Ch00bakka3

Three Portlands
Augur-Haruspex

The End Is Nigh

THREE PORTLANDS

SUNDAY, 1 AUGUST, 1943

5 cents/4d.

THE BATTLE OF PORTLANDS

LOCALS REPEL NAZI INVASION

War Correspondent (Unofficial) Stephen Haugen

Many men, especially in this day and age, see it as their duty to fight and die for their nation. They have no other wish than to take up arms against the hated foe, to make war for king and country, to perish in glory upon the field of battle. I am not one of those men. I would be the first to say that I am a coward; not a mere pacifist, a Quaker or some other Christly type with conscientious objections to the business of warfare, but a genuine dyed-yellow-in-the-wool craven. I have never fired a gun, nor swung a sword, nor cast a spell in anger, nor do I wish to; and yet, since the beginning of this latest, bloodiest war, I've found myself time and again in the thick of things with nothing but my pen and my wits to defend me. I suspect witchcraft, or possibly sorcery.

So since, despite my best efforts, I am fated to always be where the war is, and since, despite my father's best efforts, I have become a journalist, I have taken up the mantle of War Correspondent At Large, sending back dispatches to whatever news agency will take them. But normally, I have to travel far and wide across the Continent to find a war to correspond; this time, the war followed me home.

[STUFF STUFF STUFF]

A double handful of Bureau agents, whose only combat experience before last weekend was a few half-hearted shootouts with smugglers. Most of ICSUT's history department, on campus for a retirement party. A baker's dozen of police golems, half as many flesh-and-blood policemen¹. Seventeen various Portlandsites,

baseball

Three Portlands
Augur-Haruspex

The End Is Nigh

THREE PORTLANDS

SATURDAY, 31 OCTOBER, 2020

$3.25/£2.50/₿3.5e-5

BASEBALL BASEBALL BASEBALL

BASEBALL BASEBALL BASEBALL BASEBALL

Sports Correspondent (Unofficial) Sofia Haugen

Everyone keeps telling me that baseball is America's national pastime. I tell them that I don't even really know what "pastime" means, and they just laugh and shake their heads. I'm pretty sure they don't know either. I would look it up, but I traded my ability to use a dictionary to a demon in exchange for a six-pack and a smoking hot rack². Now, in hindsight, I probably should've just payed the $15.99 plus tax, but I was fucking starving and I left my wallet at home; and it's not like I, a professionally unprofessional journalist, would ever need to know what words mean. But enough people have given me the national pastime line that I'm pretty sure it's true, and since I am technically an American, I think it's past time³ for me to opine on the sport.

As fans of my ouevre are no doubt aware, I'm from Washington State, and I've lived in ThreePorts and/or the Oregon Portland since getting out of the small-town shithole where I grew up. You might, therefore, expect me to be a Mariners fan; you would be wrong. Redneck hill-people from the Washington scablands and kombucha-sipping Rose City hipsters have their differences, but they share a few key qualities: a taste for quality flannel shirts, a love of sad folk music, and a bitter hatred of Seattle and all its exports. The other American Portland is in Red Sox country, but personal reasons⁴ make that a no-go. So, like many Americans who don't actually care about sports but are forced by a pact made long before their birth between rival demigods to become professional sports journalists, I follow the same team as my parents: the New York Mets.

My family history bears a marked resemblance to trench warfare: long periods of grim anticipation and mind-numbing tedium, punctuated by brief moments of terminal excitement. A full account would be boring as hell, mildly memetically hazardous, and potentially self-incriminating, but I do need to summarize it if you're going to understand why a kid from Coulee City WA is a fan of the other New York baseball team. So. My grandparents all managed to have terminally exciting lives. All of them were veterans of the Seventh Occult War, doing things they still can't tell me about without getting a visit from some well-armed United Nations door-kickers.

man with a gun

There's a Man with a Gun Over There

The first shot got Ted in the skull as they were walking through the village center. The rest of the unit had scattered pretty quick, ducking into doorways and behind ruined walls. Isaac hadn't been quick enough. One through the gut, and another one through Saul's chest when he tried to drag his brother to safety. Not even twenty seconds, and an eighth of the unit was down.

They'd all broken line of sight. Didn't matter. Andy and Woods went down to ricochets. Pierre, the kid from La Résistance, got shot through a solid brick wall. When Sven tried to scry the sniper, the round appeared in his pineal gland, burst out, and got the lieutenant in the throat.

ashtaroth

"Hey, Annie, who are our opening band on this one?"

Futanari Titwhore Fiasco, the world's greatest tranarchanart synthrash pseudopop group, was headlining their first European tour. Tonight's gig was in Copenhagen, in a slightly-flooded subbasement of a dive-bar-slash-opium-den. The owner had tried to pay them in bricks of hash, there was some sort of black mold creeping down the walls of the dressing room, and the extension cords for the amps were daisy-chained through some kind of eldritch hell-dimension, from which unspeakable rat-things occasionally emerged. (The rat-things were quickly caught and eaten by the owner's unspeakable cat-thing, Mikhail Gorbachev.) It was the classiest place they'd played all tour.

"Uh. Some black metal band. I can't read the logo though, it's like a pile of sticks."

Candice squinted at the flyer. It looked like a third-generation mimeograph, printed on a piece of wrinkled green construction paper. "Hmm. Uh. Yeah." She held it right up in front of her face. "Uh. If you like, unfocus your eyes, I think it's a magic eye picture of a horse."

"Oh shit! Someone noticed, Ash, I told you it was a good idea." A pair of black-clad corpses loomed in the dressing room doorway, covered head to toe in wicked spikes and iron chains. The one on the right was speaking, in a chipper American accent. "Yeah, uh, we're Loki's Foal. I'm Nifelheim Fimbulwinter. Well. Call me Nick, that's just a stage name. And this is Ashtaroth Ragnarok Antichristiansen. Uh, not a stage name."

The other corpse nodded. Its maw gaped wide, and from the pit within, a cold wind howled. "Call me Ash."

methuselah

"The name's Methuselah Toole, ma'am."

"And is Methuselah, by any chance, some sort of nickname, on account of you're secretly a couple hundred years old?"

"No, ma'am, Methuselah's the name my momma gave me."

"See, that's interesting, because I've got sworn affidavits from a number of gentlemen who saw a man with your name and description get into some trouble up Reno way, sixty, seventy years back."

"Musta been my grandpa. 'S a family name."

"Tattoos run in your family? Scars too?"

"Well, Ms. MacArthur, I suppose I gotta admit that my momma was a very perceptive woman. Really knew how to name a kid."

nemo

Nobody called the slave-market a slave-market. Its part-owner and proprietor, a freedman named Clodius Marcellus, called it a boutique, an enterprise, a club, anything to conceal its true nature; no doubt his investment partners, Manius Curius and Curius' brother-in-law Lucius Caecilius (called "Ater," "the Black," for his coal-dark hair and eyes) used similar language, though they tended to keep some distance from the operation. Their clientele called it by the names of its owners, and were sure to let their friends and enemies alike know when a slave had been bought from Marcellus, Curius and Ater.

Nobody called it a slave-market, though.

tags: nobody marshall-carter-and-dark tale

FTF:LIC!

"Hey, so, can you explain…" Pris waved her arms around vaguely, indicating the whole general situation. "Again? Because I still have no idea why we're even here."

"Because," Annie said, heaving another amp out of the back of the tour bus, "I found a poster. In a porn shop."

"Babe, the enigmatic oracular pronouncement thing might work on the new girls, but I am completely immune to it."

[STUFF]

"So. Because you found a poster. That appeared to be official tour merch. We're performing a live show, to an audience of seagulls and stray dogs, in an amphitheater, in a protected archaeological site, in a disputed territory, in the rain."

"It's not an amphitheater."

"What?"

"It's not. An amphitheater has seating all around. The Colosseum is an amphitheater. This is just a regular Greek-style theater."

"But everything else is accurate, yeah?"

Annie nodded. "Yeah, pretty much."

[STUFF]

C: "Hey, we didn't bring a generator, right?"

A: "We did, but I found an outlet."

C: "What, like, for the archaeological site lights or something?"

A: "I mean I guess? It was set into like, an old brick wall, and I didn't have the right adapter so I had to jury-rig it, but it seems to work fine."

[STUFF]

Footnotes

1. Exactly half as many; Sergeant Josephs suffers from a unique condition called "bilateral corporeal displacement". His left side was directing traffic halfway across town at the time.

2. The beer was some kind of shitty double-hopped IPA microbrew, but the ribs were fucking amazing, so on the whole I'd say it was a pretty good trade.

3. Pun not intended. I would never intend to make a pun. I consider them the lowest form of humor, lower even than slapstick and prop comedy. (Higher, of course, than improv, which is no more a form of comedy than a koala is a bear. Improv was actually created at the University of Chicago School of Inhumanities as a form of torture, and was released into the wild by a disgruntled grad student when his funding was cut.)

4. The Dropkick Murphys know what they did.