Gantic has a thread and will weave a cloth. This is a thread brought to you by Gantic & Co. Bringin' change to a constantly changin' world.
The title of the thread will become apparent later, but to start off:
Three Cowboys
Just to make things clear, there were never three cowboys. Just two. One of them's got the solar-powered laptop, the other's got the rubber ducky, but they're both mavericks, all three of them. It was my idea to throw in the third cowboy, but he's as real as any of the others. The solar-powered laptop and the rubber ducky were my idea, too. So were the two cowboys. To make things clear: There were no cowboys. In the vast emptiness of the Moobes, a black craft shaped like a horse, christened the Star Straddler, cruised to what was only a small but sparkly blue-and-green marble. The captain had his boots up on the dash as his craft crawled along the moobe that would bring him to the planet that the Moogle Navigator had found. As the craft touched down on the surface, only one thought was on the captain's mind: "The Space Cowboy has landed. In Armor Games."
I suppose now would be a great time to inform you that I've got far more training as a musician than as a writer or artist!
Nooo... My worldview is destroyed. Or is Strop actually more normal than he appears? A sense of humor is a sign of sanity or intelligence, I forget which, might be both.
Three Cowboys
It was at this very moment, that the hero of this story was literally pulled into action. The goose took him by her wing, and though she had no fingers, her grip was strong. He was dragged across the city and dropped in front of a group of men. Of course the Bullman was there, too. He wasn't about to let a newbie get knocked out of his boots before he learned to walk. Faced with a group of strangers, the Space Cowboy asked, "Who are you?" The leader replied, "We are the Rainbow Gang." "A goose told us you were holding someone on the grounds of sleeping in public," the Space Cowboy said. "And what do you want?" the leader asked. "Give us the gander." "You want us to check you out?" "No. Give us the goose." "Now you want us to hiss at you?" "Just give us the bird in the blue cap." "Well, why didn't you say so earlier," the man replied. "Make us." The Space Cowboy reached to his side and realized that he had left is Smith & Wesson laser gun on the dash. The Bullman was ready with the rubber ducky in his hoof-hand and had it pointed at the group. The Bullman replied, "Now when you say make us, did you really mean that, because I've got the most powerful rubber ducky in Armor Games."
There was a glitch in the program. The logic unit could not comprehend how there were only two cowboys when all three of them did not exist. It could not comprehend the metaphor either. An artifact was created in the gibberish of the output as the logic unit tried to "rectify" the mistake, garbling the input in the process. The artifact emerged as itself. That was not my idea, not at all. The program will resume. To make things clear: There still were no cowboys. I hope. The Stranger sat with his back against a rock on the moors. His hat was tipped forward to shade his eyes from the full moon. It was nighttime but he wasn't sleeping. His eyes were fixed on the LCD in front of him, browsing. How is it my Moogle Navigator only comes up with these abandoned blogs? These journals left on a park bench? It had been the same for all the nights before. He'd hook up the rechargeable battery pack to his laptop and browse the Moobes but the Moobes would only show abandoned blogs, usually void of comments. He felt compelled to read them. Someone had to. They were written for the world to read but only his lonely eyes searched them for meaning. He wanted to connect to someone. He would gather up the courage to comment in hopes that the creator would one day return and know that someone had read it. But what could he write? He would abandon the idea altogether after convincing himself it was pointless. The solar panel flap of his laptop fell open without cause. The Stranger lowered the screen to fix the problem. When he did, he closed his eyes to relax and opened them to look upon the horizon. A bright shooting star fell just above it. Some change would be nice, he wished. He raised the screen again, but it was different. He hadn't touched any keys, but it displayed something else. Something called "Armor Games".
Nooo... My worldview is destroyed. Or is Strop actually more normal than he appears? A sense of humor is a sign of sanity or intelligence, I forget which, might be both.
But a sense of internet humor is a sign of insanity or pseudo-intelligence, baha!
And now Hitchhiker's meets post-modernism. Are you breaking the fourth wall, Camus!?
There were games, many flash games here. It was something different. He clicked on one and found the message: "Log in to disable this advertisement and to view comments" Log in? Should he create an account? Not now. He continued browsing the site and found a link that piqued his interest. Community. He sat a little straighter as the forum lists appeared on the screen. "Support and Suggestions" "Newcomers Forum" ... "Art, Music, and Writing". Writing on a flash game website? Perhaps it was a sign. He clicked it and enumerated the threads. It was mostly contests and art threads, but then he found something that caused a heavy, tremulous beating in his chest at the bottom of the "Art, Music, and Writing" forum of Armor Games.
It's much too early for recursive narratives, but would you ban Joyce?
They're coming up.
Three Cowboys
The Bullman and Space Cowboy were outnumbered five to one, but the Rainbow Gang didn't seem to want to move against the rubber ducky. The Space Cowboy considered each of his opponent's ability to brawl since he was obviously unarmed. The Rainbow Gang acted tough but none were worth the wood to grill. The Bullman was twice his size and armed, albeit with a rubber ducky. There was a twitch and the man on the left was blasted away by a jet of water as the Bullman squeezed the ducky. The others fell one by one, leaving only the leader of the group standing. Without backup, he relented and produced a goose in full Union garb in return for not being harmed. "Who are you people??" the Space Cowboy asked. The Bullman simply replied, "Well, you're dressed like a Cowboy and fly in a mechanical horse that eats grass in a backwards place without electricity. Who do you think we think you are?" "Hey, hey," the gander piped, apparently unfazed by his captivity. "Quit the xenophobia. I don't belong here either. I passed out when some time-travelling doctor was operating on my battle wound and I woke up as a goose." "What?" the Bullman and the Space Cowboy cried in unison. "Yeah, the time-travelling doctor said he was from Armor Games."
*hopes Strop never read Finnegans Wake... and finished it*
Three Cowboys
Time travel was mostly impossible as far as the Space Cowboy knew. Something about Nabokov or Novikov or someone and self-consistency. So long as it did not result in a paradox, so long as the past was not changed, time travel was possible. One could conceivably travel back in time and make out with oneself so long as it did not alter the course of events in the future and in fact, led to those events. But something about the current situation didn't add up correctly in the Space Cowboy's head. "Now wait just a minute," the Space Cowboy said. "None of this makes sense! The Bullman just said this place has no electricity here and from what I can tell, we're somewhere in the Middle Ages mixed with anachronistic Greek mythology. How the heck can there be a time travelling doctor from Armor Games? If the doctor is from Armor Games and travelled back in time to operate on you, how are you, a goose dressed as a Union soldier, in Armor Games?" "I did say there was no electricity here," the Bullman replied, "but that's only here, on this side of Armor Games and this is Armor Games. There's much more to Armor Games than Armor Game City. Until you've been to the other side, you can't imagine the breadth of Armor Games."
The Inconsistent Imaginarium, possibly the most awesomest place in all the Moobes, was far west of Armor Game City. People went crazy in there if they weren't utterly destroyed by how fatally uncreative they were or how hopelessly asinine the mind could be. Anything that could be imagined (within Armor Games) would be there, however illogical, impossible, or improbable or just plain idiotic. The Bullman did not want to join them, perhaps not wanting to find out whether he was or was not a figment of someone's imagination or perhaps fearing the power of concentrated creativity. He left the Space Cowboy, and the Union goose, with a Universal Region Locator and wished them good luck. Unfortunately, the Star Straddler had not yet been fully refueled nor the scrubber activated and it would be quite a long trek on foot across Armor Games.
