In the meantime, I’ve been poking my old Silent Hill webcomic again; it’s currently on mini-hiatus as I build and texture and decorate some more scenery for it (not one but two sets for this next bit) but new pages should start appearing soon.

I have been sneaking in bits of writing time where I can. The paying job has been crazy busy and I’ve been working late a lot, and then I’ve been working on getting my ass in shape to run in this, and other assorted things have been going on. It is slow, but it is coming along, I promise.

In case you’re wondering, it involves Kenny and a late-night radio show that is absolutely not Coast To Coast AM. *cough*

Speaking of the Race for the Cure, donations are greatly appreciated. Even a dollar or two will help. Just to clarify: I do not see a dime of this–it all goes straight to Susan G. Komen For The Cure–but I might be persuaded to reward donors with doodles or quick fics. I’m just sayin’.

(protip: yes, I know how a calendar works and I know how long it’s been since I’ve put up a chapter. Commenting or e-mailing to tell me such doesn’t do anything but kind of make you look like a jerk. Please don’t waste your time or mine doing that. )

THANK YOU, CATHERINE ♥♥♥

Also, chapter 12 is coming along–though admittedly slowly on account of new Wii in house and things to play on it. Anyone play Animal Crossing: City Folk? My friend code and stuff are here, I got apples and some nifty shirt designs in the tailor shop, drop me a line with your code if you’d like to come swap foreign fruit or something.

…also also I kind of hammered out a quick and silly bit of future fakenews stuff with a little bit of smut.

Also, the director’s cut of that Shousetsu Bang*Bang story is up over here.

Meanwhile, I scribbled out a little slightly naughty ficlet set in the same universe as that SS*BB story.

So imagine my surprise when, come quitting time, Roger asked me to step into his office for a minute.

Ohhhhh shit.

Let me tell you something about my boss. He has an office. He, being the boss, is the only guy on the fire team with an office. He hates being The Guy WIth The Office. He spends as little time as is humanly possible in his office. And he uses his office for exactly two things: taking naps and chewing asses.

He did not look sleepy.

Okay. Logically, I knew I had nothing to worry about from him. I’d been working a little overtime to cover for guys Ike had hit harder than me. I hadn’t taken a sick day since the Teeth Incident. My stepdad had brought in two briskets the week the Texas City guys came in. I had exactly two minor writeups on my entire four-year record–one for getting a day off and a day not off mixed up and accidentally pulling a no-call no-show, and one for an admittedly immature and irresponsible episode involving mini-marshmallows and a wrist rocket. Other than that, I was an awesome employee. In so many words on my last review, in fact.

There was no reason for me to think I was in any kind of trouble on that particular day. So why did I get this feeling of impending doom when I walked past Brian and he gave me another weird unprovoked nasty look?

“Shut the door,” Roger said as soon as I set foot in his office.

That, that right there, that is never good.

For whatever reason, I thought, I was almost certainly doomed.

Roger stared at me for a minute.

“Is Brian still out there?” he asked, quietly enough that he wouldn’t be heard through the door.

I cleared my throat. “Passed him on the way in here, I think he was heading out, but–”

“Good.” Roger blew out a breath, sat down, and put his feet on his desk. “You,” he started, and oh fuck whatever it was, whatever I did, here it was, “are not in trouble. You’re not even close to being in trouble. Now sit your ass down and relax. Jesus, you look like you want a blindfold and a cigarette.”

“Okay, yeah, I didn’t think so,” I said. Oh you fucker why do you do this to me, I thought. “So what’s, uh…”

Roger pointed at the closed door. “That son of a bitch cornered me out at the smoking patio,” he said, and it was pretty obvious which son of a bitch he was referring to. “And he said–” He paused and shook his head. “He said he does not want to work with you.” This he said in the overly careful, measured tone that usually means this is not a verbatim quote.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Uh…” He cleared his throat. “Okay, what he actually said was ‘I want another shift, I ain’t working with that faggot.’”

I blinked. I swear to God I felt my brain hang and reboot. “What.”

“And then he said some shit about the PC police taking over and if he was me he would have fired you ’cause thank God you can still do that in Texas and some other bullshit.” He shrugged. “Which is when I told him to shut the hell up.”

“Okay,” I said. This… boy. This was a first. There was no precedent. After the years I had worked here and never had a single problem with anyone, I had no idea how the fuck to even start to process this. “Wow. Okay. Wow. Man, what the hell. I didn’t do anything to him–I don’t think I did anything, I mean–”

“No, you didn’t. I know you didn’t. I know. It’s cool.” Roger scratched at the back of his neck. “If that son of a bitch was here permanent, I’d be on the phone with HR right now telling ‘em to rustle up the paperwork to fire him and yeah, I told him so. Don’t know if it got through his thick-ass skull, but.” He picked up a thin sheaf of papers and a pen. “He’s only gonna be here till Texas City gets back online. They’re talking two, three weeks, and then he’ll go back. You got a week of vacation I’m just gonna have to get on your ass about taking before you lose it in a couple months and it might be a good idea if you go ahead and take it now. I’m gonna go ahead and put him on night shift, too. Unless you want it instead.”

I shook my head. “He can have it.”

“Okay.” Roger scribbled some stuff on that stack of papers–presumably the kind that said “this guy can go on vacation–” and tossed them in a box on the corner of his desk. “If he pulls anything with you, you don’t say a word to him, you just come straight to me and I will deal with his ass. ‘Kay?”

“Yeah.” I raked a hand through my hair, still barely able to think anything beyond man, what the fuck? about all this.

“‘Kay.” He stood up and slapped me on the shoulder. “See you in a week.”

“He what?”

Yeah, that’s about what I figured Kenny would have to say about that. “You heard me.”

“He called you a what!?”

“You heard that too.”

“Oh hell no.” He jabbed his backspace key a couple of times to remove the spastic blob of keyboardmashing I’d just made him splatter all over his very professional e-mail message. “And you didn’t hit him? You’re a better man than I.”

I rubbed my forehead. “One: he didn’t say it to me. And two: he’s going to be gone in two or three weeks and it’s not worth losing my job over.” I coughed. “And, uh, three: he’d already left.”

Kenny made that little snotty snorting noise he makes when he’s fighting the urge to bonk his forehead on the nearest wall or desk. “You should let the air out of his tires.”

“Dude–”

“Put pureed habaneros in his lunch.”

“Dude, no, I have to work there too–”

“Put eyedrops in his Coke.”

“Jesus!” I threw up my hands. “Man, why do I get the feeling you’ve tested all that shit out yourself?”

“Because you know I survived four years of college in America.” He sent off his very professional e-mail. “Seriously, though, tell me you’re at least filing a complaint or something.”

“I will if he does it to my face.”

“Why wait? That’s discrimination, you can–”

“Not in Texas, it’s not.”

He started another Very Important E-Mail and glanced up from his laptop. “Are you serious?”

“You know that thing we did the night before last? You remember that?”

“Mmm.” Kenny’s fingers stilled on his keyboard. His eyes glazed over. “Oh yeah.”

“Yeah, well, that was illegal here six years ago.” I flopped down on Kenny’s sofa. “He’s only going to be there two or three weeks. I’m taking a week off. When I go back to work he’ll be on a different shift. It’s not worth starting a big old shitstorm over.”

He blew out a sigh and shook his head, then went back to typing. “Don’t you ever want to move?” he asked me.

“Move, as in–”

“As in, move. Somewhere that’s not so much with the redneck assholes.”

I shrugged. “Not really. I grew up here. My friends are here. My family’s here.”

“And all my friends and family are in Japan and yet, here I am. I–” Kenny’s pocket started singing before he could finish that sentence. He set his laptop aside, wriggled his cell out of his hip pocket, and flipped it open. “Hello? …yes, it is, who’s–oh. Oh! Hi! Yeah, of course I remember–oh God, they didn’t come back, did they? …okay, good, that’s… mmm, no, but…” Long pause. “Really. Oh wow.” Longer pause. “Huh. Yeah, that sounds like something I might, uh… of course, sure, let me–” He tucked the phone between his ear and shoulder and pantomimed scribbling on his palm with his finger. I tossed him one of his stupid tiny notebooks and a pencil, and then made a point of stealing the laptop long enough to pop Notepad open and gesture at it.

Kenny scribbled down the name “Roy Russell,” the word “Groveton,” and a phone number with a 936 area code. And then he flipped me off. I beamed. Mission accomplished. “Oookay,” he said, dropping the pencil onto the coffee table. “I’ll give him a call right now. Uh huh. You too. Bye bye.” With that, he snapped the phone shut, but did not stuff it back into his pocket. “That was Edith,” he said. “Lady with the redcaps?”

“Oh yeah.” Yeah, that… that was something I would never, ever forget. Well, not so much the redcaps themselves because I didn’t go along with Kenny on that trip, but the aftermath? Yeah, that was one for the history books.

“Well, she has a friend of a friend with some strange birds on his property, she remembered what an awesome job I did on her little redcap problem, and she wanted to know if I had time to talk to him about it.”

“Huh.” I frowned. “Birds?”

“Birds.” He shrugged. “Chickens, specifically.”

“Huh,” I repeated. “So… isn’t this maybe more of a fish-n-game dude problem?”

He wrinkled up his nose. “Yeah, uh, I’m thinking maybe it’s more of a me problem. Because from what she said, they didn’t have feathers. They had scales.”

“Scales,” I repeated.

“Scales.”

“Chickens with scales.”

“That’s what she said.” Was that a grin? Just a little bit of one? “Oh, man. I need to talk to the guy first, but if it’s what I’m thinking, man, I’m gonna have to get Don to buy me some time so I can rewrite that chapter with some actual…” He trailed off and wandered out the back door, already dialing.

Wait. “Rewrite that chapter with some actual…”

I marched out onto the back porch just as Kenny put the phone to his ear. “Hi, is this Roy Russell? …ah, okay, this is Kenny Tachibana, Edith told me you had some strange birds on your–is this a good time, or–okay, great, great–”

I seized Kenny’s stupid notepad and pencil and scrawled one word under Roy Russell’s name and phone number: Cockatrices?

He gave me a thumbs-up. “So, could you tell me a little more about your chicken problem?”

Oh crap. Oh crap. No. Not cool.

See, here’s what Kenny knew about cockatrices (or what he’d showed me in the current draft of his latest book), which is all I knew about cockatrices.

I didn’t know whether or not Kenny knew anyone who had actually seen cockatrices in person these days and I couldn’t ask while he was on the phone, so I didn’t know how true any of this shit actually was. But supposedly, they looked like chickens with some kind of reptilian features–I’m guessing the scales would qualify. Which is fine, okay, it’s actually pretty fascinating if you think about it. They’re like this one point where birds and reptiles didn’t quite go their separate evolutionary ways.

But what they were really known for was turning people into stone. With their eyes. Yeah. Great. If that was in any way true, I didn’t know why Kenny was even thinking about going to check this out in person. I definitely did not want to ride along on this one. Sure, there seemed to be a number of hypothetical defenses against that, but holy shit, wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing to have to call in to work with in a week? I could just imagine the phone call. Hi, Roger? This is Kenny. Jeff can’t come in to work today. He’s been turned to stone. Yeah, it sucks, but I got him a nice pedestal, he looks awesome out on the back porch. Listen, I gotta go, I don’t know what the hell people have been feeding the pigeons around here lately but I gotta go hose him off again.

But the longer Kenny talked to Roy, the more certain I was that there was going to be a road trip in his very near future. And seeing as how I was on vacation and had nothing better to do, it would have been pretty shitty of me to not help him out.

“Okay, and the address–got it. No, no, that’s not too far, let’s say… tomorrow, about noon or so?” He scribbled some more info down and set the notepad aside. “Okay. Great. See you then. Bye.” He snapped his phone shut. And grinned. And grinned.

Oh, I did not like this.

“So,” he burbled, “Apparently, he noticed the scaly chickens when his dog went after them and all of a sudden he just kind of fell over on his side.”

“Who, the guy?”

“The dog. And then the birds ran off, and a few minutes later the dog was fine.”

“Okay,” I said. “So maybe he has an epileptic dog.” Oh God. Epileptic dog. Please let it be an epileptic dog. I mean, God, poor dog, but it sure beat the alternative…

“It happened more than once. Always when the dog was chasing the birds.” Kenny scooped up his laptop and scurried back into the house. “So! That explains the whole turn-you-to-stone thing, it’s just temporary paralysis, that’s fine, we can deal with that! Right?”

Christ. Kenny was way, way, way too chipper about this. “Um… no?” I followed him into the house. “Dude? Have you ever actually talked to someone that’s seen those in person?”

He shrugged. “Well, not that I know of, but–”

“Okay…” I shut the back door and gently led Kenny to the couch before he could run off and start throwing clothes and shit in a duffel bag. “So what if the paralysis thing is just like a warning shot or something?” He quirked an eyebrow and shook his head at me: say what? “How the hell do you know they can’t actually do the whole stone thing?”

Kenny frowned a little. Aha. He had to think about it. Got ‘im.

But before I could open my mouth to claim victory, he cut me off. “Okay. Say you were a chicken. A tasty, tasty little chicken.”

“A tasty chicken that just happens to have ugly-ass scales.”

“Whatever. Say you were an ugly chicken with Magical Eye Lasers you could use to turn things to stone. Like, honest-to-God solid stone. But if you wanted to, you could just make things fall down paralyzed for like five minutes.”

“Uh…huh.”

“Say something that would very much like to eat you was chasing you. Would you rather Magical Eye Laser it to put it on the ground for like five minutes after which you know it will get up and keep chasing you if it’s marginally intelligent or very hungry or just really likes chicken, or Magical Eye Laser it into a statue that will never chase you again?”

I blinked at him. “I am not a Magical Eye Laser Chicken,” I said. “You’re asking me to speak from a position of Non-Magical-Eye-Laser-Chicken privilege. But I’d probably put it out of commission for good, yeah.”

“Exactly.” Kenny thrust a single pointy finger at me. I knew I should never have let Mario bring that Phoenix Wright game over. “You would if you could. So why doesn’t this guy have a dog statue in his yard? Because they can’t do that.” And there was that grin again. “It’ll be fine! Besides, all you have to do is, y’know, not look them right in the eyes.”

Did that sound like a candidate for the Famous Last Words List for 2008? Because it totally was.

The new Shousetsu Bang*Bang is out, and I have a story in it. It’s not 100 Candles smut (I’m hoping to have a preview for y’all soon, if not the whole damn chapter), it’s something, uh… different. And it has a couple of pretty pictures on it. It’s fairly ridiculous, but oh God I had fun writing it.

If you enjoy this, please take a moment to check out the rest of the issue and show the authors some love.

Between NaNoWriMo and the SS*BB story that ate my brains in the good way and OMGCHRISTMAS and chunks of my website kind of getting hosed I’ve just been slammed and haven’t had much time to work on 100 Candles. But it’s a-comin. Really.

I’ll see what I can do about tweaking the font size, and uh, I’m not sure why the comment box isn’t showing up on stories and other pages. Obviously I did something terrible with the best of intentions and now I will have no idea how to fix it! Aheh.

[ETA: One line of copypasta later, comments are working on the stories. \o/]