Crimsonsparr
came back from the war
not his choice
but all the same
he was greeted by the Fates
"Now is the Age of Leisure and Order, what you fought for, is here, deep down, in this wandering place of recreation murderstalk corridors staffed by premium snuff musclegrafted POW convict labor to get your very own first person slasher trip working; packed with technological goods that overmaster your ass with endless maintenance ultimatums; and all the Discount Fucking, so don't fall in love, else it'll rip you up all over again"
and it wasn't so much
that Crimsonsparr never knew how to have fun
more that he resented the fact
that he had gone to so much trouble
to rip himself apart
on what he thought were his terms
but now he was supposed to accept this New Destruction
hadn't he earned the rubblemind
in his own way
didn't he make a point
of mass prisoner slaughter in tightly arranged geometric choreographies
of never meeting a registered cultural site he didn't blast to pieces
what about the waste tracks he laid across downtown cores, and the libraries burned, hospitals demolished, his Schools-Into-Craters Initiative, Crimsonsparr even took his battle to the rural areas, he didn't discriminate between city and suburb, didn't he pull it all together,
of course people resent you your virtuosity,
only ever like you
when you stay in your lane
just do the one thing
share the glory 'round
Crimsonsparr got it, okay,
he was just coming from the Old School of grind,
but whatever
it's fucking fine
and how 'bout those viral videos of chopping the heads off dogs
hadn't he earned the rubblemind
in his own way
if it had been here all along
undergoing commercial product development
in glowing anticipation of the All Quadrants Launch
then for what damn reason had he been fired into theatre
Crimsonsparr had no love of the uniform, the costume,
for he was a wild and hairy and burning beast
scarcely able to maintain a military mold
but he did maintain
maintained the fuck out of it
when it made no difference
but the difference he convinced himself it made
even then
he inkled
that lie
that fucking lie
in his own way
-later, when he was a lot less upset, Crimsonsparr served as the Official Shroudhounder Product Ambassador. He and his creative staff summoned the decapitated dogs from the land of the dead to implement them into a modular Meta-Combiner Omni-Action Doll. This was marketed as an Adult Collector's Item with an air of desirable mystery to it in that you couldn't buy it in the usual way. Of course, if you had the rubblemind you could see it right there in the Crimsonsparr section with all the other figures and playsets; but if you were without the rubblemind then it got a lot trickier. Shroudhounder, in that case, chose its customer. This led to all sorts of ancillary products: bogus guides for making yourself more attractive to Shroudhounder so as to increase your likelihood of being chosen for customership; fakeass mental rubble supplement pills and powders; and a whole galaxy of vlog content creators pushing phony conspiracy theories and invented accounts of Shroudhounder sightings-ultimately, Crimsonsparr had to go to war all over again to destroy the pirates and the copycats pooping out pseudo-Shroudhounder products, which led to his orchestration of a multifront proxy war within the Non-Aligned Special Economic Zone. Crimsonsparr himself was killed by a nameless vatgrown mercenary during the Battle of Burnguy Mall, but this account has been disputed in recent years. The major Rival Narrative has it that Crimsonsparr accidentally killed himself when he performed a sloppily executed summon attack using the buggy-as-fuck Mecha-Shroudhounder product. The Rival Narrative has some weight to it due to the notoriously high rate of catastrophic meta-malfunctions that plagued the Mecha-Shroudhounder product line. Amusingly, in the past decade a Crimsonsparr cosplayer has bubbled up out of some hell to claim the mantle, even launching a line of life-sized action dolls molded in the war hero's image. Traditionalists have performed the suitable style of outrage over this stuff, even as the big-as-life toys surpassed all sales records of comparable products, leading to the usual cycle of shortages'n'riots'n'counterfeits'n'regional conflagrations'n'media hype-
in the fullness of time
the Crimsonsparr Cosplayer
displaced the war hero original
within the public rubblemind
in a confessional all-too-vulnerable vlog
the Crimsonsparr Cosplayer addressed the
by that point
century-long controversy
with a mixture of uplifting bootstrappy aphorisms
Shroudpowder-based Vitality Enhancement Shake recipes
and hintdrops about horizonal dramas aborning
And concluded with the following,
"Sometimes, y'know . . . you just have to get out of your own way."
-October 2020-October 2023
