The most prolific nine-year-old hitwoman the world had ever seen flip-flopped down the brown-floored halls of a well-lit apartment complex. Her short dark hair glistened, slick with gel, and the business suit fit her like a globe. As in, push your measuring child into a volcano or oceanic rift to get an idea of it. She carried a box full of cookies baked by the girls that survived the daunting task of being scouts in Ilure city, the ones that didn’t step on an anti-cultivator landmine, being promoted from explorers to exploders.
Brunhilda, in all her inexistence, followed, full of herself.
Samari had prepared the necessary covenants. She had downed a coffee. She had loaded her intricate trap. She had downed a coffee. She had managed to look somewhat unlike a midget cop in drag. She had restarted her heart. She had downed a coffee. She had accrued seven potential felonies for shouting racially charged slurs against a couple of black batteries. Double A, if anyone asks. Black, like she liked her coffees.
One would expect her to have carried a crowbar on her person for such a job, but she had decided against it. As an implement it was too heavy, it screamed murder, and drunk corvids were a hell of a clientele to deal with. Her methods were subtler, if as traumatic.
She licked her finger and proceeded to abuse the doorbell. She didn’t ask for consent before making the little button shriek in panic. It was a dead ringer of her last victim.
The bulky wooden door got opened by an animated, dusty, dark grimoire that hung in the air as it held the handle and tried to read Samari’s face.
Samari checked the direction she had noted on a piece of paper. “Uh, sir, is this the house of the pedophile?”
The book parted its pages as if they were lips to speak. “No. We are all traditionalist here. ‘Cept my youngest son. The poor thing was born an EPUB.”
Samari took initiative and pulled the door shut on the face of the living book. Hoew many apartments 3B could a complex contain?
At least one per mass extinction in the Phanerozoic, it seemed. Ordovician-Silurian, Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic, and the big non-avian-dinosaur-monstergirl genocide at the end of the Cretaceous. That’s at least four, people, learn to count.
She shuffled her bunny flip-flops to another door marked 3B. Sixth time had to be the charm.
Brunhilda prayed this wasn’t the time where it meant three bees, that, knowing Cabaret, had to come eventually.
Samari licked her whole hand this time, and then dedicated a vile grin at the helpless doorbell. She laughed like the sort of men you don’t want your children to associate with as she triggered the mechanism. She wasn’t a wicked person per se. To begin with, she had spent several hours as a clinically dead entity. That is a surefire way to accumulate bad bureaucratic karma. Harbinger of a tribulation that would make The Decolonized One proud.
In a faraway heaven that looked much like a nearby office building, Tribulations spat his decaf aberration of a drink all over files nobody ever bothered to check or organize. His face scrunched up in offence. “I still have part of my colon!”
You said it, pal. Part. And shut up if you want to keep it.
Back with Brunhilda and her pet, the doorbell rang out in despair. After several seconds of uniterupted torture, the jiggling sound of keys came to its rescue, and Samari relented her attack as she stepped back and put on her best scout girl smile. The fact she was donning a smoking wasn’t meant to break the illusion of her being a scout girl selling cookies.
What opened the door was a wide creature, once a man, now dehaired. His lower eyelids twitched in the light, his stained t-shirt depicting an ostensible hominid of nocturnal habits and Japanese heritage, judging by the exorbitant size of its eyes and the apparent lack of a nose. “What do you want, boy?”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Samari wished she lacked a nose too, and as her cheeks tugged at her lips and strained to keep her smile, she began talking. This had to be her quarry.
“Hello sir, I am selling cookies and… Did you call me boy?”
“Hohoho! Little man, I appreciate you wanted to be all ggrown up and doin…” His sausage-like fingers described greasy circles in the air. “Business, but…”
“I am a girl, you disgusting child molester!” Samari crossed her arms as she let the box of cookies fall. Yeah, her hair was short, but she was clearly a young miss.
The pedophile scratched his balding head.” Listen, I may be an abuser of young lasses, but whoever told you you are a girl is worse than me. If you were born with a weenie, you are boy, and you should embrace your nature,” he placed one of his big hands on Samari’ now blemished shoulder.
“I was born a female. My birth certificate says I can be somebody’s Selective-serotonin-reuptake-inhibitors-addicted wife someday. I have ovaries. I have a womb. I have higher chances of breast cancer.”
The pedophile pulled back in revulsion, like a dog tasting a lemon. “you mean you are a girl, for real?”
Samari nodded. “For real.”
The disgusted man scratched his chin. “Well, I don’t feel like abusing you. You are too ugly for a girl. Have you considered transitioning to a boy? I have friends that could… enjoy you that way,” he offered in the very casual way only somebody with a completely stunted social intelligence could.
Something non-physical broke inside Samari. It’s one thing to be in danger to be a rape victim. Part and parcel of being a young female, her mother had once said. It was another one, completely different, to be considered too ugly to abuse. It was weirdly relieving and insulting at the same time.
She then looked at the predator straight in his bulging eyes. “You are courting death.”
“Yes, I’d prefer to have a romp with the Grim Reaper before touching you, lil aberration. No offense meant. ”
“I can see the future. You are going to die of an iron overdose,” Samari pointed with a wiggling finger. “Brain damage caused by it as the main cause of death.”
“Oh, great, you are one of those nefarious spirits that curse you if you don’t violate them, aren’t you? But… no, death is preferable to touching you. Really. Don’t you have any cute friends?”
Samari glanced sideways as she wondered if Kalon could be considered cute. “Maybe, but you would have to settle for a boy with a spherical family tree.”
The fat man grunted, his fingers pressing against the boder of the door, threatening to dig on the wood “Female friends.”
“Brunhilda. But she’s a bitch. Literal. Rottweiler.”
“You know what, here, have some spare change and leave me alone,” The man begun digging on his pocket for a couple low-denomination bills to give Samari.
Samari showcased her empty palms, and from them rose twin Inner Control Incunabulas, the dancing nets of spirit imitating little fires. “The Archives pay me better for your head.”
Realization dawned on the man’s face and he tensed the mistreated muscles of his flabby arm to slam the door with all his might, but the sudden kvetching noise above his head distracted him. just for long enough.
Then a thoroughly-drooled and biled anvil appeared midair, failing straight on the man’s head, unceremoniously crushing it against the floor. Blood splattered all over Samari’s suit, and flip-flops, and she kicked her off, revealing a clean, white pair of the same footwear waiting underneath. Then she disembarrassed herself form her suit and pants, throwing it to a side, revealing… yes, the exact same clothes underneath. She had prepared a covenant that provided her infinitely replacing clothes for an hour, no matter what. A safety measure against rapists that may try to denude her, but apparently not as good as the face she had been born with.
With dead eyes she regarded the dead man and the hole in the floor that the anvil had left. Breaking through the roof of the lower apartment and continuing its way down undeterred. “Good job, Brunbrun, now get rid of the body.”
The void-based dog began sucking the decapitated cadaver by the feet, slowly making it disappear into thin, but chomping and salivating, air.
Once the scene of the crime had been licked mostly clean — save for the anvil that was now in a better place mostly devoid of gravitational potential energy — Samari’s face remained with a frown. The scum of Cabaret had called her too ugly. Ugly beyond abuse. And she knew this piece of information was an advantage to be leveraged. But her ego, was still hurt, and that was unacceptable. A fragile ego was Aunara’s thing. Not hers. She couldn’t be like her mother. No!
Besides, her mother wasn’t ugly. What had gone wrong with her face? Why was she too ugly for the bald, fat, unbathed lolicons of the world? “Let’s go, Brunhilda. I need a bath to stop feeling this dirty. And a compliment. From an old grandma. And cookies. Unpoisoned. From the same kind old grandma, if possible.”