AngryJedi

Alright. So I’m Annie F. The F is for “Featherstone”, but if you tell anyone that, I’ll kill ya, gottit?

So you can probably tell from the accent that I’m from England. Miserable, rainy little craphole that it is. We came to the States to make our fortune.

Who’s “we”, I hear you ask? Well, that’d be me and me band. “Annie F and the Misanthropists”, we’re called, cuz of the fact that the boys in the band don’t talk to people much. In fact, when they ain’t on stage with me, they tend to be hiding in their rooms playing that World of Whatsit online game. Saddoes. But I love ‘em really.

Anyways, we came to New York first – seemed like a good place to start, right – and we tried to get a few gigs in some low down nasty little basement joints, just to get ourselves noticed a bit, right. We got a few, with a bunch of your usual greasy-haired rock muppets coming in to mosh a bit, banging heads, spilling beer, that sort of thing. And it was kinda cool for a while, though basement gigs don’t go too far to paying for a really rock an’ roll lifestyle, you know?

Then there was one night… it kinda changed all that, and kinda changed our priorities a bit, too. There was this guy, see, but… ah man, I gotta tell you about the gig first.

We’d just played a rocking set, and the crowd was well and truly warmed up. We were about to go offstage, when there was this huge “bang”, right? At least, it kinda felt like a loud noise. Actually, it was kinda the opposite – it was all the noise suddenly stopping. If you’ve been standing in a sweaty pit with numerous hairy music "enthusiasts" for a couple of hours and suddenly everything goes silent, trust me, it feels like something’s gone “boom” next to your ear.

Anyways, I thought this was kinda weird… especially cuz not only had everyone shut up, but they’d stopped moving and everything. I gave Daren a poke but my finger went right through him. It was creepy.

Then I saw this bloke coming up to me. He was the only thing moving in that room, so I couldn’t miss him. He was wearing this wicked long black robe type thing and he had one of those faces that just makes you think “don’t mess”, all right? I figured if he was the only one moving around in whatever weirdy “ghost world” I’d got myself into, I’d probably better not annoy him.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Annie,” he said back, in a thick voice, kinda low and deep, like Barry White, right? “Annie,” he said, “it’s time.”

Now that kinda freaked me out a bit. He knew my name and apparently he knew something about what was gonna happen to me that I didn’t. For one of the few times in my life, I said nothing and just waited to see what happened.

He kept quiet for a bit, then started talking again.

“Are you ready?”

This set me off.

“For what? Who are you? What’s going on?” I had loads of questions, but I knew right when I asked them that this geezer wasn’t gonna answer any of them.

He just came up to me and pressed his hand against my head. I couldn’t move, couldn’t stop what was going on… but I kinda didn’t want to. As his hand touched my head, I felt a complete “charge” run through me, kinda like a really really good orgasm… hell, no, better than that, I dunno how to describe it, but it was wicked nice.

Then he just let go, pushed a couple of bits of paper into my hand and slunk off back into the darkness. Then everything started moving again – no-one had noticed what had happened.

When we got back to our grotty rooms later that night, I went straight to bed while the boys sat up and compared, I don’t know, elf notes or something. I took out those bits of paper and looked at them. One was a kinda tourist brochure or something, just called “Welcome to Paragon City!”. The other was a crumpled bit of paper with an address scrawled on it. Apartment 27, Wolfrun Building, Galaxy City.

Something inside me clicked – I dunno, I kinda felt like that was where I was supposed to go. So in the morning, after the boys had woken up… actually, I should make that early afternoon… we packed our stuff and got in the van to head for Paragon City.

After a bit of driving around, I found the address from the paper. It was a nice apartment – pretty big, rooms for the boys and for me, and two bathrooms (thank God). There was this wicked ninja sword hanging over a big fake fireplace type thing, and as I saw it, I noticed another note sitting on the top underneath it.

“Take it,” it said, “and do what has to be done.”

I felt kinda like I was powerless to resist, you know, like I HAD to do this, or something. So I took it… and it felt so, like, “right”. I felt like I’d always had this sword and I knew exactly how to use it.

So I figured that I’d been given the power to use the sword for a reason… so when the boys had all flaked out (which didn’t take long), I took off into the night with my new toy and set about looking for a bit of trouble to help with.

It didn’t take long. Some thug was trying to steal a girl’s purse. Having grown up in inner-city England, I’d seen this plenty of times… but this was the first time I thought, “I ain’t crossing the street this time… I’m gonna help her”.

And I did. I kicked the thug’s butt and saved the girl. The cops showed up soon afterwards and took away what was left of the thug. I hadn’t killed him, but he was a right mess. The cops didn't seem to mind though - in fact, he thanked me.

So that's how I came to be here. Part-time hero, part time music buff. Hopefully we'll get the chance to play a few gigs before we're murdered by whatever gangs I've managed to tick off with my ninja-sword activities.

If you want to show your appreciation or just have a nosey at some of our tunes, check out our site on MySpace. And hopefully I'll run into some of you soon. It's kinda cool being a freak in a city full of other freaks.

Laters, ya?