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Another CNG Message

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Hi; this is Cripto.  Although we have evidence to prove that the CNG crisis has ended, the stuff itself will never go away, I fear, because of how it creates itself out of nothing.  It was driving my friends and family nuts, and by friends, I mean the friends I had before I turned 18 and became a G-52.  What a day in my life that was, truth be told; it was ultimately one of the best birthdays I ever had.  When you look at my life now compared to then, though, these are better days.  The overall percentage of me using my powers has gone down, and I'm not as prone to having meltdowns as I once did.  

Don't get me wrong; because I am autistic, sometimes it still triggers certain things, and many things still make me sad.  I'm just choosing to put it behind me instead of dwelling on it like I used to do, because once upon a time I convinced myself I was absolutely worthless to everybody.  This wasn't because I was bullied; I genuinely came to that conclusion myself.  Self-fulfilling prophecy took effect, and the bullies took advantage of it.  They just though they were being original when they did what they did, calling me worthless, only for me to snap back at them and yell, "I'M STUPID; YOU DON'T HAVE TO TELL ME!  I ALREADY KNEW THAT!"

"Wait; what?" they said.

"I don't need people telling me I am the most worthless being ever!  I've been telling myself that already!" I echoed.  (Obviously we all know that's not true, but I was just eleven years old at the time.)

"Wait; since when have you been telling yourself that?"

"Since birth!"  (Not really; I just said that to make them feel bad.)  "Nobody should be allowed to tell me I'm an idiot but me!"

Now we all know self-bullying was not the answer, because it just gave the bullies more ammunition.  I did, however, have somewhat of a victory in that moment, because it confused them so much, they didn't know what to do or say next.  In obedience to my parents, however, I did not say anything about my grandma, the notorious Chloe Clements, or the things that she did that (from her perspective) unconsciouly reinforced these beliefs.  Still, it was creepy parallelism if you could call it that; both were doing the same thing without knowing the other side was doing it.  The difference was that except for Louis the Merciless, I made amends with the bullies by the time I got to high school, and later on in life, they got to be contestants on some of the game shows I've hosted.  (One of them actually ranks among my 10 top all-time winners, as a matter of fact; to date, he's won over $112,400 in cash and prizes.)  

Grandma, by contrast, continued to let me have it until near the end of her life, even though I did make amends with her as well, because I wasn't living the life she wanted me to live.  If I was, it might have spelled defeat for all of us, but I said nothing because every time Grandma heard about the CNG crisis in the news, she assumed it was just the tabloids making stuff up to deceive us, just as they did when they wrote about alien invasions, or by claiming that Abraham Lincoln was a woman.  (Yes; one satirical fake news magazine actually used that as a headline.)

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End the flashback and fast forward to now, because come this year's Oct. 27, it will mark six years since Grandma passed away, which also illustrates that she made one vital mistake towards the end of her life: she preached that she didn't care who won the 2016 election.  She didn't want to live to see the results, because she assumed our country was dying and going to Hades for the direction we have taken, clearly turning our backs on the Lord.  She got her wish.  (Under our current president, however, who just happens to be Leo the Patriotic Lion, mainstream Christianity has actually seen a huge uptick, although part of that was a result from the CNG crisis.  When everybody learned how CNG changed its agenda so that it wasn't killing people if Christianity was their religion, they were converting to it to save their lives from it.  However, they didn't stop there; they also lived their lives according to the Bible, and they publicly professed their faith through the act of baptism.)

Why do I bring this up, though?  Well, today, Mom and Dad called me to complain about the fact they woke up this Saturday morning only to discover there was more CNG showing, even though it was just doing its rainbow message routine, spelling out the message in all caps.  "We called the C.I.D.F.," Mom told me over the phone, "but we wanted you to see this as well."

"I'll be right over," I said, "but except to see my boss there as well, and by my boss, I mean SuperCat.  The C.I.D.F. come from the same planet he does (Caticon), and so their policy is that when they know about it, he knows about it."

"Okay, thanks."

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Super C did not deem this an emergency worthy of us dressing up in our battle uniforms, so he just wore one of his outfits he wore as a personal trainer, and I wore one of my t-shirts with the logo for "The Price is Right" on it, plus a pair of brown cargo shorts.  It was too hot to pad (go barefoot) outside (at least it was for me), and so I also wore socks and my tennis shoes.

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When we got to my parents' house, we saw the following message CNG had spelled out on the front lawn, and after about 30 seconds of the rainbow sequence, it changed to solid white, but still showed the message in all caps.  I'm not going to write it that way, but that's what it always does.  Here was the message, and it was really geared towards my mom more so than my dad:

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Dear Mr. & Mrs. Knight, but specifically you, Mrs. Knight:

We're sorry to bother you, but we felt we owed you a confession as well, because while there is a chance that it is true that your lives were made miserable by the antics of your mother, who absolutely had no sense of touch with the real world, we felt we were to blame for it.  Why?  Well, for the record, let us first of all state that Chloe Clements was never affected by us, the CNG clumps throughout the years, in any way, shape, or form.  She genuinely hated the modern world and twisted the Bible out of context so that whatever she said was allegedly the way to live your life.  But a churchgoer shouldn't hate people, should they?  She showed nothing but hate, and she clearly had some influence since she did get everybody to boycott the Beatles.  Wildcat City didn't really tolerate rock or other modern music until the 1980s when heavy metal hit the scene, but by that point, people just ignored her.

What we did, however, was rile up the people against her, and we thus apologize to you for any grief it may have caused.  She was your mother, after all, and it didn't help that there was the incident where she randomly just barged into your house (and later your son's house, meaning Cripto) and started cleaning it, claiming what terrible housekeepers you were.  But were you really?

However, because the old version of Bendraqi secretly used us, the clumps of CNG in all different forms we can shapeshift into, in his hypnosis serum, we therefore are responsible for brainwashing you, Mr. & Mrs. Knight, the fateful night in 1992 that you went to a Hardee's, because the diet soda you drank had the serum in it.  We're not going to tell you how Bendraqi did it, because all information about the old version of him is forbidden knowledge; documents on it are all kept in secret storage facilities owned by the U.S. Army.  We did say we were setting him up for his doom only to have discovered he took his own life by accident, but the fact you expected him to have a perfect 4.0 GPA even after it became impossible for him to do so was clearly our doing.  We reinforced the brainwashing by doing it to you again, and again, and again, and again.  (Your younger son, Mitchell, never got brainwashed or affected by us; he's free.  Just advise him to protect his house with the CNG-OFF products if he hasn't already.)

Thus, it was ultimately our fault that Cripto was such an emotional trainwreck from childhood until he hit his 30s if you count, even though by the effects of how we did the immortalization treatment, he's frozen at age 22.  We are literally to blame for absolutely everything, even if your President says otherwise.

All we ask is that you accept your apology for that reason; if you don't, we understand, because many people won't forgive us for anything.

CNG out.

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"It's almost like it's giving me a taste of my own medicine," I thought aloud, "because I did used to beat myself up over absolutely everything.  Now it's beating itself up over everything."  (At this point, the C.I.D.F. arrived to collect the CNG and dispose of it as only they knew how, and my parents allowed them to do their cleaning and sanitizing methods inside and outside the house.  About three soldiers went inside the house, while four more did their job outside.)

"Well, it was responsible for so much destruction of this modern age, especially when you get to about 2015 or 2016," Super C replied, "but it's a shame we didn't know about it sooner.  If we had, we could have put an end to this sooner.  Not to mention we'd fully understand your troubles better."  He then turned to my parents and said, "I meant to ask you that the first time I met you; why did you want him to earn a perfect GPA of 4.0 even when he couldn't get it?"

"I honestly don't know why we wanted that," my mom replied.  "It had nothing to do with trying to keep my mom happy; I think it just shows what CNG can do to people if we let it, and we let it.  Nathan (Cripto) wouldn't be able to do the things he can do without superpowers.  We wanted him to have a good life.  Yet it seems what CNG did to us was make us exact carbon copies of my mom."

"When do you think the spell wore off?  CNG spells don't last forever."

"Thank goodness for that," said my dad.  "I think by the time Nathan was 15, it wore off, because by then, he had superpowers.  We didn't want to believe it at first, but we did in the end."

"What made you believe it?"

"Something to do with bailing the world out of debt, I think?  Nathan?"

"There was one case where I was having a bad day at school, but it was a Friday," I said, "and so I thought, 'Okay; I've got the weekend.  I'll just sleep in and we'll be fine.'  The dream I had, triggering from my stress, involved people blaming me for absolutely everything, including the fact we were in a national debt we couldn't pay off.  I know it was clear CNG that got to me; what I can't remember is if I sneezed or not, because sometimes when I do sneeze, my powers start acting at random.  That's going down, by the way, but at the time, it was a problem."

"Right."

"So I go to bed that night, and the nation is in debt.  The next morning, I wake up, and the nation has enough money to pay it off 500 times over, and our economy suffers from everything being worthless because of the laws of supply and demand."

"So that was the first time you pulled money out of thin air, then?"

"Yes.  The first time I did it on purpose was when I became a game show host for the first time.  That's what got me into trouble, though."

"It did, but what's puzzling me is why CNG now thinks it has to go around apologizing to people like this; the world just wants to be done with it."

"At least it's not doing any harm doing this."

"True."

"I just had the latest of my autobiographical novels published; you might want to read that if you're curious."  (I have seven of them in total; I clearly had a problem becaue I was once guilty of a condition known as hypergraphia, meaning one has the complusive urge to write or draw, or so my mind thought.  I am autistic, but some patients diagnosed with hypergraphia do not write or draw anything of any substance.)

"Okay."  Super C continued to take notes, and my parents hugged me while shedding a few tears.

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Since I wasn't filming a game show episode or working with my rock band, I went ahead and spent much of the day with my parents since I had already told them I'd help them move some stuff out and around; this was due to the fact my mom was retiring from her job as an English teacher; she had been doing this for almost 26 years, and she felt it was time for her to hang it up.  She made the comment that she saw her salary jump sharply from a stereotypical five-figure salary to six figures, and the six figures ensured she earned more than Mayor Jabowitz, whose salary was only five figures for most of the time that she was teaching.  (Jabowitz's salary is now six figures, but it does not top the salary public school teachers in Wildcat City earn; the total moving to six figures was the result of inflation, but since we had a surplus, he was able to put the surplus to good use.)

That night, they stopped by my house so they could talk to me some more while enjoying the take-and-bake pizza that I ordered, and I gave them index cards that my powers summoned automatically (so it was not a demerit from Super C) which had the message on it.  Mom and Dad weren't sure what to believe because sometimes CNG makes no sense when it apologizes, but it has shown in these past few days that it always tells the truth.  I made sure they knew about this.  Note Super C was also present that night because he answered all the questions my parents had about CNG.

In the end, they felt better about the whole thing, and with the declaration that Leo, as President, made about the CNG crisis having come to an end, it ensured Mom and Dad would be exonerated of any wrongdoing that resulted from the CNG effects.

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I forwarded the message to Leo and his administration the next morning so that they could discuss it amongst themselves, and then I spent part of it dusting and vacuuming my basement.

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THE END