(cue the Courage The Cowardly Dog intro)

It was yet another incredibly dull and lifeless morning (of the year 2014) in the flat, barren and featureless (borderline) desert that was Courage's hometown of Nowhere (Kansas), and after yet another obligatory establishing shot of said dog's janky old wooden (Bagge Farm)house, the next shot was abruptly cut to (also as always) to show what was going on in his adoptive owners' (Eustace Bagge's and Muriel Bagge's) rather extremely tackily decorated living room, as in basically nothing at all...well, unless you count Eustace lazily sitting on his armchair and callously burying his face into the latest issue of his local newspaper while Muriel merrily rocked back and forth in her rocking chair with Courage lovingly sprawled out atop her lap as something, I suppose.

"HMMMMM..." Courage happily crooned as Muriel comfortingly stroked up and down his lovely pink coat of beagle fur with her fingers while Eustace sneered disgustedly in response, muttering numerous hateful insults about the poor dog under his breath while Courage just exasperatedly shrugged and rolled his eyes in the classic "here we go again" type of fashion.

"Geez, how much are you going to have to pamper that stupid dog before you FINALLY start to get just a bit TIRED of it, huh?" Eustace began angrily griping and nagging in Muriel's general direction, "FINALLY" slamming his newspaper down onto his lap and making eye(glass) contact with the equally old, decrepit and bespectacled Muriel just to make sure that she actually was paying attention to him; as you can probably imagine, Muriel and Courage both sincerely wished that they could just ignore him and relax in peace, but AS USUAL, Eustace's abhorrently spiteful and self-centered intentions were ENTIRELY to the contrary and then some, to put it lightly.

"What do you MEAN, Eustace?" Muriel suddenly stopped rocking her chair, curiously placed her left index finger over her mouth (while continuing to warmly pet Courage with the entirety of her right hand, naturally), and naively asked her curmudgeonly old fart(knocker) of a husband while Courage flipped himself around to face him with an exceedingly "tired of Eustace's crap" look in his eyes.

"Look, you know it EVERY bit as well as I do; that mangy, over-fed little mutt is WAY too high-strung for his OWN sodding good, let alone OURS!" Eustace growled angrily, clenching his non-existent teeth together and threateningly shaking his left fist at Courage for emphasis while Courage just pathetically quivered and mewled in response, ironically proving Eustace to actually have a genuinely valid point for once...needless to say, however, Muriel completely and blatantly refused to admit TO said point's incredibly obvious validity, as always.

"Oh, PLEASE! Says YOU, you crotchety, hedonistic old miser who, need I mention, as opposed to doing ANY actually productive farm work OR house work, just grumpily SITS around on his malnourished, lazy bottom and waits for everyone else AROUND him to CATER to his every whim! Most notably Courage in particular, whom you MORE than evidently STILL treat like the very same utterly deplorable garbage that YOU yourself act like on a regular basis even though he's clearly SAVED our aforementioned bottoms from certain doom more times than I can even bear to COUNT!" Muriel angrily threw her arms out beside herself and ranted back at Eustace in a sadly futile attempt to try and finally talk some (common) sense into the greedy, selfish bastard.

"Oh, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH! BIG DEAL! What good is a FEW thousand times in the grand scheme of the universe anyway?" Eustace callously rolled his eyes and snidely belittled Muriel. "Why, that pitiful little wuss is probably only going to last a FEW more years on this EARTH anyway, at the rate HIS miserable JOKE of a life is going!" Eustace craned his neck directly toward Courage and revoltingly laughed in his face while Courage just winced in disgust from a combination of what he was saying AND how much spit was flying out of his mouth and directly onto Courage's own face as he said it.

"My dear, ever-loving Christ, how DARE you say such a thing about Courage?! Why, you ought to be absolutely, positively ASHAMED of yourself right about now, if I do say so myself!" Muriel furiously shouted at Eustace as she finally stood up and quite literally put her feet down (more accurately her rather excessively large shoes, a thing that Eustace also constantly wore in his own house for whatever reason), briefly leaning forward and gently setting Courage down onto the floor so that the two of them could both place their hands firmly onto their hips and angrily glare at the dog-hating old coot in unison.

"Let's see how YOU like it when a fellow member of your own immediate family physically abuses you in this type of manner, SHALL WE?" Muriel seethingly growled at Eustace, suddenly pulling out her rolling pin from absolutely (well) nowhere in particular and bashing Eustace right upside his introvertedly newspaper-buried head with it, causing him to reflexively drop his newspaper, tightly clutch his comically bald (except for the also-comically massive newsboy hat) head with both of his freakishly bony hands and yell "OWW" in extremely pained and irritated surprise while Muriel and Courage mockingly pointed and laughed at him in response just to drive their metaphorical point home even further.

"Oh, COME ON, can you really BLAME me? I mean seriously, for CRYING out loud, it's been YEAR AFTER YEAR now, and the 'POOR LITTLE' lily-livered basket case STILL jumps AT LEAST an entire fricking FOOT into the air every single time I do THIS!" Eustace exasperatedly tossed his arms out beside himself and continued ranting, making yet another surprisingly good point as he suddenly reached into the nonexistent storage space behind his armchair, pulled out his comically hideous Native American witch mask and slapped it on.

"OOGA BOOGA BOOGA!" Eustace jokingly waved his suddenly claw-shaped hands around in the air and shouted at Courage, causing the poor, poor little MENTAL case to indeed jump an entire foot (and a half) into the air, flap his limbs all about like a hummingbird and scream at the tops of his ever-loving lungs like a little girl before then proceeding to pathetically bolt over into the kitchen, curl himself tightly into sideways fetal position and mawkishly whimper his mentally exhausted little head off.

"Heh heh heh heh heh!" Eustace childishly pointed and laughed at Courage with his right hand while shoving his mask back behind his armchair with his left.

"HMPH!" Muriel frustratedly sneered at Eustace, giving him a SECOND well-deserved bashing on the head with her rolling pin.

"OWW, WHAT'D I DO?" Eustace obliviously groaned in pain, rubbing the corresponding side of his now-aching head with his left hand while irritatedly resting his right upon the corresponding arm of his armchair as he suddenly intensified his head-rubbing into severely skin-damaging head-scratching and thought long and hard (more accurately, over the course of exactly two seconds) about what he would have to do in order to redeem himself at the sheer point that his outright villainy toward his poor little dog had now reached.

"HMPH yourself!" Eustace angrily retorted to his immensely disgusted wife, who just wordlessly folded her arms over her chest and continued glaring at him in response while Courage reluctantly walked back into the living room, retook his former position right next to her and did much of the same while (surprisingly) assertively nodding his head in agreement.

"You wanna know what THAT shrimpy little squirt REALLY needs? Why, I'LL tell you what HE needs, assuming that you somehow actually ARE naive and gullible enough to not already have it figured out yourself!" Eustace frustratedly leapt up onto his feet, pointed his right index finger straight (diagonally) down at poor little Courage and bitterly growled at Muriel while Courage sassily placed his wrists onto his hips, depressedly glared at the show's viewers, worriedly raised his eyebrows and smugly nodded his head as if to sarcastically say "well, YEAH" in response.

"Oh, LET ME GUESS, what he needs in YOUR cynical, jaded eyes is, oh I don't know, a 'good old-fashioned' spanking session with the nearest crowbar like what your OWN parents allegedly used to do to YOU whenever they even THOUGHT they caught you misbehaving?" Muriel annoyedly (but admittedly still somewhat sympathetically) snarked at her completely insufferable husband's expense, with her arms remaining tightly folded over her chest all the while as Eustace sadistically drooled, panted and moaned at the mere thought.

"Well, I mean YEAH, that too, of course..." Eustace embarrassedly sighed, slapping himself across the face with his left hand in order to regain his composure.

"...but more importantly, what HE needs even MORE is a good NEW-fashioned SHRINK if you ask me!" Eustace continued explaining while Courage nodded "MM-HMM" in response.

"SHH! Don't tell those ignorant numbskulls what I meant by that!" Eustace secretively cupped his right hand over the corresponding side of his mouth, leaned directly toward the camera and shadily whispered to the show's viewers, smugly pointing at Courage and Muriel with his left thumb just in case said viewers were too stupid to figure out who he was referring to themselves.

"OooOOOoogh...I KNOW I'm not gonna like this!" Courage clutched his head tightly with both of his fluffy little hands and terrifiedly whimpered and groaned at the mere thought of being put through yet ANOTHER vore-fetish episode after what he had previously been put through in Tulip's Worm and most ESPECIALLY Muriel Blows Up, with Muriel indeed being so ridiculously naive that she somehow wasn't even able to pick up on Eustace's insultingly obvious pun.

"OOO, yes, a PSYCHIATRIST! Man, WHY did I never think of that before?" Muriel giggled merrily while Courage just tossed his arms out beside himself as if to say "I dunno".

"Oh, I don't know, maybe because you're STUPID?" Eustace smugly chuckled at Muriel while Courage nodded his head at his viewers in very much the same manner as before.

"Oh, now that's just plain RUDE!" Muriel placed her hands on her hips and angrily retorted at Eustace. "Kind of true, though..." she scratched the corresponding side of her head with her right hand, hung said head ever-so-slightly in shame and regretfully thought to herself while Eustace just sat right back down in his armchair and continued snickering at her expense...when all of a sudden, completely without warning, his living-room television (seemingly) turned itself on without any direct command whatsoever from his remote!

"HUH?" Courage, Muriel and Eustace all gasped in unified shock as Di Lung's big, douchey, spiky-haired, giant-lipped, cool-shaded, insensitively East-Asian-stereotype-modeled face suddenly revealed itself on Courage's and company's television using an additional remote that he had somehow cloned for it by eerily unknown means; as you can probably imagine, he was very clearly standing in the Bagges' front yard...which, as I already mentioned before, was so soul-crushingly barren and featureless that with Lung's camera facing AWAY from the house itself rather than TOWARD it, the fact that he had used a copy of the building's living-room TV remote was pretty much the broadcast's only immediate indication of him actually being in the general vicinity while filming it. (Also, the night before the day on which this story began, he had somehow successfully hidden a paper-thinly fridge-magnet-disguised sound-recording bug on the refrigerator in the house's kitchen, which he had then linked up to his walkie-talkie and used as a means of stalker-ish-ly eavesdropping on the conversational activities of the house's residents while he camped out in his flawlessly stealth-cloaked new Mystery Machine van...which, for obvious reasons, was now un-cloaked and sitting in plain, naked sight on Courage's and company's rather-undeservedly privately owned turf. What an absolute creep Di Lung was indeed.)

"Greeting, American FOOLS!" Di Lung sarcastically waved and laughed at his already heavily annoyed new audience, tossing his duplicate remote aside as if it was nothing while his automated video-camera drone (incredibly) intelligently and efficiently tracked every single one of his movements in an amazingly precise manner, so as to deliberately show all of the best possible cinematic angles on them. Surely enough, he was already standing right in front of the right side of his new Mystery Machine replica, presumably just for the pure sake of showing off the fact that it actually WAS, in fact, the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo (except with only one person in it, effectively defeating a huge portion of its actual intended purpose).

"I, Di Lung, quintessential Chinese-American science/engineering prodigy now filthy rich thanks to wonderful inventions, wood rike- I mean, WOULD LIKE to offer Bagge family EXACTLY what grumpy stuck-up asshole of said family ordered!" Di Lung arrogantly laughed and explained to his thoroughly bewildered and generally confused new audience, walking (all the way) around to the back of his obscenely well-decorated, thankfully Warner-Brothers-licensed new van and (very, VERY over)dramatically swinging both of its back doors wide open simultaneously to reveal the conspicuously (not to mention terrifyingly) large new laser cannon that he had just recently installed in its back trunk.

"OOO!" Muriel excitedly put her hands together in prayer position and crooned with delight, giddily jumping for joy as she did so.

"HEE HEE HEE...COURAGE IS SO GOING TO GET IT...OH, I JUST CAN'T WAIT, I'M SO EXCITED..." Eustace evilly cackled under his breath as he greedily rubbed his hands together like a dirty little fly and began fantasizing intensely about how much money Di Lung's technology could potentially make him (and how much abuse Courage was more than likely about to be put through by Lung's upcoming experiment on him), grinning maliciously from ear to ear and drooling rabidly at the mere thought of it all the while as Courage tightly clutched his poor little head with both hands and sheepishly whimpered in response.

"OH DEAR GOD, PLEASE SAVE ME..." Courage looked up at the ceiling and horrifiedly thought to himself, putting his OWN hands in prayer position and helplessly trembling with fear.

"Forget stupidly expensive NORMAL therapists that take FOREVER and day to properly evaluate problems of patients; THIS shrink absolutely free of both charge AND patience demand! With just one ZAP of beam this device shoot from cartoonishly decorated energy nozzle, all of patients' personal demons instantly, true to slang, SHRINK into nothing! Allow me, Di Lung, to demonstrate!" Di Lung propped his (right) girlishly flower-sandal-clad foot up on the outer rim of his van's back trunk and smugly explained, concluding his explanation by respectively pulling out a life-size human (male) mannequin (whose featureless, pure-white face had been crudely labeled "CHILDHOOD TRAUMA" in black Sharpie ink) and his Shrink/Grow Ray remote from the left and right pockets of his shorts and using the remote's SHRINK button to make his new size-alteration cannon literally "shrink" said mannequin to roughly the size of a peanut.

"Look, it now so small I crush between fingers with ease! OOHOOAHHHEHEHEHEEH!" Di Lung arrogantly shoved his SGR remote back into his right pocket and began laughing maniacally as he theatrically picked up his pitifully shrunken-down mannequin (that he had just recently spent roughly fifty stinking dollars to buy online) with his left hand and effortlessly crushed it into dust between the thumb and index finger of said hand (considering how freakishly bony his OWN hands, as well as his entire body structure in general, were, THAT right there was indeed rather terrifying to say the least).

"HooOOOOOO!" Courage loudly howled, whimpered and moaned in terror, placing his hands over his mouth and hyperactively dancing back and forth on his tippy-toes in a fit of panic.

"MURIEL, FOR GOD'S SAKE, HE MEANS IT LITERALLY, YOU BLASTED LOON!" Courage continued frantically dancing on his tippy-toes and began unintelligibly blabbering to Muriel in his native dog language, finishing with a loud, high-pitched whine and a rather embarrassingly tight wrapping of both of his arms around Muriel's right leg.

"What's that you say, Courage? For dogs' aches, he treats them liberally, New Master Lung?" Muriel placed her right index finger over her mouth and asked Courage curiously.

"NOOOOOO!" Courage continued dancing on his tippy-toes, desperately clutched his head with both of his hands, tilted said head straight up toward the ceiling yet again and loudly shrieked in unbelievable-ignorance-induced agony, his nose actually bleeding ever-so-slightly from a combination of Eustace's sheer callous-ness and Muriel's sheer stupidity.

"Anyway, since I myself have childhood riddled with rather embarrassing stories (AUTHOR'S NOTE: Journey To The Center Of Joyce, for example, which is an incredibly short black-and-white furry vore comic that he had admittedly sloppily but still rather impressively hand-drawn entirely from scratch back in his original homeland of China when he was only five years old and therefore was still far too naive at that point in his life to understand just how cloyingly blatant, albeit even MORE cloyingly cutesy, of fetish porn much of the strip's content, despite having largely comedic intent behind itself at heart, ultimately came across as being; luckily, however, what little still remains of said strip can now be found as a mysteriously unfinished last-minute re-upload of itself in the comic section of Aryion despite the fact that he permanently deleted the original upload from the Internet due to how humiliating it became to him in retrospect once he got older), I can gladly confirm that this device work like absolute CHARM! Seriously, just LOOK how happy Lung now is! OOHOOAHHHEHEHEHEEH!" Di Lung laughed maniacally yet again, baring his freakishly shiny sparkling-white teeth (probably one of the only things about him that WASN'T stereotypically Asian) at Courage and the Bagges in classic infomercial style and obviously wanting to selfishly take out his yesteryear guilt on Courage through something more-than-likely VERY closely related to the comic mentioned above in the author's note, if not an outright re-enactment of its main events (wink, wink).

"So go ahead and bring your no-good-ass dog out to front lawn for experiment- I mean, TREATMENT! I sincerely promise to make that pathetic joke of dog better, not only in mental sense but also EVERY sense! In fact, I take him to better place, period! Or worse place, preferably! ERRAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH!" Di Lung began laughing even more maniacally than before, gesturing so ridiculously melodramatically with his hands in the process that he "accidentally" karate-busted his own five-hundred-dollar video-camera drone with them, thus hilariously abruptly ending his transmission and sending Eustace's television screen into static mode.

"STUPID CHEAP AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY!" Di Lung furiously (not to mention childishly) jumped up and down atop his already broken drone and screamed at it in a demented, anime-esque temper tantrum while Eustace irritatedly growled much of the same at his television under his breath, rather surprisingly and relievingly deciding to actually walk over to said television and turn it off himself without having to use his remote and/or Muriel for once. Needless to say, Muriel looked positively elated by this after how dreadfully low of standards the grouchy old codger had set for himself over her many, many agonizingly long, painful and drawn-out years with him.

(opening drumbeat of Crisis Theme begins)

"I KNOW I'm not gonna like this!" Courage submissively shrugged his shoulders and nervously sighed in surprisingly clear English while Muriel "reassuringly" patted him on the head with her left palm.

"Oh, don't WORRY about it, dearie!" Muriel teasingly swung her right hand down at Courage like a cat paw and giggled (unintentionally) at his expense.

"By the time this therapy's over with, you'll be an utterly CHANGED man, I can assure you!" Muriel continued giggling, also continuing to lovingly pat and stroke Courage's head with her aforementioned left hand as she did so. "Why, you'll have so much emotional baggage lifted from that poor little head of yours that it'll make you feel literally WEIGHTLESS!" she merrily, naively explained, somehow still blissfully unaware of what Di Lung was ACTUALLY planning to do to the emotionally abused and neglected little bastard.

(Crisis Theme monumentally intensifies at the exact moment at which Muriel finishes delivering her "weightless" line)

"GULP!" Courage nauseatedly clutched his chest with both of his hands and audibly, literally swallowed his pride at the mere thought of what Muriel was unknowingly implying.

"Heh heh, WORKS FOR ME!" Eustace chuckled contentedly, grabbing Courage by his noodly, spindly little legs and forcefully, backwardly dragging him over to his house's front door.

"NO, STOP, I'M BEGGING YOU! PLEASE DON'T DO THIS TO ME, PLEASE! I'M FAR TOO YOUNG AND CHEWY! AND I HAVEN'T EVEN GIVEN THIS CRAZY BASTARD ANY FREAKING CONSENT, FOR FREUD'S SAKE!" Courage hopelessly cried and screamed in his native dog language, animalistically digging his finger-claws and teeth into the house's wooden floor in an ever-so-pathetically pointless last-ditch effort to try and stop Eustace from being able to move him any further across said floor.

"Huh? What's that you just blabbered at the tops of your ever-so-wondrously boundless lungs, Courage?" Muriel scratched her head with her right index finger and asked Courage curiously as Eustace finally finished dragging him over to the front door, maliciously cackling all the while and briefly letting go of Courage's frantically flailing and wiggling left leg so that he could reach out behind himself and open said door with his corresponding hand.

"OH, FORGET IT! I'M DEAD AS A DODO ANYHOW!" Courage screamed and cried uproariously in yet more full-blown English, desperately attempting to crawl out of Eustace's grip with his own (painfully inflamed and bleeding) hands while the crotchety old man just sadistically laughed and spat at him in response, scooping him up with both hands and eagerly readying himself to literally throw Courage right out the window (well, technically the front door in this case, but I believe you get the idea nevertheless).

"SAYONARA, SUCKER! EHH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEEEH!" Eustace mockingly jeered at Courage's expense, chucking him right across his own front porch and sending him tumbling a ludicrously long and painful distance across the barren, rocky ground outside as Eustace rudely and incredibly loudly slammed the front door behind him, tightly locking it with no less than six different mechanisms as he did so.

"Is that REALLY necessary?!" Muriel infuriatedly tossed her arms straight up into the air and yelled at Eustace.

"I'll tell you what IS, woman; MY BREAKFAST!" Eustace brattishly tossed his own arms straight up into the air and yelled back at Muriel.

"OOOoooooo..." Courage dejectedly, bloodshot-eyedly whimpered and moaned in pain as he exhaustedly laid face-down on the ground, struggling to even stay awake.

"Well, well, WELL...what we have HERE?" Di Lung snidely chuckled, eagerly approaching the now-helplessly-and-ever-so-fearfully-trembling Courage one step at a time and casting a frightfully ominous shadow (a "curtain of cruelty", if you will) over him as he did so. Meanwhile, Courage just buried his head underneath his hands and hatefully cursed his own existence under his breath in response.

(Crisis Theme finally stops playing)

"My intellect-challenged arch-nemesis yet again, be you not? HA HA, how QUAINT indeed!" Di Lung looked down and spitefully laughed at Courage, forcefully stomping his sad, sobbing face into the ground several times with his sandal-clad right foot before finally finishing the combo by brutally smearing his crying, whimpering face back and forth in the dirt with his equally sandal-clad left foot.

"Worthless idiot, you bring shame to family of Mr. Bagge and brilliance of Mr. Lung for LAST time, you understand?" Di Lung angrily and contemptuously snarled at Courage, kicking him in his bruised, battered face (with his right foot) so hard that it caused his entire body to flip right over from face-down position into face-up position while Lung just sadistically smirked with delight all the while.

"Umm...w-WHAT are you planning to do with me post-shrink, pardon my asking?" Courage exhaustedly scraped himself back up onto his feet and nervously asked Di Lung.

"Oh, that SIMPLE! Eustace tell me you been VERY un-appreciative of Muriel's tireless effort to pamper you to death! So I decide the only way for Lung to fix problem is to send stupid, worthless mutt into adoptive granny's body so he KNOW what it like having to cater to everyone so much! FAIR ENOUGH, would you agree?" Di Lung snidely explained to Courage, sarcastically patting him on the head with his left hand in a clearly mocking display of fake affection while making a rather conspicuous masturbation gesture with his right.

"NOT if you're going to just use it as one-dimensional FUEL for your sick SADISM fetish, you narcissistic CREEP!" Courage disgustedly spat at him, sticking out his tongue and loudly going "BLECH" at the mere thought of just HOW abhorrently far Mr. Lung was inevitably going to end up taking this ridiculously contrived and elaborate evil plan of his.

"We in episode written by XanderMartin98 now! GET USED TO IT!" Di Lung hatefully sneered at Courage, scooping the poor dog up into his arms and irritatedly carrying him over to his Mystery Machine so that he could digitally teleport a nice big halfway-filled (metallic and probably self-refrigerated) glass of ice-cold water from its passenger-seat glove box, take Courage back around to the still-wide-open back side of the van, sit him down in criss-cross position right in front of said glass, and then finally ask him an incredibly pretentious and overused philosophical question about it.

"So tell me, is water cup half EMPTY or half FULL?" Di Lung teasingly asked Courage, yanking out his SGR remote from his right pocket with his corresponding hand and intently pointing his size-alteration cannon directly at the exact spot in which Courage was now sitting with his left while Courage audibly gulped and feebly shivered in apprehensive fear.

"Uhh...w-well, half EMPTY, I suppose?" Courage tossed his arms out beside himself in a classic "I got nothing" gesture and nervously chuckled.

"WRONG! TRICK QUESTION! I'm AFRAID correct answer was half-FOOL! OOHOOAHHHEHEHEHEEH!" Di Lung laughed like a stereotypically Chinese monkey, forcefully slamming his right thumb onto the SGR remote's SHRINK button and effectively reducing the resoundingly face-palming Courage to the size of a pitifully small ant.

"HA HA HA HA HA! Think you so BIG and SMART now, DO you, stupid American?" Di Lung arrogantly laughed at Courage, involuntarily spitting all over his face in the process as he squatted down into frog position, pinched him by the ears with the thumb and index finger of his right hand (causing the poor little dog to loudly squeak in pain and begin wildly flailing his scrawny little limbs all over the place, naturally), lifted him what seemed like hundreds and hundreds of feet up off of the ground while doing much of the same to the water glass with his left hand, then finally dropped him into that very same glass that he had just (trick) questioned him about in a truly supreme act of dramatic irony.

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliter-AAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Courage tightly closed his eyes, put his hands into prayer position yet again and began dramatically, internally monologuing to himself as Lung lifted him the aforementioned ludicrously extreme distance straight up into the air...then completely lost his composure altogether and began screaming for dear life like an absolute lunatic as Lung finally let go of him, sending him freefalling what seemed like literally two hundred sodding feet straight down into the water glass until FINALLY, at long last, he landed face-first into said glass' freezing-cold contents with a nice big SPLASH!

"See, THIS what you idiots get for eating hot dogs all the time! Now YOU a COLD one! OOHOOAHHHEHEHEHEEH!" Di Lung laughed insufferably hard at his own stupid and pompous joke while Courage angrily rolled his eyes in response, folding his arms over his chest and meekly shivering from how freakishly cold Lung's water was all the while as Lung dutifully carried both him and the glass that he was now trapped in straight back to Muriel's house so that the REAL meat (beating) of Lung's unspeakably diabolical plan could begin.

"Go on, little doggie, play DEAD for me! Why you no BE dead for Lung while you at it, HUH?!" Lung angrily jeered and ranted at Courage, tightly clutching the water glass in his left hand while hatefully forcing Courage beneath the surface of the water within said glass with his right index finger as the two of them (thankfully) quickly approached Muriel's rather redundantly locked front door.

"MMMPH! URRRK! UGGGH!" Courage limb-flailingly gagged and choked, struggling back to the agonizingly cold water's surface and gasping desperately for air as Lung finally stopped torturing him (well, for the following few SECONDS, at least) as his way of indicating the fact that he and Courage had now finally made it all the way back to Muriel's front door!

"Open the damned DOOR, ya FOOLS!" Lung shook his right fist at the door, violently pounded it several times WITH said fist and angrily yelled at it in frustration, then proceeded to smugly place his right wrist over his corresponding hip and very impatiently tap his right foot in rather disturbingly eager anticipation for Muriel and/or Eustace to FINALLY answer said door.

"Be patient, my dear! I'M coming!" Muriel happily reassured Lung, somewhat annoyedly unlocking all six of the door's locking mechanisms in miracle order (from top to bottom) and enthusiastically swinging it wide open to find...Di Lung holding a glass of water, with Courage (seemingly) nowhere to be found whatsoever?

"OH, MY! Pardon my asking, but where on Earth is my dear little DOG, young man?" Muriel put her hands into prayer position and worriedly asked Di Lung.

"YEAH, what IS all this nonsense you've been spewing about (makes sarcastic 'quotation' hand gesture) SHRINKING your patients' personal issues into nothingness anyway? You weren't talking about shrinking the patients THEMSELVES by any chance, WERE you?" Eustace lethargically walked out from the kitchen to Muriel's front door (in very much the exact same manner that Muriel herself had presumably just exhibited), scratched the corresponding side of his head with his right hand and "confusedly" asked Di Lung, blatantly feigning ignorance of the matter's fine details but in a way that Muriel was sadly STILL far too gullible and incompetent to actually be able to pick up on.

"Follow me into kitchen and take seats with me at dining table! There, I explain!" Lung chuckled merrily as he smugly waltzed right into Muriel's house straight through the front door, then proceeded to casually stroll right on over to the aforementioned dining table in said kitchen as if HE were the house's owner.

"Um, Eustace? No offense, but this guy DEFINITELY comes across as being more than a little stuck-up and holier-than-thou if you ask me..." Muriel leaned over toward Eustace, cupped her left hand around his right ear and nervously whispered into it, prompting a WAY overly excited response of "why, that's JUST the way I LIKE them" from him as the two of them obediently followed Lung to that very same dining table that he had just mentioned and politely took their seats in a neatly triangular formation around it (from the top view: with Muriel in the top-center one of the distinctly wooden table's six equally wooden chairs, while Lung and Eustace occupied its bottom-left and bottom-right seats).

"I'm only going to ask you ONE more time, good sir; WHERE is our precious, sweet, lovely little dog and WHAT in God's graceful name have you done with him?" Muriel put her hands on her hips and annoyedly asked Di Lung while Eustace went over to the refrigerator and got out two more pre-prepared (regular, not to mention actually FULL) glasses of water for Di Lung and himself, then "innocently" whistlingly strode right back over to his seat and distributed both of said glasses straight to their intended chuggers, prompting a comically thick-accented response of "THANK YOU, YA FOOL" from Lung while the sadistic, nationalist bastard smugly pushed his Courage-concealing metal glass right over to where Muriel was sitting.

"Oh, do NOT worry, dear lass; I simply use ancient Chinese voodoo rituals to coax out personal demons from patient's ears, then use size-change gun to shrink them too small to ever be able to bother anyone again! It TOTALLY legit medical practice, I ASSURE you!" Di Lung bald-facedly lied through his pearly-white teeth, trying desperately not to bust out laughing at the mere thought of what he was saying while Eustace also did much of the same, winking at Lung in the process to remind him that this whole fiasco was indeed rehearsed (well, as far as THEIR parts in it were concerned, at least) while Muriel just absentmindedly yet still ever-so-adorably-elatedly folded her hands straight up and crooned "WOW" in response. Meanwhile, Courage was desperately crying and screaming for help within Muriel's glass, sadly to no avail due to a combination of how pathetically small Di Lung had just made him and how incredibly weak Muriel's sense of hearing was.

"That still doesn't answer her other more IMPORTANT question, however; where IS that mangy little mutt?" Eustace "grouchily" yelled at Di Lung as Courage became completely exhausted and helplessly, dizzily began to ever-so-slightly sink beneath the surface of Muriel's water (basically the only part of him that actually was still above the water's surface was his ears, unfortunately enough) from a combination of intense hypothermia and how embarrassingly long of a time he had just spent doggy-paddling for dear life.

"In my van, where he now is reflecting on how much life sucked for him prior to my recent treatment of him, of course! As if it really suck any less NOW, need I mention!" Di Lung swung his right hand straight down like a cat paw and teasingly giggled at Muriel, causing all "three" of the table's occupants to loudly, merrily and uproariously laugh together in unison while Courage shiveringly, terrifiedly clenched his fervently chattering teeth, squinted his eyes shut and tightly covered his ears with his hands to stop his poor little eardrums from bursting, causing him to become fully submerged and sink deep beneath the water's surface (in laymen's terms, begin to rapidly drown to death).

"Well, I sure do hope he's having good care taken of him, at least..." Muriel obliviously wrapped her left hand around her glass and worriedly sighed while Courage screamed in terror and immediately began paddling his way straight back up to the water's surface in a pathetically futile last-ditch effort to save himself upon seeing her massive, water-ripple-distorted face materialize itself directly above the glass as she lifted it off of the table and began slowly but surely bringing it straight up to her eerily inviting lips.

"Oh yeah, REAL good care! OOHOOAHHHEHEHEHEEH!" Di Lung diabolically laughed at Courage's expense, with Eustace spitefully following suit as Muriel worriedly joined the admittedly more-than-slightly-fishy two of them in the act of merrily clinking their water glasses together in a traditional toast to Southern hospitality and Christian faith so that they could then proceed to gluttonously chug the contents of said glasses right down in one fell series of gulps without even the SLIGHTEST discernible hint of a second thought.

"MURIEL, IT'S ME! COURAGE! PLEASE DON'T DRINK ME, I'M BEGGING YOU! MURRRIELLL! (GLUG! GLUG! GLUG!)" Courage briefly resurfaced in Muriel's water with an incredibly loud (for his size) gasp for air, flailed his spindly little limbs every which way like an absolute lunatic, and began bloodshot-eyedly screaming for dear life at the tops of his ever-loving lungs for Muriel to save him, sadly STILL being way too small for the bloated dolt (or Eustace) to be able to hear him while Di Lung sadistically chuckled under his breath in response.

"Well, like they say in Scotland, BOTTOMS UP!" Muriel merrily giggled, tightly closing her already incredibly near-sighted eyes and carelessly pouring the entire contents of her water glass straight into her gaping, ravenous mouth while Eustace and Di Lung did much of the same...except that THEIR glasses didn't have their own dearly beloved adoptive CHILD figures helplessly trapped within them, mind you.

"OH GOD, NO, NO, NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NOOO!" Courage began horrifiedly stammering and (then) shrieking to himself as Muriel tilted her glass directly into her mouth, causing the resulting stream of forcefully rushing water to inexorably wash him right into said mouth and thus straight down her throat from there.

"YES!" Courage squeaked with false relief as, upon having been washed all the way along Muriel's massive, fleshy tongue into the soft palate area at the back of her mouth, he suddenly caught sight of Muriel's wholesomely, welcomingly dangling uvula and desperately attempted to reach straight up with his arms and grab the weird little thing with his hands...but alas, the water's elevation was simply far too low, and its current at the moment was also rather clearly far, far, FAR too fast.

"NOOOOOOOOO!" Courage ear-splittingly howled in absolute misery, uselessly attempting to doggy-paddle against the water's current as he was indignantly washed right down Muriel's throat while Eustace and Di Lung "annoyedly" yelled "WE'RE BORED" and ran upstairs so that they could lock themselves in the attic and indulgently spy on Courage's revolting new predicament (definitely not for fetishistic reasons, we swear) using the "Automatic Courage Stalker" video-recording app on Lung's Evil-Empress-enchanted MacBook Pro laptop.

"Oh my...was...was that my dear COURAGE'S voice I just heard? Nah, I'm more likely just going SENILE!" Muriel worriedly gasped and whispered to herself with both of her hands placed tightly over her mouth in a rather distinct expression of truly frightful dread...then just shrugged her shoulders and dismissively laughed it off.

"GEE, you fricking THINK?!" Courage, who was now stuck in yet ANOTHER ridiculously long free-fall, infuriatedly screamed as he repeatedly and very painfully ricocheted off of the nauseatingly moist and fleshy walls of Muriel's gullet until finally, at long last, he groggily, green-facedly landed (face-first) in the poor old lady's immensely bloated and unhealthily-dieted stomach with a nice, big...CRACK?

(In The Hall Of The Mountain King starts playing in background)

"UGGGHHH...this is already officially the worst day of my entire LIFE, and it's barely even STARTED yet..." Courage lightheadedly moaned and exhaustedly groaned to himself, flipping himself right back up onto his feet and tightly clutching his aching, thoroughly depressed head with both hands as Muriel's massive lake of stomach acid bubbled and churned intensely all around him.

"Good thing I landed on this Ritz cracker...no, wait, it's actually the slightly smaller and presumably only remaining half of a super-sized double-chunk chocolate-chip Chips Ahoy cookie with EXTRA added sugar...MAN, for someone so incredibly talented in the art of cooking, Muriel sure as Hell does need to EAT better..." Courage worriedly looked down at the disgustingly processed, accidentally-swallowed-whole piece of dessert food that he was now INCREDIBLY luckily standing atop and rather hypocritically judged Muriel for having also very recently eaten so many other extremely fattening and/or cholesterol-loaded things of remarkably similar natures (doughnuts, thickly and traditionally buttered bagels, pizza, summer sausage, potato AND tortilla chips, Ritz crackers themselves, macaroni and cheese, bacon and eggs, baloney/salami sandwiches, almost every possible type of dessert food imaginable, et cetera) as he (seemingly) pointlessly glanced around himself to make sure that no one was watching him (SPOILER WARNING: Eustace and Di Lung WERE) before finally proceeding to sneakily dig out one of his makeshift new raft's enormous chocolate chunks (that Muriel had ever-so-gluttonously forgotten to chew while eating said "raft", of course) with his bare, filthy hands and just-AS-gluttonously gobble it up himself, getting greasy chocolate stains all over his face (not to mention his hands) and burping extremely loudly in the process.

"EYUH HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE!" Courage childishly laughed at his own burp for lack of anything better to do, opening his mouth super EXTRA wide so that ALL of his viewers could see the disgustingly thick strands of chocolate that he now had thickly interwoven all across both comically oversized, grotesquely disfigured and hideously rotten rows of his teeth while Eustace and Di Lung revoltedly gagged in response up in the Bagge residence's attic.

"Yep, just as I expected from typical AMERICANS! Muriel? Courage? BOTH FAT, UGLY, STUPID, WORTHLESS FUCKS!" Di Lung bigotedly snarled at Courage and his disgusting antics as he and Eustace laid face-down together on the floor of the attic and creepily, more-than-somewhat pervertedly watched him do exactly what had just been depicted in the previous paragraph on the former's aforementioned Magical MacBook (which he had literally pulled straight from his left shorts pocket, no less; don't even ask me how).

"See? TOLD you I was the only one in shape here!" the already rather unhealthily skinny Eustace arrogantly cackled to himself while the downright freakishly bone-thin Lung just wordlessly rolled his (slant) eyes in response; meanwhile, Courage had already thoroughly licked his hands squeaky-clean and begun frantically racking his poor, POOR little brain for ways to escape from his ungodly embarrassing new situation.

"Hmm, let's see here..." Courage quizzically rested his chin on his left hand and puzzled to himself until his puzzler was (even MORE) sore. "Should I sprinkle her stomach acid with laxatives and then get myself pooped out through her intestines? Nah, way too gross and embarrassing even WITH cartoon logic to protect me...OOH, should I perhaps instead settle on getting myself SNEEZED out through her nose? Nah, same diff...or wait, what if I just simply took a nice, long, boiling acid bath and KILLED myself right here and now...granted, I sure do WISH I could, but then the episode wouldn't be able to end properly..." he began indecisively rambling to himself, repeatedly shaking his head "no" all the while.

"BLAH, BLAH, BLAH!" Eustace impatiently yelled into Di Lung's left ear.

"MUST...NOT...SLAP...ACROSS GIANT UGLY-CHINNED FACE..." Di Lung seethingly clenched his teeth and thought to himself, struggling to remain focused on the recording.

"Oh, I know! What if I just leapt onto Muriel's stomach wall and began climbing around on it like Spider-Man, thus (loudly, blushingly swallows his pride as he places his hands tightly over his mischievously grinning mouth, trying hard not to laugh at the mere thought) tickling her tummy and causing her to laugh so hard that she accidentally inhales me into her lungs? (beat) Oh, give me a freaking BREAK, that's literally THE stupidest god-damned thing I've ever heard in my entire sad, miserable farce of a LIFE!" Courage tightly clutched his OWN, ahem, "tummy" with both hands and uproariously laughed himself to joyful tears, putting literally all of his utmost restraint into NOT hysterically rolling on the floor of his "raft" and frantically pounding his fists against it as he did so.

"Why, that PATHETIC little IMBECILE...how DARE he insult my work in such utterly degrading fashion? Why, I'd like to see HIM draw something even HALF as good as embarrassing childhood comic strip of mine he's referring to!" Di Lung hatefully sneered and growled with pent-up rage, clenching both his teeth AND his fists alike and turning distinctly bright-red in the face with equal parts anger AND humiliation as white-hot jets of steam began hazardously shooting out from both of his bizarrely oversized ears.

"NOW you're talking! This means WAR!" Eustace symbolically rammed his right fist into his left palm and cackled every bit as evilly and smugly as could be.

"Just you wait; filthy little ocean-hopping, tree-climbing GOOK bring war upon SELF before he even KNOW it!" Di Lung hissed INCREDIBLY insensitively through his clenched teeth while Courage, at long last, FINALLY had the ONE golden idea to rule them all!

"OF COURSE! How could I be so BLIND?!" Courage threw his arms out beside himself and laughed hysterically once more as he realized just how simple the optimal solution to his newfound problem actually was, with his idea being cartoonishly indicated by a giant, brightly shining lightbulb suddenly appearing in midair directly above his head.

"Remember, kids; when all else fails, drink Red Bull and give yourself a nice, big set of WINGS!" Courage chuckled merrily, curiously reaching into and then diligently digging around in his literal ass with his left hand before finally pulling a nice, big can of said Red Bull right out from it, popping it open with his right hand and guzzling it down like an absolute diabetes-ridden pig before finally crushing it into a diminutive aluminum pancake with his forehead and then carelessly tossing it behind himself into Muriel's stomach-acid lake.

"HMPH! Let me tell you, REAL men have NO need for silly overglorified steroids like THOSE stupid drinks!" Di Lung revoltedly scoffed while Eustace agreeingly nodded his head.

"Oh, sweet HEAVENS...never before have I felt so PRETTY..." Courage gaily, nakedly fluttered himself straight up into the air with his lovely new angel wings and overjoyedly sang while Eustace and Lung childishly snickered numerous obligatory homophobic jokes to each other in response (note that this whole incredibly embarrassing new misadventure of Courage's WAS, in fact, being automatically RECORDED for the later sadistic viewing pleasure of social media dwellers worldwide by Mr. Lung's laptop), unable to believe for even ONE second that the little runt's new plan actually WAS, in fact, going to work.

(In The Hall Of The Mountain King intensifies)

"Alright, time to whip up some good old-fashioned TURBULENCE in here before it's too late! It ain't gonna be pretty OR dignified in the slightest, but at least it actually has a fairly decent chance of WORKING!" Courage assertively commanded himself, borderline-uncontrollably flying around and around the inside of Muriel's stomach at what seemed to be quite nearly the speed of sound and therefore creating a massive wind cyclone within said stomach while Muriel's digestive acid began to wildly bubble and slosh all over the place in response.

"Oh dearie me, I've got the STRANGEST feeling in my belly right now...I sure do wonder what it could BE?" Muriel got up out of her seat (that she had rather amusingly fallen asleep in after Eustace and Lung had left for the attic), confusedly scratched the corresponding side of her soon-to-be-infiltrated head with her right hand, and curiously thought out loud to herself as the heaping mass of bubbly, foamy fizz that Courage had just created in her stomach overloaded her chest with air and thus sent said air rapidly flying straight up her throat, where it then came out through her mouth in only THE most adorably loud, undignified and generally obnoxious (cough, Lung and Eustace themselves, cough) of ways.

"BLOOOOOOGH!" Muriel clutched her chest with both hands and loudly burped, sending Courage quite literally flying straight back up her gullet while he dramatically outstretched his arms beside himself in the classic "T-Pose" and happily squealed "WHEE" with exuberant delight...that is, until Muriel suddenly violently hiccuped mid-burp due to her feather allergies, with the resulting inhalation sending Courage shriekingly careening straight back down into her trachea and somehow miraculously causing him to accidentally do a perfectly angled bank shot off of the left wall of said trachea into Muriel's right bronchial tube!

"Oh dear, this is NOT going to end well..." Courage frightenedly gasped, fearing deeply for Muriel's safety as the secondary energizing effect of his energy drink suddenly reached its peak, rendering him COMPLETELY unable to control himself as he began manically and impossibly-hyperactively darting all around the inside of Muriel's right lung, hitting literally ONE measly branch near the top of her bronchial tree and therefore sending himself on a ravagingly rigorous ricochet rampage through the whole damned thing!

"Oh (COUGH), dearie me, I think I might (CHOKE) be coming down with a (WHEEZE) case of (GASP) bronchitis!" Muriel worriedly stammered to herself, squatting down onto her left knee and clutching her upper chest tightly with both of her hands as she desperately struggled not to pass out from how much damage Courage was now causing to her respiratory system.

"I (OOF) KNEW (OWW) I (D'OH) shouldn't (URK) have (GAH) let (ACK) Eustace (OUCH) sign (EWW) up (YICK) for (OOGH) this!" Courage disappointedly admonished himself as he began uncontrollably zipping and ricocheting headlong into no less than SEVEN agonizingly literal (not to mention unbelievably durable) branches of Muriel's bronchial tree (knocking quite a few near-instantly regenerating feathers off of his wings and causing them to hazardously scatter all over the inside of her lung as a result, naturally), then got consecutively slingshotted off of no less than THREE of her alveolus clusters in yet ANOTHER horrifically painful, demeaning and nauseating chain reaction, sending him careening straight into and therefore through the lower-right one of her four exaggeratedly large main pulmonary veins (which he naturally got inside by accidentally busting a nice big Courage-shaped hole right through it, causing Muriel to loudly yell "OWW" in response; luckily, however, said hole healed itself immediately afterward) into the right ventricle of her adorably big and meaty (yet repugnantly cholesterol-loaded) heart.

"UGH...the things I do for love..." Courage dejectedly thought to himself, his already extremely intense fear for both himself and Muriel alike being heightened by the now ear-splittingly loud sound of the latter's increasingly fast heartbeat as he tightly held his breath and quickly swam his way up into Muriel's pulmonary artery, from which he was then pumped straight over (through a rather frightfully large and almost-complete cholesterol blockage IN said artery, need I mention) into Muriel's left lung while her brain suddenly began transmitting an ultrasonic INTRUDER ALERT message to her immune system.

"I sincerely apologize if this hurts, Mom, but I've got PLACES to be!" Courage regretfully thought to himself as he cut a nice clean hole through the left-lung portion of Muriel's pulmonary artery with his (right foot's) toe claws, prompting yet another extremely loud yelling of "OWW" from her while Courage sneakily slipped through said hole, lazily sealed the wound back up with a nice big roll of duct tape from his personal Hammerspace portal and then, after punctuating said act with his usual delirious laughter, took off flying yet again through Muriel's left lung, where he was now being pursued by an irrevocably angry swarm of exactly ten horrifyingly large white blood cells that Muriel's body represented as a bunch of rolling-pin-wielding ghost clones of herself.

(In The Hall Of The Mountain King intensifies even further)

"Now (AUGH) now (ICK), nice (GRR) Muriels (BAH)...SWEET (URGH) Muriels..." Courage awkwardly teased the Muriel Cells in an attempt to calm them down as he deliberately ricocheted himself off of as many branches and alveolus clusters of Muriel's bronchial tree as possible in order to confuse the cells' hunting tactics, once again filling one of Muriel's entire lungs with feathers and causing her to nearly pass out due to the sudden lack of suitably clean oxygen for them as he finally bounced himself straight back up through Muriel's left bronchial tube into her trachea, where the rather oddly secondary energizing effect of his energy drink suddenly began to ever-so-slightly wear off on him as the Muriel Cells furiously chased him straight back up Muriel's visibly allergy-inflamed throat (don't worry; her immune system somehow managed to rather quickly take care of the feathers that Courage had just left in her lungs as well, strangely enough).

"HooWEEEeee!" Courage fearfully whimpered as he looked down into the lovely set of vocal cords that he had just flown past and saw how frightfully quickly the Muriel Cells were now gaining on him.

"Oh dear (GASP) lord, WHAT is (COUGH) happening to me (WHEEZE) now? Why, I think I'm just about to (CHOKE) keel right over...my, my, I never even KNEW I had allergies this bad, whatever they may be..." Courage VERY worryingly heard Muriel weakly rasping through said vocal cords, prompting the obligatory cry-out of "I'LL SAVE YOU" from him as he frantically made his way back up into Muriel's mouth area while the Muriel Cells relentlessly continued chasing after him all the while.

"Uhh...just for the record, are you SURE this is going as planned?" Eustace confusedly scratched the corresponding side of his head with his right hand and rather deeply worriedly asked Di Lung, actually starting to become genuinely frightened by just how utterly inhuman and depraved Lung's way of doing things like this positively insane new experiment of his really, REALLY was.

"Silly farmer, of COURSE! Why, it almost EXACTLY like Journey To Center Of Joyce already, only slightly more realistic!" Di Lung amusedly laughed at Courage's already immensely life-threatened expense (in addition to Muriel's), yanking out a nice big wad of 20-dollar bills from his left pocket and hypnotically waving it in Eustace's ignorant douchebag face.

"ARF! ARF! WOOF!" Eustace got down on all fours like an actual dog and began loudly barking with delight; needless to say, he was also intensely drooling and panting like a dog at the mere sight of Lung's money (that he was clearly offering as a bribery reward for Eustace to keep quiet about this little Doctor Of Death charade of his and not tell ANYONE else about it, naturally).

"Oh, COME ON!" Courage whined disgustedly, flapping his wings as frantically as he possibly could as he took an admittedly rather clever detour through the nasopharynx passageway at the back of Muriel's mouth area into her main nasal passageway...only for the Muriel Cells to then instinctively follow him directly through THAT route as well!

"Running...out...of energy...don't...think...I can...make it..." Courage began exhaustedly, breathlessly moaning and gasping as he hopelessly, nearly-unconsciously collapsed onto the revoltingly hairy and mucousy (not to mention also allergy-inflamed) floor of Muriel's left nostril, prompting the Muriel Cells to, upon finally catching him, merge themselves together into one slightly bigger and WAY more powerful super-cell (letter-M-emblazoned Superman uniform and all), which then proceeded to swing its rolling pin straight at Courage's reflexively shrieking face with all of its newfound, unified might and ironically HELP him by effectively hitting him the REST of the way through Muriel's nasal passageway into the ever-so-deceptively-humble abode of...yup, you guessed it, her brain!

"GYAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Courage screamed in agony, with roughly half of his entire wings' worth of feathers having just been knocked off and therefore littered into Muriel's poor, aching nose by how brutally hard he had just been struck as he was sent repeatedly, very painfully and EXTREMELY nauseatingly bouncing off of the inner walls of Muriel's left nostril on his way through said nostril into her brain, getting humiliatingly soaked with booger juice all the while as Lung and Eustace continued hatefully laughing and jeering at his expense.

(In The Hall Of The Mountain King finally comes to a close)

"HOOOooo..." Courage, who now had about ninety percent of his teeth shattered in addition to having HORRIBLY bloodshot (black) eyes, heavily ruffled fur, barely functional wings and a clearly smashed and bleeding nose, lifelessly sprawled himself out face-down and whimpered in almost-unbearable pain as he finally landed atop Muriel's (seemingly) woefully under-sized brain with a great big mucousy SPLASH, with the Muriel Super-Cell that had just sent him careening directly into said location following behind him at a definitely more-than-slightly alarming rate to say the least.

"Wow, I expected it to be so much smaller..." Courage smugly thought to himself, taking mental note of said brain outwardly appearing to be only about half the size of the cranium that housed it as he sneakily faked being dead so that the Muriel Super-Cell wouldn't notice that he actually WAS, in fact, still alive (despite being a blatant expy of Superman, it fortunately lacked any of his actual powers besides: flight, which the Muriel Cells already had by default, super hearing when compared to that of Muriel proper, which the Muriel Cells also already had by default, and super strength).

"INTRUDER CONFIRMED DEAD. RETURN TO BLOODSTREAM." the Muriel Super-Cell robotically commanded itself, flying straight back into Muriel's now intensely allergy-inflamed left nostril at the EXACT moment at which she was literally RIGHT about to sneeze from all of the feathers that Courage had just accidentally left in her nose.

"AAH...AAAH...AAAAH...AAAAAH...AAAAAAH-CHOOOOOO!" Muriel got back up onto (both of) her feet, pulled out her beloved handkerchief from who-knows-where, and then violently sneezed into it (propelling herself backward several feet in the process), thankfully getting rid of the super-cell along with the feathers (in both her nose AND lungs) and (most of) her accursed snot congestion as she did so.

"AHH...that made me feel SO much better..." Muriel wiped the (cold) sweat off of her forehead with her right arm, took a nice deep breath and merrily sighed with relief.

"EYUHHHAHEHHEEHAHAAH!" Courage crossed his thickly bloodshot eyes and laughed maniacally, once again proudly displaying his abhorrently ugly teeth (as well as his extreme mental instability, natch) to his viewers as literally every single one of his injuries somehow instantaneously healed themselves mid-laugh. "Again, the things I do for love..." he devastatedly, tremblingly buried his head beneath his hands and helplessly cried/sobbed to himself, having already quite nearly forgotten what true love was due to the way in which Eustace and Di Lung were now treating him (as in even WORSE than they normally did, impressively enough).

"Oh, poor Muriel...my sweet massive cupcake...I sure hope that pompous, bigoted ass-wipe that snuck me in here will let me back OUT of you as soon as possible so that I can't torture you anymore...or more importantly so that YOU can't torture ME anymore, for that matter..." Courage exasperatedly scraped himself back up onto his feet and sympathetically whispered to himself as he looked into Muriel's eyes (which were represented as literal giant windows in her head, naturally) and saw just how frightfully sad and worried the expression that was being displayed on them really DID, in fact, look.

"HMPH...I always knew that those scrawny little scoundrels (Eustace and Di Lung) were up to absolutely NO good in the slightest! Looks like it's about HIGH time that I went upstairs and CHECKED on whatever it is those two are up to in the attic right now..." Muriel angrily muttered to herself, dusting her dress off with her hands and audaciously marching upstairs to the front door of said attic (from which a revoltingly great deal of sadistic laughter at Courage's expense could clearly be heard emanating) while Courage once again began frantically racking his OWN brain for a solution to his embarrassing predicament, clutching his head with both hands and frantically, shakingly glancing all around himself as he did so.

"Let's see here...what's the most creative thing around here that I can use to contact her...ah, YES! HERE WE GO!" Courage nervously thought to himself as he continued diligently scanning over the inside of Muriel's head with his eyes until finally, at long last, he spotted the exit opening of her right ear's vestibulocochlear nerve, climbing his way down her brain's right hemisphere and eagerly approaching said opening roughly five seconds later.

"AHEM!" Courage loudly cleared his throat and began dignifiedly speaking into Muriel's right ear through its corresponding vestibulocochlear system.

"OH, MY! I must be hearing VOICES now, I've gotten so senile!" Muriel put her left hand over her mouth and gasped in surprise as she made her way up the stairs.

"NO, dammit, it's ME, your best pal COURAGE!" Courage exasperatedly face-palmed himself with his left hand and irritatedly corrected her.

"Well then, what on Earth are you doing in my HEAD?" Muriel confusedly scratched the top of said head with her right hand and curiously asked Courage.

"THAT'S JUST IT! Listen, this whole 'shrink' BS you've gotten yourself wrapped up in WASN'T real! It was a freaking Chinese bootleg SCAM!" Courage frustratedly explained to her.

"How SO, though?" Muriel perplexedly put her left index finger over her mouth and asked him as she finally reached the top of the stairs.

"Oh, for CRYING out loud, do I really have to spell out EVERY SINGLE FREAKING THING ABOUT this fiasco TO you?!" Courage exasperatedly stretched out his lower eyelids with his hands and infuriatedly yelled at Muriel, causing her to put her right hand over her corresponding ear and whimper "OWW" in response.

"Whoops! Sorry to be so rude! EHHEEHEEHEEHEEE!" Courage embarrassedly blushed, put his hands over his mouth and giggled with delight.

"Alright, LOOK; bluntly put, that East Asian guy set us up, okay? For the record, I'm pretty sure that Eustace did too!" Courage nervously explained to Muriel.

"Again, though, you still haven't explained how SO!" Muriel threw her arms out beside herself and annoyedly pointed out.

"Oh, COME ON, haven't you ever realized how formulaic this show is before?!" Courage frustratedly threw his OWN arms out beside himself and admonished her.

"Pray do tell, what do you MEAN?" Muriel put her right index finger over her mouth and curiously asked him.

"Oh, YOU know; almost every single episode starts with me, you and Eustace idly relaxing in the house, then ALL OF A SUDDEN, we get attacked by some weird creature, or just plain douche-nozzle like Mr. INVENTOR here, and then a bunch of hilariously crazy stuff happens while we...actually, mostly I, for the record, desperately try to figure out how to stop the problem that said thing ends up causing for us? Does THAT perhaps ring a bell to you, by any chance?" Courage half-shut his eyes, put his wrists onto his hips and annoyedly, sarcastically asked Muriel.

"Only mildly, I suppose." Muriel shrugged her shoulders and shamefully sighed.

"Well, listen up, then; when that so-called PSYCHIATRIST that you and your crabby old coot of a husband appointed for me said that he was going to, quote-on-quote, SHRINK my personal issues, said issues WEREN'T actually what he was referring to at all! BELIEVE IT OR NOT, he was ACTUALLY talking about ME!" Courage explained to Muriel.

"WHY, though?" Muriel shrugged her shoulders and shamefully sighed yet again.

"Simple; he wanted to shrink me so that he could then sneak me into your body through that obscenely cold beverage that he had offered you just a few minutes earlier; luckily, as opposed to simply being digested in your stomach, I instead settled on causing all KINDS of chaos in your heart and lungs and nearly getting, ahem, PURGED by your immune system as a result! Needless to say, I somehow ended up smack-dab in your freaking BRAIN as a result! YUCK!" Courage continued explaining, then stuck his tongue out and disgustedly gagged for emphasis.

"Say, why aren't you freaking out more noticeably about your current situation, pardon my asking?" Muriel asked Courage curiously as she reluctantly approached the attic door, behind which Eustace and Di Lung could very clearly be heard muttering all sorts of insufferably snide insults, most of them distinctly "stupid dog" related, about Courage.

"Personally, I think a better question would have to be: why aren't YOU freaking out more NOTICEABLY about the fact that I'm inside your blasted CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM right now?! Or the fact that I ostensibly just caused you to quite nearly CHOKE TO DEATH, for that matter?!" Courage infuriatedly threw his arms out beside himself and scolded Muriel.

"Oh, come now, Courage, we've been living in this desolate backwater dump for YEARS now; at this point, I'd say I'm USED to this type of stuff!" Muriel clutched her chest with both hands and merrily, uproariously giggled, thinking back to that one time in particular when the ghost of King Ramses himself had summoned the Plagues Of Egypt onto her house.

"TELL me about it..." Courage VERY agreeingly raised his eyebrows, nodded his head and sighed, thinking back to that time when Freaky Fred had seemingly tried to molest him in Muriel's bathroom (not to mention the blue trumpet-fetus monster that he had once seen in one of his nightmares, or that time when Eustace had gotten afflicted with a body-engulfing mobster-gang foot fungus, or that time when his house had been invaded by a personality-sucking, tentacle-bodied brain monster with a weird pseudo-Mexican accent, or that time when the military had inadvertently planted an explosive mutant cyborg carrot missile into his stomach and then sent their local general into said stomach in a weird Hulk Hogan fetish costume in order to get it out, or that time when Eustace and Muriel had been turned into literal puppets that he later PLAYED with like an absolute psychopath, among COUNTLESS other things).

"Alright, that's it; unlock this godforsaken door and OPEN UP, you two! You've got an AWFUL lot of explaining to do if I do say so myself!" Muriel angrily scolded Eustace and Di Lung, pounding forcefully on the attic door with her left fist while Lung and Eustace briefly looked away from the former's laptop and went "HUH?" in response.

"Sorry, woman; we don't allow fat LARD bags in private club! GO AWAY, YA FOOL!" Di Lung irritatedly shook his right fist at the attic door and yelled at Muriel.

"Yeah, tubby-pants, you're gonna have to go on a DIET first! Not to mention that you'll also have to get a SEX CHANGE!" Eustace hatefully snickered.

"Alright, THAT'S IT; locked or not, I am NOT letting this stupid door get in my way, you scrawny little JERKS!" Muriel, whose face was now boiling-red with bigotry-induced rage and had incredibly thick jets of steam shooting straight out from both ears, furiously roared at Eustace and Lung, shoulder-charging right into the door with all of her might and sending it flying clean off of its rusty old hinges!

"HOLY CRAP!" Eustace and Lung yelled in surprise, reflexively lunging out of the way as the door flew all the way ACROSS the attic, knocked over Courage's computer chair and went right through the window at the back of said attic, shattering said window into a positively ludicrous number of pieces as said door landed on the ground outside a few seconds later with a resounding THUD.

"YAY, THAT'S MY MURIEL! GO, GO, GO!" Courage ecstatically jumped for joy atop Muriel's brain and wholeheartedly cheered with excitement as he gleefully watched the event happen through her eyes.

"WATCH WHERE YOU'RE GOING, YA FOOL!" Di Lung (having now finally gotten back up onto his feet, along with Eustace) angrily shook his right fist in the window's general direction and yelled at the door while Eustace just annoyedly face-palmed himself with his right hand in response (indeed, Lung was somehow stuck-up enough to piss even HIM off).

"How about YOU watch what you're DOING, you LUNATIC?!" Muriel furiously threw her arms out beside herself and yelled at Di Lung.

"Hey, what did I do?" Eustace threw his own arms out beside himself in the classic "hell if I know" gesture and ignorance-feigningly whined.

"THAT! JUST THAT!" Muriel disgustedly spat, assertively pointing her left index finger at Lung's laptop as she and her new adversaries sat criss-crossed together on the old wooden floor of the attic and watched as Courage helplessly fidgeted about atop her brain and desperately struggled to think of a good way to get Lung to let him out of her body.

"Do you have ANY idea how terrifying of an experience it must be from that poor little dog's point of view to be trapped inside his own dearly beloved mother figure's body with seemingly NO viable means of escape? Why, you two should be absolutely BEYOND ashamed of yourselves, you sick, degenerate, sadistic, animal-abusing FREAKSHOWS!" Muriel sneered revoltedly at Lung and Eustace, slapping the former square across the face with her left hand while also slapping the latter equally square across the face with her right.

"Speaking of which, I sure do wonder exactly how he actually DOES feel about his current predicament right now..." Muriel worriedly sighed, depressedly cupping her chin in her hands while Courage, who was still listlessly and dejectedly standing atop Muriel's brain as she spoke, pulled out a bare-legged French Maid outfit (with conveniently placed holes in the back for his new angel wings) from his personal Hammerspace with his right hand and more-than-slightly-kinkily slipped it on, then pulled out a boombox from that very same Hammerspace with his left hand, set it down on Muriel's left brain hemisphere and hit its PLAY button, causing it to immediately begin playing an instrumental version of (oh dear God, PLEASE tell me this is a typo) Ed Sheeran's "Shape Of You".

"How do I FEEL about Lung and Eustace getting off to this crap, you ask? Well, perhaps this little DANCING play I've written will explain." Courage solemnly monologued to his new audience as the song began, with his comically flamboyant bright-pink self being gorgeously illuminated by the makeshift spotlights that Muriel's eyes provided for him as he loudly swallowed his pride and immediately began dancing like a camp-homosexual ballerina atop Muriel's delightfully soft, warm and cushiony brain.

"Hey, KNOCK IT OFF, you crazy bastard! Even I at least have fricking STANDARDS when it comes to this type of stuff, you know!" Eustace disgustedly shook his (left) fist and yelled at Di Lung, whom he had just caught shoving his (right) hand down his shorts and attempting to jerk himself off to the almost-indescribably bizarre event that was now transpiring in Muriel's head.

"What an absolute PIG you are!" Muriel sickenedly sneered at Di Lung, smashing him upside the head with her rolling pin.

"Hey, what I do?" Di Lung tossed his arms out beside himself in the classic "hell if I know" gesture and ignorance-feigningly chuckled as Courage began handsomely singing.

"New York wasn't the best place to feel like garbage, so Nowhere was where I went! A featureless desert that's populated by nothing but jerks and idiots!" Courage sang, dabbing and twirling back and forth atop Muriel's brain while Di Lung snidely remarked "hey look, stupid dog become LITERAL brain cancer" and gave Eustace a great big high-five in response.

"Whenever something remotely interesting happens a-ROUND here, I wonder WHY, and when I sleep, YES, I always dream of how I might find my-SELF out of luck and then eagerly DIE!" Courage sang, hyperactively cartwheeling all over the place and then finishing the maneuver with an octuple backflip and an incredibly theatrical "TA-DA" pose while Muriel held up a "10" card, Eustace held up a "1" card, and Di Lung droolingly, pantingly held up an "11" card, already having a rather surprisingly sizable stiffie protruding from his shorts.

"Only Muriel treats ME RIGHT; everyone else thinks I'm a MEANS to an end! EVERY time I look outside, I find a new insane misfit!" Courage sang as he sexily crossed his left leg over his right one, placed his right hand onto his firmly right-swayed corresponding hip, placed his left palm horizontally across the back of his head and teasingly winked at the viewers with his right eye, causing Di Lung to overjoyedly cream his shorts and faint head-over-heels onto the floor with massive Valentine hearts in his eyes while Eustace and Muriel respectively went "BLECH" and "AWW" in response.

"And now, I am one OF THEM; all work and no play really MAKES a dog dim! MAYBE you cannot relate, but YOU can at least try not to MAS-TUR-BATE!" Courage sang as he cross-leggedly laid atop Muriel's brain in a classic "draw me like one of your French girls" pose, placing his right hand smoothly over his chest and boredly resting his head against his elbow-propped left hand (then punctuating the last word with an obvious right-hand masturbation gesture) while Eustace and Muriel just speechlessly gawked in equal parts confusion and disbelief.

"I'm in HA-tred of my own self! I've got de-CLI-ning mental health! Although I MIGHT look contrary, I am HELL'S emis-SAR-y!" Courage sang as he twirled around on his tippy-toes like a barefoot ballerina (rapidly alternating between his left and right feet as he did so), clutching his head tightly with both hands and visibly, tremblingly struggling to repress his abuse-induced psychological trauma all the while as Eustace and Muriel worriedly glanced over at each other, wondering just how much longer it actually WAS going to be before Courage degenerated into an outright serial killer.

"And if you TRY to come between me and my PRECIOUS family...I am promising you VE-ry sin-cere-ly, you will NE-ver de-FEAT me!" Courage sang, taking an incredibly assertive "come at me" stance as Muriel's new(ly reformed) batch of Muriel Cells excitedly joined him atop her brain and began proudly dancing in sync with him while Eustace and Muriel just blankly stared off into space and wordlessly mouthed out the words "what the fuck" under their breath in response.

"Though I wish I wasn't, I AM...nigh-im-POSS-ible TO kill! There's a reason Courage pre-CEDES...Coward-LY in my NICK-name!" Courage sang, moonwalking and performing the Thriller dance in freakishly perfect sync with his new Muriel Cell buddies while Muriel and Eustace respectively went "WOW" and "BIG DEAL" in response.

"Although I may sometimes seem MEEK, I'm always STEAD-fast in MY will! I am currently a VORE-fetish drag queen, and I feel LIT-er-al-ly NO SHAME!" Courage dramatically concluded, continuing his Thriller dance for several more loops before finally slamming his right middle finger onto his boombox's STOP button and striking a hilariously over-the-top cross-legged Christ pose in unison with the Muriel Cells, respectively causing Muriel and Eustace to ecstatically cheer-clap and sarcastically slow-clap in response.

"Wow, I actually DO feel incredibly bad for him! Good LORD, what tragically sick fetishes he's developed over our years living with him!" Muriel hung her head in shame and dejectedly sobbed as Courage re-stripped himself naked, returned his French Maid outfit and boombox back to his personal Hammerspace and gave a proudly rotten-toothed (albeit rather humiliatedly red-faced) grinning bow to the audience while the Muriel Cells listlessly and systematically filed back out of Muriel's head and into her torso.

"Oh, BOO-HOO, he has such piss-poor taste in music that he actually feels the need to pay that big of a tribute to one of THE blandest and most overplayed songs in existence; give me a damned BREAK, would you? Music is DEAD!" Eustace stubbornly crossed his arms over his chest and crabbily, narrow-mindedly growled at Courage's expense, comically missing the purposefully ironic point behind Courage using such a soul-crushingly boring and uninspired song as Shape Of You to express his inner feelings about such a wonderfully colorful and intriguing subject as his utterly demented farce of a life while Muriel just unsurprisedly rolled her eyes and groaned "UGH" in response.

"HMPH...quality of lyrics don't even matter in this case, ya FOOL; musical composition still primitive, repetitive trash as always with modern pop music!" Di Lung finally woke back up and annoyedly explained to Muriel, with the two of them and Eustace continuing to sit criss-crossed together on the floor and confusedly observe Courage's antics.

"HMMMmmm..." Courage relievedly sighed, intently eyeing the delectably soft and spongy surface of Muriel's cerebral cortex as he did so.

"Yes, dog, I know what you thinking! Well, go a-HEAD, ACT on it!" Di Lung amusedly commanded Courage, frustratedly forcing his right palm over Muriel's mouth to prevent her from questioning his motives while Courage threw his arms out beside himself in a classic "fuck it" gesture, went "HERE GOES NOTHING" to the viewers, then finally opened up the secret entrance hatch atop the right-hemisphere portion of Muriel's parietal lobe and, evidently not caring that said hatch CLEARLY had a ladder beneath it (or remembering the fact that he now had wings, for that matter), fearlessly swan-dove right into her brain through said hatch while it somehow automatically closed itself in response.

"Oh, man, this was NOT a good idea- GAH! ACK! OUCH! DURK! BLECH! EWW! HOOOOOO!" Courage worriedly thought to himself, then began loudly shrieking and howling in agony as he accidentally (but thankfully harmlessly) crashed into exactly seven of the neuron clusters that held the countless neural wires within the outer interior of (the parietal and occipital lobes of) Muriel's ridiculously "larger on the inside" (TWICE as large on the inside, in fact) brain together on the way down into her temporal lobe, getting brain-FRYINGLY electrocuted and causing Muriel to awkwardly twitch in response with each node that he collided with.

"EYUHHEHEHEHHEEHEEHEEHOOO!" Courage, whose fur and wings alike were now thoroughly charred and sizzling, sloppily sprawled his limbs out beside himself, crossed his bloodshot eyes and dementedly laughed (gratuitously showing off his freakishly enormous rotten teeth) yet again as he finally landed face-first on the floor of Muriel's temporal lobe while Muriel, due to Courage's accidental screwing-up of her neural impulses, suddenly began to feel rather bizarrely intense love for Di Lung out of COMPLETE nowhere!

"Oh, Mr. LUUUUUUNG?" Muriel suddenly broke out into an adorably lovestruck and warmly blushing smile and lovingly crooned in Lung's direction while Eustace threw his arms out beside himself and angrily yelled "MURIEL!" in response.

"Hey, back away from me, creep! I'm WARNING you!" Di Lung annoyedly wagged his left index finger at Muriel and warned her as the two of them and Eustace finally stood back up again, with Lung being pinned firmly against the left-side wall of the attic by Muriel while she just teasingly put her right index finger over his mouth and whispered "SHH...don't say anything, cutie-pie; I already know exactly what you're thinking" to him in response, causing him to VERY humiliatedly blush and tremble in awkward arousal all the while.

"BLEAUGH!" Courage scraped himself back up onto his feet, brushed the soot off of his fur with his hands, shook the ash off of his wings by flapping them, then revoltedly stuck his tongue out and retched at the mere thought of what Muriel was implying (age-wise, Muriel was already in her late 70s while Mr. Lung clearly didn't look to be even a day over 25 at most, not to mention that Muriel also HAD HER HUSBAND STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO HER), frantically sprinting his way through Muriel's temporal and frontal lobes, deftly leaping into his surprisingly soft (albeit grossly oversized and also generally gross) new (excess-brain-tissue-sculpted) office seat and immediately booting up Muriel's ridiculously massive Central Nervous Super-Computer so that he could stop her from going to first and second base with the crazy, egomaniacal bastard (hmm, who ELSE fits that description, I wonder) before it was too late!

"Uh uh UHH! What's the PASSWORD?" the dryly British-accented and generally pompous narrator of Muriel's CNSC childishly teased Courage as he was forced to watch Muriel lay Mr. Lung face-up on the floor of the attic and intimately, crushingly lay herself atop him face-to-face through the third-person "mind's eye" view mode of her brain's vision screen.

"HWAAAUUUGGGH!" Courage jumped two entire feet into the air and cartoonishly shrieked at the tops of his ever-loving lungs as Muriel began forcefully tongue-kissing Lung.

"HA! TRY AGAIN, BUCKAROO!" Muriel's CNSC snidely mocked Courage, causing him to grit his teeth and growl angrily at him in response as he desperately racked his OWN brain for the correct answer while Eustace disgustedly wrapped his arms around Muriel's torso from behind and began struggling with all of his might to pull her off of Lung's body.

"Muriel, for Christ's sake, we've been together for so damned long that I literally can't even freaking REMEMBER how long we've been together for! WHAT IN GOD'S NAME ARE YOU DOING, WOMAN?!" Eustace repeatedly stomped on Muriel's back with his right foot and furiously yelled at her, actually being legitimately justified in his anger for once as a giant lightbulb suddenly appeared right above Courage's head to signify that he had FINALLY, at long last, figured out what the password to Muriel's CNSC was!

"COURRRAAAGE?" Courage teasingly, girlishly fluttered his "sweet little angel" eyelashes at Muriel's CNSC and crooned in its general direction.

"Ooh, CORRECT, you cheeky BOY!" Muriel's CNSC gaily teased Courage right back as he immediately clicked straight into her digital Control Panel and activated her CEASE AND DESIST command right when she had just finished remarking "that's such a LOVELY hibiscus aroma you're wearing" and thus started attempting to forcibly strip Lung's clothes off.

"PHEW!" Courage relievedly wiped the sweat off of his forehead with his left arm and sighed as Muriel finally returned to her normal, romantically clueless self.

"OH, MY! I honestly don't know WHAT came over me!" Muriel got back up onto her feet, kindly pulled Mr. Lung back up onto his OWN feet and embarrassedly chuckled while Courage just suspiciously crossed his arms behind his back and nervously, eye-dartingly, cold-sweatingly, "innocently" whistled to himself in response, knowing quite well that what(ever in the actual seven names of Fuck) had just happened was indeed very much his OWN damned fault.

"Well, it had damned better NEVER come over you again, YOU HEAR ME?! RAGGA FRAGGA...FRIGGING FRUGGING (unintelligible Angrish gibberish)" Eustace shook his right fist at Muriel and furiously yelled at her, bonking her over the head several times with said fist while she just obliviously stared off into space as (seemingly) always.

"WATCH WHO YOU'RE FUCKING, YA WHORE!" Di Lung frustratedly yelled at Muriel, slapping her savagely across the face with his left hand, followed by his right.

"Well, I'm dearly SORRY to have to admit it, but you can't really BLAME me for what I just attempted to do to you, ya know; I simply wasn't in control of my ACTIONS!" Muriel threw her arms out beside herself in a "come on, lighten up" gesture and bitterly, sarcastically ranted in Mr. Lung's general direction while Eustace just grumpily crossed his arms over his chest and went "HMPH" in response.

"Of COURSE not! Of course it fault of stupid freeloading American canine PARASITE in pretty little head of yours! Lousy stinking no-good-ass dog ALWAYS ruin everything! ALWAYS! I'LL TEACH HIM! Why, I'll teach him EXACTLY what life in overworked housewife rain boots is like! OOHOOAHHHEHEHEHEEH!" Di Lung assertively pointed his left index finger at Muriel's forehead and furiously ranted back at her, ominously glaring directly into her eyes all the while and finishing said rant with his trademark maniacal laughter as Courage intimidatedly trembled in his seat and audibly gulped at the mere thought of what Mr. Lung was now implying that he was going to make him do to both himself AND Muriel alike.

"That RIGHT, ya stupid dog; I give you EXACTLY fifteen minutes to study up on how to act like proper housewife, then you must BECOME her!" Mr. Lung laughed quite literally into poor old Muriel's deeply worried-looking face while Eustace threw his arms straight up into the air and excitedly remarked "YEAH! I've always wanted a housewife that's a total subordinate PUSSY-willow like Courage! My fetishistic dream come TRUE!" as poor little Courage nauseatedly gulped and turned sickly green at the mere thought of what Eustace was implying.

ABOUT ONE MINUTE LATER, AFTER LUNG AND EUSTACE HAD LOCKED MURIEL INTO HER BEDROOM AND THEN EXCITEDLY GONE BACK INTO THE KITCHEN SO THAT THEY COULD CONTINUE THEIR PREVIOUS SESSION OF PERVERTEDLY AND SADISTICALLY SPYING ON COURAGE'S ABSOLUTE MISERY THROUGH LUNG'S MAGICAL MACBOOK...

"So tell me, my dear Courage, have you been learning anything IMPORTANT about me in there, by any chance?" Muriel asked Courage curiously as she listlessly laid on her bed, gently propping her head up against the pillow-cushioned headboard of said bed and nervously, tightly clinging onto the precious, beloved quilt that she was now laying underneath with both of her hands while Courage diligently searched through her memory banks so that he could take a quite literal trip down memory lane, so to speak.

"Why, YES, Muriel; of COURSE I have!" Muriel teasingly giggled to herself, covering her mouth with her right hand and embarrassedly exclaiming "OH MY" in response.

"OOHOOHOOHOOHOO!" Courage playfully giggled to himself, returning Muriel's curly-wired speech-control microphone into its distinctly telephone-shaped receptacle with his left hand as he excitedly browsed his way into the "HOW I MET COURAGE" cross-section of her memory banks and sighed happily with relief as he saw her memory of that very same moment years ago at which his helpless little puppy self from way back when, having just recently gotten his original parents sent into space against their will and therefore deliberately thrown himself into a cold and dark alleyway in order to prevent the same thing from happening to him, had been scooped up into the loving arms of a rather noticeably younger Muriel...a younger Muriel that the mere sight of caused his heart (not to mention his wings) to love-strickenly flutter with delight as his cute little ears perked themselves STRAIGHT up like the very same massive penile erections that he was thankfully incapable of having at the moment while his legs did much of the same, to be exact.

"OOH, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, MOMMY..." Courage hypnotizedly drooled, panted and moaned, squatting down on all fours in his seat and barking like an actual dog as Muriel's CNSC took him straight through the aforementioned memory lane of sickeningly adorable pictures and videos of Muriel lovingly snuggling, feeding and generally (as Eustace had pointed out earlier) pampering him.

"OH YEAH, FEED ME, MOMMY...FEEED MEEE..." Courage (faux) orgasmically moaned, pointing hornily into his ear-to-ear-grinning, rabidly salivating mouth with both hands as Muriel's CNSC showed him that one particularly mushy three-month period during which Muriel (at roughly the age of 60) had let him (only barely 18 at the time, even in dog years) eat her out, fetishistically dress himself up as her literal baby (complete with breastfeeding directly from her, which was easily every bit as disgusting for Eustace to have to watch as it sounds; for the record, he also ended up having to change Courage's diaper numerous times during this "adult baby" phase of his), and even serve as the loofah sponge for her morning showers. Needless to say, Eustace and Di Lung were laughing their absolute ASSES off in response to seeing Courage STILL be so ridiculously enthusiastic about the mere MEMORY of being so insufferably spoiled by his (adoptive) mother in general, let alone producing THIS unspeakably degenerate and perverted filth with her.

MEANWHILE, AT DI LUNG'S AND EUSTACE'S RESPECTIVE BOTTOM-CENTER AND BOTTOM-RIGHT SEATS OF THE DINING TABLE IN MURIEL'S KITCHEN...

"Wow, this insane man child take MAMA'S BOY to WHOLE new level! OOHOOAHHHEHEHEHEEH! UWOHOHOHOHO! HYAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAH!" Di Lung fell out of his chair, rolled on the kitchen floor, clutched his chest with both hands and laughed hysterically, briefly lowering his shades so that he could wipe the laughter-induced tears from his ludicrously slanted eyes.

"Dickless mama's GIRL is more like it if you ask me! OOWEE HEE HEE HEE HEE! YO HO HO HO HO! HEEHEEHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH! OH DEAR GOD, I CAN'T BREATHE, I CAN'T BREATHE!" Eustace childishly pointed and laughed at Courage's expense with both index fingers, also falling out of his chair, rolling on the floor and laughing himself to utterly hysterical tears in the process. (The main difference in this case, however, was that Eustace pounded his fists and feet on the floor like a baby as he did so, while Mr. Lung rather surprisingly did not.)

"AHHHHHH..." Courage lovingly sighed as he finally quit fooling around and clicked his way over into Muriel's digital instruction booklet on how to be the PERFECT doting housewife.

"Oh, sweet HEAVENS, you absolutely PATHETIC little twit...in all of the long, GRUELING years that me and my attic counterpart have regretfully spent knowing and serving you, you really HAVEN'T changed one single BIT in the grand scheme of things! Once Muriel's pampered little toddler, ALWAYS Muriel's spoiled little shite! And you honestly STILL wonder why Eustace had you neutered, for CRYING out loud! COOCHIE COOCHIE COO, LITERAL MOTHER FUCKER!" Muriel's CNSC spitefully (albeit well-deservedly) laughed in Courage's face about his rather nauseatingly close past relationship with Muriel herself like there was NO tomorrow, even going as far as to summon a nice big set of exactly four mechanical arms from his literal glove box and mockingly tickle him with all four of them at the same time.

"TEEHEEHEEHEEHEE! That tickles so much! STOP IT! STAH-HAH-HAH-HAHP IT! HEE HEE, STOP IT, I'M BE-HEGGING YOU, GOOD SIR-HIR-HIR-HIR! STOP IT, PLEEE-HEE-HEE-HEEEAAASE!" Courage girlishly giggled and lisped, curling himself up into face-up fetal position and wiggling his limbs up and down like an infant as Muriel's CNSC simultaneously tickled his armpits and feet, followed by his "tummy" and nose just for good measure.

"Oh, what's THIS I see? You want your precious MANHOOD back, do you?" Muriel's CNSC childishly teased Courage, curling his lower right hand into a tightly balled-up fist and placing it exactly where Courage's (erect) penis would have been if he still had one, so that he could then proceed to mockingly pretend that he was literally jerking Courage off.

"Well, FUCK YOU, you can't have it, you god-damned miserable little FAGGOT!" Muriel's CNSC hatefully growled at Courage, swinging his lower-right fist straight up and uppercutting poor Courage square on the bottom of his nose with it so that he could then repeatedly, mercilessly and VERY efficiently smash the sad little dog's face in with all four of his fists.

"EYUHHEHHEHEHEHEEHEEHEEHEEHOOOOOO!" Courage nose-bleedingly, holey-wingedly, blood-droolingly, double-black-eyedly, almost-toothlessly crossed his horrifyingly bloodshot eyes and laughed like an absolute maniac yet again as Muriel's CNSC finally decided that the poor dog had officially had enough to "teach him his lesson" and thus ended his horrifically intense physical assault on Courage, returning his arms to the glove box from whence they came while Courage magically shook his injuries right off (also causing the recently domestic-abuse-dislodged feathers lying on the floor around him to magically disappear as well, naturally) and eagerly began reading the aforementioned housewife instruction booklet that Muriel just so happened to conveniently have literally programmed into her brain from all of the years that she had begrudgingly spent with Eustace (whom her CNSC had clearly just been looking for an excuse to take its VERY unhealthily pent-up inner hatred of out on Courage, just for the record).

"HA, that NOTHING! He really should have seen what MY parents would do to me if THEY found out I was gay!" Di Lung nervously chuckled, wincing at the mere thought.

"Heh, WHAT would they have done, try to rip your SOUL out with their bare HANDS?" Eustace teasingly snickered in response.

"Well, uh...y-YEAH, actually!" Di Lung scratched the back of his head with his left hand and nervously stammered, shuddering intensely with fear as he did so.

"Say, what exactly IS going on in there, Courage? Are you all RIGHT in there, by any chance?" Muriel frightenedly, shiveringly clutched her blanket with both hands and asked Courage.

"Oh, of COURSE; why, it's NOTHING! NOTHING AT ALL! EHEHEHEHEHEEH!" Muriel sarcastically laughed like an idiot in response.

"Well, anyhoo, now that I've finally had my fill of messing with you in a PHYSICAL sense, what would you like to learn FIRST about being an overly generous and cripplingly overprotective nanny like that sweet little, quote-on-quote, MOMMY of yours?" Muriel's CNSC caustically asked Courage, causing him to annoyedly put his wrists onto his hips and sneer "HMPH" in response as he briefly scanned over the ridiculously long vertical list of things that said computer was referring to with his eyes, before finally giving up on trying to decide between all of the numerous options and instead opting to merely settle on reading the booklet from start to finish like any other old book (or article).

"EVERYTHING..." Courage exasperatedly groaned and reluctantly dug right in while Muriel's CNSC continued sadistically mocking him, calling him "YOU TWAT" all the while.

ROUGHLY TEN MINUTES LATER...

"So TELL me, dear FRIEND; would you call yourself a lean, mean, cooking, cleaning, farming, pet-snuggling, grocery-shopping, fetish-satiating, abuse-taking machine YET, by any chance?" Muriel's CNSC snidely asked Courage, who just dejectedly nodded his head and just-AS-sarcastically went "well, I'm certainly ONE of those things, at least" in response.

"GOOD! Because NOW you BECOME her!" Di Lung arrogantly laughed as he and Eustace finally undid the outside lock on Muriel's bedroom door and barged right in.

"Oh, DEAR...um, c-Courage, what exactly does Mr. Lung MEAN by that, pardon my asking?" Muriel worriedly drummed her fingers together and asked Courage.

"Oh, BELIEVE me, my sickeningly sweet little cupcake, you do NOT want to know!" Eustace evilly cackled as he and Mr. Lung gave each other a triumphant high-five.

"Uh, y-YEAH! EXACTLY WHAT HE SAID! HM-HM-HM-HMM!" Muriel maniacally laughed as Di Lung hastily bolted back out of the room, grabbed his Magical MacBook off of the floor just outside of said room, then turned it off, folded it shut and took it downstairs into Muriel's basement for safekeeping while Eustace just confusedly went "HUH?" in response.

"Ugh...I KNOW I'm not gonna like this!" Courage self-disgustedly groaned as he reluctantly pulled out a dome-shaped, garishly LED-light-covered body-possession helmet from the glove box of Muriel's CNSC, loudly swallowed his pride and lifted it directly over his head while said CNSC bitterly sneered "Oh, I DEFINITELY believe your personal feelings regarding the matter to be rather QUITE on the contrary, if I do say so myself", prompting Courage to exasperatedly roll his eyes and groan "oh, SHUT up" in response.

"Well...HEE HEE...here goes NOTHING, ladies and gents!" Courage giggled nervously to his viewers (specifically the television ones, since Di Lung had now officially finished magically recording his first torture-porn video of the poor little dog and thus stored his Magical MacBook in a designated storage box in Muriel's basement so that it could recharge itself) as he VERY audibly swallowed his pride and VERY unceremoniously plopped the body-possession helmet onto his head, effectively (and quite literally) BECOMING Muriel!

"Umm...h-hello, guys! HEH HEH! W-what can I DO for you, pardon my asking?" Muriel (possessed by Courage) got up out of her bed, interlocked her arms into a submissive V shape between her legs and nervously asked Lung and Eustace, her knees quivering like Jell-O all the while as her eyes wildly darted all over the bedroom in desperate, frantic search of a suitable means of escape from the house. Yep, she was definitely HIM, all right.

"Why, our daily CHORES, of course! Every single stinking ONE of them, to be exact!" Eustace greedily rubbed his hands together and cackled evilly at Muriel.

"Yes, but first we must NAME you! Hmm...Muriel under control of Courage...OOH, I KNOW! MURAGE, COWARD LADY!" Di Lung quizzically cupped his chin in his right hand and thought out loud to himself for a few seconds, then ecstatically thrusted his left index finger straight up into the air and laughed triumphantly with delight as a massive lightbulb suddenly appeared over his head.

"Now come on over into the kitchen and make us BREAKFAST, woman!" Eustace angrily shook his left fist at Murage and yelled at her.

"AND HURRY, YA FOOL!" Di Lung angrily shook his right fist at Murage and yelled at her as she dejectedly hung her head and arms in shame and walked over into the kitchen so that she could prepare Eustace and Lung their meals (that she now barely even knew how to make, what with her original personality having been swapped with Courage's and whatnot).

A FEW MINUTES LATER, IN THE KITCHEN...

"Alright, Eustace, here's your bacon, eggs, orange juice and toast! I sure do hope you APPRECIATE it for once!" Murage sarcastically informed the eagerly knife-and-fork-wielding (not to mention bib-wearing) Eustace, disdainfully glaring at him as she gently and politely set down a great big cafeteria tray topped all with four of the things that she had just mentioned atop the dining table, right in front of the grumpy old codger's top-left seat.

"MORE EGGS!" Eustace slammed his entire sunny-side-up, runny-yolked egg plate right into Murage's utterly disbelieving face with both hands and yelled at her.

ONE EXTREMELY FRUSTRATED STOVE-COOKING OF "FOUR EGGS THIS TIME AS OPPOSED TO THREE" BY MURAGE LATER...

"I WANTED PROPER ORANGE JUICE, NOT THIS STUPID HIPSTER 'DIET' BULL-CRAP!" Eustace poured his entire glass of diet Simply Orange juice all over Murage's head with his right hand, spat (what he had just accidentally drank of its contents) all over her face and then hatefully screamed at her while she jus