New NWES City resident Stumpy was eager to get some local color and received a couple bucketfuls at Moe’s, a centrally placed watering hole. We cut to the most relevant story the bartender told this night. “Homer?” he said after Stumpy inquired more about the famed bar brawl where Mr. Smipson lost his head which had to be kept in a jar of formaldehyde to be preserved like a pickle for possible future restoration. “Right over there.” Moe points beyond Stumpy to the pool table where it happened. “He broke a pool stick for a weapon, Homie did too. Out of the ball park for the both of ’em. But, turns out, Lemmy’s — as they called him — Lemmy’s head was real and Homer’s wasn’t. *He* was just a mascot, although it seemed to be the other way around what with the ice skating gig and all. That’s when reality began to break down. Who *else* is just a mascot and not real in this here town? Probably a lot of us. Probably more than we care to know. So we stopped talking about it, stopped yapping about it. The bar fell silent when the topic of lost heads was ever brought up. So that’s why *you* caused such a stir with your appearance tonight. You don’t have a head, yet you live!” Moe decided he better shut up for the night and started cleaning beer glasses again. Besides he didn’t have any lines left. See! he thought to himself while staring at the void between the shoulders of the man perched on a bar stool in front of him. This is what happens when this is brought up. Irreality!
The spotted figure in the picture near the pool table then stepped out of it and into this world, one who calls himself Gotham. The one who took Homer’s head away from the jar through this same portal several weeks ago for possible repair, leaving Moe with a nice (if shady seeming) nest egg at the bottom of it. But yet he was back now: unretired. Gotham had also returned to remind him of this. Moe didn’t run the bar any longer. A man named MAT had bought it and made him redundant, or, yes, forced him into an early retirement as a better option. The bar had closed 2 hours ago. In his mild, spacey way, MAT had simply forgotten to lock the front door (4th wall) when he left, distracted by a brewing storm and thunderous lightning and wind and such, let’s say. We were operating on alty time, as Gotham later termed it, sitting at the bar with Stumpy and Moe and trying to get the latter to go home to his lovely wife Dinah and put an end to coming back to work and all. “You won’t get paid,” he reminded Moe, but that wasn’t the point.
As Jaspery night yielded to Newtony day, Moe’s presence began to fade and another took his place: 1/2 and 1/2 here. Gotham turns to Stumpy. “Now about that head…”
Sunklands 