Jigolanthas in Exile

Jigolanthas in Exile

Hello, dear readers. I am Nasrudin, your intergalactic, intra-temporal narrator of stories, and I am here to bring another story about Lollipop City. Except that this story takes place in a place far, far away. 

Not much was said about what happened to the gnome Elder Jigolanthas once he was ousted by Agua, the lizardman and new King of Lollipop City.  History tends to forget the losers and focus on the winners, but I think it's only fair to give a little more information as to the retirement of this noble and insanely powerful being whom along with Xan the elf and Rainsong the human built the city.

In fact, King Agua was very merciful with Xan, Rainsong and Jigolanthas the Gnome, the three founders of Lollipop City.  King Agua decided that the most logical solution to deal with the immortal gnome, elf and human was to exile them far away. In fact, the war had not been his idea, and he had been captured trying to prevent it. But King Grumps, the dwarf tyrant would not succeed in his bid to control Lollipop City without the hugely popular Krishna Devotee.

And so, after the war, when Xan, Rainsong and Jigolanthas were all prisoners of war in the dungeons underneath the City Barracks, in typical lizard-man lesser faire style, King Agua, allowed Jigolanthas and the other two Elders to choose their own place of exile.

The gnome, one of the most debauched, sensual beings on the multiuniverse, decided that there could only be one place for him after Lollipop City, and that would be.... The Mile High City on planet Earth: Denver, Colorado, USA. After all, recreational marihuana had just been approved by the city council. And the gnome was very fond of snow-skiing. And the fact that he would live in a big city, as was Lollipop City, would mean that he would be able to attend all the fun stuff one can attend in such places, like movies, theatres, orgies and other forms of debautchery.

It was not hard at all for Jigolanthas to blend into the human population in Denver.

All he had to do was to cast a simple poly-morph spell in the mornings, before going out.  He usually chose the form of a middle aged eccentric, long-bearded hippy. There were millions like him in the Denver Metro area. He would never be found out. And besides these “hippies” were known for being debauched eccentrics.

With his alchemical skills, he was quick to transmute sufficient iron into gold to make himself ridiculously wealthy, comfortable and anonymous. Although he had founded a city-state in another planet, married about 144 females of various species, and in Nagaloka he was once the most famous gnome of all, he really only had two real friends, Xan the elf and Rainsong the human.

Only they could understand the burden of immortality and near-to omnipotence shared by all three since before Lollipop City was built.

But the three immortals were as different as oil is from water, and water from fire. And they had all chosen different places for their exile.

Xan, the elf, hand chosen Elfheim, the notorious planet of the elves, where he was welcomed as a hero. Xan was secretly all too happy to finally be out of the planet of the Naga Lords. He was having quite a hard time with his children, and moving the entire family to Elfheim was not a bad idea at all for him...  but that is another story.

And Rainsong, the human, had decided to stay in Nagaloka and go to the only non-Christian city where humans could survive the zombie apocalypse: Rasalandia, the land of the Vaisnava Minotaurs. In fact, the human had been attracted by the philosophy of the Krishna Devotees since the victory of the lizardman and his allies that cost him his city and his tower. Rainsong, notorious traveler in time and space recognized the power of the entity called Krishna, and he would not go against him. So he went to the oldest Vaisnava Kingdom, Rasalandia, and there, learn all he could about Krishna.

The human also knew more or less that the zombie Apocalypse would have to end in the eventual triumph of Jesus Christ. Christ's triumph in Nagaloka followed more or less, the "Final Judgment" of man in the bible, an inescapable conclusion to the human experiment created eons ago by the Gods.  Being a human, this information, gathered by a variety of time-travelers known to him and in his own experiments viewing the future, was determinant in his decision to stay in the Naga world and specifically, in Rasalandia, where he knew he would be safe from Jesus Christ and his zombies. Of course, the dead had not yet risen from their graves, so Rainsong had time to study the problem and deal with it on a very personal level.

But the imminent zombie apocalypse would mean and end of history, at least for planet earth, Rainsong’s hope were the many other planets, planes of existence, parallel universes and some such possibilities and alternative realities where perhaps, for instance, the devotees of Lord Krishna could continue to live peacefully in Nagaloka.  Rainsong was quite interested in these alternatives. After all, he was a human, and therefore he understood perfectly that he had been targeted by Christ for Final Judgment.  A dangerous prospect for one who had all his life followed the ways of the pagans in a pagan planet.

Jigolanthas on the other hand was not at all preoccupied with Christ’s Final Judgment, since he was not a human at all. Gnomes do not worry much about judgments of human gods. They have other fish to fry.

Jiji, as he preferred to be called by friends, instead worried about much more practical things. Like his new home in Colorado. First, he rented a series of gorgeous apartments in downtown Denver.  But he was on the lookout for a much better place. He required anonymity and seclusion. He was, after all, in exile. So he should live as though he was in exile, right?

He found what he was looking for not far from Denver in a gorgeous antique hotel, the Overlook Hotel.

Yeah, the same Overlook made famous by the Stanley Kubrick movie, "The Shinning" with Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duval. That Overlook. In fact, it was quite different from the one in the movie. But it was real, and there was rumors of it being haunted, so it was not very popular for the tourists, and all the previous owners, mostly banks and real-estate consortium had pushed the hotel on each other until the price became ridiculously low.

Nobody wanted to take a chance on owning the Overlook Hotel.

Soon, it was more costly to own it than to sell it, so the banks and real-estate developers put a big "for sale" sign and left it mostly abandoned.

This was the perfect place for Jiji. He planned to convert it into a nice, barely sufficient home for his needs. The needs of a megalomaniac exiled gnome city builder were not easy to meet.

He bought the Overlook by paying cash for it. He also gave a large sum of cash to various shady Colorado government officials so they would not ask too many questions as to the precedence of his enormous sums of money. Money has a basic rule: to keep it, you have to pay it out. Governments and Mafia leaders have lost all their money for not following this basic rule.

But Jiji knew just who to pay off to keep his anonymity and liberty of action in Colorado. He also knew how much to pay out, and his source of income was limitless, so losing his wealth on ridiculous expenses was never really a problem.

Losing his liberty or anonymity was far more dangerous for him.

With it's 200 rooms, vast kitchens, exterior hedge-maze, and total inaccessibility in the winter, the Overlook would be a good place to plan his triumphant return to Nagaloka to reclaim his lost city or wait for the zombie apocalypse to reach earth, whichever came first.

Either way, he would come out on top… Lollipop City would be his again. He would not rest until that happened, and that stupid lizardman was either dead or in some dungeon, awaiting vengeance… arr… justice.

Jigolanthas created the false identity of one James Alexander, and for this he also created an entire legal history, including a vast inheritance, various offshore holding companies and businesses all over the world that washed clean his enormous wealth. Once all this was done, he settled down to his favorite pastime, growing and smoking the best weed in the galaxy. All indoors, of course. For Jiji it was always hydro or nothing.

By now, Jigolanthas certainly knew about the zombie plague which would come eventually, destroying the human-occupied cities of Nagaloka and he was quite saddened by the news of the destruction of Lollipop City, which still hadn’t occurred, but was as inevitable as time itself.

One thing of peering into the future with magic is that one realizes that time is unstoppable, and what will happen cannot be stopped ever by any agency or force. Jiji had seen the future, like all the powerful diviners and sorcerers. He had used a simple crystal ball, so his visions were not as strong as others, but the basic premise was still the same. Not too long from now, the dead would rise from their tombs to slay the living.  

Although Jiji was not a native, Nagaloka was his great love, and thinking of having all the humans in that planet killed or exiled by Jesus Christ was not a pleasant meditation. But what could he do? He also understood that as soon as the humans disappeared from the Naga planet, the same fate would befall his new home: Planet Earth.

Between moments of clarity and sobriety, the gnome tried to see past all the different time-line-probabilities, temporal paradoxes, parallel-universes and time-flux lay lines to see how he could help mankind survive the Final Judgment of Jesus Christ.

The odds were not on his favor. 

His flux-investigations and deep time-travel meditations showed him a kind of temporal "causality" that took all possible alternative endings of cosmic reality to the same place.  Final Judgment. A kind of dreadful event with the extermination of two thirds of mankind, followed by the awakening of the dead for judgment by their Creator.

Ragnarok, Maha-Pralaya… The end of times.  

The event had many names.

Mostly, it was always the same: mankind engaged in a suicidal war against their own creator, who also created his own impersonator. Christ and Anti-Christ were two sides of the same coin, and in the Final Judgment, only those humans who really understood compassion and who followed the real ways of the Christ could survive. Gnomes, elves and lizardmen need not worry about it.

If this Demiurge, as he was known to the Nagas, this Jesus Christ was really so powerful that all possible timelines were inexorably drawn to his comic book-ending, meaning that all possible solutions to the great time-paradoxes ended in a "Final Judgment" of mankind on earth, then maybe, just maybe, he really was the ultimate avatar of the Creator Being. Or perhaps, he was his own antagonist, his own Anti-Christ, which would place King Agua, the avatar of the Lizard People, destined to come to Earth to resolve the Great War, the real Christ.

A lizard-Christ.

Jigolanthas did not much care for King Agua.

It was after all that stupid lizardman who not only stole his city from him, but somehow caused ... or perhaps enabled the Christ to come down to Nagaloka to collect all the humans dead or alive.

To the gnome, King Agua was inexperienced, capricious, foolish and weak. King Agua had let that horrible dwarf, King Grumps attack Lollipop City, all the while pretending that he was staunchly set on ahimsa, or non-violence.

Well, the War of the Dwarves was violent aplenty. Thousands died in a few days of battle. And now, the zombies would come down and finished off the city. In the future, King Agua had his own dragons burn down the city down to prevent the zombie infestation to spread, but the living dead were as numerous as all the human dead of all the ages in planet Nagaloka.

Jigolanthas was considering all these things as he sat in front of his crystal ball, looking for more information about the things that must come. Suddenly, a call came in through the ball. It was similar to a telephone ringing, but instead of a telephone ringing, it was a ball-ring. A kind of tolling bell-chime. 

Jigolanthas refocused his mind to accept the incoming call.

The handsome, mustachioed face of his friend Rainsong appeared on the surface of the ball.

"Hello." said the gnome.

"Jiji, I need to come over. Can you open me a portal?" replied the human.

"It’s been a while Rainsong…" answered the gnome.

"Just do it." said Rainsong, all business.

Jigolanthas liked to play his role as only spell-caster of his group. In their infancy, when they were still just adventurers in Hawkins City trying to steal gems form kobold temples, he was the "official" spell caster of the party, as Xan was only a cleric, and called upon for healing spells. The two warriors, Rainsong and Grumps would have to beg Jiji to do his "magic". That had been thousands of years ago. But the trill of denying Rainsong a spell was the same. The human had to depend on magical technology to create miracles. Jiji had it all in his veins. Magic was his blood.

Of course, the human now had a vast inventory of marvelous magic items to do almost everything that Jiji could do as a spell-caster, but the gnome still enjoyed the game.

Still, though, the human appeared troubled, so Jiji decided to open a portal immediately. He went over to his magic mirror and asked for a locator on Rainsong. Then, he demanded a portal be opened, and immediately, halfway across the universe, in Nagaloka, a portal was opened right to the left of Rainsong.

Rainsong had been in downtown Rasalandia, at the marketplace, looking for rumors of what was going on inside the castle.

He observed as a black-hole in miniature opened just right to his left. Without thinking it twice, he stepped through.

And re-appeared coming out of Jiji's giant mirror.

Rainsong really hated going through these portals. It made him think of eating too many magic mushrooms and then getting drunk on mead.

"So.....?" asked Jigolanthas, with his arms crossed.

"The rumor is that Krishna and Jesus are creating an end of time scenario. A Maha-Pralaya." replied Rainsong.

"Tell me something I don't know."

"The Minotaur Queen will the key to the entire end of time situation. . Krishna is permitting humans to exist in Rasalandia to fulfill a wish of his true devotee, Minoreyna, and that will be preventing Jesus from making Final Judgment of mankind. Mankind has to be all together for Final Judgment, and so long as there are living humans there, JC can't do his magic. Out of this conflict between Krishna and Jesus, time will end."  Rainsong had heard this from none other than Nibor, the black dragon who was also Prime-Minister of Rasalandia, and Queen Minoreyna's personal tutor.

"The key how? Why is she so important?".

"I don't know. But the end of time actually depends on her.”

 "So?" said Jiji, cold. “It’s out of our hands.  Why worry about it?”

"So, we must stop Queen Minoreyna!” shouted the human.

“First of all, she is NOT a Queen. She is a Princess. Second of all, time is not a river that you can deviate from its logical conclusion, it is more like a doughnut which does neither begin nor end, but which can be eaten from any point. Alfa and Omega are occurring simultaneously every second of existence, and they are not necessarily alterable by our kind. As time-travelers, we can, however, choose any moment in which to exist, and if time is really at an end, all we need to do to continue our lives is to travel back a bit, to a point in time less probable to end all reality.” Jigolanthas explained.

“That is a very selfish point of view, gnome.” Said Rainsong moodily.

“I am a selfish creature. I had never claimed to be otherwise. YOU on the other hand, are a fool.”

“Look, if the conflict for mankind, if Final Judgment is stopped by Krishna, then the millennial rein of Christ on Earth will be prematurely ended before it even begins. Since its Minoreyna’s prayers that summon Krishna to Nagaloka to detain Christ from his objectives, all we must do is to kidnap her and take her to another time and place and…”

“Rainsong, be reasonable. If we were to kidnap the Princess before the dead raise from their tombs and all that… what would prevent her from praying to Krishna against us? It would be far more dangerous and infinitely more unpleasant than simply traveling back in time to save ourselves from the end of times.” Jigolanthas walked over to a table where he found the control for his multimedia center, turned on his television set and began to watch an old Bela Lugosi movie as if to dismiss his friend.

“I’ll talk to Xan.” Replied the human, annoyed.

“Do so. He will tell you the same thing. Xan has been traveling to the end of time far more than I ever had, and if he is not acting to stop it, then surely there is nothing to be done.”

“What about all our friends? What about Lollipop City?”

“I have no friends. And Lollipop City belongs to that stupid lizard now. So let HIM worry about it.” Shouted the gnome over the television.

Rainsong was furious. The stubborn, selfish gnome was going to the let the universe end and there was nothing he could do about it.

“I will do it myself.” Suddenly Rainsong declared, resolute. Cold.

“You will do what?” Jiji turned off the T.V. He turned to look at his friend, now serious concern in his face.

“I will stop the Minotaur Princess. She will never get to pray for Krishna to save her people form the zombies.”

“You are an idiot!”

Rainsong pulled out a very special hand clock from his purse. It was a traveling device, an old and terrible portal-device.

“You have a portal-opener? Why didn’t you use it to come here?” asked the gnome.

“It’s old and not very good. Besides, I can only use it two times more.”

“So, you’re going back to Rasalandia?”

“Yes.”

“To kill the Minotaur Princess?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly, Lord Krishna appeared in the room, wearing a Denver Bronco’s t-shirt, shorts and tennis shoes.

The human and the gnome turned around, surprised and maybe a little terrified.

“No, you are not!” Said Krishna.

And suddenly, Rainsong disappeared….

“Did you kill him?” asked the gnome, fearful.

“Of course not. He is a good man, a virtuous soul.” Replied Krishna.

“So where did he go?”

“Back to the future!” Laughed Krishna.