Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: East of West, Issue #3 – “The Dragon”! In the previous installment, the Three Horsemen systematically decapitate every single person in the presidential line of succession until they get to the Secretary of the Interior Antonia LeVay, who seems like a believer enough in the Message to satisfy their needs.

LeVay meets up with other members of a sort of secret Message society, who don’t seem too thrilled that this new woman is now among their ranks. A guy named Andrew Archibald Chamberlain, who looks like Colonel Sanders, leaves before the feast and returns to his Chief of Staff office in the Black Towers. There, Death is waiting to kill him, but Chamberlain’s a silver-tongued son of a bitch and he (possibly) convinces Death into partnering up with him.

He tells Death that there’s something in the Message that might interest him.

He tells Death that his wife is alive.

Death’s wife is a young Asian woman.

And remember, any of the unattributed quotes in italics you see represent the occasional full-page gray-text-on-white-background bumper pages sprinkled throughout the issues. Thanks for stickin’ around!

East of West, Issue #3 [June, 2013]
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
“The Dragon”

“Who is this woman, the one who conquered Death?”

I guess if anyone was going to conquer Death, it would be the old ball and chain! Ha! Zing! Right fellas! Heh heh! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em! Heh heh heh!

In New Shanghai, women are lined up wearing Samus Aran from Metroid suits. A flower is held by the young woman we saw in the previous issue, who also appears to be under arrest in some fashion? She has these weird metal wrist-glove restraints, plus a neck device that four people can drag her along with.

“A moment, Security Minister.” speaks up one of the Metroid women, “She should be checked before you speak with her. Your father ordered it.”

The Security Minister is annoyed, but allows it. Her “checking” involves an x-ray scan, which shows abnormal denser-than-usual bone structure in some areas from skeletal regeneration, but nothing separate from the on-record prosthetics. Dense bones, eh? Sounds useful!

The young woman is named Xiaolian, and she is the sister to the Security Minister. “Father has summoned us” the Security Minister tells Xiaolian, and Xiaolian responds with a bitter “It’s been 10 years, Hu. I expected more than that.”

Ah yes, Hu, House of Mao, Security Minister. She is involved with the Secret Message Society. Good, excellent, very well then.

The bible is the real Good News!

We are treated to what I can only assume is a flashback. Hu motors up on kickass floating hog, she’s dressed like Speed Racer! She yells for Xiaolian to come out of a dark hole. “I told you — all of you — not to look for me.” says Xiaolian, “What are you doing here, Hu?”

And Hu responds with some cult Message bullshit! I’m sure Xiaolian doesn’t want to hear none of that, but then three more nefarious individuals descend upon them from the rocks. They look like older versions of the Horsemen Children, and the Red One is wearing a getup like Carmen Sandiego! I wonder if she knows she looks like Carmen Sandiego. Yeesh.

Xiaolian is alarmed. “What have you done?” she asks her sister with shock. And Hu says “A righteous, righteous thing.”

And then something happens to Xiaolian. It’s hard to tell. It looks like she gets thoroughly OWNED by these three new guests who may or may not be who I think they are. There’s some swirling electric blue vortex. She doesn’t look happy about it, at any rate.

“She lasted longer than you will.”

“If you cannot trust your eyes as you look at the world, what good are they? I can give you something better.”

Junction. On the border of the Union and the Burning Plain. It looks like…if the Grand Canyon were U-shaped, and there was a dense urban landscape within the chasm. It’s weird.

In an empty bar, a bartender is wiping down the surfaces. CREEEAKK! “Ah! First customers of the day…”

The barkeep from Issue #1 welcomes his new guests to the Atlas. “Newly refurbished and exceptionally fine!” he beams. But once he realizes who’s in his bar, his face falls. “Shit.”

Here comes trouble! The Dirtiest Dudes in Town!

Yes, yes, those three lovable scamps! The blue one asks for a “manly man drink”, and the barkeep points out, and RIGHTFULLY SO, that he appears to be underage. To which Blue replies coldly “Oh, I’m ancient. Older than the world. And you know better, Hunter. Now, thirsty, thirsty…”

Yellow feels an aura about the place. Dots of light take shape to form the outline of Death. “Yes, no mistaking it is there?” says Red, “The man certainly leaves a mark.”

After Red asks in the barkeep’s direction to confirm that Death was, indeed, in the bar at some point. When the barkeep starts to gibber and deny Death’s presence, Red claims that he wasn’t talking to him. Then some unseen force tears the barkeep’s…um…”bad eye”…out of his socket. Which we did see happen before! So at least this isn’t completely vexing to me!

MC Eyeball spittin’ rhymes with immaculate flow.

“Yesss. Yesss. Much to fear. Mister bonesss wasss rattlin’ here.” says the eyeball in sp0o0o0oky red speech bubbles! Yellow looks to more dots of light to see that Death had two companions. Red gets right into the eyeball’s face and asks what the FUCK Death wanted. And then the eyeball, continuing to speak in flowery poetry, said that it didn’t know — couldn’t see.

At this point the barkeep leaps onto the bar and grabs the little mutherfuckin’ eyeball. “Gotcha!”

“Do we need to start cutting off body parts, or are you going to tell us what you gave to him?” Blue not so much warns as he plans. Yellow and Red like the idea anyway. “Honestly, we could use the practice.”

The barkeep stammers as he shoves the squelchy octopus of an eyeball back into his socket. He tells them that he couldn’t give Death what he really wanted, so he gave him a list of names of the Chosen. The Horsemen now understand what happened to the former President. So now, knowing Death, he’s going to carry out at least three further moves: a) kill everyone on the list, b) get back what the three of them stole from him (still unnamed, as far as I, Sir Tom, am aware), and c) find his wife. Now it’s just about knowing what’s next…

If only there was a rather…helpful…barkeepery barkeep of a man on the premises…

And the barkeep is like “AH BUH UHHH YEAH DON’T KILL ME, I’M VERY HELPFUL. I’M A HELPFUL BOY.”, and he pulls a lever shaped like a bottle that opens up a hole in the floor. Out of the hole comes a rather large hologram of the Earth. And then he points at the Earth and mumbles some stuff about trackers and pathfinders. He is the Pathfinder, and the Pathfinder stores all the data that the scouts collect over the world. This sounds, to me, like a windbag way of telling the positively cherubic Horsemen that he’s too useful to be killed.

Also, he can track anyone on the planet. Right here. Right now. Boom.

The same reason all those pedophiles travel thousands of miles just to get chewed out by Dateline‘s Chris Hansen!

Death’s location is easy to spot. He’s in New Shanghai. WIFE IT IS! And, as it happens, New Shanghai appears to be where, like, Tennessee is or something. United States. Interesting.

The Horsemen are certainly confused as to why Death is bothering with this woman right now. Of the three tasks, this one seems the least important. BUT, Death is a curious entity, isn’t he. Mmmhmm, aha. Even Wolf and Crow are fascinated by Death’s motivation to find his wife, speaking to each other about how powerful love is. “It makes the old new. Makes dead things live. Love makes you into something better.”

Then Wolf says something that implies that Wolf loves Crow, but then it’s not brought up again. “It’s the reason a wolf would chase a crow, even knowing he can’t fly…and she don’t ever need to touch the ground.”

At the Imperial Palace of New Shanghai, the Mao-in-Charge in 2064, “Premier Mao”, welcomes his daughters. And “welcomes” is too strong a word. He kind of just sneers at them. Hu and Xiaolian stand rather sullenly while he talks. He tells Hu to remove Xiaolian’s chains, and Xiaolian shoots a smug smirk at her.

“If you think it wise, father,” Hu begins to argue, making a case that isolation in the garden for years may have made her positively feral! And Premier Mao agrees with that: “which is why I try to visit her garden as often as I can.”

Shocked! SHOCKED! Hu is shocked about this revelation! Then Daddy Mao starts fawning over her delinquent daughter. “We wouldn’t want your sister becoming some sad and broken thing,” he coos, lightly touching Xiaolian’s cheek. Hu is fucking FROWNING. Xiaolian continues her smug glances. “Your mercy and your kindness are staggering, father.”

Don’t make me finish the job I should have started with you years ago! All those times I could’ve choked you out in your crib! ALL THOSE TIMES!!!

And then he starts choking her. TABLES HAVE TURNED! Now who’s smirking? And then, this scrawny 120-pound man, he bursts about 40 forehead veins in his efforts to lift her off the ground by her neck. He doesn’t have time for her malarkey today!

“Your husband approaches the imperial city.”

And indeed he is, blowing up bridges an’ shit. For whatever reason.

“Death is coming for us all,” Daddy Mao warns, posing overdramatically. And then he walks away as he lets them know that both their actions have really FUBARed the natural order to the world. Hu, with her ties to the weird Message Cult, and Xiaolian, with her ties to Death by marriage and what the hell is all that about anyway?

Daddy Mao intervened; he had spoken to Hu’s Weird Message Cult ages ago and worked out an agreement to keep Xiaolian safe and untraceable, even by Death himself. And that’s why she still lives to this day. So maybe a little THANK YOU wouldn’t be so goddamned hard??

Now, they await Death’s arrival. Mao sends one of his knights, all suited up like a cartoon knight, to go attempt one last appeal. “I ask for reason and not more madness. And if he rejects this, tell him what waits for him here.” With this message, the knight clangs and rattles away on his similarly clangly, rattly motorcycle-horse!

“Tell Death we will not be the only ones that die here today.” Mao promises, as we see a view of his army numbering in the thousands. Tens of thousands!

And, if you have time, you can head on over to the 2064 AMA Motocross Championship finals!

This knight makes it to the blown-up bridge, where a dying soldier tells him to run back. Steadfast, though, in his pursuit, The Knight carries on! He approaches Wolf and Crow and tells them that Mao seeks a parley! Crow is like “fat chance, nerd”, which leaves Mr. Knight no choice but to demand that they leeeeeaaavveee heeerreee nooooowww OOOooOoooOoOoOO.

The knight starts describing the large army that awaits. The prose is very purple, describing the bridge blockade “as stars to the sun” and the imperial “armies of heaven”.

Death approaches, saying “GOOD.” More fun to kill a bunch of people, right? Death tells the knight to run back to Mao, they’re not taking his deal.

“The Great Wall is coming down…and my judgement will follow shortly.”

Final Thoughts

Death is gonna fuck up Mao’s army! Ain’t no ’bout a-doubt it!