Thread 1

“See, this self-centered, choose-for-yourself-your-own-destiny bullshit that Sartre or other dead frogs jerked off over really isn’t all that profound,” said the man that I had never met, with eyes like shotguns and razor wire. Speaking of shotguns, have you ever seen a Winchester up close? I imagine they’re exquisite weapons when they’re well taken care of. He striped his red, white, and blue. “Can’t you talk? You can sure open your fat mouth enough to eat the state’s cock.”

I stared down the paint instead.

He wouldn’t close his own patriotic gullet. “See, we like to emphasize the individual, we like to pretend that we are all like fish who swim in their own directions. Often convenient for us, our governments, healthcare workers and moms that we swim in the same direction, usually. The idea of humanism or existentialism is not an individual notion, because no person is an individual actor. It’s a fun idea in a vacuum, but selfish people, such as yourself, get killed off by people like me. You hinder our growth.”

“And you are?” I asked.

“Ah, so he can speak. Think of me as a kind of immune response. Mother nature's immune response. Your whole ‘I am the master of my destiny shit’ is just how a society regulates itse-”

“No, your name you dipshit. I’d like to know the name of the man who has a gun to my head,” I said.

My knees were tired, and this guy wasn’t making a lick of sense. He forced me to sit felattio-style for a whole 20 minutes, and so there I sat, listening to this windbag drone on and on about his vaguely anarchist moods and rants, which could have found a pleasant home in the diary of a 13-year-old in middle schooler — all entirely at eye-to-crotch level.

“Raphael. Do you know that name? What that name means?” He said, and his whiskey-darkened breath was enough to drag me out of my own disparaging inner-monologue.

I hummed for a bit, searching the letter ‘R’ in my brain, landing somewhere around the word ‘retarded’ and ‘recalcitrant.’

“You’re a ninja turtle?” I said. The retarded ninja turtle stuck me in the nose with the barrel of his gun.

“Raphael is the name of a great Italian artist, someone who brought such profound meaning and beauty into the world that he’s become a beacon of light for oppressed people like me, and- hey, what the fuck are you doing?”

I had wrapped my lips around the barrel of the gun, hoping to speed things along, lest he start with a backstory.

“I sensed a monologue coming on, so I wanted to let you know that I’m ready to get this party started whenever you’re ready. You’re ready, right?” I said, a mouth full of iron.

This whole thing was getting to be annoying as hell. First, I cried when he beat me over the head with a brick and put a blindfold over my eyes. Anyone would cry when being assaulted on their way home from work.

My shame burned like a molten pizza roll in my mouth. I wanted to die. Sure, I had a blissful, single-room apartment to come home to, and many animated women to write fictional stories about. And there was pizza for dinner, and that cute delivery girl who always works nights to gawk at from my blindfolded windows. Oh, and there were people on the internet who had very disconcerting opinions about one of my favorite in-game weapons from Daggers Edge who needed their violent homosexuality reaffirmed. But when he started playing soft classical - Debussy I think - whispering all this stuff about reclaiming the individual from a collectivist society, I did kind of agree with his plan to ‘splatter my gutless body all over the fucking walls,’ and that was purley out of a need to escape his presence. His performance was so corny. It had no tact, no class, no character. I could hardly believe this was the patron saint of the rebellion, and his plan was to accost me, of all people, on my way home from work.

‘Raphael’ was definitely not ready to light this candle, because he stabbed me in the nose with the barrel again, and told me shut the fuck up and stop trying to suck start his shotgun.

I started to bleed. God, I hated blood. The sight of my body’s own juice made my stomach heave forward like it was trying to crawl out of my mouth. Instead, I heaved forward. In my conniption fit, I knocked the gun out of Raphael’s hands. It went skittering into the darkness, well out of the reach of the warehouse’s lights. Were I not well bound at my hands and knees, I’m sure I could have seized this opportunity to use my 70+ pound advantage to crush Raphael like the wiry little tweaker he was. All I could do was watch that horrible tear of blood heave down my upper lip with all the urgency of a xan’d turtle, and splatter on the concrete beneath me. The sight churned my guts. I fought the urge to cry genuine tears of pain while Raphael went looking for his candy-cane striped shotgun.

Two things were happening at this moment that would rock the American underground to its festering core. My would-be attacker was looking for his shotgun in the dark while I watched blood drain out of my face, and somewhere in some warehouse across town, someone lost a shipment of 327 copies of uncensored doujinshi - an illicit import straight from the motherland itself - and was now about to pay for it with the collective biological weight of their skull’s contents, spewed across the warehouse’s floors.

In that moment, all of our fates were intertwined. I had some connection to this strange, perverted man: the man who would then go hunting for that doujinshi, the man who I would accompany on our eroge odyssey. We were men of the rising sun, or we aspired to be, beating our collective dicks to the same two-dimensional women. Our fates were bound at the dick by the inter-dimensional Chinese-finger-trap of trap-loving tightness. To free our meat swords -- we would have to get closer and touch tips, before we could ever get farther apart.