Story telling game – High Priestess

[gregory]

This is the thread for stories from the Story Telling Game. Do not post anything here except for the stories. Comments and thoughts about them should go in the newest signup thread.

This round is 2 - High Priestess.

Please say which deck you are using, and post an attachment with a picture of the card, or a link to one. For dates and threads for future cards, please check the first post of the signup thread.

[gregory]

It was a magical forest, where all the animals lived together in harmony. No fighting, no real arguments – just the day to day minutiae of who hid whose nuts, and who gets to play goalie in the forest foot-nut game.

But it wasn't perfect, thought Patrick the chipmunk. No arguments should mean everything going just right. But it wasn’t going just right.

Patrick loved Patricia. But from afar. He ached to get close to her – but he only looked at her – he never dared say anything. He was like that – got tongue-tied a lot. Sometimes he looked at the black-eyes Susans under the trees and wondered – maybe if I picked a few and gave them to her…. But chipmunks aren’t big on flowers as romantic gestures; she’d only eat them, he thought.

He was desperate for a Big Gesture he could make to attract her attention and let her know how he felt. But he couldn’t think of a thing.

One day, he decided this had all gone on too long. He needed advice. He screwed up all his chipmunk courage (there’s more courage than you might think in your average chipmunk) and decided to go and ask the High Priestess of the forest for help. That’s a very brave thing for a chipmunk to do, considering that the High Priestess is an elephant…..

He walked all the way to the part of the forest where she sat all day on a tree stump, reading her books and her scrolls and meditating. Hardly anyone ever came to talk to her, so he had no idea what to expect.

He trotted into her glade, bowed deeply and waited. She motioned him to a stump next to her, and he climbed up onto it and opened his mouth to speak. To his horror, he found that he couldn’t utter a word.

He needn’t have worried. In a surprisingly high voice, she said, “You have a love problem.”

Well, he thought, that was easy to guess; almost everyone did at some time, and it is the sort of thing you ask for advice about. But her next words astonished him. “You love Patricia, and you think she doesn't know you exist.”

Patrick almost fell off his stump. They weren't kidding when they said she was wise, he thought. She must be a magician.

“H-h-h-how d-d-did you…..?”

The High Priestess smiled to herself. It’s not easy to see when an elephant is smiling, and not a lot of people knew that she smiled a lot.

“I’m no magician,” she said. “I’m not even clairvoyant. I don’t even know all that much, What you find in books isn’t real life at all, and hardly anyone ever comes to visit me. But just before you came, I had another visitors. Two in one day – that hasn’t happened to me in years.”

She lifted her massive book out of the way, and to his amazement, Patrick saw Patricia, who immediately turned her back on him and blushed all over.

“Well ?” said the High Priestess. “I don’t know how these things are usually handled but aren’t you going to do something about this ?”

Patrick hopped down from his stump and thought for a moment. Then he picked a particularly large black-eyed Susan and trotted over to Patricia.

“F-fancy a s-s-snack ?” he asked.

The rest is history. Maybe.