Darkly Dreaming Demographic.

Where weird shit hits bizarre fans.


April 2018

Gage Chapter 6 ‘Leaders of Men’

Ok so I just went ahead and made a spot for 3 Ring on my inkitt page, gave it a little cover and a blurb and all that good stuff so you can go ahead and check that out and give it a little read and review and a little kissy and a cuddle if you’d kindly follow this link good karma will come to you in the form of hot topic gift baskets filled with cancer cells harvested from infected rhesus monkeys. So go do that.

The Man with the Laughing Sword.

So what’s new? Well I finished the witcher book and thought it was ok, although the ending was a little creepy and the story is just sort of thrown together, it has no cohesion, there isn’t really a beginning middle or end, it’s just loosely connected stories and then it details how Yennifer and Geralt met and fall in loves, spoilers he fucking wishing on a Genie to force her to be in love with him haha. I’m not even kidding. This was sort of talked about in the Witcher 3 but I didn’t really put a lot of thought into it because I hadn’t read the books at that point but it puts a lot of stuff from the games in context and just adds this little creep factor to the whole thing.

And I totally get the whole ‘Team Triss vs Team Yen’ thing now because although I haven’t read the other books yet I’m guessing Triss actually loves Geralt and isn’t brainwashed by a fucking magic lamp and probably also wasn’t an ugly hunchback who used magic to be beautiful, at least I think that’s what she was.

I really thought reading the books would make me like Yen and Triss more but Yen is pretty much a thot and an asshole from the moment you meet her until they fall in love and it’s not much different in the game. I got to the bit where he wishes she falls in love with him and I was like ‘y tho?’. He literally just met her and she was in another man’s bed and she was nothing but rude and conniving and literally mind controls him to do her dirty work potentially putting his life at risk but this somehow endears him to her.
I didn’t get that, specifically considering he literally murdered a woman in the first part of the book for attempting to do the same thing after fucking her.
It just didn’t make any sense and honestly I didn’t give a shit in the games when both Triss and Yen snubbed me for fucking around with them both. I didn’t care but having read this I’m gonna be in camp Triss until she annoys me in the later books haha. The main thing that put me off of her in the game is just her annoying accent.
Don’t you just fucking hate it in fantasy games where there’s that character that just has this grating overt american accent in a game set in some mythical universe. It just completely breaks immersion for me to hear people talk like that. I become so aware I’m watching a game cutscene or a tv show or whatever.
Everyone in fantasy should have english accents or some variant on that like irish or scottish or welsh, something like that. Geralt is an exception because his voice is just dank the way it is boi.
Geralt’s is more subtle, Triss sounds like a new yorker ordering a bagel. Just annoys me.
Honestly I wouldn’t have begrudged a game like Kingdom come being all in Czech with english subtitles, not that that game needed to be more immersive but that extra level of passion of the christ immersion could be cool and I might see on my next playthrough if I can set that up.

I will definitely be reading the next book though because the action and the writing is perfect inspiration for my fantasy book I’m planning and 3 ring and I enjoyed it despite the fact it didn’t make much sense.

Anyway can’t stay long, could waffle on indefinitely, I need to do more proofreading for 3 ring so I must dash.

See you…


He couldn’t say how long he waited or if he even slept like that. Days could have passed, weeks of waiting. Waiting for what? A sign? God to reach a hand down? A white winged horse? Maybe he was waiting to die.

Gage couldn’t say until he saw it and he eventually did. It came up as a dot on the horizon getting ever close until it took the shape of a group of men. As they got closer to the whorehouse they waved at Gage seeing him sitting on the stoop in his rocking chair. He just nodded and watched them come. There were about five of them on horseback leading a sixth on a rope.

Eventually they stopped their horses in front of the stoop and he could get a good look at them with the gun still on his lap

They were relatively young but looked capable and had a wry innocence about them as if they were all farm boys fresh from the tit.

Gage offered them a greeting and they returned it cordially and smiled although he could tell they held a heavy countenance.

“Good evening mister.” One of the young lads said as he approached with a wary smile on his face. He squinted with the sun in his eyes, lighting up boyish freckles on a ruddy irish face. “You wouldn’t happen to know the way into town would ya?” The boy asked earnestly like a child would. But he was tall for a boy and wore a man’s duster and stood as one and was broad with a light strawberry blonde hair and stubble on his chin. Loose springy hair on his head.

Gage shook his head.

“Oh that’s too bad” The young lad said sighing and stopping to look around. “Ya see, we was transporting a head’a cattle up from Bronson when this gang of escaped- err – you know. Them Kafta folk.” He sucked his teeth reluctant even to talk about it sighing heavily as if he were more disappointed than mad, as if it were his fault somehow. ”Well they robbed us sir, kilt one of us, lad by the name of O’Hare just cut him down like a beast.” He swallowed remembering it. “Butchered him like a hog for slaughter.” His eyes got narrow as he realised that he was probably closer to the truth than he realised. Lugs weren’t too choosey about the source of their food, we were different animals to them entirely of course. “They took as much cattle as they could and the rest stampeded off a cliff.” He spat on the ground. “But you see they left this one behind.” He gestured over to the tied up lugger, a smaller scrawny one. The runt of the litter certainly but no less dangerous. It was dressed as something like a plainsman or a farmer in a light coloured smock that was torn and dirty on bare feet. Although his kind rarely wore shoes and usually had no need of them as their feet were ususally clawed and toughened like the feet of a dog or cat. “One of the little ones and well sir, we’re planning on taking him into town to face justice there”. He paused and cleared his throat “We thought if we couldn’t get the cattle back we could at least see this done and go home with our heads held high.” The young lad smacked his lips and said “Who knows, he might even have a bounty on his head”.

“Why bother?” Gage scoffed. There was something Gage respected even in his mockery. Something only in men and only then of a certain kind, a sense of duty, even misplaced, a sense of making things right that only existed in men. Despite how bastardised this sense of honor was by a system that had learned to manipulate and putrefy it. He could still respect that but not in abstract. There was no duty to ideals or concepts or company only in blood and the soil it fell on, only that mattered. For the ideas could be soiled and stolen and changed ever so slightly as to flip them entirely.

The ideals could be and more than likely were based on lies. The concepts half baked drivel formed from the minds of men never to spill blood except with a pen. But the blood and the soil had been there much longer and would remain on when all the high minded ideals were dust and buried in rubble.


“I have a rope here”

“Erm, well” The young lad dithered earnestly. “Wouldn’t it be better just to take him into town Sir?”

Gage knew that taking him into town was a waste of time, they’d take one look at the little beast and start blaming everyone but him. To the state the luggers were a class of retarded children incapable of being responsible for their own actions. And any violence they commited was the act of a mislead minor. And any violence enacted upon them was the act of a savage monster to be scourned and derided and spat upon in the streets. The state would bring down some Cyclon lawyer or magistrate to blame men for making him work, oppressing him somehow. There had to be some way his actions weren’t a product of his own nature as nature was something the Cyclon abhorred in all forms. The idea to them of creatures having a nature was almost like a challenge to them, something to be tested and broken and moulded and changed.

The human officials would just ring their hands and differ to someone else too afraid to even make comment on it. They’d think about their little wives and children and their mistresses before saying anything that could put that in danger. A danger that was very real. Such controversies erupting from the most benale of mistakes or misteps or resistance. Just some loose tongued person taking for granted that they’d grown accustomed to living in a ‘free’ country. And could say whatever they liked were of course layed low. As all free men would be in turn until they were all gone. It was only that the land was so big and the list so long that they could grow to doubt that they would be next although not next as they were waiting in a queue.

They’d say it wasn’t the lugs own beast nature but it was the speciesism and bigotry men had shown the lug. This forced him to become the wild animal he was always meant to be. It couldn’t possibly be the other way around. No that would make sense, but that’s what the cyclone did. They made up down, left right and it worked, if it didn’t it confused people long enough that it didn’t matter if they realised they’d been had, it was already done. They’d been so skilled at it they’d completely flipped the moral teachings we had had only twenty years prior. Without our even noticing it as it had been done so gradually and enacted so henpeckingly.

We didn’t ask for these beasts in our land and we could’ve built our tracks without them and been better for it. It was the Cyclon that brought them here from some different world, or maybe they made them who knows. It was them that wanted them here because they were cheap and dumb and easily controlled. And if ever something went wrong it would never be them caught in the jaws of the monster. It’d always be some human dolt who would get the axe and if he was unlucky enough to live, the hammer would come down if he ever spoke up. He’d be called every name in the book, the names that stick and he’d never work again.

There was a pause as the wind blew and the rocking chair creaked.

“Hey wait a minute” Another lad from behind said. “We can’t just kill him without a trial, that’s speciesist.” The boy looked older than the rest and had dark curly hair with freckles on his cheeks and dark beady eyes. “We gotta take him to town.” the kid protested. Something told Gage it was this kid’s idea to take him to town in the first place. Overriding the natural recourse which would have been to bash the beasts head in with a rock on the spot. The Cyclon loved rules, they loved codes and dictums because they were always for everyone else to follow but them.

There was another silence and blowing wind and they knew what justice called for and since they couldn’t do it right now the one beast would have to do.

Gage looked at the sorry thing, it was younger but given a year or two and it would be just as deadly as the others. It had an arrogant look about it. It knew it was beaten and looked sorry but it was sorry it had been caught, not sorry about any crime it had done. The luggers never could feel sorry for crimes against humans because in their minds they were justified. They were owed whatever they stole for some past grievance told to them by the Cyclon. Every killing of a human was a revenge for some long gone gripe that may or not have happened. The Cyclon would have them believe that humans and Cyclon were one and the same and it was men that had enslaved them. There was no subtlety nor a mind capable of distinguishing it in a lug.

“If you even think of hurting this fella I’ll run into town myself and tell them everything” The nasally voiced kid with the curly mop of hair said. “He has rights, they’re thinking feeling people just like us, they’re our equals and we have to treat them that way or-“. He got off his horse to get around to the front so they could see his hand wringing and gesticulation like he was making some address to public office. Taking a few steps onto the porch and talking down to them like some cutpurse evangelist. “It goes against the very nature of this countries founding to kill this free man without a trial, we’re a nation of immigrants bound by our principles.”

The other boys made faces like they were swallowing some harsh uneccessary medicine, a lie forced down with teaspoons of sugar and grit. Their faces contorting as this little rat told them that this monster was their equal. When every sense told them that it was a monster that didn’t belong on this earth. A mix of shame and revulsion at the thought of swallowing this lie and someday even believing it themselves. And forcing it down the throats of others made them sick.

Gage snorted.

The boys looked at him with astonishment. The little rat boy had said all the magic words that made normal men cringe and prostrate themselves. To make the strong bow and scrape, make even their own fathers become humble and small and itinerant but not Gage. To Gage they were just words.

The little rat boy squinted angrily almost in tears and said “I’ll report you all and you’ll be the ones that hang!” He snuffled and continued pointing at them in turn before waving his arrogant little hand in Gage’s face as he sat in his rocking chair. Then turning around to address the boys once again as he could feel some movement amongst them “My father-“

Gage had heard enough and interrupted his feeble chatter with a blast from his shotgun into the boys side knocking him headlong into the dirt. He fell like the devil himself yanked the little snots chain. Hitting so hard he broke apart like a child’s doll wrapped in meat into squishy flabby pieces.

The gun smoked under his blanket as the boys shook with fear but only for a moment. Because people only feared what they didn’t understand, and this made some sense to them instantly and the gun was only a surprise. They’d probably never even seen one this close before. There was a time when farm boys like this would be steeped in guns right out of the womb. They’d have been bouncing a shotgun on their knee while their father bounced them on his. But years of gun confiscations had left them little more than babes in the woods. Victims waiting to be robbed and murdered by monsters that roamed free, bound by no such laws. It was lucky they’d only lost one and hadn’t been raped for their troubles.

But there was some spark of boyish wonder in them looking at the gun and what it had wrought, a terrible wonder.

Gage stood throwing the blanket off his lap and said “I’ll get the rope.”

There was a little grumbling from the boy who had spoken to him first. He later introduced himself as ‘Jameson’ his partners were ’O’Shaunnesy, McDonald and Clarke the dead one’s name was Miller.

Gage instructed them to scoop up what was left of Miller and they dug another shallow grave. Not too far from the mass grave he just dug and laid his bones down there to be dug up by the coyotes and gnawed on.

It was getting later and there was some light protest. Worrying as they were about sanctions from the state. Gage assured them as he held the large bible that smelled vaguely of piss. That there was no greater sanctions than in this book if they allowed the thing to live.

There was some sense in that, although they swallowed with fear all the same. Knowing what he said was truth that spoke to their ancient past conflicting with the ‘truth’ of their modern age. It was a practice these country boys were slow to get used to and that’s why Gage knew he could use them. The age they lived in devoted itself to indoctrinating it’s young into thinking the thoughts in their heads weren’t their own property. And their natural reactions of disgust at the world around them was a result of their bigotry and small mindedness. And they had best to train themselves to be more tolerant of an alien race raping their planet. They were taught to suppress their instinctual reactions. Encouraged instead that they should instead try to befriend the monsters. If only they treated these creatures with love and kindness maybe then they’d decide not to rape and murder and see them as a source of food. To just keep putting your head in the mouth of the alligator hoping this was the time it would see sense and not bite. Failing in every sense that there was no sense to be had and in fact biting was its very nature, a sense of it’s own.

But instead of destroying the alligator or living in separation from it. Humans were forced to share a bed with it by people that would likely never even be in the same area code as the real throng. Sure the Cyclon had them as bodyguards but they made sure to pick the best most plyable subjects. Putting them through the most rigorous of screening and genetic manipulation. Further inhibiting them from turning against their masters with surgical implants in the brain.

They would never see the consequences of their actions and would never even care. For the life of one of their kind was considered worth a thousand of ours but they would never say that although we all knew it, deep down. No to the masses we were all brothers, all equals. Living together in perfect harmony towards a better future and this was the great lie that was repeated often.

The boys off their horses were all tall to average height. Strapping lads raised on beef and cows milk. Not like those scrawny city folk who were barely up to a cows eye and ate nothing but vegetables and bread from Europa.

They were strong lads raised for work, probably moving hay bales from an early age. Grown hardy and earnest from years of getting up early to milk cows and feed chickens.

Now seeking some kind of adventure or travel had taken to moving the cattle their parents had raised. The next generation of farmers and cattle folk that would keep the country crawling along on its belly. It had puzzled Gage to think how a snivelling brat like Miller had snuck into their group.

“His pa owns the bank, he’s the one got a lean on our farm, wanted us to bring him along to toughen him up, I don’t know what to tell him”. Jameson sighed as he looked at the poultry sum of dirt and rocks that made up Miller’s grave.

Gage breathed heavy with the bible clasped in both hands at his waist. He watched as O’Shaugnesy and Clarke put the noose around the young lug’s neck as he was seated on the back of Jameson’s horse. They tied the rope off on a branch and Gage opened the bible and started to read from it.

*Editors note, this part seems unlikely and inaccurate as all reports of the man known as Phineas Gage state that he was in fact illiterate. A common state of affairs for men of his time. The ability to read and write was not something commonly attained by workmen of his station and reserved mostly for the elites of the city. The aliens of which used a completely alien alphabet no human was allowed to learn.

He read a passage about justice and fairness and carrying a sword and they all listened with an earnest wonderment. As they’d most likely never heard anything like it in their whole lives nor would they be able to read and write. Their heads dipped as if they were at a funeral. The beast just howled like a kicked dog without any decorum or respect for the words at all. Just a baying disgusting cloying and begging and pleading for life when it so easily took it from others. Something in it knew it could try to appeal to us, to the mercy it had abused it’s entire life. The trusting good nature of man that had allowed these alien forces to usurp them.

Even the concept of the good neighbour in the book he held was twisted and used to promote their agenda of tolerating the intolerable. Taking in those that would eventually destroy us. As if the book Gage held sewed the seeds of extinction for it’s own people in it’s pages. As if man were not meant to live at all but to be used and thrown away.

It continued to howl over the words. It so desperately wanted to continue living but had no idea why further than the animal need to continue to exist and propagate its dna. What could this thing do if it were allowed to live but eat and consume? Could it write a sonnet or paint a painting or create a house. Gage could do none of those things either but the potential was there, this thing could not even dream of that like a wolf could not be a pig.

It’s existence was momentary, a link of moment to moment pleasures punctuated by the pain of others. It couldn’t see other things anymore that it could conceptualise of it’s own existence. It just was. No reason to wonder why. It didn’t have the pressure put on it to act a certain way as men did, or to aspire to anything greater than being a beast. Although in the media the few specimens that were of note to be more than most of the lot were lauded and held up as an example to the mean. As if this one well behaved dog was an apt representation of the mass of rabid wolves that made up their ranks. We were supposed to ignore the murders and the rapes that had become all too common in this border towns and even in the major cities. Although funnily enough they were always one sided as for most humans it was impossible tell the Kafta women from the men. No one had ever heard of a man raping one of their women or even trying. If it had happened though it would have been all over the news and you’d have probably heard of it all the way in Europa. They’d probably be making plays about it over there, operas and poems, expressing their deep sadness and empathy for the poor monster.

“No kill” It sputtered gutterily. “Please, no kill”.

The young men looked at eachother and felt some twinge of regret and revulsion.

The sun was setting and it cast amber streaks along the sky, it was a warm afternoon with a cool quiet breeze.

The boys froze and couldn’t say anything, “Amen” Gage said as he clapped the bible shut. He slapped the horse on it’s hind quarters and it started to kick and try to take off. With a yank it didn’t move and for a moment they were all puzzled as to why it didn’t drop it’s rider and let him dangle with a crack and quick pop as they’d hoped. Ending the poor creatures suffering as quickly and as humanely as possible. The same sadly couldn’t be said for the boy O’Hare. They mentioned he lay dying with his guts hanging open in the dust as they ate and bit at him while he still lived. The screams of which they would never forget.

They’d only managed to get away because the beasts were much more interested in the cattle than they were the men. Attacking O’Hare just because he yelled at them.

At once Gage knew the problem, the vile thing was holding with his feet to the stirrups. Got them loops around his clawed toes keeping the horse in place with the strength of his legs. The will to continue existing had conjured up some monstrous feet of strength.

But as Gage got closer he saw the truth of it under lamplight. The monster had buried it toe claws into side of the horse and it was bleeding horribly but unable to move. Pinned and being slowly disembowelled by the sharp claws of the lug on top.

Gage spat with rage and took out his shotgun again and painted the tree with the innards of the beast, the barrel smoking angrily.

The thing didn’t even have the decency to die like a man, instead choosing to be cut down like a beast taking the life of an innocent animal with it. Gage was disgusted in himself in even considering involving the bible and giving the thing an actual service. It was just a savage animal and needed to be put down as one and not thought of further.

The boys were in a state of shock, especially Jameson as he undoubtledly had a connection with that horse, he probably raised it himself from a fowl. Tears formed at the tender lads cheeks and his mouth quivered with rage and sadness but lacking any real direction. A deep anguished sigh came out of his mouth and nothing more, he didn’t know what to do about it.

The lug was cut in half at the waist and swung against the tree with the force of the blast, it’s top half and it’s arms swinging loosely.

“Cut that thing down” Gage spat.

The boys gathered themselves and did as they were told, Clark and O’Shaunnesy cut it down as Jameson patted the maine of his horse which he had named ‘Molly’.

As he mourned Molly the others dropped what was rest of the lug on the ground and then they went about constructing a fire as Gage instructed. They gathered up pieces of the broken furniture and they constructed a pire to burn the body of the lug and the horse.

The boys stood around it looking sullenly into the flames for a while. Gage sat in his rocking chair waiting for the flame to die.

Something had changed in the boys but they didn’t really know what. Only that the world they came from wouldn’t have them back after this and they wouldn’t want it to.

AC Syndicate Review (Rose tinted savagery)

I was thinking of using some stupid pun like ‘Syndishit’ or ‘binthisshit’ but it seemed tacky.

The reason this savagery is rose tinted is because I got this game free with games with gold on xbox, so this is the best possible review I can give this game as the sting of not having paid forty quid for it is not present. Baring in mind if I had paid full price or anything at all I would have torn it to shreds because it’s not worth the full price of a game.

I honestly tried to like this game, I haven’t actually played an AC game since rogue which was ages ago and after that these two didn’t really interest me. I enjoyed it at the start, AC is fun when you get going, the gameplay is decent, the world looks all right. But once you really get into it there really isn’t a lot to these games.

You run around and climb and stab the man and then run around and climb some more. And after that’s it’s just constant repetition.

The things I liked about it were the combat system, they seem to have changed and I thought it was just mashing X to win but there is a little subtlety to it and there are combos. Taking the boroughs is repetitive but it’s fun testing out new skills and weapons and I thought I’d hate changing between the two characters Evie and Jacob but I actually really liked it.

It made for a nice shift in gameplay, I’m playing Evie one minute being all stealthy taking down workhouses and then I switch to Jacob and I walk right into a gang stronghold and just start punching people. It makes for a nice switch in gameplay and it stops the rpg elements from breaking the game. Because in a lot of stealth games you get rpg mechanics that ruin the game because if you invest too much in stealth you inevitably have a boss fight where you cant even hide and it just makes it impossible. But this gets around that because you have your stealth character and you have your combat character to switch to if you need to. And I liked how they had their own individual skills, like Evie couldn’t unlock the top fighting, toughness and shooting skills and Jacob couldn’t unlock the top knife and stealth, keeping both play styles unique.

Also finally different costumes have different effects and you have lots of different gear play with. And the game basically entails doing a bunch of fetch quests or nonsense missions to unlock an assassination mission. They’re pretty good, you have lots of different ways to approach them, when I say ‘lots’ I mean three. But they’re ok, kind of like Hitman but then why wouldn’t I just play hitman if it allows me to cut out all the busywork and pointless collectibles. (Seriously does anyone collect the collectables in AC games, there were like fucking pressed flowers to collect in this and I was like ‘huh’).

Now onto the fun part the stuff I hated haha.

First thing that let me down is there are basically only three variants of the same weapon for the entire game. You get a kukri, or a ‘cane sword’ (in name only because it’s a fucking knife it’s not a sword) or brass knuckles and then every subsequent weapon is just a reskin with different numbers next to it. And what really annoyed me is you only see the weapons when you actually attack, so I invest in this dope looking ‘cane sword’ and I can’t even walk around with it. And don’t get me wrong I love kukris, I have like four of them but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like a bowie knife or something just for a change. And in previous AC games you could get maces and axes and each sword had different speeds.  I dunno this just seems like streamlining instead of expanding.

The guns on the otherhand were pretty cool, reminded me a little bit of red dead but not nearly as good in the selection but on the whole I like the leveling because they dished out weapons gradually and you get a feel for a difficulty curve.

The next gripe I have is a difficult one because I actually liked the climbing in the previous games but I guess it made it necessary to shrink their game worlds before because you couldn’t get around the map fast enough. So in this game you have the scouting positions as fast travel points and you have carriages but you also have a grappling hook zipline thing.

So yeah that sounds cool, you’re zipping around like batman dropping smoke bombs and zipping away, that sounds really cool. Like it’s a game version of gotham by gaslight. It sounds cool but we’re forgetting this game was all about climbing and climbing was almost a sort of puzzle and having a grappling hook basically makes all of that unecessary. So where as in the previous games climbing to the top of big ben would have been this awesome achievement that took time and effort and skill it now takes literally one button push to go from the ground to the top with the grappling hook.

And as far as the climbing goes it’s been simplified to the point of absurdity and I honestly don’t know why they would introduce a grappling hook in this game and not in any of the others and it makes me think its because their climbing system has basically been dumbed down to the point of not even mattering so they have a grappling hook to cover that up. It essentially removes climbing from the game.

Now I’ve got the gameplay stuff out of the way, I mean if you know AC as a series you know what gameplay is like, I mean if you play one AC game you’ve basically played them all. They just add a little something new each time. Like building a town and hunting in 3 and pirate ships in 4. Time to move on to the the story; there isn’t one. Well that’s that done.

No seriously the game literally starts with the main characters just going to London to fight templars and get some relic and that’s it. There’s no back story or emotional tie to the villains, no revenge story or redemption story or coming of age. There’s no arc, no character development that stretches further than ‘Oooh Jacob has a new hat’. It’s completely hollow and all the characters are cardboard cut outs or tongue in cheek over the top representations of historical figures introduced like they’re on a cast of a kids tv show. “Ooh look it’s Charles Dickens I wonder if he needs me to stab anyone in the neck for him!” And once I realised that these side quests for these figures didn’t propel the story at all and weren’t necessary to complete the game I never did another one because they were completely pointless.

There’s even this side quest where you play a later Frye set in WW1 London where you meet winston churchill and its just more of the same game I don’t think there were even new weapons or anything and the new Frye is even less developed as a character than Evie and Jacob. And her goal, I kid you not is to get the vote for women, when she said that I literally did a full body cringe.

I expected there to be some story surrounding what happened to Evie and Jacob’s father and it’s touched on like a couple of times in idle conversations in carriages you can skip by getting to your destination faster than the characters dialogue and it’s never touched on in regards to the story rendering it utterly pointless. And the characters of Evie and Jacob can just be summed up in grumpy tough girl stereotype and charming rogue stereotype. They’re not developed any further than that.

It lacks the essential emotional drive of a story that makes you want to go forward and I ended up just completing it for this review instead of actually wanting to know what happened at the end because I already knew what would happen in the end.

They defeat the snidely whiplash moustache bad guy who is only evil because he shoots a man for interrupting him once and he has evil hair and a big moustache. That’s it. And really all you do in this game is go around to his parts of town and make his men wear different coloured coats because all that happens when you kill everyone is that they respawn working for you instead.

Now all this story stuff aside, I honestly have no problems with games having shit or no story or very little story as long as the gameplay is fun and inventive and doesn’t get repetitive. And on the other hand I don’t mind if a game series has the exact same gameplay tweaked a little each time as long as it has memorable likeable characters and a good story with interesting worlds to explore, like uncharted. I don’t care if the gameplay is the same in uncharted as long as you’re exploring a different country and Sully is there. I don’t care if they literally copy paste last of us for a sequel as long as the story is as heart rending as the first (both naughty dog games, wtf how did the people who made crash bandicoot come up with some of the tightest story driven games in history and the people who made prince of persia make this tripe???).

This game and the entire series as a whole does neither of those things. It has the worst of both worlds, it recycles the tired rinse and repeat gameplay and has a lazily written nothing burger of a story. It fails on every level because even returning characters are fucking insufferable.

I mean they keep bringing back Shaun and Rebecca like anyone liked them even as far back as AC2, but we’re supposed to be like torn up when Rebecca gets shot at the end and that sad music is playing. It was beyond cringeworthy, why do they think people like these characters? They’re mildly annoying at best, insanely irritating at worst.

I didn’t have a big problem with how they were introduced in 4, they were almost an easter egg and I thought that was fun. But it’s beyond cheesy in this and I honestly don’t know why they don’t drop the side by side time jumping. It served it’s purpose in the first three games but now it’s just a gimmick they can’t let go of and really should. It doesn’t serve the story at all anymore because they’re never going to do a present day game because they don’t have a replacement for Desmond, so why bother?  Why not just have the games set in that time and drop the animus all together?

It seems like a tradition almost, would any one care if in 4 you didn’t have to come out of the animus and walk around the office and collect post it notes? No because it was pointless, it mattered in the first three games because it was all about the two worlds colliding and the difference between reality and history as a game, a game within a game, now it’s just this tumour on the series, an excess of flesh that just has to be there. You could literally cut out all the present day scenes in this game and it would make no difference.

The problem isn’t that they keep the two timelines running concurrent, the problem is they don’t put any effort into either story but also won’t let the concept go. Either drop the present timeline and focus on the main game or make the present timeline relevant and not just a shitty immersion breaking gimmick.

What do you do with a series that basically peaked on it’s first outing? I mean 4 was nice but all it did was give was give a terminally ill franchise the strength to limp on to even more mediocrity.

The problem I have with these games is similar to star wars, they have no plan. They don’t have one person or one group of persons or a show runner planning their games and stories out so they interlink into these nice weaves of narratives it’s just ‘Hey why don’t we set a game in victorian london?’/’That sounds great I’ll go draw some top hats.’ Narrative is a complete afterthought to costumes and micro transactions.

And moreover the world was flat and boring and it didn’t feel like London it just felt like another AC game and I think a lot of that is all the immersion breaking stuff.

… Now you’re like ‘this is when he’s gonna talk about tranny stuff right?’

I’m not gonna dwell on this too long but yes ubisoft has drank the coolaid seen fit to put a female to male transvestite in victorian england for whatever reason that is obviously a woman dressed like a man but everyone still refers to them as ‘Ned’ and it’s not a joke and no one draws attention to it. But they’re really only in the game twice crucially and after that optional side quests I didn’t bother with when I realised the side quests weren’t necessary to either leveling or the story. I got to level ten and maxed out all my skills just by conquering the boroughs and the main quest so they’re completely superfluous and only give you gear that is beaten out by stuff you get just through the regular quests.

So yeah I just went over two thousands words ranting about a game I didn’t even pay for, now imagine if I paid full price for it on launch.

To conclude, stop giving ubisoft money, just stop. The AC series just needs to be allowed to die. If it was ever good or original that was long ago and now it’s a pale, cynical husk of it’s former self. AC wanted to be the COD of third person games and it got it’s wish.

See you…

Diana After Dark Chapter 13 ‘Daddy’s Little Darlings’

How do fine folk?

It’s your boi… *tries to think of a witty rap name and fails*

Err moving on. So yeah erm did a story about a clown samurai, that’s a thing, it was fun to write but it’s essentially a cool kung fu movie you can’t literally see with your eyes so that’s that I guess haha. Gotta get those old noggins joggin’ my dudes. I still think it’s bette than the first witcher book because it at least has the thread of a narrative running through it.
I will continue to rag on the first witcher book despite how excellent I think it’s written ad probably the reason I am shitting on it out of pure jealousy haha. It’s really effortlessly well written, it’s irritating haha. But yeah I thought back to even the witcher game and I was thinking there isn’t really a story here either. I mean it’s basically like this book, a series of vignettes, little fun well written stories that ultimately go nowhere but in the game those stories are loosely knitted together with the bread crumbs left behind by Ciri. So it’s less of a story and more of a Mario princess hunt.
Not begrudging it at all, I loved that game, I plan on playing the others. I mean I played 3 the popular on now I’m gonna play 2 the less popular one haha. But videogame stories are basically just there to get you from point a to point b and to make you forget you’re playing a videogame which some do really well and sometimes the skill in games is getting the story out of the way to let the player make his own story and those are games I think have a better grasp of what a game is.
I kind of always wanted to write stories for videogames but then as I played more and more games I realised that story in videogames is really just a means and not an end in itself and really story unless it’s really really good like last of us or something just tends to get in the way and hinder gameplay more than it helps it. That’s why I find myself drawn to games with only peripheral or no stories whatsoever like FarCry2 and Elite Dangerous, where the fun is found in the gameplay and exploring and making your own stories.

Anyway, back to 3 ring, so I’ve almost finished the first part, probably would have finished it earlier if I wasn’t struck down for two days by the spiciest vindaloo I’ve ever eaten *conjures feelings of the acidic alien blood*. What I tried to do with the first part is to have some fun with it and introduce Pookie as a character and have a good solid set of action set pieces with interesting villains all the while subtly lacing in an overarching story and some of the world building without it being too hamfisted.

Literally trying to do what the witcher is doing essentially haha. I want to create a story like a tv show, where you have these interconnected stories in relation to the overarching plot that carries them forward. I think due to the structure I had planned I could have rewritten it and shortened it to a book or a couple of books but I think I’m too lazy for that and I’m better maybe trying something new and just having it as a series of episodic novelettes.

I think it turned out ok, maybe a little too tongue in cheek but the witcher’s style and mine are pretty different. It has some humor but very different from my own. I am enjoying it but it’s a slog as to is the game I’m currently reviewing which should make for some cathartic savagery for tomorrow haha.

So today, I’m gonna keep plugging away with the edits for Diana After Dark, maybe do a bit of spamming and this time next week I should be back on facebook and my next newsletter is scheduled for the first with more free copies of TOTCB flying out to all of my subs which surprisingly were quite a bit the last couple of weeks.

Not much else is up except I’m watching the new season of Bosch trying to get my detective story juices flowing for Diana 2. I want to start that next but I really need to psych myself for that I think.

Anyway, enough time wasted.

See you…

Daddy’s little darlings


Darkness, and then an eye opens, I open my eyes and he’s there.

“Come on &&^%^$(*()*&

I wanna show you something”

A little boy with a bowl cut hairstyle is leading me down a tight white hallway.

There’s a door, he wants me to go through.

What’s on the other side?

The door is huge I can barely reach the handle, it’s turning red, the door, it’s melting. What’s in there?

“A surprise

I did it for you”

Shapes start to appear in the red goo the door is turning into. A face is pushing through the malleable door.

It’s my face, it’s a mirror.

A sudden jolting and my face hits something hard and flat and I’m thrust back into the land of the living rather unceremoniously.

My head hurts, I’m still seeing spots, but that’s all I see, there’s something over my eyes. I can almost feel all the veins in my neck, my brain feels like someone slam dunked it through a stained glass window.

I can feel something wet and warm on my face, getting colder, shit, blood, it has to be blood. “I’m bleeding” I cry out to the dark to no one in particular.

“Relax” A woman’s voice says “It’s just drool- you can wipe it off when we get there”

“Get where?” I ask stupidly.

“Prom, of course” Wendy said.

I try to move but my hands are strapped with ties to something at my side and I can’t move them. But I can feel the car plaining over wet roads, feel it turning, stopping, we’re moving.

“Don’t move, don’t be dumb” Her voice was tight, stern with a bitter frosty bite. “Don’t bother screaming, we’ll just crank the radio up, the windows are tinted no one can see us in here.” She said with a cool commanding calm in her voice.

“Wendy, what’s going on?”

She laughed and said “What’s going on? We’re going to prom, didn’t I just say that?” The car slowly ground to a halt and I heard the driver get out of the car. “Just gotta make a little stop along the way”

“Wendy I-“

“I should have known it was you. My mom warned me about you, you’ve always been jealous of me- how did you know?” I heard the jewellery on her arm jangling as she talked no doubt gesturing to someone blindfolded. “I bet you felt really fucking clever sending me those little notes- how clever do you feel now huh?”

The passenger side door to my left opened and something big and heavy was slung at my side.

“Don’t make a fucking noise puto, don’t make me shoot you!” A man’s voice said.

The door shut again and the large sack of potatoes started to writhe and make groaning grunting noises in the seat next to me.

“What the fuck Denny, I told you not to hurt him, he’s fucking bleeding”

“I had to hit him with the gun, big white boy wouldn’t come on his own, thought he was a tough guy”

“Now I’m gonna have to clean him up, you better not have got blood on his tux.” She screeched.

“What the hell’s going on? Is this- a prank? – It’s not very funny” The potato sack said in between pained groans.

“Paul!- Is that you?”

“Diana? – are you?” He said groggily.

“Just stay cool” I said.

“What the hell Di?” He groaned.

“What’s going on is I’m not going to let you white trash pieces of shit ruin my senior prom.” Her voice got fast and high pitch. “Already close to ruined it having it in that fucking lazer arcade. I wanted it at the beach club, but noooo that wasn’t cool enough for little miss ‘ooh look at me I’m so quirky and interesting’!” She made a clucking sound in her throat trying to get more spit in her mouth. “Me being the great friend I am let it slide, but no you gotta stab me in the back and try to ruin it”

“Wendy?” Paul said. “What’s she talking about, what’s going?”

“Would you just shut up you fucking meat head daddy’s boy retard.” She took a deep breath and filled herself with sweetness and light and said. “We’re gonna be there soon and we’re all gonna dance and have a great time and then me and Brody are going to be crowned prom king and queen and then-“

“Then what?” I said.

She laughed and I could feel her shifting closer to me, the leather creaking under her toned brown buns. She took the sleep mask off my face and put a small gun to my head, my small James Bond-type gun to be precise. She looked over at Paul and squeezed her thin drawn on eyebrows as tight as they would go. “Oh for fucks sake.” She tutted as she pulled out a tissue from her purse and spat in it rubbing furiously at the small nick at the side of Paul’s head where Denny had hit him.

She stepped back after she was done to get a good look at him. “There, you look great” She sat back in her seat in the front of the limo with the small purse pistol trained on us. Wendy was in a gold taffeta dress looking like a real princess. Paul was in the tux my aunt picked out for him tied to one of the arm rests with a plastic tie the same as I was. He was slowly, fading in and out of consciousness like he took a hit of Nyquil and whiskey.

The interior of the limo was huge. The ceiling was much higher than you would expect and coming in at a cool five three I was almost certain I could comfortably stand up in there. It was almost as a standard bus. It was wide with black leather couches on all sides and a large bar-like table with cushioned corners all the way around stretching out the length of the interior. To top it off there were blue strobe lights around the ceiling making it look almost like a mini travelling strip club. It was missing the stripper pole though. No fog machine either.

I looked down and I was wearing one of Wendy’s hand me down dresses she wore to the homecoming dance last year. The insult to injury received. Pretty in pink my ass.

“You two make such a cute couple” She smirked. She turned and tapped the glass between the passenger compartment and the drivers cab and said “Denny you’re driving like an old lady, are we there yet?”

“Couple more minutes” He shouted back “You know, we’ve got some time” He said, his voice taking on an odd tone.

Wendy turned a redder shade of gold and said “Not here dummy” She turned back to look at me, her eyes becoming sharp slits, making a sucking sound with her gums. “You think you’ve got it all figured out don’tchoo?” Her valley girl accent slipped a little, letting a little Cubano slide in. “I took a look through your littl kit, some sick shit in there, you got the letters, you were really gonna do me like that, after all I’ve done for you?”

She sighed and her and relaxed her muscles with the gun hanging languidly in her lap as she laid back in her seat spreading her legs. “What was the plan? Gonna blackmail me after I made you?” I had a feeling somebody made me but not her and not here. “No one in that school would even know who you were if it wasn’t for me. You’d just be a nobody.” That’s what she didn’t get, that’s what she could never get, I wanted to fade into the background, I didn’t ask to be popular, I wanted to be a nobody, I just wanted to fit in. “You wouldn’t have him for sure.” We both looked over at Paul as he dozed, very still slumped in the corner of the limo. “Shit I might have to cover the cut with some make up or something.” She tutted and looked back at me with half lidded almond eyes “Now you’re gonna lose it all”

She thought I just wanted to black mail her, that was a step up I guess from what I was actually planning. “You’re gonna kill us?” I said dim as ever.

“You see another way out of this, you promise not to come after me or squeal on me?” She laughed. “The funny thing is I probably would have just given you money if you asked.” She smiled sadly “What are friends for right?” She gritted her and made her eyebrows angular again pointing the gun at me “You think I’d let you ruin my prom? We’re going and you’re going to behave, because if you don’t I’ll put a bullet in both of you. Dump your bodies in a snow drift in aspen then I’ll pay a visit to your Aunt.” She looked left then right out the window like she was trying to see her reflection. “I mean you could have told her anything.”

“No- she doesn’t-“ Something bubbling up, something new. A whole world created and then destroyed. My aunt, my sister, she built a life for us and now as her reward she’d get a bullet in the head from her sister’s best friend. Bedded in an unmarked grave because I was too smart to just be normal.

“You read the letters, you think you know the truth, shit my mom doesn’t even know, they’ve got her so doped up she probably thinks she did kill the old man. She probably wanted to.”

“Why did you-?”

“Do you actually care?” She looked at me with her head tilted, the gun at an angle like she was trying to see under a veil. “You don’t give a shit, just trying to buy yourself time” She sucked her gums.

“You know I hate awkward silences” I said.

She smiled. “I should kill you right here next to your boyfriend, but then I wouldn’t get to see your face when I’m crowned prom queen.”

“What about Brodie, when he sees this-“

She picked up her phone and looked at it “He already texted me, he’s meeting us there, had some family shit, ergh, like I care.” She said throwing the phone down on the leather couch.

“You’ve got your brother”

“Th-fuck that s’posed to mean?” She rattled the gun in her hand as the accent slipped again. “You have no idea what it’s like being the little rich spic in Orange County, surrounded by all these rich white people people”.

I rolled my eyes “I’m sure it was a nightmare.”

“Shut the fuck, what do you know? Denny was the only one who understood and it almost destroyed him. My dad found out and he was gonna send Denny away to a reform school, I couldn’t let that happen, I couldn’t live without him.”

“Stop, you’ll make my mascara run” I slipped a canine tooth out as I smiled, trying to break the ice.

She laughed and let out a little tear which she cauterized with her finger to stop her make up running. “Look in the mirror baby, nobody’s making dent in that shit” She chortled.

What did that mean. I looked in the reflection of the passenger window and saw a dim reflection of what looked like a Mexican clown but I knew unreservedly was me. “Oh goddamit, spray tan, really?”

“Better than your pale ass goth shit.” She said cocking her head. “Baby I made you look good.”

“You made me look like a clown whore, did you apply this with a shotgun?”

“We’re almost there” Denny called through the little PA system in the limo.

“Show time” She said smiling. She reached over me and cut the ties with a little fruit knife from the mini bar. I looked down at the gun and then up at her and over at Paul. “Don’t even think about it.” She spat.

She moved back, her head bowed for the lip of the door and signalled with the gun for me to get out. Denny got out the driver’s side and went around the side of the car to cut Paul free. I got out the car and stretched my legs. It was night again, I’d been out all day, she probably fed me Xanax to keep me pliable so she could dress me and do my makeup. My whole body felt and sore stiff like I was living doll rented out by a submarine full of sweaty otakus.

“Wake up pretty boy”. Denny was a tall lean Hispanic man dressed in a loosely fitting limo driver uniform with the top two buttons undone. I can see why she liked him, he was pretty much a male version of her, I wonder if they used the same eyebrow pencil. A chiselled jaw on a swarthy face and even darker hair and pencil thin moustache. He slapped Paul who was roused enough to indignantly stand, faltering a little before erecting to his full height of around six one.

“Remember my brother will be watching, so don’t try any clever shit or he’ll be paying your Aunt a little visit, got it?” She put the gun in her golden D&G purse and clipped it shut. “I still have this so if you fuck this up, all bets are off girlfriend.”

“Got it” I felt like a wrung out tube sock, I wanted to drop to my knees and just die right there. I slept but it was an unrestful semi-death like I’d been hung out to dry.

I looked up at the big black open empty sky, no moon, no light, just a blanket of dark sky lit up with the orange pollution of every damn light in the state.

We were in the parking lot of the lazertag place. I couldn’t tell the time, Wendy had taken any such devices used for such things away from me, which is understandable. But I assumed she would be fashionably late to her own funeral. Parking lot was littered with limos and rented sports cars. I then idly glanced back in my stupor at the vehicle we had arrived in seeing it for the first time from the outside. It was none other than a white stretch hummer. Classy.


“I knew you’d like it” She said.

The front of the lazer arcade was a lit up like a movie theatre like it was some grand screening at Mans Chinese. Bright spots and strobes inside. A big stone awning with the Fuzion lazer tag sign on the front. I’d never actually been, it just kinda looked cool from the outside, driving past it with my Aunt/Sister. And I knew it would kind of piss off Wendy. I drilled into her the fact she chose the venue for the home coming dance, which was a golf club. I mean come on, how preppy is that? Plus it had the floor space and the lights and the food. The whole place was rented, no kids, did I mention I hate kids? I thought I’d get a kick out of watching all the people that pretended to be normal all day long chasing after eachother with toy guns, their hearts filled with playful virtual murder. But of course they weren’t actually pretending, like me.

I heard it’d been closed for a while. Some kid died here and they shut the whole thing down but with a little cutting of red tape it was under new management and back in business. Nothing stops the wheels of commerce in Orange County, not the living nor the dead. We passed the threshold which was carpeted like a theatre lobby, as in it was sticky, almost more gum than fabric. There were a few arcade machines and unmissable signs everywhere warning of impending epileptic fits.

As soon as I stepped foot inside I knew I picked the right place. The smell of popcorn and nachos the sound of shoes clipping and squeaking on linoleum floors. The pleasant cool darkness like the inside of a movie theatre. It was all black lights this and neon that, like the inside of Joel Schumacher’s sex dungeon. Obviously being on the prom committee meant I’d been in here before but all the times before it was in the day time with all the lights on. Tonight it was a completely different animal, just like me.

“Move” Wendy said through her teeth, poking me in the back with her DG purse. Those things are pointy.

She marched us past rows of foosball machines. People I barely recognised from school throwing the little balls in the holes in full prom regalia. Something about playing whack a mole in a prom dress made this whole thing seem worth it.

But I could tell Wendy hated it by the indignant sneer. “So fucking tacky” she mouthed as she watched Francine Hammond from my English lit class mount a ridge racer bike. No side saddle? Very unladylike.

Denny waited in the car, he was a few years older. He dropped out of high school to do little more than couch surf and sample a wide selection of drugs and likely crack house diseases so he wasn’t invited.

We reached the entrance to the main staging area. “Remember don’t fuck this up and I just might let you walk out of here- be cool.” She took out her hello kitty phone and pointed it at me. “If I don’t text Denny every half hour he’ll pay your Aunt a visit, got it?” She gesticulated a little more as if I might’ve forgotten what a phone looked like or maybe she thought her hello kitty phone case was intimidating. After she was done issuing threats she turned her phone over to read the screen. She opened her pursed lips and tutted. “Brodie’s running a little” She sighed as she started to text him back. “He’s gonna meet us in the main hall, come on.”

The main staging area was a large open bar and restaurant with a balcony hanging over it. Of course all the restaurant chairs and tables had been moved to sides to make way for a dance floor. Which was located under the balcony from which the prom king and queen would be announced.

The room with the main lights off was completely different. This time it literally looked like a set piece from a nineties batman movie. The one that Arnie hammed up. Strobe lights, and spotlights darted from corner to corner over a neon jungle. Complete with glowing tropical plants and monkeys hanging from pillars painted with neon paint to look like Florida palms. One almost seemed to be winking at me offering me a glowing banana.

No thanks.

I smirked because I knew on some level this had to disgust Wendy, it was tacky and kitschy and smelled like corn syrup and old beer. Cool and dark, not bright and sparkly like she dreamed. This was my world.

She turned to us both, her face agape with a wonderful disgust and then without flinching it turned into the most sugary sweet smile. I had to duck to avoid diabetic shock “Have fun you two- and remember, I’m always watching.” She said waving like a duchess.

She turned with a dramatic wafting of her poofy dress like the wicked witch of the west. Disappearing into the crowd of faceless seniors accumulating around a large ornate punch bowl, an ice sculpture in the shape of a horse’s head above it “go Trojans”, I whispered.

“What?” Paul said

I jumped almost forgetting he was here. “Oh nothing”.

“So what the hell is going on?” He whispered harshly taking me roughly by the upper arms as if he intended to shake the information out of me.

“What does it look like?” I ask as innocently as possible breaking away from his grip. Keeping my expression one of open optimism ready to mould myself to whatever situation he thought this was.

“Err well it looks like we just got kidnapped and taken to the prom by your best friend.” He said as he touched the nick on his head where he was struck.

“Yeah- I guess.” I said ditzily.

“So- what the hell are we gonna do about it?” He pouted.

“I dunno, call batman- I mean by the looks of this place he’s probably gonna be here for like a charity auction or something.”

“You think this is funny? We’re literally hostages.” He said turning to scowl at me, as if that would help.

“Thanks for noticing, wanna dance?-“

He furrowed his brow in response.

“What? She told us at gunpoint we need to have fun, so-“ Just as I said it the now iconic Simple minds – Don’t you forget about me, came on, thanks breakfast club. Yeah I know American pie already did this, how derivative.

There was already a sizeable crowd of seniors slow dancing to eighties synth wave. I dragged him into the middle of them and forced his hands around my waist and brought him close, resting my head on his shoulder rather mechanically.

“Diana, what are we doing?” He whispered into my ear.

“If we’re dancing she can’t see we’re talking and she can’t shoot through a crowd of people”.


“So what?” I hissed.

“Do you have a plan?” He asked.

“I thought you’d have one”

“Why me?”

“You’re like- I dunno- an army guy, sorta.”

“My dad is in the army that doesn’t mean I know how to escape a hostage situation”

“Well it was worth a shot” I said sinking into the nook of his shoulder. It really did smell kind of nice. Comforting, like sandalwood or something, must have been his after shave.

“We need to find a way to signal to someone” He whispered.

I stirred from a moment of dozing on his shoulder. “She said if she didn’t text her brother every half hour he was going to kill my Aunt, we need to find a way to deal with Denny first.” I said brushing away a little drool and make up gunk from his shoulder.

“How? She’s not gonna let us leave the main hall.”

“We’ll wait until they crown the prom king and queen, she won’t be able to do anything and she’ll be too distracted with the lights to see us” I said.

“And then what?”

“We take out Denny”

“Take him out?” He said as we swayed.

“Yeah you know, punch him, knock him out, you can do that right?” I said yawning on his shoulder.

“Yeah- I guess, I mean yeah I can do that.” He was still a little groggy but my Paul was coming back hopefully bringing with him a little piss and vinegar. You’d think some help from a certain dark entity might be invaluable but this certainly wasn’t his scene, far too- neon and crowded. Tacky sure, but fun, there was no moon in here, no dark chorus, no flapping of devil or angel wings. My monster was a wall flower it seemed. Much happier in some dark corner licking dew off the neck off a virgin victim than cutting up a rug surrounded by chirpy yuppies. Maybe he’d show up fashionably late too, the night was still young after all.

We danced for a little longer waiting for them to announce the prom king and queen. Give us the distraction we needed to launch our ‘Plan’ if you can call it that. It wasn’t really much of a plan. Just wait til the backs are turned and punch someone in the face but this wasn’t exactly a spy novel. And I really didn’t need my Aunt/Sister to be butchered by some junkie she’d never met, that really would be tacky.

“Hey, I’m gonna get some punch, you want some?” I asked.

“Sure, just don’t go too far ok, I can’t see her. We have to assume she’s watching us.”

I sauntered over to the punch bowl trying not to trip over all the tassels and frilly things hanging off this ridiculous princess dress. I felt like some silly doll that was supposed to be sitting on a shelf or having a tea party with a stuffed bear not dancing and dodging bullets.

Some time had passed and the crowd around the punchbowl had dissipated and the puddle of punch had shrunk too. It was only about an inch deep of a cool looking pink liquid slowly getting room temperature under the spots.

That’s when I noticed the bowl full of cheese poofs and my stomach reminded me quite loudly that I’d been in a drug induced coma for about twelve hours and hadn’t eaten so much as a handful of lint lying on the floor of Wendy’s closet. So naturally like some half starved half crazy red squirrel (that’s the bad one right) I started grabbing literal handful of the disgusting puff balls. Filling my cheeks with the articial cheese flavoured corn starch balls of goodness. Caring not for the orange dust accumulating on my face and hands giving a sigh of relief when my stomach felt less inside out than it did a moment ago. Although lacking any actual nutritious content, they’d filled a hole and would have to do for now.

It was still pretty dark in the room so no one noticed me almost sticking my head in cheese poof bowl like a horse with a feed. I quickly used way too many napkins removing the orange dust from, well everywhere.

Why did I come over here again? Oh yeah punch.

As I said it was still pretty dark which made ladling the sweet smelling non-alcoholic liquid into the stereotypical red plastic cups much harder than it should have been. Nevertheless this slight challenge was nothing compared to my intellect and superb hand eye co-ordination. I almost patted myself on the back for pouring punch into a cup, it’s the small victories that count. I picked up the cups and was about to make my way triumphantly back to Paul when I noticed something. Something dark and oddly shaped at the bottom of the punch bowl hitting a bum note in the dark orchestra. The darkness giving me a little jab in the side to remind me it was still there waiting for its moment to bask in the spotlight. Better late than never.

Would he really pull the same trick twice? I thought as I put the cups down.

I picked up the ladle and did a quick one eighty to see if anyone was watching. But at that point everyone was either dancing or eating little wieners or starring into their cups thinking of something to talk about. I dipped the ladle in fishing for whatever the little surprise at the bottom of the punchbowl was, in the back of my head wondering where the little wieners had come from.

I moved it around, it was a large square piece of paper soaking up the punch. A moment of fumbling with the sticky sheet of paper and a happy spot light fell on me and it was lit up for a brief few seconds. Revealing what was a dark black and white photocopy of something that was a little too dark and wet to see. Further fishing bringing it closer to the surface got a reaction, a smirk, a happy sharp tooth glinting in the dark depths. I pulled it out of the sweet waters and let it drain and drip on the bottom of my faerie princes dress.

No doubt about it, it was a face, a face I recognised despite the fact it was smooshed into a copier. The likeness was uncanny, it was Ruez, what was left of him. I wasn’t dreaming, that was a Photostat of his head that had been polluting the punch for god knows how long and there was only one person who could have put it there.

The person who removed had his head of course. Now if I were still toying with the silly notion that that certain someone was me it would be a hell of a trick to have to keep that photocopy on me. Waiting for this moment only for it not to be found when I was stripped and dressed by Wendy. And then of course there was the task of taking a severed head to a copier which I didn’t own. So that meant going to a library which would go something like; “Oh hey Diana, what brings you here” – “Oh you know just gotta photocopy a severed of a gangbanger I may or may not have murdered. But it’s ok he liked to kill hookers, allegedly”. The idea alone got a chuckle from the dark backseat. It was a joke, a prank, one that only we would see the funny side of.

He/she/it was here, my plus one was sending me a message but what did it mean? “You forgot this”, “Heads up”?

GS2 Chapter 15 ‘Fist of the White Lotus’

Another day, another morning where I feel like someone dropped a tanker truck on me. I don’t know if it’s because I’m actually following my polyphasic sleep schedule a little tighter to make more time for reading and cooking or if it’s because of my encroaching gains or both haha.

I had a protein shake this morning so I should perk up around about the time I need to do it all again haha. But results are really good, feeling good looking good. I still miss martial arts, I’d love to get back into them but I have this weird dichotomy in my head where I feel like diverting time and energy away from writing in any capacity even for a day would be a hinderance. But moreover it’s the social aspect. I find solace in the solitude of lifting weights at home. 

I just have my videos I use, I have my own weight and I just work and that’s how I like it. I miss the the catharsis of beating the shit out of people but I feel like I need the solitude and I need the space in my head. I dunno maybe it’s because the only martial arts club around is the one I grew up going to and I feel sort of like a failure, I’m almost thirty and I’m still trying to make a career out of pulling dumb stories out of my ass and working a dumb entry level job populated by teenagers and my hair is thinning haha. 

Does this qualify as a mid life crisis? I dunno, but I hope not because I sure as shit can’t afford a sports car haha.

Down to business, erm so I got another 10k out of Chrissy, my new editor and that’s what I’m doing today haha. Just gonna be proofreading and building my agent pitch with Diana. I was looking at the definition of ‘women’s fiction’ and funny enough it qualifies so that should be funny using that shitlib identity politics bullshit to try and make it appeal to cat ladies in new york haha. I mean what the fuck is ‘women’s fiction’? I mean how is that a thing?

This is where I put on my fedora and say “Why isn’t there a ‘men’s fiction”.

Then I put on my womyn respecter pink pussy hat and say “Because all fiction is male fiction bigot!”

But in all seriousness I wrote Diana without any politics in mind at all and she’s basically just me meets Dexter in pink panties haha. I just wanted to make an interesting fun story because that’s what I keep coming back to. 

Don’t get me wrong I love these deep meaningful stories like fight club but I never find myself coming back to them. I enjoy them in the moment but I would never reread something like that for fun. But every time I read Dexter I enjoy it. So that’s what I want to write, it’s what I like to write and I can still attempt those fight club style stories with my own spin, which is relevent because a podcast I was listening to recently did a bit on the deeper meaning of fight club and that’s sort of what encouraged me to start 3 ring samurai. So that stupid shit about samurai clowns is my answer to fight club haha.

I am really enjoying writing it though. 

Still hammering away at the first witcher book, I like it but it takes a concentrated effort to read it, mainly because it’s not really about anything, it’s just a bunch of unconnected stuff happening, a fantasy clip show with the only real connection being they’re stories about Geralt. So I find it hard to follow because there is no plot thread pushing me along. But it’s well written and I was reading it this morning thing “I say ‘said’ way too much” do they not have a word for ‘said’ in polish?

I can barely understand who’s talking most of the time and Geralt loves to fucking talk, he’s going for this brooding badass emo (spacing on the name of the character he’s a direct copy of) but he never shuts his fucking mouth haha. Like he has these long monologues sometimes, in fact there’s even a bit where he has this one sided conversation with a mute.

But I’m like is this what cool writers do, never use the word ‘said’ then the mini freakout bullet sweats starts, maybe I should start deleting all the ‘saids’ haha ^_^’. Just gonna ctlr+f search all ‘said’s and erase them and hope for the best haha.

Nah I’m not doing that, just gonna keep going over it and that’s what I should be doing now instead of just talking nonsense.

See you…

Fist of the White Lotus


“Mr Fuzzles, I can’t run anymore” Sparkles exclaimed in her cartoonish girly voice.

Fuzzles was breathing heavy, feeling like he’d been dragging her the whole time. His costume was drenched in sweat, heavy and getting heavier by the minute. The cold setting in everytime they had to stop. He looked up and down the street and saw that they looked invariably empty, they were a good block and a half away from the police station.

“Are you ok, did they get you?” He said looking back at her.

She looked at herself up and down patting herself with her hoofs and said shaking her head “I don’t think so”

“I thought I lost you, they were everywhere, they got so close, I was sure-“

“We’re ok, thanks to you, my cat in shining armor” She said giggling.


She nodded emphatically. Leaning over and planting a kiss on his whiskered cheek making a loud smooch kissing noise.

He clutched his paws to his chest and then his face as if he was blushing.

“What are we gonna do now, the police station was no good, where else can we go that’s safe?” She asked.

“What’s that?” Fuzzles said pointing at Sparkles foot.

“Huh?” She said as she started to twist and turn to look around herself.

“There, on your foo-hoof” He caught himself.

“Oh” She said as she peeled a brightly coloured wet pamphlet off her hoof. She opened it and started to read it like a child. “Whitefish mall, stores galore. A giant pirate themed Christmas show every hour, and the largest indoor icerink in the pacific northwest.” She opened more panels on the pamphlet.

Fuzzles sidled up next to her and started to look it over. He enthusiastically took the pamphlet off of her and said “This place is huge, it looks like a fortress.”

“It’ll be a great place to hide.” She said.

“No one would find us there and there’d be food and who knows what else.” He added.

“How do we get there?” She said.

He flipped over the pamphlet and said “There’s a map on the back.”

“Yay, let’s go.” Sparkles said as she hooked her hoof around Fuzzles arm. They started to skip in the snow in the general direction of the mall. As she turned it made visible a small tear in her costume. The tear revealed a pair of boxer shorts with hearts on them and a small bite mark below the leg opening on a hairy leg.

“You think I am born yesterday?” The Frenchman said as he tapped TJ on the head with his own severed pinky finger laughing.

TJ’s eyes fluttered and he passed out from the pain.

The Frenchman stood and scoffed looking down at TJ lying flat on the concrete floor.

He sniffed the air and then had a strange sensation at the back of his neck. The sensation spreading all the way around his head until he could feel it on his face. Cold fingers, little dainty fingers were crawling around his head like a spider’s legs. For some reason this didn’t alarm him, straight away. He didn’t feel any inherent intent and the feeling was so strange it felt almost like a dream. A wave of euphoria and disbelief swishing around in his head. The fingers were slimy and thin. When they got in his nose and mouth he sputtered and spat and turned around. Waking from his daydream to see.

A girl.

She was naked, green hair, soft pale skin. So pale it looked see through, like a permeable membrane. Bright blue veins running under the surface, small pert breasts, long sleek legs. She almost glowed like some sort of sprite or faerie. Delicate, yet boyish facial features completed the woodland nymph aesthetic. His turning abruptly off balanced her. Her legs moving like that of a newborn horse. She crumpled into a dainty pile on the floor looking like a renaissance painting. The girl was looking around the room as if she’d never seen lights before. She cowered and covered her shame with her small hands.

The Frenchman was dismayed. He coughed as if he forgot how to swallow. He still had TJ’s finger in his hand. He looked at it and laughed a little and then tossed it away wiping his hand. He jumped to her aid taking off his battered leather jacket to wrap around the young helpless girl. Stuttering red of cheek as he said “Mademoisselle, forgive me, sil vous plait”.

He draped his coat across her shoulders and patted them. He grunted as he got up to a knee. He moved around her like a squat plumber trying to get better angle on a ubend but she shyed from his glance. He took her chin in his hand and smiling said “What’s your name?”

She looked up and furrowed her brow.

He felt a strange sensation in his gut, de ja vu. Someone was walking over his grave. Her face, he looked off by the atv and saw the headless body of the woman he saw decapitated as he entered. “Impossible’” He muttered under his breathe.

The girl whispered her name “Sunday” her throat dry and raspy.

A sound came from the other side of the room. A mneumatic hiss and gears turning. The large garage doors were starting to open and light from the garage was leaking out. The door opened slow. The gap started growing bigger between it and the floor. A stage curtain lifting, revealing furry feet growing taller and taller. They were out there silently waiting, rows and rows of them thick.

BJ sat with his back to a column next to the garage door bleeding out. The control box connected to the garage door with a long thick cable in his lap. He was holding it down to open the garage doors, lying in a puddle of his own blood coughing and sputtering as it came up. Only one arm seemed usable the other was dead and drenched in blood, his lower body was caked in it but he was still alive.

“I’ll get you, you french faggot!” He cursed between bouts of bloody coughing.

“Merde” He called as he started to look for more ammo in his pockets closing the gap between BJ and himself. He saw Sunday’s bat on the floor. The garage doors were getting wider like the jaws of a giant crocodile, but slow, painfully slow.

The Frenchman stomped towards the bat catching his breathe.

BJ laughed, sputtering more and more blood as the heavy door rose. Before he could take in this small kamikaze victory he was dragged through the small gap. A furry monkey wearing a ‘I heart bananas’ t-shirt wrenched him by the head and shoulders. The garage door closing down on him. The force of the monkey and the door keeping him in place ripping him two disjointed pieces.

The Frenchman stopped in his tracks as the door slowly closed again on the twitching remains of BJ. Which was his legs and most of his lower body. He made a face like he wished he hadn’t seen that. “I must go” He said to himself.

He heard the patting of fast bare feet and he turned to see his jacket lying on the floor but no girl. He turned again and she was right there an inch from his face, her face pale and lined with veins

“BOO!” She shouted in his face, the wind of her breath knocking him back. He stumbled backwards tripping over Sunday’s bat. Slashing out of clumsy fear with his tanto knife. Cutting at her outstretched hand slicing off her fingers. She screamed and he landed at the feet of Bj’s leftovers. It was a hard fall for a man of advancing years, his large frame and weight hitting the ground like a sack of faberge eggs.

He rose to his forearms shakily, he’d landed face first in BJ’s blood and guts and it was all over him. He looked at his hands touched his face and grimaced at the smell. The disgust of being covered in the vile sticky cooling substance growing. He saw the steam rising off what could have been a portion of lower intestine and started to heave.

He rummaged around in his pants and found what he was looking for. He slipped the extra clip into his nine with a mechanical sliding clicking sound. He arose from the muck, hunched like a troll, the nine at waist height. He looked frantic, his eyes darted from corner to corner. Listening for those bare feet on the concrete floor.

He heard them and laughter and he fired into the dark garage. The sound of bullets hitting concrete with a cold slap, the jangling of car parts but no blood or cries of pain.

A building sound, whispering, talking.

“Over here” The voices said.

He fired in the direction of the sound and rounded the atv quickly to find nothing. Not even the fatboy was still there.


“Over here” The voices whispered again.

He turned and marched around the car holding his gun like a detective chasing down the pink panther. The panther, just out of reach.

“I’m right here a louder voice said.” Accompanied by the sound of bare feet on metal, a bouncing balking sound of suspension.

He turned to see her, she was standing on the car, completely naked. Her hands on her hips like Peter Pan smiling cockily. She looked strange, translucent, so much so it seemed like you could see her skeleton through her skin. She looked down at him and laughed at his confused frightened eyes.

The Frenchman hesitated for a split second but his composure came back in droves. He took aim and fired hitting her right between the eyes.

The bullet landed but she remained standing on the car smiling for a another few seconds with the hole in her head. Before her expression slipped off her face and she fell lifeless onto the hood. Like a hunting trophy making a light thud.

He was confused even more now, he approached the body of the girl he shot lying lifelessly on the hood of the atv. There was no doubt it was the girl he saw before, same face, same hair, the skin was different. He turned her head and the back of it was missing, that was different. He hadn’t missed, this wasn’t a trick, he shot her in the head. She was dead, again.

But the noise of feet could be heard again. That slapping of warm feet on cold concrete, was ghostly now. His heartbeat slackened as the room was silent but for the calm shuffling of furries outside. Cushioned banging noises of padded paws clutching at nothing.

He probed the darkness with his gun like he was parting a curtain or a bed of seaweed on a coral reef. A bone white hand grabbed at his wrist in answer. It wasn’t a strong grip but it was fixed like it had sealed around his arm and he couldn’t shake it off. It stuck onto his wrist like a shark bite and it wouldn’t let go. He was taken aback, left with no choice. His mind fluttering like the pictures in a slideshow. Reaching for the tanto knife and slicing and sawing. It didn’t take more than a few seconds to cut through the supple thin skin and soft muscle tissue. The bone parted easily like it was made of still drying cement.

He pulled his arm back dropping the gore caked knife on the concrete floor. His breathing slackened off and he said “Putain!” walking around the edge of the atv. He opened the drivers side door and climbed in and shut it behind him locking the door. He checked the ignition, the keys weren’t there. He flipped down the sun-visor and there was no joy, he opened the glove box and a little light came on but no hope.

“Merde.” He sat for a second in contemplation, the silence encroaching slowly. He flicked open a folding knife and started prying the panels under the dash. Only then noticing the white hand and forearm were still firmly connected to his wrist.

He held back a scream and in a frenzy pried the hand away from his wrist. Letting it drop into the passenger footwell. There was a strange smell and an odd sucking sapping noise.

He looked into the back rearview mirror. The fatboy was lying across the backseat breathing heavily a sheen of sweat on his face. The Frenchman sat forward again and swallowed. He wiped the sweat from his brow going back to work on the exposed wires.

Then another sound, a low hissing right next to his head. The arm shot out again, latching onto his wrist but there was more. Attached was an elbow and an upperarm. Both covered in a wet slimy looking see through membranous skin.

He was frozen in the grip of a terrible unknown. The arm leveraged at his wrist for purchase. Lumbering into sight an inhuman spectacle. Attached to the arm was an unnameable thing, person shaped. A skeleton sprouting like roots right before his eyes, soft and warm and with a strange sweet smell. A blob of translucent goo taking a vaguely person-shaped form. A skull forming like decay in reverse, soft and clay like. Forming underneath the translucent bubble of plasma. Teeth and eyes and tufts of green hair.

He tried to shout, say something but the Frenchman had no air in his lungs to scream. No words that would explain this travesty of nature unfurling in front of him, right at his feet. It rose like a ghostly snot bubble between his legs, climbing his thighs, latching to his clothes.

A phrenetic fumbling for his gun ensued. His eyes not moving off the shifting, shapeless form building in his crotch region.

His hands felt weak and disjointed. The adrenaline rushing around his body rendering his muscles limp and slow like he was moving underwater. He aimed the gun in the region where he could see the brain forming in real time under the translucent skin sack.

“Psss” A hushed voice said from the backseat.

He caught his breathe and looked into the rearview mirror. A shock of green and white and a wirey arm snaked around his neck locking in place. One hand locked on the other white bicep. Her other hand behind his head pushing it down squeezing his carotid. Her head was next to his, he could hear her breathing in his ear. Smell her hair and skin, her warm cheek pressed against his stubbly greasy one.

His vision started to get spotty, his gun came up slow using the mirror for guidance. He could see her teeth, the top of her head cut off by the angle of the mirror. The gun creeping through the air as if on strings getting closer to both their heads locked together. He started to lose feeling, the thing at his legs held him still. He could only feel the weight of the gun and it coming closer, his finger twitching on the trigger. His eyelids taking him in and out, in and out, his breathe wheezing as he started to feel ethereal.

A brief flash lit up the garage, a tight popping and it went quiet again.

Little miss sunshine

The coming of spring,

Brings me renewed hope,

Just to hear you laugh.


Just to see you smile,

Lets the shining sun right in,

There’s no stopping it.


I pine for that light,

But it casts a long shadow,

Quite unbearable.

TOTCB Chapter 18 ‘Nobody’s Baby Now’
















Anyway Jesus, I waffled a lot today. 


See you…

Nobody’s baby now


A week later they had his funeral.



So why was Porter still here?

The funeral didn’t go on too long.





“You remember me?”


“What did your father do to you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did he touch you?”





“Stop” Peggy sighed.





“He was yours, Johnny?”









“Is that all?” He said flat.





“What happened to your father?”





“Blood and feathers.” He said.


“Doesn’t it?”




“Blood and feathers.”







3 Ring Samurai Part 1; The man with the laughing sword

“I’m only laughing on the outside / My smile is just skin deep / If you could see inside I’m really crying / You might join me for a weep.” – Jack Napier

If anyone doesn’t know who Jack Napier is, go away confused haha. 

It’s finally here, the moment none of you have been waiting for, erm still not happy with the fight scene in it, *spoilers there’s a fight scene it, it’s a story about a clown samurai, what can I tell ya?

Ok yeah so what prompted me to do a dieselpunk clown samurai story? Not sure. But hey here it is after one proofread.

Been a little down recently, life just seems to be taking and not giving as the smiths would put it. Although it’s hard to be depressed when you look this good and feel this swole but somehow I manage it.

It’s why I’m looking forward to getting stuck back into this, I was actually really pissed when I had to stop working on this to eat on monday haha. My schedule is usually writing friday through to monday and then blogging and spamming from tuesday to thursday. So when I had to stop, I was like, ‘but I don’t wanna’. Which is great, it’s why it’s good to do fun stuff like this, recharges your creative batteries.

I’m not sure if other people will like it and I’m sure it won’t make me rich and famous but it’s like creative chocolate, it won’t fill me up but it’ll make me feel like life is worth living again and I really need that. 

Also I think my editor broke her arm or something which is why she’s taking her time getting Diana back to me, why do I have such lousy luck with editors, I must be cursed.

Maybe it’s just women in general, I can never seem to get that right. Always seem to pick the wrong ones, or I let them pick me. Make me want to listen to the smiths in the dark and not move, being super fucking edgy today haha.

I just came to a realisation that I’m never going to have a relationship with one person in particular, not a real one anyway. She’ll always just be there in the back of my mind and I’ll never be able to touch her or hear her voice, she may not even know I exist or care, why would she? I’ll never be the person she needs and I’ll never have the unconditional love I want. She’ll just exist there without me and it wont really matter. I wish there was someone to blame, but there isn’t. All that remains is this numbing painful feeling, can you imagine the person you love the most in the world doesn’t even know who you are? Doesn’t know your face or your voice. It’s a crushing feeling know that I just have to watch her grow up like a fly on the wall. 

Anyway, it turned out differently from the comic, it’s had a complete tonal shift and I think it works, it’s more serious, the characters are more defined, I hope someone enjoys it half as much as I did writing it. I tried to keep the action as restrained as possible like the witcher, leave as much to the imagination as possible but still keep it tight.

Let me know what you think.

See you…


Chapter 1 ‘Zip Code’

“Ruff ruff”


“Garfield, come back boy!” A young girl in a moth eaten yellow sundress said, short of breath as she chased after the six legged mutant mutt as he ascended a mountain of garbage.


“What have you got over there you dumb mutt?” A boy behind her in a torn duster two sizes two big for him said as he watched from the base of the trash mountain. Resting his weight on a cracked Louisville slugger like a walking cane.


The sun beat down unimpeded by the any cloud cover at all, a big yellow beam of light baking a mound of garbage left by the circus convoy that passed only the other night.


The two children reluctantly chased the mutated dog-like creature up the mountain of garbage. Ranging from empty food containers, popped balloons and ripped posters to bone fragments, broken blades and needles. Until they reached the object that so interested their faithful companion.


“Eww what is that?” The little girl said as she skipped up the trash pile to find the dog barking and gnawing at something or other, a mass of rags and garbage.


The boy got to her elevation using the bat as a walking stick, he adjusted the googles on his face to look closer at the thing the dog was distressing. “Ahh just some dead guy” The kid sighed.


The little girl paused and blinked a few times before she said “Can we eat’im?”


“Nah, he’s probably rotten, no telling how long he’s been out here.” The boy said as he lifted his cracked goggles up from his dirt and soot caked face tossing the bat over his shoulder. “We gotta keep looking”.


“But I think he’s still moving, gotta be super fresh.” The little girl said smiling through her two missing front teeth, freckles fighting for their place with dirt and muck on her tanned face a shock of dry dirty red hair sticking up on her head in all directions.




Lying face down in a pile of hot garbage a corpse lay still, it’s skin waxy and pale and almost yellow. The dog wasted no time in sniffing and licking and trying to devour the corpse feet first.


“Errrrggghhhh” An unknown voice echoed.


“What was that?” The little girl asked.


“Probably gas escaping, dead people poop their pants sometimes.”




Garfield the dog didn’t seem too discouraged as his two tongues went to work licking the corpses feet, chomping at them playfully


“Errrgghhh!” The voice said again.


The corpse seemed to jostle suddenly and then shambolicly roll onto it’s back.


The two kids froze in terror as the corpse seemed to reanimate right in front of them it’s horrible face covered in sticky icecream wrappers forming a horrifying multi-coloured mask that looked like desiccated mutant flesh.


“Ahhh” The girl screamed “It’s a zombie!”


“Zombie?!” The boy yelped.


The dog was seemingly less worried about the zombie and kept licking it’s stinky feet.


The zombie moved as if it was in a dream, rising to a sitting position in a most unnatural fashion, almost flopping forward like a fish with no bones in it’s back. Slumping into an open indian sitting position it said “That tickles.”


By this time the boy had worked his way around the back of the slowly reanimating corpse and delivered a decisive blow to the back of it’s head.



“So it’s not a zombie?”


“Nope, it’s not a zombie.” An old man said as he leant over a makeshift cook stove made of truck gas tank cut in half over a fire of burning cardboard and plastic making a gnoxious green smoke. Something unidentifiable gently simmering in the pot.


“What part of he’s breathing and bleeding and farting in his sleep makes you think he’s a zombie?” The young boy said.


The girl made a face and touched her chin as she thought about it pursing her lips in her dry tanned freckled face “Does that mean we can eat him now?” The little girl chirped smiling broadly.


“Efron, we talked about this, you can’t just go around eating folk you find out in the wasteland.” The old man said scratching his beard and tugging at his red suspenders over his dingy white shirt as if he was grappling for a good reason to why that was the case but coming up with nothing and changing the subject. “Well we gotta talk to him first, that seems like what decent folks would do” The old coot said.


“What’s with his face?” The boy said as he leaned over the unconscious man.


“Yeah what’s with that?” Efron said as she joined the boy shoulder to shoulder bending over the unconscious stranger as he lay on his back on a bed made of old truck tires and unidentified furs, his breathing shallow.


“I think he’s one of them ladymen, they got in the city- although I wouldn’t know nothing about that” The old man blushed.


“So it’s like paint?” The little girl said as she prodded at the sleeping the stranger’s big red rose.


“They won’t come off” The boy said puzzled as the makeup wouldn’t so much as smudge.


The old man stopped stirring whatever it was he was cooking and readjusted a stool made of an old motorcycle seat and joined the kids in inspecting the unconscious man.


After a moment of contemplation he sighed heavily and said “They’re tattoos.”


“What are tattoos?” The little girl asked?


“They’re like drawings under your skin” The older boy said “Jeez don’t you know anything?” He sneered.


She scrunched up her face and stuck her tongue out at him making a raspberry noise. “I know more than you Zach buttrat brain!”


“Shut yer pieholes!” The old man shushed them harshly as he took his suspenders off his shoulders and took a closer look. He opened one of the man’s eyes and then took a closer prodding inspection with his fingers along the man’s side and found a small stab wound in his midsection. “Zach, get my sewing kit, would ya?”






The boy bolted out of the door and after some scuffling and breaking noises he came back with a needle and thread and the old man went about stitching the wound and then putting a bandage over it.


“Hmm, bleeding already stopped, nothing good must have been hit, lucky bastard”. The old man scoffed.


Efron looked on, downtrodden “So we’re really not gonna eat him?” She whined.


The old man looked at her and then at the unconscious man and said “Someone’s gonna be looking for that boy.”


“How you know that gramps?” Zach said.


“Tattoos on his face, I’ve seen’em before – means he’s connected”


“Connected to what?” The little girl said.


“Circus folk, I haven’t see one for a long time but I think those markings on his face mean he’s one of them clown gangers”


“What’s a clown?”


The old man sighed deeply and said “A cold blooded killer.” An icy chill running through his words and down his back.


“Then why’d you help him?” The boy said in a harsh whisper.


“Ya see a long time ago, before all this, before you were born, in the bad bad times just after the almighty badness. Folks were wild, worse than they are now, I know it’s hard to imagine but it was fucking chaos-


People raping and eating eachother in the street, no law, no god, no judgement. Just blood and pain and mutation and suffering and out of that came a travelling circus lead by the devil himself and bound by some obscure code.


They purged the land of mutants and freaks and crazies and they united the bandit tribes of the wasteland into one travelling militia. The clowns were just one band of gangsters they recruited.


One man brought them all together, he called himself the ringmaster, he was worse than all of them combined, more terrible than any hammer or sickle. He lead a gang called the ‘Third ring’ and He beat the wasteland into shape and it limped on ever since.


The circus trying to hold it together moving from town to town putting on their show. Purging the wicked in a woodchip ring that’s what they were doing up in Woodsmoke, they take all the food they need and move on.

I hear they even snatch kids now to make bolster their ranks.” The old man paused and sighed as the two kids looked and listened silently. “That’s probably what happened to him. After the second food war, the chaos, lots of kids were left without parents and had no choice but to join.”


“How do you know all this old man?” The boy asked


“I used to be a carny – it’s like a really dirty person that does all the dirty jobs but I got too old, too tired, sick of cleaning up all that blood.”


“Then why help him, if he’s a monster?” The little girl asked without a hint of malice in her voice, instead a curious optimism eking out.


The old man let out another sigh “What else can we do? ‘Sides if he dies and they found out we just let him, and they have their ways mind you – no telling what they might do.”


Both the kids looked at the sleeping man with the silly crude smiling face drawn over his real face in a fearful awe as he began to stir.


The kids ran out of the shack. The shack itself was small and bare and made of rusty scrap corrugated iron so wobbled and bustled with every breeze. The whole thing clanged and banged as they ran around it and climbed on top of it.


The clown let out a groan and his hand listlessly touched his bandaged head.


“Ow” The clown said dreamily.


“Err ya bumped your head pretty bad, and I guess someone stabbed ya, I bandaged you up best I could but I’m not a magician”


“My sword”


“Look buddy, you were like this when we found ya, no sword, no shoes, no name.”




“Yeah we haven’t been introduced, they call me Gramps” He said with a sigh like he’d told a million people already and this was the million and first.


The shack rattled with the wind and banged with little footsteps on the roof.


The clown groaned as he tried to rise to a sitting position, seized with pain and fell back down and went limp.


“My name’s Pookie” He said breathlessly.


“Pookie?” A little girls voice rang with glee through a hole in the roof.


Surprised the clown looked up at the ceiling but she was gone before he clocked her but he could still hear her giggling.


“What was your name before?”


The clown didn’t respond.


“Look, I know what yer thinkin’. I didn’t take your stuff, we’re not the only scavvers out here. There’s a place over the mound, I traded with’em a couple of times but I wouldn’t trust them with a jar of warm piss.”


Pookie breathed in deeply and shifted his weight to the side of the makeshift bed and painfully levered himself off. Not accounting for how stiff he’d become just lying there, falling flat on his face.


“You can’t be movin’ around like that, you need to rest, you’ll get yisself killed foolin’ around like that.”


Pookie groaned again and tried his legs getting his knees up under him, holding his side.


The old man bit his lip and started looking around the shack and digging under a pile of clothes and hats. He pulled out a long dried looking stick with a little Y shape at the top.


“Here, if you’re fixed on getting yisself killed you might as well do it on yer two feet.” He lifted Pookie up to a standing position and slipped the stick under his arm. “Put your weight on that stick” He said as he clasped him by the shoulder. He looked weak, bandages wrapped all around his waist and head. He was skinny but lined with sinewy muscles and deep inset scars that looked decades old on top of obscure tattoos that danced up his arms and peaked up from out of the bandages on his back, the tail of a fish swished in a stream.


His face was a boy’s but hard, carved from sheet rock with red and white ink. A grotesquely large smile tore across his real mouth which was small and downturned. It flecked out almost like a brush stroke in a brutal crimson, red lines made an arc over his eyes and there was some bluing around the top lids on his forehead and a pair of black diamond shapes under each eye forming a disturbing mask, his face covered in war paint he could never take off. His hair was mostly shaved off in seemingly random patches and tied up into a high dark brown top knot on the back of his head.


He shifted his weight onto the stick and stood up on his own strength and the old man stepped away.


“Thanks” The clown said as he started to limp towards the opening of the shack.


The old man watched him go with a puzzled look on his face. “Yer welcome- and brush yer teeth!” He shouted after him.


The two kids watched him as he slowly limped and hopped his way over the mound as the sun reached its highest point, getting full and fat and ready to drop.


“Really think we should have eaten him” A little voice said from the hole in the roof.



The trappers house looked like an old station building the tracks that used to run parallel, long dug up and cannibalised, made into weapons or defences of some sort. Only the circus had use for trains and other such vehicles, it was for simple folk to use beasts of burden and their own two aching limbs. You saw some on bikes and even in cars but it was rare, fuel was more scarce than water in the wasteland. Nothing grew here anymore, it was just barren, open country.


The house wasn’t much to look at, just an old wood building that looked like it was in constant disrepair, covered as it was with different coloured wood patches and wire mesh where the window glass used to be.


The yard was full of empty rusty cages and broken down tractors and train cars and junk. The house itself was situated at the bottom of the mound in a hilly region so there was no doubt he was seen coming over and down the shallow hill. But surprise was never on his mind.


He made his way slowly down the hill trying not to fall over his own feet watching for the windows. He walked through the yard trying not to get tetnis, looking at all the rust and junk. Everything from the old dead world lovlingly collected and allowed to rot right here.


Pookie didn’t get within a fifteen feet of the house before a stout bald man wearing nothing but a pair of dungarees kicked open his own door like he was gate crashing a barn dance.


“Wh-th-hel-re-wht-ya-wnt? He warbled, all his words trying to get out of his mouth at once and coming out as a garbled mess running together and bumping into eachother.


Pookie breathed heavy leaning on the old stick but said nothing.


“Cnt-ya-tlk-ya-tarded?” His head was thick and round like an egg and he had no neck to speak of, his head was just a seamless, sweaty, greasy transition to a stout little body and stubby limbs.


The man got impatient and slammed a chair leg full of rusty nails against one of the support of the porch making a loud sound and gouging a chunk of old wood out of the strut.


“What’s the gaff pops?” A younger version of the man in front of him stepped out of the house. He had a full mop of greasy black hair under a black and white striped moth eaten fedora and he wore a long black leather coat a shirt underneahe with a cat on it but most notably he wore a sword on his back.


“What’s all the racket paw?” Another voice said, but it was a softer and what looked like a woman stepped onto the porch with a frying pan in her hand. The ‘woman’ was the tallest of the bunch with a chin and stubble that could cut glass. She tossed a waft of toxic green wig hair out of ‘her’ face and said “Who’s this handsome man?”




“Nobody” Pookie answered.


The three looked at eachother confused and then laughed.


“Wow bro, you’re super edgey, like your edge cut me over here” The kid said scratching his patchy neck beard. Pookie watched the sword jangle on his back as he spoke.


They stopped laughing and got serious. “Teh-hel-ya-wnt?”


“The sword” Pookie said.


“Eh?” The older man said.


“You wannit, you gotta come and get it” The kid said. “I aint afraid of some crippled heshe.” He said as he cockily dismounted the porch and made his way towards the still Pookie.


“Kek” The boy smirked and reached for the handle of the sword. It was an odd design, coloured like a red and white lollipop, or a candy striped barber poll with an evil laughing clown face as a pommel it’s mouth open wide.




“Daaaad, I can do it, I’ve been practicing in the mirror!” The kid said as he turned around to yell at his father.


The kid took a firm grip on the handle and tugged hard but it dragged the scabbard with it. He only managed to choke himself with the strap he had around his torso.


“Hawhawhaw!” His dad laughed.


The kid blushed and then remembered to grab the bottom of the scabbard. He rounded the blade out of the sheathe making a scraping noise and then the blade laughed. The handle let out a cheesey clown laugh on repeat and LED lights on the pommel in the clowns eyes lit up for a few seconds before shutting off.


“Hahahahahaha” The man and the ‘woman’ were now in hysterics laughing at the boy and his ridiculous sword.


“Wut-a-stpd-pisa-crp!” The older man snorted almost crying.


“Daaaadd, you’re embarrassing me!” The kids face got red as he craned his neck to chastise his father but then as he got no response but more laughter he turned his red freckled fat face at Pookie who stared straight passed him as if he wasn’t even there.


“You think you can fuck with me?” He swallowed loud and puffed up his chest straining his kitty t-shirt with his man boobs pulling it apart. “I’m your worst nightmare!” The kid took up a firm stance he must have seen in an old comic book and put two hands on the sword as tight as he little fat hands could and he ran straight at Pookie with the blade in the air.


He swung it down with both hands like a baseball bat and hit nothing but dirt.


Pookie stood right over him and breathed in his face.


The kid reeled back pulling the sword with him, the mirror polished blade tossing loose dirt as it retreated.


“Your breath stinks!”


Pookie smiled and stuck out his tongue.


“The fuck is wrong with you? I’ll kill you!” He slashed for Pookie head in a rough semi circle. But it was slow with no care for edge alighnment, just swinging away like he was hammering a nail, so each strike was getting too much wind resistance. With every missed strike he it took more out of him. Each clumsy miss left him more out of breath.


Before long the boy was toppled over fighting for breath. Pookie was watching the sun go down not having broken a sweat. He stared at that big ball in the sky with his back turned to the boy as he heaved for air vomitting on in his own lap.


“You know- kind of suck at this” Pookie said without looking at him.


The kid instantly flew into a rage and staggered to his feet running with all his strength, the sword tip held high determined to run Pookie through.


It was then that he felt it, the rushing tide, the blood pumping, his muscles awake and supple, the need. The desire to kill that spurred him, the roar of the crowd, that sound it made when air escaped a perfect cut.


He was lost for a minute and then the kids heavy footfalls reminded him of where he was. He turned to see the kid trying to skewer him in slow motion and not a thought crossed his mind before he turned the blade around and impaled the kid on it. He didn’t even think about it, it just happened.


Pookie pulled the sword out of the kid. It was covered in blood all the way even past the hilt and he slumped into the dirt to join all that junk in the old world.


“Sonofabitch” the vaguely feminine creature shrieked with the frying pan overhead.


Pookie still leaning on the crutch, his bloody laughing sword hanging loose at his side as the crazed he/she charged at him, Pookie limped slowly closer.


She/he/it over shot their attack and Pookie had cut them three times before frying pan came down. They walked a few steps before the dress they were wearing seemed to peel off in sections and the green wig fell off, blood slowly seeping as he fell forward.


“Fkn-pissa-sht” The older man said as he loaded and cocked some sort of makeshift cross bow made from animal gut and car parts, tears streaming down his egg-like face.


Pookie looked up at him, his face covered in blood, his eyes sad and empty. “Just the sword”.


The old man swallowed and stared for a long time at the bodies and at Pookie and he shook and after a long moment he lowered the crossbow and watched Pookie limp away.



Pookie collapsed in front of the old man’s tin shack, Efron and Zach stared at the odd figure through the door.


The old man approached him, the sword fallen in front of him in it’s pin stripe scabbard covered in weird stickers and he saw the blood.


“I told you not to go”


“Did you?” Pookie said into the dirt. His eyes open and clear staring at nothing.


“You’re close to death, you should rest.”


“It’s not the first time” He said dreamily.


The old man cleared his throat and eased the stranger to his feet and helped him into the shack.


When the stranger woke up again it was light and the old man was again leaning over the makeshift cooking pot an odd smell was emanating from it.


“Thank you- again.”


The old man let out a heavy breath and said “You told me it wasn’t the first time you’d been close to death.”


“I did.”


“You wanna tell me about that?”


“-Not really”


“Ha-“ The old man paused and breathed deeply raising his back as he stirred. “You didn’t have to kill them ya know”


“I know.”


The old man sighed again. “I think you should clear out as soon as you can”


Pookie groaned and peeled himself off the bed. He looked around the inside of the tin shack catching glimpses of the kids sneaking peeks at him through the holes. “I think you’re right”


“Nearest town, is north west over the ridge”


“Thanks” He groaned as he got to his feet and breathed heavy and sore like two planks of unplained wood rubbing together. He looked around for his sword and he saw it resting against the door next to his walking stick. He stopped for a second to think and then picked up the sword and walked out the door leaving the stick behind.

Who wants to live forever?

There’s no time for us,

We wasted the one moment,

Set aside for us.


There’s no place for us,

It’s all decided for us,

Just one sweet moment.


There’s no chance for us.

What is this thing that fills dreams –

slips away from us.

Gage Chapter 5 ‘One Piece at a Time’

Good day vaguely humanoid masses of goodly folk who read these words.

Just taking it easy today, pushed the boat out last night on chest day and I feel great but dead, I am the swole grateful dead. But I had a pretty decent week all things considered, mainly shitty, a shitty month so far, my love life is in the toilet still banned on facebook and my ‘extended family’ is in fucking shambles but I guess things can only get better from here, I hope. 

I was at my day job just feeling sorry for myself doing a job that should be the exclusive purview of seventeen year olds and feeling like I chose the wrong path. I should have listened to my uncle and done an economics degree and been some kind of wallstreet asshole blowing all my money up my nose and shit haha. Not that I’d do that, I am the ultimate solid citizen haha.
I dunno, I found myself recently having more days like that and it really bummed me out but then you have a day like yesterday and it kind of reminds you why you do what you do and reassures you that one day, things will be better and just to have faith in the mean time I guess. I’m not really religious but I think about whether there is a god and whether there is a plan for me and I really hope there is in both cases.

Anyway so I’m kinda in one of these slumps again, pretty standard for me when I finish something I’m passionate about like Gage and Diana, I just try to occupy my mind until lightning strikes again and the longer it gets the more I get worried that it won’t ever strike again.

But I’ve been reading the first witcher book recently and although there isn’t much story, it’s more like an anthology, it’s well written and I love the style, the action is frenetic and not over descriptive and for a translation from polish it’s really stylized and immersive. I was reading it for research because I wanted to do my own dark gritty almost noir fantasy in my style, something like the Kurgan from highlander meets Solomon Kane or Conan. So I thought the Witcher would be a good read to get the juices flowing on that.

BUT instead of thinking about this fantasy novel idea (which I did a bit, it’s still going on in the background) I couldn’t help thinking about 3 ring samurai again. Yeah that’s the comic I did about the fucking clown samurai named Pookie haha (Which incidentally you can still read on right here on tapastic).

Admittedly I wish I could take credit for the weirdness of the concept but someone in my comic days just came up to me and said “Diesel punk clown samurais go!” and I just went away and created an elaborate world and mythos and we turned it into a script. Then a lot of bullshit happened and when Trump got elected I had a spat with the artist who was heavily liberal and I was evolving into a trumpkin trollololmon and it just went up in smoke but at the time it was also lingering in development hell because the artist was this boomer who needed medical weed to deal with chronic pain and he couldn’t get it anymore so he couldn’t find the impetus to draw anymore, so it kind of just fell apart and it was the push I needed to dump comics for good and go into prose.

And now I’m doing prose, I couldn’t help thinking about what this would look like if I just had the freedom that afforded me and also not having an overbearing boomer telling me what the character I wrote should do/be and fucking boomerposting all over it haha.

I was kind of hesitant at first because when I sit down to write something like Diana After Dark, I’m thinking this could have mass market appeal, this could actually go over well and make money and make a name for me, it could make me. It’s not a dumb zombie book about green haired chicks and weebs with katanas that I write for the sake of irony and inside jokes with myself. Its not only fun to write a book and a character like Diana, it could really have a big impact, it can be taken seriously. But then I can’t steer away from stuff like Green Sunday and Gage and this, stuff I know, only a niche audience if anyone is going to  enjoy them but after a day like yesterday I can’t help but waste my time on projects like that because they’re so fun and they remind me why I do this.

I actually enjoy this, I’m not just doing this for cash, I’m doing this for the feeling you get when you’re writing something and even though you have it all planned out as you’re writing it, you’re still not sure how it’s going to go and it’s like this intense feeling where you feel like you’re reading a book no one else has ever read and it’s unfolding in real time right before your eyes.

It’s really an indescribable feeling.

Anyway, I’ve ranted long enough and my journey to getting swole has robbed me of doing anything really productive today so I was gonna try and proofread the first chapter of the 3 ring but I might do it tomorrow and keep you hanging to the edge of your seat for it on the thursday.

I think I’ll leave it there and remember anyone who hasn’t signed up to my mailing list you missed your free copy of The one that came back and Ladies close your eyes but do not be down in the dumps because I’ll be sending it out again the first tuesday of next month, so sign up to my mailing list today to get your mits on those professionally and very expensively edited free ebooks.

Also you know the drill as far as inkitt is concerned haha.

See you…

One piece at a time


The small gun barely moved in his great mit as he fired at the bottles sitting on rotting bales of hay in the barn.

He fired until he could hear the clicking of the pin against the spent cartridge. Gage looked down range to see that all five of the bottles were untouched and only the inside of the barn had been injured in a wide dispersal.

“Damn son, if you weren’t inside the barn I reckon you would’ve missed that too” He chuckled.

He took the gun away from Gage and emptied out the spent cartridges into his hand. He stowed them in his pocket reloading the gun and then taking a look down the sights and then at Gage’s eye.

“Don’t get much depth perception from that one eye do ya boy?” He sighed and looked at the revolver and said “Other eye probably doesn’t work so good neither”. He sighed again and sucked his gum before shooting one of the bottles looking out of the corner of his eye.

The old man sucked his gums again and said “I think we can work something out.” The old man turned went over to one of the empty horse stalls and drummed his fingers on the fence. “Why don’t you get yourself some more coffee and try and get some rest. I’ll see if I can change the odds a little” He said smiling.

Gage breathed out frustrated but nodded and found his way out of the barn and slumped into the farmhouse sitting in one of the chairs. He supped cold coffee staring at nothing for what seemed like an hour maybe two. The ragged mad thoughts came screaming back as each second that dragged more of the booze sweated out of his system.

Then there was a whistling sound which didn’t come through at first over the sound of the wind outside. Something of a dust storm had kicked up and it had mostly swallowed the horizon. But then over the whooping wind he heard a cracking sound like rolling thunder. He walked out into it, his huge hand over his one good eye as he made his way back to the barn.

He entered the barn slowly, the smell of gunpowder in the air. The old man stood looking at a giant hole in the barn the whistling wind was coming through. He turned as he heard Gage shut the barn door.

“I guess you weren’t born in a barn afterall.” He chuckled. He paused and thought a minute before putting his hands on his hips and pushing his bottom lip out. “I got something for ya” He said smiling.

He turned and nodded at a bale with a lambskin tarp over it, atop the tarp sat a sawn off shotgun. Gage went over to it and picked it up.

“Justice herself couldn’t miss with that thing, or god be my witness” The old man laughed.

Gage took it in his large hand, it was a good weight. The old man noticed him shaking it for the weight and said “Even if you miss you could just hit’em with it”.

Then he noticed the etchings along the barrel and how abrubtly they stopped at the choke with crude tools marks. The stock had been roughly sawn away and sanded down, it was the same gun that was hanging on the wall of the storm cellar.

Gage looked down at it and breathed heavily and said “Why?”

“Why what?”

“I aint done nothing for for you”

“Not yet, could be you’re the one we’ve been waiting for and we didn’t even know we’d been waiting.” The old man smiled and said “Come on try it out, it might just back up and blow your damn hand off, ruin that pretty face a’yours”. He laughed.

It was a couple of months before Gage was ready to move on. His head clear, his mind focused, his body taught and strong like a drum like it was those years ago when he swung iron on the rail road. Doubts cleared from his mind he rode west on a horse the Carpenter provided.

What he intended to do he wasn’t quite sure of yet. Like some kind of apostle or prophet he was sure it would occur to him as if it would ride out of the clouds to greet him.

It was getting dark, and when it gets dark in the desert it gets cold. He could stand the cold but something on the horizon caught his eye. He’d been riding all day and the only place for miles was this odd two story ramshackle what looked like a coach house. But it turned out to be some kind of brothel built out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it was put there by a mining company for the workers or could have been a ways out from an actual town put out of sight from the decent folk.

Either way Gage wasn’t gonna pass it by.

He was sure the place would be occupied with all sorts of riff raff being so far out here. He wasn’t ready to be picked up by some Cyclon agent who might find a handcannon on him. Things could turn really bad really quick.

So he took the gun the old man had given him, oiled it and wrapped it in a canvas sack and buried under a tree about a half a mile out from the whorehouse. So if it turned bad he could just ride out and get it. Marking the tree with a knife so it wouldn’t get lost in all this nothingness.

He rode in slow as the sun came down over the ridge, laying down behind the mountain range. The sound of crickets and birds whipping up into a frenzy as he hitched his horse.

His heavy footfalls on the rickety porch stopping the tinny piano music inside for a moment before he entered. He ducked under the door frame and pushed the saloon doors open and the smell of the place hit him first. It smelled like filth, like it covered the walls. Unwashed woman wafting around never seeing water between countless uncaring drunken customers. Rat faced sneering men that smelled like blood.

The whorehouse itself was a simple wooden construction with a wide fore area with a piano on the right surrounded by tables and chairs. Where various scraggly ner-do-wells sat drinking with their shoulders around their ears.

“Looking for some company de-ar god” A woman’s voice said as he turned his face to look at her. She was old by any standard must have been late forties but gussied up to look half that with a face painted white like an eggshell. Her rotund belly bursting the seems of an off white colour corset. Her speckled and spotty sunburnt breasts popped up like flabby rising dough propping up her chin.

“No” He answered.

He stepped over a slightly raised mantle that felt as if it were a stage and made his way towards the bar.

Above the smell the place seemed like a good start. The tubeloscope played in the background reporting on some kind of explosion that happened near the capital. Some terrorist group claiming responsibility for it. The news woman, some kind of alien half breed of her own was walking around asking people leading questions. Like ‘what kind of monsters could have done this?’ The dirty people sitting and drinking didn’t look shocked. In fact some were smiling, some even laughed or were in silent support of the action.

He had heard on the tubeloscope that there was a rebellion somewhere. Some band of revolutionairies carrying out bombings and raids on convoys of Cyclon good. They were branded terrorists and scorned as the worst of the worst to be as despised as those that had killed and subjugated alien kind in the past. Those evil men who had tried to wipe them out as they would say ‘just for being different’.

There seemed to be an air of disdain for the current system and a general attitude of undirected animosity to it.

This gave Gage some hope that he might in the right place and he sat down at the bar and tapped the bar tender on the shoulder.

The bar tender swung around aggrieved at being disturbed from whatever it was he was doing behind the bar. But he stopped before saying something he’d regret seeing Gage’s face. A dirty faced young girl stood up and wiped her mouth. Gage looked at the girl who couldn’t have been older than fourteen barefoot and almost naked and then glared at the bartender.

“Wha dya want?” The fat sweaty man asked.

Gage said nothing, he looked above the bar and saw a large copy of the bible sitting on a shelf.

The bartender turned to look at it and scoffed, “Oh yeah that’s for the whores to piss on”.

He couldn’t rightly understand it at that point but for some reason that angered him greatly. He grabbed the bartender by his sweaty dirty shirt and pulled him close to his face. Not sure if he could even think of the words that would surmise his feelings of pure hatred towards the repulsive character.

But even if he had thought of something he was stopped in his tracks by a clicking noise. The feeble prodding of the barrel of a six shooter behind his good ear.

“Now I’d drop him if you don’t want to get even uglier.”

Gage turned to see the old whore who spoke to him when he enterned. He dropped the bar tender hard against the bar, knocking about a half a dozen bottles of liquor on the floor.

The women held the gun on him with her two hands as she looked around the bar at the other patrons and smiled nervously. “Get him” She squealed.

Before he could do anything the entire bar descended down on him. A chair was smashed over his back and a bottle over his head and he was kicked and rolled and hit with anything they could get their hands on. The whores too beat him with rods from the fire and even the teen girl from the behind the bar was biting at his legs as she pulled his boots off.

The attack was so fast and savage and by surprise there was no way he could have stopped it. And if he had had his gun they would have no doubt taken it and used it on him. But as it stood he was dumped a quarter mile out and left to die of dehydration and his injuries.

He lay there face down in the dirt awoken by the sqwarking of a buzzard deciding whether to peck at his good eye.

It didn’t hurt, nothing hurt anymore, only his pride was injured. His boots took, his coat, his money and whatever else he had on him. He was stripped down to his undershirt and left to rot and get picked at by the coyotes and the vultures. He felt nothing but the soft tight feeling of the broken and the mending and a stiffening of his muscles.

It made more sense to him now, these weren’t the revolutionaries he was looking for, just general criminals. A putrid scum that only laughed at the misfortunes of the state powers as far as they enjoyed any such misfortunes of others. They only opposed the system as far as it got in the way of their of own, degeneracy that exceeded that of what the state itself was willing to promote.

They were common criminals and had no right to live on this earth he thought as he staggered to his feet. His one good eye almost closed up with swelling as he tried to find his way to that tree and the justice he would bring, buried at it’s feet.

He found it within an hour of searching and trudged his way back to bar in the wee hours of the morning. Following the vile scent of the inhuman garbage that had left him to the carrion to be picked apart like some bloated pig.

He pushed through the door and was greeted with a silence and dull humming and the sound of snoring. The bar looked frozen, like a den of sleeping hogs, the drunks who had taken joy in beating and robbing him the night before were passed out on the bar. The whores passed out drunk in the booths along the side.

Gage could have easily killed them all in their sleep with his bare hands. But he wanted them to know the face of the man that would send them to the devil one at a time.

Pulling up a chair near the entrance he waited for the first to stir. The bartender appeared behind the bar like some kind of vole or rat sensing danger. Poking his greasy bald head over the bar as if he were sleeping on the floor. He rubbed his eyes like a child and thought he saw Gage and grabbed a drunk at the bar and tried to rouse him.

“Hey, wake up, is that- It’s him!” He squealed like a stuck pig and the drunk reached for an iron feebly slow and was cut down by the blast of Gage’s gun. The shot; hot and hard, hitting the back of the bar, splintering it and bursting open the bottles of liquor and lighting it on fire. The liquid flame exploding and splashing on the bartender who shreaked like a washer woman. He waddled falling over the bar and jumping out of the window partially on fire.

A pistol coughed at him hitting the doorframe and then once in his arm but it wasn’t powerful enough to move him. He swung around to where the noise was and emptied a barrel of his shotgun into the stairs. Cutting the old whore from the night prior in half just under her corset. The top half of her popping out of it and rolling down the stairs while her legs remained, the gun tumbling down and breaking open.

The bar was awake now, skittering like cockroaches under the eye of the sun, stinking rats fleeing a sinking ship. They piled over eachother to get away into the desert. Which was fortunate since anyone with the balls to draw a weapon and fight had to clamber over the cowards who tried to flee to pop a shot off. A foot to the groin or a hand in their face not helping their aim any as people literally climbed over them to escape.

Gage fired his last shot into the crowd tearing a wide hole in it and leaving men and some women writhing around in their own putrid entrails.

He emptied the spent shells onto the wood floor putting the shells in his mouth as he slowly reloaded. Occasionally some dishevelled miscreant would pop out from behind a table to fire a poorly aimed shot at the furniture. Only to duck down behind it again if they didn’t just fire blindly over the top.

He slid the final shell into the gun as he felt a tapping on his back as if someone were insistently prodding him on the shoulder.

Swung around to see a dirty young lad with a whispy mustache standing with a 22 pistol smoking in his hands. Gage snapped his gun shut and picked him up by the jaw and slammed the hard wood handle of his gun into the kids face. The first blow loosening all the teeth in the front of his head, the next shattering his jaw entirely. The next knocking his nose in and the next shattering his orbital cavity. After that there wasn’t much left to break and he threw his lifeless body over the tops of the overturned tables the cowards were using for cover. He heard a womanly shriek.

He fired into the crowd of overturned tables and turned them into kindling almost instantly. As if they were made of leaves and a strong gust blew them away. Men that weren’t killed by the shot were caught by shrapnel. Men shrieked with thick table splinters gouged into their eyes and throats and hands. Any that weren’t dead and maimed ran to escape the sound of the dying men’s screams.

Gage trod over the desolation barefoot, glass and splinters sticking into his huge hard feet but he couldn’t feel any of it. He walked over their corpses stamping out those still gasping and gargling for life. He saw the young girl from before lying on her back a big piece of table sticking out of her throat and her eyes glassy staring up at the ceiling. He spat on the floor in disgust and walked over to the stairs.

Stepping over the corpse of the old whore he made his way up to the second floor, kicking her legs off the side of the stairs.

The second floor was just a balcony overlooking the bar and a series of doors leading to bedrooms for the whores to ply their trade.

Coming to the first door his heavy footfalls gave him away and a burst of two succinct revolver shots bust through the door. Cutting Gage along one of his arms but not deep enough to knock it out. He fired back splintering the door and sending a bald man flying out of his boots with a hole the size of a donkey’s head in his chest.

A blonde whore was prone behind the bed with a long schofield revolver in her clasped hands. Her arms laying across the bed. She looked at Gage filling up the doorway covered in blood the righteous hogleg hanging heavy at his side. She hesitated and threw her gun down on the bed and it slid down and hit the floor.

Gage said nothing before firing the last barrel at her. Tearing up the bed with a burst of feathers and blood as her head split in two and plastered against the backwall.

He stood for a moment as the gun smoked before putting three more shells from his pocket in his mouth. Breaking the gun open again and letting the spent cartridges hit the floor,

Another whore with raven hair and green eyes sprang at him from the adjacent room with a pair of taylors scissors and stabbed Gage in his raised arm. He grabbed a fistful of her hair with his free hand and slammed her head into the side of the door with a cracking squelching noise. Her knees buckling instantly and he tossed her body off the balcony with a crash of glass and wood.

He finished loading the gun and snapped it shut again and fired into the room she came out of. Knocking her customer right out of the window with a thunderous clap and a tinkling of glass.

He kicked the door down of the last room and fired both barrels without even looking. Making it nearly impossible to distinguish what remained in the room. Just a paste of blood and feathers and bone.

When the whore house was still he went outside lead by a pathetic mewling noise. Following the sound it lead him to the bartender face down in the dirt smoke rising off of him as he whined quietly with as he breathed in dust.

Gage put his foot on the back of his greasy bald head and pressed it into the mud until the mewling stopped and he heard a cracking snapping sound.

When it was done he sat on the porch in a rocking chair looking out on the horizon with the gun on his lap. After about an hour of sitting there and thinking about what he was gonna do. Maybe just burn the whole thing down and moving on. But he thought better of it and decided to start moving bodies.

He assembled all the corpses and the largest pieces near the entrance. Then finding a shovel in the back he started digging a big hole behind the building.

He spent an hour or two digging a mass grave a few feet deep. Without the pain in his muscles he found he could work much harder and longer and it didn’t seem to bother him. The only thing he felt by the end of it was his thirst. When he’d finished burying the bodies and the parts he went into the bar and dumped out all the liquor and took a drink of water from a nearby well. Then he collected up all the guns and ammo that were left lying on the floor. All in all he got six or seven pistols, ranging in size from tiny derringer meant for hiding up ladies skirts and long army schofields. There was a rifle in the back hidden behind some barrels of beer and a short double barrelled shotguns as well as a set of brass knuckles and a bowie knife. The quality of the guns was fairly low as the legality issue had made choosers into beggers. They couldn’t even steal anything that mightn’t not explode black powder back into their faces.

After that he started to tidy the place up. Getting rid of the broken furniture and mopping up the blood and picking up the brains and bones and other parts he missed. Throwing out all the soiled burnt and ripped bedding.

At the time he couldn’t say why he did it, it was more ritualistic. Feeling as though cleaning the place up, the necessity for it would be made clear when he’d finished. Or somehow the act itself was like cleaning up an especially filthy corner of the earth and this would signal the start of a great cleansing. A small part of a greater design taking shape and growing one piece at a time.

He felt some slight clawing regret at killing his own people because that’s not what he’d set out to do. All that dirty work that seemed pointless had given him time to reflect on it and as he thought of those twisted ugly dirty faces he knew. That the horrible truth of it was that the decay was too far along. The moral and social and cultural decay of his own people had been had been ingrained in them long ago. By a people that sort their disorder to form their own from the chaos.

They had indulged these vices and even promoted them telling people of the one life they had to lead. Encouraging them to lead it only for the selfish asquistion of the basest pleasures of drink and women and violence.

And the majority had done so. As the spiritual and moral values they had founded this country on had given way to material wealth and physical pleasure. Turning men into nothing more than greedy eating machines whose only purpose was to buy bigger mouths.

He’d initially thought he might excise the cancer of his society surgically. But now he knew that even those not associated with the system were just as vile. And where he might have used a scalpel before when what he really needed was a hammer and shovel to knock it loose and dig it out. Pull it out by the root and he’d have to pile the corpses of his own kind higher than his eye before he could save his world.

A million faces like his would have to be smashed before they’d be free, before his kind would seek their own freedom. Talking never worked, the Cyclon were the masters of talking and nothing changed when it was left to a vote. the Cyclon loved voting everything. His people needed to be shaken forcibly from their dream, they’d fight and cling to their chains before being free.


The word seemed like a joke to Gage. Looking at this place he saw what people did with their freedom. He didn’t want to free his people, not from morality, not from god. Just from the Cyclon. It was their freedom that lead them to this. Man was not meant to be free, not from himself and not from God.

The beasts were free and man was not meant to be a beast.

It was his place to find good men and lead them against those that would die to protect corruption and decay. A system that would stifle their good and promote their worst degenerate tendencies would have to taken a part piece by piece. By the most righteous men unfaltering in their tasks. Driven by a firey passion and slaked with an icy determination they would drive their thumbs into the skull of the system and leave it blind.

When it was all done to the best of his ability, cleaner and brighter and lighter. That dank smell of human vice gone he felt he could breathe. It was a clean open room now waiting to be filled with what he couldn’t say but it was a step in the right direction. The sun was coming down so Gage took up a blanket with a scotch hatched pattern and sat on the rocking chair on the porch. He sat with the blanket over him the gun in his lap underneath it and with a lamp at his side and waited.

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