Friday, April 14, 2017

Brevity Is the Sole of Wit: A Flash Exercise


             A prince came back from college because he found out his father died. The prince didn’t like that the uncle took the throne and had married his mother. Also, the king’s advisor’s son went abroad and the king’s advisor told him to be nice. Meanwhile, the king’s ghost haunted the castle at night. The prince’s best friend told the prince about it and they saw it for themselves. The ghost told him that the uncle killed him and that the prince should get revenge. The prince didn’t know if the ghost king was real, but decided to obey him.
            The uncle’s advisor’s daughter was the prince’s girlfriend, and the prince acted rude and crazy to her to pretend to be crazy for his revenge. The advisor told the uncle that the prince was crazy and the prince made fun of him. The uncle had the prince’s two friends from college spy on him. Then, a troupe of actors showed up and the prince decided to make them do a play involving a king getting killed by his brother. They said yes, and the prince said the play was how he’d know the uncle was a killer.
            The advisor and uncle had the prince’s girlfriend spy on him for them. The prince talked about death, but saw the girlfriend. He found out the uncle was listening in and told her to be a slut/nun. The prince gave actors advice. The play to trap the uncle started and it went something like this:
            Once there was a lion that was king, but his evil brother wanted to be king. The king had a son, who was next in line, but this young lion went somewhere he wasn’t supposed to go with his girlfriend and the king saved him. The king set the lion straight, but the uncle plotted to kill the king with hyenas. These hyenas started a stampede that endangered the lion again, and the king tried to save him again. But the uncle threw him off a cliff and told the lion that the king’s death was the lion’s fault and he made the lion go away. The lion was sad, but he met a pig and rodent who told him not to worry. So the lion stopped worrying until he was an adult. The lion’s girlfriend found the lion then, and told him the uncle had ruined everything. The lion didn’t listen, so a monkey told him to come back to learn from mistakes and that the king was alive in him. The king’s ghost showed up and told him to remember who the lion was and that the lion had to be king and get revenge on his uncle. So the lion came back with his girlfriend, the pig, and the rodent. He found out the uncle killed the king, and fought the uncle and won. The lion became the new and just king, and hyenas ate the uncle. So the uncle was dead and his legacy faded away.
The play offended the uncle, and the prince tried to kill him but stopped because the uncle was praying. The queen talked with the prince, and the prince tried convincing her the uncle was bad. But the advisor listened in, so the prince accidentally killed him thinking he was his uncle.
            The uncle was obviously fed up with the prince, and decided to send him to England. There, the prince would be killed. But the prince tricked the two friend/spies into dying in his place. The advisor’s son came back to find his father dead and his sister (the prince’s girlfriend) crazy. The prince’s best friend found out through a letter that the prince was coming back, the girlfriend drowned herself, and the uncle made an alliance with the advisor’s son to poison the prince
            When the prince met up with his best friend at the cemetery, they found the remains of a jester that the prince really enjoyed before stumbling onto the girlfriend’s funeral. The advisor’s son challenged him into a duel, where he and the uncle were planning to kill the prince. The duel between the advisor’s son and the prince began and went on, but the mother drank the uncle’s back-up poison plan for ambiguous reasons. The prince killed the uncle and the son in retaliation. But before the son died, he told the prince out of guilt that he nicked him with a poisoned sword and that the prince was dying. Before he died in the best friend’s arms, the prince told his friend to give the crown to Norwegian and spread his story around so his legacy would live forever. And it did.