Zaat

Dr. Kurt Leopold (born January 24, 1943 A.D., died Hunose 32, ???? A.D.(?)), more infamously known by the moniker "Zaat", was... is... nobody can be certain - a world-renowned, self-declared Nazi marine biologist and "father of the modern relations between man and fish", most notorious for his transformation into an ambulatory predatory fish-man covered from head to toe in moss, coral and poor life choices; and brief but memorable and perchanceYou can't just say "perchance". ongoing attempt to CONQUER THE UNIVERSE! in 1971.
Zaat's world domination endeavours rendered him quite the celebrity in the fields of catastrophic science, questionable villainy, Florida swamp tourism and ability to slaughter his delectable female prey without even touching them - a skill that baffled even the rotting, decaying cadaver of Newton, who to this day continues to circumgyrate within his grave at the mere thought of the concept, so much so that a fourth law of motion was postulated in his honour: 
:For every outrageous individual action Zaat undertakes in his quest for catfish supremacy, an opposite, equally chaotic counteraction will unfurl throughout the universe, termed "Zaat's Law".
Zaat's ill-fabled "hands-free" murder techniques remain a hot topic among baffled forensic experts; as of present day, the furry (gilly?) remains at large for his every perpetrated bloodshed. In spite of his crippling virginity which culminated in his inability to recruit a single henchwoman to rule Earth along his side; even following his numerous kidnapping attempts, questionable seduction techniques and intimidating, albeit tedious, lousy laggard pacing across the Floridian landscape for which he is infamous; Zaat prevailed and got away unscathed, proving that inadequate coordination can result in the achievement of adequate ambition.
== Childhood ==
Born on January 24, 1943 in the squalid streets of Alabama to siblings part-time seafood vendors R. "Swamp Queen" Leopold (neé Sole) and Montgomery "Trout Whacker" Leopold, a tender Kurt Leopold would happen to possess an early interest in biology by the ripe age of three, particularly anything relating to that matter which revolved around water, fish and the microscopic creatures that lived in his family's swampy outhouse. His preschool teachers paid particular attention to Leopold's peculiar enthusiasm for aquatic biology and his enthusiastic proclamations about the "secret intelligence of the undersea", whereas his bewildered classmates paid particular attention to Leopold's tendency to mutter eerie, conspiracy-esque phrases such as "They think I'm insane! THEY'RE the ones who are insane!" 
Arguably, Leopold's most esteemed accomplishment in his early curricular years was his water chemistry incident, which involved filling the nursery goldfish's bowl with a "new concoction" made from a strange combination of chlorine, water from the garden pond, and crack cocaine from the daycare manager's secret stash located in a vault in the undercroft - what he dubbed the "secret to aquatic immortality"; the result being a luminescent, gelatinous hodgepodge which allowed the glowfish to start conversing with the teacher in a mixture of what seemed like French, a multitude of cow noises, and profuse Pastafarian Bible verses, which proved quite the attainment for a limbless aquatic vertebrate without vocal cords.
Leopold's lauded status as a child prodigy granted him the entrance to a number of local prestigious Alabaman colleges and universities at the mere age of seven. All of the institutions whose offers Leopold initially accepted ultimately rejected the poor bugger from taking an academic degree in marine biology, however, in consequence of his "reckless fish-related experiments" and "giving students and professors alike an apprehensive sensation". As then-academic staff member of Auburn University, Helda Coccen-Mihan would put it, "his requests to get 'reacquainted' with fish in the lab were far too... torrid for our standards, not to mention the way he'd refer to his shellfish for student dinners on a first-name basis!" Leopold ultimately graduated from the University of Wet Dreams at the age of fifteen, an unaccredited "academy" located in the attic of an aquarium in Dallas), an establishment that the scientific community and reality have yet to recognise as of present day owing to its absence on virtually every map in existence.
 
== Early adulthood ==
During his early adulthood, Leopold applied for countless jobs pertinent to marine biology, however none of his applications ever ended up successful, primarily because most hiring managers left interviews screaming, fainting and even outright kicking the bucket. 
Feasibly his most infamous and well-documented job application came when he applied for a research position at the Alabama Institute of Aquatic Sciences. During the interview, he unveiled with rosy cheeks what he dubbed his "Aquatic Thought Amplifier" - a contraption built from a jar of mayonnaise, copper wiring, and toenail clippings. Placed inside of the apparatus was a tap-dancing tadpole in water of a distinctively purple pigment, which rightfully already came as a shock to the interviewer. Leopold pompously announced, "this revolutionary machine shall let fish voice their innermost thoughts!" When the sceptical interviewer asked for a demonstration, Leopold shook the instrument five times, causing the tadpole to emit a series of wet gurgles before proclaiming "I AM THE TRUE MESSIAH!" The mere stupefying lack of anticipation left the interviewer erratically convulsing on the carpet only to spontaneously combust in the succeeding thirty-five seconds. Before law enforcement could catch wind of this incident, Leopold evacuated the premises, chuckling to himself, "It's working..."
Rejected from any career path requiring one mere shred of sanity - yes, even the porn industryWhich described him as "too fishy" for even their standards. - Leopold resorted to a series of increasingly unhinged freelance initiatives by the age of twenty-four, venturing out to the streets of Georgia conveying bucket-loads of eyebrow-raising signs and slogans reading "Unlock the secret potential of your aquatic babes! Only $4.50!" in a stained burgundy wheelbarrow he "borrowed" from a vineyard approximately forty miles away from his birthplace. Leopold's services as a self-proclaimed "fish consultant" included "decoding of emotions", or to be more precise, yelling erotic compliments at aquariums to persuade them to bequeath their stock over to him; alongside running a hotline for sheeple with the inclination to "converse with their fish", which involved Leopold gurgling into the receiver whilst faintly mumbling such statements as "Your guppy desires an eloping getaway under the sea... with me." for his customers to hear. 
== Depression ==
Unsurprisingly, Leopold's fish-whispering ups and downs inevitably came to an unsatisfying close in June 1969 when every single pet store in the tri-state area had filed restraining orders against him for attempting to organise a "piscine Putsch" against humanity, a complot Leopold's former classmate Rex Baker had caught wind of, claiming to have witnessed him stood outside a pet store holding a sign that read, "RISE UP, MY SCALED BRETHREN!" whilst shaking a jar of shrimp flakes in his grasp, which proved the final nail in Leopold's fishy coffin. With all optimism lost in bringing the fluvial dominion of his dreams into the real world, even off of self-employed ventures, Leopold stayed secluded in a dingy Floridian apartment to undergo a depression that would last him a percentage of his life. His neighbours reported watching him stumble across the avenues of Jacksonville plotting for vengeance at 3 o'clock in the morning, all the while staggering and tottering all over chunks of litter left abandoned on the pavements.
As Leopold's obsession with fish and lust for vengeance delved further into the pits of lunacy during this extended period of despondency, so too did his belief in their inherent superiority over humanity. Whilst surveying over biology textbooks and sketching crude designs for "humanoid fish utopias" in his diary, a particular ideological strain piqued Leopold's interest: eugenics. Despite initial misconception of the matterLeopold initially believed it to concern the procreation of the "perfect fish-person" whereas much of the world viewed it as a horrifying misemployment of biology; either way it makes nary a difference., his manic readings of pseudoscientific prose led him to graffiti increasingly deranged ideas on the walls of Orlando, about how "fish-Aryans will bring balance to the Universe" and "no gills means no entry". It didn't take long for several unorthodox neo-Nazi academics hailing from Detroit to correspond with Leopold about his deluded ramblings about fish-man supremacy. Whereas some of these extremist scholars were left baffled and frightened by his letters (most of which had been penned in alphabet soup), others saw this lunacy as oddly compelling and funded Leopold a considerable fraction of their income in order to support his plans to reel in a floundering humanity. 
Ultimately, Leopold received $50,000 of financial support from these radicals and it was thereafter that Leopold's "little gem" - one that would combine science, sheer bat fuck insanity and just a dash of old-fashioned narcissism - was born.
== World domination endeavour ==
January of 1971 rocked by, therearound Leopold rented out an $800 underground laboratory adjacent to the Floridian coast, where channel catfish were of particular ubiquity. Jam-packed with all the quintessential scientific equipment and revolutionary machinery with built-in features - including but not limited to all of the essential arrays of totally-not-purposeless blinking lights dotted in every nook and cranny - at Leopold's convenience, the edifice attested itself a vitality in the budding fascist's machination. Having extracted a sample of catfish blood whilst on a sojourn at the construction site for the Walt Disney World establishment which would open its gates seven months laterMust be where all the animatronic fish auditioned for The Little Mermaid over a decade too early., Leopold's ladder to prosperity appeared an infinite ascent. Having injected himself with the catfish serum and lunged into the depths of a narcotised jacuzzi he obtained from a black market, Zaat emerged from the laboratory lido and set off to diminish the redneck population of the local town to amounts falling short of even zero, persistently limpin' la vida loca in the process. To be more precise, Zaat's attempted domination scheme involved contaminating all bodies of water in the vicinity with his lethal compound and augmenting his body countIn both the homicidal and sexual sense., with the objective to slaughter every female in the region ergo they can become one with the walking catfish - all the while not leaving even a hair's breadth of a bloodstain on any of his prey's corpses, which demarcated efforts to bring the gilly to justice from the community sheriff Lou Krantz and his co-workers. 
A scientific agency named the Aquatic Reconnaissance & Mutant Phenomenon Investigation Taskforce that Krantz contacted managed to pinpoint the location of Zaat's laboratory following another one of his female abductions and a violent meltdown that took place in a nearby pharmacy. Upon the arrival of the town sheriff and his A.R.M.P.I.T. assistants, however, Zaat ferociously massacred them to smithereens without the usage of any physical contact. CCTV footage from outside his accommodation reveals Zaat to have made a hasty escape whilst armed with two red canisters, presumably to spread his compound into the Seven Seas or something. The final glimpse of Zaat ever attested to by the public was from the last surviving A.R.M.P.I.T. operative, who claimed to witness the humanoid fish stride beyond the tide with said canisters at his disposal, virtually tumbling to the seabed at one point, before awkwardly getting back up again in an attempt to appear menacing. 
== Legacy ==
Little is known of Zaat's current whereabouts, let alone whether or not he still draws breath outside of the much propagated urban legends that he has since spawned into the rumour mill of which - on the contrary - big is known, albeit not for certain. Descendants of several Berber tribes from the Mauritanian seaboard have claimed witness to a "towering man in moss" back in the eighties, with the assumption that he circumnavigated the Atlantic to unleash his contagious amalgam upon greener (read: more arid, sandier and yellower) pastures. What they failed to realise, however, was that one does not need to be a rocket scientist to know that water tends to evaporate instantly in the scorching heat, destroying all potential of Zaat being able to transform the Sahara into a sprawling catfish metropolis. Seamen theorise Zaat to have abandoned the east coast to disperse his liquid within the confinements of a triangular accumulation of ocean notorious for its tendency to sink any form of watercraft that voyages above its surface so as to fulfill his dreams of conglomerating the infrastructure for his aquatic autocracy, getting sidetracked by his inability to make use of basic construction tools with his inadequate coordination skills.
=== Film adaptation ===
Regardless of whether Zaat is dead or alive, his legacy lives on evermore in the docudrama based on his planetary takeover quest and released some months thereafter, wherein a portrayal of him stars as the eponymous protagonist. Critical reception for this film adaptation of Zaat's biography have proven considerably negative, with criticism directed towards the Zaat actor's inaccurate depiction of the man himself, with A.R.M.P.I.T. representative Benjamin "Ben" Dover claiming the filmstar to have "not flopped around violently enough" and "gazed at meaningless graphs on his laboratory blackboard for periods of time way too brief".
==Footnotes==
Category:1970s films
Category:Fish
Category:Criminals
Category:Murderers