:21"]I'm disappointed with this story RowdyPope, I saw this thread on the sidebar, with you as the latest poster, and immediately clicked it in hope of finding soome amazing story of how you smashed up the last church you worked in or at least something more exciting than a one liner stating the obvious. Even if it wasn't real, at least add some flare, ahaha!! <object class="emojione" data="
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Ok Ok, you saw through my lie. Obviously, you are partly familiar with the history of RowdyPope to some degree. For the other readers I'll divulge a bit of the details behind the origins of Rowdy Pope.
The current historical accounts are a bit oblivious to my short reign and this was completely intentional. Note, this was not malicious intent, but rather a parting request after my tenure ended. It was a different time then and not simply in the sense of ages. I had just returned from a rather hellish day touring with Clem (Clement XI). In those days the tours were generally centered around the extracting and banishing demons from children and men alike. I dare say it was a bit closer to hell on earth in terms of infestations. I remember encountering the first trolls as well which were not unlike the ones we see today. It was always very frustrating to have a well laid out exorcism ready to go and suddenly the child jumps out of bed only to announce he was playing a nefarious trick. That didn't happen very often as we could usually find a wandering demon and have it posses a brother or sister for a few days.^1
More to the point, we had returned from the field and it was announced that 13 (Innocent XII) would be retiring.^2 He had become rather fond of a band of monks that loitered near town and decided something different was in order. Despite the common belief the position is not one of servitude for ones life time. Generally, it is rather difficult to keep one's sanity when their life span has no deterministic end.^3 The benefit to performing complex religious duties and holy feats is the rather long and unending life span.^4 The vote itself was nearly 50/50 and despite our best efforts we could simply not convince anyone to vote the other way. At one point, I offered several bottles of wine, two brand new robes and a rather funky hat I had acquired on the outskirts of the known world to simply NOT vote for me. Field duty is rather laborious in itself, but it has it's general moments. Far far more moments then sitting in a rather large chair, wearing an abrasive oddly shaped hat and swing a staff around all day.^5
Unbeknownst to each other we had more or less decided on effectively the same route to tackle this rather difficult task. In the next few days we had both performed our best to frame the other as a testament to holiness. Despite my best efforts to make Clem out to be a Pope of Pope's the vote was eventually in my favor.^6. This was only a marginal victory due entirely to a technicality. After Clem's efforts failed to praise me sufficiently as well he simply took off into the night to become a traveling rug salesman.^7
Shortly after my ceremony I was in dire need of entertainment. Within a few weeks I had already cleaned most of the cob webs from the towers and there really wasn't much to do beyond that. I did attempt to form a rock band, but no one was simply interested in my collection of musical rocks.^8 Faced with what would feel like an eternity I took up inventing to keep my idle hands from becoming the devils play things. (Why is that man so interested in hands I'll never know). Several months quickly ran by as invention after invention was deemed a complete failure.^9 Eventually, I had believed myself to have succeeded and began distributing my new charm for celebrations. I would ensure that every man, woman and child had one of these great devices to rejoice during the morning balcony ceremony. They seemed so rather drawl and to fulfill the basic rule of invention... see a need... fill a need.
On the fifth week of my service I was greeted by many adoring fans with their brand new vuvuzela's in hand. As I would later realize, it would seem that being inebriated during the course of several weeks has an interesting side effect of slanting one's judgement.^10 Fortunately/unfortunately, depending on the view point one might share, the neighboring people would establish my appearance with the simultaneous use of my new invention at every sighting. I was rather quickly retired as the device is apparently the most annoying instrument crafted in the known history of man.^11
Thanks to this clever contraption I was branded the Rowdiess Pope of mankind and sent on my way.^12
1. No sense in wasting a good opportunity for banishing a devil to the planes of hell and teaching a child about the dangers of upsetting someone of the cloth.
2. It was becoming a rather popular trend at the time to add numerical post fixes to ones name. As a joke we began referring to him solely as 13.
3. Several have tried for rather long periods, but usually retirement is forced as lack of sanity has rather diverse effects on rule making. For some reason many become fascinated with bureaucracy and tended to invent increasingly complex processes and forms. The general belief is that most of those forced to retire have either completely founded or crept their way into the IRS.
4. It's more of an equilibrium as generally demons also have an unending lifespan.
5. The staff itself was initially designed to combat demons, but it turned out that it was really only good for reaching cob webs. Unfortunately, it was deemed rather important to the image by marketing and the piece stuck.
6. I called in several favors with the powers that be to raise a mock town which presented a gargantuan statue in his name. The work being rather rushed collapsed into an equally large pile of rubble roughly fifteen minutes after the unveiling.
7. It's the simple solutions to complex problems that work the best.
8. Even I grew bored of their rather stone faced stoicism and lack of rhythm.
9. Apple Lisa, Ford Pinto, New Coke and Olestra to name a short few... which found their way back into the market to fail again!
10. This would be a bit of an understatement.
11. The church took great effort to both remove the device, it's design and manufacturing plans and even posed a fine on it's usage. However, this would not be sufficient as the discarded units were apparently found on the shores of another nation some time later.
12. Clem was found shortly after as the clergy had created an elborate rug convention to lure him out of hiding. The man just couldn't resist a good venue to sale his wares.