Old School Deep Knight Adventure

[Deep Knight]

Weathering the Storm
Another Excoriated Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 12 – The Cleaning Power of the White Tornado

The Slice Girls and I disguised ourselves as Fire Inspectors (New York City is lousy with ‘em), and under this cover entered Trump Tower. We immediately started installing tiny wireless video monitors around the areas used by residents and Trump’s people, or rather the Slice Girls did while I collecting bribes (it would have been suspicious if we hadn’t). Not only was this an executive management duty I was honor bound to fulfill, the girls had all worn push-up bras and modified their uniforms accordingly, making it easier for them to talk their way out if anyone got suspicious. Fortunately, everything was so chaotic in the Trump Organization and the tower in general that nobody batted an eye. So chaotic in fact, that they never realized they paid me my bribes twice, giving me a double opportunity to check things out.

At exactly 9:00 AM the online real estate listings were posted, and a few minutes later our lackeys inside of all the major news agencies picked up on it. Satan, in one of his rare whimsical gestures listed it at $666 million, which would have been a lot funnier if he hadn’t already used this gag when assigning the address to Jared Kushner’s 666 Fifth Avenue business headquarters. He used to have lunch at the “Top of the Sixes” restaurant when in NYC just to gloat. Anyway, Fox News got a hold of it, put it on the beginning of the last hour of “Fox and Friends,” and the game was afoot!

Much to our surprise, there was no more of a panic than there had been before, in fact things might have become a bit calmer. The only one who left the premises was Donald’s better half, Melania, wearing her now-famous white pantsuit and hat. Probably she was staying in New York to get away from The Donald, and bored, was going out shopping. A normal day for her, but maybe a little too normal. Naturally suspicious, I reviewed her exit on our video surveillance, and noted that she took a long, circuitous route to the parking garage, wearing her hat the entire way. I also noted that most of the Trump people she passed suddenly got both busy and seemed to work for more purpose. Dashing outside to hail a cab, I had the driver follow her limousine once it exited the underground garage. Luckily the driver was from some third-world country where the people look funny and talk even funnier, so he never realized who we were following, the trouble he could conceivably get into with the Secret Service, or the danger for helping a secret agent well-known for not liking to leave witnesses.

Imagine my surprise when Melania stopped at the Manhattan branch of Deutsche Bank, and came out of the limo no longer wearing white, but something more appropriate for business in “the city.” Grime gets everywhere, don’t cha know. But why would she leave wearing one outfit only to change in the car, even if it was a stretch limo with darkly-tinted windows? I know you, my readers, are all yelling, “To wear the damned white hat you idiot!” at your computer screens, but don’t worry, I’m not that dense. And remember, I’m the guy writing this in the first place, so give me a little credit. Withdrawing stealthily and slowly, I waited until we were out of Midtown to dispose of my helpful driver (he was a nice guy and I had grown to like him, so I had the Slice Girls do it).

I have to admit, it took me a while to realize that Melania might not just be a walking “white hat” signal, but the brains behind the operation. I openly admit this is because I have a natural disdain for model’s intellectual abilities. Come on, admit it, you thought the same thing when you first heard they would stand in line for hours to have a few tens of seconds of sex with me. One thing I’ve learned from years in the Illuminati and Washington, there’s no shame in prejudice as long as you remember to lie about it during confirmation hearings. But in this case it was a dangerous oversight, which I immediately took pains to correct and cover-up. A drone sent up the ventilation shaft in Deutsche Bank confirmed that her meeting with them was still going on, and although the sound got a bit spotty once the air conditioning kicked in, we could still hear enough to know that the present FLOTUS was both calling the shots and no fool when it came to banking and real estate. Sure, I only had circumstantial evidence, but sometimes this can be pretty conclusive. For example when you find a dozen used condoms under your girlfriend’s bed, and they’re not your size or favorite brand.

Hillary was beside herself in joy at the news. “That @#$!%& has been getting public sympathy for putting up with a horn dog husband, but in reality is controlling him and pulling the strings behinds the scene. That was MY plan with Bill, and they have absolutely no right to steal it without at least giving me credit.”

I averted my eyes and then rolled them. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t appreciate her homicidal skills, but when it comes to sharing credit, forget it. No matter what it is, Hillary insists she thought of it first, and usually has some clear and convincing evidence to further piss you off. It’s like I say when I’m in an introspective mood and somewhere the wife can’t hear, “We shoulda kept ‘em barefoot and pregnant.” At least her insistence cemented her belief in my frankly paper-thin evidence, which of course brought others on the Council of The Twelve along with our thinking. Hillary likes consensus, doesn’t care how she gets it, and one should never doubt the power of fear.

Satan was harder to convince, but that was solved when his wife Gladys joined us. It helped that I had selected pictures to show her which accentuated her classic-model behind. Rumor was that Gladys had gone on a “no carb diet” to reduce the size of her less-classically-proportioned hindquarters, and was crabby 24/7 from low blood sugar. Putting one and one together, I’m sure you can imagine the ire she expressed towards the current Mrs. Trump, although if you haven’t met Gladys I suggest you multiply that sum by ten. The hallways of Illuminati Headquarters literally rang with her reverberating rage, and I understand it could be heard all the way to the lowest level of Hell. Gladys calmed down when she found out my plan was to assassinate QAnon, which was presumably Melania, but she cut loose again when her better half explained that that was before we knew he, er she, was the FLOTUS. Let’s face it, Satan was right (how many times have you heard me say that?!). She had both a heavily-armed Secret Service and a scandal-loving public’s sympathy due to her husband’s recent indiscretions, and that’s a combination that’s dangerous to fool around with. Just look what we had to do to get Tsarina Alexandra of Russia, and the mess that left!

It was Hillary who suggested we try to come to an “accommodation” with the third Mrs. Trump, but Gladys immediately objected. And in the strongest possible terms (again, if you don’t know Gladys, multiply by ten). It wasn’t so much that I was for talking, but I was still puzzled by the whole “makes absolutely no sense scar on the scrotum” thing that had led us to suspect Melania in the first place, and wanted a chance to check it out. And not like you’re thinking, I never rolled like that, and beside I gave it up when I got married. No, it was because of something I had heard from this old Illuminati who ran our underground bunker in Argentina during the mid-40’s, but I couldn’t quite place what it was. We were pretty drunk at the time, and I was just a kid who was hanging out with him because I had the contract on his “retirement” and could finally “make my bones.” Ah, the good old days. Maybe it would come back to me when I had time to sit down and try to make sense of both it and the seemingly random and unassociated things that had been happening to us. I left “Hill” and “Gladie” to slug it out, and put out the word in the Supermodel community that I wanted a parlay, and what I had to say “might be to her and QAnon’s benefit.” I figured she would pick up on that, and it would reassure her that we didn’t know who she really was or what she had been trying to do.

Hillary came out the worst in the “discussion,” and Gladys “won,” but had tired Satan’s sweetie just enough that when I suggested we set up a meeting “as a trap,” she was enthusiastic. Not that I specified the type of trap, details about scarred scrotums or the possibility of her being a shape-shifting Reptilian being more than I wanted to go into with The Princess of Evil at that moment, especially when she needed to have those cuts and burns seen to before they got infected. She was just out of earshot when the call came back from a certain modeling agency about a scheduled photoshoot at a studio in neutral ground in Chelsea. If I came alone and unarmed, the “Sisterhood” would guarantee my safety, but if I crossed them, I would be forever put on their “banned” list along with pasta and bread!

To Be Continued…

[Deep Knight]

Weathering the Storm
Another Excoriated Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 13 – The Dirty Baker’s Dozen

I was “good” and came to the meeting with Melania unarmed with no weapons, per se. OK, so I brought some bugs, communications equipment, and a few Tasers, but an incredibly comprehensive search by some young women with no regard for personal privacy found them all. I should have known they wouldn’t hold back when they put on the rubber gloves and removed my i-phone. As it more-often-than-not happens, being so intimate with an undercover secret agent and well-known sex-symbol-to-Supermodels overwhelmed them and we had a group thing afterwards, but it was business, not pleasure. And it never hurts to “play the refs.”

Melania showed up late, saying it had taken longer than she thought to get past the Secret Service, and was let in with only a rudimentary search (she obviously used some sort of secret model hand-signals, or the ladies who searched her didn’t swing that way). Like most meetings between bitter enemies who want to kill each other, we chatted amicably at first, with her using her charming Slovenian accent. It turns out we have mutual friends (when you socialize with Satan you move in the best circles), and her story about certain Wall Street debutantes subverting the will of the people was delightful. Then I let a subtle hint that "I was on to her" drop to see how she would react. “By the way, the Proctors and Gambles mentioned you were posing as QAnon online and had been trying to kill me? How’s that working out?”

Melania smiled, removed her white hat, and set it down onto the table. As she withdrew her hand, it held an Uzi machine pistol. Damned women’s fashions. “Eef I vanted you dead, Agentz Knight, I vould haff killed you before you sat downz. And I do vant you dead, but first vant to explain my brilliant plan to rule ze vorld! Zen ve vill move onto ze killungs, ins zome horrible drawn-out fashion, of courze.”

During this last less-than-cordial statement, her accent had slowly changed from former-Yugoslavian to a heavy, almost comic, German one. I winced as I suddenly remembered the whole Hitler-one ball-goat thing that I had been afraid the story would get back to if things didn’t work out my way. And I wasn’t wrong.

“Your pitiful Illuminati legionz are vrong, ze Fuhrer of the Cherman peoplez did not go zu Argentina or Brazil, but zu Slovenia! Zhere, in a fortress run by one of our secret organizations called “Hydra,” he vas cloned und zat clone ist me! Now, using mine husband Donald as ein puppet, after 75 years I vill finally rule zee vorld!”

“Time out! Time out!” I asserted forcefully, making the Illuminati and football referee “T” hand sign. “You’ve got to be kidding! For one thing, you’re a girl.” Logic was never my best subject in “The Academy,” but this was an easy one.

Melania laughed, “Ze best place to hide ist in plain zight, und I’m zure you Illuminati know about advance transgender therapies.”

Actually I didn’t, I’m old school and have our Witchcraft Div. use spells to take care of sexual reassignment and such things. But since she had a gun that could fire a thousand rounds a minute stuck in my face, I pretended I did. “Try to think clearly. Clones are identical, and you and Hitler look nothing alike!”

“Zatz only because I no longer have ze Charlie-Chaplin mustache! Look at ze ears!”

I had seen this same ploy online, with blurred pictures, arrows, and incomprehensible text trying to convince you that Angela Merkel was Hitler’s love child. Nonsense, everyone “in the know” knows the German Chancellor is Stalin’s granddaughter. But let’s face it, there was no way a toothbrush mustache would make her look either like Crazy Adolph, Charlie Chaplin, or for that matter Angela if she didn’t shave. And plastic surgery wasn’t the answer, look what happened to Michael Jackson when he went too far, and in this case even that wouldn’t have been far enough. Instead of the ears (who besides Nazi fanboys know what Hitler’s ears looked like anyway?) I looked at her eyes, which were bloodshot and dilated, as if she was drugged. Suddenly it occurred to me that Putin being made to believe he was Rasputin using hallucinogens and hypnotism (“the ol’ H&H”) might not be a solitary event! Sure I had killed Sorcha in the last adventure by smelting her, or rather wrote about Kong dong it, but like a bad penny she kept showing up in my change jar. Could Melania be drugged and hypnotized also, with one-trick-Sorcha using the same convince-someone-they’re-an-infamous-historical-figure ploy? It was so unbelievable, it had to be true!

“Um, have you been drinking on the sly from some source of liquor nobody else uses?” I asked, suspecting the same manner of administration as was used on Putin. "Trust me, I'm asking as part of the story line and not being judgemental, which would be silly considering who you're married to."

“Fool!” she responded, and with a contemptible sneer on her face lifted her skirt to show me a particularly-ugly (not that I’m a judge of such things, or have seen a lot of them, or paid attention when I did) and under-filled scrotum with an even-uglier scar running up one side. If I wasn’t mistaken, the scars jagged edges were a perfect match for the breed of goat most popular in Austria. Yes, despite what you’ve heard, sometimes I do my homework and don’t just bungle in unprepared like that incident in Shanghai. But I decided to play a hunch rather than believe my own eyes, and as if with a single motion I grabbed down at the scarred sack with one hand while grabbing the arm attached to the hand holding the Uzi with the other. Tugging more-forcefully-than-I-would-have-liked, the “scrotum” finally detached with a loud “pop.” I held it up for Melania, and the security-models I’m sure were watching intently from the wings, to see.

“A prosthesis!” I triumphantly announced, “You’re no more a man or Hitler than I am, nor are you someone who knows about cloning. Scars and missing balls aren’t genetic and thus can't be passed on during cloning! QED, something smelled fishy, and given where this was mounted I better end it there, as you know where THAT analogy might lead. Girls?”

I had hoped the models had caught on and knew that an intervention was in order, and I was right. Say what you will about models, when one of their own shows up wearing a fake scrotum and claiming to be history’s greatest mass murderer, they rise to the occasion and get her help. Cursing in at least three different languages, Melania struggled, but in the end was gently forced into a straightjacket, which one of the ladies happened to have as a diet aid. I explained the situation using the same honey-smooth voice I had urged them to reach sexual climax with less than an hour earlier (see what I mean about “playing the refs?”), and letting them finger my nutsack, er, inspect the prosthesis didn’t hurt either. People are always fascinated by anatomical parts they don’t themselves have.

I knew from bitter experience that it would take days for her to “come down,” but the clock was ticking and she might be missed in under an hour. Getting my cell phone back from the ladies who searched me (they had cleaned it with Lysol), I got in touch with Archer and Spade, my shape-shifting Reptilian friends who are technically our Pindar overlords but in real life sort of overgrown frat boys. Once again it just illustrates the power of showing someone a good time. Anyway, they tossed a coin, Spade lost, and he shaped-shifted into Melania and, wearing her clothes, returned to Trump Tower. Meanwhile, Archer and his new friends, the models at the meeting site, got to know each other. Sure it got a little kinky, with Melania thinking she was Hitler addressing the Reichstag and them the same room what would you expect, but I understand it was all in fun and like the entire QAnon incident Melania didn’t remember it afterwards. Jumping forward, while at Trump Tower Spade found Melania’s liquor stash, and after a “personal analysis” by my friend Loop Garoo, I was satisfied that Melania’s delusions and scrotum had Sorcha’s ugly fingerprints all over them! I asked Spade to destroy every drop, and believe he and Archer did this at the celebration party we held afterwards, although now I’m getting WAY too far ahead of the story.

To Be Continued…

[Deep Knight]

Weathering the Storm
Another Excoriated Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 14 – Rolling Double Sevens

Now I know you’re saying to yourself-as-if-it-was-me, “You got Trump’s wife, just ransom her for the Illuminati stock he’s been buying for the hostile takeover (at this point it had increased to about 35% of the total) and go to Disneyland!” But this is because you’re an idiot who talks to him/herself and have forgotten that the White House has a stash of Melania clones in the basement, so she could be replaced at a moment’s notice (OK, so they take about 8 hours to thaw, but you know what I mean). You’re also forgetting that even we Illuminati have rules, and not attacking someone’s family for a purely political beef is one. Unless they’re all being killed in some ritual act of revenge, but that goes without saying. Besides, by doing so we might be playing right into his hands. It’s a common story, a grieving widowed President leveraging public sympathy into higher poll numbers; then using marriage #4 to join with one of the royal houses of Europe via some hot, young princess; thus pulling of a foreign-relations coup. 12th dimensional chess stuff. Don’t be ashamed you didn’t think of this; only those who live in my world need to ask and address such stupid questions. For us, dealing with “stupid” becomes second nature, and part of the allure of the job. Illuminati Strong!

No, what we had here was mutual assured economic destruction, with the New World Order’s, Putin’s, and Hillary’s vast fortunes on the line. I would add Trumps, but had suspected for quite some time his actual worth was inflated by the simple accounting trick of adding instead of subtracting debt (shades of the Federal Reserve). Any hostile act could trigger defaults on loans that totaled many times the entire world’s money supply, so we would have to tread carefully. Which is why Spade was now playing the shape-shifted role of Melania at Trump Tower, searching for hidden stashes of hallucinogen-laced liquor, and sending his fellow Pindar Archer selfies of him wearing what must have been every single piece of her wardrobe. What did I say about people being fascinated by things they don’t have (the Reptilian home planet is so hot they don’t need clothes, besides, fabrics and scales don’t mix)?

Instead, we first tried to pump Melania for information by asking her “Hitler” and “QAnon” personalities trick questions. This failed miserably because neither personality had enough intellectual depth to do anything but spew out rambling and hateful rantings. For example, having a fit about how much Winston Churchill drank and ate meat or Obama played golf. We decided to wait until “Adolph had left the building,” but by then she had forgotten everything that happened while she was these alternate persona. This just shows how wicked and devious Sorcha is, playing with people’s fragile psyches to further a greedy and selfish agenda. Too bad she’s not on our side.

So, instead I implanted new subliminal suggestions into Melania’s recently-remodeled mind. And only a few of them were little whimsical things done in revenge, such as her kicking Donald in the nuts every time the phone rings. No, what we focused on was having her make up with her estranged husband and then forcing him to come to terms with us through explicit blackmail and extortion. Let’s face it, anyone who had remained married to him this long must have such skills, and it would be foolish for us not to use them. Our only remaining problem was what to do about the gap in her memory. What would happen if she needed to recall something that had happened at the White House when she had been somebody else whose memories were now gone?

Strangely enough, it was Gladys who came up with the answer. Or maybe it wasn’t so strange, her marriage to the Big Guy having taught her skills the rest of us are glad we don’t need. Since it was obvious that Trump, like her husband Satan, was a bad boy who thought with his you-know-what instead of his brain, he had no doubt done things that pissed Melania off during the last 8 months or so. Probably a lot of things, especially since she was hiding her prosthetic scrotum. So, if anything from this “blanked out” period of time came up, a post-hypnotic suggestion put her into a “you won’t bring THAT up if you know what’s good for you” mode. In fact, we had Gladys spend 10 minutes with her venting in a general-but-enraged fashion, knowing that such coaching would “up her verbal game” to such a degree no one would touch on those subjects ever again. The technicians say that after she left they noticed the paint had been burnt off the walls in the conditioning booth.

Finally, after the drugs and resulting “hangover” had taken three days to finally leave Melania’s system and she could walk upright again, we were ready to re-insert her into Trump Tower. Besides, Spade who has shape-shifted to replace her was getting bored, and starting to do strange things just to see what he could get away with. I can’t go into detail because of the “leave the families out of it” rule, but if we didn’t get him out of there soon we would have to come up with some far-fetched explanation for where she learned to use a chain saw. We scheduled the switch for noon, with Spade sneaking out while we snuck in, just to keep things interesting. We were so well organized that we were actually in position with time to spare as the minutes ticked down to zero hour, which was 12 o-clock.

You same people who were yelling at your computer screen during the first paragraph are probably muttering that things couldn’t possibly be this easy or go that smoothly. First of all, you need to have more faith in my abilities, and second, you’re right. The first hiccup was the news that the President, hearing about Melania’s remodeling of their interior space in an impromptu manner that had serious repercussions, not unlike his tweets, decided it was was a cry for help! If only he could be similarly introspective! He uncharacteristically answered with a surprise “kiss and make up” visit. And, he was on his way in his beloved Marine One helicopter now, making an early move imperative whether we were ready or not. Swallowing hard even though my throat was bone dry, I nodded to the Slice Girls and reached for my beer. My hand never made it.

Suddenly the room seemed to explode in flames. I found out later that it wasn’t flash grenades, but flambé pans and chaffing dishes, each an inferno made from warmed cognac, brandy, or rum as a final, and theatrical, addition immediately before serving. We would have been able to fight our way out but for some guy throwing a pungent and burning mixture of spices in our faces and yelling “Bam!” repeatedly. Then there were the giant flying cuts of meat, even a glancing hit could knock you out. I saw Baby Slice get hit with a beef hindquarter right before I noticed a whole Turduckin (chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey) coming right at my face. The next things I saw were stars, and then, blackness.

When I awoke we were trussed up in what appeared to be food-grade cotton twine, using knots I recognized as only being taught at haute cuisine academies like Cordon Bleu. It was those idiots at the Food Cooking Cable Network again, no doubt looking for revenge for what happened in Chicago. Not only was the fact they were going to kill me and the Slice Girls annoying in and of itself, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Who knew what would happen when shape-shifted Spade met Trump, especially with his twisted view of human behavior? And Reptilian Spade was known to have some funny ideas too.

Approaching me slowly, wearing chef’s hats and spotless white smocks, were some of the most famous and deadliest TV-show-hosting chefs of all time. I recognized Emeril “the Fall River Fiend” Lagasse, Rachael “Nutrish” Ray, Bobby “Flayed Alive” Flay, Paula “Southern Death” Deen, Wolfgang “Wolfgang” Puck, and Guy “Drive Ins and Dives from 10th Story Windows” Fieri. In the back, overseeing the action were legends James Beard and Julia Child, who were somehow still kicking even though they had died 33 and 14 years ago respectively. Modern refrigeration can really extend those shelf lives. A nasty, hardened bunch who would be a tough nut to crack. Especially considering that I was tied up, helpless, and likely once again the main course. I quickly determined that the one who had my demise on the menu was Rachael Ray, whose reduction to formulating and selling dog food had made her bitter and under-seasoned. She was smiling widely, and carrying a potato-ricing press.

“Most people don’t know the many uses of this simple kitchen appliance,” she explained. “The combined pressure from the press and extrusion through the array of holes creates a whole new dimension of pain when applied to hanging appendages. Such as Deep Knight’s cocktail-sized wiener.”

To Be Continued…

[Deep Knight]

Weathering the Storm
Another Excoriated Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 15 – The Wham Bam Thank You Scam

Was this to be the end of Deep Knight? Processed using classic kitchen equipment by cooking celebrities? I had always imagined I would go out in a blaze of glory, for example a giant fireball from an under-bed gas leak during an orgy, but this? And, to add insult to injury, my last moments on earth would not only be broadcast next season on the Food Cooking Channel, it would be viewed by a New York studio audience, complete with guests from the remaining four of the Five Fast Food Families. I could see Colonel Sanders and Bernie “Burger” King in the box seats, no doubt brought in to watch because of our role in the Mickey Dee’s massacre. With the Slice Girls also tied up and the real-but-still-kinda-dazed Melania being forced to watch (I understand they planned to ransom her for favored tax status later), it looked like there was no possible way out. Darn it all, what an undesirable predicament!!!

But I had forgotten that Trump had a “contract” out on me, the very one that almost got me killed at the beginning of this adventure. I still feel it was an overreaction to my trying to do the same thing to him, but my enemies rarely listen to my views on such matters. Even the fact that I was about to be liquidated by someone else, making their work redundant didn’t stop the squalid squad of Federal Marshals led by an armored vehicle with a front-mounted battering ram. Luckily, the ram’s razor-sharp edges missed me by mere millimeters as it crashed through the back of the stage’s wall, but the same wasn’t true of a soundman and the cooking twine restraining me. Both got snagged and snipped, freeing me from my bonds without a scratch, which was MUCH better than what happened to the stage technician. You think you’ve seen everything, and then something like that happens ... I’m glad I don’t have to describe it to you. With bullets flying everywhere, I dove behind a partition where I found myself next to Colonel Sanders, who I soon discovered was really country music star Reba McEntire dressed and made-up for the part! Playing “the Colonel” both in commercials and real life was her latest gig. I know I’m famous for my Supermodel couplings, but fame, fortune, and self-preservation can also “raise my spirits.” Not only did my world-weary attitude, personal charm and animal magnetism make her immediately sympathetic to my cause, I suspected the “chicken fryer fer hire” had shed no tears at the elimination of a burger-and-fries-slinging competitor. Feeling confident and pressed for time, I went straight for second base.

“Listen, baby,” I said in a smooth voice, “I could see to it that the New World Order takes over all the food, cooking, and other ‘eating porn’ cable channels, and puts them under your control. Not only would you have your own media empire, using subliminal suggestions you could get them in their cars and to the KFC drive-through to assuage their television-induced hunger. You could make billions from biscuit sales alone. Ya wanna do the deed?”

They don’t tell stories about my sweet-talking abilities from Taiwan to Timbuctoo for nothing, and despite the battle raging around us the songstress and I intimately sealed the deal using a technique common for consummating weddings. Finger lickin’ good. The fact we could have even a quickie relatively unmolested is strange considering both sides were trying to kill me, but I guess when anyone shoots at you, the impulse is to shoot back no matter who they are or what they’re doing there, which tends to give an armed engagement a life of its own. Luckily, it didn’t take me much time to “put another notch in my bedpost” (I would have been faster, but her white facial hair put me off) and both of us were soon ready to take advantage of the now-weakened-by-attrition state of the still-engaged forces. The only major hurdle was the armored personnel carrier, unharmed by the bullets, explosives, and cooking tools. However, it had been temporarily neutralized by the chefs covering it in a thick blanket of white foam, both blinding it and giving the occupants a brief “high” from the nitrous oxide (laughing gas) used in their giant whipped-cream dispensers.

“I’ll free the Slice Girls,” I offered, “while you show the guys in that stripped-down tank what you know about hot music and even-hotter oil. You go first, which will be safe because I’ll lay down covering fire. Get ready to attack on the count of three.”

Since I didn’t have a gun, this was an empty promise, but the love-struck country songstress didn’t seem to notice and she rushed through a hail of bullets to the hot-and-ready-to-use deep fat fryers. Hoisting them up with the super-human strength typical of the afterglow from a satisfying Deep Knight encounter, and opening the hatch with her teeth, she poured the contents into the top of the armored vehicle, yodeling along to the screams of those inside. Grabbing a lit cooking torch and dropping it through the hatch as it closed, she rode out the carrier as it exploded in flames and gave a little jump in the air, yelling “Ye, haw!” as it did. The contents were soon ablaze and cooking from all sides, much like a tandoori cooking pot. Meanwhile, I had found a set of knives in a rolled-up pouch, used one to cut the bonds that held the Slice Girls, and distributed the rest as they became free. After all this time, I’m sure I don’t have to elaborate on the details. They didn’t waste any time cleaning out the remaining Food Cooking minions, leaving only the famous Chefs still alive.

“Not so cocky now, eh?” I asked, not expecting an answer, “Well, I have a new cooking challenge for all of you. There are no rules, you can use anything you can get your hands on, but only the last chef alive gets to walk away and leave, as the rest obviously will be dead. This Food Cooking challenge starts … NOW!”

I guess there was actually little love lost between these competitors, food show hosting and cookbook publishing are dog-eat-dog businesses. None of them were actually armed, with all the kitchen’s knives having been removed and used by the Slice Girls, but they made the best of the implements at hand. Emeril had his powdered spice mixture and flung it around to good effect until he came across Bobby Flay. Years of cooking with peppers that make habaneros look tame had given his eyes and lungs a certain immunity, and he bested his attacker by covering him liberally with his own spice mixture and proceeding to grill him. When Wolfgang tried to sneak up behind Bobby with a meat tenderizing mallet while he was flipping him over, Bobby “turned the tables” on an attacker once again and grilled him too, his bashed head down in the flames to singe away the hair. Paula Deen tried to bean James Beard with a tub of lard, but he blocked her with a large block of salted butter, and they danced around in a duel of saturated fats until they both succumbed simultaneously to massive heart attacks. Bad cooking choices have consequences. Guy Fieri choked Rachael by shoving a foot-long Philly cheesesteak sandwich down her esophagus, but as he tried to get a bite for himself he didn’t see Bobby coming up behind him, who in turn didn’t see Julia Child. Older and wiser, she had been holding back, but now proceeded to clean up using a rotisserie skewer, piercing both of their hearts with a single thrust and impaling them on still-thrashing-around Rachael. She might be “old school,” but some classic recipes and techniques never go out of style.

I was impressed, and almost let Julia live, or whatever you would call her current state. But I could tell that Reba had not yet satisfied her blood lust, and of course the Slice Girls were always up for some homicide, so I had them cut the author of The Art of French Cooking into serving-sized pieces, dip her into a batter made from a recipe of 11 herbs and spices, and fry her to an extra-crispy and golden brown perfection. Bon Appétit!

Melania was unharmed, although we had to get her some new clothes as hers were a little soiled by food and blood spatter. Absolutely amazing when you consider the number of rounds shot off in such a limited space, and the fact that still-a-bit-dazed she hadn’t ducked or moved to cover but remained sitting in her chair with a smile on her face. Years of marriage to The Donald got her used to such things, I guess. But the fact that she was still alive to swap didn’t mean she still wasn’t a problem. Trump had been with shape-shifted Spade for hours, and who knows when he would have a chance, or given his sick tastes the desire, to slip out? But I couldn’t see that we had any other choice than to once again get in position, take the chance that none of my many enemies would attack us out of the blue again, and hope for the best.

To Be Continued…

[Burnaby49]

Try to be accurate. Tandoori isn't cooked in a pot. It's cooked on skewers in an oven.

[Deep Knight]

Try to be accurate. Tandoori isn't cooked in a pot. It's cooked on skewers in an oven.

The "Tandoori" place nearby uses the big clay pot ovens, which I looked up and are properly called "Tandoors" (adding an "i" makes 'em plural, my bad). These have a charcoal fire inside on the bottom, and can cook a variety of things in a variety of ways, from stuff on skewers to flatbread stuck to the sides near the top to hanging whole chickens (the specialty, yum). They may call it an "oven" and not a "pot" on the description part of the menu (I used "pot" in the story both as a drug reference and 'cause that's what it actually is), but I do remember it emphasizes "cooking from all sides." Hence the use in the story (along with "fire inside"), which just goes to show how hungry writing about killing and cannibalism makes me. And if we can't trust what we read on restaurant menus, what can we trust?




How Burnaby49's Tandoori place does things is probably different, no doubt somehow incorporating moose meat and maple syrup. "Tandoor" is "oven or furnace" in Persian and dialects, such as Urdu, so I suppose anything that anything cooked using an "oven" ...


Obama builds his own backyard Tandoor oven

[Deep Knight]

Weathering the Storm
Another Excoriated Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 16 – The Gnat Patrol

We put Melania back “under” with hypnosis (not so much “out” as “limp and with no will of her own”), and stuffing her in a mail bag posed as US Postal Inspectors (which also meant larger bribes than last time). Don’t ask how, but soon we were ascending the mail chutes near the Penthouse, where at this very moment Trump was doing who-knows-what to our friend, Pindar Spade. And from the noises I didn’t want to know and backed off out of earshot. I know you think I’m a battle-scarred veteran of the war between the sexes, but I’m used to straightforward battles and not the sort of unusual and frankly abnormal tactics the President was rumored to favor. I mean, what would the servants who had to use those oven mittens and weed whackers think if they knew where they had been? But back to me, it had been almost 8 hours since Trump arrived, and the tension was getting to be unbearable. What could they possibly be doing that wouldn’t wear out the aging President and take that long?

I texted Crooked Hillary, who happened to be in Russia at Vladimir’s Presidential inauguration party. No doubt the festivity was bittersweet for her, given what happened in 2016, and you know how she can hold a grudge. Velna and I had been invited but declined because when Putin gets a snoot-full he gets grabby, and that makes Hillary jealous. Not a good thing to have happen when Putin’s object of hidden desire is yours truly, just ask the hundreds of people she’s personally killed due to petty jealousy. But back to my simple request; to have Putin’s “Troll Factory” put out some intimate pictures I had photo-shopped that would make alarms ring in Trump properties and golf resorts all over the world. It was of the President without hair, I mean on his head not “down there” (there are lines even I won’t cross), which made him look sort of like an orange Uncle Fester. And to add insult to injury, I accentuated his eye makeup until it appeared rather effeminate, sort of like those late 70’s “glam” or “glamour” bands. Isn’t today’s technology amazing?

Like most of my plans that don’t fail miserably, it succeeded perfectly. The angry shouts of outrage and unmistakable timbre of a banging door being used as an exit were our cue to shimmy up the rest of the chute, squeeze our way through the package slot, and get in-and-out so fast you would think the apartment was a willing Supermodel. Luckily, Spade had anticipated my move and grabbed enough of Trump’s wardrobe he could shape-shift to look like the President. Either that, or he wanted to play “dress up” some more, perhaps as part of some unspeakable role-playing game. Staying and filming would have been tempting, but we had other fish to fry. Taking Melania out of the bag and waking her up more-quickly-than-you-might-think-possible, we undressed her and shoved her into their gilded and canopied bed, then walked out, with the plan to leave by the front like we owned the place. It would have worked too if we hadn’t bumped into Trump as he was returning to his penthouse suite alone. Preoccupied and cursing under his breath (he’s quite sensitive about his hair), he didn’t notice us until he literally ran into Spade, shaped shifted to look like him. He, and the rest of us, froze, hoping against hope we hadn’t screwed the pooch. Looking at Spade as if he was looking into a mirror, Trump straightened his tie, turned around, and walked away, muttering to himself. We made straight for the elevator, and got out as fast as we could.

I checked the video monitor I had put in their bedroom, and it showed a still preoccupied Trump returning, apparently none-the-wiser. Amazing, if I hadn’t seen it I would have never believed it, could he be nearsighted and too proud to wear glasses? But that wasn’t the reason I violated their right to privacy, it was to field-test Melania’s post hypnotic suggestion. I dialed her private number when he was standing in full view of the camera, right next to her, exactly at ball-kicking distance. Near perfect conditions to observe not just a successful test, but one that far exceeded my expectations! We watched in great amusement as I let the phone ring nearly a dozen times.

Spade had a rather funky smell about him, and although he’s the type who’s more than willing to kiss and tell, I frankly didn’t want to know. And I’m sure my readers feel the same way, except for those few whose tastes are well outside of what’s considered normal (you, and the local police, know who you are). All that filtered up to me was that I had been right, the First Couple’s marital relations HAD been “strained” by her being drugged by Sorcha and having another personality implanted. Happens all the time to celebrity couples. Not to mention she was hiding a mock single-balled scrotum she thought was legitimately hers (Sorcha is one sick puppy), which one can assume made her put the brakes on when the old man came around looking for some hanky-panky. So, when Spade-as-Melania expressed a moderate degree of renewed interest by ripping his clothes off and hopping on top of him, he popped a handful of Viagra and jumped at the opportunity. He didn’t even question the unusual moves, requests or accessories, like most men he didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I know that you, like me, are disturbed by such things, especially if you don’t get to do them yourself, so I’ll leave it at that.

As we made our way up to downtown I felt safe for the first time in weeks. That was my first mistake, having feelings. The second was not noticing the funny little man following us. In fact, it wasn’t until New York’s finest surrounded us, and I don’t mean Times Square hookers, that I realized we had been being shadowed by Hercule Poirot! Somehow the rat had either wormed or weaseled his way out of the multiple murder frame-up I had provided on the Capitol Limited, and either gained the NYPD’s trust or found enough cash to pay off a lot of greedy people. The girls were all for fighting it out, but it doesn’t pay to get on the wrong side of the law, which murdering them usually does. And we were far from beaten, given the right moment we could have Spade shape-shift into being His Honor the Mayor and with a wink “fix” this for us.

Unfortunately, Poirot seemed to know that letting the law deal justly with us was a bad idea, and instead instructed the cops to kill us. “Shoots zem, in ze little grey cells, how you zay eet, ze head! I will zay zey were armed, dangerous, and noir, zat eez black because it was ze nights and you could not zee. Il n’y a pas plus sourd que celui qui ne veut pas entendre!”

Normally retired Belgian chief inspectors don’t have the authority to authorize summary executions, at least in New York, but I suspected things weren’t quite on the up and up. I know this will shock you, but there’s a small level of corruption in the NYPD (tiny, actually); which is why I carry the large roll of $100s I was fishing out of my pocket while Poirot had their attention. I was about to spring it on them, when Spade pulled out a Taser (I told you that you didn’t want to know the details about what had went on in that bedroom in Trump Tower) and hit Poirot with it, directly in the chest. I expected the screams, inability to stand, and loss of excretory control, but not a rapid display of shape-shifting. Every few seconds, in time with zapping noises from the Taser, the Belgian sleuth became another person or creature. With the dancing-like motions from the electric shocks, it was actually quite entertaining to watch, and could easily go all the way on “America’s Got Talent.” Finally, our quarry became an ugly-but-familiar woman, and shutting off the Taser with a theatrical flourish, Space announced, “Ladies and Gentleman, Sorcha Faal!”

“You may have bested me yet again, Deep Knight,” sneered Sorcha, her voice a symphony of contempt, “but no matter how well you kill me, I’ll be back to get my revenge!”

“A dish best served cold,” I noted, having decided to try getting rid of her this time by putting her in the deep freeze. As most of you know, the Illuminati have a huge cryogenic facility in Antarctica, the place we keep Walt Disney (yes, Hitler was stored there too, but that was before you-know-what). A liquid nitrogen bath might not kill the mutant floozy, but it would almost certainly slow her down. Given the frequency of her return in my writings, that sounded OK by me.

“Great work,” I falsely told the police in sham admiration. Even if cops on the beat weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, the breath and range of Sorcha’s physical changes and trash talk afterwards would cause almost anyone to question if she had been completely candid with them. Not to mention the suspicious and vaguely insulting French proverb. I nodded to the Police Sargent, saying, “Captain, take this woman into custody, she’s wanted by the Feds, Interpol, and people I know who will pay you oodles of untraceable cash. Here’s a down payment.” The police were stunned by the strange goings on, but with the mention of cash they grabbed my “up front bribe money” and the shape shifting slut, and stuffed her into a squad car. I gave the Sargent a card with an address on it, and calling ahead I made sure there were seats and cargo space on the nonstop to Antarctica so there would be no delays. It turns out it would take longer than I thought to get together the cash I had promised (when your credit goes, the news travels fast), but the daily flight to the South Pole would take care of that small problem too. We would simply freeze and ship ‘em all, saving both time and expense! Sure it was underhanded, and you may consider me cold, but not as cold as Sorcha and those cops!

“How did you know he, she or it wasn’t really a funny looking Frenchie?” I asked Spade. “Did your Reptilian senses smell Sorcha’s species out, or did you notice something wrong in Poirot’s human appearance that I chalked up to him being butt ugly? What did I miss?”

“I wasn’t any of those things,” confided the perverted Pindar. “I knew because he was the only character you couldn’t vouch for who hadn’t be cleared or killed. Sorcha had to be here somewhere, ready to gloat over your defeat, and if I was wrong I would at least have the pleasure of seeing if getting zapped by the Taser straightened out his waxed mustache.”

To Be Continued…

[Deep Knight]

Weathering the Storm
Another Excoriated Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 17 – The Final Evisceration

Back at Illuminati Headquarters, Satan was hot to call Trump and start negotiating, but I insisted he wait until morning. It would be good to let the Orange Eminence stew during a sleepless night, which I assuring using “i-annoy,” a phone app that dialed Melania’s private number every hour. This time my plan was to give us every advantage during the negotiations. Satan would be in front of the fire altar on a video link to get the maximum visual effect, Crooked Hillary (who was returning to the US, with Putin in tow) coaching, and I would be doing sound effects. Nothing like a scream in the background to move a discussion forward. My argument was a devious-but-sound one, and showing him the video of a previous call to Melania’s phone (activating the post-hypnotic suggestion) made him agree that a continuation would both be wise and satisfying. We watched it 3 times, laughing just as hard the last time as the first. Some things never get old.

Delayed in his desire for action and revenge by common sense, the Big Guy got almost-but-not-quite as hot to round up each and every White Knight or White Hat and personally tear them limb from limb, making them suffer through unbearable torture first to round-out the experience. I pointed out that while they all deserved worse, they were also the Deep State that was such a thorn in the administration’s side. And, I might add, that we were counting on for our final victory. For example, we had been feeding the Mueller probe the most outrageous lies to get Trump impeached, lies twice as dangerous as the “normal” ones Trump was using himself because they just happened to be true. Sometimes you get lucky. Sooner or later, something was going to blow, but not if the FBI investigators were all dismembered or worse.

“It would be OK if they were perverts, fiends, or liberals, but with them being turncoats how can we trust them?” the Prince of Darkness wondered aloud. “Part of being Illuminati is being trustworthy and loyal to evil, or is that the Boy Scouts?”

He didn’t know it but he had a point, “trust” has never been one of the criteria by which we choose people to enmesh in a web of sin, so it’s always a big problem here. Maybe we should clean house, kill ‘em, clone ‘em, replace ‘em, and start over like Adam and Steve. But that takes so long and costs more that we could afford, even after we got our money and stock back. I had the accountant’s reports in front of me, and they weren’t pretty. Perhaps they should try using stacks of coins or bills instead of Satan’s face for the graphics in the headers. I texted Hillary but she didn’t have any good ideas either, and I think I “interrupted” her and Vladimir rejoining the mile-high club, which I’m sure I’ll pay for later.

A sudden roar announced both an entrance and the answer to our dilemma. Kong was in the building! I ducked down beneath the conference room table as Satan’s mother, his paramour, followed him into the room. It’s not that I was afraid of her, which any sane person would be, but if she started to pursue and sexually harass me like before and Kong found out, he might not exactly be understanding. I had no hint that this might happen, but better safe than sorry. It turns out that Satan’s mom, looking out for her sweetie, had been following events, and both knew about events the Deep State – White Knights/Hats double-or-triple cross, and the rumors floating around the building that Kong was responsible just because he was running the program. Having once been the head, and namesake of it myself, I would never say such a thing, unless it was necessary or I knew I could get away with it, so I was OK, but I would hate to be some of the guys at the office who fancied themselves a comedian when coworkers gathered around the water cooler. Anyway, neither Kong nor his sugar mama was very happy about any of this: the blame, the lost money, or the stalemate with Trump; and Satan was catching hell for it. You know how mothers can be when you disappoint them, especially ones who are backed up by gorillas over 25 feet tall.

I had an idea so bold that I pulled myself out from under that table, put a couple rounds in the ceiling to get their attention and shut them up, and spoke. “Sorry, I dropped this report from our accountants, and it took me forever to find it.” I rustled a paper already on the table as if I had just brought it up, and continued, “I have bad news, even if we make the best deal possible with Trump: he gives us all the stock he’s purchased and returns what’s left of our and Putin’s funds, we’re still in the hole, er, red.” [Jumping ahead, it turns out we made exactly this agreement, “art of the deal” my hairy behind.] “Red in the shade of over a trillion dollars, which is pretty darn red. And without more cash we’re not going to be able to climb out of that red. Our credit is in shambles, this morning our Experian score was below 300, our bonds are rated as sub-junk, and even international bankers we’re blackmailing have stopped returning our calls. Soon we’ll be a second rate secret organization hobbled by draconian budget cuts and layoffs.” I waited a moment to let this ice water I had poured down Satan’s pants sink in. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Both Satan and his mom perked up, and even Kong raised an eyebrow.

“I know you want to kill the turncoats in the Deep State, their families, and kick their white hats around in the dirt,” I continued. “So do I, and so does everyone in this room who’s got an ounce of self respect. Not only do they deserve it for breaking their blood oaths, it would be fun. But this is a business, business should come before pleasure, and the pleasure itself should come from making money, not shooting ourselves in the foot.”

There were nods around the room, and murmurs that had an affirming sound to them, so I continued. “One way we found out about the Deep State’s treachery was the huge fortunes amassed by government workers who should be in debt up to their eyeballs just from buying a new compact car every 10 years. In the good old days poverty used to be one of the benefits of public service. But besides their meager salaries they’ve also been getting money under the table from us, from the forces of good, and skimming off the top into their back pockets. According to Forbes, they make up 80% of the top 1% of the top 1%. I don’t even know who to calculate what proportion that is all told, but I can add their net worths together well enough. If we ‘recovered’ only some of these holdings, just 90% from the upper-mid- and mid-upper-level managers whose demise would serve to warn the rest, we would have more than three trillion dollars! Enough money to pay our debts, do a stock buy-back and insure a hostile takeover can never happen again, pay back Hillary, give ourselves huge bonuses, and still have money left over for Satan’s special projects fund. And I think that Kong here has just the skills to do it. What do you say?”

After Kong raised an objection and I clarified that he could do whatever he wanted to these traitors once we had confirmations that the funds had all been found and transferred, including eat them, he agreed wholeheartedly. I hear it’s not that he’s bloodthirsty per se, he just tends to go ape when people try to make a monkey out of him. Even the Prince of Darkness seemed pleased, still I could sense by the “I’ll get you” looks he was shooting me, that he was upset about something. I grabbed a sharp knife, hid it in my jacket “just in case” I had to improvise, and invited him into my private office to find out what the @#$! it was.

To Be Continued…

[Arthur Rubin]

When I first read the last post, I saw

... getting money ... from us, the forces of good, ...

I knew that couldn't be right....

[Deep Knight]

Weathering the Storm
Another Excoriated Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 18 – The Screaming of the Letters FBI

“What gives?” I asked haphazardly, knowing Satan’s mood could turn sour in an instant. It was partly his digestion, not surprising given passes for food at Hell’s executive dining room, and partly because he was the personification of evil. It’s no picnic working for someone who’s so volatile changes his mind hourly, a wicked combination. Luckily, things are no better at the White House, leaving us evenly matched in the “having to constantly deal with the boss” category.

“Damn it, Deep. Mom is talking about returning here and moving in,” he fumed, “Her boyfriend, er, companion being necessary for your plan makes it hard to say ‘no.’ It’s all your fault.”

“How can it be my fault?” I asked, incredulous about the blame, not the saying “no” to his mom part. “My plan is brilliant, ties up all the loose ends, solves our looming financial crisis, and you were the one who put Kong in charge of the Deep State!”

“Yeah, but I can’t blame myself,” he reasoned, “Maybe I’ll blame my son-in-law George. He’s always giving me bad advice and forgetting about it when I bring it up later.”

“Look,” I countered, “Your mother probably just wants to be near you, the grandkids, get away from that erupting volcano on Hawaii, meddle in your lives, and drive you crazy. Let her win on the first three and fight like heck over the rest. As long as you don’t have her living too near, you can carefully schedule her visits, palm her off on your daughters or sons-in-law whenever you’re ‘too busy,’ and wait it out until she gets bored by Washington DC. With Mar-a-Lago the real center of power, nothing much is happening here and it’s bound to be dull. Then, maybe we’ll have something open up in London or Paris that Kong could fit right into …”

Satan’s mind started working, which is scary to watch, and we returned to the conference room where he gave Kong a so-enthusiastic-it-looked-almost-genuine OK to proceed with the plan. I asked that the first test be on Mueller, the former director of the FBI who had promised us Trump’s head every week for a year. It was always “it’s almost off, it’s almost off," but week after week would come and go and it would still be on Trump’s shoulders. And after consulting Velna by phone, to make Satan and his mother happy, I put our luxury penthouse on the bargaining table.

“Velna and I are planning on moving into one of the Rothschild castles, something with a big yard where we can establish a kill zone with some real depth, so our penthouse is going to be empty soon. It’s a wonderful place, has really high ceilings, and nice neighbors.” Yeah, nice neighbors I’d like give a little payback for all those times they came whining to us about explosions, stray bullets, or family members being killed due to mistaken identity. Having Kong and Satan’s mom living next door would be excessive and overkill, which as far as I’m concerned is just what the doctor ordered. The location was close enough to drive to work, but far enough, especially with traffic, that mom wouldn’t always be dropping it unannounced. Surprisingly, it was actually a good idea that might bring a little peace to Hell, and I patted myself on the back. Now, off to the airport to pick up Hillary, and then to see Mueller for a “come to Kong” meeting!

Former FBI Director Mueller had been the star of the Deep State, but the blush was off the rose and shine off that nose these days. How he thought he could tell us Trump’s demise was “very soon” or “only hours away” for a whole year and we would remain patient is beyond me. When the New World Order wants blood, we get blood! Simple is always best, and nothing from nothing leaves nothing, you gotta have something, if you wanna be Illuminati.

“Roberto,” I said in greeting, using his Mexican gang name, “We have to have a talk.” I led him into his office, where Hillary was already sitting at his desk, a scowl on her face. He suddenly looked very nervous. He almost jumped over himself to give us a positive report.

“I’ve got the evidence, and it’s going before the grand jury which will indict President Trump in a matter of days on conspiracy, obstruction, and collusion! Weeks or months at the most! I just need a little more time!”

“Relax, I’m happy to give you more time,” I assured him, smiling, “but I’m confused, is that extra time for indicting Trump, or arresting Hillary here for child sex trafficking in the basements of pizza restaurants?”

The Special Counsel’s face turned pale and his pants darker, as a wet spot spread from the crotch. Finding he had been found out, was being fingered, and had lost his bladder control at the same instant no doubt make his think this just wasn’t his day. I decided to, as Emeril used to say before we caused his death, “kick it up a notch. “

“Oh yes, we’ve know all about the White Knights and White Hats, and how they’re actually the two-faced Deep State, for a long time. Do you take us for fools? But we gave you enough rope that we could see which side you would butter your bread on, and of course toy with you.”

“Lies, lies, and more lies!” insisted Mueller, the sweat pouring from his face, “The whole thing is a crazed conspiracy theory propagated online by people who use it as clickbait to get visitors on their websites.”

“That sounds like a lame excuse with no evidence to back it up to me, but who knows, Kong might feel differently. You know what a softy he is. But what am I speculating for? We can invite him in and ask him right now!”

With a roar, Kong entered the Special Counsel’s office through the west wall. Picking up his antique wooden desk with his right hand, the big ape crushed it to splinters which he sprinkled over the former FBI Director, who was frozen in fear. Kong roared some more at the pleading, ashen-faced turncoat, who insisted that even though it was all lies, he had still learned his lesson, and deserved one more chance. Kong’s body language clearly illustrated that he didn’t believe him, and that he wanted to terminate his employment and breathing right then and there. I waited for his terror to peak, and then jumped in to make it worse.

“Kong says he’s concerned about issues of trust and personal integrity,” I clarified, “I agree, but am also beside myself in anger at your insulting my intelligence by denying your obvious guilt. Of course Hillary is looking for straight-out revenge, and like the Mounties she always gets her man.”

Mueller seemed to collapse. It was either his realization that the jig was up, or Kong’s breath. We revived him by drenching him with a large bucket of ice water, and Hillary let the terrified official know the way it was going to be.

“From now on, I OWN YOU. All of your investigators have to be Democrats who worked summers in college on Castro’s cane fields in Cuba or contributed to my campaign. Get the ones who gave me the pass on those e-mails, ignoring that using my own server is the very definition of treason as laid out in the Constitution. Tap the Trump Tower telephones, put listening devices at all of his golf courses, especially on the greens, and most of all go after his fixer, Michael Cohen. If he’s not taken care of, he might be able to fix the whole thing!”

I ended with a bit of a pep talk, to give him back some of the confidence losing control of your body functions in public often depletes. “One more slip up, and Kong will eat your children, and I mean consume as food not some illegal-to-describe-if-one-of-the-participants-is-under-aged act. I know we have a rule about families, but we have another secret rule: ‘The Illuminati get to do what they want and don’t have to follow the rules.’ You might remember that the next time your conscience bothers you or you’re tempted to do something stupid, like cross us. Even think about it and your wife will ‘sleep with the fishes,’ and if you’ve ever seen ‘The Shape of Water’ you’ll know how that could complicate your physical relationship. Especially since she knows you’re a secret communist, ‘cause you know what they say, “Once you’ve had fish sticks, you’ll never go back to Bolsheviks.” Oh yes, and we’ll be putting this tracking device into your hindquarters, it’s the size of a grain of rice, and Kong has the app on his phone that shows where it is and how to best get there, taking traffic and construction into account. Now go home and change your pants.”

Nothing makes your day like a short and successful meeting.

To Be Continued…

[Deep Knight]

Weathering the Storm
Another Excoriated Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 19 – When the Bough Breaks

The next stop was the Office of Government Procurement, which people often mistake as the place the prostitutes work just because of their name. That’s silly, it’s where the procurers, i.e. pimps, work; their girls who service the clients work for the GSA, General Services Administration. Just another example of how bureaucratic compartmentalization makes processes less efficient, and in this case keeps the pimps and ho’s from forming the close personal bonds which define their traditional and time-proven business relationships.

Our experience with their Director went through something akin to the 5 stages of grief. First Denial, as the lying sack of @#$! denied everything while driving a Lamborghini and wearing a $25,000 suit and $10,000 Gucci loafers. Then Anger as we threw his bank and real estate records in his face and he realized someone had blabbed, which continued right up to the point we called for Kong to make a dramatic entrance. Next Bargaining, as he tried to “make it right” and split his ill-gotten gains 50-50.This was followed by Depression, as he realized we had him by the short 'n curlies and weren’t going to leave him anything including his life if he didn’t start cooperating. Finally Acceptance, as he signed over his holdings and even took a shovel out to the gardens of his palatial estate and dug up the boxes of diamonds and gold while we waited. It was fun, sort of like playing pirates looking for buried treasure, and in a fit of whimsy I ended it by forcing him to “walk the plank” from the end of his swimming pool’s diving board into Kong’s open mouth.

Sure, it took a few fortnights of strenuous work, but we got back even more than the accountants had figured, not having a way of forecasting the “Kong factor.” In the end, lots of offenders were turning themselves and all their assets in, on the rumor that if they came clean we would allow them to live. We were the source of that rumor, and naturally it wasn’t true. After all, things in any organization move smoothly enough without upper-mid-level managers, and even better without mid-upper-level ones. We would let them almost get to the exit, then turned Kong, or if he was busy the dogs, on them, making sure they died slowly enough to realize their error, but fast enough to keep things moving along efficiently. After all, it is a business, and things should be done in a business-like fashion.

I have to admit that I had underestimated Kong’s skills, not realizing that he knew how to use delicacy and humor as well as force and terror. And his antics sure livened up the tedium of being what was essentially a glorified “repo man.” But money is money, just ask anyone who doesn’t have it, and a job to do is a job to do. Still, it felt good for it to be over, and I threw a big party, which also coincided with our getting ready to move into the Rothschild castle.

The party was at our soon-to-be-old place, with Polynesian cocktails and a whole pig that had been wrapped in banana leaves, buried in a fire pit, and roasted all day; no mean trick in a penthouse apartment. At first the ladies gravitated towards the kitchen and the men the billiards room. They didn’t like the smell of our cigars or “locker-room talk” about dirty socks and jockstraps, and wanted to gossip about girl stuff. It’s funny, but with all the contact Velna has had with Satan’s Mom (she’s named “Kimberley” by the way) about the apartment and raising the ceilings they’ve grown close, and Hillary has been joining them to chat and have drinks when she hasn’t been murdering people or subverting the Republic. Gladys declined her half of their invitation, saying she had a headache. Velna called her for a heart-to-heart, and told me it was due to a “family squabble,” although she used a much longer, ruder, more-descriptive, and less-publishable phrase. You would think Gladys would want to celebrate her antagonist and Kong moving out, but it may take a few years before the Princess of Darkness forgives her mother-in-law for her continued insistence that her son, “the product of a goat and a mud-brick-town floozy,” is too good for her.

Velna says that Kimberley (I’m sorry, I just can’t get used to that name, I’ll have to keep using “Satan’s Mom”) has become a new woman since falling in love with Kong, and also now realizes that sexually harassing her son’s employees and random men she met on the street was “wrong.” Like that ever mattered to anyone in her family, but still the fact that she seems to believe it is a relief. There was more about her being a new woman; bla, bla, bla; her loving Kong’s vulnerabilities and boyish naiveté; yada, yada, yada; and this new type of sex toy made by modifying one of those Roomba robot vacuums. Oh yes, they complained that the “Polynesian Pearl Divers” needed more rum.

We boys were telling war stories about killing decent men of good will, and prehistoric reptiles. Putin had lots of new ones, having just finished some ruthless post-election payback. He was knocking back "Mermaid’s Downfalls" (too sweet and fruity for me) and feeling good, having also made a deal with Trump that got him back most of his money (but not his oligarch friends', a man’s gotta look out for himself). He wrongly assumed I had told Hillary to feed him this info so he could recover his “investment,” and even interrupted them “mile highing it” in flight for this reason. He confided that this was OK, “Hill” had insisted they use the bathroom to “make it authentic,” and given the size, layout, and Vlad’s bad back (no sympathy, I mean playing hockey at his age), even the cargo hold is better. Spade and Archer were in good spirits, and felt comfortable enough to shift back to their reptilian forms, which added to the atmosphere. Best of all, Kong and Satan were getting along, with The Evil One pleased as punch to have his slush fund fully funded again. Not being able to pay off porn actresses, ballet dancers, girl scouts, and other discarded lovers, had been cramping his style and forcing him to spend one-too-many evening with the wife. The two of them ended up leaning on each other arm and arm to keep from falling over as they laughed hilariously at my description of Melania’s prosthetic scrotum. Later in the evening we all got together for a game of charades, which I let Satan win. But the high point of the game was the energetic miming and caricatures done by Kong, whose “Stormy Daniels” clues had us rolling in the aisles.

Long-time readers won’t be surprised to hear that even though we got Sorcha to Antarctica and in the liquid nitrogen bath, she somehow escaped a few weeks later. I insisted they go looking for her, but the place is so crowded with secret installations that she had plenty of places to hide. One day she’ll have to come up for air, and we’ll be waiting. As for her “writings” online, these were taken over by David Booth, whose laughable attempt to mimic her prose has left many readers leaving him/her for the smooth voice of Alex Jones. About the same thing happened when QAnon went silent; enough people were faking his posts that they continued without a hitch. The fact that none of them were linked to actual events anymore was hidden by the fact they had never actually made sense, before or after. As for Mueller, he’s been moving slower than we would like, but a long, drawn-out ordeal for Trump isn’t necessarily a bad thing, so we only threaten and torment him occasionally. Sure it’s fun, but if this story has taught you anything it should be what happens when the “fun” ends and people get hurt. But someone has to do it, and in the end that someone is me, Deep Knight, and don’t forget that’s “Lord Rothschild” to you, buster!

The End

[Deep Knight]

Weathering the Storm
Another Excoriated Deep Knight Adventure
Epilogue – Ol’ Number 20

“What do you mean, ‘sexual harassment?’” I cried, exasperated and confused.

“Exactly what I said, and I have a paper right here that you signed to acknowledge the new zero-tolerance policy. I’ve spoken to you about this before.”

And she had, because it was the same evil @#$! From HR who had harassed me earlier for violating the zero-tolerance drug policy when it was that I had been drugged and kidnapped by our enemies while doing my job. “Look, I’ve told you, I have signed releases, copies of two forms of ID which show they’re of age, and thumbprints in blood on the consent forms. I dotted every “t” and crossed every “I” to keep things on a legal basis. You have nothing on me, lady.”

“I’m not talking about your disgusting supermodel breeding program,” said the Human Resources enforcer with an actual disgusted look, “but the reports we have are that you grabbed Melania Trump’s pussy.”

“What!” I cried, “That’s a bald-faced lie! I grabbed her scrotum, and it wasn’t even real!”

“Say what?” queried the HR storm trooper, obviously confused.

“It’s simple,” I explained hurriedly, “A blabbermouth Irish nun who’s really a Russian shape-shifter convinced the First Lady through hypnotism and drugs that she was actually Hitler’s clone, and provided the evidence to prove it. Namely an abbreviated and half-filled scrotum identical to his, the result of a goat biting the future mass murderer ‘down there,’ reducing his ball count by one and leaving quite a scar. By disengaging this clever copy I was able to forcefully illustrate her delusion wasn’t real, which started her on the path to recovery and me on a crazy roller coaster ride of saving the New World Order from bankruptcy and Satan himself from shame. As if that was possible after all these years.”

“That doesn’t make sense. How would she not realize something was up the first time she washed ‘down there?’”

“What makes you think all men wash their balls?” I asked, genuinely confused. “And besides, how in the world would I know? It’s not like it came up in conversation.”

She shook her head sideways slowly, as if thinking. But having heard her speak, I knew that wasn’t the case. “Just what is it about ‘zero tolerance’ that you don’t understand?” she answered sternly, a scowl making her unattractive face even uglier. “No excuses means no excuses, no matter how good or logical they are. My job is to punish infractions, not try to deal out justice or understand human biology.”

“OK, then since I didn’t grab her you-know-what, then there was no infraction and that’s that.”

“’I know what?’ Just say it, ‘pussy.’ Don’t be afraid, they’ve been doing it on TV news for over a year.”

“That’s locker room talk, and I’m from a different, more civilized era, when men with style were polite around ladies,” I explained, not continuing with the corollary that under some circumstances, e.g. when you were humping like depraved animals, more latitude was allowed.

“You’re a wuss,” she concluded, “If you want to continue this discussion, you have to say it.”

“OK, I didn’t grab her pussy, I grabbed her fake nuts. Or rather, nut, since there was only one. And I’m glad I did, it saved the Illuminati, everyone’s jobs, and my title as Lord Rothschild.”

“Oh my god!” she exclaimed, “YOU’RE the new Baron Rothschild?”

“The one and only,” I confirmed, “I did away with the old one, and in this business ‘what you kill you keep.’”

“I’m sorry,” she blurted out, turning red, “I never knew! Of COURSE it’s OK for you to grab her pussy then. Grab as many as you like. In fact, you can grab mine if you want to.”

“No, no,” I stammered, taken aback, “That’s OK, I’m good.”

“Don’t be shy,” she said in a softer, more seductive voice as she started to raise her skirt, “Given some of the silly things I said, things that embarrass me now, I insist! Here, I’ll help you, you bad boy, you.”

“Aaaarrrgghhhhh! “ I countered as I shielded my eyes and jumped for the door. I had this sudden fear that, like Melania, she would show me another badly-healed, half-filled ball-sack. Was it because if you imagined a toothbrush mustache on the HR lady’s face she bore a striking resemblance to the Nazi nutcase? Or was it just the result of PTSD from my earlier traumas? Anyway, at the risk of insulting her, I ran through Hell like Jesus himself was chasing me, to the safety of my chauffeured limo which would take me to my castle and estate. Work, as always, continued to be a challenge, but there were compensations.

Really the End This Time

[Deep Knight]

Deep Knight’s Mail Bag

As always, the inconsistencies and outright impossibilities in my latest adventure have generated an avalanche of mail. Here are just some of the questions, and my best attempts at finding excuses.

Q: You say that Sorcha Faal is a “shape shifter” yet not a Reptilian. Just what kind is she? All hail the Pindars!
A: The Reptilians aren’t the only shape shifters, just the most bad-assed and popular. Most of the really-strange-looking aliens who visit Earth have the ability to shape-shift just to keep from being detected, for example ALL the Insectoids. You just can’t hide the eyes and mandibles otherwise. I don’t know which Sorcha is because I’ve never gotten up the courage or bad sense to get intimate enough to tell.

Q: If Kong is over 25 feet tall, how did he fit in your apartment?
A: How does he fit anywhere? It’s really amazing to see how he’s adapted to smaller spaces. As for my old place; super cathedral ceilings made possible by it being a penthouse. We literally put them in overnight between the moves using the crews who do “clean up cover ups” in matters of hours. Construction is like that, it would go really fast but the NWO runs the companies that do it and we drag it out to squeeze every dollar out of our victims.

Q: QAnon isn’t real? Are you kidding? What do you take me for, a fool?
A: Yes, no, and yes.

Q: These drugs Sorcha has been feeding people sound fun. Where can I get some? And do you really have to be a Satanist to get Adrenochrome?
A: What’s with the multi-part questions? The horrible mix of dangerous substances Sorcha used for mind control should never be taken “for fun,” just look what it did to Melania. You don’t think she was really in the hospital for her kidneys, do you? But if you insist on trying some despite my warnings, you can buy it online under the name “Miracle Mind Enslavement Elixir.” As for Adrenochrome, you can harvest it from the blood of the recently-killed-after-prolonged-terror yourself, but that tends to get you into trouble. Look at what happened to Hillary with that pizza place, and the terror was only the quality of the food (although it was simply awful). It’s much easier to simply pledge your soul to Satan, “make your bones” by killing some random innocent in a grisly manner, and get on the waiting list.

Q: Your stories make Satan sound like a regular guy, but in church he gets a bad rap. Which is true?
A: Plenty of regular guys get terrible things said about them. Genghis Khan liked nothing better than to kick back in his double-wide yurt with a tall mug of kumis, fermented mare’s milk. But did they remember that in the Chinese cities where he killed all the inhabitants and destroyed the buildings, leaving giant piles of their skulls behind? No, and not just because they were all dead, but because the Chinese were the ones who painted the scrolls and controlled the message. If Khan had known what he was doing, he would have trolled the scrolls, tweeted his own messages out, and never mixed it up with Kirk and the Enterprise.

Q: What’s with Hitler having only one ball, is that true?
A: There is a school of thought that something must have caused Hitler to become what he was, that something warped his brain (as if the trauma of fighting in WWI wouldn’t be enough). One theory had to do with a reticence to talk about or publicize his family, which despite simple explanations some insist was because of skeletons in the family closet. There were, especially relations between cousins, but the two “juiciest” rumors, that he had an illegitimate Jewish grandfather or monarchism (one testicle), and both come from political opponents who were also on the far-right but in movements shrinking in the early 1930’s due to Nazis growth. For the first one all the specific claims can be disproven, but for the second there is mixed evidence, with none of the credible pieces involving a goat. There was such an incident in that part of Austria (in the wrong year for the Grandmother’s farm visit, but close), and it is possible that that story got assigned to the future-dictator due to his notoriety.

Q: Hey, that last answer sounded pretty serious. What’s up?
A: How in the world could you know that? This isn’t an interactive session. And if you were a “real man” you would know when we talk about the family jewels, we get deadly serious.

Q: In the last two adventures you’ve explained away the impossible by saying they were simply hallucinations caused by drugs. What a lame literary device. I don’t really have a question, but just wanted to vent about that.
A: You’re correct, and thank you. I come by in honestly. In 1957 a long LIFE magazine photo-essay named “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” about Psilocybe use in Mexico caused an explosion of knowledge about psychedelic drugs and the beginning of them being referred to in popular culture. This became used in science fiction and adventure magazines, and moved into TV, which although heavy with Westerns at the time, also had some exotic adventure series. I remember an episode on a show called “The Troubleshooters” which had these people in the tropics seeing giant iguanas, but it was only the mushrooms slipped to them by the local witch doctor… Anyway, one of my favorite shows growing up was “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, where this plot device was used 4 times in 4 seasons. I remember two of these, both where this was used as a cheap-but-fast device to sew up all the impossibilities and loose ends, leaving the viewer going “Huh?” Need I say more?



A Review of a 1967 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode I remember from when it was first broadcast, “Sealed Orders.” It’s really bad, and if that makes you want to watch it, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zwc4KfQYNk

A Lovely Sort Of Danger
ShadeGrenade1 December 2009
Warning: Spoilers

As the 1960's progressed, so recreational drug taking ( particularly L.S.D. ) amongst the young exploded, and this was reflected in popular culture. Television programmes began to experiment with surrealism, as evidenced in shows such as 'The Prisoner' and 'The Avengers'. Even Irwin Allen's sci-fi shows were not immune.

'Sealed Orders' begins with Admiral Nelson opening and reading said orders. The President wants 'Seaview' to ferry a neutron bomb to a testing area. One of his crew, Kowalski, has unknowingly breached the seal on the device, and now it is giving off hallucinogenic fumes. The crew begins seeing things that just are not there, including sea monsters and rampaging aliens. They even begin to see each other disappearing mysteriously. As time runs out, it is left to Nelson to fight the effects of the bomb while finding a way to dispose of it before it kills them all...

Weirdness was not new in 'Voyage'; check out Season 2's 'Leviathan' and Season 3's 'The Day The World Ended' for earlier examples, but what makes this special are the psychedelic colours that whirl across the screen in the closing moments, combined with Nelson and co. running about in slow motion. It manages to out do Roger Corman's 'The Trip' ( 1966 ). The monsters had been in the show before; the first is from 'The Monster From Outer Space' ( Season 2 ) and the second is the 'Thing From Inner Space' ( Season 3 ).

Of course all is resolved satisfactorily at the end. Except...well, what happened to the missile expert from the Pentagon? He came aboard at the beginning. 'Chip' Morton ( Robert Dowdell ) recalls seeing him, but does not recall his name. The man's luggage is in his quarters. Yet, after the adventure is over, no-one thinks to ask what became of the guy. Hmmmm. I sense a conspiracy somewhere...

[Deep Knight]

Just for fun.

[Deep Knight]

A Fistful of Bitcoins
An Old School Deep Knight Adventure
Prologue – The Man with No Screen Name



The unnamed mule rider rode into town, and immediately got shot at by some thugs who were loafing along Main Street and good-naturedly unloading their guns at strangers. The man realized they were just having fun and didn’t take it personally, but his mule, not understanding their intentions, did. Everything was dry and dusty, and the wind blew tumbleweeds across the set. Suddenly, an ugly man appeared.

“Welcome to you, senor. My name is Patrick Henry Bellringer. I am the bell ringer,” he said in the way of introduction, “Why are you here?”

The mule rider rode on, ignoring this philosophically-loaded question. I mean, why are any of us here, and what does it all mean? Were Nietzsche and Heidegger right, making nihilism the thinking man’s only course? Anyone who saw merit in logical positivism wouldn’t touch that question with a 10 foot pole, and neither did the stranger, but that didn’t keep the ugly bell ringer from pressing him on the subject.

“To see the Rojos? No, not the Rojos. Is it the Baxters maybe? No, maybe not.”

Obviously someone who had trouble making up his mind. No doubt a Nietzsche-admiring Nihilist who still believed in a greater purpose. It didn’t take long to find out what the purpose was.

“You want to get rich? Well, it's the right place. If you use your head. That's because everybody here has become very rich, or else they are dead! What do you want to buy? Some guns? Liquor? You don't buy, you sell? You sell lead in exchange for gold? You will get rich here. Or you'll be killed. Patrick tolls the bell once again.”

Getting shot at and being talked at made the unnamed man hungry, and he sought out a cantina. The place was empty, which wasn’t surprising given the proprietor’s surly demeanor.

“We have enough trouble,” he suggested, as if he didn’t want more. “What are you looking for?”

“Food, somethin' to drink.”

“Water's over there.”

“No. No water.”

The proprietor’s eyebrow raised itself up slightly. The last time he had heard this attitude was when he tended a bar in Bavaria, and it was by mysterious secret-society types who never paid their bill. He suspected this would be no different. “Eating, drinking, killing. That's all you can do, just like the rest of your kind.”

“By the way, you'll have to mark this up.”

“I know, you have no money,” he said, smug in his prescience. “After all, you just got into town. But if you don't mind killing, you will find someone eager to pay you.”

“Yeah. Never saw a town as dead as this one,” he observed, “which stands to figure if everyone’s dead.”

“You will never see another like it.”

“What's wrong with the place?” asked the stranger.

“We've had too many killings,” answered the proprietor. “You have seen the women? None of them are women, they're widows. The place has only widows.”

The stranger nodded, even though in previous adventures he had known widows more wanton than the story's majority of woman who hadn’t experienced a husband or two getting knocked-off during initial plot development. The grief and agony get them “seasoned” as they say, and he liked his mindless encounters spicy, although not extra-crispy like ones left too long in the Mexican desert’s sun. Everything in moderation. But there was no sense in insulting his host’s tastes, so he wisely let the roadhouse owner go on.

“Here, you can only gain respect by killing other men. So nobody works. Instead they sell guns and liquor to those who come down from Texas for spring break. I know that sounds like work which would make my statement nonsense, but that’s advanced economics for you.”

“Somebody doesn't share your opinion,” noted the stranger, motioning to an old, bearded guy who had been giving him the eye while shaving a plank of wood on the veranda. His beard was long, wild and bushy, in a word, ugly and unflattering. If he had really wanted to attract the stranger’s interest, he should have shaved himself.

“That’s Piripero, the local coffin maker. Marxist firebrand and shop steward of local Funeral Workers Union, and also its only member. You should have smelled the town last year when he went on strike because the corpses wouldn’t negotiate his demand for state ownership of the means of coffin production. You know why Piripero looked you over? To take your measurements. He can do it with a glance. You will be a customer. I'm not joking. Those murderers will make a corpse out of you one day. That's why I want you to get out of here.”

“Any town that sells guns and liquor has gotta be rich.”

“Not the town. Only those who buy and sell. The bosses are the ones who clean up. But that’s only until they build the wall on the border, which I understand we peons will have to pay for.”

“Somebody has to run the place. Every town has a boss. Look at Chicago.”

“That's true, but when there are two, I'd say that there is one too many.”

“Two bosses? Very interesting.”

“Interesting is right. The Rojos, three brothers who sell liquor. And then there's the Baxters, big gun merchants. Both give aid and comfort to traveling MS-13 gang members, of course. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. For example, if I'm not mistaken, you already met some of Baxter's gang and joked around with them.”

“Yeah, we met,” replied the stranger, remembering the men who shot at him and his mule only minutes before.

“But you're lucky. They don't usually limit their fire to the mule. A man looks around for any reason, Patrick Bellringer tolls the bell, Piripero sells another coffin.” Hearing his name spoken by the eatery’s proprietor, the strange, ugly bell ringer joined the group, as the man’s advice continued. “Two bosses. They've enlisted all the scum from both sides of the frontier. And they pay in dollars. Baxters over there. Rojos there.”

The stranger smiled. “And me right in the middle.”

“Where you do what?” asked the inquisitive innkeeper.

“Don’t you see?” intoned the coffin-making commie. “Just like the capitalists during the Great Patriotic War,” “when they watched from the sidelines like football-playing vultures as Comrade Stalin slugged it out with the forces of fascism, waiting to feast on the winner.”

“That’s a lie,” spat out Bellringer, coming to attention and clicking his sandaled heels. “The Bolsheviks were playing our glorious Fuhrer against the decadent democracies, then they stabbed us in the back by forcing us to invade them!”

“Fascist Pig!”

“Subhuman tool of Communist International Bankers!”

“You two stop it!” commanded the proprietor, getting out a baseball bat and whacking both of them in the head a few times. “Last time you two went at it, one of you drove you tanks through my goat pen, even though it was neutral territory.

The batty bell ringer blushed in an obvious show of guilt, but doubled down on what had obviously been a previous denial, ranting and raving about the Deep State, fake news, and conspiracies involving the cuckoo coffin maker. With a noticeably-annoyed look on his face, the stranger drew his sixgun and shot the still-screaming Bellringer right between the eyes.

“I may have just killed him, but the crazy bell-ringer was right. There's money to be made in a place like this.”

“If you're thinking what I suspect - I tell you, don't try it.”

“Which one of the two is the stronger?”

“Which one of them is stronger?” repeated the proprietor. “Well, the Rojos, especially Ramon. They are ruthless and never bathe. The Baxters don’t bathe either, but Consuelo, the woman, douses herself with perfume, thinking it will cover the smell. It doesn’t.”

The stranger turned to the coffin maker and spoke, “Get three coffins ready.”

“Huh?” he replied knowingly.

“Are you going to kill the three men who harassed you and your mule as you rode into town? If so, it will be an iconic scene and I want to watch!” commented the proprietor, a wide smile on his face.

“Maybe later, but right now I need one coffin for Bellringer here, and two for the men who were making that whiny kid cry in the house by the well as I came into town. I hate crying kids, it’s why I don’t fly anymore but travel by mule instead.”

“It’s because Ramón separated the child from his mother. Some say he forces her to live with him, others that it’s something he learned at the border.”

“I personally don’t care who, what, or why. I understand the men were playin' around by separating children from their mothers. But my mule, he just doesn't get it. See, my mule don't like children cryin’ either. He gets the idea that they’ll make his children cry, then remembers that being a mule he’s completely infertile. That pisses him off too. Now, if they’d apologize, like I know they would never do, I might convince him that they really didn't mean it. But since they won’t and my mule doesn’t speak English, I doubt it. With his hooves he has trouble handling a knife, but he's deadly with a sixgun, especially when he's mad. I don't think two men cowardly enough to bully children will be much of a problem.”

To Be Continued…

[LaVidaRoja]

At least this adventure has a good soundtrack!

[Deep Knight]

A Fistful of Bitcoins
An Old School Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 1 – The Perils of Polyamory



The seven Delta Force Green Berets, dressed in black ninja suits and wearing night-vision goggles, moved slowly into the large, darkened room. They were on some sort of stage, it was hard to tell with the goggles, which they wore because they made them look kinda cool, like the Borg on Star Trek. Suddenly the lights grew less-dim and they saw they were surrounded by black-robed figures who started chanting a Satanic chant.

"We invoke thee, the Terrible One, who dwellest in eternal darkness, in the void place of the spirit. Abrahadabra! Abrahadabra! Abrahadabra! Oh darkened Sun! Oh blackened eye! Thy eye, thy lust, thy phallus, thy hairy scrotum! Cry aloud! Cry aloud! Cry aloud three times! Three times is the key, do not do it 4 times or 2 times unless that second time is followed by a third. It’s easy, don’t mess it up. O Prince of Darkness, we praise thee! Thou art really cool, hansom, sexy, smart, and exalted! And now for some fun and human sacrifice in thy name!"

The invading commandos let loose with everything their arsenal of portable weapons included, including the Gatling gun. When the smoke cleared, the well-perforated robed figures were still there, but a keened-eyed commando could have seen the heavy weapons they had once obscured. Luckily none of the invaders were that observant, and it was in the midst of high-fives that the chanting began anew. Individual gunshots were used as punctuation for the words, and are shown as the symbol “#” in the transcript below. And please excuse my describing the sound firing a large-caliber recoilless weapon that immediately makes a body explode a “gunshot.”

Bring me my bow # of burning gold! #
Bring me my arrows # of desire! #
Bring me my spear! # O clouds, unfold! #
Bring me my chariot of fire! #

Deep Knight pushed back his robe’s hood as he finished the ritual that opened meetings of the Council of The Twelve. “Brothers and Sisters in evil,” he began, emphasizing the serious nature of this particular address by referring to himself in the third person in the narrative. “We Illuminati are at a crossroads, and need to decide how to go forward in the Trump era. All of our traditional underhanded methods have proven ineffective with an adversary who doesn’t play by the rules. The best we seem to be able to do is remain at a stalemate, both sides neither winning nor losing.”

I switched back to narrating in the first person and paused to let my point sink in. Then I started on my boring and mostly-pointless story, which I will embellish here to make it longer and more confusing. It started when I read an old report that had somehow gotten stuck in the back of a filing cabinet I was using as a prop for a broken flume on a low-head diversion dam in my private washroom. The report was so old that when it was written dollars were worth something, and it detailed how an Illuminati operative ended up with a fistful of them by playing both sides against each other the other side of the border. He pulled it off by being deceitful and ruthless, with his only mistake being an act of kindness which almost cost him his life. A lesson for us all, nice guys finish last, or have to lug a heavy steel plate to a gunfight, which is almost as bad. At least the accompanying music was good.

Then I realized, the same thing had been done to the New World Order, time after time after time. Just look at our recent war with Trump. The White Knights/Hats who were also the Deep State cleaned up by syphoning-off the monies the New World Order and Trump Administration poured into the battle, convinced by them that victory was just around the corner. Sure we recovered a lot of it once we found out, using good ol’ elbow grease, intimidation and murder, but we would have gotten at least twice as much if we had been at the front of the payout line to begin with. Then, when pasting some platitudes into our final report’s “lessons learned” section, I realized I HAD learned a valuable lesson. Go figure. Playing fair was for chumps. We should be the ones betraying both sides and reaping the benefits firsthand! It was a bold and initially disturbing idea, but not if you looked at it as if it was a group sex act. Then the concept became natural because, obviously, in a cluster@#$! the best place to be is in the middle. Duh!

“What do you mean, we play both sides against each other. We ARE one of the sides,” screeched Hillary, showing once more her slavish obedience to logic, ignoring the many times it had gotten her in trouble. But we still kept her on the 15-seat council, as once we cooled off we appreciated her even-higher priority of doing evil, not to mention homicidal skills that rivaled history’s greatest mass murderers. One wonders how she had time to attend meetings like this.

“I mean exactly that,” I clarified, “we play ourselves against both ourselves and the Trump administration. Sure we’ll hobble our efforts, but we’ll hobble his too, and make a huge profit off both! This will more than pay for the money we loose on our hopeless effort to topple the democratically elected government that we installed after he made the winning bid for fixing the election.”

It was like a light went on behind Satan’s eyes, which is kind of hard to see as his eyes look like glowing red coals, but once you’ve gotten to know him you can tell. I believe it was primarily the idea of making enough money we could finally get beyond the budget cuts that had crippled our field operations. But he tried to act stern as he addressed my suggestion.

“My god, Deep, that’s evil. Truly evil. Hmmm. So evil that I like it! Why haven’t we thought of this before?”

Taking Satan’s lead (it never hurt to suck up to the boss), the others on the 15-member council agreed. Even Hillary, who I know wished she had thought of it herself, and Satan’s mom along with her paramour Kong who were “sitting in” in their capacity of either directly or indirectly directing the Deep State. Which was good, because in my plan we would use this recently-traitorous organization as a “front” for our double-and-triple crossing activities. Still, I felt it wise to give them an example, as some level of understanding would both aid their council activities and this story’s development.

“Take for example the Mueller probe. Trump is willing to pay billions to keep it from finding out about his questionable business activities, like money laundering, littering, disturbing the peace, and contract murder. So he he’s been outbidding us with Mueller, and you’ve seen the disappointing results. We’ll put our people in as Mueller’s agents, Kong can pay him a visit and arrange it, then have them play hardball with both the Trump and DNC people to max out cash flow. Hell, given the disruption Trump’s tariffs had had on world markets, we can probably get paid by a couple dozen foreign governments too. I estimate that this single initiative will net us more than $4 billion a month. That’s almost $50 billion a year.”

Satan was almost drooling as his eyes scanned the figures in my Power Point presentation. All that money he could waste with his foolish schemes and ever more-foolish carnal liaisons. Good, his enthusiasm was necessary for such a radical plan. No doubt others on the council would be trying to stab me in the back once the excitement had died down, especially that DuPont bitch. I mean, she should have known it could only be a one-time thing, regardless of what I promised her. So, I doubled down on hooking the Big Guy by upping that income by a factor of 20.

“Then there’s Korea, immigration, the midterm elections, the Supreme Court, the lying media, draining the swamp, filling the swamp, improving swamp infrastructure, tax reform, gun control, and the religious rights of wedding cake decorators. I conservatively estimate the income from making empty promises to both sides about these issues at $1 trillion in the next 12 months, with an expenditure of only a bit above $100 billion dollars to keep up the appearances of trying to destroy Trump. And, with any luck, some of those attacks on the President would actually hurt him, not because they had to for my scheme to work, but because it would be fun. After all, job satisfaction is important.”

Kong roared in agreement and Satan almost beamed at the rosy picture I had painted for him. And who knew, it might even work like I had laid it out for him. Stranger things had happened. But I was pleased for another reason, I needed Satan’s help. I know that sounds crazy, but in my research on the “Fistful” incident I noticed the incidental references to the New World Order doing the same thing during WWII, and wanted to learn from those experiences. I know that sounds out of character, and perhaps it is, but I was also sure there were multiple juicy stories associated with playing dictators off against one another. Not only is everything old new again, these “strongmen” were actually notorious sissy boys and perverts, and I’m pretty sure the Big Guy wouldn’t spare the embellishments.

“They were some of my greatest students, but also my greatest disappointments,” began the Prince of Darkness. “I should have known Hitler wasn’t to be trusted when he had his barber do that to his mustache. And then when Mussolini and Franco both shaved their pubes …”

To Be Continued…

[Deep Knight]

A Fistful of Bitcoins
An Old School Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 2 – For a Few Footnotes More



“You have to understand how things were 100 years ago,” began Satan yet once more when we had settled into plush chairs and dry martinis in his office. “We had just killed 18 million people more or less in WWI, many at the end having succumbed to the Spanish flu (1) which was like icing on the cake. It felt like we could do anything and the sky was the limit, so when the Mussolini made a bid to be the dictator of Italy, we jumped at it. Then it was like a dam broke, and we had trouble processing the massive number of requests. Stalin, Hitler, and Franco were the heavy hitters, but there were dozens of others, some of whom are no more than a footnote today. “ (2)

“Unfortunately, they soon discovered that the more absolute their power, the less hold we had on them. I mean, if some president or senator got out of line, we would simply have him voted out in the next election. But dictators abolished elections, and that leverage. Then there were modern armies. Once upon a time kings and popes trembled at the thought of being assailed by our minions attacking their castles carrying pitchforks and torches, but not once they had machine guns and tanks. So, one after another, they stopped answering my calls and went independent.”

The old demon was telling the truth for once, which should have been a warning right then and there, but I ignored it. I had heard about stories from old, grey Illuminati when I was a young recruit about French Foreign Minister Laval warning Stalin about his opposition to the traditional forces of evil, and he famously replied, “The Devil, how many divisions has he got?” (3) The Big Guy should have known that once one of them got away with it, others would follow, and come down on them like a scythe at the very beginning. It’s said he always had a soft spot for Mussolini. Probably something having to do with Italian food or some perversion having to do with the shape of his bald head.

“Hitler was the worst,” the Prince of Darkness admitted, “he thumbed his nose and bared his bottom at me at every opportunity. Sure we sent assassins, but they inevitably got seduced by the sharp uniforms and mass rallies and joined the SS. Loyalty was a thing of the past. But I had the last laugh in the end, when mister smarty-pants Stalin came crawling to me on his belly whining that the Germans were only 25 miles from Moscow and begging for help. I made him pay, alright, and it was sweet. Especially considering how he purged a lot of guys I used to party with when I hung out with Lenin. Stalin had Lenin killed, you know, it used to be the subject of a popular children’s hopscotch rhyme: “(4)

“Stalin’s got a gun,
Lenin you better run!
He’s got an ice axe too,
Trotsky, that’s for you!”

“But didn’t you hang out with Hitler in the early days, discovering him in a run-down beerhall and giving him his first big break in the dictator business?” I asked, hoping three quarters of a century had dulled the heartache.

“Yeah, but it started way before that. In Vienna, before the war, when he was a tramp standing in soup lines. Most demons wouldn’t have given two pfennigs for his soul, but I saw potential. And he was one sweet talker. Too bad I didn’t know he had a chip on his shoulder about goats, and was just using me.”

“You mean he really did only have one testicle, having lost one to a goat’s sharp incisors?” I asked, having trouble hiding my shit-eating grin. Hitler was not well liked in our business, he gave evil a bad name.

“I don’t know why you think I saw Heir Hitler’s nutsack, but yes, the rumors were true. All of them, including the one about him and his niece in a Bavarian barnyard. I was there, and taking pictures. Then there were the Stormtrooper girls in crotch-less lederhosen…”

I knew the old pervert mixed it up with some pretty seedy characters, but this as a new low. I understand Gladys had been really pissed, and made him sleep on the couch until the early 50’s. But as entertaining as this was, I realized Satan had evil to get done before the end of the business day, and in a strange fit of responsibility I coaxed him into focusing on the subject at hand, “playing both sides against each other.” (5)

“Stalin and his sycophants used to piss and moan about how Great Britain and America waited for the Nazi’s and them to slug it out before coming in late to get their share of the spoils. Of course, this conveniently overlooks the lack of sufficient resources until 1944, but you know how communists like to complain. Strangely, there are Americans who grouse that they shouldn’t have helped Russia in WWII, but actually let them and the Nazis beat each other to a standstill. Then, Patton could have led his tank columns to Moscow, returning in triumph to win the 1948 presidential election…”

I would have forced him to focus once more, but I was weary of playing the game. (6) So I wrapped the meeting up and decided to talk to Hillary instead. They didn’t call her “crooked” for nothing, besides which, she was well-read in every form of felony known to man. Considering her many skills and all-around competence, it’s a real shame we didn’t fix the election for her last time, but business is business.

It was like what they said about the ancient philosophers (7), but only more so. So there you have it, delay would only make it worse, and one way or the other the Oompa Loompas would still have the same skin tone as Donald Trump. “Lock her up” is easy for his supporters to chant, but if I have anything to say someday they’re going to have to lay a little pipe, if you know what I mean. (8)

To Be Continued…

(1) Somewhat like regular flu (influenza), but different in the same way that Spanish fly differs from regular fly.
(2) See, what did I tell you?
(3) This is usually and incorrectly written as if he was asking the question about the Pope, which of course would be silly. At the time His Holiness had 5 divisions of Swiss Guards, 3 of them fully armored.
(4) In English even though it was chanted in Russia. This was to keep one step ahead of the secret police, few of whom spoke that language.
(5) In this case “play” refers to a theatrical production.
(6) Pinochle (sometimes spelled “penuchle” or “pee-knuckle”)
(7) “Euripides pants, Eumenides pants!”
(8) Given how your mind is in the gutter, you probably do.
(9) A guy walks into a bar and takes a seat. Before he can order a beer, the bowl of pretzels in front of him says "Hey, you're a handsome fellow." The man tries to ignore the bowl of pretzels, and orders a fine Pilsner beer. The bowl of pretzels then says "Ooooh, a pilsner, great choice. You're a smart man." Starting to freak out, the guy says to the bartender "Hey what the hell, this bowl of pretzels keeps saying nice things to me!" Bartender says "Don't worry about it, the pretzels are complimentary."

[Deep Knight]

A Fistful of Bitcoins
An Old School Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 3 – The Good, the Bad, and the Front-Office-Appearance-Challenged



Hillary was busy sacrificing children to Moloch when I caught up with her at the pizza restaurant. She was using a new technique, having them hung by a clueless one-horse-town sheriff, but at the last possible moment shooting the rope to “let them escape.” Then it was repeated, over and over in the blazing desert sun, amplifying the terror until “Crooked Shootin’ Hillary” missed the rope. Some might say it was foolish doing this is public, especially after all the recent publicity, but Secretary Clinton is one of those “hide it in plain sight” girls you hear about in back alleys and locker rooms. I’m glad, because its contribution to Adrenochrome production was welcome, given the drain on our supplies since Satan’s mom and Kong had moved to DC. Being more than 25 feet tall, the big ape requires a slightly larger than normal dose, and of course you’ve heard about his better-half’s appetites when it comes to dangerous toxins.

Hillary was glad to talk about her and Bill’s use of “triangulation” during “their” administration (she was the true power behind the throne). This was a strategy in which one presents their ideology as being above or between the left and right sides (or "wings") of the democratic political spectrum. As such, it involves adopting for oneself some of the ideas of one's political opponent, which pisses off your side but gains you some across-the-isle support, which pisses off their side. This is the key to the successful use of this strategy, pissing everyone off, which was right up the former First Lady’s alley.

“But,” I complained, “this sounds more to me like compromise, a mature and sober approach to effective politics. That’s completely at odds with what I read on the internet, which in no uncertain terms stated that triangulation was the strategy of Satan himself, which of course piqued my interest. There it was presented as a manipulative device to engineer rivalry between two people, in other words ‘divide and conquer’ or playing one person against another. Unfortunately, they neither gave details nor helpful hints on how to get started.”

“I wish,” sighed Hillary. “That would only have worked if we could have manipulated relationships between two outside parties by controlling communication between them, which we failed … er, obviously didn’t happen here. But I’m not surprised. Everything we did was vilified, mostly because it was all a cover for villainy.”

“Villainy is exactly what I’m looking for, but it needs to be something more ‘edgy’ than negotiated compromise. You know, a fiendish conspiracy with a real impact. An idea that when we take it to the lab and put it on the slab, movers and shakers will rush to hook high voltage cables to its electrodes.”

“Well, there was one idea I had, but all our advisors advised against it. Way too risky and, quite frankly, stupid.”

She had me at “advised against,” so I asked her to please elaborate by saying, “Please elaborate.”

“Well, since we were being accused of doing some of the most horrible things imaginable, why not do them? I don’t mean this,” she said, indicating the Adrenochrome harvesting, “which is less work and more of a hobby. But activities like founding the terrorist organization ISIS. Sure, we did the responsible thing and let the Iraqis and Syrians have that one, but what did it cost us? I don’t only mean in ill-gotten gains, but prestige. The Illuminati brand would be worth a lot more today if one of the ‘I’s in ‘ISIS’ stood for ‘Illuminati’ and not whatever they actually do.”

I got out my notebook and we quickly made a list of websites to visit to get some ideas. Alex Jones’ Prison Planet, Above Top Secret, QAnon, Idiots With Delusions, and of course NESARA News. This last one distilled down the crazy to certain select articles that not only were poorly written, they made absolutely no sense. I figured they had to contain a wealth of good ideas.

But I couldn’t leave without digging my spurs into Hillary’s flanks and watching her flinch. Never gets old. “You know, you could really up Adrenochrome production if you took the kids out of those ‘frightening factories’ you have places-nobody-real-can-visit-and-confirm, and sent them down to the border instead. I understand that ICE and Border Patrol not only have new techniques, they’ll terrorize the kids on the taxpayer’s dime. Strange that folks who get all bent out of shape about Pizzagate support that kind of border stuff, but people are funny.”

Secretary Clinton thanked me in the most sarcastic way possible, her impulse to shoot at me rather than a hangman’s rope restrained by my high position. It did distract her long enough that the victim she was tormenting as I entered finally met his or her merciful end. If you’ve ever been around for an Adrenochrome harvest, you’ll know why I left immediately in a dead run, and not out of fear of reprisal for the implied criticism of my suggestion. I know that as an evil Satanist I’m supposed to like these sorts of things, but each of us has his quirks. I didn’t like the wood chipper scene in the movie Fargo either.

Alex Jones’ site was a wealth of information. It’s actually two sites (apparently we in an “information war” to see who gets to run our “prisoner planet), both of them almost glowing with crazy. Even though this meant most of the schemes you found were impossible (we’ve tried to find chemicals that turn the frogs gay, doesn’t work) or prohibitively expensive (tunnels between the alien bases that are beneath all the closed Wallmarts), there were enough completely “out of the box” evil schemes to fill a man’s heart. For example, last year he declared that “Bill Gates is a eugenicist trying to wipe out minorities.” We use Bill to build evil into software applications (why else do you think your computer works like it does?), not as a mass murderer, but when you think about it, they’re not that different. So, I’ll put the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in charge of the New World Order’s mass eugenics mission! After all, they’re a philanthropic organization aimed at improving the health and education of children around the globe, which is only a hop, skip and jump away from being an evil entity vying for global domination. “I know who Bill Gates is,” Jones blabbed, adding that the billionaire software developer’s father was a “top eugenicist,” because Bill “Pearly” Gates Sr. served on the board of Planned Parenthood. Jones went on to say that IBM – for whom he says Gates is just a “front” – was set up as a eugenics trust with “the expressed mission of creating a world-wide race-based system and funded Adolf Hitler.”

Well, I don’t know if we could get IBM on board (or would want to, they’re so “technologically yesterday”), but Bill Gates owes his fortune to Satan, and is pledged to do his bidding (or that of his legally designated representative). It was time to get this up and running, and then leak enough information about it we get a good media buzz going. When you control all the major networks it’s easy. Then, get a bidding war started for us to stop it! Then, we accept all bids and lie about the results. Bill will get bored with mass murder (people usually do, it’s not nearly as interesting as it sounds), let the project slide, and it will sort of take care of itself. A truly evil plan, I impressed even myself with my ability to steal it.

To Be Continued…

[Deep Knight]

A Fistful of Bitcoins
An Old School Deep Knight Adventure
Chapter 4 – They Died with their Freak On



I am a genius. Stealing the idea of stealing ideas from wacky wingnut websites from Hillary, I propagated the rumor that Bill Gates, his wife, and their foundation were killing minority children. Why anyone would want to do this is beyond me, and my “evil” credentials are impeccable, but for some reason people are willing to believe the worst. Bill himself didn’t have to do much, just “confirm” the rumor we were pasting all over social media by clumsily denying it, and then go into seclusion. Alex Jones, so shocked at one of his wild statements finally panning out that he almost had a heart attack, strutted and crowed like a hopped-up capon, and the money poured in as the rumor spread. All of this was devious and evil, sure, but not what I’m offering as evidence of my genius. By a stroke of pure inspiration, I picked the conspiracy that played both sides of both sides against the middle!

Take the left tribe, er, side for example. Half the bleeding heart liberals wanted to save the children, regardless of who was killing them, while the other half was happy to go with anything Microsoft put out. I mean, if you don’t like the app, don’t use it! Put as an internet freedom and web neutrality issue, the ACLU and Silicon Valley got on board and we got a surprising number of huge checks. On the right, there were also two sub-tribes, the “we hate anything Bill Gates does and/or believe anything Alex Jones says” group that sent us an overwhelming number of small donations, some of them in Dinars, and another contingent that simply liked the idea of killing minorities. Unfortunately the last group was more into marching with Tiki torches than donating, but when they did the former we cleaned up on black t-shirt sales.

But, this wasn’t all! Like a game of telephone, a surprising number of people heard the appeal of “We’ve got to rescue those kids from Bill Gates” as “We’ve got to rescue those kids from the cave.” Frantic with concern, people who wanted to “do something” got snared by the site we hastily put-up after discovering this. By syphoning off humanitarian funds through fraud we were crossing an ethical line few would dare to even approach, but someone’s gotta do it. Then there were the foreign countries and international terrorist organizations who were interested in funding the killing of Americans of any color or creed. Sure, the Illuminati had burned its bridges when it came to ISIS (professional jealousy), but the Illuminati within the Illuminati had no such track record. Unfortunately, once again a significant amount of these donations came in as Dinar, Dong, Zim, or currencies even less-valuable (how can you be worth less than “worthless?”).

Even with a roomful of DeLaRue currency scanners we couldn’t keep up, so we started weighing boxes to cash to estimate their value. Then we couldn’t keep up with that (the overworked scales started to emit whiffs of smoke), we shrink-wrapped it on pallets, loaded them into semi-trucks, and weighted a continuous line of trucks. Business was good and Illuminati stocks soared!

The Prince of Darkness was happy for a couple of days (which is rare, given the proximity of his wife and mother), but then got this bug up his butt about “the next project.” I cautioned him against moving too fast, part of my plan was to let our enemies get committed to the idea that this was our new “thing” and blindside them when we suddenly change course. The timing would be linked to cash flow, of course, maximizing profits was always a good argument with the Big Guy. But I hadn’t sufficiently accounted for his famous short attention span, and he was ready for a new toy to play with. To be honest I hadn’t had a chance to pick another non-existent conspiracy to breathe life into (it had to be even more underhanded and devious as the first, come review time Illuminati HR wants to see professional growth at all levels), and I was planning on “consulting” with Hillary first. So I winged it.

There was a buzz online last month that Pope Francis said that Christian missionaries are a lot like ISIS and had ordered European women to “breed” with Muslim migrants. I suggested that we have His Holiness expand on that theme, stressing the second part in xenophobia-stoking ways. I figured that it was sufficiently different from mass murder, and had the double word-score of manipulating prejudices of and about both Catholics and Moslems! Nothing like a little religious war. Unfortunately, Satan rejected it out of hand.

“That new Pope is impossible. I almost get the feeling he’s resisting me. Just recently I read a report about how he’s secretly expanding the Swiss Guard and buying them Stealth Fighters to replace his Dassault Mirage 2000s. The excuse that he needed new tanks to keep the faithful in line when they visit Saint Peters was lame enough, and who knows what he’s going to brew up to cover this bullshit.”

“We could always blackmail him,” I countered, “by threatening to expose his involvement in getting those kids lost in that cave in Thailand…”

“By the time we arranged that, it would be old news,” complained Satan, “and I want something new. What else you got?”

I was cornered and there was no way out, well, except for the obvious one of stalling for time.

“Look at the time! I need to run down to the receiving dock and make sure all of that cash is getting counted right when it gets deposited into our account,” I lied. “We’re dealing with an international bank, and you know how international bankers are…”

“OK,” said Satan, trying hard not to drool, “But let’s have a meeting first this late afternoon where we can review your ideas. And they better be good!”

To Be Continued…