Cauliflower did not really understand all of the name dropping and historical context that he found himself in. He was merely a lowly vassal that was swept along with the crusading ambitions of his lords, and even remained a bit unsure about whether “vassal” was the historically appropriate title that he should label himself with. What horror he had found upon himself, being mutilated and held prisoner due to his captors mistakenly believing that he was much more than just a simple soldier, which had they realized might have instead granted poor Cauliflower a quicker and merciful death through summary execution rather than this slow suffering rot, while blind and terrorized by the threat of the assassins.
Instead of facing his fears head on with acceptance, Cauliflower coped with his ordeal by disassociating from his reality and imagining that he was merely a figment of the imagination of a particularly ridiculous pedant, who can’t help to excruciatingly force everything to be so meta and self-referential, and that all of his suffering was just part of a shared fantasy among some linguists (who also occasionally find interest in a board game from East Asia) that are only playing a game (although not the East Asian one).
Alas, he snapped back into his reality and felt compelled to finally speak again.
“Wud y’all blathering on aboot?”, said Cauliflower in a confounding manner that inexplicably mixed accents., “Anyone got a plan to break this joint?”
Struggling to remain lucid, feeling the imaginary pedant slip into his consciousness, losing grip with reality, and unable to discern whether if he was imagining the pedant, or if the pedant was imagining him, Cauliflower uttered his next words with a seemingly different tone and voice.
“How many assassins are there anyways (and how did we even come to realize that assassins were out to get us anyways, did everyone else hear that strange narration in my head)? That seems like helpful information to have at hand, but perhaps our Gods do not deign to grace us with such assistance.”
Cauliflower reassured himself by thinking, “Surely, I must be real, what sort of self-described pedant would settle on a name as absurd and contextually inappropriate as ‘Cauliflower’ instead of spending a few moments on a simple Google search (which, of course, I should anachronistically know all about) to find something more relevant?”
He then lulled back into a daydream, of the idyllic life he left behind long ago in his beloved home of Rotinbah, where he so yearned to return and enjoy the simple delights of tending his crops, cutting his woods, and raising his family. He dreamed that his descendants would prosper, and perhaps one might someday take up the pursuit of clockmaking, maybe even attempting to craft one with a rooster that crows the hour, but be stymied by the engineering of the mechanism and instead settle for a clock that goes “cuckoo”.
