From the Tippelbruder Realzeitung, 8th August 1757: Rumours abound in the town today that last night a plot to deliver Tippelbruder to the Stagonians without a shot being fired was thwarted. It is said that the nephew of Max Osterling, Secretary to the General Council of Tippelbruder, has been arrested after the discovery of a treasonable correspondence with the Stagonians. The nephew, Karl Kopfarbeiter, is a well known drunken idle layabout who has squandered the talents he showed at the university of Saxe-Bearstein many years ago (he was inter-university tiddleywinks champion 3 years running) and embarrassed his family by his behaviour. However, he was until now generally regarded as harmless, if largely worthless. His most notorious habit was the long list of tall invisible friends he loudly claimed to have, including a 6-foot dormouse, a stag-beetle and a one-legged postilion; certainly his only real "friends" have long been his drinking companions in the stews of Tippelbruder.
Latest: Sources close to the Town Council have revealed that it is true that Karl Kopfarbeiter has indeed been arrested for involvement in a plot to let Stagonian troops in to Tippelbruder through one of the postern gates; he was apparently to have given the guards ale dosed with poppy juice and opened the gate at a pre-arranged signal with the troops waiting outside the moat. A family friend of the Kopfarbeiters has also claimed that Karl blames his latest invisible friend for telling him to do it; this invisible friend is a 7-feet tall white-clad hussar, with an eye patch. In a sinister turn of events, one of our reporters who has been interviewing some of Karl's drinking companions at the notorious dive "The Owl and Strumpet" in Klinkengasse Strasse tells us that several claimed (admittedly after copious libations with 3-pfennig doses of rum) that a tall man, with an eye patch and a long pipe, wearing a voluminous black cloak from head to feet, has been seen hanging about in various alehouses in Tippelbruder. Two men claimed that they had glimpsed a white uniform of some description under the cloak.
More to follow...
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2 comments:
Count Rudolf von Drednoz blanched as he read the letter delivered to him. He knew what would happen when he passed the news to his King . . .
"Cursed, foiled again!" growled Koenig Maurice when he heard the latest news from Tippelbruder. "We'll just have to move on to PLAN B . . . or is it PLAN C? Anyway, see to."
"Yes, your Majesty, at once."
A Monte-Cristan lady, by pure coincidence prsent on the spot, witnessed the events and sent by carrier pigeon a report widely confirming, among other details, the description of the "7-feet tall white-clad hussar, with an eye patch".
While did she had to send a report to the Presipapal Palace is entirely another matter, better not discussed here.
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