The Last Monk — Characters

Banger

From the out­side, Banger looks like a world surf­ing cham­pion — blond, bronzed and mus­cu­lar — but he didn’t ask to be gor­geous and wished people would stop going on about it all the time. Since his best friend Com­pletely Tre­vor van­ished ten years ago, Banger has gradu­ally with­drawn from the mod­ern world, and now divides his time between his job as a his­tory lec­turer and volun­teer­ing as a Full Moon Tour Guide at the cemetery.

He likes a quiet, private life, and he isn’t going to get one.

Com­pletely Trevor

Com­pletely F. Tre­vor is the guy you some­times pass on the street who you’re abso­lutely cer­tain you recog­nise, but you can’t think from where. His face is so aggress­ively non­des­cript that even his own mother made him wear a sign read­ing ‘your son’.

No one knows quite where CT has been for the past ten years, so most people would be shocked to find they’ve spent a sig­ni­fic­ant per­cent­age of that time watch­ing him on TV.

The Rat Race

Big­ger than any other enter­tain­ment in his­tory, the Rat Race has broken the banks of tele­vi­sion to become a global TV, radio and inter­net goliath. Six­teen con­test­ants, six months, the subtly-placed products of at least two dozen major spon­sors and the rapt atten­tion of bil­lions make up the latest Aus­tralian series, which cul­min­ates tonight when four final­ists are whittled down before the hungry eyes of the world to one Rat Race Cham­pion. Kim, Amanda, Judith or Bilby — who will it be? Tune in tonight!

Amanda

Amanda is cur­rently sit­ting in the back of a lim­ousine trav­el­ling through Mel­bourne to a packed aud­it­or­ium, where the grand prize win­ner will be announced for the latest series of the Rat Race. Amanda is going to win the Rat Race, and she knows it, because Delaney Mis­camble hired her to win it eight­een months ago.

She has just decided she doesn’t want to.

Out­side the limo, the crowd is building.

Delaney Mis­camble

Mis­camble is the bil­lion­aire inventor and CEO of the Rat Race. Known to the world as a charm­ing, affable play­boy, fam­ous for arriv­ing at photo oppor­tun­it­ies flanked by jug­glers, on a hov­er­craft or, at irreg­u­lar inter­vals coin­cid­ing with a lull in his show’s media pro­file, com­pletely nude, rumours per­sist of a dark side to the most power­ful man in world media. Never one to be sat­is­fied with suc­cess, an announce­ment is expec­ted from Mis­camble after this series of a major new devel­op­ment in the Rat Race, believed to be the pos­sibly apo­cryphal Pro­ject 10 – 9. Rat Race PR denies the exist­ence of any such project.

Evil Steve

The bad-boy of the Amer­ican Rat Race, per­man­ently tuxedoed and cowboy-hatted, ‘Evil’ Steve Lucas went from TV per­son­al­ity to TV legend when he became the only Rat Racer to be thrown out of a series after allegedly attempt­ing to bribe Rat Race staff. Close friend Delaney Mis­camble described him­self as ‘really saddened, just, you know, wow’ on hear­ing the news.

Evil Steve is sched­uled to make his return to the Mis­camble fold with a spe­cial appear­ance at the Aus­tralian Series final tonight.

Mr. Peabody

A kilo­metre away from the Rat Race aud­it­or­ium, on the third floor of a hos­pice for the infirm, there is a room which no nurse dares to visit.

Inside lives Mr. Peabody. No one knows where he came from or who he is, only that he claims the dust bun­nies under his bed are talk­ing to him and caus­ing viol­ent sand­storms in his room every night.

Which is under­stand­able beha­viour for a man vis­it­ing some of the outly­ing islands of the psy­cho­lo­gical archipelago, but why, then, do the lights dim when he screams in the night? Why is his floor always scattered with sand? And why does he seem so unwhole­somely inter­ested in the tea-cosy from the second-floor lounge?

Reuben and the Con­spir­acy Theorists

Banger has never seen his ten­ant. He knows that Reuben has a dozen tele­vi­sions in his intric­ately locked room, and that he watches them all at once, record­ing things appar­ently at ran­dom to his vari­ous VCRs, DVDs and digital recorders.

Banger does not know that Reuben is a mem­ber of a secret under­ground soci­ety whose mem­bers meet nightly in dark sunglasses and black PVC trench coats to develop their con­spir­acy the­or­ies about the Free­ma­sons, the Moon Land­ings, Secret Crys­tal Tech­no­logy from Atlantis and espe­cially, the Rat Race. But it wouldn’t sur­prise him.

What would sur­prise him is how Reuben enters and leaves his house.

Erasmus

Very little is known about Erasmus. He is believed to be a pris­oner, but his loc­a­tion is unknown and his nation­al­ity or age uncer­tain. Evid­ence sug­gests he is being forced to work towards a mys­ter­i­ous goal (per­haps some kind of machine) which he con­siders dan­ger­ous, but this is highly spec­u­lat­ive. He may or may not be pro­tect­ing one or more other indi­vidu­als from an uniden­ti­fied captor.

Efforts are being made to learn more about Erasmus.