I was comissioned by my Cousin to write a pastiche of Kafka's Metamorphosis for his birthday. I have used (at his own request) Rory's real name, and have only ever so slightly embelished the tale. Like, one percent. Rory Morgan awakens one morning to find trouble rising.
As Rory Morgan awoke one morning from confusing dreams, he found himself, in his bed, transformed into a gigantic ballbag.
What was his apex form? It couldn’t be this.
He'd love to read, just a little. Just a little Herbert to take the edge off. Visit the Dune Sea.
Ohh and after lunch a little Tolkien to staunch his head. That would be nice.
The problem is that he’s had too much work on.
He was never going to get his writing career off the ground if he was still working in that shitty office.
He’d only taken the job because he had needed to finance his writing career. Rory was lucky, not only was he talented at art, he had smarts to back it up. Rory had always had a way with numbers.
So temping one or two days at a time, here and there, making a comfortable enough wage to live by, and working creatively in the evenings and on weekends became the normal routine of things.
In the early days of the craft Rory had so much more time to research for his projects.
He is a meticulous writer, therefore anything to be explored that could nuance his complex method of world building was worth the exploration. He was reading scientific articles, classic sci-fi and fantasy authors, he was reading the DM guide for table top games, Women’s Weekly, Ireland’s Own, GUM pamphlets, the works.
Rory is working on a story about a half android monarch building a dimensional craft through seven different realities using the inhabitants as slaves to build his machine.
And in each, the presence of an eighth dimensional being has an effect. Which just so happens to have an underlying metaphor, being that the parts of the ship that are being crafted in different dimensions, provide a character map of how their inhabitants react.
Like the ones that deal with the shielding, being very caring and encompassing, to the beings that build the weapons systems, aggressive, sure of themselves, and the elusive and cryptic shadow society that focus mainly on building the complex and mysterious Hyper-mind.
Anyway there's this one dimensional orphan that goes rogue, and decides he’s going to take down the eighth dimensional being and end this thing once and for all, while meeting some allies from the different dimensions along the way. It’s all very clever and high-brow really.
And if there’s ever a chance it gets picked up for a live action series, there’s plenty of space to throw in some incest, or zombies in to keep it running for a bit longer. Ooh! Or he could say it was all a dream!