Now if you wish, like the Little People, to learn what happened to Puff the Magic Dragon, you must go back to the day when he stormed out of the Mountain with Zero Friends. Luckily, this is the same day just described in that last chapter, so it’s not going to take a whole lot of effort from either of us.
At the time, the men of Rake-town were mostly indoors—and you would be too if it was cold! The women, possibly due to weather, were nowhere to be found.
Little could be seen of the Mountain with Zero Friends from Rake-town, as the River That Ran Water blocked its lower base and nobody wanted to look at an awkward loner for too long anyway. It was an age of swift and rather exciting evolutionary progression, and sympathy was a weakness in the battle for survival. It is said the great apes only managed to acquire opposable thumbs because they could never figure out how to truly love one another. I do not know who said this. To be honest, I doubt he was a scientist.
And so the residents of Rake-town devoted little attention to the Mountain with Zero Friends. It was certainly no help that all that was up there was a deadly dragon who wore the most tiresome T-shirts. The Humans could only make out the utmost peak of the mountain from their point of view, and they were pretty bad at viewing matters from any other perspective.
Even so, they could not help but notice a flash of gold atop the mountain on that fateful night. There was much discussion among the Rakers as to what might be the source.
“Perhaps it is the Little People, sending gold down the river. The songs are coming true at last.”
“Unlikely,” said a grim man. “If you found gold, would you immediately throw it into a river?”
The men glanced around nervously. None had considered this before. The edicts of the songs were a little impractical upon closer examination. Also problematic was the fact that the lyricist had drowned six hundred years ago from paranoid delusions of river treasure.
“We’ve been deceived by the tunes,” one realized.
“It is true,” said another. “The tunes are just so catchy.”
“Then hear my tune,” said the grim man, growing grimmer. He stood and belted out a jingle three octaves lower than even an elven bass clarinet could go.
Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na
Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na
Bard the Batman!
The grim man’s name, you see, was Bard the Batman, and the na na na’s were shameless filler.
Just then a golden streak shot down the river from the north, lighting up the nighttime sky.
“It’s a bird!”
“It’s a plane!”
“When did we invent planes?”
Bard shook his head.
He climbed into his Bardmobile and sped off to the whitewashed home of Richard Nixon.
“Mr. Nixon-in-Chief, listen to me. Either the dragon is coming, or I’m not some ordinary billionaire.”
“You’re not an ordinary billionaire,” guessed Nixon obliviously.
“This is no time for backstories. Call our men to arms! Cut the bridge!”
Nixon leaned back in his swivel chair and placed his feet upon his desk. At the time, it seemed like the pinnacle of power—but as you will soon see, Nixon had a lot to learn about chairs.
“Riddle me this,” Nixon said gruffly. “If it’s a dragon that can fly, why would I cut the bridge?”
“I have heard of such Riddlers, and I am not in the mood for games.” Bard grimaced. Bard was never in the mood for games. He was usually in the mood for either brooding or tending to his many bats.
“If we cut the bridge, then we can’t escape, and we would trap ourselves on an island with a dragon and die.”
“Don’t overthink it,” said the Batman, no less grimly than his previous grimness.
“How does destroying our own bridge help us at all?”
“Because if we don’t destroy our bridge, the dragon will destroy our bridge!”
Nixon immediately understood this perfect logic.
“Cut the bridge!” he roared to his security team, the Gossipy Service.
Suddenly the warning trumpets sounded three staccato blows. One blow meant rivers running with gold, two blows meant somebody acquired a new trumpet they were proud of, three meant public dragon attack, and four meant it was going to rain tomorrow. After waiting around a few moments hoping there would be a fourth blow, everybody fled their homes, shrieking in anguish as the mighty dragon crooned above them:
Puff the Magic Dragon
Could grasp reality
And was not a delusional dragon
And made a normal amount of friends
I could go on, dear reader, but I’d rather not make you drop these pages in fright and get the Barnes & Noble employees mad at you.
As Puff swept over the rather forgettable lake alongside Rake-town’s storied rake, his fiery puppy dragon eyes homed in on the one and only bridge. He headed down to cross it by foot, recognizing it as your standard symbolic bridge of friendship—but no! Just in the nick of time, the Humans blew up their only means of escape, saving themselves from having their bridge destroyed by a dragon.
As Bard watched his town come under attack, he was flummoxed by a moral quandary.I Time and again, no matter what trouble seemed to strike down upon his beloved Rake-town, he was the only one brave enough to stop it. All the other residents were incredibly ignorant and idiotic and never appreciated his good deeds. Nonetheless, he did whatever was necessary to protect his town and its irascible mayor. He had only one arbitrary rule: never kill a dragon.
Bard, therefore, was terribly uncertain how to respond to the threat of the dragon. He now watched as Puff dove through the ravaged community, laying the land to waste, though it did cross his mind that grimness would come even more easily if his whole community was burned out of existence.
As soon as Puff saw the bridge of friendship crumble to the sea, the poor dragon could think only of his predictably sad youth in the slums of Widdle Wearth. It was there that Puff lived with his neglectful parents, two perennial underachievers who were dragons for a living. For centuries the storks were too afraid of the fire-breathing creatures to deliver any babies, and when they did, they often picked rather bad dragons to be parents. Puff’s parents were the most dismal dragons in all of Widdle Wearth, isolating Puff from his peers and stunting his development as a socially productive member of the dragon community. There was nothing for Puff to do to pass the days in his dark and lonely cave but watch reruns of Bay, oh Wulf!, an award-winning saga about being a wolf that instilled Puff with his love for mantelpiece trophies. Had he been born a wolf, how marvelous life would have been! Wolves traveled in packs and always had friends at their side.II Dragons flew alone, and pretending that the clouds at their side were friendly cumulonimbus companions only worked for so long.
Seeing the Humans’ refusal to forge the fires of friendship pushed Puff over the edge. He could not help himself; he did as you and I would do, and wept. Honestly, you and I would weep a lot if we lived in Widdle Wearth.
A dragon’s tears are not like most other tears, however. Their happier tears turn into above-average jelly beans, but their saddest tears can light the ground afire. With each tear that trickled down the scales of Puff’s face, another idyllic Rake-town gated community burst into deadly flames, with all the Lexus SUVs and high-end gas grills exploding in luxurious spectacle.III
One of these tears happened to land on Nixon’s white house, razing the structure instantly. As the building toppled, Nixon fled straight for the Dryportal, desperately hoping to shield himself from any further damage. Some other unnamed people also died, and you should feel sad about that too.
Bard saw all of this carnage, but he was unmoved, and grim.
But then he saw the side mirror of his Bardmobile. A rogue piece of wood had been flung against it, leaving a minor but noticeable scratch that would take a good hour and a half to buff out.
This changed everything for Bard. He climbed into his Bardmobile and threw his morality code out the window, damaging his side mirror even more. He knew what he had to do. Driving ten miles per hour over the speed limit, he reached the nearest Bardmobile repair shop within minutes. He dropped off his car and waited for the mechanic to put out the fire all over his pants.
While Bard waited, he looked around for anything that might help him defeat the dragon. With so much of the town burned, all that was left in the area was an armory, a nuclear bunker, and a time machine. As he tried to puzzle out a way to utilize these unutilizable objects, an old Baltimore Ravens linebacker tried to perch himself on Bard’s shoulder. They both instantly toppled to the ground.
The Raven extended a hand and helped Bard up from the burning floor. “Huddle up now.”
They thrust their arms around each other and lowered their heads.
“Listen,” the Raven said, “you look like you’re in a bit of a jam. Whenever me and my team were facing clothes-wearing, crying dragons on the field, coach would call for the old Blue-forty-two.”
Bard frowned, and since his mouth was the only visible part of his face, it was rather clear how he was feeling. “I don’t know that one,” he grimmed.
The Raven pulled the huddle tighter and whispered around the area where he imagined Bard’s ear to be beneath his mask. “The old Nuclear Bunker–Armory–Time Machine combo.”
Bard grimmed noddingly.
“Break!” the Raven cawed. “Break down the barriers of space and time!” They exited the huddle and took their stances.
Bard sprinted down his route, circling around the nuclear bunker to lure Puff into a false sense of safety and cutting across to the armory to find some guns and such. The armory was all out of guns, but by shooting arrow after arrow at the end of Puff’s tail, Bard herded the adorably friendless beast right through the time machine, sending Puff straight into the 1960s folk-rock movement. There Puff would live out his days alongside Fritos, Spam, and Gulf Oil barracks, all admittedly dated references that I apologize for. Even Richard Nixon, whose favorite book was the Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings, had absolutely no idea what was going on.
The waxing moon was stripped bare of its hair in the twinkling sky. The thick fog smoldered through the hills, mixing with the smoke to create a layer of Smog, which, come to think of it, would have been another possible name for a dragon that wouldn’t have been too bad in some sort of parody book, maybe with the dragon’s conceit being that he terrorizes towns by emitting a toxic amount of pollution. But that would have made for an entirely different book that would have sold the exact same number of copies.
The debris scattered west toward the marshes of Jerkwood, and between the wails of the Race of Men, if you listened closely, you could hear the whispers of that forest as dusk lumbered toward dawn.
“Sucks for you,” it said.
And so the Humans lamented the destruction of their town, though they were pretty pleased the one surviving building was the House That Everybody Liked. In the heat of the moment—temperatures were still around 120 degrees Fahrenheit—they felt a tremendous sense of loss, which felt a lot like having third-degree burns all over your limbs. But four out of five residents had survived the chaos, and the fifth that hadn’t were largely concentrated in the town’s dental school, which really was just asking for trouble with that flammable toothpaste they were developing. Most of their woods remained undamaged, and their pastures too. Of course, the cattle had now seen things, terrible things, so the milk would never taste the same, and the milkman had been incinerated, terribly incinerated, so no one would ever notice the difference. But the dragon had left for an objectively more groovy time and place, and everybody was just grateful they didn’t have to go to any folk-rock-movement YOLTs themselves.IV What’s more, the dragon had left the Mountain with Zero Friends completely unguarded. The Humans had not yet realized just what this meant. As I said, they were ignorant and idiotic and were liable to forget to think about the insides of mountains when their houses were burning down.
And there were other matters at hand. Word traveled quickly across town that their Nixon-in-Chief had not acted so chiefly in their time of need, though he did act very Nixonly. A virulent mob found him on the shores of the Dryportal, stuck in a life vest, calling for Pat to cut him out of the damn thing. Nixon’s cocker spaniel, Chess, was chewing on his left pant leg.
But now that Puff had gone to a better place, Nixon could practically hear the Oscar acceptance speeches awaiting him deep within the mountain.
“Hear me now,” he said, waving the one hand that wasn’t caught in his vest. “I am not a crook.”
“Lies!” cried a townsperson. “If only Bard the Batman had not perished in the time machine doohickey. Now there was an honest man, and a brave man, even if he had some troubling mood issues sometimes.”
“It is a shame he died,” echoed another.
“Yes, a real shame,” agreed a third. But this third man was no ordinary third man—he stepped behind the podium and pulled off his mask, revealing his bat mask beneath it! It was the Batman!
“Bard is no longer dead. For I am he, Bard of the line of Grimion. I am the time-transporter of the dragon!”
“His story continues!” the Rakers cheered. “King Batman! King Batman!”
Nixon could plainly see that public opinion was shifting, and he still didn’t know where Pat was with those damn scissors. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen her or any other women in years. He realized that he was okay with this.
“Now hold on,” Nixon said, and the residents felt instantly inclined to forgive him, “but why is that I am to blame? Was it I who sent the dragon storming from the mountain down into our homes? I think not. Someone find a measuring stick, and you will see that I am tall enough to ride any roller coaster in Widdle Wearth. You know who isn’t? Sorkinshield and his Little People! It is they who have wronged us in pursuit of their hordes of gold.”
“Here, here!” the crowd cried. “We have been cheated by the Little People. The smallest shadows are the hardest to see.”
As you can imagine, that immediately became a proverb.
“Now, I am the last person to call Bard the Batman anything other than an ordinary billionaire—I called him such not more than fifteen minutes ago. I am as thankful for his service as the rest of you, but Rake-town has no king, and I am your elected leader. Moments like this are what we ratified a constitution for, and populist anger like this is why I never let you read it. The line of Grimion were the lords of Fail, not Rake-town, which really stinks for you.”
Fail was a destroyed town in Moblin territory that everyone once had high hopes for. It was widely accepted now as a pretty big fail.
“Fools!” said the Batman. “The Little People did not cheat us. They were likely the first victims when Puff descended the mountain. Friendship is not a victimless crime.”
The residents nodded solemnly. They did not understand what that meant, but it was probably another famous proverb.
“I am with you, Richard Nixon,” said Bard. “United we stand, divided we stand too far apart to hear each other and work effectively as a team.”
They would have to workshop that one before it became a proverb. “Nonetheless,” cried a townsperson, “you have wronged us and you have lied to your town, Mr. Nixon. As such, we have no choice but to beseech you. We beseech you to be an honest man.”
Everyone agreed that this was the best course of action, so Nixon was thenceforth beseeched by his people. Having taken part in such a momentous political act, the citizens of Rake-town applauded and hugged one another. The nimble-handed managed both at once.
Then they looked upon the mountain in the distance, and the distance in the further distance, and the horizon at distance’s end. It was so far just then, and yet—well, you should flip the page, because, boy, will you be surprised.
The crowd dispersed to gather arms and prepare for the fight ahead, singing once more of the golden river that was once again a real possibility.
Nixon raised his hands above his head and held out two fingers on each. He descended the podium’s stairs. It instantly became a proverb.
I Story of his life.
II Counterpoint: the lone wolf.
III Think CG effects.
IV YOLT: You Only Live Twice.