Quantum Dissolve: Chapter Twenty Three Point Five. (Lentilville)

Lentilville is a character in this story, and it's an asshole.
Quite possibly the villain, come to think of it.
Here's its sorded biography.
Enjoy!


Once upon a time, in the ancient past, the human race spread out from Africa, across the Asian continent, across the ice bridge to Alaska, and then down into North and South America.

Centuries later, with amnesia of this, Europeans "discovered", the Americas....and almost immediately began slaughtering the natives.


Almost a couple centuries later, what would become New England was colonized by some religious fundie whackos in silly hats.
...who almost immediately, began slaughtering the natives.

And slaughtering each other, which was actually a nice change of pace, when you really think about it in the bigger scale of things.
But, we're getting ahead of ourselves...

So, about another century later, still with the silly hats, and silly shoes, the colonials started executing each other over ridiculous superstitions.

Now, the biggest batch of these you've probably heard of, but Lentilville had its own miniature version of these nasty and ridiculous persecutions.

One of the needless victims of this madness was an Allison.
A descendant of whom, would re-purpose this sad history into the Green Monster legend.
But, we'll get back to that.

So, the families of the piggy-eyed fucks who burnt Kimber Allison's ancestor continued to breed, and generationally hold sway over what would become Lentilville, in an incestuous nepotistic gang-bang of small minded and petty power politics for the next couple centuries.
As we will now dissect.


Eventually, the Civil War rolled around, the war over states rights...to own and torture other human beings, and Lentilville stayed out of it, because while its town fathers were and are racist as fuck, and would certainly side with the south ethically, why pass up an ECONOMIC opportunity to sell arms to both sides?

This double skid-mark pattern of bigotry and greed would remain a trademark of Lentilville identity well into the 21st century.


Finally, the industrial age rolled around, and Lentilville really came into its own with its own little smoke-stack-y factories.
And the tract homes that spring up around such factories, and the commercial strips that spring up near them, complete with bar rooms, booze halls, liquor stores, pawn shops, gambling parlors, and liquor stores.

Some of the smoke-stack-y factories aided in the war effort of both world wars.
Now, of course, as concerns the latter of those two, the town fathers hated Jews, but you've got to remember the greed factor.

That became the town's unwritten unspoken philosophy.
Grind out a mindless profit, eat, shit, fuck, and die.
Then, pass it to your kids.
And it went on like this for a good goddamned long time.

And everyone liked it just fine.
They thought it was Jim-fucking-dandy.

Well, not really, they were all a bunch of miserable drunks, but....hey, shut up.
Pencil pushing geek!
Commie!

Now, the centerpiece smoke-stack-y factory of Lentilville, known by most as just "The Plant", was its heart for a good half century or so.
Its soul, its core, its identity.

But, fuck that, money, money, money!
So, they sold it to South African investors, who bled it away, department by department, job by job, in the name of "efficiency", and the town rotted, and more liquor stores cropped up, and the social services dependent class grew, as did the homeless population,and the drug addiction problem.
As can be expected.
Cause, effect.
Stimulus, response.

As far as The Plant went, the old generation of drunken racist crackers (like Ronald Stevens) began to die out, only to be replaced by apathetic pothead slacker crackers with smart-phones grafted to their palms.

The quality of work spiraled down into chaos, justifying the South Africans making more cuts, and rotting the town some more.

The South Africans themselves being racist white crackers from Europe who infested into a continent that wasn't theirs.

The circle of life!

Now, The Plant was the heart, but it was a sick heart.
It gave off pollution that caused various cancers, and birth defects.
Oh, no flipper babies, but the spike in mentally challenged children was suspect, but not cause for alarm for some reason.

All swept under the rug.
No one dug around.
Probably scared to.

That was unwritten Lentilville rule four, after "fuck", and before "die", and "pass it to your kids".
"Keep your head down, and take it".

And everyone did.
They just took it.
Up the ass, down the throat, in the nostrils, in the ears, under the eyelids, and under the fingernails.
If it was a hole, in it went, without protest.
The Lentilville Town Fathers never ran out of things to gleefully stick in, either.


Now, where did Lentilville's unusual name come from, you may ask?
Baked beans.
Lentilville was the source of canned baked beans for the whole tri-state area for almost a century.
Until The Plant moved in, and drove the bean people out with industrial sabotage, and a hostile buyout.
But, the nickname "Lentilville", had already stuck, so, there you are.


Anyhoo...
One of the other economic engines of Lentilville was the Lentilville Mall.
Known by most as just "The Mall".

At first, a thriving, throbbing, glowing altar to the glories of consumerist capitalism.
By the 21st century, like The Plant, a gutted husk of broken dreams.

Once surrounded by an urban utopia, now, ugly Fascist architecture, mostly parking garages, grew around it like tumors on the face of Joseph Merrick.

A place for human living and happiness became a sad mutilated wretch.
The Town Fathers counted the money, and saw that it was good.
And looked for more places to inflict misery.

Down the street from The Mall, they let in the parasitic brain tumor known as Bul-Wark.
An outlet store started by  a southern cracker that exploited third world slave labor, and treated its employees like dogshit.
The Mom-And-Pops died, and The Mall accelerated its rot, and the tumor grew, and the Town Fathers had more green paper to rub on their bloated baby oiled carcasses.

And everyone just kept taking it.


Then, good old 9/11 rolled around.
The hijackers even hung out at a local Lentilville pizza joint before heading to the airport that fateful day.

Said pizza place no longer exists, and no one speaks of it.

Then, the ridiculous airport security measures came into place.
More liberty whittled away.
More happiness destroyed.
More hope ground away to dust.
Security to protect lives not worth living.
The old paradox.

And everyone just kept taking it.

Control the population with fear.
Like the witch trials.
The secret of power for the Town Fathers going all the way back to the start.
People kept falling for it.
And taking it.

They just. Kept. TAKING it.


The slums of Lentilville became known for its pyromaniac landlords, and pedophiles.
Lentilville became the pedophilia capital of New England, it seemed.
The local news always had a fresh new scumbag that had been caught.
There seemed to be no end of them in sight.


The Mayor, the old one that Jade Shade brought down, was yet another fat bastard with a French surname from a long line of fat bastards with European surnames.
Still from that scumbag bloodline.
His first act in office was a petty act of spite, tearing down a mural depicting Lentilville workers.
Can't have that commie propaganda hanging around, y'know.
The plebes with hope?
Gotta stomp that down.

Then, he immediately started handing out favors to his shitty relatives.
As was sacred tradition.

Big shit like construction contracts for more ugly shitty Fascist buildings.

Tiny petty shit, like waiving burning permits, and firearms licenses, and ignoring animal disturbance complains for his slimy son in law.
Hey, he owned a glass business, and those shitty ugly Nazi buildings would need windows.

That's all it really took to be a "big wheel", in Lentilville.
A glass place.
A car dealership.

Or, a chain of cheesey restaurants.
That was all it took for one charming fellow to be legally bulletproof with his pedophilia.
Hundreds of kids.
No one cared.
The cops laughed about it, while chowing down on the terrible dry fried chicken.

Lentilville truly was a turd.

And everyone just kept taking it.


But, oddly, business did boom.
Not industrial business, that was of course rotting, but businesses that fed on misery, they raked it in!
Hand over fist!

Booze and hard drugs were always big.

As was porn.
Particularly the creepy illegal shit with kids and animals.
That stuff made you a friend of the big wheels, the upper crust.
They delighted in that shit.

And gambling.
That was always recession-proof.
And, by putting the casinos on Indian reservations, it eased white guilt.
Even though the money really mostly went to the Italian-American mafia.

But hey, at least the native descendants could ease their misery with a higher class of drugs than spray-paint in a brown paper bag.
So, there was that.

Yep, that sure remedied that whole GENOCIDE deal.
There's THAT taken care of.


And those that couldn't take the pain?
That snapped under the weight of all this horror?
Well, there was a nice ugly, Fascist, asylum to send them to.
The Lentilville Mental Hospital.
It even looked like the castle of a comic book villain, and it rested up on a hill next to a luxury hotel.
The contrast was delightful.

It's where Hadesburster and Mr. Sleepy Seeds got sent after being properly destroyed by Jade Shade.
It also housed a lot of war vets.
Vietnam at first, but Iraq and Afghanistan soon enough.
And what the hell, to rake in more revenue, why not let's toss in some garden variety drunks too?
Get those pesky undesirables in their proper place, so as not to upset the tourists.

Plus, it made a nice example to scare the rest of the plebes into keeping their heads down, and taking it.
And they did.
They just kept taking it.

Drive on by, don't look at it, don't talk about it.
Grind out a mindless profit, eat, shit, fuck, and die.


Let's not mince words, let's call it what it was.
A Fascist occupation that came in a nice, slow, centuries long trickle.

And every occupation needs balancing with its resistance movement.
Stimulus, response.
Circle of life.


The first phase of the resistance, started in the 1950's.
An Allison descendant, Elisa Jack (name changed by marriage) founded an elementary school.
It was a progressive school, and not a brainwashing factory like so many others.
So, naturally, the Town Fathers hated the thing, and sabotaged it at every turn.
Amazingly, it always managed to hang on.

When Elisa died in her 90's in the 1990's, it's most lionhearted defender was gone, and the villains chipped away at it.

Still, even in the declining years, it gave knowledge, and happy memories to many children, including the young Dusty Irwin, and Kimber Allison.
The latter, as mentioned earlier on, re-purposed the sad history of this sordid berg into the Green Monster legend.

When the great school shooting of 1999 happened, it looked like the end for the Elisa Jack school.

But, a mysterious benefactor kept it going, and soon, in the second decade of the 21st century, it employed the adult Dusty Irwin as its janitor.

The second wave of the resistance came with the real life superhero movement, and Lentilville's first true superhero, The Jade Shade.
Inspired of course, by the Green Monster legend.
The dark birth of the town's evil coming back to bite the town in its ass.
A true vengeance spirit given flesh.
Full circle!
The circle of life!

As it would turn out, JS would be the first of many Lentilvillian superheroes.

The superheroes weren't ones to hang their heads and take it.
Those days were about to end.
Stomp on a population enough, sooner or later, they bite back.
Stimulus, response.
Nature balancing itself.

And, in those first adventures, JS took down the fat old Mayor, and a shitload of his rotten relatives, and crooked cronies.

But, there was so much more to do.

And so, we return to his tale....