Period Piece

"Alright, you ready?" he asked, cracking his knuckles.

"Please," she replied, rolling her shoulders. "I was born ready. I literally popped out of my mom's vagina fists first. That doctor never stood a chance!"

"Well too bad this isn't a hospital," he countered, placing his two sassy hands on his two sassy hips. "...uh, I mean...you're gonna WISH this was a hospital...cause I'm gonna whoop your ass so hard that you're gonna need, y'know, medical aid, and...ah, screw it."

"Good effort," she snickered, arms crossed, "...but in Soviet Jacquiville, ass whoops YOU!"

He laughed it off, but she could see him chewing on the phrase for a moment, and, as someone who might possibly ENJOY the prospect of being whooped across the face by an ass, that laughter quickly drained away into a certain uncomfortable state of awkward arousal.

...heh. "...o-okay, for real though, let's do this!" He turned to face her, notched up the belt on his robe, and dropped into his fighting stance.

She nodded, feet apart and arms at the ready.

"...FIGHT!"

No, the familiarity of the scene was definitely not lost on her. Sparring sessions with Raf were special time, and Jacqui had always enjoyed cataloging each one in her mind for posterity. The lyrics may have been a little different this time, but the melody was undeniably familiar.

The reboot must have worked...

She blocked a fierce right jab, spinning on her heel and attempting to stomp on his foot. A dirty move, but very effective...too bad Raf saw it coming and pulled back to ready up another combo.

She wasn't even sure at what point that day the timelines had stitched together, or where exactly the simulation had pooped her consciousness back out into "the Real World", as it were. If she thought about it, trying to recall the events of the day produced a messy blur of the daily college grind and the re-emerging memories of the Quest, as if one of them were just a dream and the other had been real.

All she really knew now was that Raf was about to leap into a high kick from the side, leading with his left foot.

Waiting just a half-second after his foot committed to the jump, she dashed forward to ram her shoulder into his body mid-flight, throwing him to the floor as she compensated for balance. Making a quick U-turn, she threw herself on top of him before he could recover, pinning him beneath the weight of the very ass she claimed would whoop him mere seconds ago.

"...told ya," she said with a mean grin.

"...that you did," he agreed, struggling to catch his breath. "...god, you're heavier than you look."

Her brow raised playfully. "And what's that supposed to mean?"

"Means I'm dying..." Raf gasped as he fought to push her off his imploding lungs. "Your body's more muscle than you let on...".

She snorted and tapped him on the head for the remark before rolling off of him. Not that she was particularly bothered about it - Jacqui preferred to eschew society's tunnel-vision ideas of 'beauty' and 'health' in favor of the ability to crush men's lungs with her own fat ass. "Glutes before glutens", she sometimes maximed - flaunting victory was just one of her many forms of affection.

"...uh?" she heard him follow up behind her.

"What?"

He pointed down, not to his own body, but to hers. "...you okay?"

Before her eyes even moved into position, she already knew why her pants had suddenly become the center of attention. "...ah, fuck. Really, uterus?"

Raf looked away, but not before making a noise like "euawgh" under his breath. Whatever the unspoken golden rule about men and periods actually was - whether you were supposed to politely talk your way around them, or to normalize them as if they were nothing more than "my, what shitty weather we're having today" casual - he clearly hadn't been listening in Etiquette School that day and wasn't sure what which conversational protocol was expected here.

Fortunately for him, Jacqui wasn't in a mood to be offended, and quickly hoisted herself back to her feet with an uncomfortable grunt. "Welp, guess I'm cuttin' short again...sorry, Raf."

"Aww, again?" he sighed, following suit and standing up to walk her to the door. "That's two cuts in a row, Jacqui...don't tell me you're cheatin' on me!"

She eyed him dubiously, but decided to let the snowball roll further downhill. "...yep, you got me there. I'm leavin' early to go get cozy with my new honey: a bowl of ice cream, and a shitty foreign film marathon."

His eyes rolled in perfect rhythm with his head shake, but Jacqui could see the brief calculation of worry in them, even if only for a half-second. What a dork.

"Hey, I like the necklace," he added, pointing out the new personal affect he'd never seen in all his days allowing her to stash personal affects behind the counter free of the usual locker fee. "Is that new?"

Just like in the movies, Jacqui's hand immediately reached up to gently cradle said personal affect, as if it were some kind of treasured ancestral heirloom or stolen mystical artifact. And in that moment, she wondered why it felt like something she'd always been wearing, especially when it was clearly something no one else had seen her wear.

And for one more half-second after that, she wondered if Raf might still be calculating the remark about cheating now that he'd seen her sporting a fancy new necklace around town, and whether or not she should intervene to shoot the mood down in flames.

He beat her to the punch anyway. "...what is it, like, a fish or something?"

"It's a frog," she answered automatically, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. It WAS the most obvious thing in the world, wasn't it? I mean, SHE knew what it was, even though she also knew there was no way she COULD know what it was.

She held it up like a showcase prize, highlighting its many features she also didn't know about. "Pure sterling silver frame with plated gold along the edges, tumbled and polished lapis lazuli for the body, ample 24-inch chain for my big squishy neck...fuck man, I should work the jewelry department or something."

...what the fuck am I talking about? I mean, obviously, I'm talking about the frog necklace I've been inexplicably equipped with, but really, what the fuck? WHEN the fuck? And why? What???

"Oh...that's, uh...that's neat," Raf replied with a strange half-nod, fully indicating he had no idea whether or not all that meant the necklace was super-valuable, or what gemological healing powers it was associated with, or at what point Jacqui had ever indicated in her twenty-something life that frogs were of any profound significance to her. "I mean, it, uh...it suits you."

Jacqui furrowed a brow at him, knowing full well he was speaking only in formalities at this point, but she certainly wasn't in a mood to stick around much longer now. "You're damn right it suits me. Now go do me a favor and beat the snot out of some twelve-year-olds so at least one of us gets to feel accomplished for today."

"Okay, now THAT I can do," Raf promised with a smile. "Same time next time, then?"

"You bet your taut, muscular ass," she promised back with a finger pistol over her shoulder as she whirled right on out the front door. "See ya, Raf...".

With her unexplained new necklace and resting bitchface secured, Jacqui thus began her begrudged trudge back down the Bible Belt, eager to finally revisit the unremarkable domestic simplicity of the place she knew only as "home". Reality seemed to have fully reintegrated upon itself by this point, and she took the small inconsistencies like the necklace as the result of rebooting into some kind of odd, slightly off-key beta timeline or something. She didn't plan on putting much more thought into it than that, but as clarity clicked back into place like a color filter over a poorly-lit selfie, the memories of the not-a-dream Quest resurfaced once more; a friendly recap to nicely sum up her unforgettable metaphysical journey.

So, whether by simulated reality, period dream, out-of-body experience, or some unholy combination of all three, Jacqui had been duped by two transcendent jackasses into embarking on a quest to prove God was real. And, appropriately, when she found him, she kicked him right in the balls for it. Where exactly in this new beta timeline the alleged takeover of Reality took place didn't really matter to her, just the fact that she remembered doing it - now in HD, clear as a sunny day in Texas - made it a real, concrete piece of her past.

...which, if she thought about it, more or less followed the exact same logic she'd used to explain the concept of God as an idea instead of a person. It didn't matter whether religious figures or their Crusades were ever historically real at some point, or if they were nothing more than dreams, or ideals, or even just straight-up propaganda. As long as someone out there BELIEVED they were real, Gods would be manifest through their believers' actions, and thus, for all intents and purposes, real.

And to think I used to be agnostic…, Jacqui mused, hobbling the cobble as oncoming traffic stepped aside to make room. Kinda hard to still be neutral about the existence of God after I personally introduced my foot to his nutsack...again, not that I'd ever call that pile of shit "God". Anyway, guess I can't really call myself "agnostic" anymore, either. I guess once you have a name for it, you stop getting caught up in the whole "can't prove it, can't disprove it" thing...so maybe "agnosticism" is just a word for people who haven't given their God a name yet.

...so what's his name, then? she heard herself ask herself.

She came to a complete stop in the middle of the Bible Belt to think about it.

...well, for starters, who said my God has to be a "he"? she snorted at the thought. My God can be anybody I damn well choose, so it'd have to be somebody who embodies everything I want to be in life.

She saw Vanity primp its hair in the mirror of her soul.

...is it super douchey to just say I AM my own God? I mean, not to slap my own ass about it, but I'm pretty fuckin' awesome. And I already believe in everything me believes in: changing what I know I can, and not takin' any shit that I don't have to put up with. Sounds like a pretty solid life policy to me.

I mean, look at the facts. Those two assholes roped me into their bullshit scheme, so I got right in there and wrecked their shit to pieces, even while I had a metaphorical genital shark wrecking my own shit to pieces. That's the kind of God I am. If religion is supposed to be based on who I wanna be and what I hold important, then getting shit done in spite of fucking menstrual bleeding IS my religion.

Yeah, I gripe about it - who wouldn't gripe about getting repeatedly shanked in the guts every month - but at the end of the day, I still get it done. I fucking TRIUMPH, bleeding vagina or otherwise, because it's not gonna get any better until I take some action. Change is what happens when something fucking sucks and you realize it's never gonna STOP sucking until you level the fuck up and do something about it.

And if that kinda thinking is what it takes to motivate me, then I may as well just christen myself the high priest of my own period-centric cult.

Menstruism. I'm a Periodite. A Shark Week's Witness.

And, as she found herself clutching the lapis lazuli frog necklace she hadn't even remembered buying, Jacqui heard a certain phrase float its way through the canals of thought within her head...

"She who hastens the birth...".

The world went silent.

...childbirth.

...frog...?

...blue frog...

...childbirth...

She smiled.

And, from that day forward, Jacqui had accepted as her own personal God a long-defunct Egyptian deity known for her role in ancient theistic midwifery, newly repurposed as the goddess of "Gettin' Shit Done Even On Shark Week", the very frog goddess who hastened the birth with a million-dollar smile and a can-do attitude...

Heqet.

"I should go buy some kind of new holy attire to celebrate," she said aloud, much to the surprise of no one walking along the most religiously-affiliated street on the entire campus. "...maybe a new hoodie or something."

And not even five minutes later, an inbound cramp dissolved all of her newly-acquired religious zeal, and she found herself wishing she simply HAD just gone ahead and deleted the menstruation code right out of the game of Life. What a fucking wasted opportunity...

...but I guess I'm just gonna have to power through it somehow. Same shit, different day. It's what I do now. It's how the freshly-elected First Priest of the New Cult of Heqet rolls.

For I am the Warrior.

The very Gods themselves lay in pained defeat beneath me, as I walk across their broken bodies to bridge myself into a strange new land of my own dominion. In light of my conquest, all hardships seem null, all strife inconsequential. I have made for myself a freedom of my own, an understanding of not only my Spear and the Beast, but of why I carry one, and why I hunt the other.

Never again will I fear what I've doubted about myself. For I know now who my God is, and for what cause I fight.

By my new God, I have learned how to hunt.

By my new God, I have learned how to heal.

By my new God, I have learned how to learn.

And by my new God, I have learned that frog's song beneath the moon will bring blood before the morning.