Helge Bracegirdle b. Oct. 2, 1941

In 1967, a young man named Helge Bracegirdle, a field zoologist from southern Eriador bought a one-way plane ticket to Sydney, Australia. He sold all of his earthly possessions, kissed his mother goodbye, told his college sweetheart he’d write her a letter every week, and set off on the biggest adventure of his life. He had heard rumors that the mythical beast, Christian Scholarship, had been spotted in the outback; he was going to hunt it down and not return home until he had made a name for himself.
Unfortunately for Bracegirdle, the rumors had been just that and nothing more. As everyone knows, Australia began as a penal colony for the British, so it has a history of Godlessness and illiteracy. The outback, then, could not have been Christian Scholarship’s native habitat, as its diet of highly qualified Christian minds would have been in too short of supply to sustain any herds for more than one generation. Any Christian Scholarship spotted there was not in healthy order, and didn’t survive long enough for Bracegirdle to even catch a glimpse.
By the time Bracegirdle recognized this, it was 1973 and he was thirty years old. His long-distance relationship with the woman who had promised to wait for him and become his wife when he returned from his arduous journey had ended two years previous, as he had run out of money for postage stamps. His hands were calloused from the hot winds of Australia’s arid landscape, and his vocal inflections sounded more rough and uneducated than they had five years previous—he was becoming one of the “mates.” But he had not yet lost hope. He got a full-time job at a barbie in Newcastle and lived like a wild man in the forest until he had raised enough money for a plane ticket to London, England. His newfound outdoorsy intuition had given him the insight that the ruin-smattered hillsides and history of enlightenments would provide ample breeding ground for herds of Christian Scholarship.
But alas, another ten years passed without sign of the Christian scholarship. Bracegirdle hadn’t realized that the growing European atheism had led to the fallowing of once religiously fertile lands. He found nothing but wanton debauchery around every corner of England’s city streets and grassy countryside. However, hope was not completely lost; the television in the post office where he worked always showed clips of the many thousands of Christians across the ocean in America. From what the clips showed, Bracegirdle worried that the Christian Scholarship was getting only meager helpings of intelligence from its food stock in the United States. There wasn’t a moment to lose.
At last, when he reached the purple mountains majesty and amber waves of grain on the Tarmac of JFK International Airport, Bracegirdle knew that he’d come to the right place. The bars and stars of Old Glory welcomed him to the free world, where surely Christian Scholarship would find the perfect spot to nest and populate. All he needed now was a map, a bus ticket, and a point in the right direction.
But that was thirty years ago. It’s a shame, really, because if Helge Bracegirdle had waited just a few more decades, he wouldn’t have had to do anything more than hop on the internet and run a quick Google search. He could have kept his love life in tact, he wouldn’t have needed so many underpaid jobs, and he could have done it all from the comfort of his own Eriadorian home.

More to come later...maybe. Really, I just needed somewhere to put this so I could use it as a source for my paper. Hooray for academic fudgery!

<3 spadeALLcross