The severance of Dr. Mort (An Esotericon setting piece)

Dear Dr. Mort,

For too long this board has made allowances for your “eccentricity” in the light of your incredible results in the fields of energy creation and manipulation and time/space distortion. As good as your results may be, it is the decision of the board that your methods are nothing less than abhorrent. The inclusion of ritual and cult practices within your laboratory and reference to the mouldering grimoires of Alchemists and Sorcerers discredited for centuries have rendered your inventions both distasteful and a disgrace to the principles of reasoned science.

After your Tribunal, which you have failed to attend in a manner most contemptuous, your crimes have been listed as follows:

• Moral Degeneracy of the 1^st degree, up to and including reverence for extra dimensional beings and Gods outside of the accepted diversity matrices.
• Desecration of the human form, both living and inert, without license as part of your “research”.
• Communication with extranormal entities without first gaining clearance from the diplomatic corp.
• Cult and arcane practices up to and including astral projection, spirit manipulation, machine empathy and reality deviance of the most severe magnitude.
• Recruitment and consort with criminal elements such as pirates, black marketers and pleasure facilitators.

You have been found guilty of all the above crimes on multiple counts and sentence to life imprisonment. The death sentence has only been waived in the light of your ongoing dedication to forwarding mankind’s more general progress.

All of your esoteric apparatus is to be seized and destroyed in the interest of public safety.

You go too far Sir, and his Imperial Majesty will not stand for it. The Imperial Navy has been dispatched to facilitate your capture and internment in the Pluto Maximum Security Facility for reality deviants until such time as you have left this mortal coil.

Signed,

Professor Peter Aglet

Head of the Commission for Reasonable, Ethical Science and Technology (CREST)

Bishop Reginald Dwight

Order of the Shadows, Head of the Moral Puritan Corp.

Dr. Steel, This One’s For You

Dr. Steel was right.
Not entirely, but he was right. This world is depressing and futile and sad. If we could embrace childhood as a permanent state of wonder and make it the drive for societal progress we could be happier.
If mankinds primary urge was to make mankind AS A WHOLE happier. We’d be in a far better situation.
If this was achieved by a power mad dictator who created toys that murdered his rivals and those who would deny us happiness for reasons of faith, or puritanical foolishness or simply because THEY’RE MEAN, well all the better.
Hating others for being happy is an evil path.

Hating others for their greed is understandable. Hating others for their callousness in pushing others down for their own benefit is entirely justified.
Hating others simply because they are happier than you, for whatever reason, is entirely missing the point.

Dr. Steel was right.
I cry every time I read his retirement letter about how the “real” world came and crushed his dreams. That shouldn’t have to happen to such talented, insane and inspirational people.

I remain a Toy Soldier and shall fight for my Playground Utopia until my dying breath.

Thank you Dr. Phineas Waldorf Steel for keeping the world a mad and wonderful place. If you ever come back to us, I would love to book you for an event, even if it meant selling organs on the black market. All the more so if I could book Voltaire as well as the pair of you have far more in common than most would assume.

Salaryman – The Depression of the Office Drone

Drag up your sleepy head,

Pick up your tired feet,

Dust off that threadbare suit,

It’s time you earn your keep.

Stand passively in the line,

Don’t deviate, stay on time.

Climb on the filthy bus,

Start up your rusting car,

Fighting the daily crush,

While never getting far.

In the distance you can see,

The edifice of misery.

Stare with your tired eyes,

Jab fingers at the keys,

Enter those lines of data,

So bored that you could weep,

Imprisoned here when you could be,

Imprisoned at home, in poverty.

Lay down your sleepy head,

Put up those tired feet,

Take off that threadbare suit,

Salaryman has earned his keep.

And so you lay down in your bed,

Praying you won’t wake again.

Final Judgement

At the appointed time, Jacob’s departed soul was brought up to the place of Final Judgement. As he was lead into the antechamber, he was surprised that no further Gods sat in the room, waiting to judge him. There was only an old mirror, the frame flaking and faded. The watcher leaned in and said to Jacob. “This trial you face on your own. In the mirror you will see your soul as it truly is. There is no self delusion there, no rationalising it away, no pop psychology or any other cheap trick that will save you from this. When you see what you truly are, only then may you confess your own true worth to the Gods that await you.”

The watcher then shuffled out of the room and waited for the weeping to start.

The Monster Within the Heart

The monster rests within my heart. He is warm and protected from harm. He gives me strength when it’s strength I need, but I always pay in blood. He is vanity and pride, the power of cruelty when cruelty is called for. He is the wall around my soul that keeps the world out.

The demon is my drive to compete and beat my fellow man, rather than an altruistic drive to success. He is anger. My flight response is personified in him. He is vengeance, holding grudges as deep and eternal as the oceans. His chains are forged of my self control in the prison of my cowardice and propriety.

The darkness is lust. Naked desire dances in the back of my mind. It whispers of pleasures and dreams of indulging itself, indulging me. The darkness is charming, making me appear well before others to exploit them better. The darkness makes you friends but loses them faster. The darkness lies. The darkness gave me the push to find love. The darkness then endangers love at its every turn. I owe the darkness a great debt, yet it is one of my most dangerous foes.

The monster, the demon and the darkness are all but parts of me, the whole. I would be fool accept their gifts without suspicion, but a greater fool still to deny the strengths they bring me out of hand. There must be a balance.

It is where we find that balance that makes us good or bad people. No God has the right to tell you otherwise.

Mundane Epic #1: Tea

And lo, did the great white tower fall upon the earth, into which the boiling seas were poured from the skies.
The very forests were stuffed into sacks and heaved into the roiling mass, only to be followed with enormous blocks of the sandstone of Tsu Garr, numbering not more than two.
Then came the sum of the world’s lactation, to cool the hellish brew.
For an age did the mixture settle, churned by the great curved wall of metal the Titans call Sp’n.

Finally, the Goddess lifted the great tower, full of all the things of heaven and earth and named the mixture.

“MMMM Tea.”

And lo, it was great and terrible to behold.

Tricksters

Every generation there will be those who are the Trickster’s children. Regardless of what form the Trickster takes to them, they all know that they have a duty to take people’s preconceptions of the world and shake them until they explode.

A trickster will not always do this for the same reason. Some do it to entertain themselves, others in acts of vengeance for perceived misdeeds, some do it to embrace that force known as “chaos” and some will simply to do it to see if they can make you think.

It is that final group with which I have always felt the greatest of affinities.

The eerily accurate transvestite, who plays a part before shaming you, makes you think about how you treat women. The hacker who spreads mildly irritating but non damaging malware in an email that plays upon your greed. The trickster is the satirist who points out the vanities of the time for all to see.

Tricksters are everywhere. It is a vital part of society’s development. Without somebody to question, to poke and to laugh at what we take for granted, we become nothing more than an irrelevance.

Pride comes before a fall. A trickster worth his salt deflates foolish pride before it becomes a danger.

A trickster does not fight the system. A trickster mocks and exploits it, drawing attention to the failures of those who thought themselves grand.

Related articles

• Loki the trickster. (davearthebarbarian.wordpress.com)

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