As you may have seen in Halagad's recent entry , I contributed to a winning submission in the "What's the Story" contest.

There are a few ways this ends up being an incredible event.

Firstly, I didn't even know I had been mentioned as a contributor for about 3 days after they notified, oh, I dunno, the world on the website I am supposedly on every day.

Secondly, my original entry was nowhere near as enjoyable as the finished product, which was an unwitting merging of the2ndQuest's ideas and my own.

Thirdly, I had read that entry a couple of times, and didn't notice a thing. Disappointed, vowing never to do another "What's the Story" entry again, and hastily deciding to resign my mod status, throw away all my worldly possessions and run naked into the ocean, I cursed StarWars.com for not seeing my vast contribution of pure, untapped literary genius. Or not.

But then I said to ma self, I says:

"...Still...there's something familiar about this entry. I feel..like...I don't know..."

To which the Yoda voice in my head, used in emergencies when I myself am far too obtuse to know what's going on, pokes its head around a tree in the swamp of my mind and says:

"Feel like what?"

"Like I'm being Published!"

And sure enough, 3 days later, after returning from the ocean and properly clothing myself again (as best a moose can manage), I find Halagad's entry and the confirmation of my suspicions. But, honestly, I have to be fair here. For the UT-AT entry, I really only contributed bits and pieces of terminology, a little technobabble, a little vocabulary, and essentially the last paragraph.

The2ndQuest wrote a large majority of that story, and to my knowledge, named the vehicle, to boot (mine was called a AT-CS, the All-Terrain Combat Sled, which, let's face it, when was the last time you referred to a sled as being "all terrain"?).

I really enjoyed the rest of the backstory (the parts I had nothing to do with) about the challenges of unstable terrain, the loss of troops and artillery on the natural bridges of Agamar, and the forging of a joint venture between KDY and Mekuun to produce this amazing vehicle. Even better was the nickname, due to it's triple threat of heavy armament, the "Trident".

The rest was an odd sort of blurring of some ideas I may (or may not?) have had in conjunction regarding the skid pads, and their dual function of propulsion and traction for firing. It was sort of a creative salad at that point, who knows who put what in. I've put my original version of the entry here on my Darkest Moose Geocities website, to better give an idea of what parts were me and what parts weren't. I anticipate soon I'll load up all of my What's the Story entries there (not here, because, of course, the creative submission rule, meeslings), as well as perhaps some amateurish stabs at fan fiction certain to embarass myself, and possibly the reader. But hey, that's what the Internet is for, right?

Anyway, my thanks to StarWars.com, and the judges, and most of all, to my unknowing partner, The2ndQuest, from which strangely I feel I've somehow usurped half of the glory when I should have only perhaps a fifth, if that. :0)

All the same, it goes down in history - the mind of The Dark Moose is now indelibly stained upon Star Wars lore, in my own small fashion...

So there ya go. Rush out and buy your UT-AT today! And don't forget to ask about the Imperial Employee Pricing Plus program...

DM out