Myth Into History, Week 9: The British Isles and Beyond [Thurs/1st Period, Danger Shop]
The Danger Shop was programmed to look like a temple of some unidentifiable kind today, and Janice was sitting cross-legged atop the altar, smoking the cigar she'd lit off one of the candelabra nearby. "We're backtracking a little today," she told the class once everyone had arrived. "Today's class is going to cover some events from the Scrolls that happened before the assassination of Julius Caesar, during the time when Boadicea, or Boudicca, was leading the Celts' resistance against the Roman occupation."
Hopping off the altar, she gestured around the temple's interior. "You're inside the temple of Dahak," she told everyone. "He's an obscure god, undocumented outside the Scrolls, but he appears to have been the focus of a monotheistic cult with roots in Celtic Britain. We don't know much about him, but he was powerful enough to have Ares worried. Some peripheral sources" -- she gestured to a stack of handouts on the altar -- "hint that Dahak might have destroyed the gods of the Sumerian pantheon, so it's no surprise that Ares was worried, is it? The Scrolls, as a matter of fact, say that Ares went far enough to descrbe Dahak as evil."
Janice ground out her cigar on the side of the altar and tucked it away into a jacket pocket. "Boadicea ultimately failed in defeating Caesar's armies, and that was Dahak's doing. If he hadn't captured Gabrielle, and if Ares hadn't recruited Xena to help stop the cult of Dahak by destroying this temple, Boadicea would have had a powerful ally. But . . ." She shrugged, broadly. "Well, that wasn't to be, was it?"
"Oh, and by the way?" Janice clicked the Danger Shop remote, transforming the room into a giant circle of standing stones that almost all the students would likely have at least seen in pictures before, and grinned. "That's what happened when the temple exploded." She gave the students a few minutes to boggle, stare, or otherwise react, then clicked the remote again to reset the Shop to the temple's interior.
She paced around the classroom, passing out the handouts from the altar as well as three more packets. "I don't have time to go into all of this in detail during class, so for once you get homework. I just got this set of translations from Mel, and they're a different version of the Norse saga of the Rheingold from what you've probably heard before. I don't feel like grading papers so you won't get an essay on it, but do the damn reading at least, got it? Meanwhile, chew on this: we've covered Greece, Rome, Troy, Israel, and Britain so far. Next week is going to cover things that happened in China. The Scrolls we've recovered so far don't give any details on this, but for the rest of the class period why don't you do a little brainstorming on how the hell Xena and Gabrielle got around so fast?"
After class, she hung around for a bit then headed straight for her office to spend the rest of the day playing the new PlayStation 2 game she'd gotten working on future lesson plans.
[OOC:Syllabus and roster. OCD is up; class post, as always, will remain open through the weekend.]
Hopping off the altar, she gestured around the temple's interior. "You're inside the temple of Dahak," she told everyone. "He's an obscure god, undocumented outside the Scrolls, but he appears to have been the focus of a monotheistic cult with roots in Celtic Britain. We don't know much about him, but he was powerful enough to have Ares worried. Some peripheral sources" -- she gestured to a stack of handouts on the altar -- "hint that Dahak might have destroyed the gods of the Sumerian pantheon, so it's no surprise that Ares was worried, is it? The Scrolls, as a matter of fact, say that Ares went far enough to descrbe Dahak as evil."
Janice ground out her cigar on the side of the altar and tucked it away into a jacket pocket. "Boadicea ultimately failed in defeating Caesar's armies, and that was Dahak's doing. If he hadn't captured Gabrielle, and if Ares hadn't recruited Xena to help stop the cult of Dahak by destroying this temple, Boadicea would have had a powerful ally. But . . ." She shrugged, broadly. "Well, that wasn't to be, was it?"
"Oh, and by the way?" Janice clicked the Danger Shop remote, transforming the room into a giant circle of standing stones that almost all the students would likely have at least seen in pictures before, and grinned. "That's what happened when the temple exploded." She gave the students a few minutes to boggle, stare, or otherwise react, then clicked the remote again to reset the Shop to the temple's interior.
She paced around the classroom, passing out the handouts from the altar as well as three more packets. "I don't have time to go into all of this in detail during class, so for once you get homework. I just got this set of translations from Mel, and they're a different version of the Norse saga of the Rheingold from what you've probably heard before. I don't feel like grading papers so you won't get an essay on it, but do the damn reading at least, got it? Meanwhile, chew on this: we've covered Greece, Rome, Troy, Israel, and Britain so far. Next week is going to cover things that happened in China. The Scrolls we've recovered so far don't give any details on this, but for the rest of the class period why don't you do a little brainstorming on how the hell Xena and Gabrielle got around so fast?"
After class, she hung around for a bit then headed straight for her office to spend the rest of the day playing the new PlayStation 2 game she'd gotten working on future lesson plans.
[OOC:Syllabus and roster. OCD is up; class post, as always, will remain open through the weekend.]