Greegs & Ladders - By Zack Mitchell and Danny Mendlow Read online

CHAPTER 6

  Quiggs

  The grimy condition of your average Greeg colony was not always easy to maintain. The Greegs' desire to live in disastrous mud camps was once put under great threat by an indigenous life form known as the Quigg. Quiggs are (or more appropriately, were) the cleanest creatures living 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. Whether randomly or because the planet was trying to save itself from obliteration, the Quigg seemed to have evolved with a single purpose in life. To clean. Every bodily function they have (or had… well, you get the idea, or will in a moment) in some way results in something, somewhere being cleaned. The very movement of their feet acted as a natural waxing agent against any surface. Rather than having sweat glands they secreted an antibacterial gelatin from their skin. Instead of hands and fingers they had elaborate scrubbers and brushes protruding from their arms. They also wished for nothing more in life than to be rid of filthy Greegs. In a valiant yet futile attempt to return their planet to its once immaculate state of varnished marble, shiny glass windows and freshly bleached tile floors, the Quiggs offered their impeccable cleaning service to the Greegs, free of charge. All the arrangements had been made to blast anything unclean onto Garbotron. The Greegs would have to do no work at all. Rather than dignify this gracious offer with an answer, the Greegs simply hurled globs of lesser-quality schmold at them from a distance. The blindingly acidic and parasite-ridden properties of schmold indeed make a formidable weapon, however the attack did not deter the Quiggs. Instead of fleeing back to their various homes in The Cleanliness as they should have, the Quiggs in their steadfast manner set about collecting schmold and cleaning it. Only they didn’t just clean it. They reinvented it. A stunningly impressive chemistry set was designed specifically for analyzing and purifying schmold, with the intent to remove from it all traces of bacteria and filth. Filtering screens visible from space were built and hung up between the largest of old-growth blue-leaf trees. Quiggs could be seen tirelessly running schmold through the filters day and night. They even successfully removed schmold's unique glow, which was considered distracting and superfluous to the high art of cleaning. They laboured for many suns and moons, perfecting their experiments with a meticulous attention to detail that has only been matched once in the universe (by a strange being we will arrive at much later in the story). They even went so far as to spend 3 wintry years crafting a collection of very fine flasks made out of Jardian mega-prisms. The flasks were never required in any of the experiments, but they looked very clean and pretty nonetheless. A shelf of great honour was set aside for displaying the beauty of the useless flasks, and 4 respectable Quiggs were given the job of dusting them every 7.33 minutes. Oh how the Greegs loathed them. They could barely wait to fill the flasks with all sorts of disgusting things (namely schmold) and then break them. The Quiggs slaved away until they’d acquired a hefty supply of schmold so clean it would have made trillions of dollars throughout the galaxy if properly marketed as an unparalleled kitchen counter-top cleaner. The Greegs saw this as the grossest possible violation of all things that are Greeg. Fear took over the community. The total collapse of localized schmold trade seemed imminent. Numerous Greegs fell into despair and were never seen or smelled again. Many wandered into The Cleanliness in a suicidal fashion not at all dissimilar to the way so many of your humans leaped from skyscraper windows during the 1930s collapse of your fake stock market.

  The remaining Greegs came up with what they considered in their stupidity to be a rather brilliant scheme. They stole the purified schmold and mixed it with regular schmold to make it dirty again. The now-filthy schmold was then angrily hurled at the Quiggs, who set forth purifying it all over again. This cycle went unchanged for generations, even outlasting the ridiculously long lifespan of the metallic tetra-turtle. It was finally decided the total extinction of the Quigg species would be the only way to keep schmold in its naturally polluted state. Thus was born the event in Greeg history commonly referred to as ‘The day all Quiggs were thrown into a schmold pit.’

  It is my fervent opinion that far worse events would have transpired had the Quiggs' plan to send all the trash to Garbotron succeeded. We have already learned about the disastrous results of Garbotron pollution caused by a single cannon blast, so it can be assumed the phenomenal number of cannon blasts required to rid the planet of the Greegs' mess would have caused the destruction of countless other (and better) civilizations. Because the plan failed, one species died off on a planet that had no use for it anyway. That is, how you say, taking one for the team.

  Over and over again, great minds have hypothesized and sometimes successfully proved that time does not exist. Nevertheless, time is always relevant. And short. Especially if you are thrown into a schmold pit, as no creature can tread schmold for longer than an Earth hour (unless of course you’re a metallic tetra-turtle or weigh less than helium while on the 7th moon of Grebular). In their final hour, the Quiggs frantically purified as much schmold as they could before sinking below the surface and drowning. Foolish as it was, one cannot help but admire their dedication to cleanliness. Unless of course one is a Greeg.

  Quigg skeletons were henceforth sometimes found in the schmold reserves. The Greegs never knew it but the bone marrow of the Quigg contained a powerfully sterile cleansing agent which diffused in the schmold for years after the extinction, thus making all the latter-day schmold slightly less filthy. It’s nice to know that even after their complete annihilation, the great Quigg species continued to inadvertently clean up the universe.