D
Darkside Hazuki
Guest
ACKL - The Albion Chicken Kickin' League
(This is kinda long, I know, but I wanted to get it finished in case anyone enjoyed it enough to want to read the whole thing.)
This book titled "The True Story of the ACKL," authored by not-at-all-famous historian Arthur Loveshiswaffles, has not seen use in some time. It appears to have been sitting on the Bowerstone book store's shelf for quite a long period, nestled tightly between "Happiness: A Shortsighted Dummy's Guide to Divorce" and "The Adventures of Bob the Horny Beggar."
The book chronicles the utterly hopeless, failed attempt at a full-fledged sports league dedicated to the somewhat-exciting world of Chicken Kickin'. The league was spearheaded by bored Bowerstone noble Edward Eggington, who had grown supremely tired of watching people get their lungs ripped out in the Crucible (contrary to what one might be lead to believe, when you've seen a man get flicked across a room by a rock troll's finger more than a hundred times, it does get a little old), and he had run out of ways to flaunt his wealth and waste his money on idiotic things no one with half a brain would ever consider worth buying. He desired action in his drab life, and thus set out to create a sports league that would tour across Albion so people wouldn't have to risk being attacked by Balverines and, more importantly, wear out their shoes walking all the way to Westcliff to see some kind of competition.
With the help of three friends (who thankfully had some passing knowledge of how to manage a business endeavor, as one of them had spent five years in Knothole Glade trying to sell animals that had been stepped on by various other, larger animals), Eggington set to work on figuring out how to get the league going. The first issue was to figure out what kind of competition the league would be centered around. Eggington, who was financing the endeavor, argued that while the Crucible was a fine display of somewhat-sportsmanlike competition in its own right, they should try to pick a sport that hadn't already been done, so to speak--so as to give the people of Albion something different.
As the men tried to come up with ideas for a new sport, there were various suggestions, most of which were embarrassingly terrible. Gaylord Stein, for example, suggested some type of competition that perhaps involved a man hitting a ball with a stick, and then running to what he called a "base." His suggestion was met with enthusiastic ridicule, but H.L. Huffinpuff topped it by suggesting a sport where one kicks a ball around with one's feet and tries to get it into a "goal" without using his hands or arms. Eggington was appalled and told Huffinpuff that no one in their right mind would ever want to play or watch something so humiliatingly stupid. They wanted a sport the entire world would enjoy, not something the entire world would laugh at.
Big Fat Joe mentioned that a few days before, he had once kicked a noisy chicken to shut it up, and that in doing so he had rather enjoyed himself, so he'd done it again for the sole purpose of seeing how far the feathery fellow flew, after which he had done it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. The men considered this, liked the idea, and after many hours of intense, deep deliberation, had their sport: Kick a chicken as hard as you can and if you kick it the furthest, you win.
With their brilliant idea in hand, the founders went to Bowerstone Market to hype their new sport and con-- recruit potential athletes into the new league. All sports needed athletes, after all.
"Fame and fortune will be yours!" they proffered to anyone who would listen, which ended up being very few people at all. "Fame and fortune! You know you love fame, fortune, and all the fine little things that come with fame and fortune! Come on! Fame! Fortune! Come on! Hello? F-A-M-E! All that! Damn it, are you people deaf? Don't you want fame and fortune? What? Oh, that's just rude. I-- you come back here and say that, you snivelling--" And so on--at least until they were asked by the sheriff to keep it down, or they'd be fined for disturbing the peace.
In the end, only four people were stupid enough to join up with the league. The first to be employed was a powerful, well-toned adventurer named Griff McBride. He claimed to have just returned from a hard bit of adventuring, and was always looking out for more adventure. Adventure was his middle name. People loved adventurers. People loved adventurous men. Adventure, adventure, adventure. McBride asked Gaylord Stein if he liked adventurers. Stein replied that he had never really considered it before. McBride said he would like to take him on an adventure sometime, much to Stein's disturbed confusion.
The second to join was a not-very-attractive-at-all young woman called Kathleen Korpulent. She seemed only interested in joining because of McBride's presence, despite McBride being utterly oblivious to her for almost the entirety of the league's existence. The founders liked the idea of having a woman on the tour, although none of them would have even considered touching her with a forty-foot pole.
The third to sign up was Speedy, the local carriage horse. No one really knows how Speedy got signed up, or if he managed to do it himself in the first place. The founders checked their roster at one point during the sign-up process, and Speedy's name was on it, and he was standing there eating Big Fat Joe's big fat hat. They could find no fault with having him on the tour (actions regarding unfair employment discrimination was an increasing problem throughout Albion), though there was some discussion about who was to clean up after him when a very obvious problem made itself apparent. Big Fat Joe got the short end of that deal.
Last and most certainly least to join was a poor little idiot by the creative name of Bandit. Bandit said he was a bandit, and was obsessed with the idea of being a mysterious, mask-wearing, notorious, trouble-causing bandit, though in practice he needed a lot of work.
Some time back, he had been staying at the Bowerstone inn, and he had snuck out of his room in the middle of the night to go sneaking, because that's what bandits did. He broke into a room and stole everything of the owner's, then went out and snuck around some more. When he returned to his room he found everything he owned had been stolen, and he immediately reported it to a guard. The guard came and inspected the room, only to find all the stolen property in Bandit's possession because he had robbed his own room. So Bandit got locked up in the Bowerstone jail for a few days for stealing his own stuff. It was really rather pitiful, the guards felt. They were kind of embarrassed about it.
It wasn't the finest array of athletes ever assembled, and McBride looked like the only one competent enough to kick a chicken and not kill himself or someone else doing it, but Eggington and the other league founders were mind-numbingly confident in their new employees' chicken kickin' abilities. After some obligatory marketing that involved Huffinpuff screaming at the top of his lungs to the entire town about the league, it was decided: The first game of the Albion Chicken Kickin' League's inaugural season would be held at Oakfield, the next in Westcliff, and the final right there in the heart of Bowerstone. Not the longest season by any stretch of the imagination, but they were just getting started.
The journey to Oakfield was the first sign of potential problems for the tour. Kathleen Korpulent fell off a cliff three times, and each time it happened the others failed to help her because they were laughing too hard about how she looked like a boulder rolling down a hill. Additionally, Big Fat Joe sold Speedy to a wandering merchant for a will potion, despite having no working knowledge of will powers himself, and the group spent the better part of a day reversing the deal.
Worse yet was that when they set up camp one night, it became evident that Bandit had certain tendencies while sleeping. McBride would later describe the phenomenon as "the kind of sound a banshee and salsa singer make while doing the nasty with each other." Rolling around in his sleeping bag and grinding his teeth so loudly the rest of the group swore they were breaking out of his head, Bandit would frequently alert others as to what kind of interesting dream he might be having with statements ranging from anything between "AWOOOOOOOOOYIYIYIYIYI" to "MOOOOOOOOWAAAYAYAYAYA." This would go on throughout the entire night, and it would continue throughout the tour, with all others displaying fine efforts to keep from murdering the little weirdo.
Later, the entourage was attacked by bandits, who fired flintlock rifles down at them from a higher elevation. While the others were pinned down and likely soiling themselves, McBride and Bandit hurried to the rescue. This was a spectacular failure in its own right because it turned out McBride was the single worst shot with a pistol in the entire universe (at one point he almost shot Eggington), and Bandit ran off into the woods to find a way up to where the other outlaws were, waving his rusty cutlass and screaming like a psycho the entire time. Eventually the enemy attackers got bored and left, though it took the entourage two days to realize this, after which they had to go find Bandit, who'd gotten himself lost in the woods and had since been taken in by a family of squirrels.
When they finally reached Oakfield, another problem presented itself, in that none of them actually had any chickens to kick. Eggington, with his wallet in tow, set out to remedy this issue by offering to buy a local farmer's entire stock of chickens.
The farmer would have none of this, as he was far too attached to his flock to see them used for something as self-righteous and unsightly as human competition. Incensed, Eggington argued with him for at least two hours straight, claiming chickens were good for nothing but getting fat, being eaten, and kicking the crap out of. Unbeknownst to many, this farmer would later go on to found PETA, much to Albion's disgust.
Since his stuffy opulence had failed him, Eggington decided to dispense with the nobilities and play rough. He demanded that Bandit go and steal some of the farmer's chickens, lest they have to play Chicken Kickin' with something else, like a ball (this possibility was met with horror by everyone). Bandit made his attempt late that night, and proudly returned with the farmer's infant son. Eggington took a few minutes to explain what a chicken looked like. A second attempt brought back the farmer's wife. Only when McBride went with him in order to point out what was a chicken and what wasn't did Bandit succeed in his task.
The following morning, the first game took place in front of the Sandgoose Tavern. A massive crowd of three people came to witness the event, as the ticket price of one gold piece was far too high for most Oakfielders to pay, despite Huffinpuff's best efforts to market the sport around town. While the first-ever ACKL game got started, most everyone else in Oakfield were busy tending farms, getting drunk, or wondering where their chickens were. The Official Game Chicken was placed on the ground, and everyone was ready to go.
McBride was the first to give it a whirl. He decided that he wanted a running start, and the founders could find no problem with this. Game-face on, McBride strode backwards, further and further, until he was out of sight.
A few hours later, he reappeared, running down the road towards them and kicking up the largest dust cloud in Albion's recorded history. Some who witnessed his run recall it being much like a mighty stampede, driven like an oncoming force of hurricanes that sought to obliterate everything in their unstoppable path of death and terror, a glorious coming of the apocalypse that signaled the awesome, magnificent sensation that was Chicken Kickin'. McBride's leg swung back, flew forth in a cataclysmic thunder of wind, and he missed the chicken by a mile. The most spectacular wipeout in Albion's recorded history followed, and the league founders spent the next hour pulling him out of the Sandgoose's wall.
Kathleen Korpulent was up next. Rather than kicking the chicken (which would have put her into the lead by default), she picked it up and began stroking its feathers, sputtering about how it was the cutest thing, until it mistook her nose for a worm and bit it. Not that many could tell the difference either. She broke league rules by throwing it, and as a result, was disqualified.
(This is kinda long, I know, but I wanted to get it finished in case anyone enjoyed it enough to want to read the whole thing.)
This book titled "The True Story of the ACKL," authored by not-at-all-famous historian Arthur Loveshiswaffles, has not seen use in some time. It appears to have been sitting on the Bowerstone book store's shelf for quite a long period, nestled tightly between "Happiness: A Shortsighted Dummy's Guide to Divorce" and "The Adventures of Bob the Horny Beggar."
The book chronicles the utterly hopeless, failed attempt at a full-fledged sports league dedicated to the somewhat-exciting world of Chicken Kickin'. The league was spearheaded by bored Bowerstone noble Edward Eggington, who had grown supremely tired of watching people get their lungs ripped out in the Crucible (contrary to what one might be lead to believe, when you've seen a man get flicked across a room by a rock troll's finger more than a hundred times, it does get a little old), and he had run out of ways to flaunt his wealth and waste his money on idiotic things no one with half a brain would ever consider worth buying. He desired action in his drab life, and thus set out to create a sports league that would tour across Albion so people wouldn't have to risk being attacked by Balverines and, more importantly, wear out their shoes walking all the way to Westcliff to see some kind of competition.
With the help of three friends (who thankfully had some passing knowledge of how to manage a business endeavor, as one of them had spent five years in Knothole Glade trying to sell animals that had been stepped on by various other, larger animals), Eggington set to work on figuring out how to get the league going. The first issue was to figure out what kind of competition the league would be centered around. Eggington, who was financing the endeavor, argued that while the Crucible was a fine display of somewhat-sportsmanlike competition in its own right, they should try to pick a sport that hadn't already been done, so to speak--so as to give the people of Albion something different.
As the men tried to come up with ideas for a new sport, there were various suggestions, most of which were embarrassingly terrible. Gaylord Stein, for example, suggested some type of competition that perhaps involved a man hitting a ball with a stick, and then running to what he called a "base." His suggestion was met with enthusiastic ridicule, but H.L. Huffinpuff topped it by suggesting a sport where one kicks a ball around with one's feet and tries to get it into a "goal" without using his hands or arms. Eggington was appalled and told Huffinpuff that no one in their right mind would ever want to play or watch something so humiliatingly stupid. They wanted a sport the entire world would enjoy, not something the entire world would laugh at.
Big Fat Joe mentioned that a few days before, he had once kicked a noisy chicken to shut it up, and that in doing so he had rather enjoyed himself, so he'd done it again for the sole purpose of seeing how far the feathery fellow flew, after which he had done it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. The men considered this, liked the idea, and after many hours of intense, deep deliberation, had their sport: Kick a chicken as hard as you can and if you kick it the furthest, you win.
With their brilliant idea in hand, the founders went to Bowerstone Market to hype their new sport and con-- recruit potential athletes into the new league. All sports needed athletes, after all.
"Fame and fortune will be yours!" they proffered to anyone who would listen, which ended up being very few people at all. "Fame and fortune! You know you love fame, fortune, and all the fine little things that come with fame and fortune! Come on! Fame! Fortune! Come on! Hello? F-A-M-E! All that! Damn it, are you people deaf? Don't you want fame and fortune? What? Oh, that's just rude. I-- you come back here and say that, you snivelling--" And so on--at least until they were asked by the sheriff to keep it down, or they'd be fined for disturbing the peace.
In the end, only four people were stupid enough to join up with the league. The first to be employed was a powerful, well-toned adventurer named Griff McBride. He claimed to have just returned from a hard bit of adventuring, and was always looking out for more adventure. Adventure was his middle name. People loved adventurers. People loved adventurous men. Adventure, adventure, adventure. McBride asked Gaylord Stein if he liked adventurers. Stein replied that he had never really considered it before. McBride said he would like to take him on an adventure sometime, much to Stein's disturbed confusion.
The second to join was a not-very-attractive-at-all young woman called Kathleen Korpulent. She seemed only interested in joining because of McBride's presence, despite McBride being utterly oblivious to her for almost the entirety of the league's existence. The founders liked the idea of having a woman on the tour, although none of them would have even considered touching her with a forty-foot pole.
The third to sign up was Speedy, the local carriage horse. No one really knows how Speedy got signed up, or if he managed to do it himself in the first place. The founders checked their roster at one point during the sign-up process, and Speedy's name was on it, and he was standing there eating Big Fat Joe's big fat hat. They could find no fault with having him on the tour (actions regarding unfair employment discrimination was an increasing problem throughout Albion), though there was some discussion about who was to clean up after him when a very obvious problem made itself apparent. Big Fat Joe got the short end of that deal.
Last and most certainly least to join was a poor little idiot by the creative name of Bandit. Bandit said he was a bandit, and was obsessed with the idea of being a mysterious, mask-wearing, notorious, trouble-causing bandit, though in practice he needed a lot of work.
Some time back, he had been staying at the Bowerstone inn, and he had snuck out of his room in the middle of the night to go sneaking, because that's what bandits did. He broke into a room and stole everything of the owner's, then went out and snuck around some more. When he returned to his room he found everything he owned had been stolen, and he immediately reported it to a guard. The guard came and inspected the room, only to find all the stolen property in Bandit's possession because he had robbed his own room. So Bandit got locked up in the Bowerstone jail for a few days for stealing his own stuff. It was really rather pitiful, the guards felt. They were kind of embarrassed about it.
It wasn't the finest array of athletes ever assembled, and McBride looked like the only one competent enough to kick a chicken and not kill himself or someone else doing it, but Eggington and the other league founders were mind-numbingly confident in their new employees' chicken kickin' abilities. After some obligatory marketing that involved Huffinpuff screaming at the top of his lungs to the entire town about the league, it was decided: The first game of the Albion Chicken Kickin' League's inaugural season would be held at Oakfield, the next in Westcliff, and the final right there in the heart of Bowerstone. Not the longest season by any stretch of the imagination, but they were just getting started.
The journey to Oakfield was the first sign of potential problems for the tour. Kathleen Korpulent fell off a cliff three times, and each time it happened the others failed to help her because they were laughing too hard about how she looked like a boulder rolling down a hill. Additionally, Big Fat Joe sold Speedy to a wandering merchant for a will potion, despite having no working knowledge of will powers himself, and the group spent the better part of a day reversing the deal.
Worse yet was that when they set up camp one night, it became evident that Bandit had certain tendencies while sleeping. McBride would later describe the phenomenon as "the kind of sound a banshee and salsa singer make while doing the nasty with each other." Rolling around in his sleeping bag and grinding his teeth so loudly the rest of the group swore they were breaking out of his head, Bandit would frequently alert others as to what kind of interesting dream he might be having with statements ranging from anything between "AWOOOOOOOOOYIYIYIYIYI" to "MOOOOOOOOWAAAYAYAYAYA." This would go on throughout the entire night, and it would continue throughout the tour, with all others displaying fine efforts to keep from murdering the little weirdo.
Later, the entourage was attacked by bandits, who fired flintlock rifles down at them from a higher elevation. While the others were pinned down and likely soiling themselves, McBride and Bandit hurried to the rescue. This was a spectacular failure in its own right because it turned out McBride was the single worst shot with a pistol in the entire universe (at one point he almost shot Eggington), and Bandit ran off into the woods to find a way up to where the other outlaws were, waving his rusty cutlass and screaming like a psycho the entire time. Eventually the enemy attackers got bored and left, though it took the entourage two days to realize this, after which they had to go find Bandit, who'd gotten himself lost in the woods and had since been taken in by a family of squirrels.
When they finally reached Oakfield, another problem presented itself, in that none of them actually had any chickens to kick. Eggington, with his wallet in tow, set out to remedy this issue by offering to buy a local farmer's entire stock of chickens.
The farmer would have none of this, as he was far too attached to his flock to see them used for something as self-righteous and unsightly as human competition. Incensed, Eggington argued with him for at least two hours straight, claiming chickens were good for nothing but getting fat, being eaten, and kicking the crap out of. Unbeknownst to many, this farmer would later go on to found PETA, much to Albion's disgust.
Since his stuffy opulence had failed him, Eggington decided to dispense with the nobilities and play rough. He demanded that Bandit go and steal some of the farmer's chickens, lest they have to play Chicken Kickin' with something else, like a ball (this possibility was met with horror by everyone). Bandit made his attempt late that night, and proudly returned with the farmer's infant son. Eggington took a few minutes to explain what a chicken looked like. A second attempt brought back the farmer's wife. Only when McBride went with him in order to point out what was a chicken and what wasn't did Bandit succeed in his task.
The following morning, the first game took place in front of the Sandgoose Tavern. A massive crowd of three people came to witness the event, as the ticket price of one gold piece was far too high for most Oakfielders to pay, despite Huffinpuff's best efforts to market the sport around town. While the first-ever ACKL game got started, most everyone else in Oakfield were busy tending farms, getting drunk, or wondering where their chickens were. The Official Game Chicken was placed on the ground, and everyone was ready to go.
McBride was the first to give it a whirl. He decided that he wanted a running start, and the founders could find no problem with this. Game-face on, McBride strode backwards, further and further, until he was out of sight.
A few hours later, he reappeared, running down the road towards them and kicking up the largest dust cloud in Albion's recorded history. Some who witnessed his run recall it being much like a mighty stampede, driven like an oncoming force of hurricanes that sought to obliterate everything in their unstoppable path of death and terror, a glorious coming of the apocalypse that signaled the awesome, magnificent sensation that was Chicken Kickin'. McBride's leg swung back, flew forth in a cataclysmic thunder of wind, and he missed the chicken by a mile. The most spectacular wipeout in Albion's recorded history followed, and the league founders spent the next hour pulling him out of the Sandgoose's wall.
Kathleen Korpulent was up next. Rather than kicking the chicken (which would have put her into the lead by default), she picked it up and began stroking its feathers, sputtering about how it was the cutest thing, until it mistook her nose for a worm and bit it. Not that many could tell the difference either. She broke league rules by throwing it, and as a result, was disqualified.
