[Diamond18]

“Ai!” Vogonwë exclaimed, his voice squeaking in an almost adolescent fashion as he beheld the bespectacled spectacle before them. Squeaking pipes at any age is embarrassing in an Elf, and mortifying if one is 300, and so Vogonwë suffered a moment of deeply debilitating personal shame.

Pimpi stopped dead in her tracks, and the hand which clutched Hush wavered. Her blue eyes widened, then narrowed, and her knuckles whitened around the handle of the dagger. “How dare you insult my dearly departed parents thus," she retorted. "My mother was not a hamster, she was a Hobbit. And my father was a Valiant Man of the Mike, he smelt like the flanks of his horse.”

“Yeah!” Vogonwë recovered. “How dare you insult my darling’s dead dad? Also, my own father doesn’t smell like elderberries, either, he smells like alcohol and ripe cheese. And my mother was a Chip—”

The Troll interrupted him with a vile spew of speech, which involved asterisks, and must be delicately translated due to the PG-13 nature of these documents. Since asterisks are annoying, the anonymous scribe who is painstakingly recording these events onto parchment with a quill pen and the finest India Ink, has opted to simply delete every other word. “Off!!!!! ur all psers nd u shud b violently beatn 2 deth!!!!111!”

“As opposed to gently beaten to death?” Merisu queried, knitting her alabaster brow in puzzlement.

The Troll made a reply, and the scribe, following the aforementioned translation strategy, has left us with ”.”

Earnur and Orogarn Two faltered in the face of such terrible language, and Earnur’s sword told him, calmly, I hate you, you know. For mysterious reasons, they were not able to move their limbs any further, and stood rooted to their spots, swords down, feeling the uncontrollable urge to argue against the Troll’s point, if only they could figure out what his point was. Grralph began to silently weep from under his hood, and if he had any magical @biliities with which to battle the Troll, he was too distraught by the presence of the food clinging to the people around him to remember them.

Kuruharan chewed on his beard and tried, desperately, to think of something this ogre would be interested in buying. But he could think of nothing that brought Trolls joy, besides perhaps a small plastic imitation anatomical part that belched and swore when you walked past it, but he had sold that to a drunken Uruk last month.

”U r lame nd i rawk bcuz im coolr thn u///” the Troll insisted insipidly.

“This is ridiculous,” Pimpi snapped. “Vogonwë, do something.”

“Ah! You just made me forget the word I was going to use… was it putrid or confuséd? Or—”

“Can none of us rise to meet this challenge?” Merisuwyniel asked helplessly, and the Bow vibrated ominously.

“There is only one among us whose words can match the devastating effect of Troll language,” Earnur proclaimed sagely. “Vogonwë, you must recite a poem.”

“But why—”

“Yours is not to question why, only to do or die,” Orogarn Two spoke an erstwhile motto of the Grundorians.

“Well, all right then, since you wish it of me,” it did not take much prodding to convince Vogonwë to versify for them.

“Not to us, to the Troll,” Merisu pointed.

“Oh. Quite:

It is my delight to recite, this night,
The Tale of the Finite Sprite Fight,
Wherein Dwight the Mite, a Parasite,
Snow White the Slight, did bite.

Earnur felt dizzy, and suddenly very thirsty, Orogarn Two’s hair curled, and Merisu’s brow knit and pearled. But the Troll stood fast. Does the scribe have to laboriously scratch out the worthless stuff, or can you just imagine?

The blackbird was assured that the password
Would save him from being massacred,
But it went unheard,
Which was absurd,
So that is what occurred.
WORD!

“Uuuuh…” Kuruharan fell to the ground with a thud.

The Troll sneered, and said, “Iz tht al u got?”

Vogonwë dug in and proclaimed majestically:

To be sleepy
In a teepee,
Is creepy,
And can make you feel weepy!

Merisu retreated to a Happy Place, and Pimpi longed for the days before Lopitoff had exploded, when she had found slight respite from the kind of esoteric magical vibes that one can only get from dead, gold-encrusted horseflesh. The Troll laughed long and raucously, and the sound was like unto that of an epileptic pterodactyl.

Vogonwë’s expression turned fey, and he bellowed as much as one with Elven blood can bellow:

I know some butterflies with pretty eyes,
Which hypnotize and paralyze lots of guys,
Who are spies and wear a guise of being wise,
And like to sing lullabies to fireflies,
And chastise those who have large thighs,
But wear tight Levi’s;
Who in turn do them despise and ostracize,
And finally,
Victimize!

And lo! the Troll began to weep.

“No…” The Gateskeeper moaned, unplugging his ears. “Don’t make it mad…”

But Vogonwë was well warmed up by now, and he paid the gloved man no heed:

It is a crime not to rhyme,
If you’ve got the time to mountain climb,
And if you want to pantomime
While eating lime in grime and slime,
And I know these poems of mine
Aren’t worth a dime,
But writing them was sublime,
And she’s in love with me and I feel fiiiiiine!

“U make me soooooooo mad!!!!!” the Troll bawled.

“By the Loyers, this is the end,” the Gateskeeper swore deeply. “He’s going to start a—”

“FLAME WAR!!!!!!” the Troll screamed.

“Uh-oh,” Vogonwë stated eloquently.

Then, something unexpected happened. Chrysophylax came waddling back from a foraging foray, observed the gangly Troll and harkened unto his proclamation, then shrugged and belched out a great ball of fire in the general direction of the nuisance. The Troll’s greasy hair lit up like a firecracker, his glasses melted onto his face, his volcanoes erupted, and he screamed in one last dying spasm of bad taste, “Fry mah hide!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“So, he was a Redneck Troll,” Kuruharan remarked darkly from his spot on the ground, for among the Ugly Peoples of Muddled Mirth, Redneck Trolls are the most feared, especially the ones who play banjoes.

Chrysophylax ambled up to his victim and digested him in a cacophony of crunching, regretted it, and then promptly darted off to the bushes to retch violently.

Earnur’s sword could be heard muttering something about the whole episode exhibiting a deplorable lack of class.

[ August 17, 2003: Message edited by: Diamond18 ]