1 – A Sappy Catastrophe

“Thousands are wounded. Billions in property damage.” The voice of a human, dressed in a weathered gray robe, blue tunic, and matching wide-brimmed wizard hat, boomed within the great stone hall.

The Chamber of Law, or the egg of justice as it was called for its oval shape, was great enough to even let a dragon in and held at its center a hole deep enough to push said dragon into.

All around the courtroom were bleachers from which angry and sticky dwarfs glared toward the core of the egg of justice, where a wooden platform hung from chains above the bottomless yolk. The platform creaked and balanced. Opposite it, in the head of the great egg of justice, the head egghead himself sat atop a giant marble throne. It was the great dwarf judge, whose beard stretched all the way to the bottom of the abyss. He looked at the step below him as the accusing wizard at his right continued.

“Everything one touches is sticky!” the wizard said, prying his finger with difficulty from the surface of his robe. “And who do we have to blame, Your Legalship, for this great sappy catastrophe?”

All looked toward the central platform where two small gnomes patiently waited, both angry and bored. It would be easy to say they were clones for their clothes made no attempt to distinguish them. They both wore the same red pointy hat; the same shirt and overalls. The only difference was that one wore an orange shirt and brown overall, and the other a brown shirt and orange overall.

The wizard pointed to them. “Your Honor, let the record stand! There is no question. The ones responsible for this great molasses flood are none other than the Pump brothers!” Boos echoed throughout the chamber, and some bold onlookers began to throw trash covered in sticky and days-old molasses syrup toward the gnomes on the platform.

“Order! Order!” the great dwarf judge shouted, banging his gavel onto the marble bench. “Ini Pump, Ono Pump. The evidence presented against you is overwhelming. You stand accused of sabotage, negligence, incompetence, malice, and ... regicide,” the judge mumbled. Everyone in the hall looked down in respect for the fallen king.

He continued. “Death by sugar ... it's just like how my nana went.” A small tear formed under the judge's cheek joining into a slippery mess in the remaining syrupy surface on his face. He scratched it away, leaving a bruised red mark. “Ini and Ono Pump, what have you to say against these allegations?”

Ini looked at Ono, his two seconds-older counterpart and, as they both nodded their heads in agreement, Ini took a step forward and spoke. “Your Honor, in all fairness, the city now smells much better than it did before with the dwarf stench.”

Jeers and boos erupted throughout the hall, leaving the judge to bang his gavel to quiet them down. Through the noise, Ono stepped forward.

“Is what we would say, Your Honor, if the flood was indeed our fault. But ”we'll remind you that it was your Golden Beard Bank who insisted on cutting the budget we proposed.”

“Yeah! If you had actually given us what we needed, we wouldn't have needed to use sub-standard materials to work on the molasses piping,” Ini added to his brother’s rebuttal.

“Also, we – ah!” Ono yelped as he gave yet another step forward, only to step out of the platform and into the abyss, his chained brother the only thing holding him to the platform. “Ini, help me!”

Ono yelled as his brother struggled to pull on the small wrist chains that held them together while the crowd resumed pelting them with trash.

“Enough!” The mob stopped at the judge’s shout. “This is a court of law! We will have respect. Seer Figwit, pull them out.”

Below, the wizard raised his staff f and muttered some magic words. The dangling gnome shot back onto the platform.

“It is done, Your Honor,” he answered. His words were accentuated by the movements of his bushy mustache.

“Thank you.” The dwarf turned his attention to the nearby bleachers. “Bankmaster Mathew, is what the accused said true? Did the Golden Beard Bank skimp on the allotted royal funds?”

“Well, I ... Your Honor,” a dwarf dressed in bright furs trimmed with golden silk, collars of jewels, and ruby encrusted rings on each finger said as he nervously stood up in the bleachers. “Skimp is such an ugly word not befitting this prestigious court.” He let out a smile, revealing a full set of diamond dentures.

“Did you and your bank give the full agreed upon allotment or not?” the judge asked. Everyone in the egg now looked with suspicion toward the bank manager. “Master Mathew, do not make me have to use magic upon you,” the judge said as the wizard Figwit looked intensely toward the bank master, preparing in his head the incantation to take the truth from out of him.

On the central platform, the two gnome brothers smirked.

“Well, Your Honor ... it's true,” the bank master said as around him the crowd whispered among themselves. “We deemed that the costs were unnecessarily high. So we allocated them elsewhere.”

“Allocated to where?” the judge asked with an unamused expression.

“To uh ... private accounts.”

“Private accounts?” The judge's eyes flicked to Figwit, who nodded and lifted his staff.

“Ok fine! To our accounts! Me and the rest of the bankmasters took the money for ourselves.”

The bankmasters in the audience began to shout.

“You bloody rat!”

“You are a traitor Matt!”

“You sold us out!” Various dwarfs, equally dressed in unusual luxurious and ostentatious dresses of gold, jewelry and furs all spoke out.

Some of them even tried to leap down from the bleachers and run away, only to be stopped by the armed court guard.

“No, you don't understand! We had to do it!”

“Aye, how else would we feed our crippling greed!”

“I can't go back to stealing from the orphanage! I have standards now— --impossibly expensive standards!”

“Enough!” the judge yelled and smashed his gavel. “Take the bankmasters away. We will prepare for their trial.”

The soldiers rounded up the bankmasters and escorted them out of the hall. As they left, one of the bankmasters yelled. “Please, you can't do this. I'm just like all of you. I’m a poor dwarf too! I only have a small fortune! A small fortune!”

The bankmasters were all dragged away, and the courtroom fell silent once more as the great doors of the egg of justice slammed shut. The judge nodded to the wizard and with a twirl of his oak staff the chains around the gnome's wrists came loose.

“You know, I think I actually felt safer with the chains on,” Ini stammered as he stared at the bottomless abyss below them.

“Don't you start with that now,” Ono answered, tugging on his brother's chain.

Before them, the judge called all to attention and proclaimed, “Ini Pump, Ono Pump. Under my authority as regent judge of Amberlight, and with this new evidence that has been introduced, I cannot, in good conscience, arrest you for the molasses flood.”

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The crowd cried out at the judge’s ruling. Echoes of “We demand justice!” rang throughout the stone courtroom.

“And justice you'll have!” the judge yelled back and banged his gavel. “However, I cannot simply let you go free. For you are complicit in the flooding.”

“What?”

“But we did the best we could!”

Ini and Ono cried out as the judge’s beard wriggled with the vibrations from the crowd’s displeasure.

“Indeed. But you could have warned us about the missing funds. You had plenty of chances to bring the matter to attention, but you did not. You merely continued with the job, knowing full well the danger of it,” the judge added before Ini interrupted.

“With all due respect, Your Honor, but we are the Pump Brothers. We never give up on a job, no matter how hard ...”

“or difficult, because nothing is impossible for a Pump,” Ono completed as his twin brother jumped onto his shoulders and they performed their trademarked pose. Their arms stretched and pointing to the ceiling so that their combined height almost reached that of a regular human.

“Yes, and that stubbornness of yours has cost us a king and almost all of our city! It's going to take years to fully clean it out; decades for the smell of molasses to fully dissipate. And the stickiness ... it may never actually be gone,” the judge said, trying to lift the gavel from the sticky marble surface that held it trapped.

“Our economy is in shambles. We can't produce or sell anything now and whatever we can confiscate from the bankmasters will only be enough to help us start cleaning. You, however, will be settled with the other half of the bill. Ini and Ono Pump, I sentence you to pay over three million golden crowns back to the Amberlight government to both pay up for the costs of reconstruction, and compensation for the damages to our peoples, both physical and emotional.”

“What? We don't have that money!”

“The pipping work itself was only a three thousand golden crown job!” Ini and Ono protested. Their formation broke, leaving them to scurry on the suspended platform.

The judge banged his gavel, retorting, “You have one year to either pay the full amount or find a way to provide us with a steady source of income to begin the reconstruction. If you can do this, you will be forgiven for your part in the disaster. But if you fail, I shall take away your hats … … and then toss you in the pit!”

“No!”

“Not our hats! Anything but the hat!”

Ini and Ono held each other as they heard the judge. For the first time in the proceeding, the crowd stood up to cheer for the judge's ruling.

The judge smiled at the decision as he watched the Pump brothers, grasping their pointy gnome hats. “I will, of course, for that time leave you in the care of our trusted court wizard, Seer Figwit.”

“Excuse me?” The wizard looked panicked.

“Well, of course! Someone has to keep an eye on these troublemakers. And no one's better prepared for the job than you.”

Judge Ottison declared as the wizard looked back to the gnome brothers, whose expressions had turned to panic.

He felt a hole in his stomach as the brother's movements sped up, their hands fidgeting and their feet thumping as their bodies struggled to match their mental calculations of a way to pay such an impossibly high amount of money

“Your Honor, please, I must protest. I'm already not fit to deal with children. Even less so with gnomes who will eat up my patience like a rat loose in a cellar.”

“Oh please, you'll be fine, Figwit,” the judge dismissed his concerns. “You were young once too ... I think. We all were once, even me. I remember back when I was a young lad of only sixty years of age. My beard then was only a quarter of the size its now!”

“But Your Honor!”

“Enough! You will watch over them. Make sure they don't steal away with any money, and that's final!” the judge shouted, thudding his gavel.

The wizard groaned and sat back on his bench in the lower level with his head in his hands. The gnomes on the platform called out to him.

“Please! Wizard sir! You must have some trick or magic. You can help us!” Ini cried out as the dwarf guards pulled the platform toward the exit.

“You have magic! Do something! Help us out, please!” Ono too yelled as the two gnome brothers were escorted out of the courtroom.

Ini too cried out, and their voice echoed in the stone hallway outside, “They are gonna take our hats! Our hats! Please, anything but the hat!”

The wizard sighed and shimmied along the edges of the wall toward the exit. Fixing his hat, he muttered under his breath, “It's gonna be a long year.”

#

The shadow of the window bars fell upon the bearded gnome. The stale air of the cell mixed with the sweet scent of the molasses that dripped from the walls and onto the benches where Ini sat, carving lines demarcating time into the wall.

“Been so long since I heard the freebirds sing. Don't even remember what mama looked like,” Ini said, scratching another line.

“Like sin,” Ono responded as he lifted weights, his muscles bulging through the ripped sleeve of his orange coat.

“Oh yeah,” Ini shuddered. He stood on top of the bench and began to suck at a hardened molasses clump on the wall. “So hungry. I can't eat the prison slop anymore.”

“Eh, more for me,” Ono answered with a tired laugh. A scar on his cheek expanded and contracted with his muscles.

Steps echoed outside in the jail hallway, followed by the clank of a metal door. A figure emerged from the dark, stepping across the ceramic and metal floor. When the figure revealed itself, it was the wizard Figwit standing outside the jail cell.

“What are you doing?” he let out in anguish as he saw a gnome suckling the wall and another with a ripped shirt lifting various rocks and loose cans that he was pretending were weights.

“What do you think, pinhead. We are surviving the slammer,” Ono responded.

Ini muttered with his mouth full, “Yegh. Schurwiwing”.

The wizard slapped his face. “Stop that! I just got done filing your paperwork. Now get out of there.” He rummaged through his pocket and for the key and opened the jail cell door.

“No, we have been here for too long.”- Ono let out.

“Yeah, we can't go back to living outside.”

Blood rushed to the wizard's head, and his veins pulsed with rage. “You have been here for two hours!”

“Two hours for you, but in the cage things work differently,” Ini said as Ono nodded in agreement.

“Just get out of there!” Figwit ordered. He raised his staff and conjured an invisible force that pushed the brothers out of the cell. “And clean that mess off of your face!” he said as he rubbed Ono's cheek, cleaning away the drawn-on scar and straw glued to his face.

“My God, Ini … freedom.” A tear formed under Ono's face as his brother hugged him.

“Oh Ono, I had almost forgotten how liberty tastes. It’s so sweet!”

“That's the molasses you were sucking on.” Figwit rolled his eyes as he pushed the brothers forwards.

“Sweet, sweet delicious freedom.”

“Enough of that. Move. We got work to do,” Figwit urged the brothers as he herded them toward the exit and finally closed the door of the jail behind him.

#

The trio entered the processing unit, the last room before the jail's exit and the freedom and open space of the cavern city of Amberlight.

A dwarf clerk stood behind a heavily armored desk with bars separating him from the gnomes and wizard. Behind him, all manner of neatly sorted storage containers rested, awaiting their promised retrieval.

The dwarf clerk grunted as he saw the approaching gnomes. “Ini and Ono Pump.”

“That's us!” the brothers said in unison. They peaked up from below the desk, the wizard behind them.

“Alright, let me see.” The dwarf moved to the back, trudging through goop on the floor and struggling to lift his metal boots from the sticky metal surface.

“So, what did they take from you two?” the wizard asked. “Some extra sets of clothing? Or what did you even have with you?”

“Alright, here it is,” the dwarf clerk said. To the wizard’s shock, he barreled toward the desk with a cart filled to the brim with boxes and barrels.

“What the?” the wizard said. Ono and Ini stepped on top of the desk to retrieve their belongings. Ono went first. Setting himself between the clerk and his brother, as Ini took off his hat and held it open for his twin.

“Alright, let's see: Wrench”

“Wrench.”

“Wrench.”

The dwarf opened the box and placed a metal wrench on top of the desk. Ini picked it up, repeated after him, and passed it along to his brother who placed it inside his pointy red hat.

“Hammer, nails, bolts, screws, screwdriver, long screwdriver,” the dwarf said as he placed the items one after another in the desk, only for them to be picked by Ini who placed them inside Ono's hat.

“Lamp oil, ropes, bombs, set of jewelry, a set of fake jewelry,” the dwarf continued. To the wizard’s astonishment, the hat never seemed to grow or expand in size.

“One 2x4, short sword, bastard sword, legitimate sword— -- --”

“Hey, hold on a second!” Ini cried out as the wizard tried to peer inside the hat. “We had six sets of 2x4s, not one!”

“Oh sorry, my bad, I went over them. Here's your remaining forty.” The dwarf passed the planks of wood as the wizard wondered what sort of magic the brothers actually knew.

“And of course, a barrel of glue and five sets of clothes, all orange and brown.”

“Hey, don't mix those Ono!” cried Ini. “Or else we won't know whose clothes belong to who.”

“Good thinking, Ini. Here. You should start filling your hat too. Mine's running out of space.”

The wizard's vein pulsed again. “What do you mean it’s running out of space? It looks exactly the same as when it was empty!”

“Typical wizard,” Ini said as he helped Ono properly open up his hat again.

The dwarf brought out the last box and passed its contents to Ini. “Here you go: saw, measuring rod, scissors, orange and yellow flag, water canteen, frying pan, flint and, lastly, a piece of steel.”

The dwarf finished and pushed away the now-empty box. Ini peered into his hat. “Hey! You forgot something.”

“Oh? What is it?” The dwarf fixed his glasses and stared at the inventory list on his desk.

“You forgot our jar of molasses! How am I supposed to eat my toast without molasses?”

An eerie silence befell the entire room as the dwarf glared emptily toward the gnome. Behind the two brothers, the wizard noticed the dwarf's eyebrow twitch slightly, as had his own before. It was the only movement that emerged from the now stone-like figure frozen behind the desk.

“I huh, I think we should go.” The wizard pulled the gnomes to the floor.

“But our molasses!”

From behind them, the paralyzed dwarf curled his hands into a rapidly shaking fist.

“Forget about it! Let's just go!” the wizard yelled as he pushed the gnomes through the doors and back outside, leaving the dwarf boiling with rage, alone in his post.