Firehouse Chess: Princess Emoji

A Story by Abishai100

Narrated story of a fireman (New England) whose imagery of service, cyber-chess, and romance draw him to a 'human' end.

A story about a fireman of Boston, inspired very loosely by Ladder 49, which I hope you like,

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I lived in a rather nice apartment in New England and thought about my work at the local fire-station, having been a fireman since graduating from Dartmouth and enjoying the laurels of a life of service, good/modest pay affording me decent living conditions. I became a fan of social-media (e.g., Facebook-chess) and indulged my tastes for Western-world hobbies, especially chess.

My name's Amlan Satan, and I'd dreamt of being a fireman ever since I was a young boy, having watched a classic Ron Howard movie about firemen on TV and then hoping I'd strive to reach that kind of service-level work with daring/heroics and finally/later discovered the 'humility' of the diligences involved with work for the Boston fire-station and appreciated off-work comforts like social-media, which enabled me to unwind and connect with old friends or just chat with random Americans.

The work we do at the Boston fire-station is quite complicated, and on more than one single mission, we all banded together, like brothers/sisters, to deal with an Inferno that would send us to the headlines of the New England 'town' with the desired 'calming' medicine-men story-talk we hoped to earn. It's no joke being a fireman, and the work's hard, but it's tough work, requiring agility/skill, and it's rewarding personally. There's great social-media photo-opps too for my photo-sharing albums (ha).

I decided to get myself a 'classic' Nikon-gold (camera) and used it to start taking amateur photography 'missions' on the streets of Boston, taking the 'famous' metro across the various areas of the Boston area and delighting in finding the 'perfect' model or object to capture as snapshots of the American outlook.

I met this beautiful woman, an aspiring model in Boston, who'd started researching the successes of other aspiring media 'beauties' who hoped to make that 'faith-leap' from magazines, TV-ads, serials (etc.) into full-length Hollywood (USA) films starring the likes of Joaquin Phoenix or Robert Redford. This beautiful aspiring model I met, Jackie, was an intelligent girl and happened to be a fan of chess, like me, so I taught her and she started sharing with me her cyber-photo collection of past aspiring-models/figurines who 'broke-through' that glass-ceiling to get into what we call the 'magazine' of Tinseltown (wow).

I began to post on my cyber-forum how experiences with the Inferno of fire-fighting brought me to the brink of self-control consciousness and how such 'control' of the mind was reflected in my imagination in my 'human fascination' with chess, the iconic piece-position movement strategy game of symmetry/diagonals sometimes leading to a 'perfect' tie or draw or stalemate. I also wrote about Jackie and what it was like teaching her how to play chess. All these posts/tales made me quite popular on social-media, and that's when a 'being' claiming he was a spying Martian hacked into my cyber-channel and claimed he'd offer a sovereignty-diplomacy 'accord' of non-invasion and self-exile of peace (perhaps in the Earth-ocean abyss) if I drew a stalemate-chess match with him. I achieved the simple stunner, with a rook-bishop pieces double-line stance against the Martian's queen-knight tandem, and he was furious but conceded I'd achieved what he demanded. I'll never know if he was really a Martian or just making a 'Sunday-humor' with me with his 'alien' cyber-avatar, though he was 'secretly' as good at chess as I'd become, through years of self-play/reading. What I remember from this is that chess opened my mind to the imagery regarding the nature of human 'science' and stories surrounding the 'magic' of enduring life, in all its 'alien' or 'ghostly' forms (hmm).

JACKIE: I got you this fantastic baseball-figurine themed chess-set/board, honey.

ME: Cool; thanks honey-bee; I'm glad we've started a very nice relationship, and I think you started 'liking' chess, eh?

JACKIE: Indeed, I did; you make it seem much more 'human' or somehow simply imaginatively fun, honey.

ME: That's always my vision of chess-play, be it against myself, some college-rivals, or an alien (ha).

I decided to invest in some patriotism-comics, some light-readings re-presenting all these Earth ideations on the quality of human fantasy and daring and even valor or basic desirable intelligence. I started becoming a big fan of GI-Joe comics, as they cast special wonder-tales of suited patriots, covert, tangling with a vile world-nemesis organization known as Cobra. This became as 'vivid' for me as chess, and all these patriotic activities about 'worldly' life or dreams drew me from the GI-Joe comics readings to real chess-world applications to politics-sphere conversations (on social-media) like the Cold War or Northern Ireland (wow).