Meanwhile, on Zog…

Gloam finished his breakfast with imperious glee. He had, only an hour ago, survived a rather hapless attempt on his life, and his survival made him feel more powerful, and his breakfast more flavourful.

When the desperate would-be assassin burst through the doors of his walled-off private baths (previously a hot spring available to any animal or hominid that happened across it), Gloam enjoyed watching the ease in which his spiky bat-clad guards dispatched the assailant, with a brisk, subdural hematoma-inducing bop to the head.

It wasn’t the first attempt on Gloam’s life, and it wouldn’t be the last. Assassination attempts were part and parcel of the game, and one in which Gloam had become increasingly fond of, for it allowed him to dish out justified acts of extreme violence that didn’t unnecessarily upset his increasingly urbane and polite-minded subjects.

And speaking of his increasingly urbane and polite-minded subjects - development in infrastructure to house them all had been coming along swimmingly over the past few weeks, chiefly due to Gloam’s latest innovation - slavery.

Well, truth be told, slavery wasn’t a new innovation - Zoggites had been bartered and sold between tribes regularly since time immemorial - but since Gloam now had control of the entire populace, he was able to achieve something entirely new for the Zoggite slave industry - scalability.

Scalable slavery - as we all know on Earth - is a terrifically efficient tool if one is callous and heartless enough to wield it (the Egyptian Pharaohs will wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, and the pyramids testament to how there really is no limit to what one can achieve if you just throw enough slaves at it).

And while even Gloam knew instinctively that slavery wasn’t very nice (and, indeed, illegal - for centuries - on Earth anyway - and a great number of his subjects were aware of that too presumably, having the minds of modern British citizens) he also remembered to his delight that one of the perks of absolute leadership is that you can do whatever you damn well pleased. And what pleased him at that moment was slavery.

Oh, the things one can do with a whole bunch of slaves.

For example, most recently, slaves had been redeveloping the settlement around the River Zog at a breakneck pace. Gloam’s groaning construction chain gang had made astonishing progress (you would, too - if you had a spiky bat to contend with if you had the hide to ask for a smoke break), transforming the entire riverfront into a bustling mess of stylish houses, apartments, low-rise apartments buildings and walk-ups, general (and more specific) stores, town halls - and of course, pubs - all with delightfully English names with a Zog twist, like the Fox & Hound & Screaming Death, The Plaarcqke’s Head or the Three-eyed Goat.

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And another example of where slaves had been really doing their thing, and doing it frightfully well, was in the burgeoning industry of Helium3 mining, under the stewardship of Bickly Urgh (you haven’t forgotten about him, have you?).

As Zogtown proper and the riverfront had been undergoing its revivification, Bickly had been really working rather hard. For one, he was quite excited at the prospect of this whole thing paying off in some way, and terrifically anxious that if it didn’t, he’d possibly lose his head - which he had grown rather attached to over the years.

Indeed, the addition of Gloam’s fantastic and modern innovation of Scalable Slavery® had sped along production to a frightening clip. Bowsers had cropped up all along the Spindly valley, bobbing back and forth like retro bird toys, hauling up liquid gold by the bursting barrel. Teams of slaves worked in a congo line of efficient misery, each micro-specialised into one task - whether it be carefully pick-axing at the sediment at the bottom of the wells, placing and lighting explosives to release the viscous liquid from hidden rock shelves in the murky beneath, or passing the extracted product along a line all the way to a cave, which was then sealed shut, spray painted ‘property of Gloam enterprises,’ before moving onto and filling up another cave with the highly volatile, exceedingly explosive material.

And explode it did do, quite often in fact. Helium3 mining was a terrifically lethal business, and if they were pressed, most of the Zoggites working the mines would say that they probably wouldn’t choose to make a start in the industry at all, had they known at the outset about the general danger to their lives, and had they not been conscripted against their wishes.

And while Scalable Slavery® had such obvious benefits to productivity, it did not yet answer the big hairy question that kept Bickly up at night (aside from yearning for large helpings of schnitzel and steins of weiss pilsener) of what in the hell he was going to do with it all. And Gloam was, while quite distracted with other affairs of state and general enrichment, probably going to want an answer to that reasonably soon.

Thankfully, he would not have to wait too long, although he didn’t know it yet.

For in a cave on the other side of the River Zog, our favourite little wunderkind engineer, who we now know to have the ethnic Zoggite name of Ozoga Bozoga (but who prefers now to be known by the name of the mind which she inherited - Baroness Thelma Volt - a ruthless and wealthy industrialist, inventor and peer in the House of Lords) had managed to achieve upward thrust quite reliably in her ramshackle prototype aircraft, which would benefit greatly from a fuel with as much power at Helium3