"The Sandman was the title given to me by my family in the clan, then my family in the mob, then by the newspapers and police. Actually I was just called Sand Man, at first. When I was a young armadillo I used to love to roll around in the dunes of Goadsmith, the desert which my clan occupied. I would roll around and of the patterns I made no artist has been prouder. My bemused mother started calling me Sand Man, and it stuck. We all needed a name anyway… anyway.

[Hey I thought this would be a great place for an intro, so hello there! You have a great sense of fashion I can see! This story is another project I am starting alongside the Dreams of Revolution. I think it might be fun to have a crime story and a story of hope revolution change blah blah blah and be able to bounce back and forth on writing. Please enjoy and if you have any comment or critique feel free to share it!]

Anyway I moved to the city, an armadillo in a city wasn’t the most ordinary thing and I was mistaken once as some fox in a weird suit. Most of the shiny bits of the city were populated with huskies, and those germen shepherds, nearly feral, you call street cops wanted to keep it that way. Wasn’t too before I was tossed right out of those shiny bits of the city to the part that produced the grease to keep it shiny. Not a nice neighborhood to say the least and I had no place among these poor families or gangs. I got real lucky though, met a guy called Uncle Snake; the joke was that he was a gator and the only snakes were feral, and believe me, this guy could get pretty feral. The rep suited him though.

Well he found me and brought me in. Said I reminded him of himself when he first got to the city. He gave me an option; join the mob (what he called 'The Pack of Fortunate Unfortunates') and have a family that would care for and take care of me, or simply refuse. He told me that it wasn’t one the gangs masquerading in a suit and tie (Uncle Snake wore a trench coat more often than not, but that’s irrelevant) and if I wanted to refuse he would let me. I joined in a heartbeat, and in a few small weeks I was surrounded in the heart of a family, and it beat with me, and I beat with it.

Uncle Snake took care of me. He presented me with women, and when I wasn’t interested he presented me with men. I cared for neither but… well there’s a certain feeling when you know that someone with so much already offers all of that to you and takes you in. It’s a feeling of loyalty, of love, of wholeness. The greatest of these is loyalty, so when I was asked about my name I made up a story, to please him in a few ways.

I made up a fanciful story of how the armadillo clans would go to war and secret and stealthy ones would act as assassins in the night; I told him that my signature was to drown my victims in sand by pouring it down their throats and letting them choke before they were really even awake. That was where my name came from, The Sandman. First, it pleased him as an impressive, exotic, and interesting tale and intrigued him, second, I knew he had need of assassins and I was as good as any, right?"


-The first entry found in one of the sand filled mouths of a high ranking cop, now deceased of course. It wasn’t the first man killed in this way, gassed unconscious and suffocated with sand in the night, but it was the first that had any good clue. Detective Cooper set the paper down in his desk’s drawer and drank some of his coffee. It was getting close to dawn, but he was finally getting closer.