Apologies again!

It's been a busy few weeks.  I'll try to have something substantial up in the next week, promise.

So, I got bored and spammed my status

From my facebook status and my following comments:
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Angst-filled status! I figured I'd spare you, gentle reader, of the particulars and instead tell a story. This is a story about a bridge crossing the Wannuskigi River...

So there I was. Dawn, the third Sunday of September. Standing across the bridge from me was Gerry Spindalphen, the local card shark and my nemesis. Daylight had just broken and the local fish were leaping. Lighthoppers, they were called, and they could take down a duck. Other than their splashes and haunting "Krreeeiii!", the wilderness was quiet, the birds having long ago learned to keep quiet around the Wannuskigi...

I couldn't remember the first time I met Gerry, but my earliest rememberance of him was one of pure hatred. He stole my parking spot at Tamm's Tavern, and on his back bumper was Calvin flipping me off. I keyed his car. This was the height of our friendliness.

We were at odds today for a usual reason. We routinely swapped stealing things from each other. He stole my "Honk If You Like -CENSORED- " bumper sticker. I stole his fuzzy dice. He stole my right hand mirror. I stole his son's motorcycle.  He stole my four wheeler. I stole his wife. Yesterday he kidnapped my dog, which really makes me reconsider terming it "stealing" his wife, but here we were, me trying to barter back for Sergeant Lumpy and him trying to barter back for his son's motorcycle.

Past Future Travesties of Confection and Science Part 3 - The Finale

If you haven't read the previous two installments, go do that.  I'll wait.

Done?  Great.  Here we go.

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            Cautiously, Llewellan made his way up the stairs, the door held up like a giant tower shield and bag of candy corn tied to his belt.  He had attempted to recruit Jerebiah to the exploration effort, but the scruffy marketer had refused, offered to watch the base, stayed in his seat, and pulled out a piece of wood and a carving knife.  The man wouldn’t budge, and Jerebiah had found within himself a sense of adventure, so venture he did.

            He emerged in an idyllic glade.  Idling past the basement entrance was a small creek filled with dazzling fish, all nipping at the surface of the water.  Beautiful trees containing fruits known and unknown flourished, their plump banquets weighing down the boughs.  Timid deer watched from the edges of the clearing, and an oblivious rabbit hopped by.

            In the center of the clearing was a lone tree bearing apples.  Lazing beneath it was a humanoid snake.

            His body was covered in tiny scales and his tongue forked.  Curled around his sleeping form was a lengthy tail.  As Llewellan grew near, the snakeman’s eyes flitted open, revealing a piercing gaze that chilled Llewellan’s spine.  The creature stood and began circling Llewellan, sizing him up.

            “A newcomer, yesss?  You ssshouldn’t be in the Garden, no… Doesss He know?  Or do I need to remove you?”

            Llewellan set the door down and held it with one hand while he untied the candy corn with the other.  Fumbling and stuttering, he recited the speech he had practiced during the initial sales attempts of the candy.  “S-S-Sir, do you have a c-craving for a sweet candy that is good for your skin, too?”  The snakeman hissed.  “Scales!  Great for scales!  And a tongue like yours surely has a fine array of taste buds!”  He proffered the bag of candy.  “And I’m sure we can work out a wonderful deal on pricing!  This land looks fabulously wealthy.  Whose garden did you say you were guarding?”

            The reptile hesitantly grabbed the bag and examined a piece of candy corn.  He sniffed it.  Just as he put it in his mouth, a shimmering Being, the Universal Mechanist, emerged from the woods and made its way over, a puzzled expression on its face.

            “You are not one of my creations.  What are you doing here?”

            Words abandoned Llewellan.  The snakeman looked at the Being and offered the bag.  “You sssshould try one of thesse.  They’re not half bad.”

            The Being looked into the bag, and then quickly looked at Llewellan.  “YOU!  You brought those abominations into my world!  You are the reason I had to redesign this planet!”  It spun toward the snakeman.  “Did you eat one?  Did you?!”

            The snakeman swallowed the last of the offending candy.  “…Yeah?”

            The Being was taken aback.  “And… you are ok?  No side effects?  No mutating into a mime?”  The snakeman shook his head.  “Perhaps it was not the candy after all.  Regardless, you wayward vagabond, you have intruded upon my Garden.  Leave before you corrupt its purity!”

            Llewellan was becoming better at taking hints, so he took his door and went back to the basement.  The snakeman and the Being watched the basement stairway and, a short minute later, it fizzled out of existence as time seemed to—

                                                                          –stop.

            And start again.  Llewellan heard from outside the basement the unmistakable sounds of city life.

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            While Cosgrove and Jack were hurtling to their unknown destination through a series of quick blips through millions of points in time, Jack suddenly had an epiphany.  Epiphanies usually resulted in dismissal from the bureaucratic side of the Ministry of Shenanigans because they were often paired with requests for more raises and more funding for the Science Department.

            Jack’s epiphany: Is our presence here changing the timeline?  Should we go back and stop ourselves?  Should we go back and stop the Scientist and the Yokel?

            Jack’s bureaucratic sense of survival immediately quashed his epiphany. 

They soon arrived on the outskirts of an idyllic glade.  The sound of an argument was pervading the once tranquil air and the birds had fled for more serene locales.  Jack and Cosgrove dismounted their temporal cart and hid behind a cluster of blackberry bushes to watch the heated debate beneath the tree.  Cosgrove started picking blackberries.

“I ssstill sssay you’re doing it wrong.  Free will isss the way to go.  More interessting, yesss?”

“Take a look at what free will accomplished for you.  You ate that accursed junk and will not stop arguing with me.  You are fired.”

The snakeman stuttered and sputtered.  “Y-you can’t fire me!  I’m your sssecond!”

The Universal Mechanist dismissively waved.  “I made you imperfectly.  I will simply have to do better next time.  You know where the exit is.  Live your life freely out of my garden.”  It turned and began walking out of the glade.

The snakeman stood there, dumbstruck, for a few seconds.  Finally shaking himself out of it, a snarl crept onto his face and he took a running leap toward the Mechanist.  The Being faded and reappeared three feet to the side and pointed at the snakeman.

“You DARE attack me?  Be dust.” A white light shot out of the pointing finger and engulfed the snakeman, who writhed and smoked and disintegrated, leaving a small pile of dust.  A shimmering tear fell to the ground as he turned and left the glade.

Cosgrove had missed most of these proceedings, so occupied was he with the bush loaded down with blackberries.  Jack caught it all.  Waiting a few minutes to ensure the Being was gone, he eventually picked his way across the clearing to the pile of dust.  Sitting atop it was a single piece of candy corn, except it had turned green instead of the usual orangish-white color.  He knelt down to pick it up, but as he reached for it, it cracked and broke, and out slithered a small green snake.  It hastily made its way to the apple tree and climbed it, leaving a confused Jack to wander back to Cosgrove and the machine and prepare their departure.

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            Llewellan ascended the stairs once again and found himself on the busy streets of a major city, with the basement once again acting as the basement for an apartment building.  He quickly replaced the door and instructed Jerebiah to lock it until he returned and took a walk around.  Finding a boy selling a newspaper, he traded a few pieces of candy corn to the receptive youngster and found out a number of facts about where he was.

            Philadelphia, 1880.  The paper bragged of its size rivaling even London, mentioned the boon of the economy, the availability of public transit, and the growth of both sea and railroad trading.  Factories billowing smoke dotted the horizon.  But the most important thing that Llewellan took away from his experience on the streets?  The boy enjoyed the candy corn.

            Llewellan’s heart almost burst with happiness.  He returned to his marketing agent and they began working on a strategy to start up their business.

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            Cosgrove was in the passenger seat now, devouring blackberries.  Jack decided to return to the Ministry, since the trail had grown cold.  Too many detours and wrong jumps had lost the trail.

            But as they arrived back in the future, they found a ravaged, unfamiliar landscape.  Vegetation was scarce and cities little more than shells.  Basic geography was a stranger to Jack, and it took multiple attempts to find Harmony Square before he felt confident enough to break the news to Cosgrove, the severity of his voice causing Cosgrove to pause in his feast.

            “…Everything changed, Cosgrove.  History was changed and the present was altered.”

            Cosgrove nodded thoughtfully and popped a blackberry.  Jack slapped the basket of blackberries out of the cart.

            “This is serious!  We don’t have a home.  We don’t have a time!  We shouldn’t exist!  We never were!”

            “Well, then, let’s enjoy it.  Want to go find Paris again?”

            Jack sighed.  “Why not?  I don’t know how long this buggy will last, and that slap you gave the machine when we were in the mountains cleared out the old numbers, so we couldn’t even find where all this mess started.”  He glared at Cosgrove, who was still looking mournfully at the splattered basket of blackberries.  Jack gave up.

            “Fine, let’s find Paris.”  He flipped a few knobs, twisted a few switches, and hit the Button.

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            Production boomed.  Sales were high.  Llewellan, who had since adopted the new, more period appropriate name of George Renninger, was producing the bulk of the candy corn for the Wunderlee Candy Company.  The ownership of a time machine made eliminating both potential threats and competitors a simply act of turning back a day, and the evils of the corn continued.  Even today, the vast conspiracy behind candy corn continues, although with the death of Llewellan in the early 1930s, who still lies in a vast, hidden mausoleum beneath Illinois’ corn fields, the business has started a slow slump.  Perhaps one day the world will be rid of the evil that has so corrupted it.  While the wretched abomination has already altered the very foundations of our existence, we can only hope that determination and the iron stomachs of loyal patriots of the species will prevail.

            No one knows what happened to Jerebiah or the basement, but he was heard saying that he wanted “t’git [himself] onna dem pups”, and, shortly after, time seemed to—

                                                                          –stop.

            And he and the basement were gone.

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            “This place is just like the Ministry!”  Jack beamed from behind his outrageously large desk in his plush office, fifteen stories underground in a secret CIA bunker.  “Laser watches, a gun that fires sharks, and a mechanical twenty-story goat?  We never had stuff this cool back in that stuffy peaceland!”  He took aim at a dartboard with his watch.  As always, he missed.

            Cosgrove sat in a chair on the other side.  He was growing increasingly jealous of having his subordinate as a higher rank than him, and was wondering what the company policy of offing your superior was.  He took two mints from Jack’s desk (“Hah.  Take that!”) and plotted before his mind returned to those heavenly blackberries.

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            Jerebiah finished putting up the last of the barbed wire atop his steel-reinforced concrete walls.  The fortress surrounded the quaint little log cabin he had built over the basement, and helped protect him from assault by incredibly large ‘dogs’.  Inside the compound was a supply of foodstuffs, especially peanuts and dog food, and his kennel, where he was trying to domesticate those dogs.  By his count it would be about a hundred years before he and Llewellan first appeared in this hazardous land.  He was curious what would change when the basement appeared inside a fortified compound.  He didn’t have to be a scientist or particularly smart to know that things would change again.

            He chuckled, and ate a peanut as he rocked steadily on his front porch, watching as the prehistoric sun lit up the smoky sky.

Past Future Travesties of Confection and Science Part 2

If you haven't read part one, it is directly below this one.  Stop being lazy and scroll down lest the Ministry find out your actions.

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            “Sir, we have reports of Shenanigans.”  The young man in the suit handed a dossier to the older man in the exact same suit who sat behind an unnecessarily large oak desk.  The Ministry of Shenanigans was full of expensive, beautiful rooms stuffed with cheap, inefficient bureaucrats.

            The old man sighed.  “Shenanigans, in this day and age.  Well, let’s have a look-see.”  He opened the file.  Inside was a single sheet of grey paper.  “…What is this?”

            “Well, sir, it used to be a photograph of the Peacerary in Harmony Square.  It’s since faded, and our top scientists are detecting some sort of scientific stuff happening in the space time thing.  I don’t really know what they said; I’m a bureaucrat, not a physicist.”

            The old man nodded.  “Mhm, mhm.  Right.  Well, what do they suggest?”

            “Their exact words were, ‘Take this up to that idiot, Jack.  And when Cosgrove asks what we suggest, tell him we have the tools he’ll need down here.’  Also, they said something about a time machine and the destruction of the world as we know it, but I was feeding a banana to a monkey.”  Jack smiled a faint smile and chuckled as Cosgrove grunted his way to his feet.  “Been sittin’ in that chair too long, boss.  It’s about time we got some action again!  Get to Peace Ray some jokers!”  Cosgrove groaned and left towards the Science Department, a terribly underfunded department filled with the most brilliant minds in the world.

            Twenty minutes later, Cosgrove and Jack were in an empty basement millions of years ago.

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            “Looks like you hit some poor feller’s dawg, Leeland.”  Jerebiah was still munching on peanuts as he looked at the unconscious raptor.  He nudged it with his foot and it reflexively moved its foot.  “Aww, it’s havin’ a little dawg dream.”

            Llewellan was less idiotic than Jerebiah, but his education was overshadowed by the human brain’s ability to adapt to impossible situations by ignoring them.  “Where’s my kitchen?”

            “Huh.  Dunno.”  Jerebiah looked the entire part of the slightly bored spectator.

            It would be helpful to explain their view.  Behind them, the basement descended into the grassy earth, with only a small ramp of brickwork and a wooden door breaching the surface.  Next to the door was an unconscious raptor.  Off in the distance was a smoking volcano being circled by pterodactyls, and, significantly closer, was a pair of larger raptors charging out of a tree line a few hundred feet away.

            They fled inside.  Jerebiah rescued the dog.  Llewellan placed it back outside before closing the door and locking it.

            “That wasn’t my house or my neighborhood.  That wasn’t my wonderful corn state!  And I still can’t get reception!  What is going on here?!”  Llewellan’s hysterics were interrupted with a loud thump on the door.  He ran down the stairs, grabbed a chair, and used it to brace the door.  Jerebiah was, for some reason, cautiously waving his hand around a corner of the basement.

            Llewellan ran over to the Device.  “I don’t think this worked, Jerebiah.  I think I teleported us or something, I don’t know.”  He started hitting buttons and turning dials, but stopped when a loud crash resounded from the top of the stairs and a raptor fell down into the basement.  Both of the humans froze as the raptor rose to its feet, and a standoff ensued.

            A long uncomfortable moment passed before being broken with the sound of struggle and a voice shouting out of the ether, “I keep telling you that I saw somethin’ back here!  We shoulda checked out that basement before you went pushin’ more buttons!”

            A deeper voice responded as a golf-cart sized shape began to emerge from nowhere in particular and materialize in the basement corner.  “I’ve never traveled through space and time before!  I just wanted to see what all our options were!  And I really think that Paris is just a lot nicer place than some crummy old basem— Is that a raptor?  Is he here to fill out a report on the case already?”

            Cosgrove and Jack climbed out of the Science Brand Time Machine and walked over to the very confused raptor.  It backed away, snarling.  Llewellan and Jerebiah stayed frozen in their respective corners, Llewellan wishing to be invisible and Jerebiah wishing for another peanut.  He decided to eat one anyway.

            The raptor had apparently had enough of Cosgrove and Jack’s disrespectful attitude toward what it saw as the Proper Order of Things.  Snarling once more, it leapt toward them, almost making it off the ground before the other raptor fell down the stairs on top of it.  As they struggled to disentangle from each other, Llewellan ran to the nearest flingable object and started launching it in the direction of the raptor pile, which had been joined at this point by the baby raptor.  The baby had the benefit of separating the parent raptors, however, they were still annoyed, terrified, and suddenly being hit with a rain of candy corn.  This battle lost, they fled up the stairs.

            Llewellan, body pumping with adrenaline, grabbed a sack of the sweet missiles and dashed up the stairs, yelling an assortment of different types of corn (“Sweet corn!  Golden kernels!  Crispy cobs!  Blue maize!  Popped corn!”) with each toss.  Cosgrove and Jack watched, dumbfounded, before turning to Jerebiah, who was shaking his empty peanut bag.

            “Hey, you!” Cosgrove shouted.

            Jack looked at him.  “That… really wasn’t very striking, sir.  Let’s try this again.”  He turned to Jerebiah and aimed his Peaceful Ray.  “Stop what you’re doing!”

            Jerebiah looked at them and dropped the bag.  “’Kay?”

            The silence that overtook the basement was occasionally broken with another type of corn being shouted from above and the haunting cry of a baby raptor weeping in the distance.  Cosgrove and Jack kept glancing at one another, and, finally having enough, Cosgrove stepped forward.

            “What’s your friend doing attacking those businessmen?!”

            Jerebiah shrugged as Jack leaned in to whisper, “I think those were prehistoric dinos, sir.  Remember, time travel?”

            “Right.  What’s your friend doing attacking those dinosaurs?!”

            Jerebiah shrugged again, sending the two agents into a frenzy of discussion.  In the meantime, a now empty-handed Llewellan dashed down the stairs, dove over the recently fallen podium boxes, and slammed the same big, square, blinking, green button in the center of the control panel from the first trip.  The humming stopped and lightning began tracing its way up the machine a second time and eventually the room was once again filled with disco and electricity.  The Ministry agents panicked, dove into their own machine, and quickly disappeared, back to Paris if Cosgrove had his way.  Worriedly watching the doorless exit, Llewellan muttered wishes for the machine to hurry up as Jerebiah pulled a chair over to his corner and took a seat.  Mid-sit, time seemed to—

               – stop.

            And once again it was over.  The hum returned, revealing the replacement of a wailing baby raptor with the soft bubbling of a stream and the chirp of birds.

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            People have always wondered what happened to the dinosaurs in our time.

            At the dawn of time, the Universal Mechanist was employed to create, repair, and maintain Life and the Universe.  Even for a universal being, this was a large task.  In fact, the task was so large that eventually it quit, roughly four thousand years ago, and retired, eventually rejoining the workforce in Hollywood under the assumed name of Bruce Willis.

            And everyone knows Bruce Willis’ stance on candy corn.

            This hatred originated during the Clean-Up of the Dinosaurs.  After the departure of the time travelers, the bags of candy corn that Llewellan had left above ground before fleeing from a particularly large herd of raptors were opened.  It turns out the vile rocks were just radioactive enough to alter the evolution of dinosaurs, resulting in a change from middle-class businessmen/hippies as the two forks in the evolutionary tree to a finale of malpractice lawyers/mimes.  The Universal Mechanist tried, but the evil contained in the candy corn was too terrible to be altered, and so it did the only thing it could: it destroyed the dinosaurs.

            This led to a series of drastic changes in the world, and was the first act of slaughter that the Mechanist had to do, but not the last, and certainly not the last due to candy corn.  While it may have been buried beneath the rubble on Earth, it continued to reappear through time…

            This is also why Bruce Willis donates one-fifth of his income to the annihilation of Candy Corn Producers.

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            “Paris looks different.  A lot less buildings, a lot more mountain peaks and angry yeti.  I kind of like what they did with the place.”  Jack was leaning out of the time machine, which was leaning precariously over a ledge deep in the Himalayas.  Cosgrove was very silent and very still, but his eyes were both loud and active.  “It’s pretty cold, too.  Did Paris ever get this cold?  Cosgrove?” He turned around and sat back down, causing the cart to wobble disconcertingly.  Cosgrove panicked, reached forward, and, as the cart began falling forward, he hit the Button, resulting in the plummeting vehicle disappearing.

Past Future Travesties of Confection and Science Part 1

This thing's almost 20 pages double spaced, so I'm not going to load that on you, my loyal possible two readers, so instead I'm splittin' it into segments.  Here's part one:
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            A wise man once told me, “You know, I like candy, and I like corn, but fuck that.”  Thorough research revealed an intricate story behind the history of candy corn – that monstrous culinary mistake – that can only be described as convoluted.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let me start from the beginning.

            Mad science is a hilarious sport.  No, wait, that’s not the right place to start, either. 

This story starts with Gareth Llewellan Garbesmond, a Welshman who did a stint in Germany, Japan, and the American Midwest.  Some people later claimed that Germany turned him evil, but those in the know understand that the American Midwest can corrupt a man’s soul faster than a shady fast food joint can serve you a slab of brown meat.  Llewellan – that’s what he went by, claiming his Welsh ancestry as a minority scholarship – traveled around mostly for scholastic reasons.  He was an engineer, a scientist, and a writer.  He wasn’t very good at the last one, but the evil genius’s always feel a need to record their vile deeds.

            Did I mention that this is the future?  Well, not our future.  A future.  You could maybe consider it our past.

            Llewellan was evil in a time/place/universe that didn’t really do evil.  Sure, they had scary movies (But not the Scary Movie series), haunted houses, and Asian martial arts, but war was unheard of.  Nations formed and split usually over a nice glass of Miracle Juice (“The Only Way to Imbibe Immortality!”), children played without bullying, and it was possible to get through the Department of Motor Vehicles in less than half an hour and, occasionally, with a smile on your face.

            This place was so peaceful that it was still just one, giant continent – Pangaea, if you will.  Even the planet didn’t fight.  The dinosaurs never died out.  It turns out that given just a few more generations of evolution, they evolve directly into either middle class businessmen or hippies.  They’re still the size of a two story house, but given a big enough keyboard, they’re still able to fill out reports, TPS coversheets and all.  Carnivores?  Cultivated tofu.  That’s right, lions started farming.  The continent that would have been known as Africa was the breadbasket for the world.  Sounds great, huh?  I might have lied about that tofu bit, but who knows what happens deep in the darkest parts of the Congo.

            Anyway, Llewellan became evil.  What caused this?  I’m glad you asked.

            Llewellan styled himself an inventor.  He was not, however, particularly skilled nor was he particularly scrupulous.  Stealing ideas from other inventors, though, was the work of the unimaginative.  Llewellan stole his ideas in plain sight – from the very things around him.  After redesigning a toaster to always burn toast, creating a mechanical bed/alarm clock that launched the occupant out the window, and creating a bathtub-safe hair dryer (It wasn’t bathtub safe), Llewellan began to feel a little discriminated against.  But he still had one last hope.

            During his stay in the American Midwest – Towns don’t matter, this is the futurepast, remember? – Llewellan became obsessed with the corn farms that stretched for miles throughout Possible Illinois.  For a short time he considered dropping his failing Invention Racket in order to pick up a career in Corning, but a marathon showing of the Children of the Corn movies gave him a phobia of farms as well as a nervous tic around children.  Wrenched away from his most desired calling, Llewellan began plotting.

            Llewellan wanted everyone to know the joy of corn.  Little kids, old folks, guys going through midlife crises, housewives, Siamese twins, and fanatical faux meat enthusiasts were all his target audience.  “But corn doesn’t market,” he would brood over a fine cup of corn-off-the-cob.  “I need to get it to the people.”

            Enter Jerebiah Dangall Crumps.  Once a farm boy, he left the homestead to pursue his true calling in marketing, a profession that had thus far been avoided in this serene, happy world.  Switzerland collapsed when these two gentlemen met up, heralding a significant number of our Norse mythology – Fenrir would swallow the sun and the world would be bathed in blood and battle – but all it signified in this alternate Norse mythology was that rabbits would breed especially well in the coming spring and the wise hunters would set up traps that preserved the integrity of the pelt.  Jerebiah had never quite hit his stride, always attempting to candy up his items.  The motto on his business card read, “If Candy Cain’t Fixit, People’re Dum!”  Llewellan was a poor judge of character and an even worse judge of talent.

            The resulting mixture was a kernel of corn coated in candy.  “It’ll be the chocolate covered cherry of the vegetable world!” they exclaimed.

            It wasn’t.

            The second attempt was candy coated popcorn.  The result was no better.  Finally they resorted to trickery.

            The pair realized that making a corn syrup worked, allowing the sugar and honey flavoring to mix in, creating something that doesn’t quite taste like any of the ingredients and causing people who haven’t wounded their tongue to make a slightly unpleasant face.  It turns out that Jerebiah was inbred enough to have a wonky taste structure and Llewellan burned his tongue during his trial phase of the bathtub-safe hair dryer.  They saw themselves as master chefs.

           No one else did.  This world was good, pure, and decent, and their Creation was evil, corrupt, and disgusting.  Switzerland, just getting back on its feet after the first collapse, recollapsed, sending the investors of the rebuilding effort into bankruptcy and destroying one third of the world’s sitcom producing countries.  Llewellan was unapologetic.  His genius deserved recognition, and this world wouldn’t give it to him.

            Delving deep into his old calling, Llewellan began crafting a machine capable of altering the world.  He wanted brains to be changed, electrons to be rerouted, and his glory to be a naturally known fact amongst his fellow beings.  Late nights in his basement became routine, and the candy corn stockpile continued to grow, the ever increasing mountain of orangish-yellow coal acting as fuel to his passion.  The Candy Cornium, the factory producing the substance, was raided and shut down by a newly formed group, Dinosaurs for the Ethical Treatment of Humans (D.E.T.H.), and Jerebiah fled to the basement sanctuary with his colleague.

            Months passed and the world tried to recover, and the sounds of hard work echoed throughout Llewellan’s basement.  Finally, the Day of the Great Reckoning, as it was marked on Llewellan’s Corn of the World calendar, came.  His work finished, he retired upstairs to clean himself up before being raised to the pinnacle of humanity.

            “Shock!” he exclaimed. “What has science done?!”  Llewellan’s months in darkness, lack of sleep and nutrition, and complete avoidance of basic sanitation had resulted in a gaunt, pasty, bespotted skeleton of a man with thin, wispy white hair and few teeth.  His eyes spoke depths of insanity, finally catching up with his brain and mouth in their insanity producing capacity.

            Llewellan wept, but his resolve hardened.

            “This world will pay for what it has forced me to become!” he shouted, shaking his fist at the mirror.  “They will hail me as their king! Ha!  Ha ha!  Gwa ha ha ha ha-hurk, cough, sputter!”  Popping a quick lozenge, Llewellan once again descended into his basement.

           

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            “Distinguished Gentlemen, I am about to unveil to you my masterpiece.  The machine that will change everything!”  Llewellan stood behind a makeshift podium, lovingly crafted out of three boxes of his mother’s Wishin’ Trolls, and had one hand grasping a dirty white sheet that hung from the rafters, concealing said masterpiece.

            Jerebiah was sitting in one of eight chairs, the rest taken up with elegantly written “Reserved” notices, one for each of the seven members of the World Council.  “But Lellan, I seen the machine.  I hepped bild it!”  Llewellan quickly shushed him and yanked the sheet down, showering himself in dust and dirt.

            Unveiled was a contraption that looked remarkably similar to a Tesla coil.  It was a seven foot tall tower with what might have been a disco ball on the top.  Circling the main pole below the ball were metal rings, slightly alive with the hum of electricity.  At the base was a control panel that would have looked at home in any science fiction B-movie.  From somewhere, Llewellan had donned a derby hat which did little other than to fluff his hair out horizontally.

            Llewellan gestured grandly toward the device.  “Behold!” 

Jerebiah beheld, and waited.  And waited.  Llewellan held his pose expectantly.  Jerebiah shuffled in his seat a little bit and cleared his throat.  Llewellan’s arm drooped a little bit as he grew more and more tired, but he troopered on.  Jerebiah pulled out a small packet of peanuts from a pocket and began to open them.  Finally Llewellan straightened up in a huff.  “Well?  Where’s the applause?”

“Oh.  Uh, I was gunna wait fer ye t’fire up that ma-chine.”  He popped a peanut in his mouth.  “But I can clap fer ya now, if it’s whatcha want.”

Llewellan sighed and hit a big, square, blinking, green button in the center of the control panel.  The humming stopped and was replaced with a crackle.  The rings leading up the pole began to emit tiny bolts of lightning a few inches long, eventually growing to connect each ring in a bridge of electricity.  The bridges expanded further and further up until reaching the ball at the top.  Once powered, aside from emitting disco lights, it began to spin, bathing the room in electricity and the ‘70s.  Time seemed to—

          – stop.

            And then it was over.  The electricity cut off, the lights stopped, and the gentle hum resumed.

            Jerebiah popped another peanut and clapped.  Llewellan tried to tame his frizzled hair and bowed.

            “Now, gentlemen, I shall call up the head of Candy Heaven Candy Stores, and let’s see just what he has to say about our corn now!”  Llewellan spun around and grabbed his phone from the podium.  Hitting number two on speed dial, he waited.  He made an impatient face.  He checked his phone for reception.  “Damn basement, ok, let’s reconvene… outside!”  He dramatically swooshed to the stairs and huffed his way up them.

            As he opened the door to his kitchen, his nose was assaulted with a foul stench.  Cursing the cryptic garbage pickup schedule and vowing to hire someone to take care of it after his rise to power, Llewellan slammed open the door and hit a baby raptor.

The Creative Process

They say that behind every good man is a woman and behind every good writer is a vicious, carniverous editor.  Actually, I said that.  Just now.  Take notes, I'm making history.

Anyway, I've been told I need to post some of the conversations I have while trying to brainstorm my stories.  So uh, here's the first installment.

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[17:46] TheAuburnDragon: I can't stop playing Tales of Monkey Island.  My story is not getting written.
[17:46] M4573rF4c70r3r: Dammit.
[17:46] M4573rF4c70r3r: This makes me sad.
[17:47] M4573rF4c70r3r: C'mon! You had so many ideas yesterday!
[17:48] TheAuburnDragon: Here, I'll give you a paragraph snippet
[17:48] TheAuburnDragon:      Enter Jerebiah Dangall Crumps.  Once a farmboy, he left the homestead to pursue his true calling in marketing, a profession that had thus far been avoided in this serene, happy world.  Switzerland collapsed when these two gentlemen met up, heralding a significant number of our Norse mythology – Fenrir would swallow the sun and the world would be bathed in blood and battle – but all it signified in this alternate Norse mythology was that rabbits would breed especially well in the coming spring and the wise hunters would set up traps that preserved the integrity of the pelt.  Jerebiah had never quite hit his stride, always attempting to candy up his items.  The motto on his business card read, “If Candy Cain’t Fixit, People’re Dum!”  Llewellan was a poor judge of character and an even worse judge of talent.
[17:49] M4573rF4c70r3r: Hmm.
[17:50] TheAuburnDragon: That's actually going to be my motto.
[17:52] M4573rF4c70r3r: Has candy corn been invented yet?
[17:52] M4573rF4c70r3r: Make it a vegetable marketing ploy.
[17:52] TheAuburnDragon: Llewellan has a corn fetish
[17:54] M4573rF4c70r3r: Aha.
[17:54] M4573rF4c70r3r: A strange subsect of foot fetii.
[17:55] TheAuburnDragon: During his stay in the American Midwest – Towns don’t matter, this is the futurepast, remember? – Llewellan became obsessed with the corn farms that stretched for miles throughout Possible Illinois.  For a short time he considered dropping his failing Invention Racket in order to pick up a career in Corning (I cannot believe spell check isn’t busting me for that word), but a marathon showing of the Children of the Corn movies gave him a phobia of farms.  Wrenched away from his most desired calling, Llewellan began plotting.
      Llewellan wanted everyone to know the joy of corn.  Little kids, old folks, guys going through midlife crises, housewives, Siamese twins, and fanatical faux meat enthusiasts were all his target audience.  “But corn doesn’t market,” he would brood over a fine cup of corn-off-the-cob.  “I need to get it to the people.”

[18:02] M4573rF4c70r3r: Hmhm...
[18:02] M4573rF4c70r3r: Where does the time travel come in?
[18:02] TheAuburnDragon: After they invent candy corn and it is SHUNNED by this good, decent world.
[18:03] M4573rF4c70r3r: Hmhm...
[18:03] TheAuburnDragon: So probably in another page.
[18:03] M4573rF4c70r3r: Get thee to writing!
[18:03] TheAuburnDragon: But there's a kitty in my lap.  And a cat on facebook to annoy.  And I'm huuuungry  :(
[18:03] M4573rF4c70r3r: Solution: Eat kitty, shun cat.
[18:04] TheAuburnDragon: Cannibalution:  Reverse that.

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[22:01] M4573rF4c70r3r: AHOY, MATEY!
[22:01] TheAuburnDragon: Avast
[22:01] M4573rF4c70r3r: Progress?
[22:01] TheAuburnDragon: I had some soup!
[22:02] M4573rF4c70r3r: Hurray!
[22:03] M4573rF4c70r3r: ...story?
[22:03] TheAuburnDragon: What stor--oh.
[22:04] TheAuburnDragon: I knew I forgot something today
[22:04] M4573rF4c70r3r: Hah.

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Unfortunately, facebook doesn't save chat, so here's the little bit from today.  This switches immediately into the next chat segment, we just switched to trillian.

Adam

So, what's down, homie?

9:52pmMatt

Well, I went to the store and bought five bottles of juice, some beer, and a packet of cat toys. Then I came home and ate soup for an hour and fifteen minutes while watching House and Family Guy, then I came here and I'm playing with my cat.

9:52pmAdam

Kitty!

KITTY!

KIIITTYYYY!!!

9:53pmMatt

Yeah, she really likes playing Games.

9:54pmAdam

Cats, however, cannot lose them.

CATS ARE OUR ONLY SALVATION.

10:31pmMatt

HOOOBESSS

PROGRESS IS NOT COMING

ALSO I MAY BE DRUNK

I'm not, but I can never be sure.

10:31pmAdam

You're always dunk.

drunk.

Okay, what is the last thing that happened?

10:32pmMatt

Well, I sat on facebook for 45 minutes and chatted with people.

Also, my cat keeps making me go get her toys.

10:35pmAdam

Okay, last story thing that happened.

10:36pmMatt

Oh

I saved it and went to Iaido.

10:36pmAdam

...and what had you written about, again?

10:37pmMatt

That pooooor baby raptor. Also, the Ministry of Shenanigans.

10:39pmAdam

Right!

Okay, so, he killed a baby raptor.

10:40pmMatt

I never said killed

He hit it with a door

10:40pmAdam

He sees it. He's insane, what does he think.

Right, not killed.

10:40pmMatt

"Where's my kitchen?"

10:40pmAdam

Priorities.

He has 'em.

10:40pmMatt

"Looks like you just hit sumbody's dawg, Sarge."

"That's a zerglin', Lester. Smaller type o' zerg. But they wouldn't be around here unless--...Oh shiyit."

10:42pmAdam

Starcraftastic.

10:44pmMatt

I'm currently in the Ministry of Shenanigans.

10:44pmAdam

Alright.

Ministry.

Who runs them?

Why?

10:45pmMatt

Who cares who runs them. It's an international organization designed to prevent shenanigans. It's kind of like the U.N., but in a place that doesn't have warfare.

But what we DO know is that there are two agents hot on the case of the Bastards Who Went Back In Time With Candy Corn.

Designated Case Number C.

10:48pmAdam

Cool.

Did they just get the case?

10:48pmMatt

Yeah, let me show you what I've got.

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[22:50] TheAuburnDragon: Ok, this is the entire little chapter bit I have on the Ministry so far, haha
[22:50] M4573rF4c70r3r: THANK YOU, YES.
[22:50] TheAuburnDragon:      “Sir, we have reports of Shenanigans.”  The young man in the suit handed a dossier to the older man in the exact same suit who sat behind an unnecessarily large oak desk.
      The old man sighed.  “Shenanigans, in this day and age.  Well, let’s have a look-see.”  He opened the file.  Inside was a single sheet of grey paper.  “…What is this?”
      “Well, sir, it used to be a photograph of the Peacerary in Harmony Square.  It’s since faded, and our top scientists are detecting some sort of scientific stuff happening in the space time thing.  I don’t really know what they said, I’m a bureaucrat, not a physicist.”

[22:52] M4573rF4c70r3r: How much power does this organization have? What resources do you have at your disposal.
[22:52] TheAuburnDragon: So, you know the power that the theoretical Masons have?
[22:53] M4573rF4c70r3r: Yes. Elaborate. I want to know about the Ministry of Shenanigans.
[22:54] TheAuburnDragon: The Ministry of Shenanigans employs the top Scientists and the bottom level Bureaucrats.
[22:54] M4573rF4c70r3r: Haha
[22:54] TheAuburnDragon: They have fabulous amounts of wealth that is terribly mishandled.

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Man, this is even more hilarious than I remember it being!