Mother Superior Quatris Anna Pellapso had her little quirks.
Actually, all Mother Superiors had their quirks. Perhaps it was the stress of years and years of leading an organization of picky old witches that made them all relatively excentric towards the end. Perhaps it was because they all needed to switch to decaff because of certain incidents (like old Mother Superior Mardem, who had once jumped on her desk in front of three other Reverend Mothers and yelled that the little green people were trying to steal her sugar). Perhaps it was simply the hard decisions that they had to face each day ("Do green curtains go with white walls, or do we need to change the carpets again?").
Point is, no completely or even partially sane woman could, by the laws of nature, lead the Bene Gesserit. It just couldn't be done. And although Mother Superior Pellapso had the reputation of a sober, normal human being, it was because nobody knew her deep dark secret.
She was a Neo-addict.
It had all stumbled several years before, when she had stumbled upon a seemingly harmless site, ("The most popular virtual pet site in the known Universe! Meep!"). Oh how young and innocent had she been back then! Little did she know the awful effect of the site on weak minds! Within the week, her biggest concern was scrapping enough NP for those shiny new items.
Oh, yes. Another one for the Other Memories.
It was a bright morning and the plexiglass windows (the only ones in the building, not coincidentally installed in the Mother Superior's office) had just been scrubbed free of the leftover yoghurt from the old Yoghurt/Ice-Cream debate Pellapso and Reverend Mother Laundis had had earlier that week, resulting with an acolyte getting hit in the eye with a scoop of ice-cream and a large dry-cleaning bill on two black abas.
But returning to the subject of quirks, few people knew the true reason the Bene Gesserit crafted religions or had even started doing so.
You see, one of the former Reverend Mothers had a knack for totemic idols. She had bought a round million of them from eBay and after she was dragged in a straight jacket out of the office, her successor was met with a problem: a 30.000 square foot room filled with poorly carved statuettes. So she came up with a brilliant ideea: sell them off.
Few know that that is the reason Missionaria Protectiva was started. The Mother Superior simply named a Sister and told her to think of a good way of getting rid of that junk.
Thus, nearly one millenia later, not even half of the room had been emptied.
Pellapso obviously knew all these, mainly due to the Other Memories (through which she could still hear the protests of the totem-collector: "It took me years to collect every single one of those! Hey, are you listening to me? Oh, no you don't, you can't shut me up! Hey, do you know who I---"). In fact, she was just trying to shut up the nagging voice in her head and return to her precious Neopets, when, of all people, Reverend Mother Laundis stormed in her office.
Now, obviously, Pellapso was quite used to people storming in her office ever since the Bene Gesserit's planet had become a touristic attraction, three hundred years ago. Actually, just after Laundis came in, a string of asian-looking tourists with flowery shirts and holo-cameras came in, snapping shots at the two women and the rest of the room (mainly the walls. Walls can be very interesting, especially when Pellapso doesn't have her coffee and starts staring at them.) All this had made her wish the Sisterhood would have kept the planet's coordinates a secret, instead of spreading posters with "Visit the Bene Gesserit! Only 1.99 solars/adult, 1.00 solar/children under 12". Another get-rich-quick scheme thought out by a predecessor. She made a mental note to nag her successors through the Other Memories about this after she was dead.
Laundis smacked a jar of pickles on Pellapso's desk and shooed the tourists out and turned back to the Mother Superior with the look of a rabid wolf on her face.
"Well?" Pellapso urged Laundis. This was similar to the way the Yoghurt/Ice-Cream Incident got started.
"What do you see?" Laundis asked.
Pellapso stared carefully, using all her witch talents to study the jar.
"A jar of pickles..." she finally answered, completely unaware of what Laundis was aiming at.
"Exactely!" the much-olde woman yelled from the top of her lungs. "A jar of pickles! Now try opening it..."
Pellapso raised an eyebrow, but took to the task anyway. She grabbed the jar firmly, latched another hand on the lid and using all her prana-bindu training and many other tricks available in her head, tried opening the jar. Empahsis on "tried". The lid didn't even budge. Somewhat amazed, Pellapso tried yet again.
Nothing.
"It won't open," Pellapso said, finally giving up and putting the jar on the desk, at the exact middle point between her and her friend.
"Exactely!" Laundis yelled once more. "Exactely... Now, I'd like to show you something."
With this Reverend Mother Laundis openned the door and called in a random guy from the hallway. A fat guy with a greasy shirt and a baseball cap, that had just wanted to enjoy his sandwich incidentally at that moment, incidentally in front of the office door.
"Open this." Laundis gave the man the jar, using the Voice to pursuade him to leave his lunch and do it.
He grabbed the jar and with minimum effort, popped the lid.
Pellapso raised an eyebrow.
"See?" Laundis said, waving the lid as if it were a source of unending wisdom.
"Uhhh..."
"Okay, I'll explain it to you: we are Bene Gesserit, the keepers of the most arcane secrets and of the most ancient knowledge in the Universe. Yet we can not open a jar of pickles."
As strange as it may have been, Pellapso saw Laundis' point. Capable women such as them should be able to do such things.
"So what do you suggest?" Pellapso asked, entering her "Wise Old Crone" mode. It was really impressive, and she knew because she practised it before a mirror.
"Well, you saw how easily this Cro Magnon openned it. So I suggest... a male with the powers of the Bene Gesserit!" Laundis said, thus starting a snowball of events that would lead not only to thirty five centuries of tyranny, but the survival of the human species as well. All because of a jar of pickles.
"All because of a jar of pickles?"
"YES!"
"But..."
"Do you have anything better to do with your time?"
"Uhmm..."
Pellapso stared at the computer screen at her adorable Neopets seriously considering the subject. Alas, the answer to that question would destroy her reputation of The Sane One in the whole Sisterhood.
"Well, then, why not replace out exploding sheep genetic program with a male Sister one? Of course, we'd give it some fancy title, like... say... Kwisatz Haderach!"
Pellapso didn't bother correct Laundis. It was useless. So she decided to go along with everything.
"Alright, where do we start? Or better yet, who with?" she asked, shrugging off her doubts.
"Well..." Laundis turned back the the greasy guy, still siting there and eating his sandwich. "Hey, buddy, what's your name?"
"Artie..." he replied with a mouthful of balloney and mustard (a horrid combination, in Laundis' opinion. What was a sandwich without pickles?)
"Alright then." (Turning back to Pellapso) "So we give him a fancy shmancy name too... Like, Atreides. And we make him a duke. And then, we keep his bloodline so when time comes, we can use his jar-openning skills."
Within the hour, Laundis' project was aprooved. Upon hearing this, Laundis reportedly stated,
"I'll get my damn pickles, even if it had to be after I'm dead!"
The End
actual site
Author Note: yes, "Kwisatz Haderach" actually mean "pickle-jar opener". There you have it. It's not easy to poke fun at the Bene Gesserit, really it isn't. But I tried. "Dune" is too serious, so there I go, trying to lighten up the mood.
Anyway, sorry for any inaccuracies with the series. I couldn't consult the books because they're all translated in Romanian (my first language) and they confused me more than helped me. Constructive criticism appreciated. Flames will be used to heat my ice-box of a room. Or, hell, if you don't like it, just tell me so and I'll trash it.