god's favorite psyop

this arc starts in september 2012.

his future self comes out of a time portal and says "hey shit's fucked and it's my fault. go and fix this by not fucking the future."

he gets caught by future rebels who hate him because his future self fucked the future.

escapes and punches his future self.

his future self shoots a rebel and the time machine fucking breaks for basically no reason and threatens to destroy all of reality

and his future self gets shot before *he* can make the dramatic heroic sacrifice to stop it.

i cannot express just how much of a Shit Just Happens plot this is. this takes place in-universe over the course of like a couple hours if that. Imagine for a second that you were keeping up with ctrl alt del in 2012. Okay now that you've imagined that i'm gonna give you a minute to stop laughing. Okay now that you're done laughing, just fucking, imagine. You'd have no clue the story was building to any kind of big dramatic conclusion until the literal last possible page??!?! this is such a "oh god i really don't want to be writing CAD anymore" ending but the series was fucking rebooted after this so that can't've been it.

this is the last time any of Ethan Ryan MacManus's friends saw him alive.

Right as I wake up there’s a nurse there who hustles over and says he’s glad he saw me wake up and tells me he’s giving me some pain meds and then he gives me IV Fentanyl and so I go from like “Ow ow ow ow awake awake awake” to “ooooooh fuck I’m floating on clouds made of rainbows” in like 6 seconds and so I was pretty out of it. The hospital had all the recently-post op patients all in one big-ass room, and they see patients for ALL sorts of surgeries, so I was next to an old guy who got his knee replaced on one side and some young 30-something dude with some kind of mechanism on his leg. So I asked him what happened since I was high as fuck and feeling kind as a result, and he said he broke his leg hiking off-trail when his leg went down a literal rabbit hole and snapped his shinbone. I say something like “damn dude that blowssssss” while giggling because I’m high as FUCK on actual fentanyl and he’s like “Yeah, for real, I’m feeling great right now though! What about you? What are you in here for?”

And I fully was not thinking like a person, I was thinking like a fentanyl-addled tgirl so I just go “Oh, haha, they cut my dick off!”

yay mat congrats - full on bsky and pifo