The Tale of 7 Deadly Sins: Story 6

Everyone on the whole block was envious of Tim. He had a dual boot, dual processing computer based on the Tyan Tiger 100 motherboard bought so cleverly and for such a good price from an eBay auction, but that computer was just the start. Tim had a dirty little secret, he was envious of Tumnus, and spent his entire life trying to exceed his accomplishments and lifestyle.

It all started when Tim saw Tumnus had a DC-AC converter in the Tumnusmobile, with which to run one or two small electrical devices. The converter plugged into a car's cigarette lighter, and allowed a household socket to be used. Naturally, Tim went out and bought cigarette adapters, which split one cigarette socket to three, and then put another adapter into those sockets sideways so that instead of just one lighter, he had nine. He did this for each of his car's two lighter receptacles and put a DC-AC adapter in each one, then split the adapters with Powerstrips. The power strips laid on the passenger side floor, all 18 of them making a rat's nest of cords and making it impossible for anyone to ride in the front seat. Tim installed dual alternators and dual batteries in his car to keep up with the current drain of the adapters, but it still could not keep up, so he bought a brand new 14-passenger van with a Triton V-10 from Ford. He sealed off the rearmost section and installed a 60hp diesel generator to supply electricity and took a VO-Tech class on how to wire a house, and modified it for his van. He now had an 11-passenger van with a V-10 and generator supplying 110 and 220 power lines running concealed through the paneling. He installed a window air conditioner from Wal-Mart and a ceiling fan to keep it frosty cool inside, with box fans in the rear and a 9" oscillating fan on the dash. Tumnus had leather upholstery in his car, so Tim set out to up him there too. Tim upholstered the interior, carpeting, and panel work in rich, Corinthian leather and started dressing only in leather clothes. He then bought a personalized tag "LETHRMN" for his van and felt that the Tumnusmobile was outdone. At stoplights in the car next to him you could just smell the saddle soap and hear the high-voltage whine.

One day, Suncat was at the stoplight taking Tumnus to the Post Office and Leatherman Tim (LT) pulled up next to them. They were in Suncat's Tahoe, which was a modest, but secret vehicle with special properties. It ran like a champ since Suncat took Tumnus' advice about running Clover splitfires. LT kept glancing nervously at Tumnus, who was checking his voice mail on his new cell phone. "What is with that guy?" Suncat asked Tumnus. "Dude, I know that guy! He lives back in the 'hood and calls himself Leatherman. What is that whine?" Tumnus asked. Tim drove from the stoplight like a red-assed, skinless dingo and Tumnus spied Vatorbutt (VB) peeking from under a leather curtain inside. "Damn that van messed up my reception!" Tumnus continued. Suncat flipped a switch and said, "That van is generating so much electricity it is interfering with all electrical devices within a block. It's a good thing I put in the dampening field material in the Tahoe's paint." Tumnus replied, "It didn't do much good, I have no idea what my voicemail was." "You have to have the window up to make it work," Suncat pointed out. Tumnus looked at his window, and sure enough - it was down. "Gotcha."

"Did they see you?" LT demanded of VB, who was laying on a leather beanbag eating pizza rolls straight out of the van's Fry Daddy. VB responded by flipping LT off. LT then pulled over, and bitch slapped VB with his left hand, the one with a permanently attached leather baseball glove. LT sewed an old-style football helmet on VB's head, and then lathered it up with leather balm. VB was not liking this, and quickly pulled a hot, steaming iron fresh off LT's onboard ironing board, and hit him across the face... accomplishing two, no three, things. First, it broke LT's nose, causing him to wail like a banshee. Second, it allowed VB to escape the Leathermobile. The third thing, well, this part was unexpected. Just as the pain began to fade, LT plopped down on the floor for a rest, but little did he know that VB had inadvertently stripped some power wire down to the nubs with his sharp toenails. The wire went right up LT's ass crack, and sent millions of amps coursing through his body. Tim sucked it up, and became Electro-Tim (ET). More of a marvel than a man, he could now propagate electromagneticaly through any medium, or none at all. ET zoomed out the door at the speed of light, looking for Tumnus, who he would try to electrocute now that he was made of electricity.

Suncat laughed his ass off, as he saw all the golf carts lying in the ditches. He had promised the people of Great Bend cheap transportation, and true to his word, it was... for a while. He had gathered all the golf carts in Arizona (no small task with all those old golfers, rest assured) and airlifted them to Great Bend in TurboTimmy (TT) a few weeks back. The carts were met with celebration in the streets as the backwoods primitives felt on par with the other fast growing immigrant cities. All was good, until the batteries died. People began to shove their carts off the road, beat them with sticks, and throw rocks at them. Then they regressed back to the Stone Age and never even tried to develop the power industry that could have easily kept the fleets of golf carts up and running.

Tumnus just shook his head. "Sometimes Suncat can be so dumb, I mean really, perpetual transportation based on the golf cart?" he complained to Son of Tumnus (SOT) over a deep margarita. SOT replied with a drunken Baaaa. Their heads turned as they heard the crackle of static outside, what they saw, did not sit easily with them. Luckily and conveniently, they were both wearing their suits of a ceramic/foam blend with a dielectric coefficient so small; they were very nearly perfect insulators. Sparks were flying from a floating person-looking thing, and the smell of burnt leather was in the air, smelling like a fresh branding iron on a dude ranch…Tumnus should know, he lived in Idaho for a while.

Suddenly, a leather-clad dingo howled, and Suncat burst onto the scene from underground in his Mole Mobile (MM), made from his prized Tahoe and a little Bobcat backhoe. It was designed the same way TT had been, except in the form of a large furry Mole, with beady little eyes that glowed red and big teeth made of high-carbon steel. "Tumnus, SOT, get in!" Suncat yelled, but not before downing a can of Guinness and smashing the empty can against his forehead. Suddenly, Electro Tim made a mad dash for our heroes, and just in the "ta-da" nick-of-time; Tumnus shut the furry side door of the MM. Suncat and Tumnus laughed aloud as Electro Tim tried to send a current into the MM, but it was to no avail.... they were insulated. MM let out a gaseous Entity out of its ass, and took off towards the East like a dust mite on steroids. Tumnus, Suncat, and Kitty, who was in the back all along, traveling in subterranean style, made it to Noble, GA, where they set up camp next door to the local crematory, on a small island in the middle of a pond. Electro Tim found the nearest utility pole and gave chase.

...Later that evening...

Tumnus and Suncat decided to go into the woods exploring. "We should be safe out here, there are no utility poles, so Electro Tim (ET) will have to hoof it for several miles if he is to find us" said Paddington bear, who appeared out of the open end of Suncat's sleeping bag. Paddington Bear, dressed in a yellow fireman's suit, was playing with an oxygen tank. When suddenly, a shot rang out, hit the tank, and exploded Paddington bear into bits of fluff and dander.

Tumnus and Suncat took it all in stride, deciding to forget about it, and continued exploring. To do so, they would have to swim to shore. They did. Suncat was swimming towards shore, feeling for the first sign of land beneath his feet. "Oh, there it is... but wait," said Suncat. The land seemed to move. "Hey, what the hell are we walking on?" questioned Tumnus, who after thinking he was on land; fell down into the shallow water, which suddenly grew deeper. Kitty, who had been watching the whole thing from his telescope on the island, got in his portable submarine to investigate. Indeed, after a few seconds, Kitty emerged, his face ghastly white. "You are standing on a bunch of skeletons", he said. Suncat yelled "RADICAL!" and dove under the surface, re-emerging with a leg bone clenched in his teeth. Tumnus leaned forward, grabbed his ear and pulled. Suncat's face ripped off and underneath was Popeye Patterson, but something was still wrong. He ripped again, this time it was Newt Gingrich, underneath that mask, the Domino's Noid, then Crash Bandicoot, Bowser from Super Mario Bros, then Yar from Yar's Revenge, then finally, the ultimate form…Jared from the Subway commercials. Tumnus ripped off his own face to reveal VB and punched Jared in the nuts with a cruel uppercut. Tumnus and Suncat watched from MM's secret compartment, a marsupial-like pouch on the underbelly of the car, easily overlooked because moles are not marsupials, but like what was said earlier, the Tahoe was a secret vehicle with special properties.

The MM morphed into an Angela Landsbury/ Michael Jordan/ mole hybrid (though still called MM) able to solve mysteries and make clutch plays. It stood erect and suddenly a field of lightening rod tipped model rockets appeared. Just then, a weary ET walked on scene and an old storm-chasing friend of Tumnus' flew by in a crop duster, seeding a cloud and adding instability to an already volatile situation. The clouds ripped open like a parting fart in a philosophy class and the rockets leapt skyward. VB turned just in time to see ET covered in a fine piano wire net getting struck by lightning at an unprecedented rate. When the maelstrom was through, ET was once again LT and VB entered stage right for the fight of a lifetime. MM was joined by TurboTimmy (TT) and the two held hands in a friendly, non-homosexual way. The Washington DC boxing commission sent a referee and Fraggle Rock sent a Gorg to co-moderate the fight in the field, the skeletons rose out of the lake to cheer, and everyone within six degrees of separation of Chandra Levy showed up to watch the fight. The event, unfortunately, was not on pay-per-view.

"Let's get it on!" yelled the Gorg. A band of gypsy-Mexicans on Shriner minibikes and stolen GB golf carts drove up and the scene got quiet. A coin was flipped and ET won, he got to choose the duel method - charades, VB then chose the technique - mime. The fight ended quickly, as VB out-mimed ET with a stunning "man behind a wall" move, and ET broke his leg with an over the top try to "descend stairs." VB claimed his prize, the lovely maid Merriam, which really pissed off the Sheriff of Nottingham AND Robin Hood, who blocked his exit. VB mimed a "what is that in the sky" which distracted the two Sherwood Forest residents, and sneaked off without Maid Merriam. He leapt into a nexus and when he emerged, he was LT. A hush fell over the crowd as they watched LT morph into VB, broken leg and all. "It worked!" screamed LT from within the leathermobile, but tragically, the batteries were dead - someone left the lights on the whole time. LT then jumped high into the air, and exploded, littering the scene with flesh and blood. Suncat stretched himself out MM's pouch, brandishing a sawed off shotgun, and blew the gypsy Mexicans into bloody pulps.

Kittywampus reached shore, and yelled out a few incantations... making the skeletons look his way. Tumnus and Suncat jumped out of their marsupial pouch, and joined Kitty by the shore. Suddenly, the skeletons made a mad dash for the remains of the dead ones, and sat Indian style within the bloody field of disaster. Tumnus threw the skeletons a box of cards and a keg of Heineken. Suncat thought that it was a terrible waste since the skeletons bodies were essentially transparent and more beer ended up on the ground than where their bellies should be, but this did not affect this overwhelmingly joyous occasion.

"You're the asshole," said the president skeleton to the asshole skeleton, who promptly dealt the rest their cards. Just then, TT and MM joined together, morphing into the form of the PyroVamp, complete with long hair, sunglasses, and perpetual flames in the background. Pyrovamp nodded towards Suncat and Tumnus, and opened his mouth, his jaw dropping to the ground. Inside his mouth, a magical harp, being played by Belial from Basket Case. The soothing sounds caused the drunken skeletons to enter a trance, and they walked directly into PyroVamps mouth. Once the last skeleton was inside, the mouth closed, but now it was not PyroVamp anymore, that was just an illusion, it was Mr. Mouth . VB lurched across the field, dragging his broken leg and hoping to take cover and splint his leg. "After everything I've done, I hate myself for what I've become," Mr. Mouth said, as he pulled his hara-kiri blade out of it's sheath and lunged at Suncat. Suncat deftly sidestepped the attack and in a matrix-esque/MIB move, dove into the mouth. The mouth got a quizzical look on its face, just before Suncat carved a hole in the back of it's head and climbed out with Mr. Mouth's pituitary, thyroid, and hypothalamus glands. The duo sat down and consumed the glands in a cannibalistic feast that gave Tumnus powers of telekinesis and Suncat pyrokinesis. Tumnus thought a pair of braces up and put them on Mr. Mouth, who screamed as they were screwed into the gums themselves with rusty sheetrock screws. Suncat lit the entire woods on fire as Tumnus stoked the winds. Flames leapt hundreds of feet into the air as the once defunct crematorium returned to life in a blaze of flesh consuming glory. The lake filled with blood running down the hill and began to boil as millennia of hate and despair were released, as were the souls of the uncremated. Suncat held his arms skyward and laughed through a mouth full of blood as he set the souls themselves afire with his newfound power. Tumnus morphed into a malevolent hydra and began tearing corpses apart and flinging limbs across the field and spraying thousands of gallons of gasoline and nitroglycerine as Suncat fueled the island's cadaverous fuel with the napalm of his thoughts.

As the temperature reached high enough to cause the spontaneous combustion and explosion of the concrete crematorium and bone of the dead, Tumnus' sense of duty returned, and he focused their powers on the enemy at hand - a now weeping Mr. Mouth, bleeding from the gums and slobbering rivulets of bloody drool, unable to talk, move, or even open his eyes. Losing strength, Mr. Mouth morphed into a human form and in a show of cowardice, tried to disembowel himself. Tumnus saw that coming, and used his telekinetic powers to strip the blade from Mr. Mouth's hand and use it instead to skin him and suspend him from a tree via large shark hooks. Suncat's attention was caught and he mixed paint thinner and scotch bonnet oil and rubbed it into the raw, glistening flesh of a man who knew agony far better than hope.

TurboTimmy+ then appeared on the scene and Tumnus climbed in, "Come on, let's go!" he called to Suncat, whose eyes were red with madness. Suncat climbed in and as the door slid shut, he transformed the fires from orange to a clear-blue flame that cleansed the land in an all-consuming fiery baptism which left nothing behind but carbon ash as a haunting rendition of Ministry's Stigmata echoed off into the nothingness left behind by the flames. A skinless dingo howled as it was consumed. Unfortunately, the pyrokinesis was as fleeting as the glorious power left Suncat as Tumnus piloted TT+ out of the swirling inferno, and they lost consciousness from the intense G-forces of acceleration at a last known heading of roughly 300 degrees from North.

VB watched from his cover, thankful to be alive, he had never seen such madness from Suncat and Tumnus. Once they were out of sight, he limped to a Ford Fairmont with shoe polish flames that had been run into a front-end loader's scoop during the evil episode, luck was with him; the keys were in the ignition. VB started up the engines, but oh darn, it wouldn't start. VB angrily opened the hood, and to his dismay, saw that the engine was not there, but instead, a pile of dust bunnies. Spewing enough cuss words to shame a sailor, VB kicked the Fairmont, but had forgotten about his bad leg, and was now in pain, which pissed him off even more. VB suddenly stopped to gather his bearing once again, and put on his thinking cap. A series of bubbles appeared over his head, as he began to daydream. Inside the large bubble above his head, were visions of Tumnus and Suncat, laughing at him. He wanted to laugh too, but could not. Indeed, he was envious of their happiness, and wondered if he would ever find his own. "Enough!" he yelled. VB found a dump truck nearby, got it start by hot-wiring it, and took off towards the northwest...following Suncat and Tumnus' trail of smoke.

...One day later, in Alliance, Nebraska...

"Burp" let out Suncat. The dining room was exquisitely decorated. They were at the Burger King. Tumnus' VB detecting alarm went off, just as he was about to finish his last French fry. All was going well, when suddenly, all was going even better. A busty amateur dressed as a French maid waltzed in, and performed unspeakable sexual acts on Tumnus, and then vanished into the back Kitchen. "Where was I? Ah yes, VB is near, we have to leave" said Tumnus. The duo left the place, and went to get some gas. Suncat had to go to the bathroom, Tumnus could tell. Ever since Suncat had self installed his see through ass, everyone could tell. "Man that's gross, get rid of that madness" said Tumnus with a look of disgust. "Indeed, oh very nice" said Suncat. While Tumnus was waiting, he began to converse with a local Indian chief, who had just come out of the liquor store next door. "Indeed, what a shit-hole. All they ever get here is blizzards, and an occasional high based thunderstorm. Well, in the summer I guess they get some good nocturnal stuff, but..." Tumnus was cut short by the Indian, named "Donnie the Indian chief." Just then, Suncat burst through the door, "What a relief, I feel so much better. Who is this?" he asked. "How. I am Donnie the Indian Chief." "He's a Sagittarius," said Tumnus. Beep Beep! "Oh yes time to go. VB will be here shortly," said Tumnus.

Then, they were off, but to where? "I don't know," said Tumnus. The wind was blowing ferociously, with sand and dust flying through the air. It was so dry, and when Suncat touched the car door, a large shock was sent out. "Ouch!" said Suncat, looking down on his leather glove. Then, something strange began to happen. Suncat's glove was smoldering, and he quickly got rid of it on the ground. Donnie the Indian Chief started to sing Indian songs, and ran over, diving head first into the smoldering leather pile. It swirled around, and turned into a bubbling pile of sludge. Tumnus smiled, wearing sunglasses, while Suncat searched the console for his Chinese healing ointment. Then, out of the sludge, arose none other than Leatherman Tim, incarnate. Then the sludge swallowed him back up and Leatherman Tim was dead for good, but out of his ashes, like the proverbial phoenix, arose the Envious Sagittarius (ES), which was, like the name sounded, Roman.

ES represented the most envious being to ever be part of the zodiac. He reached his arms skyward and leapt into the sky about three feet, then fell down and sprained his ankle. "Ah, there it is," said Suncat as he pulled out the Chinese blister salve. He put it on, and sighed his relief. "What is that?" he asked Tumnus as he pointed as ES. Tumnus just shrugged and replied, "That thing came out of that pile of smoking crap." On the horizon, a dump truck was visible and Suncat and Tumnus chose to stay and let Armageddon come to them. VB appeared on the scene wearing a tailored suit and top hat. He sauntered over to TT+ and leaned up against it. SOT sneaked around the car and grabbed VB's ankles and pulled them out from under him, and VB fell. "Why are you guys such pricks?!? You will pay!" he yelled as SOT dragged him to a near-by strategically placed Kittywampus circus cannon. Suncat placed his hand to his ear and acted like he couldn't hear VB. "Don't patronize me, you have everything," he continued. Suncat shrugged and VB kept ranting, "DAMN YOU! I know you can hear me!" Tumnus approached the cannon with a lit cigar, Cuban of course, "Why VB, you know a good mime doesn't talk." VB's jaw dropped and he looked at Suncat with horror in his eyes - he had been out-mimed. Tumnus blew a smoke ring and pushed a button on his watch, which opened a trans-dimensional nexus triple-ring structure at the end of the runway in the general direction the cannon was pointed. He pushed another button on his watch and the rings began to rotate, and stopped accelerating when their tangential velocities were equal to the speed of light. From the rings a bright light shone.

Suncat was thoroughly impressed. He pointed and shrugged. "Stop miming, you won," whined VB. Suncat shrugged again and cleared his throat. "What does this do?" he asked Tumnus. SOT signaled with a crescendoeing BAAAAH that the identical structure on the opposite side of the rings was in place with ES inside it.
Tumnus made some quick calculations, added Kentucky windage, and uplinked the instructions to ET's stolen computer that was powering the system. "Well, I'm not sure, but it ought to be noisy." Tumnus pulled out a dynamite plunger box and raised the handle. Sirens sounded and the locals all retreated underground, with a quick flick of the wrist, he shoved the plunger down and the cannons roared. They fired ES and VB on a collision course inside a singularity. Upon entering the rings, the light stopped shining out of the device and a sound like white noise filled the air. A line projection of VB appeared before them, looking pixilated and green, much like a computer generated 3D image done only with green light. VB looked around and said something incomprehensible, and kept talking until Suncat figured out that he was talking in English, but the words were being said the phonetic equivalent of a photograph negative. He ran some algorithms through speech recognition software to invert them and the interpreting device started to work.

VB looked at them with haunted eyes and said, "You suck."