| When I became captain of the town, I decided to extend asylum to certain
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| citizens who were persona non grata elsewhere in the area because of their
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| disgusting and disquieting deformities.
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| One was known as Spare Ass Annie. | 
| She had an auxiliary asshole in the middle of
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| her forehead, like a baneful bronze eye.
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| Another was a scorpion from the neck down. | 
| He had retained the human attribute
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| of voice and was given to revolting paroxysms of self-pity and self-disgust
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| during which he would threaten to kill himself by a sting in the back of the
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| neck. | 
| He never threatened anyone else, though his sting would have caused
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| instant death.
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| Another, and by far the most detrimental, was like a giant centipede,
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| but terminated in human legs and lower abdomen. | 
| Sometimes he walked half-erect,
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| his centipede body swaying ahead of him. | 
| At other times he crawled,
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| dragging his human portion as an awkward burden. | 
| At first sight he looked like
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| a giant, crippled centipede. | 
| He was known as the Centipeter, because he was
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| continually making sexual advances to anyone he could corner, and anyone who
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| passed out was subject to wake up with Centipete in his bed.
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| One degenerate hermaphrodite known as Fish Cunt Sara claimed he was the best
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| lay in town: Besides, he’s a perfect gentleman in every sense of the word.
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| He’s kind and good, which means nothing to the likes of you…
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| These creatures had developed in a region where the priests carried out strange
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| rites. | 
| They built boxes from the moist, fresh bones of healthy youths,
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| captives from neighboring tribes.
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| Pregnant women were placed in the boxes and left on the peak for a period of
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| three hours. | 
| Often the women died, but those who survived usually produced
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| monsters. | 
| The priests considered these monstrosities a way of humiliating the
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| human race before the gods, in the hope of diverting their anger.
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| These horrible freaks were highly prized, and they lived in the temple.
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| The women who gave birth to the most monsters received gold stars,
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| which they were authorized to wear on ceremonial occasions.
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| Once a month they held a great festival at which everyone gathered in a round
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| stone temple, open at the top, and prostrated themselves on the floor,
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| assuming the most disgusting and degraded positions possible, so that the gods
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| would see they were not attempting to elevate themselves above their station.
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| The habit of living in filth and humiliation finally occasioned a plague,
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| a form of acute leprosy that depopulated the area. | 
| The surviving freaks (who
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| seemed immune to the plague) I decided to receive as an object lesson in how
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| far human kicks can go. |