#fake sequel

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Note: This is an idea that has been in my mind for a long time. Myth The Foreseer left me with a lot of emotions, the open ending of the story and Zayne's feelings made me want to write a small fantasy sequel.

Tags: Bittersweet, hurt/comfort, storyteller, a little angsty.

Summary: No one in the village knows when the jasmine hill appeared; although time has passed, the flowers still give off a sweet fragrance and show off their brilliant white color.

There was a boy who had heard about that strange hill when he was very young. People just called it "the mysterious jasmine hill" but no one knew the story behind it. One day, his curiosity arose and he went to that place — and then he understood why it was considered so strange.

Chapter 1: The mysterious woman

The boy took small steps, weaving through the bushes to reach the strange hill. The villagers said, “It’s a hill covered in snow all year round. Some people have risked going up there, but in the end, all they saw was a pure white expanse!”

As he walked, the boy wondered: snow can’t fall all year; it only appears when the temperature drops to its lowest. Or maybe it’s just a myth?

Snow didn’t belong in summer, just as he didn’t belong in fairy tales. Yet as the child pushed through the dense shrubs, before him lay a scene that couldn’t be explained by medicine or physics: white snow fell gently on the warm ground, without melting. Jasmine flowers bloomed amid the unusual cold, their fragrance mingling with the thin mist as if weaving another world.

When we last saw Raymond K. Hessel, the hapless convenience store clerk tormented by a deranged Tyler Durden, he was sprinting down the street, chased by the threat of a bullet and the promise that the next meal he eats will be the finest he’s ever had.

And it was. 

Bodies react to stress in different ways.  Fear can induce vomiting in some; for a number, it’s sexual arousal. Still others feint away, choosing to abdicate awareness from whatever horrors may come. 

Raymond’s very being burned with an insatiable hunger as he sprinted up the street.  With each step the command reverberated:  Eat.  Eat everything.  Unused to strenuous activity, his body cried out for sustenance, and five minutes after the moonlit conversation with Tyler, he turned a corner to behold a 24 hour Chinese food storefront.  Stomach rumbling at a disturbing volume, he obliged, and entered.

With the third heaping of General Tso’s, he confronted the ultimatum bestowed at gunpoint.

“What is the one thing you want to be?” Tyler had asked.

“A veterinarian,” he had answered, sputtering. It seemed innocuous, even slightly altruistic.  

The only problem: it was a lie.

Raymond never wanted to be a veterinarian but he had been reading about one while hunched over the counter, before the armed lunatic burst through the doors and changed his life forever.  So he blurted it out, and now he’s tied to it. 

The second problem: he sucks at biology.

After consuming the remainder of the menu, Raymond staggers home realizing with each step that his life is now changed.  He was informed that if he does not chase this (arbitrarily decided) dream and become a veterinarian in six weeks, he will be dead.  He remains in bed for the first 24 hours of this enforced crossroads, wrestling with how best to pursue a new life as well while also resisting the urge to gorge. For that need is even then beginning to blot out the fear of leather clad, shaved headed death…the hunger.

Raymond awakens mid-bite from a blackout period of indeterminate time with the remains of a doughnut binge strewn around him.  Powder covering his face, he frantically searches for the date, terrified that his six week grace period has passed.  Using his expanding waist like rings of a tree, he gauges the time elapsed as no more than a week. 

He suffers a perilous run in with his former employers, the owners of the convenience store, when he literally bumps into them loitering at a butcher stall within their local market.  Crisis is averted when they don’t recognize his new, hefty frame, simply believing that some tubby stranger was shoving them out of the way for a fresh ham hock (he was).  Suddenly anonymous, he questions his next steps.

Raymond devotes the next two weeks attached to his laptop at the local Arby’s, absorbing fledgling internet pages devoted to animal physiology and subsisting off of a steady stream of Beef ‘n Cheddars.  Listless no longer, he begins to enjoy this new purposeful life of intake and consumption. 

Frightened by what he fears is a vengeful Tyler checking on him (it is really a panhandler draped in a leather throw rug), Raymond books a ticket to Lawrence, Kansas, seat of the premier veterinary school in the country.  He is now close to 300 lbs.

At the airport he confronts a twin dilemma:

Will he score high enough for admittance to his school of choice? He has, after all, just been memorizing the body parts of randomly selected animalia.

Will he be able to afford tuition AND the cost of servicing his burgeoning bulk?

Michael Vito Fredo Santino Corleone hails from a lineage of proud Italiano-Americans.  Like his grandfather and semi-namesake, the protagonist before him, he suffers as only one with elevated intellect surrounded by philistines can: by shaking his head, muttering, and planning for the next disaster.

Michael has inherited both a surname and a dream: to make the family business legitimate.  A series of car washes and laundromats in New Jersey technically constitute an empire, but one with limited upside.  He longs to see Corleone emblazoned in something other than neon, printed in the business pages rather than the police blotter.

To that end he uses the surplus from the prostitutes and cocaine trade, conveniently embedded within the aforementioned businesses, to finance a back room stem cell research operation in Paterson, NJ.  Burdened by vociferously doubtful constituents within his family and his Family, with profits dwindling,  Mikey needs a breakthrough.

Enter Bart Corleone.  Hailing from an equally proud yet ignominious lineage of illegitimate Corleones, Bart possesses the charming smile and killer instinct of his forefathers.  Caked in blood from a hit, he returns to his apartment in Bayonne one evening  with some takeout capiccola, only to find that his pothead roommate, Phil, has passed out on the couch watching Breaking Bad.  To make matters worse, the remote is lost!  Bart is put off by the unfamiliar topography and scientific vernacular of the program at first, but unable to turn the channel, he forcibly acclimates to the misadventures of Walt and Jesse.  By the time Phil wakes up, Bart is enraptured.  Capiccola consumed, he calls up his cousin Michael.

“What now?”

“Cuz, I’ve got it.”

Mike has been reviewing financials.  His Hugo Boss suit is rumpled.  One cuff link is missing, gone.  He has no time for his idiot cousin.

“What have you got Bart?”

 “Meth!”

“Congratulations, you’ve admitted to a felony.”

“No cuz.”  Bart is laughing now while Phil sits terrified on the couch.  Sober for the first time in months, he recognizes that it is not marinara staining his roommate’s hands.  “We sell it!”

The laboratory in Paterson is split by a sheet.  Employees work in double shifts, cooking meth and exploring genome manipulation, while Bart charts lines of distribution and Mike brushes up on his Excel proficiency. 

Familial bonds will be tested when one inquisitive lab tech notices a desperate tweaker staggering around the parking lot.  Will he go to the Feds?  Will Bart verify his legitimacy after finding Phil’s laptop open to Ancestry.com? Will Michael legitimize the business, be forced to murder his shareholders, or pursue a long dormant passion, and enroll at University of Phoenix?