AN:

This is a story of parody and satire. No ham-beasts were harmed in the production of this tale. The thoughts and feelings of the MC are not necessarily those of the author.

Episode 1: Ham-Beast Beat Down

It was a strange sort of thing for Scott Traveler, the day before his world came crashing down and everything changed. Never had he known the level of freedom that he enjoyed. Finally, he would have a little peace at last. At least, that was the hope he held for when he managed to get past his final road block. Standing before him, blocking his path out of town, were the type of people he disliked most in this world.

No, they did not stand in the road to block his egress specifically. Still, it was enough that they were there. Each of them, vulgar in their righteousness, screamed out their hateful epithets.

"Women are people, too!" snarled one hairy ham-beast. A reasonable statement to be certain.

"Stop pandering to the male gaze!" demanded another. Scott wasn't quite as on board with this request, but everyone had their own interests.

It was the same every day. The local feminist, or rather pseudo-feminist, group from the community college gathered just outside of the indie game studio that set up in town one year ago. Known for creating games that involved busty female characters who liked to jump up and down while laughing, it was not long before the fake feminists flocked to the area. Suddenly, they were relevant! They had a cause. No fictitious she-breast would go unshamed!

Scott had no issue with the concept of a group who wanted to push for true equality for all people. Unfortunately, much of what he'd seen in recent years involved people who honestly did not understand that the world did not revolve around their ideals. Hell, he'd become cynical enough that he even wondered if half of the people in those movements believed in the bullshit they spewed.

Want to see more diversity in gaming? Sure, that sounds cool. Why aren't you funding the creation of game studios to create games that show such things? Wait. Instead of going through the time, effort, financial struggle to become a powerful force in the market, and actually create the future they demand... They'd rather bitch at someone else till they did all the hard work, and at a loss in their profit margin?

He could not help but laugh internally when he witnessed such silly creatures. Only so many companies would slit their own throats and bow to their will before the financial backlash makes things worse than ever for their so-called righteous cause. At least, he'd always believed that.

"Shit. I'll be glad when I'm out of this town." The stench of this sort of hypocritical daily happening was disturbing. The worst part of what he saw at the moment was that the game company was closed on Sundays. Despite the jiggle physics, the company owner was a Christian who believed that people should be able to rest on Sundays. No one was inside the building.

Scott was done with this town, maybe this world, so much unadulterated bullshit happened recently that he needed to get away. Up in the mountains he had purchased a cabin, a lovely cabin where he could hide from life for a while. He could live off the land, write his stories, and just exist without all of the constant hypocrisy and advertisements.

Of course, there was no way that life would allow him to escape from his shitty little town without something happening. The aforementioned something came in the form of the protestors blocking the road itself. They demanded that anyone who passed through the area hear their message.

He honked his horn at them, but they refused to move. They would be heard, dammit. They were some sort of woman! Hear them bitch, or roar! Something like that.

Scott's motorcycle rumbled forward slightly, and he honked again. Sure, he could have simply gone around. There were alternate routes. Hell, he could have gone up on the sidewalk they abandoned in their desire to impede traffic. Not today, though. Today, he was going through here. They had no business blocking the road, not for something as stupid as a desire to rid the world of fictitious video game tits.

"We will not be moved!" snarled one of the faux-feminists.

He did not know her, but he knew her position. As the largest of the raging ham-beasts, she was clearly the pack alpha. If he was going to go forward, he must go through her.

"Hey, clear the road!" he snapped, "I've got the right of way!"

The mighty ham-beast took a step forward and lowered her head. She was preparing to charge, no doubt, but first she let out a loud warning growl. "Down with misogyny! The patriarchy's had the right of way long enough!"

If he wasn't wearing a helmet at the moment he would have pinched the bridge of his nose. All the legitimate issues in the world, and these weirdoes focus on trying to dictate what people are allowed to view as proper entertainment.

"What's any of that got to do with you blocking the road? Is the road a misogynist, too?"

The mighty beast stepped back, confused by the bizarre words she could only stare wild-eyed at whatever caught her attention. What was this strange and logical statement? This pure and pristine snark, how did she counter it?

"Shut up, you... man!" cried one of the smaller she-beasts. She was actually sort of pretty in her hairy way. Stranger things had happened that sighting a mythical unicorn, the mythological sort-of-pretty faux-feminist. The presence of such a legendary creature was quite disturbing. It was only natural that Scott did not immediately register the danger that approached.

One of the lesser ham-beasts threw a half-filled water bottle at him. It dinged off the side of Scott's helmet with a loud slosh. The power mad women pointed at laughed. Somehow physical assault was hilarious when it was an innocent male. That's what he got for being a cisgendered misogynistic tool of society, of course.

"That's what you get!" snarled the alpha beast.

The other women laughed and laughed. This was their real goal after all. Unlike a true feminist, or even a decent hater, she-beasts of this type only wanted to ruin men. Maybe their daddies didn't love them enough. Maybe they didn't like the fact that most heterosexual guys preferred women who at least made the occasional effort to maintain their appearance.

In the end, it didn't matter. Any straight white male only existed to be destroyed. Hell, some of these faux-feminists even targeted minority men. No one with a penis was safe! All testicles must die! Fight the patriarchy! Down with the dick! So on, so forth.

Despite the fact that he'd been unjustly dinged with a water bottle, he tried to be the better man. "Look. You've had your laugh. You took the horrible man-thing down a peg. Would you kindly move aside, so I can be on my way?"

Of course, trying to be any sort of man was not allowed. The penis was the enemy of all women.

"Would you listen to this guy?" asked the lead she-beast. "They take and take, but never make anything of their own. Men don't do anything but act superior!"

Several more water bottles went flying his way. They soaked him down with their unholy backwash, and drove him to the point of breaking. Finally, his patience completely ran out. He gunned the engine and pealed out. Scott rode forward at an ever increasing speed. Ham-beasts dived out of the way, their back hair and fat rolls wobbling in the breeze.

He broke free of their hateful blockade, and nearly burst into laughter, but then something unexpected happened. His rear tire burst with extreme prejudice. Something unseen in the road caused catastrophic tire failure. He fish-tailed before he could get his bike under control, but after that split-second passed he did what any sensible rider would do. He released the throttle and tried to keep the bike going straight forward so that it would come to a stop on its own.

The she-beasts forgotten for a moment due to the surprising occurrence. It was not until angry women rushed toward him that he realized the truth. He had much worse things to worry about than a flat tire.

Originally angry that their voices were being ignored by the media, no doubt because of the patriarchy, they were now filled with further rage because a man had driven through their blockade as though they were nothing. The women threw their water bottles at him. Some threw bits of broken asphalt they found, or other debris.

"The hell is wrong with you crazy bitches!" snarled Scott as a piece of asphalt smacked into his shoulder.

Those magical words unleashed, that was all it took for angry moderately elitist faux-feminists to become a murderous howling mob. Scott tried to make a run for it, but their numbers were too great. Their projectile attacks wore at him as he ran. A piece of brick slapped into the back of his left knee, and his body fell forward. He cried out in panic as he fell. No amount of desperate flailing, or attempts to fight back availed him. A man died that day, a brave man fell to the teeth and claws of the mighty ham-beast mass assault tactics.

After the women stomped a hateful series of mud holes in his masculine ass, they began to regain their senses. They'd killed a man. On the one hand, many of their girlish dreams had just been realized. On the other, it was possible that a court might find it was their fault somehow. The patriarchy did look after its old boys, with their old boys club mentality. No woman would have a real chance in a man's court.

"Shit..." said one of the smaller she-beasts, "Oh, shit... What do we do?"

"Let me think," said the alpha beast.

"We're going to jail..." said another self-proclaimed feminist.

"He tried to ride us down with his motorcycle. We could say that?" asked another.

"Yeah, but then they'd ask why we were blocking the road. You know the judge won't be sympathetic," said another.

"Hey, he had a gun," called out another woman near the fallen motorcycle. All eyes turned to see the butt of a shotgun pointing out from the side.

"He had a gun?" asked the alpha beast. Her eyes widened in realization. "He had a gun..."

Her lips spread into a jubilant smile. "Hey, bring it over here."

"Can't. It's locked in place somehow," said the woman.

The alpha she-beast waddled over to inspect the weapon then sighed. It was locked, just as advertised. After a brief moment, they realized that the key was not on the bike. They searched Scott's body and found one that worked.

"Hey, are the police really going to just accept that he showed up with a gun and we took him down?" asked one of the gathered gaggle of women.

"Right, we should fire it off a few times..."

One of the women gave the alpha beast a pair of gloves. Several of the women began to whisper about how wrong all of this was, but their leader made a loud growling noise then exclaimed, "Wanna go to prison?"

The dissenters quieted down. No one wanted to go to jail for what had happened. It was only a white cisgender male after all.

"How do you use this thing?" asked the lead ham-beast while pulling at the trigger. She looked to the smaller she-beast at her side, but the woman shrugged.

"Guns kill people. I don't want anything to do with something that kills people," she said in a sincere tone.

"Yeah. Guns suck..." said another woman. "They should outlaw something like that. You know how many people guns have killed?"

Scott's head slid sideways as the force of gravity finished pulling it downwards. A trickle of blood escaped his lips to dribble down onto the asphalt.

A brief discussion about how guns are only good for killing people erupted. The lead she-beast brought everyone back to the current matter at hand with a loud bellow.

"No one knows how to use this thing?" she asked.

One she-beast, the littlest she-beast of all, raised her hand. "My dad hunts..."

"He what?" asked one of the neighboring she-beasts. "That's fucking sick! Killing small animals is one of the signs of a serial killer!"

"Yeah, we should call the law on your dad before he fucking kills someone, the sick freak," said another woman.

Scott's bowels evacuated spectacularly in that moment, his sphincter finally relaxing after death unleashed a miraculous bit of overpowering flatulence. The ham-beasts were too far away to smell his retort, but his legacy remained none-the-less. It came to them with sound and fury, eliciting loud feminine outcries of disgust in the process.

"That fucking pig..." said one of the women, "He even had an assault rifle... Sick."

The littlest she-beast put on another pair of offered gloves and looked the shotgun over. She then made an announcement. "It's not a rifle. It's a shotgun."

"No way. Shotguns don't look like that," said the woman.

"Some do... It's not loaded, and the safety is on."

"How can you tell it's not loaded?" asked the lead ham-beast.

"Well, it needs a magazine... See?" She opened the little magazine flap at the bottom. "Chamber's empty..."

"Need to load it too, I guess," said the alpha beast. She waddled around to the motorcycle and started to look inside compartments. Under the seat she discovered four five round magazines.

The littlest beast loaded the gun and chambered a shell. "So, it's ready now."

The larger ham-beast was roughly Scott's height so she picked a spot near where his corpse rapidly cooled on the asphalt and fired off all five rounds. She then put the weapon in his hands and made sure his prints were all over it. She even had him pull the empty trigger a few times.

"You know, it's almost like she's done this before," commented one of the women.

Afterward, the lead ham-beast put the magazines into Scott's pocket and one against his free hand. "See, look. He was trying to reload. Thank goodness, we stopped him in time, and no one got hurt!"

She glared at the crowd. "Right?"

"R-right..." said the other ham-beasts.

The police were called soon after. Upon their arrival, fifteen minutes later, the first responders were greeted to the sight of sobbing women holding each other and singing songs of solidarity. They'd just undergone something terrifying.

A few hours later, journalists and various other members of the media interviewed the survivors. A local newspaper printed the following headline, page one.

Local White Man Assaults Women’s Group

By Jackie Nomen

"Oh my god! He’s got a gun!" Those were the words of hero Charlie Lackins, as she spied the alleged mass murder enthusiast Scott Traveler.

A local man known for keeping to himself for the most part, his neighbors spoke of him as a quiet but affable man. Eighty year old Margaret James spoke kindly of him, despite his obviously unstable mental state.

"He helped me change my tire once. Didn't even charge me," she said when asked about the alleged deranged 2nd amendment loving lunatic. "I... It's just hard to believe that he would go crazy and try to kill so many people like that."

It was these types of conflicting statements that drove home the necessity of mental screening for gun owners in this country. Some were cited as feeling sorry for the alleged madman. Clearly, he had mental issues and was overlooked by society.

Continued on Page 12...

In most cases, that sad little newspaper article would herald the end of Scott's existence. However, fate had plans for him. His true journey would now begin.

Darkness, all-encompassing like the shadow of a fat guy at the beach, surrounded him on all sides. Scott stood in that darkness, nothing but his shot gun in hand and his torn blood-stained rags to clothe him.

A soft feminine voice called out to him. "Seems you got your ass handed to you, little one."

"I... What's going on? Where am I?" Scott rattled off a list of questions. They were the typical sort of questions one might ask if they were brutally beat to death by angry women and then awoke in darkness.

"You are in a place between one life and the next, the edge of death if you will. You are here because I have need of your services," said the voice.

"My services? Who are you?" he asked in confusion. Most of his questions were still unanswered, but asking those two new ones seemed appropriate.

"I am Fortuna Viscata, the goddess of Fate. I am she who binds the lives of others together in harmonious balance. I grant favor to some, misfortune to others, and preside over the happenstance of existence."

"Uh... OK," said Scott. What exactly did one say to such a statement?

"You understand and believe?" she asked curiously.

"Sure, why not. I've heard stranger today," said Scott.

She laughed slightly. It was a soft, musical, sort of laughter. "Perhaps you will do after all."

"Tell me, do you believe that a man should never hit a woman? No matter the reason, a man should never lay hands on the female member of the species?" asked Fortuna.

"Hell no," said Scott. He clarified, "I mean. Don't smack your wife and kids around because you're an angry douche. But if someone's legitimately trying to hurt or kill you, fight back as best you can."

"So, if a woman were to attempt to take your life, and you had the means to defend yourself, you would possibly even kill her if you had to do so?" she asked.

"If I actually had to, yes. I don't want to kill anyone, though," he admitted.

"Fair enough..."

The darkness parted and a brilliant light appeared before him. Within that light floated a glorious image. A woman of surpassing beauty, clad only in a flowy low-cut dress that was white at the top but slowly became blue as his eyes moved toward the bottom. Trimmed in glittering gold, at the hem and the edges of her sleeves, it was quite the eye-catching ensemble.

A shear bit of gauze flowed around her as though held aloft in an unseen breeze. Upon her soft pink lips rested a hint of a smile.

"I appear to you now, in your time of dying, asking that you render aid unto me. Will you listen to my tale?"

Scott's eyes widened to ridiculous proportions. What had he died and gotten himself into now?