Slut Root 3: The Revengening

 

On the Shelf:	Behind the Counter:
₵$63 Ghost Tobacco (20)	₵$20 Sex Doll Goon Sack
₵$20 Bloody Mary	₵$49 START HERE
₵$50 El Dorado Green (1/4)	₵$295 Fireball Thrower
₵$34 Black Meat (g)	₵$189 Blue Angel Mushroom
₵$1 Slut Root (kg)	₵$150 Bux. Semp X Cannabis (One Plant)
₵$15 Marital Aid Potion	₵$8 Shiraz of Maybe Electrical Damage
₵$40 Quetzalcoatl Feathers (doz.)	₵$151 The Safe of What You Want for Dinner
₵$5 Blue Roses (doz.)	₵$340 Chocolate Bar
₵$63 Mythril (oz.)	₵$81 Bottled Emotions
₵$4 BZTCN	₵$16 Beard Cobwebs

This Week's Special:

'Trolley-jock' is a term Edward invented - the gathering of car park trolleys. They make Edward wear a hi-vis vest when he works as a trolley-jock. Without hi-vis, people would only see long train of conjoined shopping trolleys manoeuvring of their own collection volition.

Edward was born with a gift. It is unfair that people with innate talent benefit from such, but that is part of meritocracy's parcel. Edward's gift is his overpowering NPC energy, a choir of background noises announcing his presence. Edward the Human Green Screen offers his services for the right price.

Edward cannot t-pose behind YouTube talking-head video-essayist and provide canvas for their editor. Instead, he sits behind his client - with prompting, the client's meat-space gathering sees a different background.

For:	Edward can be:
High volume drug deals	Duck pond with ducks
Discrete political corruptions	Child's birthday party
Hostage exchanges	Moderately busy Chinese restaurant
First dates	That moving wall of text at the start of Star Wars

 

Mix and match.

That market is not April. April rests on beanbag atop front yard mound of Slut Root and cracks a session ale. Slut Root is the best firewood going around 'and it certainly gets around' but nobody seems interested. Slut Root is endemic to April's yard and she harvests it for the lols. The nine o'clock sun has only just peeled over the mound and it annoys her.

She considers Edward's offer: 'How about ten kilos of slut root an hour?'

Ales are sessioned.

Sinead and Graham had to glitch past the third night, which they thought meant staying up. They prepared with an early night and easy day, then hit the coffee and LAN Counter-Strike: Source. Body clocks kicked in at dawn and they fidgeted between distractions until evening, whence came the energy drinks and Brick of Cocaine. They felt their heart problems but Sinead is already dead. On the third day, they drove to an observatory and might have done a little meth. The real cost was the Ghost Tobacco chain-smoked for 72 hours.

They do not quite recall how they ended with a haunted Nintendo 64 cartridge.

Sinead was not impressed: 'This ain't a ghost, this is a fucking ghost-in-the-machine. I can't work with computer programs.'

Graham prayed for sleep on day five: 'Didn't you read the Wikipedia article?'

'Fucking -' Sinead caught anger, iiinhale, exhaaaaale. 'Did you?'

'No.'

'Prick.'

'Best solution? We sell it to someone who can use it.'

They brain stormed potential markets:

·         People who understand Artificial Intelligence.

·         People who own a tree, of ambiguous species, with a hole shaped like a Nintendo 64 cartridge and they can insert the Nintendo 64 cartridge into the tree and it will grow Deku Nuts.

That market is Easy but he is currently shooting flares at white people. Instead, Sinead comes down Schmocken street after picking up some Ghost Tobacco and staying for breakfast, then lunch. She is arrested by the heap of slut root. Also the background of Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni hashing out policy over each other's vaginas.

April waves out: ''Sup, bitch. Wanna' beer?'

'Yeah.'

April lobs a can from eski: 'So I'm buying things. Do you have a thing?'

Sinead does courtesy of lobbing the Ben Drowned cartridge up before opening her can.

April does brain activity: 'I have no use for this. Swap ya' twenty kilos for it? Just grab it from the bottom of the pile.'

Sinead skulls her beer and fills her arms. The dried tubers she selected were propping up others, which now roll down. Those tubers were propping up others, which now roll, so on so avalanche. April surfs beanbag down cascading wood pile and slides to safe halt at mound's base. She reaches a yearning hand up to eski remaining on mound's peak.

Anyway.

The E and A strings are coated in nickel, the R in Mythril, the G in steel. The pick-up's magnetic waves are converted into electrical waves, then AC is transformed into DC. The Bass Guitar of the Elements remembers a night spent inside MRI machine, wink wink nudge nudge. It has Leo Kotke's signature.

Paul suspects that the Bass Guitar of Elements is wasted on his guitar rack. He rocked the eighties, a blur of cocaine and vacuum machine instruction manuals. His trophies gather dust and he is willing to give them to somebody who will appreciate them. This someone can show their appreciation by making sacrifice.

Such as by forking out.

The Bass Guitar of Elements can shape the nearby environment. The descending strings influence, respectively, Earth, Water, Wind and Fire when played. In order to be useful, however, Indian Classical must be played, all other genres resulting in directionless, impotent cacophony. The market is someone willing to play, on bass guitar, a genre completely unsuitable for bass guitar.

That market is April. She distracts herself from her sobering by browsing Nintendo 64 prices on her phone. Neither impresses her. She is relieved to be distracted by Paul and his thing.

'Let's play a game in exchange for your fancy guitar.' She proposes. 'You will take as much slut as you can until that eski descends to something I can reach.'

Paul clarifies: 'With or without climbing?'

They spend some time hashing that particular out.

Spring arrived with flowers blooming and Easy was tasked with pruning their overhang, lest they scratch property of litigious. Flowers instead scratched Easy, sometimes uprooting themselves to brawl. The limoniums were hardy and the roses MMA enthusiasts. Easy threw sizeable collection into metre-cube garden bag and repotted them into separate quadrants of garden.

Flowers are pretty and Fighting Flowers are the subset to ask 'what you looking at cunt?' A relatively new trend emerging amongst volatile organic memes, Fighting Flowers will go animals but more likely different flora. Fighting Flowers are derided as anti-phytosemitic but will unite against herbivory.*

The first market for Fighting Flowers is the growing audience for vegetarian cockfights. A more specific market is the couple who places (cleaned) opposing flowers on staycation bed. The fight floats certain boats and will scatter petals all romantic like. Wagers on victor can help decide what position to begin with.

Oh, that market is April. She is dog-hairing her afternoon hangover and doing a guitar tutorial. He provides a brawl between tulip and nasturtium that his certain tags for certain inclinations. April understands that Slut Root flowers. Perhaps Fighting Flowers will mute slut root in fascinating new violences.

'Okay. Okay, how many flowers do you have?'

'A couple dozen. Eight varieties.'

'Hm. Let's say that I bought, hm, all of them? What would that cost me?'

Easy points at the Ben Drowned cartridge: 'I will take that for half of them. Make a no wait don't make a bouquet.'

'And what about the rest?'

'Uh, I think I'm good.'

'How do you feel about splitting freightage?'

'Oh shit, is that a word?'

 

* The word is phytosemiotic but I could not resist.