Chapter 2
TEN LONG YEARS LATER…
Regular-Ginny had always excelled at counting. She may not have been the best athlete or the best looker, but for a brief shining moment in grade school—back before addition and subtraction and multiplication and all the other -tions entered the equation—she was a star. Forwards, backwards, by tens, by hundreds, she was the cream of Mrs. Dublond’s first grade class.
But even these superior counting skills failed her now.
She smashed a gargantuan tentacle the size of a redwood down atop the last vestige of life on this planet, which consisted of a dozen humanoid figures kneeling in a prayer circle, begging their gods to save them. Their corpses left a lumpy stain across the concrete.
This earth was now a lifeless husk, barren and black and covered in naught but dust. And now this earth looked exactly like the fifty before it, and the hundred before that, and so many others before those that her counting abilities were not up to the task of keeping track.
There was a time in the beginning of her role as the Right Hand of Destruction for the Pink One—a cosmic incarnation of destruction that took the form of a pastel pink teddy bear—when this now-familiar scene filled her with guilt and terror, when the Pink One’s voice filled her with hatred and fear and murderous anxiety. Now, ten years after her decision to join the Pink One, the sights and sounds of slaughter filled her with numbness.
This earth had fallen easily because the Pink One’s foil—a cosmic incarnation of life that took the form of a pastel blue teddy bear—and his army had not appeared to battle over this earth’s fate. But that meant little for this earth’s ultimate outcome. Like every other earth that Regular-Ginny and her master successfully destroyed, the Blue One would arrive at some point in the future to heal everything, and eventually, be it years from now or days from now, the Pink One’s army would return to destroy it all over again.
Regular-Ginny glanced down from her perch within the building-sized gelatinous pink blob that served as her home. Standing at attention before her was an army of Ginnys and Arts, which she long ago had begun referring to as the Pink Marauders. With the wanton destruction of this earth at an end, they no longer moved. Regular-Ginny breathed deep, despite no longer needing to breathe at all. She had come to associate these moments just after the carnage and murder and bloodshed as the only moments of respite she would experience for the rest of eternity.
Regular-Ginny sighed. She surveyed her army, taking note of its variety. There were Arts with swords and shields, giant Arts, Arts wearing capes, Arts in sentient cars, cartoonish Arts, and hundreds upon hundreds of others, too many others for her to count. This horde of Arts was accompanied by an equally vast horde of Ginnys with equally odd iterations.
Regular-Ginny had begun creating puppets years ago when she had first lost count of conquered realities. Now, whenever the Pink One teleported her to some new reality, she would seek out the Art and/or Ginny of that reality. She would proceed to murder him/her, and then launch a pink mist from the end of a tentacle. When it encountered the Art or Ginny’s skin, the corpse’s eyes would cloud pink and then it would reanimate, following her orders like one of a nigh-infinite crowd of murderous pod people.
Much to her and the Pink One’s chagrin, the Blue One had also begun recruiting Arts and Ginnys to create his own army, and now any fight between them resulted in either a world being destroyed or healed, accompanied by a ridiculous number of Art and Ginny corpses, many of which would be reanimated as pink puppets, and just as many of which would be magically resuscitated into the ranks of the Blue One’s army. The soul within Regular-Ginny considered shuddering, but her dead exterior did not cooperate.
This cosmic war reminded Ginny of the trench warfare about which she had learned during her high school history class’s World War I unit, except with entire realities substituted for trenches. The two armies fought and suffered incredibly high casualties in order to exchange control over random earths, and no matter who won each earth, there was little ultimate benefit to either side. The winner gained a “trench” that it would inevitably lose, and the cycle of winning and losing and battling over the “trench” would repeat itself unto infinity. It was a war of attrition, but with both sides having the power to resurrect the fallen—either as fully resurrected individuals or as undead puppets—the war was endless.
Ginny’s thoughts were interrupted when the Pink One appeared with a flash and then floated down from the sky. The Pink One bit a barren spot on the ground and sucked hard. The remaining embers within the crust of this earth found themselves plucked rudely from their homes and sucked into the torturous belly of the Pink One. The pink teddy lifted her head from the meal, wiped her mouth with the back of her arm, and stared at Regular-Ginny. The bear nodded. Regular-Ginny pursed her lips.
The Pink Marauders stood in zombified silence. Then the pink bear exploded, and thousands of black bubbles launched from the epicenter of the blast. Regular-Ginny closed her single remaining eye—her other eye lost to God-Art on Earth 1,000,000 during her quest to rescue the Pink One—as the bubbles enveloped her and the army, ripping them from this reality.
Despite the ludicrous number of jumps over the past ten years, Ginny never got completely used to the sensation of hopping between realities. A wave of nausea washed over her.
She found herself falling through an infinite space both colorful and colorless. She tumbled end over end, the army surrounding her doing the same, the lot of them looking like the loose fuzz from an especially overlarge and unkempt dandelion caught in a tornado. Like always, after what felt like a combination of eternity and no time at all, the Pink One zoomed down into the empty space below the army and exploded. The black bubbles enveloped Ginny and the army once more.
The army tumbled from the space between realities down into a wide ocean, which stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see. A collective zombified moan erupted from the Pink Marauders, followed by a nearly collective splash. Some of the more mundane Art and Ginny puppets sank under the water and did not reappear.
One particular Ginny—who had conveniently been exposed to an odd type of radiation inside an ice factory on her home reality and now had the convenient ability to generate ice at will from her fingertips—created what appeared to be a full-sized Titanic replica made of ice, and those Arts and Ginnys who had not sunk below the waves swam to it and clambered up its side to safety.
Well, relative safety, anyway.
A few hundred shark fins broke the water’s surface. Seconds later, a legion of Great White sharks carrying tower shields and short thrusting swords began clambering up the sides of the Ice-Titanic, giving chase to the Pink Marauders. At the legion’s head climbed a ferocious shark wearing what looked like an ancient Roman centurion’s helmet atop its head.
Regular-Ginny shifted the density of her giant pink blob so that she floated atop the water near the Ice-Titanic. As she knew she must to prevent repercussions from the Pink One, Regular-Ginny yelled “Attack!” to her zombified minions, who immediately began brawling and murdering the sharks.
Then she rolled her eye in disgust. Though she had yet to experience the pleasure of destroying this particular earth, this scene was nearly identical to one that played out a dozen or so realities ago when her army invaded a different ocean planet that was dominated by a species of octopus that took their cultural inspiration from the ancient Egyptians. The Art of that planet had led the Royal Octopus Chariot Brigade—a chariot army drawn by sea-horses, both predictably and stupidly—and had made a fantastic Pink Marauder until the pink horde invaded a reality filled with sushi-loving samurai gorillas, where this octopus-Art had been consumed during the battle. It disgusted her how so many of these doomed realities were thematically similar at their cores, despite having literally an infinite number of potential differences from which to evolve.
A pink pinch inside her skull sent pain coursing down her body, jerking her mind to attention and jostl
ing her into action. From her floating position near the Ice-Titanic, she whipped a tentacle across the side of the ship, knocking the vanguard of sharks back into the sea. The one in the centurion helmet, however, was not displaced, and the itch that Regular-Ginny felt in the back of her brain told her all she needed to know about this shark’s identity.
Regular-Ginny snaked two tentacles across the expanse of ocean between them. She used the first to impale the creature, forming the end of the tentacle into a sharpened point and shoving it deep into the monster’s heart. The shark gasped and then breathed its last. Regular-Ginny then hovered the end of the second tentacle in front of the shark’s face. A thin pink mist launched from the end of the tentacle and enveloped the beast’s head. The shark’s eyes clouded pink. It smiled a soulless smile, and a series of sharp snaggleteeth stood out in prominent display.
Regular-Ginny could now answer the question of what she would look like as a Great White shark wearing ancient Roman legionary attire, and she was unimpressed. “Where is your mate?” demanded Regular-Ginny of the shark, having by now found that the only constant in every reality was the connection between its Art and Ginny as either current or ex-mates.
As Ginny’s voice passed through the pink blob, it translated into whatever-the-hell language the shark spoke, and vice versa—a gift, like so many others, that the Pink One had given her during their time together for which she had not asked. The shark called back, “Behind you.”
Regular-Ginny turned. She gasped a startled gasp at the gargantuan beast that burst forth from beneath the waves. And then she cursed in embarrassment, remembering that her pink blob made her nearly invulnerable.
A blue whale wearing bright silver legionnaire armor and a crown of kelp upon its head slashed at Regular-Ginny’s pink blob with a sword the size of an eighteen-wheeler. The pink within her veins coursed cold anger through her body. She parried the sword with a tentacle and then smacked the whale across the face with a second tentacle. The whale rushed at her, bowling into her and knocking her against the Ice-Titanic.
She grabbed its front flippers with two tentacles, and then sent an extra around its back. The end of this extra tentacle formed itself into a monstrous, cottage-sized mallet. Regular-Ginny used it to pound the whale in the base of its skull. She felt like some sort of devilish blacksmith as she beat the creature in the back of its head over and over, crushing its skull into a bloody pulp and readying the beast to be reshaped into one of her army’s many deadly weapons.
Once life fled from the whale’s eyes, she shoved a new tentacle deep into the creature’s blowhole. She launched as much mist as she could muster into the cavity. The beast’s eyes lost their natural black gleam, and the dull pink of puppetry replaced it. Regular-Ginny grinned at this new, gigantic addition to her collection of pink puppets.
Regular-Ginny backed away and watched the beast wreak carnage upon its former brethren. When Ginny grew bored with this sight, she changed the density of her pink blob and sank below the ocean’s surface. She sighed. It was as though the Pink Marauders had stepped upon an underwater ant hill merely by appearing on this reality. The oceans teemed with what appeared to be legion upon legion of sea creatures adorned for battle and rushing up toward the surface. Below them, cities of kelp stretched unto the horizon, gigantic buildings made from greens and browns and lit by what appeared to be hordes of electric eels.
Shark-Ginny and Whale-Art followed her below the surface, along with the dozens of Ginnys and Arts that could breathe—and thus fight—underwater. “Kill everything!” commanded Regular-Ginny, and the puppets began doing just that, gorging the Pink One on the life force of these underwater peoples.
Regular-Ginny grew dozens of flippered tentacles from her blob and swam into the depths of this ocean, ignoring the natives’ attacks against her pink hull. She began the process of destroying the kelp buildings—a process that felt almost bureaucratic at this point in her existence. Following each jump to a new reality, the Pink One needed a certain amount of destructive force to flow its way from death and wanton property destruction before it gained enough energy to drain the life force from the reality’s core, housed deep within each earth’s crust.
Regular-Ginny hated ocean planets, because the aforementioned task of property destruction on these realities was always slower, and consistently took at least a week to complete.
*
Regular-Ginny went through the motions for the next ten or so earths.
And then she felt a pang of sadness upon invading the next earth, where the Pink Marauders found themselves making war upon cloud cities high in the sky. During a heated exchange between the Pink Marauders and the native defenders of this earth, Whale-Art slipped from the edge of one of the cloud precipices. As he fell toward oblivion below, he accidentally knocked a potted petunia version of Ginny off with him. She was one of Regular-Ginny’s favorites—a particularly fierce warrior that walked about on her roots and used a pair of small tommy guns to slaughter her enemies with a hail of bullets.
Regular-Ginny frowned at having been too slow to save them from falling and thus disappearing forever into the endless gaseous mass that formed this earth. Then she swallowed her annoyance and completed the subjugation of this reality. Then, after the Pink One fed, Regular-Ginny experienced the explosion of portals, the space between realities, the nausea, the falling, and then the second explosion of portals marking an incursion into the next reality.
When she landed on the next earth, something felt off. Skulls stretched in stacks unto the horizon. A man was kneeling in front of the Pink Marauders as they appeared, bald except for a braided length of hair that dangled from the back of his skull down to the ground, where its end rested in decayed gore. His skin appeared to have both the color and consistency of spoiled goat’s milk. He wore a patch over his left eye upon which had been written the word “Arthur” in bright pink jewels, though the rest of his face looked like Regular-Ginny’s long-lost boyfriend. He wore robes of dull yellow that looked like they could have been made from flayed human skin.
This man called out, “Oh, malevolent Pink One. It is I: your servant, Arthur the Putrid. Look far and wide. I have prepared this reality for you.”
The Pink One appeared and floated before him. “Me am not happy. Me hungry for death and destruction, and Me robbed of death and destruction by you.”
Arthur the Putrid did not flinch. He reached within his robes and retrieved what looked like a mason jar. “You need not worry, oh Great One. I collected the life force for you.” He unscrewed the top and a spotlight launched from it. The light somehow moaned, and the sound reminded Ginny of the terrible version of a ghost that her niece had portrayed many Halloweens ago, only amplified over thousands of loudspeakers.
Arthur the Putrid aimed the beam directly at the Pink One. The bear squealed and flew backward in the light. At first, Regular-Ginny grew hopeful that the beam of light was somehow killing the Pink One, but like every other time a positive feeling fluttered through Ginny nowadays, the hope was quickly squashed under the boot of despair and put out of its misery. The light eventually petered out, and the Pink One flew back to her original position before Arthur the Putrid, stronger than ever.
“Oh, Me! Oh, Me! Oh, Me!” shouted the bear. “Delightful. Me want again!”
Arthur the Putrid gave a slight nod of the head. “Years ago, I foresaw this day. I prepared and I genocided, and now my long wait is over. I will provide this to you over and over and over again, if only you take me with you to be your Right Hand.”
The Pink One frowned. Ginny feared for a moment that the Pink One might fulfill this man’s wishes, giving him the Right Hand of Destruction moniker and removing both it and her life force from her. The Pink One had promised to spare Ginny’s home reality so long as Ginny served her. Ginny could only assume that her elimination—whether or not the choice was Ginny’s—would sever that promise.
“No, silly. Me Right Hand of Destruction here already,” sai
d the Pink One, waving a paw at Regular-Ginny. “You can no be Me number two. Nope, Nope, Nope. You am instead be Left Hand of Also Destruction and Life Force Catching.”
Arthur the Putrid frowned. After a few moments of silence, he muttered, “Very well.” He removed his eye from the Pink One just long enough to glare at Regular-Ginny. Regular-Ginny shrugged.
The Pink One bit down into the crust of the planet. Arthur the Putrid laughed maniacally. When he noticed nobody else was joining him in his celebratory laughter, he frowned harder than ever, kicked the dust at his feet, and tucked his hands in his pockets.
Chapter 3
THE PRE-TEEN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND
Arturo listened to his Chemistry teacher drone on and on and on. Arturo’s classmates were frantically writing notes about the nature of covalent bonds. Arturo yawned, his pencil lying dormant on the edge of his desk.
I learned this stuff before I left the crib, he thought, scorn seeping from the edges of his frown in the form of tiny bubbles. In terms of age, Arturo was a sixth grader, but he was enrolled in high school classes due to his advanced academic performance. However, Arturo believed he had learned all he could learn from high school and belonged in a university. Unfortunately for him, the system does not merely bend to the wishes of a pre-teen boy, no matter how smart he is.
“Do you have a problem with my lecture, Arturo?” demanded Mr. Lopez from the front of the class.
Darn it, thought Arturo. Darn it, darn it, darn it all to heck. I did it again. Aunt April just warned me again this morning: ‘You may be a genius, little nephew, but you behave just like a child. And us regular folks don’t take too kindly when people like you scowl at us when you think something isn’t worth your attention.’
Arturo furrowed his brow. “No, sir, Mr. Lopez. I was totally listening to everything. Heard you loud and clear. It was great.”
The Endless War That Never Ends Page 2