Once upon a time in a fairly small kingdom there lived a
king named Max who just couldn’t stop gambling.
His kingdom would have been massive but he just kept betting on things
and losing. Sometimes he won though,
which kept his kingdom afloat. His subjects
were pretty used to it, because a lot of crazy things happened as a result of
his gambling.
One day the king went out to his gambling spot and began his
usual wagering with other people. King
Max was making all kinds of bets, and mostly losing them that day. Eventually another king came along to bet
with King Max, which was interesting because he usually didn’t get to bet with
other kings. The new king introduced
himself as King Ben and he proceeded to describe a predicament that his kingdom
was in. They had a bunch of land, but it
wouldn’t grow anything except mushrooms.
All of his subjects were so sick of eating the fungi and they needed a
source of food with real nutritional value.
He wagered a bet to King Max and said that if he won he wanted all of
the flower pots in the small kingdom and he wanted them filled with rich dirt
that he could grow new crops in. King
Max agreed to the bet, as he always did, and they rolled the dice. King Max lost the bet, and thus all the
townspeople had to give up their flowerpots.
The next day King Max went to the gambling spot once
again. This time he met with a prince
who was there on behalf of his town that had so many cows that they could not
feed them all. It had turned into quite
the predicament for the small village, and he wagered with the king to take all
of the cows off of his land. The dice
were rolled, and King Max lost once again.
This time, instead of losing something, his town gained thousands of
cows, and there ended up being more cows than people in the village when they
were done moving them all there. This
was the only way that King Max ever won anything in betting. He lost almost every bet, but sometimes when
people desperately needed to get rid of things, they bet them away, and King
Max would take them back to his village.
The townspeople were used to the craziness that came with
being the subjects of the horrible gambler King Max, so they were prepared for
almost anything. The cows were a bit of
a surprise, but these people were resourceful and they figured out just what to
do. They went to the town where king Ben
lived and they offered him manure for his land to help it grow more good
food. In exchange they said they wanted their
flower pots back and they wanted some mushrooms. King Ben’s problems were solved so he quickly
agreed to this solution. The townspeople
then returned to their village and began a thriving milk business where many
people would come to buy supplies that came from cows. The little village soon overcame king Max’s
bad luck in gambling by making a good fortune for themselves from what they had
available, and the village grew and grew into a thriving kingdom… with a king that
still would not stop gambling!
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This
story was based on a part of the Mahabharata Epified Link to Reading Guide and Videos. I liked the theme of gambling in the story and
I thought it would be interesting to twist it and create a new story from
it. I kept the idea of a king doing the
gambling so that it would be a person of power, but I changed pretty much
everything else in the story so that it was something new.
I really liked the consistent patterns you used in your writing of this story. You did a good job of using sentence structure and word choice to help guide the story and keep a consistent flow to the tale. I also enjoyed the fact that you gave the townspeople an important role in solving the problems that the king created. It was fun to read!
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