Nobody asked Halgor about his daughter when he failed to make mention of her. The wonder quartet simply departed from the farm to tell the other farmers about the success of the hunt. The beekeeper sat alone in his living room, smoking, a tear or two daring to come out now and then. He swept the room, the veritable cemetery of bees it had become, with a sad stare. “Acting all tough, Halgor, now you have lost your little girl.” He gave another drag to his bitter cigar and considered his nesting dolls, that he had now rearranged like his wife had left them before the accident. “At least your memory has been restored, Farla. Now, let me think how to find our brat.”
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Lino vomited whatever had been left in his stomach, once and again, and Shelly, his new friend, provided some emotional support.
“Moo, get better. The Queen’s mooting rituals are unusual but you will get used to them in due time, moo!”
“Thanks, time-traveling beef,” Lino said, absent mindedly, with the memories of the night (night? Was there time here at all?) prior wrangling his sanity around.
“I aim to serve, moo. Only a couple thousand moore mating cycles and she should get pregnant with a prince.”
Had you ever thought that going to a gay bar would get you kidnapped by a cult and abused by an interdimensional creature? Like, at all?
Only sexy ones. Which she Isn’t! …did the cow say a couple THOUSAND?!
I see your desperation broke through to the Interrobang stage.
“A couple… thousand.”
“Yes, moo, she’s ancient: has problems getting their mootes pregnant.”
Processing what the cow had said, Lino stared at one of the amorphous blobs of vomit as it floated by. Then decided it was high time to scream out of desperation.
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Everyone else in town had fallen. Even his wife. Being a prepper, Hiraldo had been stocking his bunker for the end of times since years ago. That said, he had never imagined the end times would only affect men and women of the ringed persuasion. An end not of life or civilization, but of the sacred institution of marriage, and the heterosexuality that came with it, if you were male. But he stood untarnished still, surrounded by thick walls and canned food, he could weather this storm. He could emerge once the monster had left the area, triumphant and with his anal virginity intact, as the righteous man who had resisted the allure of the homo-demon.
The voice of his son, a boy in his early twenties that had never touched a woman —or a man that wasn’t himself, for that matter— came in through the loud speakers, tremulous and low. “Dad, I am hearing something in the vents. The vents are giggling.”
“Don’t worry, you are safe, and I don’t have vents big enough for a man here.”
“A hand came out of the shower head and stole a bar of soap, dad!”
“Oh lords, he is in the water filtering system! Son, quickly, turn on the—“
The transmission got suddenly cut in a burst of static, and Custbastra’s voice filled the room. “I am coming for your booty, darling.”
Hiraldo jumped from his stool and rushed for the first-aid kit. In it, he held the key to his freedom. If the perimeter had been compromised, there was still one way out. The monster wasn’t a necrophiliac, he couldn’t be, he thought as he rooted around the first aid kid, moving bandages and syringes and ampoules to search for the precious pill. For him, cyanide was a preferable alternative to sodomy.
He pinched the small orb between his trembling index and thumb. The ghost inside the pipes rattled the metallic tubes that surrounded him, getting closer, finding its way through, drawing nearer to Hiraldo’s round yet manly tushy. He could almost hear the whisper, the swiggity swooty. It was now or never. So he inserted the cyanide pill in his mouth and bit it, the bitter taste spreading over his mouth. It was done now. He would die a free man.
“Goodbye, Junior. You stood with me till the end. Dad loves you,” He said, knowing his son couldn’t hear him from outside the bunker.
Seconds passed and no symptoms appeared. These things were supposed to cause paralysis in seconds. Why was he alive and kicking still? Fear washed over him as he heard the reverse of a flushing toiled, the ominous sound seeping out of the bathroom whose door lay a few meters behind him. Yes, the bunker had a bathroom, with a flushable toilet. Most cultivators don’t contaminate the environment with deadly fallout after causing hydrogen-bomb amounts of damage.
“I am here, sweetcheeks,” a damped, bare-chested Cutbastra opened the door.
“I should be dead by now. Why the pill doesn’t work?”
Cutbastra slithered up to him and started massaging his shoulders. “Well, friend, do you know how cyanide acts? Why it kills?”
The man, sweated profusely. Maybe he could… no, the Cultivator was thousands of times stronger than him. Millions, perhaps. He was trapped, and his only chance to get out was now to convince him he would never consent. He would play along, for now. “I don’t know.”
“Cyanide disrupts the cells capacity to generate ATP, a nucleic acid cells use as an energy source for their molecular machinery. In other words, dear…” Cutbastra smiled wide. “It cucks your cells out of energy.”
The man’s eyes opened wide. “And if it cucks…”
Cutbastra spoke in a malicious tone. “I can control it.” He recovered his easygoing persona soon enough. “Now, can I fuck you?”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“No, I am not gay.”
Cutbastra stepped in front of the man and looked at him with eyes so deep that they could give vertigo to an anglerfish “Consider that your wife liked it, don’t you want to get back at her?”
“No! Go away!”
“Come on, I crawled through the pipes to lay some here, don’t leave me wanting.”
“Avaunt, I said!”
Cutbastra caressed the scared man’s cheek. “I’ll be gentle.”
The man shook his head, visibly annoyed.
“I’ll spank you silly and call you Sally.”
Hilrado turned, hands behind his back, and paced a bit about the shelves full of canned goods. “Continue.”
“I can dress as your favorite character and call you ‘big brother’,” Cutbastra offered, pouting.
The poor man swept the sweat out of his forehead with the back of his hand. “Even female?”
“These pecs can double as boobs with the right bra.”
“Well, there’s this one comic character. She’s a border collie dog-girl and…”
Before Hiraldo finished his sentence, Cutbastra had made his escape, the same way he had come in. He wanted nothing to do with collies. If not fornicating with this degenerate of a man damned the world, so it’d be it!
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In a planet illuminated by a lone blue sun, there lay a laboratory with starry radar dishes, a silvery structure surrounded by the greenish sands.
Inside this building, sprawled inside the vibratory monitor, the alien, with its sensible filaments erected into the matrix of the machine, interpreted the signals. It exuded a happy pheromone: they had found what they had been looking for so long.
With its pseudopodia the photosynthetic organism rolled itself out of the machine, and wandered around the place until detecting the chemical signature of its superior. It inserted its neuronal outlet into the neuronal inlet of his superior, and, in turn, the superior did the same, completing the circuit.
They exchanged thoughts. They weren’t exchanged in a voice, but in sensations unimaginable for a human being. The words are a mere translation that fails to grasp the full nuance of their messages.
“Doctor, I made a breakthrough in the deciphering of the anomalous a radio signal! I believe we are dealing with a biological-organism-related occurrence. A message from an alien species!” he thought, distressedly excited.
“Have we found what we were looking for? Is this species intelligent?”
“By identifying the pattern and discussing via vibrater with my colleagues, I believe what we caught is a sort of message. An advertisement. A publicity they broadcast for themselves and slips off into space. Not necessarily meant for anyone but them. There are some words we couldn’t decipher, like ‘jungle’ or ‘Friday’, but the entirety of the message is clearly a call to gather in some place full of…”
It was an excited neural silence that followed, and the reniform cells on the doctor’s side creased in anticipation. “Well? A place full of what?”
“Prostitutes, sir. We found another planet with prostitutes! We are not alone!”
“Millions of durleps of interplanetary travel separate us from them, and god knows how many it took for that transmission took to reach us. They could be already gone, my undissolved sizar. And yet, we have found convergent evolution regarding prostitution. This is worth a Firugledor badge, at the very least! I want to hear their frerlanis when we shove this knowledge into their minds. Try to find more transmissions from this place, from…”
“Clagadurinafretfrethawarinagodare-7,” The sizar clarified, as that was the name they gave to Cabaret. And it wasn’t a seven, because they had a different numerical system, but, for ease of understanding, I’ll translate it as such.
And so, the doctor dismissed the student, that went back to the vibrating monitor and inserted its back tendrils on it, to keep studying this gift of chance they had happened upon.
----------------------------------------
Samari cast the bouncy ball for the umpteenth time, watching it rebound against the floor, wall and ceiling of the inn’s room before returning to her. Sometimes she caught it with her hand, other’s, with her extricated spirit. It was a nice way to train her control a bit while demolishing ugly pottery “by accident”.
Kalon stared at the ceiling, laying in his bed, worried by something she couldn’t figure out. After another cycle of the ball, she pocketed it and turned to her companion. “Kalon, what’s the matter? Did the act of devouring our enemy cause you some stomach issues?” She said, genuine worry visible in her little-psychopath face.
“No, I am thinking about how far I am from killing that man!” he sat up and regarded her with a soft, self-assuring expression. “And yet… yet now I have you, Samari. We are a team capable of hunting monsters and growing stronger together.”
Samari laughed meanly. Oh, the bold declarations of the stupid. “I won’t help you get revenge against Cutbastra. He is sort of a cultivating antihero. Defends the world from threats others don’t dare take on.”
Kalon jumped from his bed, victim of indignation. “What? He is a villain, he killed like… lots of Jaggers back home. Children, not puppies.”
Jagger popped form under the bed, where, with Brunhilda’s help, he had killed the duck and made him into a rug. “Yes, he did. He has a talking skink that can see the future, and supposedly someone called Jagger born on Valelike Vale would kill him if he didn’t commit that heinous act.”
Samari sighed. Cultivators and their savagery. “It is known. But he is not only powerful, Kalon. He is the defender of the world, a wall to keep evils greater than him at bay. I assumed you knew.”
Kalon looked down, towards the floor. He grabbed his scalps and found himself wanting to tear his hair out of the follicles. “No. He is a bad man. I cannot accept him being essential for the world. That’s not how things ought to be.”
“That’s how things are, my stupid friend.”
Jagger felt a tingling sensation rising up his legs, and, shaking them after each step, stumped towards the door. Kalon’s inner turmoil was infusing him with the boy’s vital energy, and he didn’t want to do anything with it.
“But he killed so many, Samari. He needs to pay,” Kalogn argued, slowly, as if trying to sound convincing.
“Make him pay if you can, then,” she said, shrugging, returning to her game with the ball. “As for me, consider me your shadow, Kalon: I may follow you everywhere, but I won’t be there after you step into the dark. I am your friend, and I will help you reach immortality, if so you desire. But I won’t aid you directly in your quest for vengeance.”
Kalon felt rage building inside him. His lip twitched. His avatar urged him to hurt the brat in front of him. Yet… he couldn’t. He inhaled and exhaled in silence, calming himself down. Samari wasn’t evil, she wasn’t defending the man he hated. She thought of revenge as a dark endeavor, and wouldn’t his mom think of it the same way? Besides, if Cutbastra was defending the world, it was natural for her to want him to keep on living, to keep everyone safe. But for him, there was no excuse: if the world needed a man to defend it, one could replace that monster. One that walked the road of the Rottweiler, perhaps.
“Samari, you are right. I need to become strong enough so we don’t need Cutbastra anymore.” He hit his fist against his palm. “And then, only then, I will get my revenge.”
“What a dolt you are. You cannot even control your avatar yet. We will need to train that while we amass some money to travel the world.”
Kalon gave her a thumbs up, a smug grin sitting on his face, because the grin was too lazy to stand.
“Burr,” Brunhilda chimed in.
“Yes, yes!” Samari said, vexed by the dog’s insistence on the subject, “and turn you into a pill!”
Finally, Jagger reached the hall, where he laid on the floor, closed his eyes, and, happy with his life and this new understanding his friends had come to, randomly exploded.
Road of the Rottweiler, Volume 1:
Intercoursingly over at fucking last.