Transcript of "The Walk" (Mike's Story)
A Plaine Accounting, Inne which the Heroe be fet upon by Bandits againe, and the Author, lofing Patience embarks upon fundrie pointlefs Diuerfions.
Yes, this is the *ahem* "Beset by Bandits" story. All line spacing, spelling, punctuation, and headers have been preserved as much as possible, which is why I present this transcript as a plain-text, monospaced document. I've kept the custom "press return to continue" messages, even though the effect is a bit jarring. Colour information and any graphics characters have long since been lost, so you aren't getting the full experience. My own posts were in green, if that helps. And, yes, I really did put two spaces after a period back then. I'm over that now.
If you're offended by totally gratuitous and childish use of coarse language then don't look. Actually, you might want to consider calling up your ISP and cancelling your account, because if you haven't seen far too much of that sort of thing already then I don't know what internet you've been using, but it certainly hasn't been this one. It seems to me that historical accuracy is of paramount importance here, and any attempt to censor or edit would be intellectually dishonest.
The original story came from a London, ON C= 64 BBS called the Rift; the Rift was the antepenultimate Commodore BBS to close in London (mine was in fact the very last to close). Ranxerox was the sysop. Brugal was an idiot[citation needed]—although you will no doubt gather as much from the quoted text. Should I relate a Brugal anecdote? Heck, I don't even know who he was, so I suppose there is no harm in doing so. Keep in mind that everybody used a handle and hardly anybody knew anybody else "in real life" anyway.
A young woman moved into the apartment across the hall from this guy, and so Brugal regaled us with his plans to seduce her, and when he finally did sleep with his new neighbour, he posted a grand and slightly boastful announcement. What Brugal did not realise was that his wife was also a Rift member under an alias that was unknown to him. Oops.
Or am I thinking of Buster? I suppose it matters little at this stage. They have both been immortalized in their own unique way.
I'm still working on getting this thing typed up. It's amazingly hard to get all the mistakes just right, especially when typing from a faded and slightly purplish forty-character-wide dot-matrix printout using a font with no true descenders. Someday, it would be interesting to do something with this material. I'm fascinated by the possibilities of collaborative story-telling where the participants are actively trying to usurp each other. In the meantime, enjoy...