The Seafarer's Guild

The Seafarer's Guild had very few requirements. Even the worst rapscallions and scalawags gained admittance for the right amount of gold. It got to the point that Sir Francis Drake, seeking to protect what was left of his good name, withdrew his membership rather than be associated with the Guild any longer.

Calico Jack had no such compunction. Moral qualms were a disorder for weak men fearful of Hell. Jack figured no Hell could be worse than the Hell of the high seas.

It was not long after Jack's death that the Seafarer's Guild began requiring a thorough background check.

Deliver Us From Evil

We are a lost people, driven from our homes. We have nothing except our myths. The myths remind us who we are and teach us about good and evil.

Evil men take their hearts and hide them in some secret place. If you can find their heart and destroy it, you destroy that evil.

From birth, a few of us are trained as hunters. We are no longer of the people. We are separate. We are nothing. Our names are written on a piece of parchment, and burnt without ever being uttered.

Only by becoming evil, can we destroy evil.

Truce

It was a rivalry that lasted for millennia.

Napoleon, insulted by the assassination attempt, meticulously plotted his revenge. First on Elba, to which he manufactured his own exile, then New Jersey, where he perfected his own time machine.

The damage proved catastrophic of course. Our world took on the characteristics of both men. The emperor's anal attention to detail coupled with George's creative inspiration combined to forever warp reality.

These days, the friends laugh over the destruction they wrought. They occasionally admit to some regret, but proudly note the empire runs on schedule, and tea is always served at three.

The Next Great Marketing Campaign

She sat in a corner of darkness, showing her back to the world. When confronted, her words drove stakes through the hearts of every remaining friendship. She clung to her timeworn memories until they crumbled about her in indecipherable fragments.

On occasion, for no apparent reason, she would laugh pathologically.

Every day of her life was a ritual of punishment. She obsessively opened and closed a refrigerator as empty as her existence. Her soul was dead.

For the rest of her life, if life you could call it, she would never forgive her roommate for drinking the last Miller Lite.

Requests

Lunch with Napoleon was a bust.  King George now saw the fun-sized Emperor was determined to have his Waterloo.

“Plan B,” George thought as he fitted the Crown Jewels into the contraption on his arm.  Sighting down it, he wondered if decapitating Napoleon with an energy weapon could really affect France’s entry into the American Revolutionary War, considering it concluded thirty years prior.

No matter.  Mad George was determined to regain the colonies.  If there was a chance it would disrupt history, he’d kill every last goddamn Frenchmen in the continuum.

Sometimes, he liked letting the prophyria do the thinking.

The Last Great American

Ronald Reagan was the last American president born in a log cabin. His parents taught him self-reliance at an early age. He read the Fountainhead while he was still in the womb and was so inspired by Ayn Rand's message of individualism that he was the attending physician at his own birth.

He left home at age three to enter show business. He sang Yankee Doodle Dandy to Soviet peasants and they tipped enough to fund his education at the Harvard of the South.

He kept Walter Mondale's head mounted over his fireplace as a souvenir of the '84 election.

A Greener And More Reasonable World

She was at Processing, adding the monthly recycling to the family account, when the officer grasped Rayn’s shoulder.

“Come with me son.”

“What? No, there’s some mistake.  We’re under our credit limit!  We grow our own food, we hardly use the transit system- wait!”  But, even as she protested, she saw the look in her son’s eyes, and understood.  Suddenly the last months – the mysterious class absences, the inexplicable weight gain – made sense.

Possibly – depending on how much meat he’d eaten and how hard he labored at the government farms – Rayn might see his mother again.  The Republic wasn’t unreasonable.

The New Continent

Sophia forced her way down to the wharf. After six weeks at sea, she felt nauseous, unholy, drenched. Stepping into the teeming crowd was like her first baptism. Her sins were washed away by the dirt. Sophia was free.

But life on the New Continent never proved that easy. For would be tyrants, her accent was an invitation. Sophia would never be entirely free of her cursed heritage.

Sophia dreamed not for herself, but for her children and grandchildren. She lived in their future, among the accepted, in a world where being descended from Americans was no longer a crime.

King George And The Second Boston Tea Party

The Boston chapter of the Tea Party asked every newcomer to show identification. Too many liberal reporters had painted them in a bad light.

The old man was stopped at the front door. "ID please."

"I don't have any."

"Why not?"

"Because ID's are a plot by the socialist government to try and rob us of our freedom. Before you know it, they'll have us locked up in death camps."

"He's one of us."

Sweet success. First the time machine, and now this. George may not be royalty in this century, but his divine right to rule was still recognized.

The Perfect Trap

“And then I’ll have ten spicy tacos with another fifteen taquitos and a side of guac.”

“That will be one dollar sir.”

“This is incredible!”

His dollar was halfway to the register when he was thrown to the ground by a cataclysmic force.  Suddenly, the force directed itself outwards, and the walls and ceiling separated into dense gray powder, quickly carried away by the tremendous wind.  Around the perimeter where the building used to be, the mightiest of the Aesir stood looking inward.

Walking over to Loki, Odin grinned over the prostrate trickster.

“I can’t believe you fell for this!”