During a promotional event for heavy metal adventure game Brutal Legend, Jack Black was reportedly consumed in flames when a fan’s too close lighter tribute ignited the hem of his polyester muscle costume.  First responders say it was nearly eight minutes before a horrified passerby splashed the star with a large cup of soda, extinguishing the blaze – admirers had mistaken Black’s agonizing screams for his signature metal yells.

It’s been two weeks since that unintended pyrotechnics display consumed a Gamestop store along with a nearby fragrance boutique, delicatessen and day care and Mr. Black has finally woken from his trauma coma.

“This is off the record, right,” asks Tricia Lee from her bedroom window. She leans out to light a cigarette, mistakenly taking our non-response as compliance, and continues. “He looks like a sliced pickle.”

Lee’s a burn nurse at Bellevue Hospital ICU, the unit attending to Jack Black. The plastic muscle costume was a mixed blessing, she explains. On one hand it started the fire, but on the other, the polyester insulated him from the flames, saving his life. But then again, the fabric melded with his skin, melting, then quickly hardening into an excruciating shell of soldered flesh.

“It’s a cage of unhappiness,” waxes Lee. “That’s how I described it in my poetry blog.”

Inside the hospital, paparazzi fight for a photo of the pickle star.

Black’s folds of charred “skin” are preserved under a thick glassy layer of lubrication. His eyes, beady sallow specs like two white sprinkles on a chocolate muffin: one of Black’s favorite foods, which he still enjoys. Now, nurses must blend it, plunge it into a syringe and squeeze it through a small whole in his cheek – for now, a provisional mouth.

But Black’s first post-coma words shock his caretakers. Using his stub hand, a hole in it like an action figure grip, he scrawls out a sentence:

“This is so metal, I relish it.” The words of a sliced pickle.