Thread by @WritNelson

You know that The Good Place episode where Jason and his family are making a Very Illegal Energy Drink And Shampoo Combo?

I laughed at it at the time, but it turns out that was based on a REAL FRICKING COURT CASE IN FLORIDA.
There were corpses involved.

Thread:

The trouble started when Putnam County residents Odinson (36) and Ymir (52) Valkyrie began to believe that they were vikings.

Born Simon and Roger Roberts, respectively, Roger had successfully won custody of young Simon on account of his mother Rhetta drowning in acidic sinkhole Lake Barco in the 60s.

This isn't relevant to the wider story, but it's tragic and very Florida, so I'm leaving it in.

Life as a single, teenage father was tough. Roger worked 3 jobs to keep Simon eating, and sometimes...that meant skipping a few meals himself.

Raised under a rotating line of sitters and women, Simon eventually got old enough to start asking questions.
He asked where momma was.

Simon wasn't stupid. Over a quarter of Putnam county is currently under the (criminally low) poverty line. They lived in a trailer park, around other single parents. Deflections he originally took as gospel rang hollow under the fists of bullies.

So Roger had a decision.

Roger could tell Simon the sad, anticlimactic truth. That his mother died on a drunken skinnydip, choking on limestone foam and tabs of acid.

...Or he could tell Simon a story.

He chose the story.

One of the few pieces of reading material Roger could consistently bring into the tiny aluminum trailer was comic books. Specifically, the adventures of Thor: Norse god and Avenger.

Can you see where I'm going with this?

I promise it doesn't end in a viking pun.

See, in Roger's time working for a collection agency, they occasionally had cause to repossess the assets of a nerd. Comic books that weren't immediately valuable went to the quiet single father with the plain name and the weird nose.

So Roger had an elementary knowledge of Norse mythology.
Looking into the black eye of his angry son, he used it.

He weaved a tale of gods and demons and the brave people who walked in their company--vikings.

Lo and behold - the tale included Simon, too.
HE was a viking.
They both were.

Their blonde hair and malnutrition shakes were signs of a shared, noble heritage--the latter explained as their ancestral readiness for battle still raging through their veins.

Simon was spellbound.
Roger went further.
Simon wasn't a motherless dirt-covered trailer park kid in the ass end of Florida. He didn't even need a mother. He was *better*.

He was born from the Earth itself.

Roger and Simon carried magic in their blood, and Roger loved Simon *so much* - before he even knew the boy - that he spilled a little of that blood on the ground to make a son.

Odinson.

I'm going into a lot of detail because Florida redneck pseudo-vikings don't come out of the ether. You gotta make that sh*t.

And once you understand how the fathers came to be...maybe you'll have some mercy for the son.

Roger told Simon a story, because he thought he had nothing to lose.
It was an impossible story, but it was the story Simon needed, when he needed it most. It served a purpose. It kept their worlds turning.

The problem only started when they believed it.

And I see you glaring at me over there - noooooo, Odinson isn't a pun.
This COULD be a very good setup for a joke, but we're kinda past that point.

At what moment does a person believe themselves to be a god?

The trailer walls were covered in runes. They wore their moustaches in plaits. The imagery was vaguely white-supremacist.

It kept the CPS social worker away when reports arose that Simon didn't go to school any more.

Simon--

Apologies.

ODINSON Valkyrie grew.

His drunken howls transformed into the calls of the lord of thunder himself.
He was a wild boy, he was in love...and he had a child of his own.

Just like dad.

Ray Roberts was born in the moonlight.
His mother labored in a barn while Odinson knocked a hole into the wooden ceiling with a sledgehammer, so his son would be blessed by the gods--of which Odinson was a fortunate member.

Ray's mother, Candy Michigan, labored in the cold and straw and dust for fourteen hours, with only a metal tub and a frankly dubious amount of OxyContin to help.

Her howls were muffled by the shuffling of nearby cattle.

The custody of Ray Roberts was granted to his mother Candy twenty seven days after his birth.

Why?
It's a mystery.

It could be due to the screamed demands of his father that Ray be referred to by his rightful title FENRIR in the courtroom.

but who can say

All we know is that Odinson Valkyrie lost custody of his son, Fenrir Valkyrie, twenty seven days after his birth.

On the twenty ninth day after Fenrir's birth, he was kidnapped.
By his father.

The Valkyrie (Roberts) family would go on the run for the next two decades.

Unlike Odinson, Fenrir didn't have the benefit of a semi-normal upbringing.
He was raised in a shadow world of superstition and myths. The dead walked. Fairies haunted night drives to the next county.

They were outlaws, and they were magic, and he was a hostage in his own skin.

Get-mildly-more-wealthy-quick schemes were the family specialty. Knocking over liquor stores. Mugging a tourist in front of Red Lobster. Wearing a half-worn viking head and selling off-brand Disney statuettes from a trunk across from the park.

Fenrir watched.

Was Fenrir happy?
None of the court documents or witness statements say. At a certain point it didn't matter.

He was Fenrir, the wolf to be unleashed, and every damn day was Ragnarok.
He existed.

Maybe the power of stories changed the way the family worked. What we can see from documents and activities over time is that Fenrir grew to manage the family business. He believed more, and harder, because he had no other choice.
It made him...odd.

They got out of petty crimes.

Energy drinks were a natural next step.

Energy drinks are stimulants, artificial coloring, sweeteners, and water.
Stimulants were easy to come by, particularly if you had an armed 3-man team without a need to find an FDA-approved source.

Sweeteners can cover up the bitter taste of the rest in sufficient quantities.

Fenrir had seen the tastes of mankind shift through windows and advertisements. People wanted to indulge, while believing they had gotten away with a sin.

The Ragnarockin' energy drink would be different.
It would be healthy.

Chock full of iron and collagen...and other things.

People who drank Ragnarockin' couldn't stop laughing. They forgot their own names. They went mad. The drink became an urban legend for a good time--so people bought more.

They claimed to be drinking the nectar of the gods. In a way they were.
In another way, they weren't.

They caught the Valkyrie family. Not due to a blaze of glory or an error in judgement, but a little pastor in Putnam County.

The outbreak might have helped.

Pastor Henry Port was in the unique position of having a congregation primarily consisting of the elderly. One year, the heat gave way to humidity, and wiped out half of his flock.

He called police shortly thereafter...because the people they buried didn't stay in the ground.

The grounds surrounding the church never grew grass again. That was the first sign.

The other sign is that the graves turned into sinkholes, because there wasn't anything to hold up the dirt.

Someone almost drowned placing a rose at their grandfather's headstone.

The police quickly found a breadcrumb trail of churches and morgues. Some were burgled, others were desecrated, and all were robbed. That, in itself, might not have been enough to catch the Valkyrie family. Fenrir hid their tracks well.

But he couldn't hide an outbreak.

See, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease is an extremely rare degenerative brain disorder. It's incurable--and most commonly identified in cannibals.

So how did 7% percent of men in Northwestern Florida aged 15-29 contract this disease at the exact same time?

CJD (Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease) can cause hallucinations, endless laughing, personality changes, impaired balance, paranoia, psychosis...

A bunch of people bought nectar from Viking Gods out of the back of a silver and black pickup truck, and thought they were seeing the divine.

An energy drink that makes you drunk, without a single breath of alcohol passing your lips.
An energy drink that lets you see other worlds.
An energy drink that lets you fake symptoms and get out of school the next day.
A liquid roofie.

Everyone had a reason.

Fenrir watched.

Roger and Simon confessed quickly.

They'd get a hotel room with free HBO and blend bodies with a Vitamix. Bone for collagen. Blood for iron. Brains for kick. The tub was filled with the cut, raw material, so they could only stay one night at each place.

Fenrir watched.

Some kids poured Ragnarockin' into the local water tower, which explains why their homeroom teacher convulsed and shit himself into a coma during the National Anthem.

Fenrir listened.

Drug dealers in the area lined up to talk about the wolf-headed man that stole their supply with two ravens; burned their homes and slaughtered the people they loved with address books AirDropped from their phones.

Fenrir prayed to himself, for there was none greater.

Roger and Simon knew they had fed Florida their departed loved ones in a piss-colored sugar juice.

Fenrir begged to differ.
He was still magic.

When they asked Fenrir what he had done, he honestly believed he was using living material.

The dead still walked in his mind. That's how he chose bodies. They called to him from the ground, begging for release.

Fenrir would whisper to the coffins and determine their desired manner of preparation.

Some wished to be sawed like cattle.
Others, pork.

You'd be surprised who chose the pork.

Fenrir believed he was giving the undead a CHOICE. Speaking for the unspoken, he spread their languishing bodies and love to those who needed it most, and profited from it. He was unrepentant.

The dead walked behind *him*.

Follow the leader.

They asked him to draw what he saw.
Fenrir replied that he wasn't crazy. He saw the dead bodies, with their mouths glued so they wouldn't yawn open during the open casket service.

But when he closed his eyes...

The image ultimately shown to select members of the jury was of half-fleshed figures with hollow cheeks and glowing green eyes.

They were not dead.
They were not alive.
They were undead.

Fenrir was a very clever boy, wasn't he?

Capital punishment is legal in Florida. As of December of 2018, 344 people still await execution. Fenrir was one of them until a prison break in 2017.

He's still at large--and his silver and black chariot is similarly missing.

The one saving grace of the mess is that Fenrir's supernatural testimony about the 'undead' actually explained one of the last mysteries of the case. It was a misprinting on bottles of Ragnarockin'--or so the authorities thought.

The drink claimed to be full of...

elichtrolytes

Hi, I'm Xalavier Nelson Jr., a narrative designer/journalist/Event Man.

Sometimes, I use my skills for good on games like the IGF-nominated Hypnospace Outlaw.
store.steampowered.com/app/844590/Hyp…

Sometimes I use it for other things.
To hurt people.

If we'd be a good fit, hit me up, yeah?

oh wow it's been three hours how about that huh

if three (3) people wishlist Hypnospace Outlaw as a result of this thread i promise to not inflict another one of these upon you for at least a month

retweet to save several thousand lives
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