Black Gate Zeppelin to Dragon*Con Update Episode 3: the Salad is Tossed

Black Gate Zeppelin to Dragon*Con Update Episode 3: the Salad is Tossed

All hands repel boarders!
All hands repel boarders!

Gentlemen!

I can indeed verify that Howard von Steppenwolf-Jones’s fearful presentiment about the revelation of our route is correct. We are compromised and our mission imperiled. While returning home from a convivial evening of cards and tawny Port at my club (Le Cheveux Club Pour Les Hommes — best steak au poivre in Chicago, I might add) I noticed my door had been  jimmied with a crude textural analysis and took the precaution of drawing my trusty life preserver. Senses, pistol, and wits half-cocked, I entered. From my library, I heard a whispered chant:

Mene, mene, Derrida upchuckin’
Dulce et decorum est, pro postmodernism scribtum

I’d heard those black words before, in the nightmarish 2006 free-for-all at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.  A claven of MFA candidates, driven mad by Midwestern Chardonnay and a few passed-around copies of Rosebud, had very nearly cost me my life.

To this day my shoulder aches whenever I hear an open mic poetry slam or Lisa Loeb over a Starbucks sound system.  But that’s a tale for another day.

I burst in, hurling my leftover Caesar Salad with extra dressing at the figures huddled around my leather-topped library table.  The high-calorie shower of mayo and anchovies worked its usual magic, and I’m sure the garlic, vinegar and Dijon stung like pepper spray.  I swung wildly, enraged at the sight of my precious 1960s Playboy collection and Howard Weird Tales originals were being despoiled by dripping minimalist poioumena.  Though outnumbered five to one, I was on my home turf and roaring with Port-fueled fury, whereas my opponents’ idea of physical effort was downing a shot of wheatgrass juice and a metafiction circle-jerk.  They escaped off the balcony but I did manage to tear off a piece of Urban Outfitters Pennystock from one of the blackguards.

They’d hacked into my computer — the villains aren’t without technical skills —  and I’m afraid the plans for the Harold Lamb and the covered arcs of the railguns will be on Wikileaks within whatever their distributed server propagation time-frame is.  I would suggest a few extra drum-fed Thompsons and some gas-grenades be added to the Harold Lamb’s armory.

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John ONeill

I want to comment on the article, but OMG, to do that I’ll have to stop staring at that picture.

– John

John Hocking

That Mauser is totally sweet.
I’ll trade you two semi-luminous splinters of the Petrified Heart of the Jade Juggernaut for it.

[…] we are, of course, hopelessly astray of the original brilliantly planned route, E.E. Knight keeps going on and on about the steaks at Le Cheveux Club Pour Les Hommes and how big his Mauser is, and in an attempt to […]


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