“As you wish.” The frog was losing interest. As
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a magic all-smelling frog who had lived for many centuries, the Burping Bullfrog had served dozens of masters. He ranked Fiddlefart as the worst of them by a wide margin. “But you have to ask using the official words.”
Fiddlefart rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he said. “Whatever.”
The ogre took three giant steps across the room and stood facing the bullfrog. Phlegm rattled around as he cleared his throat. With arms crossed, he recited:
Burping Bullfrog in the wall,who smells grossest of them all?
The Burping Bullfrog sat on his platform, motion-less. He let the silence settle in around him. Then, suddenly, the frog grunted, and his eyes rolled back in his head. His nostrils sucked in the air around him, and he began to tremble.
His vacuum-like sniffing intensified as the trem-bling worsened into violent rumbling. The grunts grew louder and more frenzied. For a brief second, Fiddlefart considered hiding behind his garbage throne. But then, at once, the rumbling stopped.
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After a moment of silence, a loud, dank, ghastly burp erupted from the bullfrog’s mouth. The burp released green and purple vapors that swirled and twirled in front of his face. Then, the frog spoke:
Blurpity blorpy, blinkity bly, Fiddlefart, you are one stinky guy.
“Go on…” said Fiddlefart with an impatient twirl of his finger.
The green and purple vapors began to form an image. The ogre king cocked his head to the side and squinted, but he couldn’t make it out.
The bullfrog continued:
It’s true your sick aromawould wrench any nose,but compared to Hobgoblinyou smell like a rose.
As the Burping Bullfrog croaked out these words, the burp vapors took shape. They formed into the beady eyes, long, curved nose, and dopey grin of the one and only Hobgoblin.
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The vision of Hobgoblin blinked casually while six little flies buzzed around his oval head. Seemingly unaware he was being watched, the vapor-formed Hobgoblin farted and let out a little giggle. Then, in a magical swirl, the vision vanished.
“Impossible!” yelled the king, kicking a moldy pumpkin across the room. “There’s no way! I don’t believe it!”
Fiddlefart tugged at his ears, let out a chamber- rattling wail, and slashed the air around him with a series of unskilled karate chops.
Frantically, the king sniffed his left armpit and then his right. “Have I lost it?” he asked. “Am I losing my stinky edge?”
You’ve been losing your stink nowfor quite a long while,but the farmer’s aromagrows more and more vile.
“You weren’t supposed to answer that!” screamed the ogre king as angry tears burned his eyeballs.
He clenched his eyes shut to fight away the tears. Taking a deep breath, the ogre king attempted to relax
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by repeating what he called his “smell-empowerment mantra”:
“I smell worse than garbage, I smell like the sewer, I smell worse than garbage, I smell like the sewer…”
Taking this as his cue to leave, the Burping Bullfrog gave a bow, backed into his hole in the wall, and silently closed his little door.
The mantra had worked: Fiddlefart calmed down enough to take action. Or at least enough to order someone else to take action.
He trampled through garbage to the chamber door, opened it halfway, and screamed through the crack: “Huntress!!”
Promptly, as if she had been lurking only feet from the door, a squirrel wearing a hooded cloak and a wooden mask entered the chamber. She had a bushy chestnut tail and smelled of cinnamon. She came armed with a crossbow, a scrub brush, and a steely expression.
She stood there quietly as Fiddlefart, with his back to the squirrel, sprayed himself with an aerosol can labeled SHARK FARTS.
“Yes, Your Disgustingness,” she said, her watchful eyes aimed at the king.
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Fiddlefart jumped in surprise. He scrambled to hide the can of shark fart spray in a pile of garbage. The Huntress silently scoffed—it was an open secret throughout the kingdom that Fiddlefart artificially enhanced his nasty odor.
The ogre cleared his throat, walked over to the window, and pretended to look thoughtfully down at Tooterville.
Without turning around, he said: “There’s a hobgoblin bean farmer in the Mucklands in need of a scrubbing, and you’re just the woman for the job. You’re my most trusted minion, but I don’t really trust anyone. You’ll have to prove to me you’ve scrubbed the hobgoblin…”
The ogre whirled around theatrically. He was holding a glass jar.
“…by bringing back his flies in this!”
The Huntress took the jar in both of her paws.
Fiddlefart continued. “As everyone knows from fables and nursery rhymes, a hobgoblin’s flies would never leave their hobgoblin on purpose. They live for the creature’s farty stench. However!”—Fiddlefart gestured to the scrub brush on her belt—“If you scrubbed him so badly that he lost his farty stench,
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the flies would no longer recognize him. Their little fly brains would be jumbled. They’d be sad, confused, and so very easy to capture.”
The ogre grinned at his own devilishness. The Huntress looked Fiddlefart in his bloodshot eyes and said, “As you wish, Your Stinkiness.”
Silently, she slipped out the door.
Alone once again, King Fiddlefart returned to his window, resumed his mantra, and filled the chamber with an unhappy fart.
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CHAPTER 2
THE BEAN FARMER
rrummpf! Pruumpf! Paarruuumpf!!”
Soulful toots rumbled across the neat, steamy rows of bean plants. Taking a break from tooting, Hobgoblin propped his foot up on the short, rickety fence that surrounded his mud hut. He watched the sun melt into the horizon as sweat trickled down his loaf-shaped forehead.
It was the end of another hard workday on the bean farm. Hobgoblin, with kind, buttony eyes and a green cloud of stench billowing around him, was
saluting the occasion as he always did: by tooting his heart out on a rusty tuba. It was a cherished family heirloom that went back many generations.
Six flies buzzed in lazy figure eights above Hobgoblin’s head as he gazed across the Unincorporated Mucklands. Hundreds of bean plants dotted the landscape of mulchy sludge. To his right, large, smelly trees marked the beginning of the Fetid Forest.
The famously stinky hobgoblins had farmed this land for centuries. As he was the last of his kind, Hobgoblin was just called Hobgoblin. It had been a very long time since there was another hobgoblin around, and he couldn’t remember what