This article is classified "Real"
Early in the 1992-1993 school year, a group of seniors at Clio High got bored in their AP English class. The next day Jon Harmon, a member of this group, brought in a notebook which he'd planned to use to actually take notes. What was actually written in it he will most likely remember until he's old and grey and can't even remember his own name. Before class, Jon scrawled "Skipping Along the Trail to Acheron," a title which he hoped was sufficiently ludicrous, across the cover. He then wrote a short introductory paragraph to a story, and handed the notebook to Barb Gross, a friend sitting behind him, when he got to class. She read the first paragraph, snickered, and wrote a bit of her own. She then passed it to Alan Head, another friend, and thus the cycle continued. By the end of the year, the group, consisting of five regular authors and two or three irregular ones (that is, five authors who wrote often and two or three who wrote occasionally; all authors were irregular, as can be surmised by reading the story), had accumulated 68 pages of drivel; drivel which just happened to be one of the funniest things to ever come out of Clio High. The main group consisted of: Jon Harmon, the "Keeper of the Sacred Scrolls," as he came up with the idea, and thus "guarded" the original notebook when the group went off to college; Barb Gross, a nose-ring wearing rebel who also happened to be president of the Clio chapter of the National Honor Society; Alan Head, a Southern Baptist who somehow managed to hold back most of his objections to the writings of the other authors; Jon McCarron, a big hairy guy who is still actually considering pursuing a career in journalism, after a short stint in engineering at a tech school; and Kyle LaVelle, hands down the funniest of the authors, who now wanders the streets of Clio looking for someone to cut his hair. The Story, as it is often called by The Authors, is about an "agent" who has forgotten that he's an "agent," and his various "adventures." It doesn't really have much of a plot until about page 60 of the original text; instead, it wanders from moment to moment, following the life of Norman Arless, the "agent," as he searches for his "mission." While this may sound like exactly what is necessary to make a story exceedingly dull, the story is actually quite interesting, and has been called funny by everyone who has ever read it, even those who have no real reason to simply kiss up to The Authors. One even found it so funny that work has begun on a Skipping Along the Trail to Acheron radio show at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA, Earth. Excerpts from the story are available by emailing jharmon@mtu.edu. Please use a subject of "Acheron Request", as I'd like to eventually set up an auto-answer.