Project: Magnus

Green leaves unfold­ing The out­doors are invit­ing Now more so than in

Over on G+ Bliss Mor­gan put up a chal­lenge where peo­ple had to make a story from the phrase And if by noon I'm blub­ber­ing like a baby, I'll be scream­ing your name and beg­ging you to save me

This is my take :)

"What the hell is that idiot doing now?"

Michaels chuck­led to him­self as the Com­man­der walked into the obser­va­tion deck. "He's cel­e­brat­ing, or com­mis­er­at­ing, or com­muning… I for­get what word he actu­ally used, it started with a 'c' however."

"Okay," said the Com­man­der as he stopped in front of the floor to ceil­ing win­dow to watch the float­ing fig­ure, "did he say why?"

Michaels took a seat in the lounge couch, sink­ing into the overly soft cush­ions and feel­ing deca­dent as he did so, "He's explained it to me sev­eral times, but to be fair, I don't under­stand it. It's the anniver­sary of the death of his wife and son."

The Com­man­der turned to glare at Michaels. "And what exactly does that have to do with him float­ing away from the sta­tion with no tether! He's going to get him­self killed and us sued!"

"On this day every year he makes arrange­ments so that he is in space, on a sta­tion or dock or some­thing like that. Never a ship. Once he did a cruise liner but it was docked so I'm not sure it counts."

"Once? That crazy Russ­ian has done this before?"

"Every year on this date for the past fif­teen years. Ever since the base he was sta­tioned on was attacked and they were all vented into space." Michaels crossed his legs and smiled. "He puts on a suit and stands in an air­lock. At pre­cisely 12:24 in the morn­ing he opens the lock doors and just floats out. He then drifts there for four hours before moving."

Com­man­der Reynolds leaned back against the thick view­port glass and ran a hand through his hair as he watched sev­eral crew mem­bers walk across the view­ing area.

"I'm going to regret ask­ing, but then what?"

Michaels stood up, regret­ful to leave behind the com­fort­able couch and walked over to stand beside the Com­man­der. He put his hand on the glass , "Then he does what­ever he can, short of call­ing for help, to get back to safety."

"And what if he isn't able to make it back? We just let him die?"

"He said not to retrieve him unless and until he speaks the safe phrase."

Com­man­der Reynolds sighed, "And what might that phrase be?"

"And I quote 'And if by noon I'm blub­ber­ing like a baby, I'll be scream­ing your name and beg­ging you to save me'. Hon­estly, I have no idea what it means," Michaels said throw­ing up his arms in a defen­sive pos­ture, "but appar­ently those were the first words he said when the res­cue team found him."

"And he does this every year? Recre­ates the event and cir­cum­stances of that event."

Michaels turned around and leaned against the win­dow as well, fold­ing his arms across his chest as he did, "Every sin­gle year."

The Com­man­der stepped away, shov­ing his hands in his pock­ets. "Why? What's the point? What point does it serve to put him­self in dan­ger every year?"

"Maybe he's just remind­ing him­self of how close he came to dying. Or maybe he's angling for a Sec­tion 8. Who knows."

"Well, at least he comes by that 'Mad Russ­ian' nick­name honestly."

Michaels sim­ply nod­ded and smiled.

Proph­e­sies are tricky things.

Just ask Mac­beth. There are count­less dis­cus­sion, argu­ments, and treaties about whether or not the mur­ders and ter­ror that Mac­beth started would have hap­pened at all had he not heard the dec­la­ra­tion from the witches that he would 'be King hereafter'.

Which begs the ques­tion, would he have become King has he not met the witches and taken it upon him­self (with the wifes help).

Same holds true for the story of Oedi­pus, the inva­sion of Per­sia by Croe­sus, even Star Wars and Vader and the movie Twelve Monkeys.

They also have some­thing else in com­mon; they all are ful­filled in ways no one expected or pre­dicted. Vader did bring bal­ance in end and Mac­beth did become king.

A proph­esy is the heart of Chron­i­cles. It is said that a child of Dawge­ria will 'restore the lost land', and Harley, being a Dawger­ian is a good fit. As such, many are mov­ing the pieces to use him for their own want's and desires.

The board is set. The play­ers have all gath­ered and the game has begun. The pieces… well, they don't even know they are playing.

And Harley has no idea he's going to change the world.

But in order to find out how every­thing unfolds, you're going to have to read the series and fol­low the story.

So it's been pointed out to me that per­haps I could word or phrase this bet­ter, and that I should give details on any pos­si­ble or poten­tial compensations.

So here goes.

First things first, go read the first cou­ple of episodes, I'll wait.

Gar­den Wars

Done, good. Now tell me that wouldn't make a freak­ing AWESOME web comic.

The prob­lem is I can't draw for beans, and I can't seem to find an artist. I mean I can draw but I think Quer­cus and Rud­beckia will look much bet­ter as some­thing other than stick figures.

Now the comp side of the story. I need this to be 100% clear, this is not a one shot or short-​​term thing. It is also not a paid gig. Yet. Read on.

I have enough story writ­ten and mapped out for a long, long run. The plan would be to do the comic while I edit and assem­ble the prose sto­ries. Those will be pub­lished and sold on… well, to be hon­est any­where I can stick them :)

In addi­tion I plan to put the comic pages together into a graphic novel type thing and pub­lish those. As well as var­i­ous mer­chan­dise (oh trust me, there is a huge list. Shirts, bags, card games, teas…)

Whomever signs on as the artist would become a part­ner in the ven­ture. And by part­ner I mean a per­cent­age of the prof­its would be theirs. A decent per­cent (near half).

So to reit­er­ate, I'm look­ing for an artist to sign onto an indie ven­ture to cre­ate a web comic. The story is there, I have done comic scripts in the past so I have a decent idea what I'm doing (exam­ple: exam­ple script) and I'm will­ing to share any future profits.

I'm not look­ing for some­one to come on board and give away any­thing with­out some­thing in return. But I am ask­ing them to take the same risk I am. I'm not mak­ing any­thing from this yet and I work­ing my ass off to try and get it going.

Sound inter­est­ing? Know some­one who might be up for it? I have a total of 12 episodes (the link is just the first 3) presently writ­ten and under­go­ing revamp and edit­ing. There are many, many more in my head and plot­ted on paper.

So come on, what do you say! Let's get Gar­den Wars artified!

Who's with me!!

Okay, I'm going to put this out here again because.. well I think the idea has a crap ton of potential.

if you haven't read Gar­den Wars go do it, I'll wait here.

Gar­den Wars

Done, good. Now tell me that wouldn't make a freak­ing AWESOME comic. Print or web.

The glitch? I don't have an artist. I want one. I need one. I mean I can draw but I think Quer­cus and Rud­beckia will look much bet­ter as some­thing other than stick figures.

So… inter­ested? Know some­one who might be? I have a total of 12 episodes (the link is just the first 3) presently writ­ten and under­go­ing revamp and edit­ing. There are many, many more in my head and plot­ted on paper.

And I imag­ine each episode would take sev­eral comics to do up right.

So come on, what do you say! Let's get Gar­den Wars artified!

Who's with me!!

He's out there some­where. My men­tor. Teacher. Father.

Some­where in the shad­ows, watch­ing. Wait­ing. Try­ing to see how badly I've fallen from his blessed pedastal.

He once gave some stu­pid speech about walk­ing the road of ven­gence and dig­ging two graves… blah blah blah. I wasn't really lis­ten­ing. Didn't really care.

I'm tired of play­ing it his way, tying them up for the police or drop­ping them off in from of City Hall. They keep com­ing back more pissed, and stronger than before.
It's insane that we keep fight­ing these idiots, putting them in what are sup­pos­edly hyper secure pris­ons only to fight them again in six months. So I'm doing some­thing about it. I'm cross­ing the line he would never cross.

I'm end­ing their fight for good.

He told me that we could be a hero and save the world while killing the bad guys. That it 'bank­rupted our souls'. Whatever.

If that's how he feels so be it, call me Bankrupt.

"That… that's fuck­ing disgusting."

"It's fas­ci­nat­ing!"

"Of course you would think that. I'm not sure if that makes you just as dis­gust­ing or just fuck­ing weird."

"Think of the impact this will have on the world Jim. It will change every­thing we know about biol­ogy and neuroscience!"

"The only impact I'm think­ing about that of my lunch hit­ting the floor when I throw it up."

"Oh don't be such a baby. It's not that bad."

"Not that bad? Not that bad! You have his head cut open and his fuck­ing brain is full of worms. How is that not bad?"

"Well, for starters, his brains isn't full of these worms. It's made of them."

"Come again?"

"The brain is actu­ally a mass of worms. A colony if you will. We don't yet know how they com­mu­ni­cate. We do know that a giant ver­sion of the worm server as the spinal cord. You have to admit, it is fascinating."

"No. The only thing I have to admit is that it's disgusting."

"Oh grow up Jim."

"Grow up? You're stand­ing there, with the head of some­one I once knew open and pok­ing around in what use to be his brain and are telling me that they eat his brain and spinal cord and replace them with a giant morass of worms and I'm not sup­posed to be upset or grossed out by that? I knew him Cara! We went to school together and now he's.… fuck, I don't know what he is. He's not him, I know that."

"We aren't sure if they actu­ally eat the brain—"

"Now is not the time to nitpick."

"I'm sorry."

"Noth­ing to be sorry for. You didn't kill him or remove his brain or replace it with… those. Just look­ing at that thing… mov­ing, writhing like that is mak­ing me queasy.

Look, just bot­tom line it for me, do you know how to iden­tify these things yet? Or bet­ter yet, kill them?"

"No. But I'm work­ing on it."

Power.

I learned at an early age that it would be my weak­ness, my undo­ing. At least in the eyes of 'civ­i­lized' soci­ety. I got my first taste of it way back in 5^th grade when I had been appointed class mon­i­tor while the teacher when to lunch or a meet­ing or some­thing. The pure joy I got at being in con­trol of my fel­low stu­dents fate intox­i­cated me. I had the power to cause oth­ers to get deten­tion or extra home­work or demerits.

Years later I heard the phrase 'Per­cep­tion is real­ity', but I never really under­stood what that meant. Did it mean that what I see is real? What about what oth­ers saw, how did that affect the 'real­ity' I saw? It wasn't until I remem­ber being the class mon­i­tor that it dawned on me. As a mon­i­tor you had no 'real' power, it was all an illu­sion. You had the abil­ity to influ­ence the teacher who could, but in the end it was ulti­mately up to them as to wether or not to dis­ci­pline any­one. But every­one thought it had power. Every­one 'per­ceived' the posi­tion had the power to do all those things.

After that my life path was set. I wanted power and knew that I didn't actu­ally have to have any, just needed to appear to have some. I didn't need power to get oth­ers to do things I wanted, I just had to appear to them that I did have the power. I sim­ply had to alter their per­cep­tion of reality.

Then I found the book.

At first I had no idea what it was, I just knew it was some­thing spe­cial. I could feel it, sense it. That first night I paged through it read­ing the list of names and what turned out to be their man­ner of death but at the time I didn't know that. I rec­og­nized some of the words as ail­ments and sick­nesses and oth­ers were things like car crash and infec­tion. Some were quite lengthy, one even describ­ing in inti­mate detail the man­ner in which some­one had died includ­ing when and where.

I keep using the past tense but that's incor­rect. I ulti­mately learned that the death descrip­tions were not in fact how they had died, but rather how they would die. The book pre­dicted the death of the per­son listed. But again, I didn't know this when I first found the book. All that would come later, and at a fairly high price.

I began research­ing the names listed and even­tu­ally learned that the man­ner of death listed was in fact the man­ner in which each per­son had died. It meant noth­ing at the time because there was noth­ing to indi­cate it was any­thing other than what it seemed; a book of names and how they died. No dates. No loca­tions. Just the names and how they died.

That was until I looked up the last name. Michael Water­son. He was still alive. In the book he had been listed as hav­ing been killed in a motor­cy­cle acci­dent involv­ing a crane and a water truck. It didn't strike me as odd that it had was so spe­cific because it hadn't been any more spe­cific than any others.

Noth­ing pre­pared me for find­ing out he was alive. At first I began to doubt myself, I had to have picked the wrong Michael Water­son. There had to be more, one that was dead and had died in the man­ner spec­i­fied by the book. I don't remem­ber why it mat­tered so much other than it upset me. So I went back to search­ing. I spent 3 days dig­ging into obits and police reports online from around the state, then the coun­try try­ing to find the right Michael Waterson.

Then, thank­fully, I found him. Except it was the same guy I had located orig­i­nally that was still alive. His obit­u­ary was listed in an online news­pa­per some­where in Ohio. He didn't live in Ohio but rather in Mary­land so why was he listed in Ohio I won­dered. Because he had been trav­el­ing cross coun­try to visit rel­a­tives. And had dri­ven through Ohio, right through a major con­struc­tion zone. A motor­cy­cle had tried to cut across sev­eral lanes of traf­fic, the effect of which was that another dri­ver had tried to avoid the cyclist, plowed into Water­son and dri­ven him off the road.

Into a crane.

And it had hap­pened yesterday.

At first I refused to accept what my brain was telling me, that the book had pre­dicted the death of Michael Water­son. It was insane. A book can't do that.

But peo­ple can.

So maybe some­one else had writ­ten Michaels name and man­ner of death in the book. That too was insane. How would writ­ing that name and death in a book cause some­one to die? It was absurd. Com­pletely and totally absurd.

And yet…

So I decided to try an exper­i­ment. I wrote the name of a some­one I found in the phone­book and beside it I wrote 'fire'. And waited.

I did it for no other rea­son than to prove to myself that the idea was com­pletely absurd. That I was mar­gin­ally insane just for think­ing this could hap­pen, could be real.

Then the guy died when his house caught fire.

Dis­be­lief didn't even begin to describe how I felt. Although I still didn't believe it was any­thing more than a coin­ci­dence. So I did it again, only this time I wrote 'drown in kid­die pool' as the cause of death.

Five days later the obit appear in the local paper. The per­son I had ran­domly selected from the phone book had in fact drown to death in a freak­ing kid­die pool. I did it 3 more time with increas­ingly odds man­ners of death just to prove… some­thing. Anything.

Every sin­gle one came to pass. Every. One.

The book was power. Power over life. Over death. So many ques­tions. So many pos­si­bil­i­ties. I had no taste for death really, the oth­ers had sim­ply been to prove that it was real. I felt a twinge of guilt over each one but I hadn't actu­ally killed them, just writ­ten their name in a book.

I didn't know if that was a legal recourse or not, but I also didn't know how any­one would be able to link things back to me. It's just a book. If any­one found it I could sim­ply say it was a record, a diary of deaths for a project of some kind. I had no idea what kind of project, but wasn't going to worry about it.

How­ever I was insanely curi­ous. Did the deaths have to be sud­den and vio­lent? Could I give some­one can­cer with the book? It seemed like there was a win­dow of five days in which the deaths took place but what about some­thing like leukemia. That took longer than five days.

Could I give some­one the plague? Could I give some­one a dis­ease that they had already been inoc­u­lated against like chicken pox or polio?

What if I wrote down that some­one would die on a train but then tried to shot them before they got on the train, would they die from the gunshot?

Could I sim­ply give some­one a dis­ease that didn't kill? What about one that killed but not a phys­i­cal death? What about some­thing like Parkin­sons? Or alzheimer's?

Could I make some­one else kill another person?

All this ran through my head as I tried to sort things out. I now had real power. I had to pro­tect it, to insure that it would server me.

I decided then to run two more final tests. I had been hav­ing issues with a group of thugs down the street so I decided to have one beat another one to death. I wrote it in the book and added a time and date to see what would happen.

Ten min­utes before the time I had cho­sen I started walk­ing down the street on a path that would take me directly past the group that had been harass­ing some of the locals. In short order an argu­ment started and every­thing began to hap­pen just as I had writ­ten. One started beat­ing the other, blood and teeth fly­ing every­where. I smiled and con­tin­ued walk­ing mak­ing sure not to pay too much attention.

I walked in a cof­fee shop, ordered a drink, sat at a table and took out my new note­book. I smiled to myself as I began to write my fathers name, the man I hated most in my life. Beside his name I wrote a sin­gle word: Alzheimer's.

I was smil­ing the entire time.

(yes, I real­ize the sim­i­lar­ity to the Death­note anime. It's partly what inspired this, and partly the image of the guy smil­ing as he gave his father Alzheimer's)

Not the usual bit,
Added some meta today,
The Daily Haiku!

#dai­ly­haiku   #haiku   #pock­et­poem  

Week­end is now here
Hal­loween is loom­ing still
A storm is com­ing

#dai­ly­haiku   #haiku   #pock­et­poem