This Tuesday had one of the most pleasant mornings I have ever experienced. I got out of my bed after a good night's rest and I... Wait, that sounded strange.

"Oh well, I must still be half asleep!" I concluded with a broad smile as I put on my clothes and walked down the stairs with a spring in my steps.

It was a beautiful morning in the neighborhood. In fact, one could even say it was a beautiful day for a neighbor. A neighborly day even! That made me wonder; who were my good neighbors? Would you be mine? Could you be m—?

"Leo! Emergency!"

My musical train of thought was rudely interrupted when Joshua literally kicked my front door open, startling both me and my sister in the process, the latter of whom nearly dropped her platter of freshly baked pancakes in a fright.

"Good morning, Josh," I greeted my frantic friend with only the mildest hint of exasperation. "What's the problem?"

"I cracked the code, but I can't explain the details yet," he answered in a hurry as he leapt from one corner of the room to the next, checking behind the cabinets and even under the carpet. "Good, your house seems to be clean, but we can never be too cautious. Here, take this!"

"Is... that tin foil?" I blurted out in surprise, but my friend immediately shook his head while once again presenting me with the oddly shaped metallic bowl in his hand.

"Don't be silly! It's aluminium foil!"

"Isn't that the same thing?" I muttered, getting more confused by the second, but instead of answering me, Josh simply put the cap onto the top of my head.

"It's actually pronounced aluminum, and no, it's not the same," Angie explained and... wait.

"Since when were you here?!"

"She was always here; you just couldn't see her until you were deprogrammed!" Josh declared with a proud grin, and then he casually turned to my left and put another tinfoil, pardon, aluminium foil hat onto my sister's noggin.

"Now you can see clearer, but if you want to know the whole truth THEY want to hide from you, you have to avoid fluoridated water, chemtrails, Wi-Fi, vaccines, and most importantly, you have to buy very powerful crystals to restore your frequencies to the right vibratory levels," Angie pretended to explain things while vomiting a full platter's worth of word-salad at me, and... Hold on, this whole situation felt kind of familiar. Not in the details, but more like, there seemed to be some kind of nagging feeling that tried to remind me of the date. However, before I could figure out the source of the feeling, my contemplation was interrupted by a commercial jingle and my draconic girlfriend appearing from my blind-spot.

"Lucky for you, I can help you with that problem! For the low-low price of 49.99 Jens instead of 169.99 (plus shipping), I can provide you with our special Dracis brand of crystal starter kit, which is guaranteed to re-align your chakras to the frequencies of the cosmos!"

"... Princess. Just what exactly are you doing?" I asked, my mind slowly growing more and more aware of the exact nature of the situation.

"Business!" my girlfriend declared, but before I could ask her to elaborate, Josh grabbed the reins of the conversation and forcefully yanked it into yet another perplexing direction.

"You can fix your chakras later! First, I must tell you the truth, the whole truth, and only the truth before the THEY could sink their nefarious claws into you!"

"The who?" I asked back, more or less on autopilot, my brain still dedicating most of its processing power to figuring out why I was getting this peculiar feeling of deja vu. It actually didn't take that long, and all of the sudden things snapped into focus and I growled a low, "Son of a bitch, it's that day again."

My friend didn't seem to register the last part, so instead he happily began his explanation of the initial question.

"It's not the who, it's the THEY! THEY are a shadowy cabal of powerful beings who secretly govern the world from the shadows, while the masses are none the wiser! A shadowy shadow government, if you will!"

"Oh god dammit. It's happening again..." I continued to groan while holding my head in my palm.

"I understand that the truth is hard to believe, but it is truly the truth!" Josh exclaimed, completely undaunted by my obvious stupidity-induced aneurism.

"... You know what? Fine! I'll play along," I decided with a growl as I reached over and crumpled the tinfoil cap still sitting on the top of my head. "I'm listening. Who are this 'THEY' you speak of? The reptoids? The freemasons? Or maybe the classic Illuminati?"

"I see that you are at least familiar with the broad strokes of the shadow organizations," Ammy remarked with a content nod, and I didn't even bother to ask just where the heck she appeared from. On the other hand, I was momentarily tempted to inquire about the whiteboard that she had behind her, but honestly, what was the point?

"I bet the premise is that all of those are real, right?" I guesstimated, and since she only tweaked her glasses instead of giving a straight answer, I decided that I might as well just get whatever amusement out of the situation while it lasted and gestured towards her in the company of the world, "Please, proceed to blow my mind."

"Certainly!" Josh cut in, and he and his entourage began to hastily fill the whiteboard. Incidentally, Elly was still in the middle of trying to sell some crystals to my sister, and I decided to leave them alone. At least they looked like they were having fun.

"Sorry for the wait!" Angie abruptly declared before dramatically putting her marker down, and she was followed up by the class rep taking out one of those telescopic presentation pointers with a red tip and she lightly tapped it against the board.

"As you must already be aware, we are the Illuminati," she declared while pointing at the word 'mages' and then the pyramid with the eye on the other end of the whiteboard. "The reptoids are nothing but a deliberately fake narrative planted by the Draconians to hide their true identities."

"You have forgotten because of your amnesia, but The Knightly Brotherhood of the Most Heroic Bloodlines you belonged to is in truth but one of the many arms of the Knights Templar!" Josh declared so authoritatively you would have been forgiven for momentarily thinking that what he was talking about actually made sense. "The Templars have been running the financial world for centuries, and the Brotherhood was created by them in order to wage war on the Draconians because they both want to control the world through finances!"

"As for the Freemasons," Ammy picked up the thread while tapping her pointed against the board again, "They are but one of the secret cabals employed by the Celestials to secretly steer human culture!"

"Yeah, we are sneaky like that!" Angie agreed with a toothy grin, but at this point I was getting a little confused. I mean, this was dumb, but not nearly as dumb as I expected.

"What does that make the Abyssals and the Research Society?" I asked with enforced nonchalance, and Josh immediately used the opportunity to spew more exposition at me.

"The Abyssals are actually running the Majestic-12! Crop circles are actually created by gates to the abyss, and most UFO's are Abyssals flying around using holographic technology to hide themselves!"

"As for the Research Society," Ammy continued while drawing another line onto the whiteboard, "Their public front is CERN, but they are not that important."

"Yeah, they are kind of lame," Angie said while crossing her arms. "They are too obsessed with silly things, like sending bananas back in time."

"Such weirdos," Josh concluded, and all three of them nodded in agreement.

"Okay, I'm following so far. Which one is this nebulous 'they'?" I inquired, only to receive a crossfire of frowns for my trouble.

"It's THEY!" Angie declared, "And THEY are obviously Martian survivors who escaped their planet using synthetic six-dimensional Merkabahs after they destroyed their environment!"

"Yeah, and now they are using psychotronic waves to control humanity from their secret moon base! Weren't you paying attention?!" Josh piled on me, and while there were too many things to object to, I decided it still wasn't worth the effort, so I only allowed myself three seconds of facepalming before returning to the conversation.

"Oh, right. How silly of me," I mumbled in a monotone voice, yet it was enough to satisfy them.

"To truly understand the threat THEY pose, you must first learn the whole history of the world," Angie stated in a profound tone that suggested whatever she was about to tell me was only going to get sillier.

"The true history of the world," Josh added in a slightly more ominous voice.

"Do I really have to?" I asked, though I already knew it was in vain, and after receiving another blast of concentrated frown-waves from the three in front of me, I finally resigned myself to my fate. "Fine, fine. Please tell me the absolutely true and in no way hilariously stupid true history or the true world or whatever."

"You see, Leo," Ammy immediately began, apparently completely impervious to sarcasm. "A long time ago, there was a time when all humans existed on a higher level of consciousness. We lived on the islands of Lumeria, until one day there was a consciousness shift, and the island all sank down."

"Well, obviously," I responded on autopilot, which earned me a satisfied smile from the class rep.

"Indeed. In its place, the continent of Atlantis rose out of the ocean, where our ancestors used magic to create magical vortexes of higher-dimensional vibrations to form the Flower of Life. However not all of the vortexes of the Flower of Life could be filled by humanity's consciousness, so the trans-vibrational will of the planet called upon two alien races to fill in the void."

"Let me guess. One of them was the Martians," I guessed while inconspicuously bringing a chair over. I mean, if I had no choice but to listen to this, I might as well make myself comfortable.

"Precisely!" Angie cut in with an enormous grin. "As for the other race, it was my ancestors, the Irish!"

"… Wot?"

They completely ignored my nuanced question, and Ammy followed it up with, "The Irish used four-dimensional tetrahedral airships called Merkabahs that could travel through space and dimensions to arrive to the planet. However, the Martians were different!"

"Yes. They had to use a synthetic Merkabah to travel to Earth from their dying planet," Josh explained while drawing some kind of three-dimensional Star of David onto the board. "However, it was a one-way trip, and when they arrived, they tried to take over the world!"

"Of course they did," I muttered. I mean, I could ask a number of questions, such as what something out of Jewish mysticism had to do with Irishmen from space, how Angie was related to Irishmen from space, or why we were seriously talking about the premise of the Irish coming from space, but I didn't want to draw this out even longer than necessary.

"But before they could do so," the class rep smoothly continued off Josh's last sentence, "a magic comet hit Atlantis! It caused a polar shift, so Atlantis sunk to the bottom of the ocean, and humans lost their connection to the higher dimensions!"

"Humanity was doomed, but then our ancestors, with the help of the Egyptian god Thoth, created magical monuments all over the planet to create an artificial consciousness grid to lift humanity back up to the fourth dimension!"

"But… the fourth dimension is time, so aren't we already…?" I began, only to give up halfway through the thought as I realized none of them were listening.

"However, while all of this was happening, the Martians used the opportunity to use their evil technology to lead humanity astray!" Angie explained with unbridled enthusiasm. "Even to this day, they plan to hijack the consciousness-grid of humanity, and use it to create another synthetic Merkabah and use it to take over the world!"

"And what does this have to do with the Illuminati and all the other shadow governments?" I inquired, hoping against hope that I would get a straight answer for once.

"We have been fighting a shadow war against the Martians since the dawn of civilization," Ammy expounded with a frankly unwarranted amount of gravitas in her voice. "However, over the millennia, our secret societies fractured and have been fighting against each other as much as we resisted the Martians."

"It was probably because of their psychotronic mind-control beams they use from their black helicopters," Josh proposed, and the other two girls nodded like it made sense.

"That is, until now!" Angie declared and subsequently roughly patted Josh on the back. "Now we have this guy!"

"You see," the class rep followed up with another tweak of the glasses and theatrically retracting her pointer, "all the prophecies are actually left behind by Thoth on the Emerald Tablets, and they were designed to make us all recognize that we have to put our differences aside, unlock the three atoms thick airship hidden under the Sphinx by the Irish, and then destroy the Martians with it, the same way it was used to destroy the Grey aliens in the seventies."

"Wait, hold on for a moment. I thought UFO's were Abyssals in this continuity," I objected, though even I didn't know why I bothered.

"Don't be silly, Leo," Angie responded with a not at all subtle eye-roll. "They are obviously not the same thing."

I waited for her to actually give a proper explanation, but no matter how many seconds passed, she remained staunchly silent. In fact, all of them were quiet.

"Is that it?" I asked, just a tad flabbergasted.

"That's about it," Josh confirmed. "Now you know the true history of the world. Well, most of it."

"We only skipped the part when two disciples of Thoth used tantric sex mediation to conceive the Buddha by Ankhing their orgone energies through the sixth dimension, but it wasn't entirely relevant to the discussion about THEM," Ammy noted, and I was almost tempted to ask what 'ankhing' meant, but I managed to restrain myself.

In other words, this was it. The end. That was definitely stupid.

…

But not nearly stupid enough! I mean, come on! If you are going this far, you might as well go for the last mile! Swing for the cheap seats! This wasn't nearly nonsensical enough, and if they are not going to take the last step, I realized I had no other choice but to do it myself and show them how it's done!

"Well, well, well…" I began, and after some thinking, I decided to ominously link my fingers in my lap for added effect. "It seems that you guys have done your homework. Impressive."

"Thanks?" Josh responded, obviously a little unbalanced by my sudden change in mannerism. Yes, my friend. Be afraid. You have awakened the beast, now you must bear the consequences.

"You have all passed the test. I believe it is about time I let you peer behind the curtain and tell you the absolute truth hidden behind the veil!"

The three of them flinched when I abruptly stood up and walked over to the board. I grabbed the wiper out of Angie's hand and cleaned the surface before I picked up one of the markers and began to draw. First, I a wavy circle, then four stubby legs, a semi-circle for a head, big googly eyes, and finally some floppy ears.

"There! This is the true face of THEM!" I declared, earning me a couple of skeptical glances. How rich.

"That's a sheep, isn't it?" Angie ventured a guess, and I immediately gave her a finger-gun point.

"Precisely! For you see, you guys have overlooked the most important thing in your research: the Martians are sheep! They were sheep all along!"

"I… I'm afraid I don't follow," Ammy broke the momentary silence, so I used to opportunity to display my boundless patience by gently patting her on the shoulder.

"Oh well, I cannot blame you. They are covering their tracks well, those crafty ruminants!"

Saying so, I turned back to the board and began to write up my bullet points.

"Let me explain then. You see, sheep are actually really, really cunning animals. They have been acting like they were 'domesticated' all this time, luring us into a false sense of security and control while in reality, they have been ruling humanity from the shadows since time immemorial! They are manipulative, evil to the core, and kind of smelly.

For example, have you ever wondered why we have the idiom 'black sheep' in our vocabulary? Because black sheep are rare. Why? Because white sheep killed them all, of course! This proves that they are racist, eugenics-practicing monsters who killed all their black brethren! Do you need any more proof than that?" Josh looked like he wanted to say something so I hastily raised my voice and added, "Of course you don't, but let me elaborate just for comprehensiveness's sake."

I paused here for a moment to collect my thoughts as I was drawing some random things onto the board. Once I was feeling confident again, I turned back to the group and continued where I left off.

"Tell me, have you never wondered why sheep are so obviously evil, yet they are always portrayed as the most innocent beings on the planet? The only thing that could explain such a thing is successful propaganda. No, I go one step further; such a thing requires a long and sustained PR campaign that only the most powerful individuals on the planet could afford! This tells us that sheep are both evil, nefarious planners, and they have a ton of influence in human society! Does that remind you of anything?"

"That… makes sense," Josh noted, and for a moment I wanted to grab him by the collar and shake him while asking just what actually made sense for him in all of this, but I forced the urge down and remained in character for the time being.

"I know, right!? The answer's been staring you in the face, but generations of indoctrination have dulled you to the truth!

Sheep have been trying to control humanity since the dawn of time. It all started in Egypt, which also explains Ancient Egypt’s status as the source of all evil, as it was already thoroughly established by accomplished and well-known archeologists such as Howard Carter, Flinders Petrie, and Brendan Fraser.

To make sure they could rule over them, the Sheep stunted the development of the Egyptians by making them build giant stone pyramids instead of doing something useful, like say, inventing modern medicine, or the interwebs, or horseless carriages or something. They also made the pharaohs interbreed to reduce their IQ and thus make it even easier to control them. Like that, they managed to keep Egypt under their hoofs for several thousand years… That is, until the Greeks and the Romans came around.

You see, unlike the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans didn’t take any of their ruminant lies! When those guys saw a sheep, they sacrificed the shit out of it before it could try anything! They knew it all along! Of course, the sheep didn’t take this kindly. Not one bit!"

I paused here to see if they had anything to add, but by this point I had everyone's rapt attention, so I decided to ramp things up even further. In for a penny, in for a pound and all that.

"They decided to use the Jews as their instrument of revenge on the classical world. They already had a beef with those guys from the time this guy called Moses made people paint their doors with sheep blood as a sign of rebellion against the Egyptian Sheep Overlords, so the sheep chased them out of Egypt in revenge and later changed the story to fit their propaganda.

You see, the sheep remembered this whole Passover and Exodus business as it really happened and were quite mad about it all… and such, Christianity was brought to the world!

I mean, think about it! Jesus is literally called the lamb! THE LAMB! How much more obvious can you even get!?

Of course, the Jews quickly caught on to the plan and tried to sabotage it by getting rid of this Jesus fellow ASAP. Just think about it: why else would they demand his death over the death of a killer other than for the greater good!? Either they were all crazy, or there is a Martian sheep conspiracy, and I hope I don’t have to tell you which one is more likely at this point.

However, they unknowingly played right into the hoofs of the sheep. Jesus was supposed to be a fall-man from the very beginning and now they made him into the martyr the sheep intended from the very beginning!

After this, they used Christianity to infiltrate Rome and one of their first acts was to eradicate animal sacrifice! How do you explain that? The Greek sacrificed sheep, the Romans sacrificed sheep, Jews sacrificed sheep… Everyone did it, so where did the idea come from? From the sheep themselves, of course!

They also vilified the Jews over the murder of their fall-man as vengeance and established their new system of control in the Vatican. Why else do you think the pope still has a shepherd’s staff? Because he is the front man of the entire sheep conspiracy!"

"Wow, that actually makes sense," Josh muttered in an astounded voice. "I always wondered why the pope had a weird staff, but now I get it."

"Oh, and he must be wearing that silly hat to hide his horns," Angie interjected with an excited expression.

"Sure, let's go with that! It's totally obvious!" I responded, prompting the childhood friends to high five. I waited for them to finish, and only then did I continue my very accurate and historical explanation.

"While all of this was going down, on the other side of the Atlantic, the American civilizations never had to stop sacrificing sheep. In fact, they instead sacrificed people and kept building pyramids even when the European civilizations came upon them! How else can you explain that other than by the fact that the sheep forcefully stunted their development since they didn’t have Greeks and Romans and Jews over there? That is the only logical and reasonable explanation."

"The Americas had no sheep until European contact," Ammy pointed out, and I really wanted to ask if she seriously picked this of all points to object to.

"What is there to explain," I scoffed as a way to buy myself some time to come up with something, and once I did, I quickly added, "They were obviously secretly ruled by alpacas, a splinter-faction of the Martians. They were a failed experiment by the sheep, and when it turned out they had no more use to them, they used the European conquistadors to spread a biological weapon to wipe them out."

My 'answer' apparently satisfied the class rep, as she had nothing else to add. As such, I continued unabated.

"But speaking of Europe, in the next two thousand years after the death of their designated fall-man, the sheep tried to stunt the advancement of the Western civilization as well, but over time they realized that a technologically advanced civilization also had its advantages.

As such, they decided to subtly influence the great nations of Europe to engage in colonialism in order to spread themselves around the world. Nowadays you will find sheep everywhere, from the US to Australia, and it is all according to their plan.

What is their plan, you might ask? According to renowned Hungarian scientist Dr. Prof. Kitalált Személy, sheep are trying to reach a 'critical mass', and the scientific community is secretly helping them in exchange for higher positions in the coming New World Order. Why else would you think they cloned a sheep in the first place? Dolly was the first example of the next step of the same sheep-eugenics program that killed off all their black brethren, designed to further enhance their formidable psychic powers!

Wait, did I mention that sheep have psychic power? Because according to doctor professor Személy, they do. He tried to warn the world but his paper was rejected by the scientific community, therefore proving that they are in cahoots with the sheep. You see, it all comes together like a huge jig-saw puzzle!

According to this paper, when the time comes, sheep will all start jumping over fences in unison and the harmonic resonance of this act will create sleep-frequencies of the higher vibratory levels of the dimensional geometries to put every single human on the planet to sleep, and by the time we wake up we will be completely enslaved once again by our sheep overlords and their horrid sheepnotism!"

"I, for one, welcome our sheep overlords," my dear assistant spoke up all of a sudden.

"Oh, hi Dormouse. I was wondering when you would show up." After greeting Judy, I turned back to the rest of the group and asked, "Where was I?"

"At the Martian sheep using their psychic powers to enslave humanity," Josh told me with a perfectly straight face.

"Right, thanks. So, in conclusion: TIME TO WAKE UP, SHEEPLE! That's about it."

"Chief, you can't say that anymore. It's not politically correct," Judy told me while tugging on my sleeve. "The proper term is 'humanple'."

I gave my dear assistant the mother of all baffled looks, and ultimately responded with, "That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day."

Unfortunately, with this my last bit of suspension of disbelief snapped as well, and without anything to suspend our reality, the entire Simulacrum crumbled like an empty coke can at the bottom of the Mariana trench. Good riddance I say.

~~~

"… What the actual hell was that?!" The Man bellowed inside the brightest dark room I have ever not seen.

"I have no idea," The Boy mumbled in a voice filled with equal amounts of bewilderment and sulfur-hexachloride.

"Booo! I thought we were going to have a western this time around!" The Girl complained aloud as she sulked with the intensity of a thousand supernovae. "I even came up with this cool scenario about werewolves that could only be killed with silver bullets!"

"I told you, a western story doesn't have any werewolves in it!" The Man objected with obvious indignation.

"I don't care about your genre-conventions! I want to have my western werewolves! Or failing that, some vampires! Imagine the scene; two cowboys duel at noon, the bad one shoots first and starts to gloat, only for the hero to get back up and bite his neck when he gets too close!"

"Wouldn't a vampire turn to ash if they went outside at noon?" came the next question from The Boy, which naturally earned her a displeased scoff from The Girl.

"Killjoys, the both of you!" she fumed, and would have probably continued to do so, if not for the arrival of the last of the four.

"This one didn't really work out either," The Woman spoke with a sigh as her nonexistent thumb hovered over the similarly existentially challenged red reset button. "Oh well, you can't win them all, can you?"

"What's next?" The Boy inquired, and for a moment everyone remained silent. It was a really short moment though.

"Western! I want to have my western! Gimme my western, or I will go on a hunger strike!" The Girl demanded, and if the others had eyes, I presume they would have rolled them.

"We don't actually need to eat," The Boy pointed out, only to get huffed at for his trouble.

"No, but I like to, and if I don't then I will be miserable, and then you will feel miserable for making me feel miserable, and then everyone will be miserable, and then you will be sorry!"

"Fine, we are going to have a western next time," The Woman relented with mock reluctance, and a corner of the not-dark not-room immediately lit up a notch with something that I presumed was either a satisfied grin, or a small coronal mass ejection.

And with that, The Woman once again pushed the red button, and everything went dark. Well, darker. And just like that, another April Fools' day came to an end. Good riddance, I say.

…

Also, 'humanple'? Really, author? Really? Be ashamed. Be very, very ashamed.