Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Storytelling Week 10: The King Who Couldn't Stop Gambling


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. 

1 comment:

  1. 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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