Decolarent eam, eviscerate eum

"Decolarent eam, eviscerate eum" (roughly translating: "Off with her head, out with his guts!") is a brutal execution policy employed by the Hebbleskin Gang in numerous incarnations of the Gerosha universe in Dozerfleet Comics.

Definition
The policy dictates that all male prisoners deemed worthy of execution by the gang's leader must be formally executed, in a ceremonial and often public manner, in which the bowels are sliced open. Women are, likewise, to be publicly beheaded in a manner reminiscent of Anne Boleyn's execution. The heads are then collected, and skulls turned into museum gallery exhibits. While rarely ever depicted, this policy is often alluded to. Especially cruel executioners require their victims to be executed in the nude, for extra humiliation.

Candi


Candi is the single most-frequently-decapitated character second only to Laura Herrante in Stationery Voyagers: Final Hope. The Hebbleskins have specific orders for how they want her beheading carried out: fully nude, on a block, her facing down, the ax falling down on her from her left side, head into a basket, no blindfold. To date, a version of her somewhere has been beheaded a grand total of 14 or 15 times.

Prime and Despair Geroshas
She was first threatened with beheading in the 2005 version of Ciem 3, but managed to turn it around and behead her attacker. In Despair Gerosha, Candi is eventually beheaded as the way she dies - years after her adventures.

Classic Gerosha
In Classic Gerosha, her enemies threaten to decapitate her frequently. Jeff the Invisible nearly succeeds with a guillotine in Ciem. It is also established that at one point, Erin managed to foil an attempt by the Hebbleskin Gang to behead Candi when she was only 12. In Ciem 3, she is beheaded by a man working for Lloyd Kolumn. She survives courtesy of a woman named Delusia, who uses her powers to save Candi. However, she is beheaded again at the age of 53, and dies that time.

Comprehensive Gerosha
In Comprehensive Gerosha, Candi helps Denny Levens sell "Denny pills" to Darius Philippine by agreeing to star in a set of videos demonstrating that they work in Ciem: Vigilante Centipede. For the first video, she takes a Denny pill and then agrees to let Denny chop her head off under the exact same conditions in which the Hebbleskins would do it. When she is able to reattach her own head, and heals from her injuries quickly, she proves that the invention works.

She returns the following evening and repeats the experiment with Denny. This time, however, she makes one deviation from the usual Hebbleskin narrative. She volunteers to be strapped into a guillotine, rather than voluntarily assuming a position on the block. It takes her a little longer to get free, as she must feel around for her restraints without being able to see them. However, she manages to free herself and re-attach her head in 20 minutes, giving her 10 minutes to spare before the Denny pill would have failed her.

Denny finishes off the test rounds with Candi using a samurai sword. This experiment also proves successful, and Candi is able to reattach her head and walk away from the incident. Sale of the Denny pill product makes Denny rich in his own right, though still not as wealthy as Candi's inheritance. Candi supplies herself with a large stockpile of Denny's invention, suspecting it may come in handy. Her guess proves correct. She is able to use it to stage her own death aboard Arfaas' ship. Then, when nobody's looking, she reattaches her head and sets about with Dolly, causing mayhem aboard the ship while rescuing Donte.

She is later beheaded in Lloyd Kolumn's facility without access to Denny pills in Ciem: Condemnation. However, Delusia intervenes and allows Candi to survive the incident anyway. She is beheaded again at the age of 53 after being captured by Hebbleskin remnants. This time, she does not survive.

Cataclysmic Gerosha
In Cataclysmic Gerosha, Candi is off on a training exercise set with Darius Philippine and Imaki Izuki. Imaki is tricked into leaving one of Darius' men unsupervised. He administers Remotach to a Candi who doesn't know what it's for, then drugs her with Bezeetol to numb her centuition. Candi expects her centuition to kick in and alert her that the blade is coming, so she can perform a maneuver to survive execution attempts by her enemies. She has successfully thwarted several chopping block and guillotine near-deaths this way. However, a drugged Candi can't tell when the blade is arriving. She finds herself reaching around to find her head, feeling the agony of the blade having sliced through her. She is able to find her head and reattach it to her body in only 5 minutes' time. Her near-death experience is what proves that the Remotach invention works. Since the Bezeetol deception was not authorized, the official running it was fired.

Candi is later captured in Ameristan during the Instigation timeline, and sent to a death camp per orders by Affadidah and Arfaas. However, there is a power outage that distracts the executioner long enough for Candi to use her centuition and her training to escape. Once out of harm's way of the blade, she proceeds to free Dolly and stage an escape from the entire facility. She beats up her would-be killers, leaving them stung and with crushed ribs and several bruises. She has to stop Dolly, however, from using a stolen dagger to impale repeatedly through the heart one of her former guards - a man who had raped her repeatedly.

Some time later, she spends an evening hiding in a bunker with Donte, she finds that several more prisoners have been captured not far from the shelter's entrance. She and Donte realize that jumping out directly and fighting the regime would be foolish, since they'd end up betraying the location of their base. Given that she took a Remotach first thing in the morning, she instead sneaks around and tries to make herself appear to have come from elsewhere. She feigns innocence, convincing the guards that she doesn't know anything. While they are distracted, Donte frees the other prisoners from their shackles and tells them to wait patiently before blowing their cover. He then takes flight. Candi is led to the guillotine immediately, and she uses her Remotach as a safety net in case she fails. While she fights the guards to avoid being beheaded, Donte uses the distraction to catch the regime off guard as he swoops in from high above. He quickly defeats the regime soldiers, killing them off rather quickly.

After this, she and Dolly are captured by a corrupt border patrol agent upon trying to enter Toklisana on December 17th of 2019. Drugged with Bezeetol, she and Dolly are unable to fight back. They are both beheaded, and their bodies are tied to a rack and placed in the back of a truck. They are about to be delivered to Arfaas. Candi made sure both of them used Remotach, and she reattaches herself and Dolly before time runs out. However, the two are both still exhausted from their near-death trauma. Navyrope arrives and provides further rescue assistance. It takes the girls a week to fully recover from the trauma, still in shock that they almost died.

As one of their would-be executioners is still on the loose, SCALLOP personnel decide they don't want the girls to become easy targets right away. Navyrope agrees to hand the girls over to SCALLOP. Deeming it too predictable that the girls would be in a SCALLOP facility and suspecting there may be moles inside looking for them, Marion Wevenil makes arrangements to hide Candi and Dolly inside Harris County Jail for the next 2 weeks. The would-be executioner of the two girls is finally discovered by SCALLOP agents, and killed in a shootout. The girls are then released from protective custody, and all "charges" are dropped. Their paperwork, recovered by Navyrope, checks out that they are registered Toklisanans. Candi immediately collects her inheritance, and starts investing. She applies to attend at the University of Houston, and ensures she and Dolly can stay in the dorms. However, the school doesn't allow the two to share a dorm.

Candi is arrested a later time, and Hebbleskins disguised as SCALLOP personnel, still unaware of her Bezeetol advantage, attempt to decapitate her in a back room. She defies her would-be executioners successfully, and heads off to save her friends. Only one other time does this version of Candi have to worry about being menaced by serious threat of decapitation. That final time is when she lets herself be captured on purpose aboard Arfaas' ship so she can hide among the corpses of other prisoners. When confusion breaks out among women lined up for execution, she takes advantage of the chaos to teleport unseen into the execution room alone. She then teleports into the room where the dead bodies are being stored, and hides her face beneath several other naked corpses, pretending to be one herself. Two more women are executed, and their bodies placed in the same bin while their heads are put in another bin on the opposite wall. The executioners initiate a changing of the guard, and Candi uses this to flee into another part of the ship. From there, she alerts Dolly to where the male prisoners are hiding, giving Dolly coordinates to that place. She is about to free Donte upon discovering him; but Musaran arrives. Dolly finds her way into the place where MPF-frozen male prisoners are located, and frees Donte instead of Candi, while Candi exits the ship to battle Musaran far away from where the prisoners are located.

Candi's friends are threatened with decapitation at times. In the Earth-G7.1 alternate pocket timeline, the power outage comes a few seconds too late. The plot of Sodality is envisioned from what would have happened if the Ameristani executioners had succeeded in taking Candi's life. It has since become standard fare that Remotach pills exist, and that every new version of Candi will have been beheaded a minimum of one time in her history. Some survive the initial decapitation and never have to worry about it. Others are doomed to die by it. Another possibility is that Navyrope wouldn't have gotten to the truck with Candi and Dolly inside of it in time, and Candi would not have been able to reattach her head in time. Once again, the Adaptation timeline would have been very different; given that there'd be no Candi to rescue anyone. What is consistent, however, is that at some point, Candi is always beheaded on a chopping block with an ax.

Miriam Flippo
Sultry Miriam Flippo is also no stranger to the prospect of losing her head. As Candi's sister, she too is wanted dead by Arfaas. In Gerosha Prime and Cataclysmic Gerosha, she is able to lead a natural life. However, she is captured at one point by Hebbleskins in China. Stung Hornet helps ensure she isn't executed. In Despair, Classic, and Comprehensive Geroshas, however, Miriam is not so fortunate. She is captured and guillotined the same year as Candi's death: 2052.

Dolly Malestrom
Dolly has had a few run-ins with head loss also. In the Ciem Tomorrow timeline of Classic Gerosha, she loses her head in a fight to protect school children from an army of True Centhuens.

In Comprehensive Gerosha, she loses her head twice before that. Candi slips Dolly a Denny pill, allowing her to survive decapitation aboard Arfaas' doomsday ship as he hovers it over Evansville. She is executed immediately after Candi. Darius also betrays her in this version and has her beheaded so she won't get the Earwig armor. However, he failed to notice she had taken a Denny pill. Dolly survives the attempt on her life, and gets the armor anyway. As upset as she was with Darius betraying her at all, she is even more infuriated that she was interrupted during sex with Jeraime only to be sent to the block. She vows to have Darius exposed - and to kill him if need be.

In Cataclysmic Gerosha, a power outage spares her from what would have been certain death in an Ameristani death camp. It buys Candi time to get herself out of harm's way, and then to free Dolly. Dolly takes a Remotach before heading home from class one evening, right as she is preparing to do something about Rockpapsci. Her instincts pay off, as he immediately sneaks up behind her and beheads her with a machete. He leaves Dolly for dead, but she is able to reattach her head and heal from her injuries with the Remotach pill's help. Still having lost a lot of blood, Dolly retreats to her dorm dizzy and enraged. Dolly never again after Rockpapsci is defeated needs fear serious threat of decapitation.

In Earth-G7.1, the power outage came too late. This leads to there being no Earwig joining the Sodality. As a result, the Sodality has no vested interest in sparing Jeraime and freeing him from the Musaran AI backvisor. They straight-up kill him instead.

Min Lin

 * Min Lin's execution was not carried out by the Hebbleskin Gang, and is therefore treated as an example only by the Hebbleskins themselves. Her guillotine execution came about because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time: France during the Reign of Terror.  Since her father would have also died by guillotine if not for dying aboard the ship, she is not a straight example.

Mingmei Chéng
Near the end of Mingmei's first year in a Toklisana prison, some men she'd robbed in the past try to lobby for her to receive the death penalty. SCALLOP borrows some Remotach from Candi so that Mingmei can re-attach her own head. She is sent to the guillotine, and her execution is captured on video. Once her political adversaries are convinced she is dead, Mingmei is secretly transported back to Alaska. Black Rat returns her home to safety in China, where her death continues to be faked in Toklisanan media.

Taterbug
In both the Classic and Comprehensive Gerosha timelines, Celia Winehart is killed by Lloyd Kolumn this way, as a rub-in to Candi about how she failed. Celia is nearly electrocuted to death by Jim Oisdaat instead in Cataclysmic Gerosha. However, she survives the encounter when Jordan Reddlewick comes to her rescue. Celia is later apprehended by authorities during the Beliah Amendments Enforcement Drive. She is finally sentenced to a few months in prison for her and Jordan's activities in exposing and bringing down Oisdaat. She never has to worry about outright decapitation there; but she is frequently threatened with being shanked by a prisoner with PMMD. Said other prisoner is finally subdued by Mingmei, who was made Celia's cellmate and became her de-facto bodyguard.

Other

 * In The Tragedy of Lord Zeras, the policy was first adopted by Lord Zeras after he escaped from Markus Mortikus, one of the first to advocate for the policy. When Markus kills Catalina by torturing and beheading her, Zeras escapes and steals a sword to eviscerate Markus with.  It is this murder that makes Zeras more of a fugitive than he was to begin with, leading to his encounter with the Marlquaan.


 * In Feud of Three Worlds, Shortimo Bokakrast is threatened at one point with being eviscerated if imprisoned, as part of established Meethlite law on Metheel.
 * Blazarik Kripanol in believes that the policy should be enacted on all green-skinned men and women, whether true Phaelite rebels or not.


 * When mainstream Meethlite culture began to abandon the practice, the Hebbleskin Gang retained it as a part of their heritage. They decided to utilize it on their most hated adversaries, or on the scientific experiments of their Phaelite rivals.  Children of those experiments are especially in need of it, according to Hebbleskin doctrine.  That their own "Meethexo" creations also count as biological "abominations" doesn't seem to matter.


 * In later renditions of The Battle for Gerosha, Shalia Flippo is threatened with it.


 * In Ciem, a subversion occurs. Gunner shoots Erin dead, but then collects her head afterward for Arfaas' trophy set.
 * It is implied that the actual homeowner of the house Gunner and Skellig are staying at may have also died this way, although her skull is resting in the pond along with the rest of her skeleton.


 * In Ciem: Vigilante Centipede, several male prisoners are eviscerated while Dolly frees other women in line from being sent to the chopping block, arming them to form a militia to overtake Arfaas' ship.
 * The woman shown as a skeleton in the webcomic is given a name, along with a flashback explicitly indicating Gunner's memory of beheading her.


 * In Ciem Tomorrow, Dana barely escapes this fate with help from the Gray Champion.


 * Both Classic and Comprehensive versions of Marina Baret die on the chopping block at some point. Cataclysmic Marina manages to escape that fate entirely.


 * In Sodality, Ameristani and Netheel regimes agree to this policy, at least in regards to execution of female political prisoners.
 * Several other women are described in advance of Candi and Dolly to have not been so fortunate in escaping.
 * Monica Shelly is executed in 2019 in this fashion.
 * Donte and Miranda Kanla were about to be subjected to this treatment, but public energy field incineration was opted for. This allowed Ciem and the Earwig an opportunity to rescue Donte.  Miranda escapes with Jackrabbit's help in advance of Arfaas' big show.

Non-Gerosha examples
Astrabolo in Stationery Voyagers is also an avid believer in the heinous practice, even though he exists in a separate narrative with no continuity in common with the Hebbleskins. However, most Stationeries are difficult for him to keep pinned down long enough to execute in this manner. When he seizes control of Mantithian governments in Final Hope, Mantithians are subjected to this treatment regularly.


 * Vaneesa Abiyoti got the in-the-nude version of this treatment, with a rock being used as a chopping block, and inside a volcano.


 * Laura Herrante is executed this way numerous times, since her Crimson Owl status allows her to be constantly resurrected. Astrabolo begins to get wise when several of the female skulls in his collection begin looking a little too identical.