Back at the old shed, we were shown through a side door into a courtyard. Captain Grayson handed each person a small tin box with a piece of flint inside. He demonstrated how to produce a spark by striking the side of the box.
Next we each received a tal dish of cold stew and pointed over to where four small fires, unlit, had been set up for us.
Suffice to say, we spent the next hour or so trying to start a fire while our stew slowly transford into lumpy jelly . The tough part was getting the spark to catch, the larger pieces of wood adamantly refusing to have anything to do with flas of any kind. Luckily, we had all watched dozens of pseudo-docuntaries where celebrities pretended to rough it out in the wild.
We needed kindling of so kind and Flossie solved the problem by pulling loose threads off her new top and screwing them up into a bundle. Eventually we got the fire going, well after all the other groups had already started eating their hot stew.
The dishes had a small handle you used to hold it over the flas. The dish was tal. The handle was tal. I think you can guess the results.
We didnt have any kind of utensils, so you had to wait for the stew to cool down before drinking it out of the edge of the dish. Made the whole point of heating it up rather pointless, but we were all so hungry we didnt care. It tasted bland and mainly consisted of potatoes (I think). Still, at least we now knew how to start a fire.
As we sat there, stew dribbling down our chins, I could hear the other groups chatting away, so of them laughing, others complaining. Our group sat in awkward silence. Until, that is Maurice spoke up.
Ive been thinking. This is obviously a pretty backward kind of place, technologically speaking. If we could co up with an invention they havent thought of yet, we could beco bloody millionaires!
Sure, I said. What did you have in mind?
Well, it cant be anything too advanced. Its not like we can suddenly make a computer or a helicopter or sothing like that. The technology isnt there. We need to co up with sothing low-fi. Sothing that a blacksmith could knock together, right?
He looked around and the others nodded enthusiastically.
I havent really had ti to think it through completely, but as a first suggestion, how about we invent the bicycle?
I took the opportunity to introduce my own new concept to this world, the facepalm.
You think what this society is crying out for is the bike? I tried not to sound too dismissive. Im not sure I succeeded, but it didnt seem to matter.
Everything probably depends on horses at the mont, right? continued Maurice, all fired up. But horses cost money to look after. Youve go to feed them, keep them in stables, they shit everywhereits a fullti job. But a bike, you lean it against a wall, job done. These people will never have seen anything like it. Theyll think were wizards!
Sadly, wed probably all be dead long before he got his dream of recreating the Tour de France off the ground, although the idea of knights in full armour charging into battle on a ten-speed chopper had a certain appeal.
However, his idea did make realise we should use our obvious advantage to good effect. The things wed learned at school and seen on television about this sort of period in our own history should allow us to co up with sothing we could useespecially when it ca to weapons.
Even stone age man figured out how to tie a rock to a stick and kill things with it, so we should be able to, too. As the others discussed exactly how the pedals attached to the gears, my mind drifted, thinking of simple weapons we could make. Bows and arrows would probably be quite fiddly to get right, plus youd need a lot of arrows. And sharpened ends wouldnt be all that great compared to actual arrowheads.
After a bit of thinking the best idea seed to be to make a sling. If it worked for David against Goliath, why not for us? You needed a bit of string or sothing similar, and ammo was lying around everywhere. You just picked up small rocks off the ground. The more I thought about it, the better it seed.
As I sat there feeling pleased with myself, I felt a presence next to . I turned to find a girl standing there. It was her, the one with the freckled nose who had helped back in the clearing. She didnt look very happy.
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