While the Strong Still Stand...and Everything Else Falls
There are times and places for everything, and sometimes nothing can be done to avoid a disaster, no matter how much you prepare for it. This story is one of those times. The unfortunate disaster that has destroyed over half of this village could’ve all been avoided…if it wasn’t for one stubborn gentleman that refused to quit. The village helped itself into this mess…the mayor was a greedy fox that was desperate for attention. His village was so close to becoming a town he could hardly stand it. All what he needed was something big. Something popular that would really attract a crowd. What he chose would be the start of an uncontrollable force.
Mayor Turns, a brownish-red fox that was 42-years-old, strong, and incredibly hungry for power and fame waited anxiously to meet the person that would finally bring this dump into a blooming society where he would do things his way. The village had over 300 citizens, mainly dogs, pigs, and felines, and about 10 mice. There were no snakes, no dragons, no deer, and above all, no elephants. That was what the mayor wanted…if an elephant could show that it could live here without any worry, it would prove to the other towns in the forest that THIS was the place to live. For years the other mayors of the forest towns had mocked him, poking at his ego because they knew it irked him so badly that he was on the bottom tier of power. A town is any place that has over 50 buildings and over 500 people. Towns had special privileges so they could connect to the main cities that were far away, but villages couldn’t. Mayor Turns had to rely on sly trickery in order to contact a city, but it would be worth it. He was absolutely sure of it.
About 50 miles away, there was an unusual sight in the forest…a huge limo. It was heading slow, mainly because the driver didn’t want the paintjob to get ruined, but that didn’t matter to the star inside the limo. The limo was huge because the star inside was huge…Veronica. Veronica was a star in over 20 different cities and had risen to glory and fame rather quickly. A young age of only 24, to say she was a big girl was a major understatement. She was REALLY big. At 2 ½ tons, she wasn’t too overweight. She was also stunningly pretty for an elephant. Being overweight didn’t shallow this fact at all, but her attitude did. She had the perfect attitude for a professional model: cocky, a little stubborn, determined, and having that aura around her that she knew what she could do. She wasn’t selfish, but she was willing to do just about anything in order to please her fans, both for herself and for them. She also had a secret…but she took precautions before coming here, so that secret couldn’t possibly show itself.
Sighing in boredom, the youthfulness that rarely was shown on stage or on the modeling platform was revealed to the driver, her best friend Frank the zebra.
“I’m bored. Sigh…why can’t we get there sooner? I don’t even know…” She froze midsentence as one of her worst fears started to appear in the window. Quickly, she closed the window and wrinkled her trunk, making absolutely sure nothing was wrong. Frank laughed.
“Listen Veronica, there’s nothing to worry about. Those nasty flowers won’t go anywhere near you. I’ve talked to the mayor of the town we’re going to and he made absolutely certain that the pollen won’t be within 50 feet of where you’ll be at.” He above all others knew of Veronica’s secret…which in some towns wasn’t so secret.
Veronica had only one thing…ok, maybe 2 things, that made her sneeze. One was feathers, but that wasn’t what she was worried about. She personally orders people to keep any bird away from her at all times. No, what she was worried about was her allergy to pollen. It didn’t seem to matter what pollen that sometimes blew in the wind, if enough pollen tickled her large nostrils, her trunk would rear back and she would release a sneeze. With most non-macro furries, that wouldn’t be a problem. However, to an elephant, a sneeze could be a huge problem…and for Veronica, saying her sneezes was a problem was pitiful. No, her sneezes were chaos and disaster themselves.
When she feels even the slightest sniff start to build up into a sneeze, she rubs her trunk, making it wriggle less and makes it seem like there’s no problem. However, if 10 seconds go by and the rubbing doesn’t work, her trunk will visibly start to shake. When she wasn’t famous, this caused no problems at all. She lived where many flowers would tickle her sensitive trunk constantly, and her sneezes, even though they were just as powerful, never were held back, so the wind that was generated from her sneezes back then were tiny compared to what she does now that she’s famous.
Holding back a sneeze is something no large animal should do, especially whales, some sharks, any macro larger than 20-feet tall, and elephants. Veronica’s parents weren’t…smart. They taught her to hold her sneezes in no matter what if she was in the presence of any animal other than elephants. This was the root of the problem, but the results of the problem are much more dramatic.
During Veronica’s 13th model stop in a tiny town of only 550 people, a daisy flower blew in from nearby and while she was taking a deep breath of satisfaction, listening to the crowd cheer as she did her thing, the flower got sucked inside her right nostril. Having such large nostrils most of the time isn’t a bad thing. It made breathing a lot easier for her to do, and it also was a heck more attractive to breath through her trunk rather than constantly have her mouth open to breath through. Having these natural traits though made the daisy get sucked right inside her trunk, and that’s when the first disaster started.
For the first 3 seconds, she only paused, shrugged, and then continued on with her performance, listening to the crowd cheer. As she moved to her left, the flower inside her nose moved along with her, and when she waved her trunk to the crowd, the flower broke apart into tiny pieces, the pollen trapped in the flower was scattered all throughout her trunk. All of this took less than 10 seconds in order to happen. It was then the crowd realized something was wrong.
Veronica was still waving her trunk around, but the people watching her could see the sneezy look in her eyes and the wriggling of the trunk while it waved around alerted people to her situation. Unfortunately for the people in the town, they decided to stick around, stupidly thinking this was somehow part of her show. Veronica gasped as she saw what the people were doing, and she tried to warn them to get away. In taking a breath to try and speak, she made the tickle in her nose intensify tenfold.
“What are you people do…ooo…ah…aaahhh…” This lasted a full 20 seconds of her having larger and longer hitched breaths. The trees in front of her trunk swayed toward her with every intake of breath she had, and Frank was the only person that wasn’t frozen, and if he didn’t yell out an order to get down, the sneezy fit that followed could’ve killed some of the audience. While everyone got low to the ground, their heads facedown, Veronica was still holding her sneeze back. She had been fighting this tickle now for over 45 seconds, her eyes tearing up, but she knew she couldn’t hold the sneezes back any longer.
“HAAAA…AAAAAAHHHHH…WAAAAATCHOOOOO! AAATCHOOOO! HAAAAAT… whew...sniff sniff…AATTTCHOOOOO!!!!!”
Each sneeze blew a cannon of wind that was strong enough to collapse the houses nearby the stage she was on. Still she felt sneezy, and while her trunk once again wrinkled up and she started to hold back the sneezes yet again, the people finally understood to start to run away. Panic was in the air as screaming citizens ran for their lives as Veronica held back these sneezes even longer than the ones before, knowing she had to let her fans escape from her own sneezes.
The longer any large animal holds back a sneeze, the stronger it becomes, and Veronica’s trunk followed that rule of sneezing perfectly. The huge sneezes that followed were louder, more powerful, and more damaging than her previous 3 sneezes from before. She sneezed 5 more times before the daisy was completely out of her trunk, but when she opened her eyes to view the damage her sneezes had caused, she couldn’t believe it.
Over 20 houses were obliterated from her sneezes. She’d only sneezed 8 times, but the wind that was produced from these sneezes was so powerful it destroyed 2 houses at a time. Thankfully, no one was hurt, so this didn’t appear on the news. No major city cared about a little small town. If word had gotten out…she shuddered at the thought of it.
She had gone back to small towns before, just so she would feel better about destroying over half of the one she visited before, and for the most part, every time was fine. One thing she loved about main cities was that there were no wildflowers, but in the towns, there were. Every time since that first disaster, she brought allergy medication. During her last visit to another small town, she discovered that the allergy medication does have its limits…she shuddered at that memory too.
Frank sighed, and then focused back on the road in front of him, speeding up a little bit. He too was there at their last town stop…and he felt like a fool for allowing Veronica to step foot outside the limo. Their last stop was to a large town called Ginger Town, and it had over 1000 people living in it. The only thing that kept it from being a full-fledged city was the fact that there was no Mayor and no main business that set itself there. Also, the houses were so different from everywhere else that people thought ancient people lived here. Both Frank and Veronica this would be a simple celebrity trip that wouldn’t go without any problems…boy they were wrong.
Ginger Town, unknown to them, was previously named Flora Town. If it hadn’t been changed, Frank would’ve personally stopped this stop. Flora Town was well known in most of this part of the country for being a haven for the rarest wildflowers in the whole world. This spelled serious trouble for Veronica’s allergy to pollen. Even with the medication working at its full capacity, it was no match for the hundreds of different wildflowers that grew there. Veronica couldn’t even make it 2 minutes.
She was performing and showing off, just like she always did, and she was secretly glancing all around her. The flowers were everywhere, and she was praying the whole time she performed. She took a quick bow in the middle of her performance and her trunk went close to the platform she was standing on…and it went crazy.
Right under the platform was around 50 types of the rare wildflowers, and while she was performing, her mind was too distracted to notice anything wrong. When she bowed, her trunk brushed against a huge cloud of pollen that had formed while she was moving around. She didn’t even sniff, the pollen was just so thick that only that swift movement of her trunk scooped up the pollen like a sponge…and that’s when Veronica felt the tickle.
Looking frantically around, she no longer focused on her performance and looked at the stage around her. Everywhere she looked, there was pollen. Her weight had caused the platform to slightly move with every step she took, making more and more pollen scatter all around the platform. Instantly the wriggling happened, and unlike the previous crowd, this crowd wasn’t standing around. Instead, they were doing something that shocked Veronica. One of the popular citizens cried out “SAVE THE FLOWERS!!!”
In a frenzy, while Veronica was fighting the sneeze before her first hitched breath, the citizens rushed all around what seemed to be everywhere, digging out the rare flowers and then running to safety. One incredibly small child, a duck, was thumping up to Veronica, a rage clearly shown on his face.
“You big stupid head! Look at what you caused! Now mommy is crying and it’s all your fault. TAKE THIS!” He may have been small, but he could still fly…and he was stupid. He flew right at Veronica’s quivering trunk and slapped it constantly with his wings, feathers brushing against the moist pink nostrils and causing them to flare up. Thinking his plan to make this stranger leave his home was working, he continued to slap his wings on the long trunk, making each second agonizing for Veronica. She was crying, sneezy tears falling down her face as she couldn’t hold back her building hitched breaths any more.
“Ha…haaaa…”
The small duck continued to swipe his wings at the trunk, making it wriggle faster and her nostrils to flare up even more.
“HA…HAAA….AAAAAHHHH…”
The mother of this child, finally seeing what her son was doing, shrieked and frantically flew up to her son, stealing him away just as Veronica’s tickle in her nose reached its critical point.
“HAAAAAAAA…AAAAAAAAAATTTCHIOOOOOOOOOOO! AAAACHOOOOOOOO!”
With those incredible 2 sneezes, she managed to get rid of a lot of her irritation in her trunk, but the kid’s slaps had caused her trunk to still think that it was being swiped at, even though the kid was gone. Looking cross-eyed at her trunk, she saw loose feathers brushing against her trunk, creating this sneezy feeling. The citizens watched in horror as more sneezes exploded from her, the last sneeze causing her whole body to recoil backwards and she fell off the platform. The damage…well, it was really bad. Over 50 houses were destroyed because they were made from grass and mud instead of the logs that were used almost everywhere else.
With that, both of them shuddered. Frank mentioned something about the weather, but Veronica didn't care. This will be my last time going to a town to show my stuff. After this, no more. I can't stand not knowing if I'll create mayhem every time I come out here to the middle of nowhere! Oh well, nothing will happen now. Frank took care of everything. This shouldn't be a problem at all. And with that, they arrived at the village of Mayor Turns.
