Hortus Pore was rich and fat and dancing on his coffee table to a loud cosmic jazz concert playing on his 100 inch T.V. set. Everybody in his lamp-shaped house was laughing and happy- not just his party guests, but also the handmaidens and butler and nanny and chauffeur and masseuse and bodyguard and dogwalker and videotape vault manager and live-in xylophonist and sommelier and dresser and undresser. Yes, everybody had a pretty grand time all the time at Hortus’ place except for one decrepit old employee: The cook, who put a tray of zebrahogs-in-a-blanket on the buffet table then returned to the kitchen glumly.
The cook was a withered humanoid hoo-hoo named Gonorrena. A hoo-hoo is a humanoid or yokai or robot born with thaumaturgic powers, and Gonorrena had once been a very powerful one. After crossing the wrong people she had been thaumaturgically lobotomized- twice- which stripped her of her natural powers and wiped her brain of alchemistical knowledge. Since then she had moved from settlement to settlement, working a series of demeaning jobs, eventually ending up making meals for the jovial cough syrup magnate Pore. In spite of her inventive cooking none of other servants liked her, but she was fine with this, as she was left alone and allowed to do pretty much as she pleased in the kitchen. Her chronic explosive flatulence had been acting up lately and that certainly didn’t need an audience.
All the employees were female, and like everyone else Gonorrena had to wear a harem-girl style outfit and pretend to be a djinn. Her vest, turban and curly-tipped shoes were covered in sparkly green glitter with shiny yellow trimming. Her wrinkled, stretchmarked, pockmarked, skin-tag-littered mid-drift was exposed and you could see her varicose veins and graying underpants through the gauzy green puffy pants.
Gonorrena had always been cantankerous but she was particularly grumpy because she had a large, hard cyst growing on her right shoulder. It was itchy and sore and no matter how much she squeezed it and poked at it and scratched at it wouldn’t pop. (As we all know, there is nothing as satisfying as popping a huge zit.) It was a nuisance as it was right where her bra strap usually lay, so she today had gone without chest support.
One of the favorite hors d'oeuvres of Hortus Pore was the cinnamon-dough-wrapped flesh of a fresh wyrmbyrd. A wyrmbyrd is a yellowish-pink, pimply, veiny bird-class yokai- sort of the shape of a goose but with the head and neck of a red wiggler worm (Eisenia fetida). It had two long, thin legs with webbed, clawed feet on the ends. Wyrmbyrds are featherless except for a few greasy black feathers growing out of the top of their butts. Gonorrena had just gotten a fresh one from a neighboring farm and it was still in a flimsy wooden crate. Grumbling to herself about past glories, Gonorrena slammed the box on a table and ripped off the top slats.
As soon as the slats were removed, the wyrmbyrd thrust their slimy head out of the crate and peered wildly about the kitchen. The wyrmbyrd unpuckered their front-end-orafice (which took up their whole face, which was just the end of their neck) and squawked:
"HELP!" Gonorrena seized it roughly by the slimy neck. Catching a really good look at the crone, it reared up its neck till its non-visible eyes were on a level with her own. "YOU!" spat the wyrmbyrd shrilly. "Old hoo-hoo! Qrinkly old hoo-hoo, what have you done with the tremorroid!?"
"What!" wheezed Gonorrena, blinking her eyes rapidly to deflect the wyrmbyrd’s thick white spittle. “Why can you talk!?" Wyrmbyrds usually don’t have the level 8 intelligence of a humanoid, they’re usually a 1 or 2 and can only communicate through grunts, squeaks, and squirts like a common spewlie or a pimpler.
“I’m Pud! Flackfizer Pud Pudtug! Royal servant of our lord high Tremorroid Lympeter, the ruler of all of the great fairyland of Bonertania!" The wyrmbyrd was saying this with as much dignity as he could muster, which is hard to do when your face looks like a diseased bumhole.
“Um," said Gonorrena, “I almost remember a tremorroid whose name was, I think, er, Lum... pot..ter, or something like that. But I don’t remember any flackfizer named Pud."
“You took away my beautiful body and gave me this ridiculous shape and gave my job to that awful jerk-face fascist Haight Squeezog and you don’t even remember me? Change me back to my normal self at once!"
“I’m a little disappointed, Gono said, ignoring Pud the Wyrmbyrd except to squeeze his wormy neck even tighter. “I ordered a fresh wyrmbyrd and you’ve... been around the block a few times. And speaking of times, now it’s your time."
"Time?" puffed the wyrmbyrd. "What time?"
"Supper time," said Gonorrena maliciously. "You are tired of being a wyrmbyrd. Well then, I shall transform you... transform you into a meal!"
"Meal!" screamed the wyrmbyrd, wriggling their slimy neck in Gonorrena’s gross liverspotted hands. Her fingernails were yellow and crumbly. "You wouldn't dare serve me for supper! I'm a royal flackfizer and you know it!"
"Royal wyrmbyrd, you mean," snickered Gonorrena, letting go of the wormy neck and reaching behind the table for her comically over-sized cleaver. Pud struggled to free himself from the crate.
"Don't sass me you old hag!" spat Pud.
"I'll apple sass you," sneered Gonorrena. "The sooner you're roasted the better." She made a snatch at the spittle-spraying wyrmbyrd, but Pud, with a quick flounce, suddenly burst through the top of the crate and bounded into the air.
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"HELP! HELP! This woman is a nefarious jerkface!" he squawked loudly. "HELP! HELP!"
"Hush!" raged the old woman, dropping the cleaver and running to lock the kitchen door. "Do you want to alert the whole lamp?" It was her turn to be alarmed now, for in the lamphouse Gonorrena was not anxious to have the party-goers in the living room or the other servants know that she used to be a notorious villain who regularly tortured and tormented people, and kept slaves, and rented videotapes without returning them. As far as they were concerned she was a retired carpet mower named Vivian Vyvyn. "Be quiet I tell you," she wheezed angrily.
The wyrmbyrd had lept to the top of the jelly bean shelves high above Gonorrena's head.
"Very well," Pud breathed heavily, puckering and unpuckering his moist maw. "I will be quiet, but now you will listen to me. I demand that you instantly restore my proper shape or-" He gave a loud squawk that made Gonorrena leap a foot into the air.
"How can I? How can I?" chattered the pathetic hoo-hoo, wringing her hands. "I believe I enchanted you, it totally seems like something I’d do. But I’ve been thaumaturgically lobotomized- twice! Do you suppose I'd be here working as a cook in this ridiculous get-up for this nimrod Pore if I had my powers? if I had my powers, you ridiculous old dork-butt, I’d be living high on the zebrahog! But I've forgotten all the thaumaturgy I ever knew!"
"No thaumaturgy? Can you at least tell me what you did to Lympeter?"
"Not so loud," begged Gonorrena. She picked up her purple fleshwood staff (the one with a tiny chimp paw on one end) and glanced uneasily over her shoulder. She had the distinct feeling someone were listening.
Smort Smortz was listening. He had witnessed all of this from outside the lamphouse’s kitchen window, and all it, as you may well imagine, was frightfully interesting to young puppet-class yokai. So interested had the two become by this time that Smort was listening with all his might, his nonvisible earholes fairly tingling with curiosity.
Gonorrena snarled defiantly, "I don't remember what I did with Lympeter! I remember now that he existed but nothing of his fate!"
Pud seemed stunned too.
"How frightful," choked the wyrmbyrd dolefully, "how careless of you to mislay the flatulenz fairy tremorroid! How dare you forget?"
“Who cares anyway? That snot Titiana is tremorroid now and nobody even remembers this old fairy ruler of Bonertania!" Gonorrena growled at the mention of Titiana. She had a particular axe to grind with that little twerp.
Then, seeing that it was useless to appeal to Gonorrena's goodness Pud began to appeal to her badness. "Lympeter will reward you generously, if you restore him to the throne," began Pud craftily. "He can put you in the Powers Restore-O-Tron in the palace laboratory. Nothing is to be gained by us quarreling. Let us put our heads together and find the true tremorroid of Bonertania."
Gonorrena sank upon a big stool and, half closing her eyes, tried to remember her life in the bad old days before that little cretin Titi was tremorroid- the bad old days when hoo-hoos had been free to practice their arts and she herself was one of the most powerful hoo-hoos on Pus Continent. "I'll do it!" declared Gonorrena suddenly. "I’ll help you find the old tremorroid. But how shall we find him when I forgot what I have done with him?" Her swollen shoulder began to throb and she itched at it absent-mindedly.
"I'd know him anywhere," gulped Pud. "Haven't I been hunting him all these years?"
"Yes, but if I transformed you I probably transformed him," muttered Gonorrena uneasily. "If the tremorroid is not himself how do you expect to recognize him?"
"I know I'd know him in any shape," insisted the wyrmbyrd. "But try- try to remember. You turned me into a wyrmbyrd and Titiana into a boy. What did you do with the first and true tremorroid of Bonertania?"
Smort knew that Bonertania was a great circular country divided into four parts with the capital, the splendid Schmegma City, in the exact center. Right now they were in the northern quadrant, which was named after its former rulers the Plotz twins. Most of the quadrant was made up of a thick purple forest but there were many settlements, including Adolf Marx Town and Smortzville.
The western side of Bonertania- mostly factories and live theaters- was called Mukus Quadrant and the southern part- which was largely taken up by a vast trailer park named Smelsinore) was Quirk. Smortz knew there was a fourth quadrant but he couldn’t remember its name.
The wyrmbyrd flackfizer had mentioned Haight Squeezog, and Smort knew who that was. This was the nefarious flackfizer who had dispatched Tremorroid Lympeter and usurped his throne as a shark usurps a peter. Then he snatched Lympeter’s daughter Princess Titiana when she was just a toddler, delivering her into the keeping of a weathered hoo-hoo to be transmogrified.
Then Haight Squeezog ruled Bonertania for years until his gory demise. After that the Schmegma Citizens made the Ratsack Golem tremorroid. This lively bag of rats had held the throne until captured by an ambitious humanoid named Rebekkah Earwax and her army of teenage humanoids and gremlin-class yokai. But Earwax was only ruler for a few days and was herself captured by Nobgoblin, the Royal Thaumaturge and Empress of Quirk Quadrant, to whom Ratsack had gone for help. Nobgoblin, after looking through thaumaturgic tomes and zines, had figured out that Titiana was still in the weathered Hoo-hoo's clutches. So Nobgoblin had compelled the hoo-hoo to restore Titiana to the throne, where the young flatulenz fairy was proclaimed Tremorroid of Bonertania and has been ruler ever since, while the hoo-hoo had been deprived of her thaumaturgic powers and alchemistic knowledge, and no one knew what became of her.
As Smort listened, all of these facts went scurrying through his purple furry head, and while Professor Smortz in his history class had neglected to put in the weathered hoo-hoo's name, the smortz had realized with a shudder that Gonorrena was that hoo-hoo.
It had been generally supposed that Titiana's father Lympeter had been utterly annihilated by Haight Squeezog, but if what Pud said were true, the tremorroid in some shape or other was still alive and the rightful ruler of Bonertania, while this faithful wyrmbyrd was his loyal royal flackfizer.
Suddenly a big, wild, hairless, pimply, veiny hyena-shaped yokai came around the corner of the lamphouse- snarling savagely out of one nose and foaming yellow foam out the other- and the terrified little smortz’s first instinct was to jump through the window and into the kitchen. Which he did.