The rift opened in the middle of the icy wasteland, a purple scar on the fabric of reality. The hand, the first thing to come out of it, sported healthy green and violet hues. Under the skin something moved. Something with tendrils, something that crawled. Twisted nails like corkscrews or duck phalli dug into the snow, because gods forbid I give a description that makes you feel comfortable. The hand scratched, trying to drag whatever it was attached to out of the portal. Soon the tentacles, hollow like those of a coral, grasped the air around the portal, anchoring to reality. Afterwards came the face, colored like a non-white eggplant, with its mustache long gone, and from its mouth gushed out a blood-curdling tune. Amaranth by Nightwish, to be precise.
Thus under the tyrannical but distant sun of the pole emerged the King of Damned Sin, with the tentacles arranged as a single wing budding from his back, with his thousand yard stare lost as he tried to make sense of the image before him.
“This is… so much sodium bicarbonate.”
It’s snow, you dimensionally handicapped retard.
“Snow?” he made a pause, noticing how distorted and rough his own voice was now. “Ice?” Another pause. “Water?”
Add plasma too while you are at it, you brainwashed moron.
A tumbleweed composed entirely out of branching penguins rolled by.
“The fuck?”
Sometimes cultivators mess around with evolution. This is the least worrisome kind of result.
“What’s the most worrisome kind?”
The system couldn’t shrug, but it made sure to communicate its intention to with the dark magic we call emoticons.
A Venus flytrap composed in it’s entirety by deformed and mangled lion seals lumbered by, probably in search for the tumbleweed. “I have seen less distressing things in the mating chamber. Can we go back?” He turned to check if the portal was still there. But the wound on reality had already healed. Someone, he thought, should give reality a teeny bit of diabetes.
He felt one of his children moving under the skin of his chest, relocating to another section of his body, to chill there. Not the knees, he thought. Please, Junior, not the fucking knees again.
The vermis wiggled its way into his shoulder, where it coiled round the clavicle before calming down.
“There, sleep well. So, system, what do we do now? How long has it been since my departure?”
Six months, give or take a few days.
“Month… the word seems familiar.” Me massaged his temples, trying to remember. “How long is a month? How much do continents move in six months?”
To put it like this, three billion months ago, the last trilobite was dying, and we are still in the Holocene/Anthropocene.
Lino remained in silence for a while. “Long-scale billion or short-scale billion?”
Gods in heaven, smite this guy. Short.
“Ah, still a tiny amount of time, but not as much as it could be.”
Lino didn’t smile. He didn’t seem to remember how to make facial expressions. He strolled around the icy wasteland a bit, followed the tracks left by the seals. After a while, he lay in the soft, cold snow, stare lost in the sky, not knowing what to do now that his wife had set him free.
“Suggestions? Avatar? System? Me?”
Inside his head, the Nothoracopteris argentinica, not trapped as a carbon compression anymore, and rather being a blossoming seed fern spread all over his thoughts, spoke. “We could annex Uruguay again, sir.”
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“No, that’s inhumane. System?”
In my humble opinion, you have the power to do whatever you want.
“Okay, then!”
And, after millions of years of waiting for this, Lino’s eyelids closed and, under the rising polar blizzard that began blowing and whistling and howling all around him, Lino fell into a deep slumber.
----------------------------------------
Cutbastra stormed into the office of the king of Hilvera kingdom, a place of red silken drapes and golden ornaments, including one of the cats. Those cats. The Japanese ones. You know them, they know you, they know your family. They beckon. Come, they say, come, I have economic reforms that will bring prosperity to your country. And then you go, and the reforms are more Chinese supermarkets sprouting EVERYWHERE. You go to your favorite bar? It’s now a Chinese supermarket. That amusement park you met your sweetheart in? Chinese supermarket. The Venezuelan motherfucker that repaired your air conditioner? Dead before he could be replaced by a Chinese supermarket. He got a tumor, doctors thought it was a teratoma due to finding an anomalous formation of hard tissue in the MRI. They couldn’t do anything, as it was in his brain, and during the autopsy, what they found after removing brain tissue from around the tumor made them drop their scalpels and gasp in a mixture of astonishment and horror. Inside his brain, Valentino Saavedra had developed… a Chinese supermarket.
Where was I? Ah, yes, Cutbastra getting into the office of a king.
The king reacted to the approaching cultivator like he did to every unwanted visitor. “Did you have an appointment for today?” he said, not raising his gaze from his catgirl watching and classification magazine.
“No, I kicked your guards’ butts and came in here to discuss gay marriage. Can you legalize it, please?”
The king crossed the fingers of both his hands and regarded Cutbastra with his bulldog face. Yes, human, he was human just… looked bulldoggish. After a second of humming, he spoke. “The people wouldn’t like that, would they?”
“Well, no, they are kind of backwards in this kingdom of yours.” Cutbastra accepted with certain embarrassment, taking the seat the king was offering with a welcoming gesture. “Outlaw being gay and force heterosexual marriages?” he then asked as if it was the natural progression from his initial demand.
“What kind of madman are you again?”
“Cutbastra, sworn protector of Cabaret and its people, occasional non-carer about cabarets, fervent supporter of the sacred institution of marriage.”
The king hid his palm in his face, and then turned his wheel-less revolving chair to the left, palming the slave underneath slightly so it would obey faster. “You are the cucker, if my memory doesn’t need to be trialed for betrayal. Is that right? Or is reality wrong again?”
“No, sir, you are right,” Cutbastra said, remembering who he was dealing with. Then he leaned over the King’s desk to peer over the window, at the mud streets below, where people fought with knives as a form of entertainment and a fat Pomeranian that had somehow found its way to this den of poverty and corruption acted as the referee.
He pointed at the scrap of mangled gold and gems over his head. “Of course I am, I am king. He who wears the crown wields nothing but the truth.”
“I thought this was a parliamentary monarchy. Why are people so poor?”
“Because it is a parliamentary monarchy.”
Cutbastra leaned back , hands joined in front of his mouth. “Why do they live like this if they can vote?”
The king shrugged and swiveled his slave-powered chair to face Cutbastra once more. “Just because we have elections it doesn’t mean any of the candidates are on their side.”
“Democracy 101, I see.” Cutbastra tilted his head back, switching his attention to the gold-patterned, impolite red ceiling as he thought. “Well, I need people to be married to cultivate and save our planet from a world ending threat, so… can you force marriages for everyone above the age of consent?”
The king considered it a second. “How does this benefit me, again?”
“The world doesn’t end?”
“Right, that would be bad for the economy. Go fetch the prime minister, I will talk to him about your proposal.”
Cutbastra stood from his chair with renewed energy. “Where can I find him or her?”
“Partaking in the knife fight. He supports them as the national sport.”
“Why would anyone do that? And which one of the participant is he? the long or short haired one?”
“Well, the alternative was dog fights, and he is a great lover of animals. He even fucked some literal bitches.”
Cutbastra’s face became a testament to the punishment righteous men all over the world were subjected to. He raised a finger to protest, but the King gestured for him to lower it.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds, the prime minister is just the arbiter of the fight.”
Cutbastra’s brain did 2+2 and he smiled stupidly as his eyes became a thin line. “is he the Pomeranian?”
“Indeed, he is the most honest PM we ever had.”
Cutbastra felt joy surging from the depths of his soul and washing all over him for a moment, just for it to be crushed by the absurdity of reality immediately afterwards. “You need to consult a dog to legalize forced marriage?” he said, raising an eyebrow like a man that is absolutely convinced that he can cuck the guillotine into submission.
The king smiled for the first time since their unexpected , at least for him, rendezvous. “Indeed, he’s the incumbent prime minister.”
Cutbastra left his chair, and without further speaking, shuffled his feet out of the office. He wasn’t going to rush to fetch the PM pom. What could the king do? Deny him? The king? A married man? Ha, he better didn't!