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."

Nautilus Taken!

Dawn has just broken on the South China Sea. The only thing spoiling the tranquility of the calm tourquoise sea is the smoking ship on the horizon. It is the Nautilus. Along side her is the Nanki-Poo, pirate junk of the notorius Lady Marzipan and her band of nefarious evil-doers.

Below decks there is evidence of intense fighting. Brigadier Rossaroni is being held hostage in the wardroom, tending to the still unconscious Lord Turnips, who was pistol whipped by a traitorous Nautilus crewmember. Lord Woodpecker-Smythe, still ostensibly prisoner of Marzipan, enters the room.

"W-S! What the devil are you doing here? This is duced odd, I didn't expect to be seeing you. What's going on?" exclaimed a visibly shocked Rossaroni.

"I'm here with Marzipan, man," replied Lord Woodpecker. "You wouldn't have any cigarettes, would you? I've been dreaming of them, man."

"Marzipan? Where is she? I need to speak to her," said Rossaroni.

W-S laughed. "Hey, man, you don't talk to Marzipan. You listen to her. The woman's enlarged my mind. She's a poet-warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes she'll, uh, well, you'll say hello to her, right? And she'll just walk right by you, and she won't even notice you. And suddenly she'll grab you, and she'll throw you ina corner, and she'll say do you know that if is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you -- I mean I'm no, I can't -- I'm a little person, I'm a little person, she's, she's a great person. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas -- I mean --"

"What's happened to you, Woodpecker? You're not making any sense." The Brigadier was getting very worried about his old friend. He was acting very much unlike his old self. "Just take me to Marzipan."

W-S agreed and motioned Rossaroni to follow him from the wardroom, leaving the sleeping Turnips all alone. After climbing a nearby ladder they were soon in the Control Room, now transformed into a charnel house. The fighting had been fiercest here, and there were large numbers of dead Nautilus crew piled in heaps throughout the room.

Woodpecker looked nervously at the Brigadier. "The bodies. You're looking at the bodies. I, uh -- sometimes she goes too far, you know -- she's the first one to admit it!"

"She's gone crazy," said Rossaroni.

W-S bristled. "WRONG! WRONG! If you could have heard the woman, just two days ago, if you could have heard the woman! You're going to call her crazy?"

"Well, she doesn't seem to be here, where did she go?" asked the Brigadier.

"If she's not here, she's probably off with her people. She feels comfortable with her people. She forgets herself with her people. She forgets herself." Rossaroni was starting to think that Woodpecker-Smythe had gone crazy as well. He continued, "But you probably are thinking of how you can kill her, aren't you?"

"Why? Why would a nice guy like you wanna kill a genius? You know that the woman really likes you. She likes you, she really likes you. She's got something in mind for you. The woman is clear in her mind, but her soul is mad . Oh yeah. She's dying, I think. She hates all this, she hates it! But ... the woman's ... uh ... she reads poetry out loud, alright? ... And a voice! A voice..."

"She's got plans for you. Nah, nah, I'm not going to help you, you're going to help her, man. You're going to help her. I mean, what are they going to say, man, when she's gone, huh? Because she dies, when it dies, man, when it dies, she dies. What are they going to say about her? What, are they going to say, she was a kind woman, she was a wise woman, she had plans, she had wisdom? Am I going to be the one, that's going to set them straight? Look at me: WRONG! ... You!"

Brigadier Rossaroni was thoroughly confused now, "Have you been eating the Black Opium? You know your constutution can't handle Riding the Tiger. Don't you remember back in '59 when your boorish behavior single handedly started the Sepoy Mutiny? Come on man, get your head together. At least help me get some medicine to give to Lord Turnips."

"Turnips? Turnips?," muttered W-S. "Yes, yes... we can do that... she has plans for him too, you know..."