THE FIRST OGRON ADVENTURE
by MARTIN A W HOLMES
When an Ogron Ed goes missing at Ograviss Spaceport, managing to besmirch the good name of Lovely, Lovely Jo in the process, GRUNTLEIGH THE OGRON decides to set out and find him, because this has simply become a matter of honour. Donning his second-best work boots, he heads out, totally ill-prepared, into the darkness of an Ograviss evening, without even a Nana to his name, and so begins one of the worst nights of his surprisingly charmed life. Forced to dodge marauding mobs, irate OgCab drivers, dodgy sideshow operators, and the terrifying Kritters, can GRUNTLEIGH escape this Cavalcade of Grotesques and find his way home?
Stories too flawed and too cheap for a mobile phone’s screen...!
‘GRUNTLEIGH THE OGRON, the internet’s own character who more discerning fans adore...’
Hans Trommiel, Le Nom de Plume
Pocket Book (4.25 x 6.875 in / 108 x 175 mm)
168 Pages
Paperback
ISBN 978-1-326-67930-9
Available now from the Lulu Bookstore - lulu.com/shop
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Prologue: Order out of Chaos
The universe, it is said, was born in chaos. After that things got a little more complicated.
Whilst this observation is essentially true (at least as far as we understand it), it is, however, sometimes difficult to believe quite how chaotic everything in this universe actually is. This is especially true when the grey office building you are sitting in, the travel system you are currently paying far too much for the privilege of not travelling very quickly on, or the beach that you are hoping to soon be relaxing upon, all seem to be as firmly in place as they were yesterday, and hopefully still will be tomorrow.
Probably.
Most of the sentient beings that we currently know about live lifespans that are but a blink of an eye on a universal scale, or even a locally geological one. But most of them do know that if they buy a ticket on the next Express Shuttle out of Nowhere City, there are many particular certainties that would suggest that the journey that they have chosen to make has a reasonable chance of running, and may actually get out of Nowhere City in the next several days. They can also be pretty sure that the service will probably not live up to the wild promises of what it claims to be on the ticket.
So, as they grumble about the predictability of the terrible service, and complain about how chaotic it is, or how late they are running, and that it might actually have been quicker to walk, they are usually giving little thought to the movement of the universe surrounding them.
On a more local level, they will also ignore the chaotic movement of the land plates beneath them. Most will rarely consider how (should such construction works as they still hope to be travelling upon survive any future redevelopment plans), the very tracks they are still hoping to move along one day soon will eventually buckle and bend under the incredible forces of the world they are currently clamped to.
Few will pause for a moment in their busy lives to wonder how the world they are currently on will be shaped and altered so much over time that all of the place currently known as Nowhere City, that they are now so desperate to escape from, will eventually be crushed into dust. They may not give any thought at all to how their destination might actually be moving towards them at the kind of incredibly slow rate most travel companies can only dream of aspiring towards achieving, meaning that their journey might not technically be strictly necessary, in the great scheme of things, if they were only prepared to wait long enough.
There might even be the possibility that, given time, their nice seaside destination, which often can be such a lovely notion in terms of hoping to spend that weekend at the beach with someone special, might be at the top of a mountain by the time they reach it, and they almost certainly will not have packed appropriately for that. One universal suggestion that travel guides ought to make is that one should always try to be properly prepared, and pack for any eventuality.
Even longer-lived species, who are perhaps more aware of the vagaries of geology, sometimes fail to think universally, and forget that the spheres that they currently inhabit are spinning furiously around trillions of other lumps of rock and plasma in a cosmic dance based largely upon laws of physics, but which sometimes resembles grains of sand caught in a desert hurricane.
“At least,” the Eternals are occasional rumoured to murmur, “in the beginning there wasn’t anything much for us to bump into.”
And that’s what the universe we all inhabit is like since everything supposedly calmed down. After it moved into what we like to think of as its rather more predictable “post-chaotic” phase. The phase in which we mortals struggle to try and make some sense of it all, whilst we are searching for a reason to get out of bed in the morning as we head back to work after a particularly enjoyable weekend.
How different species learn to live with the complications that this universe offers up on an almost daily basis - using whatever system they use to measure their own lifespans - is just part of how we all try to come to terms with the pointlessness of trying to make sense of any of it as we stagger through our own insignificant little lives.
Some species take an interest in trying to find out how everything works, before leaping out optimistically from their home world into the great unknown. They may then try to find a way to make everywhere else in the universe look very much like the mess they made of the place they grew up in.
Such species consequently build vast and bloody empires, and are dragged into endless conflicts with others who have similar expansionist visions, and often carry far more advanced weaponry.
Some other life-forms are incredibly long-lived in comparison to these, and, whilst they might seem rather hostile to the needs of creatures that they consider to be lesser than themselves (should they actually bother to give them any thought at all), they are at least in a position to give some thought to the long-term survival of their species, and many come up with complicated solutions to ensure that this happens.
Then there are the others. The kinds of creatures who stagger through life minding their own business, and not being at all bothered about the bigger picture. Those who just seem to struggle with the day-to-day complications that come from simply surviving at all. Especially if representatives of any of those other species turn up, try to enslave them, and then seem to manage to find new and brutal ways to hold them responsible for any and all of the many new complications that may befall them.
