[Pawnee, however, didn’t so much as glance at Anna’s prone body. She had her mind on only one thing: vengeance. While Pam berated/tended to their friend, Pawnee marched straight to Jeanne Betancourt and got all up in her business. “I don’t know who the fuck you think you are,” she hissed at the author, “but you’re wrapped up in all of this somehow. You’re in league with that fucking cat and… whoever that douche in the pointy shades is.” She slowly walked forward, step by accusatory step, forcing Betancourt to inch backwards until her back was pressed up against one of the chalky trees that circumscribed the clearing. “And my name is not Lulu,” she continued. “It’s Pawnee fucking Indiana. And my father is Ron motherfucking Swanson, and don’t you fucking dare tell me any different. Got it?” The whole scene looked like some sort of goddamn medieval triptych that illustrated the three primal human emotions: the anger of a wronged victim confronting her tormenter; the compassion of a lover caring for her injured friend; and, of course, the most powerful emotion of all, a pony flappin’ around and goin’ nuts while a cat watches and poops. If Michelangelo and Picasso had been in that clearing, they would have wept at the beauty of it all, and then would have started to make out due to their pure shared stupefaction. Dirk stood aloof on the outskirts of the chaos, reading, listening, thinking. In our triptych metaphor, he’s… the frame, I guess? That works pretty well, actually. Eventually, he came to a decision. He shut the book, quietly sidestepped over to Minos, and leaned down and whispered with urgency. “Hey, cat. Minos. Cat.” Minos looked up at him and blinked. “Yes?” he said calmly. “We need to judge Acorn now. Like, right the immediate-fuck now. Things are kind of getting out of hand in here, and I’m not entirely sure what’s going on. I don’t like that. But I’ve got a plan. I suspect that if we decide to erase Acorn right now, we can shut it all down. Like an emergency eject button for the story. I was going to have us protract the judgment process for another dozen pages, maybe talk about ancient Greek shit some more. More wordplay, of course. But it’s pretty fucking clear that now we need to expedite the matter.” Minos yawned. “There are only the two of us here, Dirk. We need all three arbiters to make our ruling. And Jeanne—” he gestured to the author, who was still being aggressively berated by the enraged town in Indiana, “—is otherwise occupied.” “It doesn’t fucking matter,” Dirk hissed. “The vote just needs to be two out of three. And besides, her vote never really counted to begin with; she’s a joke character. I just wrote her in as another facet of this fucking book to ridicule. She’s not a real person, she’s my projection of the kind of person who’d write— Look, I’ll lay it all out for you, here’s what happens beat by beat.” “I’m listening,” Minos said.] #DetectivePony
