They1Who? say it’s best to parody yourself before somebody else can.2Oh, me.
Johnny Nightmailman3You know, of the Upper Noxalia Nightmailmans. is not Mondo Goodbody in many of the ways a person could not be Mondo Goodbody. Johnny Nightmailman4The Nightmailman family is both widely known and well respected, though Johnny, as far as he knows, is the only member of his family to live in the City of the Golden King since his aunt, Rowena Nightmailwoman moved away to take care of her own auncle, Patr Nightmaildeliveryemployee. is not a carpenter. Johnny Nightmailman5Johnny Nightmailman’s father, John Nightmailman, once called it the City of the Golden King the Flying King’s Folly. After today, he will never call it anything else. does not carve wooden ducks, or even know about birds, really.6Fuck, do you know how hard it is not to know about birds when you live in a flying city? Johnny Nightmailman7The Nightmailman family made its significant fortune several hundred years ago when its then-patriarch, Ronny Daymailman, decided on a whim to lie about why he’d overslept. wasn’t even awake8He was the opposite: Asleep. when the City of the Golden King fell. This was the case because Johnny Nightmailman9You know, Johnny Nightmailman. was a man of the night. And not for the reasons his family name might suggest.10A member of the Nightmailman family was no longer expected to work as a nightmailman, and Johnny Nightmailman was ill-suited to the executive offices.
Because Johnny Nightmailman11Who was very happily employed by a legal firm as an interpreter of several lesser-known languages and dialects, including Second English, Mmm, Endee, Dendagon Coverup, and and whatever the hell it is they speak over on Snork. liked to walk. Hundreds of years of nightly mail delivery, and then another hundred of executive walk-and-talks, Johnny Nightmailman12Whose great-great-great grandfather once walked for six months to deliver a package to a man who died two months after he left. liked to joke, did that to your genetics. He couldn’t help himself. At least once a day, Johnny Nightmailman13An only child if ever there was one. walked the total circumference of the City of the Golden King. Now, the City of the Golden King was not that big. It was no Old Needle,14Old Needle used to be called just The Needle, and was called that for having been built in the long, long stretch of liveable land between an active volcano and the Ice Flats of Bun. But with the volcano extinguished and the Ice Flats shaved too thin, The Needle got the chance to expand into something nobody reasonable still wanted to call The Needle. But what else to call it? You know how it goes. it was no Chiro,15Nobody remembered why it was called that. no City in the Flaw,16Everyone knew exactly why it was called that. no Apotheosity.17Apotheocity? But a city was a city, and Johnny Nightmailman had seen every floating cobblestone of this one. Johnny Nightmailman’s friends sometimes joked that if he could fly, he’d use that ability to see some of the cobblestones he’d missed and then go back to walking. That he wouldn’t know what the point was, what to do with it. Straight back to the ground. But a self-imposed mandatory daily two-hour walk did things to your schedule, to your rhythm, so the walking shifted to the night, and so Johnny Nightmailman, interpreter, nightly mail delivery heir, and walker was asleep when the City of the Golden King fell.
Twenty seconds after the birds noticed, Johnny Nightmailman18Whose family would, they would come to realise, not particularly miss him. was awake as quickly as he’d ever been. And in the one way in which Johnny Nightmailman was like Mondo Goodbody, he did think he was flying. And so all he could think when he realised he wasn’t was, “Well, that makes sense.”