It came to pass that the peoples of Slebb were known for their overwhelming, incomprehensible, staggering, unbelievable, absolutely bonkers levels of wealth. Money flowed in and out of their hands as freely as if they were reverse-alcoholics, and millionaires became known as their pauper class, with their humanity, ability, and right to life regularly questioned in all the opinion pieces of the great Slebbese newspapers.
The state of Slebb was indeed perfect. There was just one little problem: they were absolutely bored shitless. Grinding the poor underfoot had become little more than work, and once given to someone else as the unpleasant duty it had become, there was nothing left to do.
Then Lord Beaucoup Blitherish Von Parakeet VII Esq. Etc. looked out his window one day while ceremonially spitting into the street and saw a young orphan watching a scrap of wood floating in a puddle of urine.
“Ugh, how vulgar,” he said, and made sure to spit into the orphan’s eye. Then he had a very good dinner of the last known Slebbese warble-fowl and had very lurid dreams and woke up early before the sunrise with a fascinating idea boiling in his brains.
“A SHIP,” he shouted, and expired from fatal indigestion.
Luckily the full record of his activities the prior day was extracted from his household servants as they were ritualistically tortured to death before burial alongside him, and so the idea was preserved and handed to his next of kin, Joe Parakeet, who immediately commissioned the construction of what was to be the first of the greatest and most obscene fad ever indulged in by the wealthy of Slebb: the pleasure-liner SMH Indulgence.
It was a beautiful boat, about a mile long and half a mile wide and every inch of it blessed by the blood and sweat and tears of the unprosperous. Its decks glimmered, its hull shone, and a ticket cost half of your entire savings, rounded up. The only way it could’ve been more attractive would be if it fucked you, and since most Slebbese aristocracy were incapable of attaining orgasm without witnessing fiduciary crimes in a way it sort of did.
Every ticket for its maiden voyage triggered a bidding war, in the course of which some ten thousand sons and daughters of the great and powerful were killed in the line of battle. It was a huge success and so of course the only thing to be done was to absolutely try to get one over on it, starting with the launch of the Incomprehensible next summer (which was a mile and a half long and half-a-mile-and-six-inches wide) and going from there.
Ah, the competitive spirit those ships created! Oh, the awe and the power and the grace that were on display! Every steel plant in Slebb was forcibly bought out; every foundry annexed; every single mite capable of pouring molten metal enserfed and shackled, and across all the country you couldn’t sleep for the din of hammers without special earmuffs made from sumptuous furs, which all the most fashionable of the wealthy immediately purchased. Every year, a new height, a new glory!
The Incomprehensible, with its seventeen triple-layer decks!
The Incredulity, whose fountains spewed molten platinum!
The Invigorating, which boasted that not one second of its passage would be spent sober by anyone on board!
The Inviting, loaded so full of drugs and Slebbese master prostitutes that its waterline was six inches below the rails!
But as with anything else the competition irked someone, and so finally Sir Julian Marzipan Glorium Fistmouth Triumph Berserk, the most peevish of his generation, commissioned the construction of a ship to end them all. This was accomplished by conscripting all the impoverished of the country for a year of toil, during which they entirely severed the county of Blurbinghamlet from the Slebbese mainland and attached great plutonium engines to it before expiring from radiation poisoning and exhaustion.
“It’s called the Indecency,” said Sir Julian. “Top that, you fucking peasants.”
And nobody could.
Oh, those tickets sold fast, let me tell you.
The Indecency, in retrospect, had one fatal flaw: it was so large that literally everyone of even remotely attainable means could fit on it. This reduced the prestige of a ticket markedly, and everyone was very distressed until Sir Julian’s marketing riff-raff, Tremorous Punt, announced that the more money you paid for a ticket the greater square footage you personally commanded around yourself at all times during the voyage, including control of the very lives and souls of those who infringed upon your property. The bidding war that followed was enthusiastic and unrestrained, and claimed two-thirds of the peerage’s heirs, thereby solving all conceivable space issues and problems of exclusivity at once both ways.
That ship. Oh that ship. It’s almost impossible to put into words. New ones were commissioned and fitted into gilded dictionaries, but even then…
When it launched, it did so on great skids constructed from the skeletal remains of the underpoor who had shaped it, greased with their scant bodily fluids. Its horn was a live Plabian megaphant, bound in chains and amputated and tickled with a feather. The lanterns that hung off its many, many bows were gold and diamond and whenever they dimmed from overuse they cut them overboard and hung up new ones so its wake glowed in their passing.
It hadn’t even sailed yet and already it was the best thing since sliced poors.
And even if the voyage itself hadn’t begun, the festivities surely had – as each passenger boarded, they found plenty to do beyond mere mingling with their not-quite-peers.
Oh, the great activities available upon that great ship’s decks! The emerald-gargling competitions, where a lucky fellow capacious in saliva and jowls could win his mouthful! The ruby-snorting parlour, where the greatest men of their age gathered to smoke and discuss serious matters like who could get absolutely blazed off of crushed gems the hardest! The sensorium, where everything from meat cleavers to baseball bats to toothpicks to ruby-encrusted shoe horns were gifted to a passenger and a crewman selected by lot was tied down in front of them and they could do whatever!
Several of the eldest passengers were so overcome with joy that they almost cried themselves to death and had to be placed into the Indecency’s wealth-support wing, where financial experts carefully supervised the transplanting of their funds into their healthier and younger heirs before their cashless husks were thrown into the ship’s furnace. What a way to go that surely was.
But of course the fiercest competition was the placing of the deck chairs. Every passenger boarded with a small battalion of forcibly-drafted millionaires arranged into squads of forward strike teams, special operatives, Stormtroopers, artillery command, and engineers to seize, hold, and fortify their spots in the sun. Many a jovial bet was placed as to whose men would triumph and whose would be swept aside in the great race for space, and such was the good spirit and fellowship present at this time that even the losers laughed as their faces were sprayed with the arterial fluids of their conscripts, which they supped down as if it were honeyed oil!
There was a feast, of course. To save space, the courses will simply be listed in order, without elaboration.
An appetizer of eviscerated infant eels, in marmalade.
Bread-rolls baked and served inside the skulls of executed prisoners.
Salad of plebeian testicles fried in aromatic oils and diced, then tossed with rose petals and peeled grapes in a wine vinegar.
A choice of gutted infant of the Plabian megaphant that served as the ship’s horn (served with mint); or a live and angry shark (served with a chainsaw).
Side of potatoes stuffed with every single spice known to man and then roasted or spices smeared over every vegetable known to man and then roasted.
Dessert of cake baked from the blood and bones of street urchins that had been fed nothing but cream and honey for six months before harvesting.
The wine list was not available, but is believed to have been comprised largely of Sir Julian’s urine.
The morning after the feast was one of furious activity, the last moments before history was made and driven white-hot into Slebbese memory forever and ever. Prayers to Wealth were muttered, errant items were stowed, the last shift of the dockworkers who had prepared the way were formally disemboweled and thrown overboard for a lucky voyage, and so on and on and on, a thousand little chores – all typical, yet rendered extraordinary by the momentousness of the occasion.
The last aboard the ship was the captain, Lord Plord Hob Smear-Bandicoot-upon-the-mighty-river, whose eyes of chipped-and-somehow-blue-granite and incredibly authoritatively trimmed beard had made him the obvious choice. His plain but perfect jacket of midnight silk could blind an errant eye with a casual roll of his shoulders. At his elbow was his indentured billionaire, Blordo, who would be doing the actual busywork of steering and all that bullshit. At his other elbow was his other indentured billionaire, Tweedo, who would be doing the other busywork of thrashing Blordo senseless whenever he screwed up.
The horn brayed out its departure, the loading ramps were stowed away, a motherless, penniless child was smashed against the hull for good luck, and the whole ship sank to the bottom of the sea under the sheer weight of its overindulgence, carrying every single person of means in Slebb screaming to their graves in tremendous agony along with all their wealth. Not one speck of money nor one fragment of their bones was ever found, and it’s believed by many that the ship was so heavy it punctured straight through the planet’s crust past the mantle and into hell itself, where it crushed the devil.
And that is the story of Indecency Day, which will be celebrated forevermore in Slebb until the end of time.