I'm gonna move to the southwest, and, I don't know...

"I am Summer."

In the garage of the Smith household, Rick had finished twisting Summer's head back in place. He flipped up a switch on the back of her neck, which promptly dissipated back into her skin.

"Summer, state your deal."

( Its benefits are totally, like, less about the food than the emotional nourishment. )

"Tell it to my bread in the morning," Rick said, triggering the switch on the back of Summer's neck to shut her down. She fell forward into her dinner plate. "You just became my backup toaster."

"Aw, geez," Morty chuckled, but Rick was on his way over to him, too, hitting the switch so his voice got progressively deeper until it faded out. "My sister died in the spaghet---"

He, too, promptly died face first in the spaghet.

[[ CANON CATCH UP NEARLY COMPLETE! Part 1 of only 2 today, with a special OOC note to follow ]]

The Death Stalker's camp was a place where lawlessness reigned. It was a place where meals were made of human flesh and served buffet style, and tetanus lurked around every dirty, rusty corner. Where spray paint seemed inexplicably plentiful to shoot into one's face and get high since the world surrounding them was so grim and brutal, and time was passed playing chicken in the middle of the camp with weapons fashioned out of golf clubs. It was brutal, it was stark, it was totally fucking metal. And one Smith was adapting much more easily than the other.

(Summer. It was Summer.)

( Did the boomy-booms blow up all your wordy-word books? )

"Wanna piss on him?" Summer asked.

"Get outta my head," said Hemorrhage.

________________________________________

And while Summer was away shooting mutants with the Death Stalkers, Morty seemed to have gotten into his own interesting situation in the ThunderBlood Dome. They returned just in time to see Morty in the middle, his left arm somehow all jacked up and muscular, beating the snot out of some hulking dude with his overalls held up by his nipple rings.

"Morty?" Summer made her way through the crowd, trying to get a better look at what was happening.

( We are united, or we are enemies. )

And that's when Morty's monster arm reached for Rick's back, swiftly extracting the large glowing green rock of Isotope 322, promptly dropping it on the ground for all to see.

"Ohhhh," said Rick, pulling out his gun, then looking up and out, as if to some sort of forth wall or something. "We'll be right back."

[[Part 3 of ???. Continued from here and here. I love my dumb, stupid, cracky canon. Spoilers, violence, blah blah blah, all that good stuff]]

The landscape stretched out arid and dry for miles upon miles, stretching to the abysmal horizon. Heavy clouds, brown and forboding, hung low in the pollution-choked sky. All was quiet except for the approaching rumble of vehicles, their wheels kicking up red dust, their tailpipes spewing thick smoke. Rick was at the wheel of a green all-terrain vehicle, Summer beside him in the passenger seat with her ponytail whipping in the wind. Morty stood, facing backwards, bracing himself as he held a gun trained on the vehicles following them closely. Too close for comfort, pimped out vehicles driven by madmen dressed in a disarray of metal and leather and tubes.

"Morty!" Rick called out. "Shoot the mohawk guy!"

"They all have mohawks!"

( Okay. But not because you told me to. )

Rick lifted his detection device that he'd grabbed from the car, focusing it on the glowing rock, and, just as he expected, the little yellow lights sang out their rapidly beeping song.

"Kiiids," Rick turned to his grandchildren, renewed with a sudden spark of interest. "Weird pitch. Let's have this be our new life. Let's be post-apocalyptic savenge--gerrr--brrp--eers!"


[[Part 2 of ??. Continued from here! Who doesn't love a good Mad Max homage, huh?]]

Because Summer apparently didn't have enough going on in her life with trying to break her grampa out of space jail, she now had a new very important goal that seemed....slightly easier to achieve. Which wasn't saying much, because Summer apparently was a very ambitious, slightly delusional young lady. However, it didn't take her long to come up with what she thought was a brilliant idea, with but one giant obstacle: Morty.

When she got back to her room, she took a deep breath, rehearsed her speech again in her head, and dialed home.

"Morty, I need your help," she said, before he even had a chance to answer.

"S-Summer, Dad told you to stop...to stop bothering me! He says he knows of a Gromflomite detention school to s-send you to, a real one this time, if you don't...if you don't knock it off!"

"No, no, no, no, wait, Morty, I promise you, this isn't about Grampa Rick. Well, it is, kind of, but it's not about breaking him out of prison this time. I swear. Just hear me out, okay?"

Summer took his silence as a petulant agreement. "Okay, do you remember, when we escaped the wedding and Grampa Rick used that thing to pin down how many Earth-like planets were available that we could live on? Like, he just asked it and it told him?"

She could tell that he wasn't sure he'd like where this was going. "Uh, yeahhhh, why?"

"I need you to find that device for me, Morty. I need it, for a friend, okay? Just...it's too dumb complicated to explain right now, but I need you to poke around the garage and see if he's left it or hidden it anywhere, okay? Please? I'll send you as many boxes of Strawberry Smiggles you want if you manage to find it."

"S-Summer, you know they confiscated most of Rick's stuff, and Dad turned the garage into his own space now. B-besides, that-that thing was on his spaceship. He abandoned us in that spaceship. If-if it's a-a-anywhere, Summer, R-Rick still has it."

"Just check, Morty, god! How hard can it be just to look? What have you got going on that's got you too busy to just look? Making out with Gromflomites for extra pills? Yeah, I bet those little feelers and those huge, sagging ba--"

"God, Summer, stop being a bitch!"

"No, you stop being a bitch, Morty. A little bitch who can't even help out his own dear sister. Just look, okay, Morty? That's all I'm asking. And maybe, just maybe, if you pull through with me on this, I'l...stop bothering you about contacts for Grampa Rick, deal?"

Another pause, but she could tell it was a good pause. "Yeah, okay, I'll look."

Victory! "Thank you, Morty! You're the best little brother ever."

"He's not coming back, Summer! We're all better off without hi---"

Annnnnd click. Enough of that. Summer nodded, pleased with herself, and then flopped belly-down on her bed to catch up with some texts and other notifications, trying not to think about the fact that Morty was probably right.

[[ mostly establishy, but the door is open! ]]