War Is Hell In The Living Room Too

Chapter One

Story Inspired By: Mini Hammer By Red Mage Neko

Assorted Paranormal Phenomenon Inspired By The Works Of H.P. Lovecraft

The character Doctor Steel is loosely based on my parents old friend, Doctor Micheal Labrum, who really did push his tendons aside so he could punch through wooden boards without damaging them.

"Singing in the rain, just singing in the rain" I hummed to myself as I walked home through a non-descript suburban neighborhood, two-inch grass and trimmed down hedges accompanying rows and rows of identical peaked roofs as far as the eye can see.

Up ahead, on an area of raised ground between cookie-cutter houses sat a large, very old house. Four bedrooms, five bathrooms, a huge yard, and a sign nailed to the gate leading into the yard that read:

Don't Like How Tall My Grass Is? Well TOO FUCKING BAD Because I Am Not A Member OF YOUR STUPID FUCKING HOMEOWNERS ASSOCIATION And You Have NO POWER OVER ME AND MY FUCKING LAWN

(Oh Dear, Did I Just Cuss? AND WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?)

In any other City that sign would have gotten me a heavy fine and a stern speech by the local Judge, here, however, the City Council had realized that the sign was merely a symptom of a much larger conflict and attempting to remove the sign or intervene in any other way would only escalate it even further. In my eternal war with PerfecTown© Housing Development (Yes, it's actually named that) I considered that sign to be my finest work yet.

It all started when my parents gave me a house bordering College campus. Apparently my Dad won the lottery right out of college and, at the advice of a friend who Dad says was never seen sober, bought real estate all over the country and put the rest of the money in a savings account, the savings let him retire at the age of 32. He had forgotten about the real estate until he discovered a knee-high pile of property Deeds a few months ago, not exactly what you expect to find while cleaning out your desk.

Since one of the houses was ten minutes walk from the college I had just been accepted into, they decided to give it me…Deed and all.

What my parents Didn't know was that a major national corporation by the name of ExellentQuality© Inc. was planning on building a Housing Development in that area, and that my new house was in the exact center of it. Another thing that neither my parents Nor the Corporation knew was that the house was a historical landmark and immune to eminent domain. And since the house was there before the Development, it was technically not a part of the Development and not subject to the Homeowners Association's tyranny.

Now normally his would not have been a problem, aside from the oddity of living in an 80 year old house in he middle of a new Development I didn't foresee any issues.

I hadn't counted on Helen.

Helen Allison, a stereotypical Californian Rich Bitch who had divorced from a Biotech company owner named Rick Deal after he discovered she was having an affair with the local tennis pro. Her husband got the kid's. She had moved down here to work for ExellentQuality© Inc. after her new boyfriend left her for a Supermodel, go figure.

She moved into this development because of how close it was to her workplace and was quickly elected President of the Homeowners Association Board; she is a total control freak and holds a zero-tolerance stance on virtually everything except herself. She goes out every morning with a freaking ruler to measure the grass of all the houses in the neighborhood, and God forbid should anyone have grass above the agreed two inches she will do everything within her power to get you the maximum penalty, she also has the tendency to throw fines around like graffiti at a parade.

You may be wondering how she manages to get away with his crap, but that is easily explained by the fact that the local ExellentQuality© Inc. office is also ten minutes walk away on the opposite side of the Development from the College, because of the short distance, most of the people working at the local office live here, and as a direct consequence, half of the people living here and seven of the ten board members work for her, and have employed the wise strategy of agreeing with her at every opportunity. And because the Board members are fairly high-ranking in the Corporation, if any of the residents who work for the Corporation try to vote any of the those seven board members out of office, they are basically voting against their boss, and since Helen is both the highest-ranking ExellentQuality© Inc. employee in the Development and President of the Homeowners Association she is Queen in all but title

Apparently, by living within "her" Development and not having to obey her rules, I stained her flawless reputation within ExellentQuality© Inc. She has decided that the only way to redeem herself in the eyes of her superiors is to make it her mission to destroy me.

I didn't realize what was going on until a few weeks after I had moved in, mostly because she was too busy resolving the important issue of how the PerfecTown© logo would be spelled to plot anything but minor harassment, but also because I was too busy unpacking to notice. She spent the next three weeks deciding whether the logo would use two T's or just reuse the same T, and whether the beginning of the second word would be capitalized even though the two words were merged, or no capitals, or all caps, when did we decide it was one word anyway? You can see the depth of bureaucracy here is deeper then captain Nemo could ever dive.

Once her schedule had been freed up, she started her campaign of persecution by Decreeing that PerfecTown would become a gated community.

Now I didn't pay too much attention to this until I was told by one of her low-ranking minions that since I was not a member of the Homeowners Association I would not be receiving the gate code.

I had to take the Homeowners Association to Court, which ruled that since I was a resident of the area I would receive the current gate code and all future gate codes just like a "Normal" resident. Of course she started changing the codes three times a week and having "Complications" when it was time to send them to me.

Deciding that I'd had enough of this Bullshit I gave my lawnmower and most of my other yard work tools to my next door neighbor on the condition that he would tell me the codes every time they were changed (She still hasn't figured out how I'm getting them) and just let my lawn grow. As I've said before, she has this thing about lawns, she gets mad about overgrown hedges and the like too, but lawns are her thing, not mowing mine was the biggest "Fuck You" I could send to her without physically say "Fuck You" to her face. Her response was to send a work crew out to mow my lawn and remove everything that didn't conform to the Housing Development rules, that included my fish pond, my vegetable garden, the various weird looking lawn statues I'd set up and the one hundred year old tree in the middle of my front yard. I managed to stop them from taking out the tree and pond by waving an old (And unloaded) Shotgun I'd found in the attic in their faces.

When the Police arrived they were responding to two calls, one from the now Legendary Housing Development guy (Helen had once called the police to report that my overgrown lawn was disturbing the peace) saying that a work crew had gone to the wrong house and was tearing up his lawn, another from some guy with a heavy southern accent and a bad slur saying that the guy they were doing Landscaping for had come out of the house with a shotgun and was screaming at them that he had never called them out.

Eventually the redneck guy (Who was also the only crew member who spoke English) said that they had been called by "That Helen chick" to clean up some guy's lawn. Have you ever seen three Police officers, who just minutes ago were prepared to deal with some crazy guy holding a shotgun, face palming in unison? If I didn't know better, I'd have sworn they practiced.

I sued Helen for the bill from the Landscapers, the price of everything they destroyed, all of the fish and plants in my pond that were killed by pesticides, and the 15$ I paid one of the workers (He came here from some village in south America) to make an herbal paste that his people used on damaged trees and smear it on the single chainsaw wound on the side of it's trunk, he said that the tree may experience a sudden growth spurt, may develop a much deeper root system then normal, and weird fungus's may grow on the trunk, perfectly benign aside from an odd increase in rainfall in the area.

During the next week the tree grew nearly twice as tall as it was before, the root system is now underneath the entire street and partially beneath several other streets, a fungal blob bigger then my head grew where the chainsaw marks were.

Oh yeah, it also rains a Fucking lot.

I called him at his new job (He decided to quite his less-then-minimum-wage job and go work for the local Costco, made general manager in about a month) and he said that the only time his paste had that kind of affect was when he treated a willow tree in a large grave yard, and had lesser reactions from various alleged haunted houses, he said my house must be "Very odd"

I switched from singing to whistling as I walked up the stone path to my front door, I had just received a new strategy game in the mail, according to critics it was insanely hard, good, I usually breeze through any game involving the strategic command of multiple units, no matter how hard it was, I needed something like this to provide a good challenge and I intended to spend the entire weekend testing it out in the Fortress of Geek (AKA my computer room)

"Now wait a minute! This chapter is over three pages long and you still haven't gotten to the point! You promised to have Warhammer and I don't see any! Do you?"

"What the Hell?" I said staring at the man in front of me, he had to be at least 40 years old, overweight, and wearing a T shirt that said "Maybe if this shirt is witty enough, someone will finally love me" he had been hiding in a shallow ditch in my yard and apparently decided to jump up and yell random gibberish at me.

"Do I…Know you?"

"I'm a reviewer!"

"Reviewing…what, exactly?"

"You!"

"Okaaaaaaayyyyyyy…"

"Not you personally, I'm reviewing your story"

"What story?"

"The story!"

"What Story?"

"The Story!!!"

"What Story?"

"You know, the story"

"No I don't, please enlighten me"

"You are the main character in a story!"

"Right…"

"And the Author is obviously basing his main character on himself, and since he is, you are an idealized version of the author and I am blaming all faults in the story on You."

"Faults?"

"World hunger, poverty, cancer etc"

'Why?"

"Because, until this story ends, the Author is GOD!!!"

"Okay then…"

"He's up there!" he shouted, pointing at the sky "Don't you see him?"

I looked up, nothing but the clouds that had been covering the sky for most of the day and the rain falling from them.

"No, I don't"

"Of course you can't, only reviewers can see him, it's our job to point out any and all minute flaws and endlessly bitch about them!"

"Look, I don't have time for this…"

"Pandas!"

"What?!"

"PANDAS!!!!!"

"What are you talking about?!"

He then pointed to the average amount of hair on my arms and screamed "WEREWOLF!!!" at the top of his lungs.

What happened next was a sight to behold, he turned around and ran down the street waving his flabby arms above his head and screaming at the top of his lungs, for about fifteen feet before he ran straight into a pole.

I waited until he got back up and continued to run and scream down the street before I continued up the path.

I opened the door and managed to duck down just in time to prevent a missile the size of a pencil tip from hitting me in the face.

I looked over my shoulder at the small crater that it had left in my yard and back at the entryway

A small group of Demons and assorted cultists were using a pair of boots I'd left underneath the coat rack as fortifications as they tried to fight off an army of Lizard Men, over by a metal folding chair I put in a corner for no particular reason a bunch of guys dressed up like count Dracula were commanding hordes of shambling Zombies against an army of yellowed Skeletons, various groups of undead who didn't appear to have any clear leader or command structure were scattered across the hall, fighting everything except each other, on the other side of the hallway a group of medieval foot soldiers fought a mob of fantasy-trope Orcs and Goblins for control of several pairs of shoes I'd lined up against the wall, next to my feet two groups of elves were fighting for domination of the doormat.

As incredible as it was to see Knight in shining armor using a pair of socks I'd left by the door as cover against Skeletal archers, I couldn't help but notice that none of the miniature armies had any technology more advanced than a catapult, much less a missile.

Was it a missile? I wondered, It was some kind of object, and it did leave a smoke trail, but it could also be an oil-soaked rock fired out of a catapult, but would it make that big of a crater?

My questions were answered when two more of the high-speed Fuckers zoomed into the hallway and past my head, I heard more explosions as two more craters were added to my yard.

I looked at the second door that separated the entryway from the living room, I had it propped open with a shoe because I had lost it's key (Different key from the one that opens my front door) and it looked like the missile had flown out through the crack.

I crossed my fingers and hoped that the there was no missile damage to the other side of the door.

As I neared the door I noticed a Squad of soldiers in some kind of camouflage armor, (they were almost invisible) standing in the doorway on the in front of the shoe, and they were jumping, ducking, rolling, and generally acting like the elephant and/or celebrity from those annoying internet games where you try to click it while it's bouncing all over the Fucking place.

On the other side of the doorway what looked like a heavily armored bipedal robot was firing three laser cannons at the jumping retards, I noticed that two large cannons mounted on it's shoulders seemed to be slowly reloading themselves. When they fired two more missiles zoomed into the air raced in circles around the JumpTards' like a very weird variation of tag, after three or four loops both missiles shot past me and out the front door, I could hear the sound of gunfire and some kind of heavy machinery coming. I decided to push the door open and see what the Hell was going on in my living room.

Sorry about cutting it off like this, the chapter was way too long anyway, next chapter will be shorter and will have plenty of Grim/Dark carnage and warfare.