The First Adventure: The Story of How I Saved the Universe (or 'Every Time You Stab a Man in the Uvula, a Depressed Alcoholic Gets His Wings')
by Evan Forman and Michael Robertson - 16.11.2013 (Updated 18.04.15)
| Table of Contents |
| Chapter 1 - Palace of Doom |
| Chapter 2 - A Knight to Remember |
Our story begins in the same
way many an ancient tale often does: with a colossal, solid gold
pleasure palace falling through the sky at 400 miles an hour.
Exactly why there was a colossal solid gold pleasure palace
falling through the sky at 400 miles an hour is a long story
that involves ten flagons of ale, one rectangular wooden plate,
no less than three strategically placed bars of soap, and the
invention of the Quantum Spoon. It would take many textbooks,
flowcharts, and mathematical proofs to adequately explain and
rather than dwell on the past, I feel it would be far more
beneficial to focus on the much more interesting future. If we
stop to explain how things got to this point we'll just end up
backtracking a lot more than is remotely necessary. Really, this
is just the best and most convenient place for our tale to
begin.
The colossal solid gold pleasure palace falling through the sky
at 400 miles an hour contained a rogue's gallery of
cannibalistic chefs, conniving concierges, bloated aristocrats,
malnourished servants, and roaring, bloodthirsty pirate-kings.
Through the ornately decorated halls of the palace, people flew
down corridors, splattered onto wall-hung paintings, and slid
across marble floors before they were impaled on the
chandeliers. In the humid and colourful courtyards they hung
from beds of exotic flowers and screamed at the world rushing
towards them below their feet. Beautiful furniture and fine
feasts were flung in every direction. Amidst the chaos, the
owner of this grand house, the fabled Doom Pirate Nazir Al-Zahabi,
sprinted through the spinning corridors with his infamous red
scimitar in hand, in mad pursuit of the only two things that
still mattered to him: the Al-Zahabi family treasure, and the
man downstairs who was stealing it.
The battered, swinging doors to the foyer were almost blown off
their hinges as John Boss shoulder-barged through them, running
towards the palace's main entrance carrying a jewel-encrusted
treasure chest under his arm. He was a huge, muscular bald man
wearing only an eyepatch, a fantastic handlebar moustache, and a
purple silk bathrobe with the initials N.Z. embroidered in gold
thread. Pots, chairs, and people slid forward in front of Boss
as the palace became near-vertical. He sped up and flying-kicked
the colossal doors open, the winding path through Al-Zahabi's
awe-inspiring gardens falling further away from him as the top
of the palace leaned forward in its somersault. He glanced up at
the building, now above him, the shining, bulbous domes of the
roof crumbling away; thousands of little gold plates scattering
across the sky as the ancient towers snapped like twigs under
their own weight. On the balcony above the main doors, Nazir
gripped to the railings as he watched the burglar and his
priceless booty disappearing into the clouds.
Nazir Al-Zahabi knew he would likely die today, but not in this
crumbling house. He leapt forward, pointing his red scimitar
down at the world as he pierced through the tangle of vines that
held flailing uprooted trees to others on the ground; over the
emptying lake and through a cloud of flamingos in flight; past
an outdoor theatre where once he entertained princes and
princesses, now ripped in half as this falling island
disintegrated into chunks.
Hurtling towards the ground without any plan as to how he was
going to survive the impact, John Boss was finally able to take
a breather. He appreciated the scenery below: earthy greens
speckled with mud browns made up three of the human kingdoms in
the south-east - Lautusshire, Magnusshire, and Valenshire - with
the Western Wall cutting down the middle to separate them from
the vast desert of the largest human kingdom, Collisterra, that
dominated the west below the kingdom of Orcadia, which took up
half of a mountainous spread across the north; cleaved apart
from its old rival Astor - to the east - by The Abyss, a wide
strip of forest that slithered down from the lifeless Tundra and
stopped at the Northern Wall, which kept the region's savage
tribes and demonic wildlife out of Dryadora, the elvin kingdom
and swampy heart of this grand continent, this ancient stage
upon which our tale is to unfold, the legendary world of-
"BOSS!"
John pirouetted around in the air to see Nazir Al-Zahabi
hurtling towards him, veins in his head bulging as he seemed to
propel himself down through sheer hatred. "You slaughter my men
and sink my ships! You destroy my home, you cheat your way
through the five trials of my family's haunted treasure vault!
And for what!? What's inside that chest is worth enough to build
all of that again a hundred times over! And when I prise it from
your cold, dead hands-"
John Boss let go of the chest, looking Al-Zahabi in the eyes as
it plummeted to the ground.
"So is this what you were really after? The chance to finally
die by my blade, here in the arena of the heavens? Very well,
choose your weapon!" He grinned and prepared to lunge at his
unarmed nemesis.
Boss reached into his skimpy bathrobe and pulled out a
metre-long broadsword.
Nazir paused. "What the...you're...where the hell did you get
that from?!"
John Boss readied himself into a fighting stance despite lacking
solid ground beneath his feet to stand or fight on. "The
characters and events depicted here are in no way intended to
resemble any persons or events, real or fictional, and any such
resemblance is entirely coincidental. Motherfucker!"
Boss glided up towards Nazir and the two sworn enemies crashed
together in a frantic sword duel. His heavy blade sparked with
friction against the sword of the Doom Pirate, who hadn't earned
that title without impaling countless rivals for it. John put
his feet to Nazir's chest and kicked off from his opponent,
dodging a falling marble statue and a screaming dinner guest. He
started swinging his broadsword in circles as Nazir fell towards
him. As the Doom Pirate pretended he was about to block the
sword's downward (relatively speaking) motion, Boss recoiled and
swung for Nazir's right side, but they had duelled too many
times for a cheap ruse like that to work on him.
"We have duelled too many times for a cheap ruse like that to
work on me! My skill with a sword is unparalleled!"
"Let's see what Mrs. Al-Zahabi has to say about that!"
"Sick burn, Mr. Boss," conceded a falling waiter who was also on
fire.
~ MEANWHILE, IN AN INN AN INCREDIBLE DISTANCE BELOW ~
From the second-story window of his room at the Stallion and
Mare Inn, Aerin Liette sat at his desk and stared out at the
sleepy town of Sanusville. Slouched forward in a nest of blank
paper and bottles of ink and wine, he examined the dull
afternoon sky hoping that inspiration would simply fall out of
it. To say the elf was an out-of-work writer was to imply that
he was ever in work. Aerin had tried (but more importantly,
failed) to write short stories, novels, poems, and plays, all of
which ended up as either unfinished masterpieces or finished
garbage.
He'd spent fifteen minutes sitting here and all he had to show
for it was about a stanza and a half of a comedic epic poem
about a knight who...
Aerin didn't get much further than that before he scrunched the
paper into a ball and automatically tossed it behind him,
hitting the paper mountain in the wicker bin through muscle
memory alone. His head fell into his hands and he looked down at
the village below. The donkey pulling a cart of vegetables, the
children jumping rocks across the river, the little old ladies
gossiping with the butcher, the pretty young woman sweeping
outside a shop. He leaned back in his chair, balancing on its
two flimsy legs. "Why them?" He would wonder many a
night. "Why do they get to just...live? Mill about their
illiterate lives without a care in the world while I sit here,
trying to unleash a grand creative spirit that never arrives?
Uselessly clawing at demons who paint death and misery on the
surface of each the world's empty joys? What wouldn't I give
stupidly happy, or happily stupid."
"Well Aerin," said a silent voice. "That's probably
because, one, you don't have a creative spirit. Two: you have
been secretly, invisibly, but essentially malformed since the
womb and your struggle against this inevitable disease is
hilarious. And three: That's okay, none of this even really
matters, you won't remember it in the end. You are, after all,
just a dead thing waiting to happe-"
BANG. Shelves of books clattered to the floor
as a tremor shot through the room. Aerin tumbled backwards in
his chair, bottles of black ink and red wine shattered and bled
together to form a dark murk that dripped through the
floorboards. He lay still for a moment, waiting to hear anything
from the bar below. Aerin clumsily rolled out of his chair and
stood up to look for signs of life.
When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he first noticed that
everyone was still alive and unharmed. He secondly noticed that
everyone was...still. People were halfway through standing up
from their stools or holding a flagon to their lips as they
silently stared at the jewel-encrusted treasure chest at the
centre of a small crater in the floor, sitting directly below a
jewel-encrusted treasure chest-shaped hole in the roof. Their
silence became several decibels quieter when a total stranger,
naked except for an eyepatch on his right eye, gently floated
down through the hole with a parachute made out of what appeared
to be a purple silk bathrobe.
His feet silently landed upon the floor, and he stood there for
a few moments with his hands on his hips, giving everyone the
chance to take in his magnificence for a few moments. The naked
man looked intently at each member of his audience, their eyes
were fixed on his eye, but some quickly averted their gaze as
his eye, in turn, gazed back into them.
"Oh, there it is." John Boss knelt down at the chest. "Ladies
and gentlemen, the Al-Zahabi family treasure chest: forged in
hellish flames centuries ago by the mad sorcerer Abdul Al-Zahabi,
it is said that the chest can only be opened by a descendant's
blood sacrifice, and the whispered utterance of what is only
ever referred to as 'the ultimate secret of the material
realm'." John Boss inspected the mysterious machinery of the
chest's many locks, which seemed to almost hum with dark magical
reverence. He placed his foot on the lid and kicked it open with
a metallic squeal, twisted cogs and smashed mechanisms in the
lid falling out. "A ninety mile drop will also do the trick.
Innkeeper, do you accept payment in the form of diamonds bigger
than the human fist?"
The innkeeper awoke from his terrified trance and nodded
eagerly.
"Good," declared Boss. "Because I'm going to need every drink in
this building if any of us are going to survive."
From the side of the room, a man in chainmail sat up and drew a
sword, his shield on the table bore the symbol of Magnusshire's
royal family. "Sir, I'm placing you under arrest for indecent
exposure and destruction of this property. Try anything at all
and I will not hesitate to kill you right where you stan-"
The guard was sat back down again by Nazir Al-Zahabi's corpse
crashing down through the roof and onto his head, impaling the
man on the same sword that had been rammed down Nazir's throat.
The Doom Pirate's lifeless face was frozen in horror, his mouth
agape as if to say, "This is it, this is how I die: choking on
my enemy's gigantic sword."
Boss inspected the fallen death-kebab before turning to the rest
of the room. "Everyone! In the interests of health and safety I
must ask you all stand behind the bar and shield yourselves from
what I'm about to do." Everyone moved behind the bar in a herd
as they unanimously agreed that they'd feel safer if they had a
large piece of furniture between them and this madman. Only the
innkeeper ventured out from behind it to deliver as many armfuls
of alcohol as he could carry to Boss, who was setting up
something on a table near the middle of the room. As soon as
there were drinks on the counter, Boss had started mixing them
all together; shaking bottles, carefully measuring out
quantities of liquid into glasses, and all the time glancing up
to the sky through the hole in the roof.
Aerin watched John Boss from behind the bar. Despite his
arguable sanity, he seemed completely at ease - almost slightly
bored by this situation. As if falling out of the sky and
killing a man on the way down was a slow Thursday afternoon. He
couldn't stand the anxious silence any longer. "Excuse me?"
"Mm-hmm?" John Boss didn't look up from his table of bottles,
jars, flagons, bowls, and forks, which was starting to resemble
the lab of an apothecary or an alchemist more than the setup for
an elaborate cocktail.
"Yes, hello, what exactly are you doing?"
John Boss poured the noxious mixture he had created into one
bottle, slammed a cork on the top and started shaking it as he
walked into the centre of the room. "Ladies and gentlemen, the
sprawling, solid gold pleasure palace of Nazir Al-Zahabi is
currently falling towards this building and shall flatten us
like ants in exactly..." he took a step back to get a better
view through the hole in the roof "...forty seconds."
The men and women behind the bar all glanced at each other in
silent panic.
"But never fear! For inside this ordinary-looking bottle I have
everything I need to create my world famous drink, the John Boss
Alcoholic Mystery Brandy Surprise."
Aerin narrowed his eyes in stunned confusion, his arms gently
flailing on their way to his temples as if clearing through an
invisible rainforest of sheer incomprehension. "And how is a
bottle of brandy supposed to stop us all from being crushed by a
falling..." his eyes nervously darted up to the hole in the roof
"...palace? We could have sleepwalked out of harm's way by now!"
The naked man looked up from his throbbing and highly unstable
bottle. "Oh, I never said you weren't free to leave the
performance at any time, but it's too late for running now, you
boys have just passed the point of no return. Now, hold on to
something nailed down." He strode over to Nazir Al-Zahabi's
corpse, prised the red scimitar from his cold, dead hand and
took his position under the hole. "In answer to your question,
elf, this stuff isn't brandy at all." He pressed the scimitar to
the bottle's neck, and smiled. "Surprise."
Boss struck the bottle's cork and Aerin only caught a glimpse of
the spark from the corner of his eye as he ducked down below the
bar and held on tight. He kept his head to the floor, feeling
the raging torrent of fire that had instantly torn the building
apart with a quick crunching noise. The bar was thick enough to
block the flames which curved around it loosely enough that the
people behind it were only gently singed.
After about fifteen seconds, the flames stopped. The only sound
was the sizzling of the building's black skeleton. Aerin looked
up to the fading cloud of smoke where the palace used to be, and
the other patrons of what was once the Stallion and Mare Inn
slowly rose up to see John Boss, still standing in the middle of
the room, blackened by soot and admiring the clear sky above
them.
"And that, my good men..." He picked up an empty flagon off the
floor "...is how you make one John Boss Alcoholic Mystery Brandy
Surprise." He poured what was left of the drink and took a
refreshing swig. "So! On a scale of 'one' to 'stunned silence',
how amazing have the last two minutes of your life been?" There
was a stunned silence.
"You said we were boys 30 seconds ago," noted Aerin.
"And now, I say you are men." Boss smiled and raised the flagon
to his compatriots before downing the flagon.
"Halt!"
The flimsy remains of the door were kicked down by a guard, who
was followed by a veritable conga line of justice, funnelling
through the doorframe in an orderly fashion despite the absence
of a wall on either side of it anymore.
John Boss turned to face the guards, welcoming them with open
arms. "Gentlemen! Glad you could join us. Drinks?"
The guards stood there for quite some time, staring slack-jawed
into the sky above them where they should have been seeing a
roof. "What in the gods' name happened here?"
The captain stepped forward. "You're the one who caused the
explosion, aren't you? Well, let's see if you're so resourceful
when you're rotting in the depths of Sanusville Prison!"
Boss paused for a few seconds, his eyes wandering up as he
rifled through his memory banks. "Sanusville...Prison...Sanus...nope,
never heard of it. Does this establishment house any master
criminals of myth and legend?"
The guards looked perplexed at each other. "Um...no?"
"Secret passageways?"
"I don't think it's big enough for those."
"Hauntings or paranormal phenomena of any kind?"
"None whatsoever."
"Um...has anyone ever escaped?"
"Just last week we had the town drunk slip out through the
back."
"Oh." John Boss' bravado had deflated into awkward
disappointment. "Well it was very nice of you to offer, but I'm
afraid this is an invitation I'll have to decline. I'm washing
my hair tonight."
"But...you don't have hair."
John Boss hurled the bottle of his namesake beverage at the
floor, and it exploded in a great cloud. When the fragrant smoke
had cleared and everyone had stopped violently coughing, they
found themselves alone, Bossless.
"He's gone," uttered the guard captain. "Just like that. He
didn't even give us a name, his face was too obscured by the
soot to ever identify him again." He looked solemnly into the
distance. "He's a ghost. He could be anyone, anywhere, maybe
even at any time. We'll tell stories of this day. A man walks
into a bar and..."
"What is it, sir?"
He pointed solemnly into the distance. "There's the prick. See?
That little black spot."
Another guard squinted his eyes and could just about see a naked
man sprinting towards the horizon. "Oh yeah."
"Do you want to...?"
"Might as well."
Some of the guards began to pursue the strange man, but had no
chance of catching up with him.
~ That Night... ~
"And just like that, he was off: sprinting butt naked into
the wilderness, never to be seen again."
Aerin Liette and the other residents of the late Stallion and
Mare had been taken by the authorities to the safety of Magnus,
the kingdom's nearby capital, where they had been set up with
accommodation for the night after being questioned on the scene.
Aerin had tracked down the biggest Inn he could find, and a
nosey barman had roped him into regaling the crowd with his
unbelievable tale of how a fortune of jewels fell from the sky
just a few hours ago. The dead silence of the enraptured crowd
was broken by one person slowly clapping. Others followed suit
as applause snowballed from the crowd until Aerin was being
given a standing ovation. He bowed awkwardly before jumping off
the table he was standing on and disappearing back into the
crowd.
A drunken man grabbed him by the shoulders and shouted slurring
into his face, "I DON BELEEF A FUCKEN...WORDJIT YOU JUST SAID."
A hand inside a metal gauntlet grabbed the drunk by the head and
swiftly shoved him out of the way. The owner of the hand stepped
forward and revealed himself as a man with thick black hair who
was clad from the neck down in armour with a crest featuring an
orange Minotaur. His intense, bulging eyes stared directly at
Aerin, and he broke out into a gallant smile of black and broken
teeth.
"Fear not! For I am Lockswell, knight of the realm! And I am too
familiar with the knave of which you speak."
| Table of Contents |
| Chapter 1 - Palace of Doom |
| Chapter 2 - A Knight to Remember |