Part 3 - Chapter 1: Prologue

A Chapter by cad

Somewhere in the deepest, darkest parts of eastern Ursa Minor sits a man on a lawn chair, smoking a pipe on a warm yet breezy summer’s day, rocking from side to side in his bowler hat and trying to read War & Peace upside-down back-to-front for the third time this morning. One way in which to spot that this man is very slightly “off his trolley” is to observe him on a Wednesday afternoon, however, unfortunately, as he is stranded in such an insignificantly dull part of space-time, his Tuesday morning seems to have been stuck on repeat for the past few Wednesdays due to losing a bet with a particularly strict Space-Guardian named Throd on his last visit to the slightly less insignificantly dull Ursa Major Museum of Unnatural History.

This man’s name is Wilhelm. He is, to all intents and purposes, “humanoid”, or what he would call “Wilhelmoid”. If you look very deeply into the eyes of another Wilhelmoid you can usually see Wilhelm sitting in his chair or walking his pet Sea Urchin down to the park or walking his way to work, only to be told that he no longer has to work Tuesdays. This has become a ritualistic waste of 43 minutes 15 seconds of his every Tuesday morning after he realised that walking Sea Urchin (the appropriately named Labradoodle) and reading old books so many times the correct way round that he could recite The Ramblings of a Resurrected Rumplestiltskin, a little-known 1987 novel published in the heart of the Bolivian jungle, wasn’t quite interesting enough for the full 43,200 seconds he had to fill every 12 hours.

Wilhelm is what some humans may call a god, however most gods simply call him Wilhelm and carry on with their daily routines, at least until mid-afternoon tea at which point some of them have had enough of the Universe and just go around referring to him as Old Willy (not that he, at a mere 472^π years old, is anywhere near as old as some gods’ great-great-grandchildren). This would most probably irritate Wilhelm if he ever made it to mid-afternoon tea, but as it happens he has long forgotten the inexplicable difference between a cup of tea between 3.00 and 4.36 of an afternoon and at any other time of day.

This is Wilhelm’s story from birth to rebirth to death to redeath and then even Bognor Regis. Let’s start in the middle…wait we’ve already done that; birth then.

next chapter