1 Doorstep Dude Dies In This One
9 days before the end of the world, somewhere within a vast dark wasteland, a city that once floated majestically atop gentle waves of wine now lay stranded at the bottom of a dry ocean; a decrepit metropolis sprawled out in shambles beneath an endless sea of black clouds. The city was called the Shallows, and it's citizens fucking hated it. What? I'm projecting? No, no, this place is shit. It's the truth. Objectively. See for yourself.
---
In the slums on the south side of the city, a man in a gas mask and a long tattered coat sat on a doorstep with his forearms on his knees, surrounded by trash. He blinked slowly and spoke.
"I fuckin hate this city."
Ooh, do elaborate.
"Elaborate?"
Sure, just talk about whatever led you to feel this way. What, precisely, do you hate?
"What do I hate?"
The man scoffed. He gestured at the air with a finger, leaving a swirling path behind in the thick purple mist.
"Air's poison. Nothing to drink that don't get you drunk, nothing to eat that ain't stale or rotted. Thieves are more common than chit. If you got a roof over your head, you don't got shelter, instead you got a target painted on your back for the gangs: Get this guy, take his shit. That's just what I can come up with off the top of my head. Far worse shit happens."
BLAM! BLAM! RATATATATATATAT!
The man shrunk his neck down in his coat and recoiled in fear as a blue car full of gnomes with guns squealed by, belching steam from its engine and spitting lightning from its exhaust pipes. The gnomes leaned out of every window and unleashed a hail of gunfire that ricocheted off the armored body of the pitch black car behind them. The frog headed beastman at the wheel of the black car was expressionless as countless bullets bounced off his windshield with benign little tink-tink-tink sounds. He shifted gears, the engine growled in response, and the armored car barreled forwards, rocking and swerving in hot pursuit.
In the passenger seat next to him, a frog beastman with a mullet and dark shades CROAKed loudly as his neck ballooned outwards. A bright blue glow shone through the thin layer of stretched skin as his throat swelled with mana charged air. He shoved his head out the window, pulled up his gas mask and opened his mouth, and a ball of energy coalesced at the back of his throat as his mullet waved wildly in the wind.
tink-tink-tink-tink THUK! THUK!
He deftly caught two bullets with his throat, and two jets of blood and energy sprayed from his rapidly deflating goiter. He clutched at his neck and swallowed.
BOOM!
The top half of his body exploded, the gnomes cheered, and the black armored car rocked up onto two wheels, nearly fell on its side, then slammed back down to the ground. The black car raced forwards undeterred, leaving a trail of sparks on the concrete in it's wake as it dragged the passenger side door along on a single twisted hinge. I must say though, the spray of bright green frog blood and gore the right half of the car is now sporting is really a rather stylish accent on top of the black armor plating. Digression though. These guys are still trying to kill each other.
The frog beastman behind the wheel blinked at his dead partner and dispelled the floating bloody shield he used to block the explosion. He pulled a curved dagger from its sheath on his leg. The blade glinted in the light as he floored the gas pedal and spurred the car onward.
A grinning gnome poked her head out the top of the speeding blue car. She pulled out a long black gun with a rectangular barrel, shoved a mana crystal into the breech, threw the bolt forward and locked it. The gun hummed to life and purple light flared out from the vents on each side of the barrel. She mounted the gun on her shoulder and swung it around to ai-
SHIK!
Her head lolled sideways as a flying curved knife embedded into the side of her head up to its handle.
The frog beastman quickly pulled his throwing arm back into the car before the concentrated gunfire from the other gnomes could tear it to shreds.
The gnome with the knife in her head wobbled, swayed, and slipped back down into the blue car, dragging the gun with her. Her finger pulled the trigger as the barrel swung upwards.
*click*
---
Far away, in the center of the city, fireworks whistled into to the sky, vanished for a brief moment, then reappeared in a pretty burst of bright, short lived sparkles.
---
On a street in the slums on the south side of that same city, a thin purple line of light silently cut through the air above a blue car until it formed a tiny pinprick of piercing light that briefly hovered, motionless.
And then a piercing cacophonous shriek screamed to life as the innocuous point of light ripped through space and expanded into a gaping black maw that swallowed air with a fearful intensity, a titanic black sphere that pulled everything near it into oblivion. Countless panes of glass shattered, flew, and became a short lived crystalline hurricane of blades that magnetized towards the event horizon and vanished without a trace, the heavy pull of gravity bent street lights towards it, crumbled sidewalk ripped out of the ground and flew into the sky, garbage cans and refuse went whirling upwards, spaghettified and vanished past the event horizon.
The two cars began to lift off the ground as they were pulled towards the ominous sphere. The gnomes panicked while the frog beastman simply stared, expressionless. The two cars hurtled towards destruction, inches away from its edge, when...
VOOMP!
The singularity abruptly collapsed in on itself and vanished, leaving two missing semi spheres of concrete and glass carved clean out of the two tall buildings on either side of the street as the only evidence of it's existence. The two cars crashed back down to the street, bouncing and rocking on squeaky suspensions for a moment. And then the two vivisected buildings began to LEAAAAN inwards, 11 floors of concrete and metal folding in on improvised hinges before snapping off and dropping straight towards the street, casting dark shadows over the two cars.
The gnome driver flattened the gas pedal, his face a violently contorted mask of pure adrenaline. "'Old on teh yer arses!" He shouted as he thumbed the Nos button on the gear stick. The blue car burned rubber and rushed forwards, flames and lightning spewing from its rear.
The frog beastman shifted into reverse and stomped on the accelerator, and he calmly stared up at the buildings crashing down above him as the black car shot backwards.
The blue car darted past the edge of the oncoming shadow just as the building crashed down with a... crash.
On the opposite side, the frog beastman casually wrenched the wheel to the side and drifted, and the building slashed off the black car's driver's side mirror as it slammed to the ground.
The gnome driver looked in his rear view mirror at the chaos behind them and laughed heartily.
"AHAHAH! Lights 'r all cleah, and teh sky's green, boys!" The gnomes cheered.
CRUNCH.
A fat piece of rubble crashed down and split the car in two from front to back, crushing one half flat while sending the other spiraling through the air, burning like a hail mary thrown by a pissed off lava golem. The wreckage touched down and exploded, leaving a rolling line of flame along the street.
Seconds later, the long black gun came whirling down from the sky and clattered on the ground, battered and smoking.
The frog beastman kicked open his door, stood, and stared at the disaster scene in front of him blankly. He lifted a hand and focused on his dagger. The blade came spinning up through the air towards his hand and he grabbed it and sheathed it on his leg in one smooth motion.
Fireworks rapidly bloomed in the sky above the center of the city as sounds of fear, shock, and despair filled the air in the slums as the survivors of all the destruction mourned the deceased. Amidst the screams, the frog beastman calmly looked at his watch. A holographic HUD flashed to life, an overhead map with the flashing text 'Tracking! Tracking!' hovering over a motionless blip on the opposite side of the towering rubble. The frog beastman stepped back into the black car, pulled out, and sped off in the direction he came from.
---
The man in the gas mask with the long tattered coat slowly uncurled from the fetal position on the doorstep and brushed the dust and debris off his shirt. He continued speaking as if there was barely even an interruption.
"Like I was saying, far worse shit happens in the Shallows."
He looked down at his hands. One of them was covered in red. He opened his coat up and blood poured down from where a stray bullet had lodged itself in his liver. He went limp.
"And it happens all the time. Haha... you asked... what I hated about this city?"
He coughed blood and shuddered. His last words were like a whisper.
"What's not to hate?"
---
See. Not projecting. Ass-tier city, reviled by all. What? Small sample si-- this isn't a fucking statistics textbook, this is real shit! That doorstep dude and all those nice gnomes just fucking died in the streets and you still don't believe me? Doorstep dude even had a deathbed soliloquy like he's some sorta shakespeare character or some shit and you have the audacity to not fall for his argument, you're just gonna casually cite 'oh, appeal to emotion fallacy' like some sort of unfeeling slave? Fine. I'll get you your godsdamned sample size. Look at that lady over there in the ratty dress pushing that baby stroller down that dark alley. Let's get her attention.
