The Rest of the Story: You can read all parts on one page by clicking on
this link.
So here continues my fanfiction for
CRFH. The webcomic has just gotten interesting, by suggesting that Mike, the conniving, evil schemer, is in reality the archangel Michael. It's making my brain hurt. But this story takes place before that little revelation, so I won't talk further about it.
One question that I have to ask is whether it's worthwhile to write a fanfiction. After all, I don't own the characters, so it's not really my story, is it? True, but in some ways, it's a good exercise in writing. By writing for characters other people have defined, you can learn a lot about doing characterization. By keeping to the strictures of the world, you learn a certain amount of discipline that you often need in your own stories.
So, of course, the notification. The characters, world, and events referenced belong to Maritza Campos of
College Roomies from Hell!!!. Only the particular events described here are my own.
Chapter 4
Dave slammed the door behind him. For a moment there, he'd thought those guys wouldn't let him go. He'd almost been ready to use his laservision to get out of there—there was no way he could get past that Mark otherwise. He was huge! Dave's feet scuffed along the hall's carpeting as he trudged towards the elevator. It was the same ugly green color as the carpeting in his building, but he was beginning to wonder if that's where he was. The elevator door was open and some guy with blond hair was getting out. He looked familiar for some reason, but Dave was too distracted to wonder why as he slouched into the elevator.
He'd never been so insulted in his life. He'd been called a wimp, a nerd, a coward, and a freak. He'd even been called a girl—Jay made a point of calling him Petunia every time they met, although next time Dave fully intended to zap him before he got the chance—but no one had ever explained, with such complete and utter seriousness, that he really was a girl and he just thought he was a guy. They were nuts, that's just all there was to it. Only… they had known too much. They had known about the blue mushrooms and being hooked up to that machine after Mike's ill-begotten raid, and about Satan stealing his soul and part of it ending up in Chester, and Roger's werecoyoteness. That was the reason that the part of Dave's mind that wasn't fuming right now was freaking out. Oddly, they hadn't known about Dave's laservision, as they had just stared at him blankly when he told them to get out of his way or he'd zap them. For them to know so much meant that someone must have told them. It had to be a prank, one of Mike's, or worse, maybe one of Waldo's and Steve's. If it was Mike, he was just messing with his head, and Dave would fry some calamari next time he saw him. If it was Waldo and Steve, then they probably wanted something, but they were such idiots that there was no way any logical reasoning would tell him what. They probably thought he had Satan's Fruit Basket or something. What worried Dave a great deal more was the possibility that it was someone else, that it was
him. Whatever Mike and Roger said, he didn't believe that he was invulnerable to Satanic attack. He'd gotten help several times now, the miraculous shotgun and the divine dry-cleaning for sure, maybe some others depending on how you counted them, but he didn't think it was all about him. If he'd gotten help, it was because he was a piece in a bigger game, and that didn't do much to comfort him at all. And even if Satan had been, and would continue to be, stopped when he tried the direct approach, that didn't mean he couldn't make Dave suffer. He'd certainly done plenty of that before without God stepping in and putting an end to it.
Hey you up there! Why can't you just tell us what's going on? Why all the mystery and subtle interventions? It's not like the other guy's shy about being direct. Dave would have continued, but he realized he was asking God why he wasn't more like Satan, and figured it wasn't a good idea to insult the big guy.
The last thing I want to do is get on His bad side too.
The elevator dinged and the door opened. Dave looked around, wondering why he was at the lobby. Some other people he had never seen before got on and he stepped off, realizing that he'd been so lost in his thoughts that he'd forgotten to push a button, so the elevator had just gone to its next call location. Well, at least this gave Dave a chance to make sure he was in the right building. He looked around the lobby. It had to be his apartment building: it had the same ugly green carpet, the same speckled walls, the same lack of anything that might indicate taste. The layout was the same, with double glass doors, the unmanned reception desk—he'd
never seen anyone there—and the mailboxes on the left. The numbers on the front door, backwards from this side of the glass, were right, but he went outside anyway and glanced up and down the street. Yes, this was definitely his apartment building. So why did all the people he had seen look like strangers? Oddly familiar strangers, he had to admit, but they were not the people he knew. He headed back to the elevator, got on and pressed the button for his floor.
Arriving there, Dave got off the elevator and headed towards his room, pulling the key out of his pocket. Chester was clinging to his chest, as he often did, and despite the pain from the sharp claws, Dave enjoyed his soul-cat's proximity. It'd be less painful if he was on his shoulder though. Dave used one hand to support Chester, as he dug in deeper when he was supporting himself, while he unlocked the door with the other. It opened easily, confirming that this was indeed his apartment. He heard some motion in front of him, and looked to see the tops of two black-haired heads poking above the back of the couch, obviously engaged in some sort of lip-lock.
"Oh God, you two," Dave said. "Get a room or something. Preferably not mine."
Two faces appeared beneath the tousled hair, staring at him, and they did not belong to Mike and Marsha.
"Who the Hell are you?" they said together.
"I'm Dave; I live here," he said, suddenly uncertain. He had walked into the apartment thinking everything seemed okay, but looking around now, he was noticing all sorts of things which were wrong. First and foremost, it was just too clean. There was no way that Mike could live here. There were no socks on the ceiling fan, no dirty dishes on the table, no pile of dirty laundry wandering about. The kitchen door was open, which in itself was unusual as they had taken to keeping the door closed to keep the mist from poisoning the air in the rest of the apartment. It had been better since Mike and Marsha cleaned the kitchen, but now that she'd moved out it had been gradually returning to its normal state of toxicity. This kitchen looked clean. What's more, besides the cleanliness, the furniture and decorations were a good deal better than anything Dave had ever owned. It looked like someone well-to-do lived here, probably female and well-to-do, to judge from the curtains on the windows and the decorative knickknacks hanging from the walls.
"I don't think so!" the female member of the couple said. "If Dahlia's invited you to move in with us, I'll ship her to Mexico. I warned her about taking in strays."
"Huh?" Dave said. That "ship to Mexico" crack would have done more to get his attention if his eyes hadn't finally located something he recognized. "Look, if this isn't my apartment, what are you doing with that?" he said, pointing to a hand-drawn poster of a blue dragon breathing flames.
"That? That's Dahlia's. Rose gave it to her. Don't tell me she gave it to you?"
"But…" Dave said, at a loss for words.
"Look, Mister," the guy said, "I don't know who you are, but I think Michelle wants you to leave. If you are Dahlia's… friend, then come back with her. Otherwise, leave before we toss you out." He stood up, revealing a long-sleeved blue and white shirt that was only partially tucked in.
The girl stood up with him. Her designer halter-top probably cost more than Dave's entire wardrobe. She looped her arm around her boyfriend's and leaned against him. "Now, now, Marv. No need to get violent… yet. I'm sure—David, was it?—was just leaving."
Violent? It hadn't even occurred to Dave that this Marv was trying to intimidate him. The guy was a little bit bigger than he was, but his laservision could knock aside a
car, for God's sake. It had been a long time since he'd been intimidated just because someone was bigger, not unless they were armed, psycho, had a tendency to be possessed, or, as seemed to happen with alarming frequency, at least two out of three. He looked from the couple to the familiar poster. Rose had given it to Dahlia? That was crazy. Roger had given it to him! He looked back at the couple, and for a moment he saw their roles reversed. If Michelle were a guy, a bit taller and with a tentacle instead of a left arm, and if Marv—Marvin, probably—were a girl with wings… Yeah, they did look like Mike and Marsha, and that freaked him out worse than anything else.
"All-all right, I'm leaving," he said, backing slowly through the door.
Once he had shut the door behind him, he wondered where exactly he was planning to go. This was
his apartment. It was his building, his room number, the lock matching his key, and his poster inside. It had to be his apartment. But who were Michelle and Marvin? Were they really a reversed gender version of Mike and Marsha? He leaned his forehead against the wall next to the door. He had thought that Mark and Adam were playing a prank on him, a very complex one set up for unknown reasons by somebody who knew most of his secrets. That might have explained them, but it didn't explain what had happened to his apartment. Even if Mike wanted to set up that elaborate of a joke, he could not have gotten their apartment that clean in the time since Dave left for class today. And besides Mike, who else had the resources? Steve and Waldo could never have managed anything like this. So what else was there? He kept coming back to what Mark and Adam had told him. That everything he remembered about his life was a lie, and he was in reality a girl transformed into a guy by Waldo and Steve—only they were really Wendy and Stella, and they had been turned around in his memories along with everyone else.
"No. No way. I'm a guy, and I've been one all my life. Right, Chester?" Chester stared up at him with his large eyes, but didn't say anything. He was worried, Dave could tell, but that could just be the feedback of his own worry. "But how do I know? How do I prove it?"
He turned around and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, Chester on his lap.
Okay, aside from the gender of everyone and their freaking brother—or sister, I suppose—everything else is the same as I remember it. Everything except… The mutations. Neither Michelle nor Marvin had shown any signs of tentacles or wings. "And what about me?" he asked Chester. "Let's say Mark and Adam are right and the two Satanists changed me from a girl to a guy and messed up my memories. That wouldn't give me laservision, would it? Screwed up spell or not, laservision has nothing to do with my gender. That came from the misery journey, which I suppose was a pretty guy-like thing to do, but that's not the same thing. So, if my laservision works, that means the events of the misery journey really happened, every last miserable one of them."
He reached into a pocket and brought out the largest coin he could find. A nickel.
Well, I'm definitely as poor as I remember. As he flipped it into the air, everything in sight took on a blue tint as he started building up his energy. His eyes should be glowing right now. At least, he hoped they were. When the coin reached its apex, he released the pressure behind his eyeballs, and the air sizzled as blue light lanced through it to strike the nickel. It worked! The narrow beam scattered in a thousand different directions as it hit the coin, and the nickel itself went flying. Dave heard a crunch as it buried itself in the far wall. He'd put more energy into the blast than he'd meant to.
"Yes! Who's the man?
I am!" he yelled, probably a bit too loudly, as the doors on either side of him opened, Mark looking out from one and Michelle from the other. He turned red under their curious and withering stares, respectively.
"Why is he still here?" Michelle asked no one in particular.
"Why is she still there?" Mike asked no one in particular.
The "there" in question was under Dave's bed, where the girl had vanished moments after she had seen Mike's and Marsha's mutations. It wouldn't be the first time that someone had a bad reaction to Mike's tentacle—although Marsha was considerably shaken that her wings had contributed to the girl's reaction—but usually they ran away and that was that. Unfortunately, this girl was deep under Dave's bed, and only an occasional whimpering sob escaped. Mike would have just pulled her out, but a black cat lay curled up on top of the bed. It looked to be asleep, but when Mike had tried to reach under the bed a moment ago, it had been on top of him in an instant, hissing and scratching. After a minute of yelling like an idiot while trying to shake it off, he'd escaped with long scratches covering both his arm and his tentacle.
"Sheesh, even Dave gets over panicking quicker than this," Mike said.
"Come to think of it," Marsha said, her wings fluttering as she knelt on the floor, head near the dusty floor as she tried to get a better look under the bed, "Didn't she kind of look like Dave?"
"A little. And is that cat Chester or not? I thought he liked you." The cat had hissed loudly when Marsha had approached after Mike's aborted attempt, so she refused to get any closer to the bed.
"Could she be Dave's sister?" Marsha asked. "That might explain why Chester's so protective of her."
"Dave doesn't have a sister. A cousin, maybe?"
There was a knock on the apartment door, followed immediately by the sound of the door opening. "What's going on in here?" came Margaret's voice. "I thought I heard yelling." She stopped as she reached the bedroom door and saw Marsha trying to look under the bed. "What are you looking at?"
"Some girl," Marsha said. "She's hiding under Dave's bed for some reason. Do you know who—"
"Hiding? Mike, what did you do?"
"Me? Nothing," Mike said. "We were just minding our own business when she walks in like she owns the place and starts berating us, but the moment she sees our mutations she freaks out. Who is she? She looks sort of like Dave."
"She
is Dave," Margaret said.
"Wha?"
Margaret explained, "Waldo and Steve somehow turned Dave into a girl. They messed up his memories too, because now he thinks he's been a girl his whole life."
"Are you sure that's Dave?" Mike asked.
"I saw it happen with my own eyes," Margaret said. "Besides, not only does 'Dahlia' look just like Dave, she remembers the soul-stealing, Waldo and Steve, the blue mushroom trips. The memories are all turned around, and the people are all the wrong sex, but most everything's there."
"But not the mutations," Marsha said.
"And isn't that odd?" Mike replied. "Even if they screwed with his memories, you'd think he'd remember something as big as that. I wonder if that was the intention. I think I'll have a little talk with those two. Where are they now?"
"In their apartment. Roger's keeping an eye on them."
"Good. We'll play good cop/bad cop. I get to be the bad cop."
"
I want to be the bad cop," Marsha said. When Mike looked at her, she said, "Hey, it's not often that I get to interrogate people for justice. All of the fun, none of the court orders."
This has been a 2,722 word excerpt of a 17,473 word short story.
