My Kingdom Will Always Be at War- Chapter 2

Discussion in 'Fan Fiction' started by They_call_me_____TentacleFace, Apr 12, 2016.

  1. Brief preface: Please refer to the earlier installment. This is an on-going series of my KAW novella. Once written, I may retire from KAW. The writing is more or less..first-draft quality, so forgive me...but I think it contains the germinants of something more substantial. If nothing else...a confection...a huge cone of cotton candy. You bought it at dusk at some third-rate amusement park on a complete whim. You only ate a few bites of the cotton candy..but in the distance you hear the calliope music of a distant carousel intertwined with the fugue-like din of toddlers riding these ceramic beasts as they shrieked with a mixture of fear and glee. You will remember these sounds, the quality of the twilight, and the sweet taste of the cotton candy for the rest of your life.

    Valor,
    Robes


    Turkeyface was presented the option of choosing a name upon opening the Kingdoms at War app. He had all sorts of grandiloquent monikers in mind, but the format limited him to only 30 characters. He didn't want to choose his name lightly. Nothing to breezy. Nothing cliché. It needed to be a totemic power name that hinted at the shamanic genius he believed to be latent within his core being. Turkeyface also wanted it to be a violent yet sensual name...it would inform any females playing...that here was a man just as capable in a knife fight as in the boudoir.

    He certainly didn't want to be known as Turkeyface...or as Chip Burns...his actual legal name. Turkeyface hated both names, for they reminded him of a personal history fraught with defeat, entropy, and life hatred.

    He initially decided upon choosing a demonic-themed name. There were plenty of variants on names like “Demon, D4mon, Devilgirl3, Devilgal, Demonbabe, SexyDevilBabe17”, etc. in the game...but Turkeyface wanted a name that transcended the banality of these type of stock identifiers. He wanted something distinct, esoteric, the start of an authentic new self.

    Like many nerds of his era, Turkeyface was heavily into the rites of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. The game resonated even more for Turkeyface than most nerds, because he didn't really get to experience true gameplay with a cabal of supportive nerd friends.

    He had only one friend, Maxwell, an African-American nerd with moderately severe Aspergers. Maxwell liked numbers and memorizing population statistics of major world cities. He didn't like Dungeons and Dragons. Turkeyface resorted to playing Dungeons and Dragons mostly by himself. He was a solitary dungeon master.

    During his time playing Dungeons and Dragons, Turkeyface treasured the fake silk pouch in which he kept his dice. The pouch came with the game set he purchased. It was assembled in under a minute by an assembly line team of 19 child peasants in Bangladesh. Their individual stories...or collective story...may be more tragic than that of Turkeyface's travails playing Kingdoms at War, but it may not be.

    Turkeyface told himself that it was an ermine pouch. Turkeyface didn't know exactly what the word “ermine” meant, but the act of feeling the pouch, of rubbing his clammy pre-teen fingers over the smooth dice was almost like an I-Ching for him...like he was deciphering runes of incredible sadness and mystery.

    He liked the 20-sided dice the best. He couldn't really explain it, but when he cupped the icosahedral die in his hand, he felt mystical, in control of forces that typically mocked him. The popular kids, the normal-just plain kids, and all their ilk...they might be at home playing Sorry and Parchesi with 6-sided dice... but here he was rolling with more than thrice their amount of choices and opportunities.

    Perhaps, primarily due to the Dungeons and Dragons nerd cosmology, Turkeyface began to obsess over demons, witchcraft and Satanism from around the age of 12 to 14. This fascination coincided with his pubertal development. Turkeyface desperately wanted a demon to enter his being. He was certain that he could tame the demon and harness demonic energy. He thought to himself..that perhaps this demon power would make him popular with the babes at his middle school, his turkey head wouldn't matter...and he would avenge himself of the humiliation wrought upon him by his nemesis, Tab Flanagan.

    Turkeyface, outside of his interest in the occult, was not religious. He had never stepped inside any place of worship except for this one seminar held in the outskirts of Houston, Texas. It was conducted in the banquet room of a Best Western Hotel. Turkeyface was 13 years old. His mother took him along with her to the seminar during her Buddhist phase. He was disappointed because he expected there to be a wizened, oriental holy man there. Turkeyface expected to learn the basics of kung fu and mind control at the seminar.

    The Buddhist seminar speaker was not Asian. She was a thin, white woman with a hook nose and a mean face. She smiled a lot and tried to front a chill, sinuous vibe, but Turkeyface could tell she was a neurotic charlatan. All the other people in attendance were mostly old and they were all whites. Turkeyface was the only non-adult in attendance. The woman made a point to come up to him at the start of the seminar. She said, “My name is Shakti. What's your name, dude?”

    He told her that his name was Chip, but she wasn't really listening. It irritated him that she kept on calling him either “Skip” or “dude”, throughout the whole ordeal. He could tell that she was not accustomed to saying the word “dude” much and she had probably practiced it some in the event she ever encountered a young person at one of her seminars.

    Turkeyface especially hated the Buddhist white woman's shrill droning chant during the guided meditation portion of the seminar. He noticed that she had to chant the loudest. There seemed to be one pinch-faced fat woman trying to outdo her in chant volume and intensity, but the fatty was dominated by Shakti. Near the end of the chant session, Shakti was practically shrieking.

    So...despite his lack of substantial exposure to the numinous, Turkeyface believed he could conjure up a demon during this phase of his life. As he pondered opting for some kind of obscure Assyrian devil name for his KAW identifier, Turkeyface recalled his failure to seduce a demon into his being.

    The memory came back to him with a painful jolt of shame. He remembered many details quite vividly of this failure. He remembered using the word “Lucifer” a lot and how he pricked his finger with a small sewing needle. He remembered how he was scared to prick himself. He remembered that it took many attempts to pierce the skin of his pinky finger. He remembered rubbing the small amount of blood from this pin prick on a magazine cut out of the swimsuit model Kathy Ireland and on a yearbook face square of Tab Flanagan...also cut out. He remembered kissing the blood smeared picture of Kathy Ireland and burning the blood smeared, tiny, grainy, black and white 6th grade-yearbook cutout of Tab Flanagan with a match. He remembered that nothing happened.

    Thus...through the pain of this memory... he realized that any demon name would remind him of his failure as an occult mystic warlock. He then mused over another route..that of Native American lore. Turkeyface had been told all his life by his mother that he was 1/16th Choctaw. She lied.

    She desperately wanted to be an exotic Native American type herself after watching Last of the Mohicans. Over the years, she deluded herself into legitimately buying into this Native ancestry. She tacked up chintzy dream catchers all over their trailer. There was one gargantuan dreamcatcher...lots of tawdry blue and white synthetic feathers. It was big enough to practically cover an entire wall of their trailer.

    Of this dreamcatcher, Turkeyface's mother asserted, “This catcher was bequeathed in a ceremony to your grandfather. Your great-great-great Uncle, Mud Swan, crafted this catcher. I inherited it and shall pass it down to you when the time comes. The spirit will permit us foreknowledge of when this time arrives.” Turkeyface recalled the moment she informed him of this...she was eating Cool Ranch flavor Doritos. The shiny flecks of cool ranch flavor spice-crystals had rubbed off on her lips and on the marbled flesh of her chins collops.

    Turkeyface bought into her malarkey, though not without some measure of doubt, as his skin...was pale and pink like his mama's skin, and it seemed as if he had no connection with the natural world...with the exception of his turkey head and turkey face. In fact, it bothered Turkeyface that all manner of animals seemed to hate him. Especially eusocial colony insects.

    Turkeyface was terribly afraid of wasps and bees. He shrieked loudly when they buzzed by him and thought it absolute cardinal truth that these insects- wasps, yellowjackets, hornets, killer bees, etc., communicated in a mass global hivemind pheromone mist language...a malicious directive that Turkeyface must be tormented by their attacks. Please note that not once in Turkeyface's life was he ever actually stung by a wasp or bee.

    Despite these doubts, Turkeyface believed that a Native American type name would be best suited to him. He shut down the app and decided to go to sleep. He wanted to dream a name. Have a vision come to him. However, Turkeyface rarely dreamed...and his dreams were always mundane...dreams of eating cereal or turning on the microwave. This irritated him. Turkeyface always wanted to sleep and drift into cool, lush dreams, but he never did.

    It infuriated him even more so that his middle school nemesis, Tab Flanagan, had become an expert in Dream Studies. Turkeyface had discovered Tab Flanagan's website a few years back. He was of course obsessed and monitored every change to the site. Flanagan sold several self-published books, and seemed to travel around the world to various conferences hawking his books.

    As Turkeyface prepared to sleep, he grinded the small yellow giblet teeth in his beak with quiet rage. He thought of Flanagan and his website photo...dressed in a black turtle neck with this sly grin. Flanagan kind of resembled the Orlando Bloom character in the Lord of the Rings movies, Legolas, with the same top-knot pony-tail. He had an elven nose and face, but was definitely less attractive than Orlando Bloom...and Flanagan's hairline was receding. Turkeyface noted that Tab Flanagan had the same pointy features and small, shrewd rat eyes as he did back in 7th grade. Yet Flanagan always had a way with the ladies. Turkeyface thought to himself, “I may have my flaws, but I'm a much better looking man. And I'm a genius to boot. He's an outright fraud. I'll bet he seduces babes at those stupid dream conferences....”

    With this thought...Turkeyface gibbered impotent sobs of rage into a half-conscious sleep state. His sleep apnea choking snores woke him up. He jolted up from his tiny, single bed. Turkeyface was excited..for he had dreamed. He had dreamed for the first time in years. Turkeyface began to jot down the details of the dream in the same journal he kept to document his frequent bowel movements. As he scribed down the details, he realized...a problem. The dream was not a dream. It was an exact memory. Turkeyface dreamed a memory.
     
  2. I hate cotton candy