To finish off the trilogy of somewhat retold versions of Middle-earth based on plot summaries I wrote for the Cambridge Tolkien Society’s weekly read-alongs (The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit), I present the Silmarillion as seen by the madman in my head.
Arda plc make worlds under the benevolent oversight of Chairman of the Board and majority shareholder, Kazoo Slartibarttar. They have just delivered on their latest contract, a pet project of the chairman, named after his own company. So it’s time for the employee disco and karaoke party to celebrate a job well done. Everyone’s having a good old sing-song and getting along famously, until Hellchord, the chairman’s problematic nephew who divides his time (80-20) between being a menace to society and being really really good at worldbuilding turns up with his latest invention: the Chewbaxaphone. Half tuba, half saxophone, all Wookie, and lets rip [imagine an oompa cover of the Baker Street solo in the key of Chewbacca. The Wookey]. This somewhat disrupts the harmonious melody, though many of the employees are drawn to the majestic awfulness of Hellchord’s tune. Some people just want more excitement than can be provided by a Baroque piece, which was all they had before, you know? Kazoo is not entirely happy about this and stops the party, calms everyone down, and takes them on the tour of the new world. Of course, some employees are going to be needed to staff the new division of the company responsible for looking after the world, and wearing the requisite ceremonial single-colour jumpsuits that go with such a position. So we meet the Arda (Arda) board (as distinct from the Arda board, run by Kazoo): Manly (light blue), Tah-dah (silver), Elmo (dark blue), Olé (gold), Cat-mama (green), Barneiiiggghhh (red), CryForMeArgentienna (grey), Handsoff (good black), Hippyking (tie-dyed), WhyMe (ecru, woven), Bestie (pyjamas), Dancer (floral), Nessie (neon green sportswear) and HulkSMASH (pink). Meanwhile, Hellchord (evil black, with spikes), is still sulking about getting told off publicly and decides to found his own competitor company, Hellcorp. Looks as if it’s time for some corporate warfare….
The Corporation Wars begin as Hellcorp tries to stage a hostile takeover of Arda (Arda), mostly through Hellchord trashing the place like a roided up berserk bull in a very packed china shop. He even manages to knock down the two skyscrapers that were going to be the new division HQ and thoroughly vandalises the executive suites. The board respond by building a new gated compound with massive walls and sentry turrets, and then spend a lot of time deliberating. They do manage to bring their bioluminescent tree idea to production, though, which is good, because Hellchord had knocked out the lights when he knocked down the skyscrapers. Kazoo has also warned everyone that he expects his legions of kids to be found spaces on the board when they all get back from their gap millennium, so everyone’s in a tizz about that. To the point where Owly tries to smuggle all his kids in to help with the construction work. Kazoo isn’t best-pleased, but decides to allow it, so Arda (Arda) now has a Dwarf Owl unit, which pisses off Cat-Mama, who forces Kazoo to allow her horde of Maine HaHooms in. So, in addition to the overall corporate conflict, we now have a war between the pygmy owls and the Maines for control of the forests. Oh dear. Arda’s getting crowded and no one’s even shown up yet….
Manly (chairman of the Arda (Arda) board) gets a call from Kazoo (chairman of the Arda board) that his first few thousand eldest children are about to turn up and need to be found employment sharp-ish (and also be picked up from the airport). This is a bit difficult while there’s ongoing warfare between Arda (Arda) and HellCorp, so Arda (Arda) get off their arses and hire some hotshot lawyers to get Hellchord on a tax technicality while adding some pressure in the form of a massive assault on Hellcorp’s positions. So Hellchord is banged up in the slammer for a few thousand years. The slammer conveniently owned by Arda (Arda), run by HandsOff (Vice-President for Prisons and Dooms). So Barneiiigggghhhh heads off to the airport on his horse to meet the kiddies off the plane. Though, when he gets there, it turns out some of the more tech-bro ones have already been recruited by Hellcorp, and a load of the others decide to have another gap millennium or three. But that still leaves a load to be taken back to the Arda (Arda) compound (because you should never let children learn how to adult) and no one’s organised enough taxis. So Barneigggghhhhh walks them all home, losing a good chunk more in the process. Because, obviously. Including one of the three eldest, Thingy (Kazoo wasn’t good at names), who takes up with an ethereal beauty he meets in a forest. As you do. But, at last, they all get home in three groups: the Arts students, the STEM students, and the hippies.
Kazoo’s few thousand eldest children settle in to the Arda (Arda) HQ compound after the board manage to get some ferries laid in to get them to the island. Though some of them nearly miss boarding, some actually miss boarding, and a load of the hippies found their own commune on a nearby island that one of the ferries docks at by mistake. Thingy finally gets out of the forest and founds an autonomous subsidiary Sind (Arda) to explore the challenging new Middle-earth market where Hellcorp occupies a dominant position. Once in the compound, the Arts students hang about chairman Manly’s office in the central tower and nominally form the PR and Branding department, but, in practice, lounge about composing poetry for the rest of time, though they do at least help build Kiddion, the Children’s subsidiary compound, before ascending the tower and staying there, led by Ingy (I said Kazoo wasn’t good at names). The STEM students (led by Fingy – I said Kazoo really wasn’t good at names), working with Owly, found their own startup, NolCorp, and start doing science, technology, writing, all those minor things. The hippies hang out by the beach and remain hippies. Though they turn out to be quite good at boatbuilding when they can be bothered to be unstoned for long enough. Then Fingy’s son, Gurufingy (Fingy also wasn’t good at names), is born and turns out to be one of those annoying child prodigies who invents everything, is really handsome, and also a massive dick, but somehow gets married and has a load of sons with whom he has a terrible relationship. Welp. Meanwhile, Hellchord is released from prison and promises not to do it again, cross my heart and hope to die, to which Manly says ‘Cool, seems legit. You’re free’. The rest of the board is less convinced, but he’s the chairman. Hellchord, of course, is planning to take down the system from the inside by suborning Nolcorp. This can only end well.
And then Nolcorp bring out a new limited-edition product range, designed by Gurufingy (CTO): the SilmaPills. Only three of them exist, but taking one guarantees you either immortality or agonising death, depending on how virtuous you are according to Gurufingy’s black-box algorithm. Naturally, Hellchord wants them; if nothing else, to prevent anyone else having them. So Hellchord starts trying to engineer a split between Arda (Arda) and Nolcorp, so that he can then mount a takeover away from the eyes of the board. He does this by reminding everyone about all the younger children of Kazoo, who had just finished exams and were expected to turn up in the not-too-distant future and would need jobs and might turn out to be the favourite children. So all the elder children, especially Nolcorp, get a bit grumbly and tense, and start waving swords around, as you do, and then Gurufingy nearly murders his brothers, Fingyfingy and Fingerfingy, so the police get called, Gurufingy ends up with a restraining order, and it all gets a bit messy. To make matters worse, Hellchord escapes in the confusion, so things aren’t likely to get any better soon.
Hellchord breaks back into the Arda (Arda) compound by shinning up the overhanging tree in the back corner that no one had thought to cut down, along with Hellcorp R&D’s latest invention: an AI mobile energy vortex, U-No-Lights (UNL). While everyone’s off work because it’s a bank holiday, he plugs UNL into the Arda (Arda) mainframe, causing the entire compound to power down and crucial core components to irrevocably fuse and break. This gets everyone’s attention, and Barneiggggghhhhhh and HulkSMASH run after him with flaming torches to try to catch him. They fail. Hellchord wins this round, escaping with the UNL.
Shit gets real. Hellchord cleverly goes in the direction no one expected, kills Fingy, steals the SilmaPills and escapes back to HellCorp HQ’s ruins, which he proceeds to rebuild in double-quick time using a lot of 3D printers. Including his own personal mountain range, because he can. Though not before he has to deal with his own personal Singularity, when the UNL goes critical and starts trying to consume all the mass in the universe, including Hellchord and the SilmaPills, leading to a lot of screaming and an emergency intervention from the HellCorp Bot Apoptosis Last-Resort Operatives Guild (BALROG) to deactivate it. Meanwhile, back in the Arda (Arda) compound, the Board are pleading with Gurufingy to unlock the code in his SilmaPills, as that’s the only thing that can restore the mainframe. Gurufingy says no, then gets pinged the security footage showing his dad being murdered, and goes apocalyptically ape-shit nuclear-level spare. Genocidally so. As the new chairman of NolCorp, he immediately decrees a relocation to Middle-earth of the division HQ and all employees and launches an aggressive propaganda campaign, including redefining the division’s mission as ‘the complete extermination of HellCorp and the recovery of the SilmaPills at any cost’, in which he is supported by his seven sons: Guyboss, Gaglord, Gurufingy Junior, Jellystorm, Jankster, Hambod and Hamarse. So they all march off, commandeer the hippies’ boats, murder some hippies while doing so, and sail back to Middle-earth. There they burn the boats (and Hambod, or possibly Hamarse), stranding most of NolCorp back in the compound, who are understandably unhappy about this, because they now have to walk the long way round and there’s no coffee shop for the next 2000 miles. The Arda (Arda) board try to dissuade them, obviously, only a tithe, led by Fingerfingy (now Regional Manager, Valmar Branch), listen, even when HandsOff goes all finger-waggy and doom-mongery on them.
We check back in with Thingy, now CEO of SindCorp, the dominant player in Middle-earth (a market with few competitors until now), who’s married a supermodel demigod (the intelligent one of the couple) as one does and now has an extremely photogenic daughter who keeps getting papped dancing in the forest. SindCorp has also formed a strategic partnership with DwarfTech plc, to whom they outsource their R&D and construction work. So Thingy has a really nice HQ protected by the forcefield designed by his wife, Meidi Lamarr. Which is good, because HellCorp start trying to acquire market share in Middle-earth, so a well-defended HQ and well-armed security force (with the latest in DwarfTech weaponry and armour) is really rather handy. We also get introduced to some more hippies (greens, not surfers, this time), who mostly mill around, then die or join the forestry division of SindCorp. The surfers who’d stayed in Middle-earth, under Surfman, also wall away all their assets to resist HellCorp, who temporarily take a dominant position until NolCorp show up in a couple more chapters.
After all the excitement (the destruction of the mainframe, the forced de-merger of NolCorp, the asset stripping of the hippies, you know, standard corporate stuff), the Arda (Arda) board have a meeting. A very long meeting. And decide some stuff, shockingly. The key thing is to get the lights back on, because everyone keeps bumping into things and HulkSMASH has taken to wandering around nude and pretending to be a door (make your own knob gag), and it’s just a bit too much. So CatMama, Owly and CryForMeArgentienna jury-rig a generator, manage a partial reboot of the mainframe, and get things running again well enough, even if the light’s a bit flickery and weird and not a patch on the old light and a load of data’s got corrupted. Everyone in Middle-earth is amazed, because, wow, light (they’re a bit rustic over there) and also, time and counting (the board turn off the lights at night. That’s how you knew it was night. Before, they had these fancy dimming LEDs so no one ever knew what day it was and it all got a bit weird)! In response to the threat of HellCorp, they also properly fortify the compound this time so that no one, I mean no one can get in, and, otherwise, basically ignore the problem because of the fear of negative externalities if they nuke Hellchord’s new obvious volcano lair. Hellchord obviously tries to shoot out the new lights, but the new AA defences and missile shield around the compound stop that.
Kazoo’s few thousand younger kids show up, but no one realises and so there’s no one to pick them up at the airport (also see above for why everyone’s distracted). So they grumble a bit and then wander off in random directions. So some of them end up with HellCorp, some get lost entirely, and some head in the right direction to be plot-relevant in later chapters. But, fundamentally, they’re a bit weedy and useless, and keep dying, which doesn’t help anyone. But this is apparently a designed-in feature by Kazoo and has some purpose that he’s keeping to himself and not telling anyone, because it’s ineffable or something.
NolCorp begin their aggressive expansion in Middle-earth, forming a strategic partnership with SindCorp, once they’ve worked out how to communicate, and staging a sustained financial assault on HellCorp’s bottom line and a physical assault on their overt volcano HQ. NolCorp’s aggressive marketing and technological innovations nearly completely overwhelm HellCorp until Hellchord sends BALROG to do a bit of wet work and, well, if you can take down badly behaving AIs, it turns out you can also take down badly behaving organic lifeforms too. So Gurufingy gets taken out of the picture, though not before making his seven sons’ inheritance of NolCorp contingent on them destroying HellCorp. Guyboss also gets kindnapped by BALROG so Hellchord can use him for leverage, but is daringly rescued by Fingyone (Fingyfingy’s eldest son; yes, they all managed to get across by now, but are distinctly unhappy with the board’s policies re: setting fire to ships and stranding them all) with the help of Flyhere, Middle-earth’s independent, last-resort, aerial taxi service. Though Guyboss does lose a hand in the process. No biggy. On their return, Guyboss, in gratitude, and to force unity on what is becoming an increasingly fractious company, resigns on behalf of himself and all his brothers, with them all taking up non-executive directorships. Fingyfingy is therefore the new Chairman of NolCorp. There’s still some division on how best to deal with SindCorp, but Fingyfingy organises a big corporate shindig to cheer everyone up. HellCorp try to launch a new product to gain market share and territory: Draggons (short for dragon waggons) – armoured assault vehicles with mechanical claws and flamethrowers, but their prototype malfunctions badly on its test run, and is jeered back to base by NolCorp. And everything’s fairly OK: no SilmaPills, but NolCorp look as if they might be about to squeeze HellCorp out of business.
We meet Fingerfood (Fingerfingy’s eldest son) and Twoson (Fingyfingy’s second son. Spot his naming policy), who are worried that NolCorp’s crisis management plans are lacking, so start thinking about spinning off some company assets to form separate entities if the main corporation should suffer any problems. Fingerfood sets up an off-the-books financial division trading in Narcobonds, which give their names to the division and his hidden HQ, to ensure NolCorp has a reserve cashflow if market conditions should become more challenging. Then we have a quick pop quiz on the extent of NolCorp’s holdings and who all the regional managers are. There will be a test later. Then we come back to Twoson, who, inspired by Elmo, founds REDACTED and does REDACTED REDACTED. Thingy also finds out about the whole hippy murder and ship-burning thing, and, as a former hippy, has a right royal strop, unilaterally terminating the strategic partnership between SindCorp and NolCorp. What’s that Skippy? Market conditions are about to get more challenging? Too right they are….
We meet the roving metallurgy consultant, Mole, and it all goes soap opera. He used to be part of SindCorp, but took redundancy and set up on his own and has a really lucrative repeat engagement with Owls plc who are the smithying experts. He’s also the worst sort of Tinder creep, when he abducts one of his dates who happened to be FingyOne and Twoson’s sister, Babybel the Fingirl, who had been living with Twoson in REDACTED and got bored because REDACTED and so REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED and then the Sons of Feanor, for once, aren’t the baddies, and then she gets kidnapped by Mole and locked up in his wilderness prepper base, because he’s that sort of person. But then she gets Stockholm Syndrome and they have a son, Molekin, and then she gets bored again and escapes with her son (Mole is not a good father) and goes back to REDACTED, but Mole’s set up all the surveillance cameras, hastens back from his latest Owls job, and follows them. Then REDACTED REDACTED Babybel poisoned by javelin REDACTED Mole thrown off a cliff REDACTED REDACTED incestuous crush REDACTED Molekin REDACTED foreshadowing REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED oh dear.
[The chords of Also Sprach Zarathustra ring out over Middle-Earth as Eru finally decides it’s time for the Dawn of Man – the prologue to ‘First Age 500ish: A Mostly Sea Odyssey with Some Space Bits’. A whole bunch of humans wake up and wander around for a bit, uselessly and aimlessly. They die, because that’s what humans do, and eventually some of them wander around enough to see a tall metal thing, pleasingly proportioned, making strange high-pitched noises and encouraging them to learn civilisation. It’s Finrod, dressed in armour and singing. There’s probably a bit where one of them kills a tapir, or something, and it’s all very meaningful and impressive, but there’s not much actual plot.]
Kazoo’s younger children (in three groups) all finally make it to the NolCorp HQ, led by Fingerfood, who found them while he was out on a group retreat and team-bonding exercise. And, in the true spirit of elder siblings everywhere, all the elder children look down on their siblings a bit. I mean, they are a bit useless, they keep just propagating and dying, and they’re frankly terrible linguists (I mean, they call Fingerfood Nom, because he looks tasty – they’ve gone a bit feral in the journey from the airport). So NolCorp give them a load of junior positions, mostly as cannon fodder associate military operatives. The younger children are also very reticent about what they’ve been doing on their gap years, but it seems not to have been entirely legal and they’re all running from some unspecified trouble. The elder children reckon they got mixed up in some HellCorp black ops thing, which, as it will later turn out, is not entirely removed from the truth. They do turn out to be pretty good at fighting, though – even Jankster admits it, eventually, after watching one of the groups nearly get wiped out by HellCorp, and he’s the most murderous NolCorp non-executive director this side of Succession. Though, of course, some of the younger children still aren’t ready to grow up, listen to HellCorp and head off on some more gap-yah illicit mercenary activity.
SHIT. GETS. REAL (WOP WOP WOP WOP). HellCorp unveils their first production version of the DRAGGON and it is a runaway success. In that it literally runs away, crushing and incinerating a large portion of Kazoo’s kiddies, especially the fodder, and sending NolCorp’s share price and market share plummeting downwards. SindCorp do OK, as they’re all hiding behind Meidi’s magic forcefield, but they do now have an immigration problem, as everyone else related to them even remotely wants to get behind it too. But Thingy can always use more interns, so that’s fine. So Fingyfingy (NolCorp CEO) does the only sensible thing and challenges Hellchord to a cage fight, because that’s what adults do. I mean, 10/10 for metal rating, minus several million for sensibleness. Especially when your opponent is a demigod. Who proceeds to win, though not without taking a battering himself, especially when one of NolCorp’s attack drones goes rogue and embeds a load of shrapnel in his face (the result of the fight also means FingOne is now CEO of NolCorp, because his dad just got fatally suplexed). Also, even more of Kazoo’s younger children now start showing up, but they’re a bit weird and no one likes them – they’d all subscribed to Hellchord’s TikTolk channel and had some very strange views. While all this is going on, Twoson just sits happily in REDACTED and twiddles his thumbs. It’ll probably be fine. And we actually meet some of the younger children who will turn out to be important in the future: Beret, son of Beret-hire. Houdini son of GalGone. And Oooo-er, also son of GalGone (GalGone himself dying almost immediately).
Against the backdrop of the Corporation Wars and their unremitting death and doom, there were occasionally some brighter moments. Such as this. HellCorp have achieved a dominant position with the DRAGGON and the SilmaPills in their possession. NolCorp are confused and taking time to refocus on their core business (murdering Hellchord). Up steps Beret, last seen forming part of a commando squad behind enemy lines with his dad. But, the squad is betrayed, and all Beret’s comrades are murdered and he must go on the run. Which he does by fighting his way through the Infinite Spider Dungeon and hacking his way through Meidi’s forcefield to get into SindCorp (now rebranded ThingCorp after its CEO’s messiah complex got out of hand). Because some people just can’t stop overachieving. And there he’s just sort of wandering in the woods when he meets Suthingette TrilbyBelle, Thingy’s demigod supermodel daughter (and her pet flautist, who follows her everywhere in a rather stalkerish way, but it’s OK, right?). He’s a tall, dark stranger with more abs than Batman. She’s a tall, fair stranger who is literally a demigod. Do they get it on? OF COURSE. After a bit of chasing each other round the forest, Suethingette takes Beret to meet her dad and it is, like, totes awks. Thingy goes a bit Taskmaster and tells Beret to come back when he’s got one of the SilmaPills (no biggy for a macho hunk like you, right?), and locks his daughter in a treehouse. Meidi eyerolls and facepalms because she’s seen this film before.
So Beret wanders off towards Fingerfood’s secret Narcobonds base (still making cash for NolCorp), to seek some help, because he’s tough as nails and a bit dim. Fortunately, his dad’s old ring has the access codes, so he doesn’t get shot by the autoturrets. Fingerfood then promises to help him, because his dad saved his life, so gathers up a crack squad, and the Dirty Dozen head off to Hellchord’s secret volcano base. This does, unfortunately, give Gurufingy Junior and Jellystorm the opportunity to turn Fingerfood’s younger brother, BadBreath, into a puppet executive director of NolCorp. And when Beret, Fingerfood, and the squad get halfway across the warzone, disguised as HellCorp soldiers, they’re captured by Growl-on, HellCorp’s CTO, who’s mighty suspicious of them. For some reason that one presumes he thought would help, Fingerfood then starts a rap battle with him, which ends up proving that middle-class white guys are perhaps not the most natural rappers in the world. So the squad is thrown into prison and every so often one of them gets disassembled for spare bits to be used in HellCorp’s bioweapons research programme. Meanwhile, Suethingette escapes, because, let me remind you, she’s a literal demigod and can do god stuff. Though then she’s captured by Gurufingy Junior and Jellystorm who are perfectly happy with a bit of light kidnapping and are hoping for a bit of the old Stockholm Syndrome to kick in, to give them a shot at executive directorships in NolCorp and ThingCorp. She’s sprung from jail, by Juan, the Mexican Talking Dog owned by Jellystorm (NolCorp had been doing some dodgy biological research too). Her and Juan then race to Growl-on’s research facility to rescue Beret. This is good timing, because Beret is the last one left, Fingerfood having scored a 0-0 draw with the orderlies when they came to take him, by busting out of his shackles and throttling them to death, but not before they fatally stabbed him.
Suethingette and Juan turn up in the nick of time to prevent Beret being disassembled, and, because she’s a literal demigod, she just sings ‘Under Pressure’ across such a range of notes that the entire building falls down and Growl-on has to slope off embarrassed, especially because Juan had ripped out the throats of all the guards and his entire personal bodyguard when they tried to stop Suethingette singing. So the two lovers are reunited – hooray! Juan goes back to his master, along with all the NarcoBond prisoners that HellCorp had captured and tried to extract algorithmic secrets from, which does have the side effect of making BadBreath find his mojo (it was down the back of the sofa) and kick out Gurufingy Junior and Jellystorm. More hooray! But Beret is a man of his word, even if that word is ‘mad’. So the two lovers, after a bit of fun and frolics, where Beret nearly gets killed by Gurufingy Junior and Jellystorm, who just HAPPEN to be riding past, though not before he nearly throttles them (Juan decides enough is enough and that Suethingette is a better owner at this point, so chases the two brothers off), head off towards Hellchord’s obvious volcano base. Well, Beret does: he tells Juan to look after Suethingette and prepares to solo what is more-or-less literally Hell. But this isn’t that kind of movie or game (Doom), so when Suethingette wakes up, she makes Juan catch up with Beret, shouts at him, and then comes up with an actual plan. Which, somehow, works. Again, she is a literal demigod. She KOs Cerberus and then sings the world’s best lullaby medley to put everyone to sleep. Beret just sort of hides in a corner while his girlfriend does her thing, then sidles over to pouch one of the SilmaPills. Then they scarper. At which point Cerberus wakes up, bites off Beret’s hand with the SilmaPill and then has serious indigestion so runs off yowling looking for the Gaviscon.
But, Suethingette is a literal demigod, so with Juan’s help and a couple of NolCorp drones, Beret shakes off what was only a flesh wound, and they go back to see Thingy. Who grudgingly accepts that being maimed in the line of duty and that Beret technically held a SilmaPill (and still did, inside Cerberus), was good enough. Hooray! Except now there was a very angry monster dog running around drinking all the water and killing everyone who came near. So ThingCorp had to hunt down Cerberus and reclaim the SilmaPill. Which they did, but Beret got himself killed trying to solo it again. So everyone was very sad. But it was OK, because Suethingette, a literal demigod, went and sang the opening melody from Up!” at the actual gods (the Arda (Arda) board) and they were really sad and resurrected Beret. Hooray! Though, as a price, because nothing’s free, Suethingette had to agree to stop being a literal demigod and die eventually. That’s the power of love. So it all ended happily. Sort of. Which is good, because the next few chapters are bleak.
Beret and Suethingette stage a farewell tour and then go off to live in an eco-lodge in the middle of nowhere where they can’t be papped. They have one child, the first of the Hat-Elven, Deer Stalkel, and will become plot-relevant again in a few chapters.
Meanwhile, NolCorp tries to re-establish its market position by going on a recruitment drive among the newly arrived younger younger children of Kazoo. What a shame they forget to do their security vetting properly and let in a load of HellCorp stooges. This is all led by Guyboss, which means, because of what his brothers have been getting up to recently, that the Narcobond division flat-out refuses to help, and ThingCorp are also out because Guyboss reminds Thingy of whose IP the SilmaPill is and his brothers abandon all subtlety and promise to kill the whole of ThingyCorp if necessary. 0/10 for diplomacy. On the plus side, the Little Owls help, so Guyboss has some shiny bling to use. But Hellchord knows everything that’s going on, lets Guyboss launch his gambit and then totally trashes everything, including by sending increasingly insulting GIFs and shit memes to the whole NolCorp Board’s phones constantly, because he’s inside their system now and can do whatever he likes. No one’s got an answer to the DRAGGON’s market-leading and mass-murdering USPs either, and most of the younger younger children resign en masse on opening day and join the other team. And then the Board are so angry, they throw tactics out of the window and go for the good ol’ frontal charge. So everyone dies. Literally everyone. Nearly. Even though Twoson has turned up from REDACTED with a load of really good products and a big army. It’s still a shitshow. Though it does turn out the Little Owls are quite good against the DRAGGON, because they’re too small to be effectively targeted by it.
Twoson takes all the survivors back to REDACTED and only now does anyone start thinking about what happens if they have to liquidate the company. So they start trying to get an appointment with the Arda (Arda) Board, but no one had the number saved in their phones and email hasn’t been invented yet. So they have to get back to the compound, but it’s a bit difficult, because they haven’t got the passwords to all the security systems. So that’s awkward.
Houdini also survives, because Hellchord has a sense of humour. A really bad, twisted one, but still one. So Hellchord sticks him in the Supermax wing of his obvious volcano base with his eyes peeled open and a 24/7 feed of all the shit HellCorp is getting up to. Lol, jk, what a guy.
Houdini has a son, Turpin. He’s a bit intense. After Houdini’s capture, his mum, Moorhen, sends him off to Thingy to be looked after (clearly, she didn’t know what Thingy’s parenting skills were like). ThingCorp are also looking for a solution to the DRAGGON problem. Thingy sees that Turpin could be useful here (ethics, what are those?) so ThingCorp embarks on its revolutionary cyborg weapons programme and creates TurboCop, the most advanced and devastating weapon on the market. Cyborg Turpin is quite happy, because he didn’t have any friends or likeable qualities anyway. The only teensy problem is that HellCorp managed to get a virus into his operating software that means TurboCop always makes the bad decision. So when he’s made operational, he kills a ThingCorp employee, then runs off to join some outlaws, who then take hostage some dwarf pygmy owls and live in their secret cave. So Thingy sends Beleg Strongcode, his CTO, off to try to fix the renegade android, or wipe his systems. Beleg finds TurboCop and attempts to retrain his decision-making algorithm, and it’s all good – the outlaws become a guerrilla army fighting HellCorp – until HellCorp track them down and capture TurboCop, recorrupting his programming. Though he does murder everyone when he escapes. Including Beleg, who was trying to track him down again. So now the rogue weapon is unleashed on an unsuspecting populace. First he goes to Narcobonds, one of the few remaining NolCorp bases, and proceeds to make a series of bad decisions that lead to everyone dying, mostly by DRAGGON (the DRAGGON also further corrupts TurboCop’s programming). Meanwhile Moorhen and her daughter have also made a series of bad decisions with less excuse, and have ended up amnesiac and wandering. So TurboCop, through the error messages and corrupted algorithms, goes to try to find them.
The end result being that he murders all their old neighbours. Ooops. Then he wanders around some more and finds some people who need killing done. So he kills lots of Orcs. Then, somehow, he runs into his sister and marries her, because she’s amnesiac, he’s using an assumed name, and neither knows what the other looks like. So that’s fine. Then TurboCop kills too many orcs, so the DRAGGON turns up, but a last spark of his original programming allows him to kill it, after which he self-destructs, his purpose fulfilled. His sister, meanwhile, recovers her memory and jumps off a cliff in horror. And the politics of the previously happy community are buggered for evermore. ThingCorp did not repeat the TurboCop programme. Houdini has been forced to watch all this by Hellchord, and is then released for more lolz, which then leads to Hellchord finding out where REDACTED is, Houdini insulting Thingy, then realising it mostly wasn’t Thingy’s fault, and giving him some rad jewellery, finding Moorhen, who promptly snuffs it, and then jumping off a cliff himself. Fun times. And ThingCorp and NolCorp are still fundamentally buggered.
Houdini escapes from prison (obvs) but no one trusts him anymore, so he wanders around visiting all the sites TurboCop got mistreated. On the way he nobbles Dim and picks up some very shiny bling. Eventually he gets to ThingyCorp HQ and gives Thingy a piece of his mind. Thingy points out that, really, on this occasion and very surprisingly, none of it was his fault. Meidi makes the point more forcefully and Houdini stops sulking and gives Thingy the bling instead. Then goes and jumps off a cliff, because, well, this isn’t the happy bit yet. Thingy then wonders if he can combine his new bling with the SilmaPill to make the ultimate in power accessories, so hires some dwarf owls to do the work, because they’re really good at that sort of thing. But they nick the bling, kill Thingy and run off, only for Beren to come out of retirement for a farewell tour and murder the lot of them. So Suethingette gets to wear the bling, but all the court orders mean no one ever sees it. Beret and Suethingette’s son, Deer Stalkeril, the first of the Hat-Elven, then becomes CEO of ThingyCorp, and inherits the SilmaPill and the bling when his parents die. Meanwhile, Beleriand ain’t big enough for two corporations to contest the dominance of HellCorp. So the sons of Gurufingy, the non-executive directors of NolCorp, decide to crush ThingyCorp. For good. And then steal all their assets. Principally the SilmaPill. So they go full ninja, stage a night raid on ThingyCorp HQ and murder everyone (there’s a lot of murdering this week). Except Deer’s daughter Bearsking, who escapes with… the SilmaPill and the bling. And a few of Gurufingy’s sons – Gurufingy Junior, Jellystorm and Jankster – die too. So very much a no-score draw. Bearsking goes and hides out on the beach with everyone else who’s not dead yet.
Oo-er also had a son. Called Phwoar. He grows up half looked after by foster parents and half in slavery and is really hot. He also has a direct line to the Arda (Arda) Board, because he’s so hot. So when the voice of Elmo comes to him in his dreams and tells him to do things, it’s all perfectly normal and not a sign of incipient psychosis. The board plan to make him the Big New Thing at NolCorp, so they puppet him to escape, buy some new clothes, generally smarten up, and go on a wilderness trek (while still somehow staying presentable and really really hot) to find himself and, more importantly, REDACTED. When he rings the doorbell, which was a bit rusty from disuse, he gets taken to see Twoson, who ignores what the board are telling him, because he’s a prat, but lets Phwoar stay, because he’s really hot. So hot, that his daughter, Oddball, marries him. Despite the massive age difference and everything. Molekin isn’t happy about this, because he wanted to marry Oddball, despite the whole incest taboo. So when he gets phished by HellCorp, he’s very happy to tell them everything, so Hellchord takes down the REDACTED servers, sets fire to the building, and reckons that NolCorp are pretty much out of his hair too now. Phwoar is saved by the power of hotness, along with Oddball and their son Kepirendil (another Hat-Elven) so they all go and hang out down by the beach with everyone who’s not dead yet too.
Let’s take a step back. ThingyCorp is gone. NolCorp lies in ruins, with a skeleton staff still operating the last few assets. HellCorp stands triumphant, its monopoly power assured. Everyone is dead, save for four of the NolCorp NEDs and the beach party (actually a party). Said party consists of Kieran the Weedwright, who’s been chilling out on the beach getting heroically stoned every day while everyone else is busy fighting and dying (Kieran used to be big in SindCorp, as it was then, but left over creative differences); Kepirendil, Phwoar and Oddball; Bearsking (with the SilmaPill), and a motley crew of odds and sods. It’s not looking great. Then Phwoar and Oddball decide to go off on a never-ending retirement cruise, leaving Kepirendil in charge. Hence why he became known as Kepirendil the Stressed. As, fairly literally, the last boy and girl on the planet, Kepirendil and Bearsking get married, obvs, and have two kids: FezOn and FezLess. Kepirendil then decides the only way to get out of this mess is to go cap-in-hand to the Arda (Arda) board and see if they’ll bail everyone out. But no one can remember where the compound is, and the security is tiiiight. Also, HulkSmash broke the doorbell through over-enthusiasm. So he mostly wanders about getting depressed and even more stressed. While he’s away, the NolCorp NEDs stage another attempt to get the SilmaPill, which ends in another no-score draw: two of them die and everyone else at the beach save Kieran and Bearsking die. Kieran because he’s off smoking a reefer and talking to a rock, Bearsking because she hops in a salvaged prototype NolCorp ornithopter and escapes.
Somehow, she manages to fly straight towards Kepirendil, crash-lands, but survives, and gives him the SilmaPill. Which it turns out defeats all the security measures and allows the two of them to waltz into the compound. Where they interrupt the board’s Christmas do that has been going on for the last few hundred years. When Kepirendil points out how amazingly to shit everything’s gone, the Board quickly sober up and finally decide to just nuke HellCorp back to the Stone Age, destroying the DRAGGON v2 models that HellCorp had been preparing for something really nasty. Oh, and there’s also some amount of collateral damage, but who can honestly say they haven’t sunk a continent by accident every now and then? Hellchord is found dazed amidst the wreckage and locked up forever, no parole or time off for good behaviour, nothing, and the SilmaPills recovered. At which point Guyboss and Gaglord show up and nick them, though Kepirendil’s still got his one. And then they throw them away because they realise they’re fed up with this shit. Guyboss even jumps off a cliff, though Gaglord starts a productive alternative career as an emo pop star. It’s never too late to change. And everyone who isn’t dead yet lives happily ever after. Oh, wait. No they don’t. We’re not quite done yet.
It’s the Disappointing Sequel. The Corporation Wars ended with the Arda (Arda) Board triumphant, having undertaken the most-hostile-possible takeover of HellCorp, with Hellchord himself condemned to life imprisonment in the Void for genocide, fraud, gross corporate negligence and inventing jazz. But CTO Growl-on conveniently wandered off to somewhere without an extradition treaty, so is still hanging around, biding his time. Meanwhile, all the people who are still alive are given a new paradise island to live on by the Arda (Arda) board to say thank you for their loyalty and sorry for sinking their continent. They get their own corporation: HumanCorp, to run the island, which soon takes the company’s name. The first CEO is FezLess, the younger son of Kepirendil, who has an extraordinarily long stint in charge and gets all the infrastructure built. Everything’s basically great for a while, but increasing mismanagement under successive CEOs sees shrinking profit margins and maintenance shortcuts, leading to HumanCorp inventing colonialism and imperialism. Which is great for profits, but otherwise generally bad. Also the Arda (Arda) Board have banned HumanCorp from coming to say hi, in the hope this will make them stop wanting things they can’t have. This works about as well as you’d expect. The 23rd CEO, Star Commandeer, realises everything’s gone to pot and tries to implement some corporate ethics policies and generally clean up the corporation, but a shareholder revolt led by his nephew, Star Pokemon, deposes him and installs Star Pokemon as the 24th CEO, a status he cements by marrying his cousin, Star Commandeer’s daughter, Star Babybel, in a totally not-weird way.
HumanCorp has been having some trouble in its colonial possessions due to the machinations of Growl-on, who’s trying to muscle in on the imperialism market, so Star Pokemon goes on a fact-finding visit to shore up HumanCorp’s position. At which point, Growl-on appears and introduces Star Pokemon to the possibilities of crypto. Growl-on becomes CTO of HumanCorp as Star Pokemon falls hard for crypto’s illusory promises. More and more of the corporation’s resources are put into crypto mining and a giant circular data centre is built in the centre of their HQ, powered by burning those insufficiently convinced of the merits of crypto. So Star Pokemon becomes a devotee of Hellchord, the OG TechBro, and is convinced by Growl-on that the final victory of crypto can only be assured if he can persuade the Arda (Arda) Board, possibly with lots of guns, that crypto is the future. So Star Pokemon metaphorically saddles up HumanCorp’s navy, armed with the latest in electric flamethrower rocket missiles, and goes to say hi. At which point the Arda (Arda) Board, who have been watching all this from a distance and who know exactly what’s been happening because they built a backdoor into HumanCorp’s systems, and who have inexplicably just let it all happen, properly flip, hit the Kazoo panic button, and sink HumanCorp, both the corporation and the island, in a very literal sense. Except nine ships of the crypto-deniers, who make it to the colonies in time to set up the next sequel.
We had the main event and the disappointing sequel, now it’s time to round out the trilogy with the greatest hits! NolCorp and HumanCorp are not quite dead! Neither is OG TechBro Hellchord’s Mini-me, Growl-on, despite his overt volcano base being nuked by Kazoo at the end of the last movie! So it’s time for the final showdown, where Growl-on again convinces some people who should really know better to invest in ring-shaped NFTs that he controls the blockchain on and ends up leveraging that to steal all of NolCorp’s IP! It’s one last cataclysmic winner-takes-all deathmatch that only takes 4500 years to play out with an eventual win for HumanCorp because one disgruntled HellCorp investor found the backdoor into the system and sent it to his distant cousin who had inherited one of the NFTs! Featuring thrills! Eagles! Elves behaving badly! Men behaving worse! A weird musical pantomime interlude that we really should have written out! Lava! AND TEN THOUSAND ELEPHANTS!!! C.O.M.I.N.G. S.O.O.N!!!!!!!
Aiya Helcarda 