First Foozle

By: Nerodia Posted on: May 25, 2006

Twiddle, twiddle. What a bore is reading scrolls and ratting!
Mustn't there be something more than rote, rodents and rules?
Daily do I waste an hour in old Sam's Bar, just chatting;
Or learning skills from Una, dour and dogged as a mule.
Just when lethargy has slain my feline fascination,
Words take form inside my brain about some new distraction.
What's a foozle? Someone, please, I need some information!
Some new way to take my ease, a new Divine abstraction?
Then a card appears within my paw as if by magic.
Followed by, to my chagrin, a box with buttons shining.
Better read the rules, think I, to break them would be tragic.
(An ironic twist whereby -another- scroll I'm mining.)

A menagerie of creatures inked in small script faintly glowing:
A portly hippo wallowing in the muddy river;
A fierce and feisty badger, with hackles all a-quiver;
A black tenacious blood-leech, torture on the liver;
A Knight encased in steel, just the thought gave me a shiver;
A satyr and a dragonfly, oh how can I deliver?

I clutch the box and head outdoors, my inspiration growing.
Each item earns a certain score, the foozle-card decrees.
I’d better find the hippo first, so off to Dun I'm going.
The mountain path I'd well rehearsed, the valley was a breeze.
I dodge a school of biting fish and find the tubby beast,
Close my eyes, make a wish, and push the foozle button.
You've foozled a hippo! Oh! Will wonders never cease?
I've got one down and five to go thanks to the river glutton.

Back beneath the Cyrene streets I plumbed the shadowed rooms
Where rats and slime and water meet, my foozle box in hand.
Before too long an ominous shape in the darkness looms:
A long black leech with mouth agape. Still as a stone I stand.
Carefully I take my aim and press the button in.
You've foozled a leech! This game's the best I've ever played!
If old Una could see me, why I'm sure she’d crack a grin.
When in the twinkle of an eye my joy turns to dismay.
Just as I was on the verge of shouting my endorsement,
I'm overcome with the urge to turn around and flee!
My sanguinary cohort has returned with reinforcements
That lick their leechy lips as they slither up to me.

Now, somewhere in the sewers lays a card never submitted
From a foozle many days before this kitty learned:
While reading scrolls and ratting might be painfully insipid,
It's a Bardlet in a leech fight who's most likely to get burned.
The foozle box, I found, has little use in Maya's Halls
But when next the foozle is afoot, I know I'll heed the call.