[The following is a true story.]
Have you ever had an enchanted item on your hands?
I'm not talking about the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller, or some sort of Harry Potter wand.
I'm talking about a genuine, bona fide enchanted object, rife with undeniable occult gravity.
Well, when we were in college, my roommate Spencer and I got our hands on two such relics at the same time.
The first of these was the hallowed Vomit Bag of Shangri-La (Lvl. 790). This we acquired unintentionally; it fell into our laps, a Boon from the Gods, a byproduct of my relentless quest for psychedelics.
It was the first semester of our timeless tenure at the University of Delaware, and my spelunking of the World Wide Web had turned up a recipe for "LSA", a close relative of "LSD", which could be extracted from morning glory seeds via a simple procedure.
To make a long story short, the recipe did work, albeit mildly, but not before causing me to vomit up the five pound lunch I had recently scarfed down in jolly-old Pencader Dining Hall. I blasted my payload into a trash bag as I languished miserably in my bunk.
Little did I know what God had wrought through me on that red-letter day; the awesome power, and corresponding responsibility, that the Gods of Bile had bestowed, would dawn upon us only gradually, and in the correct sequence of events, as the Prophecy has long foretold.
We started taking the Vomit Bag everywhere. We took it to the dining hall, we paraded it through the dorms; heck, it may have even wound up in our roommate D-man's bed once or twice.
It is not true, however, that we brought the vomit bag to chemistry workshop. This is a common misconception, for in Truth it was a Shitty-Piss Bag (or it may have been a Pissy-Shit Bag, depending on ingredient ratios and barometric pressure at time of conception) that we brought to chem workshop. A Shitty-Piss Bag is an enchanted artifact of an entirely different quality, though every bit as potent (Lvl. 833).
[The bag pictured above is in fact a Piss Bag, and is not the Vomit Bag at all, but I have included it for visual reference. Tragically, the only known picture of the Vomit Bag is now extinct. Believe me, it was a good one; I was pretending to lick the Bag as I displayed it proudly in the dining hall.]
One of our famous misadventures with the Vomit Bag went down as we were ecstatically touring George Reed dorm with our prize on hand. We were returning to the Boiler Room (our dorm room), when we ran into Anna, a rather dim-witted yogini who enjoyed flopping her gimungous ass all over the dorm lounges in various of her "yoga" poses.
"Check out our Vomit Bag," we said, choking back tears of mirth and glory. We were absolutely certain she would feel the arcane magnetism of the Object, and would perhaps allow its conjurers to siphon off a spot of "milk".
We could hardly have been more wrong.
It turns out, as we were announcing our prize to Anna, Spencer and I happened to exchange a look with one another, a look communicating something to the effect of "Can you even believe our gumption? Our balls must be forged of pure tungsten, to strut about thusly with a Vomit Bag before bruncheon," or something like that.
Anna, clever girl that she is, detected our secret nonverbal communion.
"Okay, so I'm really, really good at reading microexpressions, and so I know you're lying," she said.
The daft harlot thought our Vomit Bag was a forgery.
We made an impassioned rebuttal, something to the effect of "Well joke's on you, because this actually is a Vomit Bag, and a noble one at that, so you can go stick your 'microexpressions' up your oversized ass." We were filled with a righteous anger, and I actually detected a note of doubt microscopically express itself across Anna's equine face.
We then bounded off to further mischief.
This represents only a minor incident in the legendary annals of the Vomit Bag of Shangri-La, but it illustrates a recurrent theme: when given the chance, folks would prefer to believe that the Vomit Bag does not exist.
How could such a blessed, accursed item possibly coexist with pumpkin spice lattes? Or delightful vine memes of people slipping on ice? Or the phrase "YOLO"? It is simply too worldview-straining to accept that a pair of Time Wizards are just strolling around with some halcyon relic from the Elysian plane.
It now becomes necessary for me to introduce the Golden Cheese Wheel of Ra, otherwise known as the Lodestone. This was the second of our divine relics, and it plays a pivotal role in the climax of the Vomit Bag Saga.
I acquired the Cheese Wheel in a fit of larcenous audacity one fine morning in ye olde Caesar Rodney Dining Hall, otherwise known as Pencader's inbred nephew. I was riding a jubilant high from the last several days of Vomit-Baggery, and in fact I had become convinced of Spencer and I's implicit immortality. This sense of infallibility is almost certainly what caused the eight-or-so nearby Caesar Rodney goop-scoopers to all have their backs turned when I made my move.
I nabbed the Wheel without a hitch and made my escape to history class, where my classmates no doubt wondered at my heinously bulging rucksack, not to mention my other heinous bulge.
In the days that followed, Spencer and I would delight in generating thunderous concussions as we lobbed our new ally down stairwells and throughout the halls of George Reed. This is how we discovered that the Cheese Wheel is indestructible; its waxy exterior can only be penetrated by those Pure of Heart, and only if they be set on consuming its fleisch for bulking purposes.
Fortunately, Spencer and I checked all these boxes.
Unlike the Vomit Bag, the Cheese Wheel won us the hearts of many, including the "First-Floor Girls", who simply could not stop swooning over us. In fact, the Cheese Wheel's only real adversary was decay, that and our roommate "D-man", who surely had some kind of allergy to rancid Parmesan.
But now we must steer back to the climax of the Vomit Bag Saga, for which Mr. Cheese Wheel was a prime witness.
It went down on George Reed, North Side, I can't remember which floor.
It is difficult for me to characterize Caroline, except to say that I do not think she had all of her teeth. She was a denizen of George Reed North, by far the more ratchet of George Reed's poles, forgive me, and we encountered her one lovely day in September as we were making our scheduled rounds with the aforementioned pair of Ultimate Boons.
Caroline was sitting on the floor in the hallway outside her room. She was in the midst of a rather distraught phone call with her father, and immediately Spencer and I perceived that she must break off her little chat pronto so we could show her our wares. She seemed to be in admiration of our Cheese Wheel, or at least she pretended to be, but was apparently unimpressed by the Vomit Bag, and so in an effort to make that sacred sack more "real" for her, I lobbed it towards her, where Mr. Bag splatted down on top of her phone, and promptly burst wide open, unleashing a septic tsunami of five-day-old vomit across the carpet.
Mercifully, Caroline's person was spared any contact with the accursed substrate. Her phone, too, was unmolested, protected as it was beneath the bag itself.
"Ew, bean dip!" she said, as we scrambled to uncover her phone before things became problematic.
Spencer and I looked to each other, like twin Gandalf the Greys at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm.
"Run!" we squealed in tandem, then blasted down the hall at top speed.
"Get the cheese wheel!" I cried, for Spencer had left the poor fellow languishing at the scene of the crime. I felt like a Vomit Artillery Captain, barking out the particulars of our tactical withdrawal.
We returned to our Boiler Room HQ, and spent the next several hours intermittently mourning our loss as we did miserable "Sapling" homework, until late evening, when the lunar energies began percolating through our veins, arousing within us thoughts of Kryme.
It started as a purely hypothetical discussion concerning a Vomit Bag Retrieval Operation (VBRO), something never attempted before, nor since, and as was so often the case with us, what began as a bit of dog-dickery soon became manifest, and we found ourselves riding the elevator up to the battlefield with an Emergency Surrogate Rescue Bag (ESRB) on hand.
Caroline was nowhere to be seen; she had probably taken up long-term residence in the UD trauma ward. There were however an unusual number of people milling about in the hall, probably looky-loos eager to witness history, and as we conducted our recovery operation I heard a nearby bloke say ". . . that's fucked up, guys . . .", or some similarly asinine comment.
"Obviously it's 'fucked up' that we nearly lost the Vomit Bag (Lvl. 790) in a tragic blunder due to malfunctioning equipment, you dolt. If you say another word I'll see you court-martialed," I thought to myself.
We desperately scooped up the remains of our wounded comrade and escaped back down the elevator shaft. Unfortunately, we were unable to retrieve more than sixty percent of the Vomit Bag's original mass, and in its diminished state the bag mostly faded into obscurity.
I have no real memories of the Vomit Bag following these climactic events.
The Cheese Wheel, on the other hand, would endure for some time. The following weekend once again found Spencer and I impossibly high on marijuana edibles, and since we were already on a misguided "gym kick", we decided to devour the cheese wheel as part of our seasonal bulk.
We had tremendous difficulty in penetrating the Cheese Wheel's tough, waxy exterior. Our only mining instrument was a Pencader knife, an implement of unrivaled shittiness and flimsiness, and only after what felt like hours of labor did we reach pay dirt.
It was made of purest Parmesan, and was incredibly salty and dry. It also sweat ludicrous quantities of grease, especially once it was cracked open, and by the time we were through with our feast, thousands of bits of Parmesan had taken up residence in our shaggy blue carpet.
D-man, who hadn't been the Cheese Wheel's greatest admirer from the start, grew incensed by all this. Our edible-fueled antics had long since wearied his fragile constitution, and now the carpet was packed with rancid Parmesan, which only grew more pungent by the hour.
The Cheese Wheel remained on that carpet in its 10% eaten state, until one day D-man's griping turned to Violence, and the Cheese Wheel vanished.
D-man had vacuumed the carpet. He also claimed he had thrown our Golden Beacon into the George Reed dumpster. We scoured that dumpster from top to bottom, yet turned up nothing worthwhile.
We would never see our Cheese Wheel again.
Though I cannot recall for certain, it was probably not long after this that we threw away our Vomit Bag in defeat and disgrace. It was a shadow of its former glory, and so were we. We would not regain our mojo until the invention of Shitty-Piss/Pissy-Shit Bags, and their manifold permutations.
During our storied academic career, Spencer and I have got our filthy paws on a great number of Abomalous Materials: Piss Bags, Shitty-Piss Bags, Pissy-Shit Bags, Shit Condoms, the Stolen Balloons, the Fart Bottles, the "Plump", a "Shit Bomb" (though technically this was a Shitty-Piss/Protein Powder Blender Bottle Bomb (SP/PPBBB)), various other Shitty Blender Bottles, and other shit and piss paraphernalia, etc., yet throughout it all we have never reached such an exalted state as when we possessed the Cheese Wheel and the Vomit Bag simultaneously.
Doors were opened to us. Frat guys were licking our boots as they begged us to drink their "Natty Light". Sorority girls demanded we ravish them in the middle of the dining hall. Our professors waived all assignments, and asked only that they might be allowed a brief glimpse of the hallowed objects, which of course was out of the question.
Our time at the top was short indeed, and in the end even the mighty must fall. But none who beheld the bright stars of Mike n' Spencer, and their Bag of Vomit, and their Wheel of Cheese, can ever forget the smell.
R.I.P. Vomit Bag & Cheese Wheel
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The Mike n' Spencer Responsibility Paradox:
In theory, both Mike and Spencer are each 100% responsible for 100% of their crimes, adding up to a total of 200% responsibility, which would make them upstanding citizens by a considerable margin. Each bears 100% responsibility because neither one of them would have committed any of their atrocities without the presence of the other.
In reality, each of them absorbs approximately 30% responsibility, with the remaining 40% being lost as entropy (mainly via scrotal heat dissipation). As Mike and Spencer become increasingly "high" (on edibles, moles, shrooms, homemade jenkem, etc.), Mike n' Spencer's individual responsibility approaches 0% (see Fig. 12).