Found only in Australia, this is a cake-eating monster which gets children into a lot of trouble. Taking the size and shape of a lamington cake, it lurks on a plate of real lamingtons. When nobody is looking, it gobbles them, one by one, and then just lies there on the plate, trying not to look too fat. Any children in the house take the blame.
Their bodies are cube shaped and brown, with a chocolate smell, and the outside is covered in small white sense organs that smell of coconut, because they treat the sense organs with coconut oil. When squeezed, they scream and open their mouths, showing a set of what appear to be razor-sharp teeth. When lamingtons are squeezed, they just squish.
Lamington monsters are the only monsters to play the guitar in the dark. They are very friendly to people, and will sometimes play a lullaby to people who are having trouble sleeping. This really annoys the sleep eaters. Nobody is sure quite why the lamington monsters do this, but it probably happens more when there are real lamingtons in the refrigerator.
ORIGINS: Scientists think they evolved from migratory soap slurpers which became stranded in Australia when the dinosaurs died away, and that they had a pretty nasty time until humans came along and invented lamingtons for them to eat.
SIZE: Generally cube shaped or oblong, the size varies from about 4 to 8 cm, depending on when the monster last fed and when it last split into two.
UNUSUAL THINGS: They breed by simple fission, meaning that one lamington monster feeds, grows larger and then divides in two. They can only do this when food is available in large amounts, and only in complete darkness. If you hear a guitar solo change into a guitar duet during the night, you will know that a lamington monster has just fissioned.
IS A THREAT TO: Lamingtons, or under famine conditions, feral cupcakes, though they may also attack dwarf underbed lions. Some scientists suspect that these monsters, given their age, may have been responsible for the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Other scientists say that is rubbish, and who ever saw a dinosaur that looked like a lamington? The first group say that there are no dinosaurs that look like lamingtons because the lamington monsters ate them.
USES: They are edible, and taste just like their food, which is lamingtons. If you see a tray with one lamington cake on it, then it is probably a lamington monster, and you should eat it immediately, before it can breed. The teeth are actually soft and harmless, so don’t worry; they are just for show.
HATES: Cake knives, hungry children. They are eaten by drain monsters, mud monsters, snickering lizards and cryptobears, which are all attracted by the chocolate smell. They don’t really like pink elephants much, because the lamington monsters often steal old-fashioned cake tins to hide in, but pink elephants track them down and open the tins, looking for fruitcake. Pink elephants are terribly fussy, and when they only find lamingtons, they stomp on the tin.
LIKES: Food, preferably food that does not scream or fight back when it is bitten. They also like collecting clocks, so if you ever see a cake tin and you can hear it ticking, it is either the home of a lamington monster, a bomb, or possibly a deadly clock cake. You need to work out how lucky you feel before you look inside the tin.
This monster indicates its presence by the absence of dwarf underbed lions, dinosaurs and cupcakes, and by the unexplained disappearance of genuine lamingtons.
These are a small and rather confused tribe of imps who run around with patches over both eyes, and making noises like ‘Avast, ye lubbers’ and ‘Shiver me timbers’. Their leader is Wrong John Sliver, who shivered the timbers of the wooden leg of Long John Silver, and took one piece to use as a weapon. Wrong John Sliver used to be called Crême Caramel Budweiser, which he did not like. So as well as a bit of Silver’s leg, he took a close imitation of the name. He made it just different enough to avoid a law suit, which is a boring black gown that only goth ravens would wear.
Copywrong pirates like to wear the most colourful clothes they can find, buy or steal, because this annoys the visigoths. Copywrong pirates hate the visigoths because they are original. You can tell if there has been a flock of copywrong pirates in your refrigerator, because everything is the same colour, a sort of cross between buff and beige, all that is left after they steal the colours.
Copywrong pirates can often be heard at night, rounding up original ideas that are left on bedroom floors. They steal them and give them new names, and sell them as their own, but they never get them right, which explains their name. They live on just one food, rum and raisin ice cream, because they believe it is what real pirates eat. They hate cold food, and this explains their bad tempers.
Copywrong pirates all have crossbows, but they always load their special crossbow arrows (which they call blots) back to front, which makes the blot so confused that it flies sideways, so they never hit anybody, and this makes the bows more livid than cross. Most of the time, you won’t actually see the copywrong pirates, but the signs of their presence are obvious. They put books in bookshelves upside down or spine-side in, which makes them a real nuisance in libraries. Most of them have names beginning with R, but as you will realise, Wrong John Sliver is a poor speller.
The only clever thing that Wrong John Sliver ever did was to persuade librarians that he and his followers were really called copyright pirates, which means information about them is always filed in the wrong place.
ORIGINS: Many of the copywrong pirates seem to be the descendants of cloned imps, produced at the Imperial Farm of Vlad the Imp-aler by the evil Count Henry Blenkinsop. Vlad wanted something tasty to dunk in his coffee, and ended up producing something not unlike Spam. They wanted to be copyright pirates, which would be even nastier, but even Vlad hated copyright piracy, so he had Blenkinsop give them an extra nose on each foot.
SIZE: About the same size as a garden gnome on steroids, but with very big egos and very small brains. They are very skinny, because they hate their food.
UNUSUAL THINGS: Because they wear patches over both eyes, their noses (the ones on their heads) are usually bleeding and spread across their faces. Their names all start with the letter R.
IS A THREAT TO: Original thinkers, inventors. They are a definite nuisance to coffee drinkers, because they steal people’s coffee, thinking it is called ‘copy’. This really gets up the noses of pudding monsters, or would, if pudding monsters had noses.
USES: None at all, unless you have a large supply of rum and raisin ice cream that has passed its ‘use by’ date.
HATES: The letters © and ®, pudding monsters, original thinkers. Their biggest hate is rum and raisin ice cream. Because of where their extra noses are, they really hate the smell of old socks.
LIKES: Any sort of copying device. They really like the letter that they call ARRRRRRR, and aardvarks. They are very fond of the part of the alphabet between Q and S.
This monster is most easily recognised by the patches over both eyes, the bad teeth (you can’t see to brush your teeth when both your eyes are closed) and the battered noses.
These small and rather insignificant monsters have one nasty habit. They climb onto your pillow and make a whining noise like a mosquito, but they do it to attract food, and not to keep you awake. Imps eat mosquitoes. This is why they make those whining noises, which say in mosquito something like ‘here’s a lovely meal!’ to attract their dinner.
There are several different tribes of imps; some used to be kept as slaves in publishing companies, where their job was to write all the books. They used to smuggle their children out, sewn into the binding of a book, and this is the reason all imps can read and write today, and why you will often see imps hiding behind the books in libraries, looking for any young imps which need to be rescued.
Because imps can read, and they can see in the dark, a pet imp can be trained to read extra stories after your parents tell you to turn the lights out. All you have to do is learn to breed mosquitoes in a bottle for them and decide to like stories that are told in a very squeaky voice.
The oldest fossil remains of imps come fro
m southern England, so they may have started there, probably in Cornwall. Captive imps used to weave most of the cloth for humans in Britain, but steam looms were cheaper, so the weaver imps lost their jobs. They later found work as tin miners, mining the veins of ore that were too small for humans, and some of them migrated to Africa, America and Australia to work in gold mines.
Vlad Tepes, Prince of Wallachia, used to wrap imps up in sticky tape, dip them in beer and swallow them whole. This habit is the reason why people today call him Vlad the Imp-aler. He said there is no better way to get an imp’s attention than to crush its toes, though threatening to dip it in beer and eat it whole also works.
ORIGINS: Probably from somewhere in Europe, but their habit of nesting in straw has caused them to spread around the world, wherever horses are found. Experts say that they are probably just very short impressionists.
SIZE: They are quite small, so that Vlad the Imp-aler was always in a bad temper because he could never get enough imps to make a decent meal.
UNUSUAL THINGS: Because they remember the nasty trick that Vlad used to play with sticky tape, imps cannot walk past a roll of sticky tape without flattening the end down to make it hard for Vlad or anybody like him to get a piece of tape off the roll.
IS A THREAT TO: Daisies, poppies and other flowers with long stalks. Nobody knows why, but they like to chop them down. It is probably significant that you can frighten them off with a sign that says Beware of the Agapanthus.
USES: Providing reading services, getting rid of mosquitoes, saxophones and other pests. If they are given some musical education, they can be nice pets.
HATES: Gargoyles, especially short-sighted ones; Royal Wallachians; beer; string orchestras, and violas in particular. They also hate bagpipes, but only because they think they are string instruments. Imps are not very bright.
LIKES: Reading, singing, telling jokes about violas like ‘What’s the difference between a viola and a trampoline?’ (You take your shoes off to jump on a trampoline.) If you want to catch a wild imp and make a pet of it, make a collection of viola jokes. Leave this under your pillow, and when you hear high-pitched laughing in the night, talk to the imp quietly and make it your friend.
This monster is mainly interesting because they are all musically gifted, and they like to play brass instruments. If you hear nice brass band music coming from under your bed or out of your cupboard, you can be fairly certain that some imps have moved in, or maybe they are just using your room to practice, because they prefer to march when they are playing. If you hear terrible brass band music, you will know that some hairyoddities have moved in.
These are very small organic robots, and they do the sums inside a calculator, operating switches to give you an answer that you can read. Calculator imps speak an ancient form of Basque, a language which nobody understands except for Basques and some imps. This is why you cannot tell them what sum they need to do; you have to press buttons that crush their toes. There is no better way to get an imp’s attention than to crush its toes, though threatening to dip it in beer and eat it whole works fairly well, according to Vlad the Imp-aler. The imps don’t agree with this.
Some people say the imps cannot do sums at all, that they have really tiny calculators on which they do the sums, but in that case, the really tiny calculators would need to have really, really tiny calculator imps inside them, with even tinier calculators with even tinier imps, and ... well, you can see where this is going, can’t you?
The truth is that the imps do all their calculations with an old invention called a sly drool. Working the sly drool is very boring, so they sing Canadian lumberjack songs to keep their spirits up. You can check the truth of this by asking older mathematical experts if they can do calculations with a sly drool or with logger rhythms.
If a calculator breaks, or is opened by untrained people, the calculator imps will spill out and spread across the floor, looking for honey and dust particles. Most monsters hate mathematics, but calculator imps are not really monsters.
At least, that’s what mathematicians say, and as a rule, what they say adds up. Then again, the calculator imps also say they aren’t monsters, and the mathematicians may just be saying it to keep the calculator imps happy.
ORIGINS: These imps were probably bred by the evil and infamous Count Henry Blenkinsop, who expected to need lots of minions to count the money from his ‘Lizards’ Gizzards’ shops —based on the idea that if a food had a nasty enough name, children would love it. Blenkinsop was breeding African shouting spiders to use in advertising the shops, but somebody let some truth-teller spiders into the pens, and the offspring got away and told the newspapers that the ‘lizards’ gizzards’ were actually compressed broccoli and cabbage. The chain of shops failed, and a few calculator imps escaped. Those we use today were captured in the wild, and trained to menial duties, much to the annoyance of the Calculator Imp Liberation Front.
SIZE: About the size of a flea. They get into beehives by hiding in flowers and then riding into the hive on a bee.
UNUSUAL THINGS: They have 24 legs, each leg ending in four toes, which helps them do hexadecimal calculations. It also means they have spare toes if you crush any too hard.
IS A THREAT TO: People. Liberated calculator imps under your bed can be annoying when they shout out numbers and number facts in very loud voices. Calculator imps tend to shout because they are not very intelligent, but they are ambitious, and somebody once told them there is money to be made in numbers rackets.
USES: They appear to do no harm to beehives, and they work very well in calculators.
HATES: They do not like mathematical inaccuracy. If you leave a sign under your bed reading ‘2+2=3’, they will leave immediately. They hate vacuum cleaners which are supposed to take away the dust, but if used carelessly, can also take away calculator imps.
LIKES: Honey. If they can, liberated calculator imps will move into a beehive, where they live happily, counting the sides on the honeycomb and eating honey. They also like sitting under beds, counting the dust particles. They hate dusty honey, though.
You can tell a calculator imp from a millipede by the colour, because calculator imps are lime green. Also, millipedes have their legs arranged in pairs of pairs, but calculator imps just have them in pairs.
The leopardchaun came originally from Ireland, although they have all long since moved to drier and warmer climates. Their true nature has been forgotten in Ireland, replaced by the legend of the leprechaun. Tests have shown that the leopardchaun is the most intelligent animal that looks like a banana. In fairness, the bananas ask us to recall that bananas are not animals, and so we should not reach any conclusions about the intelligence of bananas, based on the abilities of the leopardchauns.
There is no easy way to say this: leopardchauns are silly. They may be very good at remembering things, but so is a hard disc, and hard discs aren’t all that bright either. Leopardchauns aren’t as bright as a hard disc: in fact, they would have trouble competing in a flopping contest with a lump of jelly. Their big problem is that they like riddles, and they like acting out riddles. Ask a leopardchaun why the chicken crossed the road, and it will take off across a busy highway. Rumble, rumble, squelch, squelch!
The trouble all began when the authorities wanted to cross a unicorn with a lion, but somebody in the stores office obtained a spotless leopard by mistake, and the experimenters used that. While some of the details have been hidden, it is very likely that Count Henry Blenkinsop had a hand in the work, because nothing else can really explain why the work was such a disaster.
The spotless leopard’s name was Daisy (though she was the colour of a sunflower) and the unicorn’s name was Chauncey, but one of his great-grandmothers had been a rocking horse. The result was a small yellow animal, a bit like a corgi without legs, a sort of yellow sausage that got around by rocking backwards and forwards. As there was already an animal called a leopardcorn, they became known as leopardchauns.
Once upon a time,
castles with tuba doors attracted high rents, and landlords would ask for a tame leopardchaun each year. After the 1848 Great Leopardchaun Plague, leopardchauns were cheap, and so ‘a leopardchaun rent’ came to mean cheap.
ORIGINS: See above. Some people say that the leopardchauns seem to have spread around the world by stowing away on banana boats. Other people say that this is ridiculous, because when you make a boat out of bananas, it sinks when the bananas get ripe. People are like that, sometimes. So are banana boats.
SIZE: Much the same size as a medium banana.
UNUSUAL THINGS: Leopardchauns whistle all the time. This is as good a reason as any not to eat a whistling banana, or any other piece of fruit that whistles or wheezes, because the other ones may have carbon worms in them.
IS A THREAT TO: Deaf monkeys who don’t hear the whistling until too late.
USES: They have remarkable memories, and are sometimes used to carry messages downhill by armies that are on the move. They normally use this memory to store large numbers of riddles. It’s a great pity that their musical skills don’t go beyond whistling, because their amazing memories would make them really good MP3 players. Then again, you would probably look a bit silly if you walked around with a leopardchaun in each ear.
HATES: Deaf monkeys, because they eat the leopardchauns, and because the deaf monkeys don’t listen to their riddles.
The Monster Maintenance Manual Page 7