Cutbastra deflected the hydrogen bomb with a deft pimp hand, an action that sent it hurling towards some Binsandlar nation—this is, a nation that exists within an island, that exists within a desert, that exists within an island, that exists within a desert— nobody would care about. The dunes watched enthralled, still wearing their mourning veils of black, for it was the anniversary of the Sandstained Day, when a moron —I wonder who — had committed the greatest dune genocide on Cabaret. There were some casualties now and then, but at least they were just that, casualties. Dunes could deal with collateral damage. Until the Sandstained Day, all they had dealt with had been collateral damage and maybe a few casualties due to construction projects.
“Why can’t I kill you?” Mic screeched, weaving another nuke with its thirty metallic bird legs.
“Because I fucked your Walker’s husband.” Cutbastra flicked his mischievous ponytail to his other shoulder. “I hold absolute power over her. Such are the perks of my Road.”
“Then I shall kill the sacred institution of marriage,” Mic said.
“How?”
“Blowing the planet up.”
Cutbastra’s playful expression went serious. He was the kind of person to take exception to such claims. “Your mouth is not big enough to blow the planet, sweetcheeks.”
“What?” The titanic bird’s laser eyes crossed as it recalculated. “No, seriously, what?”
“I have heard so many cliché threats in my heroic escapades that they offend me deeply. So, suck the dick of the world? Pretty please.”
Mic chuckled.
The dunes stirred. They didn’t want to be blown. They were deeply religious.
“You killed her daughter, and yet you call yourself hero?”
“I also fucked her dead husband silly. He called me daddiest.”
The feathers of the monster dropped, as the ears of a scared dog would. “The superlative of Daddy?” it asked with a tremulous voice.
“Indeed.” Cutbastra rummaged through his pocked and pulled out a bloody, beating heart from inside it. “By the way, is this yours, Polvorina?”
Her pale face emerged from the bird’s forehead. She was smiling as blood dripped from her dried out lips. “Yes. But dying? in this economy? Can’t afford it. Daddiest?” Her last word was like a plea. A plea for it to not be true, a plea not to his opponent, but to reality itself to turn Cutbastra’s words into lies.
“Daddiest.” Cutbastra said, crushing the organ with a smug smile in his face, splattering blood all over an Oracle that would have been scowling, had evolution been kind enough to give him eyelashes. Alas… “Are you suffering from heartbreak?”
The nuke curved down slowly, growing flaccid while the woman’s eyes oasisfied. “DO you have to take everything from me?”
Cutbastra pulled a fresh, bloody pancreas from his Hawaian’s shirt trusty pocket. “Yes.”
Oracle cursed under his breath. It would take ages to get the stench out of that hitherto comfy cavity. And his Jacobson’s organ wouldn’t be happy about it: it had inherent diabetophilic tendencies.
“Die please?” Cutbastra offered, Shaking the pancreas.
“No,” she said, sinking back into the decaying avatar. The Nuke got a second wind and Cutbastra sighed. This was gonna be a long, useless fight.
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An unspecified amount of kilometers away —because the geography of cabaret follows the principle of maximum stubbornness: If too many people agree on the layout of the planet, it changes under everyone’s feet. Sometimes. When it pleases— inside a land of waters foul and rats fat, or interstellar friend rummaged through a pile of shit. Literal shit. Interesting to it, because it was new. It was sinking its tendrils into it, documenting the chemical compounds and archiving them in his mind. Very interesting.
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Close by, soaking into the lone, emo sunray that came through the openings on a lid far above, the local Sewercore Goth Capybara mused about this new development. Friend or foe? She had a hard time deciding. Her inherent biases as a capybara meant she was inclined to befriend anything that cleared the highest of bars: moving. And the alien moved alright. But the hatred for life she cultivated as a goth, which granted her the ominous powers to bend space and time to always fit one more piercing in her face and make her lipstick as dark as it was unending, was bound to counteract her natural leanings.
Yet she didn’t act, because if the creature wanted to befriend her, she would be there, expectant, self-loathing, dark, beautiful, oleaginous.
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The sea is heavy. It retains a bit too much water for my liking. It also has salts and oxides: sodium, potassium, chlorine, titanium, uranium, gold, and possibly other songs from Prince, if one searches thoroughly. But there’s one being —perfectly evolved for enjoying such hostile environments—that, between eating anemones and getting high on pufferfishes, loved being in company of her master: The Labradorca. Her vegetable tendrils kept her on a leash, attached to Lino’s hand by flexible photosynthetic extensions of their beings. She pulled with the might and zeal of the dog that had bitten her, trying to swim up to a nearby coral and grace it with a healthy dose of cetacean pee.
Yes, aquatic animals pee too. Kidneys aren’t a privilege of the land dwellers. No, the moon isn’t made of plasma, Susan. Yes, humans landed on it. No, the vaccines don’t contain remains of the one hundred and one Dalmatians: Cruella de Vil is not behind Big Pharma.
Lino breathed the calm waters in and out. The corals extended their transparent polyps into the night: whiles others caught some Zs, they hoped to catch some food. Swarms of bioluminescent creatures drifted by announcing their presence to predators and dumb prey alike. The beauty unfurling in front of him, the magnificent riff revealed by silvery threads that descended from a moon so full, so flawless. So made of rock (for the record).
It’s amazing how you can manage to not feel anything when presented with this sight, and still have the presence of mind to leash your pet.
“It’s only polite to leash it.”
“We need to keep it leashed, she is our secret weapon to kill the savage Unitarians,” chimed in Lino’s avatar.
Your avatar could be… more normal. If you’d like to change, there are the murderous, psychopathic ones without the nationalistic flair. I could make some arrangements so you can choose a new one.
“I don’t mind the Nothoracopteris most of the time.”
You don’t mind ANYTHING.
“I cannot mind things. I apologize if that bothers you.”
Then, use your power to destroy the reef.
“What for?” Lino asked, barely blinking not bothering to swat the fishes nthat swam around his head.
To demonstrate your point.
“I find it odd that the word demonstrate has demons inside. Can we exorcise it? I know some good priests,” offered Lino’s avatar.
“I don’t care about demonstrating my point. It would be an act of needless cruelty.”
Do you care about it being an act of needless cruelty?
Lino didn’t need to think to shake his head. “I merely find it not-parsimonious, and probably something that the man I was would repudiate. Simple as that.”
Why does what the man you were would think matter?
Lino shrugged. He didn’t have a good answer for that. “I needed to pick something to arbitrarily matter to be able to make any other decision, so I picked that.”
Blow. The reef. Up.
“If you insist.” Lino snapped his fingers, making giant roots to emerge out of the sea floor, cracking the seabed, stirring the infaunal dwellers out of hiding, with bivalves pumping away frantically, with cuttlefish shooting from the spots where they rested camouflaged, with sea cucumbers shitting faster than normal — how the hell holothurians remain alive to this day is a question that will forever haunt me. That said, were I a hungry predator and the only thing available to eat sea cucumbers… yeah, I’d gladly starve — with fish rushing out of their caves and corals bleaching as if the world was ending.
The zooxanthellae seem… fickle.
“Algae commits genocides without batting an eye, System. Much like me right now.”
The massive roots cast long shadows over the surrounded reef, a ring of greedy finegrs coming out of the heart of Cabaret, closing over the community. Lino slowly closed his hand, and so the roots converged with heavenly patience, they constricted the calcareous stone, the skeletons of cnidarians, the homes of morays. The reef cracked and bubbled and shook as the roots squeezed it tightly.
Finish them!
“Next you are going to tell me to test my might.”
I encourage heresy against most religions. Mortal Kombat is exempted, so shut your trap.
Lino closed his fist and the heavy roots clamped onto the reef, making the seabed shudder. They squeezed, and squeezed and squeezed until the reef collapsed, crushed under them like the Venezuelan economy under the pressure of noun (possibly even abstract).
When the sediment settled, all that remained was the panting labradorca, expelling big bubbles from her dumb mouth, nearly drowning herself in the process of mirthing the place up.
“Now, are you happy?”
Of course I am. Keep on going, I want to seek another place to … show off your new capabilities.