no, see, THEIR version goes "dun-dun-dun-dundunDUN-dun"... and MY version goes...
Our affair was still new, but it had gone on long enough now that I was quite familiar with Maggie's elaborate post-coital routine. Our pillow talk had just come to a standstill, and I casually looked sideways to witness the inevitable ritual.
She looked to her left, then to her right, hoping for a sign of life first, and a familiar face second or anything she'[d] recognize second. She shook her head, trying to make the blurriness go away before putting her weight on her left leg, testing its strength to stand up outside the ornate tent.
I swear, she was just so damned adorable. Every quirk just made her all the more sexy to me. No wonder I just couldn't quit her.
Granted, her paranoia was at least somewhat understandable. "Gifted" as we both were, our respective spouses were certainly nothing to trifle with either. We hadn't been discovered yet, but we'd had our share of close calls.
Indeed, I've learned a thing or two. I go to bed fully dressed now, including my ID and wallet and usually my shoes. I carry a few different currencies (thank god for the euro, and the fact that both Canadians and people south-of-the-border usually tolerate U.S. cash). But I've never found myself in an Eastern European country before, and who knows which one this is? I don’t have the money for it, that's for sure. I hope to God I won't need it...
"It's Romania," Maggie said. It was like she could read my mind. ...Oh, right, she could read my mind.
"...And don't worry, my bank accounts are all quite healthy here. I got this round. You can pay our way next time we meet up in Canada or Mexico or whatever. Hey, you want to go grab some lunch?"
I breathed a sigh of relief regarding the resolved financial situation. This teleporting globe-trotting affair of ours could definitely be exhausting sometimes. "Sure, I'm starving."
I wondered, though - if her local finances were so flush, why were we sleeping in a tent? I guess it was pretty ornate, but still. Damn, she was just so adorably quirky!
Lunch at the cafe had been delightful. Having finished, we sat together on a park bench at the edge of a lovely little pond. Maggie lay sideways on the bench, her head in my lap.
"Bill, this is wonderful. Getting away with you to my ornate tent in Romania was just what I needed. I know it's stressful for us sometimes, but... you know, I'm so glad we found each other."
"I know, Maggie. If loving you is wrong, I don't want to be right."
She sighed and cooed. A moment later, I felt her stiffen. "Hey, Bill... is that... is that my husband over there?"
"Maggie, I love you, but you're too damned paranoid sometimes."
"No, Bill, really, look."
I looked. It was her husband. And the towering 7-foot man-beast was none too pleased. A club in one hand and a bottle of Bartles & Jaymes in the other, steam rising from the unexplained bolts installed at the sides of his neck, he was coming right at us. I'd completely forgotten that he was capable of teleportation as well, albeit only to Romania.
I waded into the pond, letting him get close enough to swing at me. He followed me in when he missed. He was too drunk to even notice.
I called on my super power.
His head exploded. A rainbow emerged from his spurting neck. The Bartles & Jaymes comically landed on the surface of the pond, slowly sinking into the water. Maggie giggled and clapped in sheer delight.
(Later, I would try to use this super power to my advantage, to whisk away gray hairs and smooth the age lines from my skin. I went back and forth for quite a while this way, trying to keep myself at peak condition, desperate to make use of my apparent immortality. I wooed some very lovely ladies, who were impressed with such little feats. But by then, I only had eyes for Maggie.)
I looked across the pond. "Hey, Maggie, seems your husband left behind some kinda briefcase."
"Let's pick it up. I'm sure there's nothing very interesting in it, though. He was always such a bore. Hey, I'm kinda sleepy. You want to go get coffee?"
The Romanian coffee shop was quaint, if a bit strange. We were the only living souls in the shop, save for the barista, a gaggle of bridge-playing old ladies, and a totally insufferable raven in a cage behind the counter.
Maggie smiled dreamily into her mug. "Bill, I can't tell you how relieved I am that my husband is no longer a worry. I was always thinking he would get suspicious, teleport to Romania, and stop by the ornate tent."
"You think that's how he knew? He stopped by the tent first?"
"Yeah, I'm sure that's how he knew. He knows that my ornate Romanian tent is my favorite place to get away from it all."
"Well, then, maybe you could have thought to do something with the five used condoms sitting in the gar..."
I never got to finish my sentence. There was a deafening crash behind me and I spun around to see what had caused it. Everything happened in slow motion after that.
It was my wife, standing in the doorway of the shop. The way her wings were slowly, slightly flapping, I could tell she was none too pleased. She had her crossbow in hand, and her trademark ruby-tipped arrows with epoxy-hardened red-panda-gut shafts in her quiver.
...Let me tell you, the process of making those things was so disgusting, it had totally ruined our marriage. Every time I'd had to listen to red pandas screaming out in the makeshift backyard abattoir, I'd asked her if she could just make the damn things out of bamboo or something like everybody else. But OH no, it had to be red panda guts.
"You!" She pointed at me. "You!" She pointed at Maggie.
"Honey, listen... it's... it's not what it looks like."
How did she find us, anyway?
"Oh, come on, Bill. I knew you had to be up to something, all that damn teleporting, all that 'overtime' at work. So I put a GPS tracking box in your laptop bag... and I just followed you and flew in to Romania, and boy, Bill, are my arms tired.
"...And now... now I see the reason, clear as day. Teleporting all over just to be with this... telepathic strumpet?"
"No, honestly, it's not like that, honey, I..."
Faster than I could humanly perceive, my wife whipped out one of her handmade red-pandarrows, pulled it back in the crossbow, and aimed it straight at Maggie's heart. "Shh. No more talking, Bill. Time for payback. Now... now you're both gonna feel my shaft."
The ladies screamed, and then it came, all stiff and gross and red. Quoth the bird, “that’s what she said.”
Maggie, of course, being telepathic, had smartly ducked in the split second before my wife had released the arrow. In the end, ironically, 'twas the raven who felt my wife's panda-shaft.
...That doesn't even make sense, but whatthefuckever, this being LJI, you probably just skimmed the first two paragraphs before scrolling to the conclusion and it's not like you're even actually reading this any more. Derp-derr-derp-derr-derp hergen d'glergen lasagna nipples.
"Bill," Maggie said, "do that thing."
"What thing?"
"That 'super power' thing!"
"What the hell are you talking about? And did you mean to say 'superpower'? I think it's one of those words that is more commonly found in compound form in the literature, because..."
"'Super power,' 'superpower,' whatever! Your head-exploding thing! NOW!"
"Oh yeah... that."
My wife's head exploded. Her winged, bikini-clad body dropped to the ground. Her arrows all instantly and for some goddamned metaphyical suspension-of-disbelief-BECAUSE-IT'S-MAGICAL blah blah blah all turned back into red pandas, albeit very confused and quickly-suffocating red pandas covered head to toe in hardened epoxy.
The bridge-club ladies giggled and clapped in sheer delight.
Maggie and I embraced, sharing a long, deep kiss. You probably have no idea what it's like to kiss someone telepathic. They're always the best kissers ever, because they know when their kissing approach totally sucks. Also, you never have to tell them when your upper body is starting to cramp up in missionary self-support situations and maybe they really ought to be on top for a while. Yeah, it's pretty nice.
We got up to go back to the ornate tent and get down to in-ornate-tents business. But walking toward the door past the headless body of my winged wife, something odd happened. Specifically, her head grew back.
"I'm not done with you two! Stay here, I'll..."
"Heretofore-unnamed-so-why-bother-now wife, it's over. You're fresh out of pandarrows. Look." I pointed at the pile of glue-hardened red panda corpses next to her.
She was still struggling to get off the floor. "Bill, you know full well that I'm still some kind of unspecified winged, bikini-clad superhero type. I can still murder you both with my bare hands."
Maggie sighed. "Just do it again, Bill."
"Why? Apparently, her head will just grow back again."
We looked at the floor.
"What do you have, Maggie? What's in that briefcase?"
"Oh, yeah, let me look." She popped open the briefcase, looked inside, and shrugged. "Weird. It's a bunch of pictures of my husband fucking some chick. Wonder why he brought that along."
My wife screamed. "No! Anything but that!"
Maggie and I looked at each other.
"I beg of you! Please! Anything, anything but those pictures of some guy I don't care about banging some woman I don't know either! Bill, please, after all we've been through... don't let me end this way!"
I didn't need to tell Maggie what I was thinking, of course. She immediately dumped the full contents of the briefcase onto my wife.
She crumples amidst the incriminating photographs. Some woman. French, maybe. Very, very nude. Pressed right up against him. He was wearing his hair differently... wasn't in uniform... and one of the pictures showed his wedding ring was missing.
The conclusion is obvious.
...But I'll recount it anyway. The respective but strongly correlated fabrics of space and time were instantly ripped apart, because, like, duh, this is LJI. Maggie and I completely disappeared. So did Romania, and all the tents in Romania, ornate or otherwise.
My wife turned into someone named Zura, in some kind of coercive futuristic slave-to-fashion scenario, if I recall correctly.
She wasn’t sure what came over her but she stumbled to her feet and out of her small room. Eventually Zura’s determined steps led her to her mistress’s studio and it didn’t take her long to spot the dress she had worn earlier that day.
She grasped the fabric with trembling hands but after the first tear they seemed to gain a mind of her own. The sequins flew everywhere but Zura kept ripping. She didn’t stop until it was completely destroyed.
“What have you done, child?” some previously-unencountered character named Marta cried as she stood in the doorway. “You’ll definitely be sent back to the auctioneers now!”
“Let her send me back,” Zura hissed. “I won’t be her dress up doll anymore."
This entry utilizes uhhhh "found elements" from the Week 12 entries of (in alphabetical order AND order of actual usage): agirlnamedluna, halfshellvenus, kathrynrose, lrig_rorrim, padf00t, porn_this_way, the_lettersea, and x_disturbed_x. I would have used elements of favoritebean's Week 12 entry as well, but she made said entry private before I could "sample" it. Also, since y'all were chosen as my fellow "survivors" in Week 13, I would have (bravely!) used "elements" of your Week 13 entries instead... but I waited as long as I could and none of y'all slackers had even started posting yr damn entries twelve hours before the freakin' deadline. SLACKERS.
edit: now with optional bonus entry, in which i do even more unspeakable things with your sacred words