Retail outlet

"The readers are clamouring for skwirls," I reported, checking the comments. "They are clamid."

"Is that a word?" wondered tigris.

"Candid, humid," said Another Kiwi. "Of course it's a word."

So we sent Little Tim down to the Riddled Library to take out a copy of The Tale of Skwirl Nutkin.

Unfortunately the Library Pixies were in a sportive mood for they were celebrating one of their traditional ethnic holidays, and Little Tim needed rescuing. It was not until after alarums and excursions when we were finally back in the tea-room calming our nerves with a packet of Chocolate Wheaties and a bottle of Juggernaut that we discovered that he'd borrowed not Skwirl Nutkin, but the sequel.

This is where a team of vets and engineers craft a state-of-the-art carbon-fibre prosthetic tail for the hapless skwirl, to replace the flesh-&-blood appendage lost in his owl-related industrial accident. The replacement's engineering elegance makes up for its lack of physical sensation, and reflects badly on the messiness and tawdry inefficiency of Nutkin's other limbs and sense organs. Increasingly dissatisfied, it is only a matter of time before he starts finding excuses to progressively lose other limbs in further owl-related accidents, so that each may be replaced with its own better-than-meat robotic equivalent.

Inevitably, corporate interests and military lobbyists become involved when they see the possible applications of a CybEichhörnchen to further their own ends.* This always happens.



It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.
* Recall that the Tin Man ends up leading Queen Princess Ozma's army.
** Good review for Antibodies here.

Bonus EXCLUSIVE VIEW of Riddled Library Extension under construction.

UPDATE: Any history of the literary link between prosthetic post-humanism and hard-body militarism would be incomplete without a mention of Limbo, and especially Moderan ("Yes, we look like walking steel shells with flesh piping, in Moderan, and we think of wars and good pounding").