The Chestnut and the Dire Hour – Chapter 7, Act 3, Strip 72

As the Greater Evil ™ drops its erroneously assumed mask of Japanese kouhai schoolgirl bashfulness and unleashes the withering fury of millennia spent in an isolated exile beyond the world*, it seems that the hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the Age of Men comes crashing down, has finally arrived for our heroes, rendered helpless as they are by the swirling vortex of evil power**.

But then, a glint of hope…from the faintest of memories…
In their travels, they had chanced about that wizened old man.*** Who was clearly a wizard, of course, but they were polite enough not to mention it – no matter how clearly your wizdar tells you you’ve run into another one, you shouldn’t really bring it up explicitly until he comes out to you. So, pretending to be just an ordinary old man…an ordinary old man with an aura of overwhelming, ancient power and the energy and agility of a much younger man, but still only an ordinary old man…he had given them a lot of invaluable advice and important hints.

But, as wizards go, all of that was clouded so profusely in metaphor and riddle as to be completely worthless without the benefit of hindsight, so they ignored most of it straight away. They had run into the type many times before, after all. But there was one passage that seemed to make at least a little bit of sense to the Professorian, since the professorial half of his personality is well acquainted with impenetrable jargon, of course. The memory of that passage lingered in him, and it went after this fashion:
“…and when the hour is darkest, and your end seems at hand, look for support from the place where you would least expect it. The oldest tricks are often the best, or it wouldn’t have grown to be old. Nobody long remembers a trick that doesn’t work…”

That memory comes back to the Professorian now, and grasping for the oldest, lamest trick he knows within the confines of his overcrowded memory, he comes up with this old chestnut…which Alan Quatermain had once played on him, on the shores of Lake Victoria, around 1896, or so. He fell for it completely, back then, partly because he had occasionally glimpsed a 3headed monkey here and there during their travels.

So, in the hour of dire need, the chestnut is deployed…and the 3headed monkey arrives. The heroes have escaped obliteration. But for how long?

More on Thurs…uh, Monday.

* which, I guess, makes the Greater Evil ™ a tsundere. Well…that kinda fits… >_>

** Particulary K’ip, whose hairdo just isn’t well suited to dealing with swirling vortices of any kind. >_>

*** I left that off-screen, since it’s exactly the kind of seemingly unimportant encounter that’s so obviously important that it would spoil it’s own effect.