2A: Fix You

Then…

The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur and I sat at a square foldable table on plastic chairs that looked more appropriate for the backyard than the common room of a psychiatric hospital. That majestic bastard’s fur billowed over the arm rests. I thought the chair would buckle under his weight at any moment. More of these tables with equally flimsy chairs were scattered across the stained linoleum floor, stretching along the edge of the room in front of a row of stained-glass windows. The windows cast colours across the tables. Blues, reds, greens, and yellows. I saw them dancing as the sunlight from outside refracted through the religious motifs: The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane; Jesus carrying his cross; the Resurrection; the Ascension; the Pentecost.

The Crucifixion itself was saved for a life-sized statue on the back wall, complete with visceral bloody wounds designed to – quite literally – intimidate my friends and I into submission. Opposite it, the malfunctioning, cubic television continued to repeat the scene of Sarah Lacklan spearing Charlie Nickles through flaming tables at the end of Night Three of XWF Relentless 2020. It would play this scene for the next two years until the events actually transpired. Even then, the screen would continue on playing it for weeks afterwards. Each time it would be the same: spear, flames, flicker, white noise, repeat. Ol’ Wacky Wally Watson made a frustrated return to my tale as he banged on the side of the television in a vain attempt to change the course of history.

“Why won’t this fucking thing work properly?” he grumbled, the epitome of the short, grumpy, old man stereotype.

“Give it a rest!” Bobby Book called out from a bookshelf he was investigating on the only side of the room I haven’t accounted for. With a flick of his head, the scraggly pieces of ass-long hair that had fallen out from under his beanie and draped over the corner of his eyes, leaped over his shoulder. “I get it, it’s FUBAR. I can’t watch another second of Peter Gilmour either. Just try to drown it out.”

“Huh?” Wally asked, his eyebrows furrowed in the exact same manner that mine were. I understood exactly what Book was saying about Gilmour. In the years to come I would be surprised to find that the braindead simp was still around, but… before I finished my thought, Wally turned his attention to one of the disordered orderlies and unleashed a tirade upon the poor sod. “This is torture! You can’t do this to us! We have rights! You can’t just keep playing Centurion promos over and over! It’s making me want to fucking kill myself! Shouldn’t you be trying to stop that? Aren’t you supposed to be trying to save my life? What would Jesus do?”

Note to self: religious nutjobs have a very different understanding of what Jesus would do than us ‘regular’ folk do. The staff demonstrated this by tackling Wally to the ground, repeatedly punching him the kidney, and injecting him so full of Love that his dick learned who The Witness was. Or would be. Or both. Whatever, the time period of this story isn’t really important. Somehow though, the staff expected the Love to bring a splash of sanity to Wally’s bonkers world. What the fuck was he even talking about? Or Book for that matter. That’s not Centurion or Gilmour! It’s Charlie Nickles getting fucked up. Far more satisfying.

When I turned to him for an explanation, The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur just shrugged. Sometimes his stoicism seemed so impressive. At other times I felt like he was really missing out on a lot that life had to offer. He never got the Love that the rest of us did. Each and every morning he would just sit there, quietly playing cards with me. And in the evening, while I was receiving my treatment, I would catch him resting under a tree outside my therapy room. It made sense that he, of all of us, was given more outdoor privileges. He was our noble liege after all. But from my prescient vantage point – when electricity surged through my third nipple, circulated through my nervous system, and for just half a millisecond transformed me into a shoe-billed stork – it almost seemed like The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur wasn’t here to make himself better. Instead, it seemed like his life revolved entirely around… me.

Mimicking my better, I shrugged as well. The morning is not a good time for philosophicating about the motivations of mythological beasts. That’s a night-time job, best done by people who are working on behalf of the dark.

Wally’s kicking and screaming subsided as his body was overcome with Love and all the tranquillity that it brings. If the Salmon-Coloured Minotaur was at one end of the Love spectrum, Ol’ Wacky was at the other end. With the amount of injections that he was given, the doctors must have thought he needed a lot of cheering up! When his writhing stopped, our guardians dragged him by the feet out a pair of half-glass louvered doors and off to happiness. Book, and his brother Bobby Boot watched him as he departed. Boot gave a cutesy wave.

“You’ve got to hand it to short people sometimes…” Book mused as he reached for something on one of the upper shelves. He pulled out the deck of cards that he hid the day before. He never did trust those loonies who would have access to the room in the afternoon. “Because they often can’t reach it themselves.”

He grinned at his noticeably shorter brother – even more so than Wally – as he handed him the deck. Dad Joke complete. Boot narrowed his eyes and whacked Book on the hip with an open palm. Book chuckled while Boot just shook his head. He took the cards from his brother and walked over to my table. Book joined not long after and the Bobby Brothers, the Salmon-Coloured-Minotaur and I settled in for a game of Asshole. I was dealt a i[bad hand[/i], but no worry, I was very good at this game. I was always the asshole.

“AAAAAAAAARRRRGHHHHHHH!!!”

“What was that?” I asked aloud. The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur shrugged again. So did Bobby Boot. They were never very talkative.

“Sounds like Wally’s treatment’s going well,” Book replied, seemingly unfazed.

“AAAAAAAAARRRRGHHHHHHH!!!”

“Really?” I questioned. “That sounds like a treatment that’s working?”

Book joined the shrugging brigade. We played on, chit-chatting about things that aren’t worth recalling. The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur quickly won the first hand. I somehow managed to win the second, but from there it was all uphill. I lost everything.

“AAAAAAAAARRRRGHHHHHHH!!!”

“There it is again,” I commented, implying a lot more time had passed than one may realize if they were just to read a written transcript of my recollection. “If the treatment was going well, shouldn’t it have stopped by now?”

“Don’t overthink things,” Book reprimanded me.

“No,” I refused. “I don’t think I’m overthinking anything.”

I pushed my chair back, causing it screech across the floor. It wobbled, but The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur steadied it from falling. With a huff, he nodded me on my way. I weaved my way across the floor, dodging the stains for we knew not what they were. Reaching the doors that Wally had been dragged through, I steadied myself to dramatically bust through them and find the answer to Wally’s anguished cries.

BZZT.

I hit the floor.

One of the orderlies stood over me with a taser. He flashed it in my face for show and its blue light illuminated the enormous pores that surrounded his nostrils. A doctor rushed in beside him – the same one that dealt with Wally. I saw the hypodermic needle and the cloudy fluid inside it. I didn’t see the injection. But I felt it. Warmth overcame me, flushing out all of the nasties. And soon… I slept.

When I awoke, I was chained up to a gurney with a metal mask fastened over my mouth. A damp breeze puffed out of an aging air conditioning unit and tried to lap at my exposed torso. Eagerly, it tendered to my three exposed nipples. Wait… exposed?

“What’s… going… on?” Labouriously, I stammered. My eyes took in the surroundings: cold concrete dungeon walls striped with water marks; a flat stone ceiling; a cobweb that covered the solitary window separating my therapy from the manicured grounds around the hospital. Oh! Therapy! Wait… “What…” I murmured. “What did I do?” I couldn’t comprehend it. What had I done that deserved a treatment in the morning? No… not a treatment. There are no electrodes, and I still have my shoes.

A woman who in days of future past would become an Angel to me, with plump cheeks and shaped like a blueberry, closed the door behind her as she walked into the room.

“Who are you?” I asked, gaining some confidence in my voice.

“I’m your new Doctor,” she announced.

“What… what did I do wrong?” This would be a question that I would ask for years to come.

“There is new evidence on how to treat your… illness,” she told me, a grimaced grin upon her cavernous face. “As such, we have some new rules here.”

“I… I don’t understand.” I pled, not understanding these ‘rules’.

“People like you are unwell. For so long, establishments such as this have been content to merely house you. But housing…” she tutted, “…housing is not treatment. Housing is not making you better. The medication that the staff have been using – the Love, as you call it – it’s placated you. But it’s not helping you. Instead of curing you, this place has been enabling your madness.”

~~~

Aside…

“Some doctors have a bad habit of enabling madness, isn’t that right, Louis?”

~~~

“What are you going to do?” My eyes were wide with fear of the unknown.

“Fix you.”

She grabbed my wrist with the power of a man three times her size. She forced it to my side and secured it with steel and leather. I tried to struggle, to break my hand free, but the binds were too tight. She wheeled the gurney around, and before the window disappeared from my vision, I caught a last glimpse of The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur staring in at me, exhaling smoke.

Securing my other wrist, the Future Angel drew a blade. Under her breath, I heard her beginning to mutter.

“Snomed reiht fo elpoep yzarc dir ot dengised lleps a si siht.

Pu edam yletelpmoc s’ti.

Edoc siht kcarc uoy fi hctib elttil a er’ouy.

Temohpab ouy yllaicepse.”

With that, she drew lines in black ink down each of the fingers on my left hand until they connected on the top of each hand. From a work bench tucked in the corner of the room, she retrieved a bronze dagger emblazened with an upside-down pentagram on one side and a cross on the other. With it, she cut.

Each line spouted blood as the blade slid across it. I shut my eyes tight and did my best not to scream. I could hear The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur banging on the window. Desperately, I wanted him to smash through that fragile glass to come and rescue me, but even with all his supernatural might, he couldn’t get through. He couldn’t save me.

The blood soaked the thin foam mattress. Drip, drip, it went as it dribbled onto the floor.

My Angel ran her fingers across my bloodied hand. She sniffed it, and her eyes rolled back into her head. With an animalistic surge, she leaped on top of the gurney, and loosed the shackles on my left hand. She drew my hand to her face and lapped at the blood like a cat. She moaned in glee, and though I tried, I was too woozy to fight back.

With an oddly graceful dismount, she cackled to herself.

Then came the blowtorch.

A dark raven swept over my eyes, and I blacked out.

---

2B: In The Dark

Somewhere in my stupor, I thought I heard my Future Angel speaking to man with a course, nasally, British accent.

“How did it go?”

“As expected. He has no idea what’s going on.”

“It seemed… messy.”

“Are you having second thoughts?”

“Not at all. We had an agreement. Get me results, but you can do it your way. I don’t have to like the methods to be happy with the outcome.”

“I’m glad to hear you’re satisfied. He’s already losing grip.”

“How do you know that?”

“He keeps talking about some guy named Wally.”

“Who’s Wally?”

“Exactly.

“Hardly convincing.”

“How about a salmon-coloured minotaur? Plus, you remember the incident with the breakout?”

“That time he thought he broke out and went on to become a professional wrestler?”

“That’s the one. It started with this ‘Wally’ character too. And the minotaur.”

“Huh… well isn’t that rather peculiar? Good work, doctor. Get Gary in here to clean up the blood.”

“Yes sir.”

“And clean yourself up while you’re at it. You look disgusting.”

But surely I made all that up, right?

---

2C: In Utero

Now…

In a dark and dank room of a building that could be anywhere between Tombstone, Arizona and Venice, Italy, a scruffy nerf-herder searches for a piece of mind. Sitting on a damp, outdated, red carpet floor, he gently rocks back and forward, tapping his head on the wooden wall panel behind him. The carpet squelches under his larger movements.

He hums a gentle lullaby to himself, rocking to its melody. Opening his eyes, he stares awkwardly into the camera.

“So we’re doing blowtorches now, eh Baph’?” he hisses through gritted teeth. “Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of blowtorches. It just seems so… crass and uncultured. Not sure how handy it’d be in a first blood match, either. A first blistering pus match? Sure. But not so much first blood. It’s nice to know that this match wasn’t your request though. It’d have been a bit on the nose, to be honest.

In preparation for this, I’ve been doing a bit of research into the… ahem… human anatomy. Want to know the best way to make someone bleed?” he asks. “Sharp, pointy things!” His winced face shifts to excitement as he continues. “A knife? Good. Scissors? Good. A dagger? Great! A big ol’ battleaxe? That’s a big 10-4 from me! Hell, even a simple letter opener would do the trick! So what do you say, Baph’? Shall we bring the stabby and the cutty?

I mean, if you don’t want to, I understand. We can do this the hard way if you’d prefer.” Earnestly, he bats his eyes. “We could repeatedly punch each other in the same spot on our foreheads? Would you like that? Maybe hit each other with all the goodies at ringside? Go exploring under the ring for some new toys? The world is our oyster!”

He pauses, licking his lips in consternation.

“Our oyster,” he repeats, with added emphasis. “But why do I have a funny feeling that it’s not just you and I that are going to be involved here? After all, it wasn’t you who had the blowtorch in your hands, was it? It was little Ashley Quinn, high on the first piece of meaning that she’s found in the XWF. Congrats on motivating her there, by the way. And congrats on getting yet another dastardly little she-devil to join Team Left Hand. I mean, it’s not that evil blonde bitch, but congrats nonetheless.

Question though…” he holds his chin and taps his finger on his cheek, feigning that he’s thinking hard, “…why are they all… female? Like, I’m all on board for girl power and am more than happy to worship μια θεά rather than a God, but… it’s kinda creepy, bud. And not in the way that I think you’re going for.

So here’s where I’m at with this whole thing,” he muses, “I am absolutely certain that your harem is going to get involved. I could try to ask you to keep them out of it, but we both know that I won’t believe your answer. Mind games, amiright? So the question isn’t whether they’ll get involved, it’s whether or not there are enough of them to do the job?

Let’s do a little thought exercise to test the boundaries of all this.” He leans forward, shuffling closer to the camera. Squelch goes the carpet. “Pick one of your groupies. Any one of them. Maybe Ash herself. Now ask yourself if you think that they’re enough to take me. Now, let’s add another. Doesn’t matter who, but let’s just choose the wolf girl. Do you think you’ve got enough yet? I don’t. Let’s sprinkle the cherry on top and add the other one. Do you still think you’ve got enough?”

His eyes narrow.

“I.

Don’t.

Bring all three of them at the same time. It won’t be enough.”

He sternly stares through the lens.

“So really, you can bring the whole gang, but after I swat the flies away, we’re still just down to you and me.” He shrugs. “So… are you enough to take me? Not in a fight, but in terms of your order, your purpose. Are you enough to take me in? To, what was it, force me into submission? Make me your Polly? Because your Powerpuff Girls Dark sure as shit aren’t.

Baph’, buddy… I know that this isn’t about winning a stupid match to you. It’s not to me either. You mock me as if I don’t know who I am. As if I don’t know that I’m incomplete.” He chuckles. “I know it, shithead. This ain’t a mask. But you’ve gotten confused again. Just because I know it, it doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. I know I’m a different breed, sure, but I don’t need lithium for that, I need answers! I don’t care about marking my territory, and if you hadn’t noticed… I’m not lounging about here. I’m not staying away. I’m right here… doing this.”


“That’s my right hand, by the way” he teases. “You still ain’t getting the left.

You act as if this is the first time that I’ve been Approaching the Unknown. But it’s not. I live here, Closer to the Moon. And I’m quite happy being ‘disaligned with my energies’ thank you very much. I may Kick-Ass, but I’m no Kingsman. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know that I’m not exactly the ‘hero’ type. Hell, I’d struggle to even be classified as a Robin Hood-type. But you can gimme that Green Lantern ring because I will resist until the end. My will won’t waver. You will not have me. I will not join your little Secret Serivce; your Golden Circle. I won’t be a part of your Imitation Game – programmed to be pale caricature of my true self. A parrot for the Left Hand – that’s what you called it, isn’t it? Well not me. And you can’t stop me resisting. There are no magic words for that, not abra kadabra nor Shazam! ; there is no mystical ceremony nor sacrifice. I will resist. Until I’m nothing but Stardust. But Before I Go to Sleep for good, there will be Blood.

Yours.”

He glances down, lost in his own world for a moment. As his eyes flit back to the camera, the blue of his irises lightening in the darkness.

“You can have the others, Baph’. You can have Jenny, Tommy, Chris, and the rest. Take ‘em all.

You won’t Rape Me.”

---

2D: Hands of Time

Next…?

“Obligatory ‘fuck Thaddeus Duke’ comment.’