Saga Of The European King

Everyone gathered around the unconscious King. His face was a bloody mess. There was a heavy amount of sadness in the air. Roxy Tripfoot cleaned up his face the best she could with her rabbits, but though she could heal his outer wounds, she could do nothing about the hurt he felt on the inside. But Michael had a plan. It was to do with the King’s mind.

We haven’t talked much about the King’s mind. You all know how great the King is in the world of the body, but that is nothing compared to how strong he is on the Astral Plane. It’s actually quite frustrating for the King to have a body at all. It isn’t nearly as tough and heroic as his mind is, which gets to him sometimes.

Once, when he was fighting Mystic Boy (who was from the past, which is quite a mystical place, if you think about it) on top of Mount Fighting, the King realised that even he could not keep up with the constant stream of hadokens and fly kicks that Mystic Boy was shooting out at him, so he decided to trick Mystic Boy into fighting him on the Astral Plane. Mystic Boy thought this was pretty funny, as he’d picked up all his best skills from the senseis and item shops that are on the Astral Plane and reckoned that he’d beat the King there even more easily than he would in real life. So they both sat down and meditated and then the King’s mind kicked Mystic Boy’s mind so hard that he was in a coma for a year and his girlfriend left him because she just couldn’t deal with it.

So the King was on the Astral Plane now, doing one of his favourite things – fighting Inner Demons. Inner Demons were like real demons, only a hundred times more. You couldn’t really ever kill them, just make them less powerful for a little while. If you stopped fighting them, they would just grow and grow and grow and then it would be a real headache to fight them again. The King was throwing flykick after flykick at some Inner Demons, and they were shrinking with every one. But there was one Inner Demon that he couldn’t shrink down small enough to just laugh off, and that Inner Demon was BETRAYAL. He kept uppercutting it and sweep kicking it, but it just didn’t care. It was becoming a real problem, and that hurt the King – knowing that there was a problem that he could not easily solve. He was about to get really depressed, because BETRAYAL just wasn’t shrinking small enough when Michael appeared and smashed BETRAYAL to bits with a flykick that, had it been in the real world where things are generally pretty wussy, would have caused the Moon to explode.

The King smiled. BETRAYAL was tinier than a mouse now, and could not do any harm to anything on the Astral Plane for a while. He turned to Michael, who wasn’t even out of breath. Michael and the King had a special connection, because they were basically the same guy. He and Michael could hook up on the Astral Plane whenever they liked and Michael could give valuable insight and strength on just about everything because he had a different perspective and wasn’t like other people. The King and Michael high-fived, then had a hug that would have snapped a man in two, had it happened in real life.
“Thanks for helping a brother out, Michael.” Said the King, and he meant it.
“We’re all real worried about you, Your Highness. Your ex got away, and you’re hurt pretty bad.” Said Michael. The King paused and sniffed the air.
“One of my hearts has stopped.” He said.
“I came here to take you to them.” Said Michael. “You need to see for yourself.”
Now, all this might look like Michael is better than the King on the Astral Plane, because Michael can shrink Inner Demons and is powerful enough to take the King to see his hearts, but that isn’t true. When Michael is near the King on the Astral Plane, their special connection allows them both to power-up by sharing the power they both have. So it wasn’t just Michael who flykicked BETRAYAL, but it was the King AND Michael, in a way. The Astral Plane works like that. It is one of the many reasons why sharing is so important.

So the King took Michael’s hand and, combining their power, flew up high, higher than the King had ever dared to fly before on the Astral Plane. It took a long time. Michael and the King talked on the way. They talked about Oranje, what she was like in the old days, and how bad David must feel. There were monsters and towns along the way, and they dealt with them in the appropriate manner. After a few levels, they arrived at the King’s hearts. On the Astral Plane, the King’s hearts were red castles, bigger than any castle in the real world, that bustled with life and people and their own economical and political structure. They visited each one, talking to some of the thousands of people who lived in each of the castles, getting the feel of how they were doing, giving out presents and treasures from all the stuff they had done along the way and so on. Everyone in the King’s hearts was glad to see the pair, and knew all about their travels and their hardships and their quest to kill Winter. They wished them luck as they left, and waved until they had flown out of sight, then wondered when they would visit again.

The eighth castle was different, of course. The King had donated one of his hearts to Terrorthaw when he had been mauled by animals this one time and would have died. Despite everything that had happened between the King and Terrorthaw, the King had remembered what it had been like when they had been friends, and had saved Terrorthaw’s life. On the Astral Plane, the castle was still there, because the spirit of the heart was still with the King but it was now the domain of Terrorthaw. The castle was just as big as the seven others they had seen, but it was dark blue, and evil. The walls were twisted, ugly and full of spikes. There were no people in the towns, just hyenas and skeletons. Birds guarded everything that was cool or useful. The King and Michael flew up to the highest tower of the castle and found Terrorthaw on the roof.

“So, you finally decided to visit your old heart,” said Terrorthaw. “Do you like what I’ve done with the place?” then Terrorthaw laughed and laughed. It was a relaxed laugh. He wasn’t about to start a fight – he knew better than to start anything with the King on the Astral Plane – so he was just laughing because he thought he was funny. “But seriously, man. I’m sorry about Oranje. It had nothing to do with me. She was a real keeper, back in the day.”

The King nodded, and knew that it was true. Terrorthaw had been the King’s best man at his wedding, even though they had tried to kill each other dozens of times before that point. Terrorthaw was just happy that the King had found a good wife. He wore his best suit at the wedding, and it wasn’t even one that boosted his strength a hundred-fold or was atomic powered or anything. At the reception, he had summoned some demons and stuff to try and kill the guests, but that was more out of habit than trying to be a dick. The King had understood.

“What you need to do, Kingy, is find out who she is working for. The only people who are supposed to be on the Moon are NASA, better start with them. Maybe they’ve got her brainwashed or have put a chip in her head.” This is Terrorthaw speaking. “That’s what I’d do if I wanted to get to you like that.”

They left Terrorthaw’s heart and flew on to the ninth and final heart. It was the one that had imploded. The castle had fallen on the town, crushing it completely. There was no one alive in the ruins. Not one thing that was cool or useful had survived. The King knelt there in the ruins of his heart and wept. He wept so hard that everyone in the other hearts could feel it in their teeth, and all the hyenas in Terrorthaw’s heart hid under tables and whined. When at last he had stopped weeping, the King saw, floating high, high, high up in the sky above the ruins of his heart, a little speck. It was an astronaut, floating away in the loneliest, emptiest part of the Astral Plane. The King knew what was going on.
“Ric.” He said. “We need to find Ric. He is the key to all of this.”
Michael nodded. He had come to the Astral Plane to make sure that the King knew this. Of course, the King had known it all along. He had known it as soon as he had laid eyes on Carolyn for the first time. He put his hand on the King’s shoulder and they were back on the Moon. The King had awoken.

He was in a bedroom in a house inside the city on the Moon. He had been unconscious for seven days.

Time works differently on the Astral Plane.

End Of Chapter 36