Figments of an Overactive Imagination #2

Creating my characters and bringing to life my mental (in more ways than one, now that I think about it) creations wasn't all fun and games. For a while, someone I knew from school and I were on bad terms with each other. This person, who I will refer to as "Shan" (no relation to Khan) for the sake of identity protection, started going at it with me during 4th and (especially) 5th grade.

Where I drew talking cats and dogs, he drew dragons, dinosaurs, and large sabre-toothed tiger-like beasts. He would draw them attacking my own creations; unwilling to let that slide, I'd draw them getting either beaten down or tricked by any one of my various characters. Occasionally we'd draw pictures and pass them to each other, only to give them back with sarcastic comments written in any blank space that was left.

I had started to read the different Star Wars Expanded Universe novels that were available, so I embellished these conflicts a little by giving Shan Admiral Daala's Super Star Destroyer (from the novel "Darksaber") and a bunch of the Empire's ships to use against Teasy and the gang. To match, I came up with a starship of my own creation and started using X-wings and the like. Bizarre, twisted, and somehow everyone (both real and imagined) came out alive. Mostly, anyway. At any rate, Shan and I put a stop to these shenanigans in the midst of junior high, and we stopped bothering each other from then on.

Around the time all that was beginning, a new friend of mine in 4th grade liked the idea of having superpowered cats and decided that he wanted to create some of his own; 'course, I didn't do anything to discourage this. Some of them were copies of mine, while others were copies of popular superheroes such as Superman and Batman (minus the angst). A handful of them were original creations (one in particular that comes to mind was named "Cheetah Cat") that broke the laws of physics with their descriptions alone. Recall a few posts ago that some of the characters I created after Teasy were inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog? The total miles-per-hour number was written out with enough zeroes to take up the upper part of the page. The implications were staggering.

Coupled with these developments was the purchase of a Compudyne computer in 1994, loaded with Windows 3.1 (of which I am still convinced should've been the last of Microsoft's operating systems). Solitaire and entertaining screensavers aside, once I was allowed to use the computer more often, my stories started to take an unusual turn. I will go into the wonders of the Compudyne in a future post, so, until then.