Han and Goo-Sung hurried through the dark forest one night. A Wolf-Woman was seen by them crouching
behind every tree, a whisper of a shadow.
Han and Goo-Sung were following a trail of ricecake crumbs silvery with
the rays of the Moon piercing the pine canopy.
Fear gripped them as they locked hands and swiftly walked while
Wolf-Woman beheld their eagerness to emerge from the forest dark.
Now the ricecake crumbs led them to a house in a clearing. A house of candy and chocolate. Smelling of fruits and sugar and
sweetness. Chimney built from blocks of
vanilla cream wafers. Windows of sugar
glass, flowerbeds of lollipops, a bird’s house on a chocolate tree branch where
toffee-sculpted bird eats gummy worms in nest made of shredded coconut and
shavings of white chocolate with Cadbury eggs arranged. A doormat of red licorice sticks woven
together lay flat before dark solid double doors of hard fudge. A lawn fountain, an upside-down half-dome of
peanut brittle, encircled by jagged mountainous black and white cliffs of
crumbling oreo cookie, spouted out liquid caramel from the roaring unmoving
mouth of a life-size leaping candied tiger with orange tic tacs for eyes and
candy corn for fangs. The children
peered down at their shimmering reflections in the baroque decorative bowl’s
tan thick bubbling liquid. Chocolate
chip soil and green cotton candy grass closely cropped on top were soft on
weary feet. Intoxicated, Han and
Goo-Sung ran to the house and began gnawing at the corners of the building.
The front doors swung open. A
shaman lady, ancient and face covered with warts, held a broomstick in her
wrinkled hand. She walked up to Han and
Goo-Sung, their faces smeared with chocolate.
"Why have you come to my house?
Why do you eat what I live in?"
Ignoring her, Han and Goo-Sung continued their ferocious feast of
gorging sweetness pleasure replete. The
shaman frowned, then began to chant a spell.
Suddenly Goo-Sung was screaming and charging at the surprised shaman
with candycane weathervane slashing at her neck vein. In the same instant, Goo-Sung morphed into a
fox that, dropping to the ground, recovered its wits and scampered away into
the shadowy forest barking and whimpering.
A barking soon receding into the distance. Disappearing.
Han stood alone, eyes glaring, facing the calm shaman who held out a
broomstick that now sparkled with vortex of gathering magical energy.
Zu Mong abruptly awoke from
the stone floor before the burnt remains of a fire near the cave mouth opening
as a bat flapped
past his ear. His bear fur hanbok was
damp with sweat. A strange dream,
thought Zu. Like a story from long ago. But which one.
Zu got up and walked out
the cave. It was midnight in the year
4444 AD in Neo-Stone Age Koreatown, Los
Angeles. Dusky
and half-bright, illuminated yet dim, a twilight landscape met his awakening
eye: a rugged cold pebble desert flecked with ice crystals flickering ghostly
under mist-shrouded simultaneously shining Red Sun and Red Moon
always present in the damaged purple smoke-choked sky. He sniffed the bitter acrid air.
With crossbow and a quarrel
of silver-tipped arrows slung over his shoulder, he walked out into the chilly
murky ever-twilight of the Outer World, and began his daily hunt for food. As he started tracking the footprints of an
elephant, Zu thought about his dream. He
tried to remember, but already the two children lost in some forest were
running from his consciousness. A young
couple.
The tracks grew fresher and
closer together now, and Zu began to trot, then run, with crossbow out and
arrow cocked. He traveled deep into the
neverending flat featureless rocky desert, past broken piles of mountains and
mutated dwarf trees bearing poisonous fruit.
A cyclops owl with one huge yellow Moon-like orb staring from its black
face and black feathers screamed by his face, but he swatted it away, forging
onward, deep into the desert, driven by hunger.
At a death oasis, soaked
with stinking pools of purple sludge, a ghost elephant drank and bathed. Zu approached invisibly. The skin of the ghost elephant was bright
neon pink, and three white pearl eyes peeked out of its enormous ear-flapping
head. Its trunk was dipped down deep
into the sludge pool. The intense blood
red hue of the throbbing trunk thirsting always and forever, and the glaze of
film over its pupil-less eyes, demonstrated to him the chemical compulsion of
its sludge-siphoning.
In a flash, Zu was standing in front of the
lazily drinking elephant. Three arrows,
each in quick succession, pierced and popped its three eyes, gelatinous fluid
rushing out mixed with purple blood. Zu
put down his crossbow and with his stone knife slashed the neck vein of the
still-standing elephant. Two fangs
gleaming, a smiling Zu Mong sucked the blood from the dying animal, a vampire
satisfied.
After feeding, Zu gently
pushed the now unmoving bulk of the ghost elephant, and it tipped over slowly
and splashed into the muck with a smack, sinking steadily beneath the surface,
then disappearing. Zu Mong began the
journey back to his cave.
As he walked, he thought of
the dream of the candy house. The children
wandering. His belly boiling with
bubbling blood, he felt slightly nauseated as he crossed dusty dry cold
ice-crunching plains of infinity, feet pressing onward journeying in an empty
world toward the comfort of the cool dark cave.
Where sleep and dreams dance murals on stone wall shivering with satin
shadows thrown by fire flames
finicky. He thought of home.
Suddenly, from behind a prickly
three-armed cactus, on top of which a cyclops owl perched, a Korean girl
stepped out in front of Zu who stopped striding. She was about the same age as he, but though
beautiful, she was not a vampire, he could tell. She wore an orange tiger’s skin hanbok, but somehow
seemed out of place, for Zu knew all the Koreans who lived in the region of his
cave, and she was not familiar. Her face
was not covered, and the smooth fair undamaged skin of her cheeks showed few
effects from the poisoned purple air.
Ripping off his leather
mask, which was stained with red berry juice strokes of oracular runes, Zu
showed his scar-pocked blasted bare face.
She gasped.
He growled in Korean: “Who
are you, and where do you journey to in this desolate empty fordidden twilight
realm of Los Angeles? Where is your cave? What is your clan? Speak now, stranger!”
She replied in what was
recognizably the Korean language but with an unusual accent that he could not
place. “My name is Nicole Lee. I am not of your country but sailed here on a
bamboo raft from the motherland, Korea,
across the Great Dead Sea . I have no cave and no clan. Pity a poor girl and spare some water for a
parched tongue.”
In the chill orange-red soft dull glow of the world’s outside, Zu could
see that Nicole’s hair blew shiny and silky strands as winds caressed the
gentle pulsing up and down of her pretty panting chest. With no expression on his face, he tossed a
dog-leather canteen at her feet as dust rose in clouds of dryness. She drank every last drop of liquid, as Zu
watched, amazed.
Korean vampire Zu Mong age 16 lives in a
cave
in Neo-Stone Age Koreatown Los Angeles
in the fateful year 4444 AD
in 4444 AD all that remains
of science and mathematics
is a mystical “flat
astrology”
in which the Sun and Moon and stars
are envisioned as circling a flat Earth
one night Zu Mong meets a mysterious and
secretive girl
who has sailed on a bamboo raft all the way
from Korea
Nicole Lee has a hidden agenda
and may or may not be reliable in what she
says
her secret is that she is a prodigy teen
scientist
who is the inventor of time travel
technology
in the far distant unfathomable future of
2,000,000 AD
when Bear Men war endlessly with Humans
over cave territory
in a flat
world where every inch of exposed land
is stacked and littered with piles upon
crushed piles
of ancient man-made mountains of synthetic
rock
stacked thousands of miles high into sky
and space
forcing all but the now nearly alien Peak
People
who ages ago adapted to conditions at the world’s
roof
to live an interior existence
inside an infinite maze of mountain caverns
illuminated by mechanical Suns
or beneath the waves
of the fish-brimming ocean in the Water
World
where the Dolphin Kings rule the Merfolk
in aquatic megalopolises encased
in gargantuan globes of diamond
a barrier against the furious battering ram
of the malevolent Whale Gods
Alan Moon an Inuit army commando from 8888
AD
era of the Inuit Empire of North America, Mexico, Japan,
Greenland, Siberia
with imperial capital Huun-Aum established
at the North Pole
mega-city of 50 million citizens and 10
million ice-robots
levitating 100 feet above the frozen Arctic Ocean
encounters Nicole Lee at Huun-Aum’s Grand
Imperial Library
where she stretches onto her skin a Bear
Man-designed invisibility suit
and sneaks into a sealed storeroom and
steals sacred scrolls
of Inuit prophecy then prepares to continue
her journey
into the past to neo-Stone Age Koreatown Los Angeles and her fate
but Alan
Moon and his partner Yaar Uuli teleport to the library within seconds
of the silent alarm shrieking red on their
bionic eye lens monitors
the two soldiers crouch behind an
icicle-bearded universal translator machine
and awestruck watch a floating ghostly
indistinct human hand wave
a sphere of rainbow pulsing humming crystal
that traces a glittering outline upon the
crisp cold air
from which materializes a blaring portal of
white light
blinding and sucking wild wind and papers
flying
as Nicole Lee steps through the time portal
disappearing into the light
her female shape is cast into visibility
momentarily
by the cosmic brightness pouring from the
rip in time
Alan Moon with ice-scimitar drawn leaps after her
into the quickly closing portal as Yaar
Uuli yells in vain
inexplicably and accidentally transported
from 8888 AD to the primitive epoch of 4444
AD
to a bleak world blown back to the Stone
Age
by the continent-shattering Z-bombs of World War
IV
Alan Moon in this savage age hunts for Nicole Lee doggedly
he desires something from her
other than return to his own era
something secret
a robot in the likeness of a tiny fat panda
bear
with noiselessly whirring insect-like wings
and constructed out of a synthetic metal
containing semi-sentient organic properties
is sent by the Bear Men of 3,000,000 AD
who give it the code name “The Eye”
to spy on and follow Korean vampire
teen Zu Mong
and the mysterious yet beautiful Nicole Lee
as they travel through time’s treacherous
tumult
Zu and Nicole visit the Diamond Age era of
6666 AD
to verify the prophecies in the stolen
Inuit scrolls
and understand how Humans become not only
extinct
by 3,000,000 AD but replaced by Bear Men
as Earth’s master sentient species and
comprehend
how the world ended in 4444 AD and how it
recovered
and how masses and masses of man-made
mountains upon mountains
by 2,000,000 AD will erase all trace of
diamond from the world
in the Diamond Age
Zu and Nicole
seek the counsel
of the wise
yet vengeful
and greedy
Tower Wizards
the eight immortals
who are pure mind
stripped of all
physical body
glowing golden blobs
of gas trapped
in huge hovering cubes of glass
suspended in space
directly above the tops
of the eight tallest Diamond Obelisks
skyscraper-cities
made of indestructible diamond
snaking endlessly
thousands of miles up
to the silent weightless heights
where the Moon and the Sun
revolve around an Earth
flat and sparkling day and night
with crystal towers on every shore
The Wizard at the peak of the Korea
Obelisk was a powdery miasma of billowing yellowish gaseous breeze beating
against the glass sides of its levitating cubic prison. At a height so far up beyond the sky and
clouds that no wind disturbed the black and eternal calm of the heavens, Zu
Mong and Nicole Lee wore bulky head-to-toe magnet suits and diamond helmets
that weighed them down to the obelisk’s metal roof, above which the Wizard’s
glittery cube of glass floated in silence and stillness. Stars were crystal beating hearts of
brilliance, almost close enough to touch, seemingly.
Skyscrapers built out of invincible diamond girders and plated with
synthetic diamond leaf could extend as high as one million stories into the
atmosphere and beyond into outer space.
In 6666 AD, the Korea
Obelisk was the fifth tallest tower in the world.
The Wizard, over one thousand years old, and whose human
manifestation had been an eminent scientist-poet, Sung-Ho Lim, who served in
the court of King Tangun II of Historic New Korea, spoke to Zu and Nicole
directly in their minds. The Wizard was
pure consciousness and had long ago abandoned the physical substance that would
have allowed vocal speech. Seized by
electrifying fingers of fire, the minds of Zu and Nicole rippled in
mini-explosions. The swirling yellow
dust cloud of the Wizard babbled oracles and riddles to them from within the
inviolate cube. They fell to their knees
and stared up in awe at the disembodied tornado-whirling spirit.
“1492. Christopher Columbus of Spain sails to America. Origin of 400 years of war between Europeans
and the aborigines of Turtle Island also known as America. 1495.
1776. American Empire is born. 1778.
1800. 1900. Last free Native American is captured.”
Rolling slowly by, the huge gray ball of the Moon, a mountain
drifting through the ocean of space, cast a thick black shadow across their
cringing bodies.
“1944. Japan invades India. 1962.
1981. 2008. Collapse
of world economic order. 2262. World War III breaks in Greenland
and the North Pole.. 2280. Western Korean Empire established with
capital at Vienna. 2286.
End of the second American
Civil War. 3000. 3010.
3250.”
The words of the Wizard were echoing and confusing jumbling blowing
about in Nicole’s mind. Face sweaty and
slippery and straining inside of her diamond helmet, she struggled to
comprehend. Next to her, mute, with eyes
lowered, on bended knee the almost caveman-like Zu Mong slumbered.
The Moon rolled away, receding into a blinding cluster of stars,
when a shimmering blue phantom image of
a silk-swaddled woman glided down past the Wizard’s cube and towards the two, a
Mirage Guard alerted to their presence.
“3415. 3522. Earth Coalition disbanded and headquarters in
Samarkand
burned to the ground by revolutionary mobs.”
Alarm horns started screaming and red flashing lights splashed a
bloody sheen everywhere in a tidal wave of crimson. Zu and Nicole scrambled to their feet, and
clanking heavily across the metal rooftop, ran into the perilous nightscape,
despairing, knowing that the gateway would almost certainly already be sealed. In a rousing rumble of spinning funnels of
yellowness within its trembling jail, the Wizard raged in its cube, beating
against the glass walls, furious to be interrupted before the final step in the
sacred ritual of knowledge-giving, the offering of body, its flesh-hungry dark
brooding spirit unsatisfied, now vengeful.