Chapter Text
Waltzing through the bland, hospital-bright hallway that manages to be both too clean and mysteriously grimy, a strawberry-brown-haired boy makes his entrance. He carries a crinkling chip bag like a royal scepter, ruling over this tiled kingdom with the air of a niche micro-celebrity whose fame is both accidental and entirely self-authored. His mismatched, enthusiastically experimental clothes hang from his torso not so much as garments but as fabric body-bags, bravely attempting to conceal the assorted horrors and eccentricities living beneath.
Eric Cartman struts as if gravity itself orbits him, and in some grotesquely cosmic way, maybe it actually does. For a boy with an absentee father, a buffet of insecurities, and enough commentary about his weight to qualify as a full blown series, he radiates a confidence so delusional it loops back around to admirable. He sees none of this as a flaw, of course. In his mind, he is not a menace, but merely a misunderstood visionary with the divine gift of irritating everyone within a five-mile radius.
He plunges his already chili-dust-encrusted hand back into the chip bag again, stomach empty after skipping lunch to attend to what he defensively refers to as “business,” known to the rest of the common world as spending fifty unapologetic minutes in the school bathroom of all places. Yet, despite all this, he remains an enigma: one of the most chill and simultaneously least chill humans the town has ever begrudgingly accepted.
A South Park without one Eric Cartman isn’t a South Park at all, he comes bundled with the chaos, a factory default setting no one asked for but everyone just learned to accept.
As he approaches his locker, an overstuffed shrine to questionable gadgets and suspiciously odd trinkets that absolutely should not be on school grounds, Eric is already in emotional disarray. He has just witnessed the tragic unraveling of his greatest masterpiece, torn apart seam by seam right before his helpless eyes. Kim and Minho, South Park’s one and only Korean gay couple, have broken up after three steady, hopeful months. Three months that Eric considers his own blood, sweat, and metaphoric labor, because, of course, physical effort was never on the table. He had worked tirelessly (in the Cartman definition of “tirelessly”) to intertwine their souls into one radiant, co-dependent sunbeam.
But alas, for the fortieth time in his turbulent career as Cupid, the hideous hydra of high school heartbreak has reared its ugly head and snapped his gorgeously gay creation clean in half.
School without a couple to obsessively micromanage, in Eric’s view, is something akin to a soulless barren wasteland, joy sucked dry, spirits drained, everyone just wandering aimlessly like extras in a student film that should’ve been scrapped in pre-production. His only true sense of power blooms from orchestrating romance with a snap of his fingers and a ceremonial visit from his alter ego, Cupid Me. After that, the gears of destiny churn on their own.
Slowly, but gloriously, Eric’s efforts usually blossom into a completely non-televised masterpiece of entertainment: no ads, no buffering, no corporate meddling, and a plotline infinitely more original than anything cable TV could vomit out. It is art. It is labor. It is his one true calling.
And now, heartbreakingly, his stage has gone dark.
Of course Eric did everything in his power to keep the two together. But even he knows that if the shoe doesn’t fit, there’s no point in shoving your entire foot into it until the seams scream. Some cosmic destinies simply aren’t meant to be duct-taped into place.
After wrestling open his slim locker from its metallic confines, he immediately reaches for what he proudly calls his personal scripture. His Bible. Within its densely packed pages lies every detail, timeline, subplot, and scandal of each relationship he’s ever meddled in. Photos snapped on his old, wheezing camera are glued onto the pages with a scrapbooking enthusiasm that borders on cult-like devotion. Some of the “relationships” in the book haven’t even happened (yet) but Eric, though spiritually allergic to organized religion, is a devout believer in manifestation. And honestly, who is anyone to judge? Most of his pairings do end up working out in the end, even if it takes heavy negotiations with Cupid Me and several all-night romance-movie marathons to summon inspiration from the cinematic gods.
Taking the book into his hands, he strokes the cover with a gentleness wildly inconsistent with the reputation he’s infamously earned himself. Knowing the contents by heart, he turns straight to the page documenting the newly sunken wreckage of his latest matchmaking masterpiece. With a soft, dramatic tear, he rips out everything relating to the couple, photos, notes, sketches, little hearts drawn obsessively in red pen, and drops them into the overflowing mini trash can at the bottom of his locker like discarded dreams.
“I will forever remember you Kinho...” Eric whispers to absolutely no one, hosting an impromptu funeral for a couple he barely knew outside of the casual, ongoing surveillance he’d call “research.”
As he looks around, searching his mind for where exactly his grand design went wrong, he notices a strange note lying just four feet away from his open locker. Had he dropped something crucial? A clue? A prophecy?
He scoops up the odd little paper and unfolds it, utterly unprepared for the new beginning it promises, one that instantly soothes the grief he’d felt for the now thoroughly forgotten couple of fifteen seconds ago.
The note contains a meticulously crafted, unsigned confession of unyielding love for some unnamed object of desire. It gives nothing away, not a hint, not a clue, except the unmistakable ache of passion woven through its impeccable wordplay. Eric has read countless love letters, some stolen, some forged, some heavily edited to fix poor grammar. But none of them compare to the holy artifact trembling between his still chip-coated fingers.
It is, without question, the most romantic thing he has ever held.
Eric hasn’t collected this piece of paper before, meaning someone, some poor, lovesick soul not yet under his guiding surveillance must have dropped it by accident. The realization sends a spark skittering up his spine. Despite having absolutely no idea who wrote it, he feels an instant, overwhelming duty to assist this anonymous author in winning the heart of their unnamed muse. It’s instinctive maybe biological, even. Cupid Me chuckles faintly somewhere in the recesses of his mind.
He scans the hallway, hoping to catch a suspicious glance or a guilty shuffle, but the attempt proves useless. Everyone is either outside or in the cafeteria, indulging in the greasy, federally sanctioned cuisine America insists on calling healthy. The empty corridor stretches out before him, echoing uselessly, offering no suspects to interrogate.
So, naturally Eric lifts the letter to the fluorescent light like a detective in a crime show he absolutely isn’t allowed to watch anymore. He studies the paper with forensic intensity, searching for microscopic hints, a smudge, a hair, an accidental doodle of a heart with initials in it, literally anything that might incriminate the author.
Then, by some miracle (in his view, cosmic validation), he spots faint pencil strokes hidden near the bottom of the love-soaked monologue. The discovery makes his entire world explode into heart-shaped shrapnel, spiraling around him in a glittery frenzy of excitement.
It’s clear the writer attempted to erase something, to desperately conceal something, but they made a grave mistake: they forgot to consider the possibility of Eric Cartman picking up this letter. Cartman, who can, unbeknownst to everyone else, decode nonsense at a level that should qualify him for several government jobs. Cartman, who notices details nobody else can see. Cartman, who lives and breathes everybody else's business.
The eraser marks left behind faint grey lines, nothing more than a ghost of text, meaningless to the average passerby.
But not to Eric.
To Eric, those soft, dusty lines are a divine revelation.
There, tucked in the bottom corner after the final flourish of emotional overflow, is a name, barely visible, half-erased, coy as a whisper...
Stan.
Unclear as day but unmistakable beneath Eric’s hyper-attuned, chaos-fueled gaze.
Information washes over Eric like one of those over-the-top sci-fi moments where equations float in the air and everything suddenly, dramatically makes sense. And for him, well, it actually does. The letter’s cryptic charm can no longer shield its writer. With the crucial clue revealed, the entire situation rearranges itself in his head, clicking together like puzzle pieces that have been lying in plain sight.
The note is packed with strangely precise descriptions, little observations about the unnamed muse that narrow the search instantly. Now that Eric knows that the identity of the beloved figure is none other than Stanley Marsh, the field shrinks down to people who know Stan better than your standard hallway passerby doing their routine teenage parade.
Whoever penned this dramatic, near-novelistic confession, clearly has a very intimate understanding of everything Stanley Marsh. These are not the details of a casual admirer. These are things only someone who has watched Stan closely, consistently, and maybe with a touch of emotional desperation, would know.
Eric has noticed many of the same quirks: the little habits, the dopey kindness, the strangely endearing idiocy that shape Stan into who he is at his very core. But that’s normal, it comes with being friends, more or less, and surviving multiple catastrophic adventures in South Park together.
The writer, however sees those same traits through a completely different lens. Where Eric saw mundane behaviors, the author saw meaning; where Eric saw background noise, they saw poetry. Every ordinary aspect of Stan becomes something glowing and significant within the letter.
For the first time, Eric realizes he isn’t dealing with some flimsy high school “you’ll get over it by Tuesday” crush like he always is.
This obsession pierces deeper than any of Eric’s carefully engineered “true love” schemes. Every one of his past meddling triumphs now feels trivial in comparison. The letter unveils a new, thrilling landscape, one of secret possibilities and hidden emotions, though, naturally, the mysterious author remains frustratingly absent from the scene.
For Eric, this is his magnum opus. The ultimate test of his cunning, precision, and unmatched skill as a masterful matchmaker. Every detail, every clue, every whispered emotion is an opportunity to prove himself, the pinnacle of everything he has trained, schemed, and plotted for all these years. Nothing less will suffice.
He is a man on a mission, though instead of guns, he wields a cupid’s bow; a hero clad in metaphorical angel wings, saving the day armed with hours upon hours of screen time spent absorbing every trick, tip, and nuance from dating coaches. Whoever penned this letter should count themselves extraordinarily fortunate that it fell into the hands of Eric Cartman, of all people, the only one capable of bringing this hopelessly lovesick authors fantasy, into reality.
With renewed determination, Eric returns his self-proclaimed Bible to the cramped depths of his locker and carefully tucks the letter, already skyrocketing in importance over the past few minutes, into the patterned pocket of his jacket.
Fear not, anonymous author, for your secret has been entrusted to a man of unparalleled ambition. Eric will stop at nothing, bend every rule, and deploy every ounce of cunning at his disposal to ensure your utmost success.