Using Wikipedia for story inspiration is easy. All you do is click on “Random Article,” see what you get, and then write a story about that topic.
However, when the topics you get are John Elphinstone, 13th Lord Elphinstone and 1985 in Mexico, things can get a little… interesting.
During the last stream, we spun the Wheel of Prompticality and had to write a story using random Wikipedia articles. Chat voted on the two listed above, and we had to come up with some way to combine them!
Watch the video of us getting the prompt
and reading the final story here, or scroll down to read it.
Here’s what we came up with:
It all started when I was doing my job as an editor, proofreading an encyclopedia of English lords. I’d thought nothing could be blander than reading through name after name like Lord William the Eighteenth or his highness Lord Potentate Suzerain the Billionth.
In fact my eyes were so glazed over that I nearly missed the grammatical error when I was reading a section on one entry: “John Elphinstone died unmarried in King Street, St. James’s, London, on 19 July 1860, when his peerage of the United Kingdom became extinct.” Thankfully I was snapped back into reality by that absurd sentence. Nobody dies because their lineage stops, they die with (or perhaps having or, in especially unfortunate cases, unaware of) their peerage becoming extinct.
But as I brought out my red ink to mark up the page, something came over me. I felt a certain affinity for this John Elphinstone, which was strange since I’d felt about as drawn to the other Lords as much as I’d felt drawn to undercooked spaghetti. My eyes bounced over his entry, and I noticed something interesting
“In 1837, he left the Guards on being appointed governor of Madras by Lord Melbourne; it was said at the time that his appointment was made in order to dissipate a rumour that the young Queen Victoria had fallen in love with him.”
I chuckled when I read that. My name was Victoria, same as my mother’s and grandmother’s. They always joked that they did that because they could trace our lineage back to Queen Victoria herself. We’d always just laughed at it as a joke… but what if?
No. It was impossible.
Shaking the thought from my head, I crossed off the words in red, and scanned through the rest of the pages. When the clock struck five I made my way out of the office and home, with the book snuck away tucked into my purse.
Alone at home, I cooked dinner—pasta for one, all the while the book peeking out at me from my purse on the table. I couldn’t deny that there was a certain draw to it. A first for any of the encyclopedias I’d ever had to edit before. Usually I was happy to finally tear away from them at the end of the day and refresh my mind by spilling out all the jargon and technical talk, but this one had latched on hard.
I sat down at my table with the steaming plate of shells and cheese, but the book had my full attention. While my plate sat uneaten off to the side, I opened to the page for John Elphinstone again and stared at it.
As strange at it sounds, I almost expected the pages to start talking to me. To tell me something, a secret, that they were hiding from everyone else, but had been waiting to share with me. Of course, none of that happened. I sighed to myself as I stabbed a cluster of shells with my fork and brought them to my mouth.
And, being the incredible adult that I was, I dropped a shell splat on the page, cheese spilling all over the entry.
I groaned and clattered the fork back to the plate, hurrying to grab a fistful of paper towels. God knows how I’d explain cheese on the page to my boss if I didn’t get it off in time! Very carefully, I folded up the paper towel, planned my wiping strategy for maximum efficiency, then pressed it against the page.
A spark of electricity zapped the tips of my fingers. I tried to pull away, but they were stuck there, like power magnets against a fridge. The tingling stung through my fingers all the way up my arm until it hit my head. As everything sizzled and crackled around me, and I figured I was going to die from static shock while alone and covered in cheese shells, my vision flashed to something else.
It was dark, damp. Underground. Only little worms of sunlight peeked through the earthy ceiling, making it near impossible to see. And yet, as my eyes or brain or whatever was seeing this adjusted, something came into view. It was small, about the size of a baseball, lying on top of some sort of ceramic pedestal covered in moss. Slowly, I saw what it was.
A stone carved in the shape of an elephant.
The tiny sculpture of the animal was curved in on itself, all four legs touching at the center with the long trunk coming down the middle and its massive ears fanning off to the side. I had no idea what kind of stone it was made from, but it sparkled like a diamond in the meager light.
From nowhere, a voice echoed through the dirt walls.
“Seek the Elphinstone,” it said softly. “Before it brings more disaster.”
Elphinstone? As in John Elphinstone? And what disaster would it bring? I hadn’t heard of any disasters yet!
I tired to shout out, but in this vision or hallucination or whatever it was, apparently I didn’t have a voice. Everything got darker and darker still, the small beams of light fading until everything was gone.
A sharp pain in my head woke me up. My eyes opened to my blurry kitchen, with me lying on the floor. I pressed my hand against my forehead, cringing as the sharp blade of the headache seared its way further in.
What the heck had that been about? I tried to remember what had happened. I’d touched the book, gotten a shock, then seen that weird… what was it called? Elphinstone? And some strange voice had told me to go find it. But I didn’t even know where to begin looking for it! And I was probably just going crazy—
The television in my living room snapped on by itself.
“Reports are still coming in for the magnitude 8.0 earthquake that struck Mexico City this morning,” a reporter announced. “The death toll has officially reached over a thousand and is still rising, with even more residents either injured or displaced in this natural disaster.”
Disaster? At hearing the word, my headache melted away. I jumped to my feet and ran to the living room, watching the news report.
Didn’t that voice say something about the Elphinstone causing a disaster? And I had to find it before it caused another?
No. I was being ridiculous. This was crazy. This was all just a ridiculous coincidence…
…is what I thought until I looked over at my couch and a Scottish lord was sitting there, decked out in curls, kilt, stockings and rounded black hat.
“‘Ello there, Victoria!” he said in his rich Scottish tone. “Aye, keep the heid! Looks like ye n’ yer great-great-grandpa John gonna be takin’ a plane to Mexico, int it!”
Be sure to check out the video for reactions to the prompt, see some different ways it could have gone, and get my thoughts on the full story!
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Wikipedia (Edited by me)
