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When we last left our hero, Arthur:
His eyes widened. “Frell,” he said, not quite believing his ears when it came out as he’d spoken it. “Author has taken off some level of profanity filter. I hope it’s not because some bad dren is gonna go down.” He feels a little bit farfotzed by the prospect of possible troubles ahead. But he checks his armour is laced tight, checks that he has a few escape chicke- he checks himself and uses the right terminology – a few escape shemozzles – and that they have enough feed pellets and water to keep them in tiptop clackering form. They cluck and chirrr happily. Well they are just chicken-brained.
And Now:
He couldn’t believe it. He was in Marble Bar, having travelled – 900 kilometres? That was wrong. Lake Argyle to Marble Bar was around 1,100km, surely? Now thoroughly unsure, he hovered his contraption over the tarmac road an… This was a very wide road, surely, for a small town? A building in the distance caught his eye and he (rather skilfully, he felt, considering this was his first day of flying) drifted the rigid over to it.
“Telfer Airport” the sign announced.
He’d gone from one mine to another. Marble Bar was a little north of west from here. What the shemshoit?
(“Shemshoit?” he thought. “Shemshoit? Why am I using so much ZE Common all of a sudden? Also, it literally means ‘chickenshit.’ What sort of an expletive is ‘what the chickenshit?’ Sir – (Auth: and suddenly he was addressing me) – could you please sort out the language rating of this story? Please Sir?”)
Receiving no response from the Author, he sighs and sets the GPS for Marble Bar once again. He mentally reviews his mission and (Ha! Now, I hear you saying, finally the story has a quest for the protagonist. “Ha!” the TTTG shouts. “I actually do have a quest!” And I sort of have a sickly smile because I really thought TTTG had had a mission before I joined him on his quest. Damn. Now I have to think of a mission to send him on. One moment please.)
It takes a lot longer to make the relatively short hop from Telfer to Marble Bar. “Which is just as well,” he thinks. “The old snel-frockey (OMFSMWTF? Heinlein? And WTF is Oh My Flying Spaghetti Monster What The Frak? Why am I locked into SciFi Swearmode?”) still hasn’t done an outline yet, has he?” He notices too that he’s become a little bit less timid, a bit more assertive. And sweary, oh so SciFi Sweary.
He reviews what’s happened. Maybe he can glean a quest from. From. What does he know? He has a wife named Jenny whom his pet name for is Jen. Oh please, don’t let me be Scott Morrison! But then he realises he’s the Thin Tin Gent and therefore not that chubby failure. Whew.
He has a hippie, sustainability, eco-friendly vibe to him, his armour entirely made of salvaged and recycled material. His Coke can codpiece could have been a Freudian choice of material, but also just a plot device to wake the dragon. Hmmmmm… His eyes narrow. Really? He thinks.
But his armour is definitely made in a very eco-friendly way. So he’s a bit of a greenie hippie type. Good. Finding that carton full of USB cables was a stroke of luck, as they’re the woven-braid-covered kind, and the braid on these is pretty tough. He’s now fastened and reinforced both vambraces and rerebraces with enough cable to make him virtually cut-proof, at least as far as his forearms and upper arms are concerned.
He thinks regretfully of all those blister packs the cords cam packaged in. He wishes he’d brought those along to lay over his drink can metal. THAT would have made him practically indestructible and invulnerable. A sudden thought hits him – how long before the beginning of this story does his backstory go? OMFSM. It must have taken him an age to actually make and wear all this armour. It’s not like you can just say “wear armour” like and old text adventure and be instantly . . . clad . . . in . . .
Oh wow. So he could have been spawned right at the second this tale began. Oh. Frak…
When I have the whole series together it should be a short story or novella. At that time I’ll make it into an e-book and put it online. Regular readers will get the e-book for free, the link will go to a $1 site. I’m sorry it’s taking me so long but I have about a hundred “sidequests” myself and the odd random like damaged rotator cuffs make it hard to complete any of them. TTTT (The Thin Tin Gent) adventure 1 is slowly coming together line by painful line…
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