Grandson of Zool Episode 1 by Mark Charsley Aborfoasbasof was not a particularly pleasant place to live. It wasn't even a particularly normal place to live1. The main reason for this was its location. Many universes have elemental planes sort of semi-detached to them. The contents of these on the whole are determined by what the wizards accessing them are expecting2. In Aborfoasbasof's universe it appeared likely that quite a lot of wizards somewhere were expecting fire and water, but not much else. In fact the name Aborfoasbasof came from the original name used by the ancients: A-ball-of-rock-floating-on-a-sea-beneath-a-sky-of-fire3. It was, as the name suggests, a perfectly normal looking planet that was in the unfortunate position of being sandwiched between the elemental planes of fire and water: with the natural result that days were almost unbearably hot, nights were full of torrential rain, and dusks and dawns were_ well lets just say you didn't need to use a kettle to get boiling water for your morning cup of tea. Unbelievably, life hadn't just survived under such conditions, it had even thrown up the odd intelligent civilisation. However as our story starts, Gogromelgromoth The Dark Lord4 was beginning to wonder if he belonged to one of them. He was trying desperately to concentrate on his work. However, the priests down the road were holding one of their worshipping rituals down the road. One of the other peculiarities of Aborfoasbasof was that while its mortal inhabitants had got the hang of fire, wheels, ironwork and the like, its gods hadn't got past hitting things with rocks yet5. Thus worshippers of the gods usually just collected together a large pile of rocks and shouted their god's name, which had the twin uses of giving the god some more rocks to hit things with, and reminding it of its name. Gogromelgromoth had nothing against people worshipping gods in their own fashion6, but the continual chant of "Ug, Ug, Ug," had been going on for several hours now, and was ruining his concentration. He only needed to finish off the last verse of the spell and he would be safe. Gogromelgromoth had never been much of a hard worker at university; until he had come across an ancient tome deep in the depths of the library. It was a study on Meta-geology, and he'd suddenly realised what kind of world he was in: a humourous fantasy! Rattling off a few quick spells in the book, he'd checked_ Yup, completely unworkable physics, footnotes taking up half the page, bad grammar7 and no doubt somewhere a Kirby-esque cover! After reading about the kind of things that can happen to entire cities in such worlds just for comic effect, he realised that he had to escape. He could die_ or turn into a monkey_ or just have something unprintably unpleasant happen to him. Since that fateful day, he had slaved away, desperate to try and discover a spell powerful enough to transport him to a nice safe world. All those years of toil had now reached fruition, and with a final flourish he finished the spell. With one nostalgic look at the world around him, he uttered it and disappeared. Unfortunately, what Gogromelgromoth hadn't realised was that the priests had disturbed his concentration just a little more than he realised, and the magical NOT rune, has a rather unfortunate resemblance to the phrase "Ug". Thus instead of a spell to transport him to a nice, pleasant world, where he was guaranteed to have a long, happy life, he'd cast something to do the complete opposite. This shows the importance of always using a spell checker8. Thus Gogromelgromoth found himself in a lovely lush garden, underneath a large, ancient tree. He turned round slowly breathing in the clean air, and found himself face to face with a beautiful, naked young woman. "Hello," she said, "My name's Eve. What's yours?" To be continued 11 Unlike, for instance, Zool death planet where the intractable renegades of 10,000 worlds etc. 22 Which explains why you don't get many wizards who know anything about basic atomic theory: creating a wormhole to an infinite expanse of Plutonium has rather distressing effects on its surroundings. On the whole, most wizards are better off with the safer, if slightly more incorrect, view that the fundamental building blocks of matter are things like earth and fire. 33 It can be safely assumed that the ancients were the type of people who would call a spade a spade. 44 A name given to him by Mrs. Lord, a rather pleasant little woman, whose only flaw was a slightly unrealistic expectation of her son's future career, caused by reading too many fantasy trilogies. It was she who had bullied him into studying wizardry at school, and later university: where she had continually sent food parcels addressed to him, rather ruining his attempts to pretend his name was Fred. 55 The only exception was Olaf: the leader of the gods, who had had grasped the basic concepts of the grand unified field theory within a few minutes of first calling himself into existence. He'd had a glorious future glittering in front of him: until he'd had a look in other sphere's of existence. He'd seen the luxurious palaces, and beautiful gardens most gods in other worlds manifested in, looked at the grubby caves his pantheon lived in and had promptly decided to become the patron god of drunkards. He'd also discovered the trick of delaying the regrettable effects of overindulgence by drinking more alcohol. So when most gods fight things like ice-giants and undying snakes at the end of time, Olaf was fated to battle the mother of all hangovers. 66 Well nothing he was going to be let known in public, your average priest (usually a teenager with nothing better to do than gather rocks and shout a lot) tending to take a rather dim view of such opinions. Such a dim view that he was quite willing to come round to your house and discuss different belief systems. At night. With his mates. 77 Like the footnote above for instance. 88 Sorry, I couldn't resist it