A Day In The Life Of A Mountie

It is time for the point of view of a certain legendary Mountie, the fiercely cranky Inspector Lars Ulrich, who should never be mistaken for the drummer from Metallica.

7:32 AM. Walking into my detachment. Didn’t sleep well last night. Dreamed of being surrounded by entertainment journalists demanding to know why I wasn’t on tour with Metallica. And for some odd reason, I couldn’t hit any of them. Needless to say, this leaves me feeling cranky.

7:46 AM. Morning briefing with the constables and sergeants about our duties. I’m due in court today in Calgary. Another one of those pre-trial hearings involving that deranged serial killer I arrested. For some reason she doesn’t like me. Well, that’s fine. I’m not that fond of psychotic grandmas who serve tea to their next victim.

8:03 AM. On the phone with the lawyer of that bank robber we arrested yesterday. He’s complaining about his client being kept in solitary pending a bail hearing. Oh, come on. Your client asked for solitary. Can’t say I blame him. Other detainees finding out what the guy’s name is? They’d want to throttle a guy who actually goes through life with the name Justin Bieber.

8:10 AM. Out the door and on my way. I instruct Constable Mackenzie to keep an eye out for lingering entertainment journalists. For whatever reason, they seem to be drawn to me and this place like moths to a flame.

9:21 AM. Have arrived in Calgary and the provincial courthouse. Routine hearing today, even if the accused is anything but routine. Imagine spending decades of your life writing murder mysteries and interfering in police investigations, all the while acting out on your darkest impulses and murdering left and right. Such is the life of Jessica Fletcher. Or was, until I arrested her.

9:27 AM. Conferring with the Crown Attorney on today’s proceedings. Fletcher is en route from the detainment facility where she’s been held without bail. The usual security measures are in place. Which means she’s in tight restraints with a mouth guard to prevent her from biting. Kind of like Hannibal Lecter. Only she’s more dangerous.

9:51 AM. Heading into court. Passing by a group of reporters. One of them blurts out that he’s with Entertainment Tonight, asking why I’m not on tour with the band. I snarl at him, tell him I’m not that Lars Ulrich, and deck him.

10:04 AM. Waiting in court. Fletcher’s attorney is objecting to the fact that her client is so tightly restrained. Fletcher’s muttering something or another, no doubt wishing she could turn around and yell at me face to face.

10:05 AM. The judge orders Fletcher’s restraints removed, despite the objections of the Crown Attorney. I’m on my guard. She seems fixated on me. Not that I’m worried about myself, I mean, she’s past ninety, and I’m in the prime of my life. Even so, she could take a hostage, and we cannot allow ourselves to underestimate her rage.

10:49 AM. Watching the hearing. Mostly routine legal matters. The defense demands that all charges be dropped against her client. The Crown strenuously objects and points out the severity of the charges and suspicions about thousands of murders being committed by her client. The defense rolls her eyes and asks why the Crown likes to exaggerate. It’s not exaggeration when you’ve read the diaries of the suspect, Miss Mitchell. I should ask the defense sometimes if people ask her what it’s like going through life with the name Joni Mitchell.

11:36 AM. Arguments complete. Judge denying the demands of the defense, as expected. Fletcher continues to be remanded to custody. The judge ends the hearing, and as if on cue, Fletcher lunges out of her chair and charges at me. “Your head on a pike, Ulrich!” she screams as three court officers restrain her. “Your head on a pike!” the old woman hollers, glaring at me. I smirk, wave, and watch her being dragged out of the room.

11:37 AM. I ask the defense attorney when she’s going to give up on her deranged serial killer client. Joni Mitchell just glares at me with that dagger eye expression. Oh, please. I patented that look when dealing with dimwitted reporters, you know…

12:20 PM. Lunch at a restaurant with a couple of my RCMP colleagues working here in the city. Steak with maple syrup for me. All washed down with a proper cup of Canadian coffee. None of that Yankee swill they serve at a Starbucks.

12:43 PM. Lunch just wrapping up when one of my colleagues gets a call. Distant screams and a roar that sounds like a primate. Turns out that King Kong just turned up in Calgary and is rampaging his way through the Stampede grounds.

1:01 PM. Along with my colleagues, I have arrived at the Stampede grounds. Fortunately, the Stampede isn’t running this time of year. Instead we’ve got a human stampede of people running away from a really oversized ape. And there’s Kong himself, throwing cars around and yelling. Let’s see… me versus a giant cranky monster. This isn’t even fair. For the monster.

1:02 PM. Yelling to get Kong’s attention. The beast looks my way… and recognizes me.

1:06 PM. Have single-handedly prevented Kong from fleeing- it seems he remembers the last time I kicked his ass- and have knocked him into a state of unconsciousness. My colleagues come up to where I’m standing beside the fallen monster. Okay, first things first. Who keeps letting him off Skull Island? And second, who’s going to bring him back there?

1:43 PM. Watching a courier company at work trying to figure out how to move an unconscious giant ape halfway around the world. Hey, don’t look at me. You guys said you could move anything, any place.

2:11 PM. On my way out of the scene. The press approach. I sigh in dismay. They start asking questions. One of them is louder than the other. “Lars! Lars! Skip Riley, Access Hollywood! I just have two questions! First, why aren’t you on tour with the rest of Metallica? And second, will fighting giant monsters be a drawback for your career as a heavy metal drummer?”

The rest of the reporters back up, knowing what’s coming. I inform Skip Riley that I am not that Lars Ulrich. All the while clenching my fists.

He looks at me in the usual confused way of those of his profession, and asks, “are you sure?”

2:12 PM. Have broken Skip Riley’s nose and sent him falling into a nearby chuck wagon. He struggles up to his feet just in time to see me coming, and, despite being a dimwitted entertainment reporter, decides to be smart enough to run for his life. Not that it’ll help.

7:48 PM. Back home. Skip Riley is presently residing in a hospital in a body cast, whimpering. King Kong is en route somewhere over the mountains, on the first leg of a journey back to his South Pacific home, heavily sedated. Jessica Fletcher is grinding her teeth in maximum security custody, still apparently vowing revenge, my brutally drawn out death by drawing and quartering and flaying alive, and the shedding of every bit of blood my body contains. Is there some reason that should frighten me?

From Billy Goats To Dread Dark Monsters

Breaking Of Decades Old Curse Inadvertently Unleashes Elder Being Monster Upon World

Chicago (Reuters) The Chicago Cubs won the World Series this year, successfully breaking a streak of no wins in Major League Baseball’s championship that dated back over a century. They also broke the traditional curse dating back to the end of the Second World War, in which a fan and his billy goat apparently hexed the team to never again win a World Series after being ejected out of a game at Wrigley Field. And they broke a more recent bad streak that dated back to 2003, and the infamous Steve Bartman incident that had fans for years toting voodoo dolls of the unlucky fan who inadvertently screwed up their chances in the National League Championship Series. Following the win, many of those same fans finally gave up those Bartman voodoo dolls and forgave him.

The fans were ecstatic by the victory, in a dramatic Game Seven against Cleveland that’s been touted by some as one of the best World Series games ever played. Chicago has been overjoyed ever since, with celebrations of their team, signs everywhere toasting the success of the Cubs. It’s even given hope to other fans of hard luck teams under proverbial curses. Fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs are gleefully expecting that after fifty years of failure in hockey playoffs, this might well be their year as well.

And yet breaking the curse might have had a horrible consequence.

No, not the election- though that’s bad enough.

It was first reported emerging off the South American coast on Wednesday, a monstrous presence rising up out of the Atlantic Ocean and laying waste to the Argentine coast, working its way north. Witnesses described the monster as a bizarre combination of dragon, octopus, and humanoid, with two legs, two arms, massive wings, and tentacles around its mouth. Its body was dark and scaly, and massive- hundreds of meters tall, seemingly beyond the capability of a body to sustain life, and yet it was alive, gigantic, and incredibly dangerous. The clawed creature continued to carve a path of destruction as it moved north, horrifying onlookers, shrugging off missile attacks by national military air forces.

“It’s called Cthulhu,” Professor Frederick Van Helsing told reporters at an emergency services dispatch center in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The professor, who describes himself as an expert in occult studies and metaphysical philosophy, lectures at Oxford, has a reputation for being eccentric but brilliant, and comes from a long line of academics with a particular interest in the supernatural. Curious, since he shares a surname with a character from Bram Stoker’s novel about that blood sucking vampire terrorizing London. “Yes, well, it turns out Stoker knew my great-great-great grandfather Abraham and decided to weave a vampire story around him as a vampire hunter. What Stoker didn’t know was that the whole family has a centuries long tradition of vampire hunting and putting down monsters. We still do it today, though these days we seem to be encountering way too many sparkly vampires. Lot less dangerous than the classic version, let me assure you.”

Cthulhu, as it turns out, is far more than the soul consuming beast in fictional H.P. Lovecraft stories. The creature, Van Helsing explained, has been imprisoned deep beneath the ocean for millennia, and is one of the Great Old Ones of ancient pantheons. He’s the subject of worship by cultists, and is said to drive onlookers insane. “The last time he came close to escaping was 1909,” Van Helsing added. “My great grandfather Curtis Van Helsing arranged with a coven of witches to reinforce the magical bindings with a hex. As it turns out Curtis was a baseball fan, and hated the Cubs, so he figured putting a curse on the Cubs that would simultaneously keep Cthulhu imprisoned was a win-win both ways. Except of course for Cubs fans, who had to put up with more than a century of failure, but you know, sometimes those are the breaks.”

At least until the Cubs broke the curse by actually defying the odds and winning the World Series. Doing that also shattered the bindings of Cthulhu. The creature stirred from its imprisonment, breaking free of the mystic spells binding it in the deep, and returned to the surface. Multiple reports of missing ships in the South Atlantic seem to have been the first indication that something was wrong. The beast worked his- or its- way up the coast, wrecking havoc across South American seaboards, seemingly unstoppable.

Millions fled from the coastlines as the creature passed through, all the while heading in a general northerly direction across the Caribbean. He reached shore in Florida, crossing the state from west to east and making a particular point of destroying the Disney World Resort. “We can confirm that the park is shut down due to an unforeseen difficulty,” Disney World spokesperson Chelsea Rae Stephens told reporters while the ruins of the theme park smouldered behind her. “But we’ll be right back up and running as soon as possible, just as fast as we can get Tinkerbell to rebuild the place. And by Tinkerbell, I mean the Tinkerbell Construction Company who do all our infrastructure repairs. The guys in the team hate the name, but hey, that’s what you get living in Orlando.”

Cthulhu continued up the coast, coming ashore periodically to devour souls and kick sand in the faces of onlookers. He paused near New York as if wondering if he should come on in and obliterate it- it’s practically expected in disaster films, after all- but for reasons of his own kept moving forward up the seaboard, unstoppable despite everything the Navy and Air Force threw at him.

Unstoppable, that is, until he met his match.

The creature crossed into Canadian waters off the southwest Nova Scotia coast, and headed straight for shore. The Canadian government, having had seen the futility of previous military attacks by other national forces on the creature, instead were able to bring a single man into the area in advance. As it turns out, the only person on earth capable of teaching Cthulhu some manners.

It was the legendary Mountie, Inspector Lars Ulrich.

Ulrich was dropped on a beach near Yarmouth when it became apparent the monster was headed in that direction. Witnesses saw him staring resolutely out over the waters. This was, after all, the same man who’d saved the world on multiple occasions from dark cabals, mad scientists, and megalomaniacs. This was the gruff Mountie who had made Godzilla cry and run away. This was the fierce bane of existence for many an entertainment reporter.

Cthulhu emerged from the sea to the sight of the lone Mountie on the beach. The Mountie stared back. There was a long moment of silence as the two simply stared each other down. And then Cthulhu broke the silence by speaking, in a loud, booming voice, in a garbled language native to the Great Old Ones. Linguists were later able to translate the creature’s words into a sentence, though one word stood out as, well, relative English. The translation came out to “hey, aren’t you the guy who plays the drums for Metallica?”

The last word of the sentence seemed to irritate the Inspector, who called out, “I am not that Lars Ulrich.”

Cthulhu appeared to be puzzled, and linguists later translated his reply from video feeds from the area as he asked, “Are you sure?”

Ulrich charged in and struck the beast, launching a vicious attack that went on and on and on. Cthulhu, despite being hundreds of times bigger, couldn’t even get in one blow as the Mountie unleashed a storm of punches and kicks, bringing the Dread Cthulhu crashing down into the sea. The creature lost consciousness promptly thereafter, bloodied, battered, and broken by a seriously annoyed Mountie.

In the aftermath, Van Helsing and his associates were brought in. A coven of witches first cast a teleportation spell sending Cthulhu back to his prison quarters deep beneath the sea, and the mystic spells were reinforced to keep him locked away. For good measure, a curse was placed on another sports team to ensure that the creature would not be able to escape. “We put a hex on the Maple Leafs,” Van Helsing admitted. “It’s not as if they’ll ever be able to win a Stanley Cup again, right?”

The last word belongs to Roy Stieb, the self described “Greatest Leafs Fan Ever”, a Toronto resident who’s been waiting all his forty eight years for a Leafs Cup win. “I was born too late for the last one, but that doesn’t matter,” Stieb said. “Cubs win the World Series, that’s a great sign for us. We’re gonna win the Stanley Cup this year, no doubt at all. And the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that. Who cares about some curse? Who cares if that big nasty guy breaks out when our boys win the Cup? I don’t care. My buddy Joe doesn’t care. Do you care? Come on, we’ll invite Cthulhu to come up and join the big Stanley Cup victory parade when our boys win big time. Leafs forever, baby! Wooooooo!!!!!!!!!”

In the professional opinion of this reporter... Leafs fans are nuts.