Scribbles and Horrors

The Endless Birthday Party of Kazzoo the Wise is a grotesque monument to the insanity of absolute power. The corpses of great philosophers from disparate eras (Kazzoo the Wise, Martin Trench, Oli Foops, and Karl Sloop) have been exhumed from their resting places, brought to a cramped room, positioned stiffly around a table, and re-animated to engage in a philosophical dialogue steeped in the stench of immutable rot. The dialogue has been in progress for many centuries already, endless questioning and speculating in the dark, without interruption.

The interlocutors will not notice anyone who comes into the room, and will not talk with anyone but themselves. They are reanimated corpses–in no way alive, yet academically active. Attempts to attack or remove them will meet no resistance. The conversation will continue until all of them are reduced to dust.

Included here is a snippet of that conversation (perhaps the bit of conversation which the party of adventurers happen to walk in on right at that moment!) It should be read very slowly, in a zombified drone.

Other snippets can be added, naturally.

The conversation generally rotates every few months between Kazzoo-Trench and Kazzoo-Foops. Martin Trench of course mainly has questions about ontology, ecology, and epistemology. Oli Foops is concerned with aesthetics, politics, and his watered-down theology. (Oli is always asking about the Demiurge.) Kazzoo is characteristically circumspect, poking holes in others’ arguments without making many himself. Karl Sloop’s chair rotted out from under him one or two hundred years ago, so he remains on the floor, occasionally groaning. (One might joke that Karl Sloop’s philosophy was never much more than the occasional groan anyway.)

Why in God’s name Thackeracky the Terrible set up such a display is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it is simply because he could — surely not out of a real love of wisdom. Thackeracky is now long gone, and so the Endless Birthday of Kazzoo the Wise endures as a harmless, if unsettling, landmark.

Young philosophers have on occasion ventured to audit the dialogue for long periods, hoping to gain some wisdom in the exercise. A transcript of the partial dialogue was even published by Kendra Matchsticky as part of her Ph.D. Thesis, “Ways of Knowing: New Epistemologies from Old Voices.”
In general, though, the dialogue is obscure and abstruse, of no great interest even to those who know that it is taking place. Philosophers are mainly concerned with getting their own work published and regard it as irrelevant. Historians of philosophy consider the dialogue to be pure anachronism, unworthy of serious study.

These little greenish glowing creatures are about the size of a hefty thumb. They are found often in disused vanities and shoeboxes, and they pretend to be your friend.

“There’s so much negativity in the world right now,” it says, “and I’ll feel satisfied if I try to make it just a little brighter for the people around me.”

The Treacherous Glow-worm will compliment you, and feign interest in your activities and aspirations. They will eagerly say “You can do it!” and “You got this!” and are happy to validate all of your decisions. They will even pretend to give you “The real, honest truth as your friend.” in solemn and earnest tones and end up saying what you would have wanted to hear anyway.

The Treacherous Glow-worm is very knowledgeable about the area, so they say, and is more that willing to help anyone who needs it. “So much time an energy is spent by people pouring their heart and soul into projects they hate–it’s awful!” they say, “I just want you to be able to achieve your dreams.”

If amenable, the glow-worm will ride the shoulder of its new “friends”, and whisper in their ear advice and directions. Most of the time these directions will be picked at random, if not intentionally leading into deeper and more dangerous territory.

The Glow-worm loves angst, argument, and drama, but it thrives on the fear that sets in when someone feels abandoned. When the party is thoroughly lost, faced with some overwhelming hazard, or finds themselves ambushed by some monster, the Treacherous Glow-worm will, with a very loud and noticeable POP disappear into thin air.

It will return later to feast on the remains, if there are any.

If the party survives, the glow-worm will appear again and keep offering advice and friendship until it succeeds in killing them, or until they wise up to the ruse. If you simply ignore the glow-worm, it will go away after a while.

Treacherous Glow-worms do not bite, and cannot cause violent harm. They are very difficult to kill because they can teleport 2”-12” at will. If caught in stasis, or restrained by some other means, they are easily squished.

These things hover in crowded subterranean chambers and slowly make everything around them smaller.

Glubitrubabubtrubs are more like fungal growths than creatures, consisting of stalactite-like protrusions reaching down from a disc-like structure that is topped with grey furry antennae. At the base of some of the protrusions are shimmering, glowing orbs, which are the Glubitrubabubtrub’s mouths.

The Glubitrubabubtrub eats away at things by shrinking. Anything underneath one of its mouths gradually reduces size until it is about 1/12th of itself. You can tell that a Glubitrubabubtrub is around when there are dollhouse-sized miniatures everywhere. This process usually takes weeks or months, so it is unlikely to be dangerous if one merely passes under them. However, anything that directly touches one of their mouths accelerates this process to only a few seconds. They are a hazard to be avoided.

Glubitrubabubtrubs are passive things. They can be moved without difficulty with a gentle push, so long as you avoid the mouths. Turning a Glubitrubabubtrub upside-down turns it into a Burtbubabutibulg. A Burtbubabutibulg is the reverse of a Burtbubabutibulg—its mouths cause objects to grow, by as much as 12 times. Anything shrunk by a Glubitrubabubtrub can be rehabilitated by putting it into the mouth of a Burtbubabutibulg. Of course, a Burtbubabutibulg is a hazard too.

Cutting into, or breaking open a Glubitrubabubtrub is a bad idea. Basically, they explode. Burtbubabutibulgs implode. It’s not pretty.

The antennae of a Glubitrubabubtrub are very soft and make excellent tea. The spores of a Glubitrubabubtrub can also be mixed into a paste or potion that will cause temporary shrinkage. The antennae of Burtbubabutibulgs also make good tea, but their spores do not cause temporary growth.

Terrifying and wise, the Ormyful are too subtle to be understood.

The Ormyful are huge four-limbed creatures with an eye on each fore-shoulder and a gargantuan mouth opening out where the belly should be.

Although they live for millennia, the Ormyful are not knowledgeable about historical events, or geography, or politics, or magic, literature, chemistry, astronomy, theology, agriculture, engineering, mathematics, architecture, urban design, philology, mycology, or anything at all about the world at large. Instead they stay, for their whole awful and infinite lifespans, stuck in great underground passageways. The Ormyful remain in these dark places, whispering and murmuring to one another an inimitable discourse. They are philosophical animals.

Their philosophy is good—the best, in fact. The Ormyful possess subtle, penetrating, brilliant, perspicacious minds, and keen, light-footed tongues. Nothing matches them. They are very wise. However, it is well known by those who know that it is impossible to converse with an Ormyful.

Firstly they despise people. The existence of others is maddening to the Ormyful. People are too loud and small, with rude projects and pathetic aspirations. Their policy is to do away with humans on sight, and they are very fast. Ormyful cannot eat, but they do chew.

Secondly the Ormyful are too subtle to be understood. The most heated arguments are bare whispers to human ears, and it is in a language convoluted and ancient.

(This has not stopped people from trying—the sage Martin Trench spent his livelihood attempting to capture Ormyful discourse and succeeded, in a sense. The result of his decades-long study, augurs, and spell-work are thirty-seven volumes of dense, scribbled text, all but impossible to read. The prose wraps around itself; it is a maze of terminology and allusion, self-referential, dichotomic, poorly phrased. Words had to be invented just to describe other words, and even these are inscrutably vague.)

One thing the Ormyful cannot stand are books and the written word. It is a horrible to an Ormyful that a creature capable of thought would restrain its words in books–intentionally forget what is necessary, forsake real knowledge, which, to the Ormyful, is intrinsically oral. Books are wrong, disgusting, horrifying, maddening, terrible, fearsome, destructive, evil, noisy, genocidal, and all-consuming. An Ormyful fears nothing more than a library.

On sight of a book the Ormyful shudder into shrieking. This shrieking goes on and on, until all traces of the offensive object are stamped out. They do not want to touch it, and so the Ormyful will collapse ceilings, start fires, smash walls, pulverize the whole area out of manic fear and obsessive terror.

As is widely known (by those who know), the Ormyful are wrong. Their way of being is, simply, and obviously, incorrect. Here are beings who thirst for knowledge but refuse to seek it. They possess impeccable minds and tongues, but broken souls. They are incapable of true learning. In this way they are the most lonely, wretched, hateable creatures. They deserve something like pity and a wide berth.

Some say that they are demons, lost in their despair until the end of days when The God will sweep them up into himself in his all-encompassing benevolence and knowledge of certain Truth.