Zoot the Unchaste Magically Mutated!
Special to the Weekend Edition of Strange News From Bree
BREE - Zoot the Unchaste, three-time Legolas Award-winning Center fielder of the Bree Cheese, has suffered a complete personality and body transmutation resulting from a freak accident at the Bree-Land Magic Works.
The Unchaste, 29, had been recently hired as a spokeswoman for the Magic Works. She had arrived early at the Magic Works' Exhibition Hall to prepare for the unveiling and demonstration of their new portable light source, the Phial of Faerie. This phial has just begun production after some minor modifications to the original design which was prototyped as the Phial of Galadriel.
As best as can now be determined, Gnarf the Bizarrely-Formed-And-Extremely-Klutzy, an orc-freak employed at the Magic Works as a gopher and test subject, was sent to carry a box of Phials of Faerie from the warehouse to the Exhibition Hall.
Something unexpected happened along the way. The Bizarrely-Formed-And-Extremely-Klutzy inexplicably tripped and the box of phials flew from his hands. One or more of the phials were damaged when the box hit the floor. The result was a catastrophic failure of the glass containment vessels and the magic inside escaped in a blinding light explosion.
Standing in the doorway to the Exhibition Hall, Zoot the Unchaste had turned to the sound of running feet just in time to see The Bizarrely-Formed-And-Extremely-Klutzy diving headlong after a falling box. The light explosion caused The Unchaste to stagger back into a table upon which sat a display of eleventy-leven of the new Horizon Cellular Palantirs. The palantirs were knocked loose from their display stands and sent rolling off the table and bouncing down the stairs into the service area and then into a boiler hatch that unfortunately had been left open by its orc stokers.
As the palantirs overheated, the bung plugs, into which the seeing magic had been injected, failed. The palantirs launched themselves up through the heating ducts like rocket-powered cannon balls. Unfortunately, the boiler was directly below the racks of magical weapons on display in the Exhibition Hall above. Dozens of late-model weapons, including Hammers of Pounding, Swords of Slicing and Dicing, and Spears of Brittany, were blasted from their racks and blown into the other displays of magic items.
At this point, things got out of control. No one knows exactly what happened in the next few moments. With the Exhibition Hall filled with magical rings, magical bracelets, magical lockets, magic eyeglasses, magical staffs, magical armor, magical pipeweed pipes, magical hobbit toenail clippers, and other magical items, not even the great, departed Gandalf the White could have made sense of it.
The only surviving eyewitness, Zoot the Unchaste, last remembered peaking out from behind a Mirror of Galadriel Mark III - where she had taken cover - and seeing a Helm of Ridiculous Randomness flying directly at the mirror.
It was several hours before rescuers could enter the eerily-glowing remains of the Exhibition Hall. When they finally did, they found only one living soul, who was found beneath the remains of the surprisingly undamaged mirror. It was several more hours before the still-unidentified survivor awoke and the shocking discovery was made.
Zoot the Unchaste is no more. She has been completely magically transmuted into a totally different being. The 29-year-old is now a 21-year-old. The Center fielder is now a First-and-Third baseman. Yes, "man"- she is now a he.
Follow up: The ballplayer-formerly-known-as-Zoot-the-Unchaste has decided that a change-of-life requires a change-of-name and that the ballplayer-formerly-known-as-Zoot-the-Unchaste is now to be known as Biggles Dogsbody.
Follow up: Biggles Dogsbody will retain Zoot the Unchaste's slot on the Bree Cheese roster, but due to the radical body change, "her" statistics will be considered those of a different person from "his" statistics.
Follow up: League officials have decided that Zoot the Unchaste's $300,000 lifetime contract will carry over as Dogsbody's contract. On leaving the hearings, Dogsbody was overheard to mutter something about "cheap bastards (unintelligible) bribes". When asked to clarify, Dogsbody claimed to have been misunderstood and that he really said "Cheese batters have lots of pride".
Editor's note: This was the third such magical explosion accident at the Bree-Land Magic Works in the past year, but is the first to result in such a dramatic transmutation. Bree-Land OSHA officials have launched an investigation into the safety practices at the facility.
Posted at March 17, 2007 09:20 PM | more from Bree