Blame It On The Bubbles

(as requested by ers)

Blame It On The Bubbles

In the dark cave of Grendil by the swamp of Megamonsmaxilon in the Valley of the Orthopucky lived a man known as the Arbiter of Straight Lines. His proper name was Draco McSirius, a warlock from the Cement Swamps of Rote, who studied chemistry and was obsessed with forms. McSirius conjured all things in an iron determined manner, with his reliable chemistry that allowed for no guesswork. Until a Pixie named Brenda Bubbles arrived in the valley and made poppycock of everything.

Draco McSirius wasn't accustomed to visitors, and as a warlock chemist he had no idea how to flirt. He sat in his cave and thought about shadows. He thought about how great it was to have no visitors to argue with. And when the Brenda Bubbles came, he thought of how very much he wanted her to leave.

On the very first day this pixie held a dance. She called it the “Pretendo Pokeroo.” She shot bubbles from her mouth and ears, and they flew up to the sky until she climbed up on the bubbles and poked them with her eyelashes. She was the only one at the dance but she laughed the whole time.

The warlock was livid. The bubbles gave him apoplexy. He cursed in the inner part of his cave "That frivolous pixine Poof, that insubstantial trollop – her bubbles are mere dreamthings and upset my pious army of wolfhounds!"

The dogmen who served lord McSirius were an unquestioning cadre, accustomed to the Arbiter's simple plans and direct methods. Hunt a live animal, kill it till it's dead, eat the animal, chew out bones, take a dump to mark terrtitory was all in their days’ work. But the Bubbled Princess neutralized their blunt edge and made the wolfmen aware they were possessors of an insane magic. For dogmen could laugh at bubbles too! There was more to the swamp than Draco the warlock's plodding and questing. When a bubble appeared, so came with it an inspiration, feeble flickering amid a dogman's braying and barking, but welcome for its tiny roundness nonetheless.

"Don’t blame it on the bubbles,” giggled the pixie, "I have more than enough candy to make you all my friends."

But McSirius said No:

"She will turn you into a swine, my dog creatures," he pontificated; "you prefer the slop to the chase, the pen to the well-tended field?" He was high and mighty: "Go blow at bubbles then, but you'll be fuzzy, lethargic and fluffy, so oofy, goopy and soupy, and silly - like a pillowcase full of pickles in a pennypotion..."

And by the end of that sentence he was choking on sulphur from his chemical stoke ovens.

Then the Pixie sang a song:

Oh it's better to be a wizzle
And to wuzzle away the day
Than to frown like Lord McSirius
And turn grey in a cave

McSiri is obsessed with shadows
Of a land that don’t exist
My bubbles are the crystal ball
And one day he’ll do the twist!

And the wolfmen in the valley did some pretty hardass barking. Brenda Bubbles smiled. “Woof! There it is,” said the pixie. But the Arbiter of Straight lines was pissed.

McSirius tossed a thunderbolt. Well he was upset after all, and prone to fits of lightning. The wolfmen yelped and scattered, and the pixie frowned. She floated a gigantic bubble that danced from her fingertips into his cave and got oh so close to McSirius.

"Look! Something floopsy and pink," she sang.

The lip of her orb nearly kissed him; when it got close he screamed. “Oh please oh please don’t let it touch me!”

McSirius shot another bolt of lighting, but the funniest thing happened. The thunderbolt got trapped in the bubble. Like lightning, in a light bulb!

The shadows at the edge of the cave instantly disappeared. One of the wolfmen quoted Shakespeare. or was it Sophocles? “And then the scales fell from his eyes,” he said. But actually it was the Bible.

McSirius couldn’t take it. He went in his cave, slammed the door, cooked up a potion and boiled alive ten-dozen lizards. One of the wolfmen cackled, "Such a hungry little bitch!"

The rest of the wolf crew stopped barking, and started singing!

Sometime bubbles seem like trouble
Master McSirius? got a beard of stubble
lives in a cave and chews on rubble
but lookin at this pale blue bubble
from as far away in space as Hubble
and
it seems
we’re just a bunch of mopy poochies…

The pixie clapped her hands. “Yes!” she said, and pumped her fist like Wayne Gretzky. The next day she was elected mayor of Grendil. Her first act was to drain the swamp.

She boiled the bogfilth with her bubbles filled with the warlock's lightning, until the stagnant cement evaporated completely.

“Now,” she said, "let’s fill that hole with warm water, and have a nice bath.”

END