The Early Years: Pressed In Stone?

So it seems like I’ve got my entire Villains & Vigilantes Rogues’ Gallery to go through, in my giant stack of old papers and whatnot that my folks found in the closet in my old bedroom and shipped out to me, so you should be prepared for just about any kind of cheesy supervillain to show up here over the next several installations of “The Early Years”. In this case, we have somebody based on, apparently, Ajax from the Trojan War, right down to his spear-flinging abilities; except this Ajax is a villain, not a hero.*

Now, the astute reader may have noted that the real name of Ajax the Magically-Altered Human Villain is “Preston Stone”, and may also have noted that if you say “Preston Stone” out loud, you get the title of this post. If you, astute reader, are saying to yourself, “Self, I bet that the players in this game routinely mocked Ajax for his name sounding like somebody getting squashed between very large rocks, congratulations! You have correctly identified the reaction of teenage boys when confronted with a name like this. However, in my defense, it is entirely possible I named the character this way on purpose, because I used to play a lot of the old Infocom text adventure games**, starting with Zork, which quite famously included this poem as a clue for one way of getting past a major antagonist. Oh, wait … Do I need to put in a spoiler alert for an over 40-year-old text adventure game from a company that’s been defunct since 1986? Well sure, why not.

So anyway, yeah, in Zork there is a Cyclops who you are not going to be able to get past by honest fighting. However, earlier on there’s a clue, sort of, as to something you can just say to the Cyclops that will make him run away:

Oh ye who go about saying unto each:  “Hello sailor”:
Dost thou know the magnitude of thy sin before the gods?
Yea, verily, thou shalt be ground between two stones.
Shall the angry gods cast thy body into the whirlpool?
Surely, thy eye shall be put out with a sharp stick!
Even unto the ends of the earth shalt thou wander and
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.

I added the bolding to the first letters (as well as to the line I was thinking Preston Stone might be named after) to make it a little more obvious. So,yes, you can just say “Odysseus” to the Cyclops to make him take off running, thinking that his old enemy is in the vicinity, but sadly, you can’t just say “Odysseus” to this version of Ajax to scare him off or drive him a little mad.

It might work on the original though.

* Which I mean I guess from the perspective of the Trojans, the original Ajax was also a villain not a hero.
** Surprising no one.