A brief update…
The Hellbrat is duly punished, and let all within reach of my voice pay heed, for thus does House Harkaway – most puissant, most awesome – deal with the low, the cussèd, the unwise, the irksome burrs that trouble our mighty stride. (Thank you, Sheri S. Tepper for writing True Game when I was a kid.)
I rang the parent this morning and explained as delicately as I could the trajectory of the situation. The parent used words parents should not use. By this time I had heard from most of the offended parties and was disposed to some measure of mercy. (Consider, ye rash folk, what my mercy entails. See below.)
We spoke as men do. This is a secret thing, and subtle. It involves long periods of avoiding the issue entirely and establishing in good mammalian form that no actual combat will be necessary. It then moves to cautious searches form common ground.
The upshot:
I am to be spoken of as a saint by all of his line and their chattels.
He will not be spoken of at all, and the matter will lapse gently into the public forgetting. I will shortly move the original post to the archive, where almost no one ever goes. (Except @benjohncock for some reason no one really understands.) It may have been apparent to you in your initial reading, but I took pains to obscure the identities of those involved even when I was in a fury. This airbrushing will continue.
No, I wasn’t meeting David Cameron.
In exchange for my forbearance, the parent will require of the Hellbrat that he should spend his free time engaged in a serious effort to raise money for Haiti. He will recruit no fewer than three of his putrid, thuggish, street urchin friends and they will between them raise a sum the parent assures me will be almost impossible for the Hellbrat to achieve without some act of public self-immolation such as shaving his head or running ten miles in his sister’s ballet clothes.
He will do this without parental assistance and at no time will he reveal to anyone that this is not his own idea.
And he will do all this… analogue style. No computer use will be permitted.
Bwah. Ahahah. Ahah. HA.
