[Note: This article takes place sometime between the year 2020 and 2056.]

The quiet journalist, adept only in his ability to empathize with any he may come into contact with, could feel it in the air. This place, quiet aside from it's undercurrent of failed music business majors, Nazis and the occasional wannabe cowboy in a bar named after either a boxer or a kind of alcohol, could spot an outsider. The visitor didn't know why he kept being glared at and intimidated by accusing eyes. The answer was somewhere between our free market society and The Twilight Zone: For the townsfolk of Whitwell, it was a night gallery of desire for the sweet nectar that was Count Duckula merchandise.

You see, there was a leader among them. A woman calling herself Diane Makepeace claimed she was never anyone special. She made a name for herself in 1998 on a well known television broadcast of Antiques Roadshow. Miss Makepeace had been made a billionaire by selling her collection of Nickelodeon merchandise, which had been valued at about twenty seven dollars by the Roadshow-sponsored price-tag connoisseurs. Her buyer, a mysterious gaunt man in a black satin jump suit, a jerry-curl and Ray-Ban aviators, said only one thing before handing her the briefcase of British currency: "Beware the fanged one that lives on not blood, but ketchup." This seemed to trigger something in the newly wealthy Diane. She now felt driven to become something, something she never thought she had in her. First it was real estate, then Makepeace Inc., and within only a few short months Makepeace, Makepeace, and Ramseys was merging with Makepeace Inc. to form The Diane Makepeace Church of Scientology.

Whitwell Tennessee would never be the same.

The rest of the story is only hearsay. The quiet journalist from Tex-Arcane sits tight lipped, listening as closely as he feels he has the ability. I go on: Mr. Ladderman, I'm sure you can see this is a quiet town these days. That's because everything from this town that was once a southern landmark, a thriving place of ingenuity… it all vanished. How? They say the Makepeace Scientology church was in with the Vatican. They say it was a worldwide conspiracy.

He wonders if I believe what "they say." I tell him I don't, but he's not so sure. Then I continue. The powers that be, the illuminati you might call them, apparently had old Miss Makepeace pegged as the most disturbing patsy of all time. Legend said she was punished in some transcendent, almost mythical fashion. She would be forced to give birth forever to the offspring of the enemy of the people, the man in the black satin jump suit.

Now the journalist is sure I'm a madman as I begin to get excited while shouting my knowledge of the ultimate truths at a new face free of the liberating knowledge I can give. He is now running down the street and as he drops his pen and notebook and his dark brown fedora falls off, I tell him he needs some more information.

The villagers will kill him tonight. He will not be clothed in the gang insignia, the strange cartoon fetish of a past madman. Count Duckula is who I call my vindication… and my God.