Monarchic Nemesis Revealed

Sir Angel Joe is writing his memoirs.  He's become quite a popular hero back in the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy; apparently one of the reasons he was attached to this particular delegation rather than given a posting on his home soil was that he was very unnerved by the attention he was receiving.  The poor chap couldn't walk down the street without being recognised.  Complete strangers wanted to come up and touch him.  You can see how this would have interacted badly with Angel Joe's already fractured nerves.

But now that he's been away for a while, and is feeling a bit better, he's decided to write his memoirs.  He's hoping that people will stop asking him questions if his memoirs have been published, especially if they're published while he's still away from home.  All the details of his heroic mission will be there in the public record, but he won't be around for interviews, so (he hopes) everyone will just read his memoirs, and by the time he returns he'll be uninteresting and everyone will leave him alone.

Consequently, he's been talking a bit more about his mission. Angel Joe finds it difficult to express himself in prose, so he came up with the idea of dictating his story to himself on a digital recorder, and then he takes his own dictation.  He does a lot of wandering around muttering to himself (so does Zebulon, but Angel Joe isn't crazy), and sometimes he tries telling bits of his story to someone first, so that if he skips over something or is somehow unclear, his audience will tell him.

So we've learned where Angel Joe and Winidavefred the badger were sent on their mission.  This is something AJD and I had been wondering about.  We knew that the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy and the Wild Republic are on good terms, so it didn't make sense to us that the Wild Republic would have stolen sensitive documents from the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy; but we didn't know whether there were any other candidates for the Wild Parlimentary Monarchy's natural enemy.

Now we know: the Wild Parliamentary Monarchy is the sworn enemy of the Wild Fascist Dictatorship, which is governed by a tyrannical, power-mad sheep named Ebenezer Popcorn, whose bloodthirsty ambition is equalled only by his personal insanity.  If you're thinking a sheep could not possibly be that convincing a dictator, and that a carnivore would be a more likely candidate, think again.  Carnivores have to be very careful, you see, lest they make herbivores uncomfortable.  Herbivores have rather more laxity and sometimes feel like they have something to prove.  Ebenezer Popcorn is just such a sheep.  He carries a spiky staff and has a habit of randomly slamming into anyone unfortunate enough to be in his immediate vicinity.  He's also very paranoid, frequently spontaneously deciding that those closest to him are conspiring against him and then thinking of creative ways of executing them.

You do not want to get taken prisoner by Ebenezer Popcorn.  Angel Joe's torture sessions were overseen by the infamous Popcorn himself, and he is one of the few to live to tell about it.  No wonder his country holds him in such awe.