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hymns-from-the-city-of-monarchs · 2 years ago

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The Ballad of Rex, parts 4 and 56. Rex Gets his Book and Rex Gets his Gun.

CW: Drug use

This is the story of the one Westerner who entertained me: Rex. You see, I despise most boring folk. They’re too self-important and dull-witted for their own good. In Unicornland’s West, this is especially true. The treasure-entitled morons of the world are mass imported by the canny to meet their death in one of the armpit cities of the Skeroshte Sea. Rex grew up in Razortown, the perennial worst pirate slum of them all. He was a rat through and through. But His wit towered over pirate and pirate-swindler alike. Best of all, he used that wit to perform the Lord’s work: dismantling the Realms of Fortune one Moron at a time. That’s the wonder of Rex; he was a wonderfully self aware buccaneer.

In the interest of letting his actions speak for themselves, here is a couplet of stories from Rex’s life. I think they complement eachother expertly:

Part 4: Rex gets a comic in his hometown

In a hovel of burst-apart mortar, Rex the ratfolk sobbed gently. So inured was Rex to the violence of Razortown that a gunshot erupting from a drunken disagreement 5 meters away didn’t bother him. Rex had graduated to viewing gunfire as a good distraction rather than a threat. A rat wasn’t worth wasting pistol shot on in razortown, he discovered.

Suddenly Rex noticed a middle aged Orc in scuffed leather leering over him. She had the same disgusted glare that every sober person in Razortown shared. “Where’s mom?” she barked at Rex.

Rex cringed back, like he’d just eaten a mouthful of lemon juice, and made a noise like he might burst into tears. In response, the broad shouldered woman crouched slowly to Rex’s eye level. Then she slapped his chemical singed cheek, where his fur was bare. “Where’s mom?” she repeated.

“Not here,” squealed Rex with anger.

The Orcish woman hummed gutturally, knowingly. “You’re not crying ‘cause you miss her?”

“She sucks.”

“Then why the waterworks?”

Rex clammed up again, beady eyes darting.

"Give me your pack", she commanded. Rex, feeling cornered, complied. She rifled through thick books about dinosaurs and chemistry and came across a tiny beaker with a cloudy residue over it… she smelled it with concern. “How many years old are you?” she asked, noticing a little bag filled with fine aluminum shrapnel made from cans.

“Three.”

“Mmm… Us orcs and you ratfolk grow up faster than humans but, er… three is too young for any age to be cooking speed.”

Rex pouted.

“You got any money, kid?”

“...no,” stammered Rex,, “I wouldn’t have given the bag if…” his voice trailed lacrimosely.

The orc nodded. “You got mugged?”

“...what’s mugged?” asked Rex with teary, childlike ignorance.

The orc wiped her face and sighed deeply. “Did the people that gave you money for your drugs steal the money-”

And Rex was an instant, wailing mess.

And by the time Rex finished crying, he was in a dim room at an inn. The window pointed out towards the waters of the strait of Benecca. The orc was in a miraculously pristine wicker chair, and Rex pieced together that he’d been escorted to this stranger’s living space.

“Did you mug me?” asked Rex with innocence, eyes still heavy from tears.

“No. We’re gonna spend a little time together. What do you like to do when you’re alone?”

Rex sniffled, “I like reading.”

“Wanna, uh… read me one of your books?” asked the Orc with as much maternity as she could muster.

Rex nodded.

The orc rifled around in the sack the Rat carried, “Which book do you want, kid?”

“The dinosaur one.”

“You wanna read, er… Encyclopedier of Sauropod-”

“Yeah, that one.” Upon the book’s receipt, Rex immediately went to the little earmarked page titled “Tyrannosaurus Rex” and read the article verbatim. He was belting off words like “physiology” and “pneumatized” to the orc with complete confidence. She nodded along, not following nearly as well as the precocious Rat.

“T. Rexes are cool and all,” she remarked, “but uh…give it back, wouldya?”

Rex sheepishly forfeited the text. Biting her lip in focus after consulting the table of contents, the orc finally nodded. “Yeah. These guys are my favorite.” She pointed to a page titled “anklyosaurus.”

“Anky…” mumbled Rex, “I’ve never seen one of those.”

“I have,” hummed the orc, “They’re big and they have these beaks and these big tails that’ll clobber you if you see the whites of their eyes. I killed one with a bunch of buddies of mine. The thing just charged us, it was real aggressive for being an herbivore; mating season I guess.”

Rex nodded, following along. “Yeah, it says here they had teeth beneath their premaxilliary beak as well for eating-”

“Hey,” chirped the orc, “You know, kids your age really shouldn’t be reading books like this.”

Rex’s brow furrowed. “I like reading though. I like the book on chemistry and that one on alchemy.”

The orc’s brow fluttered in disbelief. “Not saying uh,” she let out a surprised chuckle, “you can’t read books like these, just if you’re gonna bother with books, they oughta have pictures-...,” her eyes grew distant and starry eyed, “...in ‘em.”

Rex picked up on the sudden stillness of the Orc’s manner. “What’s wrong? Are you gonna mug me now?”

The orc raised a finger and began walking to a drawer. “One of my buddies in the group I killed that dinosaur with,” she began with a sudden, quiet earnesty, “Was named Russell. And in that whole group, it was down to just us two in the Lazarette of some Tsakan pirates’ vessel. They didn’t feed us anything down there, and it was pretty clear that Russell would starve before me on account of bein’ smaller and thinner than me. So he told me this: ‘Kam, I got a child in Quinnston that I promised to buy a comic for, I need you to get Desperado issue 56 for Arnold Perth at 521 Grenoble Street.’ And so that’s the first thing I bought when the OPR coast guards got me out of that dungeon.” The Orc, or Kam, rather, held a delicate pamphlet to Rex. On the faded front, there laid a Vaquero firing off a pistol into the face of a dire coyote in a dramatic, orange-painted arroyo. “Now, by the time I found little Arnold Perth, he was up to issue 65 of Desperado. He had already read issue 56. So I never really got to fulfill my promise to his dad. Until, uh…look. Kid. Most adults die within a day of living in Razortown and you’ve been here, what, how long?”

“A week.”

“Aich, yeah,” wheezed Kam in flabbergast, “You’re getting this. You’re gonna read this whenever you feel like you’ve lost everything and need a reminder that you’re gonna come back to whatever it was that you were doing. Cause you will. You’re way too smart for your own good not to.”

Rex blinked with big, wide eyes, still clearly oblivious.

“So, for you, that means you’re gonna read this now, and the moment you finish it,” Kam proceded with a particular curmudgeonliness, “I’m kicking you out of here. I’m a charity this once.”

“Got it,” chirped Rex, suddenly recognizing an abject cruelty he’d grown accustomed to in Razortown. He began to open the first page and remarked: “Ah! There are pictures!”

Part 56: Rex gets a comic in my hometown

“Of course there are pictures,” remarked the Gnomish clerk at the counter of the Cygnus Purple printstore, “Once upon a time, every book in existence was illustrated like these comic books.”

Rex nodded, fingering through the copy of Desperado 56 with all of the cowboy illustrations crisper than he had ever seen them. “What about folks on the material plane in the Bucolic era? I’ve been to museums where they have examples of writing from around 1000 B.E.”

“Ah, but those are pieces of bark or knucklebones. Not books.”

Rex pursed his lips. “I think it was a scroll I saw, but sure. Anyhow, I’m surprised you guys carry comics about us uh,” Rex chuckled, “boring folk down here.”

“That’s ‘cause we published it. The author lives 3 blocks from here!”

Rex’s eyes lit up in surprise. He scrutinized the cover: “Well, I didn’t think you fairies were named things like ‘Adam Pierce’. Send him thanks, anyhow. I really like this comic,” Rex forked over a silver shilling.

The gnome nodded with keen interest, “Adam Pierce is just a pen name. We have the entire 112 issue Run of Desperado in stock, if you’d be interested in supporting the author’s work.”

“No thanks, truthfully I’m just buying a replacement,” said Rex, discretely sipping from a liquor flask and then breathing deeply. “Eh, actually, I have an errand I want to run, and once that’s over with I’ll be right back to buy the set.”

Perplexed by the ratfolk’s strange choice, the gnome nodded. “Very well, I hope that-” Rex the rat in rags and a poncho darted off briskly from the gnome before they could finish their sentence, Desperado 56 open in one hand, the handle of an umbrella tucked underarm in another.

Rex’s attention was perfectly divided between reading and drinking up little snuffbox sized capsules on his person. He was small and discrete enough that even as he breached the beginning of Pentacles territory, the street guards made no fuss about him. Though, the closer he got to the center of Pentacles territory, the more he took to alleys and the parts of buildings shyer to the sun.

Rex walked quickly. More and more quickly. By the time the Cancer Black building was in view he was striding with incredible ire and a plain derangement that was visible to anybody who could see his face swaddled in rags.

Rex scurried into the lobby of the Cancer Black lounge and planted himself at the front of a queue of nobles looking to make audience with the House’s consultants. The male secretary immediately sighed, making out a clearly high…rat monster, probably a junkie from the Wands quarter. He impatiently reached for an axe beneath his desk. “I’m going to make you leave, punk,” he seethed. He caught glimpse of sharply dressed backup. The thaumreaders at the front were blaring, this creature had hostile magic on it, apparently.

Rex, eyeballs about to burst from stress, roared: “I’M GONNA MAKE YOUR BOSS GIVE ME MY GUN BACK, JACKASS!!”

The clerk was confused “What are you on abou-“

BLAM.

Faster than the bullet came out of his hand cannon, Rex whipped it out directly in front of the guards face

THOONKTHOONKTHOONK

And Rex swiveled, freeing a jury-rigged grenade launcher from the innards of his umbrella faster than three grenades landed perfectly in the mugs of the remaining Cancer Black security. They went off in perfect harmony:

BWISHEEEEEEEEW

The antechamber was neutralized and, needless to say, Rex’s specialty combat drug cocktail was working.

Rex instantly singled out among a crowd of waifish, screaming Pentacle dignitaries the door that would take him to the boss. It mattered not that it had been slammed shut by some autonomous magic, Rex merely cast an adhesive parcel of philosopher’s thermite that he made from toy magnets and fried the steel door into a goopy, scalding mess. For good measure he fired a few grenades in the breach. Thus, there were corpses rather than bodyguards on the other side by the time he got there. He took this time to reload his launcher with his dexterous tail.

Infiltrating the remainder of the Cancer Black estate was trivial, save for the ten foot armored hulk which wielded a serrated halberd of profound magic. To kill that one, Rex had to snap it’s neck. And he didn’t get to snapping its neck without firing a shrapnel grenade at the side of its helmet first… or losing two of his fingers at the razor edge of the halberd’s magic serration. Rex was impervious besides; that’s what a flask of ironskin, omniboost, and limbic mutagen does to you.

Finally, Rex burst open the lock of a door labeled “Pawn,” and breached, scanning the room with his pistol for the son of a bitch who stole his gun. He managed to find the firearm: a semiautomatic, belt fed thing with the engraving “Desperado”. It was mounted on a little stand; whoever set it up here was using it as an office ornament.

Rex scrambled to the corner of the room where it was situated, procured it, and immediately caught wind of a woman in a tricorne cowering behind her desk, the symbol of a black crustacean on her folded tabard.

Rex briefly thought about saying something smart to her about how she was a moron for buying a gun as an ornament and then blasting her to high heaven. Then he realized his time was too precious. He felt like buying the entirety of the Desperado series. Besides, one person was really responsible for getting his signature firearm sold on the black market.

“You’re days are numbered, Marky…” he muttered. And Rex the undying, Rex the lucky, Captain Comeback, made his escape from the manor of Cancer Black with two Desperado’s.

#ratfolk #cowboy

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hymns-from-the-city-of-monarchs · 2 years ago

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KNIGHT OF PENTACLES

CONTENT WARNING: GORE

13 glasses of wine now. This was the 13th glass of wine, in, what, 15 minutes? It didn’t matter how deliberately or with what sophistication Pasquale of Aries White approached his wine-drinking, and indeed Ada Longshanks of Capricorn Blue had never met a soul so curiously devoted to the art of drinking: One glass, one swig. Then a little porter sprite would decant another glassful while Pasquale attended to his reading.

And the Lord’s edge was preserved, moreover. There was this casual incision with which he was reading her report. Pasquale was seemingly unaffected by his liquor. Seemingly. Internally Ada sensed a shadowy purpose to his alcoholic tendencies. Booze, after all, was the oil that greased the City of Monarchs. Every suit agreed that their members ought to stay permanently drunk (on what, exactly, they disagreed), permanently uninhibited. Yet Ada had never met a sit-down-and-read-policy-reports drunk before. The Pentacles were a strange bunch indeed.

Finally, Pasquale set the papers down. He sighed and clasped his hands theatrically. Then he began to let his thoughts trickle out like little, wine glazed lottery balls.

“I think,” Pasquale raised his eyebrow, “there are arguments for merely placing a Tariff on goods produced by the serfs the swords are impressing, especially since they’re too transparent and rule abiding for their own good. The money’s also exceptionally tempting.” Pasquale drummed his fingers next to a stack of antique coins, “But a complete outlaw on the Sword’s thrall import to the city has historical precedent… is within the bandwidth of our alliance’s enforcement capability, and ehh,” Pasquale casually cleansed his palette by guzzling an entire glass of Super Tuscan. 14 glasses now. “By constraining the supply of labor in the City of Monarchs, we would be providing the correct short term benefits and long term incentives for proper municipal macroeconomic growth.”

Pasquale bid the porter sprite to hand him a wax stamp. He then pressed it with a signet of a ram onto a page on the back of Ada’s form. This form was all very full of similar seals; it was also very empty of the signets, but Pasquale’s approval on this was important. Then the patriarch’s manner warmed: “Not only do I commend your motion to outlaw the Sword serfs, I must also commend your thoroughness as a stateswoman, Ada. This is all impeccably argued. Do you have any questions for me?”

And just as Ada relaxed, with congenial little questions about Pasquale’s personal life beginning to flow, there was an artificial jingle from beneath his desk. It apparently had a built in orb setup; how convenient.

“Oh, one moment. This is important,” remarked Pasquale, making an activation gesture as discrete wisps of mana were projected from a little desk panel into his ears. “Uh-huh. Yes, you have him standing by? All of the support I’ve asked for is with him-…yes, yes wonderful, send me the feed. Ciao.”

Then Pasquale swiveled to a sudden, projected illusion on the left flank of his offices’ wall. It was a scene of the Stave’s quarter. Everything seemed business as usual: decaying, sandstone edifices that merely existed without much question as to who built them or where they would go, and vagrant people furtively inching about them like forest floor insects.

Except there were Pentacles soldiers handling heavy weaponry on the margins of the illusion. And the projection placed three red rectangles on three little vagabonds, traveling in a pack. It then projected profiles next to them that suggested they were covert Staves operatives.

And the whole thing was shot from an angle that implied this footage was coming from a combat dirigible.

“Drop the cloudkill,” purred Pasquale, “And the Jackalope.”

And from the illusion’s blind spot, a small, green bead was shot right in the direction of the highlighted vagrants. There was a dweomer that homed in to intercept the bead, a likely counterspell from some on-call staves mage, but that was unceremoniously countered by a different dweomer. Aries White was almost always prepared for anything by virtue of sparing no expense.

And then that little green bead bloomed into an ominous, jaundiced fog that completely obscured the three redboxed Staves. The squatters fled and began to shriek, recognizing the dirigible as more than a mere combat drill. There was the cloudkill.

And from the dirigible, a meaty mass of beast garnished in metal and cloth catapulted himself with an abominable shriek and landed with a tumultuous, masonry shattering dropkick directly into the foggy fray. There was the Jackalope.

“Could you turn on Sir Arma’s feed?” asked Pasquale, getting to drinking another glass of wine in one, slow swig. “I can’t really see in there.”

There was a first person view of a horrified woman reaching for her warhammer just too late, and having the entirety of her shoulder pulverized into mincemeat by an blade covered gauntlet.

Ada finally understood that this is what Pasquale was like disinhibited. She saw that when he wasn’t looking smugly at his abomination’s killing spree, he was looking at her impishly.

“You’re sick,” she muttered.

“Well I could call you lily-livered and impotent,” cooed Pasquale, “But I don’t see how insults are really called for here. I figured that since you shared the Cups’ efforts to undercut the Black alliance today, that I’d share some of the Pentacles’. It’s uncanny. There’s this wonderful symmetry to what we’re doing here I’d like to appreciate. What with your trying to prevent the Swords from smuggling mutts and lowbloods into our city and me, my trying to prevent the Staves from smuggling in their illicit wares. These people think they can just dodge the Aries White customs without us noticing. How sloppy.”

“Turn it off,” demanded Ada with growing anger.

“Mmmmno,” said Pasquale, ”I have a responsibility to make sure that my investments retain their value, and in this case that Sir Arma has retained every bit of vigor and competency that I had when I…” Pasquale’s voice trailed off in anticipation as he watched the feed, and his warrior grab onto the body of a helpless and disarmed Staff smuggler…

…And simply rip his thorax in half over a chorus of crunching and screaming. Pasquale laughed in satisfaction. “Atta boy! he’s still every bit as good as when I debuted him in the Mortisbowl, capital!”

In the office, a vicious silence hung in the air, with a horrific cacophony from a distant massacre mumbling beneath it. There were bones crunching and lungs frying all around what was supposed to be a pleasant policy meeting.

“Oh, is this upsetting to you, Ada?” Asked Pasquale tauntingly, “Would you rather I have him attend little dainty sandwich socials and make nice with the black suit and talk about it really hurts his Papa’s feelings that they’re doing battle with us? You want me to use my war machine to sit in big ceremonial therapy circles where we lie to everybody that this can all be resolved peacefully?”

“He’s not a war machine. He’s a knight of the City of Monarchs. His lot is fighting other knights.”

“Oh, I don’t disagree. Yet if your Lady Honnigjonfru can be a philanthropist or whatever on the side, my boy can attend to his own hobbies. Believe me, I asked him if he wanted to do this.”

Now the final smuggler was visible outside of the fog, clearly aged several decades by their brief exposure to the lethal fumes of the cloudkill and using every bit of focus to escape. A smattering of Staff-wielding yeomen Calvary approached them as the smuggler stumbled to be rescued, salvation imminent…

“It was an instant yes from him, Ada!” roared Pasquale triumphantly.

And from the fog an enormous, chain bound chandelier fired out like a harpoon, making a grievous jangling of heavy metal, and impaling the smuggler in a million, gory spots. They were drawn back into the cloud and ravaged. Ada remembered at this point that the soldiers had been providing supporting fire from the dirigible. They had all the latest in thaumaturgically enhanced weaponry (Again, Aries white spared no expense in their tax collecting duties). Yet Ada realized that the soldiers were practically a formality. Their weapons’ damage was nigh unnoticeable in comparison to that which was dealt by Sir Arma.

Pasquale addressed Ada’s genuine disgust with genuine derision: “You’re a sore winner, Pawn Longhsanks. I put my seal on your motion to impact Red alliance policy. I think your propositions are genuinely prudent. I think it’s a great idea to be laissez-faire about the old terms of engagement, to break the rules of war against the black suit. The least you could do is accept my war crimes.”

“You’re evil,” Growled Ada.

“And the whole of the cups are good. But somehow, every other pentacle and I have gotten over the fact that we’re obligated to work with you in the Red alliance. This is the city of contradictions. Get over it.”

There was a mass of dead cavalry on the screen and, finally, an idle Jackalope, who was busy working some wrist-bound telecommunications after having counted a haul:

“It’s over. There’s 20 thousand Gil of merchandise I’ve collected off of them.”

“Well done, Bambino,” regaled Pasquale, “Return to the complex post-haste. Papa’s very proud of you.”

And as the dirigible’s perspective descended, likely to pick up Sir Arma, the feed was cut.

“I want to speak with him,” said Ada, following a melancholy silence.

“Sir Arma? Why?”

“He needs to see that this isn’t the answer.”

Pasquale smirked and let a coy silence linger.

“You’re cute. Be me guest. He’ll be over soon enough.”

Sir Arma, in a tangle of weapons, arms and thaumaturgical devices that both kept him alive and made him the most peerless knight of the city of monarchs in pure combat, appeared in a flourish of blue wisps in a warp room. He stood in the wine cellar of Aries White, a dank and industrious place that was replete with chairs where the masters would lounge with wine while the laborers toiled. The moment that most knights could be securely warped away to safety, they were, but the day where this could be done from anywhere in the City of Monarchs (a day feared by many, for it meant that the knights would be able to warp upon the breach from anywhere as well) was still far away.

Arma was immediately attended to by porters that removed his armor, his chandelier-of-war, any accoutrements of battle that were necessary for his recent raid against the Staves, and leaving only the magical cybernetics that were necessary for keeping him alive: his arm, his leg, his artificial cardiovascular system. When Sir Arma was relatively nude, it was very clear that he was a mutant. He had definitely grown up into the monster he was from a quiet, impish little horned rabbit, and he had ruined his body to get to where he was today.

And then he caught glimpse of an unfamiliar Cup in the midst of his attendants, looking at him with derision.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” said the cup with optimism. Eugh.

“But it is better this way,” Arma replied, disrobed and attended to by magical healers. The idea of reading some quarterly reports from some City of Brass state companies came to mind.

“What you are doing is carnage and destruction,” She replied, barely standing up to the bottom of Arma’s pectorals at her full height.

“It is cauterization,” Arma replied decisively, eventually landing his rear end, which was disproportionately small in comparison to his upper body, in a little reclining chair where he was given some papers to glaze over. His favorite wineskein, made from the horned head of a Mountain Goat he had personally slain, was already present. “I have commandeered money and goods bound for the miscreants. Those magical items laid in unjust and irresponsible hands. Chaos has been quelled by evil. Today, I have excised the tumor of robbery from our city.”

Arma could hear the cup proffer him while he looked at the yields on his reports, even after he had made his resolutions clear. “You have been shown violence in your upbringing as the only option. Your father abides by peace, too, you know. I am peaceful and he helped me. Peace can be an option. Those people you killed could have been Allies: new converts to the Red Alliance.”

Arma looked with squinted eyes at the cup. “No, yes, I assume so, yes, and yes. I am not blind. I am not like Siddhartha, made ignorant by my forebears of different ways of living or doing. I go out into the world every day. I encounter different people every day. There is much to be said about the power of good. I welcome comradeship from people like you, people that are inclined to use their hearts when solving problems instead of their… mhrm, brains. It’s true those people could have been made Allies. But I was built for war, not love.”

Arma sighed, placing his attention on the Cup representative in lieu of the dividend reports in his hand. “I am the Knight of Pentacles. I suggest constance and diligence. I suggest a pursuit of wealth. I am antithetical to those that would take before making, like those thieves. My commitment is fiery. I consume and burn my material goods and those that would threaten it with divine mandate. Strength and Wealth are my form. They are my function. That is the way I see things. You will not find change in the Pentacles. You will find Evil. The suits are absolute.” Arma placed a meaty mitt to his chin and looked up quizzically, “And yet, there is absolute change in chaos, no? If you crave change, seek the chaotic. Seek the staves. Make of that what you will, my cup.”

And the cup left in frustration… but before leave she seethed:

“And yet you were mutated into something evil.”

…

And that sentiment flew past Arma! In his experience, most cups just wanted a moralistic, cutting last word and the feeling that their virtues or whatever reigned supreme in the make-believe they existed so solemnly in. So he missed the cup’s point. And troubled himself not with the crucial question of whether he should have.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Credit to @Goatuna on Twitter for the art!

#gore #knight of pentacles #tarot #war crimes #fantasy #short fiction

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hymns-from-the-city-of-monarchs · 2 years ago

Text

STAR XVII

From the firmament, STAR XVI Seireios twinkled constantly. It was twin to SUN XIX and MOON XVIII alike. At day, it was the only star visible to the naked eye. Its permanent luster bid Dreamland vision in the predatory darkness of night. One would do right to appreciate the STAR in its evening splendor…

And on this night, if one got close to Seireios, they would begin to see its cloudy, gaseous silhouette…

The heavy billows of Hydrogen, Helium, Neon and Xenon spilled from Seireios, tumbling across the cosmos…

Ephemeral crackles of multicolored electricity cast across the overflowing clouds…the STAR’s great fog was deadly. Seireios decanted its miasma of starstuff infinitely and with fury.

And at the eye of its storm, at the nucleus of its legendary tesla field…

A Jack waded heel deep in the condensate of the fountain of youth. Above them the many, lesser siblings of Seireios glistened. Below them, their sandled feet were made good as new by the gentle roiling. Jack Moriogoch stood in the middle of it all with the anxiety of a nervous rabbit. The spirit of Law that hung about the place made them want to vomit. Nevertheless, Moriogoch was to insure that Dreamland was protected from its own MAJOR ARCANA. They were Jack of Wands, after all. They held two stopwatches, one clockwork, and one astrological, in anticipation of the arrival of the LOVERS VI.

The clockwork watch chimed. The astral convergence would happen in 30 seconds. The analogue clock was needed no more, so with a flick of the wrist, Jack Moriogoch replaced it with their ritual warhammer, Seth, and focused on the astrological clock.

The planet hand ticked towards 🜨 and laid upon it…

The sign hand converged onto ♋️, Moriogoch clutched this watch with white knuckles now…

A million other auxiliary hands raveled and spun, and Moriogoch devoted all of their attention to parsing them for the exact moment-

BOMB!!!!!

They somersaulted perilously and involuntarily over the gaseous meniscus of the STAR from the shockwave from LOVERS VI arrival…They grasped a lucky rock lodged in the STAR to hold onto its surface and kipped to their feet. Soon after they drew Seth at it’s TOWER-blessed hilt.

The source of the titanic splash stood blasély in the gas of the fountain: a 3 foot possum in clown makeup, wielding a big hammer, bearing an inconvenienced look. The LOVERS, or rather, the most important one, had arrived.

"🤡 >:/ 🤡" said Posso. They were quite inarticulate, but this was expected; The LOVERS were still very young in the grand scheme of things.

"LOVER of Chaos," cried Moriogoch. "Take one step further, and I will strike. The spigot of the fountain is not yours to tamper with!”

Posso looked around in dimwitted confusion. "🤡 <:c 🤡" they said.

Moriogoch sighed: Puppy eyes, how pathetic. "No,” they replied firmly, “It's not happening. Go home. It’s your bedtime isn’t it?"

"🤡 >>>>>>:0 🤡" roared Posso, erupting into an unfathomable cyclone of tantrums. Fearing the possibility of being sucked in at close range, Moriogoch deftly flung several illusory copies of Seth at the twister. These copies could usually kill in one hit, yet the tornado was entirely unapprehended.

Then an object extruded in a rapid blur from the twister: Posso’s hammer. Moriogoch had a horrifying realization: “Holy shit, it’s aiming for the spigot, it’s going to toss its damned hammer at mach unbelievable, and then the spigot’s going to be pulverized like a macintosh apple!”

With a jolt of pride and desperation, Moriogoch flew between Posso and the Spigot, and began conjuring as many illusory barriers as their soul would allow for stopping power. “Don’t do it, Posso!” They cried, “If the youth from the fountain has nowhere to flow, then the whole of Dreamland will st-ŒEAUCHKKK!!!”

Not only was Moriogoch nailed with a direct hit from Posso’s hammer, they were knocked straight into the spigot. To make things worse, the spigot was a mass of blades, and the gas it issued from its many orifices began as solid, razor tesseracts. Moriogoch’s body technically destroyed the spigot instead of the hammer. They were instantly flayed. They landed in a pulverized heap on a little island of earth on STAR XVII.

Posso raved in tornado mode for three solid seconds more before looking at their neutralized bedtime enforcement.

"🤡 :DDDD 🤡" they cheered, delighting in the sudden absence of lectures. The flow of gas from the fountain had halted. Epic.

Suddenly, a conflux of spectral black ooze encroached upon the fountain's star, whistling past a confused Posso. It congealed into an apocalyptic robed form. A corpse piloted these gossamer rags, one with a fearsome crown adorning squinting, hungry grey eyes…

"You stupid, pathetic thing!!!" Roared HANGED MAN XII, "You little twat! You really were the easiest to convince! Thanks to you, the whole universe will die in five minutes. That includes you and your stupid, squishy, idiot marsupial polycule!!! And you're all alone, too!! You even mauled your own ally! Moriogoch is dead!" The HANGED MAN's lifeless claws flared with magic, he hurled every manner of vile hex at Posso as the metaphysical space around STAR XVII began to flake away:

There were 144 vile, mistral scythes shot at HANGED MAN XII’s adversary, a plaintive spell. He created a tear in Posso's heart, subsuming space within and without the creature. He turned the constellations into a putrefied rose garden and issued forth thorns from it at the little Posso. A barrage of countless arrows blotted out the night in splendor and assailed LOVERS VI. It was magnificent.

Finally, for good measure, HANGED MAN cast Finger of Death 144 times into the small cloud of debris he created from his arcane nightmare of missiles.

Thus a half minute of hatred fueled spell spamming had been completed. The HANGED MAN peered from beyond the settling dweomer, and found, completely unscathed, Posso.

"🤡 :|🤡" they said.

Posso then hurled 1296 spectral hammers at the HANGED MAN in a 6 second timespan with the fury of an earthquake, clobbering the HANGED MAN's vacuous aorta 36 times more than necessary to kill him instantly.

The HANGED MAN, and his many backup cortices which he was hoping to use in subsequent phases of battle, were rent from reality by this. “AAAAAAAEĖAAAAOUUUUUUUUUGHHHHGHHGHHFKKOG121212121212121212121212—————-“, he remarked, issuing a primal, space shattering howl as he was slurped up into the fabric of Dreamworld with a spectral whisper. All gone.

"🤡 c: 🤡" said Posso, so delighted in their own triumph that they neglected the incredible vanishing in their periphery. They nearly tripped and tumbled through the dematerializing surface of the STAR. Moriogoch wheezed in a corner, convulsing from things like their gallbladder, testicles, and left lung phasing out of reality before reintegrating moments later. Moriogoch salvaged their diplomatic voice despite their unfathomable trauma:

"Posso...would you pretty please,” Moriogoch coughed up vile humors and something that looked a little too close to a disintegrating tonsil, “...repair the spigot?"

There was a horrific, ambiguous silence for about 15 seconds…

"🤡 :> 🤡" said Posso, scuttling up to the fountain and banging the tatters of the fractured spigot like an in-need-of-repair jukebox. Now it was even more defiled, yet the delicious fluids of eternal youth flowed once again.

Moriogoch sighed in relief and whined as their internal organs stabilized. They were still too discombobulated to recognize the significance of what had just happened. For now, Moriogoch had simply abided in their head by the time-honored Wands tradition of solving any problem of consequence within an inch of their life. The job was done. Moriogoch could slip away from what was, at this point, the most lethal force of nature in reality, and risk no longer being in the crossfire of their attention-

Wait, how did Posso pick up Seth? They were playing with it now like a toy mallet, banging their own head with the thing. That was a gift! Moriogoch needed it.

Moriogoch fished around in their pockets for suitable barter and found just the thing: an intact, chilly mint chip ice cream cone from 3 days ago. They stood up and staggered before Posso, who was busy gnawing their own tail. "Celebrate?" asked Moriogoch in very simple Old Egyptian.

Posso crossed their arms and flailed around rebelliously in the fumes of the star. "🤡 >n< 🤡" they said. Moriogoch wasn’t even sure what begged the hissy-fit, Posso was about to get a damned ice cream, they hadn’t even offered the damned cone to trade yet and-

A silhouette of a spade could be seen in the distance converging on STAR XVI. Off of it dismounted a little wallaby with a blank drama mask and a distant stoicism. It was Ruru, LOVER of law. They ambled and sat Posso up properly "🎭 👏 🎭". They said warmly, prompting Posso to agree: “🤡👏🤡”

Soon enough, the three were quietly sharing a picnic at the base of a date palm on the STAR. Ruru had brought delicious food with healing properties made especially for Posso, so of course Posso was busy licking their mint chip ice cream cone instead. More for Moriogoch, whose injuries were recovering to a point of restored lucidity. It finally occurred to them to ask:

“…Why were you interested in breaking the Spigot to begin with, Posso?”

“🤡<:o🤡”, they chirped, and produced from an errant hammerspace a crude note with the following:

"Posso,

I dare you to break the spigot of the fountain of youth do it or you suck lmao.

-Hugh Jass."

"Oh,” tutted Moriogoch, “Posso, it was the HANGED MAN who wrote this note; you were lied to. Abrogating the fountain of youth’s flow leads to a chain reaction in which the metaphysical label of life is erased from its load bearing position in the fabric of reality. That won’t do. He was lying to you, that HANGED MAN. Don't do that."

Posso blinked in surprise "🤡 :,,c 🤡" said Posso.

“Oh, cut it with the tears, it was an honest mistake you have nothing to-,” and Moriogoch was too late, Posso now wailed implacably. At least they had dropped Seth at this point, but Moriogoch felt too confused and guilty to retrieve it. They swiveled towards Ruru with a desperate look, craving advice. “🎭¯\_(ツ)_/¯🎭”, Ruru replied.

Moriogoch’s career of placating more reasonable archfey and managing the welfare of tens of thousands of Wands had met its match. They grumbled. Entirely at their wits end, they picked up Posso’s writhing body and swayed them gently in the delicate mists of the Fountain of Youth…

They bid Posso an ancient charm which was sung to them during their childhood in an orphanage incessantly. By about the 15th repeat, they noticed that their head had cleared. Then they noticed that Posso was fast asleep. Balancing Posso in one hand, they picked up and stowed away the hammer Seth somewhere safe and let out a deep sigh.

Moriogoch immediately knew the sensible thing to do, but in a final surge of frustration, they cried out to Ruru:

“Bah, it’s so stupid! This thing could snap reality in twain if it puts its mind to it! It can kill and rend and destroy whatever it wants, I’m…By Apep, I did nothing by being here, today my job is to be a babysitter to the Messiah! Why even have mortals? Why have Kings or Queens or Knights or Jacks?!”

Ruru’s stone cold deadpan pierced into Moriogoch’s eyes. They were clearly offended by what Moriogoch said. It dawned on Moriogoch that Ruru had about 2 millennia on them: Moriogoch was the guilty child here.

“We,” began Moriogoch remorsefully, “All need nap time, don’t we? And reminders to keep the universe intact. Some more than others,” they said, looking at dozing Posso, “But guidance, generally. Guidance is important.”

Moriogoch thought of the many urchins that wallowed in the beggars chute, their territory.

“We all need an adult sometimes,” they declared resolutely.

Then they felt ready to give their slumbering slinky of bristly fur back to Ruru, who nodded and vanished in a Red and Cyan flare of spades and swords.

And Moriogoch marinated their youthful heels in the fountain’s clouds and laid their eyes upon the slurry of stars in the sky beside Seirios. Then they declared with tired triumph, to no one in particular:

“Bedtime enforced.”

#star xvii #lovers vi #minor gore #cartoon violence #short story #hanged man xii #jack of wands

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