Standing in the middle of the Price Is Right set, hearing the screamy, panicky sounds of common folk running in terror, was music to his ears. He and Gwydyon had been boozing and wenching about the states for more weeks than he could remember, and did it matter that that memory loss was in large part due to the alcohol they’d consumed? No it didn’t. Too much drinking and not enough killing, that’s what he’d said somewhere around Laramie, Wyoming. The obnoxious “extreme” skier they’d bumped into 48 hours before that didn’t count.
The three of them had been drunk on the deck of some ski chalet and the skier was incessantly boasting about how he could take both of them (swords displayed very prominently) with just his board. The two divines had merely glanced at each other before devolving into raucous laughter (which had caused them considerable consternation when they spilled their beers). After that, the skier was on his feet, and they were on theirs. It was all over right about when that doofus had swung his ridiculous snowboard at them. Gwydyon had cut the thing in two as much by accident as by design, and the head came off just as easily, and just as accidentally.
Normally, Susa, in spite of his rather belligerent demeanor, didn’t send drunken blowhards home with more than a few thumps to teach them some manners. But, he’d been itching for some action again lately, and even though he could accept with whatever aplomb he had the wobbly punches and broken beer bottles of angry drunks, you just didn’t swing a big board at a drunken, sword-carrying, trigger-happy god’s head.
You just…didn’t.
To say things had gone downhill from there would imply that they had been good, in some relative or absolute sense, prior to that incident.
Well, he’d suggested something when things had finally gotten to their lowest ebb (and geez, really, sharing a Motel 6? Couldn’t they have managed at least a Days Inn or a Super 8 or something?), he’d suggested the idea that led them here, to this stupidly gaudy studio with screaming lambs running for their lives, not concerned with money anymore so much as hoping the crazy-looking people with big sharp pointy things wouldn’t kill them.
He still couldn’t believe these people had actually won that last world war. It might have hurt his head a little, if he hadn’t been already suffering from a hangover and working on his next buzz at the same time.
He cut down the Plinko! stand and kicked the remains out of the way. The look of surprised plastered across ‘Barker’s’ face quickly slid into that foul, profane huckster’s grin of his. It was filthy, the sort of filthy that made you feel like you could never get clean, and it didn’t matter if you were looking at it or not; it sort of, oozed its way into your consciousness, gave you a baseless sense of being foul and disgusting.
Susa himself felt like hiding away in a hot spring bath for a thousand years after this was over with. After he and Gwydyon beat that smile off Melichor’s face. With a maul. Or a wrecking ball. Or maybe high-pressure bleach.
He hefted his sword and began to close, but slowly, allowing Gwydyon the first move. "Looks like it's time to Check Out, eh, Bob?"