To all you teachers, would be teachers, and grammanazi out there: This, matey, is a weblog entry. I wrote it for the fun of it. It was a moment thing. If you ever have one of those moments, you would understand. It is raw, unedited, and definitely not spell or grammar checked. The problem is, during the composition, I jump often from the narrative past to apostrophic present, so understandably (hopefully), seeing that I am not a comic writer by trade, I have difficulties doing this same sort of thing Douglas Adams love to do. And besides, he throws all his asides into a fictional device that is part of the story to avoid such problems. I guess, what I want to say is... You can take that red pen and shove it where it belongs -- back into your shirt pocket. W 08.18
This is a story I wrote for S almost two days ago. As a story, the standard disclaimer apply: This work is intended to be a piece of fiction, any semblance to persons or other humanoids living or dead or yet to be born are purely coincidental and unintended. Should you find yourself in a situation deeply similar to those described in the following piece of fiction, well, then you better read to the end, since this story is also a morality tale and it will do you good not to repeat the follies some of the characters committed. With that said, we now begin our story.
There once was a kingdom.
The kingdom, like its name suggests, has a king.
The old king, like all other old kings in stories, has a wife.
She is the queen.
Over the years, the queen and the king went on seven lovely getaways.
This is not a story about the king.
Nor is it a story about the queen.
It is vaguely related to the kingdom.
And has everything to do with the seven lovely getaways.
You see, the seven getaways were indeed lovely--so lovely that, even though they are fictional royalties, our king and his queen (who weren't quite so old when they went on the getaways) couldn't help but make mad passionate love, the same way baser creatures of the kingdoms do when they accidentally find themselves in a lovely hayfield, or on a sunny patch of grass, or in a grove of mango trees, or under the moon and stars... well, I needn't go on about the circumstances, because the actual whereabouts of the lovely getaways and the circumstances under which our king and his queen fornicated legally and regally are not what this story is about at all.
No.
The only reason this story has everything to do with the seven lovely getaways is that each time, after coming back from the lovely getaway, the royal physician always finds the lovely queen loveably pregnant and after 9 lovely months she always gives birth to a daughter as lovely as the lovely getaway.
And this is a story about the 7 lovely daughters.
Well, as you might recall, before we got into the lengthy introductory sidetracking digressive straggle, the king _was_ old. Which means that it has indeed been a while since any of the seven lovely getaways--don't worry, our king is not such a horny old hump that he would go cheat on the queen with the chambermaid--which means that the seven daughters are at least of a presentable age at the moment.
And indeed they are presentable.
Each of the daughters--aww shucks, I might as well call them Princesses--each of the princesses are known for her lovely hair, which is not to say that their bosoms aren't full or their buttocks aren't round, for indeed all of the princesses are all extremely beautiful, with faces like angels and bodies, well, quite unlike angels actually, seeing that angels are androgynous after all, and our princesses do have busty bosoms and bouncy buttocks to complete their curvaceous figure, I digress. The princesses are known for their lovely hair, as I said, the hair does not detract from their voluptuous figures and their sweet faces, but on the contrary, their hair quite enhances the effect. For if the seven sisters all bore platinum blond hair of the normal variety, you might have mistaken this little kingdom for Hollywood, which is not to say the blond is a bad color for hair, since the eldest of the princesses do in fact have platinum blond hair, just not the normal kind you see.
Each of the princesses, as I was getting to it earlier, have long flowing locks--not quite as long as Rapunzels, that is spooky and unmanageble--of different colors. The eldest is platinum blond, and youngest is raven black. In between, the five sisters goes from light to dark through brown and red in different shades of loveliness.
Princes from all over have heard of this little kingdom and the beautiful princesses and especially of their beautiful hair.
All princes, you see, want a trophy wife with long flowing hair in a color that matches or complements their own. Since if you are a queen and unless you are the Snow Queen generally you have a husband sitting around running the affairs of the state and servants running around trying to take care of all the day-to-day duties that needs taking care of, you usually end up with nothing much to do but sitting around looking pretty, attending state dinners, and in general living an easy life and making babies. For that reason, being pretty is essential for a future-queen-to-be that we commonly call a princess. And hence the hair color is of utmost importance for a prince choosing his bride-to-be, I mean, if the faux pas of a brunette prince bring a girl with hair in a slightly lighter shade of brown and a hint of carrot-top to a state dinner isn't bad enough, think of what atrocity will be born of a blond prince and a raven-haired princess? Who knows what shade of green or blue or purple will arise from that unholy union?
Anyway, to accentuate his daughters' famously beautiful hair, our old king decided to give a set of 100 hair-pins to each of the princesses on her 14th birthday (well, the age really doesn't matter here, but later on we absolutely need the girls to be of reproductive age so establishing that they will be such when they receive their hair-pins is a good start).
(Well, you probably guessed by now since the king is so old the sisters have all already received their set of 100 hair-pins.)
Oh, and the eldest one? the blond? Yeah, she is married already at this point in the story. So she's not very important for our concerns. I mean, the king is old, and you don't expect such beautiful and sonsy women to become old maids, eh?
So, this one day, after waking up just before noon (better build up this habit early, since as queens they'll be doing this an awful lot), the second princess discovered that she can only find 99 of her 100 hair-pins. She distinctively remembers laying them out nicely on her bed-side table when she went to bed. But 99 is such a sucky number, thought the princess. So she stealthily crawled next door to her sister's room and took one of her pins while she was in the bathroom.
The third sister came back from the bathroom and found a pin missing. So she challenged the fourth princess to a round of tennis and lost deliberately. While the fourth is reveling in her victory, the third walked up to her to congratulate her and at the same time swipe one of her hair-pins.
After her shower the fourth discovers she is one pin short of a full stack, so after lunch, she goes to the fifth princess' room (whom she knows always wake up after lunch) and offers to help her with her hair--and at the same time picked up a pin that doesn't belong to her.
The fifth didn't find out until when she was going to bed that one of her pins was missing. She immediately suspects the fourth, but knows there's nothing she can do about it, since if the fourth took one of her pins by force, she'll be sure to guard her collection well after that. So instead, she knelt down and prayed--and at the same time kicked her cat to make sure it is listening: "Oh dear Deity-of-this-kingdom, please hear my prayers, I am missing a hair-pin, please help my kitty find it."
The next morning--excuse me, right before noon--the sixth princess who lives in the room over finds one of her pins replaced by a small bunch of cat hair. She went over to the youngest of them all with red puffy eyes and tears rolling down her chin and told the little princess all about her missing hair-pin. The little one thought to herself "big deal! It is only a hair pin. I hate these things. If it weren't father that gave us these I would've already thrown them all out." and said, "sure, why don't you take one of mine?" And went back to sitting in her messy bed in her pajamas reading her books with her raven hair falling down all around her.
Two days later, in the afternoon, the king summoned all his daughters--and his wife too--to the court. There they were shown a handsome young man who came with a horse and a parrot. The prince has beautiful red hair that matches exactly those of the second princess. He said, "My parrot came back to me a few days ago with this hair-pin in its beaks. It then told me it has seen to most beautiful woman in this land and she has hair that complements mind perfectly. I wish to marry her." To his--and everybody else's--astonishment, the princess who obviously has the matching hair did not speak up. She does not dare let out the fact that she stole a pin from her sister! That is behavior completely uncharacteristic of a princess.
After a period of awkward silence, the king spoke up--directed toward the second princess: "Dear, are you missing a hair pin?" At this point, what could the princess say? She could only mumble a soft "No" and show her full 100-pin collection to her dad. One by one the princesses walked toward the king and slowly removed the pins from their hair. And one by one the king verifies that each of them has 100 pins with her. Ah! What radiance appears in the room when five unparalleled beauties let down their hair that shown in the sunlight.
After severe prodding by her mother, the little one walked up to the king. And just like always, she was burying her nose in a book with her raven hair flung in the air. "Oh dear" thought the king "this little one, I don't even know if she has opened my present for her from last year yet, how could someone who never uses any hair products be missing a hair-pin?" But he asked nonetheless, "Dear, are you, per chance, missing a hair-pin?"
"Huh?" looking up from the book.
"A hair-pin? You know, like those things your sisters put in their hair?" (the king thought to himself, "but I am sure the one the prince shown me was the same kind I gave to my daughters!")
"Oh, yeah. Well, I only have 99 in the box now, though I wouldn't exactly call it missing..."
"Oh Joy!" The king cheered with all his heart, someone is finally here to take this unlikely princess off of his hand! He just hopes that the prince will not find his youngest daughter waking up early in the morning and spending all her time reading books and philosophizing and decide that he ought to come back and demand a divorce, or a refund.
And thus the little raven-haired girl ended up marrying a carrot-top 10 years her senior. Luckily for her, on the way back to _his_ kingdom, a gnome mistook his fiery red hair for a bush fire and smacked on it with a broom, knocking the prince off the horse, first unconscious, then dead. The little girl didn't even notice (she was still reading on her horse) and was taken in by the local librarian, whose raven-haired son she later married after a few years, and only then did she wonder 1) what happened to that parrot her fiance used to have and 2) when did her fiance changed hair color.
The moral of the story is: