Together, they had just slain the CyberPillar—a massive mechanized caterpillar that had come from the deepest reaches of forbidden space to tear the Storyverse asunder with mandibles capable of severing the delicate threads connecting stories. With one bite, it could unravel whole narratives: a guideless apocalypse leaving much of the realm bloody on the cutting room floor.
Now, the two Shadowstories stood atop its ruined head after the great robotic invertebrate had crashed down on this murky swamp planet. To make sure it was dead, the Avatar thrust his blade deep into the beast’s metal head, straight through its core processor: crunch. Grebok added his own nails in the CyberPillar’s coffin with three quick shots from his pistol: pop, pop, pop.
The glow of nearby fungus lit them in a swimmy bioluminescence. The beast’s head hissed steam.
“The Storyverse is safe once again,” Chuckles said, wiping sweat from his brow. He leaned forward on the pommel of his sword.
“Do you ever get tired of all this?” Grebok asked, twirling his pistol right into its holster. “You ever think about retiring? Settling down somewhere? Get a herd of goats or something.”
Chuckles answered quietly, “I do. I do, old friend.”
They got close, nose-to-nose, and started making out. Their tongues thrust madly against each other, each a squirming pink tentacle smashing against teeth and the roofs of each other’s mouths. Hands roamed, groping the valleys between buttocks.
Grebok reached down and felt Chuckles’ swollen tumescence straining against his dark leather breeches. The Avatar, in turn, felt Grebok’s powerful priapism, a pistoning hound trying to buck the leash that kept it contained within his space pants. They thrust their bulging cock barrows against one another.
Chuckles pulled away, gasping for air.
“I want to cum in your glorious dreadlocks,” the Avatar whispered.
“I want to drink mead from your delicious asshole,” Grebok hissed.
“First—“ Chuckles said. “I must feel it again.”
He then slid his hand under Grebok’s shirt, letting his touch drift across the roundness of Grebok’s pregnant belly. His mind reveled in the feeling of those fine dark hairs, of the rotundity of their shared child growing within the Keykeeper’s bowels.
Chuckles whispered in Grebok’s ear: “I love that you have my child inside of you.”
“I love it when you’re inside of me. Inside my rectal canal.”
“Let’s go find Gunther.”
“We can hold him down and take out both of our cocks and—“
“Cut!” came the voice of the Marvelous Marmoset. He came scuttling out of the darkness—not a marmoset at all, but actually a 19-year-old pimply boy genius with a shock of red hair and a pair of black hornrim glasses that he quickly pushed up his nose.
His eyes had a milky cast to them—a cloudy film that swirled over the irises.
“I just don’t know,” he said. “I can’t be sure if this is right yet.”
He turned to the Grand Council of Beta Readers.
“Your thoughts, Grand Council? I seek your… wisdom.”
…
Most of them had gone half-blind down here below the crust of LiveDiary’s ruined surface. The Revolutionaries that came to this world for solace, to escape war and find a place of peace for their blogging efforts and fan-fiction epics, soon found that the color of their flesh waned to a grub-like pallor, that strange cataracts began forming over their eyes. Some lost teeth. Other developed sticky cilia upon their fingertips and toes that allowed them to scamper up sheer surfaces.
They subsisted on a diet of the weird glowing fungi, scuttling cave bugs, and screeching cavern bats.
Bloggers sat huddled in corners, claiming an elbow turn or a long stretch of maze for themselves, etching their messages—angry screeds, rambling poems, remembered movie reviews—into the rock walls or the flesh of fulsome toadstools.
Fanboys and Fangirls gathered together in ecstatic orgies, their pale and naked flesh slapping together as they babbled in tongues about their love of Homeric epics or the Space Knight series or, most cherished, the sacrificial lamb known as Kendra Shields. With wet lips they sang paeans to those intellectual properties they loved above all else.
Then came those who were not content only to worship and sing praise: the ficcers, slashers, shippers, all coming together and staging theater held in the cubbyholes and dead ends of these blasted catacombs, giving praise to their Creators and hoping to appease them with plays and songs weaving in and out of that pop culture which was so beloved it was now held sacred.
All of these tribes came together under the aegis of a single mythology given to them by their de facto leader, the boy wonder known as the Marvelous Marmoset:
One day, the Infiniverse would find peace. The Revolution would succeed.
And when it did, the Children of LiveDiary would emerge ready to entertain a war-struck universe.
…
“It’s not slashy enough,” hissed Betty Boo 42 of the Grand Council. A creamy cave cricket danced across her eye. Her mouth opened, and a black tongue shot out to claim the bug. It crunched as she chewed.
“It’s never slashy enough for you,” the Marmoset said. “I think it’s plenty slashy. And the male pregnancy thing really is too squicky for me—“
“It’s what the Creators would want,” Queen I-Can-Haz-Kittehs barked, her head turning at once-impossible angles. Her vertebrae grinded and popped as her head pivoted, owl-like. “When we are finally revealed to the world, the world will demand more M-Preg. UST—“ Unresolved sexual tension, is what she meant. “—is also critical to how we entertain the masses.”
“Be that as it may—“ the Marmoset tried.
“I wonder,” said Janefan, a college-aged girl who made her way in the fanfic world by writing Jane Austen furry-fic, “if we can’t involve the Wonder Weasel somehow.”
“You always want the weasel!”
“I love the weasel,” she said, giggling. She was still pretty, despite the deepening pallor and the orange mold that had started to grow across her left eye. “Let’s put him in a Civil War outfit. I tire of the Nazi regalia.”
The Marvelous Marmoset rubbed his eyes underneath his glasses, and pinched his nose.
He knew it, then. He’d ceded too much of his authority to the Grand Council of Beta Readers.
Every day—or night, what did it matter down here?—they gained sway.
And when they gained it, he lost it.
“I want to take this on the road,” he blurted. The idea had just come to him. “USO-style. Entertain the troops and all that. I’ll take the Shadowstory Players, maybe a handful of bloggers, and we’ll go out and do a song and dance for the workers of the Revolution. A real dog and pony show. Or, dog and weasel show.”
With that came an unspoken promise: I’ll be out of your hair, and you’ll be out of mine. You can do whatever rapey gender swapping Space Knight theater-porn you want.
…
“So we haven’t had a chance to chat,” said Dave, the guy who played Lord Chuckles. He poured some creamer (really just powdered fungus) into his coffee (really just the diarrhea of cave mice). “How’d you get the gig?”
“Let’s see,” said Ronald, eating a cruller (really just a ring of mashed cricket paste on a deep-fried batwing). “I got the invite to the Grebok audition… I guess I was standing in one of the ViewToob bread lines? Someone handed me a napkin, and on it said something about a free sundae, and I figured—y’know, c’mon, a sundae?”
“Better than bread, right, right!” Dave laughed. “That’s how they got me, too. Totally. I’ll never fall for the sundae schtick again.”
“For real. From your lips to the Creators’ ears.”
They sipped and ate for a little while.
“I’m not really gay,” Dave finally said.
“Gay-for-pay. That’s cool. I’m… pretty gay. I have to tell you.”
“That’s entirely great. I don’t want you to think I’m—what’s the word? Squicked out by it all.”
“That’s good to know. Because what that Grand Council wants… it gets pretty intense, doesn’t it?”
“It gets pretty intense, yeah.” Dave crumpled the cup, tossed it into a hole dug out of the cave wall. “I mean, at first, I thought it was a little strange, but everyone seems on board.”
“Especially the girl playing the weasel. What’s her name?”
Dave knitted his brow. “Uhh. Nancy? Nelly. No, Nancy! Nancy. Yeah. She really likes wearing the apparatus.”
“Apparatus?” Ronald seemed surprised. “That’s not an apparatus, dude. That’s… that’s her penis.”
“She can’t have a penis. She’s a chick.”
“No, down here they have power over stories.” Ronald paused, narrowed his eyes. “You know I’m really pregnant, right?”
Dave went white as a sheet. “Wait. What?”
“I’m pregnant with your baby. That part’s real.”
The air went out of Dave, and Ronald reached out with a steadying hand.
“I… I’m a father,” Dave said.
“Yeah, Dave. I’m sorry you didn’t know that. But we’ll make it through this okay. I promise.”
Dave offered a tiny, terrified smile.
…
The Marmoset, bolstered by his approval from the Council, marched down the tunnel looking for his Shadowstory Players. He didn’t want to fuck around. They had to get out of these tunnels and off this rock but fast before he pulled out his hair. (Which was already happening in great clumps thanks to not having seen the sun.)
The ground rumbled. Dust and fungus drifted in streams from the ceiling.
Sand whispered from between cracks.
Somewhere above, the distant whine of an engine somewhere.
The ground shuddered.
Someone, or something, had landed.
