Clowning around in the bathtub or 21st Century Mischeif

In which Annie takes a bath,a clown may be fictional or real,and Van Gag plays a trick on the members of a 21st Century revolutionary group.

Annie Morrison sat in the steaming hot bubble bath she had drawn for herself in the hotel bathroom. They had fled the scene of the first ever Pygmalion Festival of the Arts and had arrived here after fleeing through a brief but complicated network of tunnels below the city. At the end of their flight awaited the hotel they both were spending the night in now. It was a four star German hotel, one of the finest in the country in fact, and the chance to recover from the highly stressful events of the last two hours in luxury was a welcome one. As soon as they had arrived in the room they had rented for the night, Van Gag left, citing that he had to meet up with a friend in the city. He promised to be back in forty five minutes, if all went according to plan. This had given Annie the chance to take a long hot soak and relax.

            “Heh lookin’ good toots.” cackled a voice merely a few feet across from her. Annie’s awoke, eyes widened in panic, and she nearly leapt from the tub. It took her a few seconds to recognize the figure sitting in the bathtub with her, and in those few seconds, she almost had struck out at the figure sharing her steaming bath. It wouldn’t have done her any good to do so.

            “Buffo you sick b*****d you know I hate when you call me toots!” said Annie as she lowered herself back down into the tub; the red of anger and embarrassment coloring her face.

            “That’s why I do it toots.” chuckled Buffo the Clown as he took a small cigarette from his clown suit and lit it with a small flame which spontaneously lit on the end of his thumb. He puffed on the cigarette and bathed his face in the smoke which arose from it. Annie wasn’t sure if this mask of smoke emphasized the comedy or horror of Buffo the Clown. In actuality, both.

            “Why the hell are you here Buffo?”

            “Well that’s a damn good question Toots. See, either I’m some kind of sick twisted fairy godmother s**t, or I’m just a figment of your sick twisted imagination. Or I could be some freaky stalker that’s been following you your whole life, harassing you and giving you advice on worldly matters.”

            “I didn’t ask-!”

            “Depends on your interpretation of the question toots. Subjectivity is the name of the game. I have a feeling your new buddy Van Gag would agree.”

            “He’s not my-!” snapped Annie as she stared across the tub at Buffo, who was making balloon animals out of the bubbles from the bubble bath.

            “Yeah toots, I call bullshit,” snapped Buffo the Clown in a retaliatory vocal gesture that was at once in good spirits while simultaneously in laced with a thin streak of anger. “If he wasn’t your new buddy you would’ve hauled a*s away from that psychopath and the trouble that follows him! He ain’t to be trusted!”

            “You want me to trust a clown who may or may not be real but to distrust a man who just saved my life?”

            “Touché toots.” said Buffo as he ran his gloved hands through his rainbow hair. Buffo’s’ rainbow colored hair was both whimsical as well as deeply frightening. Looking at that rainbow hair would immediately lead to a mental contrast between the whimsical insanity of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and the twisted insanity of Buffalo Bill. A pearl handled razorblade sliding its way across the neck of a Victorian gentleman with the grace of a ballerina  in direct communalistic contrast with a poor late rabbit hopping its way homeward. Everything about Buffo was this way; always was and always will be. Even since childhood, Annie had been unable to tell if she was immensely frightened of Buffo, or amused by his often irreverent personality. She believed, in full sincerity that it was an unequal balance of both which favored the former. He may very well be mysterious (and some would consider him disturbing), but his infallible penchant for providing free and reliable assistance to Annie in times of great stress granted her the ability to look past Buffo’s idiosyncrasies. Sometimes the devil was in the details.

            “Look Buffo, I’m not handing him the keys to my life and telling him to drive. As soon as he gets back I’m going to ask him what the hell is going on, who Mr.Pistol-Coitus guy was and why he was being hunted by him, and most importantly, why he was trying to find me at that accursed festival in the first place.”

            “They say curiosity killed the cat but I do not so humbly believe that curiosity has saved many a life. Curiosity, like anything with vowels in its name, has the capacity to harm, as well as prevent catastrophe on both the macro and micro scale of the universe.” said Buffo as he squeezed a rubber duck with the face of Henry Fonda from his skull. The duck plopped into the water; acting as a physical expression of the punctuation of the end of his short speech.

            “Nothing I could say would be a suitable response for what you just said.” said Annie with a smile that showed Buffo she was genuinely impressed.

            She began to roll from the side when Buffo, a look of genuine horror dawning on his whimsically strange face, shouted in a voice that was reserved by humans only for the most grievous tragedies: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! YOU JUST EXTINGUISHED 14 QUINTILLION MICRO CIVILIZATIONS; ALL BECAUSE YOU MOVED YOUR A*S TO THE LEFT!!!”

            “What the hell is wrong with you Buffo?!” shouted Annie in a voice both lit aflame from being startled, and doused in copious amounts of kerosene by her anger at being accused by Buffo of such nonsense.

            “Did I not JUST reference the micro scale?! Anyone you DIDN’T kill is goddamn insane now!! The Acolytes of Prixja have forsaken their gods and have taken to having pseudo-sexual sacrifices to their Un-Belief! Marxians of Marxus-34 now have severe brain damage and they cannot tell the difference between Marxism and Nazism! Fraction-Minds have lost the ability to comprehend even the simplest forms of math and now are living in a perpetual Dark Age of religious extremism! Look upon your works ye mighty thighs and despair!”

            Annie sat in the tub and gave Buffo her best “I don’t give a s**t” look. If there was conclusive proof that Buffo wasn’t just trying to make all of this crap up just to upset her, she would very well be upset. While she couldn’t prove Buffo was lying, she bet Buffo didn’t have any proof to back up his accusations. Annie was Agnostic about her belief in micro civilizations: she didn’t believe it but she didn’t disbelieve it either. It was possible but as of current there was no proof. And how reliable can a mentally unstable possibly fictional clown be? Well, he was good at giving advice on pressing matters but beyond that his reliability was in question.

However his “mighty thighs” comment had irked her well and she was not prone to forgetting what irked her.

            “Listen Buffo, PROVE to me that there are micro civilizations obliterated because of me or just shut-!”

            “Are you talking to someone in there Annie?” asked Van Gag from the other side of the bathroom door. ‘Oh hell,’ She thought to herself as she shifted through a list of possible lies in her head with as deft a speed as a well trained secretary filing papers. ‘Of course!’ she thought; thinking herself stupid for not coming to the obvious conclusion immediately. Luckily barely three seconds had passed in “real time”.

            “No I’m just talking to myself!” said Annie hastily as she worked hard to suppress a chuckle. The chuckle would have been too obvious; it would have given away the fact she was lying immediately. When you lie a lot in your life eventually you pick up on all of the little nuances of fibbing. It’s just like an art.

            “Can I come in?”

            Annie looked over and saw that Buffo was gone, only leaving a quickly dissipating smoke image of a smile and a hand giving her the middle finger.

“Yeah, come on in.”

            Van Gag entered into the bathroom sporting a beard three inches long, as well as a thin Machiavellian moustache. He wore torn “punk” jeans and a tee shirt that said “I’m with stupid” with an arrow pointing at his crotch. Over that he had an unzipped sweatshirt with “Genitals to the Grave!” written on the back. His hair was long and his shoes were a deep black. This Van Gag was (seemingly) different, and truly startling.

            “What the hell happened to you?”

            “It’s clothing worn by the Anti-Sexual revolution,” said Van Gag as he stripped off his clothing to reveal his naked form underneath (in a hilarious dash of quasi-irony). He then folded the clothes inside out to reveal the suit he had been wearing to the Festival. “It’s the new sensation that’s sweeping the nation! Well, the younger folk of small German towns. These guys usually just wave around signs and talk about a world without genitals and how glorious it is blah blah blah and if they feel particularly ornery they go out and make a bonfire of condoms and pornography and d****s and they light it. It feels like the birthchild of Grant Morrison and Monty Python, but it’s as serious as Alan Moore or Edgar Allen Poe.”

            “How’d you do that thing with your clothes? Who’d you go to meet and why? How long were you gone?” asked Annie in rapid fire. By nature Annie was a curious woman, and unlike Alexander Wagner, she was not prone to denying and ignoring her nature. Rather, she embraced it wholeheartedly; occasionally to her detriment but often, as Buffo would agree, to her benefit.

            “Freaky otherworldly stuff I’ll explain later. I went to meet Harry March about Germany’s story engines. And I was gone 55.27 minutes, give or take 0.3-0.11 seconds. Would have been back sooner but I decided to make a stop and have a brief spot of fun. I placed a suggestion in the heads of a few of the higher ups that there is a “supervillain” named The DilDominator who is using his/her army of Dildroids to crush the Anti-Sexualist revolution. They’ll now be sneaking into pet stores at night looking for his/her secret lair.”

            Silence for a moment as Annie took in this bizarre slew of information. Then, calmly but with an underlying tone of excitement, she asked: “Who are you and why were you looking for me?”

            Van Gag sighed a sigh not of disrespect, but of simple weariness. “Come into the living room when you are dressed and we’ll talk.” Then, simply, Van Gag left without another word. Annie watched Van Gag go, and was nearly electrified with anticipation. No fear could grip her heart when knowledge could be gained. ‘Curiosity didn’t kill the cat’ thought Annie to herself. ‘It evolved it.’

            She arose from the bath and grabbed a towel off of the rack. The towel was warm, fluffy, and….rainbow?

            “Ooooh that tickles toots! Keep rubbing!”

            Annie tore the towel off of her body and hurled it at the floor in fury. She was about to pick it up to rip him apart and flush him down the toilet when she looked at the towel: almost mundane white. Not Buffo at all. Or, at least, not currently.

            Annie quickly dried herself off with the same towel, but doing so in the mirror so she could see if Buffo was going to commit more mischief. When she finished (and Buffo had committed no further mischief), she slipped on a robe on the hook that hadn’t been there before. ‘Actually’ she realized, ‘Van Gag brought it in. I remember now.’

            With her personal self assurance that the robe was not Buffo or part of his tricks, she put it on and walked out of the bathroom and into the living room. The anticipation was killing her. She hadn’t felt this excitement since she was a child, waiting for Santa to arrive at the stroke of midnight.

             Knowledge is power, and she was about to wield the ultimate power.