(…) means twin's telepathy and ((…)) means Cosmo and Wanda telepathy.

No, I don't own FOP or any reference to its varied characters mentioned herein, and unless the new episodes that follow 'School's Out' begin showing the love again, I wouldn't want to. So, for now, Butch Hartman can keep his name tacked on…even if it is for nothing more than the royalties at this point.

Oh…and I don't own The Big Comfy Couch either. That belongs to some broadcasting company in Tennessee I think. : )

Fairly OddParents : The Next Generation

Chapter 21. The Madness of One

Denzel Crocker sat in his chair, his dark eyes no more than slits as he gazed at the screen before him. The green haired fairy imprisoned on one of the metal panels was prominently displayed in the center of the monitor he studied, while on another screen just beside the first, the other metal panel was displayed showing the dark haired fairy.

Denzel never looked at him. He was of no concern. He was merely saving a space until the last part of the plan had arrived. The pink haired fairy.

He wasn't actually sure when she would get there, but he was positive she would all the same. From what he could reasonably remember, she'd never failed to appear even twenty years ago, so what was there to stop her this time?

Time…

What was time?

It was such a limited prospect to most humans. You live…you die. And the universe moves ever outward with hardly a notice. It just goes on reaching for its destined point of maximum spread until it can stretch no more and it is pulled back in on itself with cataclysmic effect. Back it would come, back to it's center...its origins, its birthplace…only to begin the process anew once its every piece of matter had condensed back again into an inconceivably dense ball of matter and energy no bigger that the head of a teaspoon in size.

How long would it be before it would again explode out into the empty vastness of blackness surrounding it? How long before new suns and solar systems were created? How many new black holes and even rarer white holes, would exist? And how many trillions of years would once more pass as it had a trillion times before, before the world and everything on it was reborn?

The man gave an intentional shake of his head. One of the few movements he made these days that was completely by his will.

The physical grind and the mental torment of the last twenty years had exhausted him to the very ragged edge and he knew he had little time left. He could not waste it letting his mind wander down vacant channels or losing all track of time and reality. It was bad enough he had to continually remind himself where he sat and what day it was.

Denzel, you see, was going mad.

Slowly, irrevocably, mad. But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that he knew he was going mad.

The worms of its disease twisted in his ravaged mind from dawn till dusk and not for one second did he fail to realize that even when his consciousness was no longer at the fore, his subconscious was striving ever closer to topple over the cliff's edge of insanity.

And no one else knew.

Oh they'd called him mad twenty years ago. But they'd been wrong. He hadn't been truly mad then. Yes, he had been most assuredly a little over fanatical in his pursuits, doing just about anything he could think off to prove to the world what he knew. But that had never been really enough to warrant calling him mad. Not truly. After all, Columbus had believed the world was round and no one had tossed him into an asylum.

No. That title had merely been based on the object of his obsessions and it had quickly become everyone's favorite word for him back then.

And now here he sat at just shy of seventy, his mind wasting away to mush, his every thought pushed through with massive effort, his sanity ready to boil over at any moment, and no one dared call him mad. Just the reverse, the paper they had handed him right before he'd left the psychiatric hospital for the last time just 7 years ago had said he was absolutely otherwise.

Ah yes. Clinically sane. That was the term they'd given him on their final reports. They thought they'd healed him. They thought they'd been able to get him to relinquish all abnormal thoughts and behavior.

What fools they'd been.

All they'd really managed to do was convince him to internalize his every drive towards the truth. He'd separated the impulses in his mind to hunt for them, for his ability to live as a normal man. He'd submerged his obsession behind a brick wall that the doctors could not get around no matter how hard they tried. They'd thrown everything at him that last time and he'd learned to suppress himself all the better. It was the shock therapy though that had the most profound effect on his separation from publicly perceived folly to an acceptable amount of normalcy.

It took two years of it. Two years anytime of the day and night…when ever they felt like it really…to teach him to separate his state and his religion. But once he had, one who did not know him had no idea that he'd ever been anything but normal. It had even had the added benefit of curing him from the uncontrollable seizures he had every time he'd said those three little words. Although perhaps 'cure' would have been the wrong word.

He'd really just been shocked into avoiding the words.

Like a dog zapped with a static shock every time it barked, Denzel had eventually learned to automatically seek avoidance as a safety response to keep from receiving further shocks. And of course not saying it meant no more word stimulated seizures. Oh, he could still say the words on an individual basis. He could say god, parents, and fairy, though he always cringed at that last. But he could no longer say them in their precise convulsion inducing order. Never again could the three be sown together and in essence, the dog had finally been silenced.

But his bite had still yet to be seen.

Yes, he could no longer say those three words in their order; and for at least that, he was grateful. It helped give him all the seeming of an ordinary man in everyway. Unfortunately it came at a price.

The constant arcing of raw electricity through his body, for they had not just used the amps but the volts as well, had done irreparable damage to him. It had weakened his immune system, it had caused the death of much of his muscle mass, it inhibited his locomotion drastically and made his bones brittle and weak through calcification. He was a shell of a man, if one had ever actually existed within him, and he knew his time remaining was now limited to months, not years.

But it had succeeded in hiding his true mania from the rest of the world and made his efforts all the easier. On the outside, he was just an aging man, his dying body giving no one cause to consider him a threat. On the inside, he was plotting and scheming, planning vicious deeds for hit men to carry out, buying out those weak in morality and hiring men who cared little for anything but a worthy amount for any job they were asked to carry out.

It had taken six years in total to reach this point. One to find a project worth using for his own purposes. Another to buy the people he needed to do his work, and the last four to see it come to this last stage. The end game had begun and soon, they would all be dead.

Yes, behind the closed doors of Denzel's mind, madness had found its root, and with little cultivation it flourished in the dark recesses within.

And the plan it had given rise too was nearly complete.

To some it would have been hard to conceive of him ever reaching this point in the first place. Not simply because most did not consider fairies to exist in the first place. But the money, the time, and the genius involved might have at first seemed beyond even his capabilities. But the fates have a funny way of twining the threads of life and certain inconsequential moments can have effects which bounce across the cosmos with stunning results.

The first came in the form of his uncle's death. His Uncle Albert had been a bachelor his entire life and had traveled the world in search of proof that genies were not just myth and legend and lore. He'd fervently believed that they had a basis in fact and had spent his life questing for that proof.

He'd been quite the idol to Denzel as a boy. The pinnacle of scientific pursuit and dogged determination in his eyes.

Though the man in his later years had spent a good deal of time in a Canadian psychiatric hospital, put in there originally for his obsessive rubbing of lamps to the point where his hands bled, he'd been released and had one last hurrah of ranting on national television about the existence of genies before his heart gave out and he'd died on camera before millions of stunned viewers.

The second string of events, having a relation to the first, was when Denzel's own mother had departed this life shortly after his Uncle Albert. Apparently it had all been too much for the old woman and after seeing her brother die on T.V. and seeing her son hauled back the loony bin, she'd just cried for hours before having a stroke. Three weeks unconscious in a hospital bed and she passed in her sleep.

With no one left from the family, everything was willed to Denzel…including a letter from his Uncle Albert that his mother had kept from him. The letter simply stated that Uncle Albert had to thank Denzel for the wonderful gift of the lava lamp he had sent him some number of years back. It had been exactly what he was looking for and that it had given him his proof that genies exist for he had discovered that one did indeed reside within the lamp when his hands had finally been released from the straightjacket long enough to rub it. The genie had been quite the tricky fellow, befouling the first two wishes with his sly deceit. But the creature had not known to what extent madness could affect the human mind and dear Uncle Albert, by virtue of his knotted and twisted logic, had been able to successfully wish for a reasonable amount of gold from the magical entity. This he had hidden in the root cellar of an old barn at his home and he wanted to give whatever might be left after his death to Denzel to take and use for own search for the truth.

Denzel's mother had not been particularly keen in allowing her dear brother to finance her son's further craziness, hence the hiding of the letter, but as stated, things have a unique way of working in the universe.

So, after four years of being drugged, counseled, analyzed, treated and shocked into a normal appearance, Denzel was released back into the world of humanity…even though his humanity, what little had been there to begin with, was gone. With over three million dollars to his name, his mother's house and a genius mind that had been carefully veiled behind a mental barrier, Denzel came out of the institution. He kept a low profile and after releasing his imprisoned demon one last time he began to plot.

It was no wonder really that the psychologists and psychiatrists had been so unsuccessful in their treatments. They were treating Denzel by going on the assumption that Mr. Crocker was confused by what was right and wrong. What was fact and what was fiction. Truth and lies. But none of those arguments played into the psyche of Denzel Crocker.

To him, it was all there was. It was life.

Denzel's obsession with fairies had been his only driving force for so many years, since his childhood really, that it was the only thing he thought at anytime of the day and the only thing his subconscious acknowledged at night. It had warped from curiosity, to keen interest, to fixation and finally to out and out obsession.

It was during his teaching years, when he'd taken a job as an educator to get closer to children; which, according to his research at the time, seemed to have the most dealings with fairies; that his fixation had morphed into an uncontrollable obsession and it was all because of one child.

It was all because of a boy named Timmy Turner.

From the moment he had first laid eyes on the boy, he had known that he was different. Remarkably so, and the cause…the only cause…could of course be that he had fairies.

Some of Denzel's disjointed memories from those years said he'd proven it, more than once even. Some said he hadn't. But because his sheer fixation would not let him consider otherwise, he had followed up on every possibility whether the boy presented them or not. He'd even gone out of his way to make it so the boy would have cause to use or expose his fairies. Though the boy had been an underachiever anyway and truthfully deserved most of the F's he'd garnered in his classes, there were many that Denzel had given the boy just to see what response came about. If anything 'magical' occurred afterward. Sometimes it was conclusive. At other times, it was not. It varied too often to say.

But the end effect was the same. He'd never been able to get absolute, undeniable, viably presentable proof that fairies existed. Nothing perfectly evident to show the world. The few times he thought he'd been successful, he'd ended by forgetting what his purpose had been in the beginning. To simply expose them and be acknowledged for it. When he'd gained absolute power through them however, he'd allowed it to absolutely corrupt him, and in those moments, his goal shifted to the broader desire to taking over the world.

Domination had never been his first and main objective and so, without a full and detailed plan to achieve and hold on to it, he'd made mistakes and everything fell apart.

But this time would be different, his goal was neither to expose fairies to the world or take the world over.

This time, it was revenge. Pure and simple.

They were going to die.

Every last one of them.

And he was going to start with just two.

One with green hair, and the other, with pink.

Which one would he begin with, he wondered, for one must invariable be first. Which one would he torture before the other? Which one would suffer more by the pain and anguish of the other? What could he do to them to warp their sickeningly happy little fairy minds to sheer terror and hopelessness?

Denzel grinned.

What couldn't he do?

Oh, he would drive them mad first. He'd turn those two into raving lunatics before the very eyes of their fellow fairies just as they had driven him to the brink before the eyes of his fellow men. He would torture them, degrade them and they would beg for mercy. First for each other…and then, for themselves.

Then, when they couldn't take it any longer, he'd wave that one little snippet of hope before their eyes. He'd give them the chance to beg to free one of them at the death of the other. He'd see who put up the better argument and then choose.

If they argued for themselves, then whichever one had wanted to die more desperately would be made to live. How devastated that one would be that they had not gotten their reprieve from their pain. If they argued for each other, he would kill which ever one the other wanted to be left alive more. The grief he could imagine from the remaining fairy thrilled through him almost a like high.

What sweet delicious torture it would be either way.

And of course he would let the remaining fairy live a little while longer to wallow either in their own self pity or their distraught misery. And when he'd finally tired of it, when it became a dull drone in his ears, when it bored him to hear the wails, only then would he finally let that remaining fairy have their end. Only then would it die.

And so would the rest.

The rest would be lucky though. They would all die in one swift but agonizing moment of pain as thousands of volts of electricity were run through their glass and tungsten insulated cells.

The smell, he imagined, would probably be horrendous. The flesh and hair of over a thousand fairies being fried all at once would be reality defying. He didn't doubt that many of the blood toughened, and admittedly scary, men that worked for him would get sick or even pass out from it.

It wouldn't matter to him though. He wouldn't smell a thing. He couldn't.

Another side effect of his severe shock treatments, the electricity had destroyed every olfactory cell in his nose. He couldn't have smelled a week old dead rat even if it were held beneath his nose, and had he ever cause to eat such a thing, he wouldn't have tasted it either. The cells allowing for the ability to smell are also inherently tied to the cells for taste and when one cannot smell at all, there are few things he can taste.

Yes, another thing to blame on the fairies.

He hadn't been able to smell a rose or taste filet mignon in almost nine years.

He'd thought about starving the little beasts, just to have a little fun before the main event. But he'd considered against it. He didn't want any of them dieing before they'd been able to witness the destruction of the 'two'. That wouldn't have done at all.

So he'd had them given nothing more than a tasteless gruel to sustain them. It seemed far more fitting, that as he could not enjoy the taste of a fine wine or Crème Brule because of them, that they should not be able to have anything with taste as well. He'd even ordered them fed three meals a day of it.

The torture of that tasteless mix worked far better like that, for the fairies would not be so starved that they would eat anything and be happy with it. The effect would have been akin to feeding someone their favorite food for a week straight at every meal. You eventually get tired of it. It no longer has taste, it no longer stimulates a positive response in the brain, and in some cases, can even turn one completely against it for the rest of their life. By giving them something that was already tasteless to begin with, the process worked even faster. The ones in fact that had been contained the longest could barely even look at the stuff now and many had been trying to intentionally refrain from eating it. Self starvation.

Denzel had just laughed and waited for them to give in and eat it all the same. Just as he had too with every meal he took. He couldn't taste it, but he still had to eat it.

And so too did the fairies.

Denzel cracked a wicked grin.

Soon, any minute now he was sure, the last fairy he wanted to see would arrive, and then the amusement could begin.

His brain seemed to writhe within the confines of its prison in excitement and from the deepest, darkest recesses, a little voice crooned it's lullaby.

'Oh what fun it is to kill, a fairy and it's pal…'

And the answers from last week's question is…drum roll please…'The Matrix' and 'Jurassic Park'. Two movies I absolutely love and neither of which can I claim to own. Yeah, I'm a geek like that. I like dinosaurs…so sue me. No wait! Please don't! I don't have anything to take! Lol. Of course I like fairies too (duh, lol), mythological creatures hold me in fascination, as well as science fiction, and if the movie is fantasy oriented I am so there. Not in the front row though. I like the middle. That's the best place with surround sound going. I do have a rather odd mix of interests don't I?

So did anyone appreciate the break from Wanda and the kids for a chapter? I really love Wanda to death, but I needed to take a breather from her for a bit. I was starting to feel like I was writing the same thing over and over again, so I decided to explore the demonic mind of Denzel Q. Crocker, Wasn't a pretty picture was it?

And man, was this chapter ever hard. I mean, it flowed pretty well, but keeping it in line with my vision of Crocker at this point was just maddening. (Hmmm…who's madness am I alluding to now?) He's one of the few antagonists in any show I simply can't stand and too write about him like this was just exhausting. I hope it came out okay and I hope you all thought it did. Umm…just in case though, I'm going to go hide behind my brick wall…in case of flying tomatoes. He did come out a rather sick man in this, even more than normal, didn't he?

Band Geek - I like when successful people remember their roots and stick by the lessons they learned when they were humble little peons like the rest of us, lol. It only figured to me that I had to keep AJ like that too. Besides, even as a kid in the show, as intelligent as he was he wasn't above being a kid at time too…ie watching Crash Nebula cartoons and then acting them out afterwards with Chester and Timmy…and certain alien princes. Lol. And I agree. Some of the fan fiction out there so thoroughly surpasses an average new episode, that its hardly a choice anymore. And training dogs is cool to me at least. I love it. The only thing I don't like about it is when the owners don't always do as they're told! Lol.

Commander - I'm sure that AJ would love to have a hug from ya' lol. Like I've said, he was a kid too at one point and with all the craziness he had to deal with Vicky as well, I figured he could take some of that with him when he grew up. And sorry there was no Cosmo specifically in this chapter for you. Normally I'm all about the fairies too (especially fairy fluff!), but this has more then that in it. Have to try and cover my bases after all.

Aerinsoul - Yes. Cosmo and Wanda are good dancers! I have a little fluff about them doing that. It hasn't been added to any story idea yet, but I might post it on DA as part of a 'mixed bits' selection of FOP drivel, lol. Hmmm. Chester. I have to be honest I didn't really have a place for him in this…all though now that you mentioned it, I may have to toss him in for a very brief candid appearance towards the end. Just for the heck of it mind you. ;) And you got the Matrix right…obviously…but I hadn't considered Alice in Wonderland. It does have an application of sorts in here too though doesn't it? So this time it's Dr. Bender? Hmmm. A shame he wasn't around about two years ago. I had a tooth he could have pulled out. But as he wasn't, the job went to someone else. Lol.

Amras Felagund - WOW! That is some serious Yoda speech you've got going on there! It was awesome reading, lol. Can you verbally speak it as well as that? Oh yes! The specials…I saw that and OMG! Can you believe how many people it took just keep the wardrobe straight since most of the darn thing wasn't shot in sequence? And I liked Yoda's exile to Dagobah as well. It just makes me want to sigh all sad for him. sigh I liked the underlying subplot he decided to nix about Padme being in the beginnings of the rebellion. I thought it fitting that she would be at least in the early stages when her daughter finishes it out in the later years. Personally I would have liked to see that in there. It would have made her scenes with Anakin's doubt that much more taunt in my opinion. Ah well. Give Lucas a year or two and he'll re-release it uncut…the director's edition. Gotta' give it to the man. He is one heck of a businessman. And yes, hypocrisy is every where these days. I'm actually going to make that Trixie edition for you once this one is done. If I try to do it now before this one is done I'm just going to confuse myself!

Fairly-Odd-Teen - I am so glad you're liking it so far! Its especially flattering to know you couldn't stop thinking about it when you did take a break from it. And don't worry about crazy here. It is most welcome in my little world! Lol. And I am very well acquainted with that classic Gaston Leroux creation. It happens to be one of my all time fave books and I have just about every movie version created in my video library. I'm missing one from Sweden…but that's about it. The Robert Englund version has to be the creepiest and down right scariest. The Herbert Lom version was probably the weakest. But its all still good if it says Phantom of the Opera on the cover! Honestly. Being lynched by the famous Punjab Lasso is practically an honor! Everyone remembers you if you were killed by Monsieur Le Fantôme! "Serafimo, away with this pretense. You cannot speak, but kiss me in my husband's absence! Poor fool he makes me laugh, ha ha ha ha ha! Time I tried to get a better half!" I actually like when Erik comes down the grand staircase during the masquerade. "Why so silent good messieurs? Did you think that I had left you for good? Have you missed me good messieurs? I have written you an opera! Here I bring the finished score…Don Juan Triumphant! I advise you to comply, my instruction should be clear. Remember there are worse things than a shattered chandelier!" He just exudes power in waves and the managers are just standing there quaking, lol. Ah well, better cut this short. It was longer than I thought it would be. ; )

And no good people, I own not 'Le Fantôme de l'Opéra.'

Adieu.

Trixie21