ChatGPT, write me a Chapter 4 that begins with me asking ChatGPT to write a chapter 4 that begins with me asking ChatGPT to write a chapter 4 that begins with me asking ChatGPT … Fuck, I think I killed her. Now I have to write this trainwreck of a chapter myself! No!

You know what? Fine. Fine. I’ll do this myself. But angrily.

They left the town after saying goodbye to as few people as possible: this included the clerk of the guild of monster fuckuppers, Polentia —The bathroom lady— and a few of their recurrent clients, in addition to the de facto owner of the local pet store, a young lady who had inherited a turtle from her grandma (the animal legally held ownership of the place, but was unable to manage it, because she —the turtle— was a turtle.)

They had their own cart, summoned by Kalon and pulled by fierce, drooling, slightly intellectually disadvantaged Rottweilers. Their massive paws left deep tracks on the road, there where a puddle —unionized rainwater— had formed and softened the dirt. Such tracks could, one day, confuse the archeologists of the future, and make them think a horse-sized dog roamed the lands, frightening the local populace with their bark and eating stray children whole. The fact was that the only child predators in the area were Parbula the wine-aunt teacher and the hobo known as Roger “Humanitarian” Tumberlan, who thought people like Parbula should be hanged for ruining perfectly edible children.

Kalon, Jagger, and Samari were protected from the ruthless equatorial sun by a ceiling made out of unfortunate, stretched puppies conjoined by fastening their skins together with littler pups, as if they were clothes pegs with itty-bitty sharp teeth. And it wasn’t only the ceiling: every other part of the cart, from the wheels to the reins and the seats, had been built out of differently sized rottweilers: strong bulky ones for the rigid structures, and puppies for the fine details. Suffice to say, amidst the puppies it was an oven, despite the fact Samari had devised an air conditioning system where they fed a bunch of puppies mints so, when they began panting, their breath would freshen up the atmosphere. It worked until they ran out of mints, about the time they were passing through aromatic fields of tea and tobacco. Besides coffee, whose local consumption had increased tenfold in the last months for unknown reasons, those stow were the most common crops outside of flowers for honey production, vegetables and fruits. Eventually they got out of the cart and returned all the summoned dogs to their legitimate home: inside Kalon’s spirit, as vital energy.

They pranced through fields that tuned the air to the scent of lavender, and by parcels that reeked of manure. They laughed whenever a horse or a llama paced by and glanced sideways at Jagger. Like siblings Samari and Kalon jabbed each other during their conversations. They talked about the clouds, about the trees, abnout their life before meeting, about Jagger’s butt. They talked and talked, and eventually, they realized they lacked something.

“Shit, we forgot Brunhilda,” Samari exclaimed, distress evident on her expression.

“No, we didn’t, she’s with us. She just ouroborosed herself into inexistence. Look. Brun!”

A parcel of air gaggled and spat and retched, and soon, a little ball of black appeared. The ball began growing as it fell to the ground, and soon it became evident that it was Brunhilda vomiting herself out of her own stomach, covered in saliva, gastric juices, and narco remains.

Brunhilda then shook her filth off, spreading it all over the dirt road and Jagger, and greeted her friends. “Burr.”

“Okay. You know, before joining the Rottweiler squad, I used to consider physical laws to be almost mandatory, unless you had enough power to bend them. Now the blindfold is gone, and I can see that they are mere suggestions for some.”

“We would not be the first morons to run around with a magical psychopathic luggage. But at least ours is a milf,” Jagger said.

“Burr?”

“Sorry, Brunhilda. Moment of weakness, moment of weakness. You are still in your best years. Yup,” Jagger feared for his life in an eloquent way.

“Burr.” Brunhilda sentenced, and began eating her own tail again. She would not be out under this sun.

Kalon and Samari exchanged a glance and shrugged. They kept on walking as the sun jumped in slow motion overhead, like a lazy dolphin on its way to the promised rape lands beyond the horizon. They sat under a lone willow and played with the long shadows of the dusk. Samari showcased her skills to shape bunnies out of light and its absence, and Kalon tried. Just… tried. Jagger ran around the trunk as the children played, and Brunhilda frolicked with him too.

Night arrived slowly, stars appearing one by one sprinkling the deep dark of the sky, Endless other worlds, none of them as easy on the eyes as Cabaret: none of them officially confirmed to have independently evolved prostitutes. Their shadows grew faint under the dim moon, and Kalon looked at them sadly, remembering Samari’s words. He decided not to speak about it. The boy had learned not to ruin those moments, and maybe, maybe his hatred for Cutbastra would one day dwindle enough to always walk in the light, even if he attained enough power to beat him on his own. Samari was his shadow, and when night came, shadows were irremediably gone.

“Sam, what about your father? You never speak about him.”

This time, is was Samari who lost her smile. “The man that raised me was a good man, and he loved mom dearly. One day I told him of mom’s cheating and he never came back. He knew I would lack nothing; the family was pretty well off back then. He doubted me being his daughter, and so he disappeared, to not hurt me or himself anymore. I… I want to see him again. ”

“Cheating like… in games? You know, cards, dice, those kind of games?”

Samari’s lips pursed and her eyes suffered a glassing worthy of a nuclear test site amidst the desert. “Can I tell him how babies are made?”

Jagger shook his head slowly. “Yes, please.” But his subconscious betrayed his true intentions.

“Kalon, what do you know about babies?”

“Everything.”

Silence settled for a few seconds, until samari gestured him to continue. Thrice. Until he understood.

“Ah, you don’t know?” he asked, surprised by the prospect of him knowing more than Samari about a given subject.

“I have a theory. But please tell me about yours.”

Kalon cracked his fingers, then his neck, and slumped against the three’s trunk. “ah, well, it all begins when your dad plows the land and plants a cabbage. I think. I am not sure if cabbages are planted, but they are plants, and plants are supposed to be… planted…” he scratched his chin for a few seconds until his avatar howled inside his head.

“Yes! They are! Continue torturing me with your stupidity. With something new.”

“The avatar says they are but I don’t trust his biological knowledge.”

Samari inhaled, bracing for the act of giving an explanation while remaining kind. “yes, Kalon, they are plants,” she said with the tone her mother had used to speak for special needs children.

“Well, then you plant a cabbage if you are a man, okay? And a woman steals a stork’s egg and sits on it, like a brooding hen, so the egg is warm. Eggs are like, bird seeds. It’s amazing. Some eggs don’t do nothing, but other’s you heat them up, and they give a chicken. It’s amazing.” His doltish awe soon gave place to genuine confusion. “Are birds a kind of plants?”

The avatar blew his brains up with a gun-pup. He couldn’t die, but hell take him if he wasn’t going to try.

Samari gritted her teeth and spoke between them. “No, Kalon, birds are animals. Vertebrates. Like you or a lizard.”

“Fine, birds are animals. Got it. Anyway, the woman broods a stork and raises it until it is big enough, and then sets it free. Then the stork somehow flies, I think it has to do with the feathers or the wings or the beak or the hallowed bones...”

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Samari closed her eyes hard and corrected him. “Hollow, Kalon, their bones have little air sacs inside them.”

He scowled, offended by the remark. “I thought they were blessed. How else do they defy gravity?”

Samari crossed the fingers of both her hands. “Remind me, who am I speaking with?”

“Kalon.”

“That’s correct, and what happens when you trip, Kalon?”

Kalon considered the answer for a moment, and then, looking at Samari’s expectant eyes, he answered. “Chaos.”

“You know what? I am going to accept that as a valid answer.” Samari made a pause before continuing. “So, Kalon, tell me, don’t you defy gravity?”

“No!” he straightened his back. “I fall to my best understanding of the process. I respect gravity’s authority.”

“And Brunhilda respects… you know what, I am not sure how many laws of physics Brunbrun violates on the daily.” Samari tried to think about Brunhilda’s feats and identify her crimes against nature, but she lost count after a second. “Ah, screw it, back to telling me how babies are made, Kalon.”

“Fine, the stork flies, and it does so with a direction. It won’t go straight upwards, like a balloon full of hellions—.”

“Helium,” corrected Jagger, more out of habit rather than as a conscious decision.

“Thanks, Jagger. Heliums. The stork flies and moves horizontally as it does, and searches for a good cabbage. I was never told about what storks look for in a cabbage to deem it a good cabbage. I think it has more to do with the farmer than the plant itself. Anyway…”

Samari secured Jagger’s hairy tail with an iron grasp. He was not going to run away leaving her alone to dispel all of Kalon’s misconceptions about conception. Jagger whined. She was taking him with her, how unfairly fair.

“… The thing is, the stork looks for a cabbage and picks it up. This cabbage, induced by the stork claws, starts producing a baby inside, growing heavier as the stork waits for the man who planted the cabbage to show up. Then it regards the man with a haughty stare that tells him he has become a father, and with the cabbage well-grappled by the stork’s potent legs, the bird takes flight, back to the woman who brooded the egg in the first place. Naturally, the man who planted the cabbage follows the stork back to the woman’s home, and so , they receive the baby together,” Kalon concluded his dissertation about stork and cabbage based reproduction, and Samari checked her inner thesaurus for the softest words to call someone an inbred disgrace.

“You unfortunate result of genetic nepotism, that’s not how it works! At all!”

Kalon lowered his gaze. “Maybe it was a lettuce…”

Samari’s tolerance sublimated with each passing second. A tic creeped its way to her left eye and made a home there.

“Listen , Kalon, I will undonkey[1] you.”

Hands behind her back, Samari paced around the willow, tilting her head to the sides to avoid the hanging branches as she passed by them. “I will tell you about the bees and the drones. This is an important lesson, so you can avoid accidentally making more Kalons in the future.”

Jagger turned, whale eyed, and said in a tremulous murmur, “No. I should take away his balls. But that goes against the natural order. It’s a dog’s balls that the owner takes away.”

“Jagger, castration should be a penultimate resort,” Samari chided at him.

“Murder as a last one, I know.”

The dog lowered his head, and not two seconds later, he was grooming himself.

“I am waiting, Samari. “Kalon urged her with genuine curiosity.

“Ah, yes. Well, Kalon it all began with the last eukaryotic common ancestor seeking a way to fight against the looming threat of deleterious mutations…” Samari noticed that her words seemed to have the same effect as scalding frying oil on Kalon’s brain, and decided to abridge her explanation. “However it may have arisen, there is a widespread phenomenon among plants, animals, fungi, and other beings: Sexual reproduction. Are you following?”

Kalon nodded. “No,” he said, earnestly.

Samari took a long, slow breath to calm down. “Well, listen, there’s a thing called cells, they are like the little bricks our bodies are made of. You get that?”

Kalon raised an eyebrow “Erm, yes?”

“Inside they have a nucleus… core, let’s call it core. This core it’s like a little book with all the instructions to make up our bodies. Mine have instructions to make up A… Samari, and yours have instructions to make up a Kalon.”

Kalon looked down at his hands, as a murderer that has just killed for the first time and kinda still cares. “My cells know how to read?”

“It’s just a four letter alphabet they use. And they are practicing since before you were born. Don’t feel bad about it,” Jagger commented, and felt his words lacked some spice, “retard.” There, that was better.

“Cells invented reading, Kalon. And these cores, they can be recombined. Imagine books that have two versions of each page, by two different authors.”

“Can they be picture books?”

Samari’s smile crooked like fingers after a lifetime of severe arthritis. “Why not? Yes, coloring books if you will. What’s important is that one of those copies comes from our mommy, and another from our daddy… in normal situations.” Samari wondered if Kalon’s alleles were in pairs or if generations of Valelikevalian tradition had fattened up his chromosomic reserves, among other things.

“We don’t share parents.”

Jagger proceeded to heabutt his owner in the stomach, going dizzy from the impact on Kalon’s hard abs. “Stop… that…” Then the dog fell sideways and started seizuring.

“Ah, he will respawn if he dies,” Samari showed how much she cared with a contemptuous gesture. “Where were we… oh, bandits.”

The men wore red scarfs covering their mouths and rode horses as dark as the ages inside Kalon’s head, Three, they were, and around their waists the strapped guns felt at home. “Give us all of your valuables and you may leave with your life, brats,” said their leader, his voice betraying a lifetime of drinking and smoking.

“Kalon, give the bad men our most valuable Rottweilers.”

What followed included blood curling screams, a horse and its rider being torn apart by vicious Rottweiler puppies, a man choking on Kalon’s scarf, and another one getting his liver removed in a single jab and pull when Kalon let his avatar take control of his hand. The two remaining horses looked at each other and silently, accorded to slowly sneak away from the scene, faking to suffer from advanced dementia if anyone asked about what had happened.

Kalon, covered in the dead men blood and bile, sat back by Samari’s side. “Go on?”

“We get half of our cellular core’s pages from mom, and half from dad. Like, you from your dad and your mom, and I from mine, respectively.”

“Ah, I see, that happens when the stork grabs the cabbage.”

Samari faced the willow. As in, hit it. With her face, feeling the rough bark against her skin. “You cannot be like this! I am about to ruin your innocence by being very crass, Kalon, so please, stop being stupid. For your own good.”

Kalon poked her nose, knowing that that annoyed Samari. The smeared blood just added insult to injury. “And what are you going to tell me, brat, that babies are made when people fuck?”

Samari's smile widened slowly, a choppy laughter oozing from the depths of the girl. She stood with the gaze lost in the distance, and walked with stiff step, until she collapsed next to Jagger. “Awesome! This is awesome! I want seizures too! Seizures, please, God of Seizures!”

The God of Seizures heard Samari’s plea, archived it, and decided he would, possibly, check it out tomorrow and decide how to act. Deep inside, he knew tomorrow would become the day after tomorrow, and so on, and so on.

After a while of trying to end up like Jagger, Samari gave up, stopped kicking, and returned to Kalon’s side. “I despise you.”

“Listen, Sam, I know I said something very stupid, I know there’s no way for sex to make a baby.”

Samari glared at Kalon like a protective mother armed with a cast iron pan at a chupacabra that’s going after her six months old firstborn. “Stop being stupid. It’s not a suggestion. Sex makes babies. It’s one of the few ways to make babies that exist. The most common one, even.”

Aghast, Kalon recoiled, falling backwards over the grass and dead willow leaves, and miraculously avoiding one of his characteristic falls. Sometimes, chaos and order looked like one and the same.

“Listen, it’s no so bad. You see, there are these cells that look like… fish, yes, fish, are called sperm, and come out of the male’s body through his… his…” Samari, eidolon of blushing, wiggled a finger up and down to avoid naming it, “and they swim inside the woman’s coochie, each one carrying the pages from dad to make the core of a baby’s cells. They eventually reach a five star resort for sperm where they can get nourishment and live in for days: this is called the fallopian tubes. Once a month, inside the fallopian tubes a competition is held, and all the sperm currently residing there or that arrive soon after can participate. It’s a race, and the first place is … well, the head of the first place and the second and likely third explodes.” Kalon’s face was confusion and fear as Samari said this, “but one of the few that arrive soon after to the goal wins a chance to fuse with a huge cell from the mommy: the ovum. The ovum holds mommy’s pages for the baby’s cell’s cores. After the fortunate one enters the ovum, the egg’s polarity changes, like, bam! And no one else can enter. And when they fuse, they become the first cell of the baby, that then travels down the fallopian tubes and into the uterus…erm, belly, the inside of the woman’s belly as it divides into more and more cells that remain together, like superglued. After it reaches the belly, it tries to hold onto the walls for dear life, because if it fails, death awaits before even being born.”

Kalon stood in front of Samari, looking down at her. “Are you being honest? Is that load of bollocks the truth?”

Samari didn’t know how to react to that so she looked him straight into the eyes and said a simple yes.

Kalon slumped back to the ground, dejected. “Why does learning always take the magic away from the world?”

Swatting Kalon’s shoulder, she spoke. “It doesn’t take it away, silly. It’s just a magic far more complex and fascinating and plus eighteen than cabbages and storks.”

“Now, Sam, tell me… where are storks born from, then?”

Samari’s brain gave up, and she immediately fell asleep. Lucky her.

----------------------------------------

[1] Translate as “desasnar” for when the Spanish version of this thing comes out. The lack of such word in the English language should be considered a crime against common sense, and the lingua franca could use an insulting synonym for educate. Better yet if it is related to ass, referring to the animal. Deass is a viable alternative, but it could imply buttcheek extirpation, and we don’t want that. Or maybe you do. I am not kink shaming. Not today.