Try a virtue round

virtue challenge

spend one glorious day being virtuous in the loving arms of virtue

may that your choices be borne of virtue all the virtues

may that any step on this day must not violate any of the virtues

virtues are designated as: 

virtues which are considered to be virtues The Crack-wide (see appendix)

not virtues which you think it would be cute to call virtues

start the day saying these words in this order

i am a virtue i am a virtue muffin mthyuh eat me first or send your demons

i mthyuh i am am a virtue virtue muffin your demons eat me first or send your

send your demons send a virtue mthyuh eat your demons first or am your 

virtue demon me eat your demons first am send me muffins virtue muffins  

[repeat] 

in between your chanting you may find that you're making virtuous choices automatically

this is because by chanting the sacred words you have activated the K5000

the K5000 would never harm you but it does now have access and has now

taken charge of one key portion of your Braino son so

don't stop now and i mean lidderly don't stop now because

[MPS has imperiously and arbitrarily redacted this portion of the activity instructions]

(traditional MPS nuns' "friday fun day" activity)
by Phyliss [trans.]

Fervent

None of us can think of a way to take out the K-5000 without Jan barleycorn. It will be a multigenerational battle. A tragically high percentage of us will die violently, go crazy, and/or end up in the cement mines, all from the alcohol alone. 

There will not be many deaths in battle, and unfortunately, not much disfigurement either. The MPS knows that anybody can get rich on a relic tour with an interesting configuration of missing mangled scarred (MMS) body parts. 

So we'll take our casualties how we find them, get them self-inflict them, and we'll use any fuel, toxic or not, that will keep the movement fervent. We'll seek out Pharmsupply that makes us fight beyond our natural inclination to submit and get by.

by Jan
from: Early Recruit
by Jan Jansdaad, Jr.

Shouting Moons

The Shouting Moons are simply whichever moon or moons are prominent at the time of the regulatory shouting, which is always conducted during Days of Destruction, which can be announced at any time by the Mthyuh Preservation Society.  

Important shimmering of the regulatory codex happens between partisan representatives either in different parts of heavily wooded areas or at the edges of adjacent cliffs or even sometimes in abandoned bone nests, which can hang from the cliffs as long as the rock can hold them. 

K's peering from the occupied nests lounging in caves or soaring above keep mostly quiet during Days of Destruction. Legend holds that the festival was designed for that reason: to hypnotize Mthyuh's hosts.

They wanted and needed to hypnotize K's not to have a big party but so that they could get done all the doables they couldn't do as random prey owing to the burdensome and costly precautions they had to take in order to take turns in an orderly fashion to calculate who can have a chance to be eaten next, and so on. 

Plus, even a single K's earsplitting HAHAHA and its wingspan against the sun, creating temporary climactic changes and blinding darkness, all of that had an effect on overall sanity, even of pets, and this was the most caring respectful traditional way possible to get Ks to just stop. 

Flekes themselves of course don't make critical inquiry upon their own generational habits and mostly consider the rather low chance of a violent, live blood sacrifice the least of their worries. The specter of living to a very old age is the greater terror.

The partisan fleke representatives shimmer the codex during the Shouting Moons from forest meadow to forest meadow or cliff to cliff and they must conduct the regulatory negotiations only by shouting back and forth as loudly as they can. This tends to keep the messages short and heartfelt. They all know the festival is only a weekend long. But they have needs, which tend to be generously met if they can get them across and back again, sometimes heavily depending on the winds. 

The partisan fleke representatives must wear very bright robes as a sign that they are vulnerable and evocative to Ks and that their spiritual duties always come first. Again, these details are not on their minds at all. It's just another day for them. Some might find all of this fascinating and even life changing if they ever sat down to reflect on or read about it if, no that isn't fair: reading's not a thing for them. Maybe they might talk about it with another fleke on a break or, it is said, share it with their faces only. 

During the Shouting Moons it's very important that you remain as still and quiet as possible. Ks nodding out during DoD can wake up. The whole idea is that everyone cooperate at this time, even guests. Allow Mthyuh's hosts to feel the tingling in their spines and pyncos. They say the regulatory shouting first started when the early flekes figured out how to distract a K for a few minutes by shouting at it simultaneously from adjacent hilltops. Eat me first! That is how that famous chant became part of the fleke daily parlance, especially during volca, when one may shout out Eat met first! and it's never a non sequitur. This wish must be at front of mind. 

everywhere is far

The Jansdaads are speaking with their minds only.

It won't take long, but you'll be risking your life to get there. 

I know, Jan. 

I hope you'll feel Mthyuh. 

You know i will. She'll be right there on the horizon. If i die in the hooptie, her birds will eat me. 

You know there's no guarantee you'll find what you're looking for. 

I'm looking for you Jan.

I know, Jan. I want you to come and find me. 

If i can feel Mthyuh, maybe i can break the Crack, somehow i'll understand. I'll come back and go directly to the air conditioning unit for the temporary classrooms at the Community College of Cement. I'll duck under it, hit my head, that's how some got through. 

My mind is getting tired. 

Mine too, Jan.

it's all about choices

I got an out call from a Jan who was on a house sitting hustle at a really nice Highchank palacio almost entirely obscured by the 3-hooptie garage door. In fact she had to crank it open just so i could get in, which put me a little sour since i had to walk there from the coils, which were very loose that day. 

She sits me in a parlor like where you'd blow the butler and says she was a little concerned because i looked like a thug in my picture. I look at her a little harsh at the same time she's saying not in person though, not at all. 

I was all ok, got a bathroom? I think the Jan felt obligated to wait for me in the salon de fellatio to demonstrate her mindful wakefulness towards diversity and inclusion. Or she was delirious on shiv or fasting. She let me wander from room to room demonstrating my low urgency towards getting to know her better. I did feel urgent, but it was more about the Jan's purse, which was gaping open on a plinth. 

Then there were five shiny coins in my pocket as i told her i could hear the horn calling all the way from Chukkachank, that i'd learned to distinguish it from the cry of a bird, so i'd better get going now. 

Bitch did not miss a beat. Oh, that's a shame, hope i didn't offend you, good to meet you tho, got everything? 

MPS got me? Not even a butch K's dick from the mouth of the coils. I say what, it's an emergency? They're like naw, we like coming up in this neighborhood. 

So you just ignoring the calls from fucked-up barrios? 

Naw, they got they own justice. 

Say i know a Jan who's DTF. What say you check her out to see she ok and let me catch my spring. 

The one MPS goes that's not us, craning out her neck. We take you instead and abuse you in our jail. 

Hahahahaha! I was cracking up and slapping my thigh until they jabbed me with a pharmsupply corrective and did exactly what they said they would. 

They have special restraints like the ones for Ks but tiny for hybrids. I was awake and screaming with my mind only. I was mostly angry not in pain. They figured out the location of my flap vents and dorsal expressors and drained as much funk as they could. 

I get back to the hangar acting normal. I curl up behind a bone mound breathing deeply. I can't blame anyone. My ancestry is recklessness, but they say it's all about choices. 

by Reptily-ily

Phyllis (trans.)

Extinction Takeback Agreement

FRIENDS' HANGAR: Jan, now nearly full size, stands frontally abutted to a scaffolding built into the side of a high cliff. Her feet and tail are partially buried in the dunes of the Lowchank district. At eye level, she can see pine trees, and a bit above that there is only sandstone made deeply groovy by rains. The shadow of the horizon makes a line in the shape of the mountain across her forehead. Reptily stands on the scaffolding shaking out their cape and staring straight into Jan's nostrils, which occasionally emit a welcome and full-body warming blast. Reptily is using their tiny mouth hole to communicate, but Jan, for anatomical reasons, can only speak with her mind only.

REPTILY: Ya, see this flat part on the back of my head? I feel limited by it. 

JAN: Oh why?

REPTILY: I just feel like if there was a curve there I'd feel less constrained in my thinking processes. 

JAN: That's a K head Chama look at mine!

REPTILY: But you look practically full blood when yer here. I'm pretty much stuck in the fuzzy middle ground. 

JAN: Ya yor too big to get in the hygienist elevator. But you skittered up that scaffolding like a dung beetle!

REPTILY: Ya my vestments have been mistaken for an exoskeleton. It's just flocked rayon. 

JAN: ...

REPTILY: I wanted to meet here because it reminds me of home. I was born and raised at Friends' Hangar. 

JAN: Is that so?

REPTILY: Ya there was a time when I was small enough for the lift and even rather pretty by yor standards. They called me Missy. 

JAN: HAHA! I mean, you're still pretty. 

REPTILY: Fortunately I have some options like with the head tuft, which is retractable, see? 

JAN: Ooo. You know, we all have our unique struggles of difference don't we? 

REPTILY: There's no one like me. You can mostly pass on either side of the Crack. 

JAN: And it's also not our fault. 

REPTILY: On the one hand you can blame the MPS-Pharmsupply merger for our disfigurement, but we also only have them to thank for the Extinction Takeback Agreement and therefore our existences. 

JAN: Would you go that far? It was the merger that wiped out K's to begin with. 

REPTILY: We were enslaving their people. 

JAN: We were being our natural selves in the context of nature. I hate it when the losers get to write history.

BOTH: HAHAHAHAHAHA!

"ChamaJanMeetNGreet001" in

 Genetic Histories (n.d.)

Journal of the Institute for the Journal of Metacognitive Talk Therapy Apologists

Cross-species consensus

Peg and Jan are splayed across a wide florid plain. A bubbling creek and just the elbow of a river run beneath them cooling their bellies and flap pits. They each look a little cross-eyed as thousands of local bees arrive in cloudy waves and get caught up on their giant forked tongues. Jan and Peg are slurping the piquant swarming treats off one another's faces. They can communicate with their minds only.

Guessing it's a result of struggling with your own random or self-diagnosed atypical gender impulses preferences fetishes, which you think you have to subdue, or that the domination over them itself is the fetish, and you think maybe everybody loves that

What the? 

I'm referencing your comment about one of the sisters who tends to resist gender classifications.

If you mean Reptily i only used the word ambiguous. 

Well you went maybe a little farther, like suggesting all Ks are genderless or shouldn't be allowed to even have a sexuality much less a gender status in society...

Well maybe if you say that the other way around, I mean society really? Ks are a species completely separate from the society and whole system of gender logic which really applies only outside the phenomena. 

Ok, as with so many issues, a fact we really need to confirm before we can even begin to come to a society-wide and cross-species consensus on what our rights are and what our rights mean. 

You always forget the responsibilities. 

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

they use my funk for their discotecas

i think it's a moment for philosophizing for example, 

"why?" or "the hell?"

but feel i need a gentler tool, so not 

which bad choice, which horrific and all-powerful system

for example, must one coax oneself.

or should personal hygiene just occur naturally.

these are questions i can touch with my beak right now.

like an anteater i can 

daintily taste test a single wriggling assertion

or fully tongue the entire org tree including

subterranean levels

those are the ones that house the rankest

tank thinkers mercenary blowhards social

wrecking balls inciters of chaos paralegal

vengeance servers of cause and means

sinister laundries of earnest curiosity

but just one taste is all i ask and i'm tasting

real. sky bitch. musk.

they want to come up here and take that

and not because i'm dirty baby

they use my funk for their discotecas.

think i'm dying for cucumber essence.

claim their fashions suit me best.

the answer and the proof are in my nest.

Ks fly spread eagle!

"Ks Fly Spread Eagle"

by Peg

Rally opener

Daughters of Mthyuh March of Destruction

Highchank 

Good luck with that

Peg and Jan are hunched over the remains of a fascio-religious scout troop their leaders their dogs and their shiny suede saddles. The thirty-odd children and adults had been on a pilgrimage to Ilyn's diving stone at the mouth of Mthyuh. Jan and Peg carefully pick out the bits of non-edible clothing and equipment and toss or spit them off the cliff. Same with the larger bones after sucking on them for several moments, even as they chat. They are able to form, understand, and communicate language with their minds only.

Jan: Watching you and the other full-bloods i can't help but notice moments when you emerge from your face. Normally your countenance to my nose is mask-like. But maybe i'll mention my husband or the restaurants on the other side of The Crack or ask a stupid question about the Greater Chanks Phenomena, and the mask becomes animated. I respond especially to the muscles around your eyes, which normally don't move at all unless theyr being prodded unexpectedly by a tree in a cloud or an airliner. 

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Jan: Yes, i see you now!

Peg: Oh honey.

Jan: But i mean i say that because this observation also reminds me of how different i am despite my putative species how my face compared to yours is overly expressive clown-like hypo-manic. 

Peg: ...

Jan: I mean how does that affect the outcomes of everyday encounters how does it

Peg: Yr trying not to do it now aren't you. So i'm not sure i can provide any feedback yet. I'll have to catch you at a less self-conscious moment. 

Jan: Oh good luck with that. 

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

 

 

Trans. Phyliss

Ayurvedic to my nose

Jan and Peg are stretched out on their bellies in the sand. Waves splash up against their bodies. Their elbows and wrists fit on the strand of beach between the water and a desolate highway. Their tails bob and flick at seagulls far out into the bay. 

PEG: Next we turn to the stars for answers. 

JAN: What do you see there? 

PEG: What i see is filtered through the seers accounting of what supposedly they see. 

JAN: You've looked at the oracle dispenser. It disappoints you. 

PEG: It certainly tries to do the opposite, which makes me all the more concerned. So, so encouraging uplifting today that i was sure she knew something and wasn't saying. 

JAN: Oh like ya buy that new pair of shoes treat yourself watch that movie eat a bonbon and what am i going to do with a shoe? 

PEG: Mmhmm. 

JAN: I am starting to believe that because we are closer to the heavens we are affected more profoundly by other large bodies moving in space. 

PEG: So buy two pairs of shoes? 

JAN: No. Just don't depend on the oracle dispenser for guidance that should be ours directly from the stars themselves. 

PEG: Do you mean

JAN: Ya we should have and make our own charts and by doing so reclaim our ancient agency to roam in self-governed patterns. 

PEG: Dictated by our biology not theirs. Lucky way more often. 

JAN: I think i can feel a planet gently tugging on my gizzard now in the magnetic resonance of the stones. 

PEG: Jan i told you purge and start over. Gargle with

JAN: Sea water ya. I use this instead. 

Jan reaches out and snags a passing milk tanker from the desolate highway and bites off the end of it before passing it to Peg.

PEG: Oh. Ayurvedic to my nose. 

BOTH: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Trans. by Phyllis (embedded)

"Why can they fly arounan lidderly shit on the community?"

Not only do they shit on the community, and not only is it deliberate, but it is also clearly amusing to them personally because you can hear their cackle echoing in the clouds or bouncing off chanks. Why don't they go out to sea. 

They do. We have to take the same precautions there. You're right. They crap wherever they want, and wherever they want is often a populated area, and yes, they think it's hilarious. 

Our ancestors were wrong to put up with it for all those years. 

You forget it was the other way around. K's were queen. We were their transition from hunting and gathering to farming and ranching, and they are the only reason we still even exist because some among them wanted to just keep eating unsustainably.

But now that they're in preserves, they've agreed to stop killing. 

True, but we know that many flekes die each year working serving worshiping vacationing in close proximity to K's, and we do not have jurisdiction in those lands. The high chanks, although modern and popular with pilgrims and tourists, are governed entirely by the Mthyuh Preservation Society, a group that also holds an iron grip throughout the Greater Chanks Phenomena on all cultural missions and communications. 

You refer to the Filter of Loathing. 

I am afraid so. They could decide to simply switch it off. 

Their religion, well, our religion would not exist without K's. They are living relics and so holy to the MPS and to the flekes as well. 

Are you willing to challenge all of that to avoid a few hours of shoveling each year? 

 

Welcome Day n. d.

"K's Fly Spread Eagle" Bring-a-Lunch breakout group 

Chang K. Chang Ballroom

[frag.]

Trans. by Phyllis

Hard scrabble

 

JAN: What should we do should we make it so the genders are a grab bag that one can assign oneself in any combination, or are we saying these were assigned divinely, not by choice, that it's the Body that came out wrong. Or not that at all. How shall we know. What can I ask that doesn't put me at a disadvantage. It's supposed to make me vulnerable. That's so I can understand. I who don't understand. The understanding stands in the soul of the haver of the identity. We know from years of being referred to as it/ that that it seems maybe to us petty demanding the gender after you are already distinguished clearly from other classes of ambulatory sentients like the grasshopper. 

PEG: It sounds like you've been thinking deeply. Why? 

JAN: ...

PEG: I was listening. I agree you're vulnerable, but not because of the new gender directives. They are only asking that you be sensitive and thoughtful. If you're already that, you'll have to do shiv all day. 

JAN: They're asking for more than that. To get a W.A.S.T.E. I have to say that I've earned nothing if everyone didn't have the opportunity. That obviously counts out all K blood because as enormous soaring reptiles there are gigs necessarily exclusive to us only. 

PEG: What's really lame is the whole premise that we're included now since we're not going to kill hunt or eat so what have we really gotten in return.

JAN & PEG TOGETHER: Friends' Service Hangers! 

JAN: I feel a lot fresher in general. I focus on the day to day. There's some good kibble and fruit snacks. 

PEG: Tell me in a thousand years. How content you are. They think we're vampires just because of our lifespan is long and theirs is short. Because you're a seroconversion, you're not all K, and you're new anyway. I don't want to bring you down. K's fly spread eagle. 

Peg and Jan have been lying back sunning their tummies with their elbow spikes holding them up with their dorsal flaps unfurled in the wind. It's an ancient river bed. Their spines have broken through the outer crust of sediment and leave canyons of shadow and dust behind when they each roll to the right pull up their left spike and slam it in again way up pointing toward the cliff face. It looks like they're about to ski, or fly, but instead they leap at the rock horizon with their toe claws and scoop the air behind them and scrabble craning their necks up the cliff to their hangout. The rock has been hollowed out and boulders pile up at the base, which is also where they drop the extra bones. 

JAN: Is it because you're a lesbian you try to discourage me? I have joy thinking of my husband and wish we will be together? You want me there under your dark cloak? 

PEG: Haha bitch shut the fuck up. 

PEG & JAN: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

JAN: They is some mens around here an my nose is open.

PEG: There is no mens. Just more gender question marks either being ported by pharmsupply or coming in wild like you through The Crack. Now go back and read the directive. This is your life now. Jan is far too small to have a meaningful relationship with you anymore. That's all in the past. He's tiny; you're big. Doing this is not about that. You have to represent the boundary-lands. 

JAN: No I get it it's not even about like I'm here with you or you with me or we're here together. It's more about this rock shelf and some snacks and the open air and the mist and what we mean and what we can do but don't do. 

PEG: But also what we did do history and what we do do because of our air skills and gravitational importance and in terms of fertilization to all the chank communities.  

PEG & JAN: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

per Phyllis (embedded)

Sports N' Sex Crimes Bugle

Better psych care

At some level they all knew they were bad and that the only good would be to wipe each other out and to enjoy doing it. 

There was also thanks to the shiv an intense respect for the individual spirit in each putrid violent body, sprites who were challenged to but could not become angels and were unavoidably and irredeemably sucked into the gravity of their hollow pelves, long fingers, and tiny manus.

"List of lists, I've lost my license." Jan spoke with her mind only, but it was real language. 

Peg: "You funny."

"I mean I really los... oh, damn."

"Ya they make them so thin they can get lost in a clump of pycnofibes on your ass."

Both: "Hahahahahaha!"

Jan: You know, Peg: I could just swoop around with you forever. 

Peg: That's what this is, this moment.

Their wings were on slow beat two, three times. There were no peaked or valleyed panoramas, just some yellow mist and greenish floor which both stretched out and curved down as if over a globe through all the angles they could see out of. 

My dorsoventral flap is really chafed. 

I like the vet-mix salve down at Friends' Urgency Hangar. It's practically a spa. 

Ya, I need to get my W.A.S.T.E. stamped soon anyway. I'll get the lavender. I know which one you mean. 

The day they started giving out Waiver and Acceptance of Social Toxicity Estimates to K's was the day they say we got our freedom. 

Better psych care anyway. 

I say volca to that. 

K's fly spread eagle.

 

Trans. by Phyliss (embedded)

Sixty times I circled

sixty times i circled

casualties mounting

watched from every angle

my sisters' teeth were flashing

in blood and spittle

history was attacking

virgins stood on balconies

sharing the dread

of my own abilities

by Jan

Mrs. Jansdaad and La Chama Speak Using the Mind Only

Well. Here we are. 

Yes. Honestly I don't know what to do.

Thank you for your honesty. It's that this doesn't happen. I've never met sticky progeny. How did you get through The Crack. 

I didn't do anything. Maybe Braino was tracking me. 

That's likely due to how we share some Braino, sister. 

I met Peg. 

And now me. It's herstoric. 

What is the meaning of my life?

You'll have plenty of time to figure it out if you play your cards right. 

I like sitting and writing poetry at my kitchen table. 

Well, you're a monster now. 

The Crack is home to a billion holes

They say The Crack is home to a billion holes. Pilgrims, daredevils, and lost hikers alike will never be able to predict when and where they will come out. 

The Community College of Cement's entire Chang K. Chang Chank campus is dark except for a few pools of security lighting-- and the strong yellow bug lamp which illuminates the Crack Door Event area. Jan's mom Jan Jansdaad's steaming underwing fat flap is all that's keeping Jan and Lloyd from falling hundreds of feet into the parking lot below. 

Jan lands as close as she can to the bug light, which is there for the air conditioning unit attached to the bookstore next to temporary mobile classrooms B-D. Most campus employees, students and visitors walk around the air conditioning unit instead of trying to duck under it, which could cause them to end up in sudden Crack-related peristaltic shock (SCRPS), and besides now being invisible, their associates quickly begin to forget they ever existed. In this respect, SCRPS can affect an entire community from one instance only.

Lloyd is trying to keep up with Jan and her mom. As the odd group rushes across the moonlit baseball fields, plumes of white chalk dust spray from below Mrs. Jansdaad's three-clawed feet. And then they have crossed a short span of black top, and then they have reached The Crack. 

They might sound a little like disco when they're running, but when they stop there's nothing but funk, says Lloyd.

Preen gland technician

They brought me inside the control room of my own mother's puppet corpse. I could look down over the switches and buttons and through the glass down five stories and watch her feet drag and thud, drag and thud across the empty Sears parking lot, which was just the tip of the iceberg. 

Once we had triggered The Crack, it was a watery world of carelessness; a sort of sleep paralysis of the shock reflex set in while we were fed through a peristalsis of the dimensional organ. 

She was/ was not my mother. This was the flesh of the great beautiful young K who could toss me 100 meters into the sky with her beaque and catch me easily in her seal craw, where lightly blood-dappled pelts were stacked and crumpled into a very stinky but gossamer safety net. The woman they extracted from her inner ear during a shiv molting also is/ isn't La Pegyuh. She seems to carry all her memories, fears, quick tongue. Her body, as well, is now tortured day and night with Remote Tissue Decisioning in order to coordinate with image mirroring protocols and functions. They say she was a random preen gland technician who took a wrong turn somehow. 

by Reptily

No more community theater

The stage is dark at the center and it's one of those setups where the players are seated or standing around the inside of the three walls waiting to take their turns. Giant leaves made of plastic bags get caught up in the breeze of a fan and bound noisily across the upstage out of doors like plastic bags. 

"But then I'm telling you we love to have her and she's so talented but she does her writhing ritual really in breaking of character and does it right in the middle of the stage when others should be starting their lines and action."

"Jan, I can sympathize, but she's over 21. I can't control her even with the shiv. She has the fins of an embryo, but she'll never develop any further or take on the exclusive markings of any particular species. She feels like shiv's the only way she can find freedom as she will never sprout wings or a full claw matrix, so the ancient hooting and dancing are her expression of a foiled archetypal and organic need."

"Don't get me started on the topic of Institute for the Talk Therapy Apologist Movement mumbo-jumbo, Donna. We all knew from the start the risks we were taking by having Reptily here full time. I mean, not just a goat you can tether to a tree. And it's really no problem. Just no more community theater, k?"

LaChama

K Groom

when you talk so long
my responses build and ebb
without making noise



for Missy
by Phyllis (embedded)

How I Experience Communication

Do you see anything like a lip moving on my face?

No. That's because I am talking to you, and I don't do it with a mouth. You are only even hearing the English because it's my organic empathic system that makes it not even matter and it's the biology of your no-K braino that turns it into recognizable symbols. In fact, did you know that if it weren't for the human capacity for what you call "denial," your flakes and no-K's could not even reproduce? Would not be able to.

So... I wish you would look me in the eye, an organ we have in common, and state your credentials as a professional by implication of your manner, sir.



by Missy