Crazy Uncle Ivan

The late Ivan Telall Jones, also known as Farmer Jones and, most famously, Crazy Uncle Ivan, is TurtleShroom's paternal uncle (father's brother) and infamous for being killed by a freak storm boasting clouds with purple lining, consistent blue jets, sprites, and elves, record amounts of cloud-to-ground lightning, and blizzard-scale snow. The purple F2 tornado spawned by this storm which took Ivan's life, and the damage it left, remains a conspiracy hotspot to this day. Any conspirist worth their salt will visit his place of death.

Conspiracies abound, but legend says the storm was engineered to take Ivan out specifically, for reasons no mortal creature can even comprehend.

Chickhood and conspiracies
Ivan hatched two years before the incorporation of Mattress Village, in what was then western Ice Kingdom, Olde Antarctica. He, like his family and his posterity, was indoctrinated in the isolated traditions of stability, honesty, etc. etc. etc. . He was sent to "he big city" to get a proper schooling, where he quickly took to the books and enjoyed very much. He fell into a bad crowd, though; it was there that some city-slickers planted seeds of conspiracy in his mind. They told fantastic tall tales about a string-pulling "celestial bureaucracy" that controlled all, knew all, and did all.

Being a superstitious penguin, he mentally linked this knowledge to the old family tales of "the ever-watching sky programmers" and the "evil manipulative forces in the skies above". It didn't require much effort to link these two together.

Adulthood and infiltration
Eventually, Ivan was summoned back to his hometown to farm for his family, especially for his aging parents. He had to quit school to provide for his kin, and this he did. For many more years, he grew subzero-resistant corn, pumpkins, O-Berries, and those exotic pizza plants so common in Club Penguin.

He never forgot about what those high schoolers told him, though. With every turn of the plow, crank of the tractor, harvest of the fields, Ivan couldn't shake the conspiracies. He soon became a hardcore believer, particularly when he managed to contact the oldest living relative, nicknamed "TSGGG" by the family, on it. Though he didn't meet his descendant beak-to-beak, the mysterious ancestor confirmed his suspicions and even gave him enough power to "enter", as he put it.

Of course, Ivan was unaware of his great-great grandfather's power and his collapsed form, but he was zapped with something. He was told by TSGGG to go to the big city, South Pole Citidal, and to configure a crossing light.

Ivan did so and found himself in the BOF! This, of course, was at least forty years ago, and probably much more. Ivan began to explore all he could, and the more he saw, the more he was scared. This secret had to be shared, once he knew enough about it!

Ivan spent most of his life snooping around the Bureau of Fiction. For well over thirty years, the farmer-turned-stalker learned things no mortal penguin should ever know.

Every day, he logged what he saw and learned in diaries and archives, which he all stored in a locked shed about a mile from his family's home.

Gone in a flash
Finally, in 1998, he knew he was ready to share what he learned and expose the "evil sky programmers" as what they really were: evil. Ivan had one last thing he needed to do, and that was to photograph the "godfathers", as he called them, of the business. In other words, he was to photograph the Masters of the Universe. This is where he got in trouble. He sneaked around and made his way to the Masters' domain, where he snapped pictures of the Masters and their rooms. When he was to photograph Benny, he forgot to turn off the flash.

Benny sensed Ivan's presence, and he went crazy. He tried to chase after Ivan, but the penguin vanished in the crowds of scattering employees. Alarms blared and sirens went off, as all exits were shut. Ivan decided to take a secondary portal, and he found himself at the bottom of a pit. Using items in his inventory, he scaled the pit and exited one of the rickety buildings that was normally used to welcome new employees. He waddled for days, trying to get back home and to tell his entire family.

Weather
Elsewhere, meterologists were horrified to see a supercell blizzard, a nightmarish combination of the greatest of Antarctic blizzards and the warm world's mightiest winds- tornadoes -forming off of the coast of Antarctica. It was heading to the mainland fast.

The storm was a monster unlike any other. Miles high and with a cumulonimbus anvil soaring into the lower stratosphere and a hundred or so miles in each direction, this monster storm seemed to have arrived overnight and was travelling east at fifty miles an hour, and, as it would be expected, slowing as it began to ascend mountainous territory.

The clouds began to climb the mountains and condense further, destroying at least three mountain outposts in a monstrous combination of blizzard and thundersnow, and taking the lives of two or three citizens there.

Weather geeks from all over stood at a distance to monitor these things. Portable Doppler radar had just been perfected, and the penguins had plenty to look at.

Eyewitnesses of Ivan's perfect storm
The surviving eyewitness accounts of this perfect storm are suprisingly few, even though thousands of weather nerds saw and reported on the storm, and the even is only twelve years old. Such a media blackout really doesn't make sense, because everyone wrote or told about what they saw. Why do so few records remain?

Below is an example of an account that managed to survive the blackout. This nerd got a perfect side view from a distant mountain. "Never, in all my years of meterology, have I witnessed such a perfect storm. It must have been thirty miles hight with vertical updrafts from top to bottom. Lightning flashed within and from the cloud to the ground multiple times a second, hurting my eyes to look at such wonder. I gazed in awe as I saw the front of the storm ascending the mountain, flickering and booming, rolling as if it was some barrelling beast, searching for prey to consume. It climbed the mountain and grew higher, its back end still in the distance and still dumping snow, I am sure.

I could see that the mountains, even from my distance, were receiving record amounts of snow. The winds there could have been peaking at seventy miles sustained, and gusts of numbers no penguin should ever see. Feet of snow in mere hours, I watched as the winter monster ascended and descended the mountain. At one point, half was on one side and half on the other.

My maps showed a definitive hook echo up front. The thing was being curled like a ribbon in the Fall Fair. As the storm creeped over the mountains, losing very little strength, I swear that I witnessed its edges turning from silver to a faint violet, while the rest of the cloud maintained is white, frozen gloom.

I turned myself towards the right to watch the mass of death, and I was saddened to see it approaching Mattress Village. Surely, they have recieved warnings of this behemoth. I only hope that they are hiding in their basements, middle rooms, and storm shelters as I write."

- Some weather nerd

This nerd vividly recounts the lightning show that soon was to take Ivan's own life. "On that night, as the storm travelled east, what I couldn't look away from was the lightning. The clouds turned a faint purple at the edges as they transversed the mountain ranges. On that day, I saw every type of lightning known to penguin.

Each time a lightning bolt slammed the ground, so too did a pair of sprites. I was told that these were rarer than a sighting of Rockhopper, but I was suddenly disproven as every six or seven bolts were accompanied by these supposedly "once in a lifetime" clouds. I could faintly make out a few every now and then.

As the storm continued east and the purple hue became really noticable, I saw the sprites shift from red to an evil purple, akin to that of any royal robe, color, or shirt in the Gift Shop. I was always told that sprites could only come in burnt orange, red, and with blue bases. They were wrong, and I promise to all who read my report that what I saw was purple.

Gawking at these rapid rarities, I also caught sight of some of the largest blue jets I would ever live to see; I mean, those bad boys seemed to be thirty miles above the already monstrous cloud, and they too made constant appearences!

On that one storm in that one night, I saw more weather phenomona than ten of my kind were supposed to see in their lifetimes. If I had been closer, Saint Elmo's Fire would have certainly been next, and ball lightning inescapable."

- Some other weather nerd

Ivan's shouts
Ivan had made it home as the supercell tumbled over the mountains. Cluds were just beginning to show over the horizon as the penguin ran into town. By now, he knew that "they" were after him, and more and more, he began to panic. He ran through the streets of his city, wailing for all to here, "THE SECRET; THE SECRET!!".

He rang a loud bell at the town hall to summon any townfolk he could. He began to talk to them about what he saw, about his records and sighting, his knowledge and most everything the BOF tried to hide from laymen.

The storm, as Ivan spoke, seemed to grow bigger (if the reports at the time are to be believed), as if it was angry at the penguin. It literally SLID down the mountainsides in less than half a minute, as if it were an avalanche consuming the icy slopes.

Ivan's sermons were interrupted by the local air raid siren, used for tornado warnings and severe weather alerts. The wind began to pick up as Ivan fled to the countryside.

He found his family in their house, bracing themselves in case they too needed to take shelter. He kicked open the door and saw the whole family at once- there for a visit -and he told them all he knew. His family didn't get it, but they still believed him.

Ivan wasn't about to stop, until the thunder and wind worsened. The sirens continued blaring. Hermeshroom, the rule-stickling bureaucrat, had long written an evacuation plan for the family for every possible disaster. They lined up and proceeded to the storm shelter. Already, the supercell had engulfed Mattress Village in heaps of snow, and its front end had long become a wall cloud, soon to be a tornado.

Ivan just stood and watched the storm. A weather nerd came up to him, having been warning other families to take cover, and urged him to get to a safe place, but Ivan refused.

The storm approached and soon formed a funnel cloud. About a mile away, the tornado touched down, perfectly landing and smashing Ivan's shed of archives and "SECRET" documents. The tornado turned a solid purple and the lightning followed suit. Even the blue jets were now a blue violet.

The purple monstrosity snaked to the ground and roared into an F2 tornado, that was heading straight for the family.

Ivan's death
The Joneses pleaded with Ivan to come in, having convinced the nerd. The tornado came closer, but Ivan held his ground, and muttered something that could have been "come and get me, programmers!". He started waddling to the tornado, and the scientist held the family back as Ivan began his suicidal match with death.

The pengion stood before the tornado, about to run over him, and he stood still, applying a blindfold and singing a song as the thing sucked him up. At that very moment, four purple lightning bolts, forming the shape of a "W" sliced the tornado. Instantly, the tornado pulled up.

The nerd had peaked out of the cellar and watched the ordeal. He can no longer be found, but his claims definitely add an air of conspiracy. He states that he saw the tornado grow eyes and a mouth, along with an evil laugh, after Ivan ran and before he vanished. This disappeared after the tornado did, and the cloud's purple returned to silver.

The sky above tinted purple as strong wind shear sliced the supercell and weakened it, passing out of Mattress Village leaving both a legacy and a landmark.

The tornado
According to eyewitness accounts, surviving maps, Doppler radar, and other tornado scanning techniques, and most importantly, the scar left upon the land by the twister, the following statistics were gathered on the tornado.

The tornado that killed Ivan touched down on Ivan's shed, where all of his BOF evidence was held. It ran roughly one mile at about thirteen miles an hour (officially, it went exactly 13.37 MPH) and was roughly four hundred forty feet (444) in diamater. It lasted for exactly one minute and three hundred thirty seven milliseconds (1.337) and stopped one hundred yards (300 feet) from the Jones family residence.

Statistically speaking, it was only a F2 tornado on a scale of zero to five, which is pretty weak for a twister. What makes this tornado special, of course, is its purple tint. There is no possible method for a tornado to turn purple. Nothing in the soil of Mattress Village could cause purple dust clouds, no item was sucked up to paint the cloud, and there was certainly no aliens to do it. The reason for the coloring is entirely a mystery, but every tracable witness all said the thing was purple, so it can not be ruled out.

Most amazingly, everything it touched was, like any tornado, destroyed... -but no wreckage was ever found! It was almost as if the tornado deleted the debries instead of sucking them up and ripping them to shreds. That would explain why the tornado had such a small dust cloud at its base and why the funnel cloud was so visible.

This so-called "deletion tornado" has no natural cause, since deletion is an artificial power from a natural source. Therefore

The Secrets' Swash
What makes the Ivan tornado so unique was the aftermath. From touchdown to dissipation, whenever it was on the ground, the purple tornado left a jet black scar on the land. This may be connected to its other odd behaviors, but this one never disappears.

Soil samples of the scarred land and the land next to it show staggering differences. The black soil is as infertile as polar ice a anywhere in Antarctica, while the untouched soil is the good old fertile Uno Valley farmland so loved by the community. Even if it is scooped up from inches from each other, or in half, this is still true. Any plant that is planted in the black streak dies overnight, so the creatures have learned.

Even worse is that if the soil is covered with, say, new soil, that new soil will vanish and leave the old black stuff behind. If white concrete was to pave over it, it is assumed, the same will happen, a black streak upon the concrete where the tornado was. Nothing can remove this scar.

It is now a local landmark, called The Secrets' Swash, and is connected to the whole mysterious aura of Mattress Village. Conspirists come from all over just to get a look at it. In many ways, it is very similar to the Demon Penguins' Stomping Ground, the fabled entrance to Diss. Nothing can grow there, nothing can remove it, and it is barren, desolate, and frightening.

Those who stand on the Swash for more than five minutes report feeling extreme dizziness and/or sickness for about half an hour. When it clears up, they usually don't want to stand there again, unless they are really crazy thrill seekers (like X-Treme Penguin or Punch Beaktoski).

Legacy
The entire Jones family knows about Ivan, but they all agreed to never speak of him. They feel that their uncle is best not spoken above, because his mere name may call back the severe thunderstorm that forever made its mark on Mattress Village, literally.

The entire town, many of whom were at least partial witnesses to the crippling storm, also live in an uneasy state of mind, also self-censoring themselves of the incident. They all believed Ivan, but they never got to hear his entire speech before he was destroyed. They live in deep fear and paranoia of the "sky programmers", and they have a shrine dedicated to them. Every two months, Mattress' Village "High Priest of Appeasement"- which is NOT a religious position, despite the name -leaves an "offering" of sorts to the "sky programmers", in the form of cookies, paintbrushes, CDs, books, pens, pencils, vinyl records, and wire coat hangers. The next day, these offerings vanish. The citizenry assumes that the evil spirits accept their gift and will not send a tornado after them again.

This is, of course, laughed off by most citizens, but any resident of that small town will reprimend anyone who laughs at this. Then again, they could be right... AFTER ALL, black vans drive on-road and off-road, all over the proximity of Mattress Village, as if they are on patrol! Most creatures do not see them or pay attention, but there are enough sightings to assume they exist.

New weather terms
The death of Ivan is even immortalized in meteorology. The storm that killed Ivan resulted in whole new phenomona that were never witnessed before. As such, the weather community had to invent phrases for them. An old joke says that it's pretty sad to have a fatal disease named after you (poor Dr. Alzheimer!), and both Ivan and TurtleShroom's family (the Joneses) get this unfortunate treatment. All of these are named after or related to the disaster, with a few exceptions.

Clouds and patterns
No purple cloud had ever been witnessed prior to the Ivan system. Naturally, the baffled meteorologists invented new phrases for them.


 * Jones' cell: any cumulonimbus cloud with a purple lining.
 * Ivanian cyclone: a purple tornado.
 * Ivanian shear: a sudden and instantaneous change/alteration in the wind shear that suddenly weakens a previously thriving thunderstorm.

Lightning patterns
The sprites and blue jets that appeared every few seconds instead of once-in-a-lifetime were deemed, after much debate, to be their own phenomenon, rather than your everyday version. This is to compensate that every other sprite and blue jet is rare and fainter.


 * Bennies: bright purple sprites that appear as commonly as cloud-to-ground lightning. Not to be confused with real sprites; they are not considered real sprites.
 * The name was suggested by Explorer 767.
 * Benny cones: blue jets that appear as commonly as cloud-to-ground lightning. Not to be confused with real blue jets; they are not considered actual blue jets.
 * The name was suggested by Explorer 767.
 * Jones' sparks: purple Saint Elmo's Fire.
 * Unoian "W": four simultaneous cloud-to-ground lightning in a very close area.
 * Ivanian omen: purple ball lightning.

What REALLY happened
Anyone who can break the Fourth Wall knows that in actuality, the Bureau of Fiction directly intervened to take out poor Ivan.

Crazy Uncle Ivan was in fact personally destroyed by Director Benny, who personally prevented the entire Department of Meteorology from doing their normal jobs, replacing them with a single toady made for this purpose. He personally commanded this creature to give the most dramatic weather show the laws of nature and the universe could allow, to strike fear in the hearts and minds of every witness. Some employees who specialized in the field of storms, the Zappers Three, and a trigger-happy tornado driver were also involved in creating the supercell.

Those who saw too much were also taken out by Benny, though through less subtle methods and other things that are illegal. The scientist that hid in the storm shelter with TurtleShroom's family vanished entirely, like Ivan. The scores of witness reports, weather logs, data, ect. ect. that were compiled by professional and amateur meterologists, and weather station data were all lost in a sporadic series of seemingly unrelated blackouts, dumb, Rookie-esque errors, or other incidents that served to erase data. Even some weather nerds themselves vanished, just like Ivan.

This was a media blackout of the highest degree, purposely orchestrated by unknown powers- maybe the government, maybe the "sky programmers", maybe a company, ect. -to cover up Ivan and all that he saw.

This, of course, fuels conspiracy circles, and they relentlessly persue the truth. On extremely rare occasions, a tourist will disappear, too.

Trivia

 * To TSP's generation, Ivan is their uncle. As TurtleShroom's parents died in 2001, they technically have no one else on that ladder, except the far-up TSGGG.
 * Most of the family calls Ivan "Crazy Uncle". This is not because they think he is insane. In reality, they call him that because they fear if they acknowledge his truth, a tornado will kill them as well. All of the family possess Lilapsophobia, "the irrational fear of tornadoes", and for good reason!
 * Most residents of Mattress Village think that TSGGG's behavior and Ivan's disappearance both stem from the "sky programmers'" wrath.