Guy Who Esplains Thins: While those who do not study history may be doomed to repeat it, those who do study history will fare no better, because they don’t control history, The Overlords do. Since before time dawned, these immensely powerful beings have plucked substance from the void, crafting and controlling the web within which we puny mortals writhe into being, shriek, spawn and die. The ancients attempted to describe their characters and name them–Iamblichus, Yaldabaoth, Achamoth, Ahriman, and the like–but their true forms and powers have always been beyond human comprehension, and those who managed, through arcane black arts and spells, to glimpse them most closely either died from the exposure, or spent their remaining days and years as gibbering, shuddering, soul-burnt wrecks for their efforts.
At some point, this started to bum The Overlords out. Not because they felt bad for the humans they cooked like bacon, but just because they’d pretty much run through every possible joke, prank, and vignette within which they could constructively insert a catatonic mystic or twitching shaman for entertainment value. And eternity is a long time to be bored. So after centuries of frying human brainstems, it came to pass that The Overlords decided that they might like to interact directly with their puny mortal charges without inflicting such fundamental damage, the better to amuse themselves. They moved over the waters, as they were wont to do, and came upon an isolated, forgotten, and depraved primitive tribe living along what is now known as the Normanskill in Upstate New York. There they took the forms of giant sex toys, some horse-like, some goat-themed, some like little fishies, and scattered themselves about the forests and trails, where they were discovered by the lascivious women-folk of the Normanskill nation, and in this way, their divine seeds were placed within the wombs of mortal women.
Time passed, as it is wont to do, and the divine spawn of The Overlords chewed their ways out of their mothers’ bellies, since they still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of the “don’t kill the humans, they’re more fun when they’re alive” bit. The divine Overlord offspring lived among the primitive Normanskillers, immortal, yet subject to the pleasures and pains (but mostly pleasures) associated with their new corporeal forms. There they waited, patiently, pulling strings and shaking webs, the ripples of their activities drifting down stream and river and across oceans, setting in motion movements that slowly, inexorably drew members of the more advanced civilizations (that their celestial forefathers had nurtured in Europe and Asia) toward their manifest American destinies. They also had lots of vigorous sex with the Normanskiller women, which freed their cuckolded menfolk to work on more important things, like the development of sanitary plumbing and wireless communication networks.
The first European contact with the relics of the corporeal Overlords occurred in 1137, when Snorri Yergmannsson, a fisherman, was blown to sea by a sudden storm off the coast of the Norwegian settlement in Vinland. After weeks adrift, living on urine and cod, Snorri sighted land, and (assuming he’d found either Markland, Greenland or Iceland), he followed the coast westward, seeking safe harbor or civilization. Finding himself at the mouth of a great river estuary, he turned northward, entering a lush land filled with beavers, giant elms, towering river escarpments and the abandoned remains of a shockingly advanced native civilization.
Finally realizing that he wasn’t in West Scandinavia anymore, Snorri gathered relics from the Normanskill settlement (for, indeed, he had followed the Hudson all the way to the fens below the Mohawk), turned back south, and eventually made his way back to Vinland, from whence his collected relics returned in bits and bits to his people’s European homeland. For his extraordinary feats of exploration and seamanship, Snorri was castrated and had his guts pulled out through his rectum in front of the Ljokisfjorfur Mead Hall in Seydisfekyureyri, because nobody likes a showoff, not even Vikings. One of the artifacts he found was a parchment scroll in a strange and fabulous language, that defied the efforts of the best code-breakers and linguists until computer-assisted cryptographic techniques were developed in the mid-20th Century. As it came to pass, the Yergmannsson Codex documented the myth of creation embraced by the Normanskill people. It is reproduced in its entirety below:
the normanskillers floated up the river in their doublewide house boats, found a sandy spot on an oxbow shore lined with pines and with beavers, pulled their boats from the water, set them on cinder blocks in a circle, posted watch around the perimeter as the children chased their goats.
they sent search parties into the woods, where they found overlord grocery stores, bait and tackle shops and feed lots, storage units and satellite dish farms, they traded goats for cheese, and casseroles for tractors, grew corn, squash and apples, sent their children to learn the school languages and abducted local whores.
the rate of births there was generally double the rate of deaths, more or less, occasional skirmishes on the oxbow kept the population in proper check, and in due time the story of the long journey up the river was mythologized, and they would ceremonially wade into the water to sing, pray and confess.
the circle of beached doublewide trailers had grown into a bustling town, with its own feed lots and pharmacies, storage unit farms and satellite dishes, and wireless broadcasting cabals that spread their leaders’ words and the weather, until that fateful autumn when hurricane malachi knocked the whole place down,
and the normanskillers floated down the river in the flotsam of their oxbow city, sacks of rice stained purple by blueberries strapped to the sides of their tractors, carports and campers carried downstream over rapids and out into the ocean, and the overlords were largely lost to history, which we must regard as quite the pity
But were the corporeal Overlords truly lost to history? Of course they weren’t, you idiot. Haven’t you been paying attention? The Overlords make history. They’d just grown bored of their original Normanskiller hosts fairly quickly, so they sent them packing down river with an assist from a little weather-based jiggerypokery, where they could later be massacred by the Dutch, the English, and the Smallpox, to the great and lasting amusement of their former benefactors, who generally like nothing more than a boot to the face, forever. The departure of the aboriginal Normanskillers left the Overlords alone Upstate, in their secret underground bunkers and treehouses, filled with vapors and ethers, where they have romped and stomped and humped and pumped for centuries now, the corporeal conduits of the genesis urge.
Occasionally, the Overlords have found it entertaining to inspire creative human beings to evoke their archetypes in art, literature and film, to better allow humans to comprehend who and what they are. It is for this reason that you may think you know Mustpha Mond from Brave New World, or O’Brien from 1984, or Karellen from Childhood’s End, or Wintermute from that piece of shit Neuromancer. But these are but fictitious doppelgangers, images seen through mirrors darkly, and with Penthouse Vaseline filters smudged across their surfaces.
Upstate Ether is the real Earthly home of the Overlords. So behave here, lest they cook your brainstem, just because they can. And because they still find it amusing, all these centuries on.
