Chronicles of Nom

AN – This is nothing less than insanity, inspired by Terry Pratchett and the ridiculousness of modern society. Please note that while this is, to begin with, a parody of the Holy Bible, it is not directed at Christianity or any other religion. I don’t mean to offend anybody as this is all in the nature of humour.

One: In the beginning…

The game known as ‘Twister’ was regarded by almost everyone who existed atop the mountain of Day-Eet-Ay as the ‘game of Gods’, and was played often by its suspiciously flexible inhabitants. Sometimes the games stretched on for millennium, the supple body of Fee-Lem the Adulterer refusing to cave under the monstrous figure of Eikeelyu the Body Breaker – other times it was over within seconds, the flimsy plastic of the Twister mat proving to be no match for the Gods that scrambled over it (particularly the ones with sharp edges). Usually though, the nightly games of ‘Left Hand On Red, NO YOU FOOL, THAT’S YOUR FOOT!’ were cut short by the bellowing of The Ineffable Nom, the only being on the mountain with the power (and quite frankly, the nerve) to silence the other Gods. Nom often grew bored of the other Gods’ squabbling, and after a billion years of Twister it didn’t take Her long to become sick of the sight of the same few colourful dots. Upon Her command, the plastic mat was tucked away into the games cupboard (much to the disgruntlement of Bendea the Spineless, who was really getting quite good at Twister), and the Gods usually sat down to a nice game of Scrabble instead. After Go-Blah the Greedy had eaten all the letters, Monopoly was usually on the cards, until said cards were pinched by Eiheace (inexplicably pronounced ‘ace’) the Cehaired Dieaomxyzn, thus leaving the rulers of the Universe with nothing to do (Cluedo was out of the question as most of the Gods had long grown sick of letting Tellypaff the Foreseer win), and so they often resorted to intergalactic war for entertainment. Hey, times were hard.

One of the only Gods never to join in during the nightly games was Nom Herself, a wild-eyed, messily-haired being who deemed Herself too good for board (or indeed plastic mat) games. While the others rolled around their mat, taking delight in the way Neigh-Keed the Pole-Dancer insisted in taking all of her clothes off before putting her right foot on green, Nom would sit with ineffable posture in Her ineffable chair, which was positioned with ineffable accuracy in Her ineffably ineffable room. In Her hand there would often be a glass of ineffable grape juice (made from ineffable grapes) and in her mind there would be milling a thousand ineffable thoughts.

Nom was no longer content with watching the other Gods play Twister. Nom wanted a new toy, and for the best part of the last dozen decades, She had been hell-bent on devising a way of creating Life.

‘Life’, as far as Nom was concerned, was simply a prison sentence for the deluded majority. She had devised Her very own philosophy concerning it, and had been so pleased with Herself at the time; She had demanded that Oovardeelynez the DIY Expert paint it on the seat of Her chair in neat size sixteen Times New Roman text. Now, whenever She stood up, her seat read: “Why is Life like a prison sentence, one might ask? You enter, depend on everyone else for a few years, spend forever striving to be a ‘better person’, gain notoriety and take advantage of those younger than yourself, and eventually leave and go back to being what you were before you committed that terrible crime; absolutely nothing.”

So convinced was She that this was true that one day, after twelve too many glasses of grape juice, Nom decided to create Life of her very own. She had called Breynie the Brainy into her room and shown him the almost-complete model of a spherical object, made entirely from pomegranate seeds. Grinding the last pomegranate in Her left nostril, she tentatively put the last seeds into place and proudly presented the globe to Breynie, who was less than impressed and more than a little confused.

“…Forgive me, O Holy Nom, but what exactly is that?”

“You are Breynie the Brainy, are you not? Do your powers of deduction not point in the right direction so as to answer your perusable question?”

“Well…” Breynie said, after some examination of the pomegranate planet. “It just looks like a big ball of seeds to me.” He hesitated, catching the glint in Nom’s ineffable eyes. “A very good ball of seeds, though. Finely made, I can tell. Only one such as The Ineffable Nom could have made it, I am sure.”

Nom grinned, showing rows of eerily ineffable teeth. “You’re quite right there, my friend. I am disappointed to see you so perplexed by my wonderful Creation, but I cannot say that I am not dying to enlighten you as to what exactly it is.” She pushed the sphere under his nose, scents of nostrilised pomegranates rising from the surface. “This is a scaled-down version of what will be my greatest invention…I call it ‘Urrf’.”

“Urrf?”

“Yes, Urrf. I discovered that after grinding so many pomegranates in my surprisingly delicate nostril, the mere sight of the fruit began to disagree with me. When I came to name my creation, ‘urrf’ was the first thing that sprang to mind…I think it is quite suitable.”

“I see…” Breynie said, still none the wiser as to what the seedy sphere actually was. “And this…Urrf, what exactly does it do?”

“Well, nothing yet – like I said, this is only a model.” Nom said, scratching at her sore nose. “When it’s actually made, however, it will be a planet – filled with people and colour and pretty flowers. You know, living things.”

“Living things? Why on…well...why on Urrf would you want a place filled with living things?”

“Target practice, of course. I’ve developed quite a likeness for darts recently, and if I put a few distinguishing features on Urrf, such as islands or something, I’ll be sure to have plenty of different things to aim for. Once I’m well-practiced it’ll make for a good Friday night tournament, will it not? A welcome change from Trivial Pursuit, I should think…it’s just something about watching Gods trying to pretend they don’t know the answers to questions, it doesn’t sit right with the Creator of Everything.”

Breynie nodded, taking the sphere from Her hands and admiring it from all angles. “You’ve certainly put a lot of time into this, My Lady. Making it into an actual world shouldn’t be too difficult; I could ask Arseytext the Part-Time Builder to put in a few hours, if you like?”

“No need, I already spoke to him and Oovardeelynez this morning. They said they’d look into getting it done by Monday, possibly Sunday afternoon. Ideally it’d be finished by Saturday, but you can’t rush perfection I suppose.” Nom looked wistfully away into the distance, which was really nothing more than a sea of endless black (the God of Decorating was away on holiday).

“…I can get the replica plans drawn up in ten minutes, is that okay?”

“Yeah, perfection takes too long anyway.”

And so out of a maelstrom of comets and asteroid shards (eerily similar in appearance to pomegranate seeds), ‘Earth’ was born after a clever renaming courtesy of Eiheace the Cehaired Dieaomxyzn. Nom littered its surface with islands which were in turn littered with beautiful plants, trees and animals (‘all the more fun to blow to pieces!’), and in the midst of it all she put a little something she liked to call humanity (‘just in case moving targets are ever incorporated into darts – you never know!’). Nom regularly used Earth for target practice, disguising her darts as ‘lightning bolts from heaven’, and was soon the most accurate dart-thrower in all of Day-Eet-Ay. The other Gods, delighted to finally see their ineffable leader involved in their games, built a few planets of their own (though they were made from apple pips, as the pomegranate supply was running low) so as to brush up on their own dart-playing skills for the weekly tournaments.

And so the Universe was born – although admittedly not the product of the careful planning of an unmovable higher being, the people of Earth grew to be proud of their history, and often sacrificed their own dart-boards to the Gods to appease them when someone had done something bad (such as forgetting to say ‘The Ineffable’ when talking about Nom). Darts was revered as the game of Gods and eventually became exclusively a game for Kings and agreeable land-owners, pomegranates were eaten only on Sundays, Twister was forgotten about and the word ‘Monopoly’ was soon just a distant legend, said to the name of a board game criminals used when plotting their latest getaway-route from the nearest trading jewellers.

In one of the smaller and less tourist-infested towns on Earth (called Crater after its strange tendency to be hit by ominous lightning bolts from heaven, coincidentally making it one of the towns the aforementioned Monopoly criminals steered well clear of), a young man gazed wistfully out of his bedroom window at the pomegranate stars, longing to know what the Gods got up to whilst Life went on below them.

Preventing the heavens from collapsing…saving a species from extinction…counterattacking an alien invasion whose leader plans to take over Day-Eet-Ay…oh, the wonders the Gods must see!

He reached over to his bookshelf and pulled a flimsy paperback into his hands. Half of the pages were still blank as the book was technically still being written, but the pages that were filled were grimy and smudged with use. Ruley of Crater had read the stories in his hands, which were collectively entitled The Chronicles Of Nom, a thousand times or more, and as he turned to the first page to read them again, he caught the attention of an ineffable being who smiled down on him as She had her first foot-massage of the morning.

“Tell me Cree-Plah, who is that young man down there who can’t get enough of my histories?”

“That is Ruley Sokkatoumee, Your Ineffableness. Would you like me to throw a dart at him?”

“No, it’s quite alright.” Nom replied, waggling Her toes in an ineffable way. “I try not to throw darts at those who read my books. Personal favouritism, I suppose – belief in Me is ailing, as is faith in the other Gods. I can’t really afford to kill anymore believers, they’re verging on becoming Anti-Nomian as it is.” She sighed, disapproval of the growing trend to thwart the Gods clear on her face.

“They’ll return to you in time, My Lady. Most of them do, when they realise their lives are futile and their only chance of living forever is by worshipping you endlessly.”

Nom sighed again, feeling a bone snap somewhere in Her foot. “Ah, that’s better. A little to the left, now – yes, just there.” She reached for the glass of grape juice that stood on the table beside Her. “I suppose you’re right, it’s just so boring when they have no faith in Me. It’s so much fun watching them burn dartboards, actually thinking we’ll commend them for it…those were good times…oh bugger, I think I’m depressed. When you’re done, get Eikeelyu and Pea-San-Lorf in here right away, they always make for an interesting conversation.”

Cree-Plah the Foot Feeler bowed to Nom and left, dreading the thought of prising Pea-San-Lorf from whatever tree she was harassing today. Nom returned her attentions to Ruley of Crater, who was still reading the book in his hands with an intense look of interest on his face. “He’ll be getting to the part about fruit any minute now…”

She observed passively the other events happening on Earth as she waited for the Gods of Body Breaking and Love Spreading to arrive, displeased to see the amount of church-burning that was going on. At this rate the Chronicles will never be finished, she thought, her ineffableness turning momentarily into a lesser adjective. That poor boy will reach the end of the book and be disappointed once again to see the same amount of blank pages. I need to finish My history somehow…and I need to re-ignite the flames of religion in those damn blasphemers. Inciting fear is always effective….

Nom paused her train of thought for a second, and somewhere inside the ineffable caverns of Her mind a tiny little light bulb went ‘PING’ and shone with light (ten seconds later it flickered and went out again, but ten seconds was all it took sometimes). “REJI-SHTAR!” she bellowed to the God of Receptionists, who was always hanging around near a filing cabinet when you needed him. “Get me five carrots and a hollowed-out pomegranate! MAKE THEM EXTRA LARGE!”

The ineffable cogs in the mind of the Creator of Everything where whirring once again, and in a broken-down town on a small island on Earth, a young man finished reading his book and looked out of his window to see the most peculiar sight he would probably ever see.