The Gronch cackled and put down his blessing book.
That filthy old BAR had a nasty new look!
With a nasty grin of his own the Gronch hoisted and aimed.
The castle grounds were teeming with Tabs to be maimed.
From the top of tall castle came a sound like “thubibibib!”
Taking out Tabs was like yanking toys from a crib.
Let this be a lesson to all Tabs new and old:
With just the right blessings, a gross BAR turns to gold!
Once upon a time…
At the century’s largest salesman convention, a foul-smelling fatty was peddling his precocious potted plant. With very little luck that day, and surrounded by hundreds of other sellers and their wares, he was feeling spiteful and angry, and stumbled into a fight with a vacuum cleaner salesman after an argument escalated. His carnivorous, sentient, vicious vine could move anywhere and it could even double as a leafy leaf blower. It was much, much better than a little pink blob that could suck things – no matter how much sucking it could do! But in the row that ensued, the man and his plant blew up the vacuum cleaner and killed its owner, quite by accident. He fled into the eaves of the castle, the sinister scrub trailing behind.
This castle, rented by the world-wide association of salespeople for their annual convention, was a zen affair nestled in the richly thicketed mountains of Japan. From the highest floor, the view of the afternoon sun propped by the distant peaks was as breathtaking as the tubby, terrified product placer’s realization that his sin had been witnessed by two vigilantes dealing more than justice: an experienced woman selling toy robots, wearing a bright yellow dress, and a fresh young sales-swords-man with a catalogue of utility chimps. The stylish sellers rooted, er, routed the petulant plant, but the frightened fatso killed them, too, and escaped. The robot and the monkey were left mangled and useless. Wheezing, the escaped death-dealer fled again, and delved into the wilderness beyond the castle, deeply forested, to escape from his crime and his past life.
Up, up high in those deep green forests which shroud the mountains of Japan, that fat man stumbled and wheezed as he hauled his stubby legs away from the luxurious Edo-styled castle on the mountainside, glowing and now hazy in the clementine-flavored sunset. Behind him were three dead bodies, four shattered samples, and one very dead career. Blobby pink vacuum cleaners, laser-launching toy robots, eerily-grinning utility chimps, his grinning leafy greens—three sales people peddling their little inventions. Three lives he’d stolen in one blind moment of rage, after that one sucker had laughed at his potted pet plant portfolio. He’d come to the salesman convention, all the way to this cedar-scented wilderness, all the way from from Europe, all to make a name for himself and his multi-purpose potted plants. Now it was all wasted, along with his best red suit, now covered in sap, tatters, and tears.
Meanwhile, in a rustic dojo not too far away…
A blond-haired man in a metal-plated ball-cap was sitting, dejected, on the old dilapidated dojo steps. His muscles glistened as he sighed and pulled his miniature ponytail through his hand: an old habit. The jet-coiffed, olive-skinned old Master was insistent that the future Master of the dojo would be the Master’s grandson, another black-haired tan man. Time and time again, the melancholy blonde boy had triumphed over the grandson, his rival: his bouts were clean, his heart was pure, his hat was quite sharp. He had dedicated his life to impressing his Master, but to no avail. Anger swelled within him.
Suddenly, something tubby stepped into view, hugged (just barely) by the setting sun. A familiar-looking man with a red hat and blue overalls and a foreign letter on his brow. And a few scrapes and cuts, the evidence of a long journey.
“My god!” said the young man, leaping to his feet in Japanese. Before him stood a squat figure, and as the plum-colored light glimmered on a spectacular mustache, the young man realized exactly who it was that had graced his master’s dojo. “Mario! It is you, isn’t it?”
“There are some who would call me by that name,” said Wario, after a pause.
Suddenly, from inside the building came a horrible cry, a fastball from hell in the pitch of a squealing demon, and an equally horrendous scream. The two capped crusaders rushed inside to find the dojo’s Master, an ancient, prune-like man, whose shriveled appearance was unnervingly unset by leathery black wings which sprouted from incredibly muscular shoulders. After a furious and senseless fight where the geezer gutted his own grandson, the tubby man and the blonde man thoroughly destroyed both of the dark men and decided they may as well take over the dojo as well: for, during the fight, Wario had discovered a technique he wished to study: the power of the Big Fist.
Wario and Terry (which was his name) restarted the dojo as a pair of mixup-masters, and sent out a call for recruits. Alas, the only applicants were mere misfits: a weird humanized hedgehog from Korea, a psychic boy who longed to improve his physical strength, and a creature so disgusting it will not be described here. In a remarkably destructive demonstration, the miniature esper thrashed the two other applicants and was welcomed as the Big Dojo’s first starry-eyed student.
After some months of training, the Big Dojo attend a world-wide tournament held on a private island. Master Big (his secret moniker) felt a big anxiety about the potential of big popularity if they won, but settled nonetheless into his big, cushy first-class chair. He dozed, surprisingly daintily for a man of his great girth.
And woke up when he was blasted from his seat by a nigh-explosive punch, out of the plane and almost out of the tentative cradle of life. Fingers digging into the slick metal wings, he assessed his own terror as a blank-faced robotic doll, a fine-tuned trainer turned terminator, climbed from the flimsy fuselage, trailed by a fine-faced young woman, a smarmy young fellow and a sleek geezer. This was a hit team sent by the sales people in revenge for his sales sins, and they brought big business. Unfortunately for them, business was bad and they fell to the Big Fist and his best blonde friend, who dusted his palms after the fight, eyes gleaming, knowing that his friend was hiding a complicated past. They arrived at the tournament as planned, a little unnerved but thoroughly warmed up.
In the junior division, the psychic boy was teamed up with a young sword-wielding lad in a silly outfit, and they barely survived their final bout against a thick-headed swordsman and the real danger, a furry, Korean creature who became stronger and brighter the more he was hurt. The fight climaxed as the sun crested the sky, and while the sunlight glittered off of fighting mats and sea foam, the two young men clasped palms in victory as the canine catastrophe howled into the chasm below the arena.
The swordsman with the silly hat felt his heart grow big with camaraderie, and was soon initiated as the fourth member of the Big Dojo.
But the sensational victory of this slick new school in the students’ tourney did not stop with that final fracas. In the heated final match of the Masters’ tournament, the two cap-wearing Big Dojo leaders squared off against another terrible pair: two Korean mutant animal creatures: a bird with a gun and a dog with a bag of bombs. It was an incredibly close fight, but the two cap-wearers won thanks to the humongous power of the Big Jutsu fighting style championed by the fat master, and the explosive power of its most secret move.
The celebratory newspaper photograph caught the attention of Mario, the President of the United States of America. Mario is angry, very angry, furious that this impostor is using his image for personal gain – for even though he never admits it, the fat man has never outright denied his masquerade as Mario. The Japanese cannot tell Europeans from Americans, and though no one ever asserted that the massive Master is President Mario of the USA, the man’s chubby charisma, with his wink and his smile, would make them think: “Maybe…”
And so, bristling with pride and wrath, the President invited the whole of the Big Dojo to the white house, ostensibly to award them a Presidential Medal of Might and Merit. But immediately upon initiating a suspiciously silent ceremony, Mario and his entourage attacked the dojo delegates in full presidential regalia: Super President Mario; his brother Secretary of State Luigi; First Lady Peach in a gold-plated dress; and the commander of the armed forces: Captain Falcon. In the melee, Wario was horribly battered, but—thanks to the heroism of the two youngest dojo members, who tagged in to take on that blue-collar commander and his atrocious advisors—the President’s whole cabinet was laid to waste in the secret fighting rooms behind the oval office.
When everything was settled, Terry said: “Now we’re in trouble, what are we going to do if the President is seen to be missing?”
And Wario looked around and said: “The President is right here.”
On the third term of his presidency, President Mario of the USA changed. He got bigger, for one. He adopted a new policy that encompassed his entire country: Make Things Bigger. He made taxes bigger. He made the deficit bigger. He made the military bigger. He made the roads, the homes, the people of the country bigger. He made every state a little bigger, especially Florida. He made the country bigger by annexing Canada and Mexico. He made the presidential term limit bigger. He made his cabinet bigger. He added thirty more judges to the supreme court. He asked the Legislature: How do I make the constitution bigger? His new amendment was the biggest yet, and made the freedoms and liberties of the American people much bigger. The private sector was furious that government interference got bigger, but they couldn’t complain because the American economy was so much bigger too. Even the dollar got a little bigger. People said it was just a big re-election campaign, but they also said: America has never been so big.
This went on for quite a while, and the President decided he wanted to accomplish something no one had ever done before. He wanted to make the planet bigger. But he wasn’t sure exactly how—maybe make humanity bigger, maybe make the scope of human civilization bigger. His favorite idea was really to make the planet bigger, and so this led into a cross scientific enterprise plus peace meeting at Shadow Moses Island in Antarctica, a neutral zone, with the new country of New Zealand Korea: Shadow Moses Island, where representatives from both countries were collaborating on research that would make the planet itself a little bit bigger.
Now, I need to tell you something important about the history of New Zealand Korea, or NZK. NZK had actually sent delegates to Shadow Moses Island in the hopes that the President would come himself, and then the delegates would kill him. NZK had been founded by salespeople: the very same salespeople who had found three dead bodies and a torn-up plant at the top of an old castle, all those years ago, and wept and howled and had vowed revenge with one-hundred percent interest, compounded yearly. New Zealand Korea was a country steeped in caffeine-free sin, and came about like this:
All those years ago, some months after the great fighting tournament on some forgettable island, two spec-ops salespeople, dedicated but nigh-forgotten, submitted their final report on the twin tragedies connected to one wide load. One of these was a tough, buff old man, about six feet tall and heavily muscled, who sold very good hairpieces. The other was a mysterious woman covered in black armor, who sold artificial intelligence software. Were not their hearts both bundled in maximum-security attaches, perhaps they could have loved each other… but the cost of love is hard to squeeze onto a balance sheet.
This pair of partners had known the agents sent to dispatch Wario on the way to the island tournament, and had seen later, after bitter and baffling radio silence, that the President of the United States of America actually turned into the very man who had wronged them, this ingratiating fatso whose cursed hands must still drip with ichor. Action Item One and Only was approved with astounding alacrity, all expenses billable: they would need to destroy the US of A, and would need backing from a whole nation of their own to do it.
And so from their base on that same island, the salespeople decided to take over New Zealand as a way to start their new empire. New Zealand was easy to storm into because only the Prime Minister, who was a young attractive woman with multiple personalities and hair colors, lived in the capital. At the time of their operation, she was having a peace meeting on top of a mountain with an extremely black aboriginal and some kind of poisonous frog. The two black-hearted hate-hockers invited themselves in and unexpectedly stole the allegiance of the aboriginal, who himself slaughtered the prime minister and pledged on behalf of the whole aboriginal population to serve the sales force. They toasted over high-dropped frog legs.
Next, the new government of New Zealand decided that in order to take on the USA, they would need nukes, and the best way to get nukes was to take over North Korea. But they also needed manpower to run their new country, and needed super-sleaze agents who could schmooze entire countries, so they went to hell to ask Satan for help—salespeople are of course good friends with Satan. The two hell-divers stepped through a flaming portal and in hell, they petitioned Satan, a giant scaly beast, for assistance and succor. Satan granted them the powers of two barbaric demons: a big evil turtle thing and a big evil dragon-lizard thing, both fire-breathing hellspawn, after the salespeople defeated them in combat. Satan also restored the man’s red-haired youth in exchange for a really excellent hairpiece.
Staying in the shadows as all salespeople do, they sent their demons on an air-drop mission to North Korea, and after fighting off an aerial defense force of semi-psychic furry humanoid experiments, the creatures crash-landed in the castle of the glorious leader of Korea: King Kim Jong K. Rool, a big fat evil crocodile who was waited on by two more anthropomorphized super-soldier servants. One was a fox (with a gun), one was a wolf (with a gun), and both were cousins of the Korean delegation who had been sent to the martial arts tournament: the bird (with a gun) and the dog (with some bombs). How small the world is! If only the two parties had been privy to their shared interests—perhaps a King K. Kontract could have been drawn up. Instead, Kim Jong K. (for Korea) Rool, strung up and sliced up, bled out all over his beautiful carpets, which never rolled up quite right after that.
Now having taken the country of Korea, the salespeople spun a deal with South Korea, allowing the two long-separated countries to join together once again with the demilitarized zone becoming a New Zealand territory. It was really all under the same government, but the borders were open between the three regions; the terrible reign of Kim Jong K. Rool was over; and everyone in the Koreas finally started to calm down. The little strip of “New Zealand” was a wonderful little buffer area. The demons were also sent over to Australia to take it over, but it was really only some animals over there and everyone kind of forgot about it. The nation of New Zealand Korea was born that day, covered in the blood of the old king. Now the salespeople had nukes, a powerful military, and lots of empty land to send all of their future American prisoners.
Now, back to the present. Back to Shadow Moses Island.
The portly President of the USA was no fool, and sensed danger from this up-and-coming military country. He sent his two young champions to the island instead of going there himself, where they clashed with none other than that same aboriginal ambassador and an evil assistant. The Americans tasted victory, but the revelations from that cursed conference echoed outwards: now, in the bloody aftermath, it was obvious that the hazy, blood-orange horizon glimmering over Shadow Moses portented a great war.
As the first act of a diabolical play, NZK sent an invasion force to the biggest American state: Florida, which the President had made the biggest and a little straighter and thicker for obvious reasons. Since America’s guard was obviously up, the sinister salespeoples’ goal was to blow the state to smithereens by sneaking in a nuclear device disguised as a regular old robot. Two escorts brought the bot to an island outside of Miami, but were heroically interrupted by some of the greatest American heroes ever: Florida Man (a thick-set brawler with a mullet and a perpetual smirk, who wears his bathrobe all day outside), Florida Boy (a blond-haired pretty boy who runs around in swim trunks), and Skater Girl Who Wears a Beanie All the Time Even Though it’s Really Hot Outside (who does that very thing). The hit squad bit the dust and the heroes reported to the President: an act of war had been committed on American Soil. And so grimly the president said: “Heroes, go strike back at New Zealand Korea.”
The next piece of communication to the President was one that blackend his brow: Florida Man, Florida Boy, and Skater Girl Who Wears a Beanie All the Time Even Though It’s Really Hot Outside had all been slain in New Zealand Korea by more mutant animals custom-commissioned to be weapons of war. The president crushed the communique in his fist. His big fist. President Wario stared at his fist a long time, and then sighed. He picked up his cherry-red phone-shaped phone, monogrammed with a slick “NKZ” (his adopted son had mistaken how monograms work), and dialed directly the head government office of New Zealand Korea. The president said: “Let’s finish this fight. Four versus four, televised to the whole planet. On the moon.”
The battle on the moon, upon whose outcome the course of nations and the whole world would be set.
At the appointed hour, the whole population of the entire planet looked to the sky and the future. And what they saw was exactly what the President of the United states had wanted: they saw the beloved hero Mario (older and stouter with age); his Vice President, Terry, with his famous metal-brimmed cap; and the President’s two adopted sons, who had become staunch, strong-hearted defenders of the American way as they had grown up: the young psion had channeled his psychic power into fiery explosive punches, had trained his body earnestly and with dedication over the years, and had pulled round him the massive mantle of the Commander of All Armed Forces. The awkward young man who flailed with a trainee’s sword at the martial arts tournament all those years ago had crafted an impossibly fine blade as his partner, and stood now, in fighting stance, with that weapon well-balanced in his hand.
On the other side of the view screen stood four terrifying figures representing the young, violent country of New Zealand Korea, whose nightmarish initials stood simply for sin: those two twisted salespeople: one who had re-gained his original age, gray and angry; one who had never lost any age at all, and who now could not remove her power armor lest her whole body crumble, but who was still incredibly deadly. And behind them skulked two ageless, demonic figures, still dripping with spittle and evil and shadow.
It was a furious battle. The NZK forces where a whirlwind of years of hatred and eons of sin, but the Americans had a leader. The President had learned that the biggest fist of all is the one that is guided by a big brain, and in the greatest deal of his life—for, despite the fate of nations in the balance, it was his precious fighting family that were biggest now in his heart—President Wario dealt a flawless victory in the greatest battle the world had ever seen. Unbelievably, the NZK fighters, their forces of will twisted into a bloated lance, forged over flaming years of desperate hatred, failed to steal even one precious life from America’s fighting force.
In the aftermath, with none of the country’s leaders left alive, the ministers of New Zealand Korea hurriedly signed an annexation treaty from which blossomed the Big United States of America, and as the years passed the BUSA grew to cover the whole planet and then, later, grew bigger still. And so it went for many generations…
Once upon a time…
Robin and Cloud, two of the most powerful heroes in the land, defeated the most powerful Pokemon Trainer in history. They clashed atop the roofs of Saffron City, and though the Pokemon were strong, one after another fell to Cloud’s blade and Robin’s magic. The last defeated was Mewtwo, the monster, a corrupted clone of the progenitor of all Pokemon. Perhaps that grim science would lead to even more misery in the distant future…
Some time later, deep within the jungle, the monarch King K. Rool was plotting. Those two pesky fighters stood against any evil, but surely, thought King K., they could not withstand the power of what once was good. K. Rool’s magnificent plotting had already forced his nemesis Donkey Kong to serve the cruel rule of K. Rool (DK’s smelly chimp friend came as a free bonus), and he cleverly planned an all-out attack that would strip the land of their heroes. He would kill the heroes, marry a princess, and the throne would fall to him: King K. Rool, the Crocodile King of All Things. He and his green-garbed servants (for it was jade jungle juju that mind-morphed the monkeys) were plotting this when Robin and Cloud burst into the shack and slaughtered all three of them. Robin was a girl at the time, for some reason.
Meanwhile, in space, dark forces plotted to consume the universe…
Star Wolf, furious, enraged, ashamed by defeat after defeat, reached into the darkest cranny of the cosmos and pulled at the corners of the darkness in between the stars. From the Outside leaked corruption, blinding Wolf with darkness that poured black from the hole in his soul, shaping itself to the things he kept always by his side: misery and hatred poured into his cherished sidearm, and its scratched and polished parts alike crackled and snapped and glowed as it grew powerful legs, explosive arms, and a glowing, staring, cerulean eye. Everything left of Star Wolf congealed into a charcoal blob of hateful hunger that played with his empty body like a puppet. These three wretched creatures flew onwards towards civilization, where they would call from the cosmos more like themselves… that was their plan, anyway, but in a burst of light Robin and Cloud leaped through space and destroyed all three of them in an instant. Robin was a boy again this time, for some reason.
With the universe saved, the crown princesses of the Mushroom Kingdom and their dog decided to make a giant cake to celebrate the heroes’ victory and their return from space. Still cheering and weeping, their transmission clicked off, and the five shipmates gazed at the stars as the ship swept them towards home and pastries.
Weren’t there only two, you ask? Robin and Cloud? Well, that’s what the two of them thought, too. But a dribble of chaos muck clung to a crack in Cloud’s sword, a droplet of congealed hatred sank into Robin’s inkwell, a particle of primeval power slipped into the refrigerator, and neither of them noticed until it was too late…
Until they touched down and the hatchway opened to cheering and sobbing and tickertape-tossing (and a dog wearing a sweater)…
Until the cake had been wheeled out and the princesses and their dog all took out their claws…
The instant the first slice was cut, the three hosts, now hosting a vengeful virus, attacked the heroes in a frenzy of spite and spittle. Swinging and spelling furiously, Cloud and Robin (who was a girl again, for some reason) deflected the girls’ attacks away from the terrified crowds and led them up to the roof of the castle, where a furious battle took place between Earth’s exhausted saviors and the corrupt royalty. As Cloud clocked Isabelle into dreamland, the canine being the last to cling to consciousness, he turned to Robin and said something in Japanese. Robin nodded.
The two friends plopped down on the castle roof, the sun still high over their heads. Peach and Daisy were both snoring daintily. The evil had been defeated for good, disintegrated by the power of the morning sun. And downstairs, there was still cake.
Suddenly, they heard a repulsive voice from below.
“Wa-ha-hey there, heroes,” cackled Wario, wearing a tremendously awful cyan and magenta suit. Behind him stood a fat grey penguin and a fat grey crocodile, neither of whom looked quite real. “If you don’t hand over that cake, we’ll kill you and take over the world.”
“Fine,” Robin (who was a boy again for some reason) said grimly. “Try it. But let’s at least fight somewhere else. The people of the castle have seen enough brutality.” Downtown, Cloud got a haircut and a new black outfit, and the two heroes fought the fat warlord and his two monochromatic minions and were both horribly killed. Wario stole the cake, slit the princess’s throats, ate their dog, and plunged the world into terror. His belly and power grew and grew as his wa-ha-horrible rule consumed more and more of the innocent planet, until many many years later the whole world had been reduced to little more than the crumbling plaything of the wretchedly warped Wario and his white-washed warriors.
Some time later, two new heroes stood against the ways of weight. Dr. Mario and Wii Fit Trainer struck out for the planet’s center where Wario, transformed into a scaly beast, toyed with his fighters and with the Earth’s core alike. They fought for peace, for fitness, for the restoration of order and in the loving memory of those past heroes lost, but they, too, were defeated: dashed into the lava, where Wario’s roaring laughter drowned out their final words as they melted into the magma. And Wario reigned on, consuming rocks and oceans and cities until his fatness supplanted the land itself, and his triad of colorless enforcers (for there was a third now, a flat one, since Wario had very little imagination) erected atop the Wario World an enormous city, and from there ruled mercilessly in his stead. Eventually, Wario slept, as the land always does, and his grey giants gripped the world in their greedy fists.
And right on cue, into the city stepped Ganondorf and Bowser, vainglorious villains who had long ago set aside their differences—and perhaps even their evil hearts—to plot and scheme to rescue the world from Wario. They both claimed the reason was want of power, and that this was just a tactical maneuver, but—well, let me tell you the rest, and you can decide for yourself.
The two Kings climbed atop the tall city skyscrapers from which the fatlords ruled. The starlit sky shone bright onto the five massive fighters, each of whom could cross a rooftop in four strides, and they charged into battle: claws slicing, fists flying, boots exploding, bacon frying. Soon the two villains had dispatched two of the other three villains and stood there against the flat man, blessed with the very essence of the fat man, and twice as strong as the others. He said nothing, flickering in and out of sight near the building’s edge. And without a word, Ganondorf leapt forward, and the King and the Thing disappeared from the roof and plummeted together into legend.
Bowser quickly took the world for himself and ruled with an iron claw, launching the land into misery. It wasn’t as miserable as it had been under Wario, but things were still pretty awful for everyone except Bowser. It went so well for the new King that he went on vacation with his son and his pet plant to a tropical island. Bowser snoozed while Bowser Junior chased beetles and hunted for treasure in the sand.
“Now,” whispered a voice. Koopa Jr. exploded.
A man in red camouflage stepped out from behind a palm tree, and a second man in a green armless jacket leapt out of the shallow water. The missing Mario brothers were no longer missing.
Mario, tactical weapons expert, ripped the plant’s leaves off. Luigi, the vampire hunter, throttled the Koopa King with an iron chain whip, and the brothers set sail for home on Bowser’s pirate ship. Out on the open sea, the ship was attacked by a scary scarlet alien monster and its ridiculous red robots. Mario and Luigi danced around lasers and sidestepped fireballs, handily defeated the alien, and drowned the bots under the keel. Unshaken, the Mario brothers sailed home, retired from fighting, and built an era of peace and harmony and flying airships. And so it went for many generations…
Although some thought of the place as a bore,
The Tabs down in Harbour had much to give thanks for.
The worst one could say was, if his mood was quite poor,
“How nice it would be if this frame had a door.”
The sun shone up high on a crisp autumn day.
The Tabs were all chatting during a break from their play.
Soon matters turned to the struggles of friends,
And the excuse of the date to help make amends.
An antler-eared Tab remarked with a sigh,
“If only the lads at Tall Castle came by.
My cousin, a chicken, is hard up on his luck.
That place has been ruined by a nasty green—”
Suddenly six arrows appeared in his face!
The Tabs ducked for cover in a perilous race!
From windows and doorframes there billowed white smoke
(“I knew I needed a door”, grumbled a bag-headed bloke).
The reindeer’s own cousin had turned to the dark!
A rooster-masked hacker who flew in on a lark.
He’d bought some fresh cheats to win fights for free,
And as the Tabs scrambled he clucked loudly in glee!
But the panic was stopped by a Tab with a hat
(And a billowy shirt that made him look fat).
“Listen up, Tabs! This jerk has the gall
to swoop in on Thanksgiving and slaughter us all!”
“But he’s made one mistake, he forgot today’s date!
And today is the day that our friendship’s most great!
Let’s show this dumb cluck that he can’t be a winner
And then let’s go home and eat his feathers for dinner!”
With courage anew the Tabs rallied and struck!
The hacker (and cousin) were both out of luck.
And as the sun set the Tabs danced and sang,
Giving great thanks for fun times with the gang.
Now the Tabs down in TABG liked battle a lot.
But the Gronch, high up in Tall Castle, did NOT.
From his towering fortress the Gronch frowned and said,
“These goggle-eyed tabs aren’t right in the head!”
“They shoot and they loot and they blast euro-trash!”
“My whole castle shakes with every car crash!”
The very next day, some Tabs stole his car!
The only thing left was an empty old BAR!
The gronch jumped in the air and and shouted “I’ve had it! Enough!”
“I can’t take any more of this battlegrounds stuff!”
He dashed to his keyboard and started to work!
The hours flew by and his frown changed to a smirk!
One short week later the Gronch sat back to relax.
Tall Castle was quiet now, that was a fact!
His hard work paid off! The Tabs were defeated—
They’d seen what he’d done and had swiftly retreated.
The Gronch cackled and and browsed to thegronch.gg:
Download Fresh TABG Hacks for the Low Price of Free.
The cover screams at you. It really screams. Just like an American wizard to print thousands of copies of a sales catalogue that just won’t shut up. Not until you give in, pull the catalog open with a sigh as the screeching voice finally quells itself, and entertain the living, charlatan scripture that guides you through a forest of candies and treats whose overseas shipping you can’t possibly afford. The enchanted catalogue can tell when you’re skimming, too, and obviously-disinterested readers tend to end up with paper cuts.
CHOCOLATE FAMILIARS are packaged as large, fist-sized chocolate eggs coated in shining, animated foil. Once you tap the tip of your wand to the top of the egg, the foil peels downwards, curling into a sort of nest-like bowl. The paper-thin shell then crumbles away to reveal a chocolate facsimile of a magical beast. The stronger the chocolate, the more frightening the creature: white-chocolate and milk-chocolate eggs might contain a tiny white mouse, siamese cat, or snowy owl, while a dark-chocolate egg could hide a thick-set rat, a skittering tarantula, or a speckled adder. Whether cuddly or creepy, the tiny fondue familiars are best friends with their owners until they get eaten.
The creatures weren’t chosen by the chocolatiers, but by an extremely complex charm cast on the candy during the chocolate-making process. The spell molded chocolate creatures into life based on the strength of the chocolate, and for the darkest chocolate eggs the spell wasn’t stable. Augustus’s “Dark Warlock” 97% Dark Chocolate Familiars turned out a couple of horrifying but safe familiars, like the egg filled with thousands of tiny sprinkle-like spiders, or the one that turned into a chocolate bicorn with a wafer horn. The discontinuation of the 97% line was only because Augustus wanted to be very, very sure that the chocolate basilisk would never, ever show up again.
ALMIGHTY AUGUSTUS’S GOBBLE-EM GOBLINS: these delicious, miniature, geared-up goblin figurines come in inexpensive packs of seven. Immediately after climbing out of their platoon box, these little un-meltable ice-cream goblins become vigilant fighters until death. Once a goblin dies, you’d better gobble it up quick: death breaks the freezing enchantment and it’ll start to melt. Since the creatures are made of ice cream and cannot carry projectiles, they all fight hand-to-hand, except for a few of the rarer soldiers who carry thick swords or axes. There are five “factions” of Gobble-Em Goblins, each with a differently-colored platoon box: Brownies, Cookie-Creamers, Orangey Creamsickers, Pistachioes, and Vanillers. Vanillers is the worst selling faction for some reason.
At just two sickles per box, imported—that’s a bit more than half a pound sterling—the company only makes a tiny profit on each Gobble-Em Goblin, and relies on large volume-of-sale to bump up revenue. At such a low price, even a relatively poor wizard child can build up their own Gobble-Em Army. Goblin battles were very popular with wizard students during the summer that Augustus’s Candies had a direct import line to Hogwarts. Although the goblins are supposed to be eaten once defeated, some of the battles grew to be so big that pools of melted goblin began to show up in house common rooms and bedrooms, and a few sticky puddles even made their way into the restricted section of the library. Allegedly, Dumbledore thought this was very funny and declined to ban the treats. Some time later, the “Vanillers” faction was phased out in favor of the “Lemon Droppsers,” which sold much better.
FAERIE FISH (discontinued) were small packets of tough red gummy candy that superficially resembled fish eggs. When left alone in sugar water, they “hatch” and grow into living red gummy fish that have a strange berry-like flavor and a pleasant chewy consistency. They wriggle around in the water—a little less fluidly than real fish, but they’re always smiling.
Faerie Fish demoed poorly. Hungry wizard children prefer eating candy to investing in the possibility of candy and a guarantee of a soggy robe. Furthermore, there was a lot of up-front work and waiting to do that didn’t balance against the (nonetheless satisfying) payoff of snapping the little red fish out of the water and chomping down on them as they squirmed. Augustus’s Candies considered selling special fish that could lay more eggs, but that sounded too much like a scam: “Buy one pack of faerie fish eggs for a handful of sickles and start hatching a profit!” After Augustus cracked a joke about pyramid schemes seeming exactly in line with legendary fae trickery, he rejected the idea and discontinued Faerie Fish.
JELLY WEEPERS are another gummy candy. They look like a large, angular teardrop with a flavorful liquid center that gushes out when bitten, causing the chewer to immediately burst into tears. These are sold in packets of just one, with a prominent warning not to eat two at once, because each additional weeper causes liquid to burst from more places than just your eyes: first your nose (students who abuse weepers to invoke a crying fit see this as a bonus), then mouth, then… any other available places.
DOLLY’S OWN FIZZ GUMS are spongy candies that your teeth cut right through. They immediately fill your mouth with a fizzy flavored foam. Frankly, Fizz Gums are disgusting. The company has no idea why they sell so well, despite the branding that distances Fizz Gums from Augustus’s other treats.
PERSONIZED BALLOONS, one of Augustus’s few inedible offerings, are a combination of animated wizard photographs with muggle rubber balloons. Each balloon has been “personized” with a personality and face which both inflate as the balloon grows in size. Most are very friendly and mime encouragement: they feign weakness when small and crumpled; they make faces and puff up their cheeks as they are inflated; they smile and (silently) laugh as they float and bounce around. Personized balloons slightly lose their composure as they’re inflated to near-bursting, but not to an uncomfortable degree; at most a brief flicker of perhaps-feigned uncertainty as they get bigger and bigger, before continuing to encourage their playmates.
FOOD ROLL-UPS are small waxy paper squares with a shimmering spell cast on them that makes one side a little slippery. Place two, shiny side inwards, on either side of any foodstuff, tap your wand to one of them, and with a wobble and a zwoooop!, the food gets squished into a thin square of flat goo stuck firmly between the two pieces of paper. This magical sandwich can be rolled up, stored, sliced, etc. Most foods are flattened into a very thin square; extremely large foods (for example, an entire roasted goose) end up thicker and tough to roll. To undo the seal, peel off the same piece that touched the wand, and the squashed food in the middle bounces slightly as it re-inflates into its original shape. Roll-ups only slightly protect the temperature of the food—there’s no extra magic involved, just the natural consequence of less thermodynamic heat transference—but it’s much easier for a wizard to heat or cool something by magic, or just use an insulated lunch box, once the food is rolled into a convenient little tube.
Food Roll-Ups are very cheap and sell well when paired with cauldron cakes, coffin cookies (a generously proportioned chocolate soft cookie sandwich, in the shape of a coffin, with a white-cookie cross on the top, and the shallow inset in the lower cookie filled with a distinctive strawberry-cinnamon jam), pidgin pot pie (an American-style pot pie filled with gravy, assorted meats, and vegetables, where the meat and vegetable chunks magically resemble little living people or animals that swim in the gravy), and other large pastry-type foods that students may want to stock up on before the school year starts.
A food roll-up can be rolled up and stored, or it can be sliced or torn into smaller pieces, which also divides the food. On the Hogwarts Express, a cauldron cake can be squashed into a Food Roll-up, then very easily ripped into fairly equal parts to share among friends who haven’t mastered the esoteric and dangerous Divisio charm. Even if they know Divisio, which enchants one’s wand to cut through the first thing it’s placed on top of, it’s much easier and a lot less sticky to cut a convenient paper square instead of a syrup-covered cake. Divisio is not taught in schools except through special electives, as “the first thing it’s placed on top of” is non-exclusive, and often involves books, tables, robes, and fingers.
CHOCOLATE CONCEPTS dissolve under your tongue and allow you to viscerally imagine eating anything you can visualize that’s made of chocolate, like a lucid hallucination. Zero calories and won’t make you sick to your stomach, just sick of chocolate. Bummer.
LEMON DROPKICKS. Try and keep your balance once your legs go crazy after eating one of these.
AUSPICIOUS AUGUSTUS’S SWEET QUILLS (discontinued) are more or less the same as Honeyduke’s Sweet Quills: chew on the end during a tough exam for a refreshing sugar high. Augustus was especially proud of this product, certain he’d thought of it by himself until he received a letter from a first-year Hogwarts student comparing them unfavorably to Honeyduke’s. After staring hard into the corner of his office ceiling for a good few minutes, Augustus discontinued Auspicious Augustus’s Sweet Quills and mounted the letter on his office wall as a reminder of his own pride: however original one of his ideas might be, novelty only produces one sale. Flavor is what produces fan letters.
GOB STOPPERS are a kind of long-lasting, tough, chewy candy that comes in tins. Each tin is filled with a checkerboard flavor pattern of little squares of the stuff: chocolate and vanilla, strawberry and banana, whiskey and soda (for adults). While you’re chewing on a Gob Stopper it will absorb all the liquid in your mouth and keep it pleasantly dry, which is great for, er, all kinds of things.
SUGAR HAIR. Young witches who regularly chew on their hair during class are sure to fall in love with this sweet alternative. Just like Sugar Quills, Augustus designed this treat to corner the market on students who crave sugar in the library or lecture hall. Flavor varies by hair color: black is liquorice, dark brown is dark chocolate, light brown is milk chocolate, blonde is a wheaty citrus, and red is gingerbread, obviously.
ARTICULATE AUGUSTUS’S SPEAK-EASIES are small pastel-colored candies made of heavily compressed sugar powder that has been shaped into a kind of twirl, stacked together, and then wrapped up in a holographic cellophane wrapper. Each packet of about twenty-three candies is themed after one of a selection of difficult-to-pronounce common spells and charms taught in wizarding schools. The candies double as a study aid for these tricky incantations. After you eat one, you forcibly pronounce, with perfect intonation, the spell that the candy represents. For flavor, the candies are molded to a shape that matches the spell’s wand movement, and they have a consistent color and taste unique to each spell, although the candies themselves often fluctuate slightly in color.
For instance, take a packet of the Wingardium Leviosa Speak-Easies popular with first-year students. The candies are shaped like a sideways “2”, are colored varying shades of bony white lavender, and taste like plums mixed with sugar and chalk. After eating one, the next words you speak will be a perfect recital of Wingardium Leviosa.
In theory, a diligent student can use these to practice the mouth feeling of difficult charms to help develop oratory muscle memory. Realistically, however, lazy students tended to rely on these during exams—until the thoughtful headmaster of an American wizarding academy suggested giving the user an additional “tic” as a kind of proof of usage. His letter to Augustus suggested: winking; pronouncing “speak-easy” before the spell; creating a colored flash in the user’s mouth; or releasing a powerful scent that matched the flavor. Augustus’s decided that making the user wink as they spoke was an excellent and non-invasive modification, which actually resulted in two interesting phenomena once the change arrived at schools:
Firstly, teachers conducting exams occasionally broke down laughing as they watched students violently struggle to prevent themselves from winking after secretly swallowing a Speak-Easy during practical examinations. At least one poor old professor tittered himself senseless and had to be replaced by the assistant headmaster for a few hours.
Secondly, students who relied too much on Speak-Easies tended to wink as they cast the charm even without the candy. This obviously led to some bullying.
Augustus’s eventually modified the candies again to create a brief flash of colored light upon activation, which was much easier to see in a hall full of students than a wink was, and wasn’t as likely to cause any long-term bullying. Augustus’s sent a large package full of candies to the academy headmaster regardless as thanks for his ideas, although their letter “regretted” that they were totally unwilling to touch his final idea with a 13-inch wand1: deliberately faulty Unforgivable Speak-Easies.
Unforgivable Speak-Easies, as imagined by the helpful American headmaster, were Speak-Easies styled after the three Unforgivable Curses: Imperio, Crucio, and Avada Kedavra. The headmaster’s idea was that any dark wizard honestly trying to use these candies for practice would find them unforgivably incorrect: the intonation would be very, very, very slightly wrong. Additionally, perhaps using more than one would impart a very expensive, very secretive, very hard-to-break curse that would force the user to tend towards that intonation permanently, crippling their ability to use those spells. This was much more interesting and probably much more legal than making the user’s brain melt, and would prevent curious students from ever actually using the curses. Aside from the potential ethical, moral, financial, and legal ramifications, Augustus strongly doubted that Dark Wizards would be stupid enough to buy candy that openly advertised itself as an aid to maiming people, and declined any research into the idea.
ARGUABLY AUGUSTUS’S MINUTE APOTHECARY DROPS (discontinued) are small hard-packed balls of grimy goo that are essentially “potion starters.” Each one contains an easy-mix base and the foundational ingredients of various kinds of basic early-year potions. Stir one into a bubbling cauldron and your homework is done faster than you can say “Accio eye of newt.”
These were discontinued in response to Augustus hearing that the drops were used to cheat during potions exams. Minute Apothecary Drops are not candy and taste absolutely terrible; some students were using the drops to cheat during potions exams by hiding them in their mouths. These cheaters were easy to identify because they usually threw up into their cauldrons immediately afterwards, which certain cynical potions professors found extremely satisfying. After reflection, Augustus decided it was harmful to his brand to give his candies a cousin that tasted like the bottom of a cauldron which hadn’t been cleaned in seven years.
SLICED BEVERAGES (discontinued): Convenient, portable slices of many of your favorite drinks, including water, tea (with and without milk and sugar), and coffee (same). A second spell, aside from the one that solidifies the liquids, keeps dirt and grime off the slices, so you can throw a few slices of water in your robe pockets without needing to carry a bottle. These were discontinued because they didn’t sell very well to sugar-hungry students, and Augustus hated how they seemed to suck the very idea of fun out of his candy catalogue pages.
GUMMY SNITCHES: Fast-flying chocolate snitches—which these are not—have been around since Quiddich conquered the wizarding world of sports, but they don’t tend to sell very well. If you catch one with your teeth, either the wings snap off in your mouth and the rest of the chocolate falls to the ground, or your bite merely glances off the snitch’s big tasty chocolate body. If you try and grab a chocolate snitch with your hands, most of the chocolate ends up on your palms and fingers instead of in your mouth, since you practically have to crush it to catch it. Chocolate snitches flew out of the public eye and modifications have, so far, failed to score, so Augustus’s Candies created Slow-Flying Gummy Snitches.
Gummy Snitches glide around a meter-diameter spherical space centered on their cellophane wrapper (so don’t throw it away! The best thing to do is to put it in your robe pocket). Instead of thin, flickering foil-covered wings, the wings on the gummy snitches are thick, chewy caricatures that slowly flap as the snitch glides around its owner. The soft gummy texture makes it easy to nab with your teeth, it’s too big to accidentally swallow, and it won’t burst if you grab it really hard. You can even let the snitch go again if you like. Gummy snitches come in a variety of fun, sparkling flavors, like gold champagne, classic cola, and rainbow fruity fizz.
A few students like to keep their gummy snitch flying indefinitely as a sort of pseudo-familiar. Since the snitch will orbit its wrapper for up to ten minutes and can be magically “recharged” with a very basic charm, it’s possible to have a gummy snitch buzzing around you all the time. This, however, is not nearly as interesting as unwrapping a few dozen gummy snitches at once and stuffing the wrappers in your friend’s robe pockets when he’s not looking.
FLOO FLUFF: Frighten your friends and family when you eat some of this sparkling sugar powder instead of tossing it into the fireplace.
DECEASTICKY BUNS (discontinued) were an innovative piece of culinary-ectoplasmic research. Each of these tasty, sticky, cinnamon-flavored buns left behind a foggy little ghost bun hovering in the place it had “died” by being bitten into, impaled (with a fork) or cut for the first time. The remnant buns would fade away after a few days unless they were eaten by a real ghost, like the 87-year-old spirit of a young lady who lived in Augustus’s office chimney and whose history, thankfully, will not be recounted here2. She tested a bun that had died heroically on Augustus’s sideboard, and described it sadly as “quite tasteless, but a thoughtful gesture nonetheless.” After that, Augustus said he considered them a failure and discontinued the project.
GUMMY-GUM-GUM is chewing gum that will make your jaw hit the floor—if you chew the whole pack at once. Just one stick at a time will merely stretch your jaw down to the base of your neck as you chew. Gummy-Gum-Gum is colored bright pink and has a classic bright pink flavor. Yes, Augustus’s refuses to explain what the flavor really is. It’s just pink.
[REDACTED] are little strawberry and vanilla snack cakes with a cross motif. Eating one alters your voice and vocal profile for a few hours. Don’t ask why. Really, really, don’t ask. Augustus hates these and won’t explain why he can’t discontinue them. [REDACTED] are only available by special order and aren’t in the catalogues.
ALCHEMICAL AUGUSTUS’S COMBUSTABUBBLE GUM: This foul, black chewing gum that tastes of liquorice, coffee grounds, and soot became remarkably popular with alchemists, especially older students. Energizing and strong enough in flavor to overpower fouler fumes, it wasn’t meant to be used for bubbling, but the fact that even the tiniest bubble from this gum exploded with a sound like a dragon swallowing a combustion engine only made it more popular with the already-outcast alchemist students. As the number of blasts echoing through the halls of wizard universities increased, so too did alchemy enthusiasts grow to be even more reviled than they already were. They chewed with pride, and alchemy examinees were usually given whole buildings to themselves, often due to conveniently timed university holidays.
Augustus demoed a special variant of Combustabubble Gum with the same spell-ingredients as Gob Stoppers. They were designed to absorb dangerous alchemical and potion fumes, but test audiences agreed that they’d “rather inhale the inside of a wyvern’s wind pipe3 than one more whiff of that grease” and that it tasted “like dragon dung.” This was surprising because the soot-like flavor and combustive power of the original actually came from—actually, never mind.
OUR-GAS SODA POPS in Orange Cream, Root Beer, and Blue flavors, come fastened together in two cold little bottles joined at their caps in an hourglass shape. Snap the hourglass in half and you get two open bottles. One goes down ultra-fizzy but the bubbles disappear after drinking, and the other goes down smooth but is guaranteed to make the drinker belch horribly (or hilariously). These are meant to be shared between two drinkers: the bubbles magically move to the other drinker’s stomach. Alternatively, mixing the bottles and drinking will guarantee a fit of extreme belching an hour later that can be useful for many situations. This bonus feature completes a three-way naming pun (“our gas”, “hour glass”, and “hour gas”) that Augustus is very proud of, even though he doesn’t usually go in for prank treats.
APPARENTLY AUGUSTUS’S VERY MILD BEANS come in a beige box and are probably candy, but although the flavors—which include Waffle, Black Tea with Milk & Sugar, Dishonest Blueberry, Orange Pulp, Foreign Red Pastry Filling, Sweet Cucumber, and Maple Snow, among others—are sweet, they’re barely detectable to kids. The beans are all slightly off-white or barely-not-black, and have a fancy “A” written on them. These must be a treat for adults.
it's sabs, like "sobs"