First appearance: S4E12 — Racoons — Sam Cletus v Ben Zappa · watch it on YouTube
Ben Zappa is a monk with a very specific problem: he is haunted by the Jolly Chimp, the ghost of one of those antique cymbal-banging monkey toys, except this one has “a fist the size of a car.” It has ruined his sleep, his job and his dating life. He came to the Void hoping the Deathmatch would finally get rid of it. He left the arena without an eye, with rabies, and locked inside The Box of Chaos, but also as the winner and, somehow, at peace with his monkey.
Story
Ben arrived through the Grandmaster’s blood portal on the frazzled last day of April. The Grandmaster had just been rescued from a pantry by The Shadow King, who had mainly wanted his Doritos. Ben explained that he can’t go to work, can barely sleep and eats melatonin “like they’re candy,” all because of the spirit: “I just want this thing gone.” His opponent, the hard-drinking wood elf Sam Cletus, was not sympathetic. Sam spilled whiskey on Ben’s only pair of shoes (“Do you have any idea how hard it is to find reproductions of these shoes?”) and called the ghost his imaginary friend. Sam then looked a little closer and saw a giant cymbal monkey behind Ben, with red-ringed eyes and a wide grin of sharp teeth, staring down at him. Ben also got Sam in trouble for dirtying the Grandmaster’s floor, which earned Sam her displeasure before the fight had even started.
The arena was an abandoned throne room buried deep beneath The Dread Fortress, and The Acolytes had already summoned a chaos event before anyone threw a punch. A humming saucer descended and The aliens beamed both champions up. Sam tried to seduce the aliens by clapping their cheeks (they had none, being as flat as sheets of paper) and came back smarter anyway. Ben resisted, and the unimpressed aliens took his left eye. In place of an eyepatch, they gave him a glow-in-the-dark band-aid with an alien smiley face on it. Pushed over the edge, Ben heard cymbals crashing in the distance and summoned the Jolly Chimp’s arms: matted black fur, pale and far too wrinkly knuckles, yellowed nails, and tiny cymbals on every finger. The blast drew first blood. Then Sam threw a raccoon named Dolores at Ben’s chest. Ben tried to swat her back and failed. Dolores clung to his head, and when Ben looked as if he might shake off the infection, Sam hit him with “pocket sand” and a bit of luck magic. Ben came away with rabies, and his job’s healthcare hadn’t kicked in yet.
Once the Acolytes told him there was a rabies vaccine in the Box of Chaos, Ben dashed up the throne steps with Dolores still on his face and fed her to the box. The box loved her (“They’ve always wanted a pet”) and gave him the Raccoon of Annihilation, a cute raccoon-head charm that is really a weapon of mass destruction if you squeeze it too hard. Ben skimmed the manual: “Weapon of mass destruction. Got it.” He did not get a cure. The fight then became a game of rock ping-pong. Sam kicked Ben’s thrown rock back, and the chimp arms, asked to block it, just clapped along, so Ben took the rock to the face and kept a raccoon-shaped mark on his forehead. Then Sam reached into the box after Dolores, got dragged inside, and came out fused with her as the “were-coon” Deletus, with only his penis still wood elf. Later he tumbled back in and came out inverted, with a human-toothed raccoon face and a raccoon penis.
The turn came with a natural 20. The chimp’s eyes and grin appeared behind Ben’s head and its arms crashed together, flattening Sam between the cymbals. Ben then aimed squarely at Sam’s groin, “because it’s the only part of you that has actually hurt me in this fight,” and the cymbals smashed the raccoon penis. The rest of the Jolly Chimp took shape around him: a chimp head in a bloody red fez, hypnotic red-black-white eyes, and a grin of flat, perfectly white teeth. Ben panicked (“I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this thing”), but when the Grandmaster told him to embrace it, he started clapping. The chimp’s arms clapped in sync, and the Acolytes clapped and chanted along. Sam used science and leverage to tackle Ben into the Box of Chaos. With the Acolytes’ blessing, Ben became a full man-sized Jolly Chimp, “going full JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure,” and pummelled Sam’s raccoon balls like a speed bag, “making biscuits out of these balls.” Sam survived, rubbed a genie’s lamp with his battered penis and wished it fixed; the genie healed it to Dolores’s size, and Dolores had no dick, so Sam came out with a raccoon vagina as Samantha Cletus. Inside the smoky box, Ben briefly felt sorry for her and asked if she wanted to get out of there, though he was “only kind of sorry that I just smashed your penis into a vagina.” Samantha flexed so hard that one of the chimp’s spirit hands broke, leaving it with only one cymbal. Ben tried the lamp himself, but it held a knockoff genie with a one-wish-a-day quota, so he threw it at her. She kicked it back. “God damn it all right, I’m done with this,” Ben said, and the Jolly Chimp brought down its unbroken hand. “In that squishing sound like a bug, Samantha is no more.”
Ben had won, but he was still at the bottom of the box. The Shadow King appeared at the lid and asked whether he’d been having trouble with his friend. Ben admitted he’d grown used to the chimp: “After that fight, I think we both kind of bonded. But the rabies, we’re not bonded to the rabies.” The Shadow King promised to see what he could do about the rabies. Then he shut the lid, turned his finger into a key and locked Ben and the Jolly Chimp inside. Ben was last seen there, victorious, one-eyed and still rabid.
Personality and Abilities
Ben is a tired, put-upon everyman who happens to be a monk. He is polite enough to suggest the Fortress wait for an Amazon sale on a Roomba, and he is visibly exhausted by everything: the ringing in his ears, the drunk elf, the raccoon on his face. His comedy is weary disbelief (“Ah, fuck. What the hell is this?”), along with a dry habit of pointing out when other people made his day worse. He frets about his reproduction shoes and his healthcare, and he would honestly “rather have the Jolly Chimp than have rabies.”
He fights with monk speed and flurries of punches, but his real weapon is the Jolly Chimp itself. It manifests first as floating furred arms with cymbals on each finger that can strike from ten feet away, and then as a full chimp head with a red fez and a too-perfect grin forming around him. At its peak, the spirit takes him over completely and turns him into a giant cymbal-wielding chimp. It is not entirely under his control: it claps when he wants it to block, frowns when it grabs a handful of raccoon dick instead of the lamp, and seems “pleased at the violence and madness.” By the end of the fight, he wore a glowing alien band-aid over his missing left eye and a raccoon-shaped mark on his forehead, and he carried the Raccoon of Annihilation.
Relationships
- Sam Cletus: His opponent, who ruined his shoes, gave him rabies, and promised with his dying breath, “you got a Samantha Cletus for life.”
- The Shadow King: Called him “a champion who spanks his monkey too much” before the fight, then locked him in the Box of Chaos after it with a vague promise about the rabies.
- Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: Hosted the match, gave Ben an edge when the Shadow King backed Sam, and urged him to embrace his spirit.
- The Box of Chaos: Took Dolores, gave Ben the Raccoon of Annihilation, hosted the final fight, and became his prison.
- The aliens: Took his left eye and gave him a glow-in-the-dark smiley band-aid instead.
Memorable Quotes
- “I just want this thing gone.” (S4E12)
- “I told you, this giant spirit monkey toy just shows up and ruins things.” (S4E12)
- “You throw raccoons, I throw rocks.” (S4E12)
- “Because it’s the only part of you that has actually hurt me in this fight. I now have a disposition against raccoons now.” (S4E12)
- “I’d honestly rather have the Jolly Chimp than have rabies.” (S4E12)
- “Honestly, I think I’ve gotten pretty used to this fella. After that fight, I think we both kind of bonded.” (S4E12)