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The King of the Fart Ghouls was known as the Fartmeister because he was constantly and compulsively stealing the farts (and sharts) of the good humanoids and yokai of Pus Continent. He had a huge stash of farts and sharts in the treasury of his fartcano headquarters. The fartcano itself was big and brown, and every few minutes it would unpucker and noisily release a noxious cloud of toxic gas into the atmosphere.

Fart ghouls look just like the ghouls you’ve read about in storybooks, only with pointier ear lobes. The Fartmeister was half fart ghoul, half flatulenz fairy. He had a bald head, a thick black beard, and resting pissy face. Today he was wearing his red robe, decorated with various alchemistic icons cut from velvet. He had been nodding, half asleep, on the sole seat in his fartcano’s spacious home theater as a linguine western played on his 100 inch TV. It was hot from all the rejected farts funneled through pipes behind the screening room’s walls and the Fartmeister was sweating profusely. Suddenly he sat upright uttered a roar of rage. The roachberry pipe on his lap clattered to the floor, and the King of the Fart Ghouls began squeezing a large moist horn on the arm of his recliner.

"PHFFFFFPT! PHFFFFFPT! PHFFFFFPT!" went the horn.

The squelching sound filled the theater and penetrated to many rooms beyond, where countless thousands of fart ghouls were working at their unending tasks, receiving and processing and cataloging the king’s farts and sharts. The ghouls trembled at the sound of the Fartmeister’s moist honking and whispered fearfully to one another that something unpleasant was sure to happen; but none dared slack off.

The door to his theater opened slowly and Kankersaur the Royal Flackfizer entered. Kankersaur was a nervous orange raptor wearing thick round glasses. He carried a clipboard in one hand and in the other, a tray of cheese with a small orange knife.

"Yes, your stenchiness?" the dinosaur asked, with a wide yawn, for he had just wakened. He set the cheese plate on the table next to the king’s recliner.

"Up?" snarled the Fartmeister, while cutting the cheese. "We’re about to be invaded!"

"How do you know?" asked the flackfizer, yawning again.

"I feel it in my loins," said the Fartmeister. "I can always feel it when dork-butts draw near to my fartcano headquarters. I am positive, Kanker, that Bonertanians are this very minute on their way here to annoy me- and I hate Bonertanians more than I do constipation!"

"What do you want me to do, sir?" asked the raptor.

"Look through the Cosmic Telescope, and see where the invaders are," commanded the King, stuffing his mouth full of stinky cheese.

So Kankersaur went over to a large control panel covered in blinking lights, gauges, keyboards, black and white monitors and switches and cranks and levers and buttons. Next to the control panel were five holes in the wall. The dinosaur pressed a button marked with an eye icon and the Cosmic Telescope’s long, fleshy eyepiece extended out of the wall.

Kankersaur leaned forward and looked through the slimy hole at the tip of the tube. "I see them, your foulness."

"What do they look like?" inquired the monarch.

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"There’s a little orange-and-black robot, three female humanoids, and the Ratsack Golem."

"Bah! I hate that goody-goody sack," said the Fartmeister. "No matter. A dozen of my ghoul soldiers can destroy them all in a spurt."

"I’m not so sure of that," said Kankersaur. "The robot holds an enchanted machine gun."

"That proves these dork-butts are coming here on no peaceful errand," declared the Fartmeister, scowling fiercely. "In fact, no one ever comes here on a peaceful errand. I hate everybody, and everybody hates me!"

"Very true," said Kankersaur.

"I must in some way prevent these dumb-butts from reaching the fartcano. Where are they now?"

"Just now they are entering the Vulcanized Village, your pungentness."

“Vulcanized Village, eh? I’ll send a brown stool pigeon to King Vulcanite McRubberbritches and have him turn up the bounce. These cretins will be launched into orbit!”

Meanwhile, Soda Olheiser the Cursed, Chunks the Chunks Golem, Montana Shingles the Vice-Tremorroid of Bonertania, and the Ratsack Golem walked down a rocky road, following Cydroidobot’s son who led the way with his enchanted machine gun. Knowing the trip to Fartcano Dominion would be a long hard one, Mono had left her companion yokai Elvira Daisy Shingles at the log chateau in the care of Cydroidobot’s oft-congested butler Baryshnikov. They had been traveling for two months, including a nine day stop at the Buddy’s Dad’s Slaughterhouse to solve the Case of the Twisted Pile, plus several days lost in a kingdom-wide ska music festival near Ardisson.

After passing many tempting flea markets they had reached Repulsi Village, a crummy little ghost town which bordered the toxic wasteland that separates Bonertania from the other countries of Pus Continent, and fortunately Mono had brought her super best friend Titiana’s thaumaturgic carpet so they could cross without touching the contaminated smoldering dirt and puddles of green glowing goo. The silver carpet expertly navigated around fluorescent skeletons of many sizes, derelict cars and vanbuses, and rusty metal barrels with fires burning in them, and thanks to its thaumaturgy they were protected from the sickening gasses that filled the air.

Now they trudged through the rocky brown terrain of Fartcano Dominion, and the living burlap sack of rats was pontificating. "I believe one of the most important skills we can learn is to see best in others. I even believe that the Fartmeister must somehow be worthy of some sympathy; his mommy and daddy must have been truly nefarious people for him to grow up to make lying, stealing, and fart-hoarding his sole means of navigating the world, to say nothing of being apparently incapable of sympathy himself."

"Uh-huh," said Soda.

The friends had no idea that while Ratsack was talking they had entered Vulcanized Village. They had no suspicion that the rocks and trees were rubber and even the path they trod was made of rubber.

Presently they came to a brook where cloudy yellow water dashed foamily through a deep channel and rushed away between high rocks far down the mountain-side. Across the brook were stepping-stones, so placed that travelers might easily leap from one to another and in that manner cross the water to the farther bank.

Cydroidobot's son was rolling along on his roller skate extensions, brandishing his enchanted machine gun. The robot boy saw the yellow stream and the stepping-stones and, without making a pause, retracted his wheels and placed one upsidedown-funnel-shaped foot upon the first stone.

The result was astonishing. First the android sank down in the soft rubber, which then rebounded and sent him soaring high in the air, where he turned a succession of flip-flops and bounced off a rubber rock behind the party.

Chunks and Soda did not see Cydroidobot's son bound until it was too late, so quickly had he disappeared; therefore they also stepped upon stones and instantly shot upward like arrows.

There was Cydroidobot's son, still bounding from one rubber rock to another, each time rising a less distance from the ground. And there was Soda, bounding away on her butt in another direction. And there was Chunks, who had struck a rubber rock headforemost. Finally, however, they managed to bounce back to the others.

"What happened!?," asked Mono.

"Those stones are rubber; therefore they are not stones”, said the son of the Robotic Emperor. "Those rocks around us are rubber, and therefore they are not rocks. Even this path is not a path; it’s rubber. We are surrounded by rubber. Unless we are very careful we are all likely to get bounced like bad checks."

"Then let’s be careful," remarked Soda. Chunks wanted to test the quality of the rubber ground, so she began bouncing. Every step sent her higher and higher into the air, and then she made a great bound and bounded way across the stream, landing lightly and steadily on the other side.

"There is no rubber over here," she called to them. "Suppose you all try to bound over the stream, without touching the stepping-stones."

Soda at once grasped the value of the suggestion and began jumping up and down until she found herself bounding almost as high as Chunks had done. Then she suddenly leaned forward and the next bound took her easily across the yellow stream, where she landed by the side of Chunks.

"Come on, Mono! Come on, Ratsack!" called Soda, and her friends tried to obey. They managed to bound pretty high but when they tried to bound across the yellow stream they misjudged the distance and fell with a splash into the middle of the cloudy yellow water.

Mono and Ratsack were amazed to find they were not wet at all.

"It’s dry water," said Mono, dipping her hand into the yellow stream and showing how the liquid fell from it and left it perfectly dry.

"In that case," returned Ratsack, "we can walk through it."

The duo avoided the rubber stepping-stones, and made the crossing with ease. Our friends assembled on the bank and Montana burped triumphantly. Then they renewed their journey into the jungle along the path that led to King Fartmeister’s fartcano headquarters.

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