It’s time for another elf tale. You know the one’s that begin “ Once upon
a time”.
Once upon a time, long ago, in the time of legends great and small there
lived a knight name Sir Lostalot. Now Sir Lostalot was part of King Arthur’s
Court but you probably never heard of him. He was one of the lesser knights.
He never made it up to the round table. He was a knight of the square table
or to be more exact, which they never are in stories like this, a knight of
the rectangular table.
He always hoped that he would show himself to be worthy of the round table
but he had one serious problem. Sir Lostalot got lost a lot. He would start
out on a small crusade to save some damsel in distress and never find the
place. It wasn’t all together his fault. On the two goldcoins King Arthur
paid him every month he couldn’t afford a card with the Association of Trolls
and Telepaths. With that card all you had to do was go into any bar. Show the
card to the troll tending bar. He would summon the telepath and you would
receive excellent information. But the Association was expensive. The base
cost was one gold coin and that only got you five minutes a month. Then there
were all those extra charges like dragon connections, troll payoffs, special
taxes so the actual cost was more like a gold coin and a half. There were of
course other services that cost less but as the troubadours sang across the
land the Association had more bars with trolls than any other group.
Alas none of that matters because Sir Lostalot had no cards and when he was
lost he was lost. In every other way he was a good Knight. On his crusades he
often stopped to drive out a local minor dragon that was bothering a village.
He even chopped wood for old ladies. He was the essence of what a knight
should be. All across the kingdom people sang his praises. He just never got
to the damsel he was supposed to save.
One day while trying to find his way back from a mission to drive out an
ugly ogre , which he never found, he was joined on the road by a short knight
in green armor. The knight explained that he was an elf and that because of
his good deeds Sir Lostalot was being given two wishes. These, however were
restricted wishes. Each wish could ask for only one thing. You could wish for
a million coins or a castle but you couldn’t wish for a castle and a million
coins. If your wish did not fit the rule you would hear a voice that said”
Invalid wish-Please try again!”
Well Sir Lostalot could have wished to be a Knight of the Round Table. But
he would still have gotten lost a lot and brought disgrace on the table
itself. So after much thought he simply wished that he would never get lost
again. There was a flash of light and a voice said “ As you have wished so it
shall be”.
After this Sir Lostalot completed all his missions on time and as directed.
His fame grew and King Arthur granted him a trial membership as a knight of
the round table.
His first assignment was to go with six of the other knights and slay a
huge dragon that was eating tax paying members of the town of North Lumlan .
Now one might