The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

“Thousands of years ago, before the, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish and Christian beliefs were born. Before the gods of Rome, Egypt and Greece were called forth, before writing, before any of the Earth’s civilisations, even before man was a pack of nomadic hairy tribes, the Green Man over-saw all.

The Green Man breathed life into the Earth. The Green man made all and yet the Green Man was no God. He created life on our planet as part of a science project in his early school years. The Green Man was born into a people who travelled the stars, expanding their knowledge and in so doing, expanded the universal consciousness.

They didn’t hold belief as they had long since advanced beyond it; instead they held knowledge. They held the knowledge that all things were part of the great universal machine and that this machine was just part of a greater network of alternative realities and universes. They knew that they existed inside just one particular universe experiencing itself subjectively. All was joined and all had purpose.

The Green Man wanted to create more life in the cosmos so that he could increase the universe’s experience of itself, or in other words, he wanted to increase the universes productivity, to speed things up a tad. He was a visionary with a mind unlike any other.

For Millennia the simpletons on Earth praised his work.

He was kept alive through the millions of years of his existence by inseminating willing hosts with his soul. For the largest part, these hosts were of his own race. The green man’s people had long since been able to surgically remove the soul using interesting looking bits of coiled metal, sticks and phlegm. Each incarnation would receive the teachings of the last and seek to improve on them to help the universe understand itself better. This was his life’s work and his life had lasted for age upon age.

He would often pop back to Earth to see how we were doing and frequently marvelled at how far his little science project had gone. On occasion he would manipulate things and creatures, just sort of tweak everything a little so as to speed the evolutionary process.

The reptile era seemed very promising until a huge meteor set the project back a few million years. Clearly the universe had decided that it preferred mammals as the dominant species on the planet, and who was he to argue with the universe?

After the dinosaur’s extinction all went relatively well. He spent a few million years away and when he came back, to his great surprise, he found some monkeys, monkeys that used tools and showed great promise. In fact, his experiment went so well after that, that one-day he decided to spend a few incarnations experiencing the planet first hand. With this in mind he randomly picked a willing young woman to receive his seed and artificially inseminated her.

She lived in Nazareth.

Her name was Mary.

The rest, as considered in some circles, is history, or as considered in other circle, myth. All of this was kept extremely secret after the first incarnation (he had a bit of a hard time with torture and being nailed to crosses) save for a select few. The Green Man took the Earthly title of the Sion (which was primarily a nick-name but it just kinda stuck) and those closest to him were known as his Priory.

One day, almost 2 thousand years since the green man had come to Earth, a child was born to some freethinking hippies called the Winkles. They were the type of people who made up their own names. They named their child Shoop (a word they believed should be the singular word for sheep. If there was more than one goose they were geese, so why not one shoop and many sheep. As I said, they were hippies and had messed around with a few too many psychotropic substances).

Something rather upsetting happened in Shoop Winkle’s childhood that stayed with him for the rest of his life. It involved a death and a séance and he used it as an excuse to be a destructive, miserable and a sneaky sod ever since, happily annihilating everything even remotely strange that crossed his path.

It seemed to work quite well for him, so he stuck with it.

Shoop Winkle had no knowledge of the Sion and the Priory, which was probably for the best.

At least he’d known nothing… until now!