A Lesson in Alternate History
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 56027
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Awkward silence followed the Baron's statement. Fred refrained from
speaking because he was too far lost in thought, and Stacy was too
shocked from his statement to try to contradict it.
After several minutes of tunnel-wandering, Fred finally spoke again. "Mistake, this really, really, can't be good." "You can say that again." "No, you don't understand. Your mind is - well, not right. You've been having amnesia attacks since you were ten. Now you're starting to make up a whole new persona. I thought just one was enough, but now you have to go around convinced you're this Stacy Jones character." Stacy repeated what was left of her sanity. "My name is Stacy Jones. I live in New York. I look remarkably like a character in a series of comic books by Stephen Allar." "You're really convinced of this, aren't you? York - York - Duke of York. Yes, that might be it. Do you remember anything about the Duke of York?" "Duke of York?" Stacy thought long and hard about anything she might have learned in her American History class in high school. "Yeah - he's the guy New York's named after. He conquered the Dutch city of New Amsterdam in the 1600's." Fred's laughter bounced off the sewer walls. "He didn't even bother to come out to fight, sent some guy named Nicholls or something. We knocked him and his troops all the way back across the Atlantic! Wasn't till the revolution of '76 that we got assimilated into English-speaking culture. Darned General Howe went right through us to get to Philadelphia." Stacy was very confused. Some of it sounded close to right - she couldn't remember her history that well. But some of it sounded completely wrong. "That's not what I remember." "Gosh, Mistake, don't you remember any history? 1664. Battle of Fort Christina. We were getting routed, badly, when an unexpected group of battle mages showed up, cut Nicolls' forces in two, then slaughtered the smaller group. Battle turned the whole tide of the war; people finally cared enough to support us, and with that kind of support it was easy to finish them off." Stacy squinted as the artificial light of the sewers turned into the bright sunlight of the above ground. She must have gotten thrown into some parallel world where magic prevented the assimilation that Stacy had known to be true. Somehow, though, all the other events seemed similar. But if the sheer presence of magic could disrupt one event, who knows what else it could disrupt, with disastrous consequences?
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unknown adventurer
1/10/2006 11:34:04 PM
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