I originally came up with this story spur of the moment when my brother came home with an assignment to write about what would happen if a historic personage was brought to modern times. He was laughing the whole time, so I decided to write the story down. However, I waited to long, so I don't think it's as funny as when I did it spontaneously. Well, review it, and I'll see if people still think it's funny.
I woke up. Thankfully, it was Sunday. No school. Good. I turned around to look at the clock, and found myself trying not to faint. There in the corner of my room sucking his thumb and rocking in the fetal position was some weird guy with a sword, a bow and arrows, and he was dressed in Lincoln green. Who was he, some Robin Hood wanna be? I went over to him. He was muttering to himself "What is this fur, I've never seen it, where am I, what happened to me, how is any of this possible, is it even real???" I interrupted his babbling.
"Hey, who are you," I asked, "how'd you get here?"
"I don't know, I think I'm dead, this must be heaven, or maybe it's hell! Who are you???!!" screamed the man.
"Whoa, relax." I said, "This is Teaneck."
"Teaneck?" he asked inquisitively.
"Yeah, you know, a city in New Jersey." I answered.
"So I'm in Jersey?" He asked.
"No," I answered, "Jersey is some place in England. New Jersey is in America."
"Hold, am I not in England?"
"Uh, no."
"I am in this America of yours."
"Yes."
"Oh, I get it now," he said, getting more and more frantic as he spoke, "I've just been BEWITCHED BY THAT $&$#&#& &$r &$ (&$#! $&&$# WOMAN!!!!"
"Um, I could help you, but first I need to know who you are, what woman is this, and how she bewitched you."
"Fine," he said. "I'm Robin Hood, The woman is some village witch, and if I knew how she bewitched me, I'd fix it."
"How'd you get bewitched" I asked, trying to keep from panicking or laughing. Robin Hood, Robin hood was 1000 in the future in my room sucking his thumb in the fetal position like a 2 year old. "So, how'd she bewitch you?"
"Well, I was running away from the Sheriff of Nottingham. I do that a lot since I wanna improve England by stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, and he's very rich, so I robbed him and ran for it. But he was catching up, so I stopped in a village and found their medicine woman. I asked her to help me escape. I knew Friar Tuck would be very angry at me for consulting a witch (Tuck gets like that, really annoying with all his preaching) but I had no choice. The woman had me come into her hut. It smelled odd, incense, and chemicals and odd fumes. She gave me a potion. It smelled like old cabbage, but most potions do, so I took it. I felt like I just got punched out. I woke up on this weird fur, in this America of yours, and I wanna go hooooome!!!
"Okay." I said. "I can help you get home. But in the mean time, we need to get you a job, a house, I can't hide you here."
"But, I can't go out there," said Robin, "I don't understand it, it's noisy and scary and confusing and it smells worse than the hag who sent me here!" And then, before my eyes, the legendary Robin Hood started to cry.
"Whoa, relax; I can help you with your confusion. Just ask m e you're questions."
"Very well, where is this America in relation to England?"
"A bit to the west," I answered.
"But then you would fall off the world."
"But the world is round, you can't fall off," I said without thinking.
"What??!!! How can that be, it only makes sense that it's flat."
Oh no, I thought, he lived before Columbus and Magellan. "Yeah, well, I made a mistake; I meant that we're west of England, very west, the far west."
"In Asia?" he asked tentatively, hoping to find somewhere he knew.
"Yeah, Asia," I said, thinking "Well there is a land bridge under water, we are connected to Asia. I haven't really lied"
"So I'm not mad?"
"No" I replied, "I don't think so."
"So then why is this world so different from mine? What were those weird glowing numbers on the box by your bed? They changed!! How?"
"Uh, it's a clock, for telling time."
"But there is no sun, no shadow on it, how can you use it to tell time?"
"Well," I said, deciding to lie a bit to make things easier on him, "there are little metal wheels, which grind against each other, and they make sparks, and that is the light. They are made to go in a certain shape, and they change when the time changes. They know when to change because the sun hits, them, and they can tell the angle of where it is in the sky and what time of day it is from that. At night, it stays the same, but it fixes at sunrise." I said on a spur of the moment burst of creativity.
"Okay," said Robin Hood, "I guess that makes sense. But what is that bowl of water in the hall room, it can't be drinking water, it's not a well, who wastes water like that?"
"Oh, that. Well, uh, that is sort of where you, er, do your business."
"Why would you need water for purposes of trade?"
"No, not that kind of business," I said awkwardly.
"What other kind is there?"
"Um, you know what chamber pots are for?"
"Well, yeah."
"For us, what we do is we sit on that bowl and go. Then we push the lever and the water drains, carrying, er, what we let out away underground."
"Wow, it must be a huge hassle to refill the bowl, especially if you need to use it again immediately."
"No, it refills itself; there are special pipes that let more water in."
"But then wouldn't you run out of water if everyone used this? No, the pipes bring in already drained water that's been cleaned."
"Wow, so much complication for just one thing. I think it's better to just use a chamber pot and dump it in the forest. Then you fertilize the trees."
"We don't have a lot of trees around here, it's a city."
"Oh. Well, this is better than dumping your chamber pot in the street, that method gets kind of messy…"
"Okay, let's move on. Any other questions?"
"No, that's it for now."
"Great. Now we have to get you some normal clothes. Then we have to get you a job. I'll hide you here until you can get a room in a hotel. So, about that job, what skills do you have Robin?"
"Well, where I come from, the tax collectors are very greedy and charge the people too much taxes just for there own benefit. Some things never change, I muttered. Anyway, I got tired of having all my money extorted so the nobles could party, so I started a band of people who were in the same situation as me. We started to steal the tax money back from the tax collectors, and give it back to those it had been unjustly taken from."
"So you have a good understanding of how taxes work, right?"
"Yeah, I know how the whole, unfair system works. That's how I manage to mess it up."
"So we could get you a job as an accountant."
"What's an accountant, pray tell?"
"They're basically tax collectors. With you're in depth knowledge of the system, you wouldn't need more than a few books to get the right qualifications for a job at my dad's firm. He's an accountant."
"WHAAATTT??!!! A TAX COLLECTOR???!!! I'LL KILL HIM!!!"
"What?!! Robin no, that's my dad!! Stop! He can help you, and he doesn't take taxes for his own gain!!"
"I DON'T CARE! AND IF YOU LIVE FROM HIS WAGES, THEN YOU'RE AS GUILTY AS HIM! IT'S BECAUSE OF YOU THAT POOR FAMILIES ARE STARVING! BECAUSE YOU TOOK THEIR MONEY!" He pulled out his bow, and in one fluid motion had drawn and nocked an arrow. "Prepare to die, tax collectors brat." He was crazed. Temporarily insane. Before I had another thought, he had fired at me.
I jumped to the side and rolled. Robin Hood's arrow went flying into my closet door. Great. My mom was gonna obliterate me. I needed to come up with an excuse. The arrow that went a millimeter above my shoulder then put the formation of my excuse on hold. "Robin, stop, calm down! If you kill me, you kill your best chance of surviving here long enough to get back to your own time!"
"Oh. I didn't really think it through that far." He put down his bow, and put the arrow he was holding back into his quiver. "Sorry about that. Old habits."
"Yeah, well, you can't just do that here. They may not have been able to catch you where you come from, but here they'll have no trouble at all. There aren't a lot of people using newly made arrows that look like they came from the 1200's. And not many people are dressed in Lincoln green and carry a bow and arrows around. And prison is horrible."
"Oh? What's it like?" said Robin. He seemed to have calmed down and let the incident pass, but I sure hadn't.
"Well, they give you a cold hard bed, the food is horrible, you get no meat, just bread, and there's no bowl of water to go in, you need to use a smelly hole in the ground."
"You get a bed? And the bread is fresh? And holes in the ground are normal. You call that prison? I'm surprised people don't commit crimes and get into prison instead of bother to work for food and a home."
"Wow," I said, "are prison conditions where you come from that bad?
"Oh, yeah. Worse, probably." said Robin.
"Okay, so maybe jail wouldn't be too bad for you, you'd still have no hope of returning to your own time without me."
"Yeah," replied Robin, "that would be a major problem. I'm sorry. You forgive me?"
"Yeah, okay. Now, let's get you some normal clothes. You stay here, while I go get them. I'll be back soon." Luckily, I was old enough to have a license. I went to the mall and bought Robin Hood clothes. Shirts pants, underwear, nothing fancy, just the cheapest stuff I could find. I drove back home. I didn't really start to worry until I pulled into the driveway. I had only been gone 45 minutes, but what if something happened? I went inside my house, afraid of what I might see.
Robin was inside raiding my fridge. "What is this machine that keeps the food cold? I wish I had one of these. And you have so much food. You must be very rich."
"What are you doing? If you need food ask me. Please, don't leave my room. If your see it's gonna give me problems."
"What kind of problems?"
"Problems like asking me who the Robin Hood wannabe in my house is. We've heard of you here, you're pretty famous. People would recognize you."
"Oh. But I can't stay in that room! I need to help the poor! And what if I have to go to the water-bowl?"
"Okay, you can use the bowl if you really have to, don't take me so literally. And as to the helping the poor, it's time for you to start. I went to my basement and brought up my dads accounting books. "Here, read these" I said. "They'll teach you the basics of taxes and how they work here."
"Okay. I'll start right away. In the mean time, you have to start looking for ways to get me home and teach me about how things work here."
"It's a deal Robin."
Epilogue
Well, Robin Hood became an accountant. It took him a while, since there were some discrepancies between our respective economic systems, (and because I had to teach him to read first) but in about 2 months he felt confident enough to take the CPA exam. He passed, and I convinced my dad to give him a job. So now he works for my dad's firm, screwing with the tax returns, so the rich lose a bit of money, and the poor save a bit. Robin says it's not quite the same as robbing the Sheriff of Nottingham on the road, but it's as close as he can get until I send him back to his own time. But whenever he sees a grossly unfair tax return, he keeps miming shooting someone with a bow and arrow. Gets quite a few looks from the co-workers.