Dahksa Superbio and the Order of Soonmai are available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Dahksa Superbio and the Order of Soonmai, in order that others may use these properties as they wish. All rights reversed.
“It’s, hmm…I don’t know,” said Grant Richmond, alias the Mad Hatter.
“Yeah, it’s, uh…there’s a word for it. I just don’t know what that word is,” said Reuben Reuben, alias the Red Rube.
“I like it!” Persephone exclaimed.
The two superheroes turned to look at her.
“You know, Seph,” the Rube said, raising an eyebrow. “You don’t have to be nice about everything. Especially when there’s no one around to get their feelings hurt.”
“Oh, you don’t care for it?” Grant asked. “Whew, thank goodness. I thought I was the only one.”
“I like it,” Persephone reaffirmed. “I think it’s fun. It’s simple, maybe even crude, but I like the message.”
“The message is hard to figure out,” the Rube said. “And that’s on top of the fact that the art is ugly as sin.”
“I will say, Persephone, I have seen better,” the Hatter said, nodding.
The three adventurers were standing in a blank-walled, dimly-lit cubical room in an unknown region of the universe, having teleported there on the cue of Persephone’s alterself, Pluto. In front of them was a plain wooden desk, which had a laptop computer sitting on it—both were basic in design, matching the aesthetics of early 21st Century Earth. The laptop was displaying a comic strip that fictionalized one of Persephone’s past adventures, wherein she had helped a monk of the Order of Soonmai, one Dahksa Superbio, deal with the sudden manifestation of a physical avatar of all his conflated negative self-judgments. Persephone had subdued the so-called “Dark Superbio” and his mockery of the young Dahksa by use of an Opposite to Emotion Beam, which had inverted Dark Superbio’s words and forced him to compliment the real Superbio instead of insult him.
“I think what it’s trying to say is fairly clear,” said Persephone. “I mean, okay, it’s complicated by having a meta-layer to it. This really happened to me, in real life, but at the same time, this comic, as we’re viewing it, was authored by someone—someone who titled it ‘Based on a True Story.’ Assuming that this person doesn’t know I’m real, this must be a metaphorical account of their use of Opposite of Emotion to battle their own internal negative voices.” She pointed to some text that sat at the bottom of the strip. “They even say something to that effect right here.”
“I still say they didn’t explain it very well,” the Red Rube put in. “They don’t ever tell us what ‘Opposite to Emotion’ actually is.”
“Opposite to Emotion is a skill taught in dialectical behavioral therapy, a form of mental health therapy practiced on your home planet,” Persephone said. “I like DBT enough that I’ve incorporated its principles into my energy manipulation arsenal.”
“And I assume this ‘Opposite to Emotion’ is exactly what it sounds like?” the Mad Hatter asked.
“Basically you train yourself to do the opposite of what your negative emotions tell you to do. If your depression wants you to stay inside under the covers, you ask your friends to hang out—if your anxiety tells you that driving is dangerous, you take short, slow drives around the block. That sort of thing.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
“I suspect this author uses it for themselves in the same way I used it on Dark Superbio. They take all of the negative words in their head and turn them into positive ones.” She giggled in that moment. “At the very least, being aggressively, violently nice to yourself is usually so ridiculous that you end up laughing. Which dispels the dark feelings pretty quick.”
“That makes a good deal of sense,” said the Hatter. “I might have to try that sometime.”
“None of that excuses the fact that this is a terrible comic,” the Rube said. “None of what you just said is communicated in it, Seph. Not in the actual content of it. And like I said—the art is absolutely horrendous. They should’ve practiced a lot more before they even thought about posting it online.”
“Fair opinion. But mine is that everyone’s gotta start somewhere.” She shrugged. “At least they tried, within the moment.”
“It’s just very unprofessional. I don’t understand how we’re supposed to take this seriously. It’s so cringe.”
“You feeling okay, Rube?” the Mad Hatter asked then. “I don’t think whoever made this took it super seriously…”
“And there’s really no such thing as cringe,” added Persephone, calmly. “That’s something that people say to try to keep others trapped in artificial hierarchies.”
“This person’s insert character is named ‘Superbio?’ Pretty dang egotistical of them.”
“Like I said, I don’t think whoever wrote this knows that the characters depicted are real,” Persephone said. “From our perspective, at least, Superbio comes from an Order of pulp hero-type people. They all have dramatic names. The greatest of the Soonmai Brothers, Dahksa Vahjj, arranged to name himself after the most dramatic pulp hero of them all. Superbio is still in training, he has no chosen discipline yet. He could become anybody. So he keeps his name a little on the generic-heroic side, for now, until something better comes along. I don’t think he’s intended as a self-insert.”
“I’m just not very happy when people demand other people’s precious time for shit that’s silly and unpolished,” the Red Rube barked. “We don’t need to see your stupid autistic hyperfixations. We don’t need to see you act all clever and obscure. We don’t need excuses for why your art looks bad.” His face was twisted with rage then. “And we don’t need saccharine bullshit telling us obvious crap that we already know!”
“It’s just some rando on the Internet doing a comic about being nice to yourself!” Persephone cried.
“Oh, ‘be nice to yourself?’ How fucking original. Did we need to see that tired horse beaten to death for a zillionth time? Much less rendered with children’s crayons?!”
“Reuben, calm down,” Persephone urged. “Something’s wrong, something’s…using you…”
“No, they’re not! This is my true self!”
But there was a flash of something behind his eyes. And then came the roaring wind that divided his current self from the mortal boy he was at heart.
Suddenly, he was gone—but he hadn’t called out the magic words, “Hey Rube!” Nor was it young Reuben Reuben who took his place. Instead, it was a dark, blurry-edged shape, a black hole in space in the rough form of a woman. To the Mad Hatter’s horror, it distantly resembled Persephone.
“You thought Brother Superbio was the only one to have a dark side?” the wraith laughed. “No, Persephone—we all cast a shadow. Some of us longer than others!”
“I was afraid of this. I really hoped that you didn’t actually exist,” Persephone said.
“What—what is that thing, Seph? And what happened to Reuben?” The Mad Hatter raised his fists, but for once he didn’t think they’d be of any use to him.
“I suspect that this creature sabotaged the multidimensional link that allows Reuben to swap between his mortal and superhero identities,” the blonde traveler said. “She made it her own. Reuben is alive—but trapped somewhere.”
“You called it a she?”
“Yes.” Persephone sighed. “I’ll...explain. You know that I’m the same as Pluto, the one who books my appointments for me. But he’s not my only other face. The parts of me that are beyond perception manifest as Hecate, for instance. And this…is another of my faces. My own dark side. Mormo.”
“I’m a lawyer, not a literary scholar,” the Mad Hatter said then, “but isn’t Mormo the name of an ancient Greek boogeyman?”
“I have been called the Boogeyman before,” the shadow intoned. “Though perhaps Boogeywoman is more appropriate.”
“It’s a fitting name, for sure,” said Persephone, bitterly. “I prayed we’d never meet. To be honest, I didn’t want to believe you were really out there in the cosmos. But that was arrogant of me. You’re right—I have darkness inside me.”
“Yes—sometimes we are even accursed.” Again the wraith, Mormo, laughed. “Because we are the same as wretched, behexed, chaos-loving Eris, we are joined together with that hideous clown who you hate more than anything—Zanthia Honkledonk!”
“Zanthia Honkledonk!” Persephone cried. She shook her fist as she spat out the name. “Okay, listen, Mormo—I stand by my point. There’s no such thing as cringe. There are some things out there that are genuinely, inescapably gross, and bad, but 99% of the time I don’t believe that people are doing anything wrong by trying something new for themselves. That having been said, Zanthia’s story of origin, that ‘Kinky Sexy OC Heaven’ one, was condemned to the Lost Stream recently, and that is absolutely a good thing. I hope that’s the end of her, I hate being bound to her.” Looking aside, she murmured, “Somehow I don’t think even being rendered Multiversally non-canon will stop that bitch…”
The Mad Hatter was taken aback. He’d never heard Persephone swear before.
“But you see? Even you agree. Some things belong to the void. It’s just the natural order of things.” Mormo held her empty hand out towards her counterpart. “This comic is part of your narrative—one of only a few pieces of it to be meta-textually expressed at present. If it is cringe and useless—you are cringe and useless.”
“Stories change—they evolve—sometimes maladaptively. Like all forms of art they’re inherently fluid.” Seph had seemingly regained her focus, having already forgotten the Clown in Yellow. “What are perfectionism and professionalism at the end of the day but functions of capitalism? Sentient beings create things—it’s just what they do. It’s the same as birds flying, or fish swimming, or children playing. Some of them play long games, some of them give up halfway through, some of them never get good even after years and years of practice. But who benefits from cutting people down in innocent pursuits? Who benefits from denying people gentleness in their mistakes? Respect, that’s something tangible, that’s a lifeblood. Those who don’t act respectful do merit critique. But are we to forget that everything in existence teaches us something about existence, and that that’s a joy in itself? A joy born of the natural diversity of the universe!”
“Even trash teaches us things! Especially does trash teach us things!” the Hatter laughed. “I love the ‘soap operas’ that play on the radio back in my time. And I know that Seph loves her cheesy monster movies. You don’t need a good budget or even good writing to have a good time.”
“You’re right. Let us sanctify trash,” said Mormo, sarcastically. “Let us abolish trash cans. Let us allow carcasses and offal and rubbish to flood the streets. Let’s allow dirt to smother gold.” And then, doubling her sarcasm, she went on, “Besides, it’s not even that big a deal. I’m just criticizing a story. It’s not the end of the world.”
“But I do feel like some of your phrasing goes against curiosity, and against compassion,” Persephone said. “I know you don’t want me to be all hung up on that, but it’s part of my mandate to try to improve the condition of sentients everywhere. And so I don’t want you running around calling people cringe. It’s mean.”
“‘Oh, you’re just so mean!’ You little baby,” Mormo growled. “Get over yourself, snowflake. This is the real world. You gotta have a thick skin if you’re going to make it out here.”
“But your rhetoric will never be right, Mormo. Curiosity and compassion are the supreme virtues. No matter what.”
“Stop using this moment to get on your soapbox! I hate when you people get all preachy!”
“Then let me explain that I cast a Beam on you from the moment I recognized you,” Persephone said then, smiling. “Another skill. ‘Check the Facts.’”
“What?! No! No!!”
“The facts are that this comic and the person who made it are far from perfect,” she said. “And clearly, so am I.”
“You can’t do this to me! You can’t!”
But she could. Persephone was being skillful. And she happened to be right, too, this time, anyway.
Mormo was her opposite. If Persephone was right, that unfortunately made her wrong.
Mormo had to be right. A good chunk of her identity depended on it.
Without it, she lost her grip on realspace.
“This isn’t over, Persephone! I still have your precious Red Rube!”
The Mad Hatter bared his teeth. She was right in that regard.
“You’ll never find us, you fool,” the evil alterself went on. “I know you too well—because I am your true self! And what you think is your true self—is just a stupid hippie Mary Sue! Empress Theresa-tier trash!”
But then her shadowy form flashed with a bright light, and she began to fade away. With a final cry, and a clawing lunge towards her counterpart, she vanished from existence.
Persephone and the Mad Hatter stood in silence for a moment. It took a while for the Hatter to take in that he had just witnessed Persephone arguing with herself.
“This isn’t over,” Persephone said. “We’re going to find Mormo. When I first considered that she might exist, I had a theory on where a being such as her might come from. But I’ll need help to find out for sure.”
“Who do you think can help us?”
“Me.” She turned to him, her face glowing with confidence. “I told you, I have many faces. Now you’ve met Mormo, my ugly side, but there’s another one I can call on.”
“Oh God,” he said, “are you summoning that Honkledonk lady? Because, from what you’ve said about her, she sounds completely insane…”
“No, of course I’m not involving Honkledonk. Besides, now that she’s non-canon, I’m not sure the bond of Eris will work. I’m not summoning Hecate either.” She crossed her arms. “Pluto and I are working together all the time, every minute of every day. But when we’re in the same room together—it means business is about to get taken care of.”
“Pluto made you an appointment here,” the Hatter said. “I think he knew this going to happen. And in making it happen, he was warning us about Mormo.”
“I’m sure that’s what he—I—meant.”
Persephone looked down at the laptop, and wondered who had put it there. Then she smiled.
“Before I go—”
And she snapped her fingers.
Somewhere out in the universe was someone who was low on hope. Someone who couldn’t even find hope within their creations anymore.
When she snapped, her smiling face appeared in their mind. They felt better for just a moment. And suddenly they found the strength to try again.
And try they did.
The authorial intent improved slightly.
TO BE CONTINUED...!
No comments:
Post a Comment