Monkey Meeting Mood.

Heh. Alas.

Today would be the day I do it. Prove myself. I'd act on something so delicate yet so flexible you'd probably look at it and I'd vanish in an instant.

Yes. I'll demonstrate my worth to them.

I'll do it by storming this place as barricaded as it is and kill that monkey.

"It's an expensive job and your cheap as hell for doing it. As paradoxical as that sounds, well considering-" Jonas declared to me frankly as he ran over the details. His voice buried lazily over the wealth of info.

“At the front gates you’ll see around eleven mercenaries  armed to the teeth ready to pick at what yours the moment you intrude on what’s theirs.”

He certainly wasn’t lying. I was swimming in red dots the moment I became more than a silhouette to the scouts.

I wasn’t scared though because I was prepared. Against a private army, all I needed was all I ever had.

A hoodie and a kettle.

Well, you see the hoodie was more of a hand me down..... or so my grand aunt used to tell me. I come from a family peculiar people so this was naturally a peculiar hoodie. Or rather there was something that made it peculiar. One trait. Just one.

You see---well you wouldn’t this time around really since I’m wearing a long ass, brown trench coat over it.

“Eyes on the target. Requesting permission to fire.”

Well pretend your seeing what I’m saying so I’ll benefit from trying to explains. The thing is, every time I flick this hoodie over my head--

“Permission granted.”

“Roger that. Weapons hot.”

Take now for example--

“Engaging target.”

I flip out. Literally.

“I think I waited too long that time. That could’ve been it.”

People would call it switching dimensions but I like to refer to it as “Re-Placement.”

See how this works is that it doesn’t switch me out if a situation but rather replaces the situation I’m in to something similar.

Take for example, your in earth originally, but hoodie sends you to Jupiter. It would make Jupiter feel like earth by taking elements of what was happening to you on earth and replicate it on Jupiter. But this place is not earth so the elements won’t be similar at all, only positioned the same.

In this situation, this was made absurdly clear. Moments before the replacement, I was being swarmed by military personnel as they converged on me from all directions while opening fire from assault rifles making attempts at my life. The bullets were inches away from my skin.

Those bullets were replaced by a gentle breeze crashing against my cheeks. The swarm of soldiers were now trees and the front yard leading to the gate of the mansion was now a lush, green, open land.

As for the mansion, the gates were replaced with blocks and the mansion itself with ruins. These ruins were seemingly from an old castle that had withered away leaving only bits of its former self remaining.

The castle was structurally similar to the mansion but whereas the mansion was of competent shape and was nowhere near its withering stages as a piece of architecture, the castle was only a skeleton of it’s former self.

I easily made my way into the castle stepping over the blocks that used to bar it from the outside world as a gate and quickly navigated my way into the castle.

This was made all the more easy by the fact that the area showed no signs of human or animal life.

I used my knowledge of the layout of castles to quickly make my way to the throne room. As I walked my way up the empty aisle on the dirty torn carpets I laid my eyes on it.

The king’s throne.

It was isolated from the rest of the room by flight of stairs but was still relatively accessible despite it’s isolation. I made my way to climb the steps.

Soon I was on top standing in front of the lonely throne. Abandoned despite its vigor. From my perspective, it looked quite pathetic as it was enveloped by the deafening silence of the room.

But forget that. It was in this position that I decided that I wanted to be replaced once more.

And by the flick of a hoodie:

“Hello monkey.”

I was before a desk. A desk that seemed worked in. It gave off the presence of status. Hiding behind this desk was a man. He was wearing a yellow suit with the black stripes with both his elbows placed on the desk. They acted as anchors for both his hands which formed an esteemed bridge to hold his chin in place as he looked up at me-

“Wha- State your business!” 

I didn’t bother looking behind me but it seemed that I popped up behind two of his personal guards. One of which shouted that in premature shock as he turned and pointed his gun to my back.

“Stop. Shoot and he dies.” with the flick of a hoodie of course.

“Hah! As if I’d--”

“Even a man with less than relatively good sense would know better than to provoke an unknown threat that literally just popped up before them.”

Seems this was a sensible monkey.

“But sir-”

“Please at least humor me this. Look at the bright side of things for once in your dull lives. This is one of those situations were doing your job to the best of your ability is pointlessly foolish. If I’m to be a dead man right here and now, you both are cockroaches to contest that reality!”

But he was a monkey nonetheless.

“Please leave us. Clearly this gentleman means me no more harm than a provocative conversation. I suggest you both humor him as well.”

“Sir!”

And thus the two trained men vacated the room while struggling to come to grips with what they just saw in order to sustain their employer’s dignity.

“Please, feel free to hang your coat on the rack behind you and have a seat. Welcome to my structured insanity, dear sir. Make yourself at home while I go fetch us some drinks.”

The monkey was setting up to converse. Well guess you could refer to him as the man wearing the monkey suit.

Time swung on a pendulum , begrudgingly. It’s flow slowly began mocking us--mocking me for my absentmindedness as it was scented by the spiteful brew of the coffee.

I stared blankly at the empty desk before me, feeling something not far from distinguishable contempt.

“For your patience.”

He placed the cup of coffee on my shared front portion of his desk before retreated back to his territory before me. He formed yet another elegant hand bridge which acted as a skin ceiling to barricade the evaporating mist emerging from his satisfied mug.

“Before we progress any further, would you be so kind as to present me with a name? It’s much easier for me to properly attend to you when I’m able to constrict your presence down into something...more human.”

“Hue.”

He snuffled into a quiet smile in response. His face retained it’s mummified texture age had cursed it with but it suddenly gained more dimension.

“Sir Hue, honestly, I could bring forth so many guesses as to why your before me given my rich history around these parts. Whether or not I consider myself proud of it, my men have worked to spread their own version of my legacy with me being forced to pay them for it. Unfair as that is. So I’d have to ask again--”

“Your life and everything that comes with it.” my confession cut sharply into his concerns with baseless honesty.

“You rely on death to make up for your lack of disciple. I’d rather not say what exactly that does to my initial impression of you.”

"With as much time that we have on our hands...or well yours in this situation, I think a short story would be in order." he continued trailing in off into a vaguely connecting sentiment.

"Retracing your footsteps before you erase them, huh? Seeming less like a monkey and more like an inelegant chimera the more you babble."

"Heh. Inelegant you say? Not sure if I'm as pleased with that as you are but fine let's go with that. I do bare some similarities currently I'd admit but it wasn't like that in the beginning. Say, Sir Hue, what do you believe the most susceptible thing in the wilderness is?"

"Leave me out of your retrospection."

"The green on the surface of the leaves. The obvious but at the same time not so obvious answer don't you think? It's so dependent on everything else to establish its authority when it's just as vulnerable and twice as weak. Makes it uniquely pathetic in my opinion. This green comes in different shapes each with their own unique tendencies. There was even this brighter shade of green- radiant and blissful in its own right. if everything around it took keenly observing it as serious as they took envying it, they'd realize that it had one defect."

He realized that my reluctance had transformed into quiet observation.

"It was too reflective. One day, something came through the jungle coming into contact with that very same green."

He looked at me and smiled.

"If you had guessed as a good listener would, you would've probably gotten it right. A monkey. One with fur made of gold. This monkey had only crossed paths with the green for mere seconds. Seconds in relation to our lifetime. But this was more than enough for the green to expose the monkey to its defect. In a matter of seconds, the reflection of green blinded the golden monkey. Everything; not just its fur became gold. This dissatisfied the monkey. It was also desensitized. Gold no longer mattered, only green. So it desperately searched. So desperately in fact, that it came in contact with other colors. Red, Blue, Orange, Indigo, Sliver, Violet...even black at some point. The monkey now came in contact with so many colors green stopped mattering as well but gold became scarce as well. So scarce in fact that anytime the monkey came into contact with this color, he'd protect it dearly. He'd protect it because since green by this point had probably gone extinct, Gold was now the closest color to green in the monkey's mind and the most important color now as a result. He'd use the other colors to protect the Gold by building around it until eventually, this gold was in an almost impenetrable space."

"Get to the point already."

"One day not that long after, whilst the monkey was protecting the gold by residing close to it, they came under siege. Surrounded faster than they could even understand what was going on they began to panic. The fortress was breached and pretty soon, the monkey came face to face with the culprit. The monkey began to panic as it realized the Gold would be in danger and attacked as soon as it caught sight of the attacker. That's when it realized. The culprit was green. It fell to the floor and slowly bled after being attacked leading the monkey to come to another realization. This was a monkey with green fur. After realizing that, all the monkey could think was, 'Thank the heavens, the gold is safe.' You get it?"

"The monkey had lost itself because of blindness in a world full of color and had forgotten what it stood for and wanted."

"No. The monkey was never Gold, it was white. It was just like the green; reflective. The gold it came in was lost when it reflected the green. Both of them reflected each other causing the entire jungle to appear gold. After leaving the jungle to search for the green, it came across other colors which made the gold reflect a lot less."

"So why did the green become of less importance to the monkey?"

"Because the colors around it valued Gold more than green because they envied green. The white monkey is a reflection of those colors as well. If the gold vanished, the green would once again become the most important. The world is one big jungle after all. In the end, it reflected those colors a lot more than green and gold making what they wanted more important than what it wanted."

Interesting.

I thought as I sat there. The dark-skinned boy with the grey-black bowl cut followed by a slender, inverted black V plastered across the bridge of his nose as a rather acute feature of his otherwise tender face.

As him. As me. I sat there thinking that.

"Is that all?" I interjected the silence with my left thumb tacked neatly beneath my chin in aloofness.

"Roughly. It'd vaguely tie into current time for you but for me, it concludes things for me rather definitely."

"Is that so?" I contested this selfish sentiment just because I could.

"Yes. See it reassures me. Reassures me that I'm alive and well. Because these walls don't bleed. My men don't have memorable names. The oil used to grease these greedy cogs flows through me in place of blood these days. And as for my seed....if you couldn't tell from the hints I threw at you earlier are as good as dead to me if I haven't killed them all already. This isn't an empire. Or a castle. It's a monument. One that exists to uphold itself like an establishment would. One that I've pumped my own life--my whole essence into and by doing that, I've made it inerasable."

"And the well being of the people---my people---those people you 'institutionalized' from those villages were just collateral?"

"No. They were colorful."

He snickered. I snickered. We both exploded into laughter. Hysterically.

I took out the grenade launcher with the kettle-like handle and blasted. Took out a chunk of his shoulder--well the left side of his torso.

Pushed back in his chair, he began coughing from both the pain and laughter. He tried to calm himself down by taking a sip of the coffee.

I took the time to look down into my mug as well. I hadn't taken a single sip as of yet. I just stared on and chanted emptily to my hollow reflection:

"To be honest, your story was a bit hard for me. That's because the person I could possibly be doesn't exist. Therefore I don't continuously exist either. I won't evolve properly. So as I was listening, I was at a lost as to where I could position myself into it. You just grew your presence before me even more. Probably because you realized that I was invisible and small all this time. Even now, with your blood all over the room, your getting larger while I'm sinking further into invisibility. Guess I should be saying thank you since this time despite how distant you may be, the person I want to be is right before me, but they won't ever vanish."

"Your most welcome."

And with another click I expanded his brains all over the office and he ascended into colorful immortality. All while I sat there.

Knowing that I gave up on myself because I thought I couldn't be what I thought was truly meant to. It was irritating. Felt like I met a monkey just for it slug some shit into my face.