8FOLD/HCC: Journey Into # 23, "The Required Elements" [reformat]

[Andrew Perron]

On 8/22/2015 7:07 PM, Tom Russell wrote:
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>            "THE REQUIRED ELEMENTS"
>         ~~A HIGH CONCEPT ADVENTURE~~
>              ~BY TOM RUSSELL~
>
>
> It is not so much that Herb Hettinger pretended to be an only child,
> as that implies a kind of deliberate deceit quite alien to his
> character.

Ah! A return to the Leon Czolgosz!

> An orphan,
> perhaps, all alone in the world and completely abandoned, that will
> engender all sorts of sympathy, but only to a point; somewhere around
> twelve or thirteen, most people get rather tired of orphans and their
> sniffling and their big doe eyes.

That's about the time they start training to fight crime and become the best at 
everything.

> Herb tired of them rather sooner
> than most, and found himself in a spot of bother when he told off a
> particularly weepy four-year-old whose parents had perished in a freak
> umbrella accident.

Why XD

>     Herb did not pretend his sister did not exist, nor was he unaware
> of her; it was more that he simply forgot about Rhonda, in the same
> way a person might forget temporarily about Liza Minelli or the
> Jacobite Rebellions, only to be reminded of them unexpectedly.

An entirely reasonable metaphor. >.>;

>     Rhonda Finlayson (though they were born to and raised by the same
> parents, she had always had a different last name; there was some
> reason for it that involved a rotary phone, but if he often forgot
> that she exists, one can hardly expect him to remember the reason!)

Oh yes, I forgot this part. XD

> In short, she had all the
> usual drawbacks one associates with starvation and malnutrition,
> including a general state of confusion and dulling of the wits, but
> none of the positives: that is, even when she went days without
> eating, she never seemed to lose any weight, a fact that made her
> exceptionally cross.

*pulls out a bunch of really fascinating facts about weight loss, natural 
weight, health, etc.*

> she came to the conclusion that the smallest
> token he could offer toward recompense would be to take her out for
> dinner for her birthday. Said anniversary was actually not for another
> six months, but she did not think he would remember this, and it
> likely would not surprise my reader over-much to learn that he did
> not, and so the next evening they went to the Chinese restaurant.

What a good brother, to take her out for her half-birthday.

>     Herb then said something in response to this, but I am not quite
> sure of what precisely this was. Attempts to reconstruct it from the
> police reports afterwards were unsuccessful.

Heeheehee.

> Rhonda quite naturally began to weep
> inconsolably at the indignity he suffered. She reached out with one
> trembling hand, intent on removing the offending sprout with a swift
> but gentle tug, but he would have none of it. Clearly, there was no
> other course of action but to seek professional medical help.

This story isn't a garden path so much as it is a ramen noodle.

> and that it
> made more sense to find someone, anyone really, anyone at all, who was
> at bare minimum gainfully employed and capable of properly sanitizing
> a liberally-splattered cat carrier.

That was a hell of a paragraph. @.@

>     At any rate, it was the first (and, due to judicial mandate, the
> only) softball game that was attended by Rhonda Colman (nee
> Finlayson), and I think we can all agree that that was for the best.

...indeed!

Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, chewing this over.