A new week, and no comic again.

I’ve really had to take stock of my life recently and prioritize what needs to be done. I’ve been working on my portfolio website so that I can get a real job. Until I can manage to get one, Heavenward updates will be inconsistent at best. I’ll be focusing my energies on not making pizza anymore. I want a job that uses my degree. In addition, I’ve been facing a number of financial hiccups, most of which involve my car.

Last night before leaving work I sat in the drivers seat of my Explorer - which I often do- to go home from a long Monday. I turned the key to find only a click of a response. The lights were working, but the engine wasn’t starting so it couldn’t be the battery. I went ahead and called the folks at AAA to give me a hand. “Twenty minutes,” said the voice on the phone. “Okay,” I replied. Soon enough a truck rolls up and the large man inside asks me to try the starter again. My car yields the same monosyllabic response. “Wait here,” says the large man. “Okay,” I replied. He returns with a large pipe-looking things and (what I believed to be) cranking noises start to sound from under my hood. “Try it again.” “Okay.” The car sputters to life. “What was it you did there?” I inquire. “Just smacked it.”

Brilliant.

So he begins to tell me that my starter for my car is bad, and that I should get it replaced as soon as possible. He said that the next time I try to start my car it may do the same thing, and if that is the case, I’ll have to do what he did. I guess I’ll have to drive around with a big-ass lead pipe from now on.

Back to work, commissions, and the website.

Holy shit! Holy shit!

I just escaped, I just got out of there—the hospital, I mean—they wouldn’t give me a computer, they said I was just babbling and babbling about nothing—nothing!—but it was something, dammit, it was, it was, it was the end and not delusions brought on by Saharan-scale dehydration in turn caused by the unrelenting cyclical march of Eddie’s death through my brain! Although… that probably didn’t help.

Also, work was busy. So was moving out of my old place.

But enough of that; they’ll surely be here soon with their “straight” jackets and my tale must be told, must be finished.

So Eddie: torn to indistinguishable hunks of pink and red by a frenzied mob of Cedar servants and starving mutant fish at the gates of Soak City, probably dead. Band-aids would not have sufficed to save him, and we didn’t have time for a full-blown necromantic ritual, it just wasn’t in the cards.

We fled from the scene. The mission had to be completed. In some sort of perverse, Pokemon-esque obsession, we had to ride them all. Eddie knew that.

It was getting to be late in the day. West, across the park, we fled. The Magnum XL-200 and the Gemini were conquered in about thirty minutes each; obviously we’d lost the demons, at least for a little bit.

And then we came upon the Millenium Force. It is well known that Lord Cedar, in the rapidly escalating course of his madness, recruited a right hand from the West; someone to act as High Priest in the budding cult of “fun.” Nobody knows whether this man was a Native American shaman, some descendant of the Aztec blood priests, or just a man whose mind was scoured and scarred by the deserts of the West, but he certainly possessed the most vicious and bloodthirsty traits of all three. With his new right hand at his side, Lord Cedar’s “holidays”—merciless and carnal club hunts of defenseless people imprisoned in an elaborate facade of a town—reached a fevered pitch, occurring almost daily.

During one of these hunts, those that would be the prey dug deep within themselves and said, “No.” They fought back, but by that point Cedar was not a man, he was… something else. A crimson avatar of sadism and insanity. A demon. A creature beyond death, in any case. His mysterious right hand, however, was cut down by the terrified mob. Rather than let the world be free of his dark champion, Cedar imprisoned his soul within the ground upon which the Millenium Force would later be built.

And so it was that we came to this coaster, possessed by a monster both just within the umbra of humanity, and driven even more fucking crazy to now come in second behind the Maverick. The line was short; this ride gobbled up souls insatiably, trying still to prove itself to its dead master.

We were relieved to see a set of cars lying bloodied and shredded by what appeared to be gigantic talons, discarded just off the path. Why the relief? The bones of some titanic bird lay astride the wreck long picked clean by the carrion feeders of northern Ohio. Surely there couldn’t have been more than one of those monstrous creatures born into this world, and now it had passed out again.

I was wrong, of course. We came to the platform, where passengers would board cars only to return terrified, broken, and crying some token time later. Half of them, anyways. The very lucky half. The back of the train was just an ecstasy of metal, blood, hair, claw marks, and spiders. Upon seeing this last item, I immediately had my gun in my mouth. Apparently these birds carry spiders on them. Sure, why not? Clean up the loose ends that you miss with a nice little arachnid payload/infestation, eh, bird?

I don’t really remember the actual ride, just the feeling of screaming and crying. The next thing I really remember is the smell of Panda Express.

Yes, even though we were in a section of the park that was supposed to be Western themed, there was a Panda X. In a western facade. Even though I had just been chased by a man-eating bird covered with man-eating spiders around a track possessed by a jealous, mass-murdering zealot, seeing that Panda Express made me more angry than watching the Shanghai Noon/Shanghai Knights double feature.

We moved on to the Mean Streak. It was actually pretty tame in comparison, but it was still like having a legion of midget ninjas run a karate-chopping train on your lower back. At that point, I was just cackling. Really, Lord Cedar, if you seriously wanted to have a nightmare amusement park, you wouldn’t take suggestions from your seven-year-old daughter. Don’t try to hide it in the back of the park. Or at least put it toward the front, where it’s more menacing.

The final test stood before us: the Maverick; the coaster that drove the former champion, the Millenium Force, to even higher levels of demonic frenzy. It had had a 2+ hour line all day, and even at this twilight hour, it still did, despite the frequent short, surpsised screams coming from the endless line as person after person was snatched into the shadows. This was truly the black nexus of Cedar Point.

And it was too much.

We could not conquer it. Despite everything we’d been through, despite everything we’d lost and the terrible price Eddie had paid, it would have been in vain to join that line. Joe and Kedo itched, and howled, and paced; they destroyed small concession stands, and cut themselves, true berserkers ready for the fight. Barry sang of vengeance and glory. John drank several bottles of whiskey as if it were water and brandished innumerable firearms. It was I and I alone that held us back, for though the entrance line was filled with people, the exit lane ne’er witnessed a soul.