Sir Reginald Frankfurter De Dandy Carlyle Esq.
rating: +5+x

An old television screen crackles and hums to life. Staticy audio begins to play as you hear the high pitched frequency that accompanies old televisions.

“The following is a paid presentation endorsed by Carlyle Pop Co. Endorsement of this station is not to be inferred.”

The black and white scene on the television opens to a thin man in a tall top hat and very fancy clothes. He sits in a chair next to a small table on a balcony overlooking a large vineyard.

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen.”

The man speaks with a posh British accent. As he speaks, he adjusts a monocle on his left eye.

“My name is Sir Reginald Frankfurter De Dandy Carlyle Esq., big game hunter, attorney at law, and pop chef. Today…”

Sir Reginald Frankfurter De Dandy Carlyle Esq. reaches over to the table and grabs a book off of the table to his right and opens it in his lap.

“Today, through the glorious capabilities of my marketing team, I will be sharing with you the totally accurate, abridged version, wonderful story of my life and my creation of the most wonderful substance ever created… Carlyle Pop! The fizzy phenomenon, sweeping the Archonon!”

A cheap effect of ripples distorts the image which changes to show the point of view of Sir Reginald Frankfurter De Dandy Carlyle Esq. peering down into his book. The book shows a crudely drawn image of Sir Reginald walking with a cane down a dirt path.

“Now it all began when I was just a boy.”

The crude image of Sir Reginald shrinks by two or three inches, indicating the size of a small child. The pencil mustache he had above his upper lip is not removed however.

“I was born at a very young age. Reportedly I burst into beautiful song, right as I left the womb!”

The next few moments cut jarringly back to Sir Reginald who proceeds to sing, “Don’t cry for me Argentina,” in the most operatic and tone deafened voice. After he finishes, he looks at the camera and provides one of his signature dashing smiles. The scene cuts back to the story book.

“Now, as with all good boys and girls, I was thrust out of my home at the ripe age of 5-months to make my fortune.”

Baby Reginald is picked up by a pair of disembodied arms and thrown off screen. The scene cuts to the young boy toddling around a large forest, with snakes stalking him a few feet behind.

“In my days the wide world was unexplored and dangerous. Huzzah! Around every corner there lay dragons and basilisks, Manticores and medusas. Adventure was ripe, dear friends.”

The boy climbs sheer cliffs with no gear up to a nest of griffins, where Reginald pilfers an egg.

“I became Reginald, explorer extraordinaire! The only one brave enough, dashing enough, to go where no others had gone before, to retrieve what no others had retrieved, and to sell what no one had ever sold at incredibly marked up prices! Of course…”

The still very much a child Reginald is attacked by a mother griffin, picked up, and dropped off of the cliff.

“Things didn’t always go to plan, but…”

As the form of Reginald hurtles towards the ground, he deploys a parachute and takes out a remote control. Giving a cursory glance back at the momma griffin, Reginald slaps the big red button on the remote control, blowing the griffin nest to kingdom come.

“Sometimes they did.”

The segue to the next scene is a slide transition. The next scene shows Sir Reginald Frankfurter De Dandy Carlyle Esq. as a grown man. It is a mostly still image of him using his cane as a shotgun and blasting shadowy creatures that are creeping out of the forest towards him. Reginald stands daringly on the cusp of the dark forest and the bright meadow, the only protection for the inhabitants of a nearby village.

“There are those who would have called me savior, which I most certainly was. At the age of eighteen and seventeen nineteenths I saved a village in a meadow from perverted monsters that lay within the forest. When I returned to the village for assumedly an award, I was met with… hostility.”

Reginald returns to the village with a bag full of the monsters heads and walks up to the village elder, holding out his hand expectantly. The woman refuses him and begins to cry. Reginald raises one solitary eyebrow, and his eyes glow red through the black and white screen. The woman points to a chair which sits next to hers, with a picture of a young boy that looks very similar to her. She points to the bag which Reginald is holding and beckons him to open it. Reginald does so, revealing the head of the boy and several other villagers inside. Reginald drops the bag to the ground, raises his cane, and blasts every villager he can see with buckshot. He leaves the village in which there are surprisingly no screams. Yet. He tosses a molotov cocktail onto the thatched roof of one of the cottages and walks away.

“Now, I had always been fascinated with animals and monsters. That is why I decided to go on safari. On safari I found all manner of creatures!”

A gallery of photographs comes into view, all depicting Sir Reginald wearing a safari helmet and holding his cane standing over multiple creatures’ corpses. Included in these corpses are sphinxes, manticores, lions, and giant sky whales.

“As a big game hunter, I was always looking for the next largest beasty to slay. Sadly, after I took down my first leviathan-”

A black line circles one of the sky whales.

“- I was unable to find any sort of larger game to hunt. At least, for eight years that was the case. Then I heard rumors of the Drake.

The scene shifts to an image of a large reptile with three large horns in a straight line up its skull, like a three horned rhinoceros. The Drake is built like a bulldog, but scaled up and covered in thick plates of armor. The armor somewhat transitions to leather and fur near the underbelly of the beast.

“The Drake was considered the most powerful monster that a man could fight. None had slain it before, and there was only one Drake, meaning that the slayer would be the only Drake killer to live. The beast’s hide was covered in thick sheets of hardened stone that it wore as armor. It used its horns to charge those it saw and gore them through. The only possible weakness of the thing was its underbelly. The belly was more leathery, rather than stone-like, and somewhat furry. That would be my only way of possibly slaying the beast."

The images and slideshows now transfer into a black and white film. Reginald is shown walking heroically into the cave that was the lair of the Drake. He is dodging the enormous beast’s charges casually, and is shown landing shots from his cane onto the beast’s hide. The beast gains the upper hand when Reginald’s sleeve gets caught on a rock and he is stuck. The Drake charges him, getting within twenty meters at a full sprint. Reginald calmly aims his gun-cane at the ceiling of the cave and lets a shot off. What happens next is off screen, but large booming and cracking sounds ensue, and a slight fireball is visible at the very tip of the screen. Humongous boulders fall from the ceiling, and the cave collapses onto the Drake. Reginald was lucky enough to be standing beneath what looks like a steel pylon that was painted the same color as the stone of the cave, causing the ceiling above him to not collapse.

“With my devilish cunning, I thought to shoot at a stalactite resting over the beast, which caused the ceiling to collapse and lay it to rest. Over the next two weeks, me and my chaps worked tirelessly to uncover the remains so that we may take our trophy and leave.

The video shows a dig site, where cranes and workers with pickaxes slowly remove boulders and rocks to dig through the earth to the buried body of the Drake.

“It took me and the men ten hours of constant labor every day for two weeks in order to dig out the foul creature.”

The video runs through clips of Sir Reginald Frankfurter De Dandy Carlyle Esq. helping his men dig, but in other clips he is barely visible lounging off to the side, eating grapes like a caesar while his men toil. The video abruptly cuts to a stuffed statue of the Drake in a large atrium with a glass domed ceiling. A sign is in view that says, “Carlyle Inc. HQ: HR Division”. The large stuffed Drake towers above a crowd of people gathered below. Reginald is visible, standing on a stage wearing a top hat and a wielding a new cane. It looks to be made of ivory from, you assume, one of the Drake’s horns. The camera pans up to the head of the beast and indeed; one of the horns has been cut down some length.

“Now, as much as I would have loved to continue my big game hunt for the rest of time, I had peaked with the Drake. I decided that it was time for a new adventure, a new path. And that path was destined to be…”

The screen fades to black. Then it flashes bright white and shows the monocled face of Sir Reginald standing in a courtroom.

“The adventure of Sir Reginald Frankfurter De Dandy Carlyle Esq., Attorney at Law!”

Old-fashioned-superhero-TV-show-style music begins to play. A rapid succession of images flashes, showing Sir Reginald’s incredible moments in the courtroom. He is talking to jurors at one moment, and showing damning evidence to the justice at another. Barely perceptible, but still visible, is Reginald being tackled by a bailiff, for entering the well without permission. The following scene is heavily reminiscent of the old video game “Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney”. An 8-bit, pixelated version of Reginald is seen, standing behind his table, pointing his finger at the judge. He presents damning evidence, and the criminal he was prosecuting is immediately moved into a new chamber and strapped into a chair that rests on a raised platform. Phoenix Wright has won the right to flip the switch, as the conquering attorney. He moseys up to the electric chair on the raised dais that the man is strapped into. Muffled screams for help can be heard from the gagged man, but Reginald shows no remorse. He grabs ahold of the lever that is lying on the ground next to the chair and slowly pulls it, which slowly and painfully turns up the intensity of the electricity that the man is subjected to. Several times Reginald completely shuts off the chair, giving the man a moment of comfort, before reigniting the biting ants of electricity crawling all over the man’s flesh. After around three or four minutes of this, the man’s corpse is a mangled mess of burnt flesh and hair of the body is singed and smoking. His eyeballs have melted, leaving empty, bloody, and half cauterized sockets behind. Reginald pushes a button on the top of the lever, which releases the straps on the corpse and tilts the chair backwards, where it dumps the body into a previously unseen trapdoor behind it. Nothing can be seen in the pit beneath, but you think you may have glimpsed… glistening black and writhing tentacles or snakes. You almost think that you see the inky darkness itself reaching up to grab the body as it is dumped into the realm below. Reginald pushes the lever back into the starting position and looks over to the other attorney and motions for him to come foreward. There are to be two executions today.

“My reign as Chief Prosecutor lasted for a long period of time. I was the one who kept the traditions alive in our struggling world. I was the one who continued the laws of the old gods. ALL BOWED TO ME!”

The image distorts, showing an inky black, nightmarish reality, constantly interfering with the image of Reginald sitting on his chair, book in hand. You see Reginald standing up, moving towards the screen. As he gets closer, the image distorts more and more. His face begins to melt and disfigure, becoming unrecognizably hideous. As Reginald gets closer to the screen, you observe just how tall he is. You estimate him to be well over nine feet in height. He gets ghastly thin as well. He is standing so close to the screen now that you can’t even see his face. Then all of the sudden, he bends down.

“Let me in child.”

You do not respond.


You see now what his face truly is. The pencil mustache is a disguise for a row of black slugs that dangle out of Reginald’s nose. His pale skin is in actuality blistered and cut everywhere, leaking white and pale yellow fluids, like pus and plasma. His teeth appear to be crude imitations, crafted from bits of plastic and metal, covered in the white pus, and stabbed into his empty gums. The monocle is in actuality a circular scar around his eye, featuring lines zig-zagging around the circumference. Reginald gets thinner and thinner, to the point that his clothes just fall off. You try to avert your eyes from the creature as you see its horribly mutilated body covered in scars and oozing wounds. Because of its rapid thinning, long flaps of skin fall from the limbs and the stomach, which offers a measure of modesty to the now nude creature. The hand that used to hold the cane made from Drake horn is revealed to be a long bony claw that extends from the middle finger like a far too overgrown fingernail, but thicker and chitinous. The only portion of Sir Reginald Frankfurter De Dandy Carlyle Esq. that remains is his black silk tophat, which is nestled perfectly on the deformed head of the creature.


The monster thrusts its long claw at the TV screen. You see the screen crack. At first you think its just the program, but then Reginald strikes it again, and its claw breaks through, impaling a shard of glass. You watch in utter terror as the thing shoves its head through the television and into the real world.

"MMMmmmAAAHH! Mmmmnnng."

The beast moans as it crawls into your living room. Any resemblance to Sir Reginald is lost as the voice changes from a high British accent to the moaning and groaning calls of a hungry animal. The top hat is the last thing to change. Right as the creature is coming upon your prone figure, you see the top hat change form into that of a deep red crown with jagged edges digging into the abomination’s flesh. White pus and yellow ichor drip from the thing’s head and into your face and eyes as it leans over you. You are only able to utter one statement before you are devoured by this creature which has begun to assimilate your body into its own by means of melting your flesh. What do you say?
