Sunday Comix (The Colour Green)
2001-08-14 - 11:46 p.m.
This story was written a long time ago, I don�t remember right off the top of my head when. Basically, the whole story was based around the idea that there are several words in the English language that do not rhyme with other words...
There once was a prince.
That sentence by itself is not a very original one, so I shall have to give the prince an adventure (because we all know that a prince without an adventure is like pancakes without peanut butter). This particular prince will be strong, brave, and decently intelligent. We will also have to give the young prince a name, and since you can�t suggest one to me I will name him Wesley. Wesley will be a good prince, with a huge castle on a large island called Fish (located near where Wales is now) and will have plenty of servants and valets, but only one good squire. This squire�s name shall be Frederick. Wesley will also have a flaw, a hole in the bottom of his shopping bag, so to speak. This flaw will be that he thinks too much of himself, and brags a lot. Of course, no one in the kingdom would tell you that the prince is doing such an awful thing as bragging, but everyone knows it. And so, for many years, no one told Wesley that bragging was bad, so he continued to think even more of himself. This ego problem works much like a virus, spreading and worsening because it has spread. And much like a virus, it has an antidote. This antidote was his mother, the queen of Fish, also known as Esabelle. Esabelle wanted her one and only son (traditionally the royal family could only have one child, because Kings and Queens of those days always did) to grow up to be a fine gentleman and rue with his heart, like his father before him. And all the right books told the queen all the wrong things; like that nobody is perfect and that it is impossible to raise a child to be flawless. With this in mind, she set out to make her son the only perfect child in existence. Wesley quickly learned not to bully, or use his salad fork in his meat, and on top of everything to be polite and not to brag. But when our prince was only fourteen, his mother died saving the life of a peasant�s child who was about to be run over by a carriage. Wesley�s father raised him the rest of the way, for he refused to marry again.
Now, I�m not saying the king of Fish was a bad parent, but he was a better king; and he constantly moped and cried over the loss of his wife. This contributed toward his looseness with his son. Overall, the king didn�t really care about the upbringing of his son. Every day, he told himself that Wesley would be a good king after him, and he left it at that. Wesley�s friends began to change, and by the time he was nineteen, all of his friends were fishermen or hunters. And we know that these types of people brag about more than a person can see on a clear day. To compete with the bragging of his friends, Wesley had to brag about himself, and he slowly forgot his mother�s teachings.
One day, as Wesley was doing nothing but sitting by a large pond near the beach of Fish Island, an old man approached him.
�What are you doing?� The old man said.
�I�m...I�m skipping rocks.� Wesley said in reply, and started to do so.
�But you might strike a frog with one of those stones.� Suggested the man.
�I know that, because I�m smarter than anyone. In fact, I am also a master rock skipper, and can easily knock a frog out. I remember one time, I got a frog soo big � �
�Well well, what a coincidence�, the old man interrupted. �For I happen to be a master rock skipper also, and I shall challenge you. But seeing as we are both so very good, we should play for something. If you win, you may have one pouch of jewels from me, and if I win, I shall turn you into a frog and hit you with my skipping stone.�
�Why would I...� Wesley began, but then rethought the situation. If he won, he could go home and brag to his friends that he had won several sacks of jewels from the old geezer. And even if he lost, the man wouldn�t really be able to turn him into a frog, so there was no real danger in it (Wesley, even though he was a prince, didn�t believe in all that hocus-pocus stuff). Besides, this old guy probably couldn�t throw a rock worth his next rock anyway... �Sure. But you might want to save me the time and give me the jewels now.� Saying this, Wesley threw his rock. It skipped four times, and he leaned back and smiled to himself. The man also smiled and threw his stone. It skipped one, twice, thrice, and kept going. Wesley got a strange shrinking feeling. The rock skipped four more times as Wesley�s eyes bulged, and his tongue flicked out. He was a frog! In the weeks that followed, the king was devastated by the loss of his son. No one had seen Wesley in three days, so he went to the town mage to ask for help.
�Your son has been turned into a frog by another mage, sire. The only way to break the spell is for him to be kissed by a princess. And the only princess that I know of is the Princess of Whales.�
Meanwhile, the prince had been properly denounced as a liar by all the other frogs of Fish. So, being the good swimmer that he prided himself to be, he had left the island altogether. Eventually, Wesley�s body floated up on the shore of Whales and was picked up by a maiden. This maiden was none other than the Princess of Whales, who very much liked frogs and other slimy critters. She wouldn�t have been able to stand it if the frog died, so she put him in her pocket and took him back to her castle. There, she bathed the frog in the bishop�s holy water and placed it on her pillow until morning. The Royal Bishop and the King of Whales were very displeased by this. The bishop was upset because he had drunken the Holy water the morning afterwards. The king, on the other hand, was an amphibianist; he hated frogs (and other assorted slimy things) straight out. Frogs were one of the few things that the Queen of Whales and her husband argued about. So Fellra, as that was indeed her real name, went to her mother, who was called the Queen in Green or the Queen in the Muddy Dress by her close friends, for her curious love of slimy things and consistently green-coloured clothing. Being the nice sort of Queen that Fellra�s mother was, she allowed her daughter to keep the frog, on the condition that she kept it properly watered. And dried out Wesley was, too. He had been sitting on the princess�s pillow, waiting for rain or for a servant to fetch him water, for hours. At this point, he was as limp as a boiled gummy worm and was starting to doubt that he was truly the strong and brave person he thought he was. That night, cuddled up to the princess�s head, Wesley decided to go out on a hop by himself, to do some thinking about how he had acted in the past, and get a drink of water. He found the holy water to taste very much like normal water, and was starting to ponder about what the difference was hen the Bishop seized him. He pleaded his case to the King, to no avail, and then the king argued with the Queen, to no avail, until everyone had had quite enough arguing and decided that the frog had to go. But in the morning, just before Wesley was to be released, the King received a telegram from the King of Fish that told him the true identity of the frog, and how to cure the transformation.
Now, the King of Whales knew that his daughter loved the frog, and he didn�t care to have a frog as his son-in-law. After all, the princess might get warts from him! No, he decided, it wouldn�t happen. So the king thought up three tests for the frog, claiming that only the true prince, who had mastered all the beasts of the wood, and caught larger fish than had ever actually been recorded, could survive. First, the frog would have to joust with the finest knight of the kingdom. If the joust was won, he would be placed against his head wizard�s wits, and if he lost, would be boiled alive by the cook. As the final challenge, the king would fight the creature himself, sword-in-hand to webbed foot.
And so it soon came to the morning of the joust, and the King of Fish and the squire Fredrick had arrived from the nearby island of Fish. The previous night, Fredrick and Fellra had spent with Wesley, brainstorming plans that would allow such a tiny frog to hold such a huge lance. The had settled, eventually, on Wesley�s idea that he not have a lance at all. As the two horses and the two sets of armour walked out and readied for the joust, the crowd laughed because there was only one lance between them. The knights charged. Thump-thump-thump...crash! The best knight in the kingdom had pierced the other knight straight through the chest plate, and everyone cheered for his victory. But as he went to pull his lance out of the looser, he became quite unbalance on his horse and fell flat on his face. The knight had been tricked, for the entire inside of the challenger�s armour was filled with icky picky sticky gelatin. Then Wesley cam out of the saddlebag, and had won the match, for he was still mounted.
At noon, the second trial started. The Head Wizard of Whales had chosen to challenge the prince to a rhyming contest, and this is how it would work: The frog would choose a word for the wizard to rhyme with, and then the wizard would choose a word for the frog to rhyme to. If someone couldn�t think of a word, they lost. Thinking that the frog couldn�t possibly speak to play the game, the wizard believed he would win automatically. But as the wizard was about to take the win, an anonymous peasant asked if Wesley could write. And after several scribblings in the ground, Wesley found that he still could write, as a frog, trying first the word �frog�. The wizard quickly replied with the word �log�, and then chose the word �orange� for Wesley to rhyme with. Wesley wasn�t very good with rhyming games, even when he was still a prince, but he thought he remembered hearing that �orange� was one of those words that simply could not be rhymed with. The prince thought and he thought, and eventually wrote the word �sporange�. And jumped up and down, to express that the definition of the word was �the sound a frog makes when it jumps�. The wizard became so flustered by this new word and that he forfeited the match and immediately retired from his position.
�Ha, ha. Now I will finnish the amphibian off myself.� The king said to his Bishop. Before the fight started, however, Fredrick stated that it would be an unfair match. The prince-frog, at least should be given the advantage of a home terrain. And the crowd was on his side so that the king couldn�t refuse, so the whole event was relocated to Frog Bog nearby. As people started to leave, Fredrick took the Queen in Green off to the side to talk.
When everyone had reached Frog Bog, the King of Whales, who was getting nervous from all the croaking noises in the bog, drew his sword.
�Where is my challenger?�
Suddenly, the prince-frog jumped out of the camouflage of the Queen�s dress and pounced directly on the King�s helmet. In shock, the King of Whales fell backwards into the bog and sunk like a stone in his full plate mail. Fellra picked up her winning prince and kissed him on the head...
POOF. Before her stood the handsomest and muddiest frog that had ever turned back into a person. After a brief discussion, Fredrick was placed in charge of rulling Whales while the King of Whales recovered, and told the Head Wizard of Fish to turn them both into frogs so they could live happily ever after. Oh yes, and the former King of Whales never really recovered, so Fredrick ruled over Whales for a very long time. As his first act as king, he changed the spelling of Whales to �Wales�, because the �H� didn�t really need to be there, and everyone knew that he would be a wise and sensible ruler.
THE END
