#noah's a voice of reason in a cacophony of screaming. no matter how loud he shouts he'll never be heard.

[total-drama-brainrot]

Saw this somewhere and wanted to throw it your way, sorry if you’ve been asked this before but what do you think of the concept of Noah always having been an assistant (even before the first season)/never playing as a contestant would look like?

The thing about Noah as a contestant is that he's, for all intents and purposes, kind of useless. And by that I mean Noah as a character isn't important to the plot at all in the grand scheme of things. He's barely important from an episodic point of view either; Noah does very little throughout Total Drama in terms of story relevance, and just in general. (Lazy king 👑.)

So taking him out of the equation wouldn't really affect too much in the grand scheme of things, save for probably preventing his friendship with Owen and, from a fanon standpoint, the rest of team E-scope. He'd be pretty much the same person, just behind the camera instead of on it.

But that's kind of a boring answer, and not at all what you were looking for, right?

So, let's say that Noah lands himself a job working as the personal assistant for some hot-shot A-list celebrity through one of his many siblings' various contacts; is it nepotism? Probably. But who's Noah to look a gift horse in the mouth? A fairly easy job following some pretentious asshole around all day and grabbing him the occasional coffee sounds like a pretty sweet gig, especially with the salary and various benefits that come with the job description. So Noah takes the job without question.

And that's how he finds himself stuck in the middle of nowhere, Muskoka, on an undisclosed island owned by said A-lister whilst he films the first season of his new Reality TV show, Total Drama Island.

Being Chris' personal assistant was supposed to be an easy pay check. "Supposed to be" being the point of interest there; Noah didn't anticipate Chris being as sadistic or as childishly needy as he was. If he wasn't running around like a headless chicken trying to accommodate for Chris' oftentimes outlandish whims and fancies, he was stuck answering to the producers in the host's stead- and the producers were pissed with Chris more often than not for his frivolous use of the show's budget. Something about having a genius level IQ and enough snark to make grown men cry apparently made him qualified enough to deal with the industry big-wigs. Noah was far too overworked to question it.

So much for an easy pay check.

Noah's not bad at his job by any means. In his professional opinion, the whole show and Chris' career would be in the dumps without his personal input keeping everything afloat. That doesn't mean he doesn't loathe his job with every sleep-deprived inch of his being.

And, inevitably, Noah ends up spending a lot of time around the campers themselves. Mostly as a consequence of always having to remain "on set" so to speak, since Noah's pretty much contractually obligated to linger around Chris' vicinity and wait for his boss to assign him some menial task to do. Most of the campers are just as egocentric and insufferable as he'd first assumed- and honestly, what else would he expect from people who singed up for a Reality TV show?- but a select few turn out to be decent company; namely Owen and Eva (and Izzy, but Noah refuses to admit that the "Psycho Hose Beast" is actually bearable to be around).

He'd even go so far as to claim they were friends good acquaintances.

Of course, his job takes precedent over frivolous things like relationships, platonic or otherwise, so Noah doesn't exactly have the free time to hang out with them. Which is probably for the best considering if he did spend a lot of time around his friends acquaintances, the other contestants would have a solid enough foundation for accusations of foul play in the competition, and that's a headache Noah really doesn't want to deal with.

Consequently, Noah floats through the filming of Island, and later on Action, maintaining cordiality with his little group and cold indifference towards pretty much the rest of the cast. Not that he doesn't keep close tabs on the campers; of course he does, not only is Noah incredibly observant by nature, but he's also the one in charge of accommodating for these weirdos... plus, Chris is oddly invested in his "prize cast of ratings jewels", whatever that means. So Noah knows these people, probably more than some of them know themselves, thanks to a combined sixteen-ish weeks of observation and forced proximity.

In turn, the competitors know of Noah, though for the most part he's regarded as little more than a spectre on set- Chris' elusive personal assistant who the cast will occasionally see the barest glimpse of, usually hidden behind an impassive pair of mirrored sunglasses and, more often than not, rushing off to do whatever it is a PA does. Chris does get a little lazy in Action and on a few occasions does get Noah to make a "guest appearances" on screen- mostly just to deliver him a coffee and a gluten free muffin during the downtime of that day's challenge- but he's still practically non-existent to he majority of the cast.

Which is fine by him.

What isn't fine by him is the surprise addition of two people he knows nothing about, come the third season.

One of those contestants happens to know a lot about the cast, and a concerning amount of information about him. It's uncanny, just how much Sierra seems to know about everyone around her, even more so because of the way she practically worships the ground they walk on. Sure, Noah's encountered the odd super fan here and there- not fans of himself, of course, but in this time as Chris' assistant he's had to chase off more than enough rabid fans from trying to sneak their way onto the set of whatever show Chris was working on (or more accurately sic the on-scene security on them)- but Sierra's brand of crazy takes it to a whole new level. Noah doesn't like her on principle and is both incredibly vindicated and incredibly concerned when her stalkerish behaviour rears its ugly head. Not that he's allowed to do anything about it; the producers are adamant that Sierra's outlandish behaviour is entertaining enough for the audience to ignore the immorality, and given how much Chris has been allowed to get away with in the past Noah's inclined to begrudgingly agree.

And the other new contestant? The one who qualified for the apparently non-existent Total Drama Dirtbags (and Noah totally isn't salty about that show being an elaborate ruse that he spent countless sleepless nights working on)? Noah's just as concerned about his friends acquaintances ignorance to Alejandro's inherent sliminess as he is about Sierra's blatant disregard for others' privacy, but again it's not like he can do anything about it. He's not even supposed to be on the show, so any sort of interference would be a big no-no.

Oh, what's that? They want him on the show?

Fuck.

Turns out, Noah's brief appearances during Action (characterised by his usual level of sass and snide comments) really resonated with their audience; they like him for some inexplicable reason, and want to see more of "Noah, Chris McLean's mysterious personal assistant".

So he's pretty much forced into acting as a co-host of sorts, much like Chef had done for the first two seasons, all whilst carrying out his usual tasks. Is he happy about this? Not a chance in hell, and he lets the producers know exactly how he feels about the sudden change in his contract. Not that it changes anything.

And the best part? World Tour is a musical themed season. If they expect him to sing, they've got another thing coming.

But, as a small part of him chimes in, spending more time on camera would give Noah plenty of opportunities to spend time with his friends acquaintances. There's a non-zero chance that he could have fun, even if it's at the expense of his valued privacy.

His new status as part of the show does allow Noah some opportunities to skew the competition in the favour of his friends acquaint- no, screw it, his friends. That's one silver lining of the whole situation.

Better yet, he can tilt things out of Alejandro's favour, since the former Dirtbag seems to have a knack for manipulating the competition anyway- Noah might as well make things more challenging for him, as it seems this game is too easy for him thus far.

[ruinousrealms]

Flayer

It was half past nightfall when we crossed the Rio Nuevo into Las Verdantes. Our outfit was fifteen men strong, pushing half a thousand cattle for Erlen Baymer, one of the state's lesser cattlemen. In truth he was a hard boss, a hard man who had captained a company of border raiders during the war and never tired of bragging about his service. 

A favorite story of his was the time he and his men came across a family of free black farmers in southern Kansas. Baymer had approached on horseback, riding through the fields with the self-confident swagger of a plantation overlord surveying his property. He asked the father whose plantation he had run away from, and for response the black said he had been born free. 

Now, Erlen Baymer was a devout Christian, and he knew the black race were descendants of Ham, son of Noah, and that for his transgression against God, he and his descendants were evermore cursed to servitude, to hew wood and draw water and be servants unto servants. He did of course explain this position to the black, as he ordered his men to strip him naked to find the truth of his claims. No man is born into slavery but he feels the whip, and so if he were born free, his back should be free from blemish. 

Indeed, the man's back was smooth, free from the lumpy scars of the lash. A novelty, many of his company had come up to gawk and ask questions. How did the negro know what to plant and when without any white man to tell him? How did he work the fields without a lash to urge his lazy, indolent soul? 

At length Captain Baymer ended this game and pronounced the sentence. The man was to be hung for his crimes against the Confederate States of America, those crimes being largely related to the color of his skin and the manner of his livelihood. It was understood that, if he were truly a born freeman, then surely his father and mother were somebody’s escaped property. Thus his very existence constituted the crime of theft. The children were brought back to Tennessee and dispersed among the slave markets.

The freeman’s remarkable back, Erlen Baymer had a leathersmith tan it and stitch it into a saddle. He rode that very saddle, decked out in silver dollar conchos and a rebel flag tied round the post, when we crossed the river that night in 1868.

Now, the facts of that night - I’m going to relate them to you here, plain and simple and just as they happened, like I’m some fancy New York journalist-reporter type. I grant you some of what I’m about to say may seem unbelievable. Well, there’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t got any proof, any evidence beyond what I saw that night with my own two eyes. The way Erlen Baymer died, and the things that happened to us in his trail crew before and after… I tell you boy, it’s a curse, the things I seen with these eyes. It’s what drives a man to whiskey.

The country there was flat as flapjacks, and the only place we could find to camp out of the wind was in a dried up riverbank. There we laid out our beds, cocooning ourselves in canvas sheets and wool blankets and shivering in the chill night air. The southwestern desert is hotter than a griddle all day long, but come nightfall and it’s as cold as the north pole.

Well, it was cold that night, like I said, and the wind was howling and kicking up a whole storm of dust. Me and some of the boys, those being Joe Merwin and Caul Bretton and Micah Sanchez, we took turns digging a hole in the side of the riverbank. It wasn’t like a cave, just a dirt overhang a few feet deep, with the excavated dirt piled up to protect our side from the wind.

I wouldn’t say it was the hole we dug that saved us. It sure didn’t save poor Caul, and from what I hear Micah’s still out of his mind up at one of those New England asylums. I’d say it kept us from getting noticed long enough to save our lives, for whatever that's worth.

Now we’d been seeing the makings of a dust storm in the distance for most of the afternoon. They’re common enough out here and we didn’t make much of it beyond what we’d have to do to keep the cattle from scattering. A herd of dumb heifers can scatter to the four winds during a dust-up if you’re not careful with where you lay them down.

The cows stretched out for more than a mile down the riverbed, but they wouldn’t bed down quietly. Whips of dust kept kicking up and no sooner had they sat down than they were on their hooves again, bellowing out loud.

Erlen Baymer kept riding up and down the line cursing to high heaven, kicking the sentries when he came upon them and telling them to get off their lazy god damned bean-eating asses and put the god damned cows to god damned sleep. The only effect that had was making it impossible for any of us to get sleep - But that probably saved us.

It was so dusty at that point that when dark fell there wasn’t a moon nor a star to be seen. A man could just see the dots of cattle guards’ lanterns like the windows of distant farmsteads. Weren’t no use keeping your eyes open, the wind kept kicking the stinging dust up and there weren’t anything to see anyways. I pulled my bandana up over my nose and pushed the brim of my hat down over my eyes and tried to get some shuteye.

I might even have caught a wink of sleep. The cattle down at the far end of the line were getting riled up, bellowing and braying into the night, and that got the whole herd nervous. A nervous longhorner is a dangerous longhorner, and a whole herd of nervous longhorners is a stampede waiting to happen. Joe Merwin went out to see what was the matter and lend a hand if need be. That left just the three of us.

The screaming started soon after. I think it was Tadd Murfree, but from the sound it was hard to tell whose voice it was. There are sounds and intonations particular to men and sounds and intonations particular to animals, and only in the extremity of fear, agony or ecstasy can one make the sounds of another. I don’t think poor Tadd was in ecstasy that night.

More screams started up, and the horses neighing, and the braying and bellowing filled the night air with a mad cacophony. I wager nobody’s ever heard a sound like that before, that of half a thousand screaming and panicking cattle. The hoofbeats were like thunder, like cannonfire, like a thousand drummers pounding madly out of time.

The three of us huddled at the back of our shallow hole in the edge of the riverbank, wishing we’d dug in even deeper and almost thankful Joe Merwin wasn’t here, because he was a big man and there wouldn’t have been room to hide.

I had a small trail lantern whose flickering light we used to play cards. It took five tries to get a match lit, my hands were shaking so much. It lit up our little hole just fine; I saw Micah had his revolver out, and his knuckles were white around the oakwood grip.

“Put that thing away, Micah, do you mean to shoot something?”

“I intend to be ready,” He said, which was reasonable enough.

I crawled to the entrance of the hole. As we were digging we piled the dirt up at the entrance to serve as a wind-break while we slept. I crawled up to it like a trench’s parapet and peered over with my little lamp. It didn’t illuminate much, but in its glow I could see a rush of cattle, a torrent of bovinity running full-tilt down the length of the riverbed. A lot of the animals had raw bloody wounds, some so flayed they appeared to be covered in red patches like a hellishly perverse Holstein.

These animals were panicking for a reason, fleeing some unknown predator, but what on God’s earth it could be I had no idea. Suddenly a cow fell headlong into the side of the embankment near us, sending a shower of dirt down from the roof of our little dugout. It kept trying to get up, but couldn’t; And when it rolled over I could see one whole side of its hip had been laid open and the bloody pink bone was visible. Well, I put the poor bellowing beast out of its misery and hurled my dinner over the side of the dirt heap.

And you see, that’s when Erlen Baymer rode past us. God, if the sight don’t haunt me. I once seen a drawing of the Third Horseman, Famine, a rotting man riding atop a rotting stallion. That’s what I saw. That’s the scene I’ve got to describe to you, to make you understand why I can’t sleep at night no more.

The horse looked like it had been dead and rotting for a week. It had hardly a hair of fur left on its body, and the skin… It looked like somebody had taken a cheese grater to the poor beast. Through flapping bits of flesh I saw muscles moving like an accursed anatomical flipbook. The horse’s jaw was hanging on by a thread of tendon and it was screaming, just screaming with that stump of a tongue hanging out.

The poor girl had been beautiful, just absolutely beautiful, with a black coat that shone like oil in the sunlight. Thinking back on it now I wish I’d have drawn my pistol and put an end to the poor thing, but at the time I was too shocked to do anything but watch as it thundered past, carrying its shrieking, flailing load.

Erlen Baymer was naked as Adam in Eden, and it was plain whatever was happening to the horse was occurring to him as well. He was flailing like a man possessed, slapping at himself as if desperately beating out flames; There were no flames, just raw red meat that spurted every time he touched it. He raised his arm and I caught a glimpse of the frayed ends of muscles poking through a bicep.

Something fell with a wet thud near our little hollow, and leaning over just slightly with the lantern, I saw a withered human leg severed at the knee, as if the joint had been so weakened it simply fell off. It seemed to be writhing as if covered by a hundred thousand ravenous little insects, methodically stripping it down to the bone before my very eyes. It was wearing one of Erlen Baymer’s fancy gatorskin ropers. Once the flesh was gone, the carnivorous beasties went to work eating the leather of the boot, anything fleshy enough to be consumed, till all that remained were bones and a silver spur.

I crawled back in the hole, barely able to process what I had just seen. “Alright, boys, what in the hell do we do?” I asked, and Micah Sanchez said what we three all were thinking - Make a run for the horses.

Well, you didn’t have to tell us twice. We three all crawled up to the opening, and Micah and Caul took off at a full tilt. I stayed behind a second - I’d just glanced at the body of the cow beside our dugout. It had been picked to the bone.

Just as I scrambled to my feet, Caul fell and started screaming.

“No! God, no!” Caul frantically started beating at the lower hem of his pant-legs. We didn’t know what in the hell was happening; Micah rushed over with the lamp and pulled up his trouser leg. Micah screamed and dropped the lantern, bringing the infernal night down around us once more. Caul let out a kind of a long drawn-out moan, with notes of fear, sadness and resignation. At the time what it reminded me of, more than anything, was a deer that’s gotten itself trapped in some crevasse it can’t get out, and the more it struggles the more stuck it gets, till it’s exhausted itself and all it can do is bray and wait to die.

A gunshot lit up the darkness for a moment, and the afterimage stayed in my eyes for a long time, like looking too long into a fire. Caul’s body slumped down almost casually, but the upper part of his head sprayed across the sand. I heard Micah’s running footsteps and his heavy gasping breath, and he thudded down next to me and skittered like a rat into our little safe haven.

“Flies!” Micah’s fingertips dug into my shoulders like blades, his dirty breath blowing in my face, “It’s flies! Must be millions of them! They were eating him right up! Cleaned his ankles down to the bone, I’m telling you!”

I told him to shut up.

“That’s why he fell, there weren’t nothing holding his foot bones to his leg!”

Maybe the reader will judge me for what I did next. I hope you’ll take into account the things I’d seen, and the stress I was under at the time. Micah was raving mad, clenching me for dear life like a survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a broken mast. I’d just seen him blow a man’s brains out - Though thinking back to it, he may have been right. It would have been cruel to leave him to be eaten alive, and if Micah had tried dragging him back, he’d have brought the carnivorous flies with him. He put him out of his misery as you would an old cow. But at that time I was still in shock, and the only thought that came to mind was of Caul Bretten, whom I hardly knew, but with whom I’d shared campfires and kettles of coffee, and whose brains were steaming in the cool desert night.

Thinking only of justice, I reached for my lantern and brought it down on Micah’s head, extinguishing the light and silencing his ramblings. I didn’t know whether or not I’d killed him. He was quiet. We lay there together a long time. I must have nodded off and woken several times. At one point, I woke to see Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address in the corner of our cave. Again I woke, this time to see a skinless and eyeless cow wandering blind in the dim pre-dawn light. It walked past absolutely silently.

When morning came, the desert was still and not a thing moved. The sun was well up in the sky before I dared move. I was caked in dust from head to toe, cracking and falling as I stirred.

Micah’s face was red and my first thought, as the events of the night came rushing back to me, was that he too was being consumed alive by those unstoppably ravenous insects. But no; My lantern blow had split his scalp and dry blood painted his face red as an Apache warrior. He was still breathing softly, so I left him there and took a gander outside.

The dry riverbed at first seemed to be decorated with a vast elaborate network of ice sculptures, gleaming a blinding white in the sun. These were the bones of cattle and cattlemen, five hundred dead heifers stripped of skin and meat and life. A lot of them had broken and ran, and their bones shone white in the distant desert sand. Clambering up the slope, the impression one got was of an overflowing river turned to ice in the blink of an eye, as if by magic.

Here and there the bones of the sentries. I recognized Eustace Bagge from his cigarette case. The leather had been eaten away, but the copper badge bearing the name of the regiment he served in the war was still perfect.

Two or three miles down, laying near some scrub was the skeleton of a horse surrounded by silver dollar conchos. I picked one up, turned it over; It could only be Erlen Baymer’s horse and saddle. The saddle, however, was gone but for the metal pegs that held it together. The freedman’s dark skin, that nightmarish piece of leatherwork, had been completely eaten away by the swarm.

The man himself had crawled away from his dead horse and left a trail of bones. He lost a lot more than the one leg; Toe and finger bones poked from the sand like pebbles, and the larger ones, a femur, most of a hand and the arm up to the elbow. I found gold teeth, and his revolver with the tacks that had held together the holster.

A bit further on I found Erlen Baymer. I turned and went back down the riverbank.

Micah had woken up and I found him wandering dazed and confused amongst the skeletons. I spoke to him but he didn’t reply; He never said a word to me again, and from what I’ve heard those New England brain-doctors haven’t gotten him talking. There was something wrong with his eyes. I couldn’t tell you what. He just kept staring past me.

He followed me without resistance. We followed the riverbed. We must have walked ten miles the first day and ten miles the next. The whole time we were stepping around skeletons. A herd can go surprisingly far in panic; The only reason they hadn’t gotten farther was, well, they were being eaten alive at the time.

The sun was our enemy. We had our canteens; I kept pouring little slips down Micah’s mouth, worried he’d choke but even more worried he’d die of thirst. At some point the brim started falling off my hat and letting sunlight hit my forehead, searing the skin red and raw.

Round noon of the third day, we came to an old covered bridge where we took shelter from the sun for a while, then started out along the road. After two and a half days walking, we were near dead. I had to pull Micah along, but he’d only move at a snail’s pace. I was terrified that he’d eventually fall down and just refuse to get back up; It’d be the end for him, and my own couldn’t be far away.

And then, as if by magic, a carriage appeared. One moment we were walking and then, the sound and smell of horses and a voice crying out in Spanish, “Quitate de en medio, idiotas!”

Well, I spoke a peck of Spanish, just enough for him to understand that we were in trouble, and the kind old man stepped down and helped me load Micah into the back, building a little bed for him out of bags of corn, and setting up a tarp to keep him out of the sun.

We rode to a hacienda named Soledad El Aquelarre, and the women bathed us and fed us and fussed over poor Micah. There was a nunnery not far away and the old man sent for the holy sisters to tend his needs, but beyond keeping him fed and cleaning up after him, there was little they could do.

I never told him a word of what happened. My lack of Spanish helped in that respect; Whenever he asked, I could pretend not to understand. He was kind, too kind for the likes of us, and I do feel guilty about lying to him, but I didn’t think he could comprehend what we’d been through, let alone understand. I barely could, and as I lay there day after day I got to wondering if the whole thing hadn’t been some sort of insane dream. I could see the workers in the fields through my window and beyond them the bone white desert stretched out gleaming, a thousand miles of dust to the gulf of Mexico.

One night, however, I was visited in my room by one of the sisters. She spoke good English and introduced herself as Sister Clarita. She was one of the sisters tending to Micah. She didn’t ask me what had happened, because she already knew. There were stories in this region going back centuries, of caravans going missing in the desert night, and by light of day all that are found are the polished white bones. The monastery library held many such reports going back to the days of the conquistadors. Sister Clarita thought it must have been going on a lot longer; The native tribes shunned this entire area, considering it an unclean place to visit and avoiding the entire hundred-mile stretch of desert as we Americans avoid the cesspit or the slums.

There were other books, too. Books on biology and entomology, and the evolution and adaptation of species. Sister Clarita suggested that a species of small insect, like the tiny mites and fleas that live among grains of sand and are so small as to be almost indistinguishable, may have become adapted, over many centuries, to the consumption of flesh. That such a diet would cause changes in the bodies of the insects making them more adept at catching their prey; Perhaps their mandibles had developed a razor’s edge for slicing off bits of flesh. Or maybe they coated their victims in digestive acid and slurped up the liquified flesh. Sister Clarita knew of several insects that consumed their prey in just such a manner, though none that she knew had ever gone after so large a prey as a man or a cow.

“But Sister, if these really are man-eating insects, why do they stay out here in the desert? Every animal migrates toward its food source; These things could strip a town clean of flesh overnight! Why aren’t they swarming through the cities, just… Everywhere?”

“Perhaps they just like the weather here,” Sister Clarita said and kissed her rosary.

After a week of recovery, I felt well enough to travel. I collected Micah from the sisters, who protested, but I thought if anyone could help him it would be at one of those new asylums up in New England. The old man took us as far as the train station in Las Friolero del Resol, and there he bade us goodbye.

Two days later we were back in Texas. First thing I went to the barber to shave off the wild beard I’d grown. Then I walked into the nearest sheriff’s office to report the fate of the Erlen Baymer Cattle Drive.

Well, they didn’t believe a word of what I told them and locked me and Micah up for murder. To hear them tell it, the two of us got up one night and slit everybody’s throats. Didn’t matter to them what I said, nor the state Micah was in; They left us to rot six weeks before the circuit judge came ‘round to pronounce the sentence.

He had expected an open-and-shut murder case; When we were brought to stand before him, he saw my sleepless eyes and the empty shell of a man that was Micah. He listened to my story silently, nodding occasionally for me to continue, and when it was done he pronounced the sentence.

“I, Judge Howard Lorbbock of the Great State of Texas, do hereby declare these two men to be mentally insane. No doubt they were driven mad by the ordeal they suffered, of crossing the desert after their cattle drive was destroyed by Apaches.”

There weren’t any damn Apaches in that part of Mexico, but I kept my mouth shut. The sheriff was making enough noise as it was, imploring the judge that “What the people of this town need to see is a good old fashioned hanging!”

Well, we were sent to Houston for treatment. Micah was considered such a specialty case that he was sent up north to New England, to the asylum in some town called Arkham. 

I stayed behind at the Houston madhouse. The medicine they gave me made me sleep, but nothing can stop the dreams. When I close my eyes, all I can see are Erlen Baymer’s lidless eyeballs rolling round and round in his red skull-face.