I, The Turnip

Lord Townshend, aka Lord Turnips awoke with a start. He had recently received a nasty blow to the back of the head from a crew member. But Lord Turnips didn't recall that. All he knew was that he was being fed some sort of vile medicine and he spat it out.

"Whut the hell are you mugs doin'? He grunted.

"Turnips, old bean, are you well?" exclaimed Brigadier Rossoroni.

"Who da hell is Turnips? And who da hell are you pal?" Lord Turnips was clearly not himself. He looked around and found himself surrounded by a very James Mason-ish dapper gentleman in a stylishly cut blue wool suite who was trying to feed him medicine of some sort. He seemed to foggily recall the name Rossoroni as he looked on the charming gent but naught much else came to mind. Also in the room was a familiar face that he recalled from his youth. The face was familiar and he seemed to recall a name that was something about a bird. Maybe the name was Hummingbird, or Finch, or perhaps Cormorant.

(Cormorants are native to many areas of the globe.)

Lord Turnips shook his head Wile-E.-Coyote style and gradually came to recall that before him were Brigadier Rossoroni his old friend from the club back in Blighty, and his school associate Lord Woodpecker Smyth, who Turnips recalled owed him quite a few gold sovereigns for a stage production of Annie Get Your Gun.

Brigadier Rossoroni distracted Lord Woodpecker Smythe by asking him to fetch a copy of Catcher in the Rye from his luggage for him and leaned over and whispered to Lord Turnips.

"I don't think we can trust that one. I think dicky old Woody has been compromised. Not sure exactly what gave it away although if you were awake a few minutes ago you would have seen him acting almost exactly as Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now which we agreed would be his signal that he had been compromised. I was just about to chalk it up to his overactive imagination but he was so pitch perfect in his delivery. I thought, he's actually not good enough of an actor to pull that off unless he was pretending to be a bad actor pulling off a good performance in order to....er, rather...uh, wait, let me start again. I've lost my train of thought. What I mean to say is that I think he's using his duress signal which was a impersonation of Dennis Hopper."

Lord Turnips agreed "Yeah, I seem to recall that that was his duress signal." He thought for a second. "Your duress signal was doing a spot on impersonation of James Mason in North by Northwest." He thought for another second. "And my duress signal was to do the song I'm a Little Teapot while acting out the roles of teapot handle and spout. I believe at the time I was very, very 'in my cups' and acting very silly." Hmmm...not sure if we need to go to all that bother. You seem to be managing the James Mason portrayal pretty well. So what do you imagine is the trouble with Woody?"

Brigadier Rossoroni leaned in again. "Ohhh...one more thing. What I failed to mention 5 minutes ago, was that the Nautilus has been taken over by Lady Marzipan's thugs and she's sailing us to a rendezvous with the brutal Chinese General who has your son prisoner."

At that Lord Turnips did a spit take like no other spit take.

"wha, wha, wha, WHA?!!!!"

With that his mind became a fury of red hot anger. He slapped his forehead like Curly in the Three Stooges and began spinning around the floor and thrashing. He raced to the passage way where a lone member of Lady Marzipan's personal guard was stationed in the hallway armed only with a CHICOM knockoff of a Makarov automatic. Lord Turnips ran up to the guard and before the burly lad could unholster his weapon, Lord Turnips shouted "OY" and drove his forehead square into the nose of the unsuspecting tough.

Lord Turnips ran up a nearby stair to the next deck and seeing two of Lady Marzipan's guards standing on either side of the portal he grabbed both of their heads and crashed them together which produced a delightfully zany bowling pin sound.

Lord Turnips saw another crew member approaching with a cricket bat apparently thinking that this would cow the normally sedentary agriculturally-obsessed aristocrat. But Lady Marzipan's thug didn't know that Lord Turnips was out of his bean because something had in fact had been knocked loose when he went overboard and that he was absolutely gone spare with rage at the notion that some Chinese General had his son captive. Lord Turnips dodged the thug's first swing, caught the bat wielding arm and proceded to whack the thug's head with his own bat into the wall. Lord Turnips held the thug still for a second and rattled the thug's head between the stationary bat and the wall until Marzipan's tough fell to the ground stupified.

Turnips decided to question Marzipan's man to find out what he could about the current situation on the ship. As he did this in unspeakably violent and decidedly too rough a manner for the audience of this blog, Brigadier Rossoroni and Lord Woodpecker Smyth came up to check out his handiwork. Brigadier Rossoroni, as a military man, could only envy the savagery and cartoonishness of this bizarre head-injury inspired Lord Turnips.

Lord Turnips turned to Brigadier Rossoroni and tried to explain himself:

" Look Rossi, You're tied down by rules and regulations. You've got your precious military code watching over you. I'm alone. I can slap someone in the puss and they can't do a damn thing. No one can kick me out of my job. Maybe there's nobody to put up a huge fuss if I get gunned down, but then I still have a private cop's licence with the privilege to pack a rod, and they're afraid of me. I hate hard, Rossoroni. When I latch on to the one behind this they're going to wish they hadn't started it. Some day, before long, I'm going to have my rod in my mitt and the killer in front of me. I'm going to watch the killer's face. I'm going to plunk one right in his gut, and when he's dying on the floor I may kick his teeth out."

Brigadier Rossoroni cleared his throat. "Rather. I guess I'm not sad to see your a beserk-with-rage-killer at this exact moment. I'm just a little stunned." He motioned for Lord Woodpecker Smyth to join him. "Perhaps we can use this to our advantage. . . . I have a plan"

With that Lord Turnips apraised his recently captured Makarov and cricket bat and said: "I've got something a little better than a plan, I've got the hardware to pull it off."