The Blessed Rv was stopped at a boarder crossing run by seven foot tall, burly pigs. They spoke perfect english, in mannerisms that were recognizable as human. The guards were looking for jewish or muslim names, and then forcing them, in small tent chapels set up just for this purpose at every crosssing, airport and train station in the country, to either convert and pledge allegience to the god of the pigs, Porky, or simply disavow human religions all together. No one was actually thrown out for having one of the two prejudice filled religions, because everyone knew the policy; people who were unwilling to say a few otherwise meaningless words simply stayed out Pigland.
Mugily had no idea such a beast existed and at first thought Ralph had changed them into pigs, and he half expected them to look at their hooves and start screaming, then kill him again. Constantly being killed, often horrifically and slowly, had torn Mugily's mind a bit-- broasting in the burning RV once for forty excruciating minutes was a particular motif in his reoccuring nightmares. A twitch under his eye bothered him immensly, got him to habituate, when talking to other people, to holding his hand up over the offending tick -- an un-natural position which acutally emphasized the tic to whomever he was talking to.
Others were showing much more outward signs. Kiplo the food fetishist had taken to stringing shoes around his neck, waist, arms... he had red high heels and black, shiny combat boots and slippers and mocassains. The Toilet Boy To The Stars, the once cocky and proud celebrity janitor, was constantly cleaning the rv, often for up to 36 hours at a stretch. When he was asked why, he would get all abusive and superior, once telling Mugily, "You can live like this if you want, but not me, man. I will not live in filth. You think you know shit. You don't know shit. I know shit. I seen some shits." He would then keep up his mutterings for hours. It didn't take long for eveyone in the RV to learn to just step over and around him as if he were a sleeping dog.
Ralph too was a little disturbed at the moment, though not about the deaths of the humans, which he considered insignificant since he could resurrect them. To his god ears, the humans complaints about the agony of their deaths
was pointless whining about the human condition. When Ralph talked to Jesus,
he thought he was talking to an old friend, until it was revealed to him, in the cruelty of the practical joke Jesus had played on him, that they were less than friends. Indeed, Ralph had realized then and there that the other gods thought he was stupid. All because he had chosen to just be a part of the physical enviornment, to accept and kind of relish it, rather than attempting to make it like his own realm.
After the pigs passed them through, a shaken Mugily started to ask Ralph a question, and as always as his mouth started to open... the answer appeared in his mind.
The Rising was behind the first pig out of the blur of a low intelligence. They believed that just because humans were the first species to employe the benefit of high intelligence and speach capabilities, that gave us no right to effectively stop the evolution of other animals by keeping them tightly penned and stupid in a life track going quick from a womb to the slauther house. They conducted their experiments completly off the map, on a small island in Indonesia patrolled by a vicious private army.
The first Pig, Heeply, after being educated and socialized, was quick to accept that they had been eaten -- after all, the pig had never been above eating a human. The hatred of the jew and muslim, though -- that still lived on, even a hundred years after the eating of meat was effectively banned by the Un. This riled the pig, like any prejudice will the demonized party, and after many years...they started petitioning the Un to stop the Jews and Muslims from spreading slander about how they were 'unlcean,' and other vile words that were peppered about their holy books. The jews and muslims still refuse to touch the pig. Won't shake their hands, allow them into their holy places or delis or cafeterias.
There were problems with the first pigs, a lower intelligence than expected resulted. The Rising Group rushed through the experimental phase to trials on pigs, and then when there were problems with the intelligence of the first hundred, none of them would have even considered killing off the mistakes.
The pigs were raised as secular speciest... and would have perhaps easily integrated into the World Culture if not for their finding out, and then reading up on, the Jew and Muslim prejudice against them. The idea of a religion itself intrigued them, unfortunatly; they had been deep spiritualists before the group gave them intelligence and an education. Some of them longed to be one of the Before pigs, the ones lacking the genetic askewing, but when they themselves were running their own labs, and discovered how easily they could just damage their brains, none of the pigs were willing to give up who they were.
Two hundred years into the Awake Time -- as the pigs called the period before their DNA was supercharged, the slow simmering anger against the religious prejudice against them finally exploded. Three pigs were protesting in front of a Mosque in Iran and a religious nutshot them dead with an ak-898 (a seventeen year old who who later claimed in court that he had been sexually molested and then indoctrinated into an illegally controlling religion--laws had long since stripped the con-pastors of their ability to use brain washing techniques to convince people of their mania, and some of the perpetrators indeed were jailed) . After this, the pigs all moved, in mass, to one of the communities emptied when the Bush Dynasty moved the wealthy to the succulent playground of the moon, where the god jesus was the sole deity worshiped.
There was a little known fact about the situation of the gods, one known only by a few, mostly jesus and his pals and Ralph-- who it was assumed was too stoned to remember what other god's talked about, so they spoke in front of him about matters they otherwise would have kept secret. The secret was this: Jesus was not actually sustained as the most powerful god by the worship of the Moon dwellers, like was popularly thought. It was assumed, because of a mind habit picked up during the eons of human social evolution, that the power of the rich man's prayer was somehow worth more than the poor mans, yet in truth it took almost all of jesus's followers on earth, plus those favored by the Bush Dynasty, to keep his supreme throne.
And even through Jesus had made it out like it was a joke when he almost smited Ralph, he could sense that there was some kind of probably unconscious reason Jesus had chosen just that moment to play his damned joke -- Ralph had been inadvertantly picking up followers. Probably not him, but Mohhama-mohn, or one of the other powerful gods, might make a play to get some followers on the moon if they knew they merely had to convert a few hundred poor ass humans -- who most gods knew could be bought by answering a few prayers.
The moon was a garden paradise entirely constructed from the memories of the wealthy into polo grounds, golf courses, airports and large gated communites dotted with speciality shops -- and was indeed covetted by the other gods, expecially after the destruction of the earth's fauna and sealife made most of the earth thick, lifeless mud.
