• About
  • About Us
  • Site Rules
  • FAQ
  • Licensing
  • Criticism Policy
  • Article Deletions
• Community
  • Site News
  • IRC Chat
  • Authors' Pages
  • Artist Directory
  • Contest Archive
  • Staff List
• Resources
  • Guides
  • Essays & Resources
  • Wiki Syntax
  • Sandbox
  • Usertools
• Sister Sites
  • SCP International
  • Wanderer's Library
• Contact Us

• About
  • About Us
  • Site Rules
  • FAQ
  • Licensing
  • Criticism Policy
  • Article Deletions
  • Contact Staff
• Community
  • Site News
  • IRC Chat
  • Authors' Pages
  • Artist Directory
  • Contest Archive
  • Staff List
• Resources
  • Guides
  • Essays & Resources
  • Wiki Syntax
  • Sandbox
  • Usertools
• Sister Sites
  • SCP International
  • Wanderer's Library

It is the peak of summer, the hottest time of the year, so hot that you can drink a glass of water and then sweat it out of your pits and unmentionables in under five minutes, so you know what that means: ice hockey. In an ice-covered, zamboni-drifting middle finger to global warming¹ and common sense, the Three Portlands International Hockey Leagues (not affiliated with the National Hockey League, singular in both country and league) have moved hockey season to the middle of the summer, starting on the summer solstice. Allegedly, this is so they don't overlap withrugby season in the spring orroller derby in the fall,² but really it's all a plot against me, God's most fragile lesbian, to force me to go outside during the summer to an open-air ice hockey stadium and watch beautiful women give themselves chronic traumatic encephalopathy for the love of the game. Hey, at least it's not football.

Of course, I'm not covering the entire hockey season, both because my editor refuses to pay for over 5000 words³ and also because the majority of the season coincided with a research trip I took to Eurtec to observe the new and complex sporting events the mechanical minds of the cyberpunk city were cooking up (and also so I could hook up with this cyborg chick I met on Baltimore Lex a couple years ago). Unfortunately, I am now banned from Eurtec,⁴ which led me to catching the IHL quarterfinals during a tear-stained bender while I crashed at my editor's apartment for a couple days.⁵ So if you wanted a blow-by-blow of the entire hockey season, just check out ESPN's Void account, or AsterismSports, or read a column other than my own for once, nerd.

The aforementioned Leagues take the best below-Veil teams from America, Britain, and Canada, put them into the rink, and see which ones come out alive, or at the very least not-dead. The favorites this go around were the Toronto Tornadoes and the Cornwall Cannibals, though the Newman Nuggets⁶ were an underdog pick. I myself had money riding on them getting to at least the finals through the power of friendship and plot armor, but I guess pluck, gumption, and a pygmy elephant don't really do much when the Warp Spasms take to the ice and turn from beautiful, androgynous Sidhe into copyright-infringing masses of muscle, sinew, and scraps of protective padding.⁷ The power of friendship apparently has limits, and the limit starts and ends with "Cú Chulainn reborn whaling on a middle schooler with his own femur."

The quarterfinals were a mess. Game 1 immediately descended into a complete cluster, though the EMTs at the scene were able to stabilize most of the Nuggets before the match got too depressing. The Warp Spasms won by forfeit, as there weren't any players left in one piece to oppose them.⁸

Game 2 wasn't that much better, as the aptly named Flaming Phillies took on the Fightin' Unitarians in a head-to-head matchup that was 2-2 all the way to the final quarter. Unfortunately, due to some magnificient stroke of stupidity on the part of the Phillies' management, their strategies all involved pyromancy in a primarily ice-based sport, and they melted the rink with five minutes left on the clock. Fortunately, the Unitarians had just left derby practice and still had their rollerblades on hand. As there is no rule in hockey that the players can't use rollerblades the Fightin' Unitarians dominated those final five minutes and closed out the match at a blistering 7-2. All in all, a very promising start for what was looking to be a very interesting quarterfinals. If only I remembered anything else.

See, dear reader, I suffer from a condition known as Being Cursed. I am currently suffering from twenty-three separate curses, some of which were placed on me by exes jealous of my charisma and game, some of which I inherited, and some of which just attached to me because they felt like it. According to scientists (my friend Kelsie Ambrose [Gender Studies/Abjuration, 2019]) the more lethal curses all cancel out in a state of "thaumic equilibrium," and as such I am (theoretically) immortal. Unfortunately, it's not all good news, because one of the curses means that I am also Benjamin Franklin.

Founding Father Of Our Great Nation, Scientist, Philosopher, Diplomat, Inventor and all-around Sex God Benjamin Franklin, FRS FRSA FRSE, contrary to popular belief, did not die in 1790 from the condition known as "being 84 before the invention of germ theory," but rather in 1789, when he was struck by a large horse-drawn carriage and isekai'd to the modern day. His soul then attempted to take over a high-school boy's body in an effort to kill John McCain and save the world from his fiendish, Machiavellian plot to turn America intoAtlantis 2.0. But by virtue of time-madness and the fact he was freshly dead so he didn't really know how to steer, he missed the high-school boy⁹ and landed in high-school Sofia Haugen. This situation has been okay for most parties involved, except for me.¹⁰

So, like I said, I was in the middle of a very mutual breakup with a girl who had a pneumatic press instead of genitals and 1,000 CCs of silicon instead of pectorals and I was handling it very well all things considered. As part of my reasonable coping mechanisms, after Game 2 I downed an entire bottle ofUltimate Wormwood Princess Death Bastard Seven. I really shouldn't have done this, given I blacked out instantly and the bottle was like two-thirds of my last paycheck fromParasports Illustrated, so you know I'm in dire straits right now in terms of finances.¹¹ I woke up one week later at a Toronto bus stop, covered in what I presumed to be someone else's blood, holding a gun in one hand and a voice recorder in the other. Benjamin Franklin had been busy.

After disposing of the gun and dumping the blood-stained clothes in the nearest dumpster¹² and making my way back to Three Portlands by magic Greyhound I took stock of the situation and reviewed the voice recorder that was taped to my hand.

I share with you now the contents of this device, which are much more interesting than the quarterfinals, as they happened to me. As all this stuff happened to Ben piloting my body like some weird ghost mecha, this is all second hand information and impossible to verify. But I refuse to allow Franky to write for me, because its almost always incomprehensible with those long-S letters that you find sometimes in old documents. I don't even know how he bound the long-S to my keyboard. As such, this is a retelling of the events that happened to me and Ben, reconstructed by me, with a few comments by Ben.

It's strange hearing your own voice in a recording you don't remember making. It's like when the police show you dash cam footage of Benjamin Franklin in your body trying to talk his way out of a parking ticket, or when an ex shows you a recording of Benjamin Franklin trying to play matchmaker and put you two back together again.¹³ Anyways, the beginning of the tape starts with the least ominous thing a person can say: "There's been a murder." Right up there with "Sofia, your car has been towed" or "Sofia, we need to talk about last night." Awful. Looking back at the news, it looks like the left defenseman for the Cornwall Cannibals, Brock "Hard-as" Stone had been murdered in the locker room, minutes before Game 3.

Now, I know what my studious readers are going to say. "But Sofia, you effervescent beacon of beauty and charm and loud Hawaiian shirts, didn't you say it was no-holds barred and that a middle schooler got brutalized with a femur?" Well yeah, but that was in the rink, after they signed a waiver in triplicate, it was purely business. But this murder, this was for pleasure.¹⁴ Also, if there's anything in the world that would distract me from covering sports for once, a sports-related murder sounds just perfect (at least, is what I assumed Benjy was thinking. I try to stay as far away from murders as I can. Not really my type of crime, I prefer to stay to the safer end of the crime spectrum among my many larcenies and misdemeanors).¹⁵

Stone had his throat slashed with his own ice skate, which some might chalk up to either an accident or suicide if not for the fact that he was literally made out of Cornwall granite. This seemed like a clear cut case of foul play to this intrepid reporter('s philosopher tulpa), as slashing a throat made out of Cornubian batholith with a cheap ice skate could only be done with either an temporary enchantment or several hundred years of persistence.¹⁶ Again, the Cornwall Cannibals were favored to win, so there's any number of people who could have been implicated in this. Other teams, fans of said other teams, teammates that had a parley on Stone having his throat slashed before Game 3, Björk Guðmundsdóttir,¹⁷ everyone was a suspect.

So I/he/we set off to the Anderson/FTX IHL Memorial Ice Rink to look for Clues, and were immediately accosted by a couple capital-G Goons as h/we attempted to illicitly access a crime scene-in-progress. Ben's actual note during this period was "halted during the courſe of my inveſtigations by reprobates of a ſwarthy Iriſh nature." As he said this into the recorder while still in the process of being accosted by said swarthy Irish reprobates, the lead Goon promptly decked him in the face, leaving me to deal with a nice conversation piece of a shiner. Ben's not really one for street-smarts, methinks.¹⁸

While reeling from the punch to the face, the Goons dragged us out of the arena and into an autorickshaw, refusing to listen to Franklin's very good excuses as to why he broke a window to gain ingress to a blood-soaked locker room, and that his name was Sofia Haugen and that he was a reporter and many other op-sec compromising things that you shouldn't say to people with big fists and even bigger guns you idiot.^19,20 Anyways, the Goons ignored Ben's terrible excuses, went through a Way, and deposited us in a large, empty warehouse, tying us to the only chair in the building. It was very nice of them to leave the voice recorder in my hand, so that I could have a solid ten minutes of Ben talking about the intricacies of the empty warehouse in great detail.²¹

After an indeterminate amount of time getting rope burn on my wrists and listing all of the fascinating metal alloys used in the warehouse's construction, a woman in apparently the hottest fucking outfit approached Ben. I do not know if even my towering vocabulary can do her justice from what Ben noted (again while she was standing right in front of him, which seems like a bad habit on his part), so I will let him do the honors: "She was a ginger fox, towering over my ſmall, restrained body in heels that went on for days and legs that went further ſtill, dreſsed in ſqueaking ſkin-tight leather and fingerleſs gloves that revealed hot-pink acrylic nails, ſharp enough to cut through ſkin and metal. Her lips were ſhaded ruby and her eyes were a dull, though captivating ſepia. Truly, one of the most beautiful women I have ever met below the age of fifty."

So, this devastatingly beautiful woman (that I am ashamed to have met while comatose and while a 314-year-old man was piloting my body and while I smelled of very illegal absinthe) starts to low-key threaten us with very ominous phrases, like "you have discovered too much," and "you must be dealt with" and "it's a shame you're so cute."²² Keep in mind that she said all of this despite the fact that we hadn't really discovered anything of note, and that she was telling on herself by doing her cute little monologue. Turns out she's the general manager for the Toronto Tornadoes, and they hired a contract killer on Void to off Stone and improve their odds in the playoffs, because there's a lot of Darke²³ money riding on the game and also because the Tornadoes kinda suuuuuuuuck. No idea how they got into the quarterfinals, probably bribery.

As to how he escaped from this leather-clad minx, the last voice memo he made mentioned "The Forbidden Technique of the Wrath of Boudicea Tenfold." After extensive research in the secret under-library of UChicago, I have come to the conclusion that Benny Boy used his sex-science-wizard powers to unlock the the long-forgotten thaumaturgical secrets of Roman cunnilingus. I am horrified and incensed to learn this, as he could have been teachingme these forbidden secrets the entire time but selfishly kept them for himself.²⁴

Due to Ben's ramblings about the description of the warehouse, the tape on the recorder ran out soon afterwards,²⁵ so I have no idea what happened in between the warehouse and the Toronto bus, and Ben isn't telling me.²⁶ So I leave it up to the reader to imagine all the fantastical adventures that the brave Sofia Haugen/Benjamin Franklin amalgam took in those six days. Maybe I went to the moon, orwatched a kaiju fight, or lived a thousand lifetimes as the soulmate of Björk, who knows.

Anyways, after I pored over this information, I promptly put 500 bucks on a parley of the Tornadoes getting banned from the quarterfinals on DraftKings²⁷ and reported the murder of Stone by the Toronto Tornadoes to the head honchos at the IHL.²⁸ They said they couldn't do anything, since the owners of the Tornadoes had a 51% ownership stake in the IHL. Alas.²⁹

All in all, didn't really matter in the end, the Fightin' Unitarians swept the quarterfinals and won against the Toronto Tornadoes 5-0, showing that the power of religious unity and the pent up sexual energy of cross-ideology dialogue can conquer all evil. Looks like crime really doesn't pay, who knew.