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It always comes back to weasels in the end.

Downloadable MP3 available: http://tindeck.com/listen/orxd

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On January 3rd 2003, I had the ill fortune to be the most featureless individual on a tram journey from one section of Sheffield to another, making me the inevitable narrator for this tale of woe.
It was rush hour and the cart was packed to the non-existent gunwales with commuters. Sat next to me was a portly gentleman in a tracksuit who smelt heavily of pennies. Sat before me was a woman besieged by stoats, which clung to her hair and cardigan as if they feared to be flung off into limbo should the grasp of their titchy claws be lessened.
Most everyone else was hidden from view courtesy of whoever it was who had brought a massive Victorian dressing screen with them onto the tram. I heard one poor soul suffering from one of the obligatory winter's plagues judging by the wheezes and sneezes he parted with and two other people were discussing a sinister plan to steal Portugal itself, hide it in a cupboard and sell it to the BBC.
We were seventy seconds from our destination when... Terror and unpleasantness; an unscheduled solar eclipse sent us into a portentous darkness of doom and ill-will. Terrified shrieks filled the air, and when the sun came back then we all discovered, to our horror, that our cart had become detached from its fellows and deposited in a lake.
As our heads flicked from window to window, confirming this unexpected change of location, water began to seep in through the gap-riddled entrance hatch near the bow. Yet more shrieks filled the air and then started several minutes of confusion and tumbling as the displaced commuters began breaking windows and attempting to prise open the metal roof with their bare fingernails in a desperate bid to escape before the car was dragged to the bottom of this body of water before everyone drowned... best avoided really
As for myself, I made use of highly impressive arcane tricksmanship to facilitate my departure... Well actually no I just happened to have a wooden mallet with me and, with some difficulty, used it to shatter a window. Carefully I crawled out, slicing my hands a bit on the glass shards and ruining my suit in the brackish algae-strewn waters of what I later learned was not a lake at all but the nest of a rare moisture-sparrow, which are larger than most elephants.
Fortunately the beast was out getting her driver's license renewed and so was not on hand to feast upon the meaty morsels that had, by some circumstance or other, come to be in its lair.
For all the panic in the tram cart, no one actually died. Once we were all outside, shivering in the Winter's air, we noticed that it was taking on water at a pitifully slow rate and we probably would have had hours to escape.
So, frozen, muddied and slightly embarrassed, we traipsed through the woodlands in the hope of finding civilisation.
Instead, somewhat tragically, we blundered across the abode of the tornado weasel. Riddles he demanded as toll for safe passage and failure to answer resulted in a surprisingly painful kick to the shins and the placement of an un-removable dunce cap atop the sconce.
We lined up in a long line and were each given a riddle. Most people got their riddles wrong or made the mistake of trying to flee, only to be chased down by the spry riddles-weasel
When it came to my turn, he asked the following:

'Seventeen legions couldn't seize by force what I, through fiendish cunning, have seized. What have I seized?'

I don't think I was being facetious when I explained that his riddle was intolerably devoid of context and thus unintelligible. He however proved rather adverse to constructive criticism and, perhaps predictably, I now have a dunce cap magically welded to my mazzard.

Here ends my tale of woe.