Word count: 2775 | Completed: No | Style: Loggody

Footstool tottered down an immense and irregular staircase, dwarfed by eight humungous statues that stared unreadably at his back. Keeping his eyes downcast so he couldn’t see just how big and empty the space around him was, clutching onto his simple hessian bag for dear life, he slowly neared the huge wooden doors at the hall’s end. Footstool had always been overawed by the hall of Log, with its huge renditions of the venerated Loggods and confusingly uneven staircase that seemed to almost malignantly trip you at every opportunity. But, if he wanted to take the final step to becoming a proper priest of Log, he had to try to sure-footedly pick his way down the stairs and through the downright unnecessarily huge doors once every year.

If an acolyte could make it to the doors without tripping, they would have only one holy challenge between them and their becoming a priest of Log. Every year, on their birthday, each acolyte was shoved through the doorway with a cheerful “You’ll be right, luv!” by Mrs. Toga, the hall’s matron cleaning lady. Every year, only one priest made it to the wooden doors without falling flat on his face and being mystically transported to the roof of the hall, where Mrs. Toga had to climb a ladder and rescue them.

This was Footstool’s fifth try, and he was twenty three years old. Not that you could tell that from just looking at him – he had a rather round face and protruding teeth that made him appear more like a teenager than a young man. He had tried all manner of skin creams and hairstyles, but he still had the mildly uneasy and slightly pockmarked look of a boy who didn’t have anyone to take to the school dance. The depressing lack of female companions was his main reason he had decided to become a priest of Log, not that he’d ever admit it. Instead of changing his aftershave and abandoning his love of dog grooming, Footstool had signed up for a lifetime of devotion to the Log and free suppers. Not that he was a very good acolyte, he was rather ordinary at all of the duties he had to perform, but Footstool appreciated the free suppers and tried his hardest.

To his surprise, Footstool found that he had walked into the doors at the end of the hall. It took him a minute to absorb the fact that he had made it, and wasn’t about to see Mrs. Toga’s grinning face rising from the shingles to help him off the roof. He turned to offer thanks to the Loggods for guiding his feet, but one look at those gigantic stone forms made him too nervous to say anything. So he turned the overlarge brass doorknob and lent against the door with all of his weight until there was a gap big enough to slide through, leaving the statues to their almost absent glaring at the staircase. Death, Satan, Pestilence, Antichrist, Mother Nature, Osiris and Time were all elsewhere of course, but a slice of their consciousness implanted into their statues registered that an acolyte had made it through their obstacle course of a staircase.

It was, Footstool thought as he opened a small garden gate, quite a let-down after such a grand hall. He had often imagined the wonders and delights that awaited him behind those huge doors, the grand room, the beautiful tableaus and tasty scones that must surely await any acolyte skilled enough to gain entrance. So when he slid through the doors to find a dingy, small office with shelves of antiquated scrolls and an old man called Rumply sorting through the scrolls, Footstool was rather shocked.
“Am I in the right place?” he had asked the old man, who looked down at him from a ladder in the corner.
“Did you come to begin your ultimate pilgrimage?” Rumply had asked, motioning that Footstool should sit down on the floor.
“Yes.” Footstool had replied, sitting on his bag because the floor was cold.

Rumply had gone on to explain that he was a priest of Log, and that Footstool was a very clever boy to have got through the hall at such a young age. Footstool had explained that he wasn’t that young, and priest Rumply had embarrassedly changed the subject to Footstool’s quest. He was very vague about what it was that Footstool had to do, mumbling something about pumpkin soup. Footstool had asked if there was anything else. Rumply had laughed rather like a drainpipe and shown him to the door he had entered through.

It had led to the rather unkempt garden Footstool was now walking through. After he was sure the gate was secure, because the sign said “Shut the gate, font face”, he looked around himself to try to get his bearings. But the land around him was completely unfamiliar. He turned to go back through the gate and try to get priest Rumply to tell him more, but it had disappeared. Turning slowly in a circle, Footstool noticed that the land around him had direct borders of change, triangles radiating out from the place he stood. Eight completely different landscapes existed right next to each other, improbably boasting their own weather patterns and eco systems. There was only one place where such an oddity could exist.

Footstool was standing in the middle of the fabled Isle of Log, or Loggodia. The wonderful home of the Loggods, masters of their own triangles of the island in space and time. Before he stepped into any Loggod’s domain, Footstool decided to examine the objects that Rumply had given him. Footstool wasn’t the wisest of men, but he didn’t fancy walking unprepared into a great Loggod’s realm. After examining his bag’s contents, Footstool was none the wiser. It seemed Rumply had put random objects into the bag, but then Footstool spotted the instructions. They were written on a piece of crumpled paper, in what appeared to be beetroot juice. The paper was tucked into a leather bound novel with “Cimemapr” written on the back, and nothing on the front.

Ye Instructions
1. Do not at any point turn into a seagull. It’s considered rude in most social circles.
2. Use the following objects for nothing but the following uses.
Bluberry Pie – Give to the piece of idiocy shaped like a human
Scroll of pi – Inedible but just as wonderful for the Godly
Prima Juice (Orange and mango) – Use to change the disposition of Time
Cigarette – Smoke to bolster confidence and enjoy the fullness of Nature
Matches – Eternally useful things
3. Don’t step on people’s toes (or voles)
4. The Log Book shalt be completed when each of the Loggods sign the inner cover.

Hoping the Log Book would make sense of this, Footstool settled down and read every word of the informative and beautifully typeset volume. Typically, it said a lot about the Loggods, but nothing about anything useful. After a lot of thinking, Footstool decided he’d better go ask one of the Loggods what he should do. Placing the Log book and the instructions back in his bag, Footstool set off at random direction, almost but not quite bravely.

After short trek through the decidedly cheese-like landscape, Footstool came across a small door in the ground with “No junk mail, unless it’s a priceline or Magnavision ad with Leonard Nimoy in it” scrawled across it in texta. It was the only break in the relatively flat, holey and yellow landscape as far as he could see. Nervously, Footstool opened the door and stepped back should anything evil come from the darkness beyond. A small vole appeared in the threshold, blinked up at him and promptly fell asleep. Stepping carefully over the slumbering rodent, Footstool lowered himself through the doorway to find a very narrow passage. There was only the way forward, and that was sideways. Holding his bag over his head, Footstool held his breath and slid gingerly down the golden tunnel. Five minutes and twenty two seconds later, he stumbled into very large and very yellow cavern that appeared to be empty.

The cavern was roughly hexagonal, with strange circular indentations in the wall and wisps of brown hair in the carpet. An upside down computer screen floated in the cavern’s exact centre, glowing with a half-finished piece of Leonard Nimoy fanart. Despite her apparent absence, this was definitely Pestilence’s home. Her hair was not only in the carpet, but erratically hovering in small streams in the air.

Pestilence had the kind of hair that could be found on all corners of the globe. And it had been - pieces of the legendary follicle had drifted from her head and invaded people’s houses all over the world. Hence the proverb “Hair in soup, pass the tweezers” was born. Footstool mused on this as he explored the huge yellow space, picking the annoying stuff off his coat. Footstool was about to stand on his head to get a better look at the computer screen, but there was a less than impressive flash of light and a half-hearted ‘Pfut!’ from somewhere that distracted him.

“Hello!” cried a voice from above him. Suddenly an idiotically grinning face popped into Footstool’s vision, upside down and almost radiating lunacy.
“Uh…Hello.” Said Footstool uncertainly, stepping back to get a proper look at what must be Pestilence. He had often wondered why she was always depicted as upside-down in the Log book, and now he knew. It seemed she spent most of her life like that, ridiculous 1.3 meter long hat dangling almost on the ground. She wore a yellow garment halfway between robes and a tracksuit that seemed oblivious to gravity and her rather wild reddish-brown hair.
“Did you come with pie?” she asked, swooping around him like a hawk searching out a rabbit.
“Yes, I did, oh small and…Um…Mildly erratic one.” Footstool said, trying to sound reverent but failing miserably.
“YAY!” cried the Small and Mildly Erratic One, sticking her hand into his bag and pulling out the blueberry pie Footstool had been given.
“I was wondering, oh potentially amazingly irritating goddess of insanity and grasshoppers, would you sign my Log book?”

He had to wait until Pestilence had finished devouring her pie for an answer.
“Aww, sure. Who should I make it out to?” she rifled through her hat, discarding sporks and thick textas until she found a pen of the appropriate size.
“Footstool.” Said footstool, handing her his Log book. She quickly scribbled in it, then handed it back with a grin that made Footstool feel rather like he was looking into the eyes of a turnip.
“Tell old Rumply he should change his hat. The one he’s wearing now will probably turn into an earthworm by the end of the month.” She said, and disappeared with a gleeful “Ping!”
Footstool stood still for a moment, as confused as he had ever felt. Pestilence was indeed the mistress of oddity and yellow. He glanced down into his Log book to read what Pestilence had written to find that instead of a message she had drawn a whopping big pie, with a vole attached to its base. ‘Pievole!’ exclaimed some ornate text below it, and then a ‘Eat pie and prosper, love, Pestilence’ in such weird writing it hurt the eyes to look at it. Closing the book, Footstool turned back to the yellow tunnel and began to think of his next autograph.

The sky was a very pale blue, reflecting the scattering of silvery cubes that dotted the landscape in an alarming manner. The cube’s reflections rippled in the air and made soft quacking noises as Footstool walked past them. As he progressed, the ground underfoot seemed to be getting softer, almost like pale blue fairy floss. Footstool stooped to examine the surface and found it to actually be millions of wires thinner than human hairs intricately woven together. Every now and then a flicker of power would flit across a wire and continue off into the distance. Had it not been for the large red shaft of light ahead, Footstool would have been surrounded by nothing but wires and cubes. But there was a red shaft of light ahead, so he wasn’t.

On approach the red shaft of light proved to be about one meter in diameter and emanating from a large fan nestled in a bed of the softly woven wires. It hummed very softly to itself, producing a very strong and invisible updraft. Footstool circled it warily, ignoring the irritated quacks from the cube’s reflections. The cubes themselves were getting rather annoyed at this man who was tromping all over their networking cable, and those nearest to Footstool reared up and pushed him bodily into the red shaft of light. As he was caught in the updraft and flew inescapably upwards, the cubes settled down contently, reflections pinging in contentment.
With a soft sucking noise, Footstool was pushed through the bottom of a cloud that was made of marshmallow and finally stopped moving. Even though this meant he was stuck in a large marshmallow, Footstool was very glad that his compulsory flight was over.

**Some filling needed here to link things**

With a mighty roar the sky opened up. A burst of silver light so strong it knocked Footstool over issued forth. Curling up into a little ball to protect the Log book, Footstool waited until the world had stopped being so shiny and peeked around. About five meters away stood a female figure.
Footstool stood up timidly, squinting at the brilliantly glowing form of Time. He had expected her to have more of an hourglass figure, but she was undeniably the owner of the smiling face drawn in his Log book.
“Hello.” She said, extinguishing her radiance so Footstool didn’t need to squint anymore. Steeling himself for what he predicted to be a life-changing and difficult chat with the master of Time itself, Footstool fumbled in his pocket for the cigarette Rumply had given him. He needed every ounce of confidence he could get.

“Just a minute,” he said to Time, sticking the cigarette in his mouth and nervously fumbling with a box of matches. Time watched him mutely, unreadable as an orange. Footstool struck a match and raised it to the cigarette when suddenly the clouds dumped a good five litres of water on him.
“Smoking is bad!” cried a voice as petulant as a flock of seagulls. Footstool swung around and looked straight into the eyes of another Loggod. The Loggod was shouting at him so loudly he fell over again, to stunned to hear her words. This had to be Mother Nature, not only because she matched the picture in the Log book, but because she had it written on her shirt. Footstool realized he should be listening to her eternal wisdom in stead of looking stupidly up at her, so he shook his head and tried to pick our her words.
“And then the sea will rise up and wash all of your clothes but fill them with salt!” Mother nature finished with a definitive sweep of her arm. Following this gesture all of the trees to her left decided it was autumn and promptly dropped all of their leaves.

“What is it you wanted?” Time asked, flinching as Mother Nature made a lake appear just feet from her feet.
“Can I have your autograph?” Footstool shouted over Mother Nature, who was panicking because the fish in the lake she had just created looked a lot like Klingons. After a moment of scuffling through his bag, he produced an orange and mango box of Prima juice and waggled it temptingly in Time’s general direction.
“Sure!” She said enthusiastically, snatching the juicebox and signing the book at exactly the same moment, because she was Time and could do spiffy things like that.

“Hey!” she called to Mother Nature, who had produced a phaser and was teaching her newly created Klingons the alphabet. Leaving the Klingons with several copies of Run, Ferengi, run, Mother Nature sat on top of a computer-shaped cloud and floated over to them.
“This mortal here would like your signature.” Time was softly spoken as usual, but her words reached Mother Natures ears rather loudly, as they took no time to get there and had not passed through any atmosphere.
“Really…” Mother Nature glared at Footstool’s hastily extinguished cigarette, and it turned into a porpoise with very good grammar. The porpoise rolled over to the Klingons and began to teach them about how some letters are silent, like ‘P’ in ‘Pfunge’.

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Original ideas etc. are MINE, but unoriginal things are used for fun and not for profit and belong to various people.