The Webcomic.

Otis looked blankly at the computer screen. Something was amiss. As the brightness of this page blinked into his eyes and his browser leisurely loaded the page, Otis could feel an awkward, almost disturbing sensation that pulsated across his body, tingling in his arms as it slithered down his back, a chill that can only be truly summarized with the feeling one gets sitting on Santa’s lap as he pats you on the shoulder in the mall after age twelve or something. You know, the kind of feeling one gets from true fear.

Otis was reading Megatokyo again.

He could not believe that he was still reading this comic strip. As Gallagher’s amateur pencil strokes stabbed at his tired, wearied eyes like a thousand graphite daggers and his body reeled against the horrible storylines and terrible anime fanart, Otis began to contemplate what he could do next. He could kill himself, thus making the world one mangatard less, and much happier to boot. Or he could blind himself with a sharp object, thus rendering his sad, pathetic obsessions moot.

But he did not.

He just… kept… reading.

The lamplight added shadow and light to the scene. As the sun set to the west, and as a light guitar solo played in the background, and as his mother slammed the door of their trailer as she went to get another beer, so did Otis read, munching on chips and salsa as he went, putting fire in his belly and slowly melting his mind on the senselessness of the webcomic. He could not quite comprehend what he was reading. He tried to look away, certain of his doom if he could not stop. He tried to fixate on some other thing, some wonderful, happy, magical thing that is not Megatokyo. Unicorns, or fairies, or Winnie the Pooh, or boobs. Nothing could work, particularly since the boobs gave him nightmares of visualizing the webcomic artist, Fred Gallagher’s, wife, naked, her sheer size and weight crushing his last childhood fantasies of beauty and love. So did Winnie the Pooh, now that he thought about it. Also fairies and unicorns. He guessed that those kinds of things just did that to him. But especially Seraphim, or whatever the hell her real name was, after he found out that she didn’t look like she did in the comic. He had looked in horror at her when he realized that. You know how that goes.

He finally converged on thinking of geisha girls, and a soothing feeling rushed across him. There was just something about geisha girls. This wave of cool water cleaned the wounds of his mind, for just a brief moment, before he clicked for the next comic, and was thus rushed yet again into a world of pain and misery.

He could not handle the pure shittiness of the webcomic. It was beginning to infest his eyes and brain. He tried to read through “Piro’s” rantings at the end. It was even worse.

He knew what he had to do. He picked up the machete. He would have to do it.

He would have to KILL FRED GALLAGHER.

But then he thought, no, he couldn’t. He had been irrational. No, no, what was stopping him? After all, Gallagher was an architect–surely he deserved it! He flashed with rage, and threw the machete into the wall. He screamed with anger, burning inside while clutching his forehead in mental anguish, because he could not throw fireballs like Luigi could, going straight and true until they snaked into New York, setting Fred Gallagher’s computer on fire. His fire was on the inside. He realized what he had to do.

He boarded the plane for New York, knowing by instinct the path he had to take. He got off at JFK, boarding a taxi for a seedy low-rent hotel somewhere in Brooklyn, spending his time just as the Mario Brothers would have: In the plumbing.

At that very moment, Fred Gallagher was using the restroom. As he was about to fish for a new comic from the toilet (where he always gets new material for his strips), and as he took some pocky off of his bathroom counter (because it is too far for him to walk to the kitchen to get food), he noticed something odd, and the water in the toilet began to bubble. He edged his face closer and closer to the bowl, until one of the infamous New York alligators, crimson with the flame of fireball, leapt from the fiery depths of the New York sewers and ate Fred Gallagher alive. And the alligator that Otis had trained to slink up that sewer, and which he had fed the pure New Mexico chile that gave a fire to its belly, was never seen again.
THE END.