The Extraordinary Life of Klaus Gänsefett
Inventor, Renaissance Man, Human Cannonball
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1426
Just 14 years old but already a maverick, Klaus Gänsefett left his bustling hometown of Cologne, intent on making a name for himself. He set out for a sleepy, backwoods village that no one had ever heard of—not even Klaus, which made navigation difficult.
On the road there, he got into a brief but violent altercation with his own cuffs and, in doing so, invented the dagged sleeve. Over the decades to come, dagged sleeves would be all the rage across Europe, with many a noble gladly giving their right arm for a pair (only to realise they then had one dagged sleeve too many).
However, without a patent, Klaus never saw a penny for this most popular of inventions. It was a rookie mistake he vowed never to make again.
1429
Three years later, Klaus made the same mistake again. He failed to register a patent for his next invention: the “mobile oven” (essentially an oven on wheels), which he designed to be pushed around a busy marketplace by a “mobile chef” (essentially a chef on legs).
Some of the most popular items on the menu at Klaus’s mobile oven were the McRoasted Hedgehog, the McBladder-Bread with Cheese, and the Fish Guts Happy Meal (which usually came with a toy… a dead moth on a string or something). But the business proved unviable, mainly because he’d chosen to make a name for himself in a village with only five inhabitants (one of whom was himself and three of whom he had good reason to believe were all the same person in an array of extravagant disguises).
In a momentary state of despair, Klaus tried to beat himself to death with a trowel. But his bad luck continued; he accidentally beat his only customer to death instead.
Klaus fled. While he was on the run, his brother, Johann, released the following statement to the press:
“We weren’t cut from the same cloth, Klaus and me. He always had an evil streak that was most foreign to me. As children, he could poke a horse in the eye for hours and hours and never get bored. I, on the other hand, was bored after an hour… two hours tops!”
1433
For a short while, Klaus made a comfortable living selling wooden carvings of twigs at a piazza in Genoa until one eagle-eyed customer realised all his carvings were not carvings at all—they were just twigs.
Forced to change careers once more, Klaus began selling lavender and sweet fennel to superstitious peasants who, following his instructions, would use it to coat the floors of their homes to ward off evil spirits and mask the stench of their waste and unwashed bodies. However, such superstitions were generally frowned upon by members of the clergy (whose houses all stank). When the peasants had no money left to pay their tithes, the church declared Klaus a heretic, and he was again forced to flee.
1437
With little else for it, Klaus Gänsefett changed careers a final time and became the first ever human cannonball. During the Siege of Tangier, he was fired from a bombard at the walls of the Moroccan citadel and, by all accounts, made quite the splash.
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