#or the room itself is fake and the walls fall down to reveals the wilderness

[maxiwaxipads]

Hangyon's Hangyodon Seminar

(Arupek feels a prick on his neck before turning to see Chaco and Tuxam collapsed on the ground)

Arupek - “…Eh?” “Tuxam? Chaco?”

[???] - “That’s no good~ Are you immune or something?”

(Arupek looks around to find the source of the voice) (Nothing but dirt and greenery reverberated under the clear blue sky) (At the same time, he feels around the side of the neck to find a dart in his right hand) (Before he can react, a hand gently grabs his left shoulder and his mouth is covered by what appears to be a handkerchief) (Arupek then passes out)

[???] - “There. There.” “Have nice dreams for me, ‘kay?”

[???] - “Nnhhh… I should had thought further ahead.”

[???] - “Lili.” “Do me a favor and help me carry one of them.”

[???] - “Don’t look at me like that~” “For the sake of Lord Hangyodon, it is imperative!”

(Moments Later…)

Chaco - “Aru.” “AAaaarrruuu.”

Tuxam - “I’ll do it.”

(Tuxam whacks Arupek on the head)

Arupek - “Yeouch!”

(Arupek gently rubs the spot he was hit on) (In front of him are two figures, Tuxam and Chaco) (He notices the desk in front of him with a small pool of drool, and himself sitting on a chair) (Identical desks are spotted to his left and right) (Square ceiling lights are rowed 3 by 3) (A security camera is spotted by the corner of the room, with a red blinking light) (The wall is covered with pictures depicting Hangyodon)

Chaco - “You sure are hard to wake up, aren’t you?”

Arupek - “Heheh… Lord Pekkle says the same thing!”

Tuxam - “Here. Take this handkerchief and clean up the drool.”

Arupek - “Sure thing!”

[???] - “Testing~ Testing~” “Can you hear me? Would you describe my voice as beautiful and enchanting~?”

(A light flickers, and a square TV being held on a pedestal on wheels shows two figures) (One is speaking into a microphone, and the other figure—much smaller, rests on top of the other’s shoulder)

Hangyon - “Hi, Hi~ Nihao.” “This is Hangyon and Lili!”

Hangyon - “Let’s see if everyone is present—roll call!”

Hangyon - “Arupek?”

Arupek - “Here!”

Hangyon - “Tux—”

Tuxam - “Wait, wait, wait—!”

Tuxam - “Hangyon, correct?” “Where are we? What’s happening?”

Hangyon - “Silly tuxedo knight~”

Hangyon - “Everything will be answered soon enough~” “When I say your name again, say ‘Here!’ Like our good little Arupek!”

Hangyon - “Tuxam~?”

Tuxam - “H—Here.”

Hangyon - “Chaco?”

Chaco - “Here.”

Hangyon - “That makes everyone~ Attendance complete!”

Hangyon - “Welcome to the Hangyodon Seminar!”

Hangyon - “It’s sure better than taking English Language Arts or History, yes?” “After all… Hangyodon is the best there is.”

Hangyon - “Saying his name… I might want to repeat it again and again! (for the rest of my life…)”

Hangyon - “Hangyodon, Hangyodon, Hangyodon, Hangyodon, Hangyodon, Hangyodon, Hangyodon, Hangyodon, Hangyodon, Hangyodon, Hangyodon, Hangyodon, Hangyo—”

Chaco - “About this seminar?” “I—I like to hear more about this.”

Hangyon - “Ah~ Look at myself! Getting into a tangent.”

Hangyon - “So very sorry~”

Hangyon - “What was I doing again? Oh—Yes.”

(The lights blink out for a moment and confetti falls down)

Hangyon - "“The Hangyodon Seminar!”"

Hangyon - “Like the name suggests, the Hangyo—”

Chaco - “Question.” “Once this is over, we get to leave, yeah?”

Hangyon - “Of course! I wouldn’t leave you here now, wouldn’t I?”

Hangyon - “But like I was saying—the Hangyodon Seminar is all about—”

Arupek - “Sorry to interrupt, but I’m kinda hungry.”

(Stomach gurgles)

Hangyon - “Oh… That won’t do.” “The Seminar is about a day long… W—Wait! I’ll have some food sent down there.”

Chaco - “D—id he say a day long?”

Hangyon - “Yuh-huh!”

Hangyon - “The Hangyodon Seminar!: Part 1 out of 100 in the Hangyodon Experience!”

Hangyon - “Everything is all about Hangyodon~ And I mean everything!”

Hangyon - “The food is Hangyodon themed ~ The posters are Hangyodon themed~”

Hangyon - “There’s even small Hangyodons under the chairs.”

(Arupek bends down to check under his chair)

Hangyon - “Haha! I made you look.”

Hangyon - “But I should had done that in the first place…”

Hangyon - “As a Knight of Fragaria, this is a transgression as well…”

Tuxam - “If you can’t commit to a theme, then this is a failure on being Hangyodon theme.”

Tuxam - “Shame on you.”

Hangyon - “Ghhhh! Critical hit!”

Tuxam - “You’ve disgraced the Hangyodon Experience.” “It’ll be better to give up.”

Hangyon - “Y—You’re right.” “How could—”

Hangyon - “Eh?” “What is it, Lili?”

Hangyon - “No… How could I be down at a time like this!?”

Hangyon - “It can still be saved!”

Chaco - “At… At least you tried, Tuxam.”

Tuxam - “(pouts)”

(The lights above the desks open up, and a single pack of Fruits Snack falls) (The lights unravel back again)

Hangyon - “I pinky promise that you can eat later~” “Have this for the meantime, ‘kay?”

Chaco - “Honesty… I don’t really want to be here.”

Tuxam - “Ch—Chaco! We already tried kicking it down…”

Chaco - “No.” “Not yet.”

(Chaco digs into his pocket, and takes out his…) (Credit card!)

Hangyon - “Eh?” “I mean. I’m quite suspect able to bribery…”

Hangyon - “I got it! I’ll just talk faster!”

Chaco - “No. That’s not what I meant.”

(Chaco walks towards the door, sliding his card between the doorframe’s gap.) (He adjusts his hand, sliding it with greater tenacity.) (The door opens.)

Hangyon - “Eh…?”

[7r0773r]

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

“. . . . The point is — aha! yes! the bastard has a point and isn’t too damn drunk to bring it home — this is the point, Will.” Nobody else ever called him Will. “St. Paul says there is one God, he confirms that, but he says, ‘There is one God, and many administrations.’ I understand that to mean you can wander out of one universe and into another just by pointing your feet and forward march. I mean you can come to a land where the fate of human beings is completely different from what you understood it to be. And this utterly different universe is administered through the earth itself. Up through the dirt, goddamn it.” (p. 63)

***

[Kathy] set down her shoes inside the door, made her way to the bedroom. She groped for the flashlight on the nightstand and undressed by its dim illumination. On the nightstand also lay Timothy’s book, she’d found it among his things, the dreadful essays of John Calvin and his doctrine of predestination, promising a Hell full of souls made expressly to be damned, she didn’t know what to do with it, kept it near her, couldn’t help returning to its spiritual pornography like a dog to its vomit. She found a match, lit a coil of insecticidal incense in a dish, crawled under the mosquito net, drew the sheet to her chin . . . Certain persons positively and absolutely chosen to salvation, others as absolutely appointed to destruction . . . Lying there in the stink of her life with her hair still wet from rain. She didn’t touch the book. (pp. 83-84)

***

The priest seemed to sense Skip’s disarray. He was solicitous. “We all have a spiritual trial to go through. When I was a little boy I was very hateful toward the Jews because I said they were the crucifiers. I was very contemptuous of Judas too, because of his betrayal.”

“I see,” Sands said, and saw nothing.

Carignan seemed to struggle. The words stuck in his throat. He touched his mouth with his fingers. “Well, it’s very much for each person to experience alone,” he said, and whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it. (p. 106)

***

He had more on his mind than his love life. He worried about his mother. She didn’t make much money at the ranch. She exhausted herself. She’d grown thinner, knobbier. She spent the first half of every Sunday at the Faith Tabernacle, and every Saturday afternoon she drove a hundred miles to the prison in Florence to see her common-law husband. James had never accompanied her on these pilgrimages, and Burris, now almost ten, refused to serve as escort — just ran away into the neighborhood of shacks and trailers and drifting dust when the poor old woman started getting herself ready on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

James didn’t know how he felt about Stevie, but he knew his mother broke his heart. Whenever he mentioned enlisting in the service, she seemed willing to sign the papers, but if he left her now, how would it all turn out for her? She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her. James suspected she was just faking herself out, flinging herself at the Bible and its promises like a bug at a window. Having just about reached a decision in his mind to quit school and see the army recruiters, he stalled for many weeks, standing at the top of the high dive. Or on the edge of the nest. “Mom,” he said, “every eagle has to fly.” “Go ahead on, then,” she said. (pp. 138-39)

***

On the last page, another note in the colonel’s hand:

Tree of Smoke—(pillar of smoke, pillar of fire) the “guiding light” of a sincere goal for the function of intelligence—restoring intelligence-gathering as the main function of intelligence operations, rather than to provide rationalizations for policy. Because if we don’t the next step is for career-minded power-mad cynical jaded bureaucrats to use intelligence to influence policy. The final step is to create fictions and serve them to our policy-makers in order to control the direction of government. ALSO—”Tree of Smoke”—note similarity to mushroom cloud. HAH! (p. 254)

***

[E.M. Cioran] Doubt collapses onto us like a disaster; far from choosing it, we fall into it. And try as we will to pull out of it, to trick it away, it never loses sight of us, for it is not even true that it collapses onto us—doubt was in us, and we were predestined to it. (p. 357)

***

Skip on his knees at an open footlocker, lifting out the troughs of card files — a musk of paper and glue, slight nausea, anger, those many months with these odors in his mouth, al of it a waste — and found the T’s and flicked through the cards by their edges and plucked out three entries in his uncle’s block printing:

ToS

A pillar of smoke stood above the Ark like a cedar tree. It brought such a beautiful perfume to the world that the nations exclaimed, “Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like a tree of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all the powders of the perfumer?” Song of Solomon 3:6

ToS

And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and palm trees of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. Joel 2:30, 31

ToS

“cloudy pillar” — Exodus 33:9, 10. literal — “tree of smoke.” (p. 445)

***

[Trung] watched people passing on the street. Surrounded by souls he didn’t know he woke to the world in its true scale, not a room with a window that looked at a wall, but an entire world in which he was lost. Whatever the details of the situation, whatever the nature of the problem, whoever had let him down, he was lost. 

And to think how careful he’d been, and how pointlessly. It wasn’t that he regretted the mistake. He regretted the hesitation. Doubt is one thing, hesitation another. I waited three years to decide. I should have jumped. Doubt is the truth, hesitation a lie. (p. 484)

***

The patient’s two comrades squatted by a tree not far off, ready to fetch whatever might be needed, as if they had anything to fetch. The man’s family kept out of the way in one of the hooches, all but a toothless mamasan who enacted a ritual of private significance only a few meters away, out in the relentless sunshine, in the smoke of the charcoal fire and the steam from the pot where the instruments boiled: a dance of ominous hesitations, and sudden leaps, and arabesques. Dr. Mai permitted the display without comment, and Kathy welcomed it as boding well for the patient. The idea that among the ragged, the crazy, the whirly-eyed, the frothing-at-the-mouth, among the sideways, among the mumblers, shufflers, laughers, a bit of loving scrutiny would turn up the blessed poor in spirit, the burned visionary, the holy vagrant — she’d always entertained it, this romance. (pp. 530-31)

***

He’d lived almost twenty-five years, his hardships colored in his own mind as youthful adventures, someday to be followed by a period of intense self-betterment, then accomplishment and ease. But this morning in particular he felt like a man overboard far from any harbor, keeping afloat only for the sake of it, waiting for his strength to give out.

When would he strike out for shore? When would he receive the gift of desperation? He stayed under the covers in the chilly, Lysol-smelling room until the management knocked on the door. He asked for ten minutes, showered, and went bak to bed to wait for the knock that meant business. (p. 538)

***

[Jimmy Storm] “Man, it’s no good if he’s doing it for money. You’ve gotta do it for the thing, man, the thing. You need a reason, you need to be sent by the signs and messages.” (p. 592)

***

The headman raised a hand and the circles parted for a quartet of women, each clutching the corner of a blanket. They laid it before the priest — a pile of hacked wooden carvings, most no bigger than a hand, several others up to half the size of any of their Roo worshippers. The four women threw back their heads and bawled like children as the headman attacked the figures with his axe. As he worked at it, getting them all, and as the women knelt to collect the pieces and add them to the pyre, Mahathir said, “They break their household gods and throw them on the fire because the gods haven’t helped them. These gods must die. The world may end with the death of these gods. The sacrifice of the soul of the stranger may prevent the world’s end. Then new gods will rise.” (p. 594)

***

Chosen to suffer penance because no one else is left. Traversing inordinate zones, the light beyond brighter or dimmer, never enough light, nothing to tell him, no direction home. One figure yet to be revealed in his truth. 

Everyone had unmasked himself, every false face had dissolved, every dissemblance but one, his own. (p. 596)

***

The scene before [Kathy] flattened, lost one of its dimensions, and the noise dribbled irrelevantly down its face. Something was coming. This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest gauze. She sat in the audience thinking — someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone’s soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can’t remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who’ve ruined their health, worshipped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved. (p. 614)

[queen-of-evil-fanfic]

30

    Minerva dipped her head respectfully at the Sage of Force.  “Sage Lucat.  It’s wonderful to see you here.  I’ll gladly accept your invitation.”  She spoke with a careful, graceful cadence.

    The cloaked Sage waved up to the guards atop the wall, and in a moment the portcullis began to groan as it was lifted.  Minerva waited for it to be locked in place, the dirt it shook safely settled to the ground, before she stepped over the threshold, paying no mind to the stony glares being sent her way by the guards flanking the entrance.

    She greeted Lucat as an old friend, and the Sage maintained his peaceable smile in kind.  “Please, lead the way,” she said.  The light shining from the halo crowning her head glinted in Lucat’s eyes.

    “‘Course.” He turned to shout up to the guards atop the wall.  “Thanks for humoring me, folks!  I’ll get out of your hair now.”  To Minerva, he simply winked, and then turned to lead her into the city.

    Minerva fell into step behind him, scrutinizing him through the back of his head.  Out of all the Sages to win to her side first, the Sage of Force was both the riskiest and the most promising.  He stood as the most renowned of them all, making his name as a wandering hero of sorts even in the years before he had taken the position of Sage.  And this was not without good cause.

    While Minerva had never seen him demonstrate his ability firsthand, she knew that the man held a supreme command over his magical power, orchestrating his inner force in a way that rivaled even the Royal Family itself.  The title of Sage of Force rarely fit its bearer as well as it did him.  All of this, and the man did not even carry a drop of the blood of the gods within him; his ears were as round as could be.

    If she could win him over, Minerva knew that the Sage of Skies and Sage of Earth would fall into line.  They were both weaker-willed, and would easily follow Lucat.

    “Watch your head,” the man said cheerily as he led her through a road dense with hanging ornaments strung between market stalls.  The city towered above them, most buildings  standing at least three stories high, and layered on top of and between one another such that the cobblestone roads crisscrossing the city were often at different levels entirely.  The two ducked under a bridge festooned in even more colorful decoration.

Normally Minerva would expect to be ignored while walking alone and unannounced through a foreign city, but the magic lighting up her body drew in stares from every bystander she passed.  People would talk, she knew, and that would allow Zelda to quickly learn that she had visited Rin and swept the Sage of Force out from under her hero’s feet.

    The Sage, meanwhile, waved to and greeted what felt like every person they passed on the street.  People of all species and ages eagerly greeted him in return; Minerva wondered if the man did this every day, or if this was his way of trying to impress her.

    He finally stopped before a stout brick building that sat neatly flush with the rest of the surrounding buildings, its ground level propped up on the second floor of the city’s roads. Minerva waited while the Sage fiddled with the door lock.  Looking up, she saw the symbol of Kythera engraved above the door frame, sitting between the windowsills out of which oozed a tremendous number of flowery and leafy vines.

    The door squeaked open.  “After you,” Lucat waved her in.

    She complied, finally releasing the spell she held keeping the halo of light in place around her head.  She let it fade to a dull spark to light her eyes.

    The door shut behind her.  The chamber within was dim, opening from a small square foyer into a sparsely furnished room beyond.  It was windowless, little more than an apartment, with the only living space to speak of being a couch, a chair, and a table.  A mostly-empty bookshelf lined the far wall.  To the right sat an alcove bearing cooking implements, and to the left a tiny stairwell that spiraled upward.

    Lucat stepped ahead of her, toward the kitchen.  “I’ll get that tea started.”

    As Minerva moved to take a seat, she watched the man doff his cloak, again revealing the array of mundane weaponry he carried within.  Even the cloak itself had weapons sewn into the inside folds.

    One by one, he withdrew and placed each of the weapons adorning the belts on his body into their resting places in his home.  There seemed to be no pattern, but nonetheless he placed each with precision, purpose, and practice.  When he had finally finished and his belts were bare, he began preparing the stove and kettle.

    Minerva watched him the entire time, saying nothing as she sat with her legs crossed in the chair facing him.  But Lucat ignored her almost entirely, not meeting her eyes even once.  Was he trying to intimidate her?  It was becoming irritating that she couldn’t tell what his goal here was.

    Eventually, he spoke.  “Sorry about the humble accommodations. The city was nice enough to let me stay for free.”

    “I don’t mind.”  She had been doing business in the dirt for the past three months, after all.

    “Well, I’m glad to hear it,” he said over the tinkering with his kitchen.  “You never seemed like the sort to get worked up about that sort of thing.  Good sense, that.”

    Silence fell over them until the man finished preparing their drinks and he carried them to where Minerva sat, taking his place on the couch.  His posture was pristine, but he looked relaxed as could be as he drank deeply from his cup.

    He sighed in exaggerated satisfaction.  “How long has it been since I last saw you?” he asked, looking at her for what felt like the first time since her arrival at the city gate.  “You truly look the part of Princess now.”

    She would let that title slide and ignore the prickly pain it left in her ears when he said it.  It was no fault of his to assume her father’s decree stood.  “Almost a decade, if I recall.  You look quite the same, yourself.”  Were pleasantries really necessary?  The Sage must have some idea of why she was here.  He wouldn’t be able to pretend he didn’t for long.

    Lucat laughed.  “Wouldn’t that be nice!  You certainly know how to flatter.”

    His laugher must be fake, she knew, but he was quite skilled at it.

    It was some time again before either of them spoke.  Minerva would not press him; seeming impatient or desperate wouldn’t help her win him over.  She simply sat and let her tea grow cold as she watched the Sage enjoy his.

    “I heard the business about Romulus,” he said.  “He was a good friend.  He shouldn’t have gone so soon.”

    The sympathy in his voice, the way his eyes sparkled when he spoke, the way he smiled so knowingly at Minerva when he said it; it must have been a ploy to take her off guard, but it felt real, and it made her feel disarmed, even as prepared as she was.

    “Thank you,” she had no choice but to say.  She chose her words carefully, spinning the scepter she still held between her thumb and finger.  “I have tried to live up to my duty as his daughter.”

    “So I’ve been hearing.”

    “That’s why I’ve come here today.”

    “With an army.”

    “My followers.”  The light in her eyes flared.  Had the Sage been frowning at her just a moment ago?  He was smiling again now; if he had scowled, it was already gone like a dream.

    “Ah,” he said simply, as though she had just confirmed a hypothesis he held.  “Well, I’ve been hearing some other stuff, too.  Some folks are talking about a Hyrulean Princess gone hunting in the wilderness for blood.”

    “I don’t want blood.”  That was the truth.

    “No?”

    “I’m trying to end this war, not continue it.”

    “So what’s the army for?”  The man’s face had barely changed expression, but his sweet voice had darkened and become somber almost unnoticeably quickly.  His empty teacup sat unattended upon the table.

    Minerva leaned forward in her seat, clutching the armrest with her free hand.  “I want to end the wars we’ve been pointlessly fighting for thousands of years.  I’ve gathered my followers as proof that I can lead them, that they can be tamed.  They’re following me as their Queen, and have sworn their lives to me.

    “And I need your help.  I need those who doubt me across the world to see that my cause is just and legitimate.  I’m asking you to join me and accompany me back to Hyrule to take my throne back from Zelda and ensure we never repeat these asinine mistakes ever again.”

    Lucat stared her down, but she knew he had already decided his answer from the start when he spoke.  “No.”

    Her hand tightened around her scepter as if by reflex.

    “You’ve done a terrible impressive thing, Princess.”  He said that word again.  “I can imagine the kind of difficulties you went through to make it this far.  But going against the will of your father’s dying wish…  Trying to dethrone your sister…  That’s something I can’t abide.

    “The best thing you could do for your kingdom now would be to take those followers you’ve got and disband them.”

    “You don’t get it, do you?” she growled.  “This is greater than my father or my sister.  I am trying to save Hyrule.”

    He just shook his head.

    This was insane.  He was supposed to be reasonable.  But the only person Minerva could see was playing the part of a fool, one who she had thought just moments ago had been cleverly measuring her in a battle of wits.

    She had no choice but to appeal to his status as a guardian.  He wouldn’t be able to deny her then.

    She glanced around the room.  Weapons sat on nearly every surface.  A knife, the blade clean and gleaming, pointed toward her from its seat on the table between her cup and Lucat’s.  If the Sage decided to kill her after this gambit, he’d certainly have the implements to do so.  She steeled herself.

    “I am not going to disband them, Lucat,” she said.  “They are my followers and I am their Queen, just as I am Hyrule’s Queen.  And they will follow my commands to the letter.  If you cannot see sense and join me willingly, I won’t let you stand against me.”

    The Sage stood up from his seat.  Minerva tensed in anticipation of the worst option coming true, but Lucat did not move further, and did not reach for any of his weapons.

    He only spoke.  “The answer’s no.”

    Was he mad or simply stupid?  She was giving him every opportunity and every allowance she could muster, but he insisted on making her fulfill her words.

    “I’ve got no interest in helping your silly fantasy.  Go home, and tell your friends to do the same.  Stop playing warlord.  You have a kingdom waiting for their Princess.”

    He was doing it on purpose now.  She rose in a fury.  Her arm that held the scepter was shaking.  She couldn’t believe that he was really daring her to strike him.

    “I think we’re done here,” the Sage said.

    Minerva stilled her rage.  She had no other choice.  “Yes, we are.”  She turned to leave, waiting to hear the man’s footsteps as he followed her, but there were none.  He only watched.