Here's one of the many things Margret has taught me: you might lose to a weaker opponent if they are faster; you might lose to a slower opponent if they are stronger; but you will *always* lose to an opponent who doesn't tell you the rules until after the game's over.
I was quietly sitting reading a book yesterday when Margret surged in, all insectoid with rapid, jerky, scanning movements and leaking urgency everywhere. She hissed with irritation, and then - brisk; insistent - said to me, "Have you seen the whatsit?"
This is obviously ludicrous.
There wasn't even a mime-clue to accompany the question. (The indicative waving of a foot, say, or that thing some people do where when they're asking for any object whatsoever they hold their hands apart to illustrate the general size of it - Mouth: "Have you got a stool I could borrow?"; Hands: "The top of a stool is about *this* big.") Now, it's hardly unusual for Margret to sweep into a room in the company of ludicrous, but I'm quick to see that the way she's done it here gives me the opportunity to Make a Point. So, at the speed of brain, I script the remainder in my imagination. This is how the whole exchange will play:
Margret: "Ssss... Have you seen the whatsit?"
Mil: "Yes."
Margret: "Yes?"
Mil: "Yes, but it's more impressive viewed from the air than when you're actually travelling across it."
Margret: "What?"
Mil: "Oh - I thought you meant the Øresund bridge between Sweden and Denmark. Were you asking about something else?"
Margret: "Ah, I see what you've done there. You've used the rhetorical device of a vastly unlikely assumption to wryly spotlight the preposterous lack of specificity in my question. Yes, indeed - that gentle arrow was well-aimed and much-deserved, Mil: you are brilliant, handsome and charismatic, and I will start doing some of the washing up from now on."
As I say, this is formulated and performed entirely in my mind, and so it takes only a flashing instant for me to view it, mentally. In Earth time, Margret's words have barely had chance to dissipate into the air and she's looking at me for a response. Thus, without any audible comma, I can begin the scene for real. It goes, *in its entirety*, like this:
Margret: "Ssss... Have you seen the whatsit?"
Mil: "Yes."
Margret: "No, not that." (She makes a geysering, 'You're useless, you are'-style sigh and strides out of the room.)
Pwned.
I defy you to come up with a way in which that makes any sense at all, other than as an exercise conceived *exclusively* to confuse, unsettle and defeat me for sport. And let's be unflinching about how utterly I was taken down here. Not only was my plan made to explode in the barrel, but I was *also* left completely baffled, *and* with A Point, now doomed to be Unmade, lying like a constricting weight on my chest, *and* I couldn't even carry on reading my book in peace as the words now no longer sank in; I read the page multiple times, but each time I got to the end I realised I hadn't absorbed a single thing I'd read as my head had actually been given over to repeatedly re-running our short scene and wondering, "Um... what just happened there?" Quite honestly, she might as well have simply marched into the room and tasered me.
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Originally Posted by rachprice
Oh bugger
I spray and walk away!!
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