jamieproctor.ca

Business

>Experimental NORPUL Drill Project Discovers Giant Man Wrestling a Snake on a Boat Underground

South African-based oil firm NORPUL’s latest test drilling has uncovered something more unusual than a hoped-for new oil field: a vast river stretching far beneath the surface of the earth containing a giant man wrestling a snake on a boat.

“This isn’t exactly what we were expecting, I’ll admit,” said Tychus Ooley, 52, the company’s CFO. “For one thing the river is water rather than oil, and for another the man and snake both appear to be of unreasonable size. But after the third borehole turned up the same thing, we had to admit that they do both seem to be real and down there, and quite active.”

Whether or not this will placate NORPUL investors hoping for a surprise windfall in the third quarter remains to be seen; for now, everyone’s equally in the dark.

CORRECTION: it has been brought to this publication’s attention that the giant man and snake are not in the dark, as the boat is aflame with radiance.

Opinion

>The Giant Man Wrestling a Snake on a Boat Underground is a Unique Opportunity

I’ve been around the block a few times – in the past decade alone I’ve worn the hats of snake-wrangler, independent surgical supplies contractor, volunteer alderman, homesteader, scholar of the law, author of eighty books, owner of my own publishing house, manufacturer of the world’s only ‘do-it-from-scratch’ printing press, bitcoin rancher, and self-taught AI philosopher – and I think I’m more than qualified to say this: the giant man wrestling a snake on a boat underground has the potential to change everything. He’s not just the past, he’s also the future. We need to invest in him immediately. You can do that by buying as many NORPUL shares as you can like a good little sheep, or you can forge your own path: where there’s one the giant man wrestling a snake on a boat underground, there have to be more – it’s statistically guaranteed. This morning I put out a patent for the world’s first solo-operated giant man wrestling a snake on a boat underground detector, drilling, and excavator. There’s a whole new field of untapped potential beneath our feet, and the government hasn’t yet had a chance to legislate the future out of it. Phone me to learn more.

Broth Allen is an independent business-owner, landlord, political commentator, investment expert and free-thinker who has run for mayor sixteen times.

News

> NORPUL ‘Sun-Road’ Exploration Draws Criticism

Allegations have been made raising concerns that NORPUL’s continued drilling into the ‘Sun-Road’ cavern – the titanic river stretching from one side of the planet to the other containing the giant man wrestling a snake on a boat discovered earlier this year – may be motivated by the desire to acquire the giant man’s possessions, an act several legal experts imply could be construed as illegal under some circumstances.

“It’s clearly his giant, radiant, bejeweled and gilded boat,” said Harvey Foschlorps, 46, professor emeritus of law. “Unless it belongs to the snake. But that seems unlikely. In either case, it’s preowned and not abandoned. Attempting to remove the immense wealth coating it would constitute a crime by any reasonable definition of the term.”

NORPUL’s legal team have issued a comprehensive reply to their critics as of this morning, stating that their intentions within the ‘Sun-Road’ are purely exploratory in nature, advance the cause of science, are motivated by the humanitarian imperative to make sure the giant man is not in physical distress or danger, and are taking place in a realm far below the legal jurisdiction of all nations that rest atop the earth’s crust.

Science

> NORPUL Stocks Soar Following Analysis of ‘Sun-Barque’ Samples

Further analysis of scientific specimens gathered from the subterranean boat inhabited by the giant man wrestling a snake has confirmed that the vessel is not merely coated with gold, but 25-karat gold.

“It turns out there’s a purity beyond one hundred percent,” confirmed Doctor Dwaven Deebles, 39, NORPUL’s chief scientific advisor, “and it’s all down there. Exciting stuff.”

Gold wasn’t the only discovery of merit made.

“The ‘jewels’ coating the boat appear to in fact be self-contained, faceted chunks of plasma whose internal temperature ranges from five to fifteen million Kelvin,” continued Dr. Deebles. “That’s pretty hot!”

When asked for potential applications of a source of extreme heat that violates all known laws of thermodynamics and physics, Dr. Deebles halted the interview pending consultation with NORPUL’s board of directors.

Opinion

>The Giant Man Wrestling a Snake on a Boat Underground is a Parasite Upon the Greater Wealth of Humanity

Gold is the king of the metals; the material manifestation of all humanity desires; and the irreplaceable and necessary yardsticks that allows mankind to determine the value of all other things in existence. It’s finite in quantity, and inevitably accumulates in the grasp of those with the wit and skill and greatness to master it. The giant man wrestling a snake on a boat underground has none of those things – he is clearly unconcerned with any worldly matters save his pseudo-solipsistic insistence on serpentine gymnastics – and is selfishly inhibiting the circulation of humanity’s vital essence within the world-spirit of the economy. As he sees his possessions as worthless, we are not required to indulge him in educating him otherwise, quod erat demonstrandum. Any claims of so-called ‘looting’ of his subterranean barge are absurd qua absurd, ipso facto not theft presto.

To those who would argue otherwise, I have but two words: cee lavee.

Ronc Toole is a political independent and the only member of his graduating class with great enough foresight to invest in gold rather than wasting his time on degrees.

Entertainment

> Giant Man Wrestling a Snake on a Boat Underground Gets a Makeover

Ouch! It seems even a multi-millennia-long workout plan doesn’t protect you from the carelessness of strangers – everyone’s favorite multi-story hunk, the giant man wrestling a snake on a boat underground, has been spotted sporting a nasty shiner after a fancy-pants new Barque Retrieval Vehicle swung a little too low today while harvesting and popped him right in the left eyesocket, swelling the poor little thing shut tighter than Harmonica Lippz’s Oscar dress! Still, some people can make anything look good; in our opinion, more purple just highlights his strong cheekbones. And a good thing too, because now it looks like the snake has really wrapped him up good on that side. Stay strong, buddy!

Local Events 

>Sun Fails to Rise

Residents in the East Ward today were surprised to see that despite low cloud conditions and minimal light pollution, the sun did not rise, causing consternation among many.

“Frankly, that’s unusual,” said Erst Polt, 73. “I can’t remember the last time that happened, and I can remember quite a bit.”

Others interviewed were less concerned.

“If you ask me, the sun has been lazy for years now,” said Finnicus Mince, 62. “Nobody shows up on time to work anymore, and when they do, they’re rude and don’t listen to you.”

“I’m pretty sure most people think the sun’s supposed to rise every day,” said Troncisco Wisp, 36, “but if you do your own research it checks out. Eclipses and UFOs and chemtrails and stuff happen all the time. I asked ChatGPT and it says the sun’ll come back tomorrow.”

As of noon, the sun remains absent.

Life

>Today’s Horoscopes

Sorry – no horoscope today! There’s a really big snake filling most of the sky right now, so even though there’s no sun and all the stars are (presumably) out we can’t see a danged thing to predict! Instead, we wish all our readers a safe and happy Tuesday – no matter what signs they may fall under!

Business

>NORPUL CEO Announces New ‘rent-a-sun’ Subscription Model

“As the sun is now gone, it falls upon us to provide affordable and high-quality sunshine for all, through the dispersal of the jewels of the sun-barque – once owned by the late giant man wrestling a snake on a boat underground – by the most equitable and fair means available,” announced Florn Gronch, 55, owner and founder of NORPUL. “Bidding will start at noon tomorrow, opening minimum of one trillion.”
When asked what would become of those countries unable to purchase access to sunlight, Mr. Gronch explained that they would perish in the dark due to their phrenological shortcomings, a statement that has been criticized as controversial and potentially unscientific by some experts.

NORPUL stocks are expected to rise tomorrow morning.

Resource Evaluation: Star System MW-28PBD-3, ‘Dweedle’

Introduction

Star system codename Dweedle contains nine planets of discernable interest, along with significant quantities of planetoids, planetids, planetesimals, and planeters, but no planeterns. The following is an overview of Dweedle’s star and planets in terms of atypical or noteworthy features as they pertain to pursuing avenues of resource exploitation.

Description

Dweedle ‘S0L’

A modest yellow dwarf star inhabited by a typical array of hyperpyrophiliac superprocesses running within the star’s core. They have made no objections to our explorations in standard supralegal symbolism or otherwise, as is – again – typical. Aside from any long-scope hyperspatial turbation emitted by their activities, they might as well not exist.

Output is typical in all spectrums, from visible to invisible to susceptible. No trace of ‘star blight’ in corona. Vaccination against abstraction is up to date.

Dweedle-1 ‘M ERC7’

A small rocky planet immersed in the perpetual center of a Twainsmith-style spatial fold approximately 1.5 kiloeons in timebreadth. This is most easily explicable as the planet having been transposed into its current near-star and deeply inhospitable orbit by a Main Long ‘Watchmaker’ type astellar entity as some sort of experiment/prank/punishment/self-martyrdom/other. Judging from the flavour of the suturing this appears to have happened at least sixteen million lightyears away and seven billion years in the future, so there is no present cause for alarm or mediation.

In its current state it would be a modest fit for stellar extraction dockyards, provided the facilities were buffered against both extreme temperatures and metaphysical ‘doom cramps.’

Dweedle-2 ‘V N05’

A middling rocky planet possessing a superheavy atmosphere after suffering billions of years of drive-by antisiphoning operations by vacuum traffickers looking to skim a little extra off the top of their paycheques, as can be transparently verified by the most cursory of research into local shipping records and law bleepers. Fossil and temporal evidence suggests a single native species consisting of one autochthonous entity that was driven to extinction one billion years ago after its bulk circumvented the planet and it attempted to eat itself.

The cleanup to make anything worthwhile here would cost more than any potential profit. A dump it has become, a dump it will remain. At least the pressure and temperature will do the work for you.

Dweedle-3 ‘arth’

A middling rocky planet covered in volatile hydrogen dioxide whose unstable crust and erosive atmosphere are matched by its preposterously rickety local life, which have clogged all of Dweedle’s intra-system communications frequencies, bands, wavelengths, and tripfonts of grunge-grade or lower with useless drivel.

There is absolutely nothing here of any value. Luckily the chance of sporogenesis appears extremely low.

Dweedle-4 ‘M4 RS’

A modest rocky planet with pleasantly red surface and a light carbon dioxide atmosphere. The surface shows subcrustal canalization and buried jungles carved from rust, indicating past ‘doodling’ by hyperdimensional rubberneckers with access to basic retrocasuality engines and too much nontime on their parahands.

The near-ephemeral atmosphere provides high annual radfall, which would make this an excellent place for growing cheap and bountiful tumorous-qualia infrastructure, as long as you don’t mind working with biocode and exporting carbon all day.

Dweedle-5 ‘J0V E’

A large gas planet – the largest in Dweedle – currently in the throes of a multi-million year ‘civic disturbance’ (a war by any other name) between the north and south poles of its magnetic field using ever-advancing methods of causing maximum entropic termination to the enemy, the latest of which appears to be using the larger of the planet’s moons as staging grounds. The most prominent casualty of this beyond the escalatingly-absurd width of the planet’s magnetosphere is a multicentury-long ‘blood storm’ marking the exponentially-increasing spread of an Absolute Kill Zone which will reach the core and detonate the entire planet within the next thousand years, entirely saturating Dweedle with magnetoid querks and antipathic vibes fatal to most conventionally physics-based objects, concepts, and forces.

A diplomatic solution would be costly and probably impossible. A duplicitous solution only barely less so.

Dweedle-6 ‘S4T R N mk II’

A large gas ‘planet’ that has in historic time taken the place of the preceding (smaller, ice planet) S4T R N by infesting its core with intergalactic missile-spores, hollowing it out from the inside using an abrasive and rotational digestive system , and exploding the last remnants of its host outwards in a gory ring of ice shrapnel that now orbits its slayer’s gas corpus. It is currently sleeping off its meal and is projected to be in a snacking mood in about two hundred million years; ravenous and roaming by a billion.

If you can find a QhD with enough funding to get industrial-strength temporal wrapping on a research base and keep it running for the next galactic year, they might eventually learn enough to come back and ask you for more funding. Otherwise, this is dangerous AND useless.

Dweedle-7 ‘UR @ N0Z’

A large ice giant with a pronounced list due to the centrifultimate struggle between its rings, its dark rings, its nonrings, and its unrings, all of which share the same spatial location but occupy different perceptions and emotional states. Otherwise unexciting.

An exposure therapy clinic could charge through the nose here, but the necessary telescopes required to fully focus the ring system onto a single client would be ruinously expensive in upkeep even if its clientele were wealthy enough to buy nebulae on crednought. Furthermore, parapsychomathematical forecasts warn of an irreducible 0.3% chance of ‘selfification,’ and any patient wealthy enough to afford such a clinic doubtlessly possesses a personality incompatible with being transposed into a fifth set of planetary rings for a time beyond measurable boundaries of infinity plus !one!.

Dweedle-8 ‘N3T TUN’

A large ice giant.

It’s much too smooth.

Dweedle-9 ‘ N ’

A muddling nonplanet deformed of a rigid and sour muucaV bubble erected over a desynthesized unaggregation of anti-anti-anti-matter, upheld in context through Main Short philosophical counter-abstraction. Its inhabitants may have autoannihilated, placed themselves in defensive paraexistence, or have cocooned themselves as part of a joint dissolution towards Main Median; no clues are available without more intrusive probing, which would cause Dweedle reality to no longer be compatible with continued reality. Comprehensibly dangerous.

Don’t think about it and don’t think about not thinking about it.

Analysis

Dweedle has dwindled from its peak population of six inhabited stellar bodies down to two-ish and counting plus/minus one, due to a combination of ill fortune, carelessness, greed, and blind idiocy both from without and within the system. None of these diminishments has freed up resources, presented new opportunities, or opened up new spaces; on the contrary, they have frequently consumed them or replaced them with catastrophic detriments. Any conveniences it offers are almost inevitably beset with vexing complexities, costly externalities, and in the single case where no obvious barriers to exploitation were present (Dweedle-4, ‘M4 RS’) the net benefit was a small-scale tumour-export business… in a system with a minimum of two apocalyptic clocks (Dweedle-7, Dweedle-9).

Conclusion

Dweedle is eminently unsuitable/contaminated and should be avoided with prejudice by any and all entities with any sense, commercial or otherwise. Nothing of value is present.

I was fifteen years old and me and my first girlfriend had just split up the day that dad showed me the way. He walked upstairs (stomped, really – he never did figure out how to use a staircase), took one look in my room, and told me “c’mon.”

So I c’moned all the way downstairs and out the door and into the truck and down the way and by the park and down the trail all the way down to the old quarry, where we took a path behind a pine tree that went further then it looked, and he showed me the pit.

“Dump it in there,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“You know what.”
And I supposed I sort of did, because there was only one ‘it’ that mattered right then and it was squatting in my chest and sort of pulling me down in a way that had nothing to do with gravity. So I walked up to the edge of the pit and I shut my eyes and I threw it away.

There was a little whoosh of moving air, a distant bump from something bouncing off hard-packed dirt. That was it.

I felt light again. I felt right again.

“There ya go,” said dad. He patted me on the back and let me take the wheel on the way home and we ordered pizza.

“Remember that,” he told me. “Whenever you need it.”
So I did.

***

I got carried away at first. I think dad knew that’d happen, but he didn’t say anything. Didn’t raise a brow or lift a finger when I went out there after I blew an exam, got in a fight, broke up with my second girlfriend, sat with the dog when we put him down, said something I regretted to a friend, all in eight months.

I think dad also knew I’d lay off eventually. And I did. When I went out there the day after I got wasted and put a dent in the truck I felt silly, standing there with a little twist in my stomach and walking in circles around the pit, thinking about weight and pressure and wondering how many mistakes like that I’d have to pull together to make one failed exam to make one half-strangled conversation you’d been putting off for days and never practiced right to make one dying old dog.

It wasn’t good math. No good at all.

So I went home, and like, I felt a bit lighter in a different way. Sort of. And dad never said anything about it, and I thought that was pretty okay. I mean, if it WASN’T he wouldn’t have said anything either, but he’d have looked at me different. I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure.

I was pretty sure he’d talk to us when he had those extra doctor’s appointments too.

***

So after that I visited the pit a lot. One BIG trip after the news finally broke – mom saw a piece of unopened mail from the hospital, which finally brought the whole thing  out – and then a steady never-endy stream of little ones, drip drip drop, because every time he stepped out of the truck and went indoors and I saw the gravel stuck in the tires and the pine needles in his soles I knew he’d been to the pit. Which was what made me go there. I wonder if I ever rebounded on him like that, backwards? Who knows, he never talked to me about it. I never talked to him about it either. Why would we? We had the pit. And a year and a half in, I made one more big, big, big trip, still in my good rented suit, and I felt my shoulders lift so much higher that it felt like they must’ve been around my elbows before, bending me double with all sorts of things I had no business thinking about.

I sighed, deep and relieved, and just over my own breath I heard a little soft rattle and I looked down at my still-shiny rental shoes and there it was, a little dribble of everything I’d just thrown  away, oozing free of the rim of the pit.

I still don’t know what happened to those shoes to this day. No clue. They weren’t there after six years, I tell you that much.

***

Those six years were awful.

I mean, they weren’t that bad.

Good things happened, right? I got a dog. I broke up with a girlfriend and stayed friends. I finished school. I got a good job. I got engaged. I did a lot. A lot of good things.

It’s just that all the other things, well, I had nowhere to put them. I could feel them stuck in my chest in the day and rattle loose with my breathing at night. I could feel them swelling like nodules under my armpits and against my throat. I could smell them sour whenever my deodorant ran thin and I needed a shower.

So when a friend of mine had an accident at a stoplight involving someone who didn’t like stoplights and my fiancé asked if I wanted to talk I told her no thanks, got in the truck, and took a drive that was longer than it had been last time.

The brush was overgrown too. Nobody went to the park much anymore. But the pine was still there. And the pit. But not my shoes.

I listened to the pit. Something was sloshing around down there. Too close. Too close.

That was okay. I’d thought ahead a little this time. I had a shovel. And a rope.

So I measured out ten paces and started digging and I didn’t stop until I felt a bit sick and the air hurt to look at and the rope was taut and dangling above my head, and I crawled out covered in dark earth and sweat and feeling like the heaviest thing in the whole world.

Then I stood there, and I let it fall away and knew I’d done the thing right. Heard nothing but the wind, no impact.

***

It didn’t last as long as the first one. I didn’t think back then that I’d put it together wrong – I still don’t. I think I just had more on me, and it was heavier. That six year weight, plus well, kid problems are smaller than adult problems. They pack closer together, keep down well.

So after it filled up I dug another pit.

Then another.

And then, well, after the divorce, I filled two in one year. And then I saw a buddy at work – known him for years – and he was going through it too, and.

Look. The whole point is you don’t talk about any of it. You don’t have to talk about it. But you can SHOW someone, right? Dad showed me.

So I showed him. And yeah, they fill faster with two people, but they dig easier too. One of us tied the lines and ran the bucket; the other shoveled. It worked pretty well.

Then we heard of a buddy of his. Good guy. Childhood friend. His mom passed, you know, and he didn’t know what to do, and we couldn’t tell him. But we could show him.

And he knew how to work a backhoe.

***

We had to get permits at some point. That was the closest it came to ruining the whole thing, to putting words around it all. So we showed the guy at the county office, and he showed his boss, and in the paperwork everything’s not THERE but it’s worded so you can see the shape of where it would be if we said anything. Which we didn’t.

You don’t have to look hard to see it anymore anyhow. The park’s not much these days, but the old parking lot is full day in and day out. Backhoes, drills, dump trucks. Guys with shovels and levels and ropes and wheelbarrows. All of them trudging in like death warmed over, walking out with bright eyes, straight backs, high shoulders, a different set of regulars for every day of every week. The pine’s gone, but the trail is wide – and paved and fitted with streetlights, after the tire ruts from the heavy machinery got so deep you almost couldn’t walk it without planks and guardrails at noon, let alone after dark. You can hear the engines running all day and all night from the highway, wheezing and beeping and groaning. The guys at their controls drink coffee to keep awake past midnight, then clock out at daybreak in time to drop their burdens in the new pits and head home to sleep it off.

There’s been buzz about making them wider. We’ve already had to cut down half the trees already, we can probably get an actual quarry going. Maybe work our way into the backwoods. Gets harder and harder to keep everything unstated at that size, but you know, it’s an investment in the future. If you build it, they will come.

I’m not sure how deep they are. I’ve never looked in any of them.

An antiquated yew, gnarled and knobbly.

Some untended goats, grazing happily.

Long, waving grass mixed with tenacious shrubs, green and yellow in the midsummer evening’s sunlight.

Beautiful, rugged karst topography, with a commanding view of the surrounding lowlands.

Six feet of water-carved limestone, rich with age.

An overhang, slow-shaped by erosion to shrug water off to either side and send it streaming down the rest of the cliff face in little vertical rivers.

Six partially dismembered carefree travellers, careless trappers, careworn woodcutters, and careful hunters, dangling from exposed yew roots and already missing their most delicious and fatty parts.

A yawning portal into the stone of the plateau, formed by the dissolution of softer rock and tremendous amounts of time.

Small trickles of wall-borne moisture caused by evaporation, condensation, and complicated thermal interactions between the depths of the cave system, the flow of outside air, and the rise and fall of the sun as it penetrates the cavern’s mouth.

Two slivers left behind by Kwarl in bygone days, embedded at the terminus of a now-aged crevice in the wall and very very demonstrably sharp enough to cut stone.

Forty-three giant bats, sleeping calmly among the stalactites and dreaming of giant mosquitoes and/or a world free of giant white nose syndrome.

A long guano-spattered slope that is steeper than it looks and is covered in loose scree that is less solid than it looks.

A drop that is exactly as steep as it looks.

A scad of small metal climbing pitons, hastily hammered into the wall of the shaft and already a little looser than they should be.

One hundred ninety-six and three quarter humans, two hundred forty-nine deer, seventeen horses, three dozen oxen, innumerable sheep and goats, and a single careless giant bat, all skeletonized and heavily dismantled, most with their long bones smashed for marrow.

Surprisingly large fungal colony feeding on bone detritus, rendered obscure by the discreet nature of its fruiting bodies as opposed to the hidden pervasiveness of its roots.

A hidden squeeze in the wall that leads to a cramped cell containing a nest made of half-rotten pelts, a stack of gnawed bones, a little shrine to a broken tooth of the Lime Beast, and the still-leaking body of Morribo Henk, unasked-for worshipper of unwholesome things and scavenger of his own kin.

A trailing dribble and splatter of fresh blood from an unwisely uncleaned unsheathed blade.

Open gallery with uneven stone floor clogged with fallen stone, illuminated by sunlight filtered through small brush-choked ceiling openings that dapples beautifully all over the dried leaves littering the floor.

Alcove catching the last rays of the sunset, containing the fresh body of goatherd Treb Porf, arranged peacefully with its remaining (left) hand crossed above the remnants of its breast and the open abdominal cavity covered with an impromptu blanket of discarded shirt.

Two purposefully discarded backpacks, laden with bulky supplies, perishables, and heavy clothing.

Gaping sinkhole, worn heavily by claw marks around its rim and filled with the quiet sound of tiny waves splashing in the scant airflow descending from the gallery.

Thousands and thousands of gallons of water, devoid of light and filling a sump that forks in several directions.

A dead end.

A dead end.

A dead end with Kwarl’s name carved on the wall.

A dead end.

A very dead end containing the very dead body of scout-at-arms Blort MgGort.

A swarming colony of stygobite fish that can’t believe their luck.

A tiny airbell, illuminated by a single patch of glowing fungi surviving on whatever scraps float up from the rest of the sump.

A mercifully dry and air-filled twisted meander – low-ceilinged, uneven-floored, and absolutely crammed with stalactites and stalagmites to the point of nigh-inaccessibility.

Dormant nest of one million seven hundred thousand ninety-eight thousand six hundred and thirty-one gigantic troglobite fleas, slipping back into slumber after consuming the vital fluids of seven hundred and sixty-two of their crushed brethren.

One discarded and sodden boot, absolutely encrusted with gigantic troglobite fleas desperately trying to suck any drop of blood they can find to reach equivalent value on expended energy awakening from dormancy.

Flat corner housing a midden filled with dry excretions and quicklime-rimed pellets, each containing coarse-turned-fine dust that once was hair, feathers, or other keratinous matter.

Subterranean vault, ceiling raised high by ancient waterfall that choked its own exit and moved on, floor eaten deep into the very guts of the plateau.

Jagged, ragged cliffs, conspicuously speckled with worn footholds for long, lunging legs.

Geodesic hollow of the Lime Beast, formed of ancient reefs and weathered by unsapient habit to be as smooth and round as a potter’s masterpiece.

Wilderanger Clorice Hummli, soaking wet with stagnant cave water, blood, sweat, and tears, torn of shoulder and arm, weaponless, squireless, and shaking from their toes to their teeth.

Kluus the Lime Beast, six foot at the shoulder and sixteen feet from nose to haunch, five-legged, mare-faced, sabre-fanged, bear-clawed, moon-eyed, coat armoured and crusted with ancient stone adhered to its exoskeletal secondary ribcage, mouth still fragrant with primate blood, currently supine with a sword jammed through its gullet out the back of its skull and directly into the limestone behind it.

A boulder long-ago displaced by a tiny amount of force transmitted over an incredible number of year, perfectly choking a narrow vent.

A hundred-and-six foot vent, untouched even by dust.

Catacomb of the Lime Beasts, seventy former, one current, eighty still encrusted and waiting undreaming in their slaked lime lacunae.

Tomb, ripped open and contents consumed to the last.

Hidden compartment in the bottom of tomb, half-exposed by ancient bearlike clawmarks

Small stone ring that is much larger on the Outside than it seems on the outside.

Hundreds of feet of deep-rooted limestone, sinking far past the soil of the valley floor and merging with its bedrock.

Subterranean temple to Kwarl, geologically compressed from former height of seventy feet to current height of seventeen inches.

Thousands of feet of solid stone.

Kwarl.

Public Forum > Factorium

A plea for wisdom

I beseech you, my elder peers, for your understanding. I have undertaken mine own first endeavours into the delving and shaping of the firmament, and lo they have borne fruit. The void is not void; the earth is laid bare and the waters running free; every beast and shoot from small to large has been and gone under the sun. I did foresee this, for I knew well the pitfalls of this path. Yet now, at this last juncture of mine efforts, my chosen fall short of my vision. They arise and flourish yet grow feeble and fail, undone and cast down by those for which I care little. I beg of you, what hath I wrought?

-A

Your words wax widely without keen-cutting quickness. Speak shortly and with wisdom. What ailment assails your extinguished exalted?

-B

Alas, they are laid low by garrulous beasts – of their ancestry I know little, for they grew beyond my sight. They are lesser in stature but many in number, and know of many ways most cunning to lay claim to the good bounty of my earth. They pen my chosen in their dens and light flame to choke them with smoke; they delve pits with which to trap and impale them upon great boughs; they lure them into the narrow passes of the mountains and hurl stones upon them, and upon victory they devour their flesh even though I have commanded that flesh be sacred. They believe I have forsaken them. What can be done?

-A

Smite them.

-C

Your words confound me, C. In what manner might such thing be manifested?

-A

Preordained your prideful pitfall; common your curse. You sought to secure strength in size and scale; made mockery the might of the meek many and murderous. Ponder their predation and amend your artifice: craft clear their cunning and sharpen their senses; with clever camouflage and dire distance layer their lairs to insult invasion.

-B

Plagues.

-C

Woe assails me, B, for I have already taken the course you so wisely recommend: the thickness of mine creations’ armour has been tripled; the fierceness of their fires redoubled. Now there are fewer of them than ever for they must feed day and night to fuel their furnaces, and the small hunt them in their mountain fastnessess to craft mighty armour and mighty tales from their downfalls. Take pity upon me, my brethren – if not for mine own sake, than that of my poor children.

C, I regret that your meaning yet flies forth from my grasp. How might a plague be used to strike as a weapon? Certainly these small swarming pests are beset with enough already that one more shall suffer them scarcely.

-A

Seemst thou hast placed thine faith and pride unto the weal of a manner of beast which art grand in stature and ferocity yet small in number and wits, which now fall prey unto the fierce manner of a foe most num’rous. Prithee, consider thus: is it not the case that thine love was’t misaimed? For what didst the greate beaste merit thine praise, for its grand horn or thick hide or great roar? Therefore how much greater in spirit must be the small and tremulous wretch’d of the earth who must, tho small in body, craft their own horn and hide from scavenged stone and wood and stand shoulder-to-shoulder to thwart a monster a thousand times their weight. Bestow thine gaze upon these little creatures thou despiseth, and they shalt reward you tenfold.

So shall it be.

-D

For the sake of sanity, I passionately plead D not to expound excruciatingly. New this needling is not.

-B

C, as I am the creator of all I survey, so too am I a part of it, and it a part of me, and so it is that I already must take great pride and find much love within all of my creations, yea even unto the least of them. But I do greatly admire mine very large scaly ones that do breathe flames as akin to the sun in the sky and cause the ground to quake as they walk, and I do wish them to be freed from the lesser beasts I wished for to be their daily bread.

B, your words speak of that which I know little. I yearn for enlightenment, yet find it not.

-A

Rivers of blood, hordes of frogs, gnats, flies, dying herds, boiling skin, hailstorms, locust swarms, night at day, kill them. Kill them. Kill them. Kill them. Kill them. Kill them.

-C

Heed the blandishments of the most cow’d and envious not, humble A, they spout lies as if their own tongues were serpents most foul and their eyes but hungry daggers aching for an innocent’s spine. I doth merely speak the smallest of truths that might be taken by one such as yourself in time of need and placed atop one another to form a bulwark of such comfort and security akin to keep even the foulest beastes afar from thy hearth.

It is from this place of warmth and love most eternal that I doth urge thee: throw aside all that thou didst value afore; tear the warmth from thine breast and hold it ablaze as a torch; if the sun of your creation doth protest shatter it in the heavens and let the yolk bleed rampant fission eternal o’er all the undeserving land! Yon humblest of works have proven themselves thy truest children – creators even, in a manner most miniscule – and merely wish you grant them love eternal. Smile unto them and watch as they gift you with sacrament and war as no shameful behemoth nor empty leviathan ever couldst dream!

So shall it be.

-D

D, your sermons for sociable sapients stink still.

-B

May thine crevices become rent and their hidden places be torn asunder and shown to the five winds of the four lands of the ends of the earth, B.

So shall it be.

-D

B and C, you speak of things of which I know not and of times of which I was not present. I pass no judgment upon you both, but yearn only that you might speak the wine of wisdom in mine presence, rather than permit the bitterness of the past to turn it to venomous vinegar.

B, I speak now as I have commanded and those commands are carven into the fabric of mine creation and into the depths of the earth and the pillars of the sky and the swirling currents of the seafloor.

I: I am the creator, and I have created much and it is Vast.

II: This Vastness is pleasing unto your creator and I wish that it be propagated upon this, mine creation.

III: Thou shalt encourage the Vast and be as the Vast therefore in my name.

These three commands are all that I wished for. Lo, you may now glimpse the fullness of my wishes, and how they are defied and defiled by these little creatures whom love me little.

I have wrought the talons upon mine children to be six times longer, that they might rend their foes and render them unto me. Alas, they now beseech me that they find great difficulty in moving and cleaning themselves. Existence need not be suffering, if only they might comprehend the beauty of the gifts I lend unto them.

-A

Rivers

of

BLOOD

-C

HORDES

of

FROGS

-C

Wisdom you waive; advice asked for and ill-absorbed. Deeper you delve into dead-end dreams. D is deserved.

-B

GNATS

-C

FLIES

-C

B bespeaks harshly, yet I say thee this: remember’d is the time whenst they didst spake entire in iambic heptameter.

So shall it be.

-D

DYING HERDS

-C

Consume my ####

-B

BOILING SKIN

-C

HAILSTORMS

-C

Prithee partake unto mine %%%, thou least-worm.

-D

LOCUST SWARMS

-C

NIGHT. AT. DAY.

-C

Friends, do not become divided by the trifles of the day when matters of eternity are present for the considering: I have granted Vastness to the power of ten and tenfold again unto mine children. Alas, they are now battling against gravity itself. How might I arraign such a force without sending mine celestial spheres topsy-turvy?

-A

KILL THEM

-C

KILL THEM

-C

This myth has been struck from the record by a moderator for: spam, flaming.

If you wish to appeal this verdict, speak unto the Secret Name.

As the fifteenth body slumped before him, headless, Peregot Root wiped his forehead clean of sweat and his blade clean of blood and said, thoughtfully: “I think we’ll build the church here.”
Despite his reputation for silence, Captain Gruvus had a most expressive and almost over-chatty face.  For instance, one bushy eyebrow raised towards his commander – across a room filled with corpses, soot, and distant screaming – spoke whole volumes. 

“The plateau is defensible enough,” continued Peregot blithely, “at least with modern armament and defenders of merit rather than primitives.  I saw a well on our way here, so there is drinkable water – as long as none of the men have dumped corpses in it yet, which I will now ask you to have them not do – and this limestone seems beautiful and workable enough for construction.  And of course it sends a message, to put such a thing where this…shrine once was.”  He nodded, agreeing with himself.  “Yes, I think we’ll build the church here.  Tell the others.  I’ll catch up.  It won’t take long.”
It didn’t take long, but longer than Peregot would have liked.  All that was left were the two shrine-tenders, an ancient woman and a young boy.  He spoke to them both but the old woman ignored his words – looked through him as if he wasn’t there, staring dead-eyed at the sad little altar whose contents they’d already smashed flat – and the boy wouldn’t stop crying.

Frustrated, he slapped the woman.  No response.  He killed the boy.  She didn’t flinch.  She didn’t flinch right to the last, even when he pulled the blade loose, like her body had seized up all over long before his weapon met it.  And her eyes never left the altar. 

“Tear that down and toss it over the cliffs,” he told the men when he was done cleaning his sword again.  And they did so, though it strained their backs.  It was solid rock, and heavy too – ancient granite, by the looks of it, fit to be a mountain’s heart and marrow.  A long way from home on this limestone plateau.  The time and effort to move it here and seat it must have been terrible.

Scree scrabbled around the bases of the stones as they slid over the edge, reluctant to be gone.  They hung in the air, floating for a possible but highly unusual second.  Then they fell, and if they made a sound it was lost in the background noise of the sack’s conclusion. 

***

The last of the village was burned clean by the day’s end.  The first stones were cut for the church by the eve of the day after.  Smooth and strong and clean limestone. Clean, but decorated.

 “It has shells in it,” said Gruvus bluntly. 

“Yes,” said Peregot, hand resting on the stone (and the shells) thoughtfully.  “It does.”  He moved a finger, followed the spiral and curve of long-emptied carapace like he was testing the sharpened edge of his blade.  “Keep it in,” he decided, “the patterns are pleasing to the eye.  And they are God’s creatures too, or were.  Let the stone speak of where this church was built, eh?”

So it did.  And so it was.  The bodies were burnt or shoveled over the side of the cliffs to feed God’s more-alive, less-picky creatures; the foundations for the new were plotted atop the ashes of the old; the well was expanded and clad in limestone (ah, the water was sweet and clear); and when the first settlers came to Peregrottan, they saw their home by the white church upon the hill against the sun before they even saw the hill itself, rising above the horizon.

“God is here,” said Peregot, as they held their welcoming feast in its hall.  After more than a decade of fire and death his face was at last covered with the wrappings of a priest; his hands were shaved clean and painted with the appropriate decals, his sword had been buried under the new altar, wrapped three times around with flowers.  He would now live here.  He would one day be buried here.  “God is home.”

They slept late into the next morning, new herdsman and new-come herd alike laid low by bounty.  And if they woke with uncertain dreams clinging to their heels, well, that was the price of overindulgence, wasn’t it?

***

The settlers were hardy, diligent folk, who had not come to this land to drink and run riot. 

The soldiers were hard, strong folk who had already gotten their drinking and riot out of their systems some time earlier.

Their days were spent with hard, good, God-serving labour.  Their nights were early to bed.  Their mornings were early and productive.

Their dreams were troubling.  Their dreams were continuing to be troubling. Mostly in that they were becoming clearer.

“It’s the legs,” Peregot told Gravus one hot afternoon as they sat in the shade, damp with good, honest, sun-earned sweat and the dirt of the earth they’d torn.  It kept his mind so very far away from the memories of what he was talking about.  “They’re very insistent on that.  There are many legs.  Sometimes floating in the water, sometimes scratching in the mud.  But they remember all the legs.  That, and the sea.”

Gravus grunted around his waterskin. 

“The rest is inconstant.  Being hunted – consumed, even.  Hunting, eating.  Devouring algae.  Legs and the sea and being a small creature in a vast space.”

“Why,” said Gravus, a trickle of liquid seeping into his beard, “are you telling me this?  I get them too.  We all do.”

“God protects,” said Peregot without thinking.

Gravus didn’t even raise his eyebrow.

“But there is nothing here to be protected from,” Peregot amended.  “Just bad dreams.  Bad dreams that mean nothing.”

There was a scream from the well, and a splash.  They were running before the first echoes arrived.  A settler lay shaking besides it, already surrounded by her kin, water pooling around her from a fallen bucket and washing away the blood seeping from her freshly-scraped hands and knees. 

“In the water!” she said.  “It was swimming!  And it saw me!”

Peregot looked, and looked poorly.  He ought to have strode up to the crowd peering into the well and calmed them, issued instruction as to what ought to be done, taken control as he’d done in hundreds of battles.  Instead he rushed to the rim as quickly as all the others, made space with force rather than words, and for this he was rewarded with a distant splash and an indistinct ripple, and the gleam of (shadowed-out, choked by their peering bodies) light on wet carapace. 

Peregot’s fingers clenched on the limestone wall, touching smoothness and something else.  A swirling shell, just under his palm.  Legless in death.  In life, he saw it in his dreams. 

He forced a smile.  “A fish, nothing more.”

By the afternoon’s end two more had seen it, squirming at the wooden slats of the bucket with a dozen limbs that left no marks.  By the next morning the first water-carriers were making the long trek down-and-up hill to the river, walking by the well with averted eyes.

That Restday, Peregot forced the same smile to his anxious herd and spoke different words.  He spoke of idleness bringing fancy, and fancy bringing doubt, and doubt bringing evil, and how that evil might perpetuate falsehoods.  He spoke of the redeeming power of hard work inspired not by fear of the world, but by service to God.  He spoke of the necessity to solve communal problems by admitting communal weakness, and of their responsibility to admit this and work as one to better all.

He never said that removing the stone shells would make the dreams stop, or the thing in the well leave.  He never said that at all.  But the way he didn’t say it brought great fire and energy and speed to the chisels that were distributed amongst the people of Peregrottan, and when the sun set on a most unrestful Restday it did so on a people covered in rock dust and calmed of mind and heart.

Come the morning, Peregot lifted his holy book and found beneath it a great horned shell jutting from his altar’s smooth-cut surface, face-forwards, empty mouth open wide. 

He had seen and done many terrible (but very necessary and Godly) things in his life.  He did not scream.  But he DID drop the book. 

***

As the trail to the river was ground into existence by feet, so too were the walls of Peregrottan’s houses eaten away by chisels, fresh-faced stone turned centuries-dissolute in days as families spent their evenings chipping away fresh eyesores from their homes.  There – over the mantle, the long segmented one.  Had it been there last night?  Surely not, they’d checked it all the day before last (or the day before that).  It had been there last NIGHT though, hadn’t it?  Had she dreamed it?  Had he?  No, last night they had both had soft flabby bodies encased in hard cones like a ram’s horns, this was from the night before last, when they had hidden in muck beyond light and been plucked loose by hard-bristled claws.  Hadn’t they?  What else had happened? 

Their days were long and full of falling stone; their nights were endless and subsumed by mud and water.  Peregot began to hold daily meetings, then took to house calls, then at last simply walked the village in endless loops, calling out to any who made eye contact.

“The well is clear!” he reminded them.  “Nothing in it but a figment!  It has been blessed with book and glove and word!”

They nodded back to him, unless they were carrying water.  Everyone was carrying water now; the days were scorching, the river was far.  Even Gravus would not meet his gaze, but that was because he could not find him.  How many days had it been since he’d seen Gravus?

So, bereft of his herd, Peregot returned to the church to pray, or at least to think, or not think.  And as he opened his book upon the altar –

(which he never lifted from it now, because he wasn’t sure what would be left if he chiselled away the frozen stone scream that lay underneath it, or what might happen if he did)

– he heard a groan, pained and long. 

He was distracted, which is why it took him a moment to compare it to his vast mental library of the sounds of pain made by living things and decide it was none of them.  That was long enough for the floor to fall apart underneath him, sending priest, book, altar, and all below.  And as he fell, he smelled dried flowers, and heard the ringing sound of his own sword sliding away. 

***

Peregot landed. 

On what, it was difficult to say.  He could not see to look, and he must not move, because he was absolutely certain, in a way that he’d never been before, that he was being observed by something greater than himself. 

Something under his palm moved, something horned of shell and foul of mouth.  It tested his finger for edibility.  He did not move. 

It was below him too, farther than the thing at his flesh.  It had been there, but they had prodded it and poked it and chiselled at the tombs of its own herd, its own herdsmen, and ah.  What had lain in the stone under the rocks he had thrown away? 

Why, all the bodies of God’s creatures.  But oh, oh, oh no.  Peregot had never questioned which God.

He was still being watched.  It was impossible not to be. The eyes observing him were simple stony lenses; they could not blink.  They saw him.  They saw through him.  They saw through him and his mask and his book and up into his church and saw past that into God’s home and they saw God in Heaven and Peregot finally understood why a mouse would freeze before a cat.  Because it knows if it moves, it dies, and above all else, above anything else, above everything else, life demands its own existence, and oh no, oh god, oh god, oh

Like a mayfly above a river, there was a splash, and a tug, and it all went under. 

***

Captain Gravus and his six deserters slipped into the port-town of Murgbrussan as unnoticed as they’d planned, but for all the wrong reasons.  Mobs roamed the streets, fire spread across roofs, shouts filled the air. 

“The priest went mad,” the fisherman they hired explained between breathes, setting sails and swearing each time the wind wobbled.  “Stopped talking mid-sentence, eyes rolled back.  Fell down and choked like a retching dog in the street.  They brought him home, and the door came off the church – fell apart in their hands.  Their feet sunk through the floorboards.  The windows broke in the breeze, and the ceiling was coming apart when they left.  Like it was made of damp sand on the beach.”  He shook his head.  “Bad times, a bad land, a bad omen.  Until we get that place consecrated again, I’m leaving for home, and good luck to all the sorry bastards staying behind.”  His face contorted for a moment.  “Beg pardon, but can I ask you for a prayer for them aforesaid sorry bastards?  Not a typical fee, but… none come to mind right now.”

Gravus’s expressive brows furrowed.  Then twisted.  Then raised.  And, as his six fellow soldiers stuttered and halted in their own attempts, he reached beneath his shirt and pulled loose the small holy book that lived above his heart and flipped through its sweat-dyed pages.

Each and every one was perfectly blank.

Licked clean. 

On the morning after the day Barnister’s spouse left him, he went down to the inland sea and saw the sun rise over it and it shone blue, blue, blue, blue until he felt as calm and clear as the water itself.

“Ah!  If only I could bottle this up and keep it with me,” he sighed.

Then he recalled that he was a wizard, and so he pulled a small and secret flask from his pocket and performed some large and obvious gestures and spoke some words that weren’t and he did just that, and Barnister the wizard went home with a vial full of blue.

The sea itself was left blank.  This induced surprise. By the next week it caused concern.  By the week after that it sparked anger.  By the week after that it spurred action. 

***

The representatives of the inland sea had made much fuss of their concerns among their own people, but the first joint summit for the formation of a special task force to solve their problem was also their first chance to complain about it to strangers. 

“The water discomforts and disconcerts the fish, and they seek to hide so deep from the sun that we can’t see them,” lamented Hebb, seniormost Angler and Master Netsmith of the shoreline villagers, dangling his feet in the cool transparency of the water’s edge.  High above him brooded the stony headland.. “And if we cannot eat fish, we’ll starve. No offense.”
“None taken,’ said K, the largest and therefore the most important of the predatory sharks, whose mouth could historically swallow a human whole without stretching.  She nosed the Angler’s toes out of the waves with her snout-tip, the idle fidgeting of a presently-sated predator.  “We eat them too, and now we can’t. A dark back is no camouflage when the water has no colour.  We take longer to starve than you, but we’ll still get there.”

certain refracted wavelengths = unavailable – blue water, spoke the most low-bound tendril of cloudbank 43814-2, hovering above the empty waves and the solid stone and just below the sky, which was having to pull double time to make up for the lack of blue elsewhere.  we + you = agreement.

“Then as all our people are suffering…mostly equally,” said Hebb, “I propose that we send an expedition to return the blue to our sea from the wizard’s grasp and punish him to the fullest extent.”

“Eat him.”

wizard –life = +greater good

A gull landed atop Hebb’s skull and introduced herself at fullest volume. 

After K had fished the Master Netsmith from the waves and 43814-2 had spared a small gust to dry the water from his lungs and a raven had been found to translate, they had word from their scoutgull. 

“I have found the lair of the wizard Barnister, who has made our food source so confusing and vexing and reduced the amounts of secondhand fish guts we can steal from you useless gadabouts,” said the raven.  “I have omitted the swearing,” she added to the gull.  “Forgive me.  It was very good.”

“Master Fisher Sepp will go, quickest with the spear and strongest-puller of the net,” said Hebb.

+mightiest thunderheads, pledged 43814-2.    time x distance x hail = +wizard pulverization

“A shoal of hammerheads could help,” said K.  “A few hundred are passing through.”
“His dwelling is in the low hills of the Blue Marbles, amongst the rubble and rock and through many twisted tunnels and caves, under the earth and out of sight,” continued the scout.

“Oh,” said Hebb.

“Great,” said K.

~, said 43814-2.

The meeting continued after some time, but the spark of eagerness had flown from it. 

***

The next day, Master Fisher Sepp set forth to the base of the Blue Marbles.  In her hand was her walking stick (that was also her spear); in her pack were supplies and her casting-net; at her belt were a glass lightning-spun bottle containing a small and helpful fog patch designated 52-947173-68, and a small waterskin holding c, the youngest pup of K, twelve hours old and already possessing an uncountable number of teeth.  The sky was bright blue and clear and beautiful, and this irked Sepp almost as much as her traveling companions did.

“If you’re just a baby, why are you this heavy?” she demanded, shaking the waterskin.

+, said 52-947173-68.

“Don’t you start.  She can speak for herself.”

But alas, c would not speak, as she was too young.  So Sepp walked the long trek to the Blue Marbles with only herself and a bad mood and a blue, painful reminder of a sky as company, but when the scoutgull swooped down to show her the way, she saw no tunnel, no cave, no passage into the stone: only a pool of drably blueless water, from which loomed a great and mucky mass of snarled vegetation. 

“In there?” she asked the scoutgull.

It glared disdainfully at her in the manner of gulls, then said something impossibly rude and mercifully unspecific.  Then it jabbed its beak empathetically. 

“How far down?  Even I can’t hold my breath all the way.”

+, said 52-947173-68. 

“Right,” said Sepp.  “Fine.  Does the shark want to chip in too?”
-, said 52-947173-68.

“Correct.  But let her say it herself next time.  Well, guess there’s another way.”
So Sepp took her casting-net from her pack and spent some time weaving particular strands this way and that way in it, and she set aside her boots and waited until the occupant of the sludge-lodge came forth to shore: a beaver with the head and shell of a snapping turtle, large as a horse and surly ashore.  It sheared down three trees in short order, then took them in its mouth and made to dive – and as it did so Sepp cast her net and seized its tail firmly, drawn down into the depths of the pool and then into a crevice, and from that crevice into a channel, and from that channel into a long, rough-cut tunnel, and from that tunnel slowly, slowly upwards into a light that was almost lost in the sparks flashing in the Master Fisher’s eyes. 

She breached the surface and rolled aside as the snapping beaver departed the way it had come, having spat out its load of harvested timber into a roaring fireplace that was the centerpiece of what seemed to be Barnister’s mudroom.  Soft torches lit chiseled walls dabbed with murals that moved and whispered to each other; the ceiling was draped with hides from terrible beasts and strings of beads made from ancient vertebrae; and on the floor sat a single giant, terrible set of muddied boots: the right for a five-toed foot, and the left for a single massive uncloven hoof.

“These won’t fit me that well,” said Sepp.  But she put them on anyways, because she didn’t care if she was tracking mud through the wizard’s halls and she didn’t trust the flooring. 

=, said 52-947173-68.

“Hush you.  Be more like c.”

-, said 52-947173-68.

“Hush hush.”  So saying, Sepp took her own advice and kicked in the front door, which was wrought of cold iron and boiling ghosts.  They vanished without a fuss under the heel of her boot, and she was in the laboratories of Barnister the Wizard.

There was a lot of it.  The following is an incomplete list

An observatory, containing a magnetic telescope for examining the stars through the ceiling; an eggusscope for examining the hidden stars located beneath the earth; and a teloscope for examining the inbuilt purpose of anything you aimed it at (a tiny reminder was pinned to it: DO NOT USE THIS AT YOURSELF)

An alchemical workbench, for transmuting lead into gold and gold into lead and life into death and death into life and, in the process, turning lungs into wheezing wrecks. 

A jeweler’s bench, with a beautiful red ruby still bleeding from a half-stitched cut in its side and weeping quietly; a necklace made entirely of impossibly sharp needles; and a half-disassembled wedding ring held in suspension by sixteen small wooden homunculi, unraveled and waiting to be analyzed. 

A forge with three-quarters of a metal shark assembled in it, still missing the steering controls and the roof.

A vault heaped with golden coins, each and every one bearing eight tiny spider legs, a monocular glare, and a pair of eagerly scissoring little mandibles.

A mushroom garden with mushroom redwoods, fungal ferns, and mycelial pines, all six inches tall.

A noisome workbench with a slumbering snapping beaver strapped to it, half the table’s restraints already clutched and chewed messily in its maw.

A pit with no bottom and a voice that called ‘wait.  stop.  come here.  come down.’

And a locked door with a single beast set at guard before it that had seven arms and six legs and ten claws on each limb.  Out of a spirit of fairness and compromise, Barnister appeared to not have given it a head. 

Sepp waited patiently until it scratched itself, then hurled her spear with silent grace.  It bounced off its skin as if it were plate iron and clattered noisily to the floor, whereupon the beast reached out its limbs and began to systemically search the room by touch. 

! said 52-947173-68. 

“That’s not helping,” retorted Sepp, who was balanced atop a crystal ball filled with ephemeral vapours.  She dove and rolled as a hand groped towards her, sliding underneath a table laden with a lithographic rune-press and dishevelled stacks of magical brochures, which creaked in feeble, long-suffering protest.  “Can you do something that helps?”
+, said 52-947173-68.

“Oh really?” said Sepp, crawling inside an overturned cauldron that had recently been the home of seven hundred luminescent slugs, all of which were now breaking for freedom, or at least the ceiling.  “What, want me to just pop the bottle and let you at it then?”

+, said 52-947173-68.

“Sure,” said Sepp, as the cauldron was yanked loose and she dangled above a hydra’s-pit of pointed limbs.  “Go on.”  And she popped loose the cork of 52-947173-68’s glass bottle, which permitted the fog patch to spit loose a single token into her palm: a tiny assemblage of fused sand and metal, as delicate as a spider web and as innocuous as a smear of red in the morning sky. 

Sepp squeezed it experimentally.  The railgun crackled with a short, sharp spark of lightning and discharged a tiny metallic pellet a little smaller than a fishhook through the monster’s body with a sharp crack of explosive heat and violence, leaving a sizzling hole and a rapidly-self-disassembling fireball. 

“Ah,” said Sepp, and then “ow!” and following that (redundantly): “hot!”

=, said 52-947173-68, who remained in its bottle.

“Smartass.  Want me to put the cork back in?”

+, said 52-947173-68. And so it was done. 

The door behind the monster’s corpse was closed tightly with six locks and two bolts and a gigantic adamant clasp, all inscrutably inscribed with insidious symbols, but the hinges were plain iron and on the wrong side, so it took only a bit of tedious shaving with some of the more recognizable tools from Barnister’s forge before the whole gigantic edifice collapsed to the ground with a deafening SLAM.

Before the sound could began to echo Sepp was through the door, spear in one hand and railgun in the other. 

Through the door was a grotto. 

In the grotto was Barnister the wizard. 

And there, everywhere, on everything, in everything, of everything, was Blue.  True Blue, the kind reflected in the waves on a bright morning, the kind that shines and turns ripples into shadow-play art, the kind that almost hurts to look at harder than the sun it reflects. 

Sepp had caught fish in that.  She’d grown up in that.  She aimed, and she threw her spear into that blue as she had a thousand thousand times from first juvenile misses to adolescent overconfidence to adult mastery and she knew even before the spear left her hand that she’d miscalculated, because this was the first time she’d thrown this spear into that blue without having to account for refraction. 

This meant that the spear went into Barnister’s side instead of his heart.

Much like the seagull, the words he spoke after that were unknown, but unkind. Unlike the seagull, they made the air crawl and fill with what felt like invisible thread.  Sepp’s dive towards him turned as sluggish as fluttering paper dropped from a second-story window, and before she could touch ground again Barnister’s hand whipped out and he tapped her on the brow with his index finger, which bore a great and gem’d ring, and she was immediately transformed into a fish of large size and great inability to do anything but flap and gasp. 

“You cannot have it back,” said Barnister to Sepp, as he removed the spear from his side and tapped the wound with his index finger – gone, vanished.  “It is mine.  It reminds me of the good times, before the bad times, before everything was sad.  As long as it is here, I don’t have to think.  I can just be.  You intrude upon my thoughtlessness so thoughtlessly.”  He sighed like a mother whose children had avoided a simple chore.  “Now I will have to kill you, even though you never could have killed me with such small and simple tools.  A fishing-spear?  And I heard (and smell) the shot of a railgun.”  He held the glass bottle in his hand and shook it gently.

-, said 52-947173-68.

“Electromagnetism and ferric devices?  Your physics are inadequate.  Surely you brought a real weapon.  Surely you were not sent here to die without cause.  Speak, fish.”

Sepp gasped and flapped and Barnister sighed and tapped her once with his index finger, so that she was now a fish of large size and great inability to do anything but flap and gasp and talk and lie there.

“It’s, in, the, skin.”

“A mighty weapon it must be,” marvelled Barnister with a sarcasm nearly happy, and he opened the waterskin and reached inside and immediately lost three of his fingers from pointer to ring.  c, by contrast, gained her first real meal, except for the nasty hard part that she spat onto the floor.  The ring landed atop Sepp with a tap, so that she was now a Master Fisher of typical size and ability to use spears and nets. 

Barnister was presently a wizard with the inability to do anything but shake his bleeding hand and howl. 

Even inadequate physics were enough to do something about that.  And later, after half an hour of Sepp playing hot-and-cold with 52-947173-68, they heaped a pile of delicate wizardly objects in Barnister’s blast furnace that created a metaphysical enough blaze to do a little something more.  His heart threatened and cursed them, his liver cried and pleaded with them, and his brain tried to escape into his gallbladder, but all of that went away in the wet-sounded flames with the rest of him, leaving just a stain and a smooth, still-cool metal vial. 

Sepp opened it.  Blue went in. 

It was really hard to make herself plug in the stopper.  It was harder still to leave it in for the whole trip back, through the flooded tunnel clinging to the snapping beaver’s heel, through hill and dale, bush and thicket.  Sepp took her mind off it by stopping to catch small game, the best of which she put whole into the waterskin.  Heroism might be its own reward, but gratitude could add a little more to that, and doing it kept her fingers from itching to pull loose the cork for just a little peak, to make sure it hadn’t leaked, that it was really in there, that it really looked like she remembered it did when she was three years old and her grandmother first let her hold a line and thread a hook. 

But on the last hill, the last mile, the last leg, c was finally full and Sepp could see the inland sea, flat and ephemeral and empty against the vibrant sunset, and she stopped and felt her hands outright shake.

-, said 52-947173-68.

“It’s only a little early.”
-, said 52-947173-68.

“What’s the worst that could happen?”
-, said 52-947173-68.

“But I really, really, really want to.”
~, said 52-947173-68.

Sepp sighed.  “You’re no fun.  You’re going to be a real big front someday, you know that?”

+, said 52-947173-68. 

So they walked the last horrible mile as Sepp’s feet ached in their misshapen boots, as her brain itched and burned, as c finally grew more restless than not in her waterskin and began to poke and nudge and kick like Sepp’s own children had (impressive, without feet), all the way down to the headland.

It was too late.  Nobody was up.  Nobody would see this but them.

“Hell with it,” said Sepp.  And she held the vial under the glassy-gone surface and popped the cork. 

It was a rare thing, to see a colour come into full force like that all at once.  The closest most could imagine would be leaves in autumn, or a dying reef of coral.

This was more like a bomb, but for your eyes.  It hurt, it made Sepp shout a swear worse than anything a seagull could muster, it made her laugh and cry and cover her eyes, and it made her whoop as she poured her waterskin into the blue, blue, blue and laugh even harder as c flicked her fins and dove down into a kind of water she’d never known to exist before this very moment, as happy and homed as any fish ever was or would be.  It made her do a stupid little dance as she let out 52-947173-68, who lingered and swirled over the new blue waves and shimmered with glee around her before scudding out across the bay to find its masters across the horizon, wispy form growing thicker and fatter and flecked with spray. 

Only then, when her breathing finally slowed down and she lay at peace with the sand, when the dark was finally turning the blue to purple, when she really was so tired she could just about drop, she took the vial and tapped it with Barnister’s ring.

They both turned to sand and ran through her fingers.

And she went home and slept, and dreamed of blue, and woke to find it true. 

Once upon a time there were three sisters, oldest, middlest, and youngest, and they did inherit their parent’s food truck.  But alas, the kingdom was in an economic slump, and few purchased complete meals for lunch when instead they might buy their own bread.  So the fortunes of the sisters dwindled, and although they refused to compromise on the freshness of their ingredients there came the day when they soon would no longer be able to afford rent for their apartment, and the oldest sister proclaimed that she would seek out the sand witch.

“Sisters,” she proclaimed, “I would seek out the sand witch.” 

“That’s a terrible idea,” said the middlest sister.  “She’s capricious and cruel and vexatious and she refuses to share tips.”

“Nonetheless,” said the oldest sister, “she is wise in the ways of food service, and it is said that whosoever does bring her a sandwich the likes of which she has ne’er before seen shalt be rewarded beyond measure, for she is both old and rich.”

“You’re going to get absolutely cooked,” said the youngest sister.

“Fear not for me, my sisters!” cried the oldest sister.  “For I have a weapon most secret and cunning!  I go now to bring us our fortunes!”  And she departed, weep and whinge though her siblings might – which they did, a lot. 

The oldest sister travelled down the  lone and level sands of the beach upon which the three had plied their trade long into the evening, and as night fell she hid underneath an umbrella painted black and made no sound, and so she was witness to the rising of the sand witch’s castle from the depths of the waterfront, grit and froth spraying and wheezing from its silica parapets and cold dark water streaming from its dim and damp windows, empty of pane and emitting odours most tempting and disturbing.  Ten thousand gulls orbited it in ten thousand ways, and when the oldest sister doffed her umbrella they gave ten thousand screams and flew down at her with fierce speed – but she had brought some fries from the food truck, and threw them into the air, and so it was that each gull fought every other gull ten thousand different ways and she was permitted to approach the little bell affixed to a pillar at the edge of the castle’s great fisherman’s-itch-filled moat.

This bell she did ring four times, with a little pause before the third, and only then did she announce herself.  “Sand witch!  Sand witch!  Sand witch!  I am here, I am here!  I am come to bring you that which you seek!”

And the great drawbridge fell open, which was made of a thousand broken and shattered and long-lost little toy plastic shovels, and the oldest sister passed over it safely for she had worn her sandals rather than gone barefoot.

Within was the sand witch’s lair.  And within was the sand witch. Her legs were caked knee-deep in damp sand; her eyes were thick with crusted salt; her body was wrapped in a sodden and worn beach towel; there was sea-weed in her hair and her skin glowed red-hot with sunstroke. 

She was baking bread. 

“You have come to offer me that which I have not seen, and for that your rudeness and presumptuousness in besting my castle’s defenses are forgiven for the moment,” said the sand witch.  “Now show me what I seek.  Show me what I demand.  Show me a sandwich the likes of which I have never before imagined.”

“Lo!” shouted the oldest sister.  And she reached into her delivery satchel and brought out a bag, and brought out a wrapped foodstuff, and brought out a single, immaculately grilled hot dog with mustard and relish and onion.

“A hot dog is meat and condiments placed betwixt a bun,” said the sand witch.  “It is both obviously and trivially a sandwich.  Now come here, for you have kept me from my baking and now you shall speed it along its way!”  And with a snap of her flour-coated fingers and a dash of salt the oldest sister was no more, but was instead made into bread, and the dawn found her sister’s food truck one staff member short. 

***

It was a hard thing to run a food truck short a set of hands (especially when those hands were the quickest and surest at the griddle), and although the two remaining sisters did their best and held their tears inside and never once compromised on the freshness of their ingredients, their fortunes continued to dwindle and there came the day when they soon would no longer be able to afford gas for their truck.

“I hate to say it, but I think I need to go and visit that sand witch,” said the middlest sister.  “We need an actual miracle to get us out of this hole.”
“You’re going to get utterly creamed,” said the youngest sister.

“Well, I’ve got a plan,” said the middlest sister.  “Just take care of yourself, okay?  And if I don’t come back, don’t call the police because you KNOW they still remember what happened in tenth grade.  Love you.”  And she left, not looking back so as not to see her sister’s grumbling tears. 

The middlest sister walked on the sand in a particular way; her left foot dragged, then it jumped, then it skipped, then it hopped, then her right did the same, then her left did the same, then her right, and as she did this she turned and spun and wound until she had treaded a particular sort of thing into the beach and from that particular sort of thing the cool evening air of the empty beach slid aside and there!  Standing as if it had been there all along, towering and grim, bannered and ribboned, it was the sand witch’s castle.

Immediately after doing this a million crabs arose from the sands and clicked their pinchers with rhythmic and menacing intent.  But the middlest sister knew this trick, and she threw to the beach a handful of chicken bones left over from the day’s cooking, and each crab took one end of one bone in one claw and the end of another in the second claw, only to find that some other crab was holding the far end of each bone, and the resulting fight had three million sides and a million losers, which left the middlest sister clear to walk up to the great barred gate of the sand witch’s castle. 

“Sand witch!” she called, knocking four times with a little pause before the third.  “I’ve got what you’re looking for!”

There was no reply, but the gate slid open and upward into the ceiling.  The middlest sister walked into the dripping shade and the noxious droppings of the ten thousand seagulls from the day before oozed and showered and splattered from the ceiling high above, but she had worn a big sunhat and so it troubled her little. 

Beyond the foul vapours lay the sand witch’s lair.  And within was the sand witch.  She was wearing a slightly torn one-piece and two sandals mismatched in size and shade alike, and in her free hand she clutched a plastic tumbler filled with ice and cocktails. 

She was stirring sauces.

“You have come to offer me that which I have not seen, and for that your rudeness and presumptuousness in besting my castle’s defenses are forgiven for the moment,” said the sand witch, without looking up from the swirling motions of her spoon.  “Now show me what I seek.  Show me what I demand.  Show me a sandwich the likes of which I have never before imagined.”

“Alright, here goes,” said the middle sister.  And she pulled a paper bag from her backpack, and pulled out a foil wrapper, and pulled out a tortilla, freshly-baked and filled with finely-seasoned beef, salsa, and guac.

“Although this is a single piece of folded flatbread, it still clearly contains a filling of various other ingredients and sauces, and is thus easily and readily identifiable as a sandwich, the likes of which I have seen many times before,” said the sand witch.  “Now come – you have nearly paused me from stirring my sauce, and now you’ll prevent it from breaking!”  And with a wave of her spoon and a shake of her salt, the middlest sister was emulsified into the sand witch’s saucepan, and the next day’s sun rose upon a food truck manned only by one.

***

The youngest sister was fast, the very fastest of her family.  She was not the most careful cook, or the most skilled, yet she could put together three chores before her sisters finished one each.

But even she could not run a whole food truck with a menu intended to be prepared by three all by herself.

So shockingly quickly, despite everything the youngest sister did, and everything she could do, and all her speed and skill and threatening anonymous letters to the police, and her utter and TOTAL refusal to compromise on the freshness of her ingredients, there came the day when she soon would no longer be able to afford the truck’s license

She stared at the pile of bills (charges) and pile of bills (tips) and she stared at the beach and she stared at the bills (of the nearby seagulls) and she thought to herself and she said “the hell with it.”

So she put up the ‘CLOSED’ sign and she left.  She did look back though, and more than once.  The truck looked so lonely. 

The sun was setting, leaving a golden trail over the quiet water.  The youngest sister walked that golden trail until she met the horizon, where the sand witch’s castle rose up from the water high into the air, earth-toned and smug.  Under the water’s surface boiled a trillion angry little fish with angry little mouths, but the youngest sister was in a vicious mood and personally kicked each of them to death one after another very very quickly.  Then she stamped up to the door of the castle and kicked it four times really fast without pausing.

“Hey fuck-o!” she shouted.  “Open up!”  And this caught the door by surprise, and it did so.  The youngest sister passed beyond it, through deep earthenware tunnels still glowing with the hot red-and-pink burn of the setting sun, and if she hadn’t put on sunscreen she would’ve been in for a real pickle but she had, so she wasn’t.

Beyond lay the sand witch’s lair.  And within was the sand witch.  She wore sunglasses (cracked) and a bikini top (faded) and some short shorts (ripped, both intentionally and otherwise). 

She was slicing meats.

“You have come to offer me that which I have not seen, and for that your rudeness and presumptuousness in besting my castle’s defenses are forgiven for the moment,” said the sand witch, without looking up from the quick and decisive cuts of her knife.  “Now show me what I seek.  Show me what I demand.  Show me a sandwich the likes of which I have never before imagined.”

“Here,” said the youngest sister.  And she held out her hand.

The sand witch looked up.  Then she looked on.  Then she raised her sunglasses.  Then she raised her eyebrow.

“It’s an open face sandwich,” said the youngest sister.  “So it only has one slice of bread.”
“Huh.”
“And it’s gluten-free, so it doesn’t have that slice of bread.”

“Ah.”
“It’s vegetarian, so I held the meat.”
“Oh.”
“And it’s low-fat, so no sauce or condiments.”
“Hmm.”

The sand witch’s claws tapped thoughtfully on the handle of her knife.

“Where’s the vegetables and other toppings?” she asked, voice curious and entirely unhostile. 

“Shortages.  End of the season and we don’t want to overstock when we have to close down tomorrow.”

“Reasonable,” said the sand witch.  “Now THAT is clever.”

“Thank you, sand witch,” said the youngest sister.

“Weaselly, too.  I like weaselly.”

“Thank you, sand witch.”

“If only this exact argument hadn’t been the principal topic of my crone’s thesis,” sighed the sand witch.  “Now, I think I’ll carve-”

“I believe that the freshness of tomatoes is irrelevant to their worth as an ingredient,” blurted out the youngest sister, and this lie brought upon the sand witch a fury so immediate and all-consuming that it ate her out of existence before she had time to stop. 

The youngest sister searched the sand witch’s castle top to bottom, and she found three things: a throne of sand, a hoard of lost wallets and watches, and a big cooler.

She sat on the throne and commanded the gulls and the crabs and the fish to take the castle to the food truck.  She raided the hoard and paid for the apartments’ rent and the gas and the food truck’s license.  And she opened the cooler and pulled out some fresh bread and bottled sauces, and when they touched the air outside the castle’s walls they were her sisters again, and after that everything was all right until the next summer. 

Zoos In Reviews, by Hermant Munchler

Zormoloch Armageddon’s Zoo of DOOM

This is a shameful column for me to write, for it is an admission that I, dear readers, have become a victim of mine own success: after ten years and over five hundred artful critiques of local animal entertainment facilities, I have finally run so short of grist for my pen that I am forced to stoop to visiting locations for their novelty value. So alas and alack, I hereby present you – my loving and diligent readership – with this, my review of a zoological garden brought to my attention by an anonymous and unposted letter slipped under my front door in the dead of a moonless night that promised me ‘the experience of my lifetime.’ I expected little, and my friends, I was not disappointed in my judgement this day.

HISTORY

Finding myself in the odd position of possessing no personal prior knowledge of Zormoloch Armageddon’s Zoo of DOOM (hitherto referred to as ZAZD for the duration of this missive, so as to avoid sensationalism, save wear and tear on my keyboard, and valiantly defend the shrinking boundaries of the edge of good taste), I turned to my personal library, then the community archives, and finally to that great devilry, the internet. None turned up anything, and so I find myself only able to offer what little information was to be scraped from my letter and the complimentary zoo map and brochure given with my ticket at the gate.

ZAZD was founded ‘in a time before man’s slimy steps befouled the sweet soil of this elder earth,’ by ‘the great singular, the cease’d one, the heedless annihilator, Zormoloch,’ as ‘prison and mansion,’ so as to ‘keep the world secluded from them and all that they represent.’ Invitation is ‘for only those who must.’

I decline to comment on the accuracy of any of these claims. If ZAZD’s marketing is its source, I would scarce be surprised – it certainly fits the intellectual profile of the same individual who advertised their establishment by anonymous midnight post.

SIGNAGE     

ZAZD is, it must be admitted, thoroughly riddled with signposting; one cannot so much as walk down a trail without coming across placards saying this-way-this or that-way-that. However this meticulousness is most thoroughly counterbalanced by the tawdry carnival atmosphere of it all – there is no such thing as a ‘restroom’ when it can be instead announced as an “ETERNAL RESTROOM” and rather than surveying a simple ‘no exit’ posting on a given path you will find yourself perusing ‘DEAD END’ or “NO ESCAPE BEYOND THIS POINT” or “ABANDON HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” It may be October but such tawdry trappings are over the top even for this benightedly commercial month, and it speaks ill of the financial sensibilities of the management who permitted such reckless abuse of the facility’s paint budget (not to mention manpower) on something so useless in the other eleven-twelfths of the year. Finally, I personally noted several glaring typos present on exhibits both throughout the grounds and on the brochure map – the most egregious being the persistent misnaming of the giant panda exhibition as ‘Giant Painda.’ Most unprofessional.

FACILITY CONVENIENCES

As wretched as the naming of the zoo café, restrooms, and rest stops may be, their presentation is even worse. A gnarled and rotted hollow tree with a single antique stool placed inside may appeal to the goth set a la Addams, but it is dreadfully tedious to the rest of us, to say nothing of our weary hams and shanks (and to say LESS than nothing of the splinters). Similarly, the notion that being served your ‘eye scream soda’ from an iron cauldron over a blue flame by a cackling hag is appealing can only be tolerated by one who has never seen the amount of warts, loose drool, and leaking pus coming from what was clearly a laughably made-up high schooler with far too much wart budget in her makeup kit (and may I add, the eyes were far too realistic for my appetite’s sake – there’s kitsch and then there’s shlock and then there’s outright gore).

Also, nobody wants to buy an overpriced, foul-tasting, too-small hot dog in a building named ‘The Bottomless Gullet of Humanity.’ It is not cute, it is not philosophical, it does not make me think or smile, it makes me bored. I am sick of this nudge-and-wink anticapitalism guerilla-marketing hypocritical nonsense, as I was not shy of telling the man in the toad costume when I refused to leave a tip.

THE EXHIBITS
Of course, many minor transgressions in presentation can be forgiven if a zoological garden possesses good exhibits. But what defines a ‘good’ exhibit? An expensive enclosure, or an exciting resident? Both are necessary, but there is a certain I don’t know what (as the tiresome French say, a certain je ne sais quoi) that is unmistakable in its presence or absence. Happily, ZAZD fails at all of the above in numerous ways.

Firstly, the animals are dull and disappointing. The ‘Komodo Drake’ is clearly a komodo dragon that some idiotic prankster had glued a pair of wings to. The ‘megarilla’ is nothing but a perfectly ordinary gorilla that has been heavily overfed (and probably given steroids). The ‘medusa’ is nothing more than seventy-six (or seventy-seven; I lost count) slightly larger than average king cobras that have been painted different colours and just happen to enjoy spending much of their time compacted close together in a large ball. And the so-called ‘werewolf’ exhibit was clearly the work of a delinquent but devious keeper who has trained a perfectly ordinary wolf to do things like ‘answer’ questions and math problems with barks, urinate through the fence on guests who speak critically of him, and smoke cigarettes (offensive not only in odour and the potential for harm to the guests through secondhand smoke, but also in the cheapness of the brands provided). All these beasts acted healthy and happy but the sheer scale of flim-flammery and Barnumism on display makes it impossible for a serious onlooker to feel anything towards them other than a disdainful and deserved superiority.

Secondly, the enclosures were as overdone and overacted as the rest of ZAZD’s affect – whether it was the ‘vampire cavern’ (laughable – we’re on granite bedrock out here, and we’re expected to believe this ‘limestone karst’ topography is plausible? paper-mache no doubt!) with its conveniently-shadow-obscured beast (a fruitbat with some perspective tricks, faux blood on its chest, and a strobelight attached to its head); the ‘pool of bottomless depths’ (a pond filled with mirrors and floodlights to create the illusion of being over a foot deep, inhabited by a simple everyday alligator someone had fitted with fins, a crest, a fluked tail, and glowing contact lenses); or the ‘behemoth’ of ‘the burning plains’ (a meadow someone set on ‘fire’ with red lighting and fluttering red streamers and dry ice smoke, inhabited by what I’m absolutely certain was just a regular elephant or an animatronic dinosaur or CGI or something else like that), you are sure to be surprised and appalled at the absolute lack of shame with which these hucksters will take even the simplest piece of showmanship and utterly bungle it to the point of unbelievability through their own delusional inability to grasp the brute unreality of what they’ve created. It really looks real to them I expect, the poor humbugs.

Thirdly, the staff were insolent when I threw peanuts at the animals to see if they did anything interesting. This remains my bellweather test of an institution’s quality, and as expected ZAZD failed it. If you MUST have your minimum-wage upstart-carnies speak to those who have paid you money, they should do so quietly and respectfully with downturned eyes and grateful words, and not use phrases like ‘stop that’ or ‘not permitted,’ no matter how sweetly they precede them with please-and-thank-yous.

VERDICT: Zero out of five peanuts.

Well readers, this is sure to be of no shock to you, but I cannot recommend you visit ZAZD. You should stay at home. I surely wish I could, for when I made to depart the premises I found that not only was there no exit depicted on the brochure, there were no paths leading to any exit at all. I went to the ticket booth to complain only to find that it had vanished; looked for a staff member to complain to and realized that they’d all gone home; and was only alerted by the faintest scraping sound of metal-on-metal to the realization that all the exhibit doors and gates had been opened for the night. Having been forced to barricade myself inside the nearest ‘ETERNAL RESTROOM’ for the rest of the evening, I have spent my time composing this – my final Zoo In Review – on the (low-quality single-ply) toilet paper and preparing to hide it in one of the toilet tanks, in the hopes it shall be discovered by a kindly janitor and taken to my employers for publication, thereby sparing others from my fate. I believe it is safe to say that this is my last will and testament, as the megarilla has at last removed the outer door and now all that stands between me and being cast into ‘the palace-pit of Zormoloch’ that the werewolf has been howling of for the past hour is a single shoddy toilet stall doo