"Yeah, I got loads of stories. Hmm." Ben scratches his chin for a moment, thinking. "I was in the French revolutionary war. That one was pretty weird, they didn't even count time right. Had this weird bullshit idea that every day should be ten hours, every hour a hundred minutes, and every minute a thousand seconds. They did it upward too, having a week be ten days, a month ten weeks, a year ten months, it was insane. Especially during a war, you ever hear the expression "make sure the trains run on time"? That's a war expression, about war trains carrying war supplies! And they fucked the calendar sideways with their fetish for the letter ten... No surprise, they lost the war, but to this day you ask a historian about the French revolution and most will give you some crazy off the wall date, because they screwed with history's time too, and now nobody can figure out what day was what because of it. 'Mon aéroglisseur est plein d'anguilles', as the Frenchies say, the idiots."
"Yeah, so as I was saying, trains didn't run on time. I came in during the middle of the whole thing, they'd gotten this time system everywhere, but nobody was used to it, nobody really understood it. I ended up coming into the city four days later than I was supposed to, because when they said they needed reinforcements in a week, we thought they meant seven normal days. The revolutionaries already had the damn city, and were in the process of leaving, and then we roll up and--we couldn't tell 'em apart, they all looked the same--we thought we were supposed to reinforce the revolutionaries. Cue two months--I don't remember which type--spent traveling through France with the wrong damn side, shooting the guys we were supposed to rescue! Not one of them thought to explain this to us in English, they just expected us to know French, like we were psychic or something. Again, idiots, I'm not gonna tell a French guy to stop shooting me in English, I'll tell him in Bullet, that language is universal. They weren't very good at Bullet either, obviously, else they wouldn't have been losing so hard."
"Anyway, we eventually got to Paris, and we were starting to get suspicious, but they kept calling the city 'La Villain Lumer' or something after we asked for clarification on what city exactly we were attacking, so we figured it was some place called 'Lumer' and full of villains. Understand, this was awhile ago, we didn't have the fancy technology all you kids are strangling your little minds with today, we just saw another bombed out city full of the worthless pansies we'd been slaughtering for weeks. Midway through our assault though, one of my buddies was checking a kill and called me over, and low-and-behold the corpse was a brit too. That sent us for a loop, but it explained why a few of us had actually gotten shot for once. Now, we knew something was up, and we figured if our French allies knew, they would've told us, so we decided to get some answers--that night, we just walked right to the heart of the city without any French, and nobody shot at us. We didn't get it at the time, didn't talk to anyone, but they just figured 'oh, more of the British garrison, they look like they're doing something important', so we walked right into our own side's base camp, and I personally found the man who sent us into France. He was pissed, but he figured out what had happened--explained most of what I've been explaining, actually--and then he told me that I was gonna be sentenced to death for committing treason."
Ben interrupts his story to give a long sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
"See, that started the gears in my head. I thought about how stupid he was to say that to my face, while I still had the gun I'd been carrying across France, and then it clicked. Of course he was that stupid, he was the idiot who'd sent me over too late, which got me on the wrong side, so he was obviously the reason why I'd been fighting the with them. He committed more treason than I did, because our whole damn battalion had been shooting our way across France, and he was responsible for every bullet fired, even the accidental ones. So I shot him in the face for being a treasonous prick who betrayed our country, then I went home and changed my name to Harold. Couple years later in crazy French time, some of the revolutionaries actually sent me some mail inviting me to a coronation they'd set up, but I missed it 'cause I was off in India at the time. Pity, I think I'd make a good king. All the kings today are old, senile and never get into the thick of it, I can't believe anyone respects them."
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Topic: COVEN: Gulled Goldsmiths and Lost Locomotives (Read 145944 times)