The Royal Family Page 12
21 There are actually cats with thumbs. They are a genetic mutation known as polydactyl cats. There are polydactyl dogs too, but they can’t do things such as hold doorknobs, like some polydactyl cats can. Though I once had a poodle that could play the accordion.
22 For those of you who have not read The Floods 12: Bewitched (yes, you know who you are – and so do we), Queen Anaglypta is Tristram’s mother and she is the Queen of Shangrila Lakes. Want to know more? Well, read the book. AND pay the statutory fine of twenty-seven pieces of bacon.
23 This was what practically everyone said when Queen Anaglypta asked them.
24 Actually, when he had been a puppy, Tristram had a bad habit of chewing chair legs with the result that sometimes people ended up on the floor with a look of sudden surprise on their faces and hot soup in their laps, but then everyone usually fell about laughing, so maybe it wasn’t a bad habit after all.
25 And whose heart would not skip a beat at those words?
26 Or Flapwig.
27 It would stay like that forever, unchanged by moulting or rain or any hair product. Each of the cats, including their future kittens, looked permanently terrified until their dying day.
28 Which she had secretly done on more than fourteen occasions.
29 Which is not a type of furniture polish, no matter what it says on the can in the supermarket.
30 A ‘burn’ of dragons is like a flock of sheep, or a shoal of fish, or a complaint of teachers.
31 Which is like The Naughty Corner, with added damp and slime and no way out just by saying you’re sorry.
32 He had particularly liked the armpit smell and deep chuckle of the Patagonian Laughing Toad and the weasel’s whiskers.
33 Thumbs, for example.
34 The De-Vere Creaks were well-known for burying themselves in leaves on a regular basis. In fact, there was an annual Mulching Festival in Shangrila Lakes, where the entire population buried themselves in rotting foliage for up to thirteen days to celebrate the leaves falling off the trees every autumn. ‘Why else would the leaves fall off, if not so that we could bury ourselves in them?’ everyone said.
35 This is the Standard Bacon Lounge as opposed to the Crispy Bacon Lounge, which is in a completely different place. I know this is probably obvious, but I feel it needs saying.
36 Oh for goodness sake, look it up in a dictionary.
37 See the back of this book for more information, though, of course, you can’t see the recipe.
38 See The Floods 12: Bewitched.
39 And just to stop your worries and your imaginations from getting all stressed out, I can reveal that none of the above actually ended up at Nerlin’s beautiful cottage, though there were a few bottoms that got mixed up. But, hey, you’ve never seen anything as funny as a Belgian Traffic Warden with a sheep’s bottom all covered in wool. Though at least the traffic wardens had the materials to knit themselves nice warm scarves.
40 And believe me, there were a lot of them. Though, to tell the truth, most of the inventions didn’t actually need the bacon and some would have probably worked better without it, but hey, BACON!!
41 I know I don’t need to say this, but I have been told to for legal reasons – DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME (or ANYWHERE ELSE).
42 See footnote 41. Which reminds me, when my cousin Stephen and I were kids, we persuaded his little sister to see how many daisies she could stuff up her nose. She ended up at the doctor’s, where the daisies had to be pulled out with tweezers. We never did find out exactly how many she had got up there, but I bet she would have got into the Guinness Book of Records.
43 No one has discovered where these missing bits actually went.
44 Making it a MASSIVELY successful weight-loss machine in the future, once all the wrinkles have been ironed out – wrinkles in the design and build of the machine, and wrinkles left on fat people who have lost the weight.
45 Or, in the case of the duck and the chicken, not so much wide and blue, as narrow and dark.
46 As we have seen in earlier Floods books, Nerlin was actually a pretty rubbish wizard, but everyone loved him, so they didn’t care.
47 See the back of this book for a selection of Winchflat’s Magic Hats, including one that might be a bit rude and another one that will be VERY RUDE, if I can distract my publisher long enough to get away with it.
48 Yes, once again, see footnote 41. In fact, let’s just say, don’t try ANYTHING in this book ANYWHERE.
49 And no, DO NOT turn to the back of the book to look for them. These are the sort of things that only wizards are allowed to see.
50 See The Floods 12: Bewitched.
51 The saucy songs are not rude songs but songs about sauces, like the aforementioned barbecue sauce.
52 See the back of this book to read and learn a selection of Betty’s brilliant swear words, some of which have already appeared in the Floodsopedia. It is a little-known fact that one of Betty’s main hobbies is collecting disgusting things, including swear words, which she finds in interesting places such as sewers and rubbish tips. I would love to produce a book of Betty’s most disgusting collections but, of course, I will never be allowed to. I know it’s a terrible shame that you will never get to read about them. All I can say is, use your most disgusting imaginations.
53 ‘Dolors’ and ‘scents’ are the Transylvania Waters equivalent of dollars and cents.
54 One of the most popular books in Transylvania Waters was Ninety-Nine Bottoms – the only book to have ever been banned in the kingdom. It had ninety-nine candid photos of bare bottoms being pressed against Inspiration Rock. When the book had first been published, there had been hundreds of letters sent to the Dreary Times from readers trying to guess who the bottoms belonged to. The book had not been banned because it was rude, but because everyone had got so fed up with the endless letters and guesses with no way of knowing who any particular bottom belonged to, except for Grenoble St Aubergine’s, which had a bunch of brussels sprouts tattooed on the left buttock.
There was also a photo of Saucy McPhoarr’s bottom, which had the lines of a noughts and crosses game, and he (or she – no one was sure) was only too happy to let people mark the grid with a big red lipstick.
55 Sometimes there were so many people seeking inspiration at the rock that there was a queue.
56 Sometimes, on deep dark winter nights when icicles hung from Castle Twilight’s battlements, Nerlin would wake up shaking from a dream in which Gertrude came marching into the castle to claim the throne and throw him into the dampest, darkest dungeon. Nerlin prayed and hoped that his sister was dead so that the secret could remain buried forever. He told himself that all those years in the damp darkness must have had taken their toll by now and that Gertude had succumbed to some terrible damp darkness disease. In fact, Gertrude was in better health than her brother and all that had happened while she was down there was that she had grown webbed feet.
57 This is just a weird expression that makes no sense at all, because at no point did any of the tiny songbirds’ hearts actually leave their bodies. That only happened when they were fried for breakfast.
58 See The Floods 12: Bewitched.
59 Nor am I at liberty to tell you. Let’s just say there were a lot of tweeting slugs and homing gherkins involved and leave it at that.
60 One of Transylvania Waters’s most popular music albums was The Songs of the Slug. Even if you turned the volume right up, all you could hear was a gentle squelchy noise as the slugs slipped towards a big cabbage and a faint rasping as they ate the cabbage leaves.
61 And where I live – The Promised Land – is not called that without good reason.
62 My favourite.
63 My extra, extra super favourite – even better than bacon.
64 Mordonna wasn’t actually falling to bits. It’s just an expression and another example of how silly our language often is.
65 There are some brilliant and talented people who have quite a lot of LEGO.
66 S
ee The Floods 11: Disasterchef.
67 Betty and Ffiona’s restaurant, The Devil’s Kitchen, had been a huge success and there were now sixteen of them dotted around Transylvania Waters, with branches planned for Patagonia and Tristan da Cunha. Neither Betty nor Ffiona were involved in the day-to-day running of the restaurants, due to the employment of highly trained zombies who guaranteed that none of their bits would fall into the food.
68 The Flood children already knew that Betty would one day become the ruler. So why, I hear you ask, were they all so adamant in their refusal to become King or Queen when Nerlin asked them to? Well, the reason for this was, although they all knew individually that Betty would end up in charge, they never spoke to each other about it and certainly not to Betty because there was always the worry that Mordonna would find out what they were thinking and try to do something to Betty to keep her from her destiny. And by the way, I didn’t actually hear you ask this, I just hoped you were intelligent enough to think it.
69 Which, as they were witch and wizard, could mean waiting around for hundreds of years.
70 Please don’t even try and imagine what throwing up into a sea of blood looks, feels and smells like. Just accept that it’s one of the grossest things ever.
71 Though he did get to keep the stuff he’d actually swallowed.
72 Repetitive Vanity Injury.
73 Not each, obviously. The brain cells were shared amongst the admirers.
74 And what do we learn from this? If you are having a bad hair day, do not leave the room and keep very, very still.
75 Do NOT try this at home or anywhere that isn’t home.
76 Of course, Nerlin didn’t know about the Undo Button. This meant that what Nerlin had just told Mordonna was both completely wrong and completely rubbish.
77 Of course she didn’t. She believed him about thirty-seven percent.
78 TOP TIP: This is NOT a good idea, no matter what people tell you.
79 Which is the wizard’s answer to Milo, where the malt and the milk are replaced with groutweed and ditch water.
80 There were actually dozens of cats in the kitchen, but Grummo was unique in that he was not a recipe ingredient.
81 The toaster had been on the bagel setting, which only heats up on one side.
82 No, it wasn’t to anywhere rude. It’s just that for security reasons I am not allowed to tell you where it was.
* Pathetic Neurotic Self-important Security Agency
83 As it turns out, the ‘Single Species’ rule did not apply to Satanella. She had been a human when she’d been born, but it was only for two seconds.
84 NONE of the rules about anything at all applied to the holder of the Ultimate Super-Wizard powers. There was only one single, simple rule for them: You Can Do Absolutely Anything You Want.
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Version 1.0
The Floods 13: The Royal Family
Published by Random House Australia 2014
Copyright © Colin Thompson 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Random House Australia book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
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First published by Random House Australia in 2014
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Author: Thompson, Colin, (Colin Edward)
Title: Royal family [electronic resource] / Colin Thompson
ISBN: 9781742755335 (ebook)
Series: Thompson, Colin (Colin Edward). Floods; 13
Target Audience: For primary school age
Subjects: Witches – Juvenile fiction
Wizards – Juvenile fiction
Magic – Juvenile fiction
Dewey Number: A823.3
Design, illustrations and typesetting by Colin Thompson
Additional typesetting by Anna Warren, Warren Ventures Pty Ltd
This work is fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is just lucky. If you recognise yourself in this book, you should probably keep very quiet about it unless you want to make people jealous. If that is something you want to do, then tell everyone and you will instantly convert your friends into enemies.
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