The Underbaker

"So hey, Erik ? Who do you say is the greatest superhero, ever!!"
"I'll tell you if you tell me yours first!"
"The Weather Wizard!"
"What ?"
"Yeah, he's a super hero that fights crime with his power of the Weather!"
"What, if they steal his shit he cries them a river ?"
"How about Injun Joeⁱ ?"
"Eh, going around naked and with a knife, what powers are those ?"
"He can play dead real well! Like, he could fool anyone."
"He's sure fooling me..."
"He's supposed to play live, not dead. How about Captain Cold ?"
"Nigga, please! That Cap'n Cold bullshit is no better than that Lightnin' Lezzie and the rest of the bullshit they do in WonderWoman."
"Ewww."
"Or that slice of Swiss cheese in underwear, living underwater in a pineapple."
"Ok, cut out the bullshit. The greatest superhero ever is Thunderin' Terrible. Though his real name's Tibby, short for Tiberius. Though he gets real mad if you say his name that way."
"What does he do ?"
"He doesn't do anything!"
"What ?!"
"How does that work ?"
"He fights crime, but his superpower is making just the sound of lightning, like as if there was real lighting going on somewhere nearby."
"Wow!"
"But it's not real, it's just the sound like if it were real. Which it isn't."
"I bet all those criminal villains are totally confused by this completely unexpected turn of events."
"That's right!"
"Cool beans!"
"Say Erik, what are you getting ?"
"GraveGlaze ChocoCake!"
"O wow..."
"That's the best!"

The Underbaker had been set up in the village pursuant a humble proposal to the village barf of trustees made by Herr Totten Kopf, a perfectly respectable German immigrant from Nordirland on the very day of his arrival. He was an expert baker by trade, and after completing his Abiliturⁱⁱ in his domestic homelands he specialized (after the required period of indolent itinerancy and vagrant bummitude, of course) in the baking of really tall cakes, tales, jellows, pastries and other delectabilia -- all with a twist.

As needful implementation of the intrinsic duality of existence, you see, all the products of this noble confisseur were based on adequately redoubled ingredients. Where unskilled, naive practitioners might use plain pastry flour straight, the artful Herr Kopf instead employed a mixture of his own devising, equal parts flour and strychnine. Where cocoa solids were called for -- such as in the setting of a rich dark glaze upon a cryptic cake -- Herr Kopf applied liberally his patented formulation : half Nutella, half quick-dry varnish. Glazed strawberries had their tops elegantly re-made in Paris green (to which he always referred to as "Schweinfurtgrun", out of perhaps excusableⁱⁱⁱ national-irredentism), and so following. The only guarantee Her Kopf could make as to the elaborate products of his industrious craft was that indeed any portion or part thereof howsoever selected did retain the subiacent structure of all cosmic universe : two parts, of which one each of each!

From a more practical perspective, the village folk were quite delighted both with the German's pricing scheme (any one piece costing the same penny no matter what it was, or how often selected) as well as with its ultimate results : the demise of the supernumerary children, a culling of the herd quite easiersome on the well tried purse of the workaday parents as it was easing on the chancels and chapels, and schools and purgatories, and all other places besed by an abundance of children without anything like an abundance of resources. Why bother raise them, anyways ? The crows can only take so much feeding, and for every dancer of the gallows there's the hard, burdensome, tiring work of carpentry and lumberjacking -- the naive notions that children are yet without sin a poor substitute in imagination of the more practical observation that they're certainly without merit ; and so an approach to ridding the world of tomorrow's unruly mob without having to first waste the pudding on their earthly something for the birds indeed as great contribution to the great march of progress as ever could of industry be hoped.

The Underbaker thus carried on its wholesome business, fraternally respected by all others in the village ; while the perennial children, yet of the size and appetites of little pets, carried on their meaningless chirping, independently rediscovered yet stably self-same, predictably equal to itself during each equally passing year. The last time anyone even bother to fashion fetishes for the little morons long lost to memory, their current discoveries mere constant rediscovery and apocatastasis, of things predating their current year in the sun by fifty or perhaps a hundred even, or put in their own dog lives -- an eternity. For the horizon had come ; and gone.

1. There's a reason all Injuns were Joe, and that reason's not hard to guess : scum survives by attaching itself to living things, and indeed the real Joe lives on through the unremarkable, unsurprising an' ultimately unimportant moral bankruptcy of Xtianity. [↩]
2. Amusingly enough, Trilema itself seems to be the only available resource for this -- purely German!!! -- concept. [↩]
3. Excusable because how little does it care matter what sewer it is dumped to kill the rats incumbent therein, when it was invented specifically and deliberately in Bavaria, so as to replace with an even brighter, more permanent alternative Scheele's interior decorating pigment, at the time (and henceforth) celebrated for the delightful interior scenes it made possible, of oxiuric children wasting away in bright emerald rooms under the dim discreet halo of Gosio gas ? Might as well call it MRGCvGreen then, for Monet, Renoir, Gagarin, Cezanne & van Earkutoff. [↩]