All was quiet on the southern front.
There were a good deal of layabouts making some ruckus on the western side, but she had learned to ignore that lot, who never amounted to anything good, especially when they came 'round, asking to borrow her portable stove, and her pack of cards. The ones that were only slightly marked because she'd been experimenting to see if she'd be good at cheating at cards, not that she ever would. Curiousity, was all.
But the southern front remained quiet, which was nice, she liked quiet, even though it was in the midst of the quiet that the strains of Boyzone and Bewitched could be heard blasting over there from the camps on the western front. She really rather didn't like them.
And so, quiet it was, over on the southern front, the melodies of Boyzone thankfully barely audible over the rise, and herself without much more the noisy blokes over there could possibly want to borrow, when a terrible, terrible thing happened.
She was captured by the enemy. Which she should have seen coming, being on the quiet side, as why would the enemy attack a noisy side, when that side promises only to be occupied by loud and unruly characters that are bound to put up a fight?
This all would have been fine, yes, even this circumstance was not the terrible thing that happened. That was to come. She thought while she was being roughly passed down the hillside to the lorry waiting on the road below where she'd been staked out, on the southern front, that this was the terrible thing that had happened, as it wasn't going to look good, not at all, that she'd been captured. And she continued to believe so the entire ride back to the enemy camp, over on their eastern front, and the walk into their camp, amidst a good deal of cheering and carrying on around the prisoner, and especially when it dawned on her that the enemy camp reminded her a good deal of the lads on the western front, and this did little to settle the sinking feeling that this was a terrible situation to find oneself in.
However, the real terrible thing was still to come.
And when they sat her down at a rough-hewn wooden table* and took seats opposite her, she had a very strong feeling that she hadn't experienced the terrible bit yet, which she would have known, had she listened to us.
From the altogether needless gestures that the enemy repeatedly needlessly made (as they spoke the same language as she), she gathered that they were asking her to do the one thing she couldn't do.
Because the lads from the western front had taken her cards, she was left in the lurch, alone, adrift on a sea of desolation, without any hope of aid or rescue, abandoned, of a sort, though it was her own fault she got captured, and not really her comrades fault at all, and quite frighteningly small and powerless to fulfill their request that she teach them how to build a house of cards.
disclaimer:
* Note: That is the same rough-hewn table that makes an appearance in the fable "The Person and the Ingot of Gold," which you probably haven't read, as Asop hasn't ever let anyone read the entire thing, clutching it to his person and waving it about madly whenever he's seen in public. He is not known to have ever put it down for someone's perusal.
Note also that the main reason the two factions had gone to war, besides wanting to play awful pop music very loud, was because one side refused to share their age-old skill for building houses out of a deck of playing cards, and their skill was revered and honoured across the land for it's artistry and beauty. And so, this occasion could have ended the war, had her comrades not stolen her playing cards, but, alas, it was not to be.
Yer Weekly Horoscopes. closing out the millenium early.