Fred Gets Some Company

Josh had not been on the island more than a couple of hours, when he encountered a man wearing ragged clothes and having an unkempt beard. He carried a wooden sword. From the look of him, he had been on the island for some time. After a brief scuffle over a misunderstanding, Josh introduced himself: "I'm called Josh."

The ragged man gasped with astonishment. This puzzled Josh. After all, "Josh" was a common enough name. "I recognise you now," the man said. "You modestly called yourself 'Josh', but you are actually Sir Joshua, aren't you? I met you once or twice at court functions."

Josh remembered the computer game he had been playing when things had started to get weird. It had been called "Sir Joshua's Quest" and he had taken the part of the eponymous hero. [109] "You wouldn't be Lord Fred by any chance?" he said to the ragged man. "The knight the king sent after the dragon before Sir Joshua?"

"Yes, I am Lord Fred, but why are you referring to yourself in the third person?"

Josh decided that it would be too hard to explain. Even if he succeeded, he doubted that Lord Fred would willingly accept that he was a fictional character. "Never mind," he said. "Tell me, how do you come to be on this island?"

"I don't remember," Fred replied. [1864] "I got swept away by a stream in the dragon's caves, and when I regained consciousness I was somehow on this uninhabited tropical island. I've been here several weeks."

"Have you thought of trying to build a raft to escape?" Josh asked.

1. "I don't want to escape. I rather like it here, though it can get boring at times."
2. "What a good idea! Why didn't I think of that?"
3. "Yes, I thought of it, but decided it would be too difficult."

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