Knight in Real Life: Part Two, Brief Acquainting

Knight in Real Life:

Part Two, A Brief Acquainting

“Are you nuts? Bring him down here?” Paul asked. Throughout their conversation they spoke in hisses, although the clanking metal plates of the anachronistic knight caused enough of an echo to make that practice a waste of effort. “I can see why they want to give you a doctorate.”

          “I couldn’t very well have him in seminar, now could I?” Bethany finished sending a cryptic email to Professor Rycliffe and glared at her friend without meaning to.  “I’ll be back in two hours. Three, max.”

          “And what, pray tell, am I supposed to do for two and a half hours?”

          “A movie, perhaps?”

          “Then why didn’t you put one on for him?”

          “He slayed my laptop.”

          “I guess that would make watching Iron Man 3 difficult.”
           "Hilarious."

          They both turned to the knight, who had thrown back his visor once more and was twirling his mustaches around the bared left hand.

          Paul closed his laptop. “Maybe I’d better put this away.”

          “I don’t know what to do with him, to be perfectly honest. Maybe work on something you can explain to him. Like a map. Maps are safe.”

          The knight exclaimed, “I love maps! Mine father and I scoured noble libraries for them. He vowed to map the entire world, even to the edges of the East.”

          “Wow, even to the edges,” Paul said. “Did you hear that, Bethany?”

          “Help Paul with mapping out the Battle of Something or other – I don’t care.” Bethany found her hands jutting on her hips and wondered when she had stopped being an undergrad afraid of her own shadow and gained more of a mom persona. “I have to go to the Elias building, and somehow along the way I have to find that gauntlet you threw at the squirrel.”

          “Thou must know the rat was mocking my person,” the knight returned, “and I say not throw, I say the fit was ill to begin with, ever since my sister-son Frederick thought to ply his mischief on them whilst they cooled.”

          “Whatever.” Paul opened his historical topography books and tried hard to fall into them. It was difficult to concentrate with a large knight peering over to comment on the strange runes of modern print.

          “You’ll keep an eye on him,” Bethany said. She had started walking already, as she would need all the time she could get to cross the expanse of lawn, let alone to print the manuscript copy Professor Rycliffe would probably want to see.

          “Yea,” two voices chimed.

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