I realize it is wrong on many levels for a writer to be amused by his own words, but keep in mind I don’t consider myself to have invented Mickey the Witch of Williamsburg, but rather to have discovered him from the Muse who whispered him to me.
This is a scene from HERMETIC MILLENNIA (on sale now!). The setup is this: archeologists of the race of the Blue Men in the year 10515 AD have looted a ultralongeterm hibernation facility, and woken the slumberers from several different eras and previous civilizations.
One of the men they woke is Menelaus Montrose, the inventor of suspended animation. Over the centuries and millennia, a myth has grown up around him, and the more superstitious centuries regard him as a godling, like Anubis, the guardian of tombs and sacred crypts where the ancestors rest.
He is said to condemn any age of history which does not maintain a technology level sufficient for space flight, and to sentence the civilizations of that age to apocalypse and destruction: and therefore this fearsome figure is called the Judge of Ages.
He actually does possess the art, learned from supremely advanced and mysterious aliens, of statistical prediction of the future, something like the ‘psychohistory’ of Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION stories, and so can predict the downfall of civilizations, or set in motion events calculated to cause a downfall. So the myth of a Judge of ages is not baseless, even though it is not accurate.
One of his loyal allies is a warlock from one of the more superstitious of the many Dark Ages cratering the landscape of history, a man named Melechemoshemyazanagual Onmyoji de Concepcion, Padre Bruja-Stregone of Donna Verdant Coven at the Holy Fortress at Williamsburg. Since that is impossible for poor Meany Montrose to pronounce, he calls him Mickey.
The archeological dig is also a prison camp, where the disinterred and thawed out slumberers are kept, and forced to work digging up other hibernating relics from ages long lost. Outside the wire, the world is suffering an Ice Age, and whether or not Menelaus Montrose’s ancient enemy, Ximen del Azarchel, is still alive, or whether anyone is still alive, is a matter of debate.
We join the conversation as Mickey and Meany are discussing the aircraft they can glimpse in a small airfield beyond the prison camp wire.
And, of course, the amusement value of any editorial hidden in a tale has nothing to do with the soundness of the argument given. If the reader already has a definite opinion opposing the writer’s, or if the reader has hair-triggered skepticism in general, will he be likely even to notice he is being played for a sap.