Everything must go

I believe the Man has hit the first major snag in his long and weird cloning scheme.

No one is buying the Small Man.

It's not for lack of interested customers: Many, many have come to observe the product of the Man's elaborate Bay B experiments. They come every day. They come, and they regard the Small Man with admiration. They heft him, sniff him, bounce him about to assess his weight and durability. They photograph his asymmetrical, bloated countenance for posterity. They even envelop him in capes and cloaks of varying colors, presumably to better gauge his true pigment and pallor.

Some — Laddle, Dark Mistress of the Hellhounds, for one — have even returned multiple times to re-examine and re-bounce the Small Man. Comparison shoppers, I expect.

And yet, no buyers. So far as I can tell, not even any bids.

I am not sure if the Man is asking too high a price for his creation, or if there is some inherent flaw in the product itself. But judging by the amount of wobbling, sputtering, and leakage, I'd wager the Small Man is not the world's finest example of craftsmanship.

And to be honest, I cannot for the life of me imagine what the market is for flatulent clones of pasty inept drunkards. But if it will move things along and put this whole ordeal behind us, I'll make the following offer: Anyone who deals with me directly can have the Small Man for half price. I'll even throw in an impressively large and solid Rodent gratis.

Hurry. Supplies are limited.

What manner of monkey is this?

I should have known it was too good to last.

For four days, I had the fortress entirely unto myself. No Man, no Woman. No Rodent. No strange experiments in the night or clanky assemblings of bizarre pseudoscientific mechanisms intruding upon the easy calm of my solitude.

The couch, the whole of it, was mine. The pellet bowl eternally full. Everything in the universe was, at last, right.

And then, and then.

The Woman returned, looking badly beaten and leaning pathetically upon a rolling scaffold for support, her gait uneven, her eyes sunken. She was followed closely by the Man, teetering and exhausted, and carrying in his arms some... thing.

At first I watched the door for signs of the Rodent — surely he would be close upon their heels (in fact, he did not return until later that evening, escorted by the Melodious Freckled Lady and My Doorman). But my attention was soon diverted to the twist, the x factor, the elephant in the room. The thing.

It was small. Tightly bundled, yet still squirmy. Definitely alive. I mounted the couch for closer inspection. Smelly. A somewhat medicinal scent, with strange conflicting overtones of both hygienic cleanliness and exremental contamination. And it was vocal — mewling and squawking and hiccing and burping in a manner not unlike the Rodent in his heyday.

Could this monkey-thing be the product of the Man's Bay B experiments?

And then I moved in slightly closer, and suddenly it reached out with one of its sickly-pale digits and tugged at its swaddles, and I saw, oh help me, I saw its face.

No no no no no.

The Man has cloned himself.

Bast and Sekhmet preserve us from stinky evil!