The compile "Brief Explanation" thread

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Part 1

Leslie Gore died because she was a worse dancer than me.

Not only was that incredibly difficult, but intolerable in the eyes of any orderly universe - I dance in the way that I imagine Richard Nixon fucked...Slow and plodding, with odd and inappropriate grunting noises that would be more appropriate in a zoo.  But Leslie Gore's Dancing in the televised version of It's My Party, and I'll Cry if I Want to from "Hollywood A Go Go" in 1965 demonstrates that you can in fact insult the Gods, even if those Gods might not exist.

The fail backed up and clogged her glands.

Within a year, she had become a mammoth sack of bloat, held in vaguely humanoid shape by a variety of industrial grade harnesses and girdles.  It couldn't last, of course, and when she hit the high note at the end of You Don't Own Me in concert, a buckle failed and the entire contraption flew apart, killing two stage hands and a member of the audience.  Poor Leslie literally came unglued, turning into an amorphous mass that leaked down through the RCA stage and into the sewers, thus depriving the world of another 10 years of saccharine "Johnny" ballads.

Rumor has it that what she had become still haunts the sewers and subways of the big apple, devouring homeless people and late night commuters, but nobody really believes that.  Things like that just don't happen, even in New York.

Part 2

So, yeah, I was sitting at the Meetrack with Nigel, drinking cheap whiskey and smoking too much.

But something was wrong.  Nigel is back in Portland, and why the hell am I wearing 1991 vintage DCUs and all the load bearing equipment that goes with it?  Why do I have an M16?  I don't feel like I'm dreaming.

Nigel was surrounded by sycophantic perverts, who leapt up every time  she said "Daddy, I need a fucking pony", and fought over who got to buy her a drink.  She seemed a little amused by this, with perhaps more than a touch of disdain.

I ask her where Mr Language is, and she replies, "That's really not the issue, Dok.  The issue is where you think YOU are."

"I'm at the Meetrack, obviously.  I'm wondering why you're here, come to think of it."

"I'm here because when I was a girl, They issued me a Barbie™ doll and a Barbie™ face, and told me what my role was, just like they gave you legos and GI Joe and told you what your role was.  But I don't like that Barbie™ face they stapled to my skull, and I kind of think I'm going to do something about it."

Then she pulled her face off.

That was too much, even for the perverts.  Some started to scream, others started puking.  Nigel just unfolded her other four arms from behind her back, each holding a dagger or a knotted rope or a blowtorch, and her breath was as hot as Dresden, back in the bad old days.  People began trying to get around her, to the door.  I, on the other hand, had a world-class panic attack and fell on the floor.

"What's the matter, kiddies?", she asked, with her gory skull hanging out, "Don't you want to buy me a drink, anymore?"

The bar started to smell like chlorine gas and blood , and Nigel sprouted fangs in her mouth, and razor wire around her arms (there's no reason certain mythic entities wouldn't modernize, is there?), and a lot of really bad things happened to people in the general vicinity.

Then she walked over to where I was laying on the floor, and I could see her heels crack the concrete, and her white sun dress all soaked in pervert.  I remember thinking there was an (Asian) Indian myth like this, and then she was next to me.

"It's not the drugs, Dok", she said, "Don't ever let them tell you it's the drugs.  They lied to me and they lied to you, and they'll lie to our kids just like they lied to our parents, and their parents.  It's not the drugs".

I think I passed out at that point, and the next thing I knew, I was staggering down the road in my regular clothes, with the sour aftertaste of cheap whiskey in my mouth, and no idea where my car was.

Just another night in Side Effect City.

Part 3

Note:  This may seem like two stories, separated by a line of asterixes.  It isn't, of course, it's the same story told in two different realities, or perhaps the same reality, but 500 years apart.  At least the two core concepts are the same.

From the written ship's log of the Endeavor:

We left Earth with great fanfare, the first manned starship, off to look at 3 planets that were suspected of being habitable.  Our ship was fast, and we expected to spend most of our time in hibernation, waking for maybe a month at a time to conduct routine maintenance.  The computer was programmed to keep us alive and healthy enough to complete the mission, and had a full VR suite to while away what waking hours weren't devoted to work routines.

We were four years out from Earth when the bomb went off. 

I don't know who planted it, but I'm guessing Earth First or one of the really whacko environmental groups that insist that "we have no right" to colonize other worlds.

Anyway, the bomb went off in the cryo-berths, killing all 30 of my crew mates.  I was on a short, unscheduled waking cycle to repair a bad repeater on our communications array, so I had the engine room between me and the explosion, and didn't get a scratch.

The computer wasn't so lucky.  90% of it's processing capacity was destroyed, and by the time it finished re-routing its programming, it had no room for anything other than medical oversight, navigation, and one (1) game that I could play, an ancient puzzle game called "Minesweeper".  The cryo-berths were utterly destroyed, so I was sentenced to solitary confinement for 30 years.

Obviously, I went mad within months.  The computer fixed that by harvesting different brain chemicals, etc, from the frozen bodies of my crew mates, and has kept me rigidly sane ever since.  I expect that there's enough "material" to keep me this way for the entire trip.

I have 25 years to go.

But I'm getting pretty good at Minesweeper.

*****************************************************

A Bad Day in Old Town.

The tramp freighter picked up a parking orbit around Earth. 

Nobody challenged it, of course...Earth had been abandoned as a dead world 100 years earlier.  From space it looked like a brownish-yellow marble, with just a hint of blue-green.  The last of the holdouts had been shipped off to newer garden planets, as the last of the eco-system failed.

Captain Semaj couldn't have cared less.  What he cared about was the stiff in the shuttle.  It was in style at this point for rich old bastards to be buried on Earth, the cradle of mankind, yada, yada...and even though this was happening quite often, the fee for burying the old weirdo here would allow Captain Semaj to retire.  No more hauling ore around in solitude.

The shuttle flight to the pre-selected point was completely uneventful. 

The Captain looked around as a servitor droid dug the grave.  There was a verdigrised arm bearing a torch sticking out of the sand about a mile away, and a concrete stairwell closer.  His suit pickups seemed to be catching a noise from that, but it was probably just the wind going across the entrance.

He was brought back to reality by the thump of the old geezer's body going into the hole.  He turned around, read the short service clearly while looking at the body, so that his suit recorder would catch it all for the lawyers and executors back home, and then waited as the servitor filled the hole back in.

But this time he DID hear something from the concrete stairwell.  It sounded like giggling.

Captain Semaj walked over to the stairs, and looked down.  In the darkness, he could clearly hear a whiny voice saying "mine mine mine..."  The Captain walked down the stairs, expecting to see some broken old announcement system in what was now clearly an old subway system.

Instead, he saw a man.  The fellow was covered in tumors and scarring from radiation burns, and was clutching a human hand.  He was gnawing on it.  The man scuttled backwards out of Captain Semaj's suit lights, now screaming "MINE MINE MINE!"

"I just want to help, man...", the Captain began.

"Oh, but you can." another voice said, as a bank of ancient lights crackled to life.  The Captain whirled around, and found that there were dozens of other mutated humans in a large chamber with him.  One large-ish one rose from what appeared to be a primitive throne, and approached him."

"I can tell them you're here", the Captain said, "They'll send proper medical supplies, get you off this rock." 

"Oh, right", the mutant leader replied, "The same people that left us here to die, so we wouldn't stink up their perfect new worlds with our disfigurations?  No, if you tell them, they'll stop bringing bodies.  I think you can help us in a more direct sense.  Fresh meat."

"Fresh...Meat...", the Captain murmured in horror, while the mutants whooped and hollered.

Captain Semaj pulled his burner and shot the mutant chief in the face, at a range of 20 feet.  Designed to burn through combat armor, the pulsed plasma burned the chief's head off cleanly at the neck.  The Captain turned and ran back up the stairs.

Behind him, he heard a high-pitched voice say, "The boss is so thoughtful!  He didn't just GET lunch, he IS lunch!".

The Captain piled into his shuttle and crash-started his engines, howling off the desert sands in mere moments.  He left the loading door open until the only air in the shuttle was in his suit, just in case.

On ship, he flopped into his chair and told the computer to break orbit.

"Goddamn freaks.  Goddamn cannibal freaks", he muttered to himself, "Well, fuck this shit.  When I get back, all those credits are mine.  I'm quitting this shit and moving to one of the pleasure worlds, where I'm gonna live a dream of expensive whores and booze, and I'm never gonna wake up."

Wake up.

Wake up.

HEY, WAKE THE FUCK UP!

James Semaj snapped out of his drugged haze, and looked at Nast, who was shaking him by the arm with a tumor-covered hand.

"Come on, James.  We got a whole train full of stiffs to unload, some freighter's crew just buried like 50 fat bastards.  We're gonna eat like kings for months."

"Leave me alone.", Semaj said, looking for his works.

"Oh, come on, for fuck's sake.  Eventually, you're gonna run out of drugs, and then you're going to have to face reality like the rest of us."

Semaj watched Nast walk back toward the subway train, as he cooked up some more heroin on a spoon.

"Fuck you, Nast.  Fuck you.  I'm not going to 'face reality' if that means living on a graveyard world, and eating the dead.  No, fuck that.  I just came down too fast is all.  Just need to up the dose a little bit.  Yeah, that's it."

Part 4

Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden, "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," priestess in Athena's temple, but when she and the "Lord of the Sea" Poseidon had sex together in Athena's temple, the enraged Athena transformed Medusa's beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone.

The problem with Tucson is that, being Eris' Holy City, we're up to our collective arses in Greek Gods, monsters, and heroes, because they have nowhere else to go.

I met Medusa in 2007, though she calls herself "Mistress Freeky", now.  To prevent the obvious disasters from happening in traffic, she keeps her hair in front of her face, most of the time...Her hair IS composed of snakes, but they are monofilament thin, and can only be seen as vipers under a microscope.  Likewise, she didn't actually do the nasty with Poseidon...He was just talking smack.  Gods do that.

Her face, as noted above, is "terrible", not "ugly".  She's actually very pretty, as many statues in Tucson could tell you, if they could speak.  So far, she's racked up two generals (complete with horses), six jockeys, Paul Bunyan, and an Alien being named "Double Oval, Reproduction".  I imagine there's more, but that's all I've seen so far.  I suspect horrible things about the giant stone Easter Island head downtown, but I can prove nothing (Legend says she once saved Tucson from a giant, but that's another story).  It's best not to look directly at her, if the wind is blowing.

She's not a bad sort, as cthonic monsters go, and she's a fantastic cook.  It seems that you're safe around her if your heart is pure, and it's a calm day.  My problem is that I don't have a pure heart, and I got too close, and learned about the snakes, as did Nurse Enabler.

They don't have a venomous bite, as you'd expect.  Instead, they tunnel into your chest and wrap around your heart, and never, ever let go.  If you're truly a bad person, she tears your heart out and feeds it to the cat...If you're just an ass, she keeps you and makes you eat delicious exotic food.

Never forget, Tucson is a City of Monsters, and most of them look just like you and I...when they aren't stabbing people, or selling them meth, or beating their spouses, or putting teenaged girls out on the corner.  But then there are the other kind of monster, and we mostly look right past them, because they don't fit in with our perception of reality.

And that's a damned shame, because some of them are damn fine people.

Part 5

Dr Fu Manchu looked around at the wreckage of his base.  The heroes had been through, and once again trashed his property, his plans, and his entertainment system.

"Why must they always interfere?", he mused, "I'm only trying to have a bit of fun."

That's when he noticed a bloody bit of fur sticking out from under a death ray mount.  He gaped in horror, and strode over to the destroyed weapon.  Underneath it was the corpse of his beloved Newfoundland Dog, Tojo.

"That is the absolute fucking limit!", he cried, "NO MORE MISTER NICE VILLAIN."

Once back home, he began to move money, funding the start up of some interesting companies.  Halliburton, Exxon, Blackwater, and dozens of others.  If he couldn't conquer the world, he'd fucking BUY it.  Then he'd put the screws to all of those "hero" bastards that killed his beloved pet.  Oh, yes, just let them try to fight their own economic system...It would be like watching them kick themselves in the balls.  Fu Manchu grinned at the thought.  It wasn't a pleasant grin.

Tojo was a good dog, he mused.  Never shat on the carpet, stayed at his heel during walks, hardly ever ate the help.

They'll pay, those bastards, because that was also the shaggiest damn dog ever. 

TGRR,
Not sorry about this.

[Pæs]

WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

[Richter]

YESSSSSSSS....

[Nephew Twiddleton]

I remember these 

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Even Stephen King doesn't imagine Richard Nixon fucking. This is beyond pure, unmitigated horror.

SCREENPLAY! 

[LMNO]

I think this was the first time we learned about the One True Nigel.  Who then became Legion, but that's another story.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am SO FUCKING GLAD the search function works again!