Monkey Around
Chapter 1
Monty Fiske was an intelligent man. He knew that one day he would lose his life to the darkness of death. He knew that he would succumb to the blackness of the grave and never again see the sunlight, the trees, his castle, or have any hope to continue his journey through the world. All the power written in ancient texts, all the Mystical Monkey Power ever contemplated and sought could not save him from the cold grip of the Grim Reaper or heal the wound left by Death's scythe.
When Monkey Fist knew his world was beginning to crumble around him, he expected darkness. He expected shadows to slowly cover his eyes with long, twisted fingers until his entire world faded to blackness. He expected the coldness and the stiffness that swallowed him, but he did not expect the stone encasing him from all sides. He expected to be blinded by the darkness, not by the light around him.
White surrounded Monkey Fist as he sat on an endless white floor. He could feel the surface beneath him, but did not feel the pressure of gravity. It was as if he were floating just above the ground—not far enough to be noticeable by the naked eye, but nevertheless he held no weight. He tried to move, to shift so that he could explore this new feeling, but found that, much like a statue, he was frozen in his sitting position. He could feel his own panic begin to settle in his stomach and crawl through his body, but he could not react to it, could not breathe, could not thrash about, could not do anything but stare into the whiteness around him and float above the ground.
Footsteps echoed from somewhere behind him, somewhere from the cloudy white that no eye could penetrate. A figure moved to the man's side, the short stature radiated power as yellow-green eyes inspected the sitting humanoid hybrid. A brown tail moved under Monkey Fist's chin to forcibly turn his head so that he was staring directly into the eyes of Yono the Destroyer. The man's blue eyes widened a fraction as the realization of his predicament dawned on his racing mind.
He had followed the path of the Yono into battle, and he had lost everything. This new plane of existence was nothing more than a creation of the Destroyer. Nothing more than a prison cell to contain those who failed the Yono in their quest for conquest, for wealth, for pride, for any stupid reason that man could come up with. And he, a genius archeologist with a royal title, had fallen victim to the same idiocy as every other man before him.
"Your fate is sealed, Monty," the Yono's deep voice seemed to shake the world around the two. "You decided to follow the path of the Yono and fell victim to your own greed and wants."
Monkey Fist wanted to scream, to howl, to screech that this was all ridiculous, ludicrous, and morally wrong. But somewhere inside his mind he heard the memories of other voices saying the same thing about him. Those same voices fell on willingly deaf ears that heard every word and tucked them each away in the far corners of the beholder's mind. Men strongly insinuate that words are nothing. That petty phrases and insults only show that another man is breaking. No one ever says anything about how quickly words reenter a man's mind when all he is left with is silence. No one ever mentions that the sting caused by painful words only festers with time and infects the wound into a painful, throbbing memory. No one ever mentions that the man who is breaking is only doing so because the words—the nothings that others tell him—that were once spoken to him.
Monkey Fist's deaf ears heard every word whispered about him. It made him stronger, made him biogenetically engineer his hands and feet so that he could be better. It made him grow and claw and bite and fight, tooth and nail, for the power to prove wrong everything that was said against him. His wealth could never have bought him happiness, but it bought him the tools to force others to be more miserable than he was. And that meant he was happier than everyone else around him. That meant he won.
And now he had lost again.
—
The ninja monkeys slipped through the small, Japanese town they found as they made their way from the ruined Yamaguchi walls and sandy land in which their master now was buried. They chattered amongst themselves and decided that they were now charged with finding help for the man who took them in and trained them in the art of Tae Sheng Pe Kwar. They remained hidden from all eyes, only venturing from their hidden places to find a new, shadowed area to sneak into. They watched every person who passed them, desperately trying to decide who to approach and who would help them in their cause.
A loud crash turned their attention to a young man who had strayed too close to a garbage can. The man's slender frame laid, bent double, over the metal container. His khaki pants were stained at the knee by an unknown liquid and his black polo shirt was torn at the bottom seam. Two, black gloves covered his hands and created a stark contrast with his pale skin. The man's hat was askew enough to reveal a ring of black hair amongst the reddish curls that covered his head which resembled a simple crown. The man rose from his fallen position, muttering angrily under his breath as he righted his hat and tied a green apron with some sort of symbol of a white, outlined woman around his neck.
"Yeah, fall over a trashcan in the middle of the street. Way to keep yourself away from attention, Lafeu, way to do yourself a favor and keeping from the crowd. Well done," the man growled as he stalked past the monkeys' hiding places.
The monkeys laughed amongst themselves at how freakish the man seemed and how different he was from everyone else on the street. On that note, they each suddenly stopped laughing, suddenly seriously contemplating whether or not they should rush after the man they saw. Different was good, it meant he was more likely to accept the fact that monkeys needed his help to free a Monkey Master. Quickly, the ninja animals began to plan.
—
The blank stare that the monkey ninjas received upon entering the coffee shop, in which the man they saw earlier had entered, was nothing short of insulting. They needed the man's help and he was just watching them with a neutral expression and no urge to listen to them. They chattered in their anger and sent insults flying at him about his intelligence and heart.
"Yeah, that's nice…your coffee will be right out, thank you and come again," the man remarked, rolling his golden-brown eyes. "I thought pets weren't allowed here…had I known I could raise monkeys, I would have brought my dog with me on this stupid study abroad thing."
The ninja monkeys countered his statements by attacking the register and throwing coffee around the small café area. People screeched and ran out of the shop—desperately trying to escape the wrath of the angered primates. The man, all the while, had ducked down under the counter and was covering his head with his arms. "Okay, okay! I'm sorry! Monkeys are better than dogs! Monkeys are better than dogs!"
The ninjas quickly jumped to the ground, cornering the man in the small area he was currently crouched in. They chatted to one another before deciding on a speaker. Said speaker stepped in front of the rest of the ninja group to offer an outstretched paw to the cowering man, who uneasily glanced around the situation before finally taking the paw in his hand.
"Uhhmm, hello? I'm Lafeu. Nice to meet you?"
The monkeys began to excitedly screech, which only seemed to cause the man to become more nervous. As they settled down, the speaker laid out the details of their predicament before realizing that the man had returned to giving all of them a blank stare. The speaker of the monkeys cocked his head to the side, one eyebrow rising as he questioned what the man was thinking.
"All things holy…you're talking to me. And I kinda understand—well, I get the gist of—I can slightly follow along with—I'm not completely lost over what you're saying."
This reaction only seemed to confuse the speaker of the monkeys more than the man's original silence. Men don't talk to monkeys. Humans don't understand primates. There had always been a language barrier that only the monkeys' master had ever broken through. Only Monkey Fist could communicate freely with them, yet here was a man who could follow their words with relative ease.
"Either you're telling me that you wanted skim and not cream in your coffee or you're trying to recruit me for something. Do monkeys drink coffee?"
All but one monkey shook their head in a negative response.
"So, I doubt you care what we used in your order…which only means," the man's eyes widened. "You're recruiting me? For what? You're a bunch of monkeys dressed in ninja costumes; you shouldn't be recruiting anything but bananas from trees."
The monkey who gave the only positive response to the previous question suddenly held a banana toward the man.
"No, I'm good. Thanks, I think."
The speaker growled at the banana wielding monkey before he hopped forward to place a few papers on the man's lap. Covered hands slowly moved to shift through the pile. The first page held details of an old legend about a god named Yono, who was supposedly a destroyer. The man looked from the page, to the monkeys, and then back to the page before placing it in the back of the pile. The second page was simply a hand-drawn map on worn paper. The third was a wanted poster for a man named 'Monty Fiske AKA Monkey Fist'.
"Wait, Monty Fiske, that's the archeology guy, right? From England?"
The monkeys nodded.
"What exactly am I supposed to take away from all this? A wanted archeologist got obsessed with some legendary power to the point that it dictated his life and now he's in trouble and you want me, some random, college student to go after him?" The man snickered, "that's ridiculous."
When the monkeys made no such similar mocking noises, Lafeu stopped his laughter.
"No. No, no, no. This isn't real life. This is what stories are made from. This is TV sitcom stuff, not reality. I'm just a transfer student, working at Starbucks, and doomed to a life in a cubical until I grow old and die alone. This isn't—" the man abruptly stopped as he looked down at the gloves covering his hands. "This is all ridiculous, ludicrous, and morally wrong."
—
Monkey Fist stared at his inhuman hands through bored, blue eyes. Yono had allowed him to move freely, only because it was hard to play poker with a man who was paralyzed. But there was no where to go and nothing to see in the white expanse of nothingness. His mind had grown bored with the empty area around him, and his body seemed weak and useless.
"The moment I get out of here, I'll never look back."
"And how, Monty, do you plan on freeing yourself from me?"
Blue eyes sent a glare at the god, but Monkey Fist gave no other reaction to the talking monkey. But his silence answered the question with a blaringly loud response—I don't know.
"You cannot defeat me, especially not now. I am Yono the Destroyer. You are a broken toy soldier."
"Toys can be repaired and brought back to life."
"You still think that there is a way to walk away from the path of the Yono?"
"I suppose we'll have to wait and see."
"Word."
The human-monkey hybrid cringed at the slang, which only proved to him that the world was going under, for even an entire language was failing to survive the man-made torture of the ages. Language was meant to be used as a way to communicate ideas and create written art, not as a distinction between the educated and the idiotic. It was never meant to be used to degrade or to separate people from others. But the English language was getting to the point where it could barely be understood in a conversation between two English speakers. It was as though made-up words and made-up definitions had more weight in the world than true meaning and logic.
On the other hand, he had spent his fortune on monkey hands and feet. And that was fairly unconventional.
Monkey Fist shook his head of thoughts. He was not desperate enough for a distraction to contemplate languages and their origins. Not yet, at least.
—
The ninja monkeys had followed Lafeu home. They watched silently from the darkness as he entered an apartment building for college students. Once they could see him through a window on the third floor, they instantly jumped to the window sill and the fire escape ladder to keep an eye and ear on the man.
"Hey, man wadderya doin' home ear'y?" A man with black hair and brown eyes slurred from his place sprawled across a small couch.
"Yeah, don'cha have ta wor' the ni' shift today?" Another man asked from the floor near the couch, a bottle of some kind of drink in his limp hand.
"No. Not tonight. A bunch of monkeys wrecked the store and got me fired."
"But then wher' 're we suppose ta get money fer food…and dri'ks?" The man on the couch whined.
"Well," Lafeu snipped, "you could try getting a job."
"Wha' ya say? Lil' Laf-y tryin' ta ge' all tough?" The man from the floor swayed into a standing position.
"Just pointing out the obvious, Steve. Chill out," Lafeu hissed, but nevertheless began to back away from the other man.
"Ya know, James…Laf-y's kinda cute in ta li' ri' now."
"Oooh, yeah, I ne'er noticed tha befer," the man on the couch struggled into a sitting position.
Lafeu snarled as he began to push past Steve. However, the taller man seemed to have another idea, for he grabbed Lafeu's arm and threw him to the floor. "Loothen up, man. Have a dr'k."
"Or two," James chimed in.
"No. To both of you."
"C'mon, Freakshow, take a sip," Steve smirked.
"Yeah," James laughed, "mayber it'll make ya human."
The monkeys threw questioning glances to one another.
Lafeu curled the corner of his upper lip into a scowl before standing up and stalking out of the room. The monkeys muttered amongst themselves as they climbed down to the ground to watch for the object of their interest. The young man appeared into the night a few minutes later. His eyes instantly locked onto a lamp pole. A golden-brown fire flickered behind the man's eyes as his slender frame trembled.
"Monkey ninjas!" The man called. "If you're still following me around, I have an answer for you!"
The primates instantly congregated around Lafeu. Their eyes were wide as they continued to inch toward him until they were practically climbing on him.
"If my choice is spend another day with those morons or go save some crazy guy," the man sighed. "Then let's go."