hwango

Oh, hello children. As you can see, I'm a little busy repairing this intricately crafted clockwork toucan, and can't really talk at the moment. What do you mean, "why?" Obviously I'm fixing it because it's broken, and unless I fix it I won't have a functional clockwork toucan. Buy a new one? Where would you suggest I - no, that's beside the point. Honestly, children these days. I'll bet your clockwork toucans don't even have time to break down before you've replaced them with fancy new clockwork toucans in a slightly different color that know two additional songs. You know what, now I'm far too agitated for delicate work like this, and I'd best set it aside before I ruin it completely. I guess that means you can have a story after all.

There once lived a dreadful faerie who was known by the dreadfully unwieldy name Internecine Alstroemeria. Like many faeries, Internecine Alstroemeria was easily enraged and prone to overreacting, and he would frequently challenge people to a duel to the death over such perceived insults as mispronouncing Internecine Alstroemeria, shortening Internecine Alstroemeria to something less unweildy, or using circumlocutory techniques to avoid having to say Internecine Alstroemeria at all. Internecine Alstroemeria felt that if he had to carry the burden being called Internecine Alstroemeria, then other people should at the very least have to say it, and to say it properly. That, and fighting duels gave him a way to channel the boiling rage he felt at having to bear the name Internecine Alstroemeria. He fought a lot of duels. He also won a lot of duels, which should go without saying, since people rarely develop a habit of losing duels to the death.

One fateful day, Internecine Alstroemeria was dueling another faerie who had committed the unforgivable offense of referring to him as "my esteemed and learned colleague." To be fair, the other faerie had said this with enough sarcasm to stun an elk, so this challenge was rather more justified than many that had come before it.

Anyway, the duel was a dramatic spectacle of flashing swords and fiendishly insightful improvisational allegory, with spectators intermittently applauding when one combatant or the other executed a particularly impressive maneuver in either aspect of the conflict. Finally, Internecine Alstroemeria presented some eloquent commentary regarding the dichotomy of reason and emotion and then stabbed his opponent through the heart with his sword. Though this did achieve victory for Internecine Alstroemeria, it had the unfortunate consequence of breaking the blade of his sword into several pieces. That's what you get for stabbing something as hard as a faerie's heart. Remember, children, if you ever get into a swordfight with a faerie, go for the throat. That's not the lesson of today's story, it's just good advice in general.

Well, Internecine Alstroemeria was understandably distraught about his broken sword. Without it, he couldn't very well continue to challenge other faeries to duels, which was essentially his defining characteristic. And no, it's not as if he could simply get another one. Nor, in fact, could he just get another sword, either. Faeries don't typically discard and replace things like swords just because they break - they only do that with people. People are easy enough to replace, but it takes skill and power to make something like a faerie's sword. Simply tossing one aside to replace it would lead people to doubt the value of that skill and power, and since value is entirely subjective the skill and power would in fact become less valuable, and because perception and opinion can affect faeries more effectively than something as mundane as the truth, they would consequently become less powerful, which would be completely unacceptable. Besides, while a new sword might be full of youthful enthusiasm, Internecine Alstroemeria preferred a weapon that had slain a hundred foes and already had a taste for blood and an aptitude for shedding it.

This is all a very roundabout way of explaining why Internecine Alstroemeria needed desperately to fix his sword. He had tried to gather up all of the pieces, but some had gone missing. They had probably been stolen by magpies or vaporized by the caustic obscenities the other faerie had managed to utter with his dying breaths. This was terribly inconvenient, and it was going to make repairs more complicated.

The next best thing to having all of the original pieces would have been to patch the gaps with more of the same substance that was used to create the blade in the first place, but Internecine Alstroemeria's sword had been made from a moonbeam reflected in a pool of tears, and Internecine Alstromeria didn't think he could afford to wait for the next full moon to make repairs, and the moonbeams of any moon short of full would be too weak to serve his purposes.

Eventually, Internecine Alstroemeria decided to fill the gaps with lies. They were just as solid as moonbeams, were excellent for inflicting injury, and, like any faerie, Internecine Alstroemeria had a ready supply of them.

The end result was pleasantly unsettling to look at, with the pieces seemingly held in place by nothing and swishing through the air with their neighbors in tight formation and apparently in complete defiance of gravity. This would hardly be the first time a faerie had disregarded gravity, though, and it was long past giving them the satisfaction of seeing how much its feelings were hurt. But then other faeries found the aesthetic so delightful that they started breaking things on purpose just so they could put them back together with lies, and the whole thing quickly go out of hand.

Internecine Alstroemeria was a skilled and savvy craftsman, and had been careful to use convincing lies in his work, binding the pieces of moonlight together with plausible fictions not easily disproven and unlikely to be carefully scrutinized in the first place. Other faeries did not exercise the same restraint, and used lies so outrageous and deceptions so clumsy that it wasn't long before it became commonplace for objects reconstructed with the technique to fall apart again under the weight of inspection as light as an admiring second glance. That is to say, incredible things became literally incredible.

And so it was quite a short-lived fashion, and soon everyone thought that Internecine Alstroemeria was an uncultured buffoon completely out of touch with modern trends, and he was the target of almost constant ridicule. Naturally, this prompted him to challenge even more people to duels, and eventually he had killed so many people with his sword that it developed sentience and demanded autonomy and he had to go on an epic quest to hurl it into a volcano and then make a new one after all.

The lesson to be learned here is that you should make an effort to learn how to pronounce people's names correctly, and you shouldn't give people nicknames without their permission. That, and we should be careful how much we let our weapons learn if we want them to remain ours.

Now, you should all run along home so I can I can get back to working on this clockwork toucan. If I don't finish it before tomorrow morning I'll have to wait almost a whole month to get more parts.