Scheherezade has been having intermittent fading of her ability to pick up the WiFi. When she's good, she can tell her tales without the connection, but some nights--well, a thousand and one nights is nearly three years. Try composing a new story, cliffhanger and all every night for thirty months, knowing that if you falter, that if your story fails to engage, your head will be uncermoniously lopped off, and none of your friends and family back in the future will have a clue to what happened.
Oh, yes, she was a scholar, she had learned the ancient form of Arabic, had reproduced the dress, and had studied the sites so well that the chronomotron did not deposit her in a wall, ten feet underground, or so high in the air that she would suffer a fatal fall (that being said, later time travellers without the same confidence in their archaology simply donned a parachute and chose to be dropped a thousand feet above the ground in the dark of night).
But it was her bearing that made her so out of place--the lack of a hunch in her back, a walk of confidence that no simple farmer's wife would dare, and that dead giveaway of outsiderhood--she gazed straight into the eyes of any man or woman she met. Indeed, her disguise was too good--she would not be forgiven her odd ways as an obvious foreigner. And so she had been condemned to death.
But she did have one assett. Her personal implant could feed her terrabytes of date she kept stored on what a less ancient incarnation of civilization would call a combination web server (well, whole internet by early 21st century standards), wifi router, and most importantly, chronomotron beacon, burried in the clay of a simple pottery lamp.
And so, the condemned prisoner, she needed that device desperately; for all that her strange ways enraged her captors, her strange tales had enchanted them. Her would be executioner, a low, brutish man was enraptured by the scripts of mindless situation comedies of a century ago, which she artfully translated and embellished. Soo he brought his fellow brutes to hear the tales, then a more refined class of ancient soldier, officer, and ultimately, royalty. For each, she searched for finer and more exotic tales, as her walk from her cell to the palace took her past the unseen room where her lamp was stored.
If only she could lay her hands on that lamp, its signal sent to the future would bring rescue. What sort of tale could she tell that would bring her captors to surrender that lamp? This was the question that engaged Scheherezade for 999 nights. But now the answer came to her...
Uh, sorry, I guess that's not where you were going with your post. Nevermind.
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Date: 2010-04-02 09:09 pm (UTC)Oh, yes, she was a scholar, she had learned the ancient form of Arabic, had reproduced the dress, and had studied the sites so well that the chronomotron did not deposit her in a wall, ten feet underground, or so high in the air that she would suffer a fatal fall (that being said, later time travellers without the same confidence in their archaology simply donned a parachute and chose to be dropped a thousand feet above the ground in the dark of night).
But it was her bearing that made her so out of place--the lack of a hunch in her back, a walk of confidence that no simple farmer's wife would dare, and that dead giveaway of outsiderhood--she gazed straight into the eyes of any man or woman she met. Indeed, her disguise was too good--she would not be forgiven her odd ways as an obvious foreigner. And so she had been condemned to death.
But she did have one assett. Her personal implant could feed her terrabytes of date she kept stored on what a less ancient incarnation of civilization would call a combination web server (well, whole internet by early 21st century standards), wifi router, and most importantly, chronomotron beacon, burried in the clay of a simple pottery lamp.
And so, the condemned prisoner, she needed that device desperately; for all that her strange ways enraged her captors, her strange tales had enchanted them. Her would be executioner, a low, brutish man was enraptured by the scripts of mindless situation comedies of a century ago, which she artfully translated and embellished. Soo he brought his fellow brutes to hear the tales, then a more refined class of ancient soldier, officer, and ultimately, royalty. For each, she searched for finer and more exotic tales, as her walk from her cell to the palace took her past the unseen room where her lamp was stored.
If only she could lay her hands on that lamp, its signal sent to the future would bring rescue. What sort of tale could she tell that would bring her captors to surrender that lamp? This was the question that engaged Scheherezade for 999 nights. But now the answer came to her...
Uh, sorry, I guess that's not where you were going with your post. Nevermind.