Lucas Fiction

[Icebox]

Here is the companion to that Mojo Art thread that I started and subsequently aborted a while back. Luckily for you, I actually have some writing talent, as opposed to the gnarled doodles I burdened you with prior. This thread, like the last one, is for all writers to post their work. Unlike the last one, I hope it lives until its beard turns gray and its eyebrows grow shaggy.

 

Well then...

 

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“Fantasy, if it’s really convincing, can’t become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time. In this new dimension, whatever it is, nothing corrodes or gets run down at the heel or gets to look ridiculous…”

 

-Walt Disney

 

The fall was a long one. Through magma and stone, concrete and twisted girder, he plummeted, deep, toward the place where no jubilant light shines. The flickering of fluorescent anxiety washed over every industrial rivet of the place, but at first, he had fallen to darkness. Groping, snatching at the wall for a switch, he paused. A familiar, putrid smell wafted to his nostrils. He shivered, afraid, remembering countless hours in the fortress of the damned, far from heaven and this mechanical hell, a crucible of both water and fire, smoke and acid, mange, daemons spawned of vodun.

 

The switch in his room clacked on, engines beginning to whirr and hum, working their magic, the magic of negation. Yet screaming into his brain came the guttural growl of his old foe, the undead captain, who had chased him through fen and field, over briny shoals and reefs encircling bottomless depths, bright islands ripe with bananas and catacombs where the rotting dead spill out of every orifice.

 

Wordlessly, Les Carroll withdraws a single, ragged doll. No ordinary doll, as the laws of that space between spaces permit, a tool of torment, pins jutting out of it like teeth out of some ravenous maw.

 

Guy did not know at that hour what realm he had tumbled into, like Alice down the rabbit hole. For an instant, he was as void; the zombi captain channeling a crackling arcane power into the twisted toy. Wrought across millenia in a numbing singularity, every world ever imagined, he knew perpetual torment, only to come speeding back into this hall of doors, these underground tunnels.

 

He wanders a bit, skeletons decaying silently, pristine among the shiny steel walls and formaldehyde drenched couches. If they are his parents, of them he remembers little, strange vapours obfuscating his memory. Whether they are the thin, ventilated fumes of this godless machina or the sifting stench of Les Carroll’s festering carcass. But they eat away at him, acidically dismembering his every thought.

 

The tunnels are endless, doors all alike; some lead to supply rooms stacked with boxes, some to ominous clinics polished sparkling with ammonia. One marks a room which serves no purpose other than to collect, machines and weird baubles hanging off of the walls, dented and rusted. A moth eaten teddy bear lies suspended from awful hooks, soulless black eyes staring into nothingness, a guess at the true nature of this place. And one set of doors… They lead directly into the jaws of the machine, a convoluted contraption humming with sterile life, obscure buttons lining glowing panels. In his search, Guy presses one, an upward arrow, that of ascension. And although he cannot place it, it opens into a street familiar.

 

His adventure has at last come full circle. A poster is tacked onto a wood paneled wall. It is one bright and colorful, like a childhood jester. The haunting elevator music piped in from and beyond the tunnels is silent here. Wind grazes the rooftops and recesses of the alleyways about him, like latin woodwinds played in the streets of the dead. He sits for a while. Staring into that jovial harlequin’s face, that rumpled poster, clown grinning innocently, for once not of nightmares, but of peaceful dreams. “Circus” it reads. It possesses an almost intangible nostalgia, memories unbound, of popcorn, men in bright suits, women dancing, breathing fire, lions, roughnecks from all corners of the orient.

 

But unfortunately the real world is not one of childhood innocence, of make believe, pretend swords and shields, corsairs gripping valiant cutlass, singing songs of rebellion and dionysian verve. The world is one calculating; every fantasy is spurred by an equal or greater machine; every paradise exploited. In that brief instant, in the haunting glow of the streetlamp, a horrible revelation slowly rises from the pit of Guy’s fears, toward the summit of his knowledge.

 

Nothing is real.

 

This piece was done for my blog, Leave Luck To Heaven. I wrote it after they announced MI2:SE, which at first I was skeptical about. I'm still worried they might ruin the ending, which has impacted me more than the ending of any other game and single-handedly altered my perspective on reality, although not in the way this story presents. I guess I'm okay with it now, though.

 

I'm going to be writing more for MI, as well as a piece for Maniac Mansion, coming up. I probably won't do Grim Fandango, because I respect it too much to butcher it with my jumbled writing. You never know, though.

 

Notes on the names. I try to keep my work distant enough from the games for both artistic and copyright reasons. "Les Carroll" is just a French bastardization of LeChuck, which I chose for its Louisiana connotations. "Guy" stems from that old story of how they chose Threepwood's name, basically the same, minus the "Brush", as though George Lucas hadn't stepped in to suggest it. Elaine, who will be introduced later, goes by "Eleanor Zimbabwe", and will be black, surprisingly enough. Nobody said we were going by the book, here.

 

Special thanks to The Scumm Bar's upload of "Underground Tunnels", Ron Gilbert for hinting at the Secret, and Gabez, The Tingler, and Co. for keeping Mojo alive through this turbulent time. Once 10 is forged, you will be seeing a great deal of my work on the new Lucas Fiction.(Ed: Disregard this last bit, it's uninformed nonsense. --Icebox)

 

At Ease.

[Gabez]

I don't have anything to contribute myself, but I liked the piece you wrote. There are some really nice descriptions and you captured a very intense atmosphere. I would have preferred if you had used the names Guybrush and LeChuck, though, because it was obvious that that was who they were, and I think it should either be fan fiction (and use the names) or something completely separate. I don't think there's a problem with artistic license, since I expect fan fiction to do it's own thing (part of the appeal of the genre), and as for copyright... unless you're selling it there won't be a problem.

 

Once 10 is forged, you will be seeing a great deal of my work on the new Lucas Fiction.

 

I don't know where all these rumours of a new version of the site are coming from, but there's honestly nothing being worked on any more. We've got our plate full just trying to keep the hackers out, and keeping the ageing code ticking over. Maybe in a few years time we'll try and update the site a bit more, but right now it's not a priority. Also, Lucas Fiction (the hosted site) will not be updated unless the original webmaster updates it, or someone takes over the site. It won't be affected by any changes to the main site (if and when they should come).

[Fealiks]

I liked that, it was a really nice approach. Very real and dark rather than comic.

 

I might write something at some point, but it probably won't be as gritty as this. I've got something in mind, not sure if I'll actually write it... I will if I can be bothered and if I have time

[Icebox]

Thank you both. I think one of the reasons I change the names in my work; I'm trying to portray... Not the actual characters, precisely, rather, flavors or shades of their potential.

I.E., a writer could interpret the more sarcastic side of Guybrush, or the more Naive side of Guybrush, etc. By giving them names not too far detached, I am freeing them from the boundaries the games place them in.

 

The Guybrush here is a battered, morose one. Almost like a nautical Aqualung, and the acts which the games paint in a mischevious light would here be more desperate. I also wanted to give the notion of the tunnels themselves as a character, possibly an even greater evil than LeChuck. It's not reality, precisely, it's more the nature of simulation, and how far it reaches. The magic of Big Whoop extends to the point where it transcends time and space, and Monkey Island is but one of many worlds it could encompass.