lol that's cool
On this glorious day, we, Uncle Antero, provide you with news ever so delightful and joyous!
Last weekend, during the starry and warm night that took place between the Saturday and the Sunday, the happy workers of Uncle Antero's Fish Platter Emporium succeeded in finishing a long lasting beautiful dream of Uncle Antero himself.
And as the picture below clearly states, they managed to store the magnificent amount of one-hundred-thousand Fish Platters to the storage unit.
--- And my dear Settlers... Get ready to dump all these platters on Aunt Irma's island!!! May she drink fishy waters forever and ever more from her fish platter contaminated wells and watermills. Make her island smell of old trout and her palace get stuck with such rotten smell that not even the Black Knights dare to enter those halls of vile and repulsive stench in the next two hundred years.
Special thank you to my guildies Saulikainen and SirSinneri for providing me with fish and provision house buffs.
Last edited by AnteroTurku; 19.09.16 at 19:02. Reason: Finishing touches here and there
Uncle Antero's Fish Platter Emporium
Here to make your Island have that extra special stench all year around!
Even Uncle Antero and Captain Sonya Graham have a past together...
So, without further ado, here's my participation to the Tell Excelsior's Tale Event which earned me a third place in the actual competition. This was a pleasant surprise, as I am fully aware my story was very tongue-in-cheek and more Uncle Antero - not Sonya Gaham - based. (And way much longer than the given word limit...)
This is an edited and updated version, not entirely the one I submitted for the competition.
CAPTAIN GRAHAM AND THE BLIND FISH
"My dear friend, I see you're doing well!"
The voice was warm and familiar. But still it startled Uncle Antero, the owner and creator of the Uncle Antero's Fish Platter Emporium. No one had been announced. No one should have been capable to enter the mayor's private quarters without the guards noticing. Absolutely no one. The security around the mayor's mansion was very tight.
Yet, there she was, standing in the doorway with that crooked smile she always had.
"Sir, sir! There's a flying house outside... Or a flying ship... And there was a captain... And she's..."
"Here, already.", Uncle Anero pointed out blatantly to the guard who was huffing and puffing up the stairs to announce the surprise visit of Captain Sonya Graham, the world's most experienced explorer and an old aquaintance of Uncle Antero. The guard bowed deeply, knowing that he would pay later for letting an intruder get to Uncle Antero unnoticed, and rushed off back to his post outside the mansion.
With a swift cat-like movement Captain Graham stepped into the study and started to go through Antero's collections of sorts with a keen eye.
There was a long pause. Too long. She was never silent. That was most unnerving.
"How long has it been?", Uncle Antero asked from behind his desk, uncomfortably.
"Too long, my friend."
Friend... Antero had been many many years younger then, a mere fisherman, hiding on the island. He was happily fishing by the shore. He liked it that way. No one knew he was there. No one. And that's how Sonya Graham had found him when she first visited the island. That flying ship-house of sorts - the Excelsior she called it - it moved so fast! Antero did try to hide and get away from it, but the Excelsior caught up with him and before he knew it, Captain Graham had Antero on board with her, having a nice cup of tea with a promise not to tell anyone about Antero's little hide-out.
She had been younger back then too, full of energy, eyes burning with a longing to adventure and a desperate need to find every lost treasure and artifact in the world. Well, nothing had really changed there. Except maybe her eyes. The eyes were wiser now, more focused Antero thought to himself, as he studied the woman deep in her thoughts currently reading one of Antero's old tomes.
She had come to the island for a reason back then. She had deciphered with her Oven of Truth some old scroll telling about a dark haunted castle built deep behind the snowy mountains with a secret worthy of kings. Antero did not know about such things. He had never left the shoreline nor seen a dark castle on the island. But before long, he was there with Captain Graham, on board the flying ship, flying over that small island, over the hidden bandit camps deep in the forests, charging towards the dark towers that peaked from the North-Eastern corner behind the mountain tops.
And in the castle, there had been a demon. An evil demon that asked riddles. It had threatened to eat both Sonya and Antero unless they knew the answer to his query: "What do you call blind fish?" - Neither one of them knew.
Captain Graham was muttering to herself. She did that a lot. Antero guessed it had to do with all the lonely hours she spent on board the Excelsior. Antero enjoyed silence more.
"Be quiet, I'm trying to think!", snapped Antero who tried to focus his own thoughts to solve the demon's riddle.
"A blind fish is a blind fish. It can't see. So it's unseen... not seen.", Sonya kept on going.
"Please shut up!"
"Not seeing... Without seeing... seeless..."
The demon was getting impatient and demanded an answer.
"Just shush! Give us one more minute!", begged Antero.
"What did you say?", asked Sonya suddenly.
"Give us one mor...", Antero repeated.
"No... before that!"
"Um... shush...?"
"Yes! Of course! Not seeless. But without eyes. Not without 'C's but without 'I's. Fsh. The answer is FSH!"
"It is... unfortunately... correct.", said the Demon with a disappointed growl and disappeared in a gulf of smoke revealing the passageway to the treasury deep under the dark castle.
"I could not have solved that riddle without you.", Sonya had said. "And as a thank you...", he gave a piece of old paper to Antero. "This was in the castle's treasury. If you want to know what it says, I have a way to decipher it. I really don't know if it's worth anything or not, but I have a feeling it belongs to you."
They used Oven of Truth. With trembling hands Antero read the paper after the oven had worked its magic. It was a recipe. A recipe for Fish Platters.
Antero knew there and then it was his destiny. He had been running away from it too long. He did not want to continue in his family's footsteps, not wanting to have a life that had been decided by others long before he had even been born. Yet there he was, with a small piece of paper in his hand, a paper that was mocking all the choices he had made in his life.
"I will not go back.", Antero said to himself. "I will start over. And it will by my way, my company. My emporium."
"And I see you're Emporium is doing quite well.", Sonya said, making Antero blush as he realized he had been talking aloud to himself.
"Yes. It is."
"And you still fight with your mother?"
Antero looked out the window towards the Excelsior hovering by the shoreline, above the place where he had had his little hideout when he first had met with Captain Graham.
"She's nowadays my nemesis. With a heart of grout.", Antero muttered to himself.
"Oh, you've already heard of that one! You know, I was so afraid to ask you at first, but since you've already heard of that myth. You know, you should have contacted me straight away. Anyway, I deciphered this new text. Apparently, the dark castle wasn't the only interesting place here on yourisland. There is this hidden temple sunken in the lake in the middle of this island. And in there, there is this beautiful statue which has a heart made of grout, and to get there, you must..."
Antero had vowed not to get involved in another adventure with this woman. Yet... Here he was, soon saying yes to an invitation to meet her up on Excelsior for another cup of tea. Captain Sonya Graham did know how to brew a really good cup of tea.
Uncle Antero's Fish Platter Emporium
Here to make your Island have that extra special stench all year around!