Matman: The Dark Night

Even though she had learned long ago that it was merely the stuff of dreams to sleep on a cloud in the sky, Calorie still found herself greatly saddened when her musket took her straight through a cloud and it wasn't fluffy in the slightest. She hunkered down on her broom in an attempt to lessen the wild slapping of her bangs on her face and squinted until her eyes were much smaller than they had been previously (which wasn't saying much, considering she basically had two lines for eyes) to shield them.

Fortunately, she saw that there were others in a much worse off situation. Two broom spaces over and one to the left, Auricularis was plastered to the underside of her broom like a barnacle on a ship, the space around her head looking an awful lot like the parking lot of a car dealership overcrowded with inflatable balloon men, except that the balloon men were hairs. Huh, she mused. Calorie felt like she was getting pretty good at this simile thing even if she had failed her English class twice.

To her surprise, the haggard butler, flying just behind her, was sitting relaxed on the top of his broom in a supremely butler-ly manner. Calorie was indeed becoming quite the wordsmith in her private narrations. Maybe she would try to become a radio host or something when they eventually returned to their own world--because they had to eventually, right?

"Ahem," the butler cleared his throat at her, clearly mistaking her for one of his kind, which was fellow manservant.

"Yeah?" Calorie squinted even harder. From where she was, she could barely see his monocle.

"I am surprised you and the princess have so graciously decided to assist with the rescue of Lady Bolita. The lady and the princess had never been particularly close, in fact since I have known them they've always been at each other's throats."

"That so?"

"Indeed it is."

"Well times change and so do people," said Calorie, taking a stab at being wise old man. Though she didn't have the gray hair and beard that would have made her a perfect fit for the job, being a knowledgeable elder was something she'd always wanted to try.

"Perhaps you are curious as to why I, a lowly butler, truly the lowest of the low, nothing but the dirt beneath Lady Bolita's feet, is so desperate to see Lady Bolita safe."

Calorie had never asked, nor did she care.

"You see," continued the butler, "it was a dark and stormy night when it all began."

"Wait, before you begin, I never got your name," interrupted Calorie.

As the ex-resident popular girl of her school, Calorie had made it a habit to pick up the names of the people she was talking to because she understood the power of connections, not that she ever ended up remembering any of them anyway. Also, she didn't want to be calling him the butler in her head forever. She already had the palace's butlers to try and remember.

"Oh yes, forgive me, the name is Alfred. And yours?"

"Calorie." Even saying the blasted name out loud was enough to make the maid cringe. She cursed at the parents of the maid who had done their daughter dirty.

"I was but a boy at the time when it happened," continued Alfred, looking awfully solemn for a guy sky high on a magic musket.

"My parents had just taken me to see a movie, a rare event for us, and the show had just finished. It was night, as you might have gathered, and it was a night so dark it might as well have been painted black. There was simply no way that in such a setting I, young and untrained, could have seen him coming."

Calorie was starting to feel a little interested.

"You see, I lived in Gottem City at the time, a city notorious for its tremendously high crime rate. In those days the most feared of them all was The Fool, a ruthless villain who committed so many heinous crimes that to this day the townspeople still dare not utter his name above a whisper."

All of a sudden, the sky around Calorie faded to black then into a low graphic panoramic scene of a young child and his two extremely wealthy looking parents standing in the middle of an alley in the dark of the night.

Despite the awful pixelation, Calorie could still make out the ropes of pearl around the woman's neck and the solid block of gold that was the man's watch. In contrast to the two adults whose wealth was positively dripping off of them in the form of luxurious accessories, the child was wearing an ill-fitting pin-striped suit, obviously meant for one of a much younger age and a little reminiscent of a prison uniform.

"The fuck is this," thought Calorie.

She supposed that the flashback was so grainy because of the butler's bad eyesight, which was probably translating into his memories.

There was a crash of thunder and a flash of lightning illuminated the silhouette of a man against a wall.

"I don't remember how we got there, or why we were there in the first place, but we were in an empty alley. Or at least we thought it was empty," narrated Alfred.

There was another flash of lighting and Calorie saw the silhouette again. But this time, it had gotten larger.

"Then, The Fool appeared. I remember it like it was yesterday. Dressed in his unmistakable signature tailcoat the horrible hue of an eggplant and in that hideous green jester cap, he stood before my father, mother, and I. My parents were dead before I could so much as scream, and I would have been too had he not rescued me. He, in the unmistakable butler uniform of the Schmancy Household, was Mat Man."

The fade in and fade returned, and the low resolution flashback took Calorie to a home improvement store where a tall man, 6'2 if Calorie had to guess, with considerable muscle mass was browsing mats. He was pale with short, dark hair and had eye bags like he hadn't shut his eyes since leaving the womb. Calorie had to wonder if these were really Alfred's memories because she didn't understand how he would know what was savior was doing at the moment of his parents' murder.

"Need me a matmobile," muttered the man in a mutter so quiet that Calorie barely heard it.

There was another clap of thunder and he looked up with brows furrowed and shook his head. Clearly he felt that this weather was not prime time to be buying interior decoration. He exited the shop looking a bit downcast, and began walking down a street. As Alfred had mentioned earlier, it was a dark night, so with that added to the flashback's quality being worse than a video off a pirating site, Calorie couldn't make out any details of her surroundings.

A shrill scream pierced the sound of rain splattering, and Mat Man began jogging in its direction. There was a second, louder scream, and Mat Man picked up his pace. Another fade in and fade out happened--all the scene changes were starting to make Calorie dizzy--and she was back with the young Alfred in the alley. She watched as Mat Man appeared in the alley's entrance and The Fool turned around and saw. Cackling maniacally, the man in the eggplant suit vanished with the next bolt of lighting, leaving nothing but a crying orphan behind.

"Mat Man took me in," said Alfred. "He took me to the Schmancy Manor and presented me to the duke as a butler candidate. Though he had saved me, he had also plunged me into a new and terrible world. As the newest and youngest butler, I was but a lad hardly eight years old, I was fresh meat pre-marinated and tenderized in honey."

The form of the flashback changed, and Calorie found herself sitting in a movie theater watching video after video of a young Alfred either getting beat up by older butlers or being assigned more work by lazy higher-ups.

"Dude had it rough," she thought, feeling enough pity for him to moisten her eyes.

The videos stopped and the screen went black. Calorie was whisked away from her very comfortable seat in the theater to where she assumed was the servants' quarters of the Schmancy Manor. The only reason she was able to make so educated a guess, though, was because recently thanks to a certain transmigration related incident, she had been staying somewhere similar.