Prompt of the Week - Week 70

TAGS: Snitties, Implied Growth/Hyper, Book Clubs

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It baffled everyone involved just how quickly the cult had spread through the populace, even more so when no holy texts were ever apprehended, or even spoken by those taken in for questioning. Despite the authorities’ best efforts, everyone they captured seemed perfectly content in just keeping their mouths shut, sporting the widest and most contented smiles anyone had ever seen; this naturally raised concerns regarding potential brainwashing, which didn’t help at all with the realization that a significantly larger chunk of the world’s population either became involved with the cult directly, or began harboring sympathies for it. This mostly translated into large-scale protests demanding said cult be recognized as a mainstream religious belief as opposed to being labelled a fringe terrorist organization, protests which grew more numerous and disruptive the more national authorities insisted on blacklisting the organization. Yet, despite this, numbers only kept going up, even when police crackdowns were ordered; it certainly didn’t help that no matter how many raids were conducted, or how many apprehensions ordered, no information regarding this cult beyond what was already publicly available was ever discovered, prompting investigators to wonder if things weren’t actually as simple as they appeared to be. Everything started a few years prior, when the core of what would later become known as the “Grand Order of Great-Ass Snitties”, a name which would echo throughout the ages as either the best or worst one for a cult, formed as an online group dedicated to the “mutual admiration of that most sublime of creations”. At first, literally no one considered this to be of any concern; so what if a bunch of people wanted to get together and proclaim how much they loved snake tits? It was entirely within their rights to do so, and hell, maybe it would help some of them even achieve the mythical snitties at some point in the future, especially since, by all indication, the folks in the forum were extremely polite and welcoming to anyone who wanted to join, snake or not; it wouldn’t be long before the first cases were reported of individuals who joined the group and eventually found someone to spend their life with, and from there it was just a short skip and a hop to the first publicized marriages linked to this odd and very idiosyncratic online forum. Even then, no one thought much of it; people meeting through mutual kinks wasn’t exactly new, and with the internet being what it was, it didn’t rank anywhere close to the top ten when it came to the weirdest things one could find there. If anything, reception was quite positive at first, since this group managed to turn what could very well have become nothing but a wretched hive of sex-starved maniacs into a, by all accounts, genuinely decent support group-slash-dating website, with several success stories to their name. They weren’t even calling themselves a “Grand Order” at the time; for the first two or so years of its existence, the forum was rather adequately named “SnittyWorld”, a name which helped authorities the world wide refuse to take a very serious threat with the gravity that it very much required of them. Two years, whereby the influence of this forum spread across the internet, spawning imitators, subsidiaries, branches in different media aggregate websites, even entire content creator careers, with streamers dedicated to looking through the various forum posts to discuss what happened within the community, all while espousing the beauty and magnificence of snitties, of course. It was at this stage that the most paranoid among governmental structures the world over began to cock a few eyebrows; it was one thing for a dating site for kinksters to attract some media attention and even succeed in setting up a handful of marriages, but quite another for it to lead to an entirely new genre of media content to appear from thin air. Soon enough, it was impossible to read the news without finding some piece related to this group in some way, which had by then rebranded as the “Center for Snitty Appreciation”, headed by a mostly-anonymous group calling itself the “Snitty Council”. Again, for those trying to make their superiors pay attention, the apparently deliberate choice to make the names as silly as possible served as an horrendously effective roadblock to any investigation, even when the first ordained ministers began to appear; it was only natural, given the number of people who were getting married as a result of meeting via the oddly snake-focused group, that they would eventually want the ceremony itself to be conducted by someone from within said group. Given how relatively easy it was for someone to be granted that power, it was, again, seen as little more than a cultural curiosity, a momentary upsurge in a peculiar fraction of the zeitgeist that would eventually die down, just like those things always did. It was a fad, authorities kept telling themselves, nothing more; thus, they shouldn’t have to worry about the multiple reports coming in that spoke of the group less like a friendly bunch of snitty lovers and more like an organized religion operating under the nose of the taxman. This was, ultimately, the first real attempt at bringing the organization to heel; those who had seen fit to investigate it figured that the best way of getting their governments to pay attention was to point out that this was a religion in all-but name, and yet they weren’t being regulated by the tax code. Who knew how much money was being transferred to and from each individual within the confines of this “church”, and who knew how much of it was being laundered in certainly illicit and dastardly activities? In truth, very little; even the most persistent of snoopers couldn’t find evidence of more than the most barebones of tax evasion going on, most of it surrounding wedding gifts and minor ceremonies, but their superiors didn’t need to know this. What mattered was getting eyes on that damned cult before it had a chance of exploding out of control… which, by the time it did, it did so with far more power and reach than anyone could’ve ever expected. It was, at the end of the day, only a matter of time before the Center for Snitty Appreciation chose to see itself recognized as a legitimate religious organization, on par with other more mainstream groups; in their eyes, what they were doing was no different than anyone else, and it just so happened that their object of worship was something significantly more mundane, yet also far more present in one’s everyday life. Their goal, they argued, was merely to bring as much joy and happiness to those around them as they could, and the quickest way of doing so was to spread the love of snitties all across the globe; that this led to a significant upsurge in the cult’s media presence, along with far more aggressive marketing and outreach, did not go unnoticed, but by then, it was impossible to stop the chain of reactions that led to the whole thing blowing wide open. The cult had made its first move, renaming itself to its current state as the “Grand Order of Great-Ass Snitties”, seemingly unwilling to let go of their ridiculous naming schemes after it became obvious it wouldn’t work to obfuscate their goals anymore; as a result, whatever governments around the planet did next, it would determine where things went going forward. They had a chance at a peaceful resolution, but the sudden and (to them) inexplicable meteoric rise of this group, coupled with some of the rhetoric being spewed by the most “devout”, led to a severe backlash amongst regulatory structures, which climbed all the way to the top to convince world leaders that what they had on their hands was not merely a harmless group of snake titty lovers, but a dangerous terrorist organization that had sunk its claws into a distressingly large amount of people. That crackdowns and announcements of “containment measures” led to counter-protests across the globe didn’t help either, nor did the fact that the cult itself seemingly did… nothing at all. There were no bombings, no suicide attacks, no homicides, no ritualistic killings, no anything that previous, legitimately dangerous cults had engaged in; for all that governmental agencies insisted the group was dangerous and needed to be taken care of, said group was positively harmless, most of its members leading comparatively mundane lives where most others simply weren’t aware they were part of the “cult” to begin with. Meanwhile, their online presence continued to grow, as it had spread so far and wide that even attempts at bringing down “SnittyWorld”, the original forum that began it all, only led to more imitators appearing with every passing day, as net denizens waged an information war that national security agencies were woefully unprepared for absent orders to engage full-on authoritarian measures. Yet, as conventional strategies continued to fail, and it became clear that the Grand Order was only picking up steam, those orders wouldn’t take much longer to arrive; though controversial to say the least, paranoia at every level of governmental structures led to the passing of several pieces of legislation in key countries that were then copied by most others, empowering the state to detain and interrogate anyone remotely suspected of being involved with the Grand Order, as well as unleashing the full might of their technological resources upon an unsuspecting internet… and only leading to the world’s largest search engine company to counterattack by threatening to shut down its services and bring the whole world into the dark until the witch hunt was officially halted, at least on their turf. More and more, state agencies began to realize that they weren’t fighting a cult anymore: they were fighting everyone else. Wherever they looked, they found sympathizers, ranging from the thoroughly mundane and only mildly interested to the greatest of snitty lovers, and the worst aspect is that none of them behaved the way they should. It would’ve been so much easier if they were raving lunatics or madmen, if they tried to fire back or resist arrest; instead, every single person brought in for questioning, regardless of where in the world they were or what language they spoke, always replied with some variation of the same sentence:

“We just like snitties. Don’t know what the problem is.”

It was maddening, especially when no other tenets were ever discovered. Attempts by spies and top investigators to discover just what the cult actually believed in almost always ended up with them slamming into a proverbial brick wall, with nothing really there; for a cult, the group did seem incredibly disorganized, being almost entirely built around the rather nebulous attraction for snake titties. Nebulous, because there seemed to be nothing else to it besides that general category; while predilections seemed to veer towards bigger sizes, the whole organization was united purely via that one, single throughline: they just liked snitties. There was nothing more to it, which was clearly impossible given how far and wide their influence had spread; it clearly couldn’t be that governments were wrong and their hamfisted approach to a perfectly peaceful and reasonable group of people had led to a series of protests and further destabilization as their constituents fought back against perceived injustices. No, the cult was hiding something, and they were going to find it. Though, who they were varied over time, mostly in a downward trend; it felt as if the longer one spent investigating this supposed “cult”, the more likely it was that one fell down the rabbit hole and turned out to “defect”, joining the ranks while proclaiming that not only had they found no wrongdoing, but they’d been wasting time trying to look for it in the first place, since clearly there was nothing there. This only steeled the resolve of those who were left even more, especially after a handful of states caved in to the demands and recognized the Great Order as a legitimate organized religion; in the minds of those who fought tirelessly to expose crimes they were certain had to be there, this was nothing short of selling all of furkind to whatever eldritch gods these people worshipped, nevermind the fact that civil unrest went down almost immediately after official recognition. Indeed, no actual places of worship were even built; all legislation passed merely handled the issue of taxation (or lack thereof), as well as empowering those ordained by a “recognized religious authority” to conduct wedding ceremonies while also serving as a notary, provided they follow proper protocol. That nothing bad seemed to come out of this was, to put it lightly, completely baffling; those who yet fought this cult with everything they had left sought to find anything they could use as ammunition, only to come up short every time when nothing at all presented itself. Those who still clung onto the hope that the Great Order’s advance would be halted desperately attempted to pinpoint any opening in their seemingly impenetrable defences. Yet for every presumed step forward there were multiple steps back, as even the most dedicated of investigators inevitably fell to the same curse that all others had, sucked in by the promises of “great-ass snitties”, never to be seen again. Or, well, to be seen, but certainly not the same person they were before; they smiled and waved to their former coworkers, proclaiming in a disturbingly jovial tone how they’d found the cult to actually be a bunch of “really fun people” who “just liked snitties, you know?”, all sentences that were repeated in some way or another throughout the globe, driving paranoia among the few uncorrupted ones to levels never before thought possible. To them, the whole world had become infected, corrupted by the influence of this sinister cabal, by the shadowy inner core who had gone from a simple forum on the internet to a world-spanning empire who could not, and would not, be toppled. The nuclear option was considered, but much to the dismay of those who requested it, their handlers found this to be “excessive”, since clearly, those few countries that simply accepted the cult were doing just fine, so maybe the Great Order wasn’t that bad? On trying to bypass regular channels and contact military forces, nothing would be found but that same, dreadful attitude: that the cult was perfectly innocuous, there was nothing to worry about, and that anyone who thought otherwise should really just get that stick out of their ass and learn to love life for what it was. Maybe, these brainwashed idiots argued, these folk should just get to know how great snitties were, which, to most of the remaining sane folk, was all the proof they needed to know they had failed. Years of vigilance down the drain, as the whole world descended into a state of apathetic detachment, unable to realize how they were being played from behind the scenes as they carried on with their seemingly mundane lives. It was the end, these investigators assumed, the end to all civilization as they knew it; sure, nothing really changed, but they knew better! They knew who was waiting for them behind the veil, ready to strike should they let their guard down! One by one they had fallen prey to it, succumbed to the wiles of a suspiciously increasing bustline average; one by one, even seasoned veterans of international intelligence agencies let go of this pursuit, most of them after having contact with a pair of snitties big enough to cover their whole bodies and deciding the case wasn’t worth pursuing. And one by one, the precious few whose minds were yet their own retreated to their bunkers, to their safehouses, to ride out the rest of their miserable existence isolated from a world gone mad; unwilling to admit defeat, they would rather lock themselves away than risk being contaminated, certain to their last that they were the sole remaining sane minds left on the planet.

Of course, to everyone else, this barely registered. By then, the number of people who still suspected the Great Order of Great-Ass Snitties of being anything other than just a bunch of lewd fucks who really like snake tits were such a tiny minority that, on occasion, even their own agencies failed to notice they went missing; why should they, when they were utterly unimportant? After the advent of the Snitty Enlargement prayer system and the proper standardization of offerings to the Great Snitties Beyond, all the initial hiccups that impeded proper snitty worship were effectively removed from existence (sometimes literally), opening the way for the cult to actually get down to business spreading the love and joy of snitties to all the corner of the planet. They’d already succeeded in making the average snitty size so much bigger than it used to be that most snakes needed a couple of assistants just to be able to walk around, but that was hardly the end point as far as they were concerned. No, the Great Order wouldn’t stop until everyone could bask in the glory of snitties, and the best way of doing so was to just give them to… well, everyone. It would be the grandest ritual yet, even larger than the one which allowed them to break into the mainstream, but the best part of it all was that there wasn’t a need for any actual ritual practice; all that was required was a permeating, global adoration for snake titties, focused over time into objects of worship. Given that said objects weren’t technically specified, those at the center of the organization figured they could kill two birds with one stone: empower the snitty, and share the snitty at the same time!

Truly, it was the paradise they had all sought, and the best part of all was that it required effectively no sacrifice on anyone’s part.

Well, apart from their spines.

And the occasional bra.