A Cowardly Cynic

“I don’t care,” Kimberly said her catch phrase on air once again. “We aren’t one of those shows that bow down to the woke mob.”

Kimberly tuned herself out as she went into yet another rant about wokeness, feminists run a muck, and all the rest. She made loads of money as a TERF, and couldn’t care less about all the men that wanted to be women she exploited. Unlike most journalists, who were starving like artists, she had a house, a car, and a healthy bank account. And all before she turned 30! Most people in her profession would be lucky to leave their parent’s basement before they turned 35 at this rate.

After she wrapped up her latest podcast, she turned off the recording and exited her home office. Working from home was a good cost saving, and justified being in such a nice place. It also allowed her to do some tax shenanigans with her various activities. Kimberly didn’t need Uncle Sam taking all her gains, ill gotten or otherwise.

This train of thought was interrupted by a loud knocking at Kimberly’s door. She hadn’t been expecting anyone, so did the logical thing and grabbed a can of pepper spray. As a denizen of many far right spaces, Kimberly knew how quickly stupid internet shit could get women raped, if not killed outright. This weapon would sting like crazy, and give time for the cops to arrive if that’s what it came down to.

But when Kimberly answered the door… she saw someone who put the assumption that pepper spray would do anything to the test. Someone who stood tall that her door couldn’t reveal the person in full. They were seven feet tall, and had fire red skin, something that was impossible out of movies full of fantasy shit. Then the figure leaned down, and Kimberely saw they had burning eyes.

“Hello Kimberly,” The figure announced. “I’d suggest you don’t spray that stuff unless you want this to be a rather painful journey.”

Before Kimberly could do anything to prevent it, the figure grabbed her by the neck, and yanked her outside. Another arm yanked the pepper spray out of her hand, and crushed it.

“You hurt a lot of people in your life Kimberly,” The figure continued. “Trust me when I say as a figure created to punish the wicked, you fit the bill and then some.”

No one heard Kimberly scream. Nobody even noticed the briefly open door to her house, or that all the lights went out. And of course, not a soul spoke of a seven foot tall demon when they were all at school or work...

“What is your issue with Hanna?” Paisley asked. “I don’t think it’s just because she saw you with porn, or because she trashed your life in high school. For all of your issues, you have shown the ability to let bygones be bygones, or at least try to. Why couldn’t you do that with Hanna?”

“She made me an online punching bag for her crusade against porn,” Max said. “The condescending way she talked about me as a victim of porn addiction, the way she kept sharing one of the worst moments of my life repeatedly, and the way she conveniently left out how she invaded my privacy to do it. I’m no longer a person, just a symbol for her crusade that she can use over and over again in her ideological pursuits.”

Despite the strides Max had made in becoming more mature with Paisley, the wound still hurt. Saying it out loud made him realize it wasn’t so much the initial wound, but the repeated stabs from the knowledge that Hanna was still talking about it. Still dragging him through the mud. Max may have been a common name, and to his knowledge she didn’t say his last name, but they lived in the age of the internet. He didn’t need someone blabbing about the worst time in his life over and over again with how much the incident spread.

“Max, what Hanna did, and still does, was wrong,” Paisley said. “With that said, I hope you aren’t following her online, or worse, trying to contact her.”

“Fuck no,” Max said. “I did once see what she was up to after the fiasco with the guidance counselor, and that’s how I found out she was podcasting with a TERF. Which if you aren’t-”

“Don’t worry Max,” Paisley finished for him. “I’m very aware of what a TERF is. Please continue.”

“Other than that,” Max said, “my preference would be I never see, interact with, or even think about Hanna again. But I don’t get that option, do I?”

“You can get close,” Paisley said. “But it is true that in the age of the internet, if she’s not willing to let it go, it will be very hard to escape the impact of her words. It does matter though Max that you want to be the bigger person, and just let it go.”

“Yeah,” Max said. “I knew a guy once. I thought he was a bit of a nerd, or at least that’s what I thought, until the incident. Then he said all this incel bullshit to me, about how women were just whores wanting to fuck Chads, and would do nothing but rob money from the rest of us.”

It was a moment Max never told his mother about. She didn’t need to know that the guy he played video games and watched anime with growing up was the exact piece of shit she was terrified he’d turn out like. Not when she had just watched all the dreams she and her husband had for Max’s future, that they had paid a pretty penny for, go up in smoke.

“Did you believe him?” Paisley asked. “What he said was horrible, but it would make sense if you believed at that moment in your life.”

“No,” Max said. “I said he was a piece of shit trying to exploit me for money, and that he was going to die alone as a loser if he continued buying into that bullshit. And I said that not as a feminist, or some nice guy wanting a reward, but as someone who knew exactly how pathetic these people were. I got exposed to them far too often in the comment sections and forums I traversed for pornography.”

Max could still remember that moment. The rage he felt at someone trying to exploit the worst moment of his life, and to have yet another person he trusted betray it. Worse, not understanding why he would throw away their entire friendship up to that point. Was it for money? The chance to spread the garbage in his head to someone else? Was it the universe trying to teach him that he was a fool to stick to his beliefs? That he should just give up, and become the porn addicted loser that Hanna thought he was?

“Regardless of why Max,” Paisley said, “out of stubbornness, or genuine fortitude, you resisted something men a lot more fortunate than you haven’t. It was more than the end of a relationship after all, but you were also publicly humiliated. Even if what you did was inappropriate, it doesn’t change that what happened to you was traumatic.”

“Yeah, well, I have got to try to be the man my mom wanted me to be...”

“Next up is Kimberly, Max,” Paisley said. “You would know her from listening to Hanna.”

“The TERF?” Max said. “Sure hope nobody in your audience is trans. Or even slightly bothered by transphobic slurs.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that Max,” Paisley continued. “Kimberly isn’t a bigot, she’s a mercenary who exploits bigots for cash.”

Max knew Paisley was manipulating him. It was obvious as day that she wanted him angry with her so it’d be harder to save her. It didn’t make the revelation any less infuriating. Kimberly knew what she did was wrong, and yet did it anyway for cash. It disgusted him on a level he didn’t know was possible. All he could was, once teleported to the same damn hallway, was jerk off again and hope that it blew off enough steam for him to do the impossible: Protect Kimberly from herself.

When Max entered the bedroom though, he saw that Kimberly was terrified. She was curled up on the bed shaking like a child. Or at least, he assumed this woman was Kimberly, as Max had never seen her in person before, he had only heard her voice. And he never heard her whimper, or whisper to herself, on that podcast.

“Kimberly?” Max asked. “Is that you?”

It took her frustratingly long to respond, but Max realized that whatever had happened to her made her scared out of her mind. He wished he could be patient, but he could practically hear the clock ticking while she shivered on the bed in fear.

“Who are you?” Kimberly whispered. “Are you going to rape me?”

“No, of course not, my name is Max,” Max rushed out. “I’m not going to touch you, or even come any closer to you given how scared you are.”

Max hoped by staying near the door, he could help calm her down. He somehow doubted Paisley was going to accept an argument that the contestant was borderline pissing her pants in terror upon seeing him. Kimberly herself was… not what he expected. She was a brunette that would look like any other woman on the street, whether it came to her body, or the clothes she was wearing. Max wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but this wasn’t it. He expected someone more distinctive after hearing her rant so much.

“I… I got some details about what’s going on here,” Kimberly said. “I doubt you’re going to respect my boundaries that long.”

“Do you see me moving closer?” Max asked. “Regardless, we’re running out of time. I can get you out here, but you have less than five minutes to tell me why you don’t deserve to be here.”

That caused Kimberly to bolt upwards. “Wait, I can get out?”

Max nodded, and motioned with his arms for her to keep going, desperate for her to continue.

“Alright, alright I…” Kimberly trailed off as she gathered her thoughts. “I’m a journalist who exposes the powerful-”

“Bullshit,” Max said. “You rant about transwomen and call them things I refuse to repeat for how foul it is. You also do it for money?”

“I… look, what does it matter, that doesn’t make me deserve to be your fucking sex slave!” Kimberly’s bravery returned out of nowhere. “You try making it as a journalist in this economy and tell me how much your fucking principles matter.”

“Defensive, aren’t we?” Max asked. “But we got to keep moving. Other than being a bigot for cash, what do you do? Do you investigate fossil fuel companies as your main job? Expose the rich and powerful? What do you do when you aren’t ranting about where people piss?”

“I…” Kimberly trailed off as she gathered herself. “I report on celebrities. Got some juicy tidbits on a hot little starlet you may know called-”

“You’re a tabloid reporter,” Max interrupted. “So on top of being a bigot, you don’t even have the fucking decency to report on anything that matters-”

“Oh FUCK YOU!” Kimberly launched herself off the bed. “You think anyone can fucking eat off the stuff that matters? Besides, how many more times do you think people need to be told that the planet is burning and that the government is corrupt? How many more times do you think saying the rich flout the law and receive bailouts do you think it would take to get them to stop voting for fascists? People are fucking stupid, I just give them what they want!”

Max looked at her the way his mother had looked at him after he lost his job: Overwhelming disappointment. “I once said stuff like that. I was also a teenager on drugs that fucked up his hormones and made him a depressed sack of shit. You’re a grown ass woman, who has had several decades to get used to that we live in an unfair world. Why do you think that gives you an excuse to exploit the vulnerable for profit?”

Before Kimberly respond to that, Max teleported out of the room. Once again, he felt unprepared to defend her, and seethed at all the time she had wasted…

Paisley, despite it being brief excursions from Max’s perspective, was lounging on the beach. She had returned to reading stuff from the porn collection he had when he was eighteen, once again poking at his wounds. It was another hentai, and one he had cherished quite a bit at the time. It was also one he saw Hanna throw in the trash right in front of him, and that he couldn’t read anymore without painful memories.

“What an excellent read,” Paisley flipped through the pages. “They took a pretty standard porn premise about fucking twins, and executed it with perfection. Each twin looks lovely of course, and has subtle points of differentiation that many readers won’t catch, but that I’m sure you did Max. It isn’t just sex either, they have a loving relationship, as he genuinely loves both of them for more than their bodies.”

“Alright Paisley, we get it,” Max said. “You know my porn habits, and what I like. You also are great at stacking the deck with people I fucking despise and cannot imagine having to spend time with going forwards. You already did with Hanna, why do I need someone else I can barely tolerate?

Paisley closed the hentai and walked towards him. “Max, we can fix all of that. You’ll also find she can be quite cooperative when the threat of elimination is introduced.”

“If you’re just going to transform her, then why pick her?” Max asked. “My only connection to Kimberly is that she was someone Hanna talked to on a podcast. I saw her for the first time mere minutes ago. As for her ethics, the number of tabloid journalists in the world is quite high, and the same goes for bigots who talk on podcasts. If she disappears, someone will just take her place in a flash.”

“Max oh Max,” Paisley said. “You always see the good side in people, especially women. Or at least the less toxic side. Unfortunately, that will not work here, because there are two details that break your case.”

“Which are?” Max asked. “Also, you guys scared her so bad that I couldn’t get mission critical information here.”

“Max, before Kimberly became a TERF for money, and before she followed the famous around so she could milk them for money, she was a genuine journalist,” Paisley said. “For exactly one investigation, and one of her first, she broke an important story. She trashed a senator’s career by putting together the pieces on a rape case. In the process, she gave a victim hope who had none.”

“I didn’t know that,” Max said. “I couldn’t have known that. Also, that doesn’t exactly make her deser-”

“Max, she learned the wrong lesson from it,” Paisley said. “See, she could’ve followed up the case to bring down more people, especially the rich and powerful, but that would’ve required her to stick to her guns. And it didn’t take much for them to scare her away.”

“So she’s here for being a coward?” Max asked. “A lot of people get scared. And again, I didn’t know about this. If you’re going to rely on hidden information, then this whole debate thing is bullshit.”

“She could’ve told you about it,” Paisley said. “But she didn’t, she wasted her time instead. It’s that cynical worldview that causes her to exploit the vulnerable for profit. And Max, because she actually gained a shred of credibility from her initial investigation, she hurt a lot more people when she sold out for money.”

“Look, what Kimberly says is noxious, but-”

“Max, you know how much a single story about you can ruin your life,” Paisley looked at him like a disapproving teacher. “She lies, or she twists the truth to the point where it might as well be, all from a platform where she milks her audience for cash. She only does the celebrity stuff to get her into contact with more people she can rope into her podcast network and then milk for every dollar she can get. You know how much you can make selling gambling and supplements?”

“Why was so scared when she showed up?” Max asked. “Nobody else was like that, despite being kidnapped, and held against their will. Heck, there are parts of this that should make me feel catatonic, but don’t for some reason.”

“I have an assistant who looks terrifying,” Paisley said. “Sorry, she is terrifying unless you’re in a position like mine. Mortals can’t even speak her true name without horrific consequences befalling them. I had her pick up Kimberly as she was a… late arrival.”

“Late arrival?” Max said. “Compared to whom?”

“When you saved Claudia, Max,” Paisley said, “I warned you there would be consequences. Kimberly is that consequence. And unlike with Claudia, you couldn’t win.”

Paisley walked up to Max. “Cheer up though, while she’s here, Kimberly will harm a lot less people. Now, let's see if you can save a different kind of bigot…”