Sorry 'bout the wait, you guys... went on hiatus for school, then I sort of forgot what I had plotted out for this story and got distracted by 90s sitcoms. So now I'm winging it.

Martyrdom: It's Not For Everyone

05. If You're Old Enough to Remember Fraggle Rock, You're Probably too Old to be Reading South Park Fanfiction

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Kenny McCormick is dangling ten feet above the ground, bound by an ankle to a higher-off-the-ground-than-ten-feet tree limb with an impromptu vine rope. Kenny has no idea what is going on, in part because his upside-down state has made both his clothing and his blood collect at his head, so he's got a head rush and is trapped inside a hot, musky shirt. The main reason for his disorientation, however, is that his heart only started beating when you started reading this paragraph.

To make things clear (to you, not Kenny; poor boy doesn't get the narration of his life, and so has no idea a rogue mosquito is about to bite his exposed stomach): Kenny's corpse was collected from the coast and strung up for future consumption. In a short while he will gallantly fight off ravenous monsters, that is to say, he will run away and hide. He will not leave the island alive, but he will leave the island. In a longer while he will see his illegitimate son, and in an even longer while Kyle will throw up on a plastic plant in his presence.

How's that for foreshadowing?

But for the moment, Kenny is trying to contort his body in such a way as to reach the rope vine tied around his ankle. His limbs flail about wildly—the three unbound ones futilely—and the strain on the tree limb he is tied to (for it wasn't a very strong tree limb, but bless his little captors' hearts, they tried) causes it to snap; Kenny falls to the earth and is hit on the head by the branch.

"... owch," Kenny grunts, nose in the mud. "OWCH," he says again when someone—technically something—jabs him rather hard in the ribs with stick. Kenny had not the strength to lift his head (which still had the tree branch laying on it), but he overhears the following conversation:

"I told you he was still alive, Gobo!"

"Impossible, Red! I checked! He was dead! How could something that was dead now be alive?"

"Uh... well... you're both right..."

"Oh shut up, Wembley!"

"It's some sort of monster, come to slash and kill us all! Oh, Fraggle blood shall pour forth into the sea! The end of days is upon us! Repent sinners, our God has forsaken us! ¿Porqué dios? ¿¡PORQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEE?!"

"Oh God, you just had to set Boober off."

"Shut up, the lot of ya! Help me carry him to Madame Trash Heap, she'll know what to do."

They may as well have been speaking Chinese with a lisp, for all the sense it made to Kenny. You see, Kenny doesn't have easy access to wikipedia, and thus doesn't know he has washed up on Fraggle Rock, "a colorful and fun world, but also a world with a relatively complex system of symbiotic relationships between different "races" of creatures, an allegory to the human world, where each group was somewhat unaware of how interconnected and important they were to one another."

So speaketh the wikipedians, dispensers of knowledge, editors of fact, and source of mockery for Stephen Colbert. But this here's the real world, and no human allegory is complete without a hefty dose of hostility.

So Kenny gets dragged to a mutated, talking compost heap, and the rest of the Fraggles gather to decide if they should throw the monster back into the sea from whence it came, or kill it and eat it and be endowed with its magical powers to reincarnate, thus ensured that the Fraggles would rule Fraggle Rock with an unsuppressable regime. In due time the Doozers and Gorgs appear, because an island economy can only support so much, so each race wanted to hoard as much as possible in case one of those other bastard races tried to take more than their fair share. Tempers flared; ethnic slurs would have been thrown back and forth if the words "fraggle", "doozer", and "gorg" didn't already sound like ethnic slurs. Someone threw a radish. Then all hell broke loose.

Kenny snuck off and hid in the bushes, staring at the bloody massacre playing out before him. Unnaturally-colored fur flew all over the place. Googly eyes rolled back in heads. Everywhere fuzzy little creatures where being strangled with wires.

Kenny would have managed to sneak off alive if he hadn't been overcome at that moment to scratch his stomach, which, for some unfathomable reason, felt unbearably itchy. He scratched, and the movement attracted the attention of someone in the fray, and then Kenny was smacked on the head with a well-thrown radish. He fell backwards over a conveniently placed cliff and was dashed to pieces on the rocks. Eventually the tide rose, and what was left of him was washed out to sea.

Who knows how long he floated out there, drifting along. (Well, we do, but... meh.) Fish came along and nibbled at his remains, and a dolphin came by and tried to have sex with him (dolphins do this. Sea turtles, plastic bags... they're horny little bastards). Eventually, Kenny's body reconstructed itself and he came back to life, but remained unconscious.

And because we want him to, Kenny washes up in Denver. When he comes to he discovers an address written on his palm and exactly the amount of money he needs to take a cab there in his pocket, because we want him to. Our whims transcend the realm of reality.

What Kenny doesn't realize until he steps out of the cab is that the address is that of his ex-girlfriend, the one he dumped after she refused to get an abortion. Kenny groans, but is compelled to walk up the front steps and knock on the front door by some force he doesn't understand. That force being us. As if you didn't know.

And we hope you also know who Kenny's ex-girlfriend is. We worried over Wendy giving too obvious a hint, and then not enough. We are going for blatant storytelling, after all.

So footsteps approach, the knob turns, Kenny considers diving off the poach and hiding in the bushes (again), but oh, too late, the door opens and Kenny's ex-girlfriend stares at Kenny.

"KENNY?" she asks, just to make sure.

"Hey, Bebe," Kenny says, resigned.

We'd end the chapter here, but we realize you're probably curious as to what Stan did after Kenny's untimely tumble into the sea, and what Cartman did after they both ran out of the vatican, so:

Stan bought a plane ticket, had an uncomfortable flight because he ended up sitting next to the same Chilean transvestite Clyde and Kenny got drunk off of on their way to the vatican, and flew to Manhattan. He ran all the way to the person he always runs to when he has problems: Kyle.

Now wait a minute, you're probably saying, last chapter Kyle was an evil backstabbing ho-bag. This story is as inconsistent as the show itself! To this we say: Stan ran to Kyle Broflovski. The person who joined Cartman's undisclosed evil plot was Kyle Schwartz, aka Kyle 1, aka Kyle's cousin Kyle.

We told you it'd be lame. Don't say we didn't warn you.

And speaking of Cartman and his posse:

Cartman was quite annoyed when his band of miscreants told him Stan and Kenny had gotten away, by which we mean, he threw a hissy fit of epic proportions and hit Butters for not rappelling fast enough. (But Lexus cuddled him afterward, so he didn't suffer too much.) Once Cartman had screamed himself hoarse, he sat down and linked his fingers in a classically evil way.

"Since you dumbasses are incapable of stopping those two assholes, I have little choice. It's time to call in... the professionals."

Oh, the suspense.