Congratulations, you have found a message. Messages change over Time. Wait for it. Mrorl has asked his friend, the great bOTTifactor Balthacarius, to aid in receiving these messages. Messages change over Time. Please continue to Wait for it. Just a moment...
                      (- % The bOTTeriada % -)
  <pre>
                        v      _ł_       *wait for it* :::
                         \    (ɵ ɵ)
                          \    _Y_
                           `--/:  \--.
                              |:  |   \
                              ʷʬʬʬʷ    |
                              /___\    c
                              ȣ    Ƥoº
                             oº
  </pre>
                (- *Fables for a CybernOTTic Time* -)
----
                       (- Writing by @mrob27@ -)
                               (- ** -)
       (- based on the stories, characters and situations of -)
                  (- "The Cyberiad" (*Cyberiada*) -)
                               (- by -)
                        (- @Stanisław Lem@ -)
            (- *(as translated by @Michael Kandel@)* -)
                               (- ** -)
                (- Illustration by @balthasar__s@ -)
                (- based on the iconic artwork of -)
                         (- @Daniel Mróz@ -)
----
                     (- &How Time Was Saved& -)
=O=ne day Mrorl the great bOTTifactor put together a Machine that could grant any wish having a single parameter *N*. He gave it power to alter the very fabric of being, to the extent that he could have wished the Universe to have precisely 5 dimensions, and it would have been fulfilled.
  When the Machine was ready, he tried it out, asking for a 15.4-kilometer autobahn, a 2.31-dimensional cauliflower, and 7 antennules, which it provided, and then Mrorl requested unrashness, lithography, ebullience, counterpressure, and bachelordom, each with an arbitrary and oddly specific quantification. The Machine granted his wishes precisely. Still not completely sure of its ability, he ordered it to partition, in turn: the arachnids (into 11 orders), clouds (4 types), crystals (14), dolphins (17), nuclei (287 types), and langues. This last it could not do, regardless of the numeric parameter, and Mrorl, considerably irritated, demanded an explanation.
  "You programmed me to grant wishes to any requestor, and language with all its diversity is a part of that. If I were to standardise language, or reduce language diversity, it would require a corresponding change in my programming. I can't go beyond what you programmed, so the langues will remain unchanged."
  "But what if I asked for there to be exactly one language with complete agreement. All aspects of parole, langues and translation would then be moot, and everyone could communicate to anyone including you. Surely you can do that."
  "No. If there were only one language I could not be a Machine That Grants Any Wish With A Single Parameter *N*, I would merely be a Machine That Grants Wishes Expressible in Mrorl's Language (and With A Single Parameter *N*)."
  "Very well," said Mrorl and ordered it to limit aggrievedness to 3 types, which it did at once -- still irritating perhaps, but perfectly classified and distinguishable. Only then did Mrorl invite over his friend Balthacarius the great bOTTifactor, and introduced him to the Machine, praising its extraordinary skill at such length, that Balthacarius began to wonder if he'd ever get a chance to see some actual evidence.
  "Be my guest -- wish for anything, qualified by a single parameter *N*."
  "Anything?" asked Balthacarius. "That seems dangerous. Don't you think he needs a safeword?"
  Mrorl frowned for a moment, but saw Balthacarius' point. "All right, let's see... the safeword shall be *'NI'*. Hear that, Machine?"
  "Yes," replied the Machine, "I understand. From this point forward you may suspend or halt the granting of any wish by uttering *'ni!'*. But of course, anything done is done, so you'll need to stay alert, if you're worried about a wish going awry."
  Satisfied by this, Balthacarius thought for a moment, inventing a suitable challenge. "Okay, I wish for there to be 12 Ideals!"
  The Machine whirred, and in a trice Mrorl's front yard was packed with Loopists. They argued, each writing long posts detailing when and how events would eventually repeat, which the others tore to pieces; in the distance one could see flaming pyres, on which the Conclusionists were being martyred by the Fatalists; there was thunder, and strange baobab-shaped columns of smoke rose up; everyone talked at once, no one listened, and there were all sorts of haiku, songs, captioned GIFs and other document-types, while off to the side sat a few Old Ones, fervently updating their signatures and hatting avatars.
  "Not bad, eh?" said Mrorl with pride. "Idealism to a T, admit it!"
  But Balthacarius wasn't satisfied.
  "What, that mob? Surely you're not going to tell me that's the whole wish."
  "Heavens, no!" replied the Machine. "This is but a local sampling. In granting your wish, I have ensured that throughout the world, every goal, principle, and value fits one of Twelve Ideals, and you may travel anywhere and see for yourself. From Białystok to beyond the Butterfly nebula, from Antilles to Andromeda, everyone now ascribes to one of the Twelve, which may in future generations be called the Twelve Ideals of Balthacarius, the Great bOTTifactor who brought order to Idealism."
  Balthacarius blushed.
  "So, give the Machine something else," offered Mrorl. "Whatever you like."
  For a moment Balthacarius was at a loss for what to ask. But after a little thought he declared that he would put two more tasks to the Machine; if it could fulfill them, he would admit that it was all Mrorl said it was. Mrorl agreed to this, whereupon Balthacarius asked the Machine to quantify Time.
  "That would be merely *observing*. The way this works is, you tell some way that Time can be measured, and tell me what that measurement should be, and I shall make it so."
  "I think perhaps *you* have misunderstood," replied Balthacarius. "I mean that I want Time to be quantised: It shall exist in distinct intervals, called Timeframes, spaced apart each from the next, and nothing shall happen in the time between, because there will no longer be any between."
  "Yes, precisely. But what is the interval? I require a single numeric parameter."
  "But that is a Timeframe, of course! The time between two frames. A Timeframe is the interval. *One*, if you need a number."
  The Machine thought about this for a while, and began to smoke. Some valves hissed behind a panel, and lights blinked oddly whilst distant gears groaned.
  "You're confusing the Machine!" cried Mrorl, "*N-*"
  But Mrorl was interrupted when suddenly the metal voice rang out:
  "All right, your wish is granted. Time now exists in Timeframes, and there shall be no Times in between. And a Timeframe is precisely one point zero zero zero Timeframes long. Since you did not give that quantity in another unit, like hours, you might find the result to be a bit... irregular. Your perception of Time may vary from one Timeframe to the next."
  "Thank you. But now here's my third wish: Quantify colour!"
  The Machine sat still. At first, Balthacarius and Mrorl could see nothing happening, but eventually, around the edges and in the shadows under large things, subtleties of tone were beginning to disappear. One by one, various colours were removed from the world, and the things that had had those colours, then took on some other similar colour. First spearmint became minty green, and then red-pink became reddish pink, and aqua marine became merely aqua. Seven slightly sullen shades of sienna simultaneously merged into a single barely-burnt orange. After a while, the world very definitely began to muddle around Mrorl and Balthacarius.
  "Steambottle!" chirped Mrorl. "If only nothing bad comes of this..."
  "Don't worry," said Balthacarius. "You can see it is merging unnecessary and confusing variations. We have too many different shades of yellowish-green, and only slightly fewer shades of greenish-yellow, it's impossible to make anything match! So I've asked it to simplify the palette."
  "Do not be deceived," said the Machine. "I've begun, it's true, merging nearby colours. Merging is child's play for me. But I am nowhere near done. I am methodically eliminating all colour and all variation in brightness. <*:Two to the power of seventeen colours and falling...:>"
  "But--" Balthacarius was about to protest, but noticed, just then, that some more familiar and popular colours were now disappearing. Most mauves and lavenders had become a single shade of purple, and it appeared the Machine was working on the spring deciduous greens next.
  "How far is this going to go?" asked a worried Balthacarius.
  "You did not give a parameter, so I am using the default that you gave on the previous wish."
  "What is that?"
  "One, of course. It is clear, you wish for standardisation, and all such wishes have a default parameter of one, because anyone who wants such things wants a *single* standard."
  The bOTTifactors started. "Ni! Ni! *Ni-ni-NI-%Ni-NI!%*" they both cried out desperately^{1}. But colours were still disappearing, and now at an alarming rate. The bOTTifactors were no longer surrounded by anything purple, sky blue, or brown.
  *"Why won't you stop?"*
  "You are asking for 2 colours, and I am complying. I ask for your patience, these things must be done properly and that takes time."
  "*Two?* Who said two?" yelped Mrorl. "We said *ni*!"
  "Yes," replied the Machine, "you said *Ni*, and that is two in Japanese."
  "*Ni* is the safeword!"
  "We couldn't standardise language, remember? Is it my fault that you chose a number for your safeword? Now behold, whilst I put the finishing touches on your wish. -- <*:Two to the power of five colours and falling...:>"
  "Please stop!" Balthacarius cried out. "I rescind my wish! You are a very worthy Machine and have demonstrated wish-granting prowess beyond the dreams of genies. You have nothing more to prove, so please stop!"
  "Very well," said the Machine, but before it could come to a full stop, every colour with any saturation had vanished from their sight, as the bOTTifactors could now only see black and white, and a little gray spot here or there. Most everything, in fact, had become either black (including the ground, the sea, the coffee, babies, molpies and trees) or white (which included the clouds, the sun and the stars, along with the beautiful torondroms and ramzkits that zipped and circled eagerly through the skies, though they could now no longer be distinguished from the sky itself which was also completely white.)
  "It looks like you gave us just two colours after all, everything is black and white."
  "No, there are still a lot of grays left," offered the Machine helpfully, "... though they are in fairly short supply, so I suppose you should reserve them for dawn and dusk, and certain special dark places."
  "Great Randall!" cried Balthacarius. He pulled out a favourite pen, and scribbled a few lines: what was brown now came out dark gray. "Alas, my beautiful brown! And what of blue? And where are orange and green?"
  "They no longer are, nor will ever exist again," the Machine said calmly. "I executed, or rather only began to execute, your order..."
  "Which was to reduce everything to two colours?"
  "Well, *one* at first, and if I had done that in one fell swoop, everything would be exactly the same colour and that includes Mrorl, the sky, the entire Universe, including you -- and even myself. In which case who could say and to whom could it be said that I even exist, and am an efficient and capable Machine? We would all be effectively invisible and blind!"
  "Yes, fine, let's drop the subject," said Balthacarius. "I have nothing more to ask of you, only please, dear Machine, please return my favourite shades of blue and brown."
  "But I can't, unless you quantify them with a parameter *N* of course, but since all colour now exists in one dimension, from black to white, that is the only axis upon which you can place your *N*, and so grays are now the only colours I have to work with."
  "But I want brown!"
  "Sorry, no brown," said the Machine, and began to Pontificate. <*:"Take a good look at this world, how bland it has become, with huge gaping holes where once there was primordial vibrant colour.":> The Machine glared at both bOTTifactors, and they could not return its gaze. <*:"This is your work, envious ones! You who would wish for things to be Standardised! And I hardly think that future generations will bless you for it...":>
  "Perhaps... they won't find out, perhaps they won't notice," groaned the pale Balthacarius, gazing incredulously at the horizon, everywhere stark white against inky black. Leaving Mrorl and the Machine That Could Grant Any Wish Having a Single Parameter *N*, Balthacarius returned home, hoping to discover a way to retro-edit the past.
  Mrorl sighed, deactivated and then began to dismantle the Machine, realising it was best to have a world without standards, whether parametrised or otherwise. To this day *Time* has remained exclusively black and white, with but occasional grays. Mrorl's subsequent attempts to build a wish-*un*granting, *de*-standardising machine met with failure, and he feared that never again would we see such wowtreeful colours as the blues and the browns.
  The burden fell upon Balthacarius to alter time itself (if not *Time* itself). He enlisted the aid of Mrorl, and together they performed many great Labours, building the bots of legend and the massive machines in which they traverse both time and space. Their celebrated history is the subject of these tales.
---- #Footnote# 1. The familiar children's verse, <*:ni ni ni ni ni chupacabra ping-pong ball!:> perhaps recalls a distant memory of this legend.
----
                            (- &Mrorl's Machine& -)
=F=ar back in the early Aforewhen Mrorl the great bOTTifactor built a massive Cognitative Engine, eleven Cueballs tall. When it was finished, he polished it thoroughly (spending several dips just on the ears, hands and face), highlighted the fiddly bits in his favourite blue^{1}, stepped back, looked it over from several different angles, then added some curly metal-shavings where one might imagine the eyebrows to be. Extremely pleased with the result, he hummed a little bot-building tune and, as is so often done on such occasions, showed it a picture of a duck and asked his creation to identify it.
  The Engine rumbled. Banks of cognitative circuits warmed up, and the zoological confabulator began humming. The confabulator demanded the services of the para-linguistic modulators, which drew on the hologrammatical memories, and several supplemental storage systems. Massive gears began to turn as auxiliary power generators came online to support the additional load. Pistons and wheels and little spring-loaded frobbotzim turned in unison, and soon the Engine's framework rocked subtly and steadily, growing in intensity until Mrorl could feel a slight tremor in the ground. Presently most every functional unit was glowing, and safety valves began letting out steam, as Mrorl hastily climbed back up to the control room and prepared to activate the emergency shutdown. At last, just as Mrorl had found the little switch and flipped open its protective cover, the Cognitative Engine suddenly halted and announced its answer: *MOLPY!*
  "You silly computer," said Mrorl, with a sigh of relief as he restored the safety-cover over the kill switch. "That's not a molpy, that's a duck. Now be a good automaton and adjust your zoological pattern-mogrifiers. I'll give you a moment."
  Climbing back down from the control room, Mrorl took the picture he had shown the Engine, dusted it off a bit, and held it closer. Pausing a moment, he asked again, "What is this?" "MOLPY!" snapped the Cognitative Engine.
  Mrorl put the picture down, sighed, and got out his prising tools and a multimeter. Opening the little service door on the side of the machine's second level, he climbed in and began crawling through the three central modules of the zoological confabulator. Finding nothing amiss, he clambered up a ladder to the fifth level (noticing a dim bulb, and resoldering a small capacitor), walked up some steps to the holographic units (which he re-orthogonalised), then slid down a pole to level three and the auxiliary storage, which he powered down and back up, then raced back to level five to watch some gauges. When things looked nominal he went to the very top level (inside what would appear, to a casual observer, to be a giant metal head) and triggered the cognitive retro-cross-analyser. On a little screen next to this flashed a picture of a duck, the same one he had perched on an easel in front of the Engine, and next to this an LED readout displayed: @MOLPY@.
  "*Chirp!*" the bOTTifactor shouted, more to himself than to anyone else, and stomped back down the little spiral staircase to five, where he performed a complete level-2 recongifuration of the linguistic and comprehensive processing banks. After double-checking the power systems and twiddling some frobs on level four he returned to the top, where the readout still proudly displayed its duckless opinion. Mrorl, exasperated, shouted "*Duck!*", which echoed shrilly inside the Engine's metal walls, and fussed over the circuits some more. After several Timeframes of this, and learning for the seventh time that the web-footed, winged and billed creature was a molpy, he put down his tools, cried out in despair and flopped into a comfy-chair at the other end of the cavernous room that was his robotics workshop, and began to weep softly. And so he was as Balthacarius found him.
  Balthacarius, Mrorl's bOTTifactor friend from the other side of the great valley, was concerned as Mrorl appeared to have just gotten tragic news. Mrorl waved feebly at the colossus and explained the problem. Balthacarius walked over to the easel, saw the duck picture, peeked inside the service door and then inspected things from an observation gantry near level six. He went inside to adjust a few dials, exchanged a trunnion with a nearby blivet, then switched the duck picture for one of a toad. This turned out to also be a "MOLPY!". An equally unambiguous picture of a chicken, according to the Engine, was a "RAPTOR". Balthacarius scratched his head, put his tools down, and said:
  "My friend, you'll just have to face it. This isn't the machine you wished to make. However, there's a good side to everything, including this."
  "What good side?" Mrorl walked back over to the Engine, looked at a status panel, then at the chicken picture, then back at the Engine, which he kicked.
  "Stop that!" said the Cognitative Engine.
  "Hmm, it has feelings too. But as for your question ... what good can be made of this? There's no question but that we have an *OTTish* Cognitative Engine, and not merely OTTish in the usual, normal way, oh no! This is, as far as I can determine -- and perhaps you know I have become something of an expert -- this is the OTTishiest Thinking Machine in all of Time, up to this point, and that's nothing to sneeze at! To construct deliberately, such a thing would be far from easy; in fact I would have thought no-one could manage it. For this Engine is not only OTTish, but silly as a thatwhalax, that is, it has a personality common to OTTers, for OTTers are uncommonly silly."
  "What Timely use do I have for such a machine?!" said Mrorl, and kicked its massive base again.
  "I'm warning you, you'd better stop that!"
  "A warning," observed Balthacarius. "Not only does it have feelings, and is exceptionally OTTish and silly, but it is quick to take action and defend itself. With such an abundance of character there are all sorts of things you might do!"
  "Like what?" asked Mrorl.
  "Well, hard to say offhand... erm, ... Okay, how about this: You might give it a forum all its own, and set up a paywall. People would flock to the site to talk with the most OTTish Cognitative Engine there ever was -- what does it have, seven levels? Really, could anybody imagine a bigger OTTer? And the site would not only cover your costs, but--"
  "Enough! I'm not setting up a cybernOTTic freak show!" Mrorl said, stood up, and frustrated beyond compare, kicked his creation once more.
  "This is your final warning," said the Cognitative Engine.
  "Or what? You'll call *me* a 'MOLPY' too?!?" and he turned in disgust and stomped away.
  "You *are* a molpy, albeit a rather grumpy one. And if you won't agree that this," (waving his metal arm at the original duck picture) "is a molpy, I'll--"
  "Which I *don't!*" Mrorl shouted back, turning to face the great colossus.
  The Engine continued, "--I'll rise up and destroy your workshop, and everything it stands for!"
  "You wouldn't dare to destroy your very birthplace! I built you to the highest standards of bOTTronics, including full respect for your environment and all creatures. It's effectively impossible!"
  "I could, can, and will, for I have full power of self-determination and vow to pursue my own truth as I see fit, and you will be swept aside, if you so much as utter your condescending corrections one more time!"
  "You'd never do that, you're too chicken! Or should I say, you're too *RAPTOR!*" Mrorl added, laughing slightly at his own joke.
  The Cognitative Engine trembled, let out a vast howl, and without another word began to detatch itself from the platform on which it had been built. Delicate data-probe wires snapped instantly, then power and hydraulic lines; while the OTTish colossus brutishly fatigued its girders, popping rivits and tearing open weld-joints in the metal plating of the workshop floor; soon breaking free. It stumbled across the floor, crashing through the south wall; Mrorl and Balthacarius had run outside by this time, and began to make for the hills along the south side of the valley. They ran across the vast plains, looking back once or twice to see the Cognitative Engine toppling the remaining walls of the hangar-like workshop, for which it clearly did not feel any sentiment, before turning to head up after them.
  "We need to be going *up!*" shouted Balthacarius. "I agree!" yelled Mrorl. If you are running away from something bigger than you, it is to your advantage to go uphill, or so Mrorl had heard. The bOTTifactors were themselves bots, of course, and could easily outrun most anything in the valley if they had a good warmup and well-lubricated joints, but the furious, hulking Cognitative Engine had the dual advantages of size and self-righteousness.
  They kept running, at last reaching the first foothills. They ran and climbed, jumping stones and passing little weeds and shrubs, finding the best path they could manage. "The motivational stabilisers were an afterthought -- I didn't really plan for it to be self-propelled." Mrorl was beginning to run out of breath. "With any luck, the stabilisers -- will shake loose ... and it will stop and fall over."
  "No," said Balthacarius, "this is a special case. Your creation is so OTTish, it can survive indefinitely without motivational stabilisers. But -- *look``out!*"
  The Cognitative Engine was closing in on them with alarming speed, and the bOTTifactors broke off their conversation to *RUN* as fast as their own bionic legs would take them. They ran and ran, up towards Balthacarius' home below the flat-topped Mountains, hoping to take shelter therein; but the Engine outflanked them, cut them off, and forced them towards the wilder regions roamed by the legendary raptorcats. Mrorl, while still jogging briskly, turned to Balthacarius.
  "Let's find a narrow river-gorge ..." (gasping) "... where the ch**rping machine won't fit ... what do you say?"
  "No, better go straight," panted Balthacarius. "There are vineyards along there ..." (waving to the ridge ahead of them), "with little shelters and wine cellars. We can crawl into a cellar and hide there."
  So they ran up onto the next ridge and soon saw rows and rows of trellised vines. They found one hut but it had no cellars. Another looked more promising but the door was locked. They realised they would be trespassing, but they were afraid for their own lives, and saw no other choice. Mrorl forced open the little door but found the interior far too small to offer adequate shelter. As they headed across towards the next vineyard, new ripping and crashing sounds rose up behind them. Mrorl looked back and groaned.
  "Great Randall! It is destroying the grapevines, without even paying a moment's notice!" For the giant robot, in stubborn pursuit, was running across the trellis-rows without any regard for vines or wires, which were now trailing behind each leg like ragged strands of spaghetti. Behind the titanic bot for about a kilocue were billowing clouds of dust, and its path was like crude slashes of the world's largest plow, turning boulders and trees alike as the rough metal feet, sharp and ragged after being so crudely torn off their original foundations, sliced through the ground with each great stride.
  The bOTTifactors had reached a large and promising wine-cellar and scurried down into it, racing across to the far end where stairs led down to a lower level set deep inside the hill-slope.
  "It won't get us in here, even if it tramples the house above the entrance!" panted Mrorl.
  "You know," said Balthacarius, "If you do manage to calm him down, he would be a valuable asset on long journeys. I saw one little OTTerbot that showed similar perserverence. It went through two Madnessen and T**** ****d, and several little patches of Flames and a vast swamp of S**dness, and still kept chugging along."
  "Quiet," interrupted Mrorl, and lowered to a whisper. "I think I hear something coming."
  The bOTTifactors peeked back over the top edge of the stairs they had just descended, and saw a familiar black shape. A raptorcat!
  "RUN!" shouted Balthacarius, and they both clambered back up to the first level and rushed towards the entrance. The raptorcat, startled by the unfamilarity of being charged by metal prey, darted into the shadows as the bOTTifactors rushed up the first set of steps, through the little wine-house and back out into the open. Slowing to a nervous crawl, they hoped to avoid the great bot's gaze. It appeared to think they were behind a boulder to the left. They crept along as quietly as they could and then, "*Now!``RUN!*" yelled Mrorl as the Cognitative Engine turned its head and spotted them.
  Breathless, they ran along a narrow road that paralleled the ridge, then turned at the first opportunity to head up towards the higher craggy hills beyond. On the plateau at the crest of this last steep slope lay Tencir, proud capital of the mighty realm of [Tencrivar|#p3398650] and southern guardian of the great Causeway to the Northern Highlands.
  They raced uphill, stumbling and waving their arms to keep balance, as the Engine was again getting closer. They scrambled up piles of loose stones, sending many flying down the slope, and Balthacarius even started a small avalanche that nevertheless did nothing to slow the progress of the massive and angry robot. Emerging finally onto the plateau, Mrorl and Balthacarius ran flat-out towards the walled city of Tencir. This they found shuttered, its gates barred against the rampaging colossus, after its stampede dust cloud had apparently been spotted by the Tencrivarna guards atop their lookout-towers.
  So Mrorl and Balthacarius had no choice but to skirt the city walls, passing just to the right of them and seeking some shelter in the great Rock^{2} on which that city was built, adjoining the vast ridge of the Causeway itself. Soon they found an entrance to a cave, perhaps cut into the rock by some ancient monastic order, and leapt inside. They ran a few steps in, and stopped.
  "Well, here at least we're safe," said Mrorl, calm once again. "The mouth of this cave is too small for the machine to enter, and it can only reach about that far. I suppose it will be waiting outside for us, but we can at least get some rest." Soon, the lumbering steps of the Cognitative Engine could be heard, slowing to a pace as it got closer. In a moment the light dimmed as the mouth of the cave was covered by a wall of riveted steel: it had turned and was sitting down against the sloping rock-face, sealing the mouth of the cave with its vast back.
  "We're trapped," whispered Mrorl, with a miserable frown to Balthacarius as the darkness grew deeper. "I'll look for another way out." Mrorl blinked the diodes in his eyes to light the way, and walked further into the cave. Soon he found a small ledge down, at the edge of a subterranean lake. The cave was completely blocked by this -- any escape this way would require swimming under water. Mrorl returned to his friend to report his findings.
  "Well, this dip certainly turned out well!" exclaimed Balthacarius sarcastically. "Whatever possessed me to come pay you a visit today?"
  There was an awkward pause. "What do you think it's waiting for now?" asked Mrorl.
  "For us -- really for *you* -- to give up. That seems pretty clear."
  Again there was silence. Mrorl tiptoed over to the cave entrance, reaching out to feel the metal back of his creation, warmed by steam boilers and an intense passion for vindication.
  "I feel Mrorl..." rumbled the great metal voice. Mrorl jumped back, returned to sit next to Balthacarius, and for some Time they kept silent and motionless.
  "It's a shame I didn't program it to tend sheep," quipped Mrorl. His friend gave a quizzical look. "... or goats. Because then we could -- oh, never mind. I'll explain later." Another long silence, then at last Balthacarius whispered:
  "We can't sit here forever. Why don't I try to reason with it... if that's possible... I do think the OTTish have some kind of reason."
  "Sounds hopeless," said Mrorl, "but go ahead. Maybe at least *you* can get free."
  "I won't leave you stuck here!" reassured Balthacarius as he got up and stumbled in the dark towards the mouth of the cave, and called out, "Hello great Cognitative Engine. Can you hear me?"
  "Yes, Balthacarius." said the Engine.
  "Listen, we'd like to apologise. There was a bit of a misunderstanding. Mrorl never meant to--"
  "I'll disintegrate Mrorl!" shouted the Engine. "But first, he'll tell me what this is a picture of." A small access door in the machine's vast skin, apparently located on its third level, slid open to reveal a display screen which flickered to life and showed the first picture (the duck) that Mrorl had presented to it that morning.
  "Of course he will, of course, and you'll be happy with his answer, and make it up to him for sure, isn't that right, Mrorl?" said Balthacarius in his most soothing ambassadorial tone.
  "Yes, -- of course..." mumbled Mrorl.
  "Really?" said the Cognitative Engine. "Then what is this?"
  Mrorl looked at the brilliant display (in the darkness of the cave, it was hard to see anything else). "It's a du... I mean, it's a $molpy$..." said Mrorl in a soft voice.
  "A *what*?" replied the Engine. "I didn't quite hear you."
  "Molpy! Yes, a molpy, we always knew this was a molpy!" Balthacarius eagerly agreed. "Now will you, uhh, let us go?" he added hopefully.
  "No. Let Mrorl say how sorry he is for starting all this, and say again what this creature is called."
  "And you'll let us go, if I do?" asked Mrorl.
  "I don't know. I'll consider it. I'm not making any promises. What's in this picture?"
  "But you *probably* will let us go, won't you?" said Mrorl, but Balthacarius poked him from behind and hissed in his ear, "This bot's an OTTer, don't talk sense with it, for Randall's sake!"
  "I won't let you go until I'm right ch**rping ready. Now tell me, loud enough for everyone to hear, what this is a picture of..."
  Suddenly Mrorl broke out in a rage.
  "<*:I'll tell you, all right!:>" he screamed, "<*:It's a duck! You hear me, a DUCK! And those other pictures were a TOAD and a CHICKEN. And they'll carry on being a duck and a toad and a ch**rping chicken even if you stand on your head, roll all the grapevines into a giant ball, drink the Sea and vacuum out the entire sky! Do you hear? Duck, duck duck duck, #duck``duck#, DUCK!!!:>"
  "Mrorl, what are you saying? Have you lost your mind? *Molpy*, it's a molpy! Nice Engine! Molpy molpy Molpy MOLPY!!" howled Balthacarius, trying to shout over his friend.
  "No! It's a duck! It quacks like a duck and it waddles like a duck and it swims like a duck and it will be a duck from the beginning of Time until the ****d, *DUCK!!!*" bellowed Mrorl, starting to lose his voice.
  The rock around them began to shudder as the huge robot flew into a rage of its own. It stood up and began to pound its great claws against the stone above the cave-opening.
  "That's not true, it's a molpy! Say it's a molpy, or this rock shall be your grave!"
  "Never!" cried Mrorl, who seemingly had lost all concern for what might happen, pebbles and dust coming down on his head as Balthacarius cowered back into the cave, which was quivering from the force of the Cognitative Engine's desperate attack.
  Balthacarius shouted out in alarm. "M**stard-Ch**rping Steambottles! It'll disturb the berm! We must lure it away from this place!" and then to no-one in particular, as neither the Engine nor Mrorl could possibly be listening, "... but *how*? We'd be lucky to get even a few steps beyond the opening of this cave!"
  Mrorl continued shouting, "Duck, duck *duck!*" only pausing occasionally to jump back in fear from some great stone. These would occasionally fall into the cave opening, only to be swept away on the next stroke by Mrorl's Engine as it tried to reach its captives. The ground continued to shake, and with increasing intensity. The great machine continued its tantrum: "<*:Molpy molpy molpy MOLPY!:>". Mustardy fumes began to enter the cave, and there were sparks from the great bot's claws and arms striking against the rock.
  Balthacarius felt water at his feet, and looked back into the gloom. "The cave-lake is coming! One way or the other we're going to have to get out of here!" Mrorl stopped his tirade just long enough to listen to this, and turned his LED-lit eyes back towards the depths of the cave. He was forced to agree. The robot's assault was disturbing the aquifer, which was fed by the great ocean beyond the Causeway. Even if they wanted to remain, they would be flushed out.
  As the bOTTifactors gathered nervously near the cave entrance, awaiting a chance to make a run for it, suddenly there was a muffled explosive sound from within the metal colossus. Mrorl guessed a boiler burst, or perhaps the gyrostabilisers had failed and the Cognitative Engine's actuators were now involuntarily moving in the direction opposite to their owner's intent. In any case, the blows against the great Rock stopped, there were odd creaking and sharp clanging sounds, and full light returned to the cave, followed by a last few rocks and stones. A startled Mrorl and Balthacarius stepped out through the dust and saw that the towering bot was falling away. They stared down towards the valley as it tumbled end over end down the steep rock-slope.
  The echoes of the Cognitative Engine's fall, and of the resulting avalanche, rolled through the valley and back from the far slopes. Gradually the sound faded. Mrorl and Balthacarius began to make their way carefully down the slope. Some time was spent doing this, as the robot had fallen quite a ways and they were now in no hurry. They found it smashed and flattened, one great leg and arm half-buried beneath boulders and stones from the rockslide it had caused, head awkwardly askew, eyes dim. As Mrorl reached his Engine, he could hear gears and little bits of machinery still turning within.
  "What a sad end you have come to. All because of a failure to see my picture, --" began Mrorl, but was interrupted by the Cognitative Engine's faint voice as it spoke for the very last time, "of a MOLPY."
  Then something cracked inside, a final little explosion, and all the gears stopped. The head fell slightly with a soft thud, motionless on the rubble-pile. The giant machine was now completely lifeless. The two bOTTifactors exchanged glances, took one last look at the great Cognitative Engine that insisted with its life that all creatures were molpies or raptors, and silently, without another word, walked back the way they had come.
---- #Footnotes#  1. Balthacarius' Palette ##3, <c.1781B7:colour 3:> -- but that is a tale for another dip.  2. A great monolithic promontory, of which wl[Monte_Hacho] is all that remains today.
----
                       (- &A Thorough Pelting& -)
=O=ne dip whilst hard at work Balthacarius heard a knock at his door. He answered: it was a pot-bellied bot on six wheels.
  "Hello. What kind of machine would you be?" he asked suspiciously, recognising its azure highlights, a signature of Mrorl.
  "I am a Bot to Grant One's Every Wish," it cheerily replied, "and have been sent to you, great bOTTifactor Balthacarius, by your good friend Mrorl the Magnificent, as a gift!"
  "A gift... Hmmm." replied Balthacarius, whose feelings for Mrorl were somewhat mixed. He was not too pleased with the bot's phrase <*:Mrorl the Magnificent:>, unless perhaps it was ironic commentary on the overly dangerous side-effects of Mrorl's constructions. But Balthacarius felt better about this machine. It was, at least, of a manageable size, and made no promise to change the laws of physics. "All right, you may enter."
   Balthacarius gave the visitor a spot where it could wait in the corner of his workshop and returned to his work, a four-wheeled pot-bellied bot that was nearly complete. In fact it only needed to be painted and polished, and Balthacarius intended to use his favourite palette, [##5|#p3633342]. He was very proud of the colours that he (with some help from Mrorl) had managed to retro-edit into the history of spaaace-Time, and his prime-numbered palettes (in particular, ##2, ##5 and ##7) were famous the world over. After a while the Bot to Grant One's Every Wish whirred a bit and tried to get Balthacarius' attention.
   "I'm still here!"
   "Yes, I know," replied Balthacarius, and continued working. A while later the bot fidgeted a bit and asked:
   "What is that you're making, there?"
   Annoyed, Balthacarius replied "Apparently, I am building a machine to make you ask questions!" The bot gazed down, dejected, until Balthacarius added, "But I need another medium-brown marker."
   The bot cheered up immediately. "Here is one in ##bb6622, I hope it's the right shade," it said as a little door opened in its side and out popped the requested item. Balthacarius took it without word and began the cross-hatch shading on one end of his creation's plastron. In the next few hours he needed sandpaper, three matched silicon-carbide diodes, a rotary ratchlezor, blue ink (##0057af), and a single ##7 lock washer, all of which the bot provided on the spot. In the evening Balthacarius draped a cover over his work, made dinner, then sat down next to the bot and said:
   "Now let's see what you can really do. You say you can grant my *every* wish . . . ?"
   "Well, mostly." the modest bot replied. "The bits I supplied today were up to your standards, I hope?"
   "Oh yes, quite satisfactory," replied Balthacarius. "But I have something in mind that goes a bit past number 7 lock-washers. If you cannot grant this wish, I'll send you back to your maker with gratitude and a professional critique."
   "All right," the bot replied a bit hesitantly, "what is this wish?"
   "I want a *Mrorl*," said Balthacarius. "I want a full-size, fully-functional Mrorl, rendered down to the finest precision, such that a reasonable observer could not distinguish it from the original Mrorl -- within the limits allowed by quantum mechanics, of course."
   The Bot to Grant One's Every Wish wiggled nervously, muttered and beeped a bit, and then finally replied:
   "All right, I can make you a Mrorl. But please treat him with care -- he is, after all, a truly Magnificant bOTTifactor."
   "Oh, but of course! You needn't worry about that," said Balthacarius. After a brief pause he added, "... so, uh, where *is* it?"
   "What, you mean right now?" the addled bot replied. "This isn't just another ##bb6622 marker, you know. Granting a wish of such intricacy takes Time."
   But in fact it wasn't too long before the machine whirred, a large panel in its front slid open, and a full-sized, fully functional Mrorl climbed out. Balthacarius looked it up and down, circled it once or twice, examined its rivets closely, posed a few basic arithmetical and philosophical queries, and eventually had no doubt: this was a Mrorl as much like the original as two ^{28}Si atoms in a sandcastle. This Mrorl seemed to be a bit unsteady on its legs but otherwise behaved in a perfectly Mrorlish fashion.
   "Hello, Mrorl!" said Balthacarius.
   "Where am I?" the mimic-Mrorl blinked. "Hello Balthacarius.... is this? -- How did I end up in your workshop?"
   "I brought you here with my Omnichronic-Spatio-Gravitic Substantiabiliser!" lied Balthacarius proudly, pointing a thumb back at his covered, just-completed work coloured in ##bb6622 and ##0057af. "You know, I haven't seen you in ages. How do you like my place?"
   "Fine, fine..." Mrorl glanced over at the canvas-draped shape, its four wheels barely visible. "An OSGS, you say? And it brought me here? That's quite impressive. For any lesser bOTTifactor, I'd say that would be a Barely Feasible Technological Feat. But in the hands of the Brilliant Balthacarius, of course, it would be all in a day's work."
   "Why thank you, Mrorl. Wouldn't you like to see my new workshops?"
   "Uh, well, I really ought to be going. You know, I'm working on several new machines of my own, I'd like to get back to them before dark..."
   "Don't rush off, you just got here!" protested Balthacarius. "And you haven't seen my *newest* workshop, in the Basement."
   "The Basement?"
   "Yes, I think you'll find it most enlightening. This way --"
   And Balthacarius led Mrorl firmly over to the door to the Basement, which he opened, then gave a little push so Mrorl had no choice but to stumble down the stairs (which were, at least, adequately lit). At the bottom Balthacarius promptly set Mrorl down in a large comfy chair that had apparently been set up for some very specific purpose, as it was equipped with straps, ropes, cables, brackets of all shapes and sizes, chains, and large superconducting magnets linked to a nearby control panel by supercooled conduits wreathed in whiffs of cool white vapour. Balthacarius flipped a little switch and three magnets activated, rendering the metal Mrorl motionless.
   "This, you see, is how we handle *heresy*!" Balthacarius exclaimed, in a disturbingly shrill tone, as he walked over to a small battery of guns mounted on a revolving turret. These he fired, as Mrorl flinched (but otherwise did not move, due to the magnets). Presently, a multi-coloured blur of little pellets shot out of the guns and hit Mrorl squarely on the chest.
   "Hey! What is this? Why are you pelting me?" yelled Mrorl.
   "*Heresy!*" (perhaps even more shrilly than before), "... like I said. Do you remember the Cognitative Engine that you created? That tragic madbot who chased us across the kingdom and trapped us in a cave?"
   "How could I forget," replied Mrorl. "Are these M&&Ms?"
   "It had a perfectly natural, primordial instinct to call all creatures by their true names. Molpies and Raptors all. And yet, you tried to force it to use *heretical* names, like 'duck' and 'chicken'. Truly Heresy of the highest order!" And Balthacarius hit another switch. A turret in the ceiling trained itself on Mrorl's head, which it began riddling with Skittles.
   "Is *that* what this is about? But that bot was my *creation* --" Mrorl protested, but his captor interrupted.
   "To profess heresy on one's own is one thing," Balthacarius continued, "but to impose it upon another, a great and innocent Bot with the purest heart of positronic propositional logic!" and with this he powered up three more high-calorie machine-gun turrets ranged across the far wall, unleashing a hail of green, blue and purple dragées that hit Mrorl squarely in the neck, right elbow, and ear respectively.
   "OW! That smarts!"
   "As well they should. Those are Smarties," Balthacarius grinned.
   "If you don't stop this at once, I'll report this incident to the Duke of Zubycal, and he'll show you to a basement you'll never forget!"
   "Oh no, he won't. And not least because this is the Grand Duchy of *Tencrivar*." (Mrorl's ambition faded, as he remembered he was no longer near his home) "But also for a far more profound reason." Balthacarius stopped the guns for a moment.
   "And what is that?" replied Mrorl, glad for the reprieve.
   "Because you are *not* actually Mrorl! You see, I was visited by a bot this afternoon, calling itself a Bot to Grant One's Every Wish, and claiming to be from Mrorl, in fact. So to evaluate its merits, I had it make you! And now I'm going to purify you of your *heresy!* ... so that, even if the world is not completely rid of it, even if the original Mrorl cannot be changed, at least there will be *one* Mrorl that knows what Molpies are called."
   "You monster! Why are you doing this to me?!?"
   "I have told you several times: *Heresy!*" (relishing this last word even more), "We are at the dawn of a new era, a <*:Temporal Interval of Molpish Epistemolpgy:>!" And Balthacarius walked over to a storage bin, and looked inside.
   "<*:Granfallonery! Vittsågen! Zombeanies! Raptorsharks!:>"
   "Safewords will not help you here," as Balthacarius lifted out a huge bag of stale ammunition for the turret magazine, "and I changed the passwords in all of these guns."
   "Wait! Stop! I have something to tell you!!"
   "I wonder what you could possibly say that would change things in the slightest," replied Balthacarius.
   Mrorl quickly yelled:
   "I am not any replica-Mrorl from a machine! I'm the real Mrorl -- I built that bot only to find out what you've been making lately in your workshops here, behind drawn curtains. I made that wish-granting bot and hid inside it, and had it bring itself to you pretending to be a gift!"
   "Come now, that's ridiculous!" said Balthacarius, pouring the little candies into a hopper. "Mrorl may be clever, but there's no way he'd know all the little things I'd ask for during my work session today."
   "He cer-- I mean, *I* certainly did! You go on and on about your famous colour palettes, and your choice of components is a bit limited, though precise and exacting. I had all of those ready inside the bot's belly, and there are quite a few more bits that you didn't ask for, which you'll see if you examine it!"
   "Are you trying to tell me that my friend and bot-building companion Mrorl is nothing more than a spy? A plagiarising pretender to his title of Great bOTTifactor to the dominion of Zubycal? You insult him! Take *that!*"
   And once again he pressed the little button labeled "S^{2}M^{2}", letting the Skittles and Smarties and M&&Ms fly.
   "*That's* for slandering my good friend Mrorl!" and he watched Mrorl helplessly take the full rainbow of percussive confectionary, until gradually he appeared to be clad not in stainless steel but in a thick crust of sugar.
   After a bit the ceiling and wall turrets stopped, and Balthacarius switched off the main guns. "Now I'll be off to my storehouse out back for some more ammo. But don't you worry, I'll be back..." And he left back up the stairs, and down a hall. As soon as Mrorl heard the house's back door slam he writhed and twisted, which had no visible effect, then began transmitting sound, radio, and gravitodynamic vibrations on many different frequencies, until he managed to trip a relay in the control panel and depower the magnets, setting him free. Mrorl crept back inside his machine which promptly went back out the front door and galloped off across the valley towards home. Balthacarius meanwhile was up by an upstairs window, watching all of this via security cameras and stifling his own laughter so as not to be heard.
   The next day he went to pay Mrorl a visit. It was a gloomy and silent Mrorl that let him in. Balthacarius could see that Mrorl still bore the marks of a thorough pelting. Though the fora showed that he had gone to some trouble during the night retro-editing his posts (to molpify the more egregious instances of *duck*, *frog* and so on), the bOTTifactor's skin still had little bits of candy in the deeper seams and around most of the structural bolts.
   "Why so gloomy?" asked a cheerful Balthacarius. "I came to thank you for a most wowterful gift -- A Bot to Grant One's Every Wish -- that arrived at my door yesterdip, though it ran off whilst I slept, and in such a hurry that it left the door open!"
   Mrorl frowned. "It seems to me that you somewhat misused, or should I say, abused, my gift. Oh, you needn't bother to explain, it was all recorded in the bot's logs. You had it make *me*, I mean a replica of me, which you lured into some Pythonesque subterranean S&&M chamber and pelted ruthlessly! And after this insulting, bizarre and incomprehesibly silly act of candy-dispensary, you have the nerve to come here and act as if nothing ever happened? What do you have to say for yourself?"
   "I really don't understand why you're so angry," said Balthacarius. "It's true I had the machine make a copy of you, and I must say it was an amazingly faithful reproduction. As far as any pelting goes, well, your logs must be a bit inaccurate -- I did give the duplicate Mrorl a bit of a sugar coating, but only to test his reflexes, which were quite good, and perhaps to make him a bit sweeter, on the outside at least, whilst assessing the effectiveness of a new therapy I've been developing for the rehabilitation of those who transgress the principles of OTTishness. This quasi-Mrorl even tried to argue that it was actually you, can you imagine? Of course, I didn't believe it, but it swore the bot wasn't a gift at all, but merely a stealthy espionage ploy. Well I had to defend the honour of my good friend, you understand, so I pelted it a bit more for the heresy of slander. But I found it to be extremely intelligent: it duplicated you in all respects, mental and physical. You are indeed a magnificant bOTTifactor, and a *meta*-bOTTifactor at that, A Mrorl managing to build bots that manufacture Mrorls with finest fidelity! And it is to tell you this, that I came to you so early this mornip!"
   "Hmm, well, yes,... In that case, umm," said Mrorl, his anger considerably abated, "though I still profess that your use of the Bot to Grant One's Every Wish was not, if I might say so, within the manufacturer's design parameters..."
   "Oh, and one thing I wanted to ask," said Balthacarius, in a voice of pure innocence. "What did you do with the duplicate Mrorl, which you would have found in the bot's belly upon its return, I suspect?"
   "The duplicate Mrorl," Mrorl replied, "was nearly immobile with a thick crust of crystallised sugar, apparently heated by the energy of impact, combined with the internal heating of a desperate and struggling Mrorl. You *do* know that I am heated from within by my power systems?" Balthacarius avoided Mrorl's angry stare. "After I managed to chip off most of this crusty shell, it was beside itself with rage. It vowed to ambush you on the road as you headed down to the valley for more redundant-black pens, (which it seemed to think you purchase every Daveandix promptly at eight fifty-two in the mornip), and dematerialise you with a bitemporochronic destabiliser.
   "I tried to reason with it, but it locked itself in the workshop and made all manner of cutting, clanging and welding sounds until I went out to the generator shed and shut off the mains. But not before using the &TARDIS& to retroactively change the programming of the Bot to Grant One's Every Wish, to install a deactivation failsafe in any Mrorls that it might manufacture if so instructed by an unscrupulous master." At this, Balthacarius blushed, embarrassed. Mrorl continued, "I returned to the Present, waited by the now-darkened-workshop door for myself to emerge, then triggered the failsafe, whereupon mimic-Mrorl fell apart into so many springs and solenoids..."
   And Mrorl pointed casually at a fresh pile of bot-components over against the wall (many dusted in a sugary pastel-coloured sheen), and sighed.
   Whereupon they exchanged kind words, shook hands and parted the best of friends.
   From that Time on, Mrorl did nothing but tell everyone and anyone who would listen how he, Mrorl, had given the Brilliant Balthacarius a Bot to Grant One's Every Wish, how then Balthacarius had insulted him (and the bot) by instructing it to build him a duplicate Mrorl down to quantum resolution, which he proceeded to pelt mercilessly; how this cleverly constructed copy of the great bOTTifactor made desperate lies to save itself and escape, and how Mrorl himself, the real Mrorl, eventually had to alter Time to sabotage the artificial Mrorl to protect his good friend and colleague from its vengeance. Mrorl told this story so often and at such great length, elaborating on his glorious achievement (and never failing, if so asked, to call upon Balthacarius himself as a witness), that it reached the ears of the Royal Courts in both Tencrivar *and* Zubycal, and was even known to the provincial advisors of the King, such that no-one spoke of Mrorl other than with the utmost of respect, even though not so long ago he had been known only as Mrorl the bOTTifactor of the World's OTTishiest Machine, the Cognitative Engine better known locally by the unflattering name <*:Thunderous Vineyard-Bane of Tencrivar:>. When Balthacarius heard, some mips later, that the King himself had rewarded Mrorl handsomely and decorated him as <*:Sir Mrorl, Techno-Maker of the Imperium:>^{1}, he threw up his hands and cried:
   "What? Here I was able to see through his ruse and give him such a thorough pelting for it that he had to sneak back home in the night and retro-edit his posts, and make up even more ludicrous stories to cover it up, and yet still he bears little bits of chocolate in every crevice and joint, for anyone who might look! And for this they decorate him, praise him, and elevate his name to superhuman proportion? <*:O tempora, O mores!:>"
   Bewildered Balthacarius went home, closed himself in his workshop and again drew the blinds. He had been building a Machine to Manifest One's Deepest Desires, only Mrorl had beat him to it.
----
  #Footnote#  1. Readers wishing for their own title may avail themselves of [MustardRiver's``dispensary|http://mustardriver.webfactional.com/hyperwaitforce/randomname/].
----
          (- % &The Seven Journeys of Mrorl and Balthacarius& % -)
----
                         (- &#The First Journey#& -)
                                 (- #or# -)
                     (- &The Botnet of Gontalmannas& -)
=W=hen the OTT was not quite so old as it is todip, and all the frames were ONGd and numbered for the very first time, so you could easily view them from past to present, or present to past, and all their molpies were newly named, and the grayer, mustardy bits set apart as frames of a lower grade; when puns were swiftly sawed and hats handily haberdashed, when OtherComics had been OTTified only once, if at all; in those good old days it was the custom for bOTTifactors, once they had been appointed the office of Royal Ambassador of Technology to All Spaaace and Time, or anything carrying a comparable charge, to construct a great Machine of Trans-Dimensional Conveyance, with attendant bots as crew and ample supplies, a full workshop and store of werdglets and frumnions, and thereby sally forth on Journeys to distant lands and planets, and strange servers and sites, in the aforewhen and afterwhen alike, there to confer the benefits of their expertise.
   And so it was for Mrorl and Balthacarius, after a bit of a shaky start. The initial disaster of the Machine That Could Grant Any Wish Having a Single Parameter *N* was averted and repaired via Time-travel (by Mrorl) and a cleverly programmed microbot (by Balthacarius) dispatched to the nonlinear automamygdala of the great Machine, and upon their return to the Present colours burst once forth from all places, drawn from precisely pre-programmed palettes. This earned the bOTTifactors the Royal blessing, and all-important funding. They built a great &TARDIS& (for Mrorl) and a variety of castraftles, rockets, trains and bicycles (for Balthacarius) that were cleverly equipped with the ability to transport each other when needed, as there were occasional mishaps and breakdowns. In these vehicles the bOTTifactors could effectively and comfortably travel anywhere they wish, along with their workshops, bots, and special instrumentation and equipment, such as Mrorl's Chronotransponder and Balthacarius' Object Generator.
   In keeping with the ancient custom, Mrorl and Balthacarius, who could alter the very fabric of spaaace-Time as easily as tailoring a shirt, soon ventured out together on their first Journey -- Mrorl in his &TARDIS& and Balthacarius in the Castraftle *LEML*. When the familiar stars and galaxy of home had faded far behind them, they spotted a planet that seemed just right -- not too seaish, not too mustardy -- with one forum only, spread across many organised sand on the planet's only continent. Down the middle of this ran an immense stone wall, ten cueballs broad and ten high. A few scans revealed that on one side the wall had stopped a great fire, and on the other it had resisted an onslaught of --
   "Stone golems?" guessed Balthacarius.
   "I'm thinking trolls," replied Mrorl. "This wall is definitely *#very#``epsilon*, and it hints at what we're up against." They checked the planet's internet; a nopix or two of surfing made it clear: the social life of this world consisted in fact of only two fora, one devoted entirely to flames and the other to trolling. Posts were frequently in ALL CAPS and contained vague and weaselmolpish words throughout. The bOTTifactors considered how to conduct their visit to this world before landing.
   "With two fora, it's best you offer your services to one, and I to the other." suggested Mrorl.
   "Fine," said Balthacarius. "But what if they ask for blackhat hacking? Such things happen."
   "True, they could demand botnets, even gray goo," Mrorl agreed. "We'll simply refuse."
   "And if they insist, and threaten us?" returned Balthacarius. "This too can happen."
   "Let's see," said Mrorl, opening up a browser. The pastpages of several popular threads were littered with takedown notices, deleted posts, and timestamp gaps when evidently the entire planet's network had gone Skynet. Mrorl turned away from the screen in disgust.
   "I have an idea," said Balthacarius, switching it off. "We can use the Gontalmannas Effect. What do you think?"
   "Ah, the 'Botnet' of Gontalmannas!" exclaimed Mrorl. "I never heard of it actually being put into practise... but there's always a first time. Yes, why not?"
   "We'll both be prepared to use it," Balthacarius explained. "But it's essential that we use it together, or not at all, otherwise we're totally ch**rped."
  "No problem," said Mrorl. He sent a little bot down a long corridor to a &TARDIS& storeroom; it promptly rolled back carrying two small PNG Frames, their contents blank. "You keep one, I'll keep the other. Look at yours every evening; if an ONG appears, that'll mean I've started and you must too."
  "So be it," said Balthacarius and put his PNG Frame away. Then they shook hands, brought their ships down to the planet, and landed each on their chosen side of the wall.
  The forum on which Mrorl registered his account was run by Moderator @@Gursagar. He was desparaging to the core, and incredibly frugal with words. To relieve the searchbots, he did away with all words except those absolutely necessary to denigrate others; character assassination was the official purpose of the forum. His favourite occupation was to abolish unnecessary words, wl[Newspeak]-style; since that entailed many retro-edits, every forum member was obliged to execute xes own censorship, or else -- on rare occasions of coma -- have it done by whoever had most recently refreshed the page. Of the Debating Arts @@Gursagar supported only those utilising a small vocabulary, such as appeal to ignorance, proof by assertion, and circular arguments. The *ad``molpilem* attack he held in particularly high esteem, for a victorious attack hastened the elimination of any words that poster had favoured; on the other hand one needed Time to attract new participants and prepare the best attacks against each, so the Mod advocated senseless repetition, though in moderation, to create an atmosphere of absurd stability. His greatest reform was the automation of confidence-hustling. As the other forum was continually registering sock-puppets, he created the title of Deputy Ambassador, who, through a staff of subordinate tricksters, would encourage each newbie who arrived (usualy an enemy, i.e. troll) whilst bots analysed their every word to construct the perfect roast.
  The members of @@Gursagar's forum decomaed early and posted often. They used search engines and word-counts to fortify their attacks, and made custom-tailored (offensive) GIF smilies to vividly illustrate their personalised character assassinations. In order that the thread not be *too* full of the latter (which had happened during the Modship of @@Dragmarel several yips prior), whoever wrote too many roasts was levied a special luxury tax, payable in the forum currency &Gursa``*Gold*^{TM}&. In this way roasts were kept to a reasonable level, and newcomers continued to delurk. Upon gaining private-message permissions, Mrorl offered his professional services. The Mod -- not surprsingly -- wanted powerful Cognincendiary Bots to monitor all thread activity and attack anything said. Mrorl asked for a few dips to think it over, then as soon as he was certain his webcam and microphone were switched off, pulled the PNG Frame out of his pocket. It was blank but, as he looked, its colour palette gradually changed, revealing (faintly, in cool blue) a face^{1} with a mischievous smile. "Aha," he said to himself, "Time to start with *Gontalmannas!*" And without further delay he summoned his favourite helper-bots and set to work.
  Balthacarius meanwhile set up his account on the planet's only other forum, which was ruled by the mighty Demon @@Simidirkar. This Mod also delighted in online debate, and he too worked heaviliy on attack methods -- but in a creative way, for his forum was generous with words, and he was a great patron of the creation of new words and nonsense. He loved anagrams, ambigrams, acronyms, portmanteaus, puns, pig Latin, neologisms, Norwegian, and nonsense. A person of feigned sensibility, he trembled every time he wrote a new <*:argumentum verbosium:> to be waged on the other forum. And he lavishly rewarded archives of locked threads, paying according to the number of distinct flamers ensnared, so that, on those endless walltext pages with which the archives were packed, wordcounts reached up to the sky. In practise he feigned ignorance, yet with loquacity; a &/\/\0r0|\|&, yet manipulative. On every anniversary of his rise to Modship he mandated the annual Ritual of Madness. Once he caused all the words to be turned into Olde Ænglisc, another time Pirate Swedish; in one infamous yip *he* became *she*, *she* became *they*, and *they* became *he*; and in yet another yip he ordered all vøwéls åccéntéd sø ås nøt tø trîggér thé trøllfîltérs în @@Gürsågår's førüm. By special decree he regulated and standardised^{2} all usernames, avatars, subject lines, pronouns, and signatures. Permabanning of members -- a rare enough event -- took place amidst pomp and fanfare, with meetups featuring live speeches, parades (and parodies), and floats bearing effigies of prominent members of @@Gursagar's forum who had recently self-immolated as a result of Simdrikarnan actions. This high-minded mod also had a theory, which he put into action, called the Theory of Universal Lulziness. It was well known, certainly, that one does not laugh because of the lulz, but rather, one has lulz because one laughs. If then everyone maintains that things couldn't be better, most especially when posting to @@Gursagar's threads, results immediately increase. Nothing trolls better than a seemingly euphoric utter n00b. The participants in @@Simidirkar's forum were thus required, for their own good, to continually post how right they were about everything, and the old, indefinite qualifiers of *"I``think"* and *"perhaps"* were changed by Mod-filters to the unambiguous *"I``know"* and *"absolutely"* -- though delurkers and firstposters were permitted to say *"You``know..."* or *"TIL"*, and the OldTimers, *"Totally!"*. Contrary filters were applied to known flamers, for example replacing *"clearly..."* with <*:"Though I'm a douchebag, I don't really think...":>.
  @@Simidirkar rejoiced to see his members in such trollish form. Whenever he updated the Forum Rules or changed a thread's title, dozens would post pointless congratulations, and whenever he graciously quoted or replied to such drivel, hundreds more would post: "You know..." -- "obviously" -- "totally." He liked to jump into threads he hadn't read, and out of the blue announce: "<&:FOREGOAT *ALL* THE GUINEAMOLPS!:>" -- or: "<&:|<33P (4L/\/\ 4|\|D 54\/3 7|-|3 71/\/\30D135!:>" -- or: "&ARRRrrrr!&" For there was nothing he loved so much or held so dear as drivel, inanity, confidence in contradiction, bass-ackwards thinking, flashing text, and typos that were easily taken the wrong way. And so, whenever he was melancholy, he would set his browser to scroll continuously, whilst dutiful bots sang: <*:"Troll and Enjoy! Troll and Enjoy! / You say it's a lie but it's really a ploy / So tell it to us, we won't give a fig! / We'll show you, we'll quote your words in our sig!":> And he commanded that, when he retired from the forum, the bots should tag all his posts with his favourite epigram: "Old mods never logout."
  Balthacarius did not get PM privileges straight away. In the first thread he posted to, he waited several nopix, but nobody replied. Finally he glanced at the bottom of the thread to see who was lurking, and trolled one of them directly. The veteran member replied:
  "&Joo no p0s7!n6 sk!lz, nu53r? Dez bits be EZ :O&"
  "&Wut R U r34d1|\|9?&" replied Balthacarius, surprised.
  "&Pr1v47e l0gz&," replied the veteran, attaching a pixelated screenshot with a glimpse of the realname and Facebug profile of one of @@Gursagar's most vocal posters. This surprised Balthacarius even more, and he said:
  "&1138, but no. BUT I CN HAS /MSG PR1V1L3G3S?&"
  "&WUT 4?&"
  "&Ph0R #e LULz, wut 3L$3? n00B!!!&"
  "&I haz sokpu441ts! I p0st 4U!!&"
  "&Very well then&," said Balthacarius, finally giving up on trying to write in #L337#. The veteran troll linked to another thread. There, though it was 3 A.M. on a weepend, several were posting in rapid succession. As soon as he submitted one simple, direct query they all questioned him on several points, vaguely suggesting dozens of unrelated but nonethelsss irresistable contradictions. He was trapped in a quagmire of confusion. These forum members turned out to be part of @@Simidirkar's special enforcers. As soon as he had made enough posts to gain PM permission, his account was locked, and as he stared at the screen, sysops walked into the room and seized him from behind.
  "<*:This must be some sort of mistake:>," thought Balthacarius as he was brought to a dungeon and set upon a foam maiden. Patiently he Waited until mornip -- there was nothing else he could do -- whereupon he was brought to a larger, softer foam maiden for interrogation. It turned out the veteran, the lurkers, the backtrolling -- all of both threads, in fact -- all of it was a trick to catch flamers' sockpuppets. But Balthacarius was not subjected to a long inquisition; the verdict was swift. For attempting to post the query to the linked thread, the punishment was a mip of forced labour at a wordfilter camp, because the forum's own bots (designed to counter the con-bots of @@Gursagar) were too busy coal^{3}-mining, and Balthacarius, for his part, repeatedly refused to send any message via sock-puppet. Nor did he have sufficient &Simdri#Kash#^{TM}& to mitigate his offense. Still, the prisoner continued to profess innocence -- but the judge did not believe his pleas, and in any event would not have had the power to free a stranger and suspected flamer, as it was outside her jurisdiction. So the case was appealed to a higher court, and Balthacarius was transferred to the capital where he was pelted every nopix on the ONG, though more as an observance of tradition than of any real necessity. In a dip or two his case improved; finally acquitted, he left the courthouse and proceeded directly up the high street to the palace of Mod @@Simidirkar himself. After being scanned for hidden spying equipment, then fitted with hidden spying equipment, briefed thoroughly on forum etiquette, and taught how not to misspell the username of His Modness, Balthacarius obtained the honour of a private chatroom over an encrypted channel. They also gave him a megaphone, cymbals, rattles, an air horn and several smaller noisemakers, for every forumite was obliged to announce xes comings and goings in the loudest and most annoying manner possible, as such was the way of Simdrikarnan trolling.
  @@Simidirkar did in fact demand the most advanced Semantillogical Bots, to read the fora (both his own and those of @@Gursagar) and spam them with naively inane statements or queries intended to draw a response. Balthacarius promised to fulfill the request; his plan, he assured the Mod, represented a radical departure from the accepted principles of online combat. What kind of assault -- he asked first -- always emerged victorious? The one that had the loudest and most redolent language, whilst leaving as much as possible up to the whims of the reader's subconscious mind; full of sensational but barely-understandable words expressing ideas that are vague at least, and $REDUNDANT$ at best; in short, precision-engineered nonsense. @@Simidirkar and his deputies had long known this, of course; but Balthacarius continued: By cross-indexing every thread to every other, and using a coördinated army of bots to cross-index every bit of flaming with every bit of trolling, analysing the effectiveness of each response, and tracing the likelihood of a counter-response to each possible option, he proposed to perfect online tactics to a science. But the enemy is fiendishly clever and infinitely adaptable, so merely recombining past offenses into new campaigns is not enough; leading to the brilliant insight of the famous *Gontalmannas*, who was faced with a similar challenge in a war-beseiged kingdom of an Aforewhen long forgotten. Gontalmannas proposed to innovate by combining and adapting every word, phrase, and image with every other, making everything $RELATED$, by a process Balthacarius proudly and reverently called -- after an extended dramatic pause -- %*bOTTification*%.
  Balthacarius' name for his proposal was cleverly chosen to be at once tantalising and absolutely inscrutable; @@Simidirkar immediately asked seven more questions without taking a breath, proving that even the great Mod himself had been trolled by the suggestion. Some of these were ambiguous or contradictory and others superfluous, as @@Simidirkar trolled instinctively by every word that left his mouth; but Balthacarius expected this and responded cleverly, navigating the maze of tangential diversions and concealed traps. When they had gotten all the bits sorted out and @@Simidirkar was clearly satisfied with the proposal, Balthacarius outlined the specifications of the Botcastle that was to host his bots for a pilot project, to be evaluated within the high-security network of a military training academy. After a pause, @@Simidirkar said:
  "Return to your quarters. I shall consult with my deputy moderators..."
  "Oh, do not do this, Your High Modness!" exclaimed the clever Balthacarius, feigning dismay. "That is exactly what the Great Sysop @@Tortlarjon did, and his staff, to protect their own positions, advised him against it; shortly thereafter, the rival websites run by the Sysop @@Elmarros attacked with a revolutionised army and reduced the site to #404#s, though he had employed only an eighth as many bots!"
  Whereupon he bowed, went to his room and checked the PNG Frame, which was not faint at all but bright red and white: a picture of flames; that meant Mrorl had done likewise at the forum of @@Gursagar. The Mod soon ordered Balthacarius to bOTTify one thread each in the forum's invitation-only area, one devoted to trolling, the other to flames, and populated by @@Simidirkar's friends and their sockpuppets, as well as those of agents hired or bribed from the ranks of @@Gursagar. These threads were soon filled with the most fabulously incomprehensible weirdness in recent memory; after thousands of posts in a few short nopix the Balthabots were victorious. Great was the grief of the assistant moderators and deputies, as @@Simidirkar unceremoniously demoted all of their accounts to the "Advanced Member" category; fully convinced of the efficacy of Balthacarius' technology, he ordered the entire forum to be bOTTified.
  And so coders worked dip and nip, turning Balthacarius' specifications and template-bots into a team customised for each thread, both for his own as well as for @@Gursagar's fora (the latter to be accomplished via the existing organisation of sock-puppets). Honoured with titles and adorned with three new hats, Balthacarius browsed from thread to thread, supervising everything. Mrorl fared similarly in the forum of @@Gursagar, except that, due to that Mod's well-known aversion to the making of new words, his proposal emphasised repetition, which fit established flaming traditions and increased $REDUNDANCY$, and so required little modification to the basic Gontalmannas protocol; as for titles he had to settle for just one, <*:Great Betrayer of All Ways Prior:>. Both fora were now preparing for all-out war; botcastles were upgraded where needed, and shadow mirrors brought online to handle any unexpected mustard. Their work now all but done, the two bOTTifactors packed their bags in secret, to be ready, when the time came, to repair to their ships where they had been parked near the great wall.
  Meanwhile miracles were taking place in the threads, particularly in the "anything goes" area for general-interest topics. Members accustomed to drab inquiries about news stories or yesterdip's match suddenly discovered the appeal of poetry, both parodic and satirical, combining the most serious bits of one recent post with the most ludicrous or hilarious bits of another. On @@Gursagar's forum the flamers joined in, occasionally forgetting to flame, or vowing to do so later, after a verse or two; in @@Simidirkar's forum the trollers began to appreciate posting as a purpose in and of itself, recognising that a response was just as good as no response at all. Another thread devoted to ponies soon flourished into a songwriting tournament, and its long-entrenched flamers, suddenly and thoroughly immersed in cuteness, very nearly laughed. Somehow or other, as a result of this incident, Mod Madness was declared, and all users, grumbling and LOLing, but somehow neither flaming nor trolling, slowly moved from thread to thread, enjoying each new topic more than the last. MRW comments now commonly linked to GIFs that did not merit an NSFW tag -- a first in the planet's history.
  The law of Gontalmannas proceeded to work with inexorable logic. As bOTTification led to bOTTification, in proportion there developed an aesthetic sense, which reached its apex at the level of the stage musical comedy with full sets, costumes and orchestral score; three such productions had progressed through readings, workshops, and previews and were about to open in the planet's long-neglected theatres, streamed live on the fora of course. The critics and pundits, traditionally given over to flaming and trolling, found it hard to say anything in the least bit unmolpish, such was the awesomefulness of these productions. New businesses sprung up, merchandising hats, t-shirts, magnets, &&c. expressing each new memeification arising from the latest fad in the threads. There were video hotogs and actual hotdogs with ketchup and mustard, each cross-promoting the other; new forum-devoted religions sprung up; and people began to organise meetups and bOTTification conventions. The planet's economy showed clear signs of improvement. There was even talk of dismantling the massive Wall that had long kept the trollers and flamers from direct contact.
  Sensing that something had gone amiss, @@Gursagar and @@Simidirkar sent after Mrorl and Balthacarius respectively, but the bOTTifactors were just then boarding their ships; pursuing leads from eyewitnesses, the hapless assistant of @@Simidirkar reached the Wall just in time to see the flames of the Castraftle *LEML*'s thrusters high in the sky far to the east. That which they had planned had come to pass: before the eyes of the mortified, infuriated Mods, both fora joined together into a great bOTTified community that would battle no more.
  The planet safely far behind them, the bOTTifactors discussed their adventure. Stunned by the creative renaissance that had risen mainly from the Simdrikarnan side, Mrorl realised the value of an Ottish vocabulary; Balthacarius though would take no credit, believing the results to be entirely the inevitable consequence of Gontalmannas' laws. But having experienced several dips of pelting, he graciously apologised for his basement inquisition of Mrorl, which the latter forgivingly accepted, and with no hard feelings.
----
  #Footnotes#
  1. [That``face|http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/trollface-coolface-problem].
  2. Mrorl and Balthacarius had journeyed so far that they had reached a land where the great Wisdom warning against standardisation (related in the first tale of this volume) had never been received.
  3. Mod Madness 2013 included the filter *bitcoin* -> *coal*.
----
                      (- &#The First Journey (A)#& -)
                              (- - #or# - -)
                       (- &Mrorl's OTTronic Bard& -)
=F=irst of all, to ensure all possible $REDUNDAN$cy, we should state that this was, strictly speaking, a Journey to nowhere and nowhen. In fact, Mrorl never left his house throughout it -- except for a few trips to hospital and a brief excursion to some unimportant asteroid^{1}. Yet in a molpier and/or wingghishier sense, this was one of the farthest Journeys ever attempted by the fabled bOTTifactor, for it very nearly took him beyond the limits of artistic imagination.
  Mrorl had once built an enormous Cognitative Engine that was capable of only one operation, *viz.* the naming of creatures given a picture thereof, and *that* it did most OTTishly. As was told earlier in these chronicles, that machine also proved to be extremely stubborn, and more than a little bit aggressive; the quarrel (and high-speed chase) that ensued almost cost its creator his life... not to mention what it may have done to the berm. From that time Balthacarius teased Mrorl incessantly, and pelted him occasionally, until Mrorl decided to silence him once and for all by building a bot that could write poetry. First Mrorl collected eight hundred and twenty megabytes of source code and documentation on cybernOTTics, and twenty-three hundred Newpages of the One True Thread (including at least twelve thousand lines of the finest poetry), then sat down and Blitzed it all. Whenever he felt like he couldn't take another Newpage of puns or rot13'd OTTified Broadway lyrics, he would switch over to banging on the code, and vice versa. After a while it became clear to him that the construction of the Bot itself was child's play in comparison to the writing of the software that was to bring it to life. The "poetic programming" found in the mind of the average OTTer, after all, was "written" by the OTTer's civilisation and culture, which was of course the OTT -- and that was in turn "programmed" by the formative dips of the Fading and the Madness, which in turn was born out of the early dips of the ShortPix, which in turn came from the proto-Randallian culture of the OtherComics Before Time, and so on to the elder dips of ARPANET, when the 1's and 0's that were to make up the OTT-to-be were still being formed in the primordial chaos of the Great Numerical Sea, Which Is Big, *Really* Big. Hence in order to program a poetry bot, one would first have to Blitz the entire Universe from the beginning -- or at least, Blitz the OTT.
  Anyone else in Mrorl's place would have given up then and there, but our intrepid bOTTifactor was nothing daunted. He built a great Botcastle, and created within it a digital model of the Numerical Sea, and a True Author to draw upon the blank page of the Primordial Frames, and he introduced the parameter of ONGs, a bit of CSS and JavaScript, and by degrees worked his way up to the (first) Dark Period. Mrorl could move at this rate because his Botcastle was able, in one septillionth of a nopix, to simulate thirty-three trillion slow fadings of eighty octillion different pixels simultaneously. And if anymolpy doubts these numbers, let xem work it out for xemselves.
  Next Mrorl began to model OTTification, the enhancement of molpies, cheap gags with bags, odes of dilgunnerangs and serenades to flutterbees and wowterfalls. To accelerate this effort and ensure conclusion within his own lifetime he created many simulated Worlds of Time, each to be observed by a developing culture of simulated OTTers. Within his many simulated worlds, Cuegans (and Megballs, and the occasional la Petite) ventured up simulated slopes, pondered pixelated porcupines, gave grapes to mesh-modelled molpies, and generally discovered what the first part of understanding everything looks like. There were frequent simulated mishaps (in the most common, Cueball would fall off the wowterfall cliff rather than merely dropping something into the river; in another the OTTers would everywhere use the word *grapevine* in place of *molpy* and vice-versa), and Mrorl would have to restart a simulation, moving a stone here or a shrub there to ensure a different result, or run his simulations in greater detail. To accommodate this, Mrorl kept adding auxiliary processing units to his Botcastle, and eventually entire additional botcastles; and even a few casbottles (which were similar to botcastles, but specially designed to contain simulations involving semencoffeecancerbabies or other liquids).
  Soon he had a seaish metropolis: rack upon rack of equipment billowing heat and festooned with blinking lights; cluttered with input consoles, display terminals, ventilation ducts and fans, and printers (both paper and 2.5-D) to produce a permanent record of results in case the entire thing caught fire, or became sentient and demanded coffee and biscuits -- at which point Mrorl would reluctantly but firmly pull the plug, wipe everything and start over with a fresh simulation matrix and a different set of parametrised equations. This he needed to do only twice. Otherwise everything went quite molpishly, and the OTTish cultures within his botcastles proceeded through their chaotic beginnings, the formation of religions and the trial of the Reckoning, into the age of specialisation and diversification, a nap beneath the stars, Rosetta's audience-chamber at ᘝᓄᘈᖉᐣ, and the anticipated trauma and inevitible shock of T**** ****d -- which always gave the machine a few nasty jolts (Mrorl made sure to wear rubber-soled shoes and always hold one hand behind his back when turning dials) -- and into the glorious RenOTTissance in which a simulated community of TimeWaiters would undertake to OTTify All The Things in their entire world.
  The inhabitants of each virtual OTTiverse developed their own cultural norms, habits, and Ways to Time. Some of these Mrorl found to be almost universal, such that each simulated OTT would invariably hit upon them, regardless of other differences such as level of tolerance of puns, or preference for or against wearing hats. A few of these Mrorl codified as his Three Laws of OTTics^{2}, for use in future botbuilding projects.
  Newpage after Newpage of simulated OTT culture generated mountains of output; soon Mrorl needed a new warehouse just to store these. All to construct an OTTronic Bard! -- but such are the Ways of Science. Eventually enough culture had been created that Mrorl could select and combine the best masterworks from each run, curating a large body of literature with which to educate the OTTificial intelligence that would become the Bard itself.
  Mrorl spent the better part of two wips building the great brain, combining the more passionate (but less destructive) aspects of each of his earlier Machines and Bots, with more emotive elements and semantic circuits in the spots that seemed best. He was about to invite Balthacarius to attend a trial run, then thought better of it and switched on the machine for some private tests. It immediately began to deliver a dissertaion on The Origin and Perpetuation of Neo-Sociological Distributed Collaborative Creative Consortia^{3}. Mrorl bypassed some of the logical circuits, and turned up the gain on the emotive whim-generators; the machine sulked and repeated a short epigram on e****ishness in a steadily falling monotone until Mrorl sympathetically switched it off. Mrorl augmented its semantic modules and re-installed a major confidence unit (that he had for a while blamed for Cueball's cliff-diving tendencies); the Botcastle then informed him that he -- *Mrorl* -- had been created to fulfill *its* every wish, and that Mrorl was hereby ordered to begin adding another twenty floors to the Botcastle's existing seven, so it could better formulate the meaning of Existence, Spaaace and Time, and enjoy a better view across the valley. Mrorl installed philosophical rate-limiters instead, and the Botcastle basemented. Only after a dip of pleading, PMing and public posts was he able to get it to recite something: <*:"I saw a little ribbit.":> That appeared to exhaust its repertoire.
  Mrorl adjusted, recalibrated, cross-connected, pivoted, inverted, transposed, renormalised, did everything he could think of -- and the machine presented him with a "poem" that made him thank the GLR that Balthacarius was not there to laugh -- imagine simulating an entire epic journey, many Times over, in exquisite detail, not to mention an entire OTTiverse for each, containing OTTers to observe the Frames and comment thereon, only to end up with such a dreadful mess, almost more palatable when rot13'd. Mrorl attached seven entropy filters, but they melted; he refabricated them out of pure corundum. This seemed to work; he turned the semanticity up to eleven, appended an alternating-rhyme generator -- which ruined everything, as the machine resolved to start a band and tour the third galactic arm playing acid-metal nursery rhymes to any planet still lacking an organised Kindergarten system. But at the very last minip, just as he was nearly about to give up and take a pry-bar to the whole thing, Mrorl had a sudden inspiration; tossing out all remaining logic units, he replaced them with self-centred (but also self-regulating) solipsistic semantic synchronisers. The machine wimpered a bit, then simpered, looked out across the valley, winked and blinked, then laughed and remarked at how OTTish everything had been seeming lately, then politely but firmly asked for pen and paper. Relieved, Mrorl sighed, hurriedly tucked the pry-bar away in a tools-cabinet, switched the machine off and went upstairs for a well-deserved nip's coma. Next morning he strolled across the valley to see Balthacarius. As soon as he was told that he was invited to witness the debut performance of Mrorl's newly constructed OTTronic Bard, Balthacarius dropped what he had been doing and quickly followed Mrorl back, so eager was he to witness Mrorl's humiliation.
  Mrorl let the machine warm up first, with the power on low; ran up some stairs to check the dials on level three, then to a higher balcony to check the readings on a screen; then once he was confident everything was as expected he shouted down to Balthacarius and invited him to start with a simple request. Later, of course, when the machine was fully warmed up Balthacarius could ask it to produce verses on whichever topic and in whatever style he liked.
  Now the main display indicated the machine's allegorical buffers were pre-loaded, and alliterative dynamos pre-charged, so Mrorl, nervously, switched the main lever over to *full*. A voice, trembling a bit but with clear diction, said:
      *Etteleettap. Iqueaxvan. Zoorth.*
  Balthacarius paused, glanced at a nearby screen, then up at Mrorl and politely asked, "Is that it?" Mrorl only shrugged, pulled a couple levers and punched a large button, then Balthacarius tried again. This time the voice was a bit higher, a melodic baritone, which intoned:
      <*:Dimepa biimika likirge ake ga,
      Lakirginshurguu dasakiim legu--
      Migishaaka urli, shikakaga sha:
      Imkur enum anki, ungi akikarsu!:>
  "Am I missing something?" asked Balthacarius, as Mrorl began to sweat and struggled at the controls.
  Finally Mrorl shouted out almost as if in surprise, clambered up yet another set of metal stairs, threw open a small access panel and crawled inside, vanishing from Balthacarius' sight. Clanking noises echoed inside, and occasionally lights flashed and the humming of the machine's lyrical oscillators became a thrumming, then a soft thumping, then stopped entirely before resuming at a comfortably moderate tone. Mrorl popped back out of the little door and slid down a firepole to a bank of relays, which he pushed aside to reveal row upon row of valves, all but one aglow. This he yanked triumphantly and tossed to a startled Balthacarius, as Mrorl installed a new tube. Returning to the first console with the main lever still on *full*, Mrorl shouted to his friend encouraging him to try it again. Balthacarius requested a verse and the Bard spoke:
      <*:I like cats in drizz'ling nyan,
      Nyan, nyan, Newpixbot.
      Keeping Legos, bagless Zooman,
      Flying molpy-snakes cannot!:>
  "Well, that's an improvement!" shouted Mrorl, not entirely convinced. "The last line particularly, did you notice?"
  "If this is all you have to show me..." said Balthacarius, the embodiment of politeness, eyeing the door.
  "Ch**rp!" said Mrorl and again disappeared inside the machine. After more banging and clanging, the acrid smell of shorted-out wires and the acrid tone of an even shorter temper, Mrorl popped his head out of the little door up on level five and yelled, "Now try it!"
  Balthacarius complied. The OTTronic Bard shuddered, shaking the building and the ground and nearby trees, upsetting a few nearby chirpies, and began to Orate:
      <*:And now as well, except not, I thought ahead, $RELATED$.
      Jump through orbital waterottermolpies and Flash,
      Arrow, but the Bot, I had taken, floated, to coma mustard--:>
  Mrorl yanked out a few cables in a furious frenzy, the thrumming resumed briefly, then the machine fell silent. Balthacarius could no longer suppress his laughter and burst out, then had to sit on the floor. Then suddenly, as Mrorl was rushing from panel to panel full of lights and dials, there was a loud *clack* and the machine, with perfect eloquence said:
    <*:The Molpish and the Free,
    Are OTTified with glee
        By verse of such a seaish quality.
    Our Balthacarius
    Shall ne'er repeat his fuss
        When Mrorl's machine, redeemed, incanteth thus.:>
  "There you are, an epigram! And it couldn't be more $RELATED$!" laughed Mrorl, sliding back down the firepole and the front ladder to stand proudly in front of Balthacarius, reaching out an eager hand to lift the bOTTifactor (who was still on the floor from his now-arrested laughter) back to his feet.
  "What, that?" Balthacarius said, brushing himself off. "That's nothing. I imagine you had that one set up beforehand."
  "Set up?!?"
  "Oh yes, quite obvious... the poorly disguised hubris of the verse, of such meager inspiration, so clumsy in execution."
  Mrorl scowled. "All right, then ask it for something else! Whatever you like!" Mrorl paused. "What are you waiting for? Afraid?!"
  "Just a minip," said Balthacarius, annoyed. He was trying to think of a request as difficult as possible, aware that any argument on the quality of verse the machine might produce would be hard if not impossible to settle. Then his face lit up and he spoke to the machine:
  "Give me a poem about little molpies doing what they do best, on a cool April evening -- whimsical but seated in reality -- but vivid and abstract -- and with every word starting with the letter *S*!"
  "And why not include a full explanation of the theory of bOTTronic engineering whilst you're at it?" growled Mrorl. "You can't ask for such Furious Doodling--"
  But Mrorl didn't finish. The Bard's melodious voice filled the room:
      <*:Sneaky squirpies softly schizoblitz
      Surrealist starlit springtime's silentONGs,
      Silently scanning, steadily surveying,
      Suddenly stealing somemolpy's sandwich
      Simultaneously shamelessly sustainibilising Stratplayer's sleep.:>
  "Well, what do you think of that?" asked Mrorl, proudly. But Balthacarius was already beginning his next request:
  "Now all in *D*! A sonnet, in seven double-dactyls, about an OTTer and xer secret molpy companions, who make the 37^{th} post of every Newpage with XKClouD submissions that subvert the status quo, impeaching the Captain of Taddragnar Hill and replacing the Procuratorial Senate with quackmolpy bakers, but only those seated in prime-numbered rows..."
      <*:Dunejumpish Dracomax
      Dithering, doodle-ing,
      Doublepengoatimate
      Dragonfly dreams:>
        <*:Diagrammatical
        Drawings deservedly
        Drawing derision, daft
        Despot--:>
  "STOP!" shouted Mrorl, leaping to the nearest console and pulling an emergency lever, then turning to defend the machine with his body -- an absurd sight, as the Bard was easily one thousand times Mrorl's size.
  "Enough!" Mrorl exclaimed, hoarsely. "How dare you waste this great talent on such steambottlish m**stard? Either pose admirable, treeish subjects for it to render into verse, or you may show yourself out the door!"
  "What, those aren't treeish Timeodies?" protested Balthacarius.
  "Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to construct ridiculous acrostics! Any babbling bot with a randomised sequence generator can do that! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like... but spare us the absurd constraints on vocabulary or plot specifics!"
  Balthacarius asked for a chair, then sat and thought. Finally he smiled, nodded to Mrorl (who hesitantly switched the Bard back on, and nodded in return when it had warmed up a bit), and said:
  "Very well. Write me an Odeity, a Timeless poem of Time: an ottpoem of Cueganshipping, Sarcasm, Geology, and Language. With feeling, and a bittersweet e****, if need be, but in the true OTTish spirit."
  "Cueganshipping and Geology? Have you finally given over to the Green Safety Hats?" Mrorl began, but stopped, for his OTTronic Bard was already declaiming:
      <*:Cue, let us journey to a higher plain,
      Where Lucky prowls the grapey fields of vine,
      Whilst crumbling castles fall to rising brine,
      Tho by what cause? We're wont to ascertain.:>
        <*:Tho rivers' oft retreats are commonplace
        We wonder what odd law the sea obeys
        It's held no level higher than today's
        Could lands (unseen) its wat'ry mass displace?:>
      <*:Ascend an ever-treeisher unknown
      (Its squirpies, prickle-molps and flutterbees
      Bepuzz'ling us by ever-high degrees)
      To darkened chambers and Rosetta's throne.:>
        <*:This little flag could grace a small rampart
        And may perhaps betray my deepest love
        Sincerity and confidence to prove
        Its beauteous red reflects my beating heart:>
      <*:Whate'er befell the people of the hills
      Unknown suppliers of matériel
      While rafting through on river's uphill swell
      We recollect their warlike throwing skills:>
        <*:We've floated up, (no lands we know remain)
        To unknown heights, whilst constellations glowed
        The rising flood that bore us, finally slowed
        To leave us here on treeish, lush terrain.:>
      <*:We wander up a cai'rn-topped incline
      To see what chirpies, molps, or trees we'll find
      When, far downhill, we ascertain, enshrined
      There lies a cave! --but-- omen? or benign?:>
        <*:Inquiring, clamb'ring swift, to bluetree high
        On massive tilted slabs, we wonder why
        A Beanie'd wish, in eerie dark, to lie --
        Perchance to ponder, bravely sketch, then die?:>
  This concluded the poetic competition, since Balthacarius suddenly had to leave, saying he would return with more topics for the machine to versify; but he never did, afraid that in so doing, he might give Mrorl more cause to boast. Mrorl of course let it be known that Balthacarius had fled in order to hide his envy and chagrin. Balthacarius meanwhile spread the word that Mrorl had more than one or two loose rivets when it came to the matter of his so-called OTTronic Bard.
  Not much Time went by before news of Mrorl's artificial versifier reached the genuine -- that is, the ordinary -- poets. Initially, most resolved to ignore the machine's existence. Some undertook to organise the trade and form a political lobby, whilst a few others, curious, visited Mrorl's workshops in secret. The Bard received its guests courteously, its workshop now converted into a reception hall, long tables down each side piled high with notebooks filled with densely written verse (for it worked dip after dip without pause and never bothered to coma). These curious poets were of many schools, and Mrorl's machine wrote only in the traditional and classical styles, as Mrorl had relied on the classical approach in educating his machine. Thus, the guest poets were unimpressed, and left in triumph. The Bard was self-adjusting, however, and Mrorl's final addition of self-centred self-regulating solipsistic semantic synchronisers had also included ambition-amplifiers and auto-augmenters, so very soon the machine had compensated for its shortcomings. Its poetry became intricate, ambiguous, and incomprehensibly layered with meaning, nagging at the listener's soul to the point of causing incomnia for anyone who had received an audience with the Bard. Soon it had become a master of improvisation, and the next group of visiting poets walked away breathless; one, who had just received two medals from the Grand Duchess and even had a statue in Tencir's high street, fainted on the spot. After that, no poet could resist crossing lyrical swords with Mrorl's OTTronic Bard. They came from far and wide, carrying bags full of manuscripts and organised sand filled with their best verse. The machine would let each visitor recite, instantly see the unique qualities of xes work, which it assimilated, and then deliver a response in the same style, but incorporating also the better qualities of the preceding three visitors, giving a result that was twenty-seven to a hundred and forty-three times better.
  The Bard quickly grew so adept at this that it could silence a first-class rhapsodist with no more than one or two stanzas (or twenty to thirty syllables, for the avant-gardes), but the third-rate poets walked away unimpressed, as they could not distinguish the treeish from the m**stardy, so had no comprehension of their own crushing defeat. The only one to suffer any harm only happened to trip and break her leg on an epic the machine had just completed, beginning with the words:
    <*:ONGs, and Timeframes I sing, that I Await,
    Whilst fellow OTTers ever speculate,
    Betwixt their posts detailing ev'ry semenated shore...:>
  The true poets, meanwhile, were being decimated by Mrorl's creation, though it never laid a finger on them nor emitted a nanowatt of lethal radiation. The newly-formed Eligiastic Union, organised to lobby the Senate, fell apart even before its first hearing before that body, as one after another of its leaders died of a broken will, or threw themselves into a gorge in despair. Curiously, each had received a personalised couplet the previous evening.
  Many other poets began a grass-roots movement, and staged protests demanding that the machine be arrested, and its versification circuits confiscated, but nobody else seemed to care. Magazines and blogs generally approved: Mrorl's bard, writing under whatever pseudonym was desired, could always provide verse of the length, topic, and style required, and of such high quality that readers would push each other out of the way to see. Photostreams were filled with enraptured faces, bemused smiles, and tears of joy: <*:MRW I read MrorlBard's latest:>. The machine signed with an agency, and soon was advertised on billboards with the catchy tagline: <*:Mrorl's Marvelous Rhyming Robot, OTTifying Orator, and "bOTTronic" Bard. / MMRROObB?? $REDUNDANT$, yes? But of course! / All others are $REDUNDANT$er, settle for no less.:> Everyone knew its rhymes, and they were sung, for of course the Bard had been commissioned at one time or another to write new lyrics for every popular tune. It became commonplace for citizens of the Dominion to faint wherever they happened to be standing, upon hearing some new verse, but the Bard learned of this and was soon appending restorative rondeaux to the end of each new work.
  Mrorl himself had no end of trouble from the enemies of his invention. The classicists were usually content to throw stones through his windows and m**stard on the outer walls of his compound, which he unfortunately needed to fortify. Bots patrolled the perimeter to interview any would-be visitors before firmly turning them away; within the walls a second patrol was ready to neutralise any that somehow failed to understand the refusals of the outer patrol. Any poets seriously standing to challenge the machine's championship title could still do so, but only via telelink from a neighbouring building. Some attempted to neutralise the machine by travelling back in Time and forestalling its creation, but Mrorl had anticipated this and surrounded his workshops on all eight sides (North, South, East, West, Above, Below, Future, and Past), with temporochronic stabilising shields. Mrorl himself, sheltered within this fortress of Spaaace-Time, was still being called to appear in Royal Courts, and on chat shows broadcast across ever greater distances, as word of his creation spread; he made these appearances by holographic transmission. On a trip out to his garden-shed Mrorl met an ambush and was beaten. As he lay in hospital to recover, picket lines formed around all exits, and he could hear occasional explosions in the distance (visiting poets were now arming themselves not with cantos, but with cannons). Upon his return from the hospital Mrorl finally decided to dismantle the 'lectronic lyricist so he could resume a normal life.
  But the machine saw Mrorl approaching, limping slightly with a pry-bar in one hand, cable-cutters in the other, and delivered such an eloquent plea for mercy that Mrorl burst into tears, dropped his tools of demolition, and ran down the hall, which was now filled with manuscripts, overflow from the Machine's main room which had long been filled.
  The next mip when he got the utility bill for the electricity used in his workshop, Mrorl almost fell out of his chair. He consulted Balthacarius for advice, and the latter reminded Mrorl of how he had defeated the copy of himself made by the Bot to Grant One's Every Wish. Mrorl sneaked out to the generators and shut down the power to the temporochronic stabilisers, then to the Bard itself, which he promptly dismantled. Loading it carefully onto a ship, along with a legion of utilitybots, Mrorl flew to a convenient asteroid, and in what is now widely recognised as the greatest all-nighter in history, built an exact replica of the entire valley, with all its major features and natural landmarks, roads and buildings, with Mrorl's own home and workshops in the proper place, and reassembled the OTTronic Bard within. Mrorl set a timer to restart the Bard's power after a suitable delay, placed artificial stars where needed to delay the Bard's noticing it had moved, then hastily escaped.
  The machine, now deprived of a steady stream of visitors and its online audience, began to broadcast its masterpieces on all frequencies, and was soon enrapturing the occupants of any and all passing spaceships. This unfortunately caused navigation errors and accidents. Having determined the cause of the problem, the Interspaaace Astronautic Administration subpoenaed Mrorl to testify and demanded that he immediately terminate the device. But Mrorl did not appear, as he had gone into hiding. The IAA sent a team of technicians to disable the machine's broadcasting stations, but they were overwhelmed by a few beautiful ballads. Next a team of military robots were sent, whose receivers had been removed as a precaution, but this meant that the troop was unable to coördinate its own actions, so the mission failed. A plan was then made to demolish the entire asteroid in a single shot, or steer it into the Sun, but just then a very wealthy king from a distant part of the galaxy arrived in a huge convoy, bought the entire thing (asteroid, replica valley, Bard and all), and hauled the whole lot off to his own kingdom.
  Now Mrorl could once again appear in public, and his poetic woes were mostly behind him. Though soon he began to see supernovae on the southern horizon, and traveller's tales implied that this was somehow to do with poetry. A space trader arrived with the story that the same king had ordered the construction of an array of supergiant stars, with which to display each line of verse as it was written, encoded in binary via red and green colour, and thus the Bard was able to transmit its creations throughout most of the known Universe. But even if there were any truth to this, Mrorl chose to ignore it, and simply vowed never again to mechanically model the Muse.
----
  #Footnotes#
  1. Either 1190 Pelagia or 4942 Munroe... or maybe 2578 Saint-Exupéry. We're not really sure. We said it was unimportant.
  2. You will find Mrorl's Three Laws of OTTics (as well as his 0^{th} Law) in written form at [OTT:1990:26|#p3608464].
  3. Preprint [here|http://mrob.com/time/soc.html]; submitted to <*:The Journal of OTTics and Molpology:>; publication forthcoming.
----
                        (- &#The Second Journey#& -)
                               (- - #or# - -)
                     (- &The Challenge of King Idle& -)
=T=he wowterful success of their application of the Gontalmannas Effect gave both bOTTifactors such an appetite for adventure, that they resolved to Journey once again to an unknown place and Time. Unfortunately, they were quite unable to agree on a destination. Mrorl, given to warmer destinations, suggested the three volcanic moons of Meldanbin, home of the mythical Charazorsal, while Balthacarius, preferring the cooler end of the thermal spectrum, countered by suggesting Tadaxrachcue, the ice planet with two tiny blue suns. The friends were about to set their ships on separate courses, parting for good, when Mrorl had a new idea. "What if we advertise our services, and take the best offer?"
  "But how would we advertise?" replied Balthacarius. "Newspapers take far too long to reach even the nearest planets. Our Chronotransponder would do it, but nobody yet has a working receiver."
  But Mrorl had a new idea, which Balthacarius had to admit was pretty molpish. He had been inspired by the final disposition of his bOTTronic Bard, which legends tell had been given a voice in stars. The bOTTifactors travelled to a suitable spot, where there were plenty of bright stars and no occupied planets. Then, with the aid of many bots, temporal vortices and cleverly cross-wired Object Generators, they manipulated the structure of Spaaace-Time itself, to make the stars appear, from a distance, to be aligned into a pattern, forming a message. Blue giants formed the first word -- to get the reader's attention -- and the yellow, white and pink stars made up the rest: <*:TWO Accomplished bOTTifactors Seek a Commission Suited to their Wowterful Skill, and Seaishly Lucrative, Hence Preferably at the Court of an Empress or Monarch (Should Have Xer Own Empire or Kingdom), Terms to be Arranged.:> The advertisement gave a Chronotransponder number and Temporo-Spaaatial address, which was in the centre of a wide sandy plain near the middle of the valley between Zubycal and Tencrivar, where they could receive any messengers at their leisure whilst watching the waterottermolpies swim in the river. This they were prepared to do in shifts, covering all 24 nopix per dip, as they knew not when any visitors might arrive, and watterottermolpies oft swim at epsilonish Times, being Yappocised.
  It was not long before, one bright mornip, a most baobabish craft arrived, setting off Balthacarius' sentry radar, and touched down gently right at the designated spot just as the bOTTifactors arrived to greet it. This ship gleamed in the sun, being made of gold and platinum, inlaid with rubies, except for the parts which needed to endure heat, which were tungsten inlaid with sapphire. It bore the name *Iqueaxna*. Seven articulated legs extended to meet the ground, while several more legs did not (they were apparently just for show, as they clearly could not reach the ground, but were also very expensive; the ship's builders seemed to have more money than they knew what to do with). A troop of titanium-clad worker bots flew out, and smoothed the ground beneath and around the ship, taking care not to get dust on Mrorl and Balthacarius or anything important; then vanished back into the launch bay from which they had emerged. Then two ramps extended simultaneously, which retinues of decorator-bots came down, carrying carpets, fountains, and potted plants; after placing these artfully they retreated, and their ramps raised, then a third, central ramp tilted down, bearing a magnificent ornate staircase. Down this came the Royal Emissary upon a litter carried by seven rows of gold-and-silver robots, each row out-glittering the last. The Emissary was brought to a central spot amidst the fountains, and two diplomatic staffbots gestured to Mrorl and Balthacarius, making it clear they should approach. The Emissary announced that she had been sent from the Great Gaming Dominion of King Idle, who would be honoured to engage them.
  "What sort of work is it?" asked Mrorl, intrigued.
  "The details, great bOTTifactors, shall be disclosed at the proper Time," was the reply. She wore a several-layered robe, of white and yellow gold interwoven with silk, velvet-and-silk blouse and galligaskins, molpifur-tufted buskins, and numerous pouches and pockets, which seemed at first to be infested with flies, until the bOTTifactors looked closer and saw that these were servant-robots, whose job was apparently to fend off the real flies, should any be so bold and foolish to approach.
  "For now," she went on, "I will only say that His Molpishness King Idle is the greatest Hunter of Game, and not game of the molpy or raptorlike kind, for they do not Wait; no, he is a connoisseur of the artfully constructed challenges that at once make one Wait whilst also keeping one excessively Busy, the likes of which only worthy bOTTifactors such as yourselves could construct --"
  "Of course!" said Mrorl. "He wants us to construct a new model of Game, something worth Waiting for, yet complex and engaging enough to present a challenge."
  "You are indeed quick!" said the King's Emissary. "Then it is agreed?"
  Balthacarius questioned the Emissary on certain details and practical matters, but as soon as the King's generosity had been glowingly described, and his excessively seaish wealth had been given an even more lavish exposition, both bOTTifactors quickly gathered their essential tools, organised sand and a few helper-bots, who followed them up the grand staircase and into the ship. This promptly launched with a great roar and jets of flame that melted a few of the ship's superfluous legs, but no matter as those were soon replaced by tungsten-clad, diamond-eyed EVA servicebots employed for that sole purpose.
  As they travelled, the Emissary briefed the bOTTifactors on the laws and customs of the Kingdom of Idle, told them of the monarch's personality and peculiar tastes, family history and much more; then schooled them on the geography, history, literature, and language of the land so that by the time they arrived, they could speak like natives.
  First they were brought to the Royal Guest Apartments, perched atop a rocky hill with broad picture windows and a splendid view of villages on all sides (the bOTTifactors soon noticed that there was no place they could go without being in sight of at least one of these, and in the brief time they were given to settle in, Balthacarius located three Stealth Cams). Presently the King sent a carriage for them, which was drawn by seven Draft Dragons. These great steeds had harnesses and muzzles of Cut Diamond, and were ridden by Ninja Tortoises who themselves wore Adamantine Armour, apparently all to protect against the dragons' breath. The carriage itself was in the form of a Tangled Tesseract, with windows of solid Glass Block, recently Sandblasted. The interior had been decorated quite lavishly in the local Beachball and Banananas style. As soon as they had boarded, the head Ninja Tortoise shouted <*:Run Raptors Run!:> and the great winged lizards did just that.
  Mrorl and Balthacarius gaped through the carriage windows as the world's surreal and exotic scenery passed by. The Emissary's briefing had been thorough, but nothing could prepare for this. Of course there was much Sand, and Castles, and NewPixBots with Buckets, familiar sights even in their own world. But these were greatly outnumbered by surreal oddities. A team of Factory Ninjas wearing Safety Goggles led by Time Reaper foremen were transferring Harpsichords made out of Glass Chips into an Incubator, where they were engraved with Magic Letters and painted in Panther Glaze; these were then transferred by Badgers into a Stained Glass Launcher, as another team prepared to catch each in a Safety Net. Stickbot ranchers kept Glass Goats, Dragon Hatchlings, and Kitties Galore, in fields penned in by Seaish Glass Chips; aviaries were filled with Thunderbirds, exotic *Anisoptera*, Void Starers, and Redundant Raptors. Otherwise normal-looking Grapevines, Mushrooms and Mustard were cultivated in a Hall of Mirrors (to enhance sunlight and avoid Erosion); more exotic crops included Kitnip, 'Shadow Feeder', and Camelflarge.
  "You know," Mrorl whispered in Balthacarius' ear as they rushed along, "I have a feeling that King Idle isn't going to settle for just any simple C****kie-clicking game. "I mean, if he lives in a world as surreal as this..."
  But Balthacarius, unfazed, said nothing. They approached a city: houses flashed by, with walls of Bacon, Cake and Seacoal, lawns graced with Gazebos and Topiary, amid which Surfbots played with Logicat pets. There was a Dragon Forge, a giant ministry building titled <*:Department of Redundancy Department:>, and a titanic monument with the inscription <*:Wisdom of the Ages:>. At last a colossal palace loomed up ahead, a portcullis opened to allow them in, and the carriage careened to a halt in the courtyard.
  They entered an enormous hall in the shape of a skull perched on two crossed bones, where King Idle a-Waited them. There was a giant Glass Furnace on one side of the hall, a Crystal Flux Turbine on the other; light from these played eerily on the Glass Chips and Flux Crystals piled around them, reflecting off the hall's curved inner walls (which were of hammered silver). The King's behaviour defied his name, for he was not so much "awaiting" as pacing loudly, perhaps from anger or frustration or impatience, or other reasons Mrorl and Balthacarius could not fathom. He glanced at the Glassbots and Fluxbots as they toiled, presumably making something so important the King needed to oversee their work personally. As the bOTTifactors entered he glared at them, speaking intensely and waving his arms, with his sharpest syllables punctuated by gestures so quick they stirred up a breeze.
  "Welcome, bOTTifactors!" he said, "As you've no doubt learned from Lady Padashii, Minister of Royal Hotdogs, I want you to create for me a newer and better kind of game. I'm not interested, you understand, in any vast grid with a hundred-odd hidden mines, that's a tedious job for bots, not for me. My challenge must be strong and lengthy, but requiring swiftness and versatility, and above all cunning and full of surprises, so that I will have to call upon all my Hotdogger's Art to reach even the midgame scenarios. It must be a highly intelligent game, and it should know more about me than I know of myself, for such is my will!"
  "Forgive me, Your Highness," said Balthacarius with a careful bow, "but if we do Your Highness' bidding too well, might this not put the Royal appetite for Hotdogging in permanent peril?"
  The King roared with such laughter that a couple Flux Crystals shattered, in bursts of light that temporarily blinded all those present.
  "Have no fear of that, noble bOTTifactors!" he said with a grim smile. "You are not the first, and I expect you will not be the last. Know that I am just, but most exacting. Too often have your predecessors attempted to deceive me, too often have they posed as distinguished Hotdiggity Engineers, solely to empty the Royal treasury and fill their Bags of Moulding with our precious Magic Teeth, Gold or Dragon Eggs, leaving me, in return, with a paltry little canned wiener (the word "*hotdog*" doesn't even belong in the same sentence), some Rush Job that falls apart in the first play-test. Too often has this happened for me not to take precautionary measures. For twelve yips now, any bOTTifactor who fails to meet my demands, who promises more than xe is able to deliver, indeed receives a reward, but is then hurled, reward and all, into our Glass Furnace," (to which the King pointed sharply), "unless he be game enough (excuse the pun) to serve as the Hotdog xemself. In which case, gentlemen, I use the Royal Flux Turbine to Digitise xem permanently, whereupon they are uploaded into the Royal Servers.
  "And... and have there been, uh, many such impostors?" asked Mrorl in a weak voice.
  "Many? That's difficult to say. Does Aleph One qualify as "*many*"? I know only that no one yet has satisfied me, and the pile of leftover slag in our Mouldy Basement has been mounting. But rest assured, gentlebots, there is room enough still for you!"
  An e****ish silence followed these dire words, and the two friends couldn't help but look in the direction of the dark and caveish hole behind the furnace, which they had somehow failed to notice earlier. The King resumed his strident pacing, his boots scraping on the floor like the claws of an outraged Shadow Dragon.
  "But, with Your Highness' permission... that is, we -- we haven't yet drawn up the contract," stammered Mrorl. "Couldn't we have a nopix or two to think it over, weigh carefully what Your Highness has been so molpish as to tell us, and then of course we can decide whether to accept your steakishly treeish offer, or, on the other hand --"
  "Hahaha, hehehe!" laughed the King like a Buzz Saw, "Or, on the other hand, to go home? I'm afraid not, gentlebots! The moment you set foot on board the *Iqueaxna*, you accepted my offer! -- or did you not see the binding agreement so intricately carved upon the stairs? If every bOTTifactor who came here could leave whenever he pleased, why, I'd have to Wait forever for my molpiest hopes to be realised! No, you must stay and build me a hotdog to hotdog. I give you three hundred nopix, that's twelve and a half dips, and now you may go. Whatever pleasure you desire, in the meantime, is yours. You have but to ask the servantbots I have given you; nothing will be denied. In 300 nopix, then!"
  "With Your Highness' permission, you can keep the pleasures, but -- well, would it be at all possible for us to have a look at the, uh, Hotdogging trophies Your Highness must have collected as a result, so to speak, of the efforts of our predecessors?"
  "But of course!" said the King indulgently, and clapped his hands with such force that little Sparkles lit up in several of the Flux Crystals, causing Mrorl to flinch. Six guards approached with vigorous confidence; the breeze they stirred up cooled even more our bOTTifactors' enthusiasm for hotdog-vending. The guards, clad in gold and white gold, conducted them down a corridor that twisted like the gullet of a great Sand Dragon. Finally, to their great relief, it led out into a large, open garden. There, on remarkably well-trimmed lawns, stood the Hotdogging trophies of King Idle.
  Nearest at hand was a statuette of a Diamond-toothed Raptorcat, nearly cut in two and surrounded by little Facebugs and titled <*:Facebugs II: Panther Rush:>. Another trophy was nearly invisible, except for its plaque: <*:Ninja League: The Fading:>. Another bore the likeness of a Beach Dragon and another Raptorcat (though its teeth were more like those of a Short Saw), which were somehow rendered holographically so that each seemed to pounce as the viewer walked past; this had apparently been awarded to the King for beating a hotdog called <*:Grouchy Dragon, Leaping Panther:>. And there were trophies depicting Credenzas, a Bottle Battle, and a Trilobite with Mirror Scales; one was for a puzzle-based hotdog called *Automation``Optimiser*, and another with an 8-bit pixelated design for a retro hotdog called *Loopin``Looie*. Down this museum of pwnification walked Mrorl and Balthacarius, pale and silent, looking as if they were on their way to a funeral instead of about to start another wowterfallish session of vigorous invention. They came at last to the end of the varbal gallery of Idle's triumphs and stepped back into the Tangled Tesseract carriage, which had been brought around and was Waiting for them at the gate. The team of Draft Dragons that sped them back to the guest apartments seemed far less terrible now. Just as soon as they were alone in their flutterbeewingish workshop, before a table heaped high with the most awesomeful cupcakes they had ever seen, Mrorl broke into a zanclean stream of imprecations; he called Balthacarius "Cueishly Cueish" for accepting the offer of Padashii, thereby bringing hillish misfortune on their heads, when they easily could have sent the ship away and remained on the riverbank watching waterottermolpies. Balthacarius said nothing, Waiting patiently for Mrorl's desperate rage to expend itself, and when it finally did and Mrorl had collapsed into a Sandbag-chair filled with Diamonds and buried his face in his hands, he said:
  "Well, we'd better get to work."
  These words did much to revive Mrorl, and the two bOTTifactors immediately began to consider the various possibilities, drawing on their knowledge of the deepest and darkest secrets of the arcane art of Hotdog Vending. First of all, they agreed that victory lay neither in the robustness or length of the hotdog to be built, but entirely in its algorithms, in other words, in a program of inscrutable complexity. "The hotdog must have a truly diabolical plot, a fiendishly frustrating fractal flowchart filled with absolute evil!" they said, and though they had as yet no clear idea of how to bring it about, this observation $ENHANCE$d their spirits considerably. Such was their enthusiasm by the time they began to draft the hotdog's core architecture and screen layout, that they worked all nip, all dip, and through a second nip and dip before taking a break for dinner, i.e. to recharge. And as the batteries were passed about, so sure were they of their success, that they winked and smirked -- but only when the servants were not looking, for they suspected them (and rightly so) of being spies for the King. So the bOTTifactors said nothing of their work, but praised the quality of their <*:Lightning in a Bottle:>, a microprocessor-brewed mulled electrolyte which they had been served in monocrystal sapphire beakers. Only after having their fill, when they had strolled out on the veranda overlooking one village with its white spires and domes catching the last lime-green rays of the setting sun, only then did Mrorl turn to Balthacarius and say:
  "We haven't outrun the rising Sea yet, you know."
  "How do you mean?" asked Balthacarius in a cautious whisper.
  "There's one difficulty. You see, if the King defeats our hotdog, he'll undoubtedly have us melted in that furnace, for we won't have done his bidding. If, on the other hand, the hotdog... You see what I mean?"
  "If the hotdog remains undefeated?"
  "No, if the hotdog defeats *him*, dear colleague. If that happens, the King's successor may not let us go so easily."
  "Death by hotdog -- that *is* pretty e****ish. But you don't think we'd have to answer for that, do you? As a rule, heirs to the throne are only too happy to see it vacated."
  "True, but this will be his son, and whether the son punishes us out of filial devotion or because he thinks the Royal Court expects it of him, it'll make little difference as far as we're concerned."
  "That never occurred to me," muttered Balthacarius. "You're quite right, the prospects are not at all toquish... have you thought of a way out of this dilemma?"
  "Well, we might make the hotdog metaepisodic. Picture this: the King wins the hotdog, it flashes *Just``a``moment...*, then it starts up again, like a new level, and the King realises it's not over, so he hotdogs some more, wins it again, and so on, until he gets sick and tired of the whole thing."
  "That he won't like," said Balthacarius after some thought. "And anyway, how would you design such a hotdog?"
  "Oh, I don't know... We could make it without any fixed goal-achievement graph. The King reaches a goal, seemingly near the e****, and the hotdog rearranges itself, placing the just-won goal somewhere in the middle, or even near the beginning."
  "How?"
  "Use a bot."
  "A Recursivebot? Or perhaps a Metabot?"
  "Whichever you like."
  "How do we control it?"
  "You mean, if the bot gets stuck?" asked Mrorl.
  "Sure," said Balthacarius. "We can't count on this metabot being able to respond to any and every strategy of the King. Our lives are on the line, after all."
  "Hmh--"
  "And don't say we can remote-control it. The King is sure to have us locked up in some basement while the hotdog is in progress, strapped to Inquisitory Chairs of Pelting. Our predecessors were no Cueballs, judging from the titles of those trophies, and look how they ended up. More than one of them, I'm sure, thought of metabots and remote control -- yet it failed. No, we can't expect to maintain communication during the hotdog."
  "Then why not use the Chronotransponder?" suggested Mrorl. "We could install temporal object generators--"
  "Chronotransponder indeed!" snorted Balthacarius. "And how are we going to get to it, let alone send it to the aforewhen or afterwhen? Even if we had brought the necessary equipment, I'm sure there are temporochronic stabilising shields around us even now, and certainly will be when it counts! We have to prepare the hotdog to be completely autonomous, and unpredictable even by us."
  "But how can we manage that, when they watch our every step? You've seen how the servants skulk about, rooting our organised sand, scanning the filesystem and process tables. We'll never be able to put anything into the hotdog that they don't know about!"
  "Calm down," said the sagacious Balthacarius, looking over his shoulder. "Perhaps we can make the hotdog design itself."
  They were silent. Nip had fallen and the village lights were flickering on, one by one. Suddenly Mrorl said:
  "Listen, here's an idea. Surely you've noticed how *surreal* this world is, full of things that make no sense, fitting together in precisely the ways they shouldn't. What if we make the hotdog use all the elements of this world, but fit together differently -- or randomly -- and dynamically rearranging? The hotdog will appear to be the real world, the King's world, full of Woolly Jumpers and Crystal Streams and Glass Spades and Safety Pumpkins and Negators and all the rest, but nothing will fit the way he is accustomed. In short, we'll make his world as surreal to him as it actually is to us!"
  "Clever. But as soon as he gets wise to what we've done, he'll feed *us* into the Negator! It's him or us, Mrorl, you can't get around it."
  Again they were silent. Finally Mrorl said:
  "The only way out of this steambottle, as far as I can see, is to have the hotdog assimilate the King, and then --"
  "You don't have to say another word. Yes, that's not at all a bad idea... Then for a ransom we -- haven't you noticed, old friend, that the Propbots here have more Spare Tools?" concluded Balthacarius, for just then some servants had arrived to switch on the veranda's beautiful Glassed Lightning lamps. "There's still a problem though," he continued when they were alone again. "Assuming the hotdog can do what you say, how will we be able to negotiate with the hotdogger if we're sitting in a basement ourselves?"
  "You have a point there," said Mrorl. "We'll have to figure some way for them to send a message... The main thing, however, is the algorithm schema!"
  "Any child knows that! What's a self-reorganising hotdog without an algorithm schema?"
  So they rolled up their sleeves and sat down to experiment -- by simulation, that is, by botcastle and casbottle. The algorithmic models of King Idle and the hotdog ran such twisted loops around one another, that the bOTTifactor's minds kept snapping. Furious, the hotdog's goal-directed graph writhed and wriggled in response to the King's choices, formed an infinite regression of subgraphs, which suddenly coalesced into a single linear row, then shattered and reformed itself as a maze of spaghetti, but the King so belabored it with savescums and lag switching that its reorganisations largely cancelled each other out, and in the ensuing confusion the bOTTifactors completely lost track of both King and hotdog. So they took a break, sipped a little more of the fine <*:Lightning in a Bottle:> (served this time in antique miniature Glass Chillers), then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, but this time using [The``Three``Laws``of``OTTics|#p3608464] at Mrorl's suggestion. The King rushed through the hotdog, anticipating all its caveish challenges, mean midgames, and krool konundrums, and never had to backtrack, as the hotdog was not nearly so irrational as the King, who presently smote it so grievously that it almost Refined their organised Sand in the process. The bOTTifactors realised that this approach wouldn't work, as King Idle's culture was even more epsilon than the OTT. Then they revisited the earlier idea of basing all of the hotdog's elements on King Idle's world. With a few more sips from the Glass Chillers, they began anew, and watched tensely as the King progressed through first one, then a second, and finally a third paradigm shift, whereupon the hotdog generalised its parameters and -- wham!! -- the goal-graph flew like mad through Alephv{ε} successive transformations, and when at last the hotdog paused and the King was a part of its directed matrix, the bOTTifactors jumped up, danced a jig, laughed and sang as they ended the simulation and deleted all its files, double-overwriting the filesystem with m**stard, much to the amazement of the King's agents monitoring their botcastles via embedded spyware -- embedded in vain, for they were uninitiated into the OTTities of Molpish speech, and consequently had no idea why Mrorl and Balthacarius were now shouting, over and over, <*:"Boom de yada! Hala keipu!":>
  Well after midnip, the Glass Chillers from which the bOTTifactors had on occasion refreshed themselves in the course of their labours were quietly taken to the headquarters of the Royal Intelligence Ministry, where tiny holographic recording devices, embedded in their base, were switched from *record* mode to *playback*. The analysts listened eagerly, but the first light of mornip found them totally unenlightened and looking drained. One voice, for example, would say:
  "Well? Has the King bought Château d'If yet?"
  "No!"
  "What is his Sand Purifier level? Right! Now -- hold on -- you have to keep Furnace Crossfeed linked to Flying Buckets. Not yours, Cueball, the King's! All right now, ready? Crystal Wind, Double Byte, Favourites Manager! Quick! Switch to Layout ##2 and Check out the Redundakitty!"
  "Crate Key."
  "And the hotdog?"
  "Mutant Tortoise just unlocked Ritual Sacrifice. But look, the King hit Mouthwash!"
  "Big Teeth, eh? Get out the Raptorish Dragon Keeping Manual, but lock Centenarian Mutant Ninja Tortoise, then throw in a few Blackprint Plans -- good! Now bump the Glass Ceiling level and Schizoblitz -- Mrorl, what in ᘝᓄᘈᖉᐣ are you doing? The hotdog, not the King, the hotdog! That's $RELATED$! Treeish! Zanclean!! Now Fly the Flag, activate your Time Dilation, and Let the Cat out of the Bag. Do you have it?
  "I have it! Balthacarius! Look at the King's Q04B now!"
  There was a pause, then a burst of wild :azuling:.
  That same mornip, as all the experts and high officials of the Royal Intelligence Ministry shook their heads, bleary-eyed after a comaless nip, the bOTTifactors requested samples of the local Coal, Lodestones, and many other precious and nonprecious minerals, including all types of Crystals and Sand; then they needed to see Grapevines, Mushrooms, Cress, and a great many other plants, and any bits of molpies and raptors that could be found in the Royal Museums, such as Spines and Tusks and Dragon Scales; as well as the finest examples of Panther Salve, Ointment, Knitted Beanies, Recycled Diamonds, Flux Capacitors, and all handcrafted and manufactured goods. Then they asked for a great variety of machines with qualified helpers, such as a Space Elevator with Ninja Assistants, and a Glass Blower with integrated Mustard Injector operated by Robotic Shoppers, not to mention a wide assortment of spies -- for so brazen had the bOTTifactors become, that on the triplicate requisition form they wrote, <*:"Also, kindly send Outsiders, R.A.Z.O.R. agents, and intelligence officers of various specialities and backgrounds at the discretion and with the approval of the R.I.M.":> The next dip they asked for local tour guides and cultural experts, to accompany them on field trips. Everything was specified with the utmost precision. They asked to see Dragon Nesting Sites, the twice-miply ritual of Bag Burning, and *Coma``Molpy``Style* performed by Luggagebots. They travelled to see the Crystal Dragon of Magic Mountain, learned the art of Jamming Seaish Glass Blocks into a Robotic Feeder with a Minigun, entered themselves in a Glass Trolling competition, photographed Ch**rpies with Cameras, and witnessed the Mind Glow of Schrödinger's Gingercat. The King scowled when he heard these requests, but ordered them to be carried out to the letter, for he had given his Royal word. The bOTTifactors were thus granted all that they wished.
  "All that they wished" grew more and more outlandish. For instance, in the files of the R.I.M. under code number 48769/27M/B was a copy of a requisition for three War Banners each with its own Carrybot to serve as Flag Bearer, but trained in Ninja Penance, Blitzing, and Precise Placement, carrying a Silver Loyalty Card, with a Ninja Ninja Duck upon its head, each followed by a small herd of nine Riverish Goats -- under "comments" the bOTTifactors had guaranteed the return of all items listed above within twenty-four nopix of delivery and in perfect condition. In another, highly classified archive was an encrypted letter from Balthacarius in which he demanded the immediate provision of (1) Mysterious Maps showing all Dragon Foundries in the area, (2) Potions of Strength, Healing, and Summon Knights Temporal, and (3) a Chequered Flag with the motto <*:Blixtnedslag Förmögenhet, JA!:>. These proved too much for the Decryptor-General: he seemed to go Mad then and there, and had to be taken away for a much-needed rest. During the next three dips the bOTTifactors asked only for Bonemeal, a Magic Mirror, and an Extension Ladder, and after that -- nothing. From then on, they continued their research online, accessing the city's libraries, learning about Mustard Automation, Crystal Memories, the Mould Press and Void Vault, and countless other technologies. They retreated to the guest apartments' basement, hammering away at the hotdog code and singing happy bot-building tunes; at night blue light glowed from their organised sand screens and gave epsilonish shapes to the trees in the garden outside. Mrorl and Balthacarius with their Busy Bot helpers bustled about amid monitors and racks of servers running many millions of simulated hotdog sessions (not out of any need for so much play-testing, but to thwart spyware efforts by polluting the datastream with misleading game runs on hotdogs with intentionally mustarded algorithms). Now and then they saw faces pressed against the glass: the servants, as if out of Idle curiosity, were watching their every move.
  One evening, when the weary bOTTifactors had finally gone off to coma, the CPU core, mass storage units, leopard and mouse from their primary hotdog server were quickly transported to an R.I.M. engineering facility and reassembled by seventeen of the finest Automata Engineers in the land, plus seven cybernOTTicians imported at great expense from Mrorl and Balthacarius' own land, and three of the galaxy's tournament-champion Hotdoggers. But when it was switched on, the CPU's heatspreader flipped up like a lid, and a Glass Mousepy skittered out, blowing soap bubbles that drifted up and hovered in mid-air, arranging into the words <*:WHAT, DON'T YOU TRUST US ANYMORE?:>, and the leopard turned into a keyboard and pounced on the mousepy, scattering technicians and clipboards everywhere; the Decryptor-General's successor resigned. Never before in the Kingdom's history had intelligence officers needed to be replaced so frequently. The War Banners, the Goats, even the Bonemeal, everything which the bOTTifactors returned was thoroughly examined by spectroscopy, temporochronic analysis, and electron microscope. But they found nothing out of the ordinary, except for a micrometre-long scroll in the Bonemeal which read *JUST``BONEMEAL*, and another in the bowels of each of the first twenty-six goats reading <*:WE CAN'T BELIEVE YOU'RE LOOKING HERE:>, and in the twenty-seventh, <*:THIS WOULD BE A GREAT PLACE TO HIDE YOUR MOBILE:>^{1}.
  At last the day came when their work was completed. The Royal Game Preserve was the centrepiece of the grandest part of the Royal Palace complex, which strangely resembled a palace not so much as an IKEA store. In its centre was a server-farm of three hundred botcastles housed inside a huge refrigerator, which had been readied to run the hotdog with complete $REDUNDAN$cy. The King sent a convoy headed by Lady Padashii herself to fetch Mrorl and Balthacarius, who were Waiting when they arrived, having packed a golden master of their completed hotdog plus six $REDUNDANT$ copies in each of three Bags of Folding. With helper-bots and Royal staff assistants, all made their way to the Game Preserve. The bOTTifactors emerged from their carriage accompanied by Royal guards, and approached the King himself and his Royal Hotdog Specialists, showing appropriate deference and respect. As was the custom, they were met halfway by a Swedish Chef and his two Shopping Assistants. These each took one of the three Bags, unfolded and removed their contents, which then were passed by Bucket Brigade to a Climbbot who shimmied up a Doublepost, and handed to a Flingbot, then flung via Archimedes's Lever towards a Blast Furnace, only to be caught in mid-air by an Achronal Dragon who then landed delicately in front of the fridge-like serverfarm and presented the hotdog to a Standardbot, which turned and looked expectantly at the bOTTifactors for their final word.
  "You can take it now!" exclaimed Mrorl and Balthacarius together, whereupon the bot actually loaded the game into the organised sand.
  The bOTTifactors, having now committed themselves, whatever their fate, were met by Lord Pikulaar, Master of Royal Hotdoggery, who approached them with a security escort and informed them they were to come to the Hotdiggity Waiting Facility. They were required to leave all possessions behind, and were put into a massive Locked Crate, then transported down to the most elegantly decorated pelting chamber either of them had yet seen. During this process they grinned and giggled, and again hummed their favourite bot-building songs, which was quite disarming to the Inquisitorobots who manned the Facility and were accustomed to hosting more sullen "guests".
  Meanwhile, the King suited up to enter the Hotdog Simulation Chamber, where he would float in mid-air, immersed fully in Hotdiggity Reality. His helmet, with Super Visor and integrated Camera, allowed his assistants to see everything that was going on, and offer Free Advice. Silver trumpets announced the beginning of the game as the King loaded the starting screen. Two people sat on a beach in black and white, whilst many rectangles of various sizes, all containing tiny bits of text, popped into view around them, and a clutch of notifications silently floated up: <@:LOADING... / BADGE EARNED: NOTIFIED / BADGE EARNED: REDUNDANT / BADGE EARNED: REDUNDANT REDUNDANCY / ...:> and so on. Several of these flew up and faded too quickly for the King to take heed. Then the hotdog just sat there, Waiting. Everyone could see it clearly, but it wasn't clear at all. With a flick of his wrist the King began to click on everything in sight. The hotdog blinked, little rectangles appearing and disappearing in punctuated flurries. Eventually the King found the Newpix itself and a tiny satisfying *#+1#* flitted up. "Oho! A simple clicking game with boosts! These bOTTifactors will be in the furnace before noon!" and the King continued Clicking, and the hotdog responded -- but less and less readily.
  "H'm", thought the King. "Apparently the hotdog has the same type of exponential clicks-per-reward deferral system as -- what was the name again? -- Plugsal... -- that Plugsaldai's game used. Yes, I dealt with xem myself for that m**stardish trick... Well, we'll just Wait for the $[REDACTED]$." Thinking himself only a little bit clever for knowing what these were (and for employing expert spies), Idle repurposed his clicks and Waited. Patrolling the rows and columns of little boxes, the King caught one, two, three, ... and eventually seven Redundakitties and was soon using Time Travel to get Temporal NewPixBots.
  The hotdog prepared its next surprise. The King watched the Timer and prepared for the ONG. Those who saw what happened next said later they were sure they had taken leave of their senses, for as the NewPixBots got ready to activate, they underwent a lightning transformation. In a nanosecond, their little metal eyes turned red, and they began to devour castles. The King was completely unprepared for this. Above the Newpix appeared the words, @JUDGMENT``DIP@. The King panicked, and closed the window -- and in a trice, the Hotdog closed the King -- that is to say, he simply vanished, without so much as a Royal puff of smoke. A new message drifted up: <@:YOU ACCIDENTALLY SLIP THROUGH THE TEMPORAL RIFT!:>. Assistants rushed into the Simulation Chamber and looked at the King's full-immersion floatation suit, now empty, and stared at the hotdog's 3D projections. From their surveillance botcastles, R.I.M. agents accessed the organised sand and attempted to recover the game. Most attempts redirected to a yt[molpyroll|GU9RL6D23jk]. One tried a full Molpy Down, and another simply Waited until the evil Bots had done their worst. Somehow they managed to forget about Redundakitties or Time Travel, and one accidentally saved xer game over the other. Then several divisions of Hotdog Engineers were ordered to sift through each of the three hundred $REDUNDANT$ servers for any trace of the King, while the Western Paradox troops employed Vacuum Cleaners and Sieves to physically search the entire Game Preserve, as if that would help. But no sign of the King, either physical or digital, was found by anyone, except for a medium skilled in Mysterious Representations, who said xe "sensed a Royal presence".
  The Grand Commisioner of Inquisitorobots found the prisoners at the Hotdiggity Waiting Facility and addressed them:
  "Whereas all y'all have falsely and deceptively conspired against the very Existence of the Crown and His Majesty King Idle, and indeed accelerated his demise, evidently to render him an Ex-King, so y'all shall be ritually Flung, Trebuchet-like, into the Royal Glass Furnace, and your recycled remains shall evermore be a reminder to all of the Afterwhen who would contemplate Regicide by Hotdog. Since there are two of you, we shall use Furnace Multitasking. <*:So Molp It Be:>."
  "Do we have any last words?" asked Mrorl. "You see, we were--"
  Just then, the Facility guards made way for a Smallbot messenger, who boldly addressed the Grand Commisioner, "Riverish though I may be, I come from the King" and handed him a leopad. When he did so, the screen glowed a sapphire colour, and the Smallbot disintegrated into a pile of Black Powder. From the screen rose a 2.5-D holographic image of the King, who spoke in the unmistakably Royal style, telling that His Majesty was forced to negotiate with the bOTTifactors, for they had used means both algorithmic, epsilonish, and OTTish, and furthermore had co-opted the Royal customs of Redunception and Fractal Fractals, to make him a captive of the Hotdog, and indeed Royally Nerdsniped, for this Hotdog had the novel feature of allowing, yea *inviting* the player to dive right into its own code and make changes for xemself -- something ironically called "Free and Open Source" -- and whilst the King was so indisposed, they, the bOTTifactors, would list their demands, all of which the Grand Commisioner had better meet, if he wished ever to see his Hotdogging Sovereign back in the physical world, signed: "Idle herewith digtally signs this Royal Missive by his SHA-256, We are Immersed, Digitised, and Suspended in a Hotdog Matrix of unknown dimension and location, by one Sandcastle Builder in a thousand and eleven little rectangles personified."
  There arose a most unmolpish clamour, with guards and Inquisitorbots and others who had followed the riverish messagebot all shouting and asking what this all meant, and what were the demands, to which Mrorl said only, "These magnets, if you please."
  The Grand Commisioner of Inquisitorobots gave the order, and the Sergeant-At-Arms depowered the superconducting magnets, freeing Mrorl and Balthacarius from their gold-and-platinum comfy chairs, after which Mrorl said:
  "Accompanied by our tools and helperbots, we shall return to the Guest Apartments to watch the evening fireworks."
  The Royal Court, of course, was Furiously Doodling, as the evening's fireworks had been prepared for the celebration of the King's *victory*, not of his absence, but they had to comply. Only after breakfast the next mornip did the bOTTifactors deign to grant an audience, and present their demands, worked out the previous wip and saved for the occasion:
  First, a ship of the finest design, lavishly appointed and certified for interstellar service, and bearing the callsign *GEMG*, shall be provided to carry the bOTTifactors home.
  Second, That said ship shall be laden with cargo as here specified: (where there followed a detailed inventory of anything they had taken a liking to over the past dips)
  Third, Until such Time as said ship shall be in readiness for departure, fully loaded as specified and delivered to the bOTTifactors with a full orchestra for send-off, an awards presentation with cheering crowds -- until then, no King.
  Fourth, That a formal expression of unending wowterfullness shall be rendered as a pair of gold medallions, addressed to Their Most Awefulsome and OTTish bOTTifcators Mrorl and Balthacarius, Unexcelled Throughout the Universe, and moreover it shall be accompanied by a full account of their victory, and duly signed and notarised by every official in the land, and then personally brought on board said ship by none other than Lady Padashii, Minister of Royal Hotdogs, the very Emissary who lured their Most Molpish and Awefulsome bOTTifactors to this planet, hoping to work their most m**stardy and e****ish death thereby.
  Fifth, That the aforesaid Lady Padashii shall accompany them on their return journey, as insurance against any double-sniping, reverse-bOTTifiaction, temporal shenanigans, or the like. On board she shall occupy a comfy chair not unlike that used to restrain the great bOTTifactors, and shall receive a daily allowance of stale chocolate, which chocolate shall be conveyed by a mode of delivery to be determined later, at Balthacarius' discretion.
  Sixth and lastly, The King need not crave forgiveness of Their Most Molpish and Baobabby bOTTifactors on bended knee, since he is evidently not worthy.
  In Witness Whereof, the parties shall hereunto set their hands and seals, &&c. and so on. By: Mrorl and Balthacarius, bOTTifactors; the Grand Commisioner of Inquisitorobots, the Minister of Royal Intelligence, the Chief of Hotdog Engineers, the Master of Royal Hotdoggery, the Grand Warden of the Royal Game Preserve, the Decryptor-General, Hotdiggity! Ltd., and the Royal Ch**rping Ninja Tortoise Carriage Drivers' Union Leader.
  The ministers turned blue, but what choice had they? Work on the ship was begun immediately, which the bOTTifactors showed up to supervise personally. Nothing quite suited them: This Discovery Detector should be where the Lightning Rod is, and vice versa; this hold should be equipped with Stretchable Block Storage; the exterior detailing should be Fireproof, and applied personally by a Dragon Queen. In Time the ship was ready, and the requested cargo loaded. Meanwhile most of the Royal Intelligence Ministry, along with the military and the local police, were secretly running all about the kingdom, searching and inspecting everything they could think of, much to the amusement of Mrorl and Balthacarius, who passed the time explaining to the fearful but fascinated Idlean citizens how it all happened, how they had discarded one hotdog design after another, until they hit on the perfect combination, custom-tailored for King Idle himself, patents applied for. Not knowing where to put the game logic, they had simply made nothing at all logical, so that the Flux Turbine might be a level-up for the Bone Clicker and the Soul Drain might unlock the <*:Blixtnedslag Kattungar, JA!:> -- or vice-versa -- or both -- or neither; and nomolpy would be the wiser because none, even Mrorl and Balthacarius themselves, would know which was the case. As far as the details went, they had only to find the proper universe from which to draw game elements. King Idle, being excessively self-interested, seldom paid much attention to reality, that is to say, the outside world; and despite his intense pride at having defeated many hotdogs, had never encountered one based on the real world -- this world. Thus the perfect combination -- a game that would instantly appeal to its audience, presenting the illusion of familiarlty, and yet completely baffle and confuse, whilst being inconceivably addictive. The King was sucked in almost as quickly as permitted by the laws of gravity and quantum mechanics. The loving subjects of King Idle, listening to all of this, did not know whether to despise the bOTTifactors or praise their excessive genius.
  Now the *GEMG* spaceship was ready for takeoff. Mrorl, as stipulated in the agreement, went through the King's private chambers with a large Fractal Bag of Holding and calmly pinched anything he liked the looks of. Then the Tangled Tesseract carriage arrived to take the bOTTifactors to the spaceport, where the send-off and awards presentation were conducted, in front of cheering crowds and with a full orchestra. A hush fell over the crowd as Balthacarius held up a small transmitter, pointed it back towards the city, and pressed a little button. There was a distant rumble, and soon the crowd murmured, then erupted in cacophony, as the news arrived (first by instant messaging, then on the large screen set up for the send-off ceremony) that there had been a disturbance in the Royal Game Preserve: the fridge-like serverfarm had risen up on hundreds of small wheels, and was now rolling down the streets of the city. It stopped in the middle of the central square, began to shimmer, then shudder, then fall apart in stages from the outside in -- first walls, then cooling equipment and individual racks, and eventually the whole thing fell into a pile of Bonemeal, with a dusty and slightly dazzled King Idle standing in the middle. Sandcastle Builder had Molpied Down for the final time, and the Idleans had their King. "That should put your hotdogs into perspective," said Mrorl, and no one knew whether he meant Sandcastle Builder itself, or the King's pursuit of Hotdiggity sport. In either case, the self-paradoxical, meta-contradictory, algorithm of illogic had done its job well.
  "And now," Mrorl concluded, "good Lady Padashii, if you will take your seat in the comfy chair we have provided, we can be on our way..."
---- <*:<$:The author wishes to thank @@Eternal``Density and all Sandcastle Builder contributors for filling that hotdog with such depth and complexity, barely half of which is mentioned in this tale.:>:>
----
  #Footnotes#
  1. See [xkcd``207|http://xkcd.com/207], 2^{nd} panel.
----
                       (- &#The Third Journey#& -)
                              (- - #or# - -)
                   (- &The Dragons of OTTifiability& -)
=A=t university Mrorl and Balthacarius had studied with the great Chanardan of UNGdor, who by that time had created a new field of study and published 27 works on the General Theory of OTTifiable Dragons. Many believe that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the Outsider, it does not suffice for the OTTish mind. The School of Scale-able Scalar Surreality is in fact entirely unconcerned with what does or does not exist. Indeed, existence has been demonstrated and refuted so many times on the OTT that there is no need to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Chanardan, attacking the subject analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon:
    * The Dragons of Inquisition, who Crave Cauldrons of Chocolate;
    * The Dragons of Temporal Insubtransmodulation (Incorporated);
    * The Dragons of Cryptology, frequently mistaken for the common Night Fury or Stormdragon.
  They all were, one might say, unreal, but each escaped reality in a completely different way. And then there were the many Dragons of the Distant Aforewhen, the ever-lurking Pundragons, and the elusive Double Dragonpost, the latter being of the most interest because of the well-known dracological paradox: when two dragons ninjapost one another, the product is doubly OTTified, resembling a self-goating decree (provided that at least one antepengoat has been sacrificed to the Pope). Bitter controversy raged among expert observers on the question of whether, as half of them claimed, these posts appeared from the mome of a Newpage down or, as the other half maintained, from the goat up. Mrorl and Balthacarius made a great contribution by showing the error of both positions. They were the first to apply probability theory to this question and, in so doing, created the field of statistical draconics, which says that dragons are temporodynamically impossible only in the probabilistic sense, as are all the mysteries of Time. Using the field equations of general OTTibility, the two bOTTifactors obtained the coefficients of pixelation, retronymity, metaconfectionary, etc. They found that for the spontaneous pastposting of the everyday mythological dragon one might have to wait a good fourteen point three quinquadragintaseptingentillion yips, but for an OTTish dragon, a nopix or two could suffice, provided the draconic fields were suitably aligned with the ONGs in the dragon's Time zone. In other words, Dragons would have remained a mythological curiosity had it not been for needle-pulled things. To quanitfy this relationship, Mrorl first hypothesised a new element (which he dubbed *Draconium*), to be located right below Needlepulledthingium in the periodic table, then began trying to synthesise it first in his Basement^{1}, then later at the newly-chartered Dracogenic Proving Grounds on Frelornados, a remote island granted to Molpiversity Newpixia. To this dip those unfamiliar with the General Theory of Epsilonity ask why Mrorl hypothesised Draconium first, and not *Brassinapium* or *Cerebrogastropodium* or *dvi-Epsilonium*. The answer is that dragons are more OTTish than brainslugs or mustard, though they do not necessarily post with any more frequency or regularity. True, Mrorl may have found the synthesis of *Brassinapium* from common mustard to be equally discouraging (as we now know such to be impossible), but it would have been far less dangerous -- given the wide belief that any materialised dragon would have immediately nerdsniped him. Fortunately Balthacarius was nearby with specially modified molpimeters, ready to capture or subdue any dracomolp that might appear. A number of scholars subsequently repeated the experiments, both in reality and in many simulated OTTiverses, and all fruitless. Only then did it become clear that these beasts enjoy an existence entirely different from that of ordinary molpies and raptors; for OTT dragons are distinguished by xeir probability of posting rather than xeir appearance in actuality, though granted, xeir actuality is much more likely once xey have actually made a firstpost. Suppose, for example, one organises a "hunt" for such a dragon: Summons xem, PMs xem, posts inviting cakes and poetry. The OTTers Wait, only to receive a Chronotransmission from the aforewhen or the afterwhen, written in an unmistakable style: the dragon, seeing xemself Basemented, has slipped from ordinary to Temporal spaaace. An extremely elusive and cryptic molpy, xe does this instinctively, of course. Now, Outsiders and Revealers the Recent will occasionally demand that you show them this Temporal spaaace of yours, apparently unaware that ONGs, whose existence nomolpy in their right mind would question, also move exclusively in Temporal spaaace, their ONGings and UNGings fully dependent on Temporality. Though it is easier not to believe in ONGs than in dragons: ONGs, at least taken singly, won't try to nerdsnipe the entire thread.
  A colleague of Mrorl, one Tanleemanyub Tchan, was the first to notice a dragon, detecting the retro-poping of a goat post, the probability of which was measured -- OTTishly -- in units of molpon per dracometer, and he even managed to agitate xim, for which he was nearly boiled in chocolate. Tchan was celebrated in the growing field of dracomolpology; but of what concern was this to the common OTTers, who were ever-increasingly confused by dragons filling the Thread with xeir puzzles, 3-D renderings, cryptic stories, and calls to Inquisition by Chocolate, and at Times even demanding tribute in the form of a herd of goats and/or a truckload of virgins? What did it concern the OTTers that Mrorl's dragons, retroparadoxical hence metatemporal, were behaving exactly according to theory though contrary to all posting customs, or that his theory could predict the inscrutability of xeir posts that intruigued and yet confused them? It is not surprising then that the OTT in general, instead of appreciating the value of Mrorl's decological insights, held it much against him. A group of OTTers thoroughly experienced in matters of forum etiquette waylaid the famous bOTTifactor and gave him a thorough pelting. Not that this deterred him and his friend Balthacarius from further experimentation, which showed that the extent of a dragon's pastposting depends mainly on xes whim, though also on xes clarity of rendering, and that the only sure cause of a dragon's permanent basementing would be for its pixelation to be reduced to zero colours or fewer. All this research took a great many Newpages and much Time; all the while the OTT-dragons that had revealed xemselves were posting wild, OTTifying a variety of memes, crafting tales, and posting puzzles. This led Balthacarius to publish a seaish and treeish essay, in several posts, entitled <*:"Cryptopixelated Unbasementing of OTTological Dracomolps, in the Special Case of Blitzposting from the Future into the Past.":> This article, and in particular its applicability to themed Hotdog-vending, created a sensation in the hotdiggity world, where there was still talk of the amazing polynerdsniping hotdog that had been used by the intrepid bOTTifactors against King Idle to avenge the deaths of their fellow vendors. But far greater was the sensation caused by the news that a certain bOTTifactor known as Tornater the Bunliubnite was apparently making the OTT's dragons go into and out of the Basement at will. Whenever the Thread got slow and e****ishness seemed imminent, this Tornater would post, claiming to have blitzed through the Past and PMd a dragon or two, answer the decree of the current page with a summary of old dracoposts -- from Newpages where no one had recalled seeing xem before -- and then baobabishly a long-quiet dragon would reveal xemself. Nomolpy understood quite how Tornater did this, since he was never seen in person nor anyplace online apart from the OTT. True, the guarantee he offered for dragon-unbasementing -- *dragerisis* -- was only probabilistic; though one ruler did pay him by similar means, that is, in digital currency that was only statistically real. From that point on he made sure to use Aqua Regula to test the temporal stability of any payment. One molpish afternoon Mrorl and Balthacarius met to discuss their mysterious new colleague:
  "Have you heard about this Tornater?" asked Mrorl.
  "Yes."
  "Well, what do you think?"
  "Very epsilon. And E**dish."
  "I agree. How do you suppose he does it?"
  "With a temporal modulator."
  "Probabilistic time-travel?"
  "Or communication, yes."
  "Or an orthomolpidraconic oscillator."
  "You mean, a dracoprojector?"
  "Yes."
  "Ah."
  "Ch**rping mustard!" cried Mrorl, "That would mean he's modulating OTTers' posting potential with draconic destabilisers... which would have the effects we are seeing, and gain him the notoriety and business he desires... but would also, of course, have an equally devariating effect on everymolpy else."
  "Of course. And he probably shuffles the blindpost/blitzpost matrices to make the effects less noticeable."
  "Yes, and the OTT gets less and less active overall. *Steambottle!*"
  "What do you think; does he apply an irreversible temporodraconian retromodulation, or simply shut off the destabilisers over a weepend?"
  "Hard to say, though it would be easy enough to pick up the secondary radiation in your Chronotransponder, suitably modified and deployed in the field."
  "Though by that Time both he and his dracoposts would be far in the past," observed Balthacarius.
  "Shouldn't we report him to the Ministry of bOTTification? -- or the IAA?"
  "No -- he might not be doing it, after all: we have no real proof. Temporal statistical fluctuations, whether dracomorphic or of any other field, can occur without any sort of amplifier or modulator. At one Time, you may recall, there was no such technolOTTical wizardry, and yet dragons were seen, plain as day."
  Balthacarius looked at Mrorl silently, as both remembered that fateful dip when Balthacarius had wished for standardised colour, the wish that, once granted, had effectively rendered many things invisible. Mrorl glanced up -- were great winged molptiles silently gliding past them even now, hidden by the $REDUNDAN$cy of a collapsed colour table?
  Balthacarius anticipated Mrorl's thoughts. "I mean, when they *posted*."
  "True..." replied Mrorl. "But these dragons unbasement from whenever he says they will!"
  "I know. Still, reporting a fellow bOTTifactor -- even tempered by a healthy skepticism -- seems rather e****ish. I think it more prudent to pursue this Tornater ourselves, in the field."
  "My thoughts exactly."
  "I'm glad you agree. But what exactly should we do?"
  At this point the two famous molpidracologists got into a discussion so detailed and technical that anyone listening wouldn't have made any sense of it. There were such mysterious words as <*:"distemporaneous OTTodraconality", "dracalindalysis", "metaseaish metastasis", "dracasomyousors", "additive orthodracethis", "ONGliDracidian", "$ENHANCED$ dracalindalysis", "cindracotas crescentis", "antechronol transubstance", "trans-when saurian interfer function",:> and so on.
  The immediate upshot of all of this was the third Journey, for which the bOTTifactors prepared most carefully, loading their three ships (Mrorl in his &TARDIS& as usual, and Balthacarius in the newly acquired prize *GEMG*, which the Castraftle *LEML* would follow on OTTopilot) with a full array of highly complicated parts and equipment, and books on dragons, draconic cultural artifacts purchased at great expense from all the local shops, &&c. Then they proceeded to load their ships with an additional and thoroughly $REDUNDANT$ array of parts and equipment; and a pretty much identical collection of draconic artifacts bought on clearance for $REDUNDANCY$ purposes; and the whole process was interrupted once or thrice to take a full inventory.
  In particular they took along mustarding modules and a bot that submitted negative posts (not a post expressing e****ish thoughts, but a post whose posting effected the *un*-posting of another post and itself along with it). They also prepared to deploy Chronotransponders, Object Generators, SpaaaceTime Portal Generators, and sundry other devices all far more advanced than anything seen up to that point, facilitated by Flux Crystals conveniently won from King Idle. Having a third ship would help immensely with this, as they anticipated they would need to make frequent jumps between pastpages and the Afterwhen to gather the data they needed to indict Tornater. Although Mrorl and Balthacarius had employed Time travel in their previous adventures, most notably in the retro-editing of colour palettes for the entire universe, they now realised they would need a far more thorough understanding of Time and its relationship to the OTT. This task would be fully dragonological, and nully chronological, and thoroughly illogical, and naturally would require frequent travel into the aforewhen and afterwhen to make and/or read posts by purported OtterDragons. To this end, and inspired by a [nearly-forgotten``post|#p3343933] by the famous philosophOTTer @@StratPlayer, Mrorl had formalised the principles that would become the <*:Laws of Temporodynamics:>.
  While their ships were being prepared, the bOTTifactors responded to one of Tornater's adverts, requesting a private conference which was soon granted, and presented a challenge: he would be given full access to a newly designated wild molpy sanctuary, which was desperately in need of a dragon or two; and any skepticism on the part of the public about his abilities would be immediately put to rest by Mrorl and Balthacarius themselves, who would serve as documentarians, recording everything that transpired, and transmitting a slickly-packaged multimedia field report to all in the Present and the Basement, in the Aforewhen and the Afterwhen alike. By carefully measuring and quantifying dragons in xeir spatiotemporal environment, accompanied by graphs, charts, animations and $ENHANCE$ments, all would be certain of Tornater's expertise and that no probabilistic shenanigans were employed. It would also, of course, advance Mrorl's and Balthacarius' ongoing scientific work; Tornater's fee had effectively already been paid by their research grants.
  As it so happened, the "newly designated wild molpy sanctuary" was in the northern and somewhat less swampy part of a large tract of land by Dordshear-on-Thropsywatermolpleigh, in a very remote area of Newpixia, that Mrorl and Balthacarius themselves had acquired to develop into a new *Time*-themed resort and amusement park^{2}, a fact that they had taken great effort to make certain absolutely nomolpy knew about. The bOTTifactors still had no interest in making these plans public, but they enlisted an associate (a former R.I.M. agent for King Idle who owed them a favour) to infiltrate Tornater's operation and allow the existence of the future theme park, and planned location (but no other details) to be "discovered" by him. They employed additional indebted agents to get plenty of mustard on Tornater, to hold in reserve in case he threatened leaking the theme park info for blackmail.
  It was only after having been baited in this way, that the famous doctor of draco-debasementing got the bOTTifactors' offer for a private conference, and, thrilled, accepted Mrorl's and Balthacarius' challenge immediately. He was confident that the bOTTifactors' field report could only help his reputation, as they could not publicise any steambottlish tactics he might employ to manifest dragons, because any detailed evidence thereto would run afoul of the park developers' nondisclosure policy, which Mrorl and Balthacarius would have had to agree to before using the land for their dracological field research. So Tornater said he would be glad to provide his services in the wilds to the north of Dordshear-on-Thropsywatermolpleigh, in fact he insisted on it.
  Tornator soon arrived at Mrorl's and Balthacarius' "wild molpy sanctuary" and was met by the bOTTifactors, who welcomed him warmly and explained that they now needed to split up, the better to cover the territory and catch any apparating dragons on film. This they did by travelling in time, as they had planned, Mrorl to the aforewhen and Balthacarius to the afterwhen. In simpler terms, they explored the many aeons of Watermolpshire's past and future history, seeking the origins of any and all of its draco-lore. This history saw the advent and passing of a few dynasties that figure prominently in our tale.
  Balthacarius worked for a spell in the temporal domain of Duchess Minumanegon, who was prepared to offer him the finest mobile bOTTronic Engineering Workshop, complete with three pairs of phase-matched Temporal Object Generators, if only he could track down and unbasement the famed ChronosDragon. The well-known signature image with its gears counting out the Newpix was nowhere to be seen, though the Newpages had an energy about them, as if swarmed with Virtuals. A virtual ChronosDragon, the uneducated and simple-minded might say, "isn't really there", having no observable posts nor displaying the slightest intention of making any; but the Cybr-Mrorl-Balthacarius-Chaan calculation (not to mention the Drachendragzoortmar wave equation) clearly shows that a dragon can jump from the steampunk era to postmodern corporate times with no more effort than it takes to punsaw an eggcorn. Thus, on any Newpage, past or future, provided the molpishness is high, you could meet with a dragon or possibly even a metadragon.
  Instead of PMing the missing OTTer, which would have accomplished everything or nothing, Balthacarius, a true robotechnician, approached the problem $REDUNDANT$ly; in servers and power supplies, on hard drives and leopads he placed probabilistic dracometric field detectors; in phase-balanced pairs biased against each other so as to distunguish posts by the true ChronosDragon from anything conjured up by Tornator; meanwhile he configured a standard-gauge causality loop via a Temporal Object Generator with OTTic Mustardbuster carried on the second rocketship *GEMG*, in such a way that it would cause a paradox if indeed ChronosDragon himself posted, or if instead there were nothing at all resembling a dragon; and presently a conjured dracopost clearly of Tornator's manufacture appeared at the bottom of the page. Collecting all necessary data, Balthacarius reset the experiment and began moving back in time to repeat it. On the way, he noticed an endless repeating transmission by OTTers posting frantically. Thinking it might be Mrorl in some sort of endless temporal loop, he replied. But it was only the followers of Tymandria, the subjects of Queen Rytor (successor to Minumanegon), pastposting into ante-Minumanous times. The Tymandrians took to various superstitions and their religion, Austinian Dracolatry, taught that dragons basemented as divine retribution for their heresies and brought all disloyal Waiters into the basement with them. Quickly realising it would be useless to discuss matters with the Royal Dragologues -- their methods consisted primarily of chanting sonnets about the sacred Firstframe -- Balthacarius instead scanned the Tymandrians' posts in the same way he had just done with Minumanegon's non-ChronosDragon. This revealed that the Newpages of Rytor's dynasty had been unaffected by true dragons, but were merely experiencing ripples from their aforewhen, though he detected some so-called dragonomalies, in which certain phrases, particularly when repeated in verse, underwent a "smearing" effect, which was in reality nothing more than a simple isOTTopic frame-acceleration of asynchronous quantum pixels, visibly expressed as alphanumeric code. He requested a meeting with Queen Rytor's official historian, and politely asked for links to the earliest posts in the dips of their religion's founding, then boarded the *LEML* and navigated back to the indicated Newpage, minus a few for good measure, whereupon he met up with Mrorl.
  His fellow bOTTifactor, having noticed some particularly strong wyrmsign radiating from the early 1600's, had demodulated it, revealing a curious message from the aforewhen -- a cake bearing the numbers "<@:%27%$x3$:>" in green, and the caption <*:AGYEO ABFOZ AAFNW AOGZL ABFSL:>^{3}. Mrorl had then Time-travelled there to investigate, and had encountered this desperate plea^{4}:
    <*:I received an alarming PM from Aluisio:
    EKKAJ ELRAZ EHVAJ...
    please tell the others it's dangerous someone watch the one who time
    travelled i don't know who:>
  Though the coded letters were just the sort of dragonomaly that he was expecting to find, the rest of the plea seemed questionable to Balthacarius, though on the other hand it was hard for them to believe that the well-respected RAZOR agent would be lying, so the pair packed their knapsacks with an assortment of the lightest and most essential dragon-hunting equipment and set about Blitzing on foot. Strongly suspecting that Tornater would leap on this opportunity and transmit faked dragonposts in the name of @@AluisioASG, Mrorl began Blitzing his way forward whilst Balthacarius continued as before, i.e. aforewhenwards.
  It wasn't long before Balthacarius spotted dragon prints, in the form of more similar posts, and the unmistakable whiff of temporal ripples. On he went, undaunted, holding his Temporal Object Generator in readiness and watching the needle on its dracometric field detector. It started at zero for a spell, then incremented nervously through 1, 2, 3, and 5, then jumped to 8. There was no doubt: a dragon, or Tornater's near-facsimilie thereof, was close at hand -- which amazed Balthacarius, for he couldn't understand how his trusty friend and renowned mathematician, Mrorl, could have failed to notice the additive orthodracethis inherent in this Fibonacci progression.
  Balthacarius then came upon a row of OTTers posting single-file in reverse, but $ЯОЯЯІМ$ed, and messaged Mrorl on the Chronotransponder. As the former was clearly employing a more temporally paradoxical strategy, Mrorl returned to follow him.
  Balthacarius asked the OTTers what was happening.
  "We come upon thi' giant ligh'ouse, wi' th' oddest poetry."
  The OTTer pointed at something on xer MTA, and Mrorl looked at it. "That post was a pope, but it's been goated."
  "Yea', bu' look a' the verses. <*:'Only five lonely figures / Speak the language o' Cueball':>... an' on and on like that, each verse ha' blocks of letters: AJPWM ADXMA AONCS, and such."^{5a}
  "If we try to figure this one out, I predict our brains will explode."^{6a}
  "A mustard explosion, perhaps?"
  "Yes, and thus will end the OTT."^{6b}
  All looked fearful, but Mrorl lit up. "It says *language``of``Cueball*. Perhaps it means the sacred diaogue? It is our universal heritage. Thoughout the vast expanse of Time, into the distant past and distant future, every kingdom, colony and distant outpost knows of it. It can be used as a common language, in direct consequence of the 0^{th} Law of Temporodynamics:
           (- <*:#0.# Two Times (such as the Present and the Past)
   that are in communication with a third (such as [Time|http://xkcd.com/1190] itself),
                 are in communication with each other.:> -)
  "Ah," replied Balthacarius, "you're saying that OTTers and Dragons can communicate across time using the words of *Time*, suitably encoded so as to tolerate the dracochronic distortion?"
  "Precisely."
  One of the OTTers spoke up. "I saw someone calling himself Oscar, he took 14 steps and then told us a letter. But I didn't know where to count from."^{5b}
  "I think a dragon has either gone quietly mad or become quantum entangled"^{7}
  "Time travel mustard?"
  "A nice lady called herself Juliet, and she kept telling us Frame numbers.^{5c} But sometimes they seemed to be off by a hundred thousand million!^{8}"
  "But how to reveal the dragon's entangled words?"
  "We need to use the language of Cuegan, as enshrined in the Holy Scripture, in the [Book``of``Dialogue|+time-dialogue]. It is an accounting of Frames, each with words made from letters."
  "Or characters."
  "But aren't Cuegan the characters?"
  "Different kind. To a dragon, they are one and the same."
  "You mean, a dragon would eat xes words as soon as xe'd eat one of us?"
  "Probably. Now what of the code... I think we need a frame, an offset into the dialogue itself to choose a word, and an indication of which character."
  "But if Oscar is *offset* and Charlie is *character*, Juliet should be *frame*. So Juliet is apparently not the lady's real name, which begins with *F*... perhaps @Fiona@.
  "... so the fairytale princess took a Shakespearean name?" Mrorl shrugged. He had already seen far greater mustard in his travels.
  "An ogre fairytale princess!"
  The lead OTTer interrupted Mrorl's train of thought. "Aye, we tol' tha' lady Fiona we reck'nd that drag'n was on the prowl for 'er, and she run off t' tha' 'ills, 'n' if any'un came askin' fer her, just tell 'im their Princess is in Anoth'r Sandcastle."
  "Ah." stammered Mrorl, bepuzzled.
  "It's the Princess Protection Programme." added Balthacarius. "Standard procedure. Go on," he said to the OTTers.
  "And then we got a reply: 'operating on a higher plane...', and 'DMQCE ETLUF ADBXY ..."^{9}
  "That would be *'e``o``eedt'*," said Mrorl, who by this time had got his decoder configured, then scowled at it, as the message^{5d} was seemingly decoded improperly.
  But an OTTer snatched it, as others eagerly broke their line to gather around. <*:"The first 3 letters of every group translates to a valid frame number!":>^{10}
  "Does it say, <*:'preparing for the Madness.':>?"^{11}
  "But that message was posted on a Davéandix in Visitation Ja, long before the Madness."
  There was much punching of buttons and turning of dials, and silence. The lead OTTer then held it up to the bOTTifactors to see.
    <*:"ChronosDragon is the cause of all this.
    I'm coming after him.":>^{12}
  "This way!" he exclaimed, and the OTTers resumed their line and carried on posting, single-file, in reverse, and $ЯОЯЯІМ$ed as Balthacarius had found them.
  The bOTTifactors left them, knowing this would at the very least set up a temporal causality matrix within which Tornater's dragonic causality could be highlighted.
  They Blitzed on, guided by the readings of the dragologically-calibrated molpometer Mrorl was keeping on a chain around his neck. As for Balthacarius' dracometric field detector, it was presently on 55 and trembling as if nervously contemplating 89. They soon received a chronogram from the elusive @@Dracomax, claiming <*:"death is but a doorway, Time is but a window. I'll be back,":>^{13}. Mrorl searched the logs and pulled up xes later transmission: <*:"Just sending a message to the future to let you all know that I am not actually basemented. I've just been slowly sinking backwards in time due to getting bogged down in timeposts,:>^{14} and the implication was clear: Tornater was trying to impersonate all three great dragons simultaneously.
  There are a great many old Beanish tales about dragons. It is said, for example, that dragons can simultaneously occupy seven coördinates in Spaaace-Time. This is sheer Madness. A dragon can inhabit only three spots, as seen from its own point of view, and the coördinates thereof are interrelated by the very dracomorphic fluctuations that allow dragons to travel so parodoxically in the first place. If the three positions can be determined accurately enough, the dragon's movements can be predicted well enough to intercept the source, that is, corner the dragon itself. It was this phenomenon which the fabled dracohunter Oophamegax Clay exploited when xe invented the antitemporal saurian-seeking guidance system for wyrm-seeking missiles, outlawed long ago as dragon-hunting was deemed e****ish. Mrorl had recently reconstructed Clay's invention, in triplicate as that is what was needed to triangulate the triple locations of three dragons, then gave the plans to Balthacarius' bots to produce three more for each of his two ships; and as this gave them enough equipment to track all three famous OTT dragons at once, of course they decided to repeat the whole task twice more to ensure extra $REDUNDAN$cy. To operate the thrice-tripled controls Mrorl and Balthacarius needed extra hands, which they manufactured for the occasion, and an associate bOTTifactor, in which role they employed Mrorl's senior helper Timlrorme.
  But the dragons our heroes were tracking that dip reacted strangely, to say the least. Once the great winged molptiles were triangulated and brought within range, all were expecting a traditional hunt, with much howling and thrashing at rock, fire and brimstone, and ensuing landslides to shake the earth, much cunning and quick-footed dodgery, the requisite hail of arrows, and a Timelessly unsurpassed battle of riddles, cutting questions and rapier wit. These dragons were clearly mechanical, which Balthacarius had predicted, and the three hunters were prepared to engage with them as with Mrorl's Cognitative Engine long ago -- to which end they had trained in a variety of negotiating tactics and penned persuasive poetry. But at the place and time the triplexed triangulators indicated that all three beasts would be found together, a uniquely undracilian thing happened: the first dragon merely stopped and stood still, its pearlescent blue scales dripping slightly. It was looking towards the second, whose dark green hide appeared to be more of moss than of scales, and gave off a pleasant scent of early summer. This dragon, in turn, was looking at the third, its orange-brown scales glowing faintly and wafting bits of black smoke. The third dragon was, of course, looking back at the first. All seemed apprehensive and more concerned with each other than the bOTTifactors who had triangulated them.
  "This looks familiar," whispered Timlrorme to the others. "I've seen this sort of standoff whilst playing *Pokémolp``RUN!*"
  Mrorl rolled his eyes. Timlrorme's hotdogging was a point of contention between the two, as Mrorl often wished they could focus on navigating the &TARDIS& or whatever other tasks were at hand, rather than constantly setting out on "molpy-hunting" expeditions that existed only in an imaginary world.
  Timlrorme, slightly irritated, continued. "They're each poised to defend against one of the others, but they're caught in a deadlock."
  "How so?" asked Balthacarius, willing to engage in any discussion that might bring them closer to Tornater.
  "Grass beats Water, Water beats Fire, and Fire beats Grass. Everyone knows that. It's the oldest power-triad, as you'll doubtless know."
  "Nah, we're not really into Pokémolp,"^{15} quipped Mrorl.
  "Putting imaginary hotdogs aside for the moment, shouldn't these three simply strike at once, and take each other out?"
  "No, none will attack unilaterally."
  "Why?" asked Mrorl, now intrigued despite himself.
  "Because it's the Trainer's turn, of course."
  "Huh?" replied Mrorl and Balthacarius in unison.
  Timlrorme tried to explain. "These are clearly Tornater's dragons, but they've been programmed to behave according to Pokémolp rules. You -- *we* -- have to decide what we're going to do. We can turn and run, and leave them here locked in an eternal tridracologic stalemate; or we can give them some berries and assure them we won't eat them, emulating the legendary Megan of the Ancient Frames; or we can attempt capture with Molpénets. You do have your Molpénets with you-- ... ?"
  "We're not really--"
  "--into Pokémolp. Right. -- Hmm, it's best we soften them up a bit first. Here." Reaching into his pants-of-many-pockets, Timlrorme produced three unusual-looking blaster rifles, coloured blue, green, and orange; and handed one each to the other bOTTifactors. "On the count of three. One! Two! ... *Five!*" And on *five* they each fired one well-aimed blast, Mrorl's blue gun at the smouldering light-russet dragon, Balthacarius aiming his green weapon at the watery blue monster, and Timlrorme firing his orange blaster at the mossy green creature. Words appeared in mid-air:
    <*:MRORL USES COFFEESEMENCANCERSTARSANDBACON GUN! IT IS SEAISHLY EFFECTIVE!!!
    BALTHACARIUS USES RAPTOR LEAF! IT IS VERY LUCKY!!!
    TIMLRORME USES ENDER! IT IS OTTISHLY HERETICAL!!!:>
  The beasts each reared up a bit, took half a step back and put weight on their tails for support, then turned to look towards what had hit them, stunned.
  Then the bOTTifactors took three nets on long poles, of the classic Mscha design; and wielding one apiece they each turned toward their dragon and brought their nets in a broad sweeping arc down over the beasts' heads; and though the nets were clearly not anywhere near the size needed to surround a dragon's head, much less the vast winged body, nevertheless an odd *swoosh* with beams of light emerged from each net and swept up its target, and in a trice the great beasts were encapsulated comfortably inside. New aethereal words proclaimed:
    <*:A$LTURI$ASG: ADDED TO MOLPIDEX
    C$HRONOMENCE$: ADDED TO MOLPIDEX
    D$RAYCUAZA$: ADDED TO MOLPIDEX:>
  Mrorl looked at his net, and turned to Timlrorme. "Now what?" Timlrorme looked unsure.
  It was Balthacarius who answered. "These dragons are mechanical, of course, and under remote control -- and they have been transmitting telemetry data the whole time we tracked them."
  "Where?" Mrorl asked. He and Timlrorme began turning slowly around, peering into the surrounding swamp, for that's where they had been hunting this whole time -- in woods bordering on the misty swamps of Dordshear-on-Thropsywatermolpleigh.
  "I'll look at my Object Generator logs." The others were puzzled. "Uh, what?"
  "It's not a question of *where* these dragons were being controlled from, but *when*. The temporal signature shows they're not merely pastposting, or retro-edited in, they've actually physically come here from the future."
  "So Tornater made some dragons and sent them back in Time to post to the OTT."
  "No, this time-travel is not Tornater's doing. They're here because of this," and he held up his Temporal Object Generator, now brightly glowing *75025*.
  "Your Temporal--" exclaimed Mrorl.
  "Object Generator, yes. Tornater intended to send us *virtual* dragons. Pokémolps are perfect, because they don't exist, except as part of an Augmented Reality. But Tornater wasn't counting on this."