To denote the passage of a week in her story, Violet Crepuscular has refrained for a week from writing the next chapter of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney. As a result, she has forgotten the number of the chapter. Her best guess is Chapter CCCLXXIV.
During the week, Willis Twombley, the American adventurer who thinks he’s Sargon of Akkad, has hardly spoken two words. His best friend, Lord Jeremy Coldsore, has begun to worry about him.
“Everything all right, old boy?” Jeremy asks. “You’ve been awfully quiet lately. You’re not worried about the chapter number being wrong, are you?”
“Nah, Germy ol’ hoss, it ain’t that,” drawls Twombley. “It’s this here Trojan War that’s shapin’ up on the horizon. Gonna be a bad one; and the Trojans are allies of mine, so I really ought to do something to help ’em. But I don’t know what. My intelligence has been kinda confused, this past week.” (You can say that again.)
“Uh… Twombley, old son…” Jeremy hems and haws, but finally gets it out, “I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that Trojan War–well, they’ve already had it, haven’t they? And Troy lost. The Greeks burned it to the ground.”
Twombley stares incredulously. “You don’t say!” he cries. “You’re just funnin’ with me, ain’t you?”
“Sorry, old stick, but the war’s over and you’ve missed it. In fact, it happened several thousand years ago.”
“But it waren’t in the newspapers! Holy mackerel! Troy is burned down?” A stream of lurid and objectionable language ensues. Twombley lets out a deep breath, draws his six-gun to make sure it’s loaded, and declares, “Well, it looks like it’s time I shipped the Akkadian army off to Greece and gave them Greeks what for! Damn! I knew that weasel Agamemnon shouldn’t of been trusted! Wait’ll I get my hands on him.”
“His wife and her lover murdered him, old chap,” says Jeremy. Twombley needs some time to take this in.
“Dadburn it,” he said, “it’s this life of exile that I’m livin’, it makes me miss important things. If I was back on my throne in Akkad, this never would of happened! This adventurin’ life, it ain’t proper for a king. But I can’t give it up! I wouldn’t be on that throne for five minutes before one o’ them Babylonian hit squads found me. Look what they did to Julius Caesar! And I told him to watch out for it, too. If he’d listened to me, he’d still be in the saddle.”
Here the chapter ends. It had to end somewhere.
I think can write a doctoral paper on ancient history. However, if you get the chapter number wrong in one of them, they won’t let you be a doctor. 🙂
Remind me to tell you sometime about my defense of my thesis, “A Systemic Analysis of the Viking Age,” before a panel of the Rutgers Political Science Dept.
The thing is to specialize in a field of knowledge so esoteric, no one will be able to tell if you’re just making things up. Not that I did–but I think I could have.
That’s the strategy in many fields these days.
It’s hard to criticize a thesis when the writer knows a lot more about the subject than the panel does. They enjoyed it, though. You can’t go wrong, talking about Harald Bluetooth et al.
So long as you aren’t trying to establish reliable voice communication using his namesake, computer electronics, products. 🙂
Harald had the name first, but he never got it trademarked.
Bluetooth as a short field communications system is a bit dicey. I have a stereo amp which can connect to my iPad with Bluetooth and I can play music from the iPad through the amp. It works great, when it works, but it’s not what I’d call reliable, and this is a 6′, line of sight.
Harald Bluetooth just had to yell.
Which is much more reliable. 🙂