Now, if you recall from our last installment, Part Four: Where's the Baby?, Doug Barre and Marilyn Scott-Waters had switched places in the "penkwomics" line-up, Marilyn offering the fourth round title while Doug would be offering the fifth.
Well, when it came time for the fifth round to start, Doug decided to officially remove himself from the game: he hadn't been able to participate in the previous rounds, and he didn't think it would've be fair to step in at the end when he hadn't gone the whole way with the rest of us.
So Dan Coble proposed that the four of us still in should submit one word, and those four words would be the title for round five. Thus "Gigantic Prehensile Unction, Incorporated."
I cheated a bit in this, of course. See, I'd been following a pattern with the previous installments: the odd-numbered episodes had their titles worked into the background scenery while the even-numbered ones would get mentioned in the dialogue. So this one, Part Five, needed to be something I could put on a sign somewhere. I knew where Tharka was going after the events of Part Four: Where's the Baby?, so I contributed the word "Incorporated" to the joint title. You'll see why below.
So here's "Gigantic Prehensile Unction, Incorporated," Part Five of Hearts and Minds, one of the many pre-Daily Grind adventures of D. F. Tharka and A. Gana Belea.
Now, since penkwe is all about the number five--it's supposed to be the Indo-European word for five, after all--you might think that this, being Part Five, would be the conclusion of Hearts and Minds. But that, of course, would be much too easy...
See, originally, Tharka's line there--"Till the next one comes looking for me"--was supposed to be more or less the last line of the story. But after putting it down on paper, I realized that there was no way Tharka would hang around after this. He would be a constant target, putting Gana and everyone else around him in danger, and that would be unacceptable to him.
So the last panel became him turning and walking away, and I knew I needed another installment. It would mean I'd have to make up the title myself, of course--unless I stole a title from someone else...
Which is what I did, and the Epilogue: "Gonna Roll the Bones" lies just the other side of that link there. We've also got links here to Part Four: "Where's the Baby?", to the Archive Page, the Table of Contents, and to the Daily Grind Main Page.
