* Author : Ben Blattberg

* Narrator : Norm Sherman

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

*

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PodCastle 417: Archibald Defeats the Churlish Shark-Gods is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG

Archibald Defeats the Churlish Shark-Gods

by Benjamin Blattberg

My Dear Professor Stern,

While we’re all impressed with Georgie’s little scholarly article on Pacific Island folkloric sea life, with all of its precise details and analysis and whatnot, I fear she left out the thrilling heart of the matter. To wit: how I saved countless Hawaiians from gruesome death. Because of my quick thinking and pluck and heroism and charm and grace and quick thinking, I not only saved Hawaii from an oceanic scourge beyond the imagination of modern man, but also deserve a passing grade for this quarter’s Independent Study in Applied Folklore (PhD track).

I also must insist that my name be included on any further papers that Georgie writes on the subject, as co-author or co-researcher, as my contributions were essential to the project. After all, I rented the boat.

You see, my dear Prof, it all began with a ghastly mistake at this year’s Applied Folklore Conference in Honolulu: my name was entirely absent from the schedule of presentations. Georgie was forced to deliver our research on the Bloodchildren of Butler, CA all by herself.

(Georgie may be too humble to say, but she did tolerably well presenting our research. She only occasionally raided her ample storehouse of swears during the Q&A’s—mostly, but not exclusively, during the A’s.)

After that presentation, Georgie was shanghaied into some followup panels at the Conference, and I had some free time to make “an original contribution to the scholarship of Applied Folklore.” I believe that’s the phrase that appears in both the graduate student handbook and Great-Grandpa Hiram’s will, along with dear Hiram’s “he doesn’t inherit a damn cent unless he graduates!” clause. To that end, i.e., graduating and inheriting, I uncovered rumors of a mysterious island off of Honolulu, an island haunted by eerie piping.

That was the story I heard from Raffi, a charming island native I met at the Hawaii Convention Center—or so he at first appeared to be. And he had a boat that was for rent. So I quickly liberated Georgie from a Conference panel on Chinese mountain vampires or vampire mountains or some such and headed off on Raffi’s boat to investigate the mysteriously piping island.

Alas, the mysterious island was actually one that I’d visited before, since it belonged to my second cousin twice removed, Sophia Randolph y Velasquez. I would have recognized the island in Raffi’s story if only he had used the correct name for it—Sophia Randolph y Velasquez Island—instead of the name he did use, Ka-moku-pe-something. And that eerie piping: merely Sophia’s beloved woodwind orchestra, flown in weekly from Los Angeles.

Georgie had some choice words for Raffi and me, though I couldn’t approve of her choosing them. Since you know Georgie, I won’t bother quoting her verbatim. I’ll trust you to imagine her speech in her native tongue, where expletives serve as nouns, verbs, and surprisingly, I’ve discovered, conjunctions.

Disappointment in every line of his well-lined island face, like a slow-moving molten flow of lava or maybe something else entirely, Raffi promised to show us instead a sunken city whose clock tower alone rose over the waves and tolled melancholically on the anniversary of its flooding.