“Quato Lumpur”
♝
Somewhere in the dense jungle of Guatablanka Keys there lived a colony of cloaked worshippers inhabiting a network of old stone fortresses. Their leader was a cyber-mutant hybrid called Quato Lumpur, whose body consisted of a giant bald head stuffed into a cybernetic hover-vehicle with T-Rex arms sheathed in flabby fat folds of skin. He would float around the compound preaching in a low-pitched reverbed out voice of the coming of the prosperous Nu Days.
In order for these Nu Days to come, however, the worshippers would be required to make grisly human sacrifices on a regular basis to the Void God. No one really understood what Quato Lumpur was talking about exactly, as his condescending yet charismatic monologues were vague enough to leave nearly everything up to their feeble imaginations – but he spoke in such a commanding tone the worshipper legion offered their total adherance and respect gratefully. His dreadful appearance and sheer strength and size, combined with a savage tendency for violence towards anybody who questioned or opposed him, made him the dominant force in the area by default. So, throughout the shifting seasons, this cult led a barbarically devout lifestyle of ritual sacrifice – not only of captured foes and random jungle dwellers, but also each other when they got desperate, which was pretty often as the death schedule gained frequency over time.
This was necessary to welcome the Nu Days.
Eventually missionaries from space who seemed to be demi-gods began visiting sporadically in dropships, bearing gifts of space drugs and lo-tech weaponry (spears, swords, bows and arrows, pick-axes, etc.) which the worshippers used to hunt the jungle and capture their victims. Sparked by Quato Lumpur’s orders, a chain reaction of back and forth raid wars began against neighboring tribes of Fur-People. Life in this cycle escalated and continued for decades, but the monster never seemed to age, and the Nu Days never seemed to come.
✢
✢
“The Nu Days finally came, and a new spirit emerged from the ruins of Quato Lumpur. The temple grounds had been displaced in an epic earthquake that shifted the earth into vertically interspersed blocks reaching bizarre new heights and juxtaposed depths. The remaining followers dispersed and divided themselves into smaller factions, then set forth to start new lives.
Through the rocky depths a system of underground caverns could be descended to and some of the new nomads ventured there to begin their post-awakened lives. Others climbed the newly formed mountainous formations and used the jungle to build homes and villages there.
Quato Lumpur the Godhead had been dispelled in a miraculous flash of blue light, leaving only the cybershell of his hover-vehicle behind. The spirit remained, however, and the energy evolved into something else and mysterious which seemed to permeate the land.
Soon people began to mentally transcend to have a kind of clairvoyant hyper-focus and other anomalies of the mind – like telepathy and heightened self-awareness. So, an age of better understanding, compassion and respect ensued where before there was mostly ignorance, conformity and violence for unnecessary reasons.”
– The Disciple
