The Secondary Saga

[Deadpool]

Group 3
Grobdum, Lyra, Pinocchio, Raw Onion, Top Man

“Good job, Raw Onion!” Pinocchio cheered, and then pumped his fist.

“Yay!” Raw Onion did a backflip; her pink tail cylindered around body like a ribbon baton before she landed back on her hooves.

Lyra smiled faintly, but then groaned. “We still have one more riddle to solve,” she told the rest of the crew.

“Yes,” the deity confirmed; her head churned as it aligned with Lyra’s own, “you still have one more riddle.”

Pinocchio stole a glance of Top Man murmuring a long sentence to himself: “Will our United Nations of heroes be able to answer the final riddle correctly, or will one of them be sacrificed to the God of High Fives? Find out after this brief message from one of our sponsors.”

The metal eye levitating over Top Man’s shoulder blinked.

“Mull over this one: What lies in a bed, and stands in bed/ First white, then red/ The plumper it gets, the better the old woman likes it?” Tzitzimitl asked.

Grobdum burst out cackling. “A ooman’s dick!” he exclaimed.

The rest of the group shot the goblin looks of disdain (Top Man’s levitating eye even turned, letting out a minute screech as it stared intently towards Grobdum).

“Is that your final answer?” the deity inquired.

A wind howled, and blew passed the group; the torches on either side of the corridor suddenly went flameless, each exhaling one final trail of smoke before dying and reincarnating into charry scents. Same with the torches Top Man and Lyra held, and Pinocchio’s homemade torch. All three of them tossed them to the ground.

“Please, no!” Raw Onion pleaded. “That crazy guy doesn’t speak for all of us!”

“How much time do we have to deliberate?” Lyra asked.

“I will give you a few moments,” the deity replied, “but I do know have all day.”

“I propose a huddle-up!” Top Man suggested.

His levitating eye chirped and blinked.

The group came together in the form of a hollow circle, layering either arm over the shoulders belonging to the person next to them. Raw Onion maneuvered her body to fit between Lyra and Pinocchio, careful not to tip her hat over.

“Which one of our heroes will discover the answer to the riddle?” Top Man asked.

Pinocchio was uncertain who Top Man was talking to—his metallic metal eye and all the adoring fans watching, or the group—, but he didn’t know the answer to the riddle.

His eyes scanned across the visages of his allies hoping to find a twinkle in one of their pupils. One of those clever looks of know-it-all. None existed. All of them held similar looks of perplexity, glancing into the faces of one another, just as Pinocchio did.

“This is a tough one,” Raw Onion muttered after biting her bottom lip.

The levitating eye beeped and booped, and Top Man pulled his head up to stare at it. “A peculiar hashtag is blowing up over the Dataverse: B00BS—capital B, double zero, capital B, capital S.”

More modern coolness, Pinocchio assumed.

Grobdum spread a yellowy grin that seemed to glow under his hood. “Grobdum say we tribute ol’ tree boy to da flowtin wooman.”

Pinocchio’s shoulders quivered.

He looked back at the deity, his eyes peering to see her own. She had no eyes. Her face only kept a smirk, glossed with dark lipstick. The arms growing out of her scalp swayed like tall grass in the afternoon, and the orbs they controlled, in each hand, radiated varying colors.

“My patience is running thin,” Tzitzimitl announced in a booming voice.

Pinocchio whipped his head back forward, and clasped his eyelids shut; he couldn’t even imagine what horrors the temple god could bestow upon them (maybe each hand would stretch out, pluck a member of the group, and rip them apart like legs off a crab; or maybe the orbs should blast some sort of energy beam, which would disintegrate whatever it contacted). Her lack of eyes terrified him. It was as if she did not have a soul.

“I like Top Man’s idea!” he yelped, and then his nose grew a couple inches.

“Hm?” Lyra looked over at the marionette. “Say that again.”

“Say what?”

“That you like Top Man’s idea.”

Pinocchio felt embarrassed. He knew saying those words again would be a lie, and his nose would grow more, but maybe Lyra knew something he didn’t. “I . . . I like Top-p Man’sss idea,” he stammered.

Another inch added itself to the end of Pinocchio’s nose.

“Thank you,” Lyra said with a smile. “I think I know the answer to this riddle. It’s a metaphor, and if you replace the word get with grow it becomes much easier to decipher.”

“We not throwin da tree boy?” Grobdum inquired, and his grin bowed into a frown of disappointment.

“We’re not sacrificing anyone to anything,” Lyra replied, sharply. “Not even you.”

Top Man murmured something about losing ratings, and urged Lyra to tell the deity the answer to her riddle.

Lyra nodded, and dropped her arms from around Pinocchio and Top Man. “I know the answer to your riddle,” she said, looking over at Tzitzimitl.

Pinocchio, and the rest of them, scattered from the huddle and lined up next to Lyra.

“What is your answer—your final answer?”

“A strawberry,” Lyra replied, and took a step forward.

Tzitzimitl growled, rearing her upper lip back to reveal two rows of interlocking sharp teeth. The dexterous fingers to the hands of her arm-hair paused, and the orbs they controlled went back to their palms with an echoing clap.

Lyra gasped, and backtracked her step. “Am I right?”

“Yes,” the deity responded, “and I am a person of my word.”

The group shared a brief celebration—Raw Onion did another one of her backflips, landing perfectly on her hooves without the slightest buckle in her knee, and then darted towards Lyra to snuggle against her thigh; Grobdum cackled; Top Man threw a thumbs-up at his levitating eye, and spoke his version of commentary into it, eliciting a series of beeps and boops.

“Good luck, travelers,” Tzitzimitl said.

In an instant, her head sunk into the collar of her coat. The arms extending from her scalp lashed around as they followed her head, pulled into the bowels of her attire as if sucked into a black hole. Then the galaxy beneath her abdomen flashed, and she was gone.

Top Man’s jaw dropped, and his eyes filled with disbelief. “We got that on camera, right?” He glanced over at his levitating eye. “Please tell me that’s on camera.”

The eye beeped and nodded.

Pinocchio was just glad the deity no longer impeded their path, letting out a strong sigh as the last of her vanished. The eyeless face haunted him; those dark lips and that ominous smirk sent chills down the center of his spineless back.