Well out of the blue I just remembered today the time I accidentally joined the cast of a production of The Princess Bride….in the middle of the production.
And you’re gonna just leave us there
I mean, if you guys wanna hear the story, it is a pretty fun one
Okay, so this is what happened,
Some years ago (6? 7 years ago, I think?) there was a pirate exhibit at the state museum. We had actual artifacts from the Queen Anne’s Revenge, creepy wax dummies, historical costumes etc, it was awesome.
I was really into Pirates of the Caribbean at the time, because I played the mmorpg with some high school friends of mine (and some of their parents sometimes, who also got addicted to it), so of course when they announced “Pirate Night at the Museum”, in which visitors were encouraged to dress up, I was over the moon. So I’m there with my friends, my parents, and my sisters, running around the exhibits after the museum is technically closed.
They replaced the creepy wax dummies with people in costume at this point, and it was pretty epic.
The highlight of the night would be a showing of The Princess Bride. The movie would play on the big screen while actors would be on a stage below, acting the whole thing out word for word and shot for shot as it happened. Any audience members who knew lines were encouraged to shout them out as they heard them.
Here’s the thing. My parents love that movie. Like you don’t understand they were quoting it to us in its entirety when we were still in highchairs. I could reenact the battle of wits scene before I ever actually watched it. So my family sits in the front row, behind the railing, quoting everything right along with the actors and film.
And then comes the part in the Pit of Despair with the Albino. And the cast didn’t have anyone on the stage with Wesley. I don’t know if the Albino couldn’t make it that night, or if they’d never cast him, but it was really weird to see Wesley just lying on the stage awkwardly while the Albino is supposed to be treating his injuries.
I started twitching. My mom and sister look at me and they’re like “do it.” And one of the ushers is like “you know the part? do it”
So I launch over the railing, run up onto the stage, and take over from there, doing my best impression of the character. Being that I was a 5′2″ blonde girl in a corset and puffy sleeves, Wesley had some trouble keeping a straight face.
Then they got to the scene with Humperdink telling the guard to clear out the Thieves’ Forest, and…they didn’t have the guard either. So my twin sister up in the audience is like “hang on, I got this” and then she launches over the railing to make sure Humperdink isn’t just sitting awkwardly talking to thin air.
This meant that yes, I got bopped on the noggin by Fezzik, and yes, my sister got to do the “Give us the key.” “What key?” “Fezzik, tear his arms off.” “Oh, you mean this key!”
They made up stay on stage and take a bow with the cast when it was over, it was hilarious. Then the next year, since they still had the exhibit, the museum called my sister and was like, “So….that was super fun last year. Do you and your sister want to be audience plants and do it again this year?”
The answer, naturally, was heck yes. Since we had new volunteers playing Count Rugen and Inigo this time, this also led to my sister actually choreographing their fight scene herself. Which was awesome.
My favorite part is that this is entirely in tone for Princess Bride.
Adorable baby fakes crying when daddy tries to cut her fingernails. (x)
Can anyone provide a translation? I kinda wanna know what he’s saying.
Dad: Wait a little bit, it’s just this tip here. Can you wait please?
{Baby cries Dad laughs}
Dad: My love, wait! {laughs} wa- wait! Wait.
[tries again, baby cries, he laughs}
Dad: Ok. Wait, okay? Without crying, okay? Wait.
[Baby screams, he looks up laughing]
Dad: (laughing) You scared me! Wait, I’m just going to cut off the little tip. Oh sweet jesus what a riot. Okay wait, just the little tip. {baby fake cries} Okay, stay calm. Wait, just stay calm.
[baby cries again]
Dad [laughs]: Oh no.Okay wait, wait, just the little tip.
I want Terry Crews and Vin Diesel to do a buddy cop movie where they are both secret nerds but they don’t want the other to know. Like Vin Diesel plays D & D on weekends and Terry likes to create epic crossover fan art. Somehow they have to work undercover at Comic Con and for what ever reason I need Daniel Radcliffe to be the villain.
I’d like to add: not a character played by Dan Radcliffe. Dan Radcliffe, appearing as himself.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions of Gonzo the Great: Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it.
But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?
Don’t eat their food. If human food passes your lips/beak/membrane/other way of ingesting nutrients, you will never be satisfied with your ration bars again.
Don’t tell them your name. Humans can find you again once they know your name and this can be either life-saving or the absolute worst thing that could happen to you, depending on whether or not they favor you. Better to be on the safe side.
Winning a human’s favor will ensure that a great deal of luck is on your side, but if you anger them, they are wholly capable of wiping out everything you ever cared about. Do not anger them.
If you must anger them, carry a cage of X’arvizian bloodflies with you, for they resemble Earth mo-skee-toes and the human will avoid them.
This does not always work. Have a last will and testament ready.
Do not let them take you anywhere on your planet that you cannot fly a ship from. Beings who are spirited away to the human kingdom of Aria Fiv-Ti Won rarely return, and those that do are never quite the same.
Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.
We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar.
The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-Class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.
And then it wasn’t. And we all stopped laughing.Instead, we got very, very nervous.
We watched as the human civilizations not only survived, but grew, and thrived, and invented things that we had never even conceived of. Terrible things, weapons of war, implements of destruction as brutal and powerful as one would imagine a death world’s children to be. In the space of less than two thousand years, they had already produced implements of mass death that would have horrified the most callous dictators in the long, dark history of the galaxy.
Already, the children of Earth were the most terrifying creatures in the galaxy. They became the stuff of horror stories, nightly warnings told to children; huge, hulking, brutish things, that hacked and slashed and stabbed and shot and burned and survived, that built monstrous metal things that rumbled across the landscape and blasted buildings to ruin.
All that preserved us was their lack of space flight. In their obsession with murdering one another, the humans had locked themselves into a rigid framework of physics that thankfully omitted the equations necessary to achieve interstellar travel.
They became our bogeymen. Locked away in their prison planet, surrounded by a cordon of non-interference, prevented from ravaging the galaxy only by their own insatiable need to kill one another. Gruesome and terrible, yes – but at least we were safe.
Or so we thought.
The cities were called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the moment of their destruction, the humans unlocked a destructive force greater than any of us could ever have believed possible. It was at that moment that those of us who studied their technology knew their escape to be inevitable, and that no force in the universe could have hoped to stand against them.
The first human spacecraft were… exactly what we should have expected them to be. There were no elegant solar wings, no sleek, silvered hulls plying the ocean of stars. They did not soar on the stellar currents. They did not even register their existence. Humanity flew in the only way it could: on all-consuming pillars of fire, pounding space itself into submission with explosion after explosion. Their ships were crude, ugly, bulky things, huge slabs of metal welded together, built to withstand the inconceivable forces necessary to propel themselves into space through violence alone.
It was almost comical. The huge, dumb brutes simply strapped an explosive to their backs and let it throw them off of the planet.
We would have laughed, if it hadn’t terrified us.
Humanity, at long last, was awake.
It was a slow process. It took them nearly a hundred years to reach their nearest planetary neighbor; a hundred more to conquer the rest of their solar system. The process of refining their explosive propulsion systems – now powered by the same force that had melted their cities into glass less than a thousand years before – was slow and haphazard. But it worked. Year by year, they inched outward, conquering and subduing world after world that we had deemed unfit for habitation. They burrowed into moons, built orbital colonies around gas giants, even crafted habitats that drifted in the hearts of blazing nebulas. They never stopped. Never slowed.
The no-contact cordon was generous, and was extended by the day. As human colonies pushed farther and farther outward, we retreated, gave them the space that they wanted in a desperate attempt at… stalling for time, perhaps. Or some sort of appeasement. Or sheer, abject terror. Debates were held daily, arguing about whether or not first contact should be initiated, and how, and by whom, and with what failsafes. No agreement was ever reached.
We were comically unprepared for the humans to initiate contact themselves.
It was almost an accident. The humans had achieved another breakthrough in propulsion physics, and took an unexpected leap of several hundred light years, coming into orbit around an inhabited world.
What ensued was the diplomatic equivalent of everyone staring awkwardly at one another for a few moments, and then turning around and walking slowly out of the room.
The human ship leapt away after some thirty minutes without initiating any sort of formal communications, but we knew that we had been discovered, and the message of our existence was being carried back to Terra.
The situation in the senate could only be described as “absolute, incoherent panic”. They had discovered us before our preparations were complete. What would they want? What demands would they make? What hope did we have against them if they chose to wage war against us and claim the galaxy for themselves? The most meager of human ships was beyond our capacity to engage militarily; even unarmed transport vessels were so thickly armored as to be functionally indestructible to our weapons.
We waited, every day, certain that we were on the brink of war. We hunkered in our homes, and stared.
Across the darkness of space, humanity stared back.
There were other instances of contact. Human ships – armed, now – entering colonized space for a few scant moments, and then leaving upon finding our meager defensive batteries pointed in their direction. They never initiated communications. We were too frightened to.
A few weeks later, the humans discovered Alphari-296.
It was a border world. A new colony, on an ocean planet that was proving to be less hospitable than initially thought. Its military garrison was pitifully small to begin with. We had been trying desperately to shore it up, afraid that the humans might sense weakness and attack, but things were made complicated by the disease – the medical staff of the colonies were unable to devise a cure, or even a treatment, and what pitifully small population remained on the planet were slowly vomiting themselves to death.
When the human fleet arrived in orbit, the rest of the galaxy wrote Alphari-296 off as lost.
I was there, on the surface, when the great gray ships came screaming down from the sky. Crude, inelegant things, all jagged metal and sharp edges, barely holding together. I sat there, on the balcony of the clinic full of patients that I did not have the resources or the expertise to help, and looked up with the blank, empty, numb stare of one who is certain that they are about to die.
I remember the symbols emblazoned on the sides of each ship, glaring in the sun as the ships landed inelegantly on the spaceport landing pads that had never been designed for anything so large. It was the same symbol that was painted on the helmets of every human that strode out of the ships, carrying huge black cases, their faces obscured by dark visors. It was the first flag that humans ever carried into our worlds.
It was a crude image of a human figure, rendered in simple, straight lines, with a dot for the head. It was painted in white, over a red cross.
The first human to approach me was a female, though I did not learn this until much later – it was impossible to ascertain gender through the bulky suit and the mask. But she strode up the stairs onto the balcony, carrying that black case that was nearly the size of my entire body, and paused as I stared blankly up at her. I was vaguely aware that I was witnessing history, and quite certain that I would not live to tell of it.
Then, to my amazement, she said, in halting, uncertain words, “You are the head doctor?”
I nodded.
The visor cleared. The human bared its teeth at me. I learned later that this was a “grin”, an expression of friendship and happiness among their species.
“We are The Doctors Without Borders,” she said, speaking slowly and carefully. “We are here to help.”
