jamieproctor.ca

Thanks, thanks, glad to be here.  Now give me a second – there, and uh… crap.  How do these things get harder to use every year?  Where’s the power button?  Okay.  Right.  Thanks.  Good.

So, we all know why we’re here – let’s skip the preamble and the happy-to-meet-yous and get right down to business. 

First things first and the most obvious issue: we’ve got a lot of prime land down by the river crying out to be used that’s currently buried in a tangle of uselessly domesticated monoculture crops, where it isn’t slowly slithering out to sea.  We clear that off, we can start putting down succession from the pioneer species onwards – get the weedy little shits in there fast so they can start shading the soil and sinking their greedy fingers into it before it all oozes away.  That’s a good initial step, but I think we can do better: a lot of this terrain is low-lying because it’s drained marshlands.  We can set those up again once there’s enough greenery in place to prevent erosion from sweeping everything in one fell swoop; get things nice and sludgy again and turn this all into a proper filtration plant that can clean up the water for a population of millions. 

Next up, we need a proper downtown.  The good news is we have a great place for it, the bad news is we’ve currently we’ve got a pile of ugly skyscrapers covering it.  I know those things suck to clear, especially the stumps, but there’s no helping it: they’ve got to come down and it’s got to be done.  And it’s not all bad: you can sell the scrap cheap for habitat construction. 

Once we’ve chopped down the buildings and broken up the concrete, you’re looking at prime foundational land for an old growth city core.  Accelerate the succession because it can take it; really burn through those first few years of sun-tolerant ground-coverers, get through the disturbance and start laying the foundations for a place where you’ll have to crane your neck straight back if you want to glimpse the sky because it’ll be wall-to-wall ancient hardwoods.  Transit will be painless: an arboreal traveller will be able to slip straight from one side of the place to the other without ever once touching the ground, and the number of accessible branches per station will be luxurious and affordable.

Speaking of transit, I want to take a moment to address this head-on: yes, we’re incorporating carbon taxes into the basic requirements of our infrastructure.  I won’t mince words, you can’t do modern planning without it, and if you plan to attract good, sturdy woodlands to your area you’ll let them take away your carbon without complaining.  If you don’t want to have your carbon taxed why not ditch society entirely, eat your meals cooked, and go sleep in a suburban duplex like some kind of drooling hominid. 

Right.  So we’ve got our filtration sorted, we’ve got a long-term project for the downtown, and now we need to plan water access.  I’ll be blunt, right now it’s not great: we’ve got a concrete waterfront that totally obstructs commercial and private access to detritus and green algae, and a correspondingly grossly impoverished population of marine life.  We need to get in there and renew things, give them the tools and the space they need to stand on their own fins – ‘give a fish a worm for a day/give a fish access to water filled with wriggling things that fit in their mouth for the rest of their lives’, you know how it is.  So we’ll dredge the landside of the shoreline until we hit dirt and then and start infilling the channel and the harbour until they’ve got a healthy silt layer at the bottom again.  This is something that’ll take time too, but the good bit is that the better our other projects do, the faster it’ll happen: we get the filtration sorted, and no more phosphorus-driven algae blooms.  We get the downtown revitalized, more organic matter is getting dumped into the river and washed into the bay.  And once you’ve given enough to the water, it’ll start giving it back – detritus for beached carcasses; bugs for fish; land nutrient for deepwater sediment.  I cannot overstate the fundamental importance of free and fair current exchange in prosperity. 

Now, I’ve saved your biggest problem for last, but don’t think it’s unsolvable.  Yes, you’ve got a lot of untenable unproductive suburban wastes sprawling around the hinterland.  No, tearing up every single isolated family dwelling, swimming pool, driveway, and garage one-at-a-time would not be a productive use of anyone’s time. Yes, the soil is poor.  No, it won’t be a world center of productivity, look good on a brochure, or be the thing you brag about to your colleagues anytime soon. 

But you know what it can be?  Something goddamned usable, which it isn’t right now.  Plot it out as mixed-use woodland, and stay hands-light – it’ll never be the star of the show, but let the traffic take its way with it and watch what happens and I bet you’ll see potential in there you weren’t aware of.  Parks can turn into copses; lawns can become meadows.  Don’t try to measure the sow’s ear for a silk purse right away, start curing the leather and think about wallets.  Give it half a century and come back to it ready to make a new plan once the lemons have gotten lemonaded. 

So there it is.  You have hundreds of square kilometres of cement-and-rebar wilderness out there right now, yes.  But now you ALSO have the plans and the potential for hundreds of square kilometres of vitalized, energetic, world-class economically-active multi-biome civil society.  You’re welcome. 

Yes, I know this is a lot of work.  Yes, I know it’s going to take ages.  But unurban planning done properly is all about the long term, gentlecritters, and if you’re planning long term you’re either thinking big or you’re screwing up. 

‘What about the hominids?’  What about them?  Go join a preservation society if you want to, that’s not my problem.  Bleeding-heart dogs and cats always asking ‘what about the hominids, what about the hominids’ – if they’re so damned smart and adaptable they’ll tool-use themselves along just fine.  Now let me do my damned job.

Cindy watched, and Cindy waited.

Cindy was watching from the second floor of the house, out her bedroom window. Cindy was waiting for the snowball fight to start.

“You’re too little,” Rob had told her, and he hadn’t meant that.

“You’re a GIRL,” Charlie had told her, and he HAD meant that, and so had Rob.

“It’s for the best,” her father had said, without looking at her (he couldn’t look at her without not looking at the newspaper). “You could get hurt.”
“It’s alright,” her mother had told her, in that specific way that meant it wasn’t, but she understood and was sorry about it. “Snowball fights aren’t much fun anyways. Just slush in your shirt and cold down your neck.”

Cindy had already experienced slush in her shirt and cold down her neck because Rob and Charlie had thrown her in a snowbank before when she was being irritating, and she’d really liked the idea of having a chance at doing that to somebody else.

***

“It’s a very nice… something,” Cindy’s teacher told her. “But it’s not really proper for show-and-tell. It’s just a cereal box.”
“I made it better,” said Cindy. And she’d used scissors and markers and a few leftover stickers from Christmas to do it, too, turning it into a jack-o-lantern mixed with a spiderweb mixed with a snowflake, because Halloween was her favourite but it was winter now. It had taken some careful destructive thought, particularly when her mother had found her using the wrong scissors – the big, sharp kind.

“Well, that’s all well and good, and you’ve done a fine job. But maybe next time you’re making something better, try beginning with a different something.”

“Did I do it wrong?”

“No, no, you did it properly. You did a very good job with your canvas. But I bet you could do an even better job with better materials. A cereal box is just a little… mass-produced.”

***

Cindy had offered her brothers a snowball, as proof of her sincerity and drive.

“This isn’t really a snowball,” said Rob. “It’s all uneven and lumpy.”

“This is garbage,” said Charlie. “Look at how it just falls apart – did you even pack this? She didn’t even pack this. Did you just squeeze a handful of snow until it went hard?”

“You’ve got to roll them – like this, see?” said Rob, polishing the soft snow between his mittens. “Then it’s a proper snowball. Now it’ll hit what you throw it at.”
“Yeah, and it’ll stick together long enough to actually GET to it. This was garbage. Half of it’s just crust – you need to take softer stuff and pack it until it TURNS hard, look! Don’t you know anything?”

And Cindy watched, and Cindy waited.

***

“What’s ‘mass-produced’?” she asked her mother that night, as her homework was packed up.

“Oh, it means to make lots of something all at once in a factory, like I did during the war,” said her mother.

“What does it make?”
“I made bomb casings, but mass production can be anything as long as it’s being made in big batches. Like cars, or coats, or those cookies you wanted me to buy last week. As long as there’s lots of them and they’re all the same.”
“Oh. So it’s not special?”
“It’s a way of making things that are… sort of the opposite of special, yes.”

“Oh.”

***

She had gone inside and moved a chair from the dining room (quietly, because she wasn’t supposed to) and stood on it (VERY quietly, because she REALLY wasn’t supposed to) and reached up, up, up into the freezer where her numbing fingers quested and poked and prodded until they touched a slippery, plastic frame, brittle with cold and filled with cold little weights.

Then she brought them up to her bedroom.

And Cindy watched, and Cindy waited.

***

Just before bed, when her mother’s hand had just left the switch and the dark was new and fresh, she finally found the question. “Is there a way to make things that are special?”
“Of course,” she said, and Cindy’s eyes could hear her smile.

“How do I do that?”
“You already do it every day, sweet-pea. From everything around you.”

“Everything?”
“Everything.”
Cindy fell asleep fast. The thought followed her into it.

***

And Cindy watched, and Cindy waited, and Cindy AIMED, and just as Rob and Charlie finished shaking hands and turned their backs on each other to walk back to their forts she let fly and dropped a single, perfect, fresh-from-the-freezer ice cube from the cheap little plastic tray at her side directly down the back of Charlie’s neck.

Yes, thought Cindy as the slush flew – along with the odd fist and some VERY odd words – and repainted the back yard in a gorgeous, dizzying swirl of frigid meltwater and bitter acrimony. Yes, given the proper preparation and context, you can make art come from anything. Even from the mass-produced.

The ship is enormous and state of the art and unbearably inexpensive and perfect and it is sinking.

The human next to it is barely worth noticing.  He’s sinking too.  Already the rim of the ice is towering above him, his arms straining to grip its lowermost edge, frictionless and scrabbling.  He’s very good at math, his eyes have been checked many times in his life; he can measure and determine the exact velocity of his doom as it’s swallowing him. 

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. 

***

The idea was natural.  Nobody worth knowing had been there, and he was worth knowing, so he would go there.  He would go there and learn things and experience danger and come back and be a hero and a bringer of fresh new wisdom that everyone would love and could be used to remove the tawdry old musty wisdom they had lying around the place that nobody liked. 

***

Danger was a word to him back them which implied not problems, but a certain looseness of safety caused by an increase of uncertainty.  An untied shoelace was dangerous.  A dark wood was dangerous.  Forgetting to wear gloves in low temperatures was dangerous.

His current situation is not dangerous.  It’s perilous.  Peril sounds higher-pitched than danger, more alarmed, more immediate.  Piranhas in the pool with you.  A lightning storm outside your airplane.  A close-quarters gunfight.  A close-quarters gunfight in the piranha-filled pool inside your airplane in a lightning storm. 

Peril sounded very distinct back then, something that could be avoided by common sense and good preparation, both separable and distinguishable from the danger that he was to consign himself into.  Now he’s starting to think they’re just points on a gradient, and that he might have misread it.  Yes, peril is in the ice’s creak under his nails.  But it had been creaking for ages before this moment.  Maybe he should’ve listened closer.

***

The planning was beautiful.  A wonder-swirl of dreams sharpened and filed and measured and remeasured and plotted onto files and studied until the construction happened and they became real. 

Having become real, there was no way for the plans to fail.  That was how it worked.  It was simply impossible for it to be any other way. 

***

A deep, heartfelt groan that makes his hands shake and his body slide another unmeasurable too-far distance.  The ship is settling farther.  Sliding deeper.  Listening to gravity.

He really wishes it wouldn’t.  He really wishes he wasn’t.  He really hates gravity, which is something he’s never experienced before.  Feelings this strong about basic physics should belong to professors. 

***

The voyage was miraculous.  Transformational.  Imagine spinning in a little circle, eyes open, and everything you see is new – not just for you, but for anyone.  Nobody else has ever seen it, nobody else has ever known it.  Just you.  Just you. 

Oh, he couldn’t wait for it.  He loved it.  Loved how the cold crackled along the outside of the ship, how with every second more and more of the fingerprints of its makers flaked away and were left in his wake.  Cleaning it.  Making it less theirs, cutting the cords that little bit shorter, stretching the distance that little bit farther.  It was alone now out here, which meant it was also him.  He was enormous and state of the art and unbearably expensive and he wasn’t sinking. 

It wasn’t going to be like that. 

***

The ice isn’t quite as slick anymore underneath the manic grip of his fingers.  That’s because pieces of it are coming off.  The pieces he’s holding onto.  It’s rough and jagged and sharp and his own weight is cutting into his gloves.  Luckily it’s cold enough that the pain is barely there; sucked away the moment it registers in his palms. 

***

The disaster was caused by the same thing as usual: something small and unworthy of attention.  A defect in the ship, but what caused that?  What put it there?  The underpaid, overworked factory employees who sealed it?  The management that refused to pay them or give them free time?  The world that encouraged both of those things in profusion?  The history that made the world?  Small things unworthy of attention. 

Anyways, the ship hit a bump.  And the bump turned into a drag.  And the drag ended in a lurch. And the crew were in the right place at that wrong time and now look what’s happened. 

Small things unworthy of attention. 

***

Which makes it even funnier that he can’t get all of those small things out of his head right now, at this precise moment.  Even as his fingers – without apparent cause – cease functioning. 

Your brain really WILL try anything in an emergency.  He’s almost calm by now. 

And so he slides over the edge with relaxed muscles and slackened grip, into the abyss, off the icy roof of the garage through six feet of cold December air into a wet December slush heap where the plow has piled an entire street’s-worth of grey gunk into a towering monument to hubris – a Christmas tree that finally receives its topping angel.   

His ship goes after him and bounces off his head.  The plastic goes ‘donk’ when it does that.  And it goes ‘crunch’ when it lands. 

“Fuck!” he says very loudly without thinking, at precisely the moment a large, irritated human parent opens his and their front door to see what the fuss is about.

***

And so the expedition went down in infamy and disaster, a warning to all who had not participated in it – a somewhat smug little tale of good judgement’s necessity for those who’d naysaid it from the start; a prudent reminder of pitfalls to be avoided for those who’d felt a bit of wistfulness as they watched it leave safe harbour. 

The sled, alas, was cracked right down the middle.  Totally useless. 

The séance chamber was somber and tasteful.  The chandelier was of beautiful yet not over-ornate design; the table was clothed in a plain black that was workmanlike without being cheap; the curtains were drawn enough to permit spirits but not so tightly as to prohibit eyeballs. 

“Oh my, it’s so kind of you to go to all this trouble, for me, a poor old doddering widow with naught left to comfort her in the loneliness of old age but the cold and lifeless cash of her funds,” wept Mrs. Bagelsly, clutching her purse in tearful gratitude.

“I assure you, it is very little trouble,” said Ms. Cuthspoon with a firm and gracious handshake that turned (with gracefully-disguised awkwardness) into having to support the older woman’s weight on her forearms.  “I am but a simple student of the Lands Beyond and have very little to offer, but I am always moved to action by the plight of the forlorn and grieving.  If you and your man will both take a seat at the table and clasp your palms to mine, we can begin.”

So the circle was shaped with only a little fussing and fidgeting, hand-to-hand, widow-to-manservant-to-medium-to-widow-again, and after no more than a moment of ritual singing, chanting, and calling from Ms. Cuthspoon the darkness that filled the room seemed to grow deeper; the air more turbulent.  The chandelier shook for an instance under an alien weight; something dripped from above that glowed softly.  A faint glow appeared above the table, giving the vaguest impressions of a human face. 

“Charmaine,” spake a guttural voice from Ms. Cuthspoon’s throat.  The black cloth masking the table rippled with its breath.  “Charmaine.  Is that you?  It is very dark here.”

Mrs. Bagelsly quailed in awed delight at the sights and sounds enveloping her.  “Dear Albert,” she whispered.  “My little Alberto.  Is it really you?”
“Indeed,” roiled the voice, thick as pitch. 

Her trembling chin turned rock-solid under a quick and very nasty grin.  “That’s funny.  Because your name was Ezekiel, and you insisted on it in full.”  And with those words her hand shot up from her lap, cold steel in its grip, and swung wildly at arm’s-length over and above the séance table.  The tablecloth ceased its flapping; the chandelier stopped its clatter; there was a number of oddly musical snapping sounds.  

“AHA!” she shouted with the lungs of a much younger woman who was also an opera singer.  “Piano wires under the table, attached to strategic ‘rattle points!’ to simulate the actions of the invisible!”  The knife spun from her fingers with a deft flick, shooting past Ms. Cuthspoon’s ear and exploded in an expensive and fragmented crash.  “Mirrors and lightboxes to craft the illusion of a glimpse of those that have passed beyond the veil!  And ectoplasm crafted from-” here Mrs. Bagelsly dipped a finger in the substance oozing from the chandelier and sniffed it “- a flour base to simulate the material leavings of the immaterial!  Nothing new, nothing new at all.  You are most certainly a fraud preying on the vulnerable and grieving, young woman – and what is more pertinent and insulting, you are an UNORIGINAL fraud!  The nerve!  Book her, Potterridge.”

“The gall!” said Ms. Cuthspoon, drawing herself up in fury (and keeping her hands well away from the set of cuffs Potterridge had procured from his pocket, besides).  “I’ll have you know that I am the one and only true and real medium I know of, capable of calling the dead from their rest!”
“With flour paste and piano wire?” sneered Mrs. Bagelsly.

“That’s to pay the bills,” said Ms. Cuthspoon scornfully.  “They don’t want the real thing; they want what they expect.  Nobody wants the real thing.”
“Oh, and I suppose it’s because it’s too fearful and dreadful for our poor little hearts to take, so you must keep it secret ‘till your dying day and no you WON’T be showing me now no matter how I beg, thank-you-very-much?” said Mrs. Bagelsly in an ever-more-chilling torrent of sarcasm. 

“No, I can do that right now,” said Ms. Cuthspoon.  “It’s just that no-one likes it very much because it’s dull and a bit of a let-down.  Would you like to see it?”
Mrs. Bagelsly toyed with a second, equally-discreet knife as she met the medium’s challenge with narrowed eyes.  “Oh, and give you time to prepare a second fake?”

“We can do it wherever you please, right now.  And what, you don’t think you can see through me twice?”
She laughed at that.  “Outside then; the harsh light of day does treat flimflammery so very well.  And make it sharpish!  We don’t want the cuffs to get cold.”

***

It ended up being a little less than sharpish.  Mrs. Bagelsly insisted on holding the second ritual no closer to the estate than the ditch that bordered the property.  “It’s far enough away from the house and dull enough that you won’t have stashed any jiggery-pokery here,” she explained cheerfully.  “Who ever heard of a grand and exalted necromantic feat performed in a ditch?”
“Suits me fine,” said Ms. Cuthspoon dourly.  “And honestly, I expect it’ll make the thing feel right at home.”

“What, are you summoning up the ghosts of frog-hunters?”

“Hah!” said Ms. Cuthspoon – and it was said, not laughed: three letters and one syllable, sharp and derisive.  “I wish.  Now back up a little. Don’t fret; I’m not about to cut a run in a dress when your man there is in pants, but I DO need to focus a little and it’s hard to do that with you and that galoot breathing down my neck.”

“Mind your manners,” said Mrs. Bagelsly primly as she waved back Potterridge. 

“Mind your knife,” muttered Ms. Cuthpsoon.  And with that, she began.

There was no chant or song, and no call.  She did hum a little, in that tuneless sort of way some people do when they’re concentrating and need something to make the rest of the world shut up and go away.  And then she let out a big, long sigh, the sort that gets the air right out of the bottom of your lungs, and clapped her hands hard, and when she opened them something soft and runny and glowing was hanging in midair in the space where her palms had met.

Mrs. Bagelsly exclaimed something very unladylike.

“Quite,” said Ms. Cuthspoon.  She kept her arms open wide, fingers half-cupped like she was holding a set of invisible cymbals.  “If you have any questions to ask it, I suggest you do them now.  This is more effort than it looks.”

“Ask it questions?” whisper-shrieked Mrs. Bagelsly.  “It’s a d*mned insect, a, a, half-lobster!  Look at it!  Look at its legs!  Look at its bl**dy antennae!”

“Believe me, I am aware,” said Ms. Cuthspoon through gritted teeth.  “But ask and it WILL answer.  And hurry it up.”

Mrs. Bagelsly took only half a moment to compose herself, experienced in rewriting her attitude as she was, and the other half was spent on the practical matters of communication. 

“What are you?” she demanded.

The spectral thing twitched some of its many little legs at her fretfully.  The message, when it came, did so in the purest form imaginable: direct comprehension without the intermediary confounding of words, of language, of the meaning of meaning.  They were as follows:

ded

Mrs. Bagelsly fought the unladylike urge to stick her finger in her ear and swivel it.  “Is it being funny?”
“No, they just don’t have any imagination,” said Ms. Cuthspoon tersely. 

“Sensible of them; bet they didn’t have any mediums.  What killed you?”

at b fsh

Mrs. Bagelsly eyed the thing’s translucent flippery appendages with interest.  “Yes, I suppose you were.  No accounting for taste, especially among fish.  Can you tell us anything about what lies beyond?”

ded

“Or when you died?”
lng ag

“Or anything at all?”
n

“Well, I suppose that’s more than I expected I’d get,” said Mrs. Bagelsly.  “Just hold on a moment, I have pencil and paper on me somewhere – ah!  Yes, hold it still just a moment longer.”
“Please, there’s no rush,” said Ms Cuthspoon in the most sugary-sweet voice deliverable while biting your own tongue. 

“Hush, you owe me this much. An honest morning’s work won’t kill you – there!  Done.  You can throw it back now.”
Ms. Cuthspoon’s arms dropped, the air didn’t-quite-pop, and the thing went away.  “Satisfied?” she said, rubbing her wrists. 

“Scarcely,” said Mrs. Bagelsly, tapping her pencil against her sketchpad.  “This just raises further questions.  For instance, that all seemed very usual to you: is this what happens every time?”
“Sometimes they’re bigger or smaller.  Not by a lot, but a bit.”
“Well, that answers question two: is-it-just-the-same-one,” said Mrs. Bagelsly.  “Hmm.  Question three then: you’ve never found anything else?  Anyone else?”
“No.  Just these things.”
“Hmmmm.  Well now, it seems our business is concluded for the day.  You have provided me with evidence of supernatural powers beyond the ken of mankind, Ms. Cuthspoon, and in gratitude for this I shall look the other way in the matters of your practice of cruel japery for wanton profit by preying on the hopefulness of the bereaved.  But just this once.”
“Your charity and kindness is beyond all my hopes, Mrs. Bagelsly,” said Ms. Cuthspoon.  “Will you at least be paying me?”

No, I think not – the séance was fraudulent and you did this lobster-magic gratis.  Potterridge, go and get the carriage.  Poterridge?  Potterridge!  Oh, it seems he’s taken a turn; I forgot that he never could abide seafood.  Do you have any smelling salts?”

“Ten quid.”

“Three.”
“Done.”

“Poor haggling, young woman.”

“If it gets you out of here faster, it’s a bargain.”

“A fraud, a poor haggler, AND possessed of a rude mouth.  At least you’re sensible.”

***

The second time Mrs. Bagelsly came a-calling to Ms. Cuthspoon’s estate, she did so unannounced and early in the morning, and she left Potterridge in the carriage. 

“I’ve found out who you’re calling up,” she said triumphantly.  “I paid a visit to a naturalist acquaintance of mine, who mentioned an acquaintance of his, who referred me to a colleague of his at the natural history museum.  They all agreed my illustration was of a trilobite.  Look here – I’ve brought along copies.”
Ms. Cuthspoon stared bleary-eyed at her.  “Tea first.  Then trilobites.”
“Oh if you insist.  And toast too, while you’re at it.”

The toast was burned.  Mrs. Bagelsly wasn’t above constructive criticism. 

“So as you can see, they’re remarkably common,” she said through a mouthful of marmalade.  “Plenty of the nasty little things lying around underfoot wherever the rocks are right to hold their bodies.  How many times have you tried to summon the dead exactly?”
Ms. Cuthspoon shrugged.  “One doesn’t keep close track of inconsequentials, particularly when the outcome varies so seldomly.”
“Oh come now.”
“I told you, it’s so damned boring that I never really bothered.  I tried maybe a few dozen times when I started around age sixteen, then on and off a few times a year from then into my mid-twenties.  Doing the same exhausting thing over and over for the same disappointing results is simple madness!”
“And more than that,” corrected Mrs. Bagelsly, “it is statistics.  Now, we can make two possible conclusions from your memory here.  One is that you can only summon deceased trilobites.  This would be simple and William of Ockham would approve of that, but it would be imprudent to accept it without questioning. The other is that you can indeed summon any dead being, but trilobites are simply so common that they are always what you end up with SO FAR.”

“I do not appreciate your emphasis,” said Ms. Cuthspoon, glaring from behind the shelter of her saucer. 

“Well, then you will appreciate its explanation: you are going to summon the dead every day, all day, until we have acquired a better grasp of your abilities,” said Mrs. Bagelsly, briskly mopping her plate with the heel of her toast. 

“Oh surely not!”

“It will keep you too busy to scam, will advance the sum of human knowledge, and will provide us both with the precious chance to learn something new.”
“I shan’t and you can’t make me.”
“I have numerous letters penned and ready to be posted in my absence should I not give word, mused Mrs. Bagelsly aloud, daintily sucking a glob of breakfast from her thumb.  “And their contents are MOST scandalous.  Financially ruinous, I should say.”

Ms. Cuthspoon put her teacup down with bad grace.  “Fine,” she snapped.  “But I’m having a second helping first.  This isn’t a matter for an empty stomach.”

***

“Just a little longer,” said Mrs. Bagelsly.

“It’s sunset.”
“Almost there, hold on.  Just a little longer.”
“I can’t feel my arms.”
“Nearly there.  Nearly.  Just a little longer.”

“Going in three.”
“Just a little longer.”
“Two.”
“Just a little longer.”
“One.”
“Just a, ah that’s it.  All done.”
Ms. Cuthspoon dropped her arms to her sides and her body into an easy chair.  Her eyes, long-since shut, somehow sank deeper into their sockets.  Mrs. Bagelsly by contrast was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but her drawing  hand took a good six seconds of flexion to leave its cramped shape and she was blinking much less than a human ought to. 

“Well,” she said cheerfully.  “I think that’s a sound day’s work.  We have sketches of all varieties, tables listing them by population, age, and cause of death-”

“’At b fsh’,” said Ms. Cuthspoon with faint venom.  “’At b mllsk.’  ‘Sqshd b md.”

“-and we’re beginning to get a better grasp of the big picture.”
“Trilobites, isn’t it?  Nothing but trilobites.  All the way down.”

“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Bagelsly.  “If it were nothing but trilobites all the way down, what would be eating them?  Keep it up and we’ll find something else.  Which is why I’ll be back bright and early tomorrow morning.  I hope you have more of that marmalade, it was really quite scrumptious.”

“Hate you,” said Ms. Cuthspoon.  And she fell asleep.

***

“Just a little longer.”
“Little longer ever day.”
“That means you’re getting better at this!”
“Three.”
“Just a little longer.”
“Two.”
“Done!”

***

“Just a little longer.”
“Ending early this time?”
“Well, my fingers are stuck.”
“Again?  I’ll get the balm.”
“Would you mind?  It’s just that if I try to walk like this, the whole arm goes numb.”

***

“Alright, we’re done.”
“Oh, just a little longer, surely.”
“You’re starting to nod off.”
“Nonsense!”
“What’ve you got written for our last cause of death?”
“I was going to put it down in a moment.”
“And the one before that?”
“Didn’t I get that one?  It says ‘at b rptl.’”

“That was the one BEFORE that.  We’re done.”

“Oh, really!”
“Besides, I already put the kettle on during your last break.”

“Mm.  Do you have marmalade?”
“You’re eating me out of house and home.”

***

“And how was today?”
“Fine?  No clouds, blue sky, a pleasant breeze-“

“Oh, don’t be like that.  The WORK.  How much did you get done?”
“A dozen more than yesterday.”

“Pish posh, still well below par!”
“’Par’ was set with two of us.  I’m not as fast a sketcher, even if I wasn’t having to stop and start all the time and remember things before I write them down.”

“Well, I’d better get back to it then.”
“Not before the doctor says you can.”
“It’s just a bit of scribbling!  Honestly, you fuss too much.  I could do it right here in bed.”
“You could and you won’t.  Get better first.”
“Oh, I will, you’ll see.  Just a bit longer and I’ll be back to it, show you how it’s done.  Just a little longer first.  Just a little longer.”

***

She expected the invitation to the funeral.  And the grey-faced old men in fine coats speaking to her of how she’d been mentioned in correspondence, such a pleasure to meet her, pity about the circumstances, would she care to ever donate her collection to the museum, oh the specimens looked so lovely in pictures, such a shame, may we all pass in such circumstances.

She didn’t expect the contents of the will.  Well, maybe the bit about demanding she hire on Potterridge because he was too damned stubborn to retire, but certainly not the rest of it. 

And she certainly didn’t expect the first thing she did when she got home to be tidying up the séance room, setting up her notebook and sketchpad, and settling in for the evening’s work.  She’d been paid for it, after all, and the remuneration was going to go farther now that she wasn’t purchasing ruinous amounts of marmalade. 

Six trilobites.  Sixteen trilobites.  Ghostly little arthropods, something far away from crab and spider and distant cousin to both.  She asked and nodded and released and wrote and drew from memory, recent memory, so the older bigger ones stayed away. 

Twenty-eight trilobites.  Twenty-nine trilobites.  Small and large and decorated and plain.  She took a moment to make sure her columns were straight and tidy, corrected a smudge. Things had to be kept tidy. 

Thirty-seven trilobites.  And one more afterwards, and as her palms parted her first thought was ‘that’s not enough legs.’

And it wasn’t enough legs, if you were a trilobite.  Four squat little pillars, jutted fiercely out to the side of a little round-barrel torso, like a cross between a lizard and a small and politely confused hog.  Its earless head looked at her, big eyes curious. 

“What are you?” she asked.  What else could you ask?

Ded.

“What killed you?”

Caght in clod of bad ar.

“When did you die?”
Long tim ago, durng the gret dyings.

“Can you tell me anything about what lies beyond?”

Ded. All ded.

Ms. Cuthspoon’s mouth and arms, so ably acting in her brain’s stead, ran out of muscle memory.  Her hindbrain took up the torch.  “If you see a rude, pushy old woman – human woman, like me – around the place, ask her to stop by.  Please.  Please?”
Oky.

Ms. Cuthspoon closed her arms, made her illustration, recorded her observations. 

Then she cried a bit afterwards.  That, she’d expected.

It wasn’t much.  But it was something new, and that was worth it.

The pickles were deliciously sour; her granddaughter knew her trade better than she’d ever had, at a quarter her age. She’d just popped the first of them in her mouth when the knocking came at her cottage’s door, and so she answered it with maybe a little more force than otherwise reasonable.

“Yes?” she said rudely to the anxious and trembling young man outside.

“O witch, I come on behalf of our town and all people in it, young and old, slight and strong, short and tall, to beg of your aid-”

“Whyfor witch?” she demanded.

“Because you are old and live in the woods and have a stern and cruel look to your mouth,” explained the young man.

“I’d like to see you have a different look if you’d eaten one of my granddaughter’s pickles,” she shot back. “And what aid could you want of me, witch or not?”

“We are suffering,” said he, “under three most terrible and inescapable maladies: a brave and valiant prince; a fair and languishing princess, and – may god save our souls – a wise and just and true king.”

“I see,” she said. “Well, then there’s nothing for it. I will do what I can.”

And so the witch took up her walking stick and her best hat and set out on the long, long road to the town.

With the rest of the pickles, of course.

***

The road through the woods was dark, but the witch was used to it.

The road through the woods was winding, but the witch was used to it.

The road through the woods was very, very, very long, and the witches legs were very, very, very old – and that, alas, she could only grow so used to. Instead she had long cultivated useful spots to stop and rest, such as soft mossy stones, stumps, and in this case a toppled log too lumpy and twisted to make good firewood, half-sunken on the rim of a lily-padded little pond.

The log was occupied when she found it, beseated by the slumping a shining man in shining armour with a shining blade at his side and a large and handsome (if not quite shining) horse at his other side. There was little doubt in her mind as to who this was.

“I apologize for my slothful idleness, good woman,” said the brave and valiant prince, “but you find me in a moment of weakness betwixt quests. Tell me, is there any deed that you need done? A villain vanquished? A beast felled?”

“None come to mind,” said the witch. “I live alone in the woods, and don’t hear tell of much.”
“A witch, maybe?” said the brave and valiant prince. “Or is there a howling beast that torments your goats?”
“I don’t have any goats.”
“Please, please, please, I beg of you,” said the prince, falling onto one knee with a clatter of fine plate and chain. “I’ve been questing dawn ‘til dusk for days uncounted. I delve into dens and caves to stir slumbering creatures to battle; I cross every bridge I encounter thrice until I am stopped by a passerby and may demand a duel; I have vexed every herb-knower and spell-writer for leagues around until they curse’d me and I could take means to lift the curse; I have hunted and harried giants ‘till there be not a living creature with two legs and two arms in these lands that stands taller than six foot two. A brave and valiant prince MUST quest, no matter the cost, no matter what. Please! There must be something I can do for you! Please!”

“Well,” said the witch, “you could find me a new walking stick. This one’s all worn out.” And so filled with desperate joy was the brave and valiant prince to do this that he leapt to his feet and drew his shining blade and hewed a limb from the fallen log he sat upon all at once and in less than a twinkling.

“Oh, no, no, no,” said the witch despairingly. “Not like that, hacking away all messily! You’ll split it. You’ll want a nice sound branch. Look, see mine?”

So saying, she handed the brave and valiant prince her walking stick – which though worn, was still very s turdy and of great size. And while he looked upon it, taking great care to document the precise nature of its craftsmanship, she took the shining sword and threw it into the pond behind them.

“Now,” she told the brave and valiant prince, “we’ll need to go find you an axe.”
“Whyfor, perchance?”
“Because you’ll need something to cut wood PROPERLY with. Come along, come along. Offer me a ride, will you?”

So the brave and valiant prince nobly offered a seat on his large and handsome (if not quite shining) horse as they went down the road, and as the woods became less dark the sun became quite strong and the heat bore down on his shining armour until he was prone to sweat.

“Best put that away for now,” said the witch. “Heatstroke doesn’t improve anyone.” And this was true, and so the brave and valiant prince heeded it and packed up his shining armour and walked in his plain linen until at last they came (at the witch’s direction) to the blacksmith at the edge of town, who she knew because he was her son-in-law’s cousin, and she bid the (still-warm, dog-tired) brave and valiant prince to rest a moment while she did business, which he did with his eyes shut.

“Here,” said the witch, proffering a wood-axe. “It’s yours.”

“A gift? But I have completed no quest.”

“Oh, it’s been paid for – and so has a little house on the edge of town,” said the witch, who knew what a suit of shining armour was worth. “And now you can take quests that don’t bother anyone and that never end. People will always need firewood, or water drawn for their wells, or crops tended. And,” she added, seeing his trepidation and hope at war, “they will never want their woods to become clear-cut, or their wells to run dry, or their fields to deplete and sour. So when you halt your questing, that too will be valuable.”

The brave and valiant prince would’ve had all sorts of fine and noble things to say to that, but he found – much to his excitement – that he wasn’t a brave and valiant prince at all and settled, in lieu of applied custom or experience – to give the witch a hug. Which he did, before he ran back into the woods, axe in hand.

The horse went with him. He’d never treated it poorly, and as it was not quite shining it felt like this new way of questing was not beneath it.

Also, it was sick of jousts and monsters.

***

The town was quieter than the witch remembered it; but then again, she was older and her ears were more stubborn. Perhaps it was as noisy as it had always been in her youth. Perhaps it was noisier.

Then again, the town of her youth hadn’t been buried in the long, long midday shadow of a briar-tangled tower that rose from what had once been a thriving town square, as this one was. Maybe things were just different and exact comparisons would do nothing but oversimplify the complexities of reality.

Those were the things that the witch stopped thinking about as she very, very, very slowly picked her way through a gnarled mass of rose-bedecked briars with needles long and sharp enough to knit a suit of chainmail for an elephant. Her attention was very very specifically focused on the movement of each limb, which thankfully was something she’d gotten used to. When falling down went from embarrassing to life-threatening, you either learned to think about what you were doing, or you learned to heal fast.

The downside of being so focused was that you missed out on other things. For instance, the moment when the witch finally extracted her foot from the last of the briars was when she finally looked up and found herself eye to eye with no fewer than sixteen (she counted twice, very fast) large, scaly, smouldering creatures with goat horns and lion claws and lashing tails. They were piled in a heap two-deep around the heavy door at the base of the tower and were watching her with genuine confusion and something else.

She thought she recognized that something else. It was the expression on her cat’s face whenever he realized she had milk.

Slowly and carefully, the witch put her hand in her bag and drew out the jar of pickles. Their eyes alit on it like flies to rotting meat.

Slowly and carefully, the witch opened the jar of pickles. Sixteen pairs of scaly ears fluttered like moths at lanterns.

Gently and gingerly, the witch tossed a single handful of pickles underarm. Sixteen long, lean, muscled bodies leapt into the air and tried to eat every pickle while yelling at every one of their comrades at once.

“Oh!” cried a voice from far above, floating down the long, long column of the tower’s spiral staircase and threading through the heavy bars of its door. “Oh no! You KNOW it’s not time for dinner! Are you all trying to eat Gustave again? Oh no! Bad! Bad children! Bad!”

At this the ruckus subsided, and soon the heavy and barred door of the tower was flung open, revealing a fair (if somewhat red-cheeked from hurry) and languishing princess, plus her perspiration.

“Naughty!” she scolded, and the dragons all laid their ears back and whined most piteously. “You KNOW you mustn’t eat Gustave, even if he’s smallest! Dinner is roast yams, and you will enjoy it!”

“Pardon me,” said the witch.

“Oh!” said the fair and languishing princess again. “A visitor! Pardon me, I’m so sorry. Are you a knight, or a prince, or a hero, or a youth, or a wayward long-lost royal?”
“None and neither of them all,” said the witch.

“Oh!” said the fair and languishing princess yet again. “You’re a witch. I see. What a relief that is; things are quite untidy right now and I’m not ready at all for any of my expected visitors. Would you like to come upstairs and have some tea?”

“Of course,” said the witch.

But her hip started to pain her halfway up the tower, so she took a rest on a little chair the fair and languishing princess kept there (‘in case one of the dragons gets sick and I need to be close for the night, poor thing’) and the princess brought the tea-tray down from above.

“It’s just so much work, to be properly imprisoned.” she groaned as she poured. “And not just imprisoned – to be really, truly languishing you’ve got to have all manner of curse’d fauna and flora imprisoning you, otherwise it’s not durance vile it’s just boring old jail. And durance vile takes WORK! I’d always thought the first few years were the worst – the briars were too thin and harmless, and by the time I’d gotten them so big and sharp they’d gotten vulnerable to aphids and that almost wiped them out until I managed to encourage our ladybug population to sprout up, and all of that made it so I had almost no time to tend to my vegetable patch which meant thin rations for the dragons – and they were just dragonets back then, and that means regular big meals to grow strong scales and horns! But now – now I think it’s even harder; there’s not as much to be done from scratch but the upkeep is a nightmare! There’s so much weeding to be done, and so much planting to be handled, and the briars keep trying to overgrow the vegetable patch and by now if I need to prune them it takes a gosh-darn halberd to do the job, and when the wretched little beasts aren’t digging up the briars and setting them on fire for fun they keep trying to eat Gustave! He isn’t even that much smaller than the rest of them anymore, it’s nothing but force of habit and sheer – sheer SPITE, that’s what it is! And every time I forget a packet of seeds or a hoe or some medicine it’s all the way up, up, up, UP there, in my bedroom. Which I have to keep neat at all times in case a prince should stop by to rescue me from my languishment, which means everything’s crammed into all the drawers and inside the closet higgledy-piggledy. I can’t help but feel there must be a better way to handle all of this.”

“Well,” said the witch, who’d had time to blow on her tea and listen politely and drink and listen some more and drink again and listen some more and think a little and finish her tea altogether. “What if you made some kennels, with a private space for the runt? And a fence, to keep them out of the briars. And a fence to keep the briars from overgrowing the vegetable patch.”

“Oh,” said the fair and languishing princess. “I’d thought of that before. But there’s nothing to make the fence with; all I’ve got are briar vines and dragon-scutes.”
“You have a whole tower of stone,” said the witch. “And strong arms from weeding and tilling. You can do this.”
“But I’ve never built a fence,” said the fair and languishing princess in a small voice to herself.

“I can show you how my old garden fence was built, when I was younger,” said the witch.

“Oh yes PLEASE.”

And so all day and all night for several days the witch harvested yams for dragons and weeded errant briars while the fair and languishing princess harvested her tower for stone. She began with the roof, then her chambers, then finally the long, long spire, and at last there was nothing left but a free-standing archway (with a barred door, oddly enough), some sturdy and weather-proof dragon kennels, and a set of ordered and divided gardens: vegetable and rose. And standing there amidst them was a sunburnt and vigorous young woman, pouring a bucket of water half over her head and half down her throat.

“Needed that,” she managed. “Not sure which I needed more, but I needed it.”
“All of it, I think,” said the witch.

“Yes,” she agreed, looking the witch dead in the eyes for the first time since they’d met. “I think I agree. You know, I don’t think I can be imprisoned without a tower anymore. Do you know anybody who might want to buy guard-dragons, or thorn-hedges, or roses, or highly nutritious yams?”

“I can give a few names as suggestions for where to start,” said the witch. “And I think you’ll do the rest yourself.”
“Your thinking’s pretty handy,” said the woman.

And she gave the witch a dragon-roasted yam for the road. It wasn’t as tasty as her granddaughter’s pickles, but it was warm from within.

***

The walk up from the town to the king’s castle was short. The drawbridge was down. The guards were well-outfitted and polite to all. The halls were clean and comfortably decorated. And on a well-worn and handsomely-crafted yet simple throne in the room, resplendent in fine (but not showy) robes and crowned in gold (but not extravagantly) sat the wise and just and true king, who was very nearly any ordinary person save for the sharp look in his eyes.

The witch waited while he finished attending court for the day, and his judgments were fair, and faultless, and even-handed, and she knew that this was by far the greatest challenge yet.

“You may now approach, witch” said the wise and just and true king, who had dismissed the rest of the chamber. “The court is now adjourned, and I have some time.”
“How much?” said the witch.

“Not enough,” said the wise and just and true king. “I must manage these lands. I must manage these people. They believe I have the right to do so by birth alone, and that my competence is proof of that belief’s truth. I strive every day to make them happy and safe and to prevent harm done to them and harm done by them, and to do so in a way that they understand and appreciate. I know that if I did not do this, another would, and that other would lack something of mine – being wise and true but not just, or just and wise but not true, or true and just but not wise, or (heaven forbid) lacking two qualities, or even all three! So I sit in court and I rule with a right I do not recognize that I do not dare give up and am loved and beloved and I wish that I could wish that I was dead, I really do, only I cannot because to wish that I were dead would be to wish harm and ruin to come to all who rely on me to do right by them. So instead I wish that I may one day wish for nothing at all.”

The witch acknowledged the truth of all this with a nod. “Your majesty,” she said, “please shut your eyes for one moment, and I promise that I will fix this.”

The wise and just and true king shut his eyes, and with a single sweep of her arm, the witch did so.

“Now you can open them,” she said, and when she did so there was no more king, just a sharp-eyed man in fine robes in an empty hall. Somewhere in a corner of the room, something gold rattled briefly (but not extravagantly) as it spun out of sight.

“Come on,” said the witch. “Change into something more sturdy and let’s go visit town. They elect a new mayor every fall harvest, and I think if you’re well-prepared you’ll stand a good chance, if you want it. If not, good advice is good advice whether it’s from the mayor or a friend, and people are always hungry for it.”

“What of the castle?” asked the sharp-eyed man.

“Let it lie. It’ll be there if someone needs it.”

He looked at her again. “Will they take me in? On the word of a witch alone?”

“Of course they will. What you do is what they love, not who they think you are. And my word walks those same paths. Close your eyes for one more moment.”
The sharp eyes closed.

The witch reached up to her head and for the second time in thirty seconds removed someone’s best hat.

(But more tidily this time; hers was a gift from her son).

“You can look now, mister,” said the old woman. “Now let’s get moving. Time’s wasting.”

***

They did not live happily ever after, of course. Time moves, wasted or not, and there were other kings, and other princes, and other princesses. Here and there and elsewhere.

But then and there they had what they needed, they understood what they wanted, and nobody was hurt. And that was happily enough for anyone.

The TROGG WARS!!!! BY, CORII

Once upon a time my great-grandpa and his friends had cool boats and they rode the cool boats here and they made houses and then they built a really big house but it turned out it was ontop of a trogg mine and it fell into the mine and this started….THE TROGG WARS!!!!

The trogg wars were really hard because troggs live underground and we don’t, so, we had to find them which was hard and they could find us, which was easy. Lots of people died and my great-grandpa said lots of his friends died too and it sucked. But then we found out you can plug up the holes and my great-grandpa’s friend made friends with the birds and my great-grandpa’s other friend made friends with the tree giants and the troggs all lost and we started to win and they tried to trick us by saying timeout but it didn’t work and we won and that is why we’re here and the troggs aren’t. That was the end of the trogg wars.

My great-grandpa said it’s important to never forget what happened to his leg so I don’t because it’s really, really, gross.

***

Improper formatting.

Inadequate wordcount.

Insufficient detail.

Terrible grasp of punctuation.

Extensive reliance on source outside of the textbook.

At least it isn’t plagiarized this time. 20/100.

***

Summary of A History of the First Trogg War

Harvest 17, 1238

Nennifer Grisbit

Since the dawn of time, the Fine Folk have yearned for sights beyond the horizon, and whether by foot, by cart, or by ship they have chased its ever-distant glow. Such wanderlust was eminently rewarded in the year QD (Queen’s Domain) 732, when an unseasonably late summer storm drove a sea-serpent-hunting expedition far off course and onto the shores of a hitherto undiscovered coast. Captain Melepron found refuge in a sheltered bay with plentiful fish and fresh water streams, and upon returning to the Homeland and spreading word of its existence, it was soon populated by a wave of explorers, adventurers, and settlers, who named it Safeharbour. This first foothold grew rapidly, and soon the sheer number of would-be-manses, burgeoning shipyards, and half-tamed parkgrounds necessitated (as it so often does!) the investigation and shaping of further territory. Luckily, the rest of the large isle – now named ‘Melepronnia’ – was equally sumptuously suited to the life of which the Fine Folk have long accustomed themselves to, with the local meadows being suited to unicorn pasturage; the native pines proving eminently susceptible to subordination and obedience under the transplanted boughs of gild-trees; and the beasts of the field being of the common sort and thus easily dissuaded or directed by both Word and deed. Indeed, things were going both marvellously and typically of any new (if exceptionally productive) colony, until the fateful moment when Lord Holbrom ordered the construction of a new hunting manse for himself and his immediate family and companions. Lord Holbrom was a roamer by the standards of nobility, and he desired wilderness in his surroundings – thus, the manse was laid out many leagues from Safeharbour and its constellation of expanding villages, about, atop, and within an appealingly striking rocky crag. It was to his great and unsuspecting misfortune that this peak was already occupied.

Troggs were unknown to the Fine Folk before this encounter, but it likely that the inverse is not the case: the work laid beneath the foundations of Holbrom’s Folly (a name meant in irony, soon proven in tragedy) was patient, slow, and devastatingly premeditated. Only when the final keystone of the manse’s grand hall was placed did the troggish undermining trigger its collapse, murdering in a single fell swoop Lord Holbrom, his entire family, and much of the assembled entourage and partygoers. The only survivor was a young and quick adventurer named Elmar, who had attended only by chance in his explorations of the hinterlands. This alone was the salvation of the colony: Elmar ran day and night without rest, sleeping in trees and eating nothing, and by his warning and counsel the outlying villages were recalled to Safeharbour before Holbrom’s Folly could be replicated in a hundred halls and more. Once scouts confirmed his words, Elmar would prove central to the war-councils of what would be later called the First Trogg War.

The war itself can be divided into three broad phases: a prolonged period of initial skirmishing, in which the troggs would seek to encroach into the colonized wester coastlands and be driven back; an intense period of open warfare conducted in the rugged interior; and the final siege at the Depths of Troggak.

The first phase of the war lasted several years and was broadly inconclusive; the troggs were functionally both undetectable and impervious to assault as long as they remained in their hidden tunnels, but this rendered their offensive capabilities practically nil except for very gradual and careful use of undermining to topple homes, redirect rivers, dry wells, and other such cruelty and general mischief. It was Elmar who tipped the scales of this delicate and terrifying balance; drawing on what little he’d seen as he fought free of Holbrom’s Folly, he discovered the means and ways by which the troggs hid the doors through which they crept about the surface realm at night. Once this was known, the trogg’s tunnels afield were useless: every bird in the sky was already allies of the Fine Folk, and once they were given warning of what a trogg-door looked like they patrolled day and night, dove and owl, until at last the troggs were driven far from the fields of Safeharbour and retreated unto their rocky homes in the far hills.

The second phase of the war was a painful necessity: Elmar knew that the troggs would never stay at bay for long, and pressed most passionately to defeat them today rather than let them attack tomorrow. Despite jealousy and cowardice from his detractors, his wisdom was too great to be ignored, and so the great punitive army was forged and sent into the highlands, where the trogg homes were and they made greater use of the surface to grow their vile crops and vent their reeking forges. Initial battles were in Elmar’s favour, but as days turned to weeks the tide began to turn: the troggs were thick as leaves in the forest and had riddled the ground with such holes as to let them flank from any place they wished any time they chose. The great punitive army, though undaunted, was in danger. It was in this darkest moment before the dawn that the wilderness itself arose to volunteer aid: so tragic was the plight of Elmar that the greatest and tallest of the trees rose from their needled beds and strode down the hillsides to bow before him and volunteer aid and service. The pinelords had also suffered as the Fine Folk did under troggish cruelty, and they proposed a joining of forces: if the great punitive army could protect them, they could provide both knowledge of where to direct its wrath and the means with which to ensure victory.

The series of audacious triumphs that followed led immediately into the third and final phase of the war: an entire grove of pinelords rooted themselves atop the valley that held the troggish capitol of Troggok, and for three days and three nights their roots sang to those of all that grew for leagues, and for three days and three nights the great punitive army saved them from poisonous vapours, from flaming arrows; from fierce axes. And at the dawn of the third day, with the rise of the sun and the sap alike, the pinelords threw up their hands and the roots of all that grew within leagues pulled with them and into the pits of the earths itself sank the Depths of Troggok, where it will never return from. No living thing will grow there now.

Our land is now Elmaroreen, in the name of the one who fought so dearly for its survival. Had he not perished in that final battle, I believe he would have been pleased. So, too, would he have been pleased with our continued vigilance: the Second Trogg War would have been much worse without memory of his warnings, and without the continued assistance of the allies he made so far from home. As long as that vigilance does not falter, and that friendship does not wane, his name and the people that live under it will never end.

***

More-than-adequattely studious, advanced formatting, correct (if smug) conclusions.

Composition is adequate if overwrought.

Heavily penalize for using ‘since the dawn of time.’ If we catch it early enough, she might not insist on using it in university. 70/100

***

Review of A History of the First Trogg War

By Fonrud Furlament, QD 1238

This book is very easy to read, but it doesn’t seem very accurate. I’m going to try and explain.

For one thing, it explains why we moved to Melepronnia, but it doesn’t mention that one of the reasons Safeharbour grew so fast is the Queen was exiling debtors. Lots of people came here because it was new and exciting, but the reason they wanted to go somewhere at all was because they were being sent away.

It also messes up when the troggs found us: they sent messages pretty soon after we started building houses outside of Safeharbour. I think Elmar met them too, but I’m not really sure. This matters a lot because this is one of the BIGGEST mistakes in the book: Lord Holbrom knew that hill was dangerous to build on because the troggs told him there was a ritual cyst-cavern beneath it. He built on it anyways, even when they told him he was putting too much weight on it and hollowing the stone out for cellars. The keystone was the heaviest part and that’s why it sank, and Elmar lived because the troggs pulled him out of the rocks and healed him. It was pretty lousy of him to go home and tell everyone to fight them after that, and it was even lousier when he told them to stuff up their ventilation shafts so they couldn’t breathe in their tunnels (why does the book say he blocked their doors? It says they were undermining us, they wouldn’t need doors for that!), and it was lousiest of all that we kept the birds so busy looking for new trogg airshafts day and night that they all died. My grandma says her favourite bird was the jay. I wish I could see a jay. I wish I had a favourite bird. I wish anyone in my class could have a favourite bird.

Finally, it gets the reasons behind the end of the war all wrong. The pinelords didn’t go to Elmar; he went to them. And nobody knows what he said to them, just that he made them a promise and only told a few friends what it was before he died. The pinelords don’t like the troggs, and they don’t like us, and they don’t like anything that isn’t made of plants, and I don’t know what Elmar promised them but I bet it wasn’t great because none of Elmar’s friends ever told anyone else what he promised either (I wonder if it was about the gild-trees? They all died before the Second Trogg War). I hope nobody else ever promises them anything because if they did that to Troggok I don’t know why they couldn’t do it to Safeharbour.

In the end I don’t think A History of the First Trogg War is a very good book. It doesn’t tell the truth in some very important places and it doesn’t say why it’s doing that. I don’t like it very much.

***

Adequate formatting.

Serviceable composition.

Absolutely intolerable levels of critical thought.

Find out what he’s been reading, where he got it, and who gave it to him, then purge immediately. Inform the local broadsheets that a trogg infiltrator did it. 0/100.

The bus was late. Engine trouble. That was okay, because I wasn’t due at work for a whole half hour after I’d planned to arrive – I like to be early. That wasn’t okay, because it meant I was spending longer in the bus stop with my nextdoor neighbour, making small talk.

“I like really little dogs,” he was telling me, making motions with his hands to show the really littleness of the dogs. “They’re convenient. You can keep ‘em in a bag or a satchel or a lunchbox and let ‘em out when you need ‘em. We need to make more dogs really little. I know what you’re thinking – if the dogs are little, what happens to the cats? Won’t they eat the dogs? And that’s where the brilliant solution comes in: we make the cats really little too. Like, kitten-sized. So then we have to make sure the mice get really little so they don’t eat the cats – you ever heard of the grasshopper mouse? – and I’ve got this plan for that, see, it’s oh there’s my ride see you later nice talking to you.”

I waited. His bus was not my bus, and had no trouble with its engine. And along with me waited my fellows in suffering; neighbours of our shared street if not the same building.

“It’s too cold out here,” one told me in a voice like chipped windchimes through her two mismatched gloves and two mismatched hats and two surprisingly well-coordinated coats and her fogged-over glasses and her tragically underinsulated boots. “You notice how it’s too cold out here this time of year? Something should be done about that. I keep telling them something should be done about that, and nothing’s ever done about that. Mark Twain said nobody ever does anything about the weather and that was well over a hundred years ago and STILL nobody’s done anything about it. Why hasn’t anyone done anything about it? I’m tired of being cold. Maybe I should set this bus stop on fire. Oh, there’s my ride. Goodbye.”

“I’m not in love with you,” begged the man sitting next to me into his cellphone. “No, wait – that’s a lie. I’m in love with someone else. Wait, no, that’s a lie too – I’m in love with nobody else, just myself. I love myself and that makes me jealous of being in love with you. I’m really upset about that and now I’m trying to cut myself off with you so I don’t cheat on myself with you, because I want me all to myself. Listen, you’ve got to listen to me: I don’t want this, it’s just that I want this. I can’t not stop myself from not stopping myself. I think you should write me off, forget me – maybe move in with yourself instead and feel better. Eat more fruit. Fruit is good. God I love fruit, not as much as you though, and not nearly as much as me. I’m sorry, I didn’t want to say that, I just said it because I wanted to drive you away from me. Baby, please, please, please, please never call back and call me again after work. Hello? Hello? Hello? Are you still there? I’ve got to go now, love you bunches but the size of the bunches is simultaneously very small and very large.”

There was a soft sound of worn rubber and metal and a cyclist pulled over next to our bus stop and made direct eye contact with me.

“You’re going in a bus soon,” he told me. I nodded.

“That’s a good decision. Buses are good for transit. Efficient, and the more they’re used the more efficient they become as total traffic on the road decreases. It’s an excellent form of transportation if you lack wings, which of course we all do, as we are all humans. Look at my human arms with opposable thumbs on their hands. Look at my human feet with their functional big toes and less functional other toes. Do you understand these relatable concepts I am expressing to you in this manner, through language, through a shared cultural context of communication?”

This was the first time since I’d woken up where I’d had to express myself to another human being, and I resented it. My nod was curt and joyless – not sharp, but robotic, like a dippy bird on the edge of a water glass.

“Joyous contact has been made,” said the cyclist. “I’ll be in touch shortly.” Then he folded up his bike, put it in his pocket, and flew away with a sound like a helicopter made of leather.

“I hate those guys,” said a seething mass of hair that looked like the guy who delivered the flyers to my mailbox. “They ride on bikes and act so cool just because they can transform matter into energy and use it to sustain their lives. They have epidermises and dermises! They contract muscles! I hate them! I hate them all! You know what I mean, right?”
I hated nodding again, but I knew not doing so would be a bigger risk.

“Right! Right! RIGHT! Right. I’m left now.”

He was left then.

“I don’t think that was right,” said the old guy who stood at the corner with a placard telling you where you could get a deal on pizza. “I think that was left. We used to have two lefts and two rights, back in my day, and in my grandpa’s day we have six each and five ups and two downs. I miss being young and have conflated that with my perception of reality, choosing to think of the universe as a story with my perspective featured as a starring role rather than one of trillions of products of it. I’m much better at this than the other two, aren’t I? You think I’m like you and I’m blending in flawlessly, aren’t I? It’s okay, you don’t want to nod three times before work. I’ll leave you to it.”

The bus should’ve been there. It wasn’t. Instead there was a woman in a big truck and a manic expression making totally inappropriate amounts of eye contact with me.

“I’m losing money,” she told me. Then she revved until her tires smoked and left.

I’m normal.

“Hey, get on,” said the bus driver.

I blinked for the first time in sixteen minutes. My face was numb. My hands were cold. I clawed loose my card, slapped it against the reader, and moved on.

My farewell to sweet Alees had gone well, I thought. Her tears had died down to a faint weeping as I bade my mother good-bye at the entrance to my family’s home.

“I will return hence safely, mother – and no more tears, please, for I have chosen this course with utmost deliberation,” I told her nobly. “After all, it is but a trifle of a journey, all told, and one that shall secure my fortune. As for my safety, why, it’s all but guaranteed, and I fear not for it.”
“I know.”
“Why, such ships barely founder one time in twelve these days!”
“I know.”
“Truly, were I in your shoes, I should not be surprised to find me back on your doorstop before the conclusion of our orb’s next circling of the su-”

“I know. Be a good fry and don’t do anything stupid.” And with such wise warm words to counsel me and keep the warmth in my bosom, I departed for the docks amid a great school of fellow-passengers that grew thicker, ever thicker the closer I drew, until at last the shoreline was in sight and with it my vessel, titanic in scale before me, infinitesimally tiny before the distance it was yet to traverse. I signed aboard with trembling voice, stowed my meager belongings, and there – the calls, the cries, the bell – we were outward bound! The gangway was stowed, the ship (her name was Willifret) lurched forth on its gigantic legs, and so away we went, up, up, up, up away from the surf of home and through the long sands of the beach and into the vast uncharted vastness of the deep land.

***

It is a strange and fearsome thing, to be out of sight of water and know that whichever direction you sighted, it would be weeks travel hence before you reached it. It makes one feel very small.

Luckily, this matter was not immediately on our minds: for the first three days ashore many of the more unsalted of the crew were laid low by the lurching of the ship. I’m ashamed to admit that I was one of them, and more ashamed to admit that I would’ve remained so if one of the older and more seasoned landsmen hadn’t taken me aside and given me sound (if unsolicited) advice.

“Look up, not down,” he said, scarred fin brushed firm to my side. “You ken? Up – no, higher, yes – at the tops of the trees. See how they blow in the wind, as waves might roil on the surface above you? Watch them, and feel your stomachs settle.”

His name was Kiminol, and he was utterly correct. He became my best friend, and from him I learned to ask my questions rather than avoid them through pride. From him I learned of the many curious habits of the creatures of the land – not just the delicious ones we caught in our nets to supplement our evening rations, which were familiar as the wares of the birdmarket, but the low-voiced and mighty mastodons that drifted through the depths of the woods; the fierce-mouthed wolves (the so-called ‘sharks of the land’) that slunk behind our wake and scavenged the scraps of our passing; the high-soaring vultures that sat so effortlessly above us; the many strange chitinous creatures that coated our ship’s hull and had to be painstakingly scrubbed clear with hours of hard finwork.

And it was he that taught me of the harsh vagaries of landbound weather – how to tell a sunshower from a thunderstorm, a gust from a gale; a calm summer day from a fierce fall storm – and all the little things that might be changed or altered by it.

“I’m not comfortable with this,” he said on a beautifully still afternoon as we waded through a crunching carpet of sticks, near ankle-deep on the ship’s stilts. The two of us were sitting in the lower rigging of the vessel’s belly, checking for ants and woodlice. “See those branches? That underbrush has been building up for some time, and this is the driest I’ve seen these woods in decades. One stray lightning bolt in the wrong place and we could be trapped in a forest fire.”
“What’s a fire?”

“’The combustion of matter in the presence of air’ is what the doctor told me when I was your age,” said Kiminol. “Me, I say it’s hard to describe until you’ve seen it.”

It was a great tragedy that this was the last thing he ever taught me, and that it was as true and precise as anything else he’d ever said.

***

The smoke confused me, but not as greatly as the reaction of the unsalted hands to it. Such scream and fuss for a vague particulate in the currents of the air? The first sparks puzzled me nearly as much, hazy as they were – but then they were bright, and red, and oh so colourful even by the standards of the many sights of the land, and then they were vivacious and leaping as keenly as my little pet childhood prawn, and then they alit to the ship’s stilts and legs and clambered into the rigging and oh, but oh, then I began to understand our peril, just as we began to list hard-a-starboard, and at last we collapsed and I was foundering, drowning in the air, gasping and shaking as water spilled aimlessly and the screams of my fellow travellers became distant and small. What of them escaped the flames met more gruesome ends; I saw Kiminol founder in the crotch of a burning tree and suffocate; and our captain – Cod rest his soul – was taken in the opportunistic teeth of a wolf and dragged away to a demise I shudder to think at.

It was to fortune and little more that I credit my own escape from those fates and others still fouler, because shortly after witnessing them I fell at last from my tenuous perch in the failing innards of the stricken Willifret and landed hard against some obstruction and knew no more.

***

When I awoke my gills were immersed within cool water and my head in hellishly hot pain. Above me floated a land-creature of such startling and powerful ugliness that I broke into a scream the very moment I became conscious – its body was as thick and ugly as a grouper; its tail a monstrous parody of a fin; its gigantic protruding teeth square and chiseled. I wailed and begged for salvation and after some time of this the creature gently reached down into the water and turned me about so that I could breathe out of both sides of my gills, relieving me of some small discomfort.

I attempted to apologize after that. It went poorly; ask though I did in common Finglish, gesticulate though I may with my tail and dorsal sail, I may as well have been speaking the tongue of the moon and stars to such a benighted beast of the dry places of our world. It did utter some guttural croaks and whines, but none of them intelligible, until at last our mutual dissatisfaction caused us both to lapse into the same sulky silence. My gratitude did not wane, but I did, perchance, attempt to test my own ability of locomotion. Alas, though I could swim, there was little to swim to – a small and tepid creek, surrounded on all side by timbered and insurmountable dry land, miles and miles from any known shore! I gave up in despair, and it was at that moment that my host, with a sigh of deepest irritation, grasped me up and carried me away in a tree-bark satchel slung across its back, immersed in a scanty sum of precious, life-giving water. I would have objected had I the strength or – as previously proven – the linguistic capability, but alas and alack, and so I spent the following hours of our travel immersed in miserable imaginings of my potential fate – to be eaten whole, or perhaps fileted, or imprisoned, or executed, or fed to the wolves, or all manner of such wretched ends. I was in the midst of imagining if it would be painful to be diced alive or if all sensation would fade quickly enough to render it merciful when I was tilted, shaken, and tipped out into – oh, holy of holies – water, good, clean, deep water, and there I found myself thrust from stultifying fibrous confinement into the bustle and confusion of a large downtown.

But not that of any town I had ever seen.

Rather than being shaped from good, solid pebbles, these strange land-creatures had built their houses of tree carcasses! Their foundations yet lay upon the deeps, but they stacked their dwellings so terribly high that their roofs soared free into the air itself like unto a dockyard, and it was here that they lived while down in the sensible and kindly heart of the water they worked and built yet more to greater heights.

Mind you, these observations took some time, and several only occurred to me that night, after reflection. At the moment I was principally concerned with startlement and panic, which emerged in the form of a most undignified and impious blubbering plea to Cod for understanding and grace and mercy before I passed – once again! – into a swoon.

***

When I was once more conscious I was placed into the continuing custody of my rescuer, who appeared to be willing to commit to my wellbeing in the long-term – perhaps endeared by my apparent frailty. It found a suitable home for me in the submerged portion of its own home, in an excavated cavity used otherwise to store bark-coated tree carcasses. These, I was astonished to realize at dinnertime, were my host’s food – I was being kept in a larder, albeit not in a manner as my fears had led me to believe. My own meals had to be scavenged by fin – there were many small and idle little fish that patrolled the settlement, and though I was at as first disgusted at the notion of eating them unseasoned as the populace were disgusted at seeing me at table, I soon found that extremity was the king of spices.

Thus fortified, I spent my days exploring. My rescuer’s people were, it transpired, trapped on a tiny body of water surrounded by the unending hills of land – its depths were shallow, its waters bordered by encroaching reeds and trees. I might never leave this place without a ship, and as such, I took my salvation into my own fins and began at once to labour mightily under the curious gaze of the locals, beginning with such parts as I could salvage from my host’s food supplies.

My first escape vessel was ambitious: the span of a ship’s-dinghy in scope. Alas, when it came to slicing planks to fit the capsule so that I might breathe safely, I found that the slim timbers my host’s people kept as food were unsplittable without a great deal of splintering, and so this came to nothing but a great deal of pain and prickles. As I wept disconsolately over the ruins of my dreams of ever returning home and grasping dear sweet Alees to me once more, my host happened upon my moribund form and, taking pity, treated my wounds with various poultices, fashioned and secured with gluey sap.

My second was a wild innovation – if I had not the means to create a proper boat, then why not create an improper one? Necessity was the matron of creativity! So rather than seeking the stoutest of trees portions, I endeavoured instead to weave the slenderest of twigs like kelp, producing a basket-like capsule that could form a watertight seal to safeguard me against the perils of the open land. This, unfortunately, suffered from frailties at every turn, and my most successful basket was barely bigger than my own body, which would have been maddeningly cramped to roll myself in back to the creek I had been rescued from, let alone the long sail back home to mother and Alees. Seized in despair I allowed myself to clutch its frame too tightly, whereupon a second defect was made apparent in that this crushed it as unto a shellfish within the jaws of a horn shark. Once again I was rescued from the pits of hopelessness by the attentive and sensitive actions of my host, who brought me to a sort of work-party organized by its peers – they were crawling into the air, felling trees with their teeth, and dragging them back safely home. Although I was of little assistance in the cutting, I gave what aid I was able in moving the timbers to their dwellings, and fancied that I saw myself becoming considered less of a burden than a blessing, for the day at least.

My third escape blossomed from my subconscious fully-formed as I saw the timbers stripped of their bark – the bark that had formed the container with which my rescuer had saved me from the ruins of the Willifret ‘s final voyage! I secured some of this stuff – which took some truly thorough pleas, valuable as it was to my hosts – and at once began to work on fashioning it over a branch framework, which nearly worked over and over again until I realized that even if I completed the capsule I had no notion of how to manufacture proper stilts or secure a crew of able-swimming landsmen to run it and went mad with grief and ate most of my work.

Once more, my rescuer made a visit to me, this time to bring me to lunch with its family for some sort of celebratory event. I was just on the verge of giving up, settling down, and marrying it for the sake of appearances (surely it was uncouth to spend this long in someone’s larder without wedding them?) when I realized the occasion being feted was the arrival of a ship – a real, honest, land-striding ship, which disembarked a crew of my own kind! Oh, I had given up all hope of ever witnessing another legless creature again, and so overcome was I  that my introduction, was, perhaps, perchance, perforce, a trifle unsophisticated.

“Hello!” I blurted out, sensibly.

“Augh!” snorted the captain at my words. “Finglishman! Do you not speak the beautiful language?” and thereby he jabbered at me in the most uncouth way in his foreign gobblydegook – only, to my great shock – to be interrupted by my host, who spoke at him in what I was loathe to realize was the very same tongue, which I’d ostensibly spent half the most torturous days of my schooling acquiring fluency in. Oh mother! You always said I was the worst student of Loach (and Merman, for that matter) you’d ever known, and for you to be proven right in such a thorough way in such a faraway place was enough to fill me with joyful tears and a tiny bit of utter shame.

“I must return home!” I begged. “My family believes me lost, and-”

“Yes, yes, you can pay your way in labour,” said the Loachman captain in the most barbarous callous way, “but it will be of no great hardship to accommodate you. It is but a trifle of a journey, all told, and its safety all guaranteed. Fear not for yourself. Why, but one ship in twenty is lost these days!”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”

After four days of feasting and trading and careful negotiations in Loach that I didn’t understand a word of, I departed, leaving my personal effects in the custody of the one who’d rescued me. Her name, I’d discovered through the (amused) captain, was Nancy, and although she was happy to hear of my gratitude she was also even more glad that I wouldn’t have to marry her.

***

I tell you as one who has lived this in truth: there are few blessings more sound, kindnesses felt more tenderly, joys more true, than to see the waters of home rise on the distant muddy horizon of the land. And with each step of the ship closer, the emotions stir more strongly, until by the conclusion of docking you are a mad thing, a howling waste of tears and shaking hands and trembling heart, ready to cast yourself against the city streets like discarded scraps if such would bring you to your home’s door a single moment faster.

I did not knock. I did not pause. I opened it without hesitation and spoke like the words burned my mouth to be held within it.

“I have returned safely, mother, in the face of all of the peril of the land and the tumult of fortune!”
“That’s nice,” said mother. “Alees married a crabs-herder down the way two months ago.”
And such was the glory and fullness of my relief that I didn’t even mind that until the next morning.

Councillor A: Thank you, one and all, for returning for this first meeting since-

Councillor B: Closer to one than to all, really. Where’s everybody else?

Councillor C: Councillors E, F, G, H, I, J, and K lived near the waterfront and are currently missing presumed dead. Councillors L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T and U are busy dealing with personal issues, bereavement, or grief. Councillors V, W, X, Y and Z are confirmed dead. And the mayor is on holiday.

B: Jesus, sorry I asked. Hey, does that mean the waterfront will be getting more or less money put into it?
C: Pardon?
B: Because on the one hand they’ve clearly suffered a lot of damage, but on the other hand their representatives are now absent, but on the OTHER other hand we’ll want to seem fair, but on the other other other hand we don’t want to be biased by sentiment, and do we get temporary representatives there, and how do we choose them… man, there’s so many layers to this.

A: If we could get back to the issue at HAND, here, I was just saying that this is our first formal post-emergency meeting since the Gigamouth Incident reached its conclusion, and as such we must now turn to the newer challenges at hand.

B: Like what? Reconstructing the Tower? Half of it is still wedged in the thing’s eyeball. Checking for survivors on the lakeshore? We’re already doing that, at least for a couple more days. Clearing the streets? Setting up temporary housing?

C: Presumably the imminent public health crisis.

A: The temporary facilities in the camps aren’t PERFECT, but they’re adequate and improving every day. We can handle things until the sewer systems are running at a hundred percent again.

C: No, I meant once the carcass starts to rot.

B: Oh shit, they’re right. I mean, I wouldn’t eat beef if it had sat on my kitchen counter for twenty-four hours, and Gigamouth wasn’t even in a fridge first. That thing’s going to be turning RANK.

C: The smell will be the smallest concern. Do you know how much tissue is on an organism that size? I can do the math, if-

B: Fuck. It’s going to be an open compost bucket the size of a city block.

A: Disposal should be a priority, then. Can we expect military assistance? High explosives might be necessary to dismember the organism.

B: High explosives didn’t exactly do much to dismember it when it was alive. Hell, they could barely bruise its skin. Maybe they could bring in that thing they used to kill it?
A: The Confluxy Device? It didn’t work, it supercharged its internal reactor. It died when the Tower ruptured its eyeball and caused a plasma explosion that destroyed its brain.

B: Oh. I thought the confluzy thingy did that.

A: It was in the report. And the paper. And the entire internet.

C: Whatever method is used will require precision and a good deal of preparatory infrastructure. We want to avoid uncontrolled fluid spillage.

A: Ah. Like field dressing a deer.

B: Pardon?
C: To move the carcass we need to break it down, and it’s crucial we do so without carelessly puncturing its arteries or gastrointestinal system. The volume of liquid contained inside the organism is enormous, and even with some coagulation, the flooding it could cause downtown would be horrific. If you’d like the math, it’s-

B: So we need to cut it up right away to get rid of it before it rots, we don’t know how to cut it up, and if we do manage to cut it up there’s a good chance we flood downtown in monster fecal slurry and blood. And maybe urine?

A: Precisely.

B: We’re fucked.

A: If you have something helpful to say at any point, feel free to add it to the record.

B: Okay, fine. We’re talking about corpse disposal, where are we going to do that? If we CAN pull it apart.
A: There’s still plenty of mining projects up north that need rehabilitation. This wastage isn’t any more or less toxic than anything else they need to rebury.

C: Presuming, of course, that the toxicology report on the organism is still accurate and it isn’t an ultra-contagious biohazard, even in death. It was written in under three days.

A: Every applicable scientific resource on the planet was used to create it. What happened here was a matter of global concern, and no expense, time, or expertise was spared.

C: Yes, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t rushed. It needs more peer review.

B: You were the one that brought up the words ‘imminent public health crisis.’

C: Well, just because we need to rush doesn’t mean I have to like it.

B: Besides, what about the skeleton?
A: What about it?
B: Look, even assuming we CAN start slicing this thing into itty bitty pieces, how the hell are we meant to break apart the hardest parts of its anatomy into pieces small enough to move them? Vertebrae, okay, whatever, but the skull? The pelvis? How about the leg bones, the fibuloids or whatever – we got a crane that can move a long limb the size of a bridge?

A: You’re talking about the tibia.

B: Thanks, but the point remains. What do we do about those guys? I say we turn them into tourist attractions; put some foundations down and settle them into them and maybe rig buildings over them. Heck, with the skull we can probably put the buildings inside them. That’s where the museum can go. Or the cafeteria for the museum – no, we put that in the eyesockets, and we charge a premium for the view! I’m telling you, we can rebuild the city with the profit margin from that ALONE, and I haven’t even gotten into my ideas for that pelvis.

C: This is all solutions looking for problems. If we can penetrate just enough to allow removal of the marrow, moving the skeleton piece by piece should be doable. And anyways if we think about this realistically the bones must be abnormally light for their size, or else the creature wouldn’t have been able to walk at all. The math is very straightforward, if-

B: Oh, enough about the fucking math. If the math was as straightforward as you say it is, the damned thing wouldn’t even exist! It was hundreds of feet tall and bipedal and its legs weren’t thicker than its entire body! It barely even cracked the ground under its own mass when it walked! How did it get blood all the way from its heart to its skull without exploding its head? Who knows! It’s impossible! Face it, the math isn’t straightforward because the math doesn’t make sense anymore! So shut up about it!

C: I call for the condemnation of Councillor B.

A: State the grounds.

C: Language.

B: You aren’t saying I’m wrong.

C: Fuck you.
B: I call for the condemnation of Councillor C on the grounds of language.

A: Councillors A and B, you will – stop that! – will return to your chairs THIS INSTANT or I will be forced to – PUT THAT DOWN!

[A brief recess]

A: The meeting will now adjourn. Thank you for your time, everyone. There will be no closing remarks. Goodbye. Come in again tomorrow at eight.

Councillor D: Sorry, I wasn’t listening. What’re we doing tomorrow?
A: Nothing you need to know about.

It was a beautiful day in early April, with the presence of all that was implied by that. The grass was growing. The first leaves were budding. Birds were singing that hadn’t been seen in months. And the President and CEO of CozyCocoa, Inc. was holding a pistol to his forehead with one foot out the window.

“Listen, you’re overreacting. This happens every year. It’s just a –”

“Little dip!” shrieked Earnest Von Hestle, in the tones of one who’s heard it all before and liked none of it. “Just a LITTLE DIP?! Just a LITTLE DROP IN SALES!? Every year it worsens! It widens! It cuts a FURROW into our profits! It makes a CRATER of my stewardship! It lays an IMPASSIBLE CREVASSE betwixt me and the board, and it grows wider year by year as the gap separating me from excellence yawns greater and greater and greater and GREATE-”

“Why not,” said Leslie Green, Secretary and Personal Assistant of the President and CEO of CozyCocoa, Inc., in the tones of one who’s said it all before and can feel the breath wasting itself even as it leaves his lungs, “just launch a new product?”
Earnest’s entire body convulsed for a split second (barring, luckily, his trigger finger). He swallowed, using a few more muscles than necessary. “New?” he gurgled.

“Something that can sell in the warm months.”
“New?”

“Something that’s cold.”
“New?”
“Something that isn’t hot chocolate.”
“NEW?!” screamed Earnest. He hurled his gun at Leslie’s head and missed, utterly destroying his expensive and unused laptop and several acres of test mugs. “We do not do NEW here at CozyCocoa, Inc.! We use my father’s recipe! My father’s recipe that he made from my grandfather’s recipe! My grandfather’s recipe that he made from HIS father’s recipe! My great-grandfather’s recipe that he stole uncredited from my great-great-grandmother! And you would, would, would SULLY these OLD things with your NEW ideas?! No hell is dark and deep enough! No punishment cruel and long enough! An end! An END shall be fashioned and you will be PLACED WITHIN IT PERMANENTLY AND… it would solve it?”
“Solve what?”
“The thing. The seasonal thing.”
“The little dip.”
Earnest’s shoulders slowly began to lower themselves from ear height. “Yes. The little dip. It’s just a little dip, so we won’t need more than a little help. Yes, just a small product. A by-product, even. Something insignificant, it won’t be a big deal. No real fuss. No harm done. Yes. Yes. Good. A fine idea. Order my head of research to produce it.”
“It’ll be done in ten minutes,” said Leslie, who had done it four minutes ago before coming in to see what all the screaming was about this time.

“Make it seven!”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome! And get me a new laptop! And a new gun!”

***

Leslie Green sent the email to Michelle Folps, Head of Research and Innovativeness of CozyCocoa, Inc., who sent an email to Gregory Brisket, Secretary and Personal Assistant of the Head of Research and Innovativeness of CozyCocoa, Inc., who sent an email and a few thousand dollars to Peter Frisk, Senior Recruiter of CozyCocoa, Inc. and told him to figure something out.

So Peter Frisk took a cheque for a few thousand dollars down to the street corner and hung around for ten minutes.

“Anyone got an amazing new product idea for a warm-weather beverage?” he called out into the air.

“You’ll never get it from me!” shouted the hot dog vendor. “I told the courts I wasn’t talking, and I meant it!”
“I don’t know what counts as warm-weather,” mused a passing parent, child slung in a harness and child roving on a lead. “Is it sixteen degrees? Twenty-six? Just once it’s no longer cold? What’s cold? And what do any of those numbers mean in Fahrenheit?”

“Blolf,” said the harness-child.

“I don’t know what a beverage is,” said the lead-child.

“Sure I got an idea,” said a man with a cardboard sign. “Or I know how to get one. What’s the pay?”
“A cheque for a few thousand dollars,” said Peter.

“I only do million-dollar ideas,” said the man, putting away his cardboard sign. “But I think I can lower myself to this. Should be easy. Can you buy me a coffee and then wait here for a second humming something? No Beatles, though. I’m done with them.”

So Peter Frisk fetched the man without a cardboard sign his coffee and hummed five verses of Barrett’s Privateers while he voyaged through the six astral seas into the twelfth Realm Beyond The Soul and wrestled with the UnAntiNegaAbsense, which he slew using the shimmering poniard of his own endawnenment and the teeth of his mind-bunker. Then from his chest he drew forth a silver scroll and on that silver scroll were golden words and in the golden words were syllables of purest diamond and darkest oak that seared deep into his body and burned his tongue so that his eyes opened and his cheeks flushed and he spat out ‘Cold Chocolate.”

“Pardon?” said Peter Frisk, who had lost track of whether the privateers sailed again on the ninety-sixth or ninety-eighth day and was really concerned about whether or not this would compromise the integrity of the humming more or less than stopping to ask about it.

“There’s your idea. Cold chocolate.”
“Like, hot chocolate but cold, or…”
“No, it’s more like the fundamental exact opposite of hot chocolate. Sorry, it’s a million-dollar idea, but I’ll take the cheque anyways. Need to get this one off my hands before it burns them. Don’t look for me again.”

So the cheque changed hands, and the idea was brought back to Gregory Brisket, who brought it to Michelle Folps, who brought it to Leslie Green, who brought it to Earnest Von Hestle, who said “what the hell is cold chocolate?”

“It’s the fundamental exact opposite of hot chocolate,” said Leslie Green, who was capable of reading a message past the first sentence and the subject line.

“I don’t like it. I don’t like that.” Earnest chewed his lip and some of his moustache. “We still have that old ice cream factory in the Midwest, right? Could we use that?”
“Tectonically stable and has refrigeration facilities. Should be ideal.”
“Good. Go do that. This. Somewhere where I don’t have to watch it, thank you and please.”

***

So the money moved and the machinery followed, and an old missile bunker and an old ice cream factory were sort of mushed together until the combination yielded cold, cold fruit. Cacao beans, specifically. The things that happened after that were specifically unspecifiable, and very unspecifically unspeakable.

But their product was not. And soon it was on billboards and popups and unskippable trailers.

Cold Chocolate: The Fundamental Exact Opposite of Hot Chocolate.

You could buy a can for two dollars, a bottle for five, a big jug for ten. It froze the tongue and frosted the throat and delighted the soul, no stirring, no mixing, no heating, no shaking. It could be kept on a shelf for over six hours before beginning to thaw; twice as long if out of direct light. It could be used to numb the pain of a sunburn. It could be used to rehydrate the dehydrated. It could be used to keep a cooler full of sandwiches fresh. It could be used as a refreshing cocktail ingredient, or to elevate a milkshake to ultimate perfection.

It sold out, then it sold far out, then it sold totally far out, man. And when the summer’s quarterly review came, it came with news most unexpected.

“There was no dip,” said Earnest Von Hestle.

“It would’ve been hard to imagine,” said Leslie. “Hell, we made more in July than we do some entire winters.
“No dip,” said Earnest. “No itty-bitty dippy. No little-bittle gap. No slumpity-slump, no slouchity-slouch. Only a rise, a glorious, great, engorged, englorioused rise. Profits went up up up up up. You know what this means, don’t you? Don’t you?”

“Well, it means the board won’t-”
“It MEANS,” shouted Earnest, voice breaking into a squeak fit to kill a dog through its eardrums, “that now WINTER’S going to be a little dip for us! We need more! We need to sell more! We’ll sell cold chocolate all winter if we must – damnit, damnit damnit, that won’t do. Can you make hot cold chocolate?”
“No,” said Leslie, who not only could read a message past the first sentence and the subject line, but could remember its contents, too. “They’re fundamental opposi-.”

“You’re fired,” said Earnest, pulling his new gun out of his desk and wildly firing it into the ceiling. “NOW TELL THEM TO MAKE IT OR I’LL FIRE YOU AGAIN!”

So Leslie Green typed his last email – under gunpoint, cc’d it, and as he left the premises in a hurry and booked a flight for the opposite side of the planet it was received by Michelle Folps, Head of Research and Innovativeness of CozyCocoa, Inc., who sent an email to Gregory Brisket, Secretary and Personal Assistant of the Head of Research and Innovativeness of CozyCocoa, Inc., who sent an email and a few thousand dollars to Peter Frisk, Senior Recruiter of CozyCocoa, Inc. and told him to figure something out.

Peter Frisk went down by the street corner for two whole hours and couldn’t find one idea, so he wrote an email to Gregory Brisket telling him that he’d considered every factor and there couldn’t possibly be anything dangerous about combining hot chocolate and cold chocolate.

This was good enough for Gregory, which was good enough for Michelle, which was good enough for the passing stranger Earnest coerced at gunpoint into reading his emails for him.

Which meant that at six thirty seven pm CST, on a nice day in autumn, two great percolating vats of liquid had five millilitres piped from each of them into a test flask, which immediately erupted into a thermal singularity, thus evenly distributing all heat and matter across the entire universe into an omnipresent lukewarmness.

***

It wasn’t all bad.

The flavour, for those who (briefly) had the presence of mind to grasp it, was quite lovely.