Tales From the Burgerverse: A More Historically Accurate Origin of Laughing Jack

London, England. The year was 1804 and it was December 24th. Smog made everyone cough as if they had tuberculosis, and the snow was a deep tar black. The water tasted of soot, and you'd contract cholera just from putting your nose near it. In short, you wouldn't want to live in this time period. Didn't help the bread was made with moldy flour, chalk, talcum powder, sawdust and regular dust simply to make ends meet. If it wasn't the smell of smog in your nose, it was regular shit, horse shit, sewage and horse sewage. This is all the reality that John Mason knew, along with his eight living siblings and fifteen deceased, alongside his father and mother. John was lucky to have been named something normal, unlike his older brother Humiliation. He came from a family of Puritans who left the United States because it was "not our specific version of Christian enough" and decided the lovely, historic city of London would be theirs. The broom closet John had to share with everyone else had room enough for maybe half a man at most, but it had to be divided between John, Kyle, John, Humiliation, John, Tiffany, Karen, Pretentious, Mary, Mary 2, and The Kid Formerly Known as John.
John's father, John, worked at the shipyard as a cargo accountant and payment handler, so he had a reasonably handsome pay for his time, equaling a single penny a year. John, John, John and The Kid Formerly Known as John all had jobs as either chimney sweeps or factory workers. Wasn't uncommon to hear about how John, whom henceforth shall be referred to as John 2, lost three arms in a factory accident and had 16 hours left in his shift. John 1 died twice in one shift from suffocating on chimney soot, and John Mason was fortunate enough to be the sweeper, so he got to avoid all the dangerous industrial accidents.
"Oh praise tha guv'na! Half a dead neighba for dinna!" John Mason cheered as his mother, simply named John's Mother, brought in the upper torso and arms of their recently deceased neighbor. "First time I've eat'n this month."
The Masons that are currently the reason the plot is moving, strictly because of John Mason, were seen as more upper class of their slum in the East End, all because they had a wheelbarrow. The knickknacks and doohickies that littered the single shelf in their dilapidated shithole of a hovel were found in the cholera infested waters that the sewage company paid bribes not to actually do anything about besides blame it on miasma or humours or lack of faith in God. The single pronged pewter fork that John 2 found was shared amongst the ten of them, because they were too busy saving up for rent to afford much else. The Kid Formerly Known as John was extra fortunate, for he had found an iPad 6 and the charger washed up on the dockyard one day because this is 1804 and fuck you, that's why.
John Mason, on his only day off this year, snuck down to the nearest harbor to find some trinkets, money, or best of all, a way out of London. The harbor smelled less pleasant, since instead of sewage, soot, ash and decomposition, it smelled like all the previously listed smells but only increased due to the fact everyone dumped their trash into the River Thames. Some of the more buoyant things that were found by John Mason were the skeleton of a tosher (a person who went into sewers just to break up blockages), a rat king with its servants carrying it on a throne of bones and rusted metal pipage, a speedboat, a lamprey addicted to opium, a doctor's apron with years of neglecting to wash it, the doctor who lost his apron, an arrow of unknown origin, and a fried piece of fish skewered on a random non metal stake foreign to the city of London.
The arrow pricked John Mason's hand, and in a stroke of luck, he didn't contract a hundred different diseases just from being near the river water. The shift in the tide made the pungent smell of decomposing sewage and actual chemical waste, as opposed to that fictitious chemical waste, made everyone within a kilometer flee for their health and those unable to blacked out. When John Mason awoke, he was greeted by a sight to behold: a cartoonish clown in colors besides coal black, soot black, and vaguely clean white. Lanky, striped, probably a nobleman from a country nobody can pronounce the name of correctly.
"AAAAAA WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!" The stranger screamed as he stepped in a pile of fat and horse shit. "IT SMELLS LIKE A FACTORY'S EXHAUST VENT IN THIS DUMP!"
"Who are ya, sir?" John Mason asked, unaware of what any of the words The Stranger said meant.
"There are some who call me... Laughing Jack." He said, vigorously scraping the diseases off his shoes.
"Me name is John Mason."
"I see, well in that case I better find the nearest source of clean water."
"Oh! I know where it is!" John Mason exclaimed, grabbing Jack by the arm and dragging him with.
They stopped at a puddle on the sidewalk with some unidentified insect larvae floating atop it, positively vile in odor and absolutely lethal to drink.
"Can we go back to the harbor?" Jack asked as he held his vomit down from the filth surrounding him. "I left something there."
The harbor was as silent as a cemetery, it was almost as though the world went silent here, no vessel horn nor bell, no violent coughing of phlegm or blood, not even the movement of the what could generously be called water they stood across. A simple door of a house John had yet seen washed ashore and buried itself in the river bank of the Thames, somehow knowing the precise location of this Laughing Jack person.
"Ya must really be a angel or sumfing!" John Mason mouthed as the silence dominated the harbor.
"Let's just go with that." Jack tried to say as he saw a seagull fall out of the sky.
The pair went away from the harbor and the further they progressed, the more the normal sounds of London as of 1804 Christmas Eve returned. Jack sort of gritted his teeth and dealt with the situation as he and John Mason walked into a derelict, even for the city of London's standards, alleyway.
"Well well well! We got ourselves a noble!" Randilius the Rapscallion proclaimed.
"I say, chap!" Troybidiah the Lean attended to the situation with.
"GET ME O- I concur, fellow compatriots! I suggest we roughen these fools up with a rouse of fisticuffs!" Keith the Rotund ate.
"These guys aren't much to worry about. They just stab you thirty some times as a greeting!" John Mason said as he strode around the three hooligans.
Keith eyed Laughing Jack with a fervor not of malice nor violent intent but desperation to escape someone, something or somewhere. Possibly even somewhen, but twas inconceivable to be a somewhy. But statistically reasonably a somewhen at least.
"I see we're in the same situation. That's why we don't talk like these backwards smokebreathers. We have to get out of this time in history." Keith whispered as if somewhere, someone was listening in. "Listen, that Arrow your friend found. You have to get it from him and use it on yourself."
"You want me to jam an arrow covered in shit in my neck?" Laughing Jack scoffed.
"Look, no time to explain. Somewhen, there's something trying to keep things its ideals of perfection." Keith whispered before running back to his friends to curb stomp someone as a pastime.
Laughing Jack chased after John Mason to claim this arrow thing Keith was so hellbent on him getting; something didn't settle right in his stomach, although the general lack of cleanliness might be of cause.
The pair of them went back to the shack on the outskirts of East End that had black mold growing on the wallpaper, John 2 just sighing as he regrows both legs and his head for the sixth time today as John 1 tries to find a router to connect his iPad to. In the year 1804. John the Father was working in the kitchen as he was cooking up a classic peasant meal of the time: Sawdust Stew.
"Praise the Lord! I hope I get the splinta in me bowl this time!" John Mason cheered as he stared at the cracked stew pot.
"Psst. Billy or whatever your name is. I'll give you my food for that arrow you found." Laughing Jack whispered as not to arouse the suspicion of those around him.
"Oh! Here ya go." John Mason said as he handed Laughing Jack the Arrow. "Be careful with it!"
The Arrow felt less like wood with inlays of silver and a head of steel, but almost like it would drip through his hands like water or pen ink. Come to think of it, pen ink was the most accurate way to describe the texture of The Arrow. Jack simply tucked it within his puffed long coat sleeve to try to keep it together, lest it fall apart and wind up in some well in Worcestershire or somewhere with an impossible to pronounce name. Whether by mishap or something more esoteric, or even as outlandish as a miracle, The Arrow slashed the linen inner layer and pierced through Jack's skin, the dripping ink seeping into his bloodstream. The influx of ink into his bloodstream didn't kill him, but he woke up in a hospital a day later as a doctor stood over him with a rusted chef's knife.
"Sorry, thought you had an imbalance of humours caused by miasma and a lack of faith in God." Doctor Feelgood apologized as he dribbled down his shirt. "Thankfully you woke up before I was going to surgically implant a few souls of leeches and stray orphans."
"Yeah, thanks... can you explain where I am?" Laughing Jack said without a single laugh to be heard.
"Uh... I don't know how to read. But it looks vaguely like a hospital if I can remember. Man, I need me a gin and tonic..." Doctor Feelgood sighed as he wiped the blood of a comatose man off his forehead.
A skeleton in a hazardous material and contagious airborne infectious material suit walked in the room with a commercial termite and bedbug poison sprayer, except instead of insecticide it was bleach. He didn't say a word, and his oxygen canister intake was sealed with an empty canister as not to defeat the entire purpose of a hazardous and airborne infectious material suit.
"Oh, Henry? He doesn't speak much. Or at all. But he can read. Apparently he's from a year I can't count to... Somefing like... twenty... twenty... eight? I think?" Doctor Feelgood rambled as he stuck a moldy carrot in someone's sternum.
Henry the Skeleton stared with his eye sockets at The Door that Jack had on him, and simply pointed at it with interest or ire, nobody was sure since he's a skeleton. Jack sat up and set The Door about on the floor, and it opened before him. A colour out of space that was a near entirely whitish magenta crept into the room. Henry and Jack looked at each other before leaping in and The Door went with them both. Jack's eyes were closed due to the light blinding him, and Henry had no eyes to fret about. Where they wound up next would be a mystery to both, but it felt safer due to a considerable decrease in the chances of contracting small pox and cholera.
"Where and when are we?" Jack asked the skeleton.
"Oh. I just don't like talking. Excuse me." Henry wheezed as his deflated lungs slowly reflated.
"I can respect that." Jack chuckled to himself as he stared at a calendar on the wall. "Huh. Says here we're in 2031... August 3rd. That settles the when."
The pair walked down a flight of stairs, leaving a break room of some sort and entered a cubicle farm spanning from the end of the room to the other, the windows blocked with posters of corporate slogans and cubicles below. The clacking of a keyboard from each cubicle wasn't even random or out of sync, for each cubicle farmer was in perfect unison. The bare concrete walls and eye burning lighting looked more at home in a building under construction, condemnation or somewhere in between. Nobody dared look away from their monitor in case someone was watching them, since they would get punished for not reporting an act of insubordination just as harshly. The sea of grey and black wasn't a pleasant wave or a gentle tide but more of a tar bog in a monochromatic landscape.
"Now that we know the when, we need to know the where." Jack said as he scrounged around for something useful.
"We're in Utah." Henry sighed as he peered out the window.
The arid sands of the desert and the amount of pictures of Mount Pennell told Jack and Henry that they were far from Salt Lake City, and stuck dealing with the craziest until they left. Even in a place with weird names like Mexican Hat, Big Water, Bluff, Bullfrog, Virgin, Spanish Fork and Helper... the pair got unlucky and are in the city of Meat. Such a wacky place, even by the standards of Utah, Meat is that the God Mayor declared himself Mayor Of Life, not Mayor For Life. A difference between Mayor For Life and Mayor Of Life is that a Mayor Of Life declared to the universe at large that the Mayor, not the universe, is the one in charge. The Constitutionally Democratized Treaty of Meat declared that the God Mayor is actually the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, Sun Wukong and a taxidermized squid. Upon looking up the Meat Treaty, the pair were starstruck and struggling to get their jaws off the floor at some of the outlandish declarations by a Mayor Of Life:
1) Squids are the national bird of Meat. The price of the meat of squid shan't exceed one can of Natural Light beer, which in Declaration 18.01 Subsection 93 Section A-9, has been declared the national currency.
2) Hamburgers are made of evil, and are to be shot on sight.
3) The seventh of every January is to be a national holiday simply because I said so.
"Huh. Seems Florida has stiff competition." Jack said in jest.
They walked out the corporate hellhole and into the streets of Meat, but there wasn't much better. The roads were made of chicken wire, the light posts of PVC piping, and the sidewalk was of gravel. The God Mayor Church of Governance and Ass Kicking was where all roads in Meat lead, much like all roads in the Eastern hemisphere leading to Rome, save for Australia and New Zealand. The God Mayor Church looked like a medieval cathedral, except instead of limestone and granite or marble, the construction was made from beer cans and soda bottle caps, and the glass bottles being used for the windows. The God Mayor rode up to the front door of the Church upon a chariot drawn by motorcycles and a Toyota Camry.
"I AM MEAT! OF MEAT! MY NAME IS THE NAMESAKE OF MY TOWN, YOU FILTHY TOURISTS!" Meat preached unto an empty street.
"Fuck this, I'm outta here." Jack and Henry said as they walked through The Door.
Unfortunately, they had an unwanted guest tag along with them. Meat of Meat leapt through The Door and wound up with the other two in a different dimension altogether, where instead of life being based on carbon, it was silicon. The year was 956 AD, and a humanoid of glass blinded them with its mere nearness. The language, alien yet familiar in half of its existence, they knew they were in between Modern and Olde English, so clearly they were in a time before dentistry and beer you give to someone as an insult. All of the glass growing from the soil didn't slash their clothing nor hazardous material suit, but simply flowed in the breeze, gentle glistening from the blue star in the sky, the atmosphere a royal shade of purple. The air itself was almost identical to the atmosphere of the previous Earths they left, but not exact. A fraction of the nitrogen gas in the atmosphere has been exchanged for oxygen, and some of the argon for carbon dioxide. The blue sun shone near the horizon and the church bell rang seven times, as a second sun slowly rose over the horizon, this one of green. The impossibility of a green star messed with the known astronomy, but given trigonometric calculations, the green star was approximately three astronautical units away whilst the blue sun was roughly twice the distance.
"Maybe physics and chromaticity works differently here." Henry said as he sat down with a notebook and a pencil.
"Maybe. Wonder why there's so many Halloween decorations when..." Jack ceased his sentence as his sunglasses dropped from his eyes, the sheer amounts of light blinding him.
The pair went into the nearest church to see a huge clock spanning across the wall behind the preacher, with not twelve numbers but thirty, and four hands instead of two. Maybe each sun had its own pair of hands?
The stained glass of the roof wasn't stained the typical reds, blues, and yellows of Catholic cathedrals, but mostly blacks, greys and the occasional purple. The few silicon wooden structural supports were a rather humble, at least in comparison to the rest of the building, white and with flecks of grey of stone or concrete dust. A door identical to The Door that Jack held with him stood at the pulpit, just left ajar and leaking a black light into the church. The light wasn't ultraviolet like a black light flashlight, but actually black, as if there was no light within it. The pair didn't step within the Black Light, but something stepped out and took the door with it. It wasn't a skeleton, but a weird humanoid with a man's skull for a head, jackal paws for hands, five misaligned and jagged horns and its helmet with more horns at protruding angles symmetrically. The cloak of vulture wings and pauldrons of simple, almost rudimentary, iron juxtaposed the humanoid. A breastplate of the same iron adorned its chest asides from a red cloth cover underneath, and even then, the breastplate covered naught but the ribs. A sandstorm covered whatever the red cloth couldn't, so any features besides the head and hands were, for all intents and purposes, gone. The staff, too, was just a simple iron rod with a glass ball atop one end, almost like a walking stick made for a king or emperor who valued pragmatism over opulent and gaudy displays of wealth. It had no ill will towards Jack nor Henry, and opened the door for them to walk through with it.
"Worry not, fellow wanderers. You'll come back here eventually." It spoke with a dissonantly calming voice.
"Who or what are you?" Jack asked with caution.
"The Emperor of Sand. But who is this man with whom I'm speaking with?" The Emperor of Sand answered and inquired.
"Jack. Laughing Jack. How'd you know what we were?"
"I know those with Doors and when and where they wander. I've been doing this for as long as they've existed, Laughing Jack."
"So, where are we, Emperor?" Henry choked through dry lungs.
"There have been many a name for this place. Some called it Ygthar, others Dimension XH-92. Myself? It matters not." The Emperor said through an unmoving jaw.
"How many places have you seen?"
"More than a mortal mind can fathom, less than a single grain of sand amongst the sea floor."
"Just how many other places like this exist?"
"It's uncountable, and even if it were, no mortal could truly understand the grasp of how large the number is. What is the largest known number that isn't infinity? Tree of Three? Googolplex? Graham's Number? Try picturing how large those numbers are with your mind, and you'll understand the fruitlessness of that."
"What do you want to show us, mister Emperor?"
The door opened all the way, the black light drowning out the blinding light of the twin suns above, and the trio went in. The Emperor of Sand simply opened another Door, and then another. Hallway after hallway, room after room. Soon enough the amount of Doors was the size of an apartment complex.
"None of these are real, Jack. Neither am I, nor you, nor your friend." The Emperor said in a strangely nonchalant manner. "Nothing is real, Jack. It's all just words in someone's imagination, waiting to be made."
"What about you or I then?" Jack asked, trying to understand.
"You and I are words in someone's imagination, but only extant within so. That is what it means to be a character, Jack. A character is an idea, a concept, a meme, if you will. For if someone didn't think of a concept of the character, it wouldn't be. Ideas can live, die, change the world and multiply. The making of an idea isn't always just a flash of lightning fast creation, Jack. Others take time to be carefully sculpted into what it is to be, like a marble statue."
"So, now what is there?"
"That's up to you."
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