In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I offer you a scene from Throbbing Pagan Sex God; or, The Winterbourne Chronicles. If you're here from ipstp, you might want to start here for the full story.


Midnight in the House of Lost Rooms, and the dining room was flooded with light. Gingerbread blanketed the table and the sideboard was awash in opened architecture books. Quin sat at the end of the table before an array of frosting pots and tubes, poking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he piped a line of green frosting onto a half-finished gingerbread wall.

"Isn't twenty-four square feet of gingerbread a little, oh, I don't know, excessive for a gingerbread house?" Vin said from the doorway.

"Palace." Quin looked up. "You look like something the witch's familiar dragged in. If you're going to stay out to all hours debauching yourself, at least have the decency to look debauched when you come home. You look like you've been guddling around in a stockroom for four hours. It sets a bad example for the young." He snatched up a wooden spoon and adroitly smacked the back of her hand as she reached for a piece of gingerbread. "Fingers off the gingerbread, it's devotional."

"Six hours," Vin said sullenly, rubbing the back of her hand. "Six hours in the stockroom."

Quin blinked, awed, and handed her a piece of gingerbread.

"All because that cow Susan went home early because she had a girlfriend--oh, excuse me, I mean a headache," Vin said. She flumped into an armchair and slumped back remarkably well for a woman wearing several feet of boning. "Why is this gingerbread covered with snakes?"

"Vines. I was practicing the curve. If you want red icing instead, you can have the one I practiced the key pattern on."

Vin took a crumby bite of the vine-covered gingerbread. "And why, my tulip of the crack-addled dawn, are you practicing the key pattern?"

Quin rolled his eyes. "Because it's a Greek palace," he said. "You have to have a key pattern somewhere if you make a Greek palace."

Vin heaved herself up to survey the ranks of gingerbread. "A ruined palace, looks like. That, or you had a series of tragic straight-line-cutting accidents."

"Of course it's ruined. Duh."

"Quin, my chickadee, is this devotional ruined Greek gingerbread palace you're putting together in any way connected with your quest to become sexually adequate?"

"Could be." Quin smiled to himself secretively as he spread white frosting over a jagged strip of wall.

"Is it going to make you and Ariel hallucinate more deities?"

"Might do."

"Can I help?"

"After all," Vin said a quarter-hour later as she settled into a chair in her pyjamas and her own hair, "if you two are going to go nuts again, I might as well watch from the vantage point that gives me first crack at the sugar. Which god are you trying to piss off this time?"

"If you don't know, I'm not going to tell you."

"Dude, turning into a teenaged girl never helps."

"I'm fairly certain," Quin said distractedly, "that there are any number of situations in which turning into a girl would help." The key pattern he was piping turned out badly, and he scowled and reached for the knife. "Look, why do you keep saying Ariel and I are hallucinating?"

"Because people don't really see gods."

"You belong to a religion that says that with enough pewter jewelry and crystals, anyone can see gods!"

"The kibble is window dressing," Vin said. "Belief is the true core of the religion. And I believe that while there are gods out there, they don't come here in person any more."

"But is that what they believe?"

"Spff."

"Usually it's entertaining when you're bitchy," Quin groused. "Tonight you're just boring."

"Blackthorn picked up one of the $200 crystal globes and used it to 'channel Isis,' who told me I should get in his pants. While his little followers stood around and sniggered."

"I can kick his ass for you."

"No, you can't," Vin said. "But thank you."

"I can spread rumors about his sexual habits."

"They'd clash with the rumors I'm spreading about his sexual habits."

"I can write a blog post about him insinuating that I saw him kick a puppy."

"It'd be nice to know that people in Duluth, Palo Alto, and Brussels think he's an assrag," Vin said, "but I'm kind of looking for support locally."

"We could publicly reveal his real name."

"John McEnnis," Vin said. "Got it off his credit card. It doesn't have the chops of 'Blackthorn,' but I'm thinking he's not quaking in his 24-button Birkenstocks at the idea that someone might pass it around."

"The man is invincible," Quin said miserably.

Vin looked over at Quin slumped in his chair, and her scowl softened. "It's okay," she said. "He's just the latest douche in a long line of douches to squirt through the Raven Spiral."

"But he's the douche who's bothering you now!"

"Sweetie, I'm used to arrogant men bothering me," Vin said. "I live with you."

"You and your defense mechanisms suck."

"Better than life without them."

They iced in silence for a while. Quin got tired of icing walls and started assembling tiny furniture out of a bowl of scraps. Midway through painting a pattern on a tiny couch with a toothpick, he said, "Speaking of your defense mechanisms, why do you think the gods don't appear any more?"

"It's one of the prices of joining a modern religion," Vin said. "Welcome to the world of the spirit, the gods have all gone home for the aeon. The age of miracles is past, the Anno Mirabilis was a really good year for antiques."

"Because we pulled all kinds of cool stuff out of a bunch of rooms that magically manifested at the back of our house."

"Yeah."

"Which is totally the kind of thing that happens in a rational, un-god-visited world."

"Why not? Sure, Mom's a sorceress-wizard-mage thingie. Sure, I can yank bits of my soul out of my chest and make pretty lights with 'em. Sure, Great-great-whatever Granddad was a nutso who opened a rift in the world because the old ball and chain dumped him to shack up with a demon. None of that says, '...so of course Thor must be wandering around with his panties in a wad because my little brother said something rude about his hammer.' If Great-whatever Grandad's wife dumped him for Thor, okay, maybe there might be active gods. All we know at this point is that there's an active Hell." Vin pushed the finished wall aside and picked up a new piece of gingerbread. "All of which says: Do not poke happy fun afterlife. Yeah, thanks, got that part already."

"What about your father? Dionysus?"

"A cute Irish bellhop. I call him Seamus."

"Mother does not--not--with bellhops!"

"Bellhops, cabana boys, waiters..." Vin grinned. "You can totally see Mom going for uniforms. I mean, there are uniforms that say, 'I am the hand of the Powers That Be, bow before my authority!' And there are uniforms that say, 'Please don't hurt me, oh mighty one, I live for your pleasure.' Mom would be on that like white on rice."

"You're disgusting!"

"Hey, I'm not the one doing the nasty with cabana boys after hours in the poolhouse."

"Of course not. Cabana boys would be a step up from the men you bring home."

"This is true." Vin sighed. "It's the curse of a sedentary life. Just think, if Mom took me traveling with her, I could be doing ski instructors and tour guides and doormen..." Quin spluttered. "Maybe I'd run into Seamus. Betcha he'd still be hot. There's that 'genetic incest' thing that makes separated blood relatives want to do each other--I bet Seamus would be wild between the sheets, all that Catholic repression--"

"Shut up!"

"Aw, you're just trying to block out the upwelling of racial memories of Mom doing it doggy-style over a beach ball with a Finnish--"

Quin screamed and covered his ears.

"While I normally approve of anything that makes Quin shriek like a bunny," a cool gray voice said, "I prefer that it be used on him between the hours of 6 a.m. and midnight." Vin and Quin jumped and swiveled in their seats. Ariel stood in the kitchen doorway, long arms and legs poking out of an ancient and colorless terrycloth bathrobe, with her braid a fraying hag's whip behind her. Her face was cold with fury. "By 'prefer' I mean 'insist,' and by 'insist' I mean 'The next person who wakes me at 3 a.m. gets tossed in the basement.'"

Quin shivered. Things did not come back from the basement.

"Sorry," Vin mumbled. Quin nodded silently.

"I also prefer that the kitchen not look like Julia Child had a manic fit in it."

Quin muttered something apologetic into his lap.

"And I want breakfast in bed."

"But you come downstairs at five to sing dawnsong," Quin protested.

"And then I go back up to bed for an hour. That gives you plenty of time to cook."

"When tonight do I get to sleep?"

"Exactly what I asked myself about 10 minutes ago."

Quin hunched his shoulders and twisted his fingers together under the table. Vin put on her most submissive face. Ariel surveyed the two of them like a queen deciding whether she was in a smiting mood, then turned and swept out. Quiet fell over the dining room while Vin and Quin listened to Ariel's footsteps tromping up the stairs. A slam of an upstairs door, and the silence was absolute.

"Beach ball," Vin whispered.

Quin dissolved into helpless snorting giggles and laid his head on the table with a thunk.

"Whack rolls," Vin said. "With mango jam instead of the sugar frosting goop. Or half-and-half with the frosting goop, that'd combine the true essence of the whack roll with a soupcon of bohemian bourgeois sophistication. Scrambled eggs with cheese and shallots and, um, our spice cabinet is four feet high for a reason, we'll think of something." She leaned back and contemplated the chandelier. "I could make fritters. Do we have cottage cheese? No, wait, too much work. There's a package of chicken apple something something sausages in the back of the freezer. And a big pot of that Vietnamese tea with pepper in it that she likes because she's a pervert. Breakfast will be easy."

Quin lifted his head and brushed frosting crumbs off his forehead. "It might kill her, facing all that at six o'clock in the morning."

"Eight," Vin said, "and I'll be surprised if she gets up for dawnsong."

"We get to sleep! Yes!"

"Shhh!" They both looked at the ceiling. The second floor remained rage-free. "No," Vin whispered, "we get nearly enough time to scrub down the eighty thousand cookie sheets you used to make this gingerbread. Stop making faces, it's devotional."