by Bibby, James
MULAMPOS - A meat dish made with remarkably hot spices from the Southlands. It is the only dish that is required by law to carry a government health warning when included on menus. Travellers who are tempted to try it are warned to stay extremely close to good toilet facilities for the next forty-eight hours, and would be well advised to alert their next-of-kin.
PAKAS - A huge carnivorous bird. To quote from the Pink Book of Ulay:
The Pakas of the Forests of Frundor was a huge and loathsome bird that settled in this region during the First Age. Great terror did they cause, for many were the size of dragons, and they did feed upon the flesh of Men, serving them up with wedges of giant lemons from the Gardens of Delmonte. Heavy were their depredations, and men were forced to flee, forsaking their homes, until none still dwelt here. Then did these fell birds resort to feeding on whatever foul or putrid flesh they could find, and their lemon wedges availed them naught...
By the Second Age, few now remained, and these were mere shadows of the former birds, being less in size. Yet still their eggs remained enormous, and thus were they known as Pakas, from their cry "Pa! Kas!" which in the Ancient Tongue means "God! That hurt!" Yet on occasion did a bird like that of yore appear. Such a one was the bird that terrorised the city of Minas Welvair in the east. Many folk did it devour, before the warrior Drax the Strange sliced off its head. It nested in the huge green bay tree that grew outside the city walls, and thus was it known to the folk of Minas Welvair as the Green Bay Pakas...
Also an insult. If someone calls you "Pakas-breath", you can safely assume that they are not over-enamoured with your oral hygiene.
PATA - Dry, thorny grass that grows in desert conditions. It is about as edible as barbed wire, but is only half as nourishing.
SEVENTH DAY HEDONISTS - A religious order dedicated to the observance of the rule "Six days shalt thou keep holy, and on the seventh day shalt thou party!" In more modern times the six days are usually taken up with getting rid of the hangover. The Order can easily be recognised by their distinctive hooded robes of lime-green with orange swirls, and can often be found on city street-corners, begging for Alka-seltzers.
SKEELS - A form of spearboard played with throwing-knives. Also known in some areas as "fat-bastard", a reference to those who play the game. Porgo Lardbelly, the all-time champion of Minas Tryk, was so obese that the only way he could enter and leave his favourite tavern was by being rolled through the door sideways. He was frequently employed as the bouncer there, and would deal with persistent troublemakers by leaning gently against them until they were dead.
SPIDERS - Readers are advised to consult the pages of a reference work such as Maxon the Small's Vita Horribilorum (available from Succubi Publications (Ilex) Ltd, price 15 tablons), from which this extract is taken.
Whereas after making love the thoughts of most of us would turn to pizza, it is a sad fact that in many species of spider the female likes nothing better than to polish off her own partner after (and sometimes during) sexual congress.
Take, for example, the Black Teaser, a spider found in the Southern Cydorian Desert. The female, which is quite large, with long shapely legs and soft black hair, lures the mates of other Black Teasers to her web, has sex with them, and then instantly devours them. In the meantime her own mate, a somewhat smaller and more insignificant spider, scuttles about the place muttering unhappily to himself, cleaning and tidying the web, doing the shopping, and making endless cups of tea for the female. After several years of this, however, he frequently snaps, and chases off after the first other female he sees, where, of course, he ends his life happily but abruptly as a post-coital snack. There is a lesson in this for all of us.
Maxon the Small, it should be noted, had a particularly unhappy married life, and students of ecology should take his musings on the sex-lives of Midworldian fauna with a large pinch of Tibrethian salt.
STONE-BUSH - A dense shrubby plant that grows to a height of six feet or so. Its fruit are probably the most luscious things in the whole world to look upon, having a soft velvety skin of an enticing golden-orange colour that seems to promise the taste sensation of a lifetime. Unfortunately, underneath this skin the fruit has the consistency of concrete (hence the name of the shrub), and those poor unfortunates who have never seen the fruit before and have been taken in by its appearance are guaranteed to lose a few teeth. Indeed, poor and unscrupulous orthodontists have been known to sneak round town in the dead of night sowing Stone-bush seeds, in the sure knowledge that when the shrubs grow and fruit next year business is bound to improve.
TABLONS - The unit of currency throughout Midworld. The rather odd system of 59 bronze tablons to a silver one, and 17 silver tablons to a gold, was devised by a group of young, thrusting merchant bankers from Far Tibreth. They devised such a complex system so that the less intelligent folk of the world could be more easily short-changed. This was a phenomenally successful ploy, and they all got very rich, married incredibly beautiful (but rather vacuous) women, and had lots of none-too-bright children.
However, when these children reached maturity and took over the family businesses, they found that the financial system their fathers had devised was a little tricky to understand, and they were all taken for a rather expensive ride by the children of the less intelligent folk, who had grown up street-smart and canny. Thus every generation or so, the rich banking families were forced to change places with the less well off. This phenomenon was known to everyone except merchant bankers as "A jolly good thing, too!"
TABOGHEE BUSH - A frequently-cultivated shrub with dense masses of white, gorgeously scented flowers. The Taboghee is native to the remote island of Scawdror, which is famed for its unusual flora. The island has evolved without bees (or indeed insect life of any kind), and so the indigenous plants have been forced to rely on other creatures to pollinate them. The Taboghee has evolved flowers with the most gorgeous, almost orgasmic, scent, and humans are unable to pass near them without burying their noses in the flowers and breathing in this perfume. The pollen is thus transported from plant to plant on the nasal hairs of humans. It is easy to identify someone who has been sniffing the plant by the large clump of greenish pollen hanging down - hence the common expression "you've got Taboghee up your nose."
TRANN - Another minor Behanian deity, Trann is the Goddess of Lost Causes, and is most frequently invoked by those who are really deep in the mire. Interestingly, the prefix "tran" seems to share this lost cause connotation in most other worlds. Examples in our own language include transit lounges (where luggage is lost with monotonous regularity), Public Transport (especially British Rail), and Tranmere Rovers.
VART - Large rodent with a strong predilection for alcohol. When sober, and alone, a vart is as mild-mannered and inoffensive as anything. However, varts are usually found in large groups late at night when, after vast quantities of drinks, they roam the hedgerows singing, yelling, and making raucous and frequently obscene suggestions to innocent rabbits. They are slovenly by nature, and their burrows are usually full of empty tins, trays of half-finished take-away mulampos, dirty washing, and soiled nappies. They make appalling parents, frequently forgetting about their young for days at a time, and there have been numerous sad cases of newly born varts found lying unattended in their own squalor. Hence the old Midworldian saying, "You smell like a week-old vart!"
WIGGAT - A small furry animal so rare that even it doesn't believe that it exists. Wiggats can occasionally be seen sitting on tree branches in the more inaccessible parts of the forest with worried frowns on their faces, undergoing acute identity crises. Should you be lucky enough to see a Wiggat in the wild, do avoid making loud noises or sudden moves, as they are nervous little creatures, and any sudden shock can often result in them bursting into tears.
APPENDIX 2 - ELVES
There are two branches of the Elven Race commonly found in Midworld; the Wood Elves, Homo Viridis Galadrialis, and the High Elves, Homo Viridis Cannabinus. As their name suggests, Wood El
ves are much more at home in the countryside. They love forests, and frequently build their houses in trees. High Elves, on the other hand, are city folk as a rule. Faced with having to climb a tree, they would probably fall out of it and lie there giggling (hence the expression "out of his tree").
For information on Elven physiology and behaviour, the definitive text is generally regarded as being Elfwatching, by Morris the Bald. We would like to thank Succubi Publications (Ilex) Ltd for permission to quote the following extract concerning Elves and the sea.
Much has been written in other chronicles about the almost magnetic attraction the sea has for elves - but never before has the true reason for this attraction been set down. The Elven race, although visually similar in many ways to Homo sapiens, has a quite distinct physiology, and their metabolism is surprisingly different. For example, they are able to break alcohol down rapidly by means of an enzyme secreted by their pancreas, which combines with it to form a skin pigment similar to melanin. Thus elves are able to drink a skinful of ale at a party without turning a hair, and wake up next day with no after-effects at all, save for a pretty cool tan. Salt water, however, is a different kettle of fish. The chloride radical acts as a very powerful stimulant, and its presence in the blood stream leads to the formation of a large number of toxins. In other words, salt water gets an elf as pissed as a fart, and leaves him with the mother of all hangovers next day. Even a sea breeze is enough to leave him giggling helplessly after ten minutes.
For most elves, this is no problem. They are an inland race and tend to keep away from the sea, apart from the more extreme social occasions such as stag-nights or teenage parties. But for the unfortunate few who become addicted to brine, there is little that can be done.
Elfwatching contains many other fascinating insights into various aspects of Elven behaviour, including aggression (chapter 4), food (chapter 7), and sex (chapters 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11-17, and 19). It is available from all good scriptoria, priced 9 tablons.
APPENDIX 3 - ORCS
Orcs, or Homo Neanderthalis Ebrius, are around five and a half feet high, with bandy legs and hunched backs, dark-grey skins, clawed hands, yellow slits for eyes, and green fang-like teeth. Their life-style is summed up by their motto - "Born to fight, live to party, dying for a drink." In fact their whole life is based around having a good time and getting as drunk as possible. Orcish, a harsh, guttural language that sounds like a chain saw coughing up phlegm, has twenty-nine different words for a hangover. These range from graznik (a dull headache which disappears after half an hour) to kushganazg (those room-spinning stomach-emptying head-down-the-latrine jobs that last all day).
Generations of Orcs have consumed so much alcohol that it has become a natural part of their body chemistry. Their cells are full to bursting with it, and as a result their chromosomes are so pissed that they couldn't tell a gamete from a gynaecologist or a zygote from a zebra. Thus they are genetically unstable, and mutations such as stripy skin, horns, or extra limbs often occur. Orcs are fiercely and competitively tribal. The Kulashak-uk-Garazh (literally, "They-who-remove-bottle-tops-with-their-teeth") and the Uttuk-hai ("Lighters-of-Farts") are the two most lethal party-going orc tribes.
Orc drinking sprees are legendary. Orcs do not have stag-nights. They have stag-months, where they go on a town-crawl spending three days drinking continuously in each town. This love of a good bender has spread into all facets of their behaviour. For example, the Orcish equivalent of the human General or the Dwarf Warleader is the Uzmak-kchan, which means, when literally translated, "party-giver". The reason for this can be traced back several hundred years. In those days, the mountain-orcs used to party for several months continuously until the booze ran out. Then, led by the giver of the party, they would all come surging out from their filthy lairs under the mountains, march off to the nearest town that was likely to have a good supply of booze, and lay siege to it. When the town fell (which never took long; the defenders would find it impossible to sleep at night as the noise from the partying Orcs outside the city walls was indescribable, and would normally give in after four or five days just to get a decent night’s sleep), they would continue the party inside the town walls until the booze ran out again, and then they would march off to the next town. A popular hero still is the legendary party-giver Gaz the Tall, who in 785A.D. (A.D. = After Drinkies) led his followers on a ten month binge that devastated every major city in Baq d'Or. It was at this time that Welbug changed its name to Temperance City and banned all alcoholic beverages. However, Gaz the Tall still laid siege and, when the city fell, all supplies of grapes, wheat, barley, potatoes, apples and elder-flowers were impounded. The city's name was changed again by the orcs to Home-brew-ville and for weeks the city hummed and gurgled with the sounds and smells of a thousand illicit stills and back-street breweries. Yeast was changing hands at thirty tablons an ounce, and innocent folk were murdered for their isinglass finings. This year came to be known in the Orcish calendar as The Year of Living Dangerously, for many an orc was laid low by a dodgy pint.
For those interested in learning more concerning Orcs, further information will be available in Morris the Bald's thoroughly-researched new book, Orcwatching, which will be published next year when Morris has finally recovered from the hangover.