One-off Scifi/Comedy Chapter: Marty 9 - Hero of Prophecy

I know. I know. You guys would have preferred a fresh Isekai Terry chapter or more Unwillingly Summoned or more (insert your favorite unfinished project here). But my mind, for all the goods things about it, has some downsides. It never really stops feeding me ideas. Ever. And if I ignore all the ideas for too long, it starts shoving them forward harder and harder until it gets intrusive. Since I haven't started a new project in a while, we've been coming up on that intrusive point. So, to calm the crazy for a bit, I wrote this. I doubt I'll ever do anything more with it since I think I was channeling Douglas Adams, and I can't sustain that for a whole book. Anyway, hope you get a few laughs out of this. ~Eric

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1.

Martin Samuel Ezra Charles Covington IX, Marquess of the Alstancian Cluster -- at least until his father, the eighth bearer of that unwieldy collection of masculine monikers, and Duke of the Castelmonian Cascade, kicked off (something that Marty 9, as his parents called him, didn’t expect to happen for at least a couple more centuries) -- knew that he was destined for greatness. Unlike many children of privilege, Marty 9 didn’t know this because a string of string of sycophantic tutors had told him so. Well, they had told him so, but that wasn’t why he knew it. He knew it because he could feel it in his heart. It simply struck true whenever he said it to himself in the mirror. An event that occurred daily, although he’d never admit that out loud to anyone.

Oh, and there was also that prophecy about him. Marty 9 liked to pretend that the prophecy hadn’t influenced his thinking about the matter, but his heart also told him that it might have played a minor role in that certainty he held about the aforementioned greatness. Not that he really understood the prophecy. He had read it. He’d read it many times. He just didn’t understand it, in spite of his best efforts. A fact that didn’t seem to bother anyone but him, which also bothered him. If anyone should understand that prophecy, it seemed like it ought to be him. It didn’t help that the damnable thing was written in a dead language and dated back 62,000 years, give or take.

That number had given him pause. How did someone 62,000 years ago know about him? For that matter, how could they have made any sense of visions of events happening in a different culture, in a different time, and in a different language? Marty 9 had asked more than one scholar about that. It seemed like an important problem to him. But they had assured him that prophecy just worked like that. Apparently, prophets were given special dispensation by the god and/or goddess of prophecy they served to simply understand what they witnessed in their visions. A proposition that seemed very shaky on balance.

That dispensation did not, however, seem to extend to writing about those visions in a straightforward way that could serve as a useful guide to the object of the prophecy. It seemed altogether the opposite to him. Almost as though those prophets had been given a divine mandate to write in the most obscure, obtuse way they possibly could, thereby ensuring the object of prophecy could not use the recorded words to, for example, create an action plan to facilitate the fulfillment of the prophecy. This also seemed like a rather important problem to Marty 9, but those concerns were dismissed.

“You’ll understand when you need to.”

That was the common refrain. Marty 9 suspected that he would, in fact, not understand the prophecy when he needed to. It seemed far more likely to him that he would stumble blindly through events, hoping that whatever he did came close enough to the foggy predictions to get him most of the way there. If Marty 9 was being honest with himself, he had been courting some modern luck deities with a reputation for staying bought and taking pity on the confused. He was hoping that they’d splash enough luck on him to get him the rest of the way to fulfilling the prophecy and getting him that greatness he was so certain he was destined to achieve. If they didn’t, he had a bad feeling that he’d wake up dead some not-so-fine morning.

It was rather unfortunate for our dear Marquess Covington that he couldn’t understand that ancient and powerful prophecy. He wasn’t the only one who knew about it, which had set rather unreasonable expectations in the minds of people from across the empire. The meant that he received a rather unmanageable amount of correspondence. It came from everyone from a love-struck baker named Charlotte, who owned and worked at Wonder Dough in the city of Gengal, located on the planet Dorvinium, to an elderly baron named Bill, who had somehow stumbled into ruling a planet named Eleven, and was looking to marry off his eldest daughter, Marianne. Marianne, who was firmly into midlife, was not interested in marrying Marty 9, because she had been openly carrying on with a mining magnate named Gerald since she was seventeen, bearing the man three children, and living in his opulent space station since she was twenty-two. Marianne and Gerald had never married for the eminently practical reason that their lawyers told them how much it would ultimately cost them in taxes.

Not that Marianne and Gerald’s taxes were of concern to Marty 9, but if he had known the contents of the prophecy, he might well have been able to wave off Baron Bill. Like most accurate predictions of the future, Marty 9’s prophecy involved a great many unfortunate events. Not unfortunate like your soufflé falling, which is only a disaster of epic proportions for a certain subset of chef’s assistants who work in a certain subset of restaurants that cater to a different certain subset of people who will scream like overtired children if they’re made to wait even one second longer than they think they should. Nor was it unfortunate like finding out that celebrity you like is actually magnificently mundane in real life, which is only a disaster of epic proportions for a certain kind of “reporter” and that one percent of people who self-identify as superfans.

No, these were actual unfortunate events of that kind that generally involved explosions, rebellions, interstellar battles, and lots and lots of personal hazard. So much personal hazard. A truly appalling amount of personal hazard. A volume of personal hazard that would have given even Imperial Space Marine Recon units pause. Not a lot of pause. Those people were generally regarded as having lost any sense of self-preservation. But at least a little pause. Sufficient personal hazard that Baron Bill would have rethought his marriage plans for Marianne. Oddly enough, though, not enough personal hazard to dissuade Charlotte, who specialized in making cheesecakes and donuts that looked like housecats. Housecat donuts were considered both a particular delicacy and a high art on planet Dorvinium.

Not that Marty 9 was aware of either housecat donuts or the fact that Charlotte was considered a planetary treasure. Facts that had made her astronomically wealthy. Had he known about Charlotte, who was also widely recognized as a great beauty, he might have abandoned his plans for greatness and just married her. Life would have gone much more smoothly for Marty 9 if he’d followed that particular path. Something noted in the prophecy, but which had gone overlooked because no one had been able to translate the characters for Charlotte or housecat donuts.

That was why Marty 9 found himself at home when everything started to go wrong.