[b]Heading North on the interstate, Upstate[/b]: 

“Why do I never get to choose the channel?” Damien asked of no one in particular, clearly disappointed with his position along the picking order. An exchanged glance, and Felix and Ken answered synonymously, “because you don’t drive, Andrew,” his name wasn’t Andrew, of course, but a long standing joke at Damien’s expense had been circulated amongst the crew for years originating as a misunderstanding on the part of one of his female friends, and clearly it had stuck. “Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cake hole… Bitch,” Felix finished, a quote each present had heard more times than they could count. “Shut the fuck up Felix, you still don’t even know where that quote came from,” Ken responded, as a little blue Honda Civic cut them off whilst traversing a particularly sharp turn, causing Felix to swerve wildly to the side to avoid the passing vehicle. “Oh God, we’re gonna die,” Ken shouted, reaching past his fellow passengers to grab ahold of the, ‘Oh Shit,’ bars lining either side of the obnoxiously yellow classic Chevy pickup truck they happened to be taking upstate that particular night. 

“You shut the fuck up Ken, we’re fucking fine, as usual,” Felix retorted, clearly pleased with the happenstance turn of events providing him the upper hand in their pointless debate. “And besides, if you die we’ll bury you in a Jew cemetery and you’ll go to purgatory or some shit for kinda believing in the right God,’ ‘Fuck you Felix, if your shit driving gets me killed I’m coming back as a ghost and haunting your Muslim ass,’ ‘Both of you shut the fuck up! We have a job to do, and our chances are dodgy at best if your constant bickering gives me a damn headache,” Damien finished, clearly unhappy with the turn of events. “Always with these two yanks, I swear. You fucking twit this, you bloody twat that, yada yada Jew, yada yada Muslim, Jesus fucking Christ,” the Englishman among them thought to himself, momentarily relieved of the torrential word slinging as the three each drifted into their own thoughts for a time. “Damien, your gay,” Felix uttered nearly beneath his breath before beginning to chuckle half way through his delivery. 

“Says you! You’re the one who won’t shut up about people’s dicks! All the time, dicks this, dicks that, you have a complex or something,” Damien retorted angrily, Felix clearly having hit a nerve, which is exactly what he had been aiming for. Damien may have been brilliant, but common sense and an easily obtained understanding of the psychology of his peers was not his strong suit. “Shut the fuck up. Neither of you would have ever gotten laid if it weren’t for me paying women to sleep with you,” Ken not so subtly reminded them. “Well, there was Vio--,’ ‘don’t you even start with the whole Violet thing, Andrew! I tricked her into sleeping with you to, ‘make me jealous,’ because I’m a good person, ‘well, actually that’s not a very nice thing to do,’ ‘shut the fuck up, Damien, you were madly in love with her and I did what it took to get her to willingly give you a taste, be fucking grateful,” this having struck a deeper chord returned the three to embittered, contemplative silence. 

“Dude, your girlfriend looks like Carly Rae Jepsen,” Felix reminded Ken after a few quiet moments. “I have a girlfriend?” Ken remarked with mild amusement, before bringing an open bottle of Dos Equis Amber to his lips, simultaneously handing one to Damien, the last two remaining in the six pack they had brought along with them for the ride, before mouthing a silent cheers, clinking the two bottles together, and remarking, “that’s news to me,”. “Yeah, dude,” Felix preached, with absolute conviction, “that twelve year old stripper from Fantasy whatever,”. “You mean Kim? Dude, she’s Asian, and like, twenty three,” Ken responded in between sips of his newly procured drink. “So’s Carly,” Felix retorted, still possessed of the zealous Gnosis of a fanatic religious convert. “She has blue eyes, Felix,” Damien remarked, laughing all the while. “She isn’t Asian, bro. Although I did once know an Asian girl with blue ey--,’ ‘No one wants to hear about the Asian girl with blue eyes you used to know, Ken. We know all about your fucking muse, if you’re so in love with her why don’t you marry her?”. 

To this Ken and Damien exchanged mildly bewildered looks once again before responding in unison, “You know what, ‘muse,’ means, Felix?” both now chuckling a bit amongst themselves. “I hate you guys,” the three spoke together, each with a dramatically contrasting tone, before returning once more to the quiet which had marked the majority of their trip, broken up only by arguments about nothing important lasting minutes at a time. “This is my last time, guys. I’m out,” Damien broke the silence, before breaking into an obviously pre-prepared speech; “we’re out of Sudo. This is the last batch, and you both know it. I only planned to spend a year abroad, and it’s time for me to go back home and get a real job--,’ ‘fuck you, Andrew,” his clearly well planned and meticulously calculated speech blown to bits with a simple phrase, courtesy of Ken. “Do what you want dude, pirates are free, but you really think you can go back to working a desk job after all this?’ ‘well, it would be in a lab,--‘ ‘I’m well aware of what you went to school for Damien. You gonna stop sleeping with hookers, doing blow off stripper’s tits, making a million plus a year to go be a lab assistant for people who make better boner pills for fat old fucks?”. 

Defeated, possessed of a headache, and in no mood to play along with Ken’s verbal swashbuckler’s dream, Damien looked out the window of the passenger side, the truck itself having no back seat and Ken, easily being the smallest of the three always having been regulated to the middle seat, allowing him to hide his face away in a childish, “you can’t see me,” sense of the term. “Dude, that Asian chick’s twelve,’ ‘fuck you Felix, she has tits,’ ‘so does my twelve year old cousin,’ ‘then she’s fucking old enough,’ ‘dude, gross,’ Felix and Ken rambled on amongst themselves, stopping only as their exit came into view on the left side of an irregularly traveled rural highway thirty miles from the nearest gas station, a hundred from any settlement large enough to consider a town. Eight miles of forest, “road,” if you could call it that, and there it was, a seemingly ancient Winnebago abandoned in the middle of nowhere, complete with interior booby traps, shenanigans Felix had insisted upon, and a functioning meth lab. Exiting the three began stripping off their civilian clothes, dressing in stark white painter’s garb before strapping on gas masks and plastic hair nets. “Let’s get started then,” Damien moaned, painfully.