Hey. Psst. Hey you. Over here.
You were nodding off. Screaming something something something VITAMINS. Are you afraid?
Are you alone?
Don't worry. I'm a PI. Or a mapmaker. Or a writer. Or an actor. Or-
Or a coward.
I'm scared too. You know what I do when I'm scared? I tell stories. There's a campfire here. Can't see it? Too bad, it's here anyway.
I'm gonna tell you a story, a story about someone who lived, once upon a time, in some earth in some backwater town in some place during the 1950s. It was one of those industrial zones, the parts of the countryside where you can barely walk five feet in front of you without getting a hacking fit. God bless Coal, you know? We wouldn't be here without it.
As a kid he loved his country. Sure, they might have been funding terrorist acts. Sure, they might have embraced an economic system liable to bring about the end of the multiverse. And sure, maybe the government didn't have his best interests at heart, if you started to split hairs. But what government ever really did in history? Besides, even despite all of that, he still loved it. He loved their stripes. He loved their colors. He loved the feeling of purpose it gave him, however transient, humming those old tunes, replaying them over and over in his head.
He loved it all.
First he was a baker's boy, but he sucked at making bread. Then he was a factory man, but he had a lame leg, and couldn't do anything practical that well. Got a fucked up lung, too. So, he joined the military. There was draft, and even when everyone he knew said 'dodge it' he still pressed on. He's a man of faith, see? A man of action.
Then these guys in shades, with really cool jackets and sweet rides and fucking banger tastes in music rolled in. You could never see their eyes, but if you meet them by God you'd know they mean BUSINESS.
So when he was about to die in some war somewhere in some other part of the world for his country which he loved and the economic system that was so apocalyptic and a lapse in logic that was without impunity - they swooped in. They swallowed him up. And boom - just like that, he's gone. A magic trick. Our protagonist is nothing but a whisper in a wind that doesn't even really exist yet.
Let's call him Jonah - because now he's in the belly of the beast, the whale, the fish. So Biblical, isn't it? I could write a nationalist playbook. But I won't. That's not my job, and I sure as hell aren't getting paid for nonsense like that.
So he finds a calling. He's a SECRET GOVERNMENT NINJA DUDE now. And SECRET GOVERNMENT NINJA DUDES can do anything. Like fix their lung problems with magic. And become good at running. And shit.
That was on the public brochure, anyway.
Let's suppose, for a little moment, that all that was true. SECRET GOVERNMENT NINJA DUDES really are badass. But what then? What else did he do? What sacrifices did he perform for that country of his? And with every action, ever chip of that chisel on the crappy marble block-thing he once called himself, what monster was unearthed? What… human?
That's it. That's the story.
And that's how Jonah became a Youtube influencer!