You’re that fellow: the one always expecting trouble, and always ready for it.

You’re sitting in a small tavern at the seedy east end of Moviewood Boulevard.

Despite the heat, you’re wearing your black leather jacket over black, along with your dark glasses, dyed-black hair in a crewcut, and a moody stare.

You can pull off this Terminator rip-off look without enduring snide remarks because you’re big, you’re buff, you’re packing a very obvious main gun in a chest holster, and the way you entered speaks its history: that you have walked in and out of hangouts far rougher than this one, on back streets and alleys from Kandahar to Kinshasa, with Rocinha favela, Mogadishu, Niamey, Tora Bora, and Sana’a stamped on your passport for good measure – and most recently shouldering a rocket launcher in a rubble-strewn alley on the outskirts of Kyiv, with the laser sight painting a Skoptsyi bomber. Not to mention hell-holes well off the grid.

Truth is, the only reason you’re in a place like Tinseltown at all is that these Moviewood pukes pay you bookoo bucks to tell them what it’s like to be in the shit – meaning places where you killed indiscriminately and without remorse or fear of prosecution.

You’d numbed your conscience to the work. Deep down, however, your soul cries out for a destiny so dark that few could imagine it.

Even you could not imagine that the arrival of your destiny is imminent, in this place.

It’s dark in here, the way you like it, and despite the barely functioning air conditioning, it’s cool enough after the sun-drenched sidewalk.

You decide not to notice that the three-days-unshaved bartender with a body gone bovine is cuffing around a skinny kid in an apron. With a final shove, he growls low, “Clean those tables, ya f’kn’ waif!”

He gives the kid a final cuff to the head and a shove.

The kid, maybe fourteen if that, scared of the bartender and probably his own shadow as well, hastily grabs a gray bus tub and heads toward the front, stopping at abandoned tables, gathering empty bottles and glasses.

In the front corner opposite the door, the busboy avoids a garage band of scraggly, nineteen-looking would-be Moviewood musicians, playing as if they’d just met (which is, in fact, the case), who are thrashing that guitar-store forbidden riff about the stairwell to the promised land so badly that it’s practically an act of musical terrorism.

You’re halfway through a pint of the bar’s trademark brew, an unevenly light brown foamy ale with disturbing, promise-of-Montezuma’s-revenge greenish speckles in the head. You don’t even look at the bartender when you ask:

“What did you say this coyote piss was called?”

The bartender barely turns from the surly stare he’s been directing at the so-called band and says, “‘What The Sheriff Was Drinking When I Shot Him.’”

Just then, the door to the street opens, and in comes …

He looks like a middle-aged movie-industry Moses, except for the nastiest case of a disease that must be psoriasis on his left arm. So bad it looks like tree bark. And he’s holding an antique baseball bat over his shoulder, not the shepherd’s crook or walking staff one would expect with that getup.

He cases the place like a street crazy, walking the length of the narrow barroom front to back, checking every niche and corner, staring patrons in the eye, glancing under tables. He ends up sitting two seats over, leaving the seat between you empty.

You get to talking. That’s your fault since you asked what he does, this being Moviewood, where you never know whether someone you meet might be on screen in the next actioner or Biblical.

He tells you this story:

The deaths of his two wives* sent him spiraling down into such deep grief that he began to morph into a tree, all the while reading the entire Internet at a speed beyond human comprehension.

*He pauses for a correction, admitting that neither woman would marry him, which strikes you as a telling detail.

He says that a voice in his head, coming from the fire hydrant across the street from his street-level rented apartment, led him to the wrinkled little old lady with a bad attitude living in the penthouse. This woman – he refers to her as “The Old Hag,” but he suspects that she’s something more – told him that it’s his mission to save the Universe from a being that is challenging the Creator. Only he says “Creator” with no “the,” as if he’s one of those people operating under the delusion that they’re on speaking terms.

He goes on to say he met Sasquatch, and then went on a quest in a place called the Magical Forest (which, he tells you, is down a path behind a small adobe-style house in a blighted neighborhood down by the University of Los Celestiales). There, he recruited all manner of creatures who don’t exist in reality as you know it, and now he’s off to war against legions of demons.

And, incidentally, he says his son ran away from home and created a parallel Universe in an off-leash dog park called Runyon Canyon, up in the Moviewood Hills only a mile or two from here.

At this point, he’s long past beginning to grate on you. You’re thinking:

“Shame I can’t just shoot him. Or can I?”

Or, maybe, just to shut him up, you’re thinking that you might take a pot shot at the feet of the band.

By the time this fellow has told his story, that motley troupe has followed up its abuse of mystical stairways with the worst rendition of an outer-planet cantina song ever heard on a real or fictional world and is now launching into what might be an attempt at a famous Sixties heavy-metal interpretation of a traditional Latin Mass song in rhythms from the Democratic Republic of Mid-Africa. But with a barstool for a drum. Or it might be some other heavy metal piece; it’s nearly impossible to tell.

Then, the door opens again.

And here’s where it gets interesting. An eight-foot-tall, broad-shouldered silhouette with glowing orange eyes appears in the doorway. This one pauses, presumably having trouble adjusting to the dark interior, and clenches long, bony hands hanging down to its knees and ending in talons as long as T-Rex teeth.

The Moses guy next to you takes one look at whatever-that-is in the doorway, jumps to his feet, and stamps his baseball bat on the floor of the bar. Sky blue, forest green, and sunset magenta sparkles – very prissy and decorative-looking, you’re thinking – fly out of the business end and soar through the entire barroom.

You, because you’re you, are on your feet in an instant. You shoulder the Moses guy aside, and…

To learn more, dear reader, you’ll have to read Book Three, should Existence last long enough for their publication.