| Two
The remote island on which the Woogies live is a strange place. The Woogies themselves are well known for their fear of the unknown, and so have in fact never visited most of it themselves. They prefer the safety of their own company, and so they kept themselves to themselves, living on the coast. The rest of the island was left unexplored, and was mostly taken up by dense jungle. This, as any real explorer will tell you, is a shame, as jungle is always a very exciting place. It is always the sort of place where people can have adventures. Not all of the island was jungle though. Right in the middle, there rose from the trees a great mountain, towering over much of the surrounding area. Officially, maps called it the Black Crag. Most Woogies just called it the Big Rock That Nobody Ever Goes Near. The reason why no one would ever go near, aside from the already obvious fact that any Woogie ever liked to leave his own home, was a much darker one. From an early age, the King instructed the boy that the Crag was the most dangerous area on the whole island, for it was said that there was one who lived there who was not a Woogie like them. He was a powerful sorcerer, a great evil who must be avoided at all costs, for fear that he would do something altogether nasty to the Woogies as a whole. It was true. In a cave on the side of the Crag there really did live a real wizard. We shall call him Hamish McFeeble, because that was his name, and when someone’s name is Hamish it’s usually a very silly thing to call them David, or Bartholomew, or even Eddie – although, Eddie is a very good name, especially when compared to Hamish. Hamish had found himself on the island some years ago, and quite by accident. He had, in fact, been shipwrecked. At least, that was the story the way he would tell it. It actual fact, he had been thrown off a nearby ship when the captain had caught him trying to make a toilet explode. He explained that he had been creating a new way to get rid of waste on the ship, but the captain didn’t see the good side of not having a toilet anymore and so ordered that he be thrown over the side. He really was a wizard though, and so the sailors had thrown all his equipment into the sea as well, because they were afraid of it. One item in particular had made it safely to the island with Hamish, and now it was propped up against a wall in his cave. It was called the MirrorMere. When you first looked at it, it was just like a very large normal mirror, with some nice designs around the edge and things like that. But if you knew just the right words to say, and looked at it in just the right fashion, as Hamish did, it suddenly became like a big magical television. Hamish could watch anywhere on the island and see what was happening at that very moment. Lately, he’d been using it to watch the boy. Oh yes, Hamish was very interested in him. The wizard had never regarded the cowardly Woogies as a threat, because he had soon realised none of them would ever venture far enough into the jungle to get anywhere close to him. But this boy was different. Hamish had a bad feeling about this. Now, if you or I have a bad feeling about something, it can often mean one of two things. Sometimes, it is just a silly thing, like when you go to the dentist and you have a bad feeling that he’s going to take all your teeth out, but in the end he just looks and them and gives you a nice sticker, and you wonder what all the fuss was about. And then there are the other type of bad feeling, where you do things like drop your favourite pen down a drain and realise you will never get it back. But even that kind of bad feeling will go away after a while, because someone will always get you a new pen. But Hamish was a wizard after all, so his bad feelings were usually a lot more accurate. For instance, he’d once had a bad feeling that if he stood where he was standing at the time much longer, something bad would happen. So he moved, and a moment later, high above him, two swallows dropped the coconut they had been carrying and it smashing into the ground at the exact spot where he had just been. And then of course, the time when he had a bad feeling that if he was caught fiddling with the toilet again he was going to get wet. And I think we all know what happened there. So when Hamish looked at the boy in the MirrorMere, he knew that the bad feeling he was having was always going to mean something, well, bad. He feared that the boy would pose a threat to him, and he knew he had to make sure that didn’t happen. So he came up with a plan. And now he was completing a very complicated spell, which he hoped would cause the Woogies a lot of trouble. With a wave of a wand here and the pouring of some funny green liquid into some bubbling red liquid here, it was all coming along quite nicely. A huge machine was taking up quite a large bit of the cave. Hamish had been building it for months. It all was coming along quite nicely, when suddenly, there was a tap on the door. Hamish span around to look at it. “What the…?” he exclaimed. “How did that get there?” Then he remembered that he had forgotten to disable another spell that he had cast to magically build a plumbing network throughout the mountain. That’s the kind of thing you do when you’re a wizard. Another tap appeared at his feet. He hurriedly finished the spell he was casting, and then switched on the machine he had just finished. Then he set off to find the source of his tap problem. Back in Woogieville, which is what the Woogies called the town they had built (they were not very good at making up names for things) the King was pacing up and down in his throne room when the Archbishop of Woogenbury finally swept in. I hope you can still remember who he is, for it did take quite a lot of time to get back to this point. The King practically ran over to meet him. “Archbishop!” He said. Well, that’s not true. What he actually said sounded like “Arfbashwoogie!” But as I don’t think many of you can speak fluent Woogish, I have translated everything that they say for you with the help of some very kind woogies from Woogieville University. But anyway. “Archbishop!” the King said again. “I have heard that you have read of a great terror about to strike down my people!” The Archbishop sighed. Of course he had read of it. It had been in the newspaper. But then he remembered the King didn’t read that much, which is never a good thing. “Why, yes, your Highness. It seems that we have a great problem on our hands.” “And what exactly what that be, your Grace?” “It seems, sir, that the OggaBerry crop is very, very low this year.” The King gasped in horror. If you remember from the last chapter, the OggaBerries were the only cure for the Woogies farting disorder, and so without them, they would be in great trouble. I think I should explain. As I said before, whenever you or I have this problem, we just smell very bad and our friends either find it very funny or stay away from us. But for the woogies it is different. The gas builds up inside them until the pressure is very high, and then one of two things will happen. If they have eaten their OggaBerries like their parents tell them to, the gas will explode out of them and send them flying up into the air. Then everybody has a good laugh and carries on. But without the OggaBerries, the gas just keeps building up, until a terrible moment where the woogie will explode into little tiny pieces. This is definitely not a nice thing. So when the King heard that there was going to be a very small number of OggaBerries this year, he was naturally quite upset. “But what has happened to them? Is this a sign from God? Are we being punished for being bad or something?” The Archbishop, as head of the Church of Woogland, sighed. He knew that this, of course, was not a punishment, because God was far too nice to be doing things like that. People assumed that, just because he was the Archbishop, all he knew about was Church things. Now, it must be said, he probably knew more about Church things than any other woogie, but the Archbishop of Woogenbury, as I said before was a wise old bean. He also knew more than anyone else about the wizard who lived in the Crag, and something in his bones told him that it had to be him who was behind this disaster. He cleared his throat. “Your highness, I have been reading many books in the libraries about OggaBerries. I have learnt many things.” “Yes, and?” the King pressed. I did say he was impatient. “It seems that there are ways in which one could prevent the crop from growing, if one was clever enough to be able to do so.” “Ah,” said the King. He wasn’t completely stupid. “Like dig up all the plants? Or kidnap the farmer?” “Well, yes sire, you could do that,” the Archbishop sighed. “Or you could build a really big machine to pump out lots of poison that only affects OggaBerry plants, making sure than none of them grow without anyone noticing what is going on.” The King’s brow furrowed. “That sounds very silly. How would anyone ever do that?” “Well, your Highness, if one is a very clever wizard, it’s probably not really that hard.” |