When I heard her scream I knew my secret was out. With a roll of my eyes to the heavens I pulled myself out of my seat and down the hall to where she stood. Shivering and clutching her coat as though it were the only thing she could rely on in the universe.
She turned to me, wide eyed and shaking and spoke, her voice quavering. “There… there’s a monkey in your cupboard.”
I peered around the door into the cupboard under the stairs. Bobo looked up to me from his laptop and gave me the thumbs up. I turned back to Emily, spread my hands, trying to be placatory and I tried to explain. “Well… he’s more of an infinite number of monkey…”
“Like the Shakespeare thing?” She at least had some control of her wits. I was glad. I closed the cupboard door gently and I lead her away to the living room. Sitting her down on the sofa and going into the kitchen to make her a cup of tea.
“Sort of, you know the principle right?” I called back over my shoulder.
Still clutching her coat she sat, pulling at the fabric nervously, trying to remember how it went. “Isn’t it that, if you had an infinite number of monkeys, typing away on keyboards, eventually by pure chance they’d come up with the complete works of Shakespeare?”
“In essence, yes.” I called to her.
“But… there’s only one monkey.”
I poured hot water over the teabag and squished it gently with the spoon, bringing it out with me and sitting down next to her again. “That’s why I said an infinite number of monkey. And well, technically he’s a chimp, not a monkey. Monkey’s don’t have enough brain mass for it to work.”
“I don’t understand.” She said, letting go of the coat and gratefully clutching the tea.
“It’s really quite simple,” I explained. “he is just one chimp out of an infinite number of potential chimps from subtly different universes that stretch in all lines of potentiality in all directions. So, while he is one chimp he is also, in effect, every possible chimp at one and the same time.”
“But,” she trailed off, clutching the mug though the hot water must have been hurting by now. “what is he doing in your cupboard?”
“You’re always asking me where I get my ideas. I don’t. I have the chimps come up with them for me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You’d believe me if I told you an infinite number of quantum chimps was the source rather than deep thought, consideration, influences and yadda-yadda-yadda? I don’t think so.”
Later, I asked Bobo the best way to get rid of a body.
Hee. since I DM almost entirely improvisation style, I listen to my players while they are discussing what they have run in to & twist those ideas so they are only marginally accurate.
Whose your Daddy… DM?