sharp," Cartman says sarcastically. "The hardest part of getting rid of the rabbits is that they're so many of them. Do you know how many rabbits you can get in thirteen years? I'm getting sick of eating it every day."
Stan's eyes widen. "WHAT?"
"Hey!" The door to the kitchen bursts open and Heidi stomps in. "I'm getting tried of cooking it, you know! I'd like to see you do better!"
"YOU FED ME THE POPE?!" Stan tries to induce vomiting. Shelly, who followed Heidi's melodramatic entrance, wrinkles her nose at her little brother and says, "God, don't be such a pussy, turd." Kenny scratches his chin and wonders if he can get the recipe without Stan freaking out.
"God, untwist your panties, Heidi," Cartman says.
"I don't get it," Kenny speaks up. "I mean, what are you trying to accomplish by becoming pope?"
"Well-" Cartman begins, and Kyle clears his throat loudly.
"Remember Peter's Evil Overlord List," he reminds him. "Revealing the grand master plan is one of the worst mistakes you can make."
"Oh, right." Cartman clears his throat. "Look, you guys, it's nothing personal but we're going to have to detain you so that you don't get all self-righteous again and try and stop me. Don't worry, you'll have plenty to eat-"
Stan takes off running. And Kenny, after pausing to lick his plate off, follows.
Cartman sighs and looks over at Kyle, Wendy, Clyde, Shelly, Romper, and Heidi. "Well?! One of you assholes go get them!"
Stan and Kenny run through halls, Stan hellbent on getting out of there, Kenny wondering why the Pope doesn't hire an interior decorator. They just burst into the foyer just as two figures clad in skimpy leather outfits clearly designed by the same comic book geek that designs heroine/villian outfits and who has never seen a real woman naked, or he'd realize boobs are subject to the law of gravity rappel down from ropes that, apparently, came out of some magical trap door in the ceiling. In any case it's off camera, so don't think about it. The first figure is none other than Lexus, former Raisins heartbreaker. She strikes a dramatic pose, supporting two huge guns effortlessly despite the lack of arm muscle on her supermodel-thin body. The second figure is much more awkward, with only one huge gun, which they are straining to lift from the ground (curse that gravity!).
Of course, this all takes several minutes to do, especially when you have it timed to a dramatic musical score, and Stan and Kenny simply run right past—though Stan takes the time to shout "You too, Butters?!" over his shoulder at the second figure.
Mole presents a much more real challenge, because he steps right between them and the door without theatrics. Stan and Kenny skid to a stop to avoid crashing into him.
"You again," he says, glaring at Kenny.
"Get out of the way!" Stan demands, not sounding very threatening.
"You're free to go," Mole says, lifting an eyebrow at him. "I've got no quarrel with you."
"I'm not leaving without Kenny!"
Mole snorts. "Fags."
"What the hell is your problem?" Kenny demands. "Why do you hate me? I don't even know you!"
"Why? WHY? You ruined my life!"
"HOW?"
"You brought me back to life after the American/Canadian war!"
Kenny stares at him. "You're pissed at me because of that?!"
Yes, Mole is. And we'll make sure to fully explore why... later. Or maybe not. But this is really dragging on, so we're skipping it for the moment.
Mole detaches the shovel from his back and slides into the stereotypical karate-chop pose. "Good luck getting past me. I've mastered 500 martial arts."
"Oh you have not."
"Yes, I have!"
"No way!"
"Yes way! I can defeat anyone! ... except Chuck Norris."
"There is no fucking way you've mastered 500 martial arts. Even if there were 500 different martial arts, even if you studied 24 hours a day for every day of your life, you wouldn't have the time. It's not possible."
"Yes, it is!"
"No, it isn't!"
For those of you siding with Kenny: yes it is. So there.
The argument could have dragged on for hours if Stan didn't pick up the discarded shovel and smack Mole in the face with it. Never underestimate a nice guy pushed to the brink by shocking revelation after shocking revelation.
Stan and Kenny resume running, and run all the way to Venice, skillfully ignoring both geography and the realm of possibility for the sake of the story. We applaud them.
"Hold on, hold on," Kenny wheezes out finally. His pants are starting to slip off because he unbuckled his belt off after gorging himself, and Stan stops while he hitches his jeans back up and refastens his belt. For some reason this jostles his bottle of morphine from his pocket; he makes a grab for it, misses, and it falls into the water.
"Let it go, man," Stan starts to say, making a grab for his sleeve, but Kenny shakes him off and dives in after it. He loses it and, his muscles too exhausted from the run to swim, floats along the canals and out to sea. He bobs along with the waves until he washes up on an island. Kenny is so amazed, so stunned to have survived the ordeal, that he dies of shock.