Quick Story: Bobo and the Newspapers
Bobo the Chimp having previously gained his freedom from the Brentwood Academy; set about learning all he could about the human world beyond his gated and caged world. Previous to his escape; he had lived on what he learned from errant radio and newspapers. He had come to believe that the human world was filled with dangers and worrisome crowds of monsters who would prey upon him, (morese because he chose to disguise himself as a child).
The Real world proved to be just as worrisome; but not as horrifying as the newspapers had made it seem. Bebo noted that the Humans seemed to rush through their days, going back and forth from place to place in seemingly endless circles. He gripped the Omega Nugget tight in his paw when he wandered the late night streets; willing the people that passed him to simply ignore his hairy arms; especially when he couldn’t get shaved. Remarkably; most people simply ignored him or thought him afflicted with some terrible condition. Those in the latter group were to two types; one would see him and make a concious effort to avoid contact and the others would approach and engage him. Bobo found the latter more troublesome as he had not mastered Human speech and would have to gesture to them to leave him alone.
One late summer evening; after a long subway ride and a visit to the park, Bobo found himself wandering the streets near a series of Bars and Clubs; it was too early for the normal crowds and Bobo always gravitated to the more “empty” parts of town when he could. It made avoiding people easier and he could be sure to avoid any unwanted trouble from rowdy children and criminals. Bobo was lost in thought when he was approached by an old lady, dressed in a pink overcoat and wearing a similarily color cake shaped hat.
“‘ere, yoo look like wun ‘a them monkies, yoo doo!” she cackled and pointed at Bobo, “innit, it’s a monkey! ‘ere Mavis. Look at this ‘ere monkey! Ooos a handsome lad then?” She cooed to Bobo and crooked a finger to call him to her. “Awww, c’mere and give us a kiss you little fellar. I likes Monkeys, yoo looks like a fine feller.”
Bobo had dealt with drunken ladies before; he bared his teeth at her and gave a low keening squeal between them, as if hurt. The lady and her friend recoiled from Bobo and stopped their coaxing. Bobo snorted and waddled past them, shrinking his head into his jacket and pulling his scarf up over his mouth.
The ladies watched him go, not sure what they had just seen. They were both sure that they had been speaking to a hairy kid; but now they weren’t sure. When they sobered up they would both swear that they had seen a monkey wearing clothes and walking in the entertainment district, but being well known-drunks their story wouldn’t be well-regarded.
Bobo; for his part had learned to avoid people who had been drinking heavily and kept his walks to the late evening and early mornings.
Story: Project Billy Part 3
In the morning, Billy quietly showered and left before I got up, leaving me to check around for any lingering Pontiffs. I found a couple hiding under his bed, but they were tiny. I snatched them up and stuffed them into the disposal. I didn’t really feel like carrying some crying popes around with me while I made my way to the office.
I caught up with Billy at the Coffee Stand downstairs in his building, he was nursing a chai tea and watching the floor intently; no doubt on watch for more minuscule ministers. I ordered a house blend with two creams and two sugars and sat in a chair at his table. I pulled out my notebook and surfed for news for a while, until Billy broke the silence.
“Hey Man, do you think I could move in with you?” he whispered over his tea.
“Uhh, I dunno, my place isn’t any bigger than yours and I don’t think my disposal could handle all the extra work” I didn’t look up; but I know Billy wouldn’t have smiled at that one. I had been carefully ginning up the level of stress around the Popes for the past couple of weeks, and it was really showing. Billy was still taking care of his appearance, but his shirt was sloppy and his jeans looked like they hadn’t been washed in a while. He didn’t stink, but he was starting to give off the impression of an emotionally disturbed person who should have been in long-term care.
“Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry Man, I know. How about just over the weekend? So I could sleep, you know?” he sounded like he was going to plead, “just Friday, Saturday, okay?”
“Sure Billy, we can hit a show or something then crash at my place. Hey, are you done with your part of the project? I turned in the last of the code for section 2 last night. As of this morning, I am out of the project.” I leaned back and waited.
“No way! I’m about a week away, you know I can’t work after hours like you. I don’t even know how you do it.” Billy was crestfallen, we had been working at about the same pace until about a month ago, when the popes started popping up with so much frequency. “Maybe I’ll spend Sunday on it and get caught up, or something”
“Sure, Billy. Do you wanna head into the office?”
We gathered up our crap and left a tip in the karma jar on the counter. I winked at the waitress who had served Billy and I, she smiled and gave me a little thumbs up.
As we walked to the subway, Billy was counting something, under his breath. I didn’t ask. Better to let him stew and work it out on his own. I felt bad for what was going on with Billy, he was cracking and we really weren’t helping matters. It was just much more important to the Project that we kept him “on edge”
I caught the eye of the Ticket Booth lady and paid for Billy and I. Billy put on his headphones and nodded off; I tapped out a few notes about his behavior on my Cell phone and sms’d them to Mitzi. Mitzi was keeping track of Billy’s behavior and the Popes. Mitzi’s notes kept track of what was going on with Billy.
Billy snored a bit beside me and his head tipped back. I snapped a shot of him and sent it off to Mitzi, he’d get all of this once we were out of the subway and I could connect to the network again. Mitzi’s notes were surprisingly detailed, he had people all over watching Billy, like the waitress at the Coffee Stand and a couple of the people in his building. Billy was probably only slightly less surveilled than your average Colombian Drug lord.
At our stop I shook Billy and he sleepily followed me out of the subway and into the office. When Mitzi showed up to congratulate me on a job well done, he gave me the secret “hey” nod that meant “I’m going to call you into my office to talk about the real Project, be ready”
Billy had thrown himself into his work, in an effort to banish his problems from his head. He ignored me when I got the call and left to speak to Mitzi.
“So, he’s popping out Popes like sweat now, huh?” Mitzi was more than excited. “When do you think we can start moving on to other things? I’d really like to start him on Pokemon or something, we can sell those!” Mitzi was actually rubbing his hands like a cartoon villain. He was the Gay Blowfeld, better dressed, tanned and with better caps. Mitzi kind of looked like a svelte Jim Jay Bullock, but about as moral as Gordon Gekko. “Every time I look at Billy, I see a big money bag like Donald Duck’s uncle carted around, with a Dollar Sign on the side and gold dollar coins falling out of it.” Mitzi was obviously lost in his fantasies about money.
“Mitzi, I’m not sure we can MAKE Billy produce what we want; it all seems to be totally unconscious, he doesn’t make the popes appear, they just do. I’ve been considering that it isn’t even his subconscious. I found some popes this morning, and none of them were familiar. I had to dig around some history sites to find out that they were “False” popes from the middle ages. That’s a really obscure subject, no wiki pages or anything. Billy might be the center of these things, but he doesn’t seem to be making them happen”
Mitzi slumped back in his chair and tented his hands in front of him. “How about this, we introduce him to a conspiracy that seems real, start prodding him with a convincing conspiracy of things that could make us cash, like the Knights Templar or something?”
“I don’t know. I think once we start publicly talking about these or selling them Billy will catch on, he’s paranoid, not naive”
We both surrendered to silence for a bit while Mitzi considered what I said, I concentrated on his family photos and vacation shots. Mitzi was so proud of his family, they had always supported him, but he was in love with money first. Mitzi was a great administrator and had a savvy way of squeezing every buck out of the other divisions when we did work for them. His accounting plans had been fleshed out across the firm and had earned him a great deal of respect at the board; but they were a bunch of old prejudiced farts who wouldn’t let him rise above middle management, due to his flamboyant nature. One of the HR reps referred to Mitzi as “Machiavelli in Loafers” (except that Mitzi never wore loafers).
“Okay, let’s let him in on it!” Mitzi stood up and led me to the door. When he opened it, Billy was standing there holding what looked like a Yellow Toy rat, “pika-poo” it squeeked and dropped a duce in Billy’s hand.
“Did you guys want to tell me something?” Billy Asked.
Free To You: A Movie Plot
I wrote this out in various forms over the years, but I can’t seem to get it down in a way that will make me money. Maybe this will make you money.
Short Synopsis: A middle-aged social worker is left holding the bag when one of her care in the community clients goes missing on the subway after a meeting. The client is haunted by dreams of being a fighter during the crusades saved by monks of an unholy order, worshippers of a devil older than Christianity and darker than the black halls of their cloisters. The social worker enlists the help of a down on his luck police sergeant and his teenage runaway son in a search through the halls of the city’s underground and the dark reaches of the tortured mind of a man lost in time. Now the homeless are going missing and body parts are being found in dumpsters all over the city.
Long Version:
Our hero is a Social Worker, she’s middle aged, single and committed to her job. She’s smart, capable and single-minded. She is literally married to her job and has little time for social contacts. She splits her time between her care in the community office job and volunteering for local NGOs and social programs. What spare time she has is spent researching the histories of her clients, she has a voyeuristic bent that drives her to delve deeper and deeper into the pasts of the lost people who wander into her life. She keeps a telescope hooked to a webcam that she can control from her website so she can observer the streets outside her apartment at any time and from anywwhere.
The mystery man is a vagrant who drifts from care facilities to the street and back again. Violent and disruptive, he often finds himself in trouble with the law, which suits him fine as they keep him heavily medicated and trapped behind bars; where he feels safe. He is plagued by dreams of being a crusader, cutting down men in the middle east, only to be felled by an arrow to the chest. He dreams of being taken to a monastary that hides a deep and deadly sect of Faustian monks, who have dealt with devils and demons older than Christianity. He also dreams of stalking the streets of the city, unleashing these same demons on the poor and unfortunates in the alleys and subways of the city. After his last visit with the hero he has decided to seek refuge in the deep tunnels of the city, only to find that the Monks that he dreamed of are real and operating under the guise of a Charity for the homeless in the city.
The Sargeant and his son are at constant odds, typical father-son conflicts; but the son has run away and the sargeant reaches out the hero for help in locating his son in the system. The Sargeant is burnt out, sad that he has lost his son to the streets. The Son left home to try and stretch his wings and gain some freedom from his “cop” father, he meets our mystery man in the streets and befriends him. The son witnesses some of the horrors that creep from the mystery man during the night and looks for his father and our hero.
The “big bad” is a demon of the C’thulu level mythos, an old Demon who has been working with “The Order of the Whole” since before the Crusades. The Monks are led by a charismatic old monk who is a figure in the city of ill-repute. There is a vague air of menace around the order, but they are a generous charity who house and feed anyone who comes to their door. They are feeding the homeless the remains of their compatriots, used in dark rituals to commune with their demon lords.
Plot arc: The Mystery man is introduced, walking into a police station and assaulting 5 police officers in acrobatic fashion, breaking at least two arms. He is left in the care of the hero, to whom he relates some of his story (leaving out details about what he gets up to at night). She concludes that while he is violent, he needs care and he is taken in an ambulance to a sanitarium for further observation. Our hero looks into his past hsitry and sees hundreds of arrests. The mystery man is “lost” en route by the ambulance drivers, who stopped for a bite to eat. This sets in motion the events that lead to the sargeant and the hero meeting. After finding the monks, the mystery man is led by the demons to commit more and more horrors. It is revealed that he is in fact the Crusader that he dreamed about, and he has been alive these many years, cursed by the demons after he slaughtered the whole order save one initiate (the leader of the order now). It is the hero who in the end must face and defeat the whole order and the demons themselves.
It’s Commander Rick!
Some judicious Google video searches led me to some Prisoners of Gravity episodes online:
For the uninitiated, the young, the vain or the American; Prisoners of Gravity was THE genre fiction discussion program from the 80s to early 90s (it followed me through High School guaranteeing that I would never be “cool” at my rural high school). If you were a fan of any kind of Genre ficiton of any sort, with comics and sci-fi as a preference then Prisoners of Gravity was your mecca. I remember being excited when Commander Rick would interview the Cyberpunk luminaries like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (The Difference Engine) and authors like Alan Moore (Judge Dredd) or Neil Gaiman (Black Lotus).
I strongly encourage you (if you are a fan) to check out “Prisoners of Gravity” online at google video and enjoy what us kids in the know (and not americans) were able to enjoy way back when.
I know those were their less famous works, which is why I chose them.
LifeStream
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Posted a tweet on Twitter.
Good Morning, wipers on new car stuck in "lifted" state due to ice this AM, going to have to carefully clean them if I leave the car outside
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Full Day over, stumped by a copy/paste error in the afternoon
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New blog post: For Rememberance Sake and SSH in the Future http://tinyurl.com/6g2zbm
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HTOP is the Shizz, that is all.
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New blog post: Racist of the Week: Sad Bastard BNP Member http://tinyurl.com/5kcsdt
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I had to use a MAN page to resolve a question and consult Kernel notes to verify something, truly this is a golden nerdy age.
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Good Morning, took ages to get going today, hopefully the flywheel is up to speed now.
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On the phone praying to the Insurance Gods and listening to the same 4 songs over and over again...and again
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On the phone praying to the Insurane Gods and listening to the same 4 songs over and over again...
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My Question is: Will Jello Biafra be okay with Obama "Not" walking to his inauguration? The constant threats hove got to considered.
