Chapter 90: Book 2 Chapter 15: The Mothman Cometh

“Luckily, while Yamato-no-Orochi had sworn off drinking after his last defeat, he was not so inclined to avoid other forms of intoxicants.”

“Also luckily, being a seventeenth century Japanese serpent-demon, Orochi doesn’t know what weed is,” Harley continued. She then dragged a finger across her neck, mimicking a beheading. “We got him high and cut him down.”

“With weed? It didn’t take something stronger?”

Kim was unaffected by drugs and alcohol, since she had circuits instead of synapses, but she knew enough about them to guess that marijuana would not fell a massive eight-headed serpent.

“Oh, not just ordinary stuff, I know a fairy who deals,” Harley said. “The Fae make drugs that’ll blow your tits clean off. I once ate one edible too many and forgot how to speak English for ten hours.”

Hawke was torn between never wanting to go anywhere near the fairy weed and wanting to try some as soon as possible. A brief reprieve from higher brain function sounded good -and it started to sound better as a black shadow descended from the sky. Hawke pointed out the descending darkness with a fearful whimper, prompting Lee and Harley to look up.

“Is that…?”

“Oh, yes, I do believe so,” Lee said. “Nothing to worry about, Hawke, this is a friend.”

That didn’t actually stop Hawke from worrying, but it did help a little. He still stayed behind as Harley and Lee walked up to their aerial arrival. As it descended, the figure became clearer, revealing a humanoid body, but with bright red eyes, long antenna, a massive pair of dusty looking insectoid wings and an incredibly round, firm buttocks.

“What up, Mothman?”

“Hey Harley,” said Mothman, turning his insectoid face towards them before raising a segmented arm in a friendly wave. “Just making another check-in. You’re about to tell me it’s all clear.”

“It is all- Well, yes,” Lee said.

“Yeah, sorry. I just like to check in on this place now and then,” Mothman said. “It is absolutely bursting with apocalyptic energy, you know? It’s hard to get an omen going with these dorms radiating doomsday energy like some sort of...apocalyptic academia.”

For a cryptid whose entire job was to appear at scenes of misfortune, the apocalyptic time loop of the Einstein-Odinson campus was a constant vexation. Every day it was fated for disastrous misfortune, and every day it was mildly inconvenienced at best. He’d been making occasional visits to the campus for decades, trying to figure out the source of the confusion, but the loopers always gently shooed him away before he made any dangerous discoveries. He always came back in time, though, drawn to the school’s explosive aura like a moth(man) to a flame.

“That must be frustrating, but we’ve managed to avoid exploding so far,” Harley said. “We’ve kept a lid on the worst of it.”

“And we’re well equipped to keep up that streak. We have excellent help, after all.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Is that Vell guy still around?”

“Of course. Why would he not be?”

“Well, I didn’t want to say anything at the time,” Mothman mumbled. “But that dude has mad ominous energy. Like, enough that I can sense it even with the campus’s background doomsday energy.”

Harley and Lee both bit their lips simultaneously.

“Yes, that does make sense,” Lee said slowly. “However, we have a handle on that as well. It’s under control.”

“I don’t want to be a debbie downer or a mopey mothman, but you sort of don’t. It seems to be multiplying,” Mothman said. He pointed in the direction of the table they had come from.

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“Please tell me you’re pointing at Hawke,” Harley sighed.

“Is Hawke the weirdly attractive japanese one?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well then no, I am not pointing at them,” Mothman said.

“Come on,” Lee said. “You should at least introduce yourself before delivering a dire omen to our friend.”

She took Mothman by the hand and led him back to the table to make his introductions. After being properly introduced to the new loopers, Mothman raised his arms and his red eyes began to widen, as his full prophetic energy was unleashed.

“The mother above reaches down to raise all, but with every great rise comes the chance to fall,” he droned. “You play one half part in achieving the task, the answer to your question is that you ask.”

Mothman’s wings drooped as the prophecy finished, and he settled back into the bench.

“Whew, that one was a doozy,” he said. “Anybody got some water?”

Hawke handed over his water bottle and tried not to look as Mothman extended his proboscis to take a long drink.

“Sorry if I’m the bearer of bad news, you-” Mothman stopped himself mid-sentence when he saw Kim’s complete and utter apathy. “You’re taking your role in the fate of mankind fairly well.”

“Yeah, what else is new,” Kim said with a shrug. She’d been burdened with terrible purpose since the day of her awakening, and on several different days after that, each purpose more terrible and more burdensome than the last.

“Oh, okay,” Mothman said. Usually people had more dramatic reaction to being told their fate was uniquely fated amid all of existence. “So. Uh. How’s school going?”

“Same old same old,” Harley said. “Classes on top of classes on top of dramatic world-saving actions. How’s the roomies? Did Sasquatch move back in yet?”

“Nah, his business in Seattle actually took off,” Mothman explained.

“Really?” Harley said, genuinely surprised. A herbal tea shop in Seattle was already a hard venture to get off the ground, and a name like “Sasquench” could only hurt the odds.

“Yeah, it wasn’t really the tea, he started offering guided meditation tapes as a side thing and apparently they became a big hit,” Mothman said. He then lowered his voice a few octaves to mock Sasquatch’s gruff tones. “‘People spent decades trying to find me, and now, I’m going to help you find yourself.’”

“Huh. That’s a pretty good intro, I guess,” Harley said. “Are they actually any good or is it just the Sasquatch branding?”

“I guess they’d have to be good,” Mothman said. He shrugged broadly enough to shake a coating of dust from his massive wings. “The branding didn’t do anything to save Sas-scotch.”

“That it did not,” Lee said. Sasquatch’s failed alcohol venture had nearly bankrupted him once upon a time.

“Maybe we should get you one of those things,” Harley said to Hawke. “You seem like you could use a little help finding your center.”

“I have a podcast for that,” Hawke admitted. “I feel like getting regular self-care advice from Bigfoot would not help my situation.”

The amount of magical weirdness in Hawke’s life needed to go down, not up, and with a large prophetic insect-man sitting at his picnic table, that probably wasn’t going to happen any time soon. As Hawke came to that disheartening conclusion, Kim reached a conclusion of her own, having finished doing some brain-googling on the topic of Mothman and Sasquatch.

“Cryptid: an animal that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist...until recently, I guess,” Kim said, looking at the very provably existent Mothman in front of her. “Are all of your roommates cryptids?”

“Mostly. There was Jeff, the Jersey Devil’s old boyfriend, he moved in for a bit the first time Sasquatch moved out. Other than him, yeah. All the guys are technically mythical.”

“You all meet at a club, or something?”

“Hmm? Oh, no, for the most part we don’t even really get along,” Mothman said. “It’s just very hard to find an apartment that’ll rent out to a ten-foot tall bug-man or a goat eating lizard beast. We tend to pool our resources on any place that’ll even have us.”

“Interesting. Odd people brought together by circumstance,” Kim said. She briefly scanned the other loopers sitting with her and decided to make no further comment.

“We make do. And Jersey’s not so bad, once you get past his terrible taste in men,” Mothman said. “You didn’t need to be capable of foretelling disaster to tell Jeff was bad news.”

At that moment, Mothman produced a phone from somewhere Hawke couldn’t see and checked it, sighing shortly afterwards.

“And of course, speaking of, his new beau just made the Mongolian Death Worm mad,” Mothman grumbled. “I better got on it. If that worm secretes poison on the carpet we’re definitely losing the deposit. Good catching up with you guys, see you around!”

“Aww, sure you can’t stick around? For old time’s sake?”

Mothman looked at Harley and shook his head.

“Not this time, Harls. I’ll be back eventually, don’t worry.”

With a quick goodbye delivered, Mothman took flight once more, vanishing across the horizon on dusty wings. Hawke sighed and eventually mustered the energy to look in Harley’s direction.

“Harley, did you fuck the Mothman?”

“You need to ask?”