MSTied: "He Awakens" from a.p.dragons-inn
wolff%djdobson student@Princeton ED
[Opening credits. Fade to SOL. Joel and the 'bots are standing around
playing
Dungeons and Dragons. Joel is wearing a Viking helmet, Crow is wearing
a fake Gandalf beard, and Tom has on a "Kiss the Dungeon Master" apron.]
CROW: You hear strange clarinet music.
TOM: I keep turning the crank. What does this thing do?
JOEL: Just a second. [Turns to camera.] Hi, folks, welcome to the
Satellite of Love. I'm Joel and these are my role-playing metal
buddies---
TOM: Shut up, Joel. What happens?
CROW: Even more strange music comes up from the music box. You get a feeling
of doom.
TOM: Doom? Doom? I have to keep cranking. I mean, *I* wouldn't put some
kind of death-trap right out in the middle of the city, so why would
you?
CROW: A sepulchural voice says, "Tom! Stop turning the crank!"
TOM: I keep turning it!
CROW: A 16-ton weight falls on your head. You die.
TOM: You've killed my 16th level half-elf fighter/magic-user that I've spent
21 years of my life working on? Convincing myself that he's real?
Wishing that I could live in his fantasy world?
CROW: Yup. He's dead. You shouldn't get so attached to these things.
Roll up a 1st-level ranger, would you? I've got another new
adventure with over 16,000 useless and arbitrary ways to die----
TOM: I'LL KILL YOU! [Leaps at Crow. Scuffle ensues; both of Crow's
arms are torn off.] [Cue the Mads' lights.]
JOEL: Now calm down! Both of you! It's early in the week for the Mads,
so it must be a USENET posting. Let's listen to the Elfsong of
Shanara and the Belgariad.
[Deep 13]
DR. F: Good evening, Joel. We have just a quickie from a guy on
alt.pub.dragons-inn, a group dedicated to low-brow adventures
by people who shouldn't be published.
FRANK: Well, some of the stuff isn't too bad. The administrators tend to
do a good job codifing everything everyone says in their wildly-
contradictory stories! It's really a possibility for a rich
exchange of fresh, new role-playing ideas. . .[DR.F hits him.]
Oww!
DR. F: Shut up, Frank. This particular posting is from a newbie who is
posting out of control. I've actually provided linebreaks and
deleted the 30+ extraneous blank lines to speed your journey into. . .
BOTH: . . .DEEP HURTING!!!!!!
[SOL]
[Lights flash. Chaos ensues.]
JOEL: Ahh! We got USENET sign! Run, run away!
CROW: [As doors open to USENET viewing room] See the chameleon? Lying there
in the aaaaaaaaaaaaahh. . . . .[disappears as CAMBOT moves forward.]
[Door sequence.]
> Path: princeton!udel!darwin.sura.net!emory!swrinde!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!
> munnari.oz.au!metro!grivel!mihi.une.edu.au!bruig
> From: br...@mihi.une.edu.au (Bronwyn Ruig)
JOEL: Hey, that's a neat name, anyhow.
> Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn
> Subject: He Awakens
CROW: We lived through "Awakening" and now this. . . .
> Message-ID: <40...@grivel.une.edu.au>
> Date: 27 Mar 94 10:16:54 GMT
> Sender: use...@grivel.une.edu.au
> Lines: 59
TOM: 59 lines. Very short.
CROW: Keep telling yourself that.
JOEL: This is going to get very, very long, I think.
>
>
> ADMIN I am still having trouble understanding the keyboard,
CROW: So I thought I'd waste all of your time by posting while I figure
out what all those little buttons with those strange symbols do.
TOM: Thanks a WHOLE LOT, Bronwyn!
> please bear
> with me. This may get posted a few times, before I get it riight.
ALL: All riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight! [All high-five each other as best as they
can; Joel has to pick up Tom's hand to "slip him some skin."]
MAGIC VOICE: In fact, it was posted three times so far. . .
>
> He drifted to conciousness. Slowly he got to his feet and suveyed the
TOM: . . .pain he was causing USENETters for posting this three times. . .
JOEL: . . .without spell-checking it.
CROW: It's a common function on almost every editor, Bron-baby. Sheesh.
> characters in the inn. But he did not see their faces, rather he saw his
> friends and fellow magi incanting the spell that was supposed to save them
> all.
JOEL: From run-on sentences.
CROW: They're pretty cool, don't you think they are?
JOEL: Cut that out.
>
> He had been a conduit for the assembled magical energies.
TOM: You mean a "sewer" for the assembled magical energies?
JOEL: Mucking around where Merlin flushed the toilet.
> The power had
> pulsed through his veins. Steady as footfalls the voices of the priests
CROW: . . .overran places where commas really *should* be used.
> rose and fell, in time with the ebb and flow of the arcane energy. Rayne
TOM: Wished he would move the comma after "fell" right after "footfalls."
JOEL: Hey, he said he didn't know what the keyboard was for; maybe he just
can't decide where to put all those little dots.
> had been smiling at him, those dark piercing eyes, for once happy.
TOM: Happy eyes! What I wouldn't give for even a pair of *sad* eyes.
CROW: My eyes are happy when they don't fall out.
> His
brother
> Geoffrey had not been there.
TOM: Geoff was out in back of the conduit having a ciagrette.
> He had gone to Las Senkal
JOEL: The nationwide hub of gambling?
CROW: That's "Vegas", Joel.
TOM: Or the officer's quarters on the Enterprise-D.
> and had probably found himself an inn rather like this one to drink,
TOM: He drank an inn?
CROW: Perhaps he drank the volume of fluid equivalent to an inn?
JOEL: We're getting into a whole weird area here.
> tell
> stories and wench in.
TOM: If he meant that, he should have said "in which to drink, tell stories
and wench!"
JOEL: Lay off. He doesn't know how to use a keyboard. Why do you expect
him not to end his sentences with prepositions?
CROW: We do it, I think. Are there any other instances we can think of?
JOEL: [hits Crow]
> If they had such things in that strange foreign land.
CROW: Like sentence fragments, maybe.
> But ofcourse Geoffrey did not exist,
TOM: He's *got* to know what the space bar is for.
CROW: That for which the space bar is! Don't end sentences like that.
TOM: Sorry. We're in a conversation; we get to end sentences with
prepositions. He's writing prose.
JOEL: In his own *special* way.
TOM: I'd hate to point out the implications of mentioning a character
that doesn't exist. Aren't the readers confused enough already?
> not since the world had been consumed
> by chaos. His mind flickered back to the ending he had seen. It had been
> going so well, the spell had nearly been woven. Then the voice had
faltered.
TOM: The voice faltered when it saw that the *script* had been consumed by
chaos.
> The priests stumbled in their chant
JOEL: "And the Lord said---" Ooof! Who put this banana in the pulpit?
> and the threads started to snap.
TOM: Is that the continuity thread?
JOEL: No, just the threads on the front of the priests' jeans. Stumbling
really scrapes them up!
CROW: So these three threads go into a bar. . .
> He
> had tried to grasp at the rent edges, but they were already too far gone
> before he had realized what had happened.
TOM: I assume that he is referring to the "mis-en-scene" of this story being
too far gone.
CROW: You'd have to.
> A great black chasm had opened in
> the sky and descended through the earth.
CROW: That's hard to picture. Perhaps he might want to, oh, I don't know...
JOEL: . . .put in a paragraph break and then explain what's going on?
Why bother? It'd slow the plot down.
TOM & CROW: *Plot?*
> He had watched his firends pulled
> up and into the
TOM: The hell that *is* this posting.
> chaos that came boiling through. What it touched changed
JOEL: ...into gold! This is the "Midas" story of how to get your muffler
replaced. "Dear Midas. . ."
> and nothing was familiar, those who had not been suckedup at the begiining
CROW: Were suckedup at the eeenndd?
TOM: Ttuurrnn ooff tthhee llooccaall eecchhoo. . . .
> were transformed into various parodies of
CROW: . . .a decent piece of USENET fiction. . .
> animal existence. The earth tore
> itself apart.
JOEL: Look! Enough detail! That whole last sentence was *dripping* with
extraneous imagery!
TOM: Yeah, I mean, who would want to read some boring old description
of a planet blowing up and the end of all things as we know them?
> Then he had had the vision.
JOEL: He went to Lenscrafters Plus.
CROW: And got these attractive glasses in. . .about an hour!
> A thousand differen endings had
> flickered through his consciousness. But he had seen his world's salvation
> amongst them. The portal had opened, perhaps by will of the Gods, perhaps
by
> the subconscious need he had to survive. At any rate he had stumbled
through
> into this inn. He shook his head to clear his mind, threw back his hood,
TOM: Which flew backwards and slammed into the 7-foot tall burly ogre
standing behind him.
CROW: The ogre picked up this strange hooded man, squashed him to a pulp
and threw him back to the blown-up world from which he came!
JOEL: Hey! You didn't end that sentence with a preposition!
> and
> spoke his first words.
JOEL: [falsetto] "I'd like to thank the Academy and all the little people who
have made this moment possible."
> "I, Marec Costlyn,
TOM: Distant relative of Mark Costner, Kevin Costner's distant cousin.
> Mage and Keeper of the Lore of
> Anuin, hold the knowledge to return and save my world".
CROW: So go ahead and return. Why tell us about it?
> He pulled a leather
> thong from around his neck.
CROW: And placed it around the neck of the silk-clad blonde woman.
TOM: This sounds kinda kinky, really.
CROW: Whoo-hoo!
JOEL: Hey! Take that stuff to alt.sex.stories!
> On it hung two amulets, one the likeness of a
> serpent holding a ruby, the other a Sea Dragon clutching an emerald. He
> twirledthem enticingly in front of the eyesthat would watch him. "Who wish
> to accom-
CROW: -plish using some sort of reasonable line breaks, spaces, and
hyphenation?
> pany me. I promise great adventure, and maybe some treasure". He found him
> self a seat and awaited a response.
>
JOEL: The entirety of the Dragon's Inn looked back at him with disdain.
CROW: The room was enveloped in a stony silence punctuated by hundreds of
USENET-readers drawing sharp implements.
TOM: Termination with extreme prejudice awaits you, Marec. [Looks around.]
Let's get out of here. We've had our 59 lines of hell.
[Door sequence. SOL.]
JOEL: Well, that was mighty unpleasant. Can we try to reconstruct that?
TOM: I think it sounded like it was some guy who had a
possibly-interesting idea concerning some sort of world that ended
in a cliched chaos scene. He must have some sort of fuzzy idea about
where it will all lead, but unfortunately his inadequate understanding
of USENET and computers combined with his inability to punctuate is
really holding him back.
CROW: I think it sucked, just like "Awakening."
TOM: Really, I think it resembled "Awakening" in many ways.
CROW: Like in that nothing happened. *Nothing!*
TOM: And that there was no setting whatsoever and a hodge-podge of images
stolen from a variety of fantasy and science-fiction literature
spliced together with run-on sentences and bad grammar.
JOEL: You've got a point. It *was* a lot like "Awakening."
What do you think, sirs?
[Deep 13.]
DR.F: Well, Toto, I guess you know that in alt.pub.dragons-inn, you aren't
in Kansas any more!
FRANK: No! You're in Generica, this world of their own creation! Really,
some of the better authors make the---umpf! [DR.F covers Frank's
mouth.]
DR.F: I'm going to have to revoke your USENET privileges. Shut up and
hit the button, Frank.
[Frank hits the button.]
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[roll credits]
This spoof contains characters created by Best Brains and whose lives and
souls belong to HBO and Comedy Central. This is in no way meant to bother
them. The spoof's material was written entirely by Wolff Dobson, and you're
welcome to reproduce it as much as you'd like, only if you're planning to
profit from it, call CC first and me second.
The post heckled was written by Bronwyn Ruig. I mean no harm to him or his
children, but instead I was trying to grab some laughs.
---
Wolff Dobson
wo...@djdobson.student.princeton.edu
djdo...@phoenix.princeton.edu
> The earth tore itself apart.