Greegs & Ladders - Zack Mitchell, Danny Mendlow (book recommendations based on other books .txt) 📗

The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Greeg

While our Greegs freely romp about their own planet trashing the place whilst drawing blueprints for the next schmold museum, many faraway Greegs languish miserably in cramped carnival cells. As stated, on most planets Greegs are a small-numbered population put on display by creatures of greater intelligence and power. These imprisoned Greegs have never even heard of schmold, much less seen a drop of it, yet buried somewhere in their collective consciousness is the memory of schmold and how wonderful it might be if they had some. Carnival Greegs dream every night of a tantalizingly unattainable green substance. They always wake up just before the moment of acquisition, left with feelings of disorientation and disappointment. When they’re unable to sleep they gaze at whatever moons are in the sky of wherever they are and imagine the moons are green and made of schmold. If the moons happen to already be green, well, they especially enjoy looking at those ones because there's a good chance they might actually be made of schmold.

Carnival Greegs do very little while performing, as the mere sight of these silly creatures is enough to send even the most freakishly bizarre alien into a fit of laughter. The most popular carnival attraction is the viewing of sexual intercourse. Every mid-afternoon the Greegs are separated into groups of two (or more if you can afford the tickets) and left to perform for the paying crowd. Most aliens are fascinated with the process of Greeg intercourse. How and why do such brutish slobs perform procreation in such a dignified and sterile manner? The mystery was best discussed by the famous Dr. Kipple in his psychological think-piece Purified Procreation: Greeg Sex and What it Says About Their True Nature.

Klaxworms and Flying Grimbat Messengers

As previously mentioned, Greegs are the most intellectually evolved creatures on this planet. That does not say much for everyone else. We have witnessed the folly of the Quigg, but that is nothing compared to the pure lunacy that are Klaxworms.

A Klaxworm is a medium-sized slithery type creature with thorns and barbs and other dangerous things adorning its skin. Klaxworms exist solely on one of 11 planets containing wriggly, walky, breathy things in the hopeless, undeveloped but reasonably entertaining to look at from a safe distance sun system of the 38 planets in the 59 sunned district of Herb. The Klaxworms' estimated 3.2 trillion populace lives entirely in a single cave system. It is crowded and unpleasant to say the least. During the day there’s a stifling heat so intense it can boil the organs of unfortunately thinner-skinned Klaxworms, while the sub-zero temperatures of the evening results in all Klaxworms being frozen to the ground like the tongue of a foolish human who licked metal in the wintertime. For about 9 Earth hours every night the Klaxworms are stuck in mid-stride. Once things warm up in the morning they continue their daily routine of hoping their organs don’t boil while deciding where they’d like to end up frozen for the night.

Klaxworms do not want to live in this wretched cave. But they don’t leave. They are perfectly aware (through aid of flying Grimbat messengers) that right outside their cave exists all sorts of remarkable thingslike varnished marble, shiny glass windows and freshly bleached tile floors; in short, the entire surface of a planet for their roaming purposes. No one is stopping them, yet they cannot leave. Why is this? A Klaxworm has no great enemy to fear in the world (except the odd Greeg has been known to wander in the cave and eat a few of them for a late snack, apparently forgetting they’re deadly poisonous to everything). A Klaxworm will talk your ear off about leaving the cave, how in just a moment they’ll slither right out into the vast fields of polished marble, only they never quite make it to the exit. Along the way there’s always a distraction, such as a good discussion about leaving the cave, the boiling of one’s organs, or the finding of an excellent spot to be frozen in for the evening.

The squalor of the cave has no actual relevance with their desire to leave, for even if Klaxworms had evolved in an oasis paradise they still would have wanted to be elsewhere. To be displeased with the surroundings while at the same time attempting no change whatsoever is the unwavering state of the Klaxworm's consciousness. It is a very disagreeable purpose to have in life, one that usually results in not doing anything other than stewing about in a cave waiting for ones organs to boil.

Are Klaxworms really this stupid? Not quite. They are merely one of the universe’s laziest creatures.

Another mysterious creature on this planet is the briefly aforementioned Flying Grimbat messenger. The Flying Grimbat messenger looks like a triplet of tie-dyed Perusian vampire bats mashed up in a quality vice grip with 3 sets of pterodactyl wings frantically flapping to keep its monstrous body afloat. They feed on a strict diet of watered down schmold, making them somewhat of an enemy to Greegs (who fear the notion of sharing schmold). Luckily the fact that Grimbats water down their schmold means they don’t use very much of it. If a Grimbat consumed pure schmold the Greegs would have wiped them out ages ago. It is also true that for some reason the Greegs feel a compelling affinity with the Grimbats, as if they are one of them.Flying Grimbats have appointed themselves messengers of the planet, like a spontaneous organic media. The only problem with this flying epidemic of mass media is that nobody wants to hear their mind-numbingly boring messages, making Grimbats possibly the most useless creature on the planet. Certainly more useless than Klaxworms, who at least mind their own business and don’t drop excrement on the recently varnished marble. Grimbats are confounding blabbermouths. They are heedless busybodies swooping around the skies, eavesdropping from behind shrubs and sheepishly claiming it’s for the good of public knowledge when they get caught doing it. The parallels between Flying Grimbat Messengers and human paparazzi are staggering. In my eyes, the only blatant difference is that a paparazzi looks like a triplet of tie-dyed Perusian vampire bats mashed up in a quality vice grip with 2 sets of pterodactyl wings frantically flapping to keep it's monstrous body afloat, as opposed to having the regular 3 sets of pterodactyl wings commonly found on the Flying Grimbat Messenger.

Like I said, they are a mysterious creature

The Scam of Religious Holidays for Greegs

A Greeg calendar is an interesting collectible to come across in your space travels. Just the fact that Greegs have invented a calendar is mystifying, but matters are made more baffling when you discover there is no semblance of logic or pattern in any of the 473 pages, all of which are constantly being rearranged and rewritten due to squabbles about which holidays should be celebrated and which should never be spoken of again. Random holidays (some enthralling, some downright shameful) are perpetually coming and going, but the celebration of one in particular has always been agreed upon. It is marked on the calendar by every 4.3 rotations of the small moon Dromos, and it is a day in which all respectable Greegs must pay reverence to their deity, known by the name ‘Whatever It Is That Created Everything For the Sole Entertainment of the Greeg.’ On the day of reverence a Greeg says thank you to Whatever It Is That Created Everything For the Sole Entertainment of the Greeg, and prays the supply of schmold be plentiful for at least the next thousand revolutions round the sun. The centrepiece of the event is the great tradition known as The Offering of Schmold. Each Greeg family is expected (nay, commanded by law) to place a worthy offering in front of a stone altar, where slaves of the congregation collect the offerings and take them to a secret volcano that is the living heart of Whatever It Is That Created Everything For the Sole Entertainment of the Greeg. This was once a pure act of sacrifice, but over time the Offering of Schmold became nothing more than an egotistical competition to see who could offer the most intricately expensive display. Much of a Greeg's time between days of reverence is spent planning out and constructing their next offering. Commendable offerings in recent years have included: a 2-dozen set of schmold candles (a truly rare item considering the near impossibility of solidifying schmold short of owning a bottle of Ice-Nine), a flat-screen schmold television (with all the channels of course), a schmold-multiplier (a remarkable machine that can increase your schmold supply at a rate of .03% per rotation of Dromos, assuming you’re able to afford the astronomically bankrupting task of plugging it in), and the ever popular schmold-cake (acceptable only when baked to a crispy charcoal texture and stomped on a little bit).

Long ago it was made public to the Greeg community that the congregation had not been taking the offerings of schmold to any secret volcano that is the living heart of Whatever It Is That Created Everything For the Sole Entertainment of the Greeg. They were merely putting the schmold in their own houses. The entire celebration of the Greegian deity is a scam perpetrated by an elite group of maniacal Greegs, who for some unknown reason must own more schmold than anyone else. Was the public upset? Not really. Their desire to compete over who has the most expensive schmold offering quickly trumped the anger of being ripped off.

Greegs love showing off how much schmold they have, even if it results in no longer having the schmold.