Percy Maelock is a Liar
Ominous worlds. Ravenous monsters. Killer machines. People in mortal danger. All of known reality and of uncharted imagination to explore. These are just a few of the many, many things Percy would have you believe he dealt with on just an average afternoon. But whatever he might have to say, no matter how fantastical or romantic or even captivatingly dangerous, you should never believe a word. His lies are like a virus and the consequences of believing in even the most mundane of them will plague you for the rest of your life.
All stories come with a price, but none extract a heavier toll than the infinite lies of Percy Maelock.
I’ve known him longer that practically anyone else and I can confidently say that he’s never been able to resist the urge to add in profoundly imaginative and blatantly impossible details to each and every story he told. As a kid, every afternoon playing in the woods supposedly included fresh adventures with bandits and buried treasure. Every family vacation came with new encounters with mermaids and monsters and murders that, of course, no one else seemed to have experienced but him. Never before and never again have I met anyone who could make a trip to the grocery store or an afternoon mowing the lawn sound so wonderfully and frustratingly adventurous.
Over the years, he has declared many ridiculous things. The longer you knew the man, the more and more delusional he started to sound. Among his countless lies, to name only a few, he has claimed to have danced with royalty and dined with dignitaries. He bragged to have dated supermodels and attended movie premiers with millionaires, to have crossed deserts on camelback bringing riches to war-torn villages, and to have even earned astonishingly high praise in an unaired episode of a well-known baking show. Now, one or two ridiculous or amazing things happening in someone’s life is completely believable. Actually, it’s downright expected if your truly living at all. But Percy claimed to exist in a never-ending state of excitement, which not only made him a liar but a profoundly exhausting one.
A friendship with Percy Maelock - even a one-sided friendship - is one of the most difficult trials anyone could be asked to endure. This peddler of the pathetic…salesmen of shams and stories…charlatan of complete and utter bullshit…the correct words simply do not exist to properly describe how much contempt I hold for the man. He is egotistical, obnoxious, and trapped in an endless spiral of storytelling and fantasy. But I will begrudgingly give him credit where credit is due. Whatever the lie, no matter how impossible or whimsical it may be, he fully committed to it. The details may have been ridiculous, but thought through them all to a level so intricate that you almost wanted to believe in his stories as much as he did. I’ll admit that a small part of me, buried somewhere deep beneath the layers of my frustration and emotional fatigue, wanted the legend of Percy Maelock to be true.
Unfortunately, we all have to grow up some day. But while most imaginative children eventually outgrow this phase of their life and come to grips with the world around them, Percy Maelock obviously never did.
The only reason I have managed to last this long without going completely insane or meticulously planning how to commit the perfect murder is because of the remarkable people who help me share this burden. People like Athena Dorian, Vicki Adler, and Barrett Lassiter.
Percy Maelock Quote of the Day:
“Never trust a Crab Rangoon you didn’t prepare yourself. You never know which ones might be secretly plotting the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. And definitely don’t try telling them that it already fell in 1922. Trust me.”
