Chapter 1: Dirty And Stinkin’

Real MFG's original story by Max Gardner and Travis Taylor

“That means, ho, you been shitted on.

 I’m not the first dog that shitted on your lawn!”

            --Ol’ Dirty Bastard

            Miles was driven by opposing forces of love and hate.  He had no first name that he could remember, nor a last one (he had chosen the name Miles because he could think of nothing better) and whatever convoluted chain of events which had guided him to his present situation had been lost in the recesses of his memory through a type of mental short-circuit which occasionally dropped his powers of recollection through a hole in his mind like a train plummeting through a gap in the track.  He remembered, through a kind of metaphysical haze, a carriage filled with weapons, wine, and women, and occasionally lamented the loss of such a thing, which had apparently played a role of some significance in whatever life had once been his.

            The cell in which he found himself was like any other. It smelled like urine and was inhabited also by a large man of indeterminate race, whose name, he discovered, was George, and who never flagged in his attempts to get Miles to bend over.

            “Hey man, I think you dropped your soap or something.” It took Miles a moment to decipher the larger man’s words, as it sounded as if he were speaking through six feet of pure, uncut blobber.

            “Go away.”

            “I’ll fucking cut your balls off and turn them into milkshake,” he threatened suddenly, brandishing a brownish, blunt butterknife.

            “By the way, where’d you get the knife?”

            “Don’t you fucking worry about that.”

            “I thought you were sitting kind of funny.”

            Miles sat down in a corner, contemplating his bizarre predicament. He observed a beetle of impressive girth and weight scurry about, until George picked it up and put it in his mouth, as if it were a gold-wrapped bonbon.

            “Fucking tastes like chicken.”

            Miles continued contemplating. An hour later, three figures appeared at the door, their shadows dark and long through the bars. He heard a key clattering in the lock, shortly followed by a hollow creak as the door swung open, shedding weeks of brick-red rust.

            The one in the middle was dressed opulently, in a maroon suit. He was flanked by two men in shiny plate armor carrying halberds. None of the three stood higher than Miles’ waist. Miles felt a sudden urgency seize his bladder.

            “So,” said the man in the maroon suit, his voice carrying an odd cadence, as though he were speaking backward through some speech machine which replayed his words properly,  “this is the one who relieved himself on my wife.”

            “Yes, mayor.” One of the armored man answered, scratching his beard.

            “B--” Miles began, only to have the halberds brandished at him.

            “Silence, you tall whelp! How dare you address the Arm of Galvatron in such an ignoble manner! Get on one knee!”

            “Yeah, that’s what I’ve been trying to get him to do for a fucking whil--” George’s sentence was left unfinished, as his head was quickly severed from the shouldas by an expert slash from one of the guards.

            Miles sat in the corner, crossing his legs.

            “I told you! On one knee!”

            “Uh…ribbit…I can’t hold it,” Miles said, quoting, perhaps unconsciously, an old song from his near-forgotten youth.

            “What?!” the three little men said as one.

            “Last toilet me had, me already sold it,” Miles continued in an effort to keep calm. “Me talk to you, you talk to me, when I see a midget, I really gotta pee-ee.”

            “That’s the song of the Shitty-shama tribe, milord!” One of the guards whispered. “I heard that during the Eleven Years War, which supposedly saw the last of them!”

            “ELEVUHN!” Miles bellowed abruptly, and recoiled sheepishly, instead focusing on the severed head of George, which had become a feast for vengeful beetles.

            “Yeaaahhh…EAT US!” Miles swore he heard one of the beetles exclaim, until he decided it was his imagination and left it at that.  Some matters were inevitably better off forgotten.

            “Sire, this man…this Shitty-shama…has…issues.” The other guard nodded at this appraisal.

            “I agree….” said the Arm. “He is too dangerous to keep here. We will exile him, outside of the city’s mighty walls, where the Tang Clan of Woe shall make short work of this wastrel. With no Gangsta Truck, his fate is sealed.”

            Miles rubbed his head, unsure of his own sanity, or that of the strange diminutive beings that seemingly plotted his course in life.  The events which followed passed in a disconnected blur of frozen images: the Arm of Galvatron, as he had heard the midget in the maroon suit called by his two heavily armored companions, disabled him with a quick turn of the jade ring he wore on his right hand (he later found that he could not recall precisely what effect this had worked upon him, but it had, nonetheless rendered him less than conscious), being carried--with some difficulty--under the armpits by the two armored men, finally the air of the world from which he had been absent for days, weeks, years, as time had ceased to hold meaning in his moss-encrusted cell.  The draft was welcome, cool against his skin, though it held a certain air of discomfort--while it had been undeniably musty and old, he had grown accustomed with the passage of time to the cold, unchanging stone.  He staggered to his feet as though recovering from a period of prolonged drunkenness and shielded his eyes from the phosphorescent orbs which adorned the walls.  The two Lilliputian guards turned in silence, one shaking his head as if admonishing a disobedient child.

            He was led at halberd point out of the cell, all three midgets standing safely behind him. Miles was unsure if this was due to the physical threat he posed (or might have posed, had he been stronger and less malnourished), or if it was merely to keep their clothes free of unsightly yellow stains. He was led through a hall lined with complex and devious instruments of torture.  His captors, well aware of the presumably significant length of time he had spent confined in his cell, obviously saw no threat in him, and were eager to dispose of him.  Miles reached out, his arms still aching from lack of use, and seized from its harness on the adjacent wall what appeared to be a finely crafted wooden bat with a nail firmly hammered through its shaft.

            Spiked fuckin’ bat, his mind registered dimly as he hefted the weapon in his free hand--the other held a weathered olive-green knapsack in which the midgets had arranged what few of his possessions remained (a week’s supply of beans and dried beef, a stack of yellowing books, a plush penguin with a rather perverted and unsettling expression permanently etched upon its face).  His escorts took no note of his new weapon, as he was too weak to put it to any effective use and he would, no doubt, need such a thing outside the legendary walls of Blacklodge.  Memories of this place, and the city which surrounded it, were sparse but existent.  The guard’s passing mention of the Tang clan of Woe had sparked some distant memory in Miles, and an unhappy one at that.

            His discharge from the prison was brief and unceremonious.  The light beyond the vaulted prison doors blinded Miles for an instant, and the two guards took the opportunity to kick his feet roughly out from under him, toppling him to the hard-packed dirt road.  The Arm nodded his satisfaction and motioned for his two underlings to follow him back into the dungeon, where he apparently had other business to attend to.  Clutching his pack in one hand and his newfound weapon in the other, he stumbled along a blind path, his mouth dry and aching for water, and soon found himself at the foot of the nearest city wall.  The urge to urinate had passed, and he instead focused his remaining strength on moving the imposing door of iron set into the insanely detailed stonework of the thick wall before him.  It gave way with a metallic groan, dumping him like so much trash onto the path beyond the threshold, overgrown with weeds and plants of indeterminate nature and extending in either direction for as far as the eye could see.

            The wind whipped at his hair as he stood and collapsed again on a particularly large chunk of white rock beside the path, and he dazedly ripped a length of fabric from his sleeve, wrapping one piece around the lower portion of his thin, lily-white face and another around his forehead.  He slept then, and awoke once to find a golden beetle of the same variety as that which his cellmate had eaten prior to his untimely demise climbing along his thigh, the sunlight reflecting off of its shell in a manner which made him feel as though his eyes would pop out of his head.  Tastes like chicken if I turn into milkshake, he thought dully as he brushed the insect off and let sleep take control once more.  His dreams were unnerving, dreams of old people, ravenous zombies, birdlike women, and nameless, creeping things muttering strange thoughts into his subconscious.

            “He sees you.” The sentence passed through his dreams repeatedly. It was always the same fat balding milksop that uttered this to him, sometimes in a hazy void, sometimes in a darkened alley, sometimes in a battle-torn café. He had long ago stopped trying to interpret his dreams, instead accepting them with a sort of weariness. This dream, however, normally told him, in its own perverse sort of way, that someone was nearby.

            Miles raised his head from the weather-beaten rock tiredly. He heard footsteps approaching, coming from the direction of Blacklodge.

            “Escape from the midget’s lai-uh!” came a phenomenally effeminate voice echoing in the night--he’d slept far longer than he’d thought, and stars now shone above.  He briefly caught sight of a silhouetted figure bolting past, and then disappearing into a thicket.  Miles shrugged, and rested his head on the rock once again.

            “Loser,” he muttered with a snicker, before sinking back into a deep sleep.

            He woke the next morning to the chirping of birds. Sitting up, he looked at the vast greenery around him. He smirked at the irony of his surroundings. Here, in the middle of a forest full of the tallest trees he had ever seen, was a town full of midgets. The thought made him have to pee. 

            After wiping the dirt and moss off of his face, Miles stood up and stretched, not wanting to be groggy. People who had lived in cities often thought of forests as peaceful places, where a delicate balance existed between the soft green plants and the fuzzy woodland creatures. Miles knew differently. Forests were like great battlefields between species, not just life feeding on life, but life kicking the shit out of life and asking it who its daddy was before dragging it home to be processed messily into tender vittles. And, as he had neither a sense of direction nor a sense of time (nor any idea where he was going and why), he soon wandered unknowingly into the dark heart of this battle zone, wondering why the Guns of Navarone had not taken the liberty of busting it up once and for all.  The Navarone, while not the most logical of clans, more often than not made up for it with sheer lack of mercy, and such a place as this surely deserved none.

            The forest, Miles soon concluded, had been trained, perhaps by the midgets--at first he had assumed that the trees had grown along their own paths, fighting for sunlight and moisture, but as he walked he noted a certain uniformity in their arrangement which inspired him to jot down a quick series of sketches on the inside cover of one of his books.  The trees had been planted in a sort of gridlike pattern, each roughly ten feet from the other, and then had been left to survive on their own.  The effect was in fact somewhat disturbing, as it created a sensation of walking in a large circle and the regularity of the trees allowed sunlight to filter through the thick canopy overhead in an odd manner.  The forest extended in all directions for as far as the eye could see, and Miles wondered where he would end up were he to simply continue on in a straight line, if there were indeed a world beyond this forest.  Perhaps it would simply end, and he would fall off into some abyss.

            He snapped out of his reverie as he heard, with perfect clarity, the nearby crack of a stick, and a subsequent shuffling, as though something large and low-built were making its way through the trees.  His grip on his nail bat tightened as the creature burst into view, and he realized with horror that his weapon would have little, if any, effect on this monster.  The creature bore a striking resemblance to the stuffed penguin which lurked like a senile and perverse old man in the depths of Miles’ traveling pack, although his assailant was easily twice the size of a lion and its eyes burned with a perversion far surpassing that of its plush counterpart.  The huge penguin lay on its belly, its stubby flippers beating the ground beside it and sending clouds of dust and fallen leaves into the air, and snorted loudly, as a pig the size of a trade wagon might have.  Miles frowned and peered at the odd animal, then harnessed his bat.  The creature made no move against him, and he reached into his pack and extracted the stuffed toy, holding it before him as if he were a preacher displaying a holy relic to his congregation.  The huge animal’s snorting ceased immediately, and it shuffled closer.  For a moment Miles considered driving the nail through the thing’s head--it might reach the brain, after all, and the meat from such a large kill would get him through the week.  The animal bowed its head to the forest floor and snorted again, offering Miles its back.  He approached the penguin cautiously and threw one leg over its arched back, wondering how efficient a steed this animal would prove.  He noticed  a strange squeaking sound from within its soft-feathered body and shrugged, scratching its head.

            “Think I’ll call you Crackhorn,” he said blankly, for, as was often the case, he could think of nothing better.

            By nightfall the two of them had reached the edge of the midgets’ forest and Miles slept against Crackhorn’s side as the moon cast ominous shadows alongside the dirt path they had followed for the past two hours.  Obelisks of dark stone jutted from the ground at odd angles, and their shadows were similar to those cast by the bars of Miles’ cell.  I should get a sidekick, he thought suddenly, and speculated that he could perhaps attain such a thing in whatever town he would find at the end of this path.  His mind and body had no energy, however, to continue at the moment, and he slept; the road would wait until morning.  He awoke once during the night to find two men dancing and screaming on the path before him, one clad in a peasant’s clothes and wearing over his face a rubber mask of the sort Miles had seen worn in the Eleven Years War, the other dressed as some devil from a child’s fairy tale.  The two continued to shriek like a pair of boiling teapots until Miles grunted and turned onto his side, muffling his ears in Crackhorn’s feathers.  When he awoke, the two had gone.

            “Losers.”

Chapter 2: The Funky Cypress Hill Shit