Bela, newly empowered by her fluttering swarm of tiny mothlike friends, wheeled on the Potato King. “You monster! You knew this would happen! You’ve made everything worse, and I can’t even figure out how that’s possible considering the storyline so far!”
“Don’t, darling,” Edwood soothed. “You know you get those awful migraines when you try to figure things out.”
Bela immediately dropped to the ground, clutching her temples. “Ooooh, you’re right! Why do I do this to myself?”
“Awk?” said the two penguins now representing Jakob, in a tone that suggested Hello? Can we get back to me, please?
The Potato King gave a deep, starchy belly-laugh of pleasure. “Don’t worry, my little Antarctic friend. You’ve been spared the venom’s sting–for now. But you’ll still have to be milked, and milked, and milked, and each time–” The sentence dissolved into a maniacal cackle.
“AWK!” cried the penguins, as if to say If there’s some way of milking a penguin I don’t want to know what it is! They flapped their stubby wings in panic.
Bela raised her hand. “Is this the time where I do something stupid and self-sacrificing in the name of love?”
Edwood narrowed his fabulous topaz eyes at her. “Love? You are talking about me, right, cupcake?”
With a will of their own, Bela’s hands reached out, slowly, like a child reaching for a golden ornament on the Christmas tree, toward Edwood’s face. This happened a lot. Jakob-the-penguin tottled over and yanked her hair with his beak, which seemed to snap her out of it.
“No,” she said, rubbing her scalp. “What if . . . what if I tried to milk him?”
Edwood recoiled. “No! You harlot! How dare you suggest, um, milking another man?”
Jakob-the-Penguins seemed nothing but enthused by this suggestion.
“Edwood, don’t you see? Even though my love for you drives out every thought of . . . well, every thought from my mind, he still loves me! Even though I feel absolutely nothing for him but a sort of vague wandering pity mixed with disgust for his pathetic fawning, he’s loved me all along.”
The penguins looked less enthused.
Edwood’s beautiful brow furrowed into crystalline lines that were no less perfect. “Are you suggesting that love might save him?”
“Hey,” said the Potato King, “it’s the only thing no one’s suggested so far.”
“And then,” said Bela, rising to her feet, her voice growing stronger, “we could ask Master Mario to give him a new body! And me a brain! And you a heart!”
The Potato King groaned. He didn’t have enough hands to cover all his eyes. “And that was the other thing no one’s suggested so far. You didn’t have to go there, Bela. You didn’t.”
But Bela had already rushed to the lockers just inside the gates, where she began distributing towels to the others. “We’ll use these towels as disguises to infiltrate the castle.”
“‘Infiltrate’?” said Edwood, looking concerned. “Bela, have you been reading again?”
As she stood from knotting a washcloth around the neck of the little penguin, Bela gave Edwood a chilly glare. “Oh, and when we get home? I’m getting my degree.”
Whipping the towel around her own head and shoulders like a cowl, she trotted away. The two cowled penguins that were Jakob wobbled after her. His two tiny penguin hearts all but burst with love for Bela. You tell him, girl! he wanted to cheer. He cursed his short limbs for not being able to keep up with her longer stride, and he nearly panicked when she turned a corner and vanished. Every time Bela did things on her own, something terrible hap–
“Iieee!”
–penned..
• 
Very nice job on representing the thought-processes of the duo/single Penguins that are Jakob, very funny. Anyone else notice how Yukon Gold transmorphed into the Potato King over the past 3 chapters? Or was he always the One, True Potato King to Bind Them? My head hurts.
I’m sorry if this post seems out of place, but since all of the ‘Potato Moon’ posts relate back to the original question of the legality of writing/selling as story based on someone else’s work, this got me thinking.
Recently on the History Channel I saw a story on Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”. In it they said that he used as a reference for his work a book called “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” by Michael Baigent and others.
The makers of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” took Brown to court for copyright infringement, and eventually lost.
My thought was that, if someone writes a book that they claim is ‘fact’ based on their own research, can you claim ‘copyright’ on its contents? If someone were to use an autobiography of Kenndy as a reference for a fictional work, I don’t think the writers of the autobiography can sue unless large portions of it were used word-for-word.
Likewise with the ‘facts’ presented in ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’; as outrageous as it may sound the makers claim it is fact based on their ‘research’, thus it should be available for anyone to use as they see fit.
Anyway, just a thought ^_^
@marvelfan: I think the words you’re looking for are “intellectual property.” The Dan Brown problem was not so much that he was taking directly from the source material as it was that he was taking a source material that outlined a nearly exclusive non-fiction premise and adapting it into a fictional form. Holy Blood, Holy Grail was presented as fact, and Dan Brown used those facts as a framework for his fiction, which is perfectly kosher. But the case edged into the realm of intellectual property, where it became a bit of a catch-22: if a hypothetical researcher had access to the same materials as the HBHG guys, would he be able to come up with a theory similar to the one they presented? If the answer is “yes,” then we can call it fact and Dan Brown had every right to base a novel on it (provided he wasn’t doing anything like stealing unedited swatches of the original text). If the answer is “no,” then Dan Brown ripped off the entire premise–but it also implies that the HBHG guys were writing original fiction, not fact.
The key is using the factual framework without using the original content. In your example of a Kennedy bio, it would be cool for either a fiction or a non-fiction work to quote the “ask not what your country can do” speech, since it’s an established, unalterable fact that he did say those words on a particular date in a certain context. It’s when people start using direct, uncredited quotes of original research that you get into murky waters.