SW10/REPOST: Leo the Pirate Vampire King!

[Scott Eiler]

A repost from slightly before I met RACC, for Talk Like A Pirate Day.

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WORLD JOURNAL MONTHLY
February 23, 2009     See Our Other Issues!

A Night in the Life Of...
LEO THE PIRATE VAMPIRE KING!

Commentator: Sylvester Morrow, World Journal Monthly.

(Sidebar:  Leo was one of the first superhumans. He used his catlike 
powers to fight evil - and attract weirdness.)

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Leo knew the night would be bad, when he heard his clones were being 
used as food.

In the South Pacific, Colonel Mark Simon of the Tuvalu Defense Force 
awoke to his evening duties. But "Colonel" was only one of his titles. 
"Leo" was another, for the superhuman world. "King" was his title in the 
vampire world. As King and Colonel, he would lead his vampires tonight. 
And as superhuman, he would represent his country.

The nation of Tuvalu had begun high-level negotiations with the United 
States, about transit security for merchant ships. 
(http://www.eilertech.com/stories/2008/assessment.htm#underwater) The 
new U.S. administration was supposedly committed to talking more, 
fighting less. And Leo the Pirate Vampire King was an old friend of 
Vice-President Crusher Joe Corrigan. So Colonel Simon was representing 
Tuvalu in phone conversations with the U.S. Vice-President. Daytime in 
Washington, D.C. and nighttime in Tuvalu coincided nicely.

Before the meeting, there were bulletins to review; Colonel Simon's 
consort the Vampire Rose handed him a pile of dispatches, along with 
breakfast and coffee. Not for the first time, he wondered how he'd 
gotten lucky enough to marry a vampire who liked to serve anyone.

The dispatches came from the staff of Eric X, their patron and the 
secret master of the archipelago. Leo found one dispatch particularly 
disturbing...

The CoopTech Corp had announced a breakthrough in the production of 
artificial meat in laboratories. Their meat was cloned, from a Petri 
dish. Previous batches of their chicken meat were so tender, they could 
wash through a sink's filter and down the drain. But now they had a 
secret ingredient to improve the texture.

 From what anyone had seen of the processing plant, nobody could rule 
out Leo-clone content. As one of his misadventures before becoming a 
Pirate Vampire King, Leo got cloned.

Leo-clone meat is said to taste like pork, which is supposed to help the 
texture of the next batch. The clones had the power to incorporate into 
hybrid species; Leo himself is a human-cat hybrid, different enough from 
baseline-human to reduce the risk of disease transmission. That is to 
say, Leo-clones don't get human diseases.

Unfortunately, there was nothing Colonel Simon could do from Tuvalu. 
Or... was there?

But first, the business of the night. Colonel Simon had to track his 
batallion of vampires. About one hundred of his undead allies had joined 
the Tuvalu Defense Force. Most of them were out on naval patrol, to 
pilfer passing ships of wealth - and nutritious blood. With the coming 
of the vampires, traditional piracy was no longer needed. So world 
attention went to African pirates, while vampires and Pacific islanders 
still got what they needed. The program was going well.

Then, the Colonel reviewed the island reconstruction efforts. The island 
with the Defense Force barracks had gained an inch of new coral around 
its southern end in the last month. This was spectacular. The undersea 
allies of Tuvalu were doing their job.

Next, the telephone call to the United States Government. Vice-President 
Corrigan himself joined the call, and talked frankly with Colonel Simon 
about the needs of the vampires of Tuvalu. If the U.S. could ship 
surplus animal blood to the south Pacific, it would feed the vampires. 
They in return would help suppress all the competing pirates in the 
area. An agreement with the U.S. would be good news for Tuvalu.

After that, a telephone call to Disney. The Disney corporation has 
enough pirate-theme amusement park rides, that they'd shown an interest 
in avoiding bad news about pirates. Good news for pirates in Tuvalu, 
meant good news for Disney.

Finally, a secret call to a mercenary named "Madfinger". Madfinger said, 
he might be able to rid the world of cloned meat, both chicken and 
otherwise - for a discount price. Just leave the details to him.

All in all, a successful night for Colonel Mark Simon. As the superhuman 
Leo his record was mixed, but in his new life he was doing well.

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Commentary by Wyatt Ferguson.

Leo's been held up as an example of how degraded a superhuman can be, 
under the weird conditions of our superhuman world. But I think, the 
weirder a superhuman life is, the more successful it is. Consider just 
two examples:

*    Crusher Joe Corrigan himself has been at various times a 
professional wrestler, a terrorist in training (good thing he's Irish, 
not Iraqi), a crazy man, and the governor of California. And now he's 
the U.S. vice-president.

*    Ellipsis has been at various times a college vigilante, a declared 
terrorist (he employed Crusher Joe to fight the U.S. Government), a 
galactic power, an interdimensional conqueror, and a deejay for a dance 
troop. And now he's a scientist for the one of the U.S.'s four largest 
incorporated companies of superhumans. He founded one of the others. I 
founded the third and work for the fourth now - and my life's been weird 
too.

In short, Leo's in good company. And I think we'd best keep watching him.