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Krag Jorgenson - The Metalmonster
The Devil went on down to Helsinki, looking for a soul to steal. He found Krag Jorgenson, the hardest black metal guitarist in all of Scandinavia, the Low Countries and the Subcontinent. A virtuoso with an electric guitar, Krag is the sort of player whose licks can peel the paint right off of your walls. Both hands fly up and down the neck, pinching and plucking at the strings like a Hellenistic harp player. Bass and Distortion were his best friends, the Diminished Fifth his righteous flaming sword.
In his hubris, Krag challenged the Devil to a test of skills. Naturally, being one to oblige, the Devil showed at his doorstep and took the haughty Krag up on his challenge. The Devil, always a man of his word offered Krag a bargain. If he were to beat the Devil in a fair-and-square challenge of skills, the Devil would bestow upon him rock and roll immortality and the Devil's own Golden Cherry Axe.
Krag and the Devil did duel. Duel through the night they did. Guitars wailed and screamed. Compositions were made up on the fly. Krag effortlessly played the rhythm and lead simultaneously as his dexterous fingers flew up and down the neck, planting firmly upon the frets with such precision that one would have thought him to be some kind of machine that was devised simply for the task of playing guitar.
The Devil, however managed to match him note for note, chord for chord and riff for riff. Exhausted, Krag felt the noose tightening around his neck, it was at that moment that he realized his folly, the same folly Arachne realized when in her hubris, she claimed herself a better weaver than the goddess Athena herself. His soul on the line, the metal hero decided that there was only one way to end this duel and go down forever as the man who stood up to The Devil's challenge and took his loss with a double-barreled middle-finger salute right into the face of The Beast.
In the middle of a complicated classical piece (the Devil of course, having learned his lesson the last time this had happened to him in a guitar duel), Krag suddenly and without warning switched gears into a quadruple-tempo rendition of Yakety Sax. He executed the silly albeit complicated tune absolutely flawlessly and hung his head, consigned to his fate. Sweat poured from Krag's brow as the Devil, with a wry smile on his face copied Krag's composition to the letter.
Until the Devil encountered the particularly choppy bit nine measures in. The Devil's missed note, a gentle misplaced pling may as well have resonated with the force of an atomic blast. The Devil, it seemed. Couldn't hack Yakety Axe.
Stunned, Krag dropped his guitar, it hung at his waist on its strap, his hands dangling, jaw agape. Krag had outplayed the Devil. The Devil simply smiled, always a man who knows his limitations, always knows when he's been beat gave, without fuss or quarrel, Krag Jorgenson his prize. The Devil gracefully doffed his Golden Cherry Axe and handed it to Krag with the same gentle and graceful reverence as King Arthur's personal armorer would hand him Excalibur. Rock and Roll Immortality was his. Krag Jorgenson, the one guitarist that could out-play the Devil could now never die. For eternity, he was the man that bested the Devil. Eternal fame was to be his.
The instance Krag touched that amazing Golden Cherry Axe, the Devil's Curse was set upon him. Nobody gets the better of the Devil. Not nobody, not nohow. Upon taking possession of The Devil's Golden Cherry Axe, an amazing, pristine Les Paul fabricated out of The Cross itself and inlaid with brilliant gold pickups, strings and knobs, Krag felt the Devil's Curse flow through him. The guitar, it hungered. Krag was forced to travel the world, seeking out opponents worthy of defeating him in a guitar duel. Those that could not defeat Krag in single axe combat would suffer a fate that most wouldn't even wish on a dog. Their faces literally rocked off, Krag's opponents would find their souls devoured by the Devil's Golden Cherry Axe. With each soul consumed by the Axe, Krag's body becomes more decomposed, more decrepit and defiled whereas his virtuosity improves exponentially.
Bound by the terms of the contract, Krag can only pass the Cursed Guitar off to a player that can honesty defeat him in a duel. Being that Krag had defeated the Devil in a duel, thus making him the singular greatest guitarist on Earth, Krag is forever burdened by the curse of the Devil's Golden Cherry Axe, fated to forever roam the earth, doing battle with his fellow guitarists and taking their souls, leaving their bodies as empty, faceless husks upon the ground.
Oh, I also plan on naming some other incidental characters after firearms. There will be an Iver Johnson, a Remington Rand and perhaps a Colonel Fosbery down the line, put in simply to annoy the leftists and satiate my own morbid desire to leave naming the characters until the absolute very end of their development circle.
When I was working for Actionfliks, I actually left the characters (who were members of the Chinese Zodiac) named Dog, Rat, Rabbit, Dragon et cetera. I am simply That Fucking Good at naming characters. I mean, Jack Spicer for fuck's sake? What were they thinking when the kept that name and left out Le Pantomime (a subtle reference to Le Petomane,* the legendary fartsmith) and N. Takamura, the retired ninja who served during The War who ran a hole-in-the-wall sushi diner and grumbled about how kids these days were miserable and how things were so much better when he was cutting throats for The Emperor. Fuck you, Christy et al. I'm not bitter at all because THAT FUCKING SHOW ran for three seasons and all and I was only paid a thousand dollars to create the goddamned thing.
I'm not bitter at all.
*the Wikipedia is not an objective source for any information, but is always a convenient springboard for further research to start! Use those Google Toolbars, kids!
