Photo by: Connor Gorry
After shooting down a neighbor’s drone hovering 25 feet above the ground in his front yard, local electrician and recreational firearm enthusiast Boris Knotwood leveraged his enforcement of his immediate airspace to appoint himself King of the Skies and Ruler of the Four Winds.
“Kneel, subordinate, and bow before your new aerial overlord,” Knotwood, Son of Aeolus, proclaimed after the immobilized drone crashed onto his yard. “Henceforth you shall address me by my full title: King of the Skies, Ruler of the Four Winds, Arbiter of All that Flies, God Unfortunately Constrained by the Bounds of Gravity.”
Swift-triggered Knotwood had been reportedly sitting on his porch, polishing and performing routine maintenance on his Remington Model 870 pump-action shotgun, when he saw his neighbor’s drone approaching his property from across the street.
“And indeed I did brandish my scepter,” heroic Knotwood said as he wildly waved the firearm, “this rod that empowers me to enact the justice of the winds. But the offender would not yield, would not relent, would not bow to my predestined jurisdiction! And then somewhere, I heard the gods calling from clouds above, and I knew my destiny was to come to fulfillment.”
Masie Heller, the owner of the drone, was shocked at the righteous smiting of her drone.
“I just wanted to fly my new drone around,” she said, peering at the punctured remains of her mechanical contraption in her neighbor’s yard. “I never intended to intrude on anyone’s property or get roped into the ascension of a new de jure crown ruler, but here we are.
“Okay, so maybe I flew it a little close, and I admit that one could say it’s odd for there to be a very high-definition video camera on it, but I wasn’t using it! At least not when that asshole shot it down,” she admitted.
“Just look at my recorded footage from the drone! Here, it’s just hovering in his yard at a height that’s barely close enough to his house to invoke a questionable violation of privacy. And you can see he’s [glory-bound Knotwood] making breakfast through the window. It’s a perfectly fine morning, and then he comes out to grab the paper or something and I immediately stop recording video. How is that possibly an offense punishable by death?”
“I had seen the airborne disturbance in the morning,” lion-hearted Knotwood confirmed. “She’s lucky that I brought it upon myself to bequeath leniency for the first infraction, but alas — it was still there when I went out again later to care for my veritable gavel over the courts of the sky. I could not twice excuse the invasion of my home by that exemplary excuse for a flying pissant.”
That night, the Lord Marshal Knotwood feasted and drank heartily in his home, with some of the dishes reportedly containing bits and pieces of the dead drone’s internal electronics. During the revelries, neighbors adjacent to his house heard snippets of strong-winged Knotwood’s maniacal laughter and the occasional phrase that was described by the listeners only as “from a man drunk on power.”
“I swear I heard him [all-powerful Knotwood] say: ‘This will grant me more airspace jurisdiction than you can ever imagine!’” said one neighbor, John Geary. “Did the King of the Skies, Ruler of the Four Winds, Arbiter of All that Flies, and God Unfortunately Constrained by the Bounds of Gravity just eat drone parts to gain more power? I think he did.”
