Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: East of West, Issue #37 – “Alignment of the Stars”! In the previous installment, the Endless Nation officially takes control of the Union, and the young rebellious girl is like “I WILL NEVER, EVER BACK DOWN” at first and then is like “ok I’ll back down”. So begins the final days of the Prophet.

Meanwhile, Death receives a message from Xiaolian that war is afoot, and with the help of his trusty little geeky son, they’re going to help her with every fiber of their being.

We’re sort of at the home stretch here. 80% finished. What new possibilities await at THIS turn? One can only imagine! (george costanza drapes himself in velvet is not a bad guess)

East of West, Issue #37 [May, 2018]
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
“Alignment of the Stars”

Archibald shot Thomas’s dog. He’s worse for wear himself. Thomas struggles to get up, huffing and puffing, then injects his neck with a needle of sort of fluid (semen). He pants and huffs and pants and huffs and, after fashioning a crude burial sight for his little robot dog, he zooms away on his hoverbike.

Obviously, Archibald thought Thomas was dead. Archibald thought wrong.

“I asked for mercy, I settled for justice, now all that remains is revenge.”

“If I am not vengeance, then I am nothing.”

Later, a severely wounded Thomas heads back his Hunter outpost. The outpost is warned that they have a single rider coming their way, full throttle and slightly erratic. LIKE MY PENIS HA HAAA!!

Thomas arrives, flumps to the ground, and is immediately cared for by whatever the equivalent of EMS is here in the good ol’ East of West. One of them calls Thomas’ condition “terminal”. Three gunshot wounds, only one exit wound. Gonna lose that leg.

“Hrrnnnnnn,” Thomas is heard to groan in a very hushed voice. “Sons of bitches killed my dog.”

A week later, Thomas is alive but quite infirmed.

Then he awakes with a start.

I’m missing the new Frasier!

Scrambling to get his pants over his shiny new metal leg – and his boots – Thomas hobbles out of his room and into the hallway where a member of staff tells him “hurrrrrr shouldn’t you be in bed???”

No, send him an ambulance. He’s leaving. Tout suite.

Fuck that. Thomas pushes every bitch-ass that gets in his away and boards his own ambulance. He’s got some mofos to ruin, baby.

At the Atlas (the bar place where one-eye worked and died and also it has that big globe thing), the Three Lone Horsemen take their leave and get ready to board their own vehicle when Thomas shows up for a little talky-talky.

“I’m lookin’ for an information brokerage called the Atlas. Is this it?” Thomas asks.

“Do we look like fucking tour guides?” responds War. Ahh, War. Always looking for a battle, so to speak.

“…Yeah,” Thomas fires back all gruff and intimidating. “Yeah, you do. And not much else. Don’t be here when I come back out.” And in he strolls. Conquest wants to knife him, but War respects the cut of this man’s jib and, if anything, he wants to wish him luck due to his murderous spirit! Famine is like “Okay…” because Famine is Switzerland.

Thomas sees all the dead, skeletonized bodies on the floor and lets out a heart “Hrmpt!” He takes a swig of some old liquor left on the bar and then jabs a finger into the globe hologram in the center of the room. “Show me Chosen.”

He gets an eyeful of Chosen.

Hrmpt! The 45th President of the United States! Donald Hrmpt!

Thomas pokes fun at LeVay’s manner of death (eaten by unicorns). He settles upon John Freeman VIII of the New Orleans Monarchy or whatever. He sees on the screen that the Kingdom had purchased the Union, which happened so long ago that I didn’t even remember that. Thomas sees a weapons purchase and the trail leads to a shipment sent to… an unauthorized location. Data deleted. Looks to me like Washington, D.C. “Gotcha,” he says.

Gotcha indeed. Not sure what this is leading to yet, but I never pretended to be very smart!

Thomas tracks this to Doma Lux’s bald Widowmaker love buddy, who is tinkering with the undercarriage of a van-like vehicle. She hears crunching of twigs and leaves in the distance, then bolts out from under the van. And cocks her gun. “Okay. Enough! If you’re trying to sneak up on me, you should’ve started making less noise two minutes ago!”

The Hunter comes out with his hands up. Claims he’s been watching her for twenty minutes, then says he’s here because he’s been following the gold.

“You hear that?” Widowmaker yells behind her. “This gimpy old man just asked me to shoot him. Any reason why I shouldn’t?”

Lux recognizes this guy, and has her own gun trained at him. Once Thomas grimaces and says he’s hunting the Chosen, Lux drops her gun and invites him into their humble little shack.

YEAH, do you have any pork rinds to go with this beer???

A chit-chat ensues. Lux lays out everything she knows: LeVay needed weapons to quell the rebellion. Freeman helped a fellow Chosen, presumably, behind his fatherly king’s back. BUT, since Lux was working for the other side, she did some of her own raiding and pillaging of the Kingdom.

“So why’d you quit the great game?” Thomas asks while Lux pops open a beer for him. Lux was good at manipulating all sides and having fun with it, sure. It felt powerful. Then she realized she was just another pawn on a giant chessboard. “I thought I mattered…”

No further questions, your honor! Thanks a bunch, chickee.

“So… you’re going to just march into the Kingdom and beat the prince to death with your bare hands? That’s your plan?” asks the silent-but-deadly Widowmaker.

“You gotta better idea?”

“Yeah,” she responds, opening a cabinet full of gold bars. “I do.”

Later still, at the guns and ammo shoppe, an unidentified customer who is then identified roughly 1.5 panels later as Thomas, drops a bag full of gold bars on the counter. Lock and load, baby! Time to go prince-huntin’!

Final Thoughts

Short and sweet, that’s how I like ‘em. See you next time when Thomas accidentally shoots off his other leg!