Sunday March 30, 2003
Book 3: Under New Management — Part I: The REALLY Clever Monkeys
Note: The word "Tinth" means "sky-zoo," which can be roughly translated into Galstandard West as "ark" with little loss of meaning. Translating it as "really big sandwich, like the kind you'd bring to a frat party on an eight-foot long plank" would be less accurate, and quite a bit more likely to get you a knuckle sandwich for your trouble.

Fortunately for translators everywhere, the Enireth do have knuckles.

Transcript

Narrator: Five hundred years before humans burst onto the galactic scene, the Enireths undertook their second most ambitious engineering project, and moved three planets into a single rosette orbit.
Narrator: The Tinth-Philkra rosette, comprised of one natural world and two habitiformed worlds, eventually tripled the size of the Enireth biosphere, but not before creating a small tide problem.
Narrator: The phrase "small tide problem" is an Enireth epithet. The ecological disaster on their natural homeworld led to their most ambitious engineering project. . . Evacuation.
Narrator: The first human tourist in the Tinth-Philkra system took one look at the magnificent cluster of arks and said "Ooh! Is it a commercial for Subway?"
Narrator: A thousand years later there are humans living throughout the 'sandwiches,' and they are uniformly-but-(mostly)-quietly resented by the natives.
Narrator: Sandwich-ness aside, our heroes have a job to do on one of these arks. . .
Ennesby: The target is adjacent to a University library, which means public access all the way to the front door.
Ennesby: U.N.S. Military Intelligence assures us that security is negligible. The most dangerous thing we'll face is frat boys.
Ennesby: It's really unlikely we'll run into them in a library, if you know what I mean.
Ennesby: Of course, who'd expect to run into mercenaries in a library, right?
Legs: It looks like a big sandwich.
Schlock: I'm hungry. Who wants sandwiches?