The Genesis of 'Ibis Head People Planet!'
Chapter 1: Welcome to a world both wonderful and strange...
Richard sits at his tiny black desk looking out the window at the desert landscape as he types away at a little black, white, and red electronic keyboard.
He stops for a moment and lifts up a brass ankh sitting on the desk. It's covered in hieroglyphs and about eight inches long. The metal is sturdy even if it's thin enough to fit in a pocket where Richard tended to keep it these days, carrying it around from room to room, putting it under his pillow to sleep, and certainly never leaving the apartment without it to go buy more of the amazing weed 10 minutes down the street at the new Native Dispensary.
"Thoth, I invoke thee, Hail unto thee!" Richard said, somewhat quieter than he preferred but he could hear his neighbor out the window, watering his plants not 20 feet away across the fence so he decided to try not to sound so overtly weird and attract attention. They really needed to save together enough money so they could move somewhere else. Richard hated having to be so close to so many people all the time.
"But so it goes," a voice then said to Richard in the back of his mind.
"That's what you were going to write, right?"
Suddenly Richard feels a piercing pain in the left side of his skull and he winces but still tries to continue typing.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Thoth said. "You had a huge spiritual parasite there just sucking on your confidence and will to live, so I just snatched it off. It was quite tasty, as such creatures usually are, I must confess."
Richard looks around, a bit anxiously. No, no one is there visually, this is not some visual hallucination. This is exactly what it's been again for the last 8 months or so since he first invoked the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth, who appeared to the ancient Egyptians much as he did to Richard "in his mind's eye."
Richard could tell there was some sort of "entity" presence in the room, some sort of spirit, some sort of independent intelligence who did appear to correspond to the ibis-headed deity and possess his attributes and abilities.
But what threw him off in particular, as if communicating with an ancient Egyptian bird-headed god wasn't weird enough, were the things that he was now being instructed to do, which—as strange as it certainly seemed—he’d agreed to.
"So are you only coming and eating the demonic spirits that attach themselves to me because I have agreed to make this ‘Ibis Head People Planet’ web comic for you?"
“Certainly not,” Thoth answered as he paced around behind Richard and lit up a large joint which blazed automatically. "You need some relief from those bastards and I'm happy to oblige anytime, you just give me a call on the Ankh-phone anytime, or you can use the ones carved into your little Anubis rings. He's available on speed dial, too, as you know; he just takes longer and sometimes you need to go deeper which is fine."
There had been times in the last six months where so many spiritual parasites had attached themselves to Richard that just Thoth coming and picking them out with his long beak wasn't enough. He had to call in his friend Anubis who buried Richard into the carpet on the living room floor and then dug him up again. Later, while researching ancient Egypt, Richard had found that they gave the god of the underworld a jackal head because jackals would go into cemeteries at night and dig up the bodies.
"So, look, I'm just having a hard time explaining this to people, even my good friends and people who tolerate a whole lot of my weirdness," Richard said as continued typing.
Thoth paced around behind him.
"Would you like me to just make this more simple for you?"
"Yes, I suppose I would," Richard answered back.
"Well, what did you have in mind?" Thoth answered, sitting down on the yoga mats on the carpet behind Richard, to the right of a wall of bookshelves where Richard had amassed an assortment of novels and nonfiction titles across, politics, religion, history, and culture with too many titles on John Adams still collected but unread.
Richard sniffled and rubbed his elbow against his nose, not wanting to get up and go grab a tissue.
"Oh go on," Thoth said. "And smoke some more of that weed too before you come back. Lighten up, come on."
Richard sighed and looked back. His dog Janey wandered in and deposited herself beside him, looking up before looking away. She was a brindle mix of boxer, pitt, and German Shepherd, a dog of the desert who now parked herself behind him, perhaps drawn by Thoth's warm presence. The two of them had established a loving rapport since the Egyptian god of magic, medicine, and language had begun dropping by to check on Richard and his new wife, Lydia.
"No, I'm OK," Richard answered. “Let's get to a good stopping point first and then I'll go hit it up again." He then grabbed his orange and brown honeypot style hand-thrown mug and slurped up the final molecules remaining.
"I guess the initial thing that I've been struggling with Rules-wise with this project is just deciding on what seems to be the most important. Like, I want to give myself a lot of flexibility creatively to go where I want to, but there are also things that I want to avoid and stuff I want to return to again. I guess I'm not sure where to draw the borders."
Thoth got up and shrugged, hitting his joint hard, "It's a fair question," he said. "I know that you humans like your laws and rules quite a bit. You've been wise to avoid the legal profession - that's an absolute mess."
We paused, both seeming to wait for the other.
"So, could I just have, like a 10 Commandments or something to get started with?" Richard asked, feeling a bit like a seventh grader asking for help beginning a book report.
"Yes, let's do that," Thoth said. "You can be the Moses of the Ibis Head People Planet if that's what you're really so eager to do."
Richard protested, "Hey, I didn't want this gig, you gave it to me, I'm taking it, I'm doing it, you've said that it's going to be hilarious and a good opportunity to make cash selling merch of cute ibis head preschoolers saying nihilistic philosophical things."
Thoth grinned, which is a bit weird to explain since birds have beaks that are hard and can't really smile, but when a god is showing up in "your mind's eye" then he can do whatever he wants and is really more like a cartoon character. The ibis head thing is more like just how these spirits like to present themselves to humans, kind of a signature so other people can keep track of what it means to encounter Thoth entities and how to engage with them. Richard had started checking out books on Egyptian religion and buying them off Amazon one after the other, until he discovered...
"Go ahead and tell them," Thoth instructed as Richard hesitated to type it out.
"I don't know if I'm ready to tell people yet, this seems like too big of a reveal to give away this soon in the story," he answered.
The bird looked upward in thought.
"Yes, you may be right, we'll wait to tell them that until further down the line, and you really should probably dig deeper into the academic literature to confirm it first. That book was pretty good but a bit more New Agey than most would take seriously."
"Take seriously? Are you joking?" Richard shot back. “You are insisting that I create a Substack-based web comic created with ChatGPT and animations on Sundays to emulate a newspaper schedule, in which everyone has an ibis head like you do. Nobody is going to take this seriously."
Richard suddenly started cracking up, leaning over the keyboard and just letting a cackle rip.
"That's why it's going to be so fun!" Thoth declared. "You're going to use the relatable newspaper comic style in the ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ and ‘Far Side’ tradition, but do it with AI and lots of highbrow humor balanced with profanity and the accessibility of today's memes."
Richard sighed again.
"Yes, I get it. Now can we have the 10 Commandments of how this world you have insisted actually exists will function?"
Thoth reclined down on the yoga mats again and stretched out vertically, like a firm log.
Then he shot his head up: "No!"
"We'll save the ‘Book of the Law 2.0’ for the next piece in the series. So now go out there, hit up that bowl with that Super Boof strain again, and spend some time with Janey and Sarai."
"Do you have to keep calling her that?" Richard asked.
"That is her proper name and she has not yet come up with a better name in any of her reincarnated lives," Thoth said now all serious.
Richard stared upward in exasperation, closed his eyes momentarily, heard "Sarai's" spoon clacking in her cereal bowl - cereal for dinner yet again, as per her usual.
"Yes, I will go see 'Sarai' now and hit up that bowl again, but next time I come back I really need to get those stone tablets so I can start revealing to the people what ‘Ibis Head People Planet’ is all about and why they can all look forward to visiting it soon..."
Richard suddenly burst out in laughter again, paused "Bar Fly" by the Orwells on his iPhone, gave Thoth a grin and a light nod, and said "OK, talk to you again soon, my friend."
And then the bird-headed, long-beaked spirit-man was gone again, ready to be summoned again when Richard was massively high again and had a few minutes to waste channeling a 5000-year old metaphor that hints at the unpleasant but true reality that language is not something that humans invented.
Humans are something that language invented. Apparently because he thought it was hilarious. And he was right.
Continue with Chapter 2 here: