The motley night of the Soleno Empire got vanquished when a flaming insect like a sun, both in brightness and grandeur, appeared over the low roofs of the suburbs. Its wings were lakes of soaring fire threatening to rain over the people and their dwellings and livelihoods on the outer ring of the centrifugally-impoverished city. Its composite eyes, black molten rocks a midst the flames for flesh, met the cold night air with disdain.
A guard that was patrolling a dirt street raised his gaze, grasped his hat and angrily cast it into a nearby puddle of mud, “One week, one week without worrying about rampant inflation and judgement day has to come. One fucking week. And I didn’t take my union-mandated holidays this year. I should have listened to my wife, gods dammit. Bet she knew, the witch. Bet she caused this, the witch.”
The moth moved her tentacle-like legs, wiggling them in the air, causing a rain of harmless embers like stars upon the populace. The flap of its wings blinded those that dared stare at it, and they seemed to not move naturally, as if being afterimages without an original.
I need to fit a fan or two in here. The heart of the moth thought.
“You can will it real, Crusie dear,” Katie answered the thought.
What did I think about reading my mind?
Katie lowered the front of her frame in shame. “Understood.”
The emperor, a tall and muscular old man, peeked out of the window of the highest tower of his castle, pinched the bridge of his nose and called the imperial communicator to his side with a loud shout.
“See that?” the man pointed a finger like a sausage to the shining fire moth. “I want It in every imperial newsletter. Every press in the country should deny its existence. Tell the people it’s just… early summer or something. Now bring me my favorite whiskey.”
“Sir, with all due respect, I am not your butler, I just make your decrees and—.”
“Tell the imperial executor to come talk with me , or bring me my whiskey, I am too sober to be hallucinating this hard, and if the giant moth won’t go away, there is only one way to solve this conundrum.”
The man in purple robes forced a smile and kowtowed. “Yes dearest leader, I shall bring you your elixir of wisdom.”
And so, over the golden carpet, and through the golden door, the communicator headed for one of the multiple Whiskey Stations spread through the castle. The emperor was known for not taking lovers because time spent kissing a woman was time wasted not kissing a bottle of liquor. And, despite not having reached immortality himself, his liver had, out of sheer necessity.
Back to the slums, Crusadina decided it was high time to remodel the city, and so the moth birthed balls of fire forth, each the size of a particularly extremely obese horse the size of three particularly obese elephants that were each the size of about fifty thousand particularly average rats[1].
Mothers that were on the street at such late hours of the night embraced their children and shielded them with their bodies, because their children were valuable and said women didn’t want to lose them before they were sold to the best bidder, no refunds. Local stray dogs yawned as death approached: they had gotten through worse, they would survive a little heat. The Association of Conspiracy theorists called for an emergency gathering, and those who assisted sat on a circle over flat puffs in the roof of the house of one of them. “So, the moth of fire.” the tinhatted one opened the conversation. “Does it exist?”
An intellectual-looking woman donning a monocle chuckled, and then retorted. “Does anything exist? Remember we are all in a simulation result of a giant child moving the beads of an abacus really fast.”
A quivering one that was more nerves than man released nonsense from his deepest crevices. “Don’t listen to her, the moth is a fire-gouging demon from the twentieth dimension, it came to our plane to get a new sock. Only one. That’s why they disappear. The moth steals them.”
A fourth conspiracy theorist had adopted a pondering stance, and, after a few seconds, said, “Do you think the moth is flat, or does it have…” he gestured at his chest with both open hands. “Honkadonkaroos that the elites hide from us so we lose faith in the gods and obey the commands of the New Secular Order?”
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The men reclined in their chairs and, incoming ball of infernal rage notwithstanding, fell into a deep contemplation. Finally, the one with the tinhat broke the silence. “what if there are no flat women, but only women with invisible tits?”
The monocle lady pronged the air in front of her chest with her index, exploring the empty space. “I think the child in the abacus also makes the tits intangible. The lie has more layers than an onion.”
“Onions are a lie!” One that had been silent until then shouted.
And when they already felt the scorching heat on their skin and began considering that maybe sunscreen wasn’t a scam of Big Alchemy, the fireball bounced, being sent back from whence it came. The one of them with the most acute eyesight swore a shadow had passed in front of the light for only a fraction of a second, but he wrote it off as the influence of a soul parasite from the underworld.
Cutbastra sweated the fat drop as he played the most extreme game of baseball in recorded history. His whole body was enveloped in a thick layer of vital energy, enhancing his speed and strength. With a metal bat he had stolen from a child he had yet to beat unconscious so he didn’t go along telling people his bat had disappeared, he hit the flaming boulders of energy, directing them back to the moth. He had to get every single one, and, given the terrible city planning of the slums, reaching the places of incoming impact was harder than it had any business to be.
After batting away the last of the fireballs, sat on at the outdoor table of a café for a few seconds to catch his breath. There he touched his pocket, looking for Oracle. After a microsecond where his heart almost turns upside down, He remembered he had left Oracle safely stashed on the hollowed out trunk of a tree that grew on the nearby plains. His ear twitched when he heard a known, disquieting voice. “Oh, not him. “
On a nearby table, not noticing his date had left hours ago, a man revolved his already cold coffee. He had red hair and wore a pair of cargo shorts. “…so, this is why I spent three months elucidating the Dwarvish ovulation mechanics of my fantasy world, because I needed to know if in the interracial interspecies sex scene of my novel— which is absolutely relevant to the plot, mind you— I had to worry about the characters wearing contraception, as they conceiving a black human-dwarf could spur controversy among my readers. ‘Like, why do black people have to breed with the dwarves? They could fuck other people instead of the scum of the land. Why couldn’t it be a white person that fucked and impregnated the dwarf?’ They’d say, pegging me as a scummy racist that I am not. I believe black people have the right to marry each other if they so desire. But, them being human, I must also show them suffering —for example, by fucking a despicable female dwarf. You get it, right? It’s art, dear, our intentions cannot be directly stated, the words have to speak for us. Besides, I like tall women better, shortstacks are not my thing…”
Cutbastra rushed off of that haunted terrace. He knew that man, it was older than him. Following the Road of Endless Worldbuilding, he had achieved immortality, and he used it to curse people with his writings. Half a millennia of experience had done no good for his attempts at ““art””.
I need bigger quotes for that. BRING IN THE SPANISH ONES.
««art»»
There. Better.
Cutbastra couched and then pumped against the ground, propelling himself into the air. He produced a bike out of his pocked dimension, sat on it midair, and then began spining, while moving the bike to a side, pulling off some sick tricks on its way to face the moth.
Finally, he felt the scorching heat as he arrived in front of the monsters face and sitting on thin air, he examined the monster.
“Your technique could be refined, dear,” he said after a few seconds. Crusadina's little head popped out of the searing flames between the moth’s eyes.
“I want to destroy the city, sir. Could you stop deflecting my balls?” she asked politely, as her mother had taught her.
“No, brat, just stop, go home, be a normal teenaged girl. Go get pregnant by a criminal at thirteen or ruin yourself with drugs. Shoo. This world is not yours to destroy.”
Crusadina pouted and rolled her eyes. “And what are you going to do, stop me?”
Cutbastra enhanced the bike with his own vital energy and flung it against Crusadina’s head. Crusadina, too busy being part of a giant moth of fire, was unable to dodge, and the hit toppled her, and the moth, on their backs.
The cucktivator dusted off his hands and pants and stood from his sitting position.
The moth was slowly dissolving, its flames extinguishing as it fell towards the innocents.
Crusadina’s face twitched in anger, her forehead bled. How he dared, how he dared! She retracted all the fire around her back into her soul, destroying what remained from the moth, and sprouted the flaming wings of the insect out of her back. An armor of linked catapults manifested over his skin, covering everything but her eyes. The cast on her broken arm, luckily, had gone unharmed, but she made sure to reinforce that area with an extra coat of ballistae.
The man would pay. She flapped her shining wings to elevate back to where he was and make sure he paid. And she would accept no Visa or MasterCard, only pain.
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[1] For this calculation we are assuming no air friction and a perfect sphere shape for the three Elephants mushed together, along with the rats forming a perfect sphere with no air pockets left between rats. We are assuming the density of a horse, a rat and an elephant are similar enough. We are not assuming anything else about the horse, we don’t need to: a horse that fat would BE perfectly spherical.