They wouldn’t go away.

   It was impossible to shut it out.  He tried.  Attempt after attempt in a time sucking cycle, it didn’t matter.  A war was raging, a war he was losing inch by inch.

   They blared, they whispered, they repeated themselves over and over and over again.  As if they needed to repeat themselves!  The inanity of the messages themselves should have been evidence enough; why listen to messages of no sense, rhyme or reason?  There was no point; no point!!

   The dragon groaned at his predicament which smacked him upside the head rendering him powerless.  It was all because of that stupid box!  That stupid picture box that his friends had insisted that he obtain!  They said he had been out of the loop for too long, that he needed to broaden his horizons.  No horizons were being broadened, indeed, his view of any proverbial horizon was hopelessly obscured by the voices.

   The voices!  

   Why wouldn’t they go away!?

   Pandora’s box had been opened, quite literally, only here he had no idea how to close the box!  Nothing he did, no spells he cast could make it stop, make the pictures go away!  Foreign, black magic!  Black magic and the sacrifice of sentients, that’s what it was powered by!  Voodoo and heaps of human sacrifices!  Some evil geniuses had conspired to create this thing, to incessantly chip away at his sanity and beat at his increasingly shortening temper.  

   Thousands of years, times and trials, dreams and nightmares lived through, and yet these voices were smashing him into a thousand crazed, frothing bits!

   The tortilla!  The tortilla was back!  It was raging at the gates, screaming, then pulling back to a maddeningly soft murmur, omnipresent yet holding back from the fore, voiced by an unceasingly enthusiastic invisible narrator.  The tortilla man!  The tortilla man was proclaiming, proclaiming!!

   Screaming, he ran out of his cave and shot from his cliff, spreading his wings only after he had leapt into the air, such was his haste.  He had to obey, he had to obey the tortilla man!!

      *

   At precisely 1:16 AM during the late shift at TacoLand the two staff members on the job were chilling out back when the entire building shook fiercely.  Fumbling about, the two of them hurried to their feet when their ears were nearly shorn off with a tremendous roar.  

   “OPEN LATE!  OPEN LATE UNTIL 3 IN THE MORNING!!!” The booming monstrous voice roared.  “GET 5 TACOS FOR $2.99!!”

   One of the workers soiled himself on the spot, the other (perhaps with some foolishness in retrospect) bolted to search for the source of the unnatural roaring.  He found it in the drive through, where a massive winged reptile was hollering into the drive through speaker, repeating the Taco joint’s TV spot ad over and over again.