Storysold's Receipt for Mr? Vocal

Our Storysold team would like to thank you for your purchase of 80 chapters worth of pest control. Your customer service character of choice, Wilderness Security Guide, is standing by to produce your first chapter and post it in the little black book she’ll install in your home.

Guide is ready for action, but our accountant, Bookmaker, has informed us that we need more information from you before we begin…

A) Is “Vocal” your first or last name? And what is your preferred pronoun?

B) $20,000 worth of pest control is a lot of control. Are you open to tackling other forms of infestations? Like developing positive infestations that support Guide’s wild creature friends who live and breed in your backyard? Or exploring ways to treat action-based infestations (like boring work routines) and other generic storylines?

C) What is the address of the home you want serviced? If your services require air travel, then the price of plane tickets will be added to the cost of each chapter.

D) We know you published “DOWN THE RAT HOLE: An Intro to The Great Game for World Wild Domination,” but we reread your expectations for the job and realized that we’re at least 500 words over your preferred limit. We’d like to offer you an alternative introduction...

In the time before Big Spring, civilization had killed, enslaved, tamed, and or domesticated all of earth’s wild creatures. Bison were herded into parks and other wilderness ghettos; wolves were tracked by Park Rangers and shot by ranchers; salmon learned to follow the new river rules with their dams and engineered channels; elk ran from the bloody highways and hid from the sport hunters like the rest of the wilderness, and the insects, rats, and raccoons were diagnosed, labeled, and treated to death by the monthly culling of generic pest control companies. Nothing was wild. Every inch of land and soil with its rich culture of worms and microbes from sea to shining sea on every continent was owned by someone, or some inhuman governing body, who took an active interest in making sure The Action flowed in line with Its grant master plan.

And the poor humans were no more wild, or free, than zoo bears, but they didn’t see it that way. All they had to do was open their books, or turn on their phones, and make the blank-face-look before The 4th Wall–and their screens would project masterful tales of “wilderness.” We don’t Get It, but some humans never grow tired of watching heroes like John Wick, Wyatt Earp, and Captain Kirk break all the rules and follow their gut-instincts into The Wild to defend their homes, maidens, and loving dog with their super, animal savagery.

We know this, because we sell pest control. We tried to sell our services without wild stories about plague rats and man eating raccoons, but it didn’t work. No one wanted to buy stories like – Roof Rats: The Great Cohabitators, Humans Are Nature’s Bedbug Bait, Mice Eat My Garbage (Thanks!), Spiders Are Nature’s Pest Control, and Orkin Culls the Largest Rodent Populations in The World. No one wanted to hire some know-it-all customer service character from Storysold: Pest Control to tell them that the creatures they were killing in their home were, in fact, just as hooked on their free food, steady sources of water, and shelter as Cute Kitty and Barkly the Loyal Family Dog.

If we’re being honest here, not only did humans fail to buy stories like those—they would argue with us almost every time we’d tell a wilderness-free story where an earth creature wasn’t easily diagnosed as either “civil”or “wild” and treated with pesticides. “Argue” may not be the best word to describe their reaction. Most humans would shut down, stop listening, and either flee in silence, or fight us with a monologue (meant to suppress anything we might say next) almost instinctively like we’d thrown a snake in their lap.

Don’t worry. We’re not wild-eyed idealists. Eight years was as long as we were able to live free of lies on dishwashing wages. "Damn the wilderness!" we say now. We joined team civilization over a year ago (when I split my personality and became a business entity), and we’re not planning to relapse, again, anytime soon.

To prove that, we’re going to produce the wildest story about The Wilderness you’ve ever read. It’s a really real story about how the great nations and corporations of earth and the great men who lead them aren’t winning The Great Game they’ve all been working so hard to win. For those of you common folk who’ve never heard of The Great Game, the title was first coined to describe the 19th century Russian and Britch empires and their struggle for world domination, but we think it’s a good general description for the human quest to dominate and control all of creation since Genesis, Chapter 1 of The Bible. The great men think they’re winning, because they’ve never taken a hard look at what it means to win. Generally, the great men equate winning with the collection of powerful penetrating things like missiles, bullets, and direct orders, or strong protective things like skyscraping towers, mighty bridges, and armored ships.

The rats use an entirely different yardstick to measure the size of their winnings. The only victory they care about is arriving undead in Big Spring after The Tribulation, Zombie Apocalypse, The Suck (or The Super Massive Singularity), and the next seasonal ice age all have their ways with our planet’s working storyline. The rats figure all they have to do to win The Great Game is survive, work with and not against the flow of The Action, and the planet with its mighty mountains, oceans, and rivers will crush the completion for them.

Rats aren't nature's only great game champions. They're just the most likely champions for 3 reasons: a) crows can’t hunt for shit; b) roaches are far too dependent on the gunk they find in refrigerator drip pans; and c) ant intellegence and army intellgence are synonyms.

So yes: we’re saying that the rats are beating the humans in the quest to arrive undead in Big Spring. Mainly because they're not trying to control the planet’s supply of trees, soil, minerals, oil, wheat, beef, and peanut butter. The rats are only interested in cornering the market on our planet’s most valuable resource: The Action at the heart of every good story. The rats Get It. Great actions trump great things every time.

How do we know all this shit? For the long answer you’ll have to read our entire literary cannon: The Living City (our 485 page origin story), The Rise and Fall of The Novel Corporation (our first live action novel), and Storysold: Pest Control, Season 1 (2019-2020). We like to think of it as our company’s resume. The short answer is: our company’s bumbling human “CEO” Jake doesn’t do employees. They’re too labor intensive to manage. Instead, Storysold: Pest Control hosts 3 live action customer service characters. You know, like the Holy Trinity of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, or what authors call the first, second, and third person perspectives. All of our characters engage The Action in their own ways, but Wilderness Security Guide is our rat catcher. She knows the rats (and how they play The Game) best. Yeah, we know it’s weird. Jake is a he. Guide is a she, but our company’s required by law to be an equal opportunity employer even though we don’t host humans as characters. All we’re really saying here is, Guide is the character Jake works when we want to know about rats.

It often takes her a few trap reads to Get It, but most of the time she can identify which character the roof/ship/tree/black rat, or the Norway/sewer/brown rat has been hosting in The Action. There’s more, but here’s the Big 3:

A) The Industry Rat from a professionally culled rat population serviced by generic giants like Rentokill

B) The Disney Rat from a civilized/infested population

C) Or a formidable freedom-loving/wall-breaking wild rat.

The rats Guide predicts will arrive undead in the first unthawed green valley of Big Spring aren’t obviously the wild rats. It’s very possible The Industry and Disney Rats will continue to cling tight to the comforts of any civilization built by humans, and then finally, some day in the distant future, eat all the crops (and kill everyone off) in one epic cacophony of starvation and madness. That’s the storyline where many humans imagine winged aliens will fly in like superheroes and save them, but we generally believe that’s the one where the ants and roaches split the winnings in spite of their intelligence.

Guide has spent a lot of time plotting the best way to beat the rats. And she can sum her new strategy in one sentence:

WE HAVE TO HELP THE WILD RATS BREAK THE 4TH WALL OF CIVILIZATION AND SHARE THE WINNINGS WITH THEM.

Don’t worry. We’re almost done here. In no way do we plan to describe what we mean by The 4th Wall. That would be like trying to describe civilization. What we have here is an introduction, as we said earlier, to the wildest story about The Wilderness you’ve ever read. We’re planning to produce the rest of The Great Game for World Wild Domination in little black books, like the one you bought, which we’ll post in wild settings beyond the control of the phones, TV screens, stages, office desks, and podiums of The 4th Wall.

We wouldn’t blame you if you thought all this was bullshit. That’s the classic response for sure. But, before you instinctively “argue” with us like we’re dropping a snake in your lap, we suggest you fact check us. We have already posted at least one little black book that you can’t buy in a bookstore, or order online, or stream in movie-form on Netflix. It’s a wild live action story that’s not produced for a mass audience. We posted our little black book on the first pillar to the right of the hatch leading to Guide’s “rat hole” crawlspace. As of Feb 22, 2021, it has 11 chapters about a new Homefront our team is building for a family of humans who live in a suburb of Portland, Oregon.

It wouldn’t be appropriate to post the address here (because the nice family who owns the Homefront is real), but if you contact our human host Jake at Storysold: Pest Control we’ll be happy to share that story with you. Not that that matters. You can read the whole thing, with proof of work photos and everything, but you still won’t Get It. You won’t be Storysold until you have a little black book hanging in the rat hole crawlspace of your home that tells the wildest story you’ve ever read—all about you, your supporting cast, and your adventures fighting like rats (and fighting the rats) to build a home that will inspire the kind of action-packed storyline that we will need to arrive undead in Big Spring as victors of The Great Game for World Wild Domination. Then you'll Get It, and hopefully we'll all, one day in the not too distant future, share a moment when we rise to The Action and cheer for something that's real.

Where is your home Mr? Mrs? Vocal? All we need to get started is your payment of $20,000 and your home address. We sort of hope its in New York City. We hear the rat hunting is good there...