Hello and welcome back. Thank you for reading! Not sure when I'll update again, but so far the story is fun... and a challenge for me. Enjoy chapter 2!
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Something Strange
A Story Through Blog Posts
Chapter 2
Tristan hovered over the knight as he woke up the next morning, slurping his orange juice noisily through his favorite blue swizzle straw. He had done his research and figured out who the knight was. Of course, that wasn’t too hard… Fairies, witches, princes, princesses, and all manner of crazy things had appeared in the neighborhood the night before. It was a memorable event, and so Tristan’s research amounted to grabbing the book from under his sheets and aiming the beam from his flashlight back and forth between the knight and the picture of the knight in the book he’d been reading until he determined that the knight could only be Black, a knight known more than anything for his many acts of getting in the way of various other knights and citizens on their quests.
Black, on the other hand, felt groggy and his vision swam as he struggled to focus on the odd shape above his face. He supposed it could be any of the women he’d gone to bed with the night before. Being labeled as evil certainly had its perks, because he was a hit with the ladies! But then, he also had a strange recollection of standing over a child’s bed for a moment. His vision finally cleared and he was quite disappointed to find it was indeed a child. The noise from the child’s mug of odd potion was as noisy as one of Merlin’s spells if it went wrong. The smell of it was worse than the noise.
“Hullo!” Tristan let his straw drop all the way to the bottom of the glass. If Black hadn’t woken sooner, Tristan had felt ready to go grab a stick of some sort and start poking him. “Do you speak my language? If you speak another language, there’s some really cute girls on my block that are bilingual.”
Black rolled to his front and pushed himself onto his knees, feeling dizzy with his hangover. He’d feel better as soon as he had a fat mug of ale. That always perked up his mornings. “In ordinary cases, I’d be all over stammering a few words of another language to meet those girls, but considering your age and use of the word cute, I’m left to think those girls aren’t my age.” Just Black’s luck, too.
“My mother is your age!” Tristan offered. “She’s single, too. Sort of.” Tristan had always wanted a father! How cool would it be if Black was his father?
Black wished the boy hadn’t offered up a puzzling comment like that. How could one be single—sort of? It was one of those things that made his hangover decide to point out a big, fat soft spot on the inside of his head, and then hammer on it a few times just to be sure it was really soft. “What do you mean?”
“You could call her a bar wench from one of your stories!” Tristan said. “Except you don’t want to actually call her that. That’d be a pretty big mistake. Just call her Elizabeth Quicksilver, or Miss Quicksilver. She’s always getting real mad if you use the wrong form of address. My teacher always uses the wrong form of address… so they don’t get along well, my mother and my teacher.” Tristan couldn’t even begin to describe how excited he was for this to happen. He felt like with the explosion of story-book characters, suddenly he might have that adventure he always dreamed about.
Black just wanted his headache to go away. “Do you have ale, kid?”
“It’s Tristan. My name. I don’t have ale, but I saw a magic hangover cure recipe on the television… Come on. I’ll make it for you.” Tristan thought for a moment and then decided, “But maybe take the armor off here. I’ll get you some clothes from Cecelia’s house and fill the bath-tub for you.”
Well, the situation could be worse, Black thought. If the kid had a magic cure to the headache, that would help. Of course slamming the door to the room shut as he ran out on feet that pounded the floor like drums didn’t help.
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Please feel free to leave your thoughts below!
Something Strange chapter 2 © 2014 Jaimie Gross
A meeting of two less similar people is unimaginable! I'm surprised they can communicate at all... such possibilities!
ReplyDeleteThank you for looking in on this again, Julie! :) I hope you enjoyed it. I think Tristan and Black are in for a future of misunderstandings. Haha!
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