Weekend Disaster Post

We interrupt the Week of the Ogre slightly today by posting an update on the well known criminal mastermind The Hooded Huddleglum.

NOTICE: Tomorrow the Finale of the Riddle Ogre short story will be posted, so put your votes in for what happens at the end of the last installment!
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Hooded Huddleglum in Custody: Early this morning, in the capital city of Wenidoogoo; the widely renowned felon under the name ‘The Hooded Huddleglum’ was captured while playing blackjacks on the roof of city hall with several Ogres.

            Mr. Huddleglum refused to reveal the reason for his actions atop the capital’s building, and was charged with multiple felonies, including loitering with intent to TP, ambushing government employees, and the attempt at passing a law banning maple syrup.

            His maple syrup prejudices notwithstanding, Mr. Huddleglum was taken in an armored truck to his temporary holding cell in the grottoes underneath the Dynamite and Molasses Factory Firm. His arresting officers obviously a few chips short of a crisp bag, locked him in a minimum security cave; with a rusty lock…and shuttered windows…close to an access shaft.

            Soon after his imprisonment, witnesses heard an elephant playing the musical saw close by their charges cell, at least they thought that was what it was, and immediately ran to the cell, to see no musical pachyderm, but an exploded cell door; and a note stuck to the wall with a wad of gum saying:

I’Ve Es Caped I uSeD Ur MagaZ InES TWO WritE ThiS

            

 Fuming with anger at the theft of their Hunting Quarterly’s, the police guard attempted to recapture the fugitive, but found that he had scarpered up the access shaft.

Aboveground, a hoard of Marshwiggle radicals had overpowered the factory patrollers, and, joined soon after by their paper clipping spattered hero, they set to work inside the factory, witnessed by several hidden factory security guards.

            Several minutes after their entrance into the factory, the crowds of depressed creatures exited, following The Hooded Huddleglum to the Wenidoogoo capital; carrying several tons of dynamite and several oceans worth of molasses.

            At roughly one-o’clock in the afternoon, the city capital was buried in a wash of molasses, and promptly sank out of sight, its foundation having been exploded by a thousand packs of cheep explosives.

            The police have continued their hunt for the fugitive Marshwiggle, but as every officer is found strapped right side down on a lamp post covered with grocery advertisements, it seems Mr. Huddleglum shall be left alone for the time being.

            As far as we have gleaned, the Marshwiggle leader has since sold several tons of protest signs, a leer jet, and three of his cotton socks on Craigslist. Why? We shall certainly never know. How? Magic.

            Written by Mister Byuninch

Riddle Ogre: Second Installment

Wow! The poles are in, and the second choice has won by a landslide, no one wanted anything but that! Well, I can't keep you waiting, behold; the Second Installment!
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With a sliding thump, Ander felt the narrow chute flare open as he impacted onto a hard surface. The darkness around him seemed to intensify and as he attempted to scrabble to his feet, he slammed into another surface, this one curving upwards in an arc.

          Turning to the wall, he felt around it until his hands flew forwards into an empty space, the tunnel he had entered from. Wrenching himself forward, he leapt into the slanted chute, but quickly slid backwards on   the smooth, earthy stone.

          He tried again, attempting in vain to brace himself against the invisible walls around him, but once gain he slid slowly back down. He collapsed onto the ground, laying his head against his knees, and then he heard it.

          A soft voice that drifted along the tunnel, and flashed through his head like a swirl of dark flames;

          “Four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening…”

          Reeling slightly in the intense darkness, Ander scrabbled at his pocket with one hand, found his phone and flicked it open. A burst of blinding light shore through the darkness surrounding him, revealing the narrow tunnel he stood in.

          Looking wilding in each direction, Ander squinted for movement in the gaping darkness receding along the tunnel. The quiet voice also had melted away, leaving its words imprinted on Ander’s mind.

          He knew this riddle, the man riddle that the Sphinx had challenged Oedipus with in Mythology. The man riddle…Something knew he was here.

          “Who’s there?” He called. His voice reverberating down the tunnel, growing louder and softer until it disappeared all together.

          A second later, to Ander’s intense surprise, a hissing whisper washed over him, seeming from all sides, voicing a second riddle.

          “A marble hall as white as milk, lined with skin as soft as silk…Within a fountain crystal-clear, a golden apple doth appear...No doors there are to this stronghold, yet thieves break in to steal its gold…”

            It was the same voice as before, Ander knew, but what did it mean? As fast as it had come, the voice had sunk back into the blackness enclosing around him. His phone screen dimmed, and he tapped the keys to keep it alive.

          The second riddle was familiar, he had heard it before, or a different version perhaps. But what could it mean, had it come as an answer to his question, or a taunt to confuse him.

          It had definitely done that, his mind was a crumbling mound of confusion and barely suppressed panic. He could not climb back up the shoot, he held up his phone, the service bar was empty; nor could he call for help.

          Gripping his hands very tightly, he realized he was holding something in his other hand: the riddle book, bent and sad looking from its journey down into the tunnel, but completely intact.

          If whatever thing was taunting and guiding him with riddles, this was his best bet for freedom.

          Encouraged by this, Ander stepped down the tunnel a few yards, nothing different, bare curving walls and a blank stone floor. Back tracking quickly, he attempted to mark where the tunnel leading above was by scratching an arrow in the stone. All that did was show him the futility of imagination. Finally, he tore out the acknowledgement page of 1000 Impressing Riddles and laid it firmly on the floor opposite the chute’s entrance.

          With a wash of humming noise, the voice appeared once again, forming words in a hiss of echoes.

          “Voiceless it cries, wingless flutter, toothless bites, mouthless mutters..”

            Wind.

Ander felt the answer swim into his conscious mind at the same moment a faint breeze pricked at his face. It smelled of earth and stone, but it was air.

          Without another thought, Ander clutched the riddle book to his side, brandished the lit phone in front, and quickly strode off down the tunnel, following the distant wind into the gaping blackness.

          Around the chute’s outlet, darkness curled, the stark white page of the riddle book dimmed with it until it seemed to fold in on itself, giving in to the darkness enveloping it.

          Without a sound, with no scuffle or scuttle of movement, a hand reached through the deep shadows and plucked the page from the ground, quenching its faint glow in a flash of reptilian movement.

          III

Ander walked steadily, waving his phone like a gold prospector probing with a metal detector. Every new shadow that appeared seemed like the movement of a silent creature, every tiny outcropping appeared as a rearing head, ready to gnash his body in its stony fangs.

          In an attempt to douse his jittery nerves, Ander mulled over the riddles he had been given so far. High above somewhere, in the unassuming ‘cave’ that had started it all, the riddle for darkness that had lured him down here, then the riddle about man that had first been voiced in the tunnel, then the riddle that had answered his question with another question, and then finally the wind riddle that he still now followed.

          After some time, the muddled riddles began to make sense. Each one lead to its answer (except perhaps for the unsolved one), the first had lured him into the purest darkness he had ever experienced. The man riddle had culminated around him, the man, or at least he considered himself a man, technically he was still fourteen.

          Then came the unsolved riddle, which still baffled him at its weird familiarity. He was positive he had read it before somewhere, he had even skimmed through 100 Impressing Riddles for something on it, but it gave no answers save for how fast he could suffer a paper cut.

          As this riddle had been the only one that had come at his word, he felt as though the answer would be the most important.

          As for the last riddle, it had come to its fullness with the wind he still followed; at least…Ander stumbled to a halt. He could no longer feel the wind, it had sunk back to its source, its reassurance had disappeared like a fork of burning lightning.

          Unease wheedled back into his brain, scrubbing his thoughts raw with twinges of fear. Unconsciously, Ander sped up, his feet thudding jarringly on the hard stone floor, the phone’s light jumping wildly along the ceiling, the walls, and then it flashed across the tunnel ahead and Ander skidded slightly as he brought himself to a halt at a fork in the tunnel.

          Pushing his phone into the left fork, it barely cut through a meter of the solid darkness compacting through the entrance.

          A light other than his phone caught his eye, emanating from the second tunnel. Turning, he squinted through the opening. The light was faint, and slightly green, as though it were natural. Far off, he heard a powerful rushing noise, as if the wind he had felt had formed into an enormous body.

          Then something far nearer sounded from behind Ander, a scuffling set of footsteps swiftly coming closer, reverberating louder down the tunnel towards him, something small and fast; covering the distance between them with unnatural speed.

      Ander swung around wildly, his mind flicking from tunnel to tunnel, light and darkness blurred in his eyes as the need for a choice grew greater and greater as the steps echoed towards him, his phone screen went black, blackness swallowed him save for the faint glow from the right hand tunnel, and the noise of footsteps grew through the enveloping shadow.
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What should Ander do next?!

1: Take the tunnel filled with deep shadow

2: Choose the tunnel with the distant noises and faint light

3: Stand his ground and take on the creature coming at him from his tunnel
 

Riddle Ogre: A First Installment

Welcome all, to the third day of the Week of the Ogre! Today we are trying out something new. This is the first part of a story we wrote, which ends in a cliffhanger. In this, you get to decide what happens next. At the end of the installment, you have three choices to what the character does next. Choose well, and enjoy!

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Ander nestled himself more firmly into the soft grass, repositioning the book looming above him so that it eclipsed the bright glare of morning. Around him, the park jostled with activity, dogs barked, people talked, squirrels squealed at nuts, none of it interested Ander, his mind was firmly set on his book, 10oo Impressing Riddles.

          He had bought it lately and had not let his eyes off it since then, usually he was reading it, and always he was holding it. Packed with riddles from at least a hundred different books, the volume had tested his mind for over a week, usually winning his desperate skirmishes of guesswork, but folding eventually under his onslaught of careful logic.

          What he liked most about the book was that each riddle could give him a sample of the book it came from, a taste of the genre so that he could almost literally read a dozen books in a day.

          Ander’s reverie was cut short by the scuffle of feet reverberating through the ground towards him; a posse of Frisbee players, flinging their disc to each other and quickly getting closer to Ander’s patch of solitude.

          Grumbling like a arthritic housewife, Ander rolled to his feet and escaped into a small grove of pines away from the open ground, though still dazzled by the sunlight of the day. Finally getting out of earshot of the elephantine noises of the players, Ander looked around for a good spot to read.

          Several meters ahead, he spotted a rocky hummock, like a bump on a needle-strewn head. Trotting to the tiny hill, Ander realized it was a cave mouth.

          Crouching down he saw it went back several feet until it met a flat wall, forming a wide sort of bedroom for anyone imaginative enough to use it.

          Crumpling to his knees, Ander, tucked his riddle book under his arm, rolled over, and shimmied himself into the spacious stone birth. Perfect, warm pine needles on his back, dim light seeping through the cave mouth to create a perfect reading lamp.

          Raising 1000 Impressing Riddles above his head once again, Ander began the page.

Gollum’s Riddles

Taken from the pages of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the creature Gollum asks the hero Bilbo these riddles in a matching of wits far below the Misty Mountains.

What has roots as nobody sees,

Is taller than trees,

Up, up it goes,

And yet never grows?

          Ander’s mind flicked from Gollum’s puzzle to the cave ceiling, where something his caught his attention. Twirling across the cave ceiling like a ribbon, deeply etched words were engraved in spirals across the ceiling.

          Dropping the riddle book to his side Ander propped himself up on his elbows so to look better at the words.

It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,

Intrigued, Ander crawled farther into the cave, closer to the back wall where the words wove snakelike. Soon he could see the next curving line.

Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.

It was a riddle, Ander realized, the couplet above him was unmistakably a word puzzle. But why was it on the ceiling of a cave. Maybe the rest of it would explain.

          The next two lines were harder to decipher, as the light from outside was growing indistinct the farther he crawled. Ignoring this, he squinted upwards to read;

It lies behind stars and under hills,

Well that made sense, at least the ‘under hill’ part. This riddle seemed familiar; he looked to the next line.

And empty holes it fills.

What could fill an empty hole? Ander stored the four lines away, determined to finish the riddle. The next line stretched away, forcing him to shuffle his back farther into the cave.

It comes first and follows after,

As he read this line, something clicked in the back of his mind, but it still lay in the back, not yet fully formed. The cave did not go back much farther; the next line must be the last.

          Scooting slightly farther in, he could just make out the final line.

Ends life, kills laughter.

Darkness. The answer suddenly flew to the fore front of his mind, at the same instant, his back crested a lip and with a cry of surprise, Ander hurtled downwards along a smooth dirt shoot, blackness clamped around him, and the sunlight was snuffed out, like a candle in the wind.

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Alright, the story has started, the hanger has been cliffed, or whatever you call it. Now for the choices:

1: Ander lands in a tunnel, and meets a Riddle Ogre right off...

2: Ander comes to rest in the tunnel, and follows whispered voices into a complex of tunnels...

3: Ander slides into the tunnel, and takes stock of his situation, before going on...

A Note on Ogres

The mistake that all too many people make is to consider Ogres as an unintelligent, relatively harmless sub-species of Troll. In truth, the facts are more the other way around. Trolls prefer to lurk beneath bridges and in other damp, dark areas and lie in wait for passersby. They are far more feared than their altogether more formidable cousin the Ogre, because they are seen in their natural, horny, scaly form much more often.

Ogres prefer to remain undetected for the most part, a feat of no difficulty due to their appearance-changing gifts. However they are no less vicious for this appearance of shy nature. Able to change size and shape at will, Ogres can devour vast amounts of food with a seemingly insatiable hunger. Cunning, ferocious and wily as they come, Ogres form a formidable threat.

Below are marked a few different species of Ogre. These species are distinct from one another not only by their habitats, but also by certain characteristics that make themselves evident not only in the true form of the Ogre, but also in their own abilities and personalities.

The Mountain Ogre:

Perhaps the best known of the various species of Ogres, this creature dwells high up in the peaks of mountain ranges, both snowy and otherwise. When in their true form, they will appear as a large, stone humanoid, crudely formed and armored thickly with heavy rock. owing to this stony armor, these creatures are all-too often mistaken or Golems, giant clay creatures originating from the area of Constantinople.

Despite this cumbersome armor, Mountain Ogres move swiftly and are almost impossible to outrun. Able to change form as easily as any of the other species, the Mountain Troll’s abilities are however limited like all of their kind as they can only change to the appearance of creatures whom they have seen themselves. Therefore, it is rare to meet one that may change itself to a human form for humans will most often avoid the mountains rumored to house one of these creatures.

The mountain Ogre is possessing of a terrible bellowing call which has been known to cause avalanches in their mountain ranges. In addition to this, the Mountain Ogre is all-but immovable and its armor remains unbreakable while it stands with its two feet on stone. When on earth or in water, particularly that of a river, the Mountain Ogre is vulnerable to attack and overtime, running water will destroy it entirely. Also, like all Ogres, the Mountain Ogre is able to paralyze most creatures that make contact with its eyes.

The River Ogre:

These Ogres differ in many ways from their mountain-dwelling cousins. Firstly, their natural form is, while large and muscular as that of a Mountain Ogre, significantly less armored, possessing of little more than the equivalent of fish-scales over the bulk of their body save for their backs, where thick armor-plates grow. Their heads are rather larger than is usual, and extraordinarily flat at the top, which allows them to lurk in running water with only their pate showing above the flow so as to be mistaken for a stepping stone and lure unwary humans into their clutches.

Long green hair and weed clings to most of the body, which serves excellently as a disguise from untrained eyes. Also, as one might guess, these creatures can hold their breath for extraordinary lengths of time, sometimes staying submerged for hours on end before resurfacing.

Their hands are large and their long fingers are strong and tough. Once snared in the grasp of a River Ogre, there is little hope of it ever letting go.

One weakness of this creature is that it cannot change its appearance to anything that does not dwell in the water by nature. Therefore, human guise is beyond them meaning that they must rely far more on cunning than other Ogres in order to snare their prey.

The Man Ogre:

The Man Ogre is by the most cunning and perhaps the most dangerous of all the species. Their shape-changing gifts far exceed those of any other breed of Ogre, due to the fact that they are able to shift to suit the appearance of pictures of creatures as well as changing their shape to that of an lifeless substance such as wood, or stone, or glass.

As such, these Ogres are the species most often found in a well-populated area. It is rare for anyone around a Man Ogre’s home to realize what creature they are living by due to its uncanny shifting abilities. They most often seem extremely amiable, friendly people but possess the same insatiable hunger for flesh, and particularly human flesh, as the rest of their kind.

Man Ogres enjoy toying with people and are fond of killing humans to see the effect it has on others around them. They can grow strong on the negative emotions of others and so will often insight discord in whatever settlement they should house themselves in at a time. They will suck this place dry of everything they find of value, for they, like all ogres are extremely fond of trinkets, and, this done, will leave the place to find another, profitable area.

The true form of a Man Ogre, is unknown as no human eye has ever gazed upon their undisguised self in living memory.

  

Darn! looks like we're running out of space. I guess we'll just have to explain the rest of the species in another post.

Until then,

-T Baner