Once-upon-a-time, there
was a worthless piece of land known as the Kingdom of Wartlestoff. In the
native language, Wartlestoff meant small painful swelling under the armpit.
The people called it Wartlestoff because they couldn't actually name it
shithole which was their first suggestion.
Wartlestoff was known
throughout the continent for two things: 1. A really low average age of the
citizens that was due to an incredibly high suicide rate and the fact that
most people over five years-old tried to leave the country 2. A really low
birth rate that was due to the fact there wasn't anybody in Wartlestoff that
anybody wanted to have sex with.
Wartlestoff had been
the object of several brutal wars by its neighboring countries, with each side
claiming Wartlestoff belonged to the other. During a particularly brutal war,
someone got the idea that they could declare Wartlestoff an autonomous state
and everybody could go home.
A new formed country,
even a lousy one like Wartlestoff, could be turned into a larger one by an
ambitious, enterprising and charismatic leader. The leaders of the warring
countries realized this and decided to choose the king themselves to make
sure that this didn't
happen. They set out to find the most feeble minded, indecisive, and
uncharasmatic twit for the throne. The only constraint, they decided, was that
the twit should be of noble birth. All the countries were littered with feeble
minded, indecisive, and uncharasmatic nobility who had been unemployed during
the great layoffs of the feeble minded, indecisive, and uncharasmatic
aristocracy and Wartlestoff was no exception.
After a great search
through the mounds of resumes, the Kings found the man that they were looking
for. He was known as Lord Melvin the mildly flatulent.
He was slow, fat, rude,
ugly and tended to get lost on the way to the bathroom. His estate had
consisted of over thirty people at its height. These people, however, were all
his family or servants in the castle. They had also formed a new barony and
revolted.
They invited a nearby
Lord to annex them into his estate. The new lord returned the favor by
plundering them, killing the women and children and raising taxes tenfold.
It was said of him that
"No one would follow him to a coke machine, much less into battle." When he
failed to arrive for the interview or even give an explanation of his absence,
this was considered a demonstration of just what a good choice they had made.
He was dragged from his
castle and forcibly crowned. Afterwards the occupying armies fled the country
as fast as their horses would take them. Stragglers were left behind.
One of Melvin's first
acts was to put his face on every coin that was stamped in the realm. This
helped the economy in two ways: 1. The sheer ugliness of the coins caused
people in other realms to refuse them outright, as a result money no longer
left
the country due to
trade imbalances 2. The sheer ugliness of the coins meant that folks inside
the realm didn't really want the coins either, as a result much less money
changed hands and inflation was curbed. It was said on the street that "You
could once again buy a loaf of bread for less than 400 gold crowns!"
Ironically, the
reduction of the trade imbalance and the rate of inflation would have been
greatly heralded by the economists if he hadn't put them all to death.
King Melvin the mildly
flatulent then decided to find a new wife since his ex still refused to come
back. He decided to try a strategy that had worked so well in the past, he
sent out tons of resumes. When the various eligible women visited the castle
for the interview, they
asked questions like "You don't expect me to have sex with you do you?" and
"We wouldn't actually have to have sex if I got this job right?". Melvin was
unfazed. When Lady Bovina failed to refuse immediately, Melvin decided to go
after her with
unceasing effort. He organized a festival and a series of games in her honor.
The week before the festival, he had all the roads from her castle to the
amphitheater lined with lawyers stapled to crosses. The games were a series of
contests
between economists
armed with shields and swords and lions. The crowds went wild as economist
after economist was chewed up by the lions. The economists were eaten so
quickly that several market analysts, psychotherapists and poets had to be
rounded up to keep the crowds amused.
By the end of the day,
the crowd was at a fever pitch. They were screaming "Melvin! Melvin! Melvin!"
at the top of their lungs. Melvin, whose ego was just barely able to fit in
the amphitheater with all those people began to give a speech. He was
possessed. He began to tell them that he would raise an army to give the
people what they had wanted most for their entire lives, another decent
country to live in, decent land to build hovels on and new and better
neighbors.
When his speech reached
a crescendo, he asked the crowd to be silent. He bent down on his knees and
asked Lady Bovina to marry him.
She was startled.
"Would you promise to love me forever?" she asked.
"Forever!" he said.
"Would you turn over
your treasury to me?" she asked.
"Every last coin!" he
responded.
"Would we have to have
sex?" she asked.
"Do we have to talk
about this here?"
She looked around at
all the quiet faces who were staring directly at her and made the biggest
mistake of her life.
The stirring speech,
the ascension of the new queen, and the extermination of all the lawyers were
exactly the sort of inspiring things that the country had been starving for
for
years, and would have
been duly celebrated by the historians and political analysts if they hadn't
all been exterminated during the later games of the festival.
After the festival was
over, Melvin raised a large and inspired if untrained and unequipped army. He
led his army on muleback to the closest country and proceeded to attack by
sending all his troops over the boarder as fast as he could, while he waited
behind to see what happened.
Epilogue
Melvin's army was
thrashed as they charged into the waiting canons of the enemy. He blamed the
loss on foreign treachery, but many pundits felt the loss was due to the fact
that all the officers had sacrificed to the lions during the festival.
Melvin himself was
later killed when the mule that he was riding on collapsed of a broken back.
Lady Bovina was the
guest of honor at one last festival where she placed on the field to combat
the last remaining economists.
The Kings who had
placed Melvin at the throne of Wartlestoff were taken out and beaten.
And the people of
Wartlestoff still wait for the day when the clouds will open and a voice
proclaim from the Heavens to the people all across the land that they can
finally leave.
