entranceway | Astral Destruction

[ Clementine and Mae appear on the screen. It’s a little girl and a cat girl. They’re standing in a room on the first floor. Clem has a crowbar in her hand, slung over her shoulder. Mae has her trusty baseball bat and a very cat-that-got-the-canary grin on her face.]

Hey, so… Mae told me about how she breaks shit sometimes and how it’s… cathartic? [ that’s the word she used, right? ] And I tried it with a light bulb. It felt pretty damn awesome so we thought it might be cool to have an official place where people could break stuff whenever they needed to deal with bullshit.

[Mae immediately picks up the thread, grinning wide.]

So we are super effing pleased to introduce…The Destruction Room.

[She pans the camera over to the sign on the door. It’s generic and straight to the point. Then she pans the camera around to take in the room. There’s rows of shelves filled with china plates, vases, glass figurines and other fragile-looking items. Along the walls are dozens of light fixtures and free-standing lamps, as well as just a metric ton of lightbulbs, both fluorescent and incandescent. All of it is very precariously displayed and it looks like it wouldn’t take much to just knock some of these shelves right over.]

Isn’t it amazing? We stocked it with everything that could possibly go smash.

[Clementine gestures then to have Mae pan the camera toward the wall on the side which has a giant weapon rack with every blunt weapon imaginable from bats to maces to hammers and more. ]

Over on this wall, we’ve got every blunt weapon you can think of so you can really make the breakables crack into a hundred awesome pieces. Also, it’s on the first floor, room 4 so if you hit yourself in the foot or get glass stuck in your arm or something, the clinic’s right next door.

Yeah, we pretty much thought of everything. Because we’re awesome.

[Mae holds out her hand to Clementine for a high-five. Clementine leans over, high fiving her back, with a smile. Totally awesome. ]

Anyway, yeah, come on down and get your smash on. Work out some of that pre-event anxiety or whatever.

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[She doesn't know what happened with him, but she knows a subdued expression when she sees it.]

Door's gonna be open year-round, if we can keep the responsible adults away from it. So come get your smash on whenever you need to, okay?

The trick is to get the not responsible adults on board. Then we can have "adult supervision." [He makes finger quotes.] No one can complain if we're being supervised!

...I just realized that I guess I technically count as a not-responsible adult. Holy shit.

[That's exactly what she is, wow! She's an adult! Who is irresponsible! She...she is the adult supervision!]

[This is too much power.]

You're an adult? [....oh wait that's probably rude.] Sorry, it's just.... kind of hard to tell. Cause of. Um. [He waves his hand over his face.] Species differences?

Haha, no, yeah, I'm twenty. I'm really short for my age though. I've always been short.

Me too. And only partly because I've been stuck in Wonderland for two years.

[He was kind of short for a 13 year old. For a 15 year old he's tiny.]

How tall are most people your age?

Dude it sucks, right?

[Short people problems.]

Like a few inches taller at least. My friend Bea is pretty tall.

Yeah? How tall is she?

[.....Is there a polite way to ask if she's a cat too without actually saying the word cat??]

Uh, like a foot taller than me I think? It's been awhile since we measured.

[She pauses, because she senses another question in there.]

...She looks like a crocodile.

[Thank you, Mae, Dipper looks kind of relieved that she told him, though it raises other questions.]

Do you... also have normal crocodiles? Or did you just make that comparison when you came here?

[She sighs, trying not to be exasperated.]

Listen. People in my world look like all kinds of different animals. Cats, crocodiles--my other best friends look like a bear and a fox. And then we actually have the regular animals. They go around on four legs and are just--animals, yanno?

All the humans I've seen here kinda...man, I'm trying to like, put this in a nuanced, not-racist-sounding way. But like, okay, from my perspective, sometimes it's a little hard to tell everyone apart? But I figure to humans, it's gotta be really obvious, and it's the sorta thing I've been getting used to, like...someone's hair is different or something.

[She's not gonna say that she is constantly mixing up Dipper and Mabel because, given that they're twins, she figures they already get that a lot.]

So like, imagine that, but all the little differences between one human and another are like...instead of that, everyone just looks like animals. That's how it is. I mean, that's not to say that there's only one guy in the whole world who looks like a fox, but...I dunno, maybe this doesn't make sense.

It's okay, I'm not offended. [He supposes they do all look the same from that perspective.] And uh, sorry if this is a not-okay thing to say but like, genetically speaking, how does that work? Did your parents look like cats too?

[It's nice, she supposes. They're both being frank and straightforward. She much prefers this to being teased for looking like a cat.]

Yeah, my parents both look like cats, and Bea's mom and dad looked like crocodiles. And so on and so forth. People, uh, mix it up sometimes, but their kids don't end up looking like a cross between...I dunno, a cat and a crocodile. They just end up as one or the other.

[.......part of him wants to know more, another part is terrified this is going to lead to details he does not want to know.]

Do hybrids ever happen?

No, I don't think so. I've never heard of it, at least.

What about, like, between two different breeds of dogs? I mean, people who look like two different breeds of dogs?

[Are there labradoodle people?]

IIIIIII don't think there are any dog people actually. There's wolf and fox people, though?

Man. Your world is fascinating.

Then again, I guess our worlds must be just as weird to you, right?

Pretty much, yeah. I wake up and have to remind myself that I'm surrounded by a bunch of bald people.

Astral Destruction

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