Southern Farm Boy

It’s your standard fantasy quest with a young farm boy hero.  But the young farm boy hero is very much a southern boy.  He is awfully polite.  Just as courteous as can be.

His call to adventure comes, he’s up in the mountains .  In a cave.  And the smoke is rising, the scented smoke, and the old sage is teaching him his quest, his prophesy, but the sage is an old man.  He mumbles and speaks gutturally and gums it, and the young lad can’t understand hardly a word of it.  He politely asked the sage to repeat.  The sage is a bit annoyed, but start repeating it.  It’s just as bad as before.  The young hero seeing the sage is annoyed, is too polite to ask him to repeat it again.  He courteously sits through the whole thing without understanding a word of it. At the end, the young boy politely nods, smiles, thanks the sage warmly and heads back down the mountain.  No wiser than when he went up.

He is going to have to fulfill his quest without knowing what the quest is.

He is going to have to puzzle the riddle of the prophecy without knowing the riddle.

What happens next? 

It depends on why the young boy is so awfully courteous.  Why would he be that way?  Not everyone who is raised polite turns out that way, and some kids aren’t raised that way and end up there anyway.

People who are just extra polite, why are they that way?

If he’s timid and conscientious, if he is so quiet because he’s just touched by fear and lives in constraint, then the reader knows the prophesy even though the farm boy doesn’t. The reader gets to feel that the tension and scare watching the hero bumble from one near miss miss to another, almost blowing things up through ineptitude.

But if the hero is imperturbable and self possessed the reader doesn’t know the prophecy either and discovers it along with the hero as the villains basically reveal it to the hero in their efforts to stop him from fulfilling it.  They of course don’t know he doesn’t know.