Meanwhile, Soda Olheiser the Cursed, Chunks the Chunks Golem, Montana Shingles the Vice-Tremorroid of Bonertania, and the Ratsack Golem walked down a rocky road, following Cydroidobot’s son who led the way with his enchanted machine gun. Knowing the trip to Fartcano Dominion would be a long hard one, Mono had left her companion yokai Elvira Daisy Shingles at the log chateau in the care of Cydroidobot’s oft-congested butler Baryshnikov. They had been traveling for two months, including a nine day stop at the Buddy’s Dad’s Slaughterhouse to solve the Case of the Twisted Pile, plus several days lost in a city-wide ska music festival near Ardisson.

  After passing many tempting flea markets they had reached Repulsi Village, a crummy little ghost town which bordered the toxic wasteland that separates Bonertania from the othercountries of Pus Continent, and fortunately Mono had brought her super best friend Titiana’s thaumaturgic carpet so they could cross protected from the contaminated smoldering dirt and puddles of green glowing goo. The fleshy, veiny carpet expertly navigated around fluorescent skeletons of many sizes, derelict cars and vanbuses, and rusty metal barrels with fires burning in them, and thanks to its thaumaturgy they were protected from the sickening gasses that filled the air.

  Meanwhile, in Fartcano Dominion, the Fartmeister was nodding, half asleep, on the sole seat in his fartcano’s spacious home theater as a linguine western played on his 100 inch TV.

  The King of the Fart Ghouls was known as the Fartmeister because he was constantly and compulsively stealing the farts (and sharts) of the good humanoids and yokai of Pus Continent. He had a huge stash of farts and sharts in the treasury of his fartcano headquarters. The fartcano itself was big and brown, and every few minutes it would unpucker and noisily release a noxious cloud of toxic gas into the atmosphere.

  Fart ghouls look just like the ghouls you’ve read about in storybooks, only with pointier ear lobes. The Fartmeister was half fart ghoul, half flatulenz fairy. He had a bald head, a thick black beard, and resting pissy face. Today he was wearing his red robe, decorated with various alchemistic icons cut from black velvet. As always, it was hot from all the rejected farts funneled through pipes behind the screening room’s walls and the Fartmeister was sweating profusely. Suddenly he sat upright uttered a roar of rage. The roachberry pipe on his lap clattered to the floor, and the King of the Fart Ghouls began squeezing a large moist horn on the arm of his recliner.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  "PHFFFFFPT! PHFFFFFPT! PHFFFFFPT!" went the horn.

  The squelching sound filled the theater and penetrated to many rooms beyond, where countless thousands of fart ghouls were working at their unending tasks, receiving and processing and cataloging the king’s farts and sharts. The ghouls trembled at the sound of the Fartmeister’s moist honking and whispered fearfully to one another that something unpleasant was sure to happen; but none dared slack off.

  The door to his theater opened slowly and Kankersaur the Royal Flackfizer entered. Kankersaur was a nervous blue-and-grey raptor wearing thick round glasses. He carried a clipboard in one hand and in the other, a tray of cheese with a small orange knife.

  "Yes, your stenchiness?" the dinosaur asked as he set the cheese plate on the table next to the king’s recliner.

  "Up?" snarled the Fartmeister, while cutting the cheese. "We’re about to be invaded!"

  "How do you know?" asked the flackfizer anxiously.

  "I feel it in my loins," said the Fartmeister. "I can always feel it when dork-butts draw near to my fartcano headquarters. I am positive, Kanker, that Bonertanians are this very minute on their way here to annoy me- and I hate Bonertanians more than I do constipation!"

  "What do you want me to do, sir?" asked the raptor.

  "Look through the Cosmic Telescope, and see where the invaders are," commanded the King, stuffing his mouth full of stinky cheese.

  So Kankersaur went over to a large control panel covered in blinking lights, gauges, keyboards, black and white monitors and switches and cranks and levers and buttons. Next to the control panel were five holes in the wall. The dinosaur pressed a button marked with an eye icon and the Cosmic Telescope’s long, fleshy eyepiece extended out of the wall.

  Kankersaur leaned forward and looked through the slimy hole at the tip of the tube. "I see them, your foulness."

  "What do they look like?" inquired the monarch.

  "There’s a little orange-and-black robot, three female humanoids, and the Ratsack Golem."

  "Bah! I hate that goody-goody sack," said the Fartmeister. "No matter. A dozen of my ghoul ninjas can destroy them all in a spurt."

  "I’m not so sure of that," said Kankersaur. "The robot holds an enchanted machine gun."

  "That proves these dork-butts are coming here on no peaceful errand," declared the Fartmeister, scowling fiercely. "In fact, no one ever comes here on a peaceful errand. I hate everybody, and everybody hates me!"

  "Very true," said Kankersaur, nodding.

  "I must in some way prevent these dumb-butts from reaching the fartcano. Where are they now?"

  "Just now they are entering a zitfield, most foul one."

  Meanwhile, Soda, Mono, Vira, Ratsack, and Cydroidobot’s son trudged through the rocky brown terrain of Fartcano Dominion, and the living burlap sack of rats was pontificating. "I believe one of the most important skills we can learn is to see best in others. I even believe that the Fartmeister must somehow be worthy of some sympathy; his mommy and daddy must have been truly nefarious people for him to grow up to make lying, stealing, and fart-hoarding his sole means of navigating the world, to say nothing of being apparently incapable of sympathy himself."

  "Uh-huh," said Soda.

  The terrain had turned pink and fleshy, with what appeared to be large, thick hairs growing out of it. The soft ground was studded with large, yellow-topped lumps. The lumps got bigger and bigger the farther they walked.

  Presently they came to a brook where cloudy yellow water dashed foamily through a shallow channel. Across the brook were more swollen lumps, so placed that travelers might easily leap from one to another and in that manner cross the water to the farther bank.

  Cydroidobot's son retracted his wheels and, followed by Soda and Chunks, began crossing the river. The bumps were squishy and hard to balance on. When the robot reached the fifth lump the mound started quivering and swelling and suddenly burst open, shooting out a huge spurt of clumpy, dark, red-streaked yellow goo.

  The result was astonishing. The eruption sent Cydroidobot’s son soaring high in the air, where he turned a succession of flip-flops and landed on his head next to Mono and Ratsack.

  The other lumps in the yellow river began quivering and shaking. Before Soda and Chunks could scramble to shore the two lumps they were standing on erupted too and they were thrown up in the air in geysers of gunge.

  They landed on their faces next to Cydroidobot’s son. The trio stood up and tried wiping themselves off- All of them were stained with the gross pudding-like substance.

  “Well, that could’ve gone better,” said Mono.

  “Lets just wade across the stream, it’s not very deep,” suggested Ratsack, and with a tiny splash into the cloudy yellow water and was amazed to find he was not wet at all.

  "It’s dry water," said the sack, dipping his tiny hand into the yellow stream and showing how the liquid fell from it and left it perfectly dry.

  Our friends avoided the lumps and made the crossing with ease. They assembled on the bank and Montana burped triumphantly. Then they renewed their journey into a jungle along the path that led to the Fartmeister’s fartcano headquarters..