Because they are so powerful, everything is hilarious to them. Ks do not have power so much as they are power. They affect the hilarity of spoiled children while inhabiting bodies that could crush a small neighborhood.
What the flekes had failed to do with spears and arrows, the Jans excelled at with a new approach. Their armies of college educated unemployed were turned to the task of capturing and subjugating, and then coopting some powerful Ks of their own.
Originally meant to be a decoy, the first hybrid K. was fitted with commercially available security cameras embedded in her eye creases, and a sort of war room was established for the Jansdaads to control her movements through a process they were developing called Remote Muscular Positioning. Her name was Peg.
After all the poking and prodding and sawing and chopping and stapling and wiring, she'd ended up with a little Jansdaad blood along with a slice of Jansdaad gristle that made up key elements of her new nervous system. Some wondered if she'd be able to artificially mate and conceive with a Jan. Some others should have listened more closely to that concern, perhaps, or maybe they didn't because they knew it was the will of Mthyuh. At some level, they were all shot through with the religious beliefs of their ancestors. It was one way to make sense of what was happening without going insane.
No one expected Peg to morph into a completely normal looking Jan self, although a little fierce in the brow, or that she would end up marrying a hot older black man with gray-blue eyes and frosted sideburns.
He was a news anchorman, and she was in the news all the time. They were both a sort of freak in their own way. They bonded and bore at least one child.
The most awesome aspect of the new Peg was that she could morph right back into her K self as it suited her. Gradually, her own organs and primeval systems not only grew to their original strength but also began to subsume their artificial enhancements and incorporate them into a much more powerful and independent K than ever before. Peg and Ted's kids also had this morphing ability. At a young age, they would form a cocoon and then step out of it as lucid as the grandmother stepping out of the guts of the wolf who thought he'd fooled her.
Eventually Peg and other K hybrids learned to navigate the many holes of The Crack. Some, like Jan, had relationships and families in a number of different holes. The Mthyuh Preservation society encouraged this behavior as a way to prevent them from feeling confined and wanting to eat flekes as the Mouths of Mthyuh. Sometimes the most dangerous Ks would disappear for many seasons as they lived their lives in other destinations within The Crack.
by Phyllis
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