Order and Chaos

MEADOWLANDS: An Accounting
Linear Storytelling Is Old Hat, Daddio!

2.

Commun & Mary arrived in what was now being called "Meadowlands" that afternoon. The first thing Commun noticed was how the area had flourished and become a full-on village in scant weeks without him around, furnished with a buzzing large market gazebo, a bar and grill, defensive walls and fortifications, a watermill on the river, a masonry, a blacksmith, and a church. The first thing Mary noticed was the fashion.

Before the either of them were noticed, she yanked on his arm and turned them both around, panic seeping into her voice. "Commun: Why is everyone naked?"

"What? You're the only one here without their fingerpaint."

"Fingerpaint, fingerpaint, fingerpaint!" Mary said. "Everywhere I go, people are obſeſſed with the paint on their fingernailſ, to ſometimeſ the complete excluſion of clotheſ. It's madneſſ!"

"It's modesty, young lady," said Commun.

"Modeſty! Then why are they walking around with their dingle-dongles danglin' and bingle-bangles all floppin' about, huh?"

Commun snickered into his hand so feverishly he lost posture.

"What?" said Mary, just barely keeping her frustration from boiling out into shouting. "What iſ ſo hilariouſ about the idea that I do not wiſh to be aſſaulted with the ſights and ſounds of ſex and flesh at all timeſ and placeſ?! That people ſhould ſhow ſome decency to otherſ, ſome dignity, and cover themſelveſ when out and about?!"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but..." Commun said. "'Dingle-dongles and bingle-bangles'?" His laughter redoubled, and he nearly doubled over crying.

"We are not amuſed," said Mary. "Thiſ whole ſettlement iſ diſgusting and perverted, and I have half a mind to circumvent it entirely. Frankly, it'ſ bad enough that you're cavorting around in 5 incheſ ſquare hung around your front end!"

Commun composed himself, wiping tears from his eyes. "Your majesty," he said, and began to yammer on in that most Commun of ways. "You need to understand that Castle Vendet is a world unto itself, with its own bizarre customs, perverted holdovers from Old Old Vendet, that carry no water outside of its moat. These troops represent a beautiful little sample set of your population in miniature, I know that doesn't sound too important to you since you don't have any grounding in statistics, no?" Mary shook her head a little. "But the point is that nowhere will you find a more representative group of far-flung citizens from your gigantic country, although skewing towards the coarser and majorly to the younger, and this that so shocks you is perfectly normal for the territory you rule, at least where there's only 207 loincloths to go around, whereas to them and me, YOU are the one rudely running around with their dingle-dangle and bingle-bangle out. I've been biting my tongue this whole time!"

Mary shook her head more. "Madneſſ."

"Look, I INSIST that you apply my fingerpaint right now, and relax about the whole issue before we head in and announce ourselves," said Commun. "You can use my loincloth if you want."

What was the nature of Commun & Mary's entrance to Meadowlands? A bold, fully-dressed, and fully-announced proclamation to the residents of Meadowlands, or something that blended in a bit more?

0.

Milton was soon overwhelmed by the current. The waters washed over him, pushing him down deeper and deeper, until he woke in purgatory, waiting to be called to the gates. Eventually, he was, and strut up to the podium with unwarranted confidence.

"Okay," said Fablio, the newly- and randomly-assigned interim God of Death, as well as of Hair, Non-Meat Sauces, Roots, Skunks, Mining, Most Narcotics (besides Cocaine and Alcohol (but including Absinthe,)) Running, Perspective, Orange, Green, Purple, Cyan, Violet, Finger Length (but not Girth,) Perfume, Magnetism, Dents, Commas, Opening Quotation Marks, That Annoyance You Feel When You Had Something To Say And Waited For Someone Else To Finish Talking And Then Forgot, Elephant Trunks, Contemporary & Ancient (but not Just Plain Old) Hats, Rigged Gambling, and Ink. "So, that's two, right?"

"Three," said Milton, licking himself.

"Okay, so I put you back for 6, yeah?"

"Yeah, but not yet," said Milton. "I wanna —" The phone on the podium rang, and Hank snatched it to his ear.

"Fablio, how you?" said Fablio.

"Skunks, Mining, Narcotics, Running, for Finger Girth, Nosepaint, Punctuation?"

"Please, baby! Skunks, of all… Hey, when can I get off this podium?" The receiver went dead mid-sentence. Fablio hung it up. "What can you can expect?"

"I wanna talk with whoever is in charge around here about this whole apocalypse thing," said Milton.

"Okay, do I look like an angel, honey? I don't even look like a God of Death!" Fablio huffed and swept his hand through his hair. "Besides, you just saw how busy and rushed De is trying to sort out this whole domains thing..." He gestured at the plaque of all his titles. "Goddess of Brevity and it's been weeks I've been stuck at this bum post."

"I can wait," Milton intended to say, before he was interrupted by the telephone ringing again.

"Fablio, how you? Yeah, I'm the new magnets guy. A prayer, what? No, I don't accept the charges. No, don't print it off! Demagnetize it, I don't care." He hung up. Somewhere, a compass started drifting aimlessly. "You were saying?"

"I can —"

Suddenly, there was a bright flash of light, flashin', I mean flashin', like a strobe. Sir Nose trombipulated his way in.

"I just got back from the fantasy ahead of our time in the four lands of Ellet, headed for this place called home," he explained.

"Sir Nose! How you?"

"As good as I can feel," he stretched. "I got headache in my heart, heartache in my leg."

"Ha!" Fablio said. He didn't laugh, he said that. "What brings you here?"

"Takin' care of so much business," Sir Nose said. "I need you to blow the cobwebs out your mind and dig through your stuff & things there for a funky woman by the name of Adeline for me. It's for love. Not mine."

"I can't just let anyone know what's in there," Fablio said.

"Aw, let the nose be nosey! Don't you know you're in this too?" Sir Nose said.

"I'm in the middle of a thing here, babe," Fablio said.

"I got a thing, you got a thing, everybody's got a thing!" Sir Nose complained. He crouched to Milton. "Check it: the kingdom of Heaven is within. Now scram." Milton trotted out to the lobby. Sir Nose leaned on the podium. "Now why don't you be a beach and let me take a peek-a-groove?"

"...Fine," Fablio acquiesced, opening his book of the dead.

"See, unlike a deck of cards, where there's four of a kind, there's only one of her," the nosiest Nose I know said, sniffing through the pages. "...It just had to be none of them. Killer armadillo!" He slammed the book shut. "Then what in the world is up with that funky-ass corpse in the barn loft, huh?"

"Illusion?" Fablio shrugged. "It's a love thing, right? Why don't you check with Ilthmya't, they're the God of Love right now I think."

"No, no, no," said Ilthmya't, who was made entirely of tongues, which it was using surprisingly effectively to file and defile many items. "I'm the god of…" Their whole mass shuddered. "LUST." A great multitude of hacking and exaggerated suppressed vomiting noises hit Sir Nose in fabulous surround sound. "Don't you talk to me about those disgusting humans and their mating habits, Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk. Go find Marrch, they're Love now."

"Sorry," said Marrch, digging through the back of their "A" cabinet. "You sure they're human, yeah?" Sir Nose nodded. "Sorry, maybe I can find their other half — name?"

"Mary," he said.

"Ohhh," said Marrch. "I'm sorry, but is that another girl?"

Sir Nose nodded.

"And Adeline, that's another girl's name?"

That's another nod, too.

"Oh, I'm so sorry. You need Greg, he's on lesbians. Sorry again."

Sir Nose slogged up the 49 flights of stairs to Greg's cubicle, which he had expanded to the whole floor due to the many vacated around him.

"Bud, they put me on lesbian cephalopods and rodents," Greg explained, then burped. "Not with each other, thankfully!" He laughed.

Sir Nose had to go right back down 20 more floors. Alneit rose off his fainting couch, scarves trailing behind him. "You have entered the chambers of Alneit, God of Love and Lust!" he announced himself. "Well, not yet, I mean. Right now they have me just on the lesbian humans, but it's a lot better than being the God of Dead Chickens like before. You can help me out on that with the woman upstairs, right Sir Brownnose?"

Sir Nose was exhausted, and unamused. The God of Lesbian Love and Lust was quite helpful and competent, and found him Adeline's file in a jiffy.

"Corpse in a barn loft, huh? Doesn't say here she's even dead… And this stuff just appears when it happens, you know," Alneit said, perusing her file. He bugged out. "Soulmates with Mary Lee Vindictus? Sheesh, you should really talk to De about this!" Sir Nose waved him off with his trunk. "What do you think is going on?"

Sir Nose took a deep breath. It just had to be nobody. It had to be no-one. It just had to be none other...

But what was the cat up to?

3.

The high, vaulted ceilings, the delicately-chiseled brick-and-wood construction, and the intricate stained glass window all spoke not only to a surprising reverence to the pantheon they had all worked to destroy, but to the untapped reserves of competence and dedication Commun had had at his disposal when it was his command to command. (He was, all told, a pretty terrible leader of men.) He wandered down the aisle towards the fountain, soaking in the sights with his eye-sponges, when a freshly-minted priestess tapped him on the shoulder.

"Are you just here to look, Mr. Marx?" she said — in a language he could barely decipher. The natives had already begun to blend their languages into a take-all-comers pidgin.

Commun, startled, turned around. "Ye — I mean, no." The priestess was disappointed. "I need to make an appointment with the gods, and I was wondering if you knew exactly how. Do I have to sacrifice a cow on yew branches or slip you a few coins or...?"

"I wouldn't be opposed to it!" she said. "But you need to ask an angel. I know there's a celest here in town, but I don't know if that'd do the trick… They might be able to pass the message on?"

"Can you repeat that?" said Commun. "I didn't catch it." In her digression, she had mumbled and slipped into her native tongue.

Slowly now, she repeated herself like she were De. "Give me your money." Pause. "A joke. Ask an angel. Celest in town, might pass it on."

"Why wouldn't the celest work? Or a demon, for that matter? They're all the same damn thing, it's just where they're working," said Commun.

"For the same reason you came to the church and priestess instead of bar and bartender," said the priestess.

"Come again?"

The priestess sighed. "Jobs and place matter."

"Okay, point made," said Commun. "So where can I find this wandering celest?"

"Don't know, it's kinda hard to spot — you know of Nothing?" Commun groaned and nodded. Had she really said kinda hard-to-spot? "Maybe outside the market? It'd be preaching itself for its big God of Death push, maybe?"

Commun nodded and headed out of the church.

"Wait!" the priestess said. "You could wait here. It has a sermon this evening."

"Oh?"

Did Commun stick around for that? How did that go? Was Mary there while that conversation happened or not?

5.

tell them the truth, but if you simply must kill all of your previously-loyal humans, then so be it

Mary sunk into the mud and blood foot-first, weighed down by the sword she was using to support herself. A great plume of grey smoke, miles high, billowed out into the sky from where the church's roof finally collapsed in, burning. Her arm loosely flopped off her shoulder, hanging by the skin. Her left eye was gouged in like you'd expect, and was partially-boiled to fit in with the burns that ran all the way down that side of her. Four of her ribs were sticking straight out of her chest. Her nose, now little more than a chunk of bloody red, abruptly fell off entirely and was swallowed by the mud and rain. She was broken in places she'd never known existed, and still the fight was not quite over. It had been so hard. She swiveled, keeping a keen eye out. (She couldn't use two now.)

4.

Um, excuse them?? You are their queen, they don't get to slack off in some kind of paradise when you need them dying for you on some godsforsaken battlefield. Even if you have to make up a threat to justify it, they're following you into battle, dammit.

Mary cleared her throat and stepped up on the blacksmith's market stand. "Attention, all!" she hollered. (The bustle of business did not cease.) "This is your queen, Mary Lee Vindictuſ, ſpeaking." The citizens of Meadowlands turned to Mary, suddenly silent. You could have heard a pin drop. Someone dropped a very nice vase instead.

Mary continued. "You have all crafted a nice little paradiſe for yourſelveſ, and in record time, too. You ſhould all be commended for your great effortſ." Troops smiled at themselves. "However, you have overlooked two baſic facts: One, that the meadow land you've founded Meadowlandſ upon could very well be an illuſion crafted by the dead god Feluſ, who I killed perſonally. Two, that you never had a choice whether to ſettle or not in the firſt place.

"You are the perſonal army of the monarch of Vendet. You will be acting as my bodyguardſ. Tomorrow morning, we will decamp from here and march under my command, right back up the mountain, to the tower of the godſ."

Mary stood and allowed her statement to seep in. Discontent wafted through the crowd, and ran over into yelling, noisy rage. "No, of course not!" said the crowd, in unified chorus. I must take a detour now to clarify, they're not any sort of sci-fi hivemind or anything, they just very agreed and happened to have good timing. Mary raised her hand in an effort to quell them, but instead was hit in the shoulder with a melon. She grabbed a sword from the blacksmith's collection and posed with it, as if she was sure she had the physical endurance to keep holding it up.

"You forget, too, that I am a Vindictuſ!" She yelled. "Either you poſſibly die protecting me, or you die right now, by my handſ!" Commun nodded sagely. A classic Vindictus bluff. She really was her father's daughter. "What'ſ it going to be?"

5.

You can't make an omelette without killing a few chickens. Mary didn't know that she had it in her. Yet there she was, up to her ankles in the blood of the fallen, the insubordinate. She began to worry. Maybe Commun was wrong, and Felus had cursed her to kill every human she met. Why couldn't they just surrender and follow her? Why did she have to punish them? Where did she find the strength, the fortitude?

Temporarily, Mary shoved these concerns to the back of her mind when she heard a rumble from the rubble. (Was it a house? It was all rubble now.) A woman emerged, badly scarred, bracing a crossbow against her broken shoulder. Commun recognized her immediately: it was that black-haired mutineer who had become his third right-hand.

"Demon," she spat at Mary, and fired. The bolt ripped through her good shoulder, causing her to lose her grip on the sword handle and fall, face-first, into the mud. "Why won't you die?" The mutineer was crying.

How was Mary gonna get out of this one? And where was the Nothing? (It wasn't Mary, was it?)

1.

"Hey, you can use my fingerpaint if you want," said Commun. "I know it's not royal colors, but…"

"I'm fine," said Mary. "Thankſ."

Mary was a lot better than fine. One good night's sleep and she was at peak health. Her sling was left far behind, since her arm unbroke itself overnight, and healed over without even the faintest hint of scabbing. The only injury she had left was that neck-pocket, which looked bad but only hurt as much as the gap between your toes hurt. She looked every bit 19 again. (This despite the fact that she was, factually, 20.)

Commun always kept a keen eye out, though. Just as he was going to figure out later by watching her gay gaze travel in Meadowlands one more way in which she was her father's daughter, he figured out now that Mary Vindictus was beyond dead, and it was possible she didn't even know about it, with how utterly nonplussed she was by her healing abilities. She wasn't a ghost, or a zombie, but a still-fresh body possessed by its own, correct soul: a ghoul, immortal and unaging. The lucky girl.

But did he ever tell her just how lucky she was?

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Spoiler2.) What was the nature of Commun & Mary's entrance to Meadowlands? A bold, fully-dressed, and fully-announced proclamation to the residents of Meadowlands, or something that blended in a bit more?

0.) But what was the cat up to?

3.) Did Commun stick around for that? How did that go? Was Mary there while that conversation happened or not?

4.) "What's it going to be?"

5.) How was Mary gonna get out of this one? And where was the Nothing? (It wasn't Mary, was it?)

1.) But did he ever tell her just how lucky she was?