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Five years later, myself and Agent K1 took a tour of the crime scene, so to speak. The disintegrating motel had been wholly revamped and now looked like the sort of classy place that would never allow an event like MOCK to be held there. Rook's comic store was gone, replaced by "The Cat's Meow Yarn Shop," though a little checking around revealed it wasn't quite dead. A few tables of comics sat in the corner of a hair salon which also boasted a sign for Rook's business in its window. No phone number, no web address. MOCK stayed dead, never to rise again in any incarnation, with little remaining legacy to indicate that it ever existed. These days, it's essentially only known for being the rare example of a con where a high-profile guest died at the event. (This was at the second-ever MOCK. If it had happened in the declining years, you can bet Rook would've blamed us for that, too.) The hotel that hosted MOCK's swan song closed down. Even the judge who heard our case lost her job shortly thereafter in some local scandal. That's what you get when you fuck with the Kronies! (Hell, we might as well take credit for that; it's no sillier than most of the other crap attributed to us.)
A post from Rook following up on a post suggesting he shouldn't, essentially, feed the trolls. He twice says the cronies win no matter what he does, followed in the very next sentence by a claim that he knows "99% of their tricks." Either the cronies are spin-doctor geniuses, or he's way ahead of them and will inevitably catch them.
This epic rant shows Rook's mind at work as he dissects a post critical of MOCK, sometimes one word at a time. He denies having fetish parties right before saying that there will be a fetish party, he denies that MOCK is an SF con right before admitting that it is, and then later claims that it is not a convention at all, all while banging the "why do they HATE?" drum and speculating about possible mind control attempts on the poster's part. Witness as he isolates the single word "drugs" and spins a wholly irrational inference that the poster is actually saying that MOCK is full of stoned cops. A psych student could write an entire dissertation on this one. (Note that Rook's fascination with death by hanging reappears in his summation.)
One day later, Rook decides the previous post must've been from "K1." (It wasn't. Either the Kronies are legion, or it's just two of us doing all of it. He can't decide.) He makes ridiculous demands that are a transparent attempt to get us to do what the judge said not to do (contact him). We ignored him; nothing happened. Also, why am I the "buddy?" Half this shit was my idea!
Here we see an email Rook sent out to his staff concerning the dates of the next MOCK. The second post is after Rook denied making any such claims and called his own staff liars, only for them to publicly throw his own email back in his face.
Tangentially related, here's a fake ad for a nonexistent follow-up to a one-off show called "Starcon" (headed by the same "Richard S." who was supposed to get us into MOCK). Not only did we give actual contact info for both Richard S. and "Mr. Rook," we gave the hotel address and dates for a real but unrelated convention, just to confuse drop-ins. Yeah, brats. I could keep adding more of these all day, but I trust that there's sufficient data here to clearly answer the burning question of "who taught you to hate?" Who, indeed? Apropos of absolutely nothing related, here's a lovely little town in England. |
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