[Bordermarch] The Snake Dancer

[Lathrop, Dave]

The Snake Dancer

Sometimes one is fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time to witness Fate's mighty sense of justice.
The few brave souls who tested fury of the sun's summer heat this past weekend were indeed witness to this justice!

Lord Phocas, Lord Zane, Lord Adolf, and I decided to spend some quality male bonding time at Border Keep castle this past Sunday.
It seems that the stairs leading to the Archer's Walkway required some maintenance.
Whenever we have a gathering of great minds at the castle for work days we usually have some brainstorming sessions before we do the actual work.
Sometimes somebody's feelings get smashed in the brainstorming process, but we usually don't care.

As we were performing our pre-work pondering in a verdant sea of tall summer grasses surrounding Border Keep, Lord Phocas decided to take it upon himself to act as our
"Big Black Snake" lookout.
He had wandered just a bit from the main group when he proclaimed that a "Big Black Snake" was headed our way!
Lord Zane immediately had to go in the other direction to get a soda pop. That left Lord Adolf and myself to search the tall grass in hopes of intercepting the "Big Black Snake".

When one is looking to flush out a snake from tall grass one should always proceed through the grass with a shuffling of the foot. Never ever lift the foot or the snake will get you!
Fate's Justice came into play when Lord Adolf made the mistake of lifting his foot for the briefest of moments.

Two year's past I was attacked at Gulf War by the assassin, Carlos the Ripper, who has since become my Youth Archery Champion. He planted an incendiary device disguised as a Tiki torch in my path, when it exploded it very nearly caused my demise! Unfortunately, Lord Adolf was witness to my struggle with the burning device and very nearly swallowed his nose laughing at my predicament.
After I had successfully escaped from the Tiki torch, I warned Lord Adolf that Fate takes care of people like him. I told him he should not have taken pleasure in my pain.

Lord Adolf is apparently very afraid of snakes as well as treated lumber. As he proceeded through the grass in search of the snake I could tell he was a bit edgy but he was doing his best to be brave. He kept asking Lord Phocas, "Are you sure it was headed this way? How long was it? Was it black? Was it really big? How long was it?" Lord Phocas assured him it was headed in our direction.
I was behind Lord Adolf and just happened to have a small stick in my hand when he tentatively lifted his foot just high enough to clear the tall grass and take the smallest of steps.
His eyes were so focused on the grass before him he never saw me place the tip of the stick between his legs just under the edge of his cut-offs.
I hesitated for what felt like 1/10th of a second and then slapped his bared inner thighs quite vigorously with the stick! The slapping motion of the stick produced an unusual snapping popping sound that sort of sounded like a snake. What happened next was totally unexpected!
Lord Adolf the Mighty reached for some imaginary ladder in the sky and started to climb! While he was flailing away and high-stepping on the imaginary ladder, he kept uttering
high pitched garbled curses  that would have offended us if we could have understood them.
He must have thought that the snake was biting it's way to his crotch because he looked like one of those scared cartoon characters who start pumping their legs but never go anywhere.

When he finally regained the man-side of his persona he knew that Fate's Justice of which I had previously verbalized had caught up to him. He hung his head in complete shame. He had lost his most precious of treasures, his self control, and I was lucky enough to see it happen.

We never found the "Big Black Snake", it must have gone into a snake hole, and Lord Adolf thinks the whole thing was a set-up; but you must believe me when I tell you that it most certainly was no set-up!

The rest of the day went quite well;

a)      Lord Zane learned how to drive a nail with a ball-peen hammer.

b)      Getting a drill bit stuck in some wood inspired Lord Phocas to invent six new tools to extract it.

c)       I learned that if you stand on a wobbly brick while holding up a heavy board you will most assuredly fall.

d)      Lord Adolf learned that yelling loudly instead of talking normally would make us forget about his recent snake dance.


In Service and still Dreaming in Techni-color,
HE Santiago