Billy pointed a fat wobbit finger at the great, pitiful-looking mountain in the distance. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get over—ouch!” Billy had stepped on the rake and sent its handle flying into his face in a classic and hilarious blunder. They all laughed at the brief moment of levity in this deathly serious YOLO.
As they drew nearer to the mountain, they saw that there was nothing to see anywhere. Its surface, devoid of all life, looked super lame. The rake was maybe fifty times cooler, and that rake wasn’t even on the Top Ten Coolest Rakes in Widdle Wearth list Slorey had been reading for the past five months. The list was twenty sentences long and Slorey could read about a sentence a week if she was really pushing herself. It took Whorey but four months to calculate this.
The closer they came, the more the group was dismayed by the Mountain with Zero Friends. Normal features of a Widdle Wearth mountain it had not: Where was the world-class ski resort? The commemorative mountain goat tours? The thousands of St. Bernard dogs roaming around looking for somebody to heal with their lifesaving medicine neck barrels?I Why did everything smell vaguely of cauliflower? Who, pray tell, would possibly want to spend any time here, considering the Mountain of Four Thousand Three Hundred and Sixty-seven Friends was close enough nearby that you could just make out the laughter and snowmobile noises?
In truth the Mountain with Zero Friends wouldn’t have known itself why anybody bothered with it. It was a fluke mountain to begin with, you see—just showed up one day where once there was the Totally Amazing Valley. The men of Fail avoided getting close to the mountain, just because it wasn’t their kind of mountain, you know, nothing personal. The Little People originally only hung around there to play its Nintendo 64 on single player and eat all the Cheetos it gave them.
They felt guilty saying it, but Billy and the Little People felt uncomfortable around this mountain. It kept awkwardly avalanching everywhere they tried to walk, and then it would just make it worse with an apology avalanche. Kourtney tried to hug the mountain out of pity, but it got her entire outfit utterly soaked, and not even in a flattering way. Fili was trapped under an avalanche for about two weeks, until somebody noticed he was missing. Ballin got so fed up he screamed, “This is so pathetic!” then felt bad about it and promised to go see a movie with the mountain at some point. (I mention this only because it is illustrative of the many comments made by Ballin and Drawlin that could have been made by anybody, and are certainly more emblematic of a universal range of emotions than that of any one race or ethnicity. It’s important to note that if I keep bringing up Ballin and Drawlin’s angry comments, it is only because this a long and difficult YOLO and if I was to record all they said and did, this would probably need to be a trilogy. If, for example, the only comment Drawlin makes in this chapter happens to be about the infamous Widdle Wearth race riots, that does not mean we can reduce to him a stereotype of a Little Person who is always harping on nothing but race riots. I, for one, do no such thing, and neither should you.)
“I bet this mountain was too aloof to even take a side during last summer’s race riots,” Drawlin remarked.
It was in between losing Fili and remembering that Kiwi had a brother when they realized they had a long search for the secret door ahead of them, or to the left or right of them, depending. It could have been inside that nasty cavern that was next to that other nasty cavern. Or it could have been beneath the Stinky Cliff that was next to the Stinky in a Different Way Cliff. But first our travelers thought they should check out what was at the front of the line of Widdle Wearthlings snaking down the side of the mountain. In Widdle Wearth, lines rarely formed in front of secret doors, but you never knew. And there was the fact that Dumbledalf had been inviting everyone he met to the secret door since the beginning of the YOLO.
Still, the line was unusual. Billy had been the first to spot it, exclaiming, “Wow, a line! I love lines!”
This was true. Billy had spent his whole life looking out at lines of customers waiting for him to bag their fine groceries. He had always wondered what it was like to be in line. Maybe lines were how you met women? Billy would soon find out.
After the first three weeks of waiting in line, they could make out at the distant front a massive rock, and in front of that a velvet rope and a bouncer in cool-as-Sorkinshield shades. He was clearly a winner of a man—emotionally and intellectually fulfilled, strong personal brand. Groin pointed out that the bouncer held a long rod, which excited all for what might come next from the prophetically audacious Little Person’s mouth. But soon it was clear that it was just a baton to hit people with when he rejected them. And he rejected everyone: elves, Moblins, cool Humans who had cool catchphrases like “That ain’t nobody’s Tabasco,” various woodland creatures trying to build nests along the mountainside, indigenous trees, and Dumbledalf at least five times. They kept trying to wave to Dumbledalf, but he was either pretending not to know them or having an episode of dementia.
Another month later they moved up a few places, but in a cool way. After four months they made it to the bouncer.
“No secret door here. Move along,” he intoned. Then he raised his long rod, ready to strike.
“Wait!” shrieked Billy. “We waited for so long. Please. We’re good Little People and a wobbit. We pay our taxes, we don’t litter, none of us has ever kicked a dog, we all subscribe to the Harvard Lampoon, we’ve never committed arson—”
“Hold on. Did you say you subscribe to the Lampoon? The Harvard Lampoon? The oldest continually published humor magazine in the world?”
“Of course,” said Billy. “We all know that the Lampoon is the most entertaining, insightful, and enriching achievement of letters in the history of the written word.”
“You better not be joking,” snapped the bouncer. “It’s deadly serious when the Lampoon is involved. I’ll check the list.” He looked at a scroll of parchment rimmed in gold, a vague and beautiful light shining from it.
“Yup, you’re right here: ‘B. Bagboy and all his Little People Friends or whatever.’ The twenty-dollar annual subscription plan, huh? Good choice. You guys can go in.”
The bouncer knocked on the rock three times. Then he knocked sixteen more times, breathed really heavily on it a few times, and pressed his fingers against a keypad drawn with sidewalk chalk and whispered, “Beep boop boop beep.” Then he put a bit of dynamite under the rock and set it off, exploding the rock into a thousand bits.
The bouncer pulled back the velvet rope. “Coat check to your right; no flash photography.”
They walked in, following the thumping bass coming through the walls. Magic was everywhere. Magic walls that were not the color of dirt, magic urinals that automatically flushed, magic balls hanging from the ceiling, covered in reflectors and spinning silently, ominously, beautifully, as if by the dark magic of Moblin spells. It was by far the best club on the mountain.
But all that magic made the Little People nervous, and soon their beards were drenched in sweat, which can be a real hazard for Little People. Sorkinshield’s great-granduncle had drowned in beard sweat during a nerve-racking first date. The Little People decided it was probably cooler anyway if they just stayed in the coat check.
Of course, someone had to be brave and bold and fearless, and the Little People figured the protagonist was the best person for the job. And so Billy started down the dark cavern into the mountain alone, wobbling with fright on top of his regular wobbling. The hall still possessed the remnants of the classic Little People style from when they called the mountain their home: big tufts of hair growing out of the walls, everything inexplicably covered in mud. The “Dragon This Way” neon signs would have been a real help if Billy had been able to read. But at least the graffiti wasn’t that offensive, and Billy was impressed at himself for understanding the one reading “Gabe <3s Melissa” right above two hugging skeletons huddled on the ground.II
Billy kept on into the depthiest depths of the mountain, until there it was: the deepest chamber. It had a bathroom and a janitor’s closet. He went back one level of depth and there it was: Magic Dragon. Puff. He had so many names.III The awful dragon looked exactly like the songs described him. Horrifyingly woeful eyes, iridescent green scales of death, tufts of hair around his ears that looked like cotton candy—poisonous cotton candy. What’s worse, he was fast asleep. He clutched five or six teddy bears and a ream of paper on which he had written “JACK.” “Probably dreaming some psychologically troubling evil dragon dreams,” thought Billy. “Probably dismembering some unicorns in his dreams. Probably performing hate crimes and stealing food from old ladies.” Oh, he was so steamed. That dragon was going to be so dead when somebody else killed him later.
But then he saw the spoils. “Ay, caramba,” Billy tastefully quoted. It was incredible. There must have been sixty thousand trophies, and that was just the Oscars. There were another ten thousand Grammys, a slew of People’s Choice Awards, a huge pile of MTV Video Music Awards, no BET Awards, and a single Tony Award for Best Lighting Design.
Billy smiled. This was going to be easier than making an elf cry. All he had to do was ankletize himself into forty-eight fps and stuff some Emmys into his fat rolls. Goodness knows he had enough of those to carry home HBO’s entire trophy case. Billy squeezed on his anklet and rolled some of his leg fat down to his feet for extra padding. Utter silence would be necessary to carry this caper off successfully. “It’s like I’m back in Wobbottabad, bagging potato chips without being allowed to make a single sound or else I instantly get burned to death,” he said to himself. He clasped his hands over his mouth. He should have thought it to himself.
Puff awoke with a start. He rose up, yawned, rubbed his eyes, brushed his teeth, and looked all around him. He wore a homemade T-shirt that said “Hug Me, I’m a Normal Dragon!”
What was a poor wobbit to do? Billy threw a Golden Globe at him.
“Is somebody there?” asked Puff, because being a Magic Dragon means you can speak the same English that every single other creature in Widdle Wearth speaks (though the Jerkwood forest spoke it with an offensive Mexican accent). “If this is that one rude water buffalo again, or that insult-slinging wizard, I will inform the authorities immediately.” Puff stuck out his snout, not unlike a dog’s nose except for 685 times bigger.
“But wait. You smell like . . . like a friend! Oh boy, oh boy.”
Billy thought for a moment. He had to be careful about this. Dragons were capable, presumably, of killing wobbits.
“So . . . how are things?” Billy patted himself on the back. He could not believe how good he was at making conversation.
“I’m great now that you’re here, buddy! My insides have warmed right up.” Puff’s insides, a mixture of pretty clouds and endangered dolphin sanctuaries, had won a few People’s Choice Awards themselves in the last age.
“That’s great,” said Billy. “Great.” He knew not how to proceed. This was usually the part of a wobbit conversation when everybody would break to either eat doughnuts or breathe out of their mouths for a while. The dragon would surely devour him if he did not act quickly. He’d sucked his thumb enough to know he tasted delicious.
But Puff was already making the next move, tossing a giant, crudely welded ring of trophies at Billy.
“Have a friendship bracelet!” roared the dragon in his bloodcurdlingly beautiful voice. “We. Are. Now. Besties!”
Billy was rather sure he had just survived an attempted murder, but standard policy was to give every dragon a second chance, so he stuck around. Still, he decided he might as well hurry up and start stuffing trophies into his skin crevices while the distracted dragon rambled on about the various tortures he would put Billy through.
“I have so much planned for us—maybe we could do origami together later today? Then I have a couple of tickets to a sing-along screening of Suddenly Moblin: The Musical, but if you’d rather, we could do a pub crawl or just stay in and weave baskets. And we should definitely sign up for a cooking class! I’m so excited! Jack won’t do any of this stuff with me.” The dragon held up the ream of paper labeled “JACK.” “Listen, keep this between you and me, but I worry Stack of Paper Named Jack and I have gotten really distant. I think it might be that one time I accidentally lit him on fire.”
There was now no denying that Puff wanted to kill him, be it a quick death by fire or a slow death through ordeal. Billy could barely contain his fear, and for a wobbit that meant more uncontrollable wobbling.
“Ooh,” said Puff, “I smell you getting closer. I think somebody wants to cuddle!”
Billy was petrified. He was wobbling like a pendulum now, and was very weighed down by the awards, especially the Grammys, which seemed to be made of pewter. But just then the dragon stopped.
“Wait,” Puff said bravely. “I just want to warn you that dragons aren’t necessarily the optimal cuddlers, with our hard scales and very tiny arms and the fire we breathe, so I really need you to be supportive and not make fun of me while I’m trying to cuddle, okay?”
But as Puff was saying this, Billy took his chance and ran, awards spewing out of his massive frame left and right, clanging to the ground, sending sparks flying everywhere, lighting parts of Puff’s bed and couch on fire. “I am a hero and heroes cannot die!” cried Billy. “And I will bag various canned goods and fresh produce well into old age, just as I prophesied to myself once!”
Puff didn’t understand why his friend was running away, and for a harrowing moment he doubted himself. Maybe Magic Dragons never got to have friends. Maybe you had to trade in friends when you acquired fire-breathing powers and the ability to fly and wisps of immortality. Maybe that wasn’t even a terrible trade-off, especially compared to the sentient swamp lumps from the Sad Lands, who could have all the friends they wanted as long as they were other sentient swamp lumps from the Sad Lands. But Puff only wavered long enough to change into his “I’m Puff and I’m Rough, So Let’s Roughhouse” shirt. Then, full of a new lust for friendship, he burst out of the mountain, frolicking in friendly furor, blowing horribly destructive fireballs of joy. Meanwhile, the Mountain with Zero Friends stayed sadly behind, though it had always been ready to be Puff’s BFF. This irony was lost on both, because irony didn’t exist in Widdle Wearth.IV
Billy rushed posthaste back to the Little People, who had been sitting in complete silence at the coat check. Not a thing had happened, save for a brief make-out session between Drawlin and Kourtney in the corner, and both had quickly realized it would affect their professional relationship. Kiwi also hooked up with Loin, but that had been happening for months.
Billy explained everything to the Little People and urged them to explore the mountain while Puff was away. So the Little People at last set off for the second-deepest chamber. And when they saw the various television and media awards, they practically ripped their beards off with joy. Everybody hooted and hollered, and they could finally use all that heavy confetti they’d packed.
After a couple of hours of partying, they started exploring the treasure, and that’s when Billy spotted it. A bald gem, gruff and endearing, full of wisecracks. It was the Alan Arkinstone, he was sure, and he knew it was Sorkinshield’s greatest desire to possess this roughly handsome, award-winning stone with expert comedic timing. He stuffed it into the globule space right below his anklet, where he knew no one would want to look.
Eventually they grew bored of the Oscars, which were mostly for Best Makeup anyway, and decided to get out of the mountain for a while. Sorkinshield knew the most efficient route, past the food court and the spa and the official gift shop, to the great front gates with a dragon-shaped hole where Puff had broken through earlier that day. They gazed out over the sad, sad mountain, realizing that all the golden accolades in the world were nothing compared to that feeling of finally returning to your one true home. They got bored and depressed within five minutes.
I The creator of the accidental spell that created millions of St. Bernards throughout Widdle Wearth hasn’t come forward, but everyone’s pretty sure it was Dumbledalf.
II It was probably better that Billy couldn’t understand some of the less helpful wall writing, such as “Saruman <3s Sauron, Who Is Such a Babe,” and “Dumbledalf Is Looking for a Dog Named Serious.”
III Often Puff imagined what nicknames friends would give him if he had friends. Like: Puffy, Puffster, Mr. Puff, Tough Puff, uff, ff, P-Dragon, and the Beloved Dragon with No Companions.
IV Irony would later become the most important weapon ever wielded by anybody. Like most magical things, irony was invented by the Harvard Lampoon.