Jawknee (2006 short story)

Jawknee is a canceled short story from 2006, set in the Despair Gerosha timeline of The Gerosha Chronicles. It details the tragic origin story of Jennifer Alliston Clankton, a farm girl who was turned into a vengeful, green-feathered chicken monster.

Tagline
''And so the legend of Jawnkee begins. A new slasher is hatched…''

Plot
Farm girl Jennifer Clankton was content to her simple life. She lived out on a farm in southern Ohio, tending largely to the chicken factory that her family owned and operated. Jen couldn’t understand why, but she felt an ominous bond with the chickens, as though she could almost read their thoughts…or maybe they could read hers!

On one particular night, a van mysteriously showed up in the dead of night, and two mysterious faces hidden behind silhouetted clothing advanced out of the van toward the chicken farm. Jen’s dad, curious, took a light and a pistol (hidden under his jacket) to greet the strangers. They suddenly vanished into the thick of night, and appeared inside of the chicken shed. He chased after them, and the next thing anybody knew, they were gone. But the chickens were somehow all out of their cages. The van disappeared into the night, and the drivers weren’t seen again for quite a while.

Jen and her mother, who was experiencing health problems and considering going to the hospital, went outside to investigate once she felt safe. The air inside the large shed building seemed unusually clean. The chickens were all resting in their cages and on their roosts — even with the doors wide open! They found Jen’s father on the ground, having apparently been killed by the chickens. Jen’s mother went to the hospital shortly after his funeral. Her friends Beth and Rico did what they could to cheer her up, as well as help her tend to the chickens while the rest of her family tried to sort out the details of this horrible mystery.

One night after a long bonfire, Beth and Rico decide to leave, figuring Jen can take care of herself. Jen, sensing that the chickens are restless, begs her friends to stay. But Beth, in a bad mood, blows off Jen’s fears as nonsense. Rico is sympathetic, but also begins to believe that Jen is going crazy, so he too abandons her. Jen tries to ignore the fact that she is annoyed by them abandoning her, especially when she was so certain something foul was afoot.

Shortly after they leave, the van and mysterious men reappear. Jen does what she can to escape them, but all her efforts are in vain. She remembers that Beth and Rico got into a long debate of the roles of fate vs. choices. Jen began to realize that Rico was, in this case, more right. There was no place safe for Jen. Her friends, by leaving her, had chosen her fate for her. The men terrorize and rape her in the chicken shed.

Beth and Rico get word of what all happened, and try to get in to the hospital to see Jen. When Jen wakes up from the coma, she awakes a transformed being. She is extremely violent to everyone except Rico, and obsesses over the rape and over the chickens. The doctors, finding some very strange DNA in her blood samples, call Jen’s friends out of the room, virtually banning them from seeing her.

In disbelief, they decide that somehow, Jen is turning into something not exactly human: something…part chicken!

They decide to have her quarantined to study her in detail. But Jen, feeling the chickens are calling her as she behaves more erratically and violently towards the nurse than ever, escapes from the hospital. Very slowly, she starts growing a beak and green feathers. Her feet become particularly fowl in design, and she creeps into the darkness of what was her home.

She begins to learn that she has gained the power to control the minds of all birds in her presence, and they become her agents, willing to do anything she tells them. Her voice box begins to change, and she takes on the distinct sound of a human hen. She is at first horrified, realizing the strange beings who raped her are responsible for her becoming what she is. Yet, realizing she has no idea how to reverse it, she embraces her role as Jawknee, the Killer Human-Chicken. Her sudden hatred for her former friends, as well as for everyone who ever grieved her in high school floods her decaying mind, and a thirst for revenge takes over.

When a group of curious teens from the old high school, Beth and Rico included, decides one night to investigate the farm along with a detective, then all the chickens and every other bird in the field begins working together, as if by conspiracy, to bring down the crowd. They all call out Jawknee by name, and a killing spree soon ensues when she decides to unleash herself on the less-than-prepared victims.

Development
The idea for Jawknee actually went back to when the Dozerfleet founder and his family lived in the house on Havana Ave. His one sister's nicknames inspired the idea of a humanoid chicken creature. When the family started raising chickens in 1999, "Jen Hen" became the name of one of the Cornish hens in the chicken shed.

It became customary after that to claim that the chickens were trying to talk to the one sister, and to simulate it by calling out her name in a "chicken voice." This voice, in turn, was inspired by Phil Hayes' performance as Scratch in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.

In 2006, during the Despair Gerosha era, the character Jen Clankton was envisioned as turning into a green-feathered chicken. This idea was inspired by "Into a Chicken," an ad by McDonald's that first aired in 2006. In the fall of 2006, while at Ferris, the Dozerfleet founder formally developed a basic plot summary for Jawknee. It was decided that one of Jawknee's victims would shout "Die Featherclucker!" at one point, before being attacked by chickens. At another point, a hen would turn its head suddenly and stare at one of the unsuspecting victims who entered the barn, shouting: "Jawknee!!!!!!!! BAAAAAAAWWWWWKKK!!!" to sound the alarm.

Jawknee was shelved almost immediately afterward, so as to fix problems that interfered with the production of Despair Gerosha Ciem. When that could not be done, school assignments remained the primary focus until the arrival of Dozerfleet Portable in December of 2006. After that, Despair Gerosha was scrapped for Classic Gerosha. Jawknee remained shelved for development, in the hopes that it would be revived after the Ciem webcomic trilogy was completed.

Cancellation
In 2010, Jawknee went even further into shelving. Ciem 2 was scrapped in favor of developing Comprehensive Gerosha to fix the problems with Classic Gerosha. Ciem: Vigilante Centipede did not acknowledge Jawknee's story as being entirely canon. As of December 1st of 2012, Jawknee was re-purposed as a villain in the TV series pitch Sodality. Since that show is set to have its own take on her origins, and embed it into the show, a separate tale for the monster's origins is no longer needed. Jawknee was officially canceled on Saturday, December 1st of 2012.