ACT ONE – The Note Desolation Plays
Zoosmell Pooplord. No, no, stop being such a smartass!
John Egbert. This was the name of the young man currently standing in his bedroom, and today was his birthday; his thirteenth to be exact. He didn't feel like wearing anything special to mark the occasion, just his favorite graphic tee featuring a green slime ghost and some shorts.
However, there were a number of cakes scattered about his room.
But this would not be a very good indicator of his various interests, oh no. One could instead gather from his numerous film posters that John Egbert was a fan of really terrible movies. One may also notice his shelf of CDs and books sitting next to his computer that would indicate he enjoyed playing games sometimes and programming computers from time to time, but wasn't very good at it. And upon further investigation, one could even discover his fondness for paranormal lore and his desire to become an amateur magician.
After standing around for a good while, John decided that he would fetch his arms. He walked over to his dresser to retrieve them from a drawer before realizing this was not where he had left them at all! 'Your arms are in your magic chest, pooplord!' He thought to himself.
To his annoyance, John removed the cake that was sitting on top of the chest and placed it on his bed. He then rummaged through the chest and finally pulled out his fake arms and grinned. These would certainly come in handy for some hilarious antics later! He captchalogued the arms in his sylladex; although he wasn't quite sure what that meant yet.
Inside the chest, were the rest of his humorous and mystical artifacts – each a devastating weapon in the hands of a skilled magician or a cunning prankster. John looked over each of his items – a pair of trick handcuffs, a stunt sword, a magician's hat, a pair of beagle puss glasses, several smoke pellets, several blood capsules, a copy of Colonel Sassacre's Daunting Text of Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery and one copy of Harry Anderson's "Wise Guy," by Mike Caveney.
He felt that some of this stuff may be useful later, but for the time being decided to take only the smoke pellets. He shut the chest and stowed the pellets onto one captchalogue card in his sylladex. John still wasn't totally sure what that meant, but he was starting to get the hang of the vernacular at least.
He now had two empty captchalogue cards remaining.
John decided he now wanted to equip his fake arms. He wasn't totally sure if "equip" was a verb copasetic with the abstract behavioral medium in which he dwelled, but he gave it a try anyway.
Unfortunately, he could not access the fake arms. Their card was underneath the one he just used to captchalogue the smoke pellets. He would have to use the pellets first in order to access the arms. 'Ah, that's no good!' he thought. 'I'd just make my room lousy with smoke!'
His sylladex's fetch modus was currently dictated by the logic of a stack data structure. He was never all that great with data structures and he found the concept puzzling and mildly irritating. But he had hope that perhaps he would advance new, more practical fetch modi for his sylladex with a little more experience.
John walked back over towards his door and examined his Problem Sleuth poster. 'Is it even possible to get any more hard boiled than that?' he pondered as he looked at the image of his favorite web comic hero. 'I really doubt it.'
There was a nice spot on the wall next to it, where he had been meaning to hang another poster soon.
Looking down, he noticed a note sitting on top of his drawers that he had failed to see earlier. He picked it up, noting the aroma of fatherly aftershaves and colognes that came with it. The note read,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SON.
I AM SO PROUD OF YOU.
Beside the note was a rolled up poster which John quickly took and placed in his sylladex. He wondered what could be printed on it.
He would need a way to hang it on his wall, so he went and picked up a hammer and some nails off the floor. He first placed the hammer in his sylladex, but now all four of his captchalogue cards were full. So what would happen if he tried to take the nails?
He figured it didn't hurt to try and captchalogued the four nails into the top card, pushing all the artifacts down a card. John flinched as the fake arms were pushed entirely out of the deck and deposited on the floor in front of him. 'Oh well. They're probably completely useless anyway.' He thought. 'But I probably don't want to do that again, unless I want to drop the smoke pellets and suffer the consequences.'
Next, he merged the top two cards. The hammer and nails were now captchalogued on the same card and could be used together. He took the hammer and nails card in conjunction with the poster card beneath it and nailed the poster to the blank space on the wall.
It was glorious. A Little Monsters movie poster; exactly what he had wanted. The old man really came through this time.
John looked over at the Con Air poster hanging above his bed. "Put the bunny back in the box." Truly a classic scene. He then turned his gaze to his Deep Impact poster which hung nearby. Morgan Freeman's genteel, homespun mannerisms were perfect qualities for a president presiding over a crisis. "Oceans rise. Cities fall. Hope survives." Wow. Films about impending apocalypses fascinated John. Plus, a black president? Now he'd seen everything!