Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

Staircase to Inferno

A man in a sophisticated suit was leaning over his table, his slight hunch now shot out much more clearly displaying a heavy emotional weight which the man carried on his shoulders. With a sleek rubbing sound of rubber making out with stainless steel of which the man's table and its sections were made of he opened one drawer and removed a couple of handfuls of murky green cookies placed in a vacuum sealed cellophane package. With a careless swipe to the side, he tossed the treats sideways both to the left and to the right. At least two dozen men and women crawled out of the shadows that the man's office was covered in.

These were men and women of addiction, naked, starved, their hair ran rampant and their fingernails looked long enough to scoop one's eyes out with a spoon. Their teeth were ruined, their skin was almost bony in its consistency and they dug their rotten, leaking with green slobber mouths into the cookies. An explosion of purple smoke erupted from their mouths. As the slaves of addiction chained to the edges of the room fought for the mana from the heavens of their owner's mercy they bit each other, bashed and kicked, clawed and tore the flesh off one another despite having promised the other to never lose their humanity no matter how deep the hole addiction spirals them down in just a couple of weeks ago.

A couple of these zombies of addiction began screaming in inhuman voices. Their bodies were burning up from inside as their bone tissue covered skin no longer regulated the temperature or sweat, their skin no longer helped secrete toxins out of the body either, the unfortunate ones of that day died whining as they had too little strength left to scream. The man sitting at the table right up to the window sighed and continued to stare at his subjects. 

He opened another drawer and removed a knife placing it on the table right in front of himself. The owner of the giant skyscraper he was sitting in the top floor of lifted the knife up to his eyes, placed the tip so close that his left eye teared up from fear of the blade slipping too close. The tip and the blade traveled higher all the way to the man's forehead leaving no cut on his face or touching his skin even once. With a deep depressed sigh, the man placed the knife back to the drawer and removed a brush with a couple of face painting tools.

After opening the bottles up the mobster dipped the brush inside and turned around in a luxurious leather chair only to be faced by one of the most industrious and culturally relevant villages in the world, the most glorious panorama of the whole world opened up from where the man was sitting. Yet the shockproof thick glass reflected on the man's own image somewhat, at least the more colorful parts.

His shoes made of the hardened skin of his own drug-addicted victims. The ones that ate the "jollyjack" brand of the crackers, it seemed to be a bit less lethal and explosive than the jackbang brand but it eventually hardened one's skin to the point where it was thick as bone yet flexible as leather. Only made sense to make shoes out of the victims his drugs claimed... Where else would he have put all the bodies of those hopeless victims of fifteen minutes of pleasure ending up intoxicating and ruining their kidneys as their skin could no longer vent all the toxins in their body or regulate its temperature effectively cooking the poor souls from inside.

His fancy suit with a white vest of diamond buttons bought from the money made of selling slow death to the curious. It was hard profiting from suffering and death but truth be told those that called him anything but the businessman of tomorrow did not understand his merchandise. Yes, "Silver Dollar" Croquette was a merchant of death but not because he sold something that stupid fools misused to make death out of something that wasn't supposed to make it. No. He sold only death. Death and suffering itself and each day he invented new amazing ways of selling more painful suffering and slower, more agonizing death.

To the uninitiated, it may have seemed like a terrible thing but those were the literal hatchlings in the life's pleasures. They were the old crones who had no idea how radio frequencies or moving pictures worked, they infuriated Croquette most of all. Yes, he sold death and torture to those that came begging but only because it was so genius to do so. Death and suffering tasted horrible, they felt even worse and yet... To those to whom pleasure was boring and no longer entertaining it was a new angle. If only those fools saw the women moaning in pleasure as they carved their own bodies in front of him for another cracker. If only they saw the men that hung on the streets because they wished more of the pain and death they could not buy from Croquette. The pleasure was getting boring, the pain was the future of marketing.