Tasky John

For many millennia, powerful one-eyed hermit god HLUT NECK lived deep in a secret desert cave, doing wondrous and magical things no one else would ever see, exiled from the outside world by a mysterious cosmic allergy.

Eventually Hlut Neck grew jealous of gods who could interact with the world and do stuff that people actually knew about, so he created a little Task Man named TASKY JOHN to perform tasks for him in the world at large. Tasky John dearly loved tasks. He loved every part of them: the being given them, the having them, the doing them. He was happy.

But eventually Hlut Neck ran out of things for Tasky John to do. The Task Man was deactivated, and slept away thousands of years in a dark corner of the cave.

Then one day, as Hlut Neck restlessly wandered the tunnels of his cave, he had a bitter thought: “a god is capable of conjuring the most beautiful painting ever painted out of thin air… but that doesn’t make him a good painter.” This thought made Hlut Neck want to throw up. So he immediately roused Tasky John and sent him out to get a specific, highly recommended book on learning how to paint.

Now Tasky John wanders the earth looking for that book, desperate to climb back into the good favor of his creator, to get the task flow back up to an acceptable level, and to avoid the deathlike slumber of disuse. Meanwhile, mysterious forces are conspiring to turn Tasky John’s determination, singular task-mindedness, and weird unkillable body to their own dark purposes…