In this most recent edition of my Explorer's Journal segment, I shall share a brief anthropological insight gathered from a journey many years past to the distant shores of Borneo.
While visiting the Washnoozle-Mozimbee Blood Clan of Southern Borneo to gain a better understanding of their ability to control the rapid degeneration of tissues brought on by consuming large amounts of transfigured worm carcasses, I found myself being ushered into the not so envious position of 'best-man' at a Washnoozle-Mozimbee Blood wedding.
Now, as everyone should know, the Washnoozle-Mozimbee Blood Clan gains its name from the great War of Turnips, dating to c.1184 and the untimely deaths of nearly everyone from both the Washnoozle and Mozimbee clans. For those not remembering 4th grade exploratory history, I shall briefly recount this tragic tale.
The chief of the Washnoozle clan, Gurglixx the Flatulent, was quite the connoisseur of Borneo wild turnips. In his clans mountainous region grew the very best borneo turnips ever known. Shipped to nearly every region of the world, and sought after by traders from across Asia for their curious pickled taste and rosy-red exterior, Borneo wild turnips, and Washnoozle-grown turnips especially, were known as the best to be had. This of course, brought great fame and wealth to all the people of the Washnoozle clan. Soon they were adorned in only the finest leaves, feathers and rotting pig skins that their currency of shell and bug excrement could buy.
But this claim to agricultural fame did not sit so pleasantly with the Washnoozle's neighbors, the Mozimbee clan. They claimed to have planted the first Borneo Blood Turnip along the borders of their territorial domain over two-hundred years before. Led by their chief, Gulrog, Master of the Mountain Petunias, the Mozimbee clan launched a full scale assault on the lush farms of the Washnoozle Borneo Blood Turnips. Burning, removing, destroying and ravaging every plant and shrub from Scab Corner to Pusscreak, Gulrog and his band waged a war of unknown proportions on the Washnoozle clan, until not a single living warrior remained from either side. Sustained through years of turnip-fed rampage, the warriors fought savagely for nearly three days, until only Gurglixx and Gulrog remained.
As the two warrior chiefs fought to the last, they finally collapsed, exhausted and clumsy upon the mountainous pile of dead. Both at once gave into their age and absolute fatigue as they were evenly matched, blow for blow, strike for strike. Looking about them at the waste and destruction that lay about, they swore then and there to never again wage such a war for turnips, or land, or money. A treaty, agreed to upon a mountain of slain warriors, and amidst fields of blood soaked Borneo Turnips.
It was then, that the two chiefs ceremoniously did a very strange, and a very peculiar thing that forever changed the future of wild Borneo agriculture.
As Chief Gurglixx and Gulrog braced wrists and each took a bite from a freshly cultivated Borneo Turnip, they noticed a strange scent, and an even stranger taste. this turnip, this wild, rosy-red Borneo delicacy, was even more scrumptious when eaten with a generous smear of blood! Pulled from the blood soaked ground of the battlefield, the turnip was rich with the strange taste of the fallen soldiers! A macabre and yet, to the two Chiefs, brilliant discovery!
It was after this delightfully disgusting discovery, that the two chiefs concocted a plan to hide their joint discovery from the world, forever keeping the hidden cash-flow of shell and bug excrement from ever reaching beyond their mysterious shores. Chief Gulrog, knowing his tribe's ability to farm the most beautiful and pungent petunias, agreed to share the Mozimbee clan secret in exchange for the agricultural mysteries of the Washnoozle-grown turnips. to seal this pact, each Chief then bit off the ring finger of the other, savagely sealing their pact forever in blood, spewed upon the bulbous form of a Borneo wild turnip; henceforth forever known as Borneo Blood Turnips.
But being the traditionalist keepers of ancient ways that they are, the now combined tribal populace of the Washnoozle-Mozimbee Blood Clan, swore to keep this secret recipe thriving. From that day forth, every marriage ceremony ends with the ritual Washnoozle-Mozimbee Blood wedding tradition, where each newly committed lover swears their allegiance to the other through a swift and brutal act of removing by teeth alone, the finger of their spouse, ring attached. The finger is then passed to the best man and the bride's maid accordingly, where the ring is removed and the finger is sautéed as a delicacy over a helping of, Borneo Blood turnips of course.
And to hide this most valuable of delicacies, Borneo Blood Turnips are germinated within the pollen of every Petunia currently present across the globe. If the legend is to be believed, beneath the tangled twisting roots of the most pungent of Petunias, lies the growing seed of the Borneo Blood Turnip, doused in blood from ages past, and ceremoniously continued in the Borneo wilds with every new spring wedding.
For those most curious of readers, yes, I was fortunate to partake in the ritualistic sampling of the Grooms ring finger. Its taste is perhaps best described as a bit like pork, a bit like chicken, and quite a lot...like turnips.
Reporting from deep below Wormwood Square,
Inkley Tolew III Esq.
Exploring Editor in Charge
Wormwood Daily
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