Condor!

(Written in the Key of E minor. F# dropped)

The noble lords of Arcturus are ever watchful for the greatest threat from the skies. Every evening, at
exactly sundown, the king of vultures arrives with its retinue of winged thieves to steal livestock, babies,
and buxom babes on the beach.

It is particularly tough in summers when people are out on the rocky outcrops sunning themselves and
generally enjoying the last rays of the wholesome sun. Entire families go missing and sometimes the
authorities have to update the yellow pages to exclude some names. It is generally assumed that this
task is troublesome, but the locals are forever wary that the government is somehow responsible for the
disappearances.

There has been some talk of the Federation training the condors to keep the Resistance in check, but
neither the Resistance nor the Federation has ever been photographed with any condors and everyone
feigns ignorance and goes shifty eyed when they are asked about it.

It is in this ominous atmosphere, that our heroes, Vega and Whatsisname, dare to fall in love. Both Vega
and Alex have known pain beyond measure; Vega lost her lover to a Condor, and Alex lost his mother to
one. When Alex gets really drunk, he believes that he is being attacked by a host of doves as large as
condors. When Vega gets drunk, she passes out.

Alex works as a statistician at the local bank. His responsibilities include checking condor statistics,
plotting economic trends that might have changed due to condor attacks, and finding the statistical
normative variance of the populations reaction to condors. Everybody in Arcturus is very serious about
condors.

Alexs friend, Taylor, is a nurse. He works for Doctor Marmalade. Doctor Marmalade works in the
artificial appendages and/or implants department. Condor attacks are so common that he must work on
two cephalic replacements a day. Taylor does his best to keep a straight face when the headless patients
arrive. Most of them cant even think straight after such an attack.

Taylors friend Rory works in the lab, where they work on creating a genetic impediment for the
condors. Several solutions have been proposed, including, flying pigs, giant tortoises, and crocodiles
with bat wings. They are yet to arrive on any kind of conclusion on that front.

The situation looks grim.

Several people have taken to shooting condors for recreation. They are bad as game birds and their
meat is usually griff, smelly, and tasteless. Rednecks consider it a dangerous and tedious hobby and only
indulge in it occassionally when they are done with shooting their neighbours sons for sleeping with the
women in their family.
Several large corporations have developed condor deterring software, including one which emits
ultrasonic frequencies to annoy condors. Andrew is creating a new kind of nano crystal that will reflect
light in such a way that the birds will be attracted to it like it was some kind of a magnet. This solution
seems implausible but his people will try anything at this point of time.

Children are educated about condors from the very start. Con-dors are a large vulture like group of
birds. They eat children. As they get older they are taught about the various species of condors and
their scientific taxonomical classification among birds.

Several birders have proposed more humane solutions. One such birder, a certain Gerbill Gehsundheit,
has taken to condor whispering and has literally lost his head several times.

But why do condors make off with people? Is it because they are new world vultures that are now
evolving and mutating into raptors or is it that their brains are leaking out of their hairless shiny fleshy
combs and they are fucking evil? Sorry about that. My cat got eaten recently. So I fucking hate those
marked up fat-ass butt-ugly bald vultures.

But we never get to hear the other side of the story. W