A Complete Shithole

His first stop was Cosmic Ray’s house, which was a complete shithole. That was one item in the litany of problems with being a shady person, your perception of the world didn’t match actual reality. In Ray’s case, they were pretty sure they lived in the Sheffield’s brownstone mansion from the television show The Nanny. In reality, Ray was the sole occupant of a condo complex that, had the correct authorities been paying attention, should have been condemned a number of decades back.

Part of the appeal that it held for Ray, was that it had actually been built in the 1990s, so the bones of the complex were canonically accurate. It had spent about thirty years housing small families, ski bums, and service industry professionals. Various changes in ownership had eventually classified it as an investment property. This classification had sealed the fate of the structure, and began its journey into disrepair.

Traditionally, all condominiums were investment properties, but around the 2020s the definition of this term had changed enough to turn this condominium from a domicile into a financial instrument. This redefinition of terms had been brewing for a couple of hundred years, but really reached broader adoption a few months before the 2008 financial collapse.

Basically, the fuckwits behind this whole thing were looking to separate a house’s form from its function. When buying a house as an investment, it is implied that you will eventually sell the property for more money than you bought it for. This unshakable faith in the market was the underlying miscalculation that drove this redefinition of terms. The underlying problem with this was a misunderstanding of what a house is actually for. A house is to live in, raise a family if you choose to, someplace to microwave popcorn or forget to do the laundry. Not an esoteric financial instrument to extract money from a basic human need.

What this ultimately came down to, was the fact that pure free market capitalism had nothing to do with ethics, and market forces couldn’t be relied upon to make ethical considerations where humans are involved. Regan demonstrated this when he repealed the fairness doctrine and turned the news into a post truth free market hellscape that was driven by profit rather than facts. When this same kind of outside the box thinking was applied to the real estate industry, the successive eras of boom and bust ripped the housing industry to shreds with an ever increasing sine wave of free market full scale slaughter.

In the current market landscape, which was quite bleak, there is a vast inventory of worthless houses that nobody could afford. The financial entities that owned them saw them on paper as a bunch of spectacularly hedged assets, in reality they were mostly uninhabitable husks like the condo complex that Ray squatted in.
The people that perpetrated this financial armageddon all got huge bonus checks and retired to places like Vermont, where they quickly went to work torpedoing what was left of the local economy. These people were the majority of Leslie’s clientele.

Ray wasn’t difficult to find, all Leslie had to do was follow the sounds of lamentation. This wailing into the void was a song of mourning for snap bracelets and pogs, new episodes of Friends, and day glow windbreakers. It was a requiem over the charred bones of Beavis and Butthead, Ren and Stimpy, and Sifl and Olly. A funeral march around a smoking crater in an Iowa cornfield where a 747 laden with the members of Sound Garden, The Butthole Surfers, Cake, Soul Coughing, Violent Femmes, Stone Temple Pilots, and Smashing Pumpkins had been explosively rendered to ash.

Leslie was good at a number of things, but consoling somebody whose reality had gone through a sudden tectonic shift didn’t even hit the top 100. He had about thirty seconds to come up with a strategy while he walked from the Delica to the wrecked condo. He settled on cheerful ignorance. While not the most emotionally adept approach, there was the possibility that he could distract Ray from what was undoubtedly the worst day of their life.

“Ray!” Leslie yelled from outside, “I need a hand, you around?”

In lieu of an answer, Ray continued to wail, moan, break things, and generally sound as if the world was ending. In their defense, it was, but that was hardly a reason to cause a scene. Leslie had no choice but to go inside. This was something that was very low on Leslie’s list of favorite things to do.

The constant state of delusion that Ray had operated under until quite recently edited everything that they saw, heard, heard, smelled, tasted and touched. It was completely immersive. In Ray’s personal canon, they had a butler, Niles, the same one from The Nanny. Presumably he came with the house. Everyday, Niles would bustle around the house being witty and offering saucy quips for Ray’s amusement. Niles appeared to be cleaning most of the time, which was good. What was bad was Niles was a string of ones and zeros that had no way of actually tidying up in any way. To maintain the illusion, the shades that Ray wore just edited the tasteful brownstone so that it didn’t look like it was packed with years of garbage.

Over the years, so that Ray wouldn’t suspect that they lived in abject squalor, Niles had concocted a series of cocamamie stories as to why certain rooms in the mansion were off limits. Renovations, romantic trists with Ms. Babcock, also cat fights with Ms. Babcock, problems with Brighton, Magie, or Grace, fires, cross over episodes with Fresh Prince, et cetera. Eventually, Ray’s living space was whittled down to a single trash filled room. The Shades didn’t really care about Ray’s living conditions, they prioritized a coherent and immersive fantasy.

Now, Ray could see, smell, hear and feel the conditions that they had been living in. Judging from the sounds coming out of the condo, it was a volatile mix of emotions that Ray was feeling. Leslie would have knocked and waited for an answer under normal circumstances, but the tarp that acted as the front door was in a state that seemed like it was technically open and Ray probably wouldn’t have heard him anyway.

Inside, well, it was bad. Leslie had never been all the way inside before, because going into a shady person’s house was not typically done, unless you were another shady person. In public, their delusions were usually just social quirks. In the privacy of a home, where the majority of the delusion took place, things often got a bit untidy. Luckily, it was February and most of the condo was unheated, so the smell of trash and rotting food was kept to a dull roar.

Ray wasn’t a very large person, so the paths that their daily travels through the trash cave that they lived in were rather narrow. Leslie’s coveralls came in handy in a couple of ways while he spelunked his way towards the sound of Ray’s lament. First of all, they were coveralls, so if he managed to get some unfrozen trash juice on him, it probably wouldn’t get on his actual body. Secondly, the cuffs of his sleeves had built in illumination.

In his line of work, he often had to do things in small cramped dark spaces. Things like removing a possum carcass from a crawlspace, or thawing frozen pipes under a poorly thought out edition. In these scenarios, he was working with his hands and they were the things that needed some light shined on them. Cuffs tended to follow hands pretty persistently, and Leslie had found these immensely helpful on an almost daily basis.

The navigation of the garbage labyrinth took a good couple of minutes, with frequent dead ends and cul de sacs. Ray played the role of lugubrious minotaur, and a sort of ad hoc game of marco pollo was undertaken. When the center of the labyrinth was reached and Ray was found, they were clawing through the trash in a frantic search for something.

“Ray!” Leslie hailed.

“Fuck!” Ray exclaimed, startled, “Jesus Les, you scared the shit out of me.”

“You alright?” Leslie asked, kind of knowing the answer already.

“Do I fucking look alright?” Ray shot back, “the fucking shade server has been down for two hours and I’m losing my shit.”

“I don’t think it’s coming back on, man,” Leslie informed Ray as gently as he could, “I came to check on you.”

“Well, Les,” Ray seemed to be winding up for some kind of tirade, “I’m far from fucking alright. Roughly two hours ago I lived in a tasteful brownstone and I had a saucy butler named Niles who was apparently not doing his job very well. Everything was cool beans man, now it’s just piping hot beans wherever I look. I live in fucking trash. Cool beans? What the fuck does that even mean? Fuck. I’ve wasted my life. What the fuck are you wearing? You look like a dickhead.”

“My coverall,” Les said, looking down at his vestments, “I wear this like everyday.”

“Fuck me,” Ray’s face was streaked with tears, snot, and other evidence of lamentation, “this shades shit got way out of hand man, way out of hand. When I see you, you are wearing a dope ass Weezer concert tee and cargo shorts, you look fresh as hell. You wear a different one everyday.”

“What’s a Weezer?” Leslie asked.

“Fuck!” Ray raged, running their trash covered hands through their dreadlocks, “Do I even fucking know you?”

“Shit yeah you know me,” Leslie countered, “who gives a shit what I wear.”

“Wait, what the fuck am I wearing?” Ray examined themself in Leslie’s cufflight, “I look like a total tool.” Ray was wearing a tattered tie dye hoodie and a pair of sweatpants that had seen better days a couple of years back.

“Far as I can tell, you aren’t wearing much,” Leslie observed, “It’s ten below out, aren’t you freezing your ass off?”

At the mention of the temperature, it dawned on Ray that they actually were cold. They began to shiver almost immediately.

“Let’s get you the fuck out of here,” Leslie wasn’t one for giving commands, but this was not merely a suggestion. The chills that had come over Ray had gone from superficial to convulsive in a matter of seconds. It was clear to Leslie that the situation was worse than he had originally thought, and Ray was in need of a forcible extraction. He scooped Ray up in a fireman’s carry and retraced his steps through the labyrinth.

Ray offered little resistance, as they were busy shivering their bones to pieces, but they kept saying something through clenched teeth. Something like “Heck”, or “My Hecky Heck”, which was an utterly bizarre thing to say. The last twenty four hours or so had been fully bizarre, so it was all par for the course for Leslie.

He brought Ray to the passenger area of the Delica, which was like a tropical paradise compared to the bitter cold outside. Leslie had a couple of spare coveralls in his backpack, one of which was an extreme cold weather variant. It had an integrated heating system in it that could be activated like an electric blanket in an emergency. Leslie deemed this an appropriate time to utilize this feature and broke it out.

After a concerted effort, Ray was able to shake out of their hoodie and sweatpants and into the coverall. Leslie left Ray to their own devices for this. The question of Ray’s gender was one that Leslie had mused on from time to time, but Ray led a rich private life that until recently had been perpetrated in devotion to a lost decade. The period of time between Ronald Regan’s death and the last days of the Clinton administration. Frankly, it was none of Leslie’s business as to what sort of anatomical arrangement Ray had where their arms and legs met their torso, but he wasn’t uncurious about the whole situation.

Ray seemed to shoot the whole gender thing right down the middle. They were skinny and about five foot six, which was a completely ambiguous height. They had scraggly blonde hair decorating their chin, but also the slightest hint of hips beneath their usually baggy clothes. Sexually, Leslie had never had any clues as to what was going on with Ray. It just never seemed to come up. They showed no interest or preference in that regard. It was like the shaded life they lived fulfilled all the desires that they did or didn’t have and the details weren’t really anyone’s beeswax.

Ray was just Ray. They rallied around in their Neon, sold mushrooms to a few people, did strange dances by themselves, and generally filled the social niche of local shady weirdo. On paper, Ray was probably Leslie’s best friend, but the gulf of emotional intimacy between them kept things pretty low stakes. Leslie, not being the most emotionally intuitive person in the world, was completely fine with that.
So he gave Ray their privacy while they pulled on the coverall in the back of the Delica, choosing not to look in the rear view mirror. Leslie waited patiently in the driver’s seat and gave the occasional side eye to the broadsword next to him, wondering when he would have to explain that whole situation. Luckily, Mr. Drake hadn’t piped up through this whole thing, so an explanation could be forthcoming on Leslie’s terms.

Ray shook and chattered for about half an hour before any communication was feasible. The main problem being the hole in Ray’s head that did most of the communication was fully occupied making their teeth sound like a distant machine gun.

“Thanks, man,” Ray said, once their jaw had come back under their conscious control, “I would have been totally butt fucked if you hadn’t dropped by.”

“No Sweat, Ray,” Leslie offered.

“What’s the deal with the shade server? You know when that’s coming back online?” Ray asked with the merest hint of the desperation that they must have been feeling.

“I don’t think it’s coming back on, man,” Leslie said in resignation, “it looks like we are facing some pretty heavy shit right about now.”

“What kind of heavy shit?” they asked.

“Mr. Drake seems to think it’s the end of the world,” Leslie explained.

“That chill old dude from Kingston?” Asked Ray, for clarification.

“Yeah,” Leslie started to wind up for a full explanation of the end of the world, “I’m not sure I understand it all, but the west coast has gone dark and …”

Leslie was cut off mid sentence by the sword in the passenger’s side footwell.

“Wise men tell a tale late at night of a great King destroyed by the temptation of evil. The Freil Empire, as it was known in those days, was ruled by a powerful man, King Magridd. It seems most people thought the King was a fair and wise ruler. There were some, however, who thought the King himself was ruled by greed. One day, the King happened to hear two guards talking about a man named Dr. Leo. Now Dr. Leo was considered by all to be a great inventor and a genius. The King stayed up many nights wondering how he could use this great inventor to make him more wealthy. All of a sudden the King had an idea. He ordered his guards to capture Dr. Leo and bring him to the castle at once! Soon Dr. Leo was brought to the castle. The King confined him to a small room and ordered him to invent a machine that would summon the King of all evil, Deathtoll. Dr. Leo finally completed the machine. The King instantly called upon Deathtoll, hoping they might strike a deal. After many days, the deal was complete. The King would bring Deathtoll all living creatures, and in return, Deathtoll would give him a piece of gold for each. One by one, all living creatures began to disappear. Soon, the world was completely empty. Two people were watching this catastrophe, The Master, and you, his follower. –The king was very foolish to be tempted by evil, however I will give him another chance. You must go down to Earth and Revive the World!– The master said. On a ray of light you descended to the Earth……A warrior sent to revive the living and punish evil. A SOUL BLAZER!!” The sword that contained the soul of Mr. Drake blasted out in a tinny voice at something like twice normal speaking speed.

“What the fuck was that?” Ray asked after a couple of terribly confused and silent seconds.

“That’d be Mr. Drake,” Leslie said, as reasonably as he could.

Ray popped their head up into the space between the two front seats to try to get an idea of what exactly was going on. When the only real explanation was a broadsword and a couple of crushed paper coffee cups, they turned their head to Leslie with a look of pure confusion.

“You sure that shade server is down?” Ray asked, “this is some pretty shady shit.”

“Mr. Drake turned himself into a sword by accident while trying to save the world, I think,” Leslie observed, “he isn’t making too much sense, but that’s the best explanation I could get out of him.”

Ray retreated to the back seat. They sat there for a good minute trying to get their head around the whole thing.

“Like an uploaded consciousness?” Ray finally asked, “Can we do that now?”

“He did,” Leslie looked over to the sword, “but he’s all fucked up in there.”

“What does that have to do with saving the world?” Ray queried.

“Beats me,” Leslie shrugged, “but it all started with a game of Space Go.”

“Space Go?” they asked, puzzled once more.

Leslie went on to bring Ray up to speed on the space go guy and what he understood about the project that Mr. Drake was involved in. He also explained about the nanites that were eating the bones of their civilization and bringing desolation to the world. Furthermore, how they were now completely fucked and needed to get their shit together. He went on to muse about his possible progeny being carried by the Viking Yarl Lagertha, and how he wanted to check in on the whole situation. This being a Viking thing, the possibility of violence wasn’t out of the question and he wanted a little bit of backup.