Even he is not usually foolish enough to piss off a troll. Things that piss kidney stones are better left unpissed. Ptremendous Tarmigan? Even his friends have trouble telling what TP/PT is thinking, or if he is thinking. He is dumb as rocks in his own right, although not constructed of same, and his beaky face ain’t what you’d call expressive.
How can foam rubber and terry cloth come to life and have adventures? Because this is a fantasy story, that’s how. They could come to life if this were a skiffy story, too, but then I’d have to bore you with a bunch of bullshit explanation. See how lucky you are to miss all that?
The trolls haul the subway car down the long, cold tunnel. People and other forms of allegedly intelligent life get on and off. “Avenue J!” the lead troll bawls, and then, “Lois Lane!” and then, after a while, “Avenue Q!”
“Stop that, Cleveland,” Tundra Dawn whispers. “This is a family story.”
“I can’t help it. I feel like double-clicking,” Cleveland whispers back.
They leave Avenue Q behind. Cleveland finally does stop that. After what seems like forever but is really just a long time, the troll roars, “The palace! You wanna play the palace, this is where you get off!”
“I already got off,” Cleveland says to no one in particular.
“Someone should beat that troll with a big shtick,” Tremendous Ptarmigan says as he and Cleveland and Tundra Dawn get down from the subway car.
No one guards the way out. “Where’s the Metrognome here?” Tundra Dawn wonders.
“Probably at the Mets game,” Cleveland doesn’t quite explain.
Up the stairs they trudge, and themselves in the very heart of Metropolis find. Into the palace they walk. Very palatial it is, yes. Escorted straight to the King they are. Backward run sentences until reels the mind.
If getting escorted straight to the King doesn’t prove this is a fantasy story, I don’t know what would. In skiffy, you pretend hardest to be realistic when you’re most un-. In fantasy, you can roll with it. Sometimes. So roll with it. Please?
The King—his name is Wolcott, which is why he likes getting called King a lot—looks them over. “What are you doing in my throne room?” he asks. This is not the kind of fantasy where everybody, or even anybody, knows everything. It is more the kind of fantasy where nobody knows anything.
You see? It is more realistic than you thought.
“We’re hunting the mammyth.” This time, Cleveland comes out with it before Tundra Dawn can trample his toes.
“In my throne room?” King Wolcott says. “I don’t know everything there is to know about mammyths” (told you so—if he’s a reliable narrator) “but I never heard that they were very common in palaces. Isn’t that more what the tundra’s for?”
Wistfully, Tundra Dawn says, “If they were very common anywhere, we wouldn’t have to hunt them so hard.”
“Well, why are you hunting them?” the King asks.
“It’s a Quest,” Cleveland says.
“An Adventure,” Ptremendous Tarmigan adds.
“It’s a whole ’nother story,” Tundra Dawn says. And, since it is, I don’t have to tell it here. I can get on with the silly one of which I’m in the middle.
TP/PT raises an arm—a wing—a whatever the hell. “Excuse me, your Kinginess, but where to you keep your big birds’ room?”
“Go out there.” King Wolcott points to a doorway. “Turn left, then right, then left again. You can’t miss it.”
He and Tundra Dawn and Cleveland yatter away for the next half-hour. Tundra Dawn presumes that Tremendous Ptarmigan damn well can miss it—damn well has missed it—after all. But when Ptremendous Tarmigan comes back, he does seem relieved. He seems happy, too. TP/PT seems happy most of the time. Tundra Dawn guesses it has a good deal to do with the seeds he eats.
At last, when the spectacle of a muppetoid heroine in chainmail and her clunky sidekicks commences to pall, the King asks, “How can I help you in your quest?” By which he means, How can I get you the devil out of here?, but it sounds much nicer the way he says it.
They dicker for a while, which, unlike some of the bits here, is less obscene than it sounds. King Wolcott decides that some horses and some food are a small price to pay for washing these adventurers right outa his hair and sending them on their way. He even throws in a little cash. He watches them ride away into what would be the sunset, only the sun doesn’t set