Week 1 Storytelling: The Great Tweedle War

In the far-off galaxy of Tweedle, children all over playgrounds on the planets Dum and Dee sing and clap to the rhyme of a long-ago war.

Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee
Resolved to have a battle
For Tweedle-dum said Tweedle-dee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew by a monstrous crow
As big as a tar-barrel,
Which frightened both the heroes so
They quite forgot their quarrel.

After many years of peaceful trade and cooperation, the planet Dum built a new and advanced space station, and it came as a surprise to citizens everywhere when the Dum government denied access to all people of Dee. Enraged by news of the sudden hostility between their long-time allied planets, Captain Cabrel, leader of the premier ship of Dee’s space fleet, intentionally misaligned his ship’s coordinates so as to pass into the edge of the space station’s orbital path, damaging its exterior hull.

In bitter retaliation, Dum declared war on Dee. Battles were continually waged in the outer space regions in that part of the Tweedle galaxy for almost a century. Cyborgs and robots were drafted in droves to step up the fight. The debris of thwarted spaceships littered the sky.

The struggle might have dragged on for another century, had they not been jointly threatened by a new enemy. The unexpected arrival of a colossal, black space voyager, entirely foreign to Tweedle, so completely unnerved the two planets that they forgot their animosity and reunited as allies. Together, and terrified, the Dum and Dee space fleets pointed their combat ships outward and stood their ground until the voyager turned around and sought other planetary conquests in the universe.

After such an encounter, the previous ninety-nine years of fierce contest was all but forgotten by the Dumian and Deeish peoples. By now, it has so absolutely vanished from public memory that the majority of the truth remains only in the deepest sections of the history books. A small part lives on in schoolyard songs.

(space battle)

 

Author’s Note: I based my story on “Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum,” which I found in The Nursery Rhyme Book edited by Andrew Lang in 1897. I selected this particular rhyme because Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum are two of my favorite characters from the Alice in Wonderland books by Lewis Carroll, which I enjoy reading over and over again. Quoted in my story above, the rhyme appears to be about a fight between two small boys who couldn’t share and get along. So I tried to imagine it on a much larger scale, one of galactic proportions.