Story Vault

Part the First

Once upon a time, long ago on the docks of Boonville, a child was born. His parents would muse, after the fact, that the child had been Trouble from the start. And not trouble with a lower-case t, but Trouble, as a force, to hopefully never be reckoned with.

The boy’s father, Irin Chaos, a sour old man who had retired from civil service many years previous, knew the kid was Trouble. He’d been a social worker all his life, and had come to hate the concept. And because Mr. Chaos was a firm believer that the unknown should stay that way, he never gave the boy a name. Except Kid. Which, coincidentally, the obstetrician marked down on the birth certificate. But we’ll come to the importance of names a bit later.

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Based on a True Story

“OK, OK, keep calm, this is the big time. Anything you’ve ever wanted, just be cool. Is anyone watching? Better get it all…”

The sun shined through the trees on the rural splendor of County Route 9. The verdant forests of the Catskills swayed in response to the wind, beautiful despite their proximity to the trailers, rust-covered duplexes and gas stations that clung to the highway.

In the tiny front yard of an especially rusty duplex, a four-year-old boy hopped about like a frog, squatting down and rooting through the short grass with his sticky, marshmallow-encrusted hands. The shortness of the grass was not due to any willful landscaping on the part of the owners, but rather the constant rubble and oil sprayed by passing trucks on their way to New Paltz. The ground was dusty and filled with ants, fading slowly into the gravel parking lot of the Quick N’ Easy Deli, which lay enticingly next-door to Brennan’s house.

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A treatment for a web comic yet to be produced

“In the beginning, there was the Creator. The Creator created all kinds of stuff. It was like an obsession or something. The creator’s friends worried about him because he would just stay in his apartment all day, creating things. So the Creator’s girlfriend, Alexa, told the Creator that he had made too much stuff, and that he should stop creating. They got in a big argument, and they broke up. The Creator was pissed the fuck off. He hit the bottle pretty hard, and then got an idea. He created the Destroyer and told the Destroyer to destroy Alexa. The Destroyer said ok, and two weeks later the Destroyer and Alexa were going out. Can you believe that shit? Anyway, needless to say, the Creator and Destroyer weren’t friends anymore, and all the Creator’s stuff was getting destroyed. So, the Creator, in a fit of drunken hysteria, decided to leave and never come back. Before he left, he made the Wonder Animals to take care of the Universe while he was out “getting his shit together,” and “finding himself.”

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By Prof. Byron Korast

(This is a fictional, summarized history of an RPG setting I co-created with the lovely and talented Ms. Genevieve Casagrande. Caveat Lector, this is written for verisimilitude, not ease of reading! — BLM)

A Brief of Summary of Vol. I: After the founding of Cora in 470 B.D. by the Warrior-King Olvoros, religious tensions grew between the animistic religions of Wozer and Hodnur, and the Celestine Church. The religious strife culminated in many “wars,” if those ancient skirmishes could be called as much, eventually leading to the feudal structures inter-mingling strongly with the hierarchies of the Celestine Church.

Several hundred years of inter-woven loyalties, and strong, proto-nationalistic identity in Cora lead to an extremely strong Monarchy, and a people who identified intensely with their Faith. However, the virtues and emphasis of enlightenment in the Celestine Church would eventually lead to an, at times, excessively independent-minded populace.

So, in the year 3 B.D., King Iarmut Coranov took the throne. And three years later, the New Age of Aris began.

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This short piece is a prose teaser for a production I co-wrote with celebrated American poet and jazz heckler, Mr. Griffin Johnston.

Deep in the forests, a wolf howled. A long, mournful song, rising up above the dark mountains into the cloudy sky. In the distance thunder crashed as storms broke themselves on craggy peaks, and soon the wolf was joined by its brethren. In the middle of the caravan, a child screamed…

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This is a world background for an RPG I wrote that was run at the Unison Arts Center, in New Paltz, New York, entitled Tribes of Blood. Some would shy away from quoting Nietzsche to eight-year-olds, but if you think about it, is there really a “right age” to start discussing nihilism and identity politics?

Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

–Friedrich Nietzsche

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This was a short story written as a promotional teaser for a theatrical production I co-wrote with Miranda Tenbroeke. The production was dedicated to our Professor, Tom Davis, who passed away in 2008, and had a profound influence on the lives of many of my closest friends and family.

~           ~          ~

“The mouse hated the wolf, right?”

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France, 1943

Walking up the road was a stranger. Rainwater poured off the brim of his low-perched hat, and soaked through his camel hair coat. All the gangsters at the pool halls wore their hats like his. Not that there were any gangsters in a small town like Najac, or pool halls for that matter. But times were changing, and every day seemed more and more like a serial or a movie come to life. At a time like this, a gangster walking slowly out of the dark forest would not have been so unbelievable.

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