Though the extreme hazard was obvious to all, Darby's enthusiasm for the task at hand created, as ever, a magical cloak about his elfin form that seemed to protect him, though not from the sarcasm of Chick Counterfly, who now called after the ascending mascotte, "Hey! Suckling! Only a saphead would risk his life to see how fast the wind's blowing!"
* * * * * * * * * *
"A magical cloak"? "His elfin form"? What am I reading? Tolkien?!
Actually, I would be reading Tolkien right now but I couldn't find my copy of The Lord of the Rings. But just like the dumb hobbits and lousy elves in that series, Darby Suckling very much has a magical cloak that protects him while climbing around on the outside of the balloon; it's called plot armor. He has to live so that he can grow into a surly teenager and punch Lindsay in his smart (so smart it's practically Vulcanic!) mouth. Unless that never happens and now I'm worried Darby might fall to his death in this scene!
Chick is totally right about sapheads in this sentence (and it is "a sentence" even though Chick's quotation contains three sentences of its own! Language! Go figure, right?!). Some people can be fooled into risking their lives for the most mundane reasons and those people are rightly called sapheads. My guess is the derogatory term derives from the term sappers and the menial, often dangerous work they did.
I first learned what a sapper is from playing the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game. I probably learned most of the stuff I first learned by playing roleplaying games. I first encountered Dungeons & Dragons when I was ten or eleven and was soon also playing Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, and Top Secret. Probably more games than that because my friends and I played whatever we could get our hands on, even making up a game that encompassed ideas from all the games we were playing which we called Now & Later.
For some reason, this scene reminds me of an old video from the 80s or early 90s when "caught on tape" video shows were all the rage. It was footage taken by an Australian teacher out on a hike with students. He warned a couple of them not to go out on this thin pass over a chasm and was filming them as they were not heeding his cries. Suddenly the path gave out beneath them and they began tumbling down into the ravine while he followed their progress with his camera and shouting, "I told you not to go out there!"
Man. Remembering that video always makes me laugh! It also makes me envious that I'll never get an "I told you so!" in quite as quickly or as ill-timed as that bastard!
Apparently there was a silent comedy from the 1920s called The Saphead. The synopsis is "The scatterbrained son of a Wall Street tycoon goes to the stock exchange and saves his father from bankruptcy." He's probably called a saphead because he helps some dumb rich guy stay rich. Boo! Hiss! We hates him!
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