Not Dirk Gently, but who doesn't love a good little mystery in an old English village?
Well, this is what I would like to call a process caption that I made specifically for the blog. I had nothing in mind, other than to find an interesting picture, copy it to Photoshop, and then write something I thought was clever, fun, or otherwise engaging.
When I pulled it in, I thought of a Wicker Man type setting, where a man is visiting and wondering aloud to another person there about a sight he found charming, which to the villagers, seemed like commonplace yet still odd as hell. Whispers had been heard for years, but nothing concrete, and honestly, the less they knew, the better off they felt. Why England? Because when you think eccentric people who, while scandalized by odd things around them, also have that quirk of still being polite about it to their faces. Just something I thought about while writing, and since I had set up the main character to be a bit of an explorer / outsider .. it seemed like a good idea at the time (40 minutes ago or so when I finished it and proofed what I had written.)
From there, I just wrote it out as it came to me. The dialog was obviously going to drive the plot where it needed to go. From the beginning, the teapot she is holding was what grabbed my interest, and I figured that whatever TG element was in the caption was related to that, so it became a where do we go and how do we get there situation. About half way through, the ending hit me "Care for a spot of tea?" Once I hit that, I wanted to leave the ending vague as hell, figuring there were quite a few ways people could interpret it.
I'd love to see what you think the 'ending' was heading towards. Here are a few I have thought about:
- The explorer was an old friend of Jenkins from the war. He had tracked him down to there, and is now curious as to what happened to him, whether he actually DID become a woman, or if it's his daughter, she could fill him in as to what did happen.
- The explorer is a writer who has been traveling the planet looking to document stories of men turning into women (or vice versa) or interesting folk stories and just happens to run into one in this village, which of course piques his curiosity. Maybe she was a woman that was cursed to be a man, or changed into one because women archaeologists weren't considered proper when she was young.
- Just a chap on holiday who when he hears the story, it stirs up old thoughts of wanting to become a woman himself, or desires the company of a former male, now female. He thinks, "Wouldn't it be scandalous if, all of a sudden, 2 women starting coming into town everyday to buy a packet of tea?"