Billy awoke from his slumber as he always did: with acute chest pain and choking on his own drool. This time, however, it was not drool being forced down Billy’s throat.
“Drink your copyjuice, Hairy,” Dumbledalf said, squeezing a Capri Sun into Billy’s mouth. “Then we can go to summer camp and get Mom and Dad back together.”
“My parents are dead!”I sputtered Billy.
“I know,” whispered Dumbledalf as a somber look fell suddenly across his face. “I put them in my mirror.”
As the deflated wizard went off to cheer himself up by folding his Capri Sun into a tiny cell phone, Billy prepared to roll himself out of his bed and into his waffle lab. What he rolled off of, however, was not a bed, and what he rolled into was certainly nothing like one of Billy’s classic pepperoni waffles.II
“Well, look at that! The racist is finally awake,” said Drawlin, lifting Billy out of the manure and placing him atop the pony that had produced it. “Now get in touch with your privilege and show us a little canter.”
As he took the reins, Billy struggled to keep pace with the rest of the crew. His pony seemed to be straining mightily and looked back at him every so often with the pony equivalent of exasperation. Billy misinterpreted this as hunger and, after licking the pony a few times to see if he might kill two birds with one meal, decided to ask the rest of the party. “Might we stop and get something to eat before we reach the Forest of Metaphorical Importance?” he pleaded. Beefer and Buffer laughed heartily at his suggestion. “Looks like somebody forgot his egg whites and supplemental amino acid complex this morning,” jeered Beefer, and Buffer punched Billy in the face to accentuate the point. Billy’s spirit and nose broken, he mentioned food no more for the next several minutes. “Besides,” he thought, “being hungry and miserable is what a YOLO is all about. Let me not again forget.”III
Once the crew had thoroughly left Wobbottabad behind, they stopped in a valley with a nearby stream to rest one final time before they entered the forest. Everyone dismounted, and it was then they noticed that Dumbledalf had never come back from the game of Hide-n-Leave-for-a-Couple-Days they had played on the road to pass the time. This concerned Aaron Sorkinshield very much, especially because just before he disappeared, he had seen Dumbledalf poking an earthworm and muttering to himself that all the secrets must have gotten loose again.
Thankfully, these worries did not faze some of the more carefree Little People. Whorey, Slorey, and Kourtney, for example, stayed busy uploading selfies of themselves frolicking on the grass, and the paparazzi, springing out of the ground like dandelions, snapped pictures of the girls snapping pictures of themselves. The flashing of the camera bulbs amused Kiwi, annoyed Fili, and set Doc into an epileptic fit that everyone else laughed off. Ballin and Drawlin fell into a debate about the politics of respectability and the implications of Whorey’s relationship with their cousin Kayenne, a bona-fide hero of Southside Widdle Wearth known for his fiery outbursts. Beefer and Buffer bench-pressed the ponies while Billy closed his eyes and tried to imagine that YOLOs were no more threatening than his usual breakfast cereal: sugary and delicious grizzly bear cooked with chocolate milk and maybe a little bacon grease.IV
Billy was jolted out of this silent reverie by the abrupt appearance of Sorkinshield next to him.
“Have you signed the thing?”
“The thing?”
“It’s nothing.”
“The thing is nothing?”
“Wait. What’s the contract?”
“The contract’s the thing.”
“The thing that you need me to sign?”
“That’s the thing.”
Sorkinshield turned off sharply to the right, and Billy found himself holding a small stack of paper in his hands. These were the conditions of his employment, and they went like this:
All aforementioned treasure, including all Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Kids’ Choice Awards, enthusiastic Rolling Stone reviews, and any other valuables are, upon discovery, declared sole property of AARON SORKINSHIELD to be distributed at his discretion. Any withholding, burglary, or unintentional “failing to mention” of any such treasure by BILLY BAGBOY will result in immediate expulsion from the party, forfeit of any and all profit earned, and an extremely long monologue, an excerpt of which is below.
The monologue that followed was extensive and cruel, but it was also bitingly clever with plenty of quotable material suitable for posters or GIF sets. Unfortunately, Billy was more or less illiterate, as wobbits consider being able to read a rather dangerous step on the road to being able to read nutrition facts.V He was, however, very pleased to see “Billy Bagboy” written in such big impressive letters and tore out the bits that contained his name while feeding the rest to his pony.
After one more check of their supplies and one last holler of “Olly, olly, oxen free!” in the hopes of drawing out Dumbledalf, the crew set out to travel through the night, more than a bit discouraged by the disappearance of the one person who had any real abilities.VI The rowdy band journeyed far as the sun grew low. They passed through the Loan Lands, where the people had been crushed by massive, inescapable graduate school debt and took to eating their degrees before eating one another. They passed the Jersey Shore, Beverly Hills, and other wicked places that goodness dare not touch. They told many a joke and riddle to lighten the mood as the weather worsened and the sky grew dark. Kiwi told a particularly hilarious and clever one that had the whole group laughing for almost an hour, though the bird had intended it as a mating call.
Alas, there was more misery than laughter that night. Kiwi accidentally pecked the neck of his pony, and the poor beast was so frightened that it jumped into the river and drowned, taking a good portion of the supplies with it.VII The rain that came down chilled the Little People and the poor wobbit so terribly that they were forced to stop their trek through the deep dark Forest of Metaphorical Importance almost immediately.VIII They set up camp near the forest’s edge, with Whorey whining about her ruined hair and Ballin accusing Sorkinshield of redlining their campsite. It was then that Fili’s keen eyes spotted a faint white-blue glow far off through the trees.
“What could it be?” queried Sorkinshield, as he quickly began brainstorming thematic points the faint light could hammer home. All of the Little People put forward their best guesses. Perhaps it was the camp of some nonthreatening creatures, like the Orcs-Who-Don’t-Appear-in-This-Book or film critics. Perhaps it was a spotlight, destined to shine on Whorey, Slorey, and Kourtney so they could film their new slow-paced reality show, Slorey and Kourtney Take a Dramamine. But Sorkinshield was sure it was a deadly enemy and did not want to risk any of them running into more trouble. That is, until he noticed the shivering wobbit standing completely stationary behind a tree.
“Billy, my Bagboy. The time has come for you to truly YOLO,” Sorkinshield said. “I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.”
“I get a weapon?” asked Billy.
“Oh no, that’s just an expression. Your incredible burgling skills that you’ve shown no evidence of so far will surely suffice. Am I mistaken?” Aaron looked at the rest of his crew for support. They were called supporting actors for a reason. All nodded vigorously and added murmurs of “Oh yes, surely it is just a few film critics,” and “I’d go myself, Billy, but I have recently become blind.”
So with that, Billy Bagboy set off up over the river and through the woods to check it out by himself. “Atta boy, Billy! If you run into anything dangerous, just scream like a scared little fat man,” Sorkinshield called after him.
Wandering up the hill amongst the trees, Billy approached the white-blue glow. He stumbled and made quite the commotion, being not all that used to moving, but the glow never went out or faded, and was soon joined by a manic clicking. It was like the chorus of a hundred beetles wearing tap shoes and trying unsuccessfully to choreograph a routine to “Who Let the Balrogs Out?”IX The sound made Billy dizzy. Soon, though, he was right outside the clearing. He peered in and clutched his neck fat in horror.
Trolls. Big and pimply, a group of trolls sat in front of various computer screens, typing away, using all their fingers at once.X They stopped only to giggle maliciously to themselves or open a new tab. Sweat poured from their pale brows, and their swivel chairs, black and filthy, swayed with menace. Trolls such as these never venture into the daylight. Their backs are permanently hunched, their mouths thin and twisted into the most horrifying of grins. Billy had never encountered anything so terrible in his entire life, and he had just spent all day with Whorey, Slorey, and Kourtney. Not to mention the smell. Oh, the stench that wafted through that space was enough to make even the wobbit lose his appetite and stop trying to eat one of the wheels of the swivel chairs.
Billy covered his nose and weighed his options. He could go back to warn the others. He could see if he could use their Wi-Fi to check his email. But before the wobbit could formulate a proper plan, one of the trolls up and spoke.
“Creepshots is back up,” said the troll, prompting murmurs of approval from the others as they intensified the speed of their typing.
“What else rhymes with wetback?” mused a second troll who was now scrolling down an infinitely long page with his curled fingernails. “How about lazy wetback?”
“That’s offensive!” blurted out Billy, unable to contain himself. Suddenly he was drawn in by the trolls’ magic. Under their spell, he walked forward until he was out in the open, the leering trolls right before him.XI
“Well, if it isn’t the PC police, come to demonstrate how the New World Order Shadow Government wants to squash all original thought,” said the first troll. The others looked up and stared at Billy with their yellow eyes.
“No!” cried Billy, knowing he should ignore them but finding it impossible. “My name is Billy—”
“Billy Bagboy of Wobbottabad. Mother’s maiden name is Gram and social security number is 391-87-5432,” read a troll off his jailbroken smart phone screen. “I just enrolled you as a member of the Communist party and used your savings account to ship four thousand pounds of cotton candy to the UN.”
As Billy stammered helplessly, the first troll puffed up his chest and introduced himself. “I am L33tB33tr. King of the subreddit for hentai involving one or more deep sea creatures,” said the first troll. His face, illuminated by the computer screen, was plump and ever so slightly green.
The second troll swiveled around to face Billy as well. “I am IllumiNazi, overlord of the land of YouTube comments,” he said and smiled, revealing a row of teeth shaped like swastikas.
“And I am BarromneyOsama,” pronounced the third, “Mayor of Area Fifty-one on Foursquare.”
Billy found himself very angry. Furious, in fact. More furious than he had been when his manager at the grocery store had started selling produce. Madder even than when he’d accidentally taken a bite of a tomato, thinking it was some sort of giant Fruit Gusher. His very soul demanded that he know the real names of these vile creatures.
“Reveal yourselves!” he screamed. The third troll turned around, yet said nothing. His teeth, shaped like butts, gleamed in the computer screen light. “How can you possibly think Jesus was a Reptilian?” Billy yelled again. The troll did not respond, but began collating GIFs of Harmony Korine’s early films. Billy approached the massive creature but could not bring himself to lay a hand on him. His skin seemed to shimmer in the firelight. It was like the troll was not really there at all.
Under the river and around the wood, the Little People heard Billy’s screams. At first, they resolved to ignore them and go back to sleep, but Kourtney thought that maybe if Billy had lived long enough to scream not once, but twice, the enemy must not be so threatening. “In any case,” she said, “you guys are boring me. I did not sign a contract allowing people to watch me sleep on a webcam every night just to sleep on the ground with a bunch of losers.” So she started up the hill and, after much thought and a couple of minor strokes suffered by Doc, the rest of the crew followed.
“You’re a coward!” Billy screamed at the troll. The troll, now satisfied with his outrage, turned to face the tiny wobbit. “That may be true,” he said, “but you’re a grocer who has no business being on a YOLO in the first place. Also, Jon Stewart is a war criminal.”
Billy’s anger immediately faded and a dark, soul-crushing depression seeped into him like water rushing into a gorge.XII “The troll is right,” thought Billy. “I’m not fit for a YOLO. I’m not fit for anything. No one cares for me. I was sent up here by my own crew to die. They’d be better off without me.”
“So why don’t you just get on with it then?” said L33tB33tr, reading Billy’s mind by designing an algorithm to analyze and predict his future Google searches. Billy sniffled.
The third troll gestured to flames and tossed Billy some rope and a large spit. Billy wept as he sat down on the ground and began to tie himself up. “It’s better this way,” thought Billy. He put a gag in his mouth and tied his hands together tightly. “I will YOLO no more.”
By the time Billy had finished tying himself up, the Little People were gathered around the trolls’ clearing. “Trolls!” whispered Sorkinshield to his frightened crew. “What an unexpected twist.”
“Ah, Aaron Sorkinshield!” yelled L33tB33tr into the night. “The famed adventurer. Leader of the Studio 60 on the Silmarillion Strip quest. Or should I say, the canceled quest.”XIII
Sorkinshield’s blood boiled and, before anyone could stop him, he stepped out into the open. “How dare you!” he shouted at the trolls, who swiveled to greet him as Billy cried and wordlessly marinated himself in a variety of nearby herbs and spices.
“You should be lucky we even know your name, which wouldn’t be the case if you hadn’t sold out to be the sycophantic scribe of Silly Cone Valley,” taunted IllumiNazi.XIV Though Sorkinshield’s will was strong and the Little People hidden behind him begged him to ignore the trolls’ harsh words, he was soon just as depressed and deliciously seasoned as Billy.
One by one, the trolls targeted the Little People hiding behind the trees, drawing them out with slurs and taunts. They lamented Whorey’s lack of talent and Slorey’s lack of fame. They mocked Kourtney for being entirely irrelevant and easily the dumbest of the bunch. They told Ballin and Drawlin that their parents should have been on food stamps, and told Doc he shouldn’t have eaten all those stamps for food. They said Beefer and Buffer were overcompensating and argued to Loin and Groin that schoolteachers were overly compensated. One by one, each was so demoralized they tied themselves to a spit, ready to be roasted and eaten.
As the ravenous BarromneyOsama began to place them over the fire, IllumiNazi let out a terrified scream.
“What?” asked Barromney, dropping Doc on the ground.
“It’s my subreddit,” answered IllumiNazi. “Somebody is totally mixing up Whedonverse mythologies!”
“Impossible!” yelled L33tB33tr. “Don’t they know how much Firefly means to Joss?” They gathered around IllumiNazi’s computer and stared in wonder as the screen whirred and changed before them. They trolled furiously, but whoever was on the other side was making just as little sense as any of them.
Without warning, Dumbledalf burst into the clearing, iPad in hand, muttering incantations over it. “God, I hate Safari. Can anyone tell me how to clear my search history?” he yelled, oblivious to the fact that his friends were tied up over scorching flames.
“Are you WashintonWizard2?” accused L33tB33tr. Dumbledalf ignored him and went right back to his iPad magic. The screen whizzed and buzzed. The trolls frantically tried to regain control of their forums and message boards but it was too late. They were doomed from the instant Dumbledalf failed to correctly copy the URL for a cat meme and instead lambasted them with the Wikipedia page for erectile dysfunction. Yet trolls being trolls, they refused to give up.XV They worked through the night trying to take back their message boards, losing an entire two hours to Dumbledalf mistaking Facebook’s search bar for the “What’s on your mind?” update option. Before they knew it, morning came, and with it, the sun. The natural sunlight was so shocking to the trolls’ introverted nervous systems that they all fell dead on the spot. They had been pwned, and pwned good.
Then Dumbledalf tripped on a wire and the computer screens burst into flames, destroying all evidence of the encounter. It was a clean kill, and the online community would attribute their deaths to Anonymous for years to come.
Thus, the trolls’ spell was broken. Billy and the Little People again remembered their reasons to live.XVI They untied themselves, grabbed a number of potentially very important swords that were lying on the ground, and circled around Dumbledalf, eager for answers.
“How did you know where to find us? How did you know how to defeat the trolls? And where did you go in the first place?”
But Sorkinshield quickly pushed to the forefront and silenced the group’s clamoring. “Enough questions,” he said. “From now on I have one answer for you, and one answer only: Let Dumbledalf be Dumbledalf.”
“Who’s Dumbledalf?” asked Dumbledalf. Then he set his hat on fire and tossed it into the wind, grumbling that the stupid old bird never did anything for itself nowadays.
I Killed by a joint heart attack when they were thirty-five years old (a ripe old age for wobbits). Heart attacks are contagious for wobbits in much the same way yawns are for us.
II Billy’s classic pepperoni waffles were so popular in Wobbottabad that they’ve single-handedly caused the choking deaths of twenty-three wobbits. If I may hold you in confidence, dear reader, the secret to the recipe is that you place the pepperonis under the waffles. And inside them. And on top of them. Then you boil the rest of the pepperoni into a syrup for drinking later.
III He would. See pages 18, 27, 28, 67, 73, 84, 113, 124, 126, and all the other ones.
IV Have you ever cooked a grizzly bear? They aren’t half as revolting as you’d think, though killing one is twice as illegal as you’d want.
V Once, when our Billy was but eight years old, he came much too close to reading the words “Sugar: 3600g” on his sixty-pack of Fruit Roll-Ups. In the nick of time, he choked on the five Fruit Roll-Ups in his mouth, depriving him of enough oxygen that it killed the one brain cell that was still trying up there.
VI A sample of Dumbledalf’s many abilities: sleeping with his eyes open, coughing up doves, and forgetting how not to fly.
VII Never ford the river.
VIII As Drawlin later noted, the pit stop was like a beautiful sunset, giving comfort before the long, dark night. Because it was like this phenomenon but could not be exactly equated with this phenomenon, the edge of the forest was more emblematic of a simile than a metaphor in their travels.
IX Later in the forest, the sound would be exactly that, but because you cannot fairly compare a thing to itself, it still did not qualify as a metaphor. While the overall forest reeked of metaphorical importance, our weary travelers began to wonder if perhaps the things inside the forest were just things inside a forest.
X This impressed Billy a great deal, since wobbit fingers are usually so covered in oils or syrups that they stick to one another, making wobbit hands more like mitts, which they then clumsily smash on keyboards when ordering calzones online.
XI Billy was very good at recognizing racism in others, and less good at recognizing it in himself. In his defense, though, it is very hard to recognize anything inside a wobbit.
XII Again, simile. It’s like this forest isn’t even trying.
XIII This much-anticipated quest met an unfortunate end when the entire party was buried alive in an avalanche of exactly 30 rocks.
XIV A valley where a bunch of young people design very silly cones, which other young people buy for lots of money until an even sillier cone comes out.
XV Ironically, it is this same quality that will make our poor wobbit so endearing in the chapters to come.
XVI Food.