Coming Soon - Maze of Faiths
Winging your way before much longer comes the story of a complicated individual caught up in the moral maze of Dominion City. How can you be sure of making good decisions when all of the choices that are open to you seem to benefit deranged and deviant parties? How can you waver when your life is on the line?
Meet Mazel Volts, self-styled 'Unholy Man' and 'Redeemer of the Undamned', as he struggles to survive his misfortune and put his faith in something for longer than a drunken afternoon. Could it be that someone he meets along the way will impart to Mazel a deeper understanding of the dark reality of life in Dominion...?
Here's an extract to whet your appetite. Enjoy!
MAZE OF FAITHS
“...If only we would consider ourselves capable of our own salvation.”
The sunlight was warm and bright as it filtered through the thickening haze of the Dominion City morning. Creating a harsh glare, the rays of the rising sun gleamed back off the myriad Houses of Nebulous Worship grouped together on Kandinsky Plaza and the polished-white, faux cobbles of the processional route snaking its way across the ceremonial square.
The wiry and hunched figure of Mazel Volts weaved haphazardly through the crowds along this route, gliding across the square unsteadily on hover boots and exhibiting clear signs of being in possession of a filthy hangover.
As he progressed, Mazel muttered quietly to himself – or, at least, conned himself into thinking he was muttering quietly – offering his unsolicited opinion on each of the Centres of Religious Worship in passing.
“...See The Church of Eternal Disgruntlement there: Home to the puffed-up Reverend Glittering Ballbag; Master of perpetual pessimism – How I’d like to make all of his dreams come true one day, just to really piss him off.”
Mazel cackled, though his cackling deteriorated into a raking, hacking cough.
“And here, we have the Temple of Divine Retribution, meting out punishments to the unworthy. But, it’s not called sadism when you’re acting on a higher wisdom and delivering the verdicts of a heavenly authority. Oh no: It’s a calling; a vocation, no less.”
The crimson suit he wore, which was dishevelled without being dirty, contrasted starkly with the dazzling cobblement of the ceremonial square.
“...Who would have suspected that the answers to all of life’s quandaries could be found here, amongst the frauds and dupes, within the Wittering Assemblies of Proselytising Chumps?”
His wide-brimmed hat Mazel had pulled down low, protecting his eyes from the reflected glare. There was no way of knowing where he’d lost his customary silver-grey wraparound moon-goggles, for the night before had been one of those innocuous occasions where a sedate sortie out for a couple of liveners had, initially, morphed into a bit of a session, before stumbling into a drunken bender and, without being able to pin how it had happened, had ignited into a riotous spree of unbridled revelry involving numerous indeterminable locations and finally devolving into barely conscious wanderings of the streets wondering where everybody else had gone.
Further along the row of illustrious temples could be seen a statue of: “...Some overweening, pompous hag of doom...” stationed by the entry portico to the Shelter belonging to: “...The Salubrious Purveyors of Bullgasm...”
And so it went. “A House of Blithering Dicks...” here and a: “Temple of Peevish Dogma...” there; there was really no shortage to choose from.
Somewhere along the route, Mazel really hit his stride: “...Because, as the saying goes: You gotta have faith. Otherwise, you might rise up all disenchanted and take to smacking in the mouth the people who are taking you for a ride.”
Almost unbalancing, due to the manner in which he was gesticulating, Mazel recovered some stability and continued unabated.
“...But, if you’ve got faith, then you can imagine that somehow, through some supernatural means which requires almost no effort or forethought on your part, things will miraculously sort themselves out, for the best, at some hitherto undetermined point in the far distant future. All of which is no good to anyone in this life...”
It was this aspect of people’s faithful docility that Mazel Volts really took exception to. It drove him to distraction. It drove him to drink. And, in the end, it drove him to take up preaching.
But, the sermons he spoke were not the words of contrition and passivity. They were more a wake-up call to intelligence and potential, to antagonism and creativity. They were, in short, a work of pure devilment. Or, at least, they would have been if Mazel had been speaking his sermons to further his own agenda. Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth.
When he began preaching the Church of the Ghouly Hoax, nobody much gave a second thought to what he was saying. And Mazel liked it that way. He wasn’t in the business of trying to convert anyone to his way of thinking, he just wanted people to think for themselves; to see through the incongruities and inconsistencies in the litanies of the various faiths; see how none of it really added up to anything much at all; to perceive the fraudulence being perpetrated upon them.
This was the crux of the matter as far as Mazel Volts could see: People were prepared to believe almost any old kind of tripe and nonsense, thinking that it didn’t much matter what they believed, seeing as how they could change their minds at any time and take to believing something else instead, without it having any kind of detrimental effect upon their thought processes and, ultimately, their actions.
But, Mazel didn’t see things that way.
He could see, in front of his very eyes, plenty evidence to suggest that the ideas people entertain do have an effect on their decision-making in the moment. And, moreover, fanciful notions based on little evidence or cognitive reasoning, when entertained for any length of time, actually impair and obstruct an individual’s decision-making capacity exponentially into the future.
Mazel had seen enough evidence to suggest that the inappropriately named ‘comfort zone’ where most people lived most of the time, was, in fact, the most perilous place for a human being to reside.
The brain, with its superior computational capacities, requires stimulus in order to function to its potential. To continue to learn and grow is to continue to increase the quantity of neural connections at the brain’s disposal. To construct new neural pathways is, in many ways, the brain’s raison d’être. Without facing challenges and receiving the stimulus of new experience, the brain is more likely to atrophy, meaning that, when making decisions in the future, an individual is drawing directly on the benefits of the challenging experiences in their past.
You go filling your head full of piffle and pish, don’t be surprised when the resulting impaired faculties let you down as you get older.
So, if Mazel had a mission, it was this: To cajole people into questioning.
And the last thing he wanted was to begin to accrue followers and acolytes. But, no matter how hard he tried to prevent it, that’s exactly what started to happen.
Before he knew it, Mazel Volts was drawing crowds of listeners every time he sprang up to preach The Church of Knowing without Belief and The Creed of Unfollowing on the steps of the Houses of Nebulous Worship, as Mazel referred to them, dotted around Kandinsky Plaza. And, before long, these crowds started to give him the creeps, so he decided one day to jack it all in and give up preaching.
But, that didn’t work either; the downtrodden and credulous souls of Dominion continued to follow Mazel around the Cloud Bars and watering holes of the city, hanging on his every lubricated word as though he were spitting pearls every time he opened his mouth.
“The truth cannot be imbibed or sucked up,” He’d say, “it’s waiting out there to be uncovered. Go, discover it for yourselves...”
And they would stay, instead, and buy him another round of intoxicating mindfeeds.
“All you are doing by following me around,” He’d berate them, “is facilitating my ego and my capacity to drink. Go, and facilitate your own ego, before mine turns into something truly monstrous...”
And they would applaud, telling Mazel how wonderful and exceptional an individual he was.
Into this infuriatingly circular situation stepped a man called Oogie.
Oogie Beuller was a very persuasive and organised type who just happened to be down on his luck when he met Mazel Volts. Mazel wouldn’t have given him the time of day otherwise.
But Oogie had a hard-luck story that chimed with Mazel; a tale of how Oogie had grown a business in HomeTex Bio-Cultures until it had come to the attention of Slime Corp, one of the dominant food-producing corporations operating within the island city limits and tidal walls of Dominion.
Due to a ‘conflict of patented interests’, Oogie’s burgeoning home garden empire had been effectively impounded by State, leaving him without an operating licence while the matter awaited adjudication; a judgement to be presided over by the legal affairs department of a certain corporation going by the name of Slime Corp.
So, while Oogie understood Mazel’s attitude towards his popularity, he was able to persuade Mazel, over copious quantities of Shizzle and MindQuake, that if people weren’t going to listen to him and leave him alone, then he might as well exploit the situation in the meantime.
This, Mazel acceded to, on the basis that it might provide them both with a living. And, as far as Mazel could see, Oogie was a decent sort who didn’t deserve to be trawling the Cloud Bars on the lookout for chump change.
Oogie’s idea was to register Mazel and himself as bona fide preachers and draw down the State funding and tax breaks afforded organised religions; one of the few sectors to benefit from the largesse of State benevolence within Dominion City.
Coupled with donations from their unwanted flock, Mazel and Oogie had the basis of a liveable income. And this was despite them repeatedly urging their congregation to forego acts of charity on behalf of their pastors, for, as was often stated in no uncertain terms, they intended only to spend these donations on their own dissolution and upkeep.
Next, what was required was a roof over their heads, and a centre for their ‘ministrations’.
A suitable home was found when, shortly after they began scouting around for such a place, an explosion gutted the residency on Kandinsky Plaza of The Rejoicers in the Mutterings of Zombie Elvis. In the aftermath of the blast, The Rejoicers fled the building never to return, quiffs all ablaze and mumbling: “Thank you very much...”
Zombie Elvis had well and truly left the building.
And so was born, from the ashes, The Church of the Ghouly Hoax.
Mazel had delivered his first sermon, to a ragged assortment of looters and scrappers, from amidst the smouldering embers. “Listening to me in this dangerous setting is the very last thing you want to be doing, for I have nothing to offer you that you cannot find for yourselves...”
And it had grown from there...
