The Unforeseen Dangers of Leaving Home
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Merlin learned very quickly that he should never leave the newly arisen Round Table on their own for very long. Or ever, for that matter.
One afternoon he returned home after a stop at the grocer's to find all eight of them surrounding a sleepily cross Gogmagog with questionable intent.
"No, no, don't feel you have to help or anything," he groused as he struggled through the door overly laden with bags. "What's food for nine people going to weigh after all?"
Arthur, the prat, did what he normally did: i.e. completely miss what Merlin had said, or even that he had spoken, and start complaining about something else entirely. "Merlin!" Arthur exclaimed, and to Merlin's puzzlement he grabbed Gogmagog from his cozy place on the rocking chair and thrust the dangling - and now slightly disgruntled - cat towards the long-suffering warlock. "This creature is stubbornly refusing to talk for us. Is the beast being disrespectful or does he have some sort of mental affliction?"
"Perhaps he is a foreign cat and doesn't understand English?" an uncertain Gwen suggested.
"Nonsense!" Arthur asserted. "Likely he takes after his master in being half-witted and disobedient."
It was a mark of Merlin's confusion that it didn't even occur to him to threaten Arthur with being turned into a donkey.
"Just because he doesn't want to talk to you, Princess, doesn't mean he can't," Gwaine said.
"Do you mean Merlin or the animal?" Leon asked, not without good reason for Merlin seemed to be paralyzed, mouth gaping and brain seized up like a set of locked brakes.
"I think perhaps we have not been able to assess the situation fully," Gaius said.
Merlin nodded dumbly. "I think, somehow, that may be the case," he finally managed to get out.
"We were watching the magic scrying box - " Lancelot began to explain.
"Ahhh," Merlin said. He was still mostly in the dark, but a sense of the problem was starting to form.
The full story finally came out. While they had not comprehended a word of the cat food commercial, they had recognized that the cat on the screen was speaking with a human voice and in human words - it being the same language Merlin used when speaking into his far-speaking glass ("Mobile phone!" he'd told them nearly every day, barely keeping his voice from rising to a shout) - and, of course, every one of them had now come to the conclusion that all cats in the future could talk.
For his eight newly awoken friends, television was alien to the point of being completely unfathomable. Ironically, it was not the technology itself that was the problem (though the first time they had stumbled onto it they had rushed to him in a panic, Gwen practically in tears, begging for his help to free the tiny people trapped in the box and return them to normal size). The science behind it was simply so far beyond their ken they'd immediately ignored Merlin's rambling explanation and dismissed the wonder as a piece of Merlin's magic and thought no more about it.
No, the problem was their incomprehension of this particular mode of story-telling. Tales might have been be recited or sung in their time, but for a group for whom even medieval mystery plays had been an innovation a century or two in their future, the idea of watching people act out fictional works was a hard to wrap their heads around. *
So naturally special effects and the concept of advertising were RIGHT over their heads. (As was the idea of having food specially designed just for cats, who should be sustaining themselves on vermin and the occasional table scrap.) Merlin shuddered at the very idea of working through an explanation of them, though he supposed he'd have to do it sooner or later.
At this moment, Merlin didn't know whether to laugh or cry. What he did know however, was that from now on he was going to have all of the groceries delivered.
* A "mystery" play was not a murder mystery, but something along the lines of a religious passion play. While theatre had been around since the Ancient Greeks, knowledge of it was lost to the Dark Ages and the art form had to make a slow comeback.