Samari stared sadly at the fallen mats of her ruined hair. Last time it had been cut, it was her mother holding the scissors. Last time it had been cut, it was the walls of her bathroom that surrounded her, and not this humble and tiny one with a bronze mirror. She was thankful for the hospitality that local woman had shown them, letting them rest in her house for a wee while. It was a cozy place even… if one ignored all the bare-chested posters of Máximo Cadinoli, body cultivactor and male beauty model. His well-trained eyes and perfectly chiseled pecs accosted Samari each waking second.
And those posters were in every bathroom of the house, so she had come to the smallest one, the bathroom-bathroom, or probably a bathroom-wardrobe to stash the towels —that, for the record, also depicted Máximo Cadinoli posing sensually. To make things worse, the house hadn’t been designed in a traditional fashion. Someone, an entity of dubious sanity or scant morals, had erected a collection of bathrooms that doubled as rooms with other functions. So you had the Living, where a wide toilet with cushioned seats acted as a sofa, or the kitchen, where you could watch a chicken roast inside the oven whilst you took a shit. What this meant, mainly, is that there wasn’t a nook or cranny in the house safe from the gaze of at least three different images of Laureate Bodybuilder Máximo Cadinoli.
But this house had a mirror, running water (most of which tried to run away from the house, mind you) and comfortable beds. Well, repurposed bathtubs, technically, but they filled in for beds in the end. This house would serve them well. Plenty of toilets for the dogs and Kalon to hydrate themselves, and plenty of scissors for Samari to wreck by trying to cut her matted hair.
In another bathroom, Jagger was in the process of accepting his incoming demise. He had fallen on a toilet and couldn’t climb out. Brunhilda loomed over him, slowly reaching for the flush level with her paw. “Don’t do it Brunhilda!”
Brunhilda looked at him, smiling with all her teeth, like a slobbering, child-eating demon. Jagger believed that, when the time for Brunhilda to die came, no heaven nor hell would accept her, thus rendering her immortal. Either that, or the population of demons and/or angels would be decimated.
“Don’t you dare, Brunhilda!”
Brunhilda’s infernal smile grew wider as she placed her paw over the lever.
“When people said that women could make one flush, I never thought this was what they were referring to,” Jagger reflected. His head began spinning, as did the rest of his body, when Brunhilda finally enacted the flush sentence. “Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii,” he masterfully excogitated.
Kalon jerked awake from his nap, mind devoid of thoughts and extremely traditionalist about keeping that state untouched. He looked around, raising from the bematressed tub and stretching a bit. He crawled out of his improvised bed like a monstrous spider, mobilizing in all fours around the room, hands wetting on the dirty rug. Nobody would have confused Kalon with a dinosaur as he crawled around, as he dragged even his puppies on the floor, head closer to the tiles than the ass. Suddenly, he realized he wasn’t Culmino, and stood like a man ought to.
The hostess, a middle-aged woman that looked capable of doing dumbbells with the rock god created but couldn’t lift, watched over the scene.
“Valelike Vale?” she asked sternly.
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Kalon nodded.
“I suspected it.”
The massive woman lumbered across the bathroom, a bowl filled with berries in hand. “Want some? They aren’t poisonous.”
“Guh, Kamino berries. Mom says they are bad for the brain.”
She tapped her right temple, “They are full of protein and vitamins, they help the brain think.”
Kalon raised a finger smugly. “Aha! See, if you use your brain to think… it erodes away!”
“Born and raised in that den of idiocy, no doubts.”
Kalon would have felt insulted, but somewhere along the path to taking offense thignsa had gone astray: he had understood the insult, but his head had given up before feeling the injury to his pride. “Absolutely, we pride ourselves in having the most pure idiots on the continent.” Kalon then joined his hands and looked upwards. What was a continent?
Questions for later. There were more pressing ones to make now. “Why is my ex-greatsword in the toilet? The puppy.”
But the woman had stopped listening to Kalon to keep her own sanity intact. “eat some berries, dear, I’ll leave them on the dressing table here. Feel free to use it as a normal table. “
“Wiiiiiii.” Jagger kept on saying as he spun.
“Burr.” Brunhilda complained about the toilet’s quality and desisted on her flushing attempts. “Burrrr.”
And when she approached the toilet bowl whilst holding a devious plunger, Jagger gasped in horror. “It feels like I am about to be assailed by a third-world Dalek!”
Before the plunger descended over Jagger’s head, a whip of puppies struck Brunhilda’s snout, making her drop the tool and scuttle away while whining.
“Don’t try to flush my sword, Brunhilda! Bad!”
The woman exited the bathroom into the bigger bathroom and found a Samari with bald spots and orphaned bangs of hair stepping out of another bathroom. “Excuse me, Lady Polentia, I need help shaving my head,” Samari gestured at her mistreated scalp, blushing.
“That’s illegal. The local hairdressers’ guild would have my head if I stepped on their business territory.”
Samari winced at this comment. “How would they know it was you?”
“They have eyes everywhere a scissor click-clacks, ears wherever the tinkling sound of a fallen hair may occur. Severe cases of male balding pattern have rendered their most prodigious members deaf,” she said, no hint of irony or mockery in her voice.
“Do you have an electric razor?”
“Yes, but I don’t use it for my head.”
With her wink came Samari’s despair. Seeing the grimace of the child, the woman immediately pulled from the sleeve of his long pants, revealing a spotless, well-toned calf. “I use it for the legs, darling.”
Samari sighed in relief. “Nothing a bit of water cannot solve, then. Can you point me to the machine?”
“It’s in the bathroom.”
Samari blinked, then shrugged, then wished for a gun, and then cursed the heavens for not giving her a stroke. She was undergoing a process of Jaggerization, her will to live sublimating a bit with each passing second. “Which bathroom.” and it wasn't a question, it was a demand.
“The bathroom-bathroom.”
“I am going to bottoms up ever beauty product and chemical concoction I can find in this motherfucking house and then shit my dissolved bowels all upon your precious airhead toyboy posters if you insist with your ambiguous, useless directions, Polentia,” Samari warned, licking her lips. “I bet the nail polish tastes like strawberry.”
Polentia got her back up and forwarded a massive finger, “you are not nine years old, are you?”
Samari opened her eyes wide. “I am. I am also my mother’s daughter. Now answer my question or the only thing that will be nine years old in this house will be the stench of my rotten liquefied entrails permeating your ugly walls.”
Polentia gave up and slouched a bit. “It’s the one with five posters of the supreme papucho and an unassuming yellow bar of soap.”
“Thank you. I will be sure to take the moronic trio out of this humble abode when I am done shaving. Again, thank you for your hospitality,” she bowed before gracefully prancing towards the nearest room, intending to check if it had the yellow soap bar in it and the right number of posters.
Polentia sat on her favorite cushioned toilet and crossed her fingers. Letting out a chuckle, she muttered, “Foreign children these days…”