Hey everyone! Here is my entry for the Potpourri Treasure Contest Week 4. You can find the contest here by @sandzat. This is a writing prompt contest, so you may want to check out the prompt on @sandzat's blog first. Thanks everyone and I hope you enjoy!

Here, There Be Trolls

I instantly recognized the guy from last month. Before, it had been a family of thirteen. I remember thinking, Thirteen! Where did the extra two pop out from? What the hell has this guy been doing?

I had a good idea, and it certainly was NSFW material. Yeah, he was a newbie, but he’d figured out his niche. Just turned out his niche was running a frickin harem.

The sad thing was that the poor sod was probably swimming in picas. I checked the images. Yup, nothing but pics of babies and kids in tattered clothing. Probably legit. The guy even had the good sense to throw a starving puppy pic in as well. Lucky bastard.

The guy would be a millionaire in a month. I was totally aware of the irony. Nowadays, it was hard to fake this kind of thing. Our whole lives were posted on the Ol’ Big Brother Blockchain. And if it was discovered that you had faked your need…well, let’s just say you’d be needing an entirely different kind of help. I doubted very much that ol’ @haremhippy faked any part of it anyway… Fifteen, damn.

Everywhere you turned, you found people going out of their way to help others. Except now, in this “perfect” society, finding someone actually in need of aid had become nearly impossible. It was bad. I had heard that in some of the nicer parts of town, people were getting desperate. I’d just read an article about a woman who stabbed her neighbor just so she could sew him up and drive him to the hospital. Sure, she’d gone to jail, but not before both parties had been inundated with donations.

And jail only made it worse. The police had had to request the public to stop sending their “emotional distress contributions.” That didn’t stop the public from directly transferring picas into her account though. The woman would probably be out in less than a dime and ready to retire.

And here I’d been starving for days and hadn’t even gotten one frickin handout. My problem was visibility—no one knew I even existed anymore. Sure, the ol’ lady had been grateful. But what had I really done? I could still remember her scratchy voice.

“Oh! Sonny, you’ve saved my life!”

She had dropped her diamond studded leash attached to the pink and pedigreed poodle. The little yapper had walked an entire four feet away before I absentmindedly picked up the leash and handed it back to the ol’ bag. But not before the beast lifted its all-too-colorful-leg upon my pants.

“Oh Missy! Look what you’ve gone and done. Such a brave lad! Here, Sonny, go get yourself some new trousers.” She eyes me up and down, “And a haircut wouldn’t hurt either.” Before I could argue, she’d stuffed the 1500.00 picas in my shirt pocket and disappeared down Senile Ave.

I readied to close out my browser, I’d had enough of the sob stories and wanted to get a few more hours sleep before I…well…sleep was all I really had planned that day.

Yet, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. Fifteen. Do you ever get that feeling that Destiny is knocking on your door? And I don’t mean the Destiny that lives down the hall who clouts her elephantine foot upon your door when you’ve been playing Final Fantasy CCVIII too loud. I mean, sometimes inspiration smacks you upside the skull like that old documentary about Gallagher in that watermelon museum. Pink flesh and black bits everywhere.

I looked at the fifteen photos one more time. You couldn’t fake it, we’ve been over that. But the system could be manipulated. Ol’ @haremhippy had figured it out—he’d found out what he was good at. You just had to be honest about it. There were enough people, that odds were, someone would give a shit. Especially when the whole society was begging you to give them a reason to throw money at you. The question was, what was I good at?

I deposited the picas in my nail computer and transferred 1400.00 of it to @haremhippy’s account. Yeah, I know, he’d just have to make do. I needed the last hundred. I sat down to write a post.

It took me a lot less time than I imagined. I didn’t make it flashy. Left out the usual bells and whistles. You know what I’m talking about, stuff like the 3DMPAS (3-D Mentally Projected AdSense) or the ESP-SEO (there were big bucks in knowing what someone was going to click, before they clicked it). Nope, I kept it simple, text and the most boring 2-D pick of my mug I could find.

In looking back, I realize now that the simplicity of the article is what made it stand out. It had become common practice to cram as much screenbling as possible into the crap we put online. I mean, there were entire organizations solely dedicated to donating to families affected by screen and VR-induced epilepsy.

I looked down at what I had so far.

I have recently come to the conclusion that our society is broken. Not because there is too much pain and heartache in the world, but really from the direct opposite. There are no longer enough problems in the world for all of us to fix. And since society deems it immoral of us to create more problems we continue to fight over the scraps like mutts under the table.

So, here’s my proposal: I’m going to become a Troll.

I’m going to randomly select posts and after the indemnity clause is signed, I will proceed to rip into the them for absolutely no reason. There will be no basis for my assault, no concrete evidence for my lurid barrage of unpleasantness. It is my promise to you all that no amount of logic will appease my ill will or satiate my hunger to belittle. I will make everyone hate me.

And I want you all to pay me for it.

The purpose of this is two-fold:

1.) The target of my misplaced wrath will become YOUR new beneficiary. I will be providing an excuse for you all to throw money at your VR-screens. In your minds, you will be helping the poor victim of my onslaught. I imagine this service will become so successful, that clients will eventually approach me asking to promote them directly with my foulness. This service will free your lives, no longer will you need to search for people to “help”.

2.) Secondly, most people, at some time in their lives have felt sorry for the bad guy. I am more than happy to play that role. I will endeavor to twist the facts and manipulate the truth in order to elicit your misguided compassion (and your picas). Once I have a modicum of your trust, I will be certain to betray you by flaming something you hold dear, providing even more opportunities for you all to swoop in and play the hero.

You may be asking, but what of the emotional damages? Hence the indemnity contract. In no way will the words coming out of my mouth be indicative of the views or beliefs of my person. Besides, we all know not to take Trolls too seriously. Internet 101, people.

So, if any of you think this would be of use to you, you know what to do.

Perfect. I posted it and used my last 100 picas to pay a couple of the larger Steemit profiles to resteem my article.

I sat back and watched as the pica transfers came flooding in.

I’d finally found out what I was good at.

Smiling, I sat back and cracked my knuckles—I had some trolling to do.

Some Of My Work

* * *

The Chronicles of Salen Kur’Savien -- A Prequel to A World Long Sundered

* * *

My Blog
A World Long Sundered -- Chapter 1 Original Version -- Note: This version was edited and broken into the 2 parts of chapter 1 above. Some might like to compare.
Want to learn more about the Fiction Workshop? Click here.

Sources 1 , 2

Here, There Be Trolls--POTPOURRI TREASURE Contest - Week 4

Here, There Be Trolls

Some Of My Work