The Curse Of King Flatulo

Once upon a time there lived a King called King Flatulo.

His kingdom lay besides the sea and his castle lay at the top of some towering cliffs, in a commanding position the better to defend his realm's only port. The country was fairly prosperous, but had suffered from the recent loss of several ships, dashed to pieces on the shoals which extended out from the cliffs at the foot of the castle.

When he was newly enthroned, an evil fairy secretly visited the King whilst he slept and cast an odd spell upon him, and all of his descendants. It was a spell of such pungent originality, that only the very inventive (or only those with severe nasal clogging) could withstand its devastating impact.

When King Flatulo awoke, he found himself to be rather cold, his bedclothes having mysteriously folded themselves back to the far end of his bed. They also appeared to be fluttering in a breeze, like a large flag, though no window was open in the King's bedchamber.

Unaware that anything was wrong, the King dressed himself and exited his bedchamber, walking along a corridor dimly lit by torches. As he passed the first torch, he noticed that the flame seemed to grow in intensity. As he walked on, he noticed the same effect with the other torches. As he reached the exit, he was blown off his feet by a large explosion which had come from the direction he had just left: the explosion had left his Royal Bedchamber in ruins.

When his courtiers arrived to survey the scene the King was immediately struck by their reaction. Instead of horror at the destruction, people seemed to have turned rather green and were holding their noses against what seemed to be a rather unpleasant smell, although King Flatulo himself could smell nothing.

Just then, the king felt a rumble in his lower abdomen and he felt the need to let rip a small fart. He did so, but was astonished to see a whole crop of his nearest courtiers fall over in a dead faint, whilst those a little further away, backed away rapidly, genuflecting as they went.

Pretty soon some of the effects of the the evil fairy's mischief had become evident to the King: He probably first realised things were seriously amiss when what seemed to him to be a gentle "pop" in his underwear produced an alarming reaction particularly from his female courtiers, who when he turned around to face them, blushed rosily in their cheeks. For, gliding serenely through the air, he noticed a large piece of ripped material which seemed to resemble that from which his trousers were made. In fact, it was the same material, and it had formerly covered his backside, which was now completely exposed.

The awful truth dawned on him: whatever his nether regions produced in the way of gas, were multiplied several hundred-fold. He had become a walking bomb, and a very pungent one at that.

King Flatulo had always been a popular King (well, at least prior to the fairy's spell) and his subjects were aghast at the cruel curse which had befallen him. They feared for his survival as it was evident that any naked flame close by at the wrong moment could prove fatal.

The King decided to leave the court and left the running of his kingdom in the hands of his pregnant wife, Queen Crapula, whilst he made off, accompanied by a few loyal guards, to seek temporary refuge in some caves a little way away from the Castle, until he worked out what to do.

The King stayed alone in the caves, venturing to the entrance only to receive food and water and new clothing from his small band of loyal soldiers.

After he had gone through a fair number of trouser bottoms, he sent a message commanding the royal tailor to make him some new trousers with a flap at the back, so that he could avoid destroying quite so many of them each day. But even when the modified trousers arrived, the sheer force of the gaseous emissions merely ripped the flaps away, and so poor King Flatulo was reduced to wearing women's skirts with which to cover himself, which billowed alarmingly like ship's sails from time to time.

Time went by, and the King became depressed and bored. His men camped on the beach, far enough from the cave entrance not to risk their campfire igniting the gas which percolated from the cave. Oddly, even though the king remained within the cave, the toxic atmosphere did not seem to affect him. He could smell nothing and was not deprived of oxygen with which to breathe. He longed for a diversion to break the monotony, and requested some musical instruments to be brought for him to experiment with. He also asked for the most stretchy material available to be brought to him, with the idea that a form of clothing might one day be developed for his peculiar needs.

The musical instruments duly arrived and the King was presented with an array of mainly brass instruments from a band: cornets, trumpets, trombones and a very large tuba. The King's tailor also shipped a new-fangled elasticated material that he had developed, which he wished to show the king.

Now the king was quite a tinkerer, and he resolved to see what he could make with material, and he thought that, for the good of the kingdom, perhaps this could be fashioned into bellows to improve the function of furnaces. He whiled away his day constructing a prototype, and, realising he needed pipework for this project, obtained this from the brass instruments he had at his disposal.

With the bellows almost complete, a thick autumn fog blew onshore. The royal fleet was due back from its trading mission soon and the King quickly realised that the ships could be dashed on the shoals if things went badly for them.

Suddenly, in a moment of sheer brilliance, the King saw what he must do. On the thin end on the giant elasticated bellows, he fashioned a tube from some brassware taken from a trumpet. He carried the whole contraption out of the cave and set it upright. He inserted the tube from the bellows into the mouthpiece of the tuba. He then stepped into the open end of the bellows, lashed it tight around his waist and let rip.

The gas filled the giant bellows in an instant and forced itself through the tuba, producing a deep note of incredible power. The note travelled far out to sea, warning the approaching vessels of their closeness to land. They dropped their anchors and were saved. Flatulo's Foghorn had triumphed! However, the last blast proved too powerful and the King and his men had to run for their lives as rocks fell from the shaking cliffs. They escaped, but the King's wonderful fart-driven fog-horn was crushed.

News of the King's exploit travelled fast around the country and the people rejoiced that their commerce had been saved. The Queen had been doing a very good job in day-to-day running of the country and produced a son, who became known as "Prince Charming", but missed her husband terribly. She commanded that no flame should be allowed within the castle walls whilst the Royal Flag flew and asked that her husband return. He said he would do so, but only once the royal tailor succeeded in making suitable bottom-ware to contain his problem adequately.

At last, the tailor hit on a solution (for he was almost as clever as the King), and Flatulo returned to his castle. He wore the large elasticated pantaloons made by the tailor, and out of the legs at the bottom came two brass pipes, which fed into a socket in the wall of the King's rebuilt bedchamber.

When the King farted, the gas travelled down his trouser-legs into the brass pipes and then into a cunningly concealed network of pipes which had been built into the walls of the castle. No more old-fashioned torches adorned the walls; these had been replaced by new-fangled gadgets which burned some of the gas to give forth light. A pig roasted on a spit nearby, again powered not by flame from a fire, but from a gas flame from the network of brass tubing; but most of the gas left by a big pipe which carried on upwards to the very top of the tower.

And on the very top, a glass canopy had been constructed, with a hole in the top; and within the canopy glowed a gas-powered flame. The King now powered his castle and a lighthouse to keep his shipping safe forever, and his people were safe and became rich. The king had his new role and he revelled in it. In fact, he was so happy that he called for the biggest plate of baked beans that many have ever have seen!

With the Queen left in charge of the country, and the King its energy powerhouse, let us turn our attention to what befell their son, Prince Charming. For as the King's direct descendant, he too, had received the curse of the evil fairy, but for a long time, no-one realised what it was.

When Charming was a child, he was a good-looking boy, and only became more so as he grew into his teenage years. He was not troubled unduly by flatulence and indeed, in his early years, it seemed to smell hardly at all.

Yet, when he hit puberty, that's when he started to notice that something decidedly odd was happening.

For some reason, Charming noticed, that whenever he popped out, say whilst walking through town or through the market-place, he would fairly soon find himself being followed for a while by a fairly large clump of people. At first he had thought it was just regular regal adulation but then he noticed that it was not when he popped out, rather it immediately followed when he popped one out.

Soon the awful truth dawned. People were not following the Prince because of his dashing good looks or because of his regal manner; instead they mobbed him because his farts encapsulated the most delightful aroma they had ever smelt in their whole entire lives! They were irresistible! The people followed his butt like the Pied Piper of Hamlin. They were helpless to resist. Charming, of course, could smell none of this, and when he eventually found out what the truth was, he felt truly crushed.

Now, as many can attest, it is not too flattering to be wanted by people just because of what you have between your legs, when you know that there is so much more to you as a person. So you can probably imagine how our Noble Prince found that, handsome and regal though he may be, and in his own mind irresistible to womankind, all people really wanted him for was his farts.

"'Ere Prince", they would say, "...drop one over here would you? - Ahhhh!" At first Charming complied, but then he grew resentful, feeling used in the basest, most anal way and so he tended to bottle them up (sometimes painfully) until he was alone. But even then, frequently he would find a disconcerting queue had formed outside the toilet that he occupied.

At last, it became all to much and he resolved to rid himself of his affliction. "They are starting to treat me like a smelly whore", he thought, (although in truth it was more like a "phoar!").

One day, whilst walking though a field of flowers and trying to put his retinue of annoying followers off his scent, the Prince chanced upon a good fairy. "Please, I implore you", cried the Prince, can you break this awful curse on me". The good fairy smiled and said "Of course, I will do my best, if that is what you desire". The Prince said that that is what he wished for. And that's when the trouble really started.

Although the fairy's intentions were good, the method she used to remove the evil fairy's curse were, shall we say, flawed. Since the good fairy did not use evil magic, she had to modify the effects of the curse, not remove it. And since the effects of the curse were to emanate good, nice smelling farts, she could at least work on this and so she removed all the goodness and niceness from them.

Prince Charming wanted to thank the good fairy for her work but she seemed to have disappeared. He turned about, expecting to see the familiar gaggle of fart-followers gaining on him through the field of flowers, but was delighted to see that they too, had seemed to have lost interest in him and had wandered off. He turned about and headed for home.

As he walked back through the field, he thought he would try an experiment and cracked one off, just to confirm that all was well. The effect was devastating.

The long-stemmed flowers through which he was walking drooped immediately in a fast expanding circle surrounding him, wilted to brown and collapsed. A small flock of birds which had been flying over his head dropped down all around him quite dead. The sounds of the wood he was travelling through grew silent. Trees started to fall over and as the flower stems shrivelled to bare earth, he discovered to his horror the rotting corpses of his once-loyal band of fart-followers.

The evil that had been constrained and concentrated in his bowels all these years by the curse was now given full vent and there was now nothing good left inside him with which to hold it back. His flatulence was now toxic to all except himself.

"What have I done, what have I done?" he cried in despair to the now silent forest.

And to cap it off, he now seemed to have developed a very nasty case of the runs.

All was no longer well in the Kingdom of King Flatulo.

His eldest son had disappeared and the King's huntsmen sent out to find him had not returned. Strange stories had started to come to light about some odd malady which had afflicted some of the local population. There had been many unexplained deaths and those that had survived the mysterious malady had trouble breathing and had developed a rather sickly,greenish hue. Investigations had revealed that those affected had been amongst Charming's most dedicated fart-followers and those who had breathed in his delightful aroma most recently seemed to have been the worst afflicted.

But even this was not the worst of Flatulo's concerns; the fair forest of wild flowers which formerly bordered the Royal Parklands had mysteriously disappeared and had been replaced by a most evil domain, a hideously-smelling bog known by the few locals who remained as the Delta of Disgusting Despair. For a river of filth drained down a formerly pristine tributary, choking the life out of it and turning the whole area into an evil-smelling swamp where nothing now lived. And this swamp now threatened to spill into the realm's principal waterway, threatening the population with drought, despair and death.

Flatulo, as the King, needed to act fast and he and Crapula pondered on just what to do. In the end, they came to realise that something truly evil must lay at the heart of the former forest; that they lacked the information that they required to combat the threat and that they desperately needed intelligence on the situation. The King's hunters had failed. It was clearly too dangerous to approach the Delta by land. Another approach was needed. And then it was that Flatulo had another extremely good idea.

King Flatulo's kingdom had long been plagued by the fights between magical folk,of which the good and evil fairies were just two examples. As the king,(whilst connected to a couple of flexible tubes that allowed his continued connection to the castle's gas-power grid), wandered in his private family museum of magical artifacts, or Fartifacts, (as he liked to call them, short for "Flatulo's Artifacts"), he noticed a strange golden glow emanating from an oddly shaped exhibit in a far corner of the room.

At about 12 inches long, the object looked like a golden arrow,except that there was no arrow-head. Where this should have been,a strangely shaped not-quite cylindrical object, about 3 inches long, slightly wider at the middle than at the tip, glowed with mysterious golden pulsations. Flatulo did not recognise the object at first but he gave a sudden start when he read the label beneath the object which blandly stated its designation as "The Fart-seeking Golden Butt-plug of Crapupantia".

Flatulo reflected how fortunate he was to have his dangerous emissions safely vented away from this powerful ancient fartifact, but noted also that it was twitching expectantly. Then he noticed that it twitched in the direction of the former forest, not towards himself. It was then he knew just what to do.

Prince Charming's life had indeed changed radically, and only now did he properly comprehend the deviousness and evil of the fairy's curse on him. How the fairy must be laughing at the self-induced denouement that Charming had inflicted on himself. How he would gladly go back, if only he had the chance, to a life distributing delightful aromas, albeit accompanied by troublesome fart-fanciers wherever he went. Because that was bliss compared to the situation he now found himself in.

Prince Charming lay face down, spreadeagled over a rock, naked from the waist down. Soon after his trial pop had blasted away his band of fart-fanciers and also, to his great horror, the good fairy as well, he had started to experience tell-tale cramps in his abdomen. He had removed his strides to do his number twos, but unfortunately for him, the evil curse which had magnified his father's farts to many hundred times their natural intensity now performed its wicked work on his diarrhoea.

So now he lay, bare rump up, spewing gallon after gallon of the wicked stuff from his nether regions, in a fountain of filth which had grown so large that it had turned the former flower forest into a vile swamp, he found that he alone could survive there. For the fairy's curse worked this way: it needed its victim to survive to maximise its wickedness. So it kept Charming alive, filling his gut with food and drink as there was none to be had in that dread, dead place. He could smell no fetid smell, though all around him was rank. And his emissions were multiplied only as they left his body, so that he was not unduly dehydrated. But their intensity was manifest, as was his misery.

Charming had lain there, inert, apart from his bowel movements, for three weeks now. He had given up all hope, now seeing himself as a helpless pawn in the evil fairy's plan. But help was at hand, and it came from an unexpected direction: above.

Flatulo had considered that the toxicity of the bog was worst at ground level and so it would be best to make any attack from the air, and hope that the wind was in a favourable direction. He had again made use of the tailor's wondrous elasticated material and had had it fashioned into the shape of a hot air balloon. He disconnected himself from the castle's gas supply and plugged himself into the balloon's heater supply. His second son, Haricot, joined his father with his crossbow in hand. The heater was lit, wind direction checked, and together they floated off towards the swamp.

It did not take them long to see the bog, and a few minutes later to see the cause of the problem. The brown fountain spewed its evil some 20 metres into the air from Charming's bum, before cascading into slimy rivulets below.

Haricot took up his crossbow, and from the quiver withdrew the now highly agitated Fartifact. With Flatulo's assistance, Prince Haricot loaded the weapon and fired it in the broad direction of his stricken brother.

The Fart-seeking Golden Butt-plug of Crapupantia, when released to the air from the crossbow, glowed with a new golden intensity and arced around in the sky like a guided missile. It homed in on the fountain, travelling so fast that surely it must pierce and kill Charming as the arrow entered his rump. But as it became engulfed in the high velocity fountain of filth, the Fartifact slowed as it was countered by the strong opposing force, or perhaps it had a will of its own. At any rate, by the time it reached Charming's cheeks it did so with the gentle grace of a space-shuttle docking with the International Space Station. The only difference, of course, was that as the plug reached his bum, Charming became well and truly covered in poo. And then it was over.

Charming smiled in abject relief. And he also really rather liked his new plug.

To be continued....

(c) Greg du Pille 2008

52 year old British father of 3 (4,5,or 6 depending on the extras we've picked up along the way!) Former IT Manager, now retired and raising the kids in sunny New Zealand, dabbling with poetry (currently of a darkish sort) and flatulent story-telling. Married for 19 years.