Saga Of The European King

A lot happened in the seven days that the King spent hanging out on the Astral Plane. Stories happened. People died.

Okay, so the King is out for the count. Roxy Tripfoot is cleaning up his face and Michael is leading his band (along with Leonard Cohen and Burzum, who didn’t really need leading, but just rocked out according to their own hearts, which just happened to be perfectly in synch with Michael’s) in an awesome song about healing and getting better. Michael is secretly logging on to the Astral Plane while he is playing and the two really hot Jerusalem girls are rocking out so hard that it’s like they are having sex with everyone who sees or hears them. That’s the scene. Oh, and there’s this city on the Moon and there’s this mysterious woman that you don’t know anything about yet, except that she’s got a spy-bird and she’s got it in for the King – so much so that she keeps his ex on the payroll so that she can kill him extra hard on the off-chance of him actually showing up.

That was the point where Roxy stood up and used her gypsy intuition to make a completely correct analysis of the situation. “It’s the King’s fight now. We must do all we can to protect his body while his mind…” she stopped talking because doubt had made her intuition stop. Roxy knew about the Astral Plane and Inner Demons and stuff. She had learned a lot about all that kind of thing in Hell, where people don’t often talk about ordinary subjects, but she had heard it all hundreds of years ago and she thought that maybe the Astral Plane had changed in all that time. Maybe it was more modern and the rules had changed, she thought. She didn’t know that time works differently there.

So now the problem was: who’s going to be the leader? The King was out of it and now Michael had stopped faking it and was just sitting there, meditating heavily. David was still too young to be wise and strong and Colonel Glowfist was too fat to be taken seriously any more. Axe Axewound was a prince, but he was more of a comic relief kind of guy. He was Scottish and liked to eat. Roxy herself was a queen in her former life, but she had been queen of gypsies, not of Europeans. She wouldn’t know where to start. Ba’al had been leader over no one but his daughter, Ashleighroth, for the past few thousand years. He was still technically a desert god, but he was only good for telling people to mess other people up and he knew it. Sally knew that she couldn’t be the leader. Gappy would have made a superb stand-in for the King, but he couldn’t speak or add up. Carolyn was consumed by her love and longing for Ric and couldn’t make good decisions. She would freak out at things that weren’t very important, or just make things up. That meant that it was down to the guest stars, Leonard Cohen and Burzum. They looked at each other. They knew where this was going.

Quick as anything, Burzum played his guitar. He turned a bright red, and so did the landscape. Leonard Cohen was unimpressed. He played his guitar and turned a beautiful blue with just a little bit of green in it. So did the landscape. Burzum sniffed and played his guitar. Now everything was green-yellow. Leonard Cohen played his guitar and everything became the purest, sunniest yellow imaginable. They went on like this, back and forth, for ten minutes, each taking their turn to come up with a better colour than the last. Eventually, all Burzum could think of was a kind of sludgy orange and Leonard Cohen played the colour of pure emotion. Defeated, Burzum stayed sludgy orange for the rest of the adventure. His clothes, his skin, his hair, his guitar: sludgy orange. The landscape went back to normal. Leonard Cohen spun around. He spun so fast that he was a blur. He kicked up moon-dust so that you couldn’t even see the blur. Now he was a little tornado. He was a little bit off the ground. There was a clash of lightning and then the wail of an electric guitar and Leonard Cohen was wearing a completely different costume. It was white, which is the colour of all colours.

“I am the Field Commander,” said Leonard Cohen. “Let’s go, gang!”

Everyone knew that he was the leader at that point.

End Of Chapter 37