The Fractal Rangers: Princess Pop’s Predicament

Princess Pop descended from the lights, a flaming nude angel. Halogen green panties, its elastic snapped by an expert military slingshottist, rocketed from the stage to snugly wrap against her pubis and tuck around her hips. Sparks sprayed from stage rear, sending arrows of multi-hued bottle rockets pinwheeling.

Princess Pop favored her fans with a chiclet grin as electronic spiders crawled on her torso, rapidly knitting a horizontally striped purple and black tube top. The spiders, bidding adieu, flung themselves outward, their spinnerets weaving a night black cobweb skirt, and exploded retina-etching flashbangs of poptronica emoticons in a crackling arc to dust.

Princess Pop waved her arms and ghost limbs, phosphorescent blue, slurped along kaliesque trajectories. Riot red fingerless dukes fell from the psychedelic koi trawling heavens of the riven warehouse ceiling and spun onto her punching, twirling fists.

“Hey!”

Pop’s first word resounded, a fell wave, a tsunami of sound flattening the salivating horde and extinguishing the sea of lighters already, before the show even started, clamoring for an encore! Android cherubim wafted like demented bumblebees, their tiny clicking fingers draping upwards her legs sheer purple knee-high leggings.

Princess Pop alighted, finally, onto the polished stainless steel floor, her delicate feet slipping into steel-toed jackboots like a sigh. The audience, prone, rose like grass under a footprint, their moan of anticipation a sexy stench washing over her mohawk.

“Hey!” Princess Pop began again, rising on a blast of thunder, the sweet acoustics sending the first chords of the instant classic Power Pop steamrolling. A transparent bubblegum pink raincoat flanked by the cherubim floated out of the constant pyrotechnics and draped itself onto Pop’s outstretched form. Her boots slapped on cold steel and the multi-billion dollar musics systems took it up a notch.

Pop’s lips as pink as her coat plucked and plicked over whitewash teeth, deepthroating the words that made her a goddess. She sang of punk princesses in kingdoms of garbage and intravenous needles, of the madness of FTL travel outside cold sleep, in the quaintly distilled jargon of the times. She sang: The Ballad of Shandy Peaches the Intergalatic Punk Pirate, Holograms Can’t Love, The Beep Be-bop, Pop and Her Pussy (the clean version), and the honey lava drawl of Tarpit Tangos.

Princess Pop was in the middle of Space War Brutes when she felt a familiar presence crackle through her thoughts. It was Perfesser Prof! He was saying, “…need to be careful, Pop. It’s the big one and as you know, the most likely moment…” Indeed it was, her crescendo was coming up after a couple more songs, that big finale without a fucking denouement, like a body rolling in the midst of an orgasm with the flow abruptly unstoppered. Lights out. Her fans would be pissed, and they would love her for it.

Pop first came to this corner of reality in torn fishnet stockings and a tattered pullover dress. The Prof had outfitted her throat and diaphragm with the abilities of meta-historical she-crooners, and she had charmed her way to the top of the billboard in two years. What her fans  didn’t know, she was deep undercover, and her subsequent disappearance would be as a much a mystery as her appearance.

Pop, as she sang, recounted the cat and mouse game that was her life. A real princess, as real as anything in reality could be, her youth was the smell of hyacinths, the murmurs of wet nurses, and the joyful frolick of her and her twin sister. They lay in the womb, mirror images, and grew up, their violet eyes and peroxide blond hair mirror images. One side of the mirror was Pop and the other was Pip.

Nobody knew what happened. Some said it was the nature of twins, for one to go bad. Pop was no princess (heh heh) but she was a good girl in most respects. Pip broke the mold they both were cast in and escaped north; the kingdom was razed with her pack of slavering wolfmen and the resurrected dead. Princess Pop never had time to mourn. Well versed in the multi-martial-arts of a hundred cultures, she, with a small band of heroes, fought until she was the last one standing.

She owed it all to Perfesser Prof and The Fractal Rangers. He appeared in his fractal foaming craft, like a wild rocket blurring out of nowhere, leaking eddies of  multiverses, his van winkle beard twisting in the entropic currents, his wizened hands waving come on oh, Pop! come on! She got on and never looked back.

Pip, on the other hand, used dark arts and violent technologies that rendered her planet barely habitable to catapault herself into the metaflow of realities. She pursued Pop across dry tales, sent pirates after her in high seas blockbusters, was the dame from hell in noir hardbacks, played the cold-hearted bitch lawyer in massive litigation dramas, was a constant thorn in the meta-metaphoric heel of the Fractal Rangers, all the while laying waste to the worlds within the multitude of multitudes.

So this concert, this artificial narrative was a last ditch effort of the Fractal Rangers to bait and permanently remove Princess Pip from the equation. Quarter through the final song, The Shards of God, Pop spotted a wraith detach itself from a speaker and swoop towards her. Perfesser Prof triggered a curtain of firebrands at stage front, obscuring the twins from the audience. But they didn’t mind, as long as Pop sang. Prof had put on a recording. Pop faced off her sister.

The mirror was broken. The reflected did not reflect the reflectee. They stared at each other and smelled hyacinths from the recesses of memory. Princess Pip was a toothless crone, the horror of her history running through her blood. Her cloak, torn from the furies, moved restlessly upon her decimated frame. There was no room for words.

Princess Pip roared, raising corpse white arms.  She had forgotten why she hated her sister, only that all the pain in the pursuit was not to be for naught. She had subsisted on that rage and pain of others like a crow picks scraps of roadkill from the highway, and a meal of fraternal soul juice would do her right! The hieroglyphics of a tortured language tore through her throat, bringing flecks of blood speckling, and coloured the air with violent violet ideograms. They throbbed and wheeled, spinning into a white hot, flickering artifact, Princess Pop a shrinking black silhouette in the midst of all this light. The audience howled as The Shards of God broke apart in a scintillating mitosis, that would soon inexorably draw together  into a Big Crunch.

The artifact rose, spun on its axis to–hiss and fall apart like a bucket of incandescent water. Pip collapsed! The failed magic ran across the stage, corroding the stainless steel. Princess Pop’s boots sizzled. A couple of concert goers yelped, burnt. Pip lay, a bundle of rags and bones, her neck skewed at a bad angle. Her eyes regarded Princess Pop like an injured puppy’s,  the whites mostly showing.

Diaphanous, bleached of colour and substance, the lines of Pip’s flesh were transparent. She was spread wide and thin, her selves losing objective and straying into lost tales of pain and betrayal, of the disgruntled Catholic mother of twenty children scrubbing pans, of the woman and her smoking gun sent to jail after the murder of a wealthy husband, of the prostitute under the hands of one Jack or another, of the desperate girl and a final candle in snowy streets. Pop was overcome with pity. They had not needed to bait her! All they had to was wait until Pip extinguished herself, her component pieces lost in the megaflow.

In a final agony of movement, Pip moved her mouth into a semblance of words, a creaking vowel falling into a murmur then rising in a sharp intake s trembling into an ohhhrrrweee. Pip faded, a darkroom trick. Pip’s lines, her organic definitions, twinkled into the ether. The stuff of worlds had reclaimed what was left of her. Pop, vital and eternally in the prime of her life, wept as the flames arched above. The song, at its apogee, cut off.

The lights went out.

klowns

I am a writer in kamp klown kollege and I am in the midst of compiling my magnum opus in a chilled cabin filled with orb weavers and deceased recluses. This dissertation takes soul and a half to ream into a living cavalcade of klown kapers and takes no small cars to disappreciate. This is a test this is a test, the klown said, this is a test, print me, oh yes, yes, oh, print me, print me hard, harder than you have ever have, hard, baby print me, print the fuck out of me, print, yesss, print-t-ttt-t… whew that was a handful, and nothing has been prunted, but the time will come when the laptop cools the failing fans and tips into shipshape tiptop shape, evidently the case of the room not being polar enough.

Sigh. The maté has run low and the hour grows, the tick tock of responsibility and obligation slowly gaining mass on these stooped shoulders, as always should in kamp klown kollege. Mad grimaces of painted grease faces pass through the dirty windows, the honking of their noses wafting past, evil wigs badly pulled on threatening fall. The sun beats down on the blue shirts who scramble to repair their misconceived scheme of hasty foresight on squelching ground recovering from the beating given by the sky angry earlier over some whim of the wind, a small matter erupting into larger issues for earthbound vessels that suffer false inconvenience, forgetting the beasts who stand under sheets of pluvi to masticate with dull acceptance. Bipedalatic quick wit equals heightened fussckiness?

A mission doomed to failure because of insufficient technological quality of equipment, but endeavour, I must, for I am a klown of the most fickle kaliber, a fucking magnum klown with madskillz of leet variety hung with a fleet of talent exploding with saccharine untruths and truthful lies. The cards tell this klown he is to be dealt with. Tack tack tack, the keyboard said, sssssssss said the kettle, creep creep did the spider on silk legs acrobatic catching caught prey thrashing on threshold of death, a dearth of unbidden sound unheard falling from understanding depths and unkind heights.

Sigh sigh him did he. The children overran the banks, they did, rushing past and over him, burbling in deaf ears. Their tracks are promptly forgotten, but their wake still smells of them and he is tired. For they are energy vampires and their very motion stirs the strength from his breath. Wood crackle beam under foot warm. Ahh, open door. The sundered art scholorate determines to enact by theft of overriding boundaries of authority position, unacceptable the option of bygones be bygones.

The Kamp Kops perpetuated their crimes with a flash of fallen siren and brought the manslaughter claim to bars before, their badges gleam cruel, transferring that crude denial to the pompous pulpit of krazy judge Judge Klown who proclaimed mockingly with chests siliconate puft high blown hot air belching onions and visible chunks of seminola, My court is not klown skool. It is klown ooni-ver-seeeeity! The defendant slumped into rhetoric, knowing very well in klown university guilt is pre-determined, despite the joke battle of his cellular-call hired wordgun Mister K. Kleen Klown in a wage of war valiant trying for the missing punch line. He hung his wrists to the click of steel.

Kaptain Klown went ow as the wasp struggles to escape the penetration of its own barb upon his leg, and Kaptain Klown said, What a black summer, that a bug such a like of this, operating on pure instinct and on the horror of victims, can sneak from deep doorjambs when unawaries are seeking small wind tunnels and attack instant pain. And on the afterthought, he decided his totem bird the owl, is just a scrawny fucking bird under all that pomp.

Sated mafia battles punk the kids and turns them into practiced liars, but it’s all in the name of honest criminality. The fire burns a hole, charwise, on the hill by the pond by the horse by the road by the field in the country in the county in the state in the fucking backwards kvetching klown kult kulture of the ooohhh-neeee-saaaaaa.

Kavalier Klown levered the smoking blokgun onto his shoulder and said, “You ‘n’ me are square, bitch.”  to the corpse left behind on the beach riddled with used condoms and neglected messages in bottles, clothes rippling in the wind, the parrot beaks of the sea kulture already nipping at the cooling flesh, tugging it away in shreds, until a long calamarite tendril snakes out of the heaving waters, wrapping around the death grimace and pulls it into the brack under the oily glow of a billboard advertising AF brand jeans, “each jean sporting a meticulously created ragged hole for statement of style and status. The preferred brand of socialites and actors everyround, Azz Fuzz jeans facilitates easy, foolproof access to the place that counts. The honest holes are manufactured with high quality equipment and extensive, dedicated labor. ”

What gumption! Klassy Klown trots her rhinestone studded trellis tresses on the indoor limelit boulevard, dragging the sparkle of her oversized kaboose, clung to by a baker’s dozen of midgets in bowler hats and flannels bouncing under neon green suspenders, manic glee on their painted angry faces. Klassy Klown tchs tchs and swerves her ample entourage and sends them through the roof, as if ejected from the gunpowder womb of a cannon, to the four corners of the emporium! Ta ta, she frumples for the exit, endearing empty pocketed klowns to rush to her bosom and beg her favor, at which she snorts above her mustachioed sneer. A gunshot! Glass shatters and razzamatazz the lights shower sparks of laughing tears of electric spray and Klassy Klown shrieks, her baubles aflame, and dashes. Fire crotch! A klown shrieks. Call the fire brigade! an disesteemed klown screeches as the bartender konvalescents his drink. Sirens shattering eardrums into bleed, the century long, mile long fire truck launches itself over a gentle slope and obliterates a party of childklowns skipping to and fro, the official dalmatian dashing along in mad pursuit, slipping the Charleston on klown blood. The truck turns a bend and destroys the foundation of the recently christened—the wine glistens still among the bottleglass shards– Klown Rehabilitation Academy (When klowning becomes too hard… You are not alone!) and penetrates violently a storefront specializing in extracurricular recreational onus targeting irascible karnal activities, and explodes from its posterior to a screeching halt, tumbling fireklowns in yellow rubber raincoats rapidly mobilizing canvas hoses and pickaxes mid somersault from the firetruck to land lithe on running feet snaking the roaring hoses across the foot long promenade through a two foot by four foot window as Klassy Klown, currently a fireball, exited the building by normal means (meaning the fucking door) to ignite a dynamite factory across the street. Where’s the fire!? cried the fireklowns, aiming the furious nozzles of their hoses at anyone who dared to voucher an answer. The subsequent explosion sent the troop of well-meaning but misguided guardians of public safety rocketing into the stratosphere, along with the two hundred sixteen occupants of the dance floor, thirteen tuba players gargling vodka, a boy bartender, a girl bartender, a hermaphrodite bartender, the baker’s dozen grabbing at bowler hats, a sobering drunkard agape in horror (and as always, instinctively reaching for one of the bottles that floated at his side) at the dentures clamped on his gonads as the geriatric whore he had hired (saying, my sight’s gone, it sure has) searched the thinning air for her awol masticators, several empty pockets, a sad patron stubbornly perched over a flaming drink on a splintery piece of bar top, a midget with a severe affliction of Little Guy Syndrome laughing as he hurtled by inches past the World’s Tallest Man, and a firetruck with a dalmatian clamped to a tire in pure terror. The skeleton of Klassy Klown drifted past, an effigy of flame and calcium, and a fireklown remarked, just before reaching the zenith of their ascent, She’s shore big boned.

By dynamite light the president of Klown Kar Korps buried his greased face in his hands and considered his unprecedented rise to power; he had begun by shuffling kona from cubicle to cubicle, bearing the brunt of a series of vicious office pranks, but a legendary incident involving a latte, sixteen machetes, twelve gumdrops, eleven midgets, and a klown kar became the opening gambit of a remarkable career suddenly cut down by the skull of one Miz Klassy Klown. Introspective inspectors investigating the incident debated among themselves for a possiblity that would elevate the case from accident to murder and blow it wide open, the first exclaiming, you fools wouldn’t know a farce if it bit you on the arse, the last with his penchant for the final word puffing on his pipe and gesturing, I wouldn’t put it past her to engineer a crime this konvulted.

This was written over a week, often during periods of high fatigue and late night delirium. The author accepts all accusations of idiocy and hopes that at least someone enjoyed reading it as much as he did writing it…