Greegs & Ladders (2 page)

“No son of
mine is going to settle for working as a Bottler!” was a phrase
commonly heard screamed by the father of the Djoog household. “We
won’t be able to afford a drop of schmold on the pension of a
bottler! What is it? You think you aren’t important enough for
upper management? I suppose you also think the suns and planets
weren’t just put there for your own enjoyment?”

“Don’t be
harsh,” the logical Djoog mother might have said. “We don’t want
him to start pouring water into a schmold pit like the Glurj
boy.”

“The Glurj boy
tainted our schmold pits out of jealousy, because those useless
Glurjs never owned a drop of schmold in their whole schmold-less
life! Do you want to wind up like a Glurj? Unable to walk down the
street without people pointing at you and laughing?”

I later
checked in on the Djoog household. Their son fulfilled his dream of
being a bottler. With his paltry salary the family were able to
afford no schmold at all. In a fit of shame the father leaped into
a schmold pit. Although dead, the Djoog father was henceforth
thought about with great reverence and jealousy by all Greegs, as
it was widely believed that leaping into a schmold pit was the
greatest bath one could take.

Further
Arrogance and Schlepschen Pools

There are many
questions I’m certain you have swirling around your head already
regarding the culture, behaviours, beliefs, activities, government
and history of The Greegs. One thing you should be asking is “What
is the name of the planet these silly creatures live on?” To be
truthful though, these particular Greegs have not found it
necessary to name their home planet, as astounding a concept as
that may be to you. Space mapping space mappers once labelled it
“one of 11 planets containing wriggly, walky, breathy things in the
hopeless, undeveloped but reasonably entertaining to look at from a
safe distance sun system of the 38 planets in the 59 sunned
district of Herb,” and with that dismissive but wholly accurate
generalization, they went on to map, in much more detail, several
of the more illustrious and glorious areas of the many universes
they happened to be mapping at the time.

The
Greegs simply called it ‘our planet.’ Despite measuring only 597 cm
tall on average, (well done with the metric system earthlings, at
least you did get something right) the Greegs still had the
audacity to believe that their entire planet (measuring an
astounding 87, 000 km in diameter, on average)
belonged
to them. As if they had any say in the
matter. As if they had any idea how they even got there in the
first place. They genuinely believed its only reason for existing
was to offer them a steady supply of schmold and to act as their
planetary shelter. Not that they knew or cared about what it was
sheltering them from. Then again, these were creatures that
believed all plains of existence were merely inconsequential pretty
things for them to look at. What an arrogant, self-absorbed bunch
of jackasses, wouldn’t you say?

Another
question you may be asking yourself is why The Greegs would be so
keen to take a bath in a sticky, wet, green goo. How could they
possibly think this was a splendid idea, no less a sign of wealth
and status? To be true, if you took aside an individual Greeg and
tried to get them to explain to you the rationality behind
worshipping a glowing, greenish slime they would not be able to
give you a satisfactory or remotely logical explanation. They would
look at you in disbelief and say things like “It is the most
precious substance that exists, you fool! Why wouldn’t we want to
obtain loads of it and bathe in it?” You would be hard pressed to
shake them from this line of thinking. Even if you did shake them
from this line of thinking, the best case scenario would involve
them telling other Greegs involved in high up committees and
eventually being blasted out of a cannon towards a garbage
planet.

You might also
be wondering what it is that Greegs do should they be so fortunate
as to have a bath of Schmold. Surely they don’t just wash it all
off afterwards or put their clothes on?! No, they do neither,
because Greegs do not wear clothes. They are a naked creature.
Hairy, smelly, naked and filthy. Filth is a sign of prestige and
honour in the Greeg society. Nakedness, doubly so. To understand
why this is the case, you must first understand a bit more about
the unnamed planet these filthy, wretched, naked things live
on.

One of the 11
planets containing wriggly, walky, breathy things in the hopeless,
undeveloped but reasonably entertaining to look at from a safe
distance sun system of the 38 planets in the 59 sunned district of
Herb is arguably the cleanest, most spotless floating orb within
forty seven trillion parsecs of the 11 planets containing wriggly,
walky, breathy things in the hopeless, undeveloped but reasonably
entertaining to look at from a safe distance sun system of the 38
planets in the 59 sunned district of Herb. The planet is
stunningly, immaculately, and amazingly clean. Spotless surfaces
that look like varnished marble, shiny glass windows and freshly
bleached tile floors abound. All of the things that live on the
planet are clean and tidy. They all work cohesively in a truly mind
blowing balance, each playing their role in keeping the place
absolutely spotless. Gorgeous. Clean. Fresh. Beautiful.

All… except
The Greegs. The Greegs look at the cleanliness of the planet in
disdain. They may go out on a field trip to view the clean parts of
the planet, but just to take a look at. It gives them an icky
feeling if they stay out there too long. They much prefer to stay
in their filthy mud camps, bogs, marshes and Schlepschen pools. The
places where The Greegs reside in great numbers look like big piles
of garbage dumped on the otherwise pristine landscape. No one can
be sure, but this is most likely because the places where The
Greegs reside in great numbers ARE big piles of garbage dumped on
the otherwise pristine landscape. Greegs treat their planet as if
they were a pack of unruly teenagers, anti-establishment punk
rockers and street people whose distant relatives died and left
them a ridiculously fancy home. They’ve done nothing to earn such a
nice place, and have no appreciation for its value or how to keep a
house like this in order. In fact, they view the house as a sign of
snootiness they want no part of. As far as they’re concerned, about
the only good thing about the house is it has one hell of a liquor
supply in the basement. The liquor supply is schmold.

Coverings

To be caught
wearing clothes is a most heinous crime. There is no need to
inflict punishment, merely the embarrassment of being publicly seen
‘all covered up’ is enough to send any Greeg into self-inflicted
exile. No Greeg has ever been seen ‘all covered up’ in public
without banishing themselves into “the cleanliness,” as they call
the savagely clean lands outside their “civilization.”

It should be
noted that despite the fact that no Greegs wear clothing, there are
many clothing stores full of coverings for all parts of the Greeg
body. It is silently agreed that no respectable Greeg would ever be
caught dead in one of these filthy smut shops. Astoundingly, if one
was to do the math, they would find that nearly every individual
Greeg must have stashed away hoards of cover magazines, coverings,
and other cover related paraphernalia. The only industry on par
with the lucrative schmold trade was covering.

To be
sure, there are Greeg ‘Cover Bars’ where adult Greegs can go and
watch lower class daughters of schmold bottlers cover up their
fingers and toes, or maybe even arms, legs and torsos depending on
just how skeezy the establishment and how badly the coverers need
the schmold. To cover up the genitals would never happen, even in
these scummy outposts. Covering the genitals only occurred during
the act of procreation. The Greeg equivalent to what you humans
would call “Sex” involves an ornamental and intimate genital
covering for both male and female. The male covering is a tube that
sucks ejaculate out of the male Greeg, funnelling it into a
seal-able and sterile tube, where it can be kept for over forty
hours
.
To complete
the act, the sterile tube is placed in a receptacle attached to the
side of a covering that looks similar to an earthling gas
mask
.
The gas mask forms a suction
around the female genitals with a tube leading inside her, directly
to the womb. The male ejaculate is pumped into the elaborate female
covering and transported right to the biological doorstep to
complete an “Attempt.”

The Greegs
have the highest fertility success rate of any creature on record
in any universe.

In their daily
lives Greegs are a filthy and disgusting and vulgar creature in
every imaginable way. They go out of their way to show off just how
slovenly and insensitive they can be. In the private act of
procreation however, they are clean, sterile, sensitive, caring and
humble. It could be said this is the real Greeg, the one they keep
suppressed. In this act of procreation alone, they become one with
the planet on which they reside.

Quiggs

The grimy
condition of your average Greeg colony was not always easy to
maintain. The Greegs' desire to live in disastrous mud camps was
once put under great threat by an indigenous life form known as the
Quigg. Quiggs are (or more appropriately, were) the cleanest
creatures living on one of 11 planets containing wriggly, walky,
breathy things in the hopeless, undeveloped but reasonably
entertaining to look at from a safe distance sun system of the 38
planets in the 59 sunned district of Herb. Whether randomly or
because the planet was trying to save itself from obliteration, the
Quigg seemed to have evolved with a single purpose in life. To
clean. Every bodily function they have (or had… well, you get the
idea, or will in a moment) in some way results in something,
somewhere being cleaned. The very movement of their feet acted as a
natural waxing agent against any surface. Rather than having sweat
glands they secreted an antibacterial gelatin from their skin.
Instead of hands and fingers they had elaborate scrubbers and
brushes protruding from their arms. They also wished for nothing
more in life than to be rid of filthy Greegs. In a valiant yet
futile attempt to return their planet to its once immaculate state
of varnished marble, shiny glass windows and freshly bleached tile
floors, the Quiggs offered their impeccable cleaning service to the
Greegs, free of charge. All the arrangements had been made to blast
anything unclean onto Garbotron. The Greegs would have to do no
work at all. Rather than dignify this gracious offer with an
answer, the Greegs simply hurled globs of lesser-quality schmold at
them from a distance. The blindingly acidic and parasite-ridden
properties of schmold indeed make a formidable weapon, however the
attack did deter the Quiggs. Instead of fleeing back to their
various homes in The Cleanliness as they should have, the Quiggs in
their steadfast manner set about collecting schmold and cleaning
it. Only they didn’t just clean it. They reinvented it. A
stunningly impressive chemistry set was designed specifically for
analyzing and purifying schmold, with the intent to remove from it
all traces of bacteria and filth. Filtering screens visible from
space were built and hung up between the largest of old-growth
blue-leaf trees. Quiggs could be seen tirelessly running schmold
through the filters day and night. They even successfully removed
schmold's unique glow, which was considered distracting and
superfluous to the high art of cleaning. They laboured for many
suns and moons, perfecting their experiments with a meticulous
attention to detail that has only been matched once in the universe
(by a strange being we will arrive at much later in the story).
They even went so far as to spend 3 wintry years crafting a
collection of very fine flasks made out of Jardian mega-prisms. The
flasks were never required in any of the experiments, but they
looked very clean and pretty nonetheless. A shelf of great honour
was set aside for displaying the beauty of the useless flasks, and
4 respectable Quiggs were given the job of dusting them every 7.33
minutes. Oh how the Greegs loathed them. They could barely wait to
fill the flasks with all sorts of disgusting things (namely
schmold) and then break them. The Quiggs slaved away until they’d
acquired a hefty supply of schmold so clean it would have made
trillions of dollars throughout the galaxy if properly marketed as
an unparalleled kitchen counter-top cleaner. The Greegs saw this as
the grossest possible violation of all things that are Greeg. Fear
took over the community. The total collapse of localized schmold
trade seemed imminent. Numerous Greegs fell into despair and were
never seen or smelled again. Many wandered into The Cleanliness in
a suicidal fashion not at all dissimilar to the way so many of your
humans leaped from skyscraper windows during the 1930s collapse of
your fake stock market.

The remaining
Greegs came up with what they considered in their stupidity to be a
rather brilliant scheme. They stole the purified schmold and mixed
it with regular schmold to make it dirty again. The now-filthy
schmold was then angrily hurled at the Quiggs, who set forth
purifying it all over again. This cycle went unchanged for
generations, even outlasting the ridiculously long lifespan of the
metallic tetra-turtle. It was finally decided the total extinction
of the Quigg species would be the only way to keep schmold in its
naturally polluted state. Thus was born the event in Greeg history
commonly referred to as ‘The day all Quiggs were thrown into a
schmold pit.’