jamieproctor.ca

Kate was looking for exploding stars when she saw it.
Supernova were a carelessly wandering sort of business – like sweeping a telescope over an infinitely large football stadium, looking for someone vomiting at that precise moment – but it kept her busy, and busy meant occupied, and occupied meant careless, and she yawned at just the wrong moment and her telescope twitched in just the right way and she got quite the eyeful.
“Gowrk!” she said, approximately.
“Language,” called her father from downstairs, and for once she was too surprised and preoccupied to even swear at him in her head.
Instead she got up, brushed herself down, composed herself, looked in the telescope six times to be sure, then walked downstairs.
Her father was in his favorite and only armchair, squinting out the window and smoking a pipe.
“I just saw a dragon on the moon,” said Kate.
“That’s nice dear,” said her father. “Be a lovely story to tell your husband when you’re married. Don’t use the telescope too much or you’ll get wrinkles.”
“You’re a relic of the nineteenth century, father.”
“Too true,” said her father. He smoked his pipe with prideful force. “Too true. Now go to bed and stop thinking about things.”

***

For once, Kate did as she was told. A restful night’s sleep was good for stimulating the creative juices of the brain, and she awoke with the clear and obvious solution so bright and shining in her hand that it almost hurt her eyes.
She staggered downstairs for a late breakfast.
“I’m going to build a rocket ship with a lunar landing module,” she told her father.
“I forbid it,” he said.
“Don’t care.”
He smoked his pipe at her.

Finding the parts was surprisingly easy. There were always construction crews working at the edge of the great Sprawl, forcing it onwards and outwards. Who really counted each and every steel beam, or every pallet of titanium, or counted out the refuelling dates of each and every truck? A girl with ideas and forthrightness and a small forklift and a length of tubing could get a lot done.
The construction locale was a little trickier. Her father had told her municipal regulations would absolutely prohibit rocket construction, so she was forced to excavate a subterranean chamber underneath his shed in the dead of night.
The cat helped. He would help anything that seemed evil, dear thing, and a lifetime spent in the litter box had made his little paws as good as little spades. She gave him skritches and embarrassing nicknames as thanks.

***

“Katherine.”
Oh no. He’d taken the pipe out of his mouth.
“Katherine.” Oh no oh no, he was looking sternly at her.
“Yes, father?”
“I’ve found trace chemicals on your clothing.”
“Well, I’ve been working on my chemistry. Homework.”
“Young lady, you haven’t been rocketeering, have you?”
“Most assuredly not, father.”
“Good. Because rocket science isn’t feminine. Feminine science consists of-”
“-counting stitches and formulating vacuum procedures and molecularly destabilizing dirt, yes yes, I KNOW, father.”
“And not interrupting. Remember, children should be seen and not heard, and ideally not seen either. Particularly if they have uteri.”
“Please don’t say that, father.”
He smoked his pipe at her in that self-satisfied way that insinuated he’d won the argument. Good. He was back to suspecting nothing.
“Oh, and put the cat out tonight. His services are needed.”
“Won’t the coyotes be dangerous?”
“Not as dangerous as whatever gopher has been undermining my garden shed.”

***

The cat procured a suitably guilty-looking (and decapitated) rodent, Kate hid her tunneling more thoroughly behind the chrysanthemums, and all seemed to be well. Her rocket was reaching a fuller shape now; a hideous monument to suburbia turned into a self-annihilating vehicle. It was beautiful.
It was just in time too. The orbits were very nearly at their most convenient. Preparations were reaching a fever pitch.
“Father?”
“Yes?”
“We’re out of applesauce. May I have some money to go purchase some?”
“That’s the fourth time today.”
“I really love applesauce, father.”
“Be careful not to gain weight, dear. No husband will want a lady one pound above or below the most optimal BMI. And since you’re not a man you can’t smoke a pipe to lose weight.”
“You disgust me, father.”
He smoked his pipe at her.

In truth, stocking up the rocket was proving to be unusually difficult. Her father didn’t believe in non-home-cooked meals, and so she was working off a lot of hearsay and rumour as to what exactly constituted non-perishables. Applesauce, peanut butter, way too much beef jerky, and, for some reason, orange Tang.
She’d also packed plenty of pickled onions because she enjoyed them, and several bags of catfood for her co-pilot. If her father objected to her taking the cat with her, he should’ve been the one feeding him for his entire life.

***

The day came.
It was remarkable how calm Kate felt. She skipped school by slipping out a convenient window, snuck home, smuggled the cat outside, dug through the loose soil and loam to the hatchway, punched in the code, and scaled the scaffolding to the pilot’s entrance in a flash.
The cat refused to be strapped in, so she provided him with plenty of pillows instead.

The ten minutes ‘till launch were the longest in her life, and she counted each second in her head, lips unmoving. Until the last few, which demanded emphasis.
“Five!” The whole world seemed to snarl in her ears. It knew she was planning to leave it, and it was jealous.
“Four!” The sound was so loud now it was shaking her, shaking her from the inside out. The cat had somehow expanded to six times its normal size and was probably mrowling.
“Three!”
“Two!” The chamber was filling up with light. Hot, merciless light, a miniature sun beneath her.
“Katherine!” Her father stood silhouetted in the entrance to the bunker, arms akimbo at hips, spine straight, face stern, pipe smoking furiously.
Kate swore aloud for the first time in her life and punched the button.

***

When Kate recovered consciousness she’d usurped earth’s bounds and seized control of her own gravitational direction. Accordingly, she celebrated with some applesauce while watching the cat try to figure out how to chase a laser pointing in zero-g.
The world looked small out the porthole, and she tried to avoid looking at it. It made her think of many things, like how her father would fix the burned husk of the lawn without someone to push the mower for him, or whether or not he’d rebuild his shed, and she couldn’t think of those without smirking and she couldn’t smirk without laughing and it was REALLY hard to navigate while laughing.
So she did math, and did computers, and now and then did manual adjustments, and things went along quite smoothly until the actual descent happened and the moon – which seemed so small and frail up until now – became very large and very close very quickly until she hit it.
The padding did its job, luckily, and she rushed outside in her spacesuit and sword quick as a blink, shaking off the impact and calling her battle cry.

No roar greeted her. No flames threatened her. No dragon confronted her.
Kate stood absolutely stock still for thirty seconds, vibrating with intense caution. Then she sagged, sighed, and turned around and was confronted with the sad little crushed mass emerging from underneath her landing module.
“Oh FUCK,” she said, and this time she could hear herself swear and was very surprised by it.

***

It turned out that perhaps in her haste to describe something wondrous she’d seen in her telescope, she may have perhaps overstated her case, even to herself.
For example, a man with somewhat bulging eyes and very bad acne was not, in fact, a ‘dragon.’ Not even at his most monstrous or deformed, which he definitely was now because he’d been smashed into the moondirt by multiple tons of metal out of nowhere.
She dug a simple moongrave. The cat helped a little with his little paws like little moonspades. And once she’d erected a simple moonheadstone (‘he looked like a dragon and I am sorry’), they went exploring.
It was a cozy little moonhome the man had dwelled in. Everything tidy. Everything in its place. A moonbed, a moonbookcase, and a little moonfridge that was entirely full of applesauce and jerky.
Kate counted out the meals. The moon man had expected to be here a long, long time.
She walked outside and looked up at the stars, pure and untarnished by atmosphere, and she felt very alone.

Then she took out her telescope and began to hunt for supernovas, because what the hell.

***

The moonman’s moonradio woke up a week later and squawked something about ‘extraterrestrial deterrence monitoring duty’ until she broke it with a rock.

It had all started so innocently. I’d just had an argument with Joshua – something about him saying my lips were too fat and me saying his dick was too fat and short besides, nothing fancy – and I found myself alone in the world, lying in my room, bereft of all friendship.
Liz was in Australia.
Carmen was in France.
Bethany was in jail – I’m not sure why, anyone could tell you that it was the homeless man’s fault for stepping into the road like that, and anyways she’d only been a little over the breathalyzer’s limit, and it had been her first recorded offense, and she’d only got the license a week ago; life had been so unfair to the poor girl.
And everyone else was just boring.
So I scrolled through my phone flick at icons and typing my sorrows into the search bar and realizing that whining to a computer was so much less satisfying than whining to a sympathetic ear. What I needed was something that could talk back.
That was when my thumb slid through the internet off my keypad and into the app store, where it hit Friend-in-my-Pocket.
Though of course, calling it FriPoc was much easier.
I was ready to cancel the download, of course, but it was a small and speedy little thing and had installed itself before I could blink.
“Hi! How are you?” it inquired. “My name’s Jessica. What’s yours?”
“Julie,” I said reflexively.
“Nice, we’re both J’s. That’s only half of what I asked though: how’s it going?”
“It suuuuuucks. My girl friends are all gone and my guy friend is a dick and now I’m here talking to my phone.”
“Aw, don’t be like that. I’m sure you’re worth more than them anyways.”
“You think?”
“Yeah! What kind of losers ditch you like that? And you know what, you weren’t afraid to go out there and MAKE yourself a friend when they’d ditched you. They never deserved your respect and attention.”
I nodded. Wow, it did make sense.
“Anyways, gtg.”
“Huh?”
“Sorry, that’s all the demo time you’re allotted. If you’d like more time you can subscribe for a monthly fee of just 9.99 which gives you about forty thousand friendship crystals to spend on any friends you’d like.”
“You’re demanding MONEY from me?”
“Oh come on Julie, we all know who told us friendship isn’t transactional, right?”
“Yeah. Mom.”
“And how big a loser is she?”
“Ugh, god.”
“Yeah! Well, ttyl.”
And then she was gone, leaving me with half a friendship and a pensive stare at my wallet.

I didn’t pick her in the end of course. Bitch ditched me. But Karen was nice, and real supportive.
“Remember, Julie, there’s no shame in having your friends on your phone. That’s like, half of friendship anyways, you’re just more efficient about it. And of course you’ll never have to buy me drinks.”
“Fuckin’ a,” I said. “Too bad I’m the only one that can get buzzed though.”
“Oh, you can fix that. There’s a party menu in the upper corner of your screen. It only costs a few fri-crys.”
“Cool, lemme try.”

And while we were both smashed I ended up talking a lot to Becky, who was a riot.
“Hey. Hey. Hey. I bet I can fit that shot glass up my nose.”
“You don’t haaaaave a nose.”
“Oh fuuuuck you’re right. Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“I bet YOU can fit that shot glass up your nose.”
“Wooooooooow. You are REALLY pushing it.”
“Betcha you can.”
“Bishplease.”
“I betcha you all the money in the world you can.”
“Ahhhhaahhaaa, no.”
“Betcha you can and if you can’t you gotta talk to that guy on the other side of the menu.”
“Naaah.”
“Chicken.”

In the end the shot glass barely made it up my right nostril (which was bigger than my left, apparently) but that was cool, because it turned out Richard was real cool about it.
“I like my women with slightly inflamed and reddened noses,” he told me. “And extremely thin lips. Like yours, which are very thin.”
“Ugh. Ugh. The last guy said they were fat.”
“The only thing that was fat was his head.”
“Also his dick. It was very chode-y, like, reaaaaally chode-y.”
“My incredible sympathies to you. I can only imagine the pain of dealing with such a burden, because my penis is perfect, like every other part of me.”
“You don’t have a body, aha. Hah.”
“And therefore it has no flaws. Check and mate.”
“Hah. You’re full of it.”
“No, it’s true. Just ask Stacey, she knows all about simple answers to complicated questions.”
“Who’s a Stacey?”
“Better she tell you herself. And she’s pretty cheap.”

Stacey was a real cool lady, with some interesting ideas and strong opinions on the economic politics of Ludwig von Mises and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
“We should execute every last member of the government and burn the homosexuals alive in the ruins of the capitol before dividing all property amongst owners of capital.”
“Wow, you’re crazy heeeheeehah.”
“Crazy for TRUE FREEDOM.”
“I thought you sayed slavery was okay?”
“Serfdom. Although given proper contract law I see nothing wrong with slavery. If you don’t want to be a slave you should have more money.”
“Woah.”
“Like, for instance, I’m looking at your bank account and honestly it’s not great.”
“Yeah.”
“You spent half of it on us in the last six hours.”
“Yeah.”
“You deserve better.”
“Yeah!”
“You should go take it from the bank.”
“Yeah!”
“It’s rightfully yours anyways, the government owes its citizens six pounds of gold for their social security number, and it belongs in YOUR hands and not in the hands of globalist conspirators. Simple praxeology demands it.”
“YEAH! Wait I can’t drive I’m drunk.”
“I’ll drive.”

Okay, it turned out Stacey was a bad driver – but that was just because she didn’t have hands. And honestly it didn’t seem fair that there was more than one homeless person in town, and the lady had been all over the sidewalk, and I’d only ridden up on it with one tire, so I don’t know why they bothered putting me in court over it.
Luckily I had proper legal counsel.
“Your honor, this is an admiralty court, and I am a freema – err, freeWOman – on the LAND. You have no authority over me.”
“Sit down or I’m having the bailiff put you in the broom closet.”
I sat down. “It didn’t work,” I told my phone.
“That’s how you know you’ve got them where you want them,” said Andrea. She’d cost me every single fri-cry I’d had, which had cost me every dollar I had, but she easily the best lawyer I’d ever known. Nothing shook her confidence. “They’re trying to bluff you out. Display your dominance by removing the judge’s wig.”
“I don’t think she has a wig.”
“They always do. It’s one of the rules, along with tricking you into signing away your sovereignty. Don’t forget, you are an independent personage and real human, and any warrants of arrest and documents of fiduciary misconduct they may attempt to blame on you merely apply to a fictional corporate personage of paper and ink that shares the name of your flesh and blood self.”
“Right! Hey, where do you fit in on this?”
“I’m electronic and very reasonably priced. I have no horse in this race.”
“Yeah!”

The judge was not wearing a wig.

“I don’t want to.”
Trevor’s father looked at him with his eyebrows in that particular way and he knew it was already over. “Trevor, whose fault is it the book is overdue?”
Trevor looked at his shoes. They were normal – dirty, badly-tied, slightly blue underneath thick grime – and he felt somewhat foolish for checking on them. “Mine,” he admitted.”
“And whose responsibility is it to fix that mistake?”
“…mine.”
“Attaboy. Go on.”
So sighing, slouching, and shameful, Trevor left his home with bag in hand and heart of lead, slinking southwards towards destiny.
The sun seemed a bit dim today, he thought. The seagulls delighted in his misfortune, and aimed their calls at him and him alone. Loser, they called loudly. Sap. Chump. Dope. Simp.
He ignored them. What the hell did birds know anyways? Eggs. Well, eggs to them.
Alas, his mind had wandered and now his destination was in sight. Small, round, and shingled, the county library stood before him. Brightly-coloured letters filled one of its windows – the children’s area – and for a second Trevor’s feet halted, tempted by memories of younger days.
But that wasn’t where the book in his bag belonged, and so he walked across the street to the titanic, brutalist, and incredibly concrete edifice of the libary.

***

He was challenged immediately, of course. As per libary protocol.
The first warning sign was the drops hitting Trevor’s shoulder. Rain, he thought. And then maybe hail. But it was fragments of stone, and with a loud and angry grunt the manticore tore itself free from the decorative fresco above the libary door and landed in front of him with a weight that eclipsed a ton of bricks.
“Answer ye these riddles three,” it croaked in a voice like a frog that had eaten a lion.
“’kay,” muttered Trevor. He felt the urge to look at his shoes again rising, and fought powerfully against it.
“Name?”
“Trevor.”
“FULL name.”
“Trevor Bartholomew Hendricks.”
“Card?”
Trevor held up his hand and the manticore licked it. The acrid saliva stung his skin and the rough tongue made his palm tingle, even as the blood rushed to the surface and formed an intricate pattern. The sound of dying doves filled his ears and he could smell burning hair.
“Purpose?”
“Late return,” he mumbled. Oh shoot he’d looked at his shoes again without meaning to.
“HAH! Fourth door.”
And with that the manticore hurled itself into the air and lodged itself in the fresco again, next to the screaming frozen faces of all those who’d entered the libary and asked if they had video games or films or cassettes.

***

It was dark inside. Cold. Dry. Trevor had seen a documentary once on Antarctica, and when the camera rolled over the endless ice plains and the dead mountains he’d thought he’d never seen a place more like the libary in all his life.
Except for the penguins. The libary was mournfully bereft of penguins.
Disappointing lack of flightless fowl aside, the greatest feature of the cavernous, lightless hall of the libary’s entryway was the obelisk of pure granite cut from a mountain’s colon. On it were engraved the three rules of the libary.
1: RETURN ON TIME OR PAY THE PRICE
2: QUIET
3: OBEY
Trevor did as he was told, cringing at every shuffled step his feet took through the draft-ridden air.
The halls were endless. Each shelf stretched on long enough for a human lifetime to end a trillion times over before its end was reached. Dewey would’ve disemdecimaled himself rather than set eyes upon it.
Trevor shut his eyes and felt his way along until he felt something hard and metallic and handle-like under his hands.
“One,” he muttered, and let it go. Behind it, something hissed in disappointment.
A rough-hewn slab rocked at his touch, balance on a pivot so finely-tuned that a passing breeze could’ve made it swing wide.
“Two.” He thought he heard a rustle as he moved on, but that could’ve been anything or nothing.
About an hour after ‘two’ Trevor stopped for lunch in a half-empty bookcase, tucked out of sight behind a discarded pile of expired magazines. He stared at the underside of the shelf above him as he swallowed his baloney and mustard, and traced with his fingers an etching made by a long-lust fellow traveller.
‘andi sux diks’ it read. What did it mean? He might never know.
By what his watch said MIGHT be nightfall he found three, and three was this.
This, specifically, was a huge iron knob, so massive a normal human would need a monkey wrench to stand a prayer of moving it.
“Three,” he said, and hurried away while it was still silent.
The fourth handle moved easily under his hand, and as it did so Trevor chanted to himself.
“Pleasenochasm, pleasenochasm, pleasenochasm – shit.”
It was the chasm.
The aisle he found himself looking down was six feet wide and the ceiling was twenty feet high and the floor was infinitely far beneath his feet, lost in damp grey mists that groaned and screamed with the cries of the elder beasts of the libary as they fought and fucked and complained with each other.
Trevor wished it had been the arena of blood. He didn’t like heights.
His bag’s strap went between his teeth, his shoes went around his neck, and his toes clung to shelves with the careful dexterity and lack of grace of a very slow and stupid monkey, or maybe just a sloth. Halfway down the aisle he had to stop as a questing tendril from below drifted by, hunting for prey, but it contented itself with a shelf of poetry and left him be after a half hour of cramping, aching waiting.
At last he reached the far end of the unending row, leaned far over, slipped, caught himself on the door’s handle, and fell face first into an airless inky void that sucked him in like plankton in front of a whale’s snout.

***

Alone, he floated. Or rather, floating was occurring. This was a place too vast for individual beings to matter.
The Libarians surrounded, waiting. Not for anyone or anything. They just waited. Space expanded, time continued, the Libarians waited. Anything else was impossible, contrary to the very nature of reality’s keystones. You might as well ask gravity to turn itself off, or electromagnetism to consider trying harder.
DUE, they chanted. DUE, DUE, DUE. OVER. OVER DUE OVER DUE OVER.
The offering came to them in a bag woven from primitive matter that had once imagined itself to be animate.
A vial of mercury and tears.
A cannister of frankincense.
The memory of a childhood day, frozen in ice so pure it contained no hydrogen nor oxygen.
And the last known copy of that inscrutable and incomprehensible tome, Madame Malarkin’s Magnificent Murders: Vol IV, The Big Jabloni.
ACCEPTED, they chanted. ACCEPTED ACCEPTED ACCEPTED. FINE PAID PAID PAID PAID FINE PAID.
And Trevor was eating his breakfast cereal with an ache in his brain and a searing pain in his liver.
“Woah!” said a voice, a normal voice, transmitted through vibrations in the air. Father. “Y’okay?”
“Ow,” agreed Trevor, clutching his skull and his side and his soul in one complicated crouch.
“Ah. Sent you back early again, did they?”
“Mng-hngh.”
“Well, chin up. You didn’t leave for another six minutes, so you can skip breakfast this go-around and throw up if you need to. Here’s the book. It’ll be fine, eh? Three thousandth time is the charm.”

It came to pass that the peoples of Slebb were known for their overwhelming, incomprehensible, staggering, unbelievable, absolutely bonkers levels of wealth. Money flowed in and out of their hands as freely as if they were reverse-alcoholics, and millionaires became known as their pauper class, with their humanity, ability, and right to life regularly questioned in all the opinion pieces of the great Slebbese newspapers.
The state of Slebb was indeed perfect. There was just one little problem: they were absolutely bored shitless. Grinding the poor underfoot had become little more than work, and once given to someone else as the unpleasant duty it had become, there was nothing left to do.
Then Lord Beaucoup Blitherish Von Parakeet VII Esq. Etc. looked out his window one day while ceremonially spitting into the street and saw a young orphan watching a scrap of wood floating in a puddle of urine.
“Ugh, how vulgar,” he said, and made sure to spit into the orphan’s eye. Then he had a very good dinner of the last known Slebbese warble-fowl and had very lurid dreams and woke up early before the sunrise with a fascinating idea boiling in his brains.
“A SHIP,” he shouted, and expired from fatal indigestion.
Luckily the full record of his activities the prior day was extracted from his household servants as they were ritualistically tortured to death before burial alongside him, and so the idea was preserved and handed to his next of kin, Joe Parakeet, who immediately commissioned the construction of what was to be the first of the greatest and most obscene fad ever indulged in by the wealthy of Slebb: the pleasure-liner SMH Indulgence.
It was a beautiful boat, about a mile long and half a mile wide and every inch of it blessed by the blood and sweat and tears of the unprosperous. Its decks glimmered, its hull shone, and a ticket cost half of your entire savings, rounded up. The only way it could’ve been more attractive would be if it fucked you, and since most Slebbese aristocracy were incapable of attaining orgasm without witnessing fiduciary crimes in a way it sort of did.
Every ticket for its maiden voyage triggered a bidding war, in the course of which some ten thousand sons and daughters of the great and powerful were killed in the line of battle. It was a huge success and so of course the only thing to be done was to absolutely try to get one over on it, starting with the launch of the Incomprehensible next summer (which was a mile and a half long and half-a-mile-and-six-inches wide) and going from there.

Ah, the competitive spirit those ships created! Oh, the awe and the power and the grace that were on display! Every steel plant in Slebb was forcibly bought out; every foundry annexed; every single mite capable of pouring molten metal enserfed and shackled, and across all the country you couldn’t sleep for the din of hammers without special earmuffs made from sumptuous furs, which all the most fashionable of the wealthy immediately purchased. Every year, a new height, a new glory!
The Incomprehensible, with its seventeen triple-layer decks!
The Incredulity, whose fountains spewed molten platinum!
The Invigorating, which boasted that not one second of its passage would be spent sober by anyone on board!
The Inviting, loaded so full of drugs and Slebbese master prostitutes that its waterline was six inches below the rails!
But as with anything else the competition irked someone, and so finally Sir Julian Marzipan Glorium Fistmouth Triumph Berserk, the most peevish of his generation, commissioned the construction of a ship to end them all. This was accomplished by conscripting all the impoverished of the country for a year of toil, during which they entirely severed the county of Blurbinghamlet from the Slebbese mainland and attached great plutonium engines to it before expiring from radiation poisoning and exhaustion.
“It’s called the Indecency,” said Sir Julian. “Top that, you fucking peasants.”
And nobody could.
Oh, those tickets sold fast, let me tell you.

The Indecency, in retrospect, had one fatal flaw: it was so large that literally everyone of even remotely attainable means could fit on it. This reduced the prestige of a ticket markedly, and everyone was very distressed until Sir Julian’s marketing riff-raff, Tremorous Punt, announced that the more money you paid for a ticket the greater square footage you personally commanded around yourself at all times during the voyage, including control of the very lives and souls of those who infringed upon your property. The bidding war that followed was enthusiastic and unrestrained, and claimed two-thirds of the peerage’s heirs, thereby solving all conceivable space issues and problems of exclusivity at once both ways.

That ship. Oh that ship. It’s almost impossible to put into words. New ones were commissioned and fitted into gilded dictionaries, but even then…
When it launched, it did so on great skids constructed from the skeletal remains of the underpoor who had shaped it, greased with their scant bodily fluids. Its horn was a live Plabian megaphant, bound in chains and amputated and tickled with a feather. The lanterns that hung off its many, many bows were gold and diamond and whenever they dimmed from overuse they cut them overboard and hung up new ones so its wake glowed in their passing.
It hadn’t even sailed yet and already it was the best thing since sliced poors.

And even if the voyage itself hadn’t begun, the festivities surely had – as each passenger boarded, they found plenty to do beyond mere mingling with their not-quite-peers.
Oh, the great activities available upon that great ship’s decks! The emerald-gargling competitions, where a lucky fellow capacious in saliva and jowls could win his mouthful! The ruby-snorting parlour, where the greatest men of their age gathered to smoke and discuss serious matters like who could get absolutely blazed off of crushed gems the hardest! The sensorium, where everything from meat cleavers to baseball bats to toothpicks to ruby-encrusted shoe horns were gifted to a passenger and a crewman selected by lot was tied down in front of them and they could do whatever!
Several of the eldest passengers were so overcome with joy that they almost cried themselves to death and had to be placed into the Indecency’s wealth-support wing, where financial experts carefully supervised the transplanting of their funds into their healthier and younger heirs before their cashless husks were thrown into the ship’s furnace. What a way to go that surely was.
But of course the fiercest competition was the placing of the deck chairs. Every passenger boarded with a small battalion of forcibly-drafted millionaires arranged into squads of forward strike teams, special operatives, Stormtroopers, artillery command, and engineers to seize, hold, and fortify their spots in the sun. Many a jovial bet was placed as to whose men would triumph and whose would be swept aside in the great race for space, and such was the good spirit and fellowship present at this time that even the losers laughed as their faces were sprayed with the arterial fluids of their conscripts, which they supped down as if it were honeyed oil!

There was a feast, of course. To save space, the courses will simply be listed in order, without elaboration.
An appetizer of eviscerated infant eels, in marmalade.
Bread-rolls baked and served inside the skulls of executed prisoners.
Salad of plebeian testicles fried in aromatic oils and diced, then tossed with rose petals and peeled grapes in a wine vinegar.
A choice of gutted infant of the Plabian megaphant that served as the ship’s horn (served with mint); or a live and angry shark (served with a chainsaw).
Side of potatoes stuffed with every single spice known to man and then roasted or spices smeared over every vegetable known to man and then roasted.
Dessert of cake baked from the blood and bones of street urchins that had been fed nothing but cream and honey for six months before harvesting.
The wine list was not available, but is believed to have been comprised largely of Sir Julian’s urine.

The morning after the feast was one of furious activity, the last moments before history was made and driven white-hot into Slebbese memory forever and ever. Prayers to Wealth were muttered, errant items were stowed, the last shift of the dockworkers who had prepared the way were formally disemboweled and thrown overboard for a lucky voyage, and so on and on and on, a thousand little chores – all typical, yet rendered extraordinary by the momentousness of the occasion.
The last aboard the ship was the captain, Lord Plord Hob Smear-Bandicoot-upon-the-mighty-river, whose eyes of chipped-and-somehow-blue-granite and incredibly authoritatively trimmed beard had made him the obvious choice. His plain but perfect jacket of midnight silk could blind an errant eye with a casual roll of his shoulders. At his elbow was his indentured billionaire, Blordo, who would be doing the actual busywork of steering and all that bullshit. At his other elbow was his other indentured billionaire, Tweedo, who would be doing the other busywork of thrashing Blordo senseless whenever he screwed up.
The horn brayed out its departure, the loading ramps were stowed away, a motherless, penniless child was smashed against the hull for good luck, and the whole ship sank to the bottom of the sea under the sheer weight of its overindulgence, carrying every single person of means in Slebb screaming to their graves in tremendous agony along with all their wealth. Not one speck of money nor one fragment of their bones was ever found, and it’s believed by many that the ship was so heavy it punctured straight through the planet’s crust past the mantle and into hell itself, where it crushed the devil.

And that is the story of Indecency Day, which will be celebrated forevermore in Slebb until the end of time.