The Man with the Elongated Nipples

It was twenty years ago when Samuel ‘Default Eustace’ Skrunt inherited the rights to the folk ballad, ‘The Elfin Knight’. This ballad was composed as early as 1670, and is a variation on the more commonly known ‘Scarborough Fair’. His first act as copyright holder was, of course, the public immolation of a local vagrant; this would serve as a warning to all those who might hum his property unauthorised.

Nipple Fact #1: If Samuel’s nipples were to become erect, he would surely die.

He proposed to his wife the next day. She acquiesced immediately, under the condition that he never set her ablaze in the literal sense. In the metaphorical sense, it was deemed unlikely by both parties that he could ever ignite her passion; his exterior chilled her to the bone, and she could not bear to look upon his uncanny ennippled flesh.

Nipple Fact #2: The Great Ceremony occurs thrice every nine dog-years.

In spite of his Chosen Status, the presence of Samuel on The Opinion Factory was not particularly impressive. After all, the procedure had only been applied to his torso; had his brain been ennippled, he may have had the wherewithal to counter the various Quotation Opinions written above his muddled ideas. He could not keep up with the youthful perma-suited hybrid lawyer-consultant-journalists (LCJs) bred – no, designed – to be top-of-the-line Opinion Makers.

These past two decades had been a Hero’s Journey, and now he was living in the epilogue of his own life.

Nipple Fact #3: The corset-style is fashionable among young noblewomen; their nipples are guided into stomach piercings and tightened to preserve the figure.

As a young adult he had marketed Scarborough Fair enthusiastically with the help of a grey market Fey Trafficker. He remembered those days fondly. His parents had been adept entrepreneurs too, and he was no less of a Guided Specimen; in fact, no one could have imagined the success the Eternal Copyright on that centuries’ old song would bring him. The timing of the Fey craze was such that it was as if he had kidnapped and imprisoned Lady Luck herself. Of course, in a sense, he had.

We shall recount a brief outline of the Fairy Mining project. Many Opinion Makers in Samuel’s day were convinced that internal experience is an illusion caused by errors in the Wet Machine – that is to say, brain matter. Unfortunately such Opinion Makers were, in fact, infested by a kind of parasite known to the Welsh as fairies. The resulting F-Zombie condition was originally fatal, but nowadays there are various over-the-counter feyicides to restore subjectivity to those plagued by Qualia-Devourers.

The discovery of the Fey however was less a humanitarian triumph and, pardon the vernacular, more of a ‘Coomanitarian’ triumph. As it turns out, a fairy forced to assume physical form appears rather beautiful to humans. The resulting feeding frenzy in academic Voluptuousness Studies mirrored the public’s feverish attempts to find and subjugate fairies. Many succumbed to F-Zombieism in the process.

The Law stepped in. The Lawyer-Consultant-Journalist class are widely renowned for their Decisions, which are made based on the complex science known as Worst World Path Mapping. Their decisions appear essentially arbitrary to the public, and in many ways resemble those of an unknowable omnimalevolent God, appearing on occasion to be mildly beneficial, also on occasion to be unspeakably evil, and usually speakably evil in the sense of imposing immense boredom and meaninglessness. The LCJs decided to make possession of fairies illegal, but did not forbid the selling of such creatures.

As noted by Justice Edgar Meddler, this was entirely in line with previously inscrutable rulings on the possession of mind-altering substances. Drug use was, of course, a Sacrificeable offence, but distribution was permitted, albeit requiring a licence and the correct social class (and often Proof of Ennippling Procedure).

The reader should now understand what a boon this was for Samuel Skrunt. His Eternal Copyright was absurdly pertinent to the general Fairy Frenzy. Princesses Gertrude I through to XXI would die to have a beautiful ‘yaoi-tier’ ‘Elfin Knight’ of their own, and Samuel would tease them with a song only he could permit the playing of.

Nipple Fact #4: The ennippling procedure is not painful, as the pain qualia are outsourced onto local orphans deemed too unattractive to otherwise be profitable.

Sam initially refused to ‘get high off of his own supply’. He initially refused to do this for perhaps a week, and in order to ensure his wife’s silence on the matter gave her express permission to commit suicide. She enthusiastically took him up on this offer. How he adored those delicate elven beauties! His favourite he had named Lady Luck, for his profits were soaring, and in those days Fairy Mining was in a veritable

Gold Rush. But alas, Lady Luck was not always by his side; as previously stated, possession was Illegal. In fact, she would long to see him so much during the day that her pretty little teeth were often transfigured into fangs by the time he had returned from salesmanship seminars. He would rush to greet her, and she would bite down into his brainstem, suckling away at his experiences like an infant at a teat.

In hindsight, he perhaps should have realised the dangers of such a relationship. You can only trust the feyicide deodorant will work for so many hours of the day, and it appeared as though she was beginning to grow tolerant to it. In Samuel’s defence, however, the very first time her love bites had stolen emotion they had also stolen the memory of such an occurrence having taken place.

This is not a tale of tragic downfall, however. Samuel would have enjoyed such a fate, for at heart he had always been a romantic. No, in reality not only does time fly when one is having fun (and, pardon the vernacular, ‘blasting cum’), but it flies particularly quickly when one’s captive-cum-captor fairy is sucking out memories. And by the time twenty years had passed since that fateful Copyright had entered into his possession, the love of his life had passed away of a natural death, exploding into fairy dust – golden twinkling spores littered all over the house.

While he had a mind to capture these spores and raise his ‘children’ in a greenhouse somewhere, Lady Luck’s influence had already receded, and he became aware that she had likely psychically inserted this thought. Her parting gift to him, as it were. Now he was but a forgetful middle-aged upper upper upper middle class man, no Influential Opinion to be cast upon the Thought Network, one wife dead by her own hand and harvested and sold (and in turn resold by door-to-door organ salesmen), and another wife living on through the dangerous spores permeating his house.

He despaired. He despaired that he had nothing tragic or appropriately dismal to despair about. In a rare moment of unsalesman-like behaviour, he unthreaded every single inch of nipple weaved throughout his entire torso and bones, and threw himself into the freezer. Blood absolutely poured from his body in an attempt to erect metres of nipples off of the floor, and he subsequently died.

Nipple Fact #5: There has never been an established reason behind the extreme nipple elongation seen in today’s elites and nouveau-riche. Arguably, this is the appeal.