Chapter Notes
After reading Savannah and London there are a couple tiny details I changed, including a reference to Statesboro in the President's speech and a girl from London being on the shortwave network. The detail about girls gathering in Texas like in the Homestead was actually already there before I knew Savannah existed. I love when the universe comes together like that.
I worry that the ending of the story was too ambiguous about this, but I have precise details in mind about what happened to all of the remaining Kansas City girls. I decided against writing them down because being too specific is not always for the best, and it made me a little depressed anyway.
That aside, here's some extra stuff that doesn't really matter.
The city zoo just to the south, too, was in a state of decrepitude and had gotten that way shortly after the start of the catastrophe. As normal humans suffered merely to walk about in a fog, animals went unfed and their cages grew dirty, and most of them passed away hungry in the deadly cold.
When the wraith haze lifted four months later, a colossal wreck awaited the keepers. Strangely, it seemed the elephants had gone the quickest: where other corpses often lay rotting or even still fresh, nothing remained of the proud, towering creatures but piles of gray bones, picked clean down to the nooks and crannies of their spinal column.
“My life is worth it again,” Sedalia beamed.
“What,” Warrensburg cocked an eyebrow, “are you talking about.”
“Well, I met a boy today~” the rotund magical girl belted like a songbird as she pranced about in the dorm room. “Sensitive and kind, thoughtful and wise beyond his years, this is the one that I’ll turn into my beaux, my man, my husband, my little prisoner d'amour~ ,” she continued prattling, exhibiting an expert, supernatural elegance as she tottered on top of the bed and the dresser and even the desk.
Warrensburg felt her muscles sagging, a casual self-defense mechanism. “I thought you were done with men,” she probed almost against her own will. “That doesn’t answer my question anyway.”
“Oh, can you hardly blame me for swearing off the male species after last time? He was such a boor ,” Sedalia expounded. “As for my life, think about it. Our Soul Gems serve as an irrefutable proof that our emotions have raw, physical value.” She danced feverishly, a whirlwind that pranced through the room. “When every human is born, their emotional state is net zero. As they progress through life, they undergo a series of disappointments or pleasures, worsening or bettering the overall quality of their existence.” The whirlwind turned into a hurricane, pictures and other fixtures on the wall steadily being ripped away by the gale of her animation. “If your net emotional state is negative, then you would have been better off not being born! But if the net quality of your life is positive, then your birth was justified, and one can say that all has gone well for you! I admit I’ve suffered a string of profound disappointments in the last year or two, but this one is different, I promise you. He fills me with this… this… effusive delight that I have not experienced in AGES. AGES, I tell you. It’s simply divine~ and so my life is officially worthwhile once more and let me tell you it is going nowhere but up! ” she finished, the category 5 winds gradually winding down alongside her rant.
As the last of the maelstrom passed, Warrensburg let her hand drop from one eye, a beam of pure condescension extending forth in her best effort to pierce Sedalia’s bubble of joy. “That is the most retarded shit I have ever heard. You’re going to dump him in a week.”
In that fabled ground of the Johnson County courthouse in Warrensburg was a statue to Old Drum, that most famous of dogs who–-in reality, a rapscallion of the highest order–-had intruded on the land of another. This maladaptive behavior had not prevented him from achieving honor of the highest degree: Man’s Best Friend, a title he forever shared with all others of his species.
Or, friend to some, anyway. To others, he was merely a pest. Let him not be disconnected from Argos, who similarly routed in the dung of cows and sheep, yet who cried out in joy at the sight of his master Odysseus.
“Yeah, well,” Perry continued, “needless to say, I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him.”
“But he’s quite small, I’m sure you could throw him pretty far,” Tipton smiled.
“You a funny one, aint ya? Nah, I think his whole ‘society is from wishes’ schtick is just dead wrong. I ain’t the smartest woman on Earth but I believe in the goodness of people. I think all the good things humans have done in the last so many thousands of years is a more natural thing; it woulda happened sooner or later. His wishes just made it happen faster, if you take my meanin’ . ” She shoveled a heap of sauce-soaked brisket down her gaping maw, licking her chops. “Think about it: if humanity were more bad than good, wouldn’t us girls end up wishin’ for more bad than good too?”
“I think plenty of us do end up wishing for bad things,” Syracuse raised an eyebrow.
“Bad things, or selfish things?”
“Bad.” She chewed on that thought for a second. “Both. I don’t know.”
Once Chuck’s hooting and scratchy yelling subsided, the radio transitioned smoothly into one of George Thorogood’s lamentations on life. Finally she thought, passing three cars in the span of half a second . She squirmed in the cheap, old cloth seat to get a bit more comfortable, soaking in the intro and first few bars.
… So I go down the streets.
An amber guitar thrummed to a simple beat, tapping into her skull as her tires scraped along the highway.
Down to my good friend's house. I said, “Look man… I'm outdoors, y’know.”
Everything settled into its groove.
“Can I stay wit’ you, maybe a couple days?”
She was Queen of the Highway, soaking in the vapors of a nicotine bath.
He said, “Uh, lemme go ‘n ask my wife.”
Rain splattered the windshield, picking up slowly as she zoomed northward steadily.
He come outta the house. I could see it in his face.
A thrumming settled in her throat, a pulse that hit her heart and brain as sure as her own blood.
I knowed it was ‘no.’ He said “Oh, I dunno man, she kinda funny, y'know.”
The road bounced and jostled her just like the throaty guitar, and she felt a familiar tickle in her belly.
I said, “I know. Everybody funny.”
A heat spread through her chest and arms and the fingers that tapped on the wheel in rhythm with the high hat and the slap of the rhythm guitar.
“Now you funny too.”
George started demanding bourbon, scotch, and beer. Sounded pretty nice right now actually. Almost unconsciously she kicked one leg up, the one reserved for the brake pedal. She only needed one hand to drive anyway; screaming up 71 was child’s play.
[I'm including a list I created while debating what songs to include in this story.
For Grandview specifically on the drive over to Kearney, especially w/r to getting heated:
“One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” - definite choice unless something changes, good blend of rambling and loose and it’s got good driving energy
“Hot For Teacher” - Van Halen, maybe a bit too intense, good synergy with material? very good driving song
“Life’s Been Good” - Joe Walsh, too mellow, would be perfect for a slower reflective scene, maybe too obvious though
“Frankenstein” - Edgar Winter, excellent choice but not quite the right tone, a little too stocky and strong, demanding of the attention. Also no fucking lyrics
More general purposes:
Anything by Chicago, especially “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” and “Hard to Say I’m Sorry.” Probably avoid using, the name is too on the nose and their music is a little too gentle, would be dope to get 25 or 6 to 4 in there somehow but not likely
Silver, Wham Bam Shang-A-Lang (why did I not use this? Absolutely perfect sound, but i guess lyrics leave a lot to be desired)
AC/DC, but avoid anything except the best picks like Thunderstruck or Hell’s Bells.
Pink Floyd - most radio picks are fine, but probably something from The Wall. would be better if we could get some Animals in there but they don’t play that album on the radio, ever. Most of Dark Side just doesn’t work here
Earth Wind and Fire - only has a couple songs that get LOTS of air time on the radio, Shining Star would be great though
Hall and Oates - too bad they’re fighting each other, Man Eater would be the go-to but is too obvious
Doobie Brothers - generally high quality, fit Listen to the Music or something in there
The Bee Gees - probably not, unfortunately. Stay away from Stayin’ Alive
Electric Light Orchestra - the only ones they play on the radio are like Don’t Bring Me Down, way too overdone. If they ever played the more instrumental shit it would work. Mr. Blue Sky good song but unfortunately does not fit tone and does not see as much radio play
King Harvest - Dancin’ in the Moonlight NEVER gets played on the radio but too good to pass up
Looking Glass - Brandy is a veritable classic but also not the right tone
Steely Dan - excellent choice but hard to fit in, probably not
More stuff by the Police, god damn
John Mellencamp
Black Sabbath? Welcome to the jungle possible, probably nah. War Pigs is fantastic but overly long, lyrics could probably fit somewhere but heavyhanded probably
Fucking The Doors
Johnny Cash
Elton John’s just too peppy, even his sad songs are peppy. Somebody saved my life tonight could be a fun Dark Tower reference but nah
Billy Joel has a couple bangers but no
ZZ Top: AC/DC but way better, as much as I love La Grange it’ll probably be sharp dressed man or legs though
Dire Straits: shame i can’t fit this in really, solid stuff all around
Avoid using at all costs:
Anything by Aerosmith
Anything by John Lennon (the rest of the Beatles are fine, especially anything by Ringo and most of Paul’s stuff. George is just okay, would be too stereotypical to use in any context his music is appropriate for)
Anything by FUCKING Aerosmith
Anything by Bon Jovi, nice guy but absolutely fuck those songs]
The short-turf green was ripped and patchy, obviously uncared for in years. Apparently the new owners of the mini-golf course had quickly cut their losses and left the place to rot.
“Cool Crest isn’t really what it used to be,” Blue Springs apologized, sheepish. “It actually used to be kinda nice to look at.” She pointedly looked at a horrible little animatronic: a dwarfish jester holding a putter, blocking the way over a tiny mound between them and the hole. His pants had been pulled down around his ankles and were tangled with the putter, truncating its swings back and forth. Blue Springs couldn’t remember when the poor fellow hadn’t been depantsed in this manner.
“I’ve seen worse,” Warrensburg smiled. “I used to come here when I was younger and it was already pretty bad. I admit, though, the greens are in even worse shape than I remember.”
This section of Independence hadn’t been a great place to live in for quite some time, but last year had done little to improve the situation. Cool Crest was a combination mini-golf course and arcade which served as a palace for the excited young mind. The experience was somewhat marred for adults by the surrounding presence of a litany of used car lots and other run-down businesses, failing restaurants and corner gas stations. Often a disgruntled vagrant or two could be sighted walking on the shoulder of the highway, disruptions to the enchantment which were easily ignored by children still enthralled by the promise of swinging a putter like a lunatic.
Often enough, though, even adults found themselves lost as they wandered around in the grounds. An evergreen sign right out of the sixties thrust proudly above mini-golf courses which delineated themselves at the entrance: signs labeled Kings, Queens, Jokers, and Camelot all beckoned to visitors along fenced pathways to four different 18 hole courses strewn about the property.
It hardly mattered that the Jokers and Camelot were n fatal disrepair, terminally closed to the public, with several of the structures in Kings and Queens not far behind. The fountains failing to throw water and the anachronistic course obstacles-–a rusty, penile rocket ship here, an amateur replication of the Eiffel Tower there-–did little but to stir nostalgic wanderings in the minds of Olds who visited once a year, if that.
For most adults who had come here in their youth, there was mostly a vanishing, sad smile flitting across their face as they putted two over par on a hole with thickly layered, chipping burgundy paint and no clear markings for the gimmick hole-in-one. There was still less of a smile when they shot their brightly colored golf ball out of bounds, usually followed by a quiet curse. More were deadly utterings towards the business owners when their customers had to fish the ball out of the broken wires leading straight to the water hazard moat of Queens hole 14.
All of it was worth it for the children who visited and screamed with delight as their ball caromed into and out of corners, banging loudly, disturbing the other visitors. They had little to live for, after all. Let them have this if nothing else.
Or, they might have said that this time two years ago. As it was, no one else inhabited the course besides Ella in a plain blue tee and black shorts, and Warrensburg-–Brenda Hast-–dressed as always in a delicate, elegant dress. Their putters were red and blue respectively, short and tall.
“Aren’t you hot in that thing?” Ella pointed at her companion’s getup, a calming night black accented in blue, patterns of kittens and books strewn about the skirt.
“A little bit,” Brenda admitted, though the older girl’s smile didn’t falter. She tapped her golf ball, performing an adequate approach to the hole between two sets of uneven slats. One under par if all went well. She clacked smartly on the uneven stone walkway set on the perimeter of the hole, standing off the green next to her ball.
“Is that even your outfit?” Ella followed suit, tapping the ball deftly so that it beelined for the dirty cup set into the ground. Missing it by inches, she swung her putter up to rest like a club on her sweaty shoulder.
“If you mean when I transform, then no.” Swing, tap… just a little too hard, with a plink as the ball smacked the cup and bounced back out. Brenda finished with a smart third swing for a neat par.
“So, what, you just dress like that all the time?” Tap, followed by the dink of the ball sinking right in and clattering around noisily. Birdie. Didn’t even have to use her telekinesis to guide it in.
“Not in this one specifically, but yeah. I just enjoy the fashion.” Brenda leaned over the hole to fish the two balls out, handing Ella’s over.
“Don’t you get stared at?” They ambled slowly over to the next course, the first of the hole-in-one gimmicks that was an awful slope with a point of no return and three large holes near the top of the hill. They would have one shot to get it right, or else suffer the unbridled shame of having to finish on a second green over on the other side.
“Not much, anymore. Back when things were normal, absolutely. I got approached a lot by randoms asking if I was in a play, or rude people demanding to take a picture with them,” she chuckled as she set her purple ball down on the tee mat. “Nowadays though, I find people keep to themselves more. I’m not sure if that’s because they manage to draw some kind of visual connection or if it’s just people being generally nervous. I’ve been hassled by strangers a lot less lately.” Tap. The ball rolled up the hill, but too softly to cross the line of no return. It rolled ignominiously back to the starting mat, coming to a sad stop just behind where Brenda had put it down.
“I always hate this one,” Ella commiserated. She in turn overcompensated and hit the back, bouncing it into the wrong hole. The ball sunk into a pipe and spit out on the left side of the course, rolling awkwardly just to nestle in right up against a wall. “You don’t ever worry people will… y’know, report you, even if they’re not sure?”
“Well, sure. But I don’t care to hide who I am because of that.” Line up the shot. “I always did this, even before I contracted. You should have seen some of the outfits I put together, it was really bad at the start.” Tap with more force this time, the ball on a beeline for the middle hole on the hill. “In my mind, it would defeat the purpose if I sacrificed that part of myself just to avoid some undeserved attention.” The ball gracefully glided into the middle hole, disappearing from sight. “There’s always been assholes who stick their nose in others’ business. I’m not about to change for them.” The ball spit out into a little metal cup above the ground, labeled in shitty cursive: “Hole-In-One!” Technically, though, it was just one under par. Oh well.
“I think there’s no other way to look at it besides in terms of good and bad,” Jesse lay back on the cot, bored. The walls around them were bare and boring. She was almost always bored now.
“That’s kind of difficult though, wouldn’t you say?” Her roommate Sierra was on the toilet, taking a fat piss. The sound of it filled their little cell and rattled in their ears. Someone was always pissing around here.
“Sort of, not really. Nothing is fully one or the other, but usually people are more good or bad.”
“So you think people are a summation of all their goodness and badness.” The sound of tinkling diminished and eventually ceased completely.
“Well, I don’t know about that. It’s complicated. Look at art, for instance: someone might put out something that was low effort and the intent is just to make quick money off of it, but if it really resonates with someone regardless then it's not really bad.”
Sierra stood up and pulled her prison-issue pants up. They were offered prison uniforms but not required to take them, for whatever reason. “I am less interested in what I got out of something than what the creator intended with it. You can have infinite variations in what people get out of a single piece of art.”
With a modicum of decency restored, Jesse sat up and looked at her cell mate. “I only care what the creator intends if it's a creator I care about, haha.”
“As the inverse of what you said, you can have a piece that had the creator's utmost good intentions put into it as an expression of their worldview or beliefs, but then it can be written off by someone else as being a piece of shit or low quality garbage even if it has lots of effort and care put into it.”
“I don’t feel like putting in too much effort into figuring out those details. It’s not my problem to sort out what one person or another feels.” Jesse applied a minimum of her magic and formed a strange hollow bubble in front of her, floating between her hands.
The enchantments of the Magic Force prevented any from exerting their powers on the walls or gates around them, and there had been ample if hushed discussion at night between the prisoners to push the edges of these restrictions. Occasionally the guards would essentially force feed them grief cubes to avoid being taken by the Cycles, so they had little to fear from overuse of their magic. Following this, experimentation had told them that transporting anything in or out was also restricted, which just made sense. Excessive physical damage was not possible, including to the occupants–-some poor girl from Chesterfield had gone mad and tried to off herself by exploding, only to find that she simply could not do it. Guards had manifested to take her away soon after, and no one was quite sure where you went after this .
Within a dumb blind spot between all of these rules dwelled an ability to manifest harmless objects from thin air, a fact that Jesse now greatly enjoyed. A vermillion sheen obscured the inside of the floating orb from anyone but herself, and to her it was a window into whatever pleased her to witness. She mostly used it to watch her cat Grimsby back home, or to get a look at any new prisoners, or to spy on the TV in the barracks. She was getting rather tired of M.A.S.H. reruns, though.
“I think that there’s no ‘real’ meaning to it and that all of this is pointless, in a cosmic sense. I think there’s a field of philosophy about that called ‘ontology,’ but I also kind of think philosophers are full of shit.”
“My cat’s discovered the joys of my old rabbit fur coat,” Jesse scried. “Oh, I kinda like philosophers. They just sit around and think about some bullshit and write it down,” she tittered. “That’s basically all writers ever do, too.”
“I think creative endeavors are fundamentally different from straight up bullshitting, but you have a point.”
“They’re both the same, it’s just one is about ‘this is what we think… this is how morals work.’ ”
“I find that more frustrating because it makes assertions on the nature of being. It’s one thing to bullshit about stuff you openly admit is not real, it’s entirely another to bullshit about stuff which you’re claiming to understand deeply without real basis and which affects people significantly.” Sierra took the chance to lay down on the cot now, exhausted despite doing nothing for the fifth straight day in a row. “I guess I understand what you mean because I can appreciate all the ancient philosophers for trying to determine some sort of truth out of the universe even without having, like, meaningful tools for actually studying the natural world. That’s some impressive shit. But they also came up with braindead answers half the time.”
“Well, hardly anyone even does it as a career in the modern age, haha.”
Your species is not forward-thinking enough for that. The words came at her from far away, hazy and malformed.
“Ah,” Jesse said, changed the contents of her bubble with a flick of her wrist, bringing a fisheye-lensed Incubator into her view, and their conversation into greater focus. Hello again! Any word on getting us out of here?
Until one and a half hours ago I would have said the chances were slim, Kyubey stretched dramatically, his full length on display. Things have changed: it’s by no means definite, but the odds of escape for you and the rest of the prisoners has increased from approximately 0.60448% to 47.92216%. Those chances will no doubt change further as the situation develops .
That’s quite a difference already!
Less than even odds are not something I would bet on in all but the most dire of circumstances, I assure you. I may be able to increase them in your favor if you can provide me with some more information, however. Do you have any insights to provide on new inmates, especially anyone with more physically destructive abilities?
Well, there’s a girl they brought in a week ago from somewhere up northwest, I think near Atchison. She’s really big, kind of scary.
I know the girl of whom you speak. That will do.
Chapter End Notes
These are pieces of story that I wanted to write but did not feel I could fit them into the story, at least not smoothly. In order:
On edits/rewrites I paid closer attention to emulating the Bavitz style, with a bit of success at times, but originally what I envisioned was a more didactic story that explored the mechanics of this world. In the first section describing the Kansas City zoo survives a bit of the original spirit of what I wanted to do with it. Also, I never wrote this down in prose, but on recommendation from a friend I'm specifying it here: from the beginning I wanted Kaycee's wish to be that the Royals would win the World Series again, but she fails to specify which year. Thus, it was my thought that they would win again in 2015, the same year they did in real life. Kaycee just missed it, sadly.
The section with Warrensburg and Sedalia is a very early piece of writing where neither character survives how they are described in the work proper. As I got further in and got away from a more lighthearted feel, this kind of stuff didn't work for me.
I wrote the section on Old Drum while drunk. It is an object of some fascination to me that the phrase "Man's Best Friend" originated in a place where I lived for several years, it feels like such a ubiquitous phrase. If I were smarter, I would probably have been able to work a quote from the court battle into the text somewhere. There are actually quite a few tidbits I wrote where I deleted most of them because they were just single sentence snippets that didn't fit literally anywhere into the actual story. I just thought they sounded kinda nice and wanted to get them down. I might incorporate them into other stories, but probably not.
The discussion between Perry and Syracuse/Tipton was actually much longer and contained a whole diatribe on the nature of man and society. I cut it because it didn't flow naturally, mostly. In most of these conversations throughout the story, I imagine there's a lot that goes unsaid and what I end up with is a condensed version. It's like how characters talking in movies is not really how people talk in real life.
The section with Grandview is my favorite thing I cut, I almost want to go back and include it but there would be no real point (it does make the lyrical inclusions in ch. 14 more awkward though. Debated cutting that and didn't feel like it. (Edit 5/19: including lyrics of SOME kind is such a small inclusion, I'm just going to go back and edit that in real fast anyway)). I felt both a little weird and a little excited about the possibility of including more sexually charged material in the story. But, the Midwest is a bit puritanical, so I figured it would be more in keeping thematically to get rid of stuff like that unless it was somehow very integral to the plot, which it almost never is. Bavitz is a lot better at that kind of stuff. I included a music list because every single one of these was a potential for having their lyrics put in, though in the end my choices were mostly random anyway, based on what I happened to be hearing at the time. I guess I chose George Thorogood here (the only other viable option for a driving scene would have been Van Halen, but Hot for Teacher would have been weird lyrically) because One Bourbon One Scotch One Beer is an exquisite song to get in a driving groove for, and he seems like a likely figure for a fucked up woman to masturbate to while driving at 100 miles per hour down the highway. That sounds like something I'd do if I were a woman, anyway.
The section on Warrensburg and Blue Springs mini-golfing was a very late addition when I realized I hadn't really included Blue Springs at all after her personal section, which felt wrong, but I didn't know what else to do with her unfortunately. I never really got into her powers or anything, but I think she's ultimately a minor addition to the cast. I love Cool Crest and its dilapidation is even worse than I've managed to convey here. Warrensburg is loosely based on my girlfriend, mostly the tendency to dress nicely. The short jester obstacle is 100% real, by the way. Its pants have been down for literally over 10 years now.
The conversation between the two girls in prison is another thing that I really wanted to include in the story but couldn't fit in organically. It's honestly plot-relevant enough that I should work it in somehow anyway, but whatever. The conversation is lifted directly out of Discord DMs that I was also drunk for.
Thanks again for reading, sincerely! Go write something, unless you're Makin in which case go code an AI to write something instead.