1.2.4-Dingelchen

Club Ninety-Three, Erster Theil, 1.2.4-1.2.6 Runaway Cannon
'''1.2.4 Tormentum belli.

And lol, runaway cannons. Lol because from way back in my childhood there was such an incident in an audio play that I remember very vividly. That one resulted in someone’s leg having to be amputated. (Well, in the end everyone on board got sentenced to death for mutiny anyway, so…*hands*)



And Hugo does really pretty prose here; well, he does that everywhere but just now it stood out.

And lol again on the spelling, this is so weird. I mean it’s not necessarily large obvious things, but lots of small thing which make your brain go ‘bzuh? hä?’.

Lightning loins *cough*, Hugo what? Okay, I crosschecked and Hugo’s cannon has a lightning bolt trapped in its stomach, which is more fitting than carrying a lightning bolt between its loins (“trägt gewissermaßen einen Blitz zwischen den Lenden”). What even are you doing, Translator?

But then General HugePants is on the way to probably save the day with his Superiorness? That first part rhymed.

'''1.2.5 Vis et vir.

No, still more destruction first. Ew, ew, ew, people mush.

Footnote! for the assignats: foreign nation printing fake French Revolution Money and smuggling it in to cause inflation and devalue French Revolution Money. Financial warfare.

Vieuville does-not-maybe believe in god.

And no, now it’s Cannon Man vs. cannon, which I now see is what’s depicted in the first illustration up top.

And General HugePants comes to the rescue after all, allowing Cannon Man to finally fell the iron beast. With his ‘Nothspake’, which Translator calls the iron bar from the original text; funnily, the first page on google for that is half antique dictionary entries and half this very chapter.

Mastodonts, wikipedia tells me, were named such after 1800, but it’s the from-later-times narrator speaking anyway, so no harm.

The cannon is put back into place, and among the happy and grateful sailors General HugePants keeps working his Stoic and Silent image.



—Cannon Man with the deafeated cannon, I assume. The online version I use seems to have some trouble with mixing up the illustrations around here.

'''1.2.6 Die zwei Wagschalen.

So yeah, immediate comeuppance. General HugePants is pointed out as highest officer on board to deal out justice and rewards. He sentences Cannon Man is to death for negligence, after getting Boisberthelot’s Louis cross, because fair rewards equally for everything even if it’s a wee bit absurd.



Cannon Man gets shot and Boisberthelot is is happy to have is prayers answered for a military leader for the conflict that is both aristocratic enough and Hardcore enough for his tastes. He doesn’t even seem to miss his Louis cross that presumably got thrown overboard with the corpse, at least it wasn’t said that it was taken back.

Well, B, take that, I still copypaste your dumb name every time.