The cherub Montgomery was hatched in what would later become the Sanford Canton-Inwood Medical Center of Canton, South Dakota, in 1887. Had the school existed at the time, he would have attended Lawrence Elementary School, home of the C-Hawks. However, the way things ended up going, the only option was farmhanding. This proved difficult, considering the mistrust that the Scandinavian immigrants harbored against him due to his disdain for the Conference of the Norwegian-Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, which was the hot new church body in the area following the 1870 split from the Scandinavian Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod in North America. Further compounding Montgomery’s struggles was his skin allergy to the soy plant, which was the bumper crop of the time until crop failures from lack of proper rotation hit during the early 1890s. However, through perseverance and his dedication to scheduled crop irrigation, in 1901, Montgomery predominated over his sister and managed to produce about 7 bushels/acre of wheat, averaging 56 cents per bushel.
The cherub Alvilde Olsen (nee Ahlqvist) was an erstwhile teacher and an active member of the Lutheran Ladies Aid Society since their name change from the Norwegian Ladies Aid Society in 1899. While legally married to an otherwise unremarkable human farmer, she longed secretly to participate in the destructive and horrific endeavor of cherub-mating. She first laid eyes on Montgomery in 1906, when she was 20 and he was 19, and they fled the solar system at once in order to duel.
I will now expound further on the particulars of the personal history of Montgomery and Alvilde. Montgomery was by all accounts an upstanding young homesteader, though he distanced himself from others and shunned regular church attendance of any sort. In 1906, he was at the apex of his farming career, and had acquired for himself a reputation as a mysterious but benevolent figure in the Greater Canton community, given to generosity and quick to forgive loans. It was through one such act of mercy that he came to visit the town of Beresford, South Dakota, where his fate, and the fate of several universes, was decided, when he journeyed to meet with a local aid society in order to sell several commodity grain holdings at a slight loss.
Alvilde, of course, was possessed of an opposite alignment to that of Montgomery. Her inclination towards destruction was absolute, and her fury engulfed entire star systems in scalding waves of eternal plasma and suffering. But the great bulk of her ruinous activities occurred later, and will be discussed in due course. In the late 1890s, Alvilde was given to petty mischief, occasional jibes and cruelties, and small acts of arson within the town of Beresford. This was not the town of her birth: she was hatched in a homestead in a town recently incorporated in 1881 as Egan, South Dakota, in Moody County. Upon swallowing her natal eggshell, she ceased from slithering upon the ground and split into two beings: Alvilde and Sigvart. Sigvart, a sickly male entity, insisted upon remaining in their hometown, while Alvilde hungered for an environment more populated with targets for her wrath. In short, Alvilde labored behind her brother's back to obtain her Teaching Certificate from the University of Dakota, which would later become the University of South Dakota, and predominated over him in 1898. Once she established herself as a gainfully employed and respectable woman in Beresford, marriage proposals were soon forthcoming. She accepted her third suitor, one Knud Olsen, a bucktoothed alfalfa farmer who was several inches shorter than her, and who admired her wings greatly.
What can be said about a duel? It was like any other act of mating among cherubs. A black hole was chosen at random, they expanded into their serpentine forms spanning hundreds of times the radius of the Sun, and the ferocities commenced. The only peculiarity of the duel between Montgomery and Alvilde was the