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Morgan Henry (75)
Project: A short story (A Connecticut Idiot in King Arthur’s Court)
Known as: YaBouy (yes, he spells it that way)
Real name: Morgan Henry
Group affiliation: None
Physical description: Morgan is 16 and skinny. He has a long, stringy, dingy blond hair and a soul patch. He usually wears dirty cargo shorts and a band t-shirt.
Personality: Morgan (or YaBouy as he likes to be called) is chill – almost critically so (he’s been checked for a pulse on numerous occasions). He is an uninterested student and isn’t that bright but has a burning confidence despite this. On the topics of memes or Twitch videos he is an expert, and these are the only topics upon which he places any value. He plans to be a successful social media personality and he knows he will succeed as he is an interesting guy who is always right. He just hasn’t gotten around to recording nor editing anything.
History: YaBouy grew up in urban Hartford, CT; raised by a single mother. His mother works two jobs to support them and loves her son desperately. Things might be a little easier for her if YaBouy didn’t need the latest device and games, but she wants her talented boy to reach his full potential. Her biggest disappointment is that she is unable to send him to a private school, as so far, his special sort of genius doesn’t seem to align with public school curriculum.
One day YaBouy is skating home, anxious to get to his console gaming. Unfortunately, his weed dealer has ran out of patience around money owned and opts to smack YaBouy with a baseball bat. Knocked unconscious, YaBouy awakes in a field, where a man in armor (Sir Kay) rides up. He challenges YaBouy to a joust and YaBouy isn’t about to let some try-hard flex on him and agrees. YaBouy breaks his ankle trying to mount a horse, and Kay declares himself the victor.
Captured, YaBouy first assumes that this is either a bad trip or a bunch of out-of-control LARPers. Eventually he begins to suspect he has somehow traveled back in time. Fortunately, a few video games and movies have prepared him for this moment and he knows exactly what to do: use his knowledge of the future to rule over the people of this era.
At King Arthur’s court, YaBouy claims he is a wizard and that he can create wonders. As his garb and speech are so unusual (and mostly because things were a little boring at Camelot), they give him some resources to try to build things. The blacksmiths create something that roughly looked like a gun based upon YaBouy’s description and even bullets. Of course, they didn’t know what to do when he kept saying “make gunpowder for the bullets.” His descriptions of toilets showed some early promise but as he did not know what made water come out of pipes (nor what pipes were made of). Ultimately, this concept created a bit of a mess.
This continued for a while. They fabricated a skateboard based upon his description, but he was frustrated with their inability to create the right kind of wheels (“you know, little plastic ones that spin easily”). The tricks he could do were quite limited, especially given the quality of roads. By the time he was describing a helicopter and “you have to get the gas out of the ground” the amusement of creating things for the clearly crazy man had begun to wear thin.
Unfortunately, he was good for nothing else – he couldn’t fight, bake (“where’s the microwave?”), care for animals, farm, or do any other basic tasks (he couldn’t even scribe up to standards). Finally, he was put in motley and made a jester, but this was more out of pity than his abilities there (though he thought he was living the medieval version of his dream).
He eventually gets back to his home time. Unfortunately, he had learned very little during his time there and was largely useless to modern historians. He did finally make a YouTube channel about his experiences and was soundly ridiculed for a couple of weeks when he tried to recreate his motley.
Role in the narrative: He’s our protagonist, just not an impressive one.
Abilities: He doesn’t even play video games as well as he things he does. His natural respiration does create CO2, which is beneficial to plants.
Inspirations: To be clear, I’m not generalizing to a whole generation here. This was inspired by Twain’s “Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” When I read it, I was struck about how lame of a time traveler I would be. I’ve grown up in a time of modern devices and have relatively few skills and little knowledge that would be useful to per-industrial societies (I know nothing about mining or smelting; little about applied Chemistry, etc.). So where in Twain’s story his protagonist creates gunpowder and a lightning rod to blow up Merlin’s tower, it would be hard for me (nigh impossible) to approach something similar (I might be able to make gunpowder given lots of time and experimentation). I’ve wanted to do a more modern retelling for a while now and since then if anything things have gotten worse. As devices become more and more intuitive there is simply still less reason to bother to learn how they work. So I think most folks today are bright, I do think that there are a small few that are actually celebrated for not doing much.
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