Book II, Part I: Crazy Things Happen to Zion

Chapter I: The life and times of Zion "The Book" Cao Cao

But no! It didn't end there (Zions name was still Kluggy from then on and he lost super big time but that goes without saying)because the big crusader guys dragged Kluggy's corpse back to the big evil looking citadel on -8th street where their machine to totally and forever distroy anything was. They threw Zion in and were about to turn the machine on when suddenly they heard a shout...

"EEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDGGGGGGGGGEEEEEEEE CCCCCCCCUUUUUUUUTTTTTTTTTTTTTTEEEEEEERRRRR FIVE!"

Everyone in the room threw themselves to the ground and waited for something bad to happen but for a long time nothing did. After some time everyone in the room decided it was a false alarm or something odd like that and went back to what they were doing before the shout. Some guy turned on the machine while another guy signed on to the space internet and went to check his space Email. The computer said "You have...2345 new messages" and everyone in the room suddenly realised what that edge cutter five had done! It had ultra mega spammed all their space email accounts! Everyone jumped on their computers to install space spam filters and while they were busy doing that nobody was watching the machine with Kluggy's corpse in it. The machine distroyed Kulggy's body but his soul jumped into the the magic, unbreakable, everlasting, name tag of terror which the machine was unable to distroy. The machine kept working to distroy the name tag but it began to short out just as an Anti-Gravity time machine came flying out of nowhere and crashed in to the big evil looking citadel. There was a truly outrageous explosion with lots of sparks and smoke and then there was just a big crater where the building once was.

The only thing left was the magic, unbreakable, everlasting, name tag of terror that still said Kluggy on it. However the magic, unbreakable, everlasting, name tag of terror was launched out of time and space and came back in another dimention on earth in the time that was the most normal with no aliens or massive space alliances of any kind(so no more of this space shit damnit!). The magic, unbreakable, everlasting, name tag of terror went flying through the air and landed in a forest where it hit a Leprechaun right in the forehead!

The Leprechaun leaped to his feet right away and tried to pull the tag off but couldn't do it! He started to shout some odd irish cursing but just then Kulggys spirit took over the Leprechaun's body and then Kluggy looked around and at himself and yelled out "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I've lost super big time like ALWAYS!"

Just then, a large group of children arrive, demanding Lucky Charms from Zion.

-An excerpt from the famous "Crazy Things Happen to Zion" story written during the time of the Old Guild

Sorry about that quote. I imagine almost nobody reading this will understand what the hell that was. It was from a story written during the old guild which was actually sort of a game based on an inside joke that had started many years prior on a Geocities website that no longer exists. The short version of the story is that when Zion and I teamed up to steal a mailing list from another friend of ours named Grant as a prank, we wrote a fake story about how Grant got beaten up by a friend of his named Paul as an attempt to convince the people on the mailing list that Grant had actually given the list to us. For some reason an alternate version of this story got posted onto a forum on my geocities site (I believe that Grant's insane girl friend Julie might have been responsible for this but I don't remember the exact details). The person named Zule who would later become one of the founding members of the original Golden Shields wrote an expansion to that story for unknown reasons where Zion was killed by giant mushrooms or some other bizzare thing. Zion was offended by this for equally confusing reasons and in response wrote another addition to the story where he returned from the dead to exact revenge on Zule. Zule then wrote another addition to the story where he returned from the dead to get his revenge and so on. The story went on pretty much forever until my Geocities forum was deleted and the original story was lost forever.

When the Golden Shields was founded several years later the entire thing started again when Zion posted a draft of a fake backstory he had written in an attempt to shut the obnoxious RP oriented Shadowbane community up about our ARAC recruitment policy (if you didn't understand what I just said there, go back and read the first book in the guild history or don't worry about it). The story was awful so in protest of it I wrote a short extention to it where Zion's character in the story was killed. Zion of course wrote a reply where he returned from the dead to exact his revenge. And soon Zule, Luke and many other members of the guild got involved and the story took off once again. This went on for almost two years until the collapse of the old guild after the release of Shadowbane and the result was a very long and very confusing story about Zion being killed multiple times and returning to seek his revenge multiple times. This story would obviously make no sense to anyone but the handful of people involved in its creation due to the large number of inside jokes that made up the bulk of the story. It was outrageously funny for those of us who did understand it however.

So why exactly does a story composed of inside jokes you likely won't understand need to be mentioned in the guild history? Because it illustrates several important points. The first of many is that there are things about Zion that many people didn't know about him, including people who may have thought they knew him very well. The most important thing you have to understand about Zion is that he was a liar. A very good one. He was always obsessed with being popular and being able to manipulate people by making them think they were his friends. For that reason he learned to always make the right first impression and then keep up that image with people. That was why he lied. He used his lies to make himself look like the kind of person he thought other people wanted to believe he was. That was why a lot of people who thought they knew Zion very well probably had no idea who he really was. That was exactly the way Zion wanted it. In that way he was almost a genius, even if what he was doing was of somewhat questionable morality.

And that brings me to the second point I wanted to make about Zion: Very few people truly knew him well enough to even begin to understand what happened to him. I am one of those people. I knew Zion for many, many years and Zion's method of manipulation had one weakness that could be exploited by someone who reamined in contact with him for a few years and paid close attention to the things he said. Once a person discovered this weakness they could figure out that the image Zion had been showing them all along wasn't the entire truth of the matter. And then it was possible to begin to discover exactly what kind of person Zion was. Zion's weakness was what I like to call Liar's Memory.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Lets say that one day on the way to school Zion slips and falls into some mud. Zion is now covered in mud so when he gets to school its obvious to everyone that something must have happened to him on the way to school that day. Now lets say that the first group of people Zion runs into are the skater clique and they stop him to ask him what happened. Zion's instinctive response to this scenario is to lie to them. If its a group of skaters then hes going to tell them he was doing a "totally whack 360 allie with a 460 backflip in 280 dude" or some non-sense along those lines. I'm not exactly sure what he would say, but you can rest assured he would know exactly what those skaters wanted to hear and that he had to skill to make them believe what he was saying was the truth. So he would end up convincing them he was doing some fantastic and impossible skater move when a cop came out of nowhere and told him he wasn't allowed to skate there. Then he would try to run from the cop, slip and fall in mud and that would be his story for why he was covered in mud. And if the skaters asked where his sakteboard was then he would say the cop took it and thats why he doesn't have it and why they will probably never see him with a skateboard again. "Woah, thats totally wicked man" the Skaters will say and now they all think Zion is great.

But it doesn't end there. Zion keeps on walking down the hall of the school and he runs into his girl friend. Suddenly his story changes. Now he was trying to buy her a gift at the "hot stuff for hot chicks store" when an insane security guard accused him of shop lifting (which he wasn't doing of course, unless his current girl friend happens to be into that sort of thing) and he had to run away. But suddenly three more security guards came out of nowhere and there was a struggle! He had to fight his way out and while running down an alley to ditch the security guards he slipped and fell in some mud. And hes really sorry that he lost her gift during the chase of course. His girl friend is obviously just happy that he didn't get arrested and swoons at the prospect that he went through all of that just to get her a gift.

But it doesn't end THERE either. Zion keeps walking down the hall and he runs into the principal of the school who angrily demands to know why Zion is tracking mud all over his recently waxed marble floor. Zo Zion invents yet another story about how on the way to school he was holding his extremely good school project he had been working on for the past three months and deserved an A++ when suddenly some anti-school thugs jumped out and... fighting... and running... project got dropped... some mud was involved... you have the idea by now right? The principal apologizes to Zion for yelling at him over the mud and goes off to blame the entire thing on the janitor or whatever. Zion laughs at him behind his back and goes on with his day. Does all of this sound like the theme for a B grade TV sitcom to you? Sorry to dissapoint you but its not. This was really the way Zion operated.

But Zion's weakness, Liar's Memory, would kick in several years after this mud incident. You would be talking to Zion and suddenly you would remember that story he told you about that one time when he was in a fight with the National Guard on his way to school and slipped in some mud during the fight. You would ask Zion if he remembers that story and he would say "Oh yeah! Sure I remember that. Why I was one my way to... uh, the skateboard store! To get my girlfirend a gift, right. And... there was a riot... at the sakteboard store... and uh, the National Guards showed up and uh... I dropped my school project in some mud?" And you would look at Zion with a confused expression on your face and know that wasn't the right story at all. It had been so many years Zion had forgotten ever falling in the mud, he only remembered bits and peices of the various lies he had told people about the incident after the fact. So in his mind the real story of what happened was gone and to fill in the gaps he put togeather what little he could remember of the various stories he had told other people about the mud incidednt. And as a result he ended up with a completely jibberish story with many gaps in it about how he was going to buy his girl friend a skateboard when he ran into the national guard and dropped his school project in some mud. And if you were smart and paying close attention then this is the point where you would put all the peices togeather and realize that the original story Zion had told you was a lie and now all these years later he can't even remember the lie properly, much less the true story of what happened to him that day.

I eventually discovered the truth about Zion in a very similar fashion, when I heard his version of the guild history. At that time I was actually out of the country during the year of 2004. I had a computer and access to the internet however and when Zion emailed me his version of events in reguards to the guild I realized that he didn't really remember any of it correctly. He had apparently forgotten and his mind had attempted to fill in the blanks as best as it could with the various lies, exaggerations and half-thruths he had created over the years to persuade allies, enemies and even our own guild members to do what he wanted them to. The result was a very confusing version of our guild history that made us sound like a fantastic guild but had far too many plot holes and misconceptions for anyone to take it seriously. That was when I knew that the TURE story HAD to be told and I began work on my own version of our guild history that I eventually adapted to post here on this very website as the first book of the guild history.

The reason I'm telling you all of this is to give you some insight into exactly what kind of person Zion was and why he did some of the seemingly confusing things he did. A lot of people just say that Zion did the things he did because he had a mental disorder (bi-polar disorder to be specific) but trying to explain someones behavior with a mental disorder doesn't so much explain the behavior as dismiss it. And I can tell you for certain that dismissing what happened to Zion won't help anyone. I don't know for certain that explaining it will actually do any good, but it couldn't possibly be worse than dismissing it. Sadly though the hardest part of explaining this story or even telling it for that matter, is that I honestly believe that only Zion truly knows what happened to set these events in motion and he has taken that knowledge to the grave with him.

Go to Chapter II, Email in the Sand