Happy Cinco de Mayo to those who celebrate! I'm starting the week with a new story prompt device, the Reckless Deck. I used Volume 1 of the character deck and the world deck to pull prompts for today's stories - you can see the process here:
I ended up with a bit of a mismatch between the character and the world, but that made it more fun to come up with a reason why they went together. Below are my notes and the (extremely rough) draft of the story. Enjoy!
Reckless Deck prompts
Character:
Intrinsic nature - elf; modification - extreme facial hair; costume - chain mail armor; accessories - buckles or straps; weapon - hammer
World:
Biome - river/stream/lake; materials - masonry; features - mountains; advancements - digital/planetary technology; weather - hail; time of day - noon
- Modern day amusement park, Medieval Times-type place, character is working his first day on the job
- Not a fantasy fan, got the job from his older sister, keeps confusing dwarves and elves
- Working as a “guard” to a castle-type gift shop with one other person, die-hard Tolkien fan who is getting thoroughly sick of the dwarf/elf confusion and fantasy condescension
- In costume “chain mail” (basically printed fabric) with a long pole with no blade as a “pike”
- Noon on his first day (been on the grounds on the job for about two hours) when it starts to hail, discovers that the guards aren’t allowed to take cover - would “ruin the illusion”
- Is ready to throw it all down and quit
Mark was going to kill his sister just as soon as she went on lunch.
He hadn’t asked to be in this position - his parents had insisted that he get a job this summer, now that he’d graduated from high school and was taking a year off before college (it was only going to be a year, two at the most), and his sister had been talking up The Fable Fair ever since she’d started working there the year before. She put in a good word for him, and the next thing he knew, he was riding in her cramped old Honda, trying to hear himself think over the sound of the podcast she insisted on listening to on the half hour drive. He would have driven himself, except he’d totaled his last car the night before his senior prom and his parents had refused to buy him a new one. It was one of the reasons he’d gone along with this whole plan to get a job.
Sabrina walked with him up to the entrance gates, one earbud in place while she continued listening to the episode she’d started in the car. “This is my little brother, Mark,” she said proudly, pulling him forward to face the man inside the ticket booth. “It’s his first day today.”
“Well, hail and well met, squire Mark!” the man replied, giving an approximation of a bow from his seat in the tiny booth. Mark nodded his head, not entirely sure how to respond. His sister was beaming, and he realized that he hadn’t asked nearly as many questions as he should have before agreeing to this whole plan. “If you’ll give me your hand for just a moment, I’ll give you a token to mark that you belong in the park before the public is allowed in, and you can follow young Sabrina to the main offices.” Hesitantly, Mark offered up his left hand, and the man put an orange bracelet around it, just tight enough to keep it from falling off his hand. “Fare thee well!”
“Does everyone talk like that?” Mark muttered to Sabrina as they walked through the gate. Seeing the normally-crowded park bereft of people made Mark’s skin crawl, and he stayed closer to his sister than he normally would have. She just chuckled and steered him toward the square, flat building near the entrance gates.
The rest of the park was designed to resemble some kind of medieval village, so the appearance of a modern office building felt extremely out of place, but it also seemed like the most normal place around to Mark. Sabrina took him through the front doors and instructed him to show the bracelet to the guard at the front desk, then gave his shoulder a squeeze.
“Here’s where I leave you, little bro,” she said affectionately. “You’re going to have some training and stuff to go through, get your badge and all that jazz, and I need to get changed and get to my shop to start the day. I’ll check the schedule to see when you’re on lunch and see if I can’t get away to show you the good places to eat, OK?” With a flash of a badge to the guard, she turned down a hallway and was out of sight before Mark could say anything.
The next two hours were some of the most mind-boggling Mark had ever gone through. He had to be fitted for a costume, though he wouldn’t be told what costume it would be until he had been given a position, and he wouldn’t be given a position until he had taken the aptitude test to see where he would fit the best. He was in a class with twenty other people, mostly in their late teens or early twenties, like him, who were just trying to find work for the summer. Some of them seemed particularly keen to work at The Fable Fair, including one woman who had worn her own flower crown and fairy wings and had been extremely put-out when she was told to take them off by the instructor.
The time between the measurements and the test was spent in role play of different customer service situations, where, Mark learned, the most important thing was that the Magic Remain Intact. No matter what, they weren’t to break character or in any way indicate that they were anything other than the character they were being paid to portray. Even if they weren’t one of the named characters, if they were working for The Fable Fair, they were playing a character. So, no yelling at the “esteemed guests,” no matter what they did, no cell phones, no visible electronics of any kinds (there was a short and extremely specific list of exceptions, Mark noticed, and nearly all of them required some form of doctor’s note), and to the best of their ability, they were to use the kind of language the man at the ticket booth had used. Each member of the class was given a booklet with phrases and vocabulary to memorize, and they were told that they would be quizzed on that booklet once a week until they received three perfect scores in a row. If they didn’t get those scores within ninety days, they would be terminated.
Finally, it was time to take the aptitude test, and Mark hunched over the old school desk with the familiar dread in his gut. He’d always done poorly on tests; he’d had to get an accommodation in school to get more time and be able to take the tests away from the other students in order to make it through tenth grade English. He had no idea what this test would be like, but he wasn’t looking forward to it.
Fortunately for him, the test only had ten questions, and they were primarily short answer questions about what to do in different customer situations. Since they were all scenarios they had role played not one hour earlier, Mark felt relatively comfortable with his answers. The last question threw him for a loop, however. It was a multiple-choice question:
“In ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy of movies, the character of Legolas is noted for his long:
A. Hair
B. Beard
C. Eyelashes
Mark sat back, stumped. He’d seen the first of those movies once, on Sabrina’s birthday the year it had come out - she had begged her parents to let her go to the movie theater to see it, and they had insisted she take Mark along with her. He had no interest in that kind of movie, then or now, and he barely remembered anything about them. Sabrina hadn’t been happy about taking him, but he promised not to say anything about her girlfriend if she would buy him a large popcorn and soda, and the deal had been made. Still, he vaguely remembered something about a couple of the characters. One of them was a…dwarf? He had the long beard, and the other one was an elf, he thought, and he had the long hair. Which one was which, and which was “Legolas?”
Mark froze in indecision for a solid minute before finally using the tried and true method of picking the middle answer for anything he didn’t know. It had served him well enough in school. He was the last person to turn in the test, and the instructor had been snippy when she took it from him.
Half an hour later, the class reconvened to find out their assignments. The woman with the fairy wings had squealed with delight when she saw she would be one of the featured characters on the Fairyland Express ride, and she almost hugged the instructor before she stopped herself. Several of the others seemed happy to get their assignments, and Mark found himself getting a little bit excited to see where he would be placed. Finally, everyone else had gotten their positions and had left for their new jobs, and he was left alone.
The instructor smirked. “Ah, yes, Mark,” she said, as though she wasn’t sure which one he was. “Given your aptitude scores for our…unique environment, I think we’ve got the perfect place for you.” She handed him a slip of paper, which included directions to the costume department. “Give them this, and they’ll get you all set up. Best of luck, and fare thee well!”
Now, Mark was struggling not to fight with the straps on the helmet that had been forced on his head over his long hair, which had been roughly braided and pinned up so it would fit under the helmet and wouldn’t hang down to his shoulders. It was one of the first things he was told he would have to change if he was to keep the job - he’d either need to cut his hair, or find a way to bind it back and away so it would stay under the helmet. He’d have to talk to Sabrina for some ideas, after he gave her a piece of his mind, of course.
The rest of his costume consisted of a printed rubber suit of “chain mail” to be worn over an undershirt and pair of leggings, a pair of galoshes painted to look like armored boots, and a thin wooden pole that was about six feet long. As Mark was nearly six foot four, it looked a little ridiculous, but the pole was supposed to be his “polearm” as he stood guard at the door of the Castle.
On the other side of the wide doors, his counterpart, a man maybe a year or two older named Nathan, stood at perfect attention. Somehow, he managed to make the rubber suit look like shining chain mail, and his helmet didn’t look like it was squished down too tight or that the straps were bothering him. Mark was about to ask him his secret when a pair of women herding a pack of children came in a rush to the Castle doors. He moved to his door and, on Nathan’s signal, opened it at the same time Nathan opened his. It was ridiculous, had taken way too long for Mark to get, and it made the ladies light up with glee. “Oh, will you look at that, they’re treating us like royalty!” one of the women said with a giggle, and the tween girls with them responded with their own piercing laughs. Only the young boy at the back of the pack didn’t seem delighted, as he ran over and kicked Mark hard in the shin. As the kid was wearing flip-flops and Mark had on galoshes, the kid was the one crying, and Mark had to fight to keep a smile off his face at the little monster’s suffering. “That’s what you get,” he heard one of the women say as he and Nathan closed the doors behind them.
For a gift shop at an amusement park, the Castle was no joke. Nathan had given him a bit of a run-down on the place before the doors opened to the public and they had to get into character. The Castle was where the park made most of its money, so the fact that they had visible guards at the front was nothing compared to all of the loss prevention that was done inside the store. Nathan had worked as an outdoor guard for a year, and was hoping to move into the store this summer, but unfortunately he’d been passed over for the guy that Mark was replacing. The politics of the theme park were significantly more complicated than Mark ever would have guessed.
They’d been there for a couple of hours, and Mark knew it was getting close to noon, when he would get his first lunch. He really hoped Sabrina would be able to come to meet him so he wouldn’t have to try to wander this place by himself. Just as he was wondering what was nearby, he heard the first rolls of thunder. Peering up from under his helmet, he realized that the sky had turned a dark gray, and the first few drops of rain were starting to fall. Just as he was about to say something to Nathan, the sky opened up. The rain turned to hail quickly, bouncing off the sidewalk and lodging in the gaps between the suit and his undershirt and somehow managing to make it into his galoshes. He turned to the doors, getting ready to make his way into the Castle, when Nathan stopped him.
“We don’t go in there,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “Didn’t they tell you how the magic has to remain intact? You’re a knight. A knight wouldn’t abandon his post because of a little bit of weather. He would stay his post, no matter what.” He sounded miserable, and Mark was sure that he was getting just as soaked as he was.
“Well that’s just…seriously?” Mark said, also keeping his voice low. “There’s ‘staying in character’ and there’s catching pneumonia. They don’t pay me enough to stand out here in the hail, for God’s sake.” He had his hand on the door, and Nathan put his “polearm” down and blocked it.
“Stand, squire Mark!” he barked. In a much lower voice, he said, “Please, man. If you go inside on your first day when I’m working with you, they’re going to blame me for not keeping a better eye on you. I’ll never get inside then. Please, man.”
Mark sighed. He couldn’t argue with that. He didn’t even know Nathan, and he knew that it would be unfair to have him take the fall if Mark couldn’t hack it. He nodded and turned back to his post, hunching his shoulders to try and make himself a smaller target for the hail.
The weather lasted for another half an hour, during which time Mark thought of many ways he would like to shove the words “Magic Remains Intact” down the throat of whoever came up with them. Once it finally let up, Nathan let him take a late lunch and even pointed him to the best stand for good, fast hot dogs and elephant ears. Mark walked and ate, turning the corner back to the Castle just as he finished the last bite, and was startled to see Sabrina standing in front of the door talking to Nathan. The way they were heads down made him think he was interrupting something, but she smiled when she saw him and beckoned him over.
“Sorry I missed your first lunch, little bro, but I couldn’t get away,” she said, give him a once over. “We’re going to have to do something about that hair. Anyway, heard it’s been quite some morning, huh?”
“That’s…one way of putting it,” he said mildly, gripping his stick and trying to think calming thoughts. It wouldn’t do to start yelling at his sister in the middle of the park; it could wait until they were in the car on the way home.
She seemed to realize what he was thinking, and grinned. “Yeah. It’s pretty much always like that. So, what’s say you help us take this place down from the inside?” She nodded to Nathan, whose eyes were glittering with a malicious glee Mark hadn’t noticed before. He looked between the two of them, confused, and Sabrina took pity on him. “I needed another person on the inside. Now that there’s three of us, we can start putting plans in motion. By this time next year, The Fable Fair will be dead as a doornail, and we’ll be dancing on its grave.
“So, what do you say, little bro? You in?”
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