Tall Tales for Tiny Trykers - ROLEPLAY

Passing a campfire on my way home after another epic swim on behalf a messenger too lazy to do her job, I heard a youngling ask about the history of the Kitins. Of course he was told the usual nonsense of epic Fyros greed and folly.

Why, you might wonder, do the proud Fyros not stand up and declare this a lie? Yes, we all know that they are not the brightest of homins, but even so! The reason is simple: though the truth is less damning than the lie we have been led to believe, it is infinitely more embarrassing.

As we all know, the Fyros live in the desert. Most of us are too polite (or too small) to tell them to their faces that they make a ripe Yubo cheese seem sweetly fragrant by comparison. It is hardly their fault, I suppose, that water is so scarce in their homeland that using it for washing is considered profligate. It's not like here in Fairhaven, where to visit your next door neighbour involves a three hour swim, or Zora where it never stops raining long enough to get dirty, and the Matis, of course, are too sissy to leave the house without a coating of perfume.

There was a Fyros called Freddy. He was not very bright as the Fyros go, which is not very bright as most homins go, if usually brighter than, say, a Yubo, but he was ten times as smelly. We are talking a seriously over-ripe blue Yubo cheese, here; one that is oozing out of the larder, leaving a trail of fetid slime in its wake. That's a Fyros delicacy, needless to say.

Not only was Freddy a trifle unfragrant but he had the biggest bed bugs and head lice of all Fyros. Freddy loved his anything-but-little friends. He thought them fluffy and called them bunnies. Eventually, though, and possibly because the Matis ambassador was complaining about the stink (from the far side of the city) the Fyros elders told Freddy that he should either take a bath or get rid of his friends.

Long and hard Freddy podered over his dilemma, growing no sweeter in the process, until an idea struck him. If there was one thing Freddy was good at, it was digging, so he dug a home for his "bunnies", swept them into it and covered it with a carpet. His neighbours, fearing that they might next to be threatened with bathing, swept all their "bunnies" under Freddy's rug, and soon all of Fyros was doing the same and Freddy had to dig deeper and deeper to make enough room, until eventually he reached the Prime Roots.

All might have ended well, I suppose, but the "bunnies" grew ever bigger on the root saps and they missed the taste of homin. They eventually found their way back to the surface and have been eating us ever since.

I don't know who spread the lie that it was greed or the search for a dragon that led the Fyros ever deeper, but I can understand why the Fyros elders wouldn't want us to know that done by a stinky man that couldn't tell a bunny from a bed bug.

If you doubt the truth of this tale, take a good look at Fyrosfreddy's famous "hair". He is as bald as a Goari egg. That is not hair but a "bunny" he couldn't be parted from. It's not as big as the other kitins because it has been feeding off his brain, which as we know is small even for a Fyros, and can't be very nutritious.