The Knight’s Tale.

  Away, Justinian dragged the friar,

  Away into a mountain hideout.

  A cave concealed them for three days,

  While mobs outside explored and raved,

  Declaring if they caught our knight,

  They’d lynch him, too, for Christian crime.

  Once those indignant heathens left,

  He hired a priest with mendicants

  To cure the monk whose mortal wounds

  Had dyed his skin a pallid blue.

  “This monk you aid,” refused the healer,

  “Is not a gentlesir but evil.

  The God he worships is debased,

  And from this world should be erased.

  Restrain him as I fetch the law,

  Who’ll put his neck to righteous sword.”

  --The Butcher (snatching a tortoise tongue from one alchemist hooligan about to put it in the wrong tank of his bioweapon contraption): Now, this doesn’t relate to the last duel, but any true anarchist couldn’t help pointing out the ethical injustice here. Restraints and swords – this is always the immediate response against the so-called ‘evil’ gods, despite any rational analysis revealing them to adhere much better to the non-aggression principle than their state-backed counterparts. You show me a cultist, and I’ll show you an individual who has been lured through a completely non-coercive appeal to temptation and self-interest. It’s the other gods that won’t play market. It’s the other gods that barge into the den with the cops, smashing idols, flaying dissenters, declaring that this or that human sacrifice—negotiated via voluntary contract by at least two of the parties—presents a societal danger.

  --Stooges #1-3 (receiving a telepathic reminder from their leader not to converse, not understanding the satire regardless): …

  --The Butcher (shaking tortoise tongue empathically, in the direction of the proper bioweapon tank): What exactly is in danger here? Behind the hysterics of good and evil, the danger is against nothing but the state’s protectionist monopoly of religious expression, against—in turn, as the authoritarian conditioning of this one sacred domain of life extends to others—the state’s monopolies of property and trade. A customer too terrified to explore these gods judged ‘evil’ by the state’s inquisitors is a customer too terrified to explore the meats proscribed as ‘inedible’ by the state’s health inspector. It’s all, fundamentally, the same authoritarian operation of discipline and control. They can’t have you taking a bite for yourself! They can’t have you revealing their deceit with the truth of your own freedom-loving tastebuds!

  --Stooges #1-3: …

  --The Butcher (giving tortoise tongue back to alchemist hooligan, who—misreading the suggestion—bites into it and shrieks as its acidic juices melt through the bottom of his jaw): Shit…well, at least our knight understands and agrees.

  The knight agreed, but once alone,

  He fled the cave with monk in tow,

  For the healer’s hate had similar tune

  To bigotries himself accused.

  Hid elsewhere in another cave—

  Which home throughout his tale refrains,

  These days ahead spent much in dark—

  He taught himself the healing arts,

  Collecting herbs on moon-lit nights,

  Beseeching prayers to God and Christ.

  And praise them both, the monk rewoke,

  Returning back from Charon’s boat

  With eyes renewed in blooming life

  And speech expressing his surprise.

  “Why rescue me?” quoth he, the monk,

  “Why tempt their wrath on this afront?

  Your soul does not, like mine abhorred,

  Exalt our deity outlawed?”

  “It does!” replied the knight astonished.

  “Across this realm, I’ve been admonished,

  For chastising the heathen locals,

  Who praise and worship in misfocus

  Blaspheming demons dressed as gods.

  Alone, in faith, this knight has trod.

  Then, you, good monk, do worship same?

  The Christian God, who called the rains

  To wash a world immersed in sin,

  Who torched Gomorrah’s citizens,

  Who cleansed again by sending Christ,

  The saviour lamb of sacrifice –

  This single lord, in heaven housed,

  To God, good Sir, you truly vow?”

  --The Somali: My seeress of the slaughter, the pretender knight gives up the ruse in the next passage by sharing the monk’s ignorant misgendering of Allah, praises to His gift of creation. This blunder, according to the bard who I’ve since messaged, was not a comedic feature inserted by himself. It is an almost direct paraphrase of Justinian. The knight has clearly already detected his mistake in saving this brother ‘Christian’.

  “Indeed,” agreed our knight’s dependent,

  “Your god is mine, and mine is them, sir.

  --The Butcher: There’s the misgendering, another of the tale’s weirder themes.

  --Stooges #1-3 (watching the alchemist hooligan continuing to melt, the acid after liquifying his jaw oozing down to disintegrate his throat cartilage, chest armour, and collar bone, exposing the inner organs of his torso, also melting): …

  This monk does worship in your creed,

  That Christian god of many sprees,

  Who drowns and burns to clean their lands

  And births their sacrificial lamb –

  This deity, of herds and men, to God,

  Good knight, I’ve sworn my pledge

  And give them thanks for sending you,

  Whose sword has cut a wrongful noose.”

  Justinian, of great belief,

  Was by this news at once relieved,

  Suspicious somewhat being the friar,

  Pursued by mobs with deadly ire.

  Said: “Thank not me, but God divine,

  Who guides us to our friends in time.”

  The brother monk, as later gleaned

  In passage of recovery,

  Was by the name Betruger called,

  Betruger of The Christian Sword.

  --The Somali: My queen of the oppressed, as you have no doubt detected by now with your heaven-breaching intellect, this ‘Betruger’ fellow is no Christian saint but an outlaw worshipper of a demonic god. His defrauding of the knight only increases in severity from here, as Justinian is tricked into multiple acts of villainous corruption. Based on these farces, I’m siding with the knight having a profound intellectual impairment. I have produced from this defect multiple skits that we might discuss privately over another meal, inshallah. Warmooge can pay this time – I am flush again after quitting the heathen’s spice on your queenly direction.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  --Stooges #1-3 (watching melting alchemist stagger off into the surrounding battle, screaming for assistance): …

  --Stooge #2 (imitated by The Butcher due to a lack of interaction): This Afro Joe’s malevolently famished.

  --The Butcher (forlornly at the guts of his dead camel murdered for a fair price, the pieces streaked across the battlefield by two combatants rolling in them): Aren’t we all these days? A decent lady’s hard to find amidst these ruins of a better time…well, all we can do is grind the market and purchase ourselves another. Continuing:

  He’d been himself a knight in trade.

  Though ancient now, of feeble age,

  In youth, he’d served as ardent squire

  And soldier of a neighbouring shire.

  His lineage, The Mage’s Shield,

  Fought defence with its two-hand steel,

  --The Butcher: Two-hand steel, or maybe this line should read two-hand steal, am I right?

  --Stooges #1-3: (watching melting alchemist being slashed down by an enemy, the spraying blood sprinkling three other people behind): …

  --The Butcher: Haha. Again repeats that essential theme of the sword, thrust into the heart of the last duel as into the legendary stone of the King Arthur.

  --Stooge #3 (imitated by Butcher): What’s the number on this Joe Arthur?

  --Stooges #1-3 (real ones, watching the sprinkled three begin to shriek and melt as well): …

  --The Butcher: I’m punked on that, good customer. He seems to be a dusted Goddard in your own Offworlder pantheon. Continuing on the monk's style:

  Employing its berserker twirls

  To guard the army’s backliners.

  In war, he’d earned his accolades

  And countless troubled maidens saved,

  All fair and chaste as Guinevere,

  Heroic Arthur’s damsel peer.

  No dragons had his sabre vanquished,

  Justinian’s feats in that his captain,

  But his blade had slaughtered lesser fiends,

  Which tallied up respectfully.

  Yet since those years, disgrace had come,

  His chivalry for faith expunged.

  For turning soul to higher cause,

  To God above, Justinian’s lord

  —And his as well—he’d been accused

  Of heresy and subterfuge.

  These charges, from which now he fled,

  Had been proclaimed by wicked men,

  By heathen kings with hell-doomed doctrines,

  By enemies of Christian gospel.

  Betruger, saintly monk, once treated,

  Adopted our good knight for teaching,

  Rewarding him for healing given,

  For Christ’s undoubting dogmatism.

  For three of Io’s years, they thrilled

  Across Togavi’s wind-swept hills,

  Adventuring and fighting beasts,

  Evading the authorities.

  They lived on nuts, on wild game;

  --The Butcher: Hence the essential pro-capitalist complement for any mature anarchist, a counteraction to the movement’s unfortunate anti-materialist tendencies.

  --Stooges #1-3 (startled by an abrupt escalation of battle, the melting combatants being lost in the confusion of the hundreds pouring into the area, squeezing through gaps in their defences, scaling their walls with ladders, dropping in from the sky): …

  --Stooge #1 (imitated by Butcher, commenting on both lack of reception and one dropping-in opponent getting paralysed mid-air to land in a goofy position): That one flopped.

  --The Butcher: You’re right, you’re right. I need to work on my own material. Continuing the knight's anarchist sufferings:

  They sheltered by the sun in caves;

  Like hero rats, they crept by nights

  To do the deeds of all good knights,

  Relieving maidens, saving towns,

  Collecting gear in dungeons held,

  Collecting converts to the faith,

  Who joined them eating nuts and game.

  --The Somali: My fear-spreading Fatima, there’s a scantiness to this section that I believe comes from the knight realising that the mention of other players risks exposing him. The sect led by this demon-worshipping monk eventually became a band of criminal brigands, a record of whose criminal history I provide later. Justinian, whose obtuse roleplay they continued to entertain, was a sort of team mascot for them. Before you ask, I’ve already spoken to those attending this weekend about participating in any sketches based on these events but they told me to kill myself. I hope you’ll join me in putting curses on them. May they and their children’s children be cremated when they pass.

  --Stooge #1 (caught off guard by the last line while watching a battalion of reinforcements pour in and momentarily rout their enemies, the stragglers falling as they’re shot and speared through the back): Fuck, that’s unnecessarily brutal.

  Our knight, along this Christian path,

  Acquired himself the good monk’s art,

  --The Butcher: i.e. The Mage’s Shield, which, as a subtle point of serendipity, continues to be the base of the knight’s technique today, where the original metaphor equating offence with defence has culminated in his acceptance to break with former vows and finally employ a shield. We might read in that another of the tale’s meta-themes. The solution has always been there, as an obscure potential, but it sometimes requires external activation, for the right person to acknowledge one at the right time, for the right state-propped institutions to implode from their lack of competitive sustainability.

  Was schooled in all the magics strange

  Of this strange world he’d been conveyed;

  Of these strange magics, evil worst,

  He soon picked up a morbid curse,

  Afflicting by him accident

  One tragic eve within a crypt.

  --The Somali: My rose blossoming in the wilderness, whose every thorn deserves worshipful kisses, we have here a clear description of Justinian’s initiation into a demon-aligned prestige specialisation. Further research uncovers this to be The Knight of Abomination. I’ve included pictures for the recreation of possible costumes. As a candidate of parody, I would put forth Ibraahiim, the decay of whose interior morals would readily transfer to the character. But, as always, I leave this and all other decisions to your superior dramatic judgement.

  --The Butcher (distributing aforementioned images): For evidence.

  Stooges #1-3 (holding images without inspection as two enemy battalions arrive to clash with their own, dozens of troops at the meeting point instantly vaporised and shoved over to receive the death prick of stilettos through their visors): …

  --The Butcher: Indeed, it is shocking. Our knight seems to have a dark side hidden in his history. A goth phase.

  His flesh turned pale of sick decay.

  His golden halo shaded grey.

  His Christian sword, on splitting foes,

  Absorbed their souls as haunting ghosts,

  Which after screeched from altered spells

  That mortified the local towns.

  His Christian shields, for saving friends,

  Induced their veins to haemorrhage.

  His Christian healing likewise soured,

  From mending to a vampire power.

  --The Butcher: Attention, good customers…this is our knight’s tragic turn of fate.

  Stooges #1-3 (sprinting to a defended position around the wagon of the bioweapon, the enemy rolling over their location and surrounding the butcher in confusion as several attacks bounce off him harmlessly while he continues to sing with the occasional tender glance at his dead camel’s giblets, disturbing the newcomers who don’t understand the context of the beast being sold for a fair market price despite allusions to a prior bestial concupiscence): …

  One day, while fasting for a week,

  While praying cure for his disease,

  Approached was he by brother knight,

  A recent convert to The Light

  And sufferer same that morbid ailment,

  Whose sickness targeted the faithful.

  Bad tidings came, a happening tragic,

  Their cause no longer had its abbot.

  Their master, that fine Christian friend,

  Had since been caught and lost his head.

  As news was told, Betruger’d tried

  To halt a demon sacrifice.

  That ritual had been arranged,

  By Gutkonig, God curse his name,

  By West Togavi’s pagan liege,

  That hierophant of heathenry.

  Their kindly monk, The Christian Sword,

  Had interposed this devil lord,

  And fought with brother paladins

  Against the kingly force of sin.

  --The Somali: My saint of the blessed uncertainties, according to one of these former ‘paladins’, the demonic summoning was devised by themselves. Justinian, their mascot clown, was omitted from the affair due to the impossibility of spinning it into a Christian event, the ritual requiring several humans to be nailed alive to a portal.

  --The Butcher: As always, none of these state-deity apologists question whether those nailed ‘victims’ hadn’t volunteered, whether they, or perhaps their guardians if they were children, weren’t due for a fair monetary compensation negotiated for their pains.

  --Stooge #1 (absent in an ongoing skirmish, imitated by The Butcher for the sake of progressing his digressive argument): You’re flappin’ off the rocker, Madison. No way in space these Vickies signed up to munch it.

  --The Butcher: A fair criticism - most sacrificial victims, today, are not compensated. But this is only a perverse consequence of state restriction, which prevents the development of a proper market servicing the niche. There are countless people in the world who would volunteer to be nailed alive to a portal – e.g. money-minded suicides. These volunteers are just not yet aware of these opportunities because of the ban on advertising portal-nailing as a legitimate occupation, because the compensation and non-monetary benefit packages of portal-nailing have not been permitted to increase to rationalised values through demons openly bidding against each other over the voluntary victim supply.

  --Stooge #1 (imitated, gaining sudden enlightenment): Ah, I see now, good butcher. So, following on from that logically, the unpaid victims of today are the ugly produce of state regulation, and we shouldn’t blame the demons for merely innovating a solution to their oppression. Further ethical lessons, if we had the freedom from the cops to discuss them, might be applied to the sale of your illegal meats and even, perhaps, these fate-hatched machinations around the knight’s sword. These are all benevolent circumnavigations of the irrationalities of an overly-restricted market that prevents the best people and goods being delivered to the best employers.

  --The Butcher: Exactly, exactly, exactly! By Devin, you stole the words from my own censored mouth! Let’s just hope the cops don’t—

  --Stooge #1 (the real one in the middle of combat, cleaved through the shoulder by an enemy glaive, splitting down to the belly, dead): …

  --The Butcher: Oucho Groucho. That’s why I’ve said nothing. Continuing on the monk's demonic ritual:

  Alas, outnumbered in their task,

  Betruger’d failed and breathed his last.

  Their teacher dead, their cause was done,

  Unbearable this life they’d dug

  Amongst the hills by wealth unknown,

  With hungers fed on faith and loam.

  With teacher gone, their sect adjourned,

  And the Christian knights to wind dispersed.

  --The Butcher: So ends many a fun movement, crushed to nothing by the law. While the others move on, the tragedy of the mentor next spurs our knight onto a solitary quest of adventure and vengeance that eventually delivers him to the present, ranting with insane vagueness at a Him, blamed for this incident.

  The stadium.

  Alex Wong, covered in coffee, continues to pace around the knight with suspicion. “Does he know about our bet?”

  Yes, there have been mentions of a bet, somewhere in the design.

  Justinian gives Him a clipped answer. “I’ve regaled my adventures several times with Sir Henry.”

  The knight has. However, unbeknownst to him, he’s been censored by the duellist out of an anti-roleplayer antipathy during every one of these retellings. The duellist, thus, has no clue as to what’s happening, nor would anyone else sticking to the duellist's limited perspective and forced therefore to seek the tale elsewhere like in the battle occurring outside. The design also has its moments of ironic farce.

  “So it is a conspiracy,” concludes Alex Wong incorrectly.

  Justinian disagrees. “Sir Henry, for all the charity he’s rendered, would not concede his streak for such a purpose.”

  “You don’t know the gentleman. He would absolutely throw to spite me. He’s a psycho like that. This tournament? Means diddly squat to him – one massive scam. The trillion-dollar question is why he imagines this little scam within a scam would hit me as a mark. Fess up: has he struck a deal to buy the sword from you, in exchange for getting carried through the sixes? Did he bribe Whitefrog? And his cult apprentice? She did have his two-facedness – or ten-facedness. Be honest. I am your employer after he retires.”

  He references the knight’s professional arena contract, organised by the duellist and now signed. This gift, pertaining to events beyond the last duel, is immaterial to the design beyond acting as a sympathetic precursor to the knight’s re-training.

  Justinian loathes the reminder. “We’ve made no arrangements. The sixes were last minute – he had a completely different squad until they got harassed. As for those other two…that was fair – they just played the day wrong, too much juggling, too much acting. I’ll swear this by the sword - a knight’s honour.”

  The honest knight tells not one dishonest fib. Neither of them has made this arrangement. The mutual victory in the six-player category mentioned by Alex Wong—as will be seen to be another critical piece of the design—has passed as a minor detail in the background, a quirky product of a seemingly-unplanned coincidence. And the two other proteges of the duellist have indeed lost fair-and-square to the knight, whose playing of the day surpasses not only them but their mentoring duellist.

  “A knight’s honour…” Alex Wong mumbles. ”…more like a knight’s ignorance…” He turns for conversation the sword he’s about to lose, its golden blade swinging upright and pressing companionably close, almost to the tip of his nose. “But that doesn’t mean everyone is ignorant, does it, sweetheart? There is a rat strategising amongst us…chewing here...chewing its enigmatic plot there…so, then, how best to counter this rat…how best to trap it…”

  Continuing to ramble, He pursues his misidentified rat, its elusive shadow leading him ever deeper into the trap designed for both of them.