A Note From Ben: This is a slightly different kind of story. It's a farce of several different fics that I've seen in the two years I've been here. In fact, I'm posting this in celebration of being at FFN for two years, which happened yesterday. If you haven't read I Feel So, The Reformation of Kyle Broflovski, Short Stories with Tragic Endings, A Very Special Stan, Aunque Mi Vida Me Cuesta, or Raisins Boy (yes, I parody myself), you won't get many of the jokes here. Feel free to read anyway, but you might not be as amused as someone who actually understands where the jokes come from. Anyway, here it is, and it's all in good fun. I have nothing but respect for my fellow authors.

Disclaimer: I don't own South Park. I also don't own I Feel So, The Reformation of Kyle Broflovski, Short Stories with Tragic Endings, A Very Special Stan, or Aunque Mi Vida Me Cuesta.

by Ben Barrett

"Dude, Kenny is dead!" -Stan

"Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring...BANANAPHONE!" -Raffi

Kyle didn't want Stan to fuck Wendy. He wasn't gay or anything, no sir. He liked women as much as the next guy. He just thought the idea of Stan putting his penis in such a foul creature was a sin against the very universe itself.

"You don't know where she's been, Stan," he'd tried to explain. "You don't know what she's carrying."

"What could she possibly have?" Stan had replied.

"A penis?" he'd answered. "A big floppy one, and two nuts."

Kyle had always had his suspicions that Wendy was a man but had never been able to gather enough evidence to prove it. Now his best friend was planning to fuck him/her/it and it made Kyle sick to his stomach.

"You know, you haven't got much room to talk," Stan once scolded him during one of their debates. "You've done things way more filthy than that."

"Like what?"

"Like fucking Cartman?" Stan suggested. "In some of these slash stories, you get pissed off at me and then go fuck the most disgusting character ever created."

"Hey!" Kyle argued. "I didn't do that willingly. I mean, I don't have much say over how this crap is written."

Stan had conceded that point to Kyle. They had all been forced to do foul things in these stories, things that were too dark to even be mentioned in polite conversation. Stan still carried a lot of emotional scars from going through the whole Wendy-dumps-Stan-again-so-he-falls-in-love-with-Kyle bit about three thousand times.

That didn't stop the crap, though. No matter how much they begged and pleaded for people to please leave them alone to die, they were the world's animated sex slaves. They would perform like trained chimpanzees until the end of time or until people lost interest in the series, whichever came first.

"That's why I have to stop it," Kyle declared to nobody at all, standing outside of Stan's house. He was planning to do something unplanned and silly. He was going to prove that Wendy was a dude and blow everyone's mind. How could there be bad slash about Stan being dumped by a chick and turning gay if the "chick" turned out to be another dude?

It was the perfect setup for a dramatic scene, so of course it was nighttime and a big thunderstorm was getting ready to unleash it's fury on everything in sight. It couldn't be any cheesier than the whole "It was a dark and stormy night" thing.

He saw Stan walking toward him, holding Wendy's hand.

"Hey, Kyle," he said as he approached. "Having a good night?"

"Not really," Kyle replied. "You?"

"It's about to get better," Stan answered, wiggling his eyebrows. "A whole lot better."

"But...but I thought we agreed she was a man and you weren't going to fuck her."

"It's too late," Stan explained. "We've decided we're going to have sex because it'll piss everyone off."

"When did this happen?"

"Sometime after the first paragraph."

Kyle screamed and lunged at Wendy just as a big clap of thunder boomed overhead.

"I'll pull this fucking wig off!" he screamed, sitting on her chest and pulling at her hair. "I know it's a wig!"

"Aaah!" she screeched, waving her hook around wildly. "Quit it!"

Stan was screaming at Kyle to stop, but Kyle couldn't hear over the storm and his own screaming.

"NOT A WOMAN! IT'S A MAN! WHY THE HELL WON'T THIS HAIR COME OFF?"

It wasn't until Stan had him in a headlock, telling him what a stupid asshole he was, that he realized his mistake. Wendy's wig must be glued on! He lunged at her to have another go, but Stan slammed him in a full-body tackle and the scene went black, marking the first major story transition.

Honestly, it couldn't have come at a worse time....

"Have I mentioned how much I hate you?" Stan asked as they drove into the story, letting not just entire paragraphs but entire sections of the story pass them by without notice. If there was one thing a story transition was good for, it was skipping over lots of important stuff to get to the crap faster.

"Only about three dozen times since the last time we appeared in this farce."

"Oh," Stan said. "Well I still hate you."

Stan had never quite forgiven Kyle for trying to pull Wendy's hair off and then inexplicably running off to California in a section of backstory that isn't funny enough to recount. When Kenny died, claiming for some reason that it was for good this time, Kyle had a chance to redeem himself. All he had to do was show up at the funeral and be supportive.

Is it surprising that he didn't make it?

Oh, it isn't because he didn't try. He thought he made it. He was at a funeral, shaking hands with people he didn't know and trying to be as comforting to complete strangers as he could. It wasn't until he'd been there a good two hours that someone informed him that the person in the box wasn't Kenny McCormick; it was Heath Ledger.

"You know you're just gonna fuck me at the end of the story, right?" Kyle stated, bringing us back into a story we didn't care about to begin with. "We're gonna play around for a bit, then I'm gonna break some vase that serves absolutely no purpose or maybe flip out on you because you showed up for ice cream an hour and a half late. That'll lead to a big argument or a fight, probably in the rain, which will lead to you trying to suck my face off, and that'll lead..."

"That's enough," Stan said. "Really, it's enough."

Stan pulled into the parking lot of a small strip mall. He stopped the car in front of one of the smallest shops, a dingy little place with a small, hand-lettered sign on the front that said: FOGHORN & LEGHORN LAW FIRM.

"This is the place Kenny entrusted with his final business?" Kyle asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow. He didn't do this because he really cared where Kenny's lawyers conducted themselves, but because raising his eyebrow added words to the sentence and added to the overall word count of the story.

"That's what the card says," Stan answered, pulling out a little white business card with the words DRIVE UNTIL THE ARGUMENT ENDS printed on it in big bold letters.

"That explains a lot," Kyle said.

"I say, I say, I'm not a cheap ripoff at all!" the lawyer behind the desk cried in a cliche and overused southern accent as they walked into the office. Kyle had to bite his own tongue to keep from laughing. This guy looked almost exactly like Colonel Sanders, right down to the stupid white goatee-thing and tacky white suit.

"You're Mr. Leghorn?" Stan asked, suddenly craving fried chicken.

"No, I say, no!" the lawyer replied. "I'm Lawyer X."

"Say, now there's an original name," Stan said, rolling his eyes. "Just finish a few laps at the race track with Speed Racer, did you?"

"That's not, I say, that's not even close to funny, boah!" Lawyer X replied. "You got it all wrong! You gotta have timin', boah! You gotta have wit!"

For no real reason at all, Lawyer X pulled a large pie from his desk drawer and cut himself a piece. He offered some to Stan and Kyle, but they weren't in the mood to do pie jokes.

Lawyer X had two pieces of paper in his hand when the story transition was over. He handed one to Stan and one to Kyle.

Dear Stan:

Hey, it's me, Kenny! As if you didn't know that. As if everyone reading didn't know that. Hey, I just thought I'd let you know that I'm leaving you one billion dollars. Oh, where did I get one billion dollars? Isn't that the trillion dollar question? Actually, I worked in this bar for, like, four years or something. Man, that was one hell of a job. There was this waitress, right? Went by the name of 'Cookie'. She only had, like, three teeth in her head. One night, she took me into the dry goods room and...wait, what was I talking about again?

Oh, yeah. My billions. Well, I took my earnings and invested in the stock market. You'd never believe how much you can earn investing in those little ketchup packets. More than you could investing in Microsoft. You know why? Because every time you go to the drive-thru and ask for ketchup, they give you about a THOUSAND of those damn things. Then you can't use them all, so you stuff them in your glove box along with the super-sized stack of napkins you didn't want in the first place and...

Stan skipped over a bunch of paragraphs where Kenny rambled on some more about ketchup, then spaceships, then porno. This led to a three-page diatribe on how he would've loved to have fucked Catwoman because she looked so dominatrix in that black leather holding that sexy whip.

...she could play with MY scratching post any day of the week. Hey, baby, wanna play with Kenny's toy mouse?

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that in order to inherit all of my money, I'm going to throw out something completely improbable. Ridiculous even. You and Kyle have to live together for a year. In the same apartment. In the same bed. You don't have to sleep naked or anything, though it would be pretty kinky, wouldn't it?

"This is bullcrap!" Stan cried, sounding very Cartman-esque.

"Isn't it always?" Kyle replied, not looking up from his own letter, which was something most foul. "Can you believe he actually asked me not to jack off in your bed after your dog dies?"

"But my dog isn't dead!" Stan said.

Kyle passed Stan the letter and pointed out the offending passage.

...Now I know you'll want to jerk off after Sparky dies. God knows there's nothing kinkier than the death of a beloved pet. Still, I'm going to have to ask you to restrain yourself. At least have the decency to go into the bathroom. Don't do it in the bed with Stan there, okay? That's not cool, man.

After another story transition, which only served to keep the story moving along, Stan and Kyle were in Stan's dorm room. After much debate, none of which was funny enough to put in print, they decided that shacking up there would be cheaper than renting a whole apartment.

"I guess everybody will just overlook the giant plotholes," Kyle mumbled to himself as he walked into the scene.

"What plotholes?" Stan asked.

"That I'm staying in a dorm room in a school I don't attend," Kyle replied, ticking off each point on his fingers. "That nobody who runs the school has a problem with that. That I never bothered to go back and settle things in California..."

He was interrupted by a convenient knock on the door. Stan opened it and saw two guys who had just walked over from another story.

"Oh," Stan said. "Kyle, these are our clones, David and Ryan. "

Kyle had no trouble understanding why Stan called them "clones". They looked exactly like them, down to the minute details. Kyle couldn't help but wonder why someone would feel it necessary to do such a thing. Furthermore, it was kind of unsettling. If the redhead was really exactly like him in appearance, then he knew what Kyle looked like naked. He didn't like strangers knowing what his penis looked like.

"Where did you dig these guys up?" Kyle asked. "I mean, really? How hard is it to just rename a character?"

"I resent that!" Ryan argued. "I am NOT just a renamed Stan! I'm a renamed Stan with a Kyle personality."

Kyle did a face palm.

"Say, Stan," David asked, changing the joke, "are we going to invite Kyle to join our super secret club?"

"The secret club that isn't a cult?" Ryan added, eying David's crotch like a Mexican eyes a burrito.

"He can come to our annual pool party!" David continued. "He can be one of us!"

One of us, one of us, Kyle thought with a smirk. Gooble gobble, gooble gobble!

"As long as he remembers we're not a cult!" Ryan said.

"We'll be the best friends you ever had!"

"Best friends who'll alienate you from everyone you know, slice your hand open with a big knife, and then sear our emblem onto your back with a branding iron...but we're not a cult."

Stan did his signature nose-pinch.

"David, fuck your brother and shut the hell up."

So he did.

"Kenny," she said without turning.

"Bebe," he answered, moving up next to her and grabbing two peaches from a nearby bin. He held them up in front of his chest and began to rub his thumbs suggestively over them. Bebe tried to ignore him and his boob joke, but this only seemed to provoke him to try harder. "Peaches are a sexy fruit, aren't they? Sexy and juicy, like Kyle."

Bebe opened her mouth to respond, but couldn't think of a damn thing to say to such a statement.

"Now some people don't like sexy fruit," he said, putting down the peaches and reaching for something else. "Some people like dry and brittle garbage like this wheat grass."

"Some people realize," she snapped, "that peaches may be sexier and sweeter, but wheat grass is better for you."

"Some people only think that wheat grass is the best option because someone told them so," Kenny argued. "When they get a taste of their first peach, they'll drop wheat grass like the nasty compost that it is."

"Some people," Bebe snarled, "shouldn't go near peaches! They need wheat grass to keep them regular!"

"You keep Stan regular?" Kenny smirked. "What the hell do you two do in your bedroom?"

"What do you want, other than my Stan?" she asked, fed up with the joke. "I know you want to bang him like a toy drum, so don't even bother denying it."

"I'd like to get through a fucking story without someone killing me, whoring me out, or accusing me of being someone's boytoy. You know, Kenny has feelings too. Maybe I don't like being passed around from person to person like a joint in a room full of Jamaicans. Maybe I don't like getting crushed, shot, maimed, and otherwise brutalized every time I turn around."

"How do you think I feel?" Butters asked, walking by at random. "Every time someone writes me into a story, I'm either Cartman's whore, an emo pussyfag, a bitch, an asshole, dead, sexually abused by my parents, or completely out of character in some other way."

"Yeah, but you deserve it," Bebe said, once again being a bitch. "Nobody likes you and that makes it funny."

Butters glared at her and then walked down the aisle and out of the story forever.

"So you don't want to fuck the shit out of Stan?" Bebe asked Kenny. A little girl who'd been standing behind Bebe for no particular reason went skipping down the aisle toward her mother singing "fuck the shit out of Stan" over and over, as if it were her favorite jump rope song.

"No, I don't want to fuck the shit out of Stan," Kenny said. "This isn't a Stenny."

"Well then what the hell do you want?"

Instead of answering, he pulled a plastic bag out of her shopping cart and looked inside it.

"What are you going to use these for?" he asked.

"If you must know," she sniffed, "I'm planning to make Stan a cobbler."

"With these?"

"Yes."

"These are no good," Kenny said. "If you make a cobbler with these, it's going to be unbearable."

"I think I know a little more about cobblers than you do!"

"I'll bet not."

"These peaches are perfectly fine!"

"I'll bet not."

"The cobbler will be delicious!"

"I'll bet not."

"The best ever!"

"I'll bet not."

"And why the fuck not?" Bebe asked. "Why are you so much better at picking out peaches than me?"

Kenny reached into the bag and pulled out an onion.

"That's why, you ditzy, blond-headed bitch!" Kenny said. "Do me a favor? Don't cook anything for the rest of this story. I'm supposed to be the one who dies and writes out a complicated will that forces people to do things that are not only outrageous, but beyond the scope of believability. If you cook, you're going to end up killing Stan and then where would we be?"

When the flashback ended, Stan and Kyle were at a pool party hosted by Stan's super secret club. Kyle was trying to look inconspicuous, but since he couldn't even spell that word let alone define it, he wasn't doing a very good job. Everyone was staring at him.

"I don't like it here," he told Stan. "Everyone in your club keeps undressing me with their eyes."

"I'm not in any club," Stan said, still in denial that his secret was already out. "There's no club here. This is just a group of people who aren't connected in any way."

"Really?" Kyle said, pointing at one guy walking toward the juice bar. He had an ugly burn mark on his back that looked like a penis. "What the hell is that, then? And why does everyone have them?"

"Oh, look!" Stan declared, bringing an abrupt end to that topic. "Here comes another good friend of miine: Cliché Jock Asshole."

Kyle looked over his shoulder at where Stan was pointing. Cliché Jock Asshole was strutting slowly in their direction, bouncing his left peck at people in some crude form of a wave.

"Hey, Stan," Cliché Jock Asshole said, pushing Kyle into the pool.

"Why the hell did you do that?" Stan exclaimed, running to the side of the water. He'd completely forgotten that he was supposed to be hating Kyle in this story.

"I'm a cliché jock asshole, remember?" he responded, flexing his arm and kissing his bicep.

Kyle couldn't swim and therefore found himself sinking rapidly toward the bottom of the pool. He knew he should be in a panic, flailing and kicking to try and save himself, but he didn't see the point. He wouldn't be able to gain control of the situation no matter what he did. Besides, someone would notice his predicament and jump in to save him. Surely they wouldn't just leave him down here, right? Right?!

"So then I said 'You're the one who wanted me to kill the damn cockroach'," Stan said to some guy in a Speedo, "'don't yell at me for making a mess!'"

Guy in Speedo laughed at this and clapped Stan on the back.

"You're a funny guy, Stan," he said in a cheesy Latino accent, "but what about your amigo down there in the water?"

"Oh, we called the paramedics," Stan replied with a wave of his hand. "When they get here in twenty minutes, they'll pull him out."

Guy in Speedo was confused.

"Um, wouldn't it make more sense to pull him out so he doesn't drown before the paramedics get here?" he asked, pulling nervously at his Speedo.

"You know I never thought of that," Stan said. "I just thought it made sense to leave him there."

Down at the bottom, Kyle was losing his patience. If someone didn't come soon, he was probably going to drown. At best he'd end up a brain-damaged freak who could only scream his own name. The idea of sitting next to Timmy somewhere screaming out "KAAAHL!" every time someone spoke to him was one that made him want to scream. He probably would have...except he was under water.

What the fuck is taking them so long?

He tried to tap his foot, but of course he couldn't because he was under water. Not that anyone would have seen the gesture and picked up on it anyway. Because he was under water.

I've sure been down here a really long time.

The plus side to all of this, though, was that Kyle had plenty of time to sit and think. He even came up with a nifty little haiku about being at the bottom of a pool.

I can't fucking breathe.

Where the fuck is everyone?

This shit bites my cock.

Stan, meanwhile, was debating whether to jump into the pool or go get one of those alcoholic drinks with the little umbrellas in it. He was pretty sure Kyle wouldn't die no matter what he did. They hadn't even gotten a chance to share an angsty I-hate-you-so-much mankiss. If he died now, the story would be ruined.

"Have a drink or get wet?" he muttered to himself. "Have a drink...or get wet?"

"Ay yi yi!" Guy in Speedo screamed in really bad Spanish. "Testen bocado! Por favor conada!"

He ran toward the pool and jumped in head-first. Unfortunately, he failed to look to see where he was jumping in and dove into the most shallow part of the shallow end- the stairs. His head hit the cement and smashed open like a pinata.

"I told him to wait for the paramedics," Stan muttered.

Cartman stood on the street, watching the meat wagon take away the dead Mexican and eating a large box of powdered donuts. He wasn't really sure what purpose him being there served, but he wasn't complaining. He almost never got parts in these Stan-boofs-Kyle stories. He also never got parts in the Kyle-boofs-Stan stories, the Craig-boofs-Tweek, the Bradley-boofs-Butters, the Token-boofs-Clyde, or any of the other boof-boof stories. If he did show up, it was always to antagonize or annoy or to fuck the shit out of Butters, which was somehow worse.

Nobody ever considers my feelings. Maybe I don't want to show up dressed up like Hitler, trying to kill everyone in sight. Maybe every once in a while I'd like to show up holding a kitten or something.

Of course, the way people tended to write his character, even if he did show up with a kitten, he'd ultimately end up maiming it or fucking it. The kindest ending poor little Fluffikins could hope for would be getting ground up into chili and eaten.

Speaking of chili meat, the show was winding down and he was hungry. The body was gone and the police were telling everyone to move along, that there was nothing to see here. He needed to find some food since it had been a good five minutes since he'd eaten. Maybe he'd go hunt down that ginger kid and kill him...

God damn it, he thought as he walked off into the night. Some things never change.

Kyle was still pissed about Stan leaving him on the bottom of the pool as he lay in bed that night, staring up at the ceiling.

That asshole was actually talking to a dude in a Speedo while I was sitting under water writing poetry.

He thought about just forgetting the whole deal and doing the one thing that made sense: packing his shit and going back to California, where his life was. After all, what was the purpose of dragging this on for forty-two chapters? So he could get his hands on Kenny's money? He was Jewish; he could always get more money. He kept a bag of gold around his neck, for Moses' sake!

Why the hell am I even here, other than because the plot says I have to be?

He heard Stan's bedsprings creak and then saw Stan's silhouette in the moonlight.

"I'm going out," he said. "Your late night reflections weren't very funny, so I have to pick up the slack. Just don't follow me, because I'm not going to any secret clandestine meetings or anything."

"I didn't say you were," Kyle replied.

Stan threw on a stupid-looking costume and walked out. Kyle followed him, of course, because that's what everyone expected him to do. He didn't really give a shit about Stan's super secret club that didn't exist, but he figured if he didn't follow, the writer would just throw in a story transition to force him into doing it.

He followed Stan to a big building at the back of the campus shaped like a large, erect penis sitting between two testicles. Kyle wasn't sure how he missed the building on all of his many pointless trips across campus to classes he didn't have. He also couldn't figure out why he never noticed the flashing neon signs that declared A SUPER SECRET CLUB TOTALLY DOESN'T MEET HERE.

"Subtlety isn't their strong point," Kyle said from his hiding place behind a big bush. He was watching various members of the group sneak up to the building and enter through a door in the left nut. They were all dressed in black robes and had white masks on their faces, and Kyle couldn't help but feel he'd seen this crap somewhere before.

He inched his way up to the building, keeping an eye out for security of any kind; there wasn't any. Kyle couldn't say he was surprised by this. After all, any group that meets in a phallus-shaped building couldn't be too concerned about people busting in on them.

"Brothers!" a guy at the front of the room was saying as Kyle walked in and concealed himself behind a penis-shaped statue. "Tonight our super secret club that doesn't exist meets to uphold one of our oldest and most sacred of traditions."

"Speak it brother," the others chanted.

"Tonight," he said, pulling a large piece of cardboard with a spinning arrow on it from behind his back, "we get drunk and play Twister!"

Bebe was pissed. She was supposed to be the love that always got between Stan and Kyle. She was supposed to be a pain in the ass. Her part should have been a good twenty to thirty chapters long. Instead, she had been cut out almost entirely until she was only left with one flashback scene that she had to share with Kenny. She had complained and bitched and raised one hell of a fit until she was given one final scene.

She stood at Kenny's grave, looking down at the inscription.

KENNY MCCORMICK

DEAD

"I'M ACTUALLY FEELING QUITE BETTER!

WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THAT SHOVEL?"

"You think you beat me," Bebe snarled at it, as if Kenny's headstone cared what she had to say. "Just because everybody thinks I'm a dumb bitch and Stan's off somewhere fucking the shit out of Kyle and I'm a lousy cook and..."

Bebe hawked back and spit on the grave. Satisfied that she'd gotten over on Kenny at least once she turned to walk off. She saw a tree root sticking up out of the ground where she was sure one hadn't been before. That's two she'd gotten over on Kenny, by God! He wouldn't be tripping her today!

That's when the ground opened up beneath her and she fell screaming into a deep abyss, one that no doubt led straight to the fires of hell.

Back in their dorm room, Kyle confronted Stan about his fruity little club.

"You know," he said, "it's one thing to be a part of a clandestine organization that meets secretly at night. It's something completely different when said organization meets in a penis-building and gets drunk."

"I told you not to follow me," Stan said. "Now what are we supposed to use for plot? What the hell do we use to keep people in suspense?"

"Well that wouldn't have worked anyway," Kyle said. "That was so transparent--" 'Transparent' here means 'Ben Barrett is making a pointless Lemony Snicket reference just for shits and giggles' – "and stupid!"

"Was not!" Stan argued, almost positive that nobody reading was going to get the Lemony Snicket joke.

"It was so!" Kyle shot back.

"If it was so transparent," Stan countered, "then how come you didn't guess..."

"That your club was making secret plans to recruit me?" Kyle finished without looking at him. He was kicked back in a recliner, reading a magazine entitled HOT JEWISH HOOTIES. "Guessed that."

"Oh...well...you didn't guess that our leader is..."

"Pip," Kyle said from behind the magazine. "Got that one right away."

"How the fuck did you get that one?" Stan asked incredulously.

"Because whiny British fuckheads make the best villains," Kyle said. "Besides, he's the least logical choice for a villain. I mean, we hold him down in the dirt and fart on him and he becomes head of a cult? Yeah, that makes sense. I'll bet the guy who came up with that crap spent a whole five minutes planning it. I mean, how many pages of notes could he possibly have? Ten, twenty? Not likely. He probably had one lousy stinking page; I'd bet my life on it."

Stan wasn't happy.

"Well, that's great!" he complained. "Now we've got nothing to do for the rest of this story."

"Great," Kyle said, rising to his feet. "Let's fuck then. There's nothing left to do. We're not enemies anymore, Kenny is dead, Bebe is in hell..."

"What about the will?" Stan asked.

"We need to keep the story going for that?"

"I guess not," Stan said, letting himself be led to the bedroom, "but it seems stupid to just drop it like that. It's like we're not even finishing."

"Yeah," Kyle said, unbuckling his belt. "I know what you mean. I remember I used to read this story about Butters and Cartman. Everyone seemed to like it and kept demanding more more more, but after awhile it seemed like the author just quit trying. That lazy asshole. Updates went from weeks to months to never. It got so bad that I nicknamed the story I Can't Believe It's Not Finished!"

"It's a pretty shitty thing to just drop a story like that," Stan said, pulling off his pants.

"Yeah," Kyle agreed, tugging his boxers down, "but sometimes a writer just calls it quits. You could be really into a story, loving where it's going, and suddenly they'll just

Fin