Trolls and Tribulations
Page 28
3 Like bards only more honest
4 The legendary conqueror who spread terror across the southern continent from his capital in Khanifigzit.
5 The cat is out of the bag
6 Crypt + ic
7 A bit like a Belgian Bun but with pink icing
8 via McGuff, evolution had seen to it that no-one complained within hearing of a Fitzmichael
9 The garrison forces included a couple of dozen women but they were all referred to as “men” because, after all, the alternatives were too radical to contemplate.
10 speak
11 Otherwise known as Tony the Phoney
12 deer,
13 The sort that never actually resulted in any mating
14 See previous note
15 Invented by Rustle “Billy” Nome- an explosive cross between haricot beans and brussels sprouts. The sprouts themselves are smaller than standard brussels and clustered in groups of eight on multiple stalks per plant, hence the famous cry of market greengrocers everywhere “Billy Nome Eights, anyone fancy some Billy Nome Eights?”
16 Yes, in his case, it is spelled that way. Badger has a murky past - find out more in the novelette “Amateur Grammatics”, available free (see back of book).
17 It’s a well known trait in dwarfs and gets them into a lot of trouble.
18 Naturally, no building in the world is big enough to house everything women know.
19 Stocky is a nearly black beer made from roasted malt. It’s a favourite with dwarfs as they have no sense of irony.
20 With the possible exception of Tommy “Give him a hand” Mcnulty whose idea of opening a marine dental practice had ended abruptly (as had his arms) when he’d attempted to treat gingivitis in a great white shark.
21 Who took early retirement via a fast horse and an even faster ship two weeks after starting his post as tutor to Chortley and his sister Agrapella.
22 As it happens, there is such a thing as the subtlefish. It feeds by nibbling such a tiny amount from its prey at a time that they don’t notice until they’re little more than a pair of eyeballs and a nose.
23 I know!
24 or, indeed, their hole
25 Split, according to tradition, according to the relative wealth of the finders - on the basis that those with plenty of money clearly know what to do with it. This would ensure that, in fact, Chortley would get pretty much the lot.
26 Old McDonald’s Farm way.
27 The Kobold language - closely related to the Gobbledigook spoken in the caverns of the Darkworld.
28 The accused is escorted to a bridge and one of its offspring is held over the edge by the foot. If the troll allows the child to fall to its doom, then he’s considered perfectly sane. Begging for the child’s life, on the other hand, is clear evidence of sedimentality.
29 The world contains three types of living thing. The Biological realm includes all those plants, animals and fungi that make up the conventional ecosystem. The Geological kingdom is made up of the creatures the Lord Eric created in an attempt to populate his new world of Mud with beings made from the fabric of the planet (the first thinking beings were made in his image out of clay but their arms fell off as soon as the sun came out, although that didn’t stop certain legends persisting). The Elemental kingdom consists of beings of air, earth, water and flame - most people don’t know that the Sea is a being, or more properly, a colony of living things. Until relatively recently, there was believed to be a fourth realm - the Theological Kingdom - but this has since been discredited as a complete load of old bollocks.
30 At the quantum level, particles can be in two places at once but, though he was a dwarf, Skiver wasn’t quite that small
31 “Lab” (black dog) + “oratory” (chapel)
32 staff
33 deny + zens
34 Mined - mind
35 Bently had already made a mental note to deal with him as soon as he incorporated.
36 From whom comes the famous rhyme:
The dirty old ruler of Xoo
Preferred chunks in his royal retinue
His obsession with size
Brought tears to his eyes
So he went back to liking bijou
37 Untrue. Many of the rules of common courtesy are downright lethal in certain situations. Never, for example, say “after you” to a flatulent man in a candle shop.
38 For the sake of choosing a pronoun, we’re going to call Aligvok “he”, even though he is inside the body of a woman.
39 Indeed, the creation myth of the dwarfs goes very much along those lines. They were the first to awake, they say, from the ruins of the previous universe and it was they that cleared the path for the other peoples to follow. And they’ve been cashing in on that ever since, they truly believe that the world owes them a living.
40 Rotundia is an ancient island kingdom of the southern ocean. After a series of disastrous coconut crop failures, the government was forced to devalue its currency, each time reducing the amount of gold in its coinage by hammering it out and cutting each sovereign in two (each known as a bit-coin). By the time of the reign of Chief Landidinit, the coins had become so thin as to be essentially virtual and it became necessary for bill payers to indicate the value of the transaction by folding the requisite number of fingers. And thus was born the Tworld’s first digital currency.
41 Thun isn’t the first comic character whose counting system basically amounted to one, two, and more.
42 It’s a fact that everyone opens a banana from the wrong end. Watch how an ape (one with fur) opens a banana - they don’t do it from the stalk end, do they? Why not? Because they’re not bloody idiots, that’s why.
43 It’s a little known fact that Mathematics is a form of magic art. Numbers have a power all their own and they constantly seek to break free from the rational universe and cavort in the quantum abyss where one plus one can be three without ever passing through two. Or something like that. Bind numbers up into equations and they’ll struggle to break free, doing all they can to resist memorisation. Their greatest fear is to be turned into geometry - any sine that this is going to happen has them going off at a tangent.
44 The word “kobbold” is derived from same Ancient Varman roots as the words “knowledge” and “eternity”. Indeed, the first recorded uses of the word left in the letter “n” (knobbold) and some variants preferred to use “end” as the second syllable. After use of this early spelling sparked several wars, the “n” was removed and the current form of letters codified in law on pain of castration.
45 Liberty can mean different things - it depends on your perspective. Some liberties are enjoyed, others are taken. It’s an odd, though universal, truth that all worlds, in all realities, on which civilisation develops, have a Statue of Liberty in some form or another. In some, the statue was erected as a gesture of openness, tolerance and freedom (although, in later years, it often ended up serving as an inconvenient reminder of a more benevolent past). In others it was slammed down by a dictator, clearing away the poor hovels standing inconveniently in its footprint as the ultimate demonstration of how, as a tyrant, it’s possible to take monumental liberties.
46 The only orders a witch follows are her own.
47 Gramma had imposed her will on the naming of the machine through her usual technique of endlessly repeating herself until everyone else gave up. And, after all, none of them wanted to call it “Arse”. Not yet, anyway.
48 In fact, she was probably more accurately channeling Sherlock’s twin brother, Ideel, who was a certified idiot. It seemed that, in the genetic soup that brought rise to these fraternal twins, Sherlock got all the big chunks of meat, whilst Ideel made do with a couple of stale croutons.
49 ie after a frontal lobotomy
50 Simon and Symon Simonson were the first historically recorded conjoined twins. Born in one of the regions where the two worlds would, were they in the same dimension, overlap, Simon and Symon were joined at the waist but faced in opposite directions. They went on t
o live happy and successful lives as proprietors of a travelling circus of curiosities. Their marriages didn’t last long because, while the sex was, by necessity a group activity, and, therefore, appealing enough to the right participants, their shared digestive tract made them impossibly big arseholes.
51 Skin deep that is
52 The author got a little carried away at this point. We resume after a lie-down.
53 A horde is what happens to a host when it gets pissed and eats all the peanuts
54 Clawstrophobia, on the other hand, is the perfectly rational fear of anything with razor sharp nails.
55 In fact, it was more of a light skirmish. Thun stood no chance.