The Princess and the Nose
Once upon a time in a faraway land, there dwelt a King and Queen who wanted to have kids, but couldn't. They were quite unhappy about this, and went to see a fairy therapist, who asked them a lot of deeply personal questions. During one session it came out that, although they had been sleeping together since they had got married, they hadn't actually tried having sex yet. The fairy therapist suggested that it would be a good idea to try that. They did so, and, to their delight, not only did it do wonders for their marriage (up till then, a nice game of tiddlywinks had been the extent of their pleasure together), but the queen found that she developed an interesting round belly which made her laugh when she saw herself in the mirror. She also developed a taste for cheese and marmalade on toast. The fairy therapist explained to her that this was because the stork had come, and planted a child inside her - and despite the fact that this was highly dubious, scientifically speaking, the royal couple accepted it with rejoicing. There was great celebration throughout the land and everyone had free crumpets and jam for tea. Then they had to go back to work.
In the fulness of time, the queen gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. She didn't much enjoy the pain of having the child, and stopped speaking to the king for several days afterwards, but she was very pleased with herself for having made a baby, and wanted to have another one straight away. Until the child started screaming and crying and farting and doing other antisocial baby stuff. The king decided that it would be nice idea to throw a baby shower, and, together with a group of his strongest subjects, he managed to throw the shower quite a distance. Then they had a royal christening, to which everyone on both the king and queen's sides of the family were invited. The king wasn't really all that happy about this, since the queen was actually half fairy and she had about 100 fairy godmothers as a consequence - the king had never got on with fairies since he had had a bad experience as a child with a fairy who had given him a nosebleed. However, he graciously allowed the queen to invite all her godmothers along, and on the grand day, they all approached the baby princess and each bestowed a magical gift upon her. Then, just when the king was starting to think that this wasn't so bad after all, there was a puff of black smoke, and the obligatory evil fairy godmother appeared. She was in a bit of a strop since she hadn't been invited to the christening, and she accused everyone present of leaving her out because she happened to be green and ugly (and she wore a suit and had a moustache and was just generally grotesque). The king kindly assured her that actually this wasn't the reason at all and they hadn't invited her because she smelled funny. Unfortunately, this didn't help to improve her mood - in fact, she became so cross that her ears flapped. Approaching the royal cot, she laid a foul curse upon the princess - that when the child turned 16, something "vaguely unpleasant" would happen to her (she was clearly not feeling very inspired at that precise moment). Then with an evil cackle, the wicked creature disappeared in another cloud of black smoke. When the smoke cleared, she was still there. She apologised and tried again, and this time managed to disappear properly.
The king was distraught, and he accused the good fairies of being a bunch of complete wimps, since they could quite easily have kicked the crap out of the evil fairy godmother, being 99 against 1. It is a mistake to lose your temper with a fairy godmother, though, and he thought better of it after they had turned him into a slimy bog crud and left. Fortunately the queen had just enough fairy blood in her to reverse the spell, although she and the king had to sleep in seperate beds for a good long while afterwards.
But alas, what was to be done about the princess and the awful curse that had been laid upon her? The king bravely asked the queen if there was a possibility that she or her super-powerful godmothers could do something to break the curse, but the queen replied that it "didn't work like that". Presumably this was a reference to the utter absence of logic to be found only in fairy tales and also in John Woo movies. The king pulled at his beard with despair, for there was nothing to be done but to see how things turned out.
As it happened, for the first fifteen years of her life, there was nothing wrong with the princess (for the most part). She was golden haired, blue eyed, and the fairest maiden in all the land (well, she was a princess, so she was hardly going to be a complete minger, was she?). She was also pleasant of disposition, had a sweet singing voice, and was surrounded by small furry animals and cute little birdies wherever she went. Her only flaw was a tendency to fall over a lot.
Then, as soon as she hit her sixteenth birthday, and just as her parents had almost forgotten about what the wicked fairy had done, the evil curse struck! The princess woke up one morning in her royal bed, and discovered a nose lying on the pillow next to her head. It was snoring loudly. The princess was understandably shocked and gave a great scream that brought her parents and their attendants running. The scream also woke up the nose, which bounced around the princess's chamber in a state of panic. The king, fortunately, managed to keep his head (while the princess, the queen and most of the attendants screamed like a bunch of little girls with pigtails) and ordered his chief manservant to catch the nose in a jar. This he managed to do, after chasing the nose around the room and wrecking most of the furnishings. He then ran outside with the jar, crossed the drawbridge, crossed the road (looking very carefully both ways) ran into the forest, and deposited the nose in a bush.
However, this was not the end of the matter, for this was a magic nose, sent by the evil fairy godmother, and it bounced back out of the forest, across the road, over the drawbridge, into the castle and all the way into the royal kitchen, where the cook was preparing the royal breakfast. A few minutes later, the princess, having just about recovered from her terrible shock, was shocked again upon discovering the nose in her cornflakes. This time her screams could be heard in the village ten miles down the road. Again, the king called upon his chief manservant and other servants to capture and dispose of the intruder. After a long chase, during which the nose bounced all the way round the royal dining room, up the royal stairs, into the king and queen's bedroom, out of the royal window, and round the royal gardens, dripping milk everywhere, the servants managed to again capture the runaway snout, and this time they made sure to take it far away, a hundred miles from the castle, and drop it down a very deep well. Unfortunately, magic noses are not so easily disposed of, and later that same morning, when the princess was having her royal bath, there was a sudden burst of bubbles from under the water's surface - all the handmaidens present were horrified, believing that their beloved mistress had just let one rip in her bath (most un-princess-like behaviour, to be sure!) when the nose abruptly surfaced and shot water from both its' nostrils into the girl's face. This time she screamed so loudly that the king and queen of Wales could hear her, and so could their oldest advisor, who was deaf in one ear and also literally had two left feet so he could only walk in circles and could only go in a straight line by walking on his hands but that really has nothing to do with this story. As the poor princess was being hurried out of the royal bathroom with a towel round her, the king ordered his servants to dispose of the wretched thing and this time do it properly or he would have their heads removed. Thus began another prolonged chase, which ended with them catching the nose in a sack and then tying it to an anvil so the royal blacksmith could hammer it into something resembling a pink triangular pancake. Then they buried it.
Alas, for...oh, you know what happened next! The nose came back again. And again. And again. And again. And every single time, the servants got rid of it, and every single time, the cursed nose reappeared to torment the princess. It chased her round the castle. It slept on her pillow, snored loudly, and kept her awake most of the night. It scared off all her friends. It hid in her sock drawer, and her wardrobe, and her lunch, and popped out and made her jump. It was, in short, a menace - the kind of menace that only an evil fairy godmother who had never had a boyfriend in her life could conjure up.
Naturally, the nose also made it rather difficult for the king and queen to find their daughter a husband. Suitors came from far and wide, drawn by stories of the princess's wit and charm and beauty, only to be repulsed by the hideous bouncing proboscis that followed her everywhere. The girl's parents desperately tried increasing her dowry, but to no avail - the general opinion among the ex-would-be-husbands was that no amount of gold was worth the hassle of having to live with her malevolent companion. Alone in her castle, the wicked fairy godmother who had caused all this grief laughed and laughed, satisfied that she had exacted her revenge on the ones who had snubbed her.
At about the same time that this was going on, in another kingdom that was far distant from the one described above, there lived a prince who had never heard about this princess and her curse. His name was Prince Eric, and he found it very boring being a prince. One day, weary of living in a castle, being waited on hand and foot and having all his decisions made for him by his parents and the heads of state, he decided to go off into the world and seek adventure. So he nicked his dad's motorbike, and set off.
It wasn't too long before he came across a neighbouring kingdom that was having difficulties. All the people of that kingdom had thrown a huge party to celebrate the coronation of their new king, and the noise of their revelry had woken up the grumpy giant Anthrax who lived just over the hill. Annoyed at having his sleep disturbed, the giant had rolled up a newspaper and gone into the town and started squishing people. After a while, worn out, he growled at the remaining townspeople to "Keep the noise down or I'll be back" and stomped off back to his cave.
Thus it was that when Eric arrived, he found the king and his subjects in a state of terror, afraid to make even a squeak for fear of waking the giant again. Taking the prince for a wandering knight, the king begged him to rid their land of this terrible monster and make it safe for them to party again. Eric was delighted at having found an adventure so soon, but, lacking a sword or any other weapon suitable for dispatching monsters, and intimidated by the idea of taking on something so massive, he decided to consult the local wise man. As it happened, the local wise man, whose name was Hilary the Sage, was known far and wide as a dispenser of sound advice, and also had incredibly wierd powers, so no one dared laugh at his silly name. It was said that he could talk to animals and plants, and commune with the rulers of the unseen fairy kingdom and could also wrap his legs over his head and scuttle along the floor on his fingers like a crab which people came from all over the kingdom to see first hand.
As it happened, Hilary was very tired of being a wise man. For the most part, people only came to visit him because they wanted advice on stuff, and it was a very dull lifestyle sitting on a rock all day dispensing wisdom to stupid people. When Eric came along, the sage offered to help him defeat the giant in return for being allowed to go with him on his adventures. This Eric readily agreed to, reasoning that there was little chance of both of them surviving the battle with Anthrax anyway.
Thus it was that the prince and his new sidekick met the giant in battle - they first lured him out of his cave by turning up their walkmans really loud, and when he emerged, newspaper in hand, they were waiting. Hilary had armed Eric with the magic sword Gimboodlefung, and it shone brightly in the prince's hand so that he looked like one of the great warriors of old. He shouted his challenge to the giant, who growled, took a step forward, and tripped on an old fallen tree and fell over and broke his neck.
Eric and Hilary decided between them that the people of the kingdom didn't need to know the exact details of what had happened, so they returned to the town, and informed the king and his subjects that they were free. There was great rejoicing and a party that went on for three days. The king wanted to give Eric his daughter's hand in marriage, but she wasn't all that fit really, despite being a princess, and he didn't want to get stuck there, so he politely declined.
Eric and Hilary decided that they worked well together, and so they went off on the road together, travelling from town to town and kingdom to kingdom, as a crime-fighting team. Soon the fame of Prince Eric and his sidekick Hilary became known all over the country and all criminals, monsters, evil wizards and wicked tyrants shook in fear at their approach.
In the fullness of time, in their wanderings, our heroes came upon the kingdom where the princess with the curse of the nose lived. Upon hearing about her curse, Eric declared aloud that he would rid this girl of her troublesome companion, and challenged the nose to a duel. The nose sniffed its' acceptance, and so, despite Hilary's warning that maybe this wasn't the best approach, they met in a clearing in the nearby forest at dawn. By this time Eric had become an accomplished swordsman - however, try as he might, he was unable to hit the nose with his sword, because it was a small target and was able to bounce all over the place with fiendish speed. After about an hour of chasing the thing round the clearing, Eric was exhausted and could hardly move. The nose then snuck up on him, and with a huge sniff, inhaled all his clothes, leaving our hero standing in his boxer shorts.
Humiliated, Eric decided to retire from the wandering hero business and join a monastery. However, Hilary dissuaded him from this, advising him that since the curse was laid upon the princess by her evil fairy godmother, the only way to break the curse's power was to go straight to its' source, and make the fairy godmother lift it, by persuasion or by force. Eric brightened at this, and agreed that this seemed like a better approach, although he was also fairly nervous, since ugly green women gave him the heebie-jeebies (in fact, as a child he had met an ugly green woman in the local marketplace who had given him some heebie-jeebies as pets and they had followed him home and lived under his bed and made a nasty smell until his parents had had them removed). So he and Hilary set off for the evil godmother's castle.
Unfortunately, the evil godmother's castle was guarded by something that was so awful that it cannot be named or described here. As soon as Eric and Hilary arrived at the front gate, the ******* appeared from behind a huge rock and attacked. At the very sight of the *******, with its' huge ******** and its' terrible **************, both our heroes lost heart and retreated. Fast.
It wasn't until they were about halfway back to the kingdom that they both began to feel a little foolish for giving up so easily. Eric in particular was still smarting from the knock taken by his honour from his thorough defeat by the nose, and was very much in need of a victory to restore his self esteem. So he did a 180 degree turn and headed back the way he'd just come to confront his fear, reasoning that doing battle with the ******* couldn't be worse than his fear of the *******.
Actually, it was. Eric arrived back at the castle and found the ******* waiting for him, and, if anything, it was even more scary than before. Nonetheless, he gritted his teeth and attacked. There then followed the most unpleasant, gruelling, horrible and downright upsetting battle he had ever had in his life. It was so nasty he had to try very hard not to cry. It was worse than the dentist. It was worse than the time he had eaten an entire family-sized Crunchie bar and then gone on a very choppy sea voyage. It was even worse than nasty medicine that tasted like turpentine and, to make matters worse, had been cack-handedly flavoured to taste like raspberries. It was almost as bad as what he imagined snogging his grandmother would be like.
Just when Eric was about to throw in the towel and let the ******* beat him since the very unpleasantness of fighting it had sapped his will to live, Hilary turned up, wheezing (he was getting a bit old for all this running around), and, once he had sufficiently recovered, and seen that his partner was in difficulties, threw himself into the fray with a blood-curdling yell. Thoroughly impressed by Hilary's act of self-sacrifice, Eric extracted himself from the tangle, and legged it through the castle gate, almost failing to hear Hilary's shout of "Hang on, where are you going? Aaaaah!.."
Finding the front door, predictably, locked and demanding to hear the correct incantation before it would open for him, Eric settled for throwing himself through one of the windows. He came up, rolling, sword at the ready and came face-to-face with the very surprised evil godmother, who was busy showing an estate agent round the castle because she was planning to sell it and move to a smaller cottage in the country. The estate agent was rather startled at the sight of a bloody and dirty sword-wielding maniac, and ran for the front door, which demanded to hear the correct incantation before it would let him out so he threw himself through the window opposite the one Eric had just used and ran straight into the ******* which ate him.
The godmother was understandably, rather miffed by this intrusion - however, before she could explode with self-righteous indignation, Eric pointed his sword at her throat and accused her of 1. burdening an innocent princess with a horrible curse, and 2. setting a ******* to guard her castle, which was just rude. The godmother took issue with point 2, informing Eric that she actually had nothing to do with the *******,and it just hung around her front yard of its' own accord and raided her bins. Eric conceded this point and returned to point 1, and told the evil godmother that it was "a bit pathetic" to place a curse on someone just because their parents hadn't invited her to a party, and furthermore, if she wanted to get invited out more, why didn't she try taking a shower once in a while, and shaving her moustache off? The evil godmother responded to this by poking Eric in the eye. He responded to that by chopping her head off. She responded to that by kicking him in the shin with her pointy leather boot. He responded to that by chopping her leg off. She responded to that by elbowing him in the groin.
They could have carried on like this for a lot longer had Hilary not entered suddenly via the only (up till that point) unbroken window in the front of the castle, and loudly accused Eric of abandoning him to the unmentionable thing outside, which he had only escaped from because it had become distracted by eating the estate agent. Eric was temporarily unable to answer because he was busy rolling on the floor making squeaking noises and clutching his manhood (the evil godmother had very pointy elbows). The evil godmother reattached her head and leg and suggested to Hilary that they both finish the prince off together.
Hilary agreed with her that this would be a good idea, and even suggested using his Terrible Wand of Pain on Eric to make their revenge even more fun, and pulled a long, knobbly, brown thing out of his bag (it looked a bit like a gigantic and very nasty Twiglet). He pointed it at Eric, who squeezed his eyes shut and prepared for the worst, and just had time to wonder where on earth Hilary had got a Terrible Wand of Pain from when the evil godmother gave a sharp whistle, and an entire squadron of Wizard Police jumped out from behind her couch and surrounded Hilary with drawn staffs, and ordered him to get down on the floor with his hands behind his head. As a red-faced and startled-looking Hilary had his hands cuffed behind his back, the evil godmother revealed that this entire business with the curse and the nose had been one big sting operation to bring an international dealer in illegal Wands of Pain out into the open. Eric was, despite his relief at still being alive, naturally devastated to discover that his wise and dependable sidekick was a criminal mastermind.
The wizard squad leader turned to the evil godmother then, and suggested to her that rather than take Hilary down to the station, why didn't they do something unspeakably awful to him here? The evil godmother agreed, and, with ghoulish enthusiasm, told the wizards that they were welcome to use her Horrible Rod of Misery to finish off their prisoner, and whipped the rod out of her handbag. It was black and spiky, and even more unpleasant to behold than Hilary's Terrible Wand of Pain, and made Eric feel quite faint looking at it. Then the wizards turned round and promptly arrested the evil godmother. As they were handcuffing her, Hilary revealed that the entire sting operation had, in fact, been a cover for another sting operation to expose a dealer in Horrible Rods of Misery.
The prince was most relieved to discover that his sidekick wasn't a complete scumbucket after all, and apologised profusely for being taken in by this deception. Hilary graciously forgave him and then suggested to the leader of the wizard squad that rather than take the evil godmother down to the station, why didn't they do something uspeakably awful to her here? The wizard leader agreed that this sounded like fun, and offered to let them use his Awful Stick of Ultimate Distress to do the job, and pulled something out of his robe that looked even more unpleasant than either - not only was it a horrible mouldy colour and not only did it smell like peanut-flavoured turpentine, but it also had scuzzy little bits dropping off it. Eric found himself feeling suddenly very sorry for the evil godmother, despite her wickedness. Then Hilary slapped a pair of handcuffs on the wizard leader and revealed that this had all been one big sting operation to expose an international Awful Stick of Ultimate Distress dealer.
And it was on this very improbable, final plot twist, that our story almost reaches its' conclusion. After everyone had waited about ten minutes just to see if anyone was going to reveal that the wizard leader's arrest had all been a front for another sting operation, they all decided that no, this was it, and the wizard squad hauled their disgraced leader down to the station, where he was put on trial and finally cut a deal and exposed his entire circle. Later on he escaped from wizard prison and emigrated to a far off country where he spent the rest of his miserable life as an entertainer at childrens' birthday parties. Meanwhile, Eric and Hilary arrived back at the kingdom to find that the evil godmother had lifted the nasty curse and the nose had gone off into the world to seek its' fortunes and maybe find the head that it belonged to. Naturally Eric had to marry the princess and then he and Hilary set off together to use their powers to battle wickedness and bring down evildoers. Then they would return home at the end of the week and he and the princess would try for a baby. And they all lived happily ever after except the leader of the wizard squad and the characters who died.
The End
