Okay, I know that some people haven’t read Jerry and the Goddesses yet, and while that’s a crying shame, it is what it is.
And what that is, is about two hundred and twenty thousand words. That’s a lot of words.
So for anyone who’s interested in Glenda and the Oracle, but needs to get caught up on the story so far, here’s the cliff notes version.
The story takes place in early September of the year 2027. About a month prior to the first scene, a major news story of a massive battle in Western Germany shook the world. The story was almost fantastical, involving clashing armies, one of which seemed to be an army of LARPers, and the other was a mix of rogue Bundeswehr units and members of a recent, violent cult that had been growing like wildfire around the world. Video from this event showed some pretty impressive sights; Samurai armed with modern rifles flanking a knot of the biker-gang looking cultists, attack helicopters facing off against fighter jets, and a battle between a handful of people out front that made no goddamn sense. It looked like they were flying. There was a guy with a round shield and sword, and he faced off against some shaved giant first, and then a skinny woman, until a huge black cloud apparently spoke as it rolled over the battlefield. And the whole time, there was a naked woman watching it go down.
One of the fighters from the backyard was rumored to be a Russian fitness model who’d gone viral on the internet, years earlier. A muscular guy with a blue mohawk was seen running away.
The whole incident was absolutely bonkers.
Glenda had been a part of that cult. She’d joined up earlier in the year, for much the same reasons all of the others had; because she was angry at the world and wanted to hurt it. She saw the cults demonstrate the power they had, the power that could be hers, and she took it. The cult, in turn, had taken her in, and immediately sent her to Afghanistan. A few weeks later, her boss showed up at that remote post, murdered one of her fellows and raped her.
The boss left, but Glenda was furious. You see, Glenda had led a rough life. And this wasn’t the first time she was sexually assaulted. And Glenda was… Not a nice person. She had a collection of every single weapon a man had hurt her with; knives, belts, a pipe. She stopped short of collecting hands, but there was another body part she collected…
She knew that the cult was the real deal. Her boss, a man named Nick who sometimes looked different and went by other names had an ability to heal like Deadpool, from the movies. And he liked to show it off, so she’d seen it, first hand. She couldn’t take the thing he’d used to hurt her. And that pissed her off something fierce.
So when, a few weeks later, she found out she’d been tapped to go serve at the place Nick worked, she was even more pissed. She killed the man responsible for the transfer and stuffed his body in a closet, and then she gritted her teeth and did what she had to do. She left, and went to go work for the man who’d hurt her; the only such man she wasn’t able to hurt back.
While there, she learned of the Oracle. A pitiful creature, that once was a young woman who had the beauty of a goddess, but had been tortured and abused into a shell of her former self, stripped even of her ability to survive on her own, with both legs and arms removed through some foul magic. But the Oracle could see the future, the past and into the thoughts of mankind.
One day, she got news from the Oracle. Not directly, but she caught wind of one of the prophecies the poor creature occasionally made. Nick was returning from a fight, and he was weak. Glenda was not the only woman Nick had abused, and several of her fellow cultists joined forces with some prisoners to enact their vengeance.
They attacked him. Glenda took her trophy and watched the life bleed out of her attacker’s eyes, but the vengeance was not so sweet.
The next man in charge decided that he liked Glenda’s aggressiveness, and gave her a job as his enforcer. With nothing else to do, Glenda accepted and used her natural aggression to help enforce this new boss’s will on the cult. And with that job came one particular duty; Take care of the Oracle.
Glenda took to this with a surprising gusto. She found her stomach twisted at the things her god and fellow cultists had done to this woman, at the creature they’d turned her into. She brutally murdered those who abused her, and discovered a bit of tenderness that remained in her hard, cold heart as she bathed and fed the Oracle.
Things were looking up, until the Nightmares arrived.
One was taller, gaunt and skeletal and dressed in flowing black that hid his face in the shadows. His eyes glowed with a malevolent light, and fear of a certain death radiated out from him. The other was shorter, stockier. A woman, wild, her eyes full of madness and hate, with burning red hair and a sinister smile of joy at the destruction the two of them wreaked among the cultists. Glenda knew, somehow, that these two Nightmares were there for her, and her charge.
And Glenda decided that her only friend, this armless, legless creature who had been beaten and tortured into a hollow shell with no will of her own, was more important to her than this stupid cult, anyways. She grabbed the Oracle and they fled.
Not quite fast enough, though.
A terrifying monstrosity of flailing tentacles and black smoke herded them into a dead end, where the Nightmares found them. Glenda fought, but nothing she could do hurt them. They took them both, but instead of killing them, they did something else.
They healed their injuries, restored the Oracle’s limbs, and somehow restored enough of her mind for Glenda to finally meet the woman, Jessica, whom the Oracle had once been. And then he gave them money, guns, a car, and he sent them on their way, asking nothing but a single prophecy from the Oracle.
For the next several weeks, they drove around southern British Columbia, trying to find a place outside of the cult’s reach. Until one morning, they decided not to use the bathrooms at the gas station in the small town they’d stopped in. And that’s where this story starts.