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The Screaming Skull
Posted: 20 Dec 2005 10:23 AM |
The wizard Frobozz noted that while slime there was aplenty, a certain gelatinous creature that haunted his conjuring room and laboratory was nowhere to be seen. He found the cube filling in the corridor that led to his personal chamber, hoping that no one would notice it.
“Think I’m going to just walk into you, do you,” Frobozz scolded the gelatinous cube. “Think I might not notice and just, just walk right into you?!!”
The cube quivered and tried to escape by sucking underneath the door to the wizard’s personal chamber. The effort would have appeared pathetic to anyone. After all, Frobozz had jelly-proofed the door a long time ago.
Frobozz peered closer into the salad of difficult-to-digest objects within the massive translucent organism. “Is that my moustache?”
The cube wiggled meaningfully but it was difficult to interpret anything coherent.
But, Frobozz could see that it was his moustache. And there also, he could see an armband that had been a part of his maid’s uniform. There! A specially treated, slime-resistant loincloth… A sturdy blue leather boot… A somewhat kinky collar, with the hasp and hinge on the side!
“You cheeky thing!” Frobozz exclaimed, and put his thumb and middle finger together as though he would flick a mosquito from his arm.
The cube straightened high into a rectangular pillar, as though it might take flight and escape through the air, but instead it collided with the rough-hewn ceiling of the corridor with such force that the tension allowing it to retain shape was broken. It splattered and sagged into a mass of ooze that filled the corridor from one end to the other.
Frobozz raised his robes and the slime ran quick past his ankles. “Blast me!” he exclaimed, and a simulacrum of himself opened the door to his personal chamber, prepared to comply.
“What was that?” the Frobozz-simulacrum asked.
“SHUT IT!” Frobozz shouted as cube-slime started to slide into his chamber en masse.
“Sorry,” said the simulacrum. “But you don’t have to shout.” It closed the door somewhat huffily.
* * * * *
[Set to the Vince Guaraldi Trio's "Christmas Time is Here", instrumental version of Charlie Brown fame:]
Picking through the remains of the gelatinous cube, Frobozz was able to assemble a nearly complete maid’s uniform. He rolled out a long sheet of parchment on the top of his laboratory table and dropped each wet thing onto it. “Who will clean up this nasty business?!!” he exclaimed, failing to realize the irony in his words.
The wizard then turned to other things less easily assembled. First of course, he fetched out a slippery white cranium. “Rotten teeth,” he mumbled, carrying it over to his table by the eyeholes. He wiped off the goo, flicking it from his fingers to the floor.
A mandible would also be necessary. It was plucked daintily from the mound with just the thumb and forefinger, and shaken to loose the slime onto the floor and walls. Then came long bones (So brittle! Frobozz remarked to himself, snapping an ulna with very little effort…) and a pelvis, and a pair of feathery-light shoulder-blades. Most of the ribs were easily recovered.
Now came the tough part. Vertebra required some excavation into the mound. Frobozz strung them on a length of cord as he found them. The small bones in the hands and feet, and the digits…Well, I can find those anywhere, Frobozz thought with some satisfaction.
The wizard rinsed the skull in hot water, swirling it around inside the brainpan several times until it rinsed clean and free of bits. He blotted dry the white polished surface and set to work on the jawbone. Post-cranial elements he was happy to leave in a pile, for the time being. When the skull was rearticulated with the mandible Frobozz fetched a rectangular stone palette and mixed a cobalt-colored powder with a clear sweet-smelling oil. Using a brush of badger-hair, he began to draw elaborately weird sigils on the skull, finishing with a thin blue moustache underneath the nose cavity that curled elegantly at its ends.
Pulling up his sleeve, Frobozz plunged his left hand into a deep thick jar and fished out a pair of inhumanly large eyes. He rolled them between his fingers to test for firmness, and caught the firelight from his hearth in the lens. Satisfied with their clarity, he plugged them indelicately into the skull and whispered an incantation.
“AAAACK!” came a clipped, hollow, dry scream. The lidless eyes flashed about the room incomprehendingly. Up…left…right…left…right…
“You used the portal, didn’t you?” Frobozz asked the skull.
The lidless eyes flashed to Frobozz and locked on him. “Yeshhh!” it replied.
Frobozz clucked and shook his head in disapproval.
“It’s Shalt!” the skull shouted hoarsely. “Shalt! Shalt!!”
"I know its Salt," Frobozz said dismissively. "You were wearing your uniform, weren't you? I made it specifically to protect you from things like this. Its slime-proof!"
The skull said through clenched teeth, "I's nearrrly nekkid!"
"Nearly naked? Its plenty of protection," Frobozz disagreed.
The eyes in the skull turned to look at the uniform, laid out next to it on a sheet of paper. Then they looked back to Frobozz. "Grrrrr..."
“Why is this place a shambles?” Frobozz demanded of the skull. “I thought you were going to do something about this slime!”
“AAAAACK!” the skull screamed in response. The huge lidless eyes rolled up grayish-white, and then slipped all the way around to look at Frobozz once more. Somehow they conveyed surprise. Then the skull began screaming again.
Frobozz dropped a greasy cloth over it to muffle the sound.
[OOC: Hope its alright to take liberties with an NPC like this--just trying to figure out what will happen next.] |
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about dying."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means lying in the ground with dirt on your face and holding your breath forever."
-Burt Reynolds, "The End" |
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Re: The Screaming Skull
Posted: 20 Dec 2005 11:04 AM |
((Bravo, keep it coming! Choked on my coffee laughing )) |
All my problems are meaningless
But that don't make them go away
~ Neil Young "On the Beach" |
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Re: The Screaming Skull
Posted: 20 Dec 2005 02:04 PM |
| Excellent, when its this well written, i say take all the liberties you want. |
If you catch a butterfly.
You can either keep it and watch it die.
Or let it go and watch it fly away.
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How Many Frobozz?
Posted: 31 Dec 2005 04:36 PM |
“Hello?” Salt called into the smallish shop. “Did you see someone, Drugo?” As he worked at the gnome’s alchemical table - momentarily blind to his race or perhaps contending to himself that some gnomes are alright - the seer thought a rather striking gentleman had come through the door, and exited again before he could take his attention off the work before him.
Salt looked out the large round doorway upon a peaceful afternoon in the Vale, and returning to the table and his work he heard the voice: “Yes, did you Drugo?” Salt made a sour face at Frobozz and his purloined query.
“I’ve been asking him that all day,” Frobozz said.
“Asking whether he could see you?” Salt nearly stammered, but then he slowed down, “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Frobozz shook his head ruefully. “Well, of course it doesn’t. Sense doesn’t grow on trees, you know. You have to combine a bit of judgment with some calendula.”
“Calendula? Why it’s economically useless. A useless plant!” Never mind that Salt had been working with calendula in just that moment, and failing to discern its properties. “Really, marigolds! I don’t know why the Myconids tend them so carefully…”
“Nonsense!” Frobozz declared. “Do you think they can see in the dark by themsel-”
“Oh there you went,” called another Frobozz from across the room, as though he had found a lost cat. “Oh and thank you for the lovely oozicide.” He held out a rather familiar looking flask, the glass tinted green with verdigris, with skin stretched over the top of it for a closure in the method that Salt preferred.
“Where?” asked the Frobozz that Salt had been speaking to. “What? There I went?”
“Not you,” the other Frobozz corrected, “I know when you went. I mean him,” gesturing to Salt with the green flask.
“Shall I go then,” asked the Frobozz who had initially appeared. He thought a moment and answered his own question. “…no, no I don’t leave until later. Well, he can’t make our oozicide in that robe, he’ll get it all over himself.”
Salt looked down at his somewhat raggedy traveling robes, and then looked at the work laid out futilely on the alchemical table.
“But I told you he made it already, Frobozz.”
“He did?”
“And it works perfectly.”
“Does it?”
“Of course! And it smells lovely, too.”
Salt’s head started to rock back and forth.
"And you doubt my wisdom with the calendula… Tell me,” said one Frobozz to Salt, “How did you make it? I would like a second batch.”
“I didn’t make anything!” Salt shouted.
“What?!!” Frobozz demanded.
“Nonsense my boy,” said the other. “It worked perfectly. He’s getting his tenses all mixed up,” said then-Frobozz to now-Frobozz, and then he addressed Salt: “You haven’t made anything but you will have made it.”
“Frobozz the master of style and tense?” the now-Frobozz joked.
“Oh, stop,” said then-Frobozz. “You’re making me blush.” Then-Frobozz went blue in the face.
“Can… can I see that?” Salt asked of the flask of oozicide that he would make in the proximal future.
“I’ve been asking Drugo that all day,” said one Frobozz. Amidst these exchanges, Drugo had climbed beneath a large low table on the far side of his workshop so that only his feet could be seen, with his arms hugged fast around his shins like a gnomish fetus, albeit with a beard.
“No, no you will have to make your own,” Frobozz said withdrawing the flask. “You gave this to me already, and it is mine.”
Salt clapped his hands together huffily. “Are one of you saying that I somehow already gave you an oozicide, that I have yet to formulate?”
“Will have made it,” Frobozz corrected. He drew his eyebrows together, in a gesture suggesting that Salt had taken the wrong tone with this wizard. But fortunately for Salt, the eyebrows fell off of the mad wizard’s face providing a new topic for conversation. “Blast,” Frobozz said. “Have I come too far forward? Or, will it be too far back?” He withdrew a timepiece and, finding it broken, pitched it into a brew that was bubbling in Drugo’s largest cauldron.
“I don’t know,” said Frobozz, “Have you asked the Ice Queen? Remarkably organized woman; very good at keeping track of time…”
Salt found himself holding the green flask of oozicide, after then-Frobozz had recovered his watch, his eyebrows, and his purpose. Now-Frobozz called his attention to it. “What’s that lovely-smelling concoction there in your hand?”
“What’s that?” Salt asked confusedly.
“Smells lovely,” Frobozz said. “Bit soapy though.”
Perhaps it was that then-Frobozz had slipped the flask to Salt, who offered it to now-Frobozz, allowing Salt to abandon the project altogether and move on to other, saner affairs. He really did wonder about that formula, though… And he wondered: how many flasks are in play here, anyway? And, when would the substance finally be used up?
A better question might have been: how many are Frobozz? For just as Salt thought that he was clear of this obligation, just as he had handed the green flask of oozicide to now-Frobozz and the mad wizard prepared to depart, there came through Drugo’s great round doorway yet another.
This Frobozz led by the nose a great giant demon, a grey winged Cornugon Lord the likes of which Salt had not seen since he had been party to a raid on the Temple of Helkris in the coldest corner of Netharu.
The Cornugan Lord abased itself to enter the diminutive space of Drugo’s laboratory, and crouched growling just inside of the round doorway.
“Frobozz, we’ve got slimes!” said the newcomer to his double. “I wish someone would make some oozicide.”
“That’s a brilliant idea,” Salt said. “How would you go about it, Frobozz?”
“That’s a good question,” replied the most recent arrival of the mad wizard. He added, “I should get an apprentice to work on that for me. Are you interested? The apprenticeship comes with a lovely outfit…” |
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about dying."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means lying in the ground with dirt on your face and holding your breath forever."
-Burt Reynolds, "The End" |
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Re: How Many Frobozz?
Posted: 01 Jan 2006 01:08 AM |
| ((*lol* poor salt)) |
Purpose in life: finding better ways of allowing players to kill themselves. Repeatedly.
--
"...Cause he mixes it with love
And makes the world taste good."
--
<@James42> Lawful good isn't in your vocabulary, it's on your menu.
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