Ben Cracker

Ben Cracker was a mentally unstable Khanz Penguin that made an attempt to expose the Bureau of Fiction. Conspiracy theories assert that he was filming a large documentary on the subject and kept the tapes and equipment in his yurt (which is a portable house native to Pengolian culture), which was never in one place for too long, partly because Ben was a nomad and partly because THEY were out to get him. Despite his nomadic nature and his constant movement, he and his yurt were nonetheless hit by lightning in a freak storm as he was working on storing away his videos to prepare for travel. The lightning bolt set his yurt on fire and, sadly, killed Ben and destroyed whatever he was working on. It even destroyed his truck with it!

Ben Cracker is also famous for his mentally deranged spasms. Whenever he spoke of the BOF, he would spaz out and shout it. His mental instability constantly led to him talking to himself (and his self answered back), and his quest for exposing the alleged Masters of the Universe consumed his entire being. He had slews of "Fourth Wall Detectors", crude tracking devices, and disguised items, originally stolen from the BOF itself, but he later developed his own.

Chickhood
Ben hatched to protective parents that lived the traditional Pengolian lifestyle of constant, nomadic migration. He was pure ethnic Khanz, and his family followed the ancient lifestyle of endless travel. In the days when Pengolia was its own territory and Antarctica was constantly changing its governments, the Cracker family lived off the land and had a good, simple life. Those who knew Ben said he was a very happy chick that had plenty of friends in his caravan, and was loved dearly for his goodness and cheerful goodwill.

Ben's selflessness and love for both his tribe and others greatly boosted his caravan's morale and productivity, and he was a bright light in everyone's life. Adored and loved, Ben was a very happy penguin who would one day almost certainly assume the role of the leader. The elders had already begun schooling him.

Ben's discovery
Sadly, a traumatic experience changed his life when he was ten years old. His parents and the community caravan had parked in the northwestern borders of Pengolia, where steppe shrubs grew and the rocky terrain was a bit smoother. They were there to rest and let the chicks wander around and play.

Very early one morning, Ben left his circle of friends and waddled into the thicker brush of the steppe, where he happened upon the strangest thing. He saw a Khanz Penguin, obviously a ranking official or elder by his clothes, whip out a laminated card- something he only heard of "in the big cities far away" -and insert it into a particularly large bush. To Ben's awe, the bush lifted up and a capsule-like elevator appeared. The elder stepped in and it began to lower. Ben, ever curious, dove in before the bush lowered back, and rode on the roof of the elevator. When the elevator stopped and the elder got out, Ben opened the emergency hatch and exited the elevator.

Using the skills he had learned from his people for hunting animals and gathering food, Ben stealthily wandered around the BOF building. He didn't bump into an employee for hours, and saw way too much. He was frightened by this big mysterious office, so alien and advanced, and knew something was wrong, but he wasn't sure what. Absurd topics beyond his comprehension filled the halls and conference rooms as he wandered.

Eventually, Ben caught on to what was going on in there. Apparently, these penguins were a "New World Order" of sorts that rule the world with an unquestionable iron fist. No one told them what to do or how to do it, and they controlled everything and everyone in total secrecy. The more he explored, the more frightened he became, and the more he wanted to escape and forget it all as a nightmare. He realized these people even controlled him, and Ben, frightened for his life, just wanted to go home and tell his community and hope they'd help him. He found items laying around and stashed them in his inventory.

Mind wipe
The little Khanz was eventually caught by an employee and forcefully delivered to the Moose in Black, who had to mind wipe him.

As he was dragged hy his webbed feet to the menacing, evil rooms, he shakily took a marker and wrote some words onto his hat: "$$THEY$$ $$EXIST$$!".

He scribbled crude drawings of some of the things he saw and stuffed the items he took deep into his robes, pleaing they wouldn't strip-search a chick.

The Moose placed him into the machine and threw it on, but something went wrong when the safety pictures went wrong. The force of the blast caused adverse effects on Ben. It blew out much of his hair and destroyed his posture, hunching him over and making his voice more raspy. It drained him not only of his experiences in the BOF, but most of his life, mindset, and experiences, including his cheerful personality and eagerness to do good and help others. The color of his feathers were drained and, essentially, he never remembered being happy.

They realized their mistake when Ben was removed from the mind wiping system. They couldn't just toss the mutilated chick back out to his family and community; they would immediately see something different with him.

They sent him to the Department of Plot, where the bureacurats who had been running the graveyard shift were about to punch out and call in the day workers. They were tired and exhausted and didn't put much work in his rewrite.

They simply changed his last name and his ancestors' appearence to explain his hunched posture and sickly coloring. They also just waved the personality change away by labellig his happiness as a "phase" that would have collapsed at ten anyway. They kicked him back out and returned to his family, who were worried because, in this new reality, Ben had rapidly become more depressed when he hit his ninth birthday, and it was getting worse. Ben himself never remembered a time he was happy.

Ben's re-discovery
The glitch in the mind wipe system left Ben's from the day of the wipe to his fifth birthday totally gone, and it made him wonder what could have removed so much time from his life completely. It was when he was contemplating this in his family's yurt- sitting in deppressed silence was common in this reality -that he took off his hat and noticed the words.

"THEY EXIST."

...-but who? Who were "they"? Did "they" have a connection to this strange feeling he had? Ben looked through his clothes and found some items the MIB didn't take. They had tracking power and could locate BOF Entrances, and there was a card he had stolen off of some guy's desk. What were these? What's a "BOF"? Why were these items with him? Where did they come from?

All of these questions haunted Ben. His status as an outcast in this new world was worsened as he snooped around with his tracking devices and scanners, and usually got chased by an angry group of similar-aged Khanz for snooping in their private affairs (such as sneaking into females' yurts to check for what he called "Boffs"). He was bullied and ridiculed, but this drove him further to prove his point.

His lack of social interaction and fixation on the socially absurd idea of snooping, stalking, and getting in others' business made the rest Ben's chickhood extremely lonely and unloved.

In his adolesence, the tribe decided to send Ben off to a "new world" school to get a "Modernist" education, thinking that the technology he had been using for so many years was a sign that he deserved a higher education. He was enrolled in the ninth grade into a school in the faraway South Pole City, most famous in that day because the Olde Antarctican Kings met there annually.

Adolescence
As a teenager, Ben continued his escapades when he wasn't studying his schoolwork. Having no life and constantly being bullied and ignored, Ben focused himself on his work and was considered by his teachers as "obscenely gifted", but also said he had "irrepreable chickhood trauma" that would probably harm him for the rest of his life. Everything seemed to run against Ben: his species, his accent, his horrid posture, his traditional wardrobe, even the fact that he needed glasses were all targets of mockery. None were more insulted, though, than his quirks and obsession for chasing the "Boffs". Ben refused to speak about his past- because he didn't know it himself -and drove himself further into isolation.

In vacation days when school was out, Ben would wander around the city looking for evidence of the BOF. Ben's trackers occasionally led him to ab Entrance, and he go in there to learn more about the BOF. It eventually landed him the ultimate jackpot by taking him to the city's permanent BOF Entrance, which he would constantly use for the rest of his days.

Ben had become stealthier and even better at hiding than his last adventure, and he constantly took scribbled notes and jotted crude drawings of what he saw, and tried to share it with anyone he met. He was ostracized by society because of his "luny theories", and the mockery was slowly eroding his mental stability.

Adulthood and the documentary
After graduating with very high grades from the high school, Ben bought himself a truck and obtained a Pengolian yurt in his travels home. From there, he used his nomadic experience and lived off the land, doing various odd jobs in between his endless searching for "the truth".

Since he could obtain his own food and water for little to no cost, his funds went straight into furthering his BOF search. He had the idea of recording evidence beyond notes, and purchased what was at the time a very sophisticated camera and its applicable film media.

Ben turned his yurt into a makeshift film studio, and he constantly recorded footage when he entered the BOF either through its permanent SPC Entrance or by others he happened to luck upon with his tracker. He even began to pose as a BOF employee by changing the picture and name on his card, explaining his camera as a "training video" for new BOF employees.

He learned way too much and got far too involved. Ben's mental stability failed him fast in the very late 1950s, and he talked to himself and spazzed out when he spoke of the BOF. In the offices, his insanity actually contributed to not getting figured out. They assumed that his insanity was what gave him the Fourth Wall Abilities to enroll in the BOF. Miles of red tape and buried forms didn't set off red flags for years, because no one reviewed his record or budget. After all, Ben was one penguin in a company of thousands upon thousands, and wasn't worth tracking. His card looked legit and his constant moviemaking seemed harmless, so they didn't investigate for years.

Ben was made fun of even in the BOF, where employees matching his clearence level called him "the office crazy" and ridiculed him when he wasn't looking or wasn't in the BOF rooms. Unlike the school and his early years, the BOF employees were nice enough to reserve their cruelty to private watercooler laughter when he wasn't around.

Ben found a home amongst other tinfoil conspiracy cooks when he rolled into Mattress Village in around 1963. Conspiracy theories had inhabited the town since its founding, and they were amazed at all of Ben's evidence. His evidence was used by Ivan Jones, who considered Ben a close friend and fellow "Secret buster".

Ben found happiness in Mattress Village. He visited on a monthly basis to update his colleagues on the latest conspiracy and fueled a whole new generation of truth-seekers. He was one of Ivan's big supporters and helped him evade capture for years longer than he would have without traditional Khanz hunter-gatherer training.

It was in the late 1970s that Ben finally stopped returning to Mattress Village, telling everyone "it was time". Ivan and Ben worked on each other's items, but Ben eventually withdrew from Ivan to finalize his production of his documentary. He feared that if they kept working together, the "Boffers" would kill them both.

Ben meets his end
The last linchpins of Ben's sanity left him shortly before his death. He was in the last stage of his life's work, his magnum opus, and the one item that would vindicate him from a lifetime of mockery and laughter. He dedicated all his time to publishing and getting the last bits of data to blow the cover off of the BOF. He had even succeeded where Ivan would fail in the end of his life: he had media of the Masters of the Universe themselves and the Narrator's Organ!

It was Ben's insanity, though, was what led to his death. He had grown used to talking to himself and himself answering back, and, unfortunately, he slipped up and forgot penguins were sometimes around to listen. A particularly stressed BOF employee overheard it and reported it to her supervisors to score "brownie points" with the boss (maybe that would finally lift her from her toilet scrubbing job!).

The Bureau investigated the link and immediately found that Ben had never existed on the BOF's records and had zero BOF powers. The inefficiency and red tape of the company had kept Ben underground for nearly twenty years, and who knows what he could have found out! (Being a bureaucracy stinks sometimes.)

The fire
Director Benny wasn't going to take any chances, so he orchestrated a storm to eliminate him the next time he parked his yurt.

It didn't take long, and on November 5th, 1971, Ben had stopped to continue finalizing and compiling his documentary. The storm came without warning and brought with it blizzard winds and heavy snow. Purple lightning cracked in the air and struck Ben's yurt dead-on. Twice. WITHIN THIRTY SECONDS. Ben's yurt caught on fire, and a convenient gust of wind buried Ben in the piles of tapes, reels, papers, film equipment, trackers, and other such items.

Ben couldn't escape fast enough, and he perished in the fire, literally killed by his own documentary. Coroners officially said his death was caused by a house fire that resulted from the blizzard short-circuiting the portable generator he used to power his equipment. The death was ruled natural and shut quickly.

His entire life's work was destroyed in the fire as well. Not a single scrap of film, shard of tracker, piece of paper, or the card he had stolen survived. What few ashes and bits and pieces that made it out of the horrid conflagration were picked up by shady "cleaners" in sinister black vans, though they left Ben's ashes.

For several months, no one knew poor Ben was gone, but his conspiracy friends became worried when his birthday passed that next year. He always returned on March 15th. Always. They set out for the last location he said he went to and found the remains of him. They all knew "THEY" had killed him and grieved greatly.

Ben's ashes was placed in an urn and buried in a humble Ulaansnowtar grave, where his conspiracy theorist friends erected a lovely tombstone for him. Ben was buried beside his parents, who had also perished in fierce storms in fires but weeks before he did (and he didn't live long enough to learn of it). The bodies of Ben's parents, though, remained mostly intact and received a better burial. The Cracker cemetery plots can be found in Penghis Khan's Second Memorial Cemetery (christened this by Penghis Khan in 2002), about ten miles from Penghis Khan's palace, on a cliff overlooking the windswept, freezing wastelands of Pengolia. Conspiracists regularly visit his grave.

Legacy
Ben Cracker's legacy isn't as famous as his close friend, Ivan's. His was far more successfully covered up because few knew him and he was much more private with his life, as well as being crazier and simply more under the radar. However, his name was circled amongst the really hardcore conspiracy theorists, and scribbled notes from his friends regarding him are archived amongst the ancient tomes in the Mattress Village City Library, with copies at SnellBook.

Trivia

 * Ben is a parody of Denzel Crocker, from the classic Nickelodeon show, Fairly Odd Parents.
 * Alongside Flavoraide19 and Ivan Jones, Ben comprises three of the most dramatic lives and deaths of BOF skeptics. However, there are many other, equally astounding characters affected by the BOF, such as TurtleShroom's formless great-grandfather (named BaldurShroom), the roaming Fraz Jones, and Bob Meterson, who got even closer to the Secret than Ivan, BaldurShroom, and Ben combined, but also suffered the most brutal death of them.
 * It is thought that the elder that led the young Ben to the BOF in the first place was a Bureau of Entropy figure in disguise, who wanted to use Ben as a means to eradicated the BOF's power over the universe.