(This has nothing to do with Japan, but sometimes I feel like posting stories here. I'll call them Story Time! WARNING: May be too explicit for some?)
Reaver buried his Prosaic Axe of the Harpy's Vertebrae into another troll's stinking, wart-riddled flesh. A bluish fluid sprayed into his face, almost getting into his mouth. Yet his Chewing Gum of Warding had created a thin film of red, sparkling, cinnamon magic that kept him safe. Good thing. Reaver couldn't handle another night trying to get the blue stains off his tongue.
Robert Frost headbutted another troll beside him, his steel-gray hair fluttering in the desert wind. He spat. “I must stride again/A winter's delicate kiss/Never-ending fades/Into an encroaching dawn.”
“Why do you talk like that?” Reaver blasted the fallen troll in the face with a Rainbow Grammar Hex spell. Every kind of grammar possible. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, gerunds, conjunctions. Soon the troll's body parts would rot off in a brilliant array of colors: putrid green, neon orange, rose red, and ultra-violet. Pretty parts.
“I must travel these roads/Only I can take/The long winter's come/On this frozen lake.” Frost mumbled to himself as another troll scraped his claws against his ABAB Glyphed Heavy Free Verse Plate.
“Dude, we're in the desert. It's not winter for the last time.” Reaver ignored his verse spouting companion and just waded further into the clump of trolls, letting his axe make music against their bursting flesh. Streams of blood crossing sand, bubbling like brooks along a long forgotten trail. A mystical song of ancient rhymes of ancient mariners--Ah, crap. Now he was thinking like Frost. I've got to get rid of this guy. I don't want him telling my story. He can't write prose. He's a poet and doesn't seem to know it. That he can't write prose, that is. I wasn't try to rhyme. Seriously.
Waves of trolls kept coming. They spouted such barbaric war cries as:
“ur teh suck, lolz!” One of the grisly beasts wailed, his black braids trailing behind him like licorice in a raging snowstor--ah, stop it!
“then he took an arrow in the knee...” Another murmured, his rancid breath hot on Reaver's neck.
“I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGERS NAO, ROTFL!”
“Gross, stop it!” Reaver beat back the mouth-breather. “Why are you all here? Leave us alone!”
Robert Frost suddenly went epic, stream of consciousness. An Infinity Sonnet. The trolls were entranced, dancing in that break-neck, boogie down style that they do. Frost's tongue loosed such epicness that Reaver had never seen before. Allusions. Alliteration. Onomatopoeia.
“Pow! Boom! Bang! Zoom!” Frost's poems were cold as ice, bro. Trolls flew in every direction, befuddled and battered by the waves of pure poetic carnage. One particularly nasty limerick took off a troll's head, leaving a dancing fountain of warty gore popping and locking as it collapsed in a heap.
How does he does he do it? Is the Poetic Way truly better than my own Prosaic Way? Were the darkest arts of Forgotten Verse truly superior to the Paragraph Magicks?
Reaver, in a jealous rage, unleashed his dreaded Ectoplasmic Ban Hammer of Holy Crushingness. The slime of the lime green hammer left trails of corrected grammar sputtering from the mouths of even the foulest trolls with the foulest of comments.
“lolz” became “That is funny.”
“n00b” became “Rather inexperienced gentleman.”
“pwn3d” became “I defeated you both efficiently and succinctly.”
“ROTFL” became “Ha, ha, ha!”
The trolls howled with displeasure in hearing their twisted, guttural, nonsensical language of bastardized tongues transform into something that actually made sense.
Robert Frost was angry too. As angry as a poet can get. His ice blue eyes shimmered with an unearthly rage that could only exist in the warped mind of a poet who's run out of subject matter. Dark, Gothic poetry fell from his lips. Teenage journals. Ramblings of a collapsed MySpace.
“What is happening to me?/Am I losing my poetic gift/Or something/Ugh!” Frost, wading through the slush of devastated troll goo, pointed a crooked, ink-stained finger at Reaver. “Only one of us can tell this story/Dude!”
Reaver's prose had proven stronger than he expected. The trolls were fleeing or lying in quivering mounds. Their grammar had improved and they were scattering to the farthest reaches of the Earth, back into their dark caves with no light and pictures of scantily clad troll vixens.
It was only Reaver and Frost now. In the desert. Poetry vs. prose.
“My art is more coherent and easier to understand, Frost.” Reaver bellowed. “Your poems are old and obsolete. I am the true Word Weaver!”
Frost's pale skin glistened with sweat. Or maybe they were small comma splices. Reaver wasn't sure. The amalgamation of words still hung in the air, clouding the skies. With a wave of his hand, Reaver cleared the hanging words away. Deleted them almost. Frost seethed.
A ghostly sword made of aborted and long-dead poems appeared in Frost's hand. The tears of broken-hearted bards. The buried verse of Emily Dickinson. The cold-fire and old wine of Poe. The white-hot veins of the Beats, snaking their way through the spectral blade.
“I want to try to/Do this attack in haiku/But they suck bad...man!” Frost pushed the last syllable out with a caustic venom. He was bringing the pain this time.
Reaver blinked and rushed forward, Ban Hammer swinging overhead. He'd smash this poet into oblivion and finish his quest to eliminate distorted language from the world forever. “Eat this!”
A jagged bolt of stream of consciousness rippled across the clear blue sky. “The trails of earth are mine alone and yours are mine and sands and glass and broken dreams all hinge upon the tattered seams of fathers' pride and mothers' eyes galactic squid of ten thousand comets--”
“Ah! Shut up!” Reaver battered his way through the poetic bolt. “Just use regular magic! Regular words!” His hammer came down with the force of highlights, red ink, edits, and revisions. The gooey hammer splashed across Frost's silvery, feathered hair, knocking the poet back into the sand, mumbling something about “spidery silk.”
“I yield./I yield./Yield.” Frost stammered. His poetic-ness had been driven out of him like an exorcised demon. “I will take the road less traveled. Or more traveled. Sorry.”
Reaver looked down at Frost with sadness. A tinge of guilt struck him. Who was he to tell others how to tell their story? To practice their craft? To express themselves? Unless they were babbling trolls, everyone had the right to use their own unique style. Their own magic.
“Stand, Frost.” Reaver offered his troll-mush slicked hand. “There's room in this world for two Wordsmiths. If only we can stand together to fight ignorance, bad grammar, and needless flaming, I care not for how you do so.”
Frost nodded, his grandfatherly head bowing in respect to Reaver. “You are right/dear friend/by which way the sands of time lead us/we all stagger in quicksand.”
“Whatever, dude.” Reaver mumbled, putting his arm around the veteran poet-warrior. “Let's just go kill some more trolls.”
And with that Reaver and Robert Frost ventured to the land of Yutoob to find the troll's den, to finally root them out once and for all. But will the dark and mysterious, cloaked bird-man the Twittering Wanderer with his Sword of Limited Text cross their path? Or the much maligned Free I-Pod Knight of Sullied Dreams?
Who knows? But Reaver shall be ready. Wherever there needs to be moderation. Wherever there needs to be correction. Wherever someone's words need to be moved to another section because they don't go where they were originally placed, Reaver will be there.
Waiting. With his weaving words.
Ah, damn alliteration...
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