Relieving

Bad Guys Need Flowers - Part 4
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Girl (responding to the query which ended Part 3): “I guess I am.”

Calvin’s eyes opened wide. If this were true, then what the frak was the girl trying to pull before?

Girl: “I mean, since neither of you boys is gonna take charge, then I will. You may bow to your leader, Midnight.”

Rog (looking at his watch): “I have 6 PM. Unless I’m way off, it’s not midnight.”

Midnight: “No, no, no. My name is Midnight. You may bow to Midnight, not at Midnight. The time is time to bow to me.”

Calvin noticeably began to smile, and Rog began to chuckle quite heartily.

Midnight: “What is it? Is there something on me?”

Calvin: “Your name is Midnight?”

Midnight (defiantly): “Yes. What’s yours?” Rog continued his small fit in the background.

Calvin: “Calvin.”

Midnight: “Too long. I don’t want to say that ‘v’ all the time. Shorten it to Cal.”

Well, she was certainly displaying leadership qualities – quick, irrational decisions. Irrational, though, is not always wrong. The shorter name did have its qualities.

Cal: “I’m to take advice from a girl who calls herself Midnight?”

Midnight: “It’s not so much advice, as it is an order.” And then she flipped on the charm switch again, leaning into Cal in a commandeering, you-can-see-my-cleavage-better-this-way position. “Are you questioning my orders?”

Cal sighed and turned away. He’d liked what he’d seen (not yet having a vasectomy); however, he didn’t like where this was going. Although college degrees are often awarded to social idiots, Cal was not one of them. He knew Midnight was trying to reel him in, so he swam away. Now was not the time to be giving in to unknown power.

Rog, on the other hand, was taking the bait. Hard. At the sight of Midnight’s alluring lures, he’d run over and slid to the ground, bowing as low as he could. “My full name is Roger, but I’ve already shortened it to Rog. Do you approve, master?”

Midnight frowned a bit at the ease of this catch. “Hmm, I don’t really care. I don’t like either option, to be honest.”

“Yes, my liege. Then I will stick with Rog, until you demand otherwise.”

It was Midnight’s turn to sigh and look away.

Cal: “Wait. If you’re in charge, then I really don’t get that thing before…”

Midnight: “I’m only in charge because your inaction put me in charge.”

Cal: “So, you sent me this note?” Cal pulled the meeting note out of his pocket.

Midnight: “No. Otherwise I wouldn’t have this note.” Midnight pulled the same note out of her jeans pocket. Obviously, those were her pants.

They looked to Rog, who was still crouched on the floor, praying to his Midnight goddess. Recognizing the silence as his turn to speak, he peered up. “I got one, too.”

Cal (handing Rog his note): “And it looked exactly like this, correct?”

Rog: “Actually, I don’t think so. Let me go out to my Hummer and check on that.” Rog winked at Midnight, expecting some love for his Hummer. In the midst of re-inspecting her note, she gave no indication of hearing him.

A beat of silence passed as Rog stepped out. Midnight was still looking at the note, sincere doubt developing inside her.

“Cal, what time is it? And don’t make a joke.”

“I don’t have a watch, but I’d say at least 6:15/”

“No one else is coming, are they?”

“I don’t know. I’d think somebody would. The notes have to mean something.”

“They should.”

Another beat passed. Midnight looked up. Staring deep into Cal’s eyes, she tried to convince them both. “We’re going to be okay. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

The all-powerful Midnight, who had essentially proclaimed herself queen, was already succumbing to the inevitable fear uncertainty breeds. For the first time, Cal saw in Midnight someone he could like on a human level. Maybe he would’ve recognized this, too, if he hadn’t been so uncertain himself.

Meeting in Red Square

Bad Guys Need Flowers, Part 3
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“Uh, what?”

“That the best you can do?” One of the most beautiful girls Calvin had ever seen was standing a few feet down the poolside, apparently engaging him in conversation. She was dark-featured all around (or maybe that was the shadows), wearing a light, lacy top with form-fitting jeans jeans. “After all the trouble you went through getting me here, I thought you’d have a better opening line than ‘uh, what?’”

Regarding the beauty of this girl, it bears repeating how remarkable it was. Still, that’s to be expected in stories like these.

Calvin: “Did I meet you somewhere? Should I remember you?”

“No, officer,” the girl cooed sultrily. “Should I remember you?” She was inching her way towards Calvin.

“Uh, are you seducing me?”

She centimetered closer.

“Uh, no,” she said, once again steamingly imitating Calvin’s nervous speech.

And then it stopped. The threat of sex she’d emitted immediately dissipated, becoming pure threat. “Despite the barrage of questions you’ve thrown, the fact is, in fact, reversed. I’m interrogating you.”

“Oh?” Now assured of his role as inquisitee, Calvin dispelled of the “uh”s.

“Yes. Why did you invite me here, and, perhaps more importantly - since it may involve some breaking and entering issues - how did you invite me here?”

“I didn’t invite you here.”

“Oh?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

This back-and-forth tête-à-tête over, the scene regained the spotlight. Two, confused souls stood in an abandoned poolhouse, a rustic autumn rising up behind them.

Something about what the girl said had caught Calvin’s ear, so he (re)started, “When you asked how I invited you…”

The creak of the front door sounded in the distance.

Girl: “It would seem our answers have arrived.”

The footsteps approaching were odd – almost squishy. Squod, squod, squod.

Calvin (reacting to the sound): “Apparently they’ve arrived in the shoes of some sea creature.”


Girl: “Makes sense. We are at a pool.” Calvin gave her a confused look, knowing that what he'd said made very little sense at all.

Calvin and the girl looked to the spot where the new entrant would first be visible. Neither was particularly scared, still feeling the positive rush of newness furling over them. The whole “squod” thing did make things weirder, though.

Thus entered our third character. Panning from top to bottom was a goggled, polo shirt-ed, slack-wearing fellow. With damp, squoddy sandals. Lifting the goggles from his eyes and setting them on his head, he spoke, “Hey, I’m Rog.”

Calvin and Midnight (in unison): “Hi Rog.”

Rog: “It’s starting to drizzle outside. Whosever bike that is should move it inside.”

Calvin lifted his hand a little. “It’s mine.”

Rog: “Good, good. So, who’s in charge here?”

Grass falls greenly

Bad Guys Need Flowers - Part 2 (If confused, scroll).
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Calvin awoke to a room in which nothing had happened. He was still crumpled on the floor (like most people, he normally wouldn’t be), but otherwise there was no residual evidence of the event that had or had not occurred. Weird.

As he sat up to stand up, Calvin felt a piece of paper crinkle in his pants pocket. He reached in, pulled a note out, and read: Meet at 18:00. Address (plus) on back. Calvin had no recollection of such a note, wondering for a second whether he had somehow put on somebody else’s pants. He then decided to do the expected and flip the note. On the back was written a strange address and a postscript labeled “plus”: Plus – These are your pants. Obviously.

Maybe he had received the note long ago, meaning there would no longer be any reason to follow its instructions. Maybe not. In any case, it was a pleasant autumn evening, and the intrigue of learning more about this address satisfied. Hey, maybe some hottie in a bar had slipped it to him once. She’d still live at this place, right? Calvin shook his head (“I can’t believe I thought the word hottie”), picked up his jacket, and left.

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A bike turned into a concrete slab that was once a parking lot. The bike parked in front of a concrete block that was once an indoor pool - faded lettering revealed as much: “Derwood County Community Pool.” Calvin dismounted, the bike being his and all. He looked at the address, looked at the building, and realized he should have checked this out online first. Usually he would have, but the whole “computer-seemingly-blowing-up” thing must have thrown him off. Whatever. He was here, at this vacant structure outside of town, and he was content enough with it all. What could easily have been a spooky setting, wasn’t. Yellowing leaves framed a scene which appeared more disappointing than scary. A beautiful forest scarred by an ugly slab of 70s architecture – blech. Calvin had had enough of this visual. He entered

The building featured no surprises. A path to the left led to the men’s changing room. A path to the right led to the women’s. A path straight led to the pool. There was a moment’s hesitation, as the inherent allure of the right path pulled at Calvin’s heart, but his rationale defeated his perversion and he headed straight. The pool was unsurprisingly rectangular and unsurprisingly empty. A large, dirtied glass window on the back wall provided Calvin with some hope – the architect, whose passion had probably been whittled away by years of government-ordered rectangular pools - hadn’t just designed a concrete box. He’d designed a concrete box with one glass side.

Calvin stared for a while, observing the forest behind the window. The sun continued to set. A few leaves here and there had begun to fall. Clouds moved between the cracks of the canopy. The same words came to Calvin that had doubtlessly come to the architect when he was applying for the job that led to this: “That out there is the world, and I’m stuck looking for a dynamic office environment.”

Apparently Calvin said this out loud. He got a response: “Well, you’re also looking for a girl.”

Hey! I like you magic ball!

Six Lines Productions is proud to present an early draft of the upcoming manga series Bad Guys Need Flowers. The author (who would like to remain nameless and is NOT Tom Selleck) expects it to be on shelves early next year(s). It will have more pictures then, and less words, to everyone's delight.
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Do you want to work in a fast-paced, exciting environment?
Are you ready for an upbeat job experience?
Do you love the prospect of completing team-oriented projects?

Calvin knew the answer to all of these questions. He always had known the answer. He always will know the answer.

Of course, the answer was “no.”

“Are there really people excited by these type of job postings?” Calvin asked himself. “And if there are, how much do these people suck?”

Having earned a masters degree in International Relations, Calvin had been browsing job listings for almost two months now. Very little caught his eye, and those jobs that did seem interesting coincidentally also always featured black holes: He’d send in an application, and it would never be heard from again.

It was a Friday night, some time in the fall, in some suburb in the Midwest. A nebulous setting, perhaps, which is how Calvin looked at it as well. Maybe some of his friends would be going out on this weekend eve. Calvin could care less. Every night is the weekend for the unemployed, and he was bored by all that anyway. College had not only disillusioned him to the real world, it had disillusioned him to partying. More on that later. For now, Calvin could be found sitting in his parents’ house, in his bedroom-cum-office, scanning the internet for some glimmer of opportunity to save him from the darkness of normal employment.

And that’s when he saw it - it being an ad on some second-tier Craigslist site which proffered the possibility to “Make Money While Being Bad.” Huh. What exactly this meant was impossible to figure out without clicking for more info, so Calvin inched his mouse towards the link. Despite its intrigue, he mostly expected the result to be some kind of half-assed marketing scheme, hidden beneath a semi-interesting tag. Still, ideas began to swirl in Calvin’s mind. What if he had stumbled upon some kind of awesome double-agent job? What if this were a real Fight Club, ready to bring about the destruction of the corporation? What if he could become a vampire and have blood orgies? Weird and illogical thoughts brewed – thoughts that, after a few seconds if introspection, Calvin would never really wish for – but, at this moment, bad seemed good.

Bad was exciting. Bad was upbeat. Bad was team-oriented, maybe, in some cool, evil society kind of way. Whatever. Calvin clicked.

A second's pause, and then utter destruction. The monitor burst apart at every pixel, megabytes becoming minibytes, plus whatever other technobabbly metaphor could be used to describe a computer completely exploding. Because Calvin had appropriately been where his eyes needed to be in order to view the screen (aka close), the explosion led to some problems. The force knocked Calvin clear across the room where his body - littered with cuts from the various mechanical shards erupting out of what was a reasonably-priced computer – crumpled to the ground. Losing blood, Calvin’s vision faded into haze. He was out, too unconscious to enjoy the spectacle which seemed to be occurring.

The explosion was starting to reverse, as were Calvin’s wounds. Or at least it seemed that way.
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More to come! For now, enjoy this radio advertisement.