Phenson and Hedgeworm Shoot the Proverbial Shit
Hedgeworm and Phenson struck an immediate friendship and trust seeing an innate hatred and callous disregard for the human spirit combined with a certain inextinguishable joy in life and action. They spent many nights in Hedgeworm's worn mobile carnival office sharing 300 year old scotch and reminiscing about old times, cons perfectly executed, national policies snuck past a wary populace. "I once absconded with Astanasia, an Eastainarian prince's 4 year old daughter after winning her at a game of 7 card monte," Hedgeworm regales, "he was furious, sent out the internatiomutual gendarmes calling me a kidnapper and a fraud. The kidnapper moniker hurt, I'm not in it for the ransom, I never was in it for the money... I'm in it for the art and the purity of the carnival. The girl was practically born to be a contortionist - she fills tents with slack-jawed ignoramuses, can fold herself into a paper aeroplane and glide over peoples' heads, she can take her arms off and juggle them with her feet. I can't return to plundering the yokels of Eastainaria again without immediate arrest, but it was worth it, she'll never leave the carnival, it's in her blood... I could spot that when we sat down at the card table. She got "Fuck Eastainarian Royalty" tattooed on the inside of her lower lip, totally renounced the royal lifestyle. Of course she had to get a lip enlargement so the tattoo could fit, she's that committed to the carny lifestyle."
Phenson: "I remember getting the memo from the gendarmes about you... 'Arrest immediately and with extreme prejudice -- violence in arrest mandatory.' I filed it with all the other International Men and Women of Crime That Don't Affect Me In the Slightest (IMWCTDAMIS) files. That dossier is pretty big now. I should track some of the others down... like Phillip Fillsten, knuckle smuggler. He'd had this huge network of corrupt doctors and front agencies dedicated to taking the knuckles of the well off when they came in for Life-Enhancement surgery. He claimed it was all moral since he gave them a small discount as a bill line item on page 34 of his invoice. He had perfect timing, just as the well-to-do were noticing, 2-3 weeks later, that they were missing a few knuckles, he'd have boarded up his front agencies and set up shop in another country. All the while he was exporting these grade A knuckles (he really had an eye for quality knuckles) to backwoods countries that were suffering from congenital knuckle affliction birth defects stemming from medical waste of companies that had moved there for cheap labour and lax emission standards. He'd sell them like hot cakes, the peasants considered him a robin-hood. Of course, unbeknown to the peasants, he also had substantial holdings in the companies that were emitting the knuckle-eroding chemicals (dioxy-robognosticistic-redux-12 and fulmigranite-semyphore-upthine) and that those chemicals actually weren't totally necessary to their workings, but they produced them anyway."
"That's funny, Kenny The Knucklier probably bought a pallet of knuckles from old Phillip, he had them installed everywhere... he can hold a book and turn the pages with his nose. One of the finest non-congenital freaks I own... or rather... employ. He had his spine removed so he can bend backwards and stick his head through the hole he carved in his chest. A real crowd pleaser, that one."
"That's the crux of our difference, and it is an important one. I've been thinking about this, we both abhor the populace at large, their simpering reptilian brain driven actions and primate compulsions. You exploit their capacity for irrational hope... that they really will be able to get a tossed ring around an empty beer bottle and win some big fluffy animal-doll-thing for their target of admiration in the desperate hope that the show of their ring tossing prowess will get them sexual gratification. Or that they will be able to out manoeuvre the shell game practitioner and double their hard earned votes in what is essentially a rigged game of (not-even) chance."
"... While you have used their irrational fear of change, those different from them, and vague, official sounding threat grades. In your national pogroms and mandatory military service, you've completely subjugated the entire populace from a relatively peaceful ignorant mass of idiots to a terror drenched mob of paranoiacs that would rival a race of schizophrenic wildebeests in violence and outright distrust. You've so cowed them that they've let you force them into a 45 o'clock mandatory curfew that some citizens are insisting is too lenient. Your policies of self aggrandizement and outright thievery in the name of moral justice were master-strokes of political infamy. My hat is off to you, sir."
"But how can the same people hold such irrational notions of hope and fear at the same time? Their capacity for cognitive dissonance never ceases to impress me, how much wilful ignorance must these 'people' practice in order to not implode from the sheer logical incongruity?"
"That, my friend, is the question of the universe. I'm not bothered by it, I just exploit it."
"I guess I may be too bothered by it, it's most of the reason I abdicated my dictatorship... show me again this 7 card monte thing, I think I've almost got it..."
And on they drink into the night. Hedgeworm learning about various classified socio-national-political intrigue, and Phenson learning how to live as a Carney and meeting with the fantastic underworld or illegal-smuggler-con-artist intrigue.
Phenson: "I remember getting the memo from the gendarmes about you... 'Arrest immediately and with extreme prejudice -- violence in arrest mandatory.' I filed it with all the other International Men and Women of Crime That Don't Affect Me In the Slightest (IMWCTDAMIS) files. That dossier is pretty big now. I should track some of the others down... like Phillip Fillsten, knuckle smuggler. He'd had this huge network of corrupt doctors and front agencies dedicated to taking the knuckles of the well off when they came in for Life-Enhancement surgery. He claimed it was all moral since he gave them a small discount as a bill line item on page 34 of his invoice. He had perfect timing, just as the well-to-do were noticing, 2-3 weeks later, that they were missing a few knuckles, he'd have boarded up his front agencies and set up shop in another country. All the while he was exporting these grade A knuckles (he really had an eye for quality knuckles) to backwoods countries that were suffering from congenital knuckle affliction birth defects stemming from medical waste of companies that had moved there for cheap labour and lax emission standards. He'd sell them like hot cakes, the peasants considered him a robin-hood. Of course, unbeknown to the peasants, he also had substantial holdings in the companies that were emitting the knuckle-eroding chemicals (dioxy-robognosticistic-redux-12 and fulmigranite-semyphore-upthine) and that those chemicals actually weren't totally necessary to their workings, but they produced them anyway."
"That's funny, Kenny The Knucklier probably bought a pallet of knuckles from old Phillip, he had them installed everywhere... he can hold a book and turn the pages with his nose. One of the finest non-congenital freaks I own... or rather... employ. He had his spine removed so he can bend backwards and stick his head through the hole he carved in his chest. A real crowd pleaser, that one."
"That's the crux of our difference, and it is an important one. I've been thinking about this, we both abhor the populace at large, their simpering reptilian brain driven actions and primate compulsions. You exploit their capacity for irrational hope... that they really will be able to get a tossed ring around an empty beer bottle and win some big fluffy animal-doll-thing for their target of admiration in the desperate hope that the show of their ring tossing prowess will get them sexual gratification. Or that they will be able to out manoeuvre the shell game practitioner and double their hard earned votes in what is essentially a rigged game of (not-even) chance."
"... While you have used their irrational fear of change, those different from them, and vague, official sounding threat grades. In your national pogroms and mandatory military service, you've completely subjugated the entire populace from a relatively peaceful ignorant mass of idiots to a terror drenched mob of paranoiacs that would rival a race of schizophrenic wildebeests in violence and outright distrust. You've so cowed them that they've let you force them into a 45 o'clock mandatory curfew that some citizens are insisting is too lenient. Your policies of self aggrandizement and outright thievery in the name of moral justice were master-strokes of political infamy. My hat is off to you, sir."
"But how can the same people hold such irrational notions of hope and fear at the same time? Their capacity for cognitive dissonance never ceases to impress me, how much wilful ignorance must these 'people' practice in order to not implode from the sheer logical incongruity?"
"That, my friend, is the question of the universe. I'm not bothered by it, I just exploit it."
"I guess I may be too bothered by it, it's most of the reason I abdicated my dictatorship... show me again this 7 card monte thing, I think I've almost got it..."
And on they drink into the night. Hedgeworm learning about various classified socio-national-political intrigue, and Phenson learning how to live as a Carney and meeting with the fantastic underworld or illegal-smuggler-con-artist intrigue.