On the Subject of Pie - Episode 21
Created | Updated Dec 6, 2007
Quandary Phase - Episode Twenty-One
John was beginning to get irritated now. Ever since he had asked about the small paper bag Lluchmoor was holding, the demon had just continued to ramble on about foods of the sugar-filled variety, and had thus so far completely failed to help John work out what on Earth was going on. However, since averting the end of the world was a subject reasonably close to John's heart, he persevered and was soon drawn into a protracted dispute over the meaning of the word 'doughnut'. This led him to deliver a lengthy soliloquy on the matter, including what he thought to be a particularly convincing argument that a doughnut was meant to be a nut made of dough with a filling inside and not a ring of bread with icing sugar on top. As is natural for someone with an attention span shorter than the Planck constant, Lluchmoor soon got bored and wandered off, and as is natural for someone doing their best to save the world in time for supper, John became even more irritated to the point that he went running off after him.
After having repeated his rather painful limp along the riverside, John arrived back where he and Emily had left their bicycles. Having got bored of spinning the pedals around backwards, Lluchmoor was now playing with the top-secret envelope that John had used to line the basket at the front of his bike in order to make it a slightly better place to put a glowing white swan which had nonetheless been wrapped in a nice warm jacket. John snatched the envelope off Lluchmoor in a rather rude manner and started to walk off when Lluchmoor started to cry again.
John sighed and turned around only to notice the genuine look of anguish on the poor demon's face. He'd obviously had a bad experience during his childhood or something like that, John reasoned, and so the envelope was soon back in Lluchmoor's hands under the condition that he would be careful with it. Without paying too much attention, Lluchmoor nodded emphatically and went skipping back along the riverside, with John following closely behind.
Once upon a time, there was a writer known as AA Milne. Now, compared to Dickens, Tolkien, Tolstoy, Austen and the like, Milne's best works were comparatively short, but it must be said that the life stories of a Mr Winnie T Pooh still deserve to be on a level footing with the other great epics. The illustrations are one reason that I make this statement and the astute use of the phrase 'tiddly pom' is another, but the single most remarkable thing about Milne's work is the inclusion of a game which is simplicity itself. Not only is it simple in its requirements and its victory conditions, but it is in fact so simple that it can be played by just about anyone capable of dropping a twig over the edge of a bridge, no matter how simple they themselves are.
'That's my one! I did it again!' Lluchmoor beamed.
'Yep – well done,' John conceded, knowing for a fact that he had released his own twig quite a few seconds after Lluchmoor had let go of his, thus giving the demon's 'Pooh stick' plenty of time to navigate the short stretch of dike before flowing out into the river. Still, the game was really cheering Lluchmoor up, a fact which was evident in the broad putrid grin which he bore every time he went running from one side of the bridge to the other to see if his stick had what it took to be a winner.
Watching as Lluchmoor did a funny little dance in the sort of way that only lumbering demons of questionable impiety know how, John started to realise that he had actually stopped worrying about life for a short while and was glad to see that the demon had cheered up so dramatically. Unfortunately, reality was still keeping its beady eye on John and, having realised that he was perhaps even starting to become laid back and happy, it decided to throw another spanner into the mix. The glowing feather in John's pocket had somehow ridden up inside it and was poking out through the top of the pocket to the extent that Lluchmoor could barely miss it.
Having just finished his seventh game using exactly the same sort of twigs each time, Lluchmoor decided to ask John very nicely if they could race with something else – John could use the pretty feather that he had in his pocket, and Lluchmoor could use something equally interesting and they'd see which one would win. John agreed and decided that he'd play properly this time – if John did win, it would be because he was using a better object to race with, and surely that wouldn't upset Lluchmoor.
Concentrating hard on picking the right bit of water to drop the feather into, John completely failed to notice as Lluchmoor performed the incredibly predictable act of dropping the envelope into the water; in fact, John didn't even look round until the very moment before it collided with the glowing feather and disappeared into some kind of statically-generated extra dimension combined with the sort of temporal distortion that might just come about from throwing a certain type of glowing feather into the river which flows into a certain lake.
Fortunately, John had managed to realise what was going on just in time to go hurtling after the pair of items and be sucked through the space-time continuum after them. To those watching this may have seemed awfully convenient, but the level of serendipity that John was for some reason experiencing at the time was such that upon reaching his destination, his fall was cushioned quite nicely by someone else's back.
Up until a few seconds earlier, King Galen of Cygnus had been addressing his entire people: a people consisting of slightly odd-smelling folks who were generally a tad on the evil side but were none-the-less just a little bit irritated to be told what to do by a demonic fellow who quite clearly wasn't one of them, and who therefore saw the need to regularly indoctrinate them with the idea that they were supposed to all be extremely evil. Today was another day just like that, and the people had gathered from all around to hear Galen's speech, not because they wanted to but because he had a habit of burning Cygnians who didn't listen carefully to what he had to say. Today's emphasis was on Galen's prized flock of boars, which legend said had been domesticated over many generations to make them much more edible than those which used to sweep across the plains of yore. It was a well-known fact amongst the Cygnians that the boars had been around a lot longer than either them or their 'king', but nobody ever had the courage to point it out, and so Galen continued to take credit for them.
He had just got to mentioning how tasty the boars were – not that any of the Cygnians ever got to eat Galen's boars – when a slightly startled human dropped out of nowhere and onto his back, knocking him flat on his face. At the same, an envelope appeared a short distance away from where John had landed; to be precise, it materialised in the middle of an enclosure containing a number of the aforementioned despotic leader's boars. It soon became obvious that the envelope liked roast boar, but having announced its entrance with a large white fireball that had roughly the same effect as an oven at 200°C would have over 2 hours, it then fizzled out of existence, following which it generally failed to do anything else that might be construed as 'interesting'. The feather which had travelled with it was quite happy to make up for this shortcoming in amusements, and quickly decided it would like to hum quietly whilst hanging in the air just above the point where John had landed.
