InsaneJournal

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NOTE: Nihilist is running a "20 snarks in one month" contest, so expect me to be fairly busy in that regard...just fairly, I am pretty busy. Please let me know if I drop in quality at all.




NOW IT'S BLOODY PERSONAL.

So apparently the Lynchian aside I ended on last time is actually related to the plot, as the next chapter opens on Evra's fearful explanation. Mr. Tiny is, in fact, the gay midget prostitute ringleader, and presumably either adopted his name either to garner a feeling of fellowship with his charges or because he has a dick of Quampish proportions. Evra mentions that he gets the feeling that Mr. Tiny wants to slaughter, skin and roast him, and that everyone in the troupe holds the same misgivings, because we haven't had a vore ref in at least three pages now.

Talk turns to the gay midget prostitutes themselves, who Evra theorizes are afraid of Mr. Tiny as well. He relates that they never speak, and that they very rarely let their hoods down.


"Have you ever seen their faces?" I asked.

"Once," Evra said. "Usually they don't let their hoods slip, but one day I was helping a couple of them
move a heavy machine. It fell on one of the Little People and crushed him. He didn't make a sound, even
though he must have been in a huge amount of pain. His hood fell to the side and I caught a glimpse of his
face.

"It was disgusting," Evra said quietly, stroking the snake. "Full of scars and stitches all crumpled together,
like some giant had squeezed it with his claws. He didn't have ears or a nose, and there was some kind of
mask over his mouth. The skin was gray and dead-looking, and his eyes were like two green bowls near
the top of his face. He didn't have hair, either."


Gosh, that certainly is an original and creative--oh, wait. Looks like Mulder and Scully went to investigate the wrong circus in Humbug. Also, way to be accepting of your fellow freaks, Evra, gold empathy star for today.

Evra is unsure whether the little dude survived, as his brothers hauled him off immediately and they're impossible to tell apart. Darren vows to use his "vampire powers" to find a way to talk to them. This is probably going to boil down to him trying Pig Latin, semaphore, and Morse code before trying the old standby of speaking very loudly and slowly in plain English, all while the gay midget prostitutes chain-smoke and telepathically shoot the shit about what a cock he is with each other, until Crepsley finds him and rapes the shit out of him smacks him upside the head. It's times like these that I wish I could draw fanart.

Evra notes that it's strange that there were no gay midget prostitutes in the Cirque when Darren joined up, and that the mysterious appearance of Mr. Tiny "was probably just a coincidence, or fate", effectively showing that snakes don't understand how opposites work. However, this blatantly shoehorned piece of dialogue curious coincidence of conversation turns talk to srs business:


He paused. "Which is another thing: Mr. Tiny's first name is Desmond."

"So?"

"He tells people to call him Des."

"So?" I asked again.

"Put it together with his last name," Evra told me.

I did. Mr. Des Tiny. Mr. Des-Tiny. Mr …

"Mr. Destiny," I whispered, and Evra nodded seriously.


Evra: Is that sad or what?
Darren: And I thought that thing where Mr. Crepsley makes me wear the Fay Wray dress and pretend he's King Kong was pathetic.
Evra: What?
Darren: What?

Seriously, I cannot read that as anything but a desperate midlife crisis combined with the millions of grade-school beatings someone with a name like "Tiny" must have received. I know I've been spoiled by Discworld, where protagonists actually call out characters with names like "Miss Tick" ("Miss Teak would be better, wouldn't it?"), but come ON, someone had to PROOFREAD this. Oh well, at least I can pretend he's Desmond-the-flamingly-gay-stoner-I-was-acquainted-with-from-my-sister's-college now, that does make things a little more bearable.


I was dying of curiosity and asked Evra a bunch more questions, but his answers were limited. He knew
almost nothing about Mr. Tiny, and only a little more about the Little People. They ate meat. They
smelled funny. They moved around slowly most of the time. They either didn't feel pain or couldn't show
it. And they had no sense of humor.


Wait a second...tiny green people in hoods that move very slowly, don't seem to feel pain, and have no sense of humor? I hereby rescind my former assessment of their character and rejoice heartily! This is canon now, guys. I am waiting with bated breath for one of them to shuffle up to Darren and 9999 his ass.

Anyway, Darren asks how Evra knows that they have no sense of humor. While the standard answer would be that they read the entirety of Achewood and didn't laugh--not even once--Evra launches into a story about someone who used to be in the troupe.


"Bradley Stretch," Evra answered darkly. "He used to be with the show. He had rubbery bones and
could make his arms and legs stretch.

"He wasn't very nice. He was always playing practical jokes on us, and he had a nasty way of laughing.
He didn't just make you look like an idiot: He made you feel like one too.

"We played a show in an Arabian palace. It was a private show for a sheik. He enjoyed all the acts, but
especially liked Bradley's. The two started talking, and Bradley told the sheik he couldn't wear jewelry,
because it always slipped off or broke because of the changing shape of his body.

"The sheik ran away and came back with a small gold bracelet. He gave it to Bradley and told him to put
it on his wrist. Bradley did. Then the sheik told him to try shaking it off.

"So Bradley made his arm small and big, short and long, but he couldn't shake the bracelet loose. The
sheik said it was magic and could only be removed if the wearer wanted to take it off. It was really
valuable, priceless, but he gave it to Bradley as a gift.


Evra: ...and that's the story of Another Gorram Over-Appropriately-Named Freak and the Magic Cock Ring.
Darren: Ooh, ooh! Tell it again, but do the voices!
Evra: Haha, okay, champ. I spoil you, you know.


"Getting back to the Little People," Evra said. "Bradley loved to tease them. He was always finding new
ways to trick them. He made traps to hang them up in the air by their feet. He set their capes on fire. He
squirted liquid laundry detergent on ropes they were using to make their hands slip, or glue to make them
stick. He put thumbtacks in their food and he made their tent collapse and locked them in a van."


Stretch: EVIL! EVIL EVIL EVIL! I AM SO FUCKING EVIL! GOD FORBID I HAVE DEPTH AS A CHARACTER OR ANYTHING, I'M JUST REALLY FUCKING EVIL! oh God Daddy why didn't you love me.
Tonberry: askoose me, but do you have any more thumbtacks? they are delicious and good though they require much chewing and noshing and biting and gnawing.


"Why was he so mean?" I asked.
"I think because they never reacted," Evra said. "He liked to see people get upset, but the Little People
never cried or screamed or lashed out. They didn't seem to notice his pranks.


Stretch: So, uh, you're on fire. That doin' anything for you?
Tonberry: enh, I got lotsa HP. you got anythin' in a Vanish/Doom flavor?
Stretch: Will Vanish/X-Zone do?
Tonberry: aw, that combo is a butt.


Evra made a funny noise that was half a laugh, half a moan.


Evra: O-oh God I just jizzed.
Darren: Man, you're on more of a hair trigger than Mr. Crepsley.
Evra: I can't help it, people with highly malleable anatomies torturing gay midget prostitutes is like my second-favorite fetish!
Darren: That sucks, man. What's the first one?
Evra: Idiot preteens being turned into creatures of the night by overbearing chickenhawk vampire freaks.
Darren: Oh, I can see where that would be--OH GOD RIGHT IN MY EYE
Evra: God, that one just never gets old.

Long story short, Stretch disappeared one day, and when Evra went to clean out the communal Tonberry cooking pot, there, amid the scraps of meat and bone...WAS A BLOODY HOOK! Wait, no. ...WAS THE PROM QUEEN'S SWEATER! ...no, that's not it either... ...WAS THE MAGIC COCK RING! Darren screams and wets himself and is inconsolable for the rest of the night, Crepsley scolds Evra for winding him up like that, Evra tells Crepsley that maybe if he watched the fucking kid sometimes instead of spending all night watching reruns of Crossing Jordan and sobbing into his Valium then maybe they would be a better family, then the yelling starts and Darren cries in his coffin-shaped couch fort because Daddy and Daddy don't love him anymore...okay yeah that's how it should go. Instead Darren and Evra crack the hell up because Evra fed the scraps to the Wolf-Man and cannibalism is ~hilarious~.


"We shouldn't laugh." I caught my breath. "Poor Bradley Stretch. We should be crying."

"I'm laughing too hard to cry," Evra gasped.

"I wonder what he tasted like?"


Evra: Kind of smoky, but not too bad. Mr. Tall's a lot worse, really, all that red meat he eats.
Darren: What?
Evra: What?


In the middle of our fit of hysteria, the flap to the door of our tent was pulled aside by an inquisitive head,


Sigmund Freud: Pardon me, just injecting a little birth imagery into the story. Ahem...weh, weh! I am a child being born! I feel rejected by my mother and will, in my adulthood, seek to bond with her this intimately again through an incestuous relationship!
Darren: what the Jungian fuck
Evra: Oh, that's just our new recruit, Bill Oedpial Obsession, showing off his new act.
Sigmund Freud: It's Freud.
Evra: By God, if you are going to be one of us, Bill, you are going to be named like one of us! Now go to your room!
Sigmund Freud: The room in this case signifies the mother's womb--
Evra: HAUL TITS, PUSSYMAN.

Okay, it's actually Hans Hands, but this book would be so much cooler with random appearances by Austrian psychologists in it. Unfortunately, he brings sobering news...


"I have a message for you two," he said. "Mr. Tall wants you to report to his van as soon as possible."

"What's up, Hans?" Evra asked. He was still laughing. "Why does he want us?"

"He doesn't," Hans said. "Mr. Tiny is with him. He's the one who wants you."

Our laughter stopped instantly. Hans let himself out without any further words.

"Mr. Tuh-tuh-tuh-Tiny wants us," Evra gasped.

"I heard," I said. "What do you think he wants?"

"I don't kn-kn-kn-know," Evra stuttered, though I could tell what was going through his mind. It was the
same thing that was rushing through mine. We were thinking of the Little People, Bradley Stretch, and the
big black pot full of scraps of human meat and bone.


Evra: We gonna get raped, huh.
Darren: Repeatedly. With great enthusiasm.
Tonberry: lol pwnt.


Next time: Del boggles at the fact that this was only ONE GENTLY-CARESSING CHAPTER, and fears the insanity to come.