Farm Boy

[Martyna Z'muir]

Originally posted March 25th, 2013 by EM Elizabella on the Great Lakes EM Site:

Meet at Britain Counselor Hall on Saturday, March 30th, at 8 p.m. CDT.
--------------------------------------------------------- *You dream that a pixie hands you a book.*
*You open the book and, unusually for dreams, you can read all the words.*
--------------------------------------------------------- A Bet-Lem Reg Dream
by Robin Goodfellow

Characters:
Westley – a farm boy
Hermia – an heiress
Queen Silvani – queen of the pixies
Lord Oaks – king of the pixies
Puck – mischievous servant of Lord Oaks
Robin Goodfellow – Puck in disguise
Princess Nissa – a lady of Florin
Sweet Maid Sally – pirate-mayor of Vesper
Nicholas Hart – an actor
and a motley band of merry adventurers

Settings:
Bet-Lem Reg – the Ilshenarian treetop home of the pixies. It can also be reached in dreams.
Vesper – the Trammel home of merchants and pirates. It is best reached by moongate or sea.

Once upon a time, Westley, a poor farm boy, fell in love with the beautiful heiress Hermia. Her family would not allow her to marry a man who had neither wealth nor title.

Queen Silvani and Lord Oaks were walking through the forests of Termir Ilshen and saw the farm boy pining over Hermia. Lord Oaks decided to help him. He ordered his servant, Puck, to make the farm boy fall in love with someone more suitable, a shepherdess or perhaps a goose girl.

Puck created a magical buttercup blossom that would, if placed under a slumberer’s pillow, cause him to fall in love with the first person he saw upon awakening. Just before dawn, Puck placed the flower under the farm boy’s pillow of moss. He meant to use small trickery to drive a comely shepherdess towards him, but got distracted and forgot. Instead, the first person the farm boy saw was a pirate lass!

The farm boy disappeared, taking only his small bundle of clothes. Hermia was sad that he did not stop to say goodbye, but believed he had gone to make his fortune so he could marry her.

Lord Oaks felt sorry for Hermia. He tried to remedy the situation by putting the magical buttercup blossom under Puck’s pillow and a portrait of Hermia by his bedside. Puck fell in love with Hermia. He disguised himself as a handsome, charming, wealthy noble and chose the name Robin Goodfellow. In this guise, Puck went to Hermia’s parents to ask for her hand. They readily agreed. Hermia refused the betrothal and stated that she was waiting for her true love. Her parents set a date for the wedding anyway. The night before the wedding, Hermia disguised herself as a man to sneak past the guards and ran away to look for her farm boy.
*****
Lord Oaks thought for many moons about how he could make things right. Finally, he though of a way to break the love spells, but it would require the magical buttercup blossom.

Unfortunately, in the meantime, Queen Silvani had brought a troupe of actors to Bet-Lem Reg in their dreams to perform a play for her and the court. One of the actors, Nicholas Hart, intrigued Puck so much that he turned Hart into a deer. Twisted and malformed by the actor’s own terror at the transformation, the deer was grotesque. The maddened stag broke scenery and uprooted trees with its powerful horns as it fought its way out of Bet-Lem Reg. The magical buttercup blossom got caught in the deer’s horns as it fled.

[Enter, stage right, a motley band of merry adventurers]