Three-Headed Snakey Man
From Mediwikiknightipedia, the free Medieval Knights! encyclopedia.
| Three-Headed Snakey Man | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
||||||||||||||||
| Scientific classification | ||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
| Binomial name | ||||||||||||||||
| Hominidus cerberusca (Huduwe Appreciate, 2468) |
The Snakey Men, creations and subjects of Lucifer Polydegmon, are both the most numerous and the most ill-designed creatures of the Air Realm, which is occasionally called the Air Plane by people who think they're being funny.
You see, snakes can't fly. Men can't fly. (Shooting them out of a cannon doesn't count, as that's more of a delayed plummet.) Snakey men, therefore, are doubly unsuited to flight, a rather critical way of getting around in a Realm composed entirely of floating islands in an endless sky.
(Some of the more educated - or crazy, since the two seem to go hand-in-hand - sages believe that it's a ploy by Polydegmon to keep unwanted visitors out of his palace. After all, if most of the locals can't fly, how are they going to get to his palace, which is on a floating island by itself?)
The flying creatures of the Realm used to charge a pretty penny to act as transports, but the snakeys (particularly the three-headed species detailed here) pulled a fast one and developed teleportation magic. Well, first they developed cannons, but that didn't work out for reasons detailed above.
Snakey Growth and Corporate Ladder Ascension
Snakeys with two or three heads often become experts in related fields, creating the ideal environment for rapid cross-field advances. This effect is magnified because snakeys have yet to develop a good bathroom magazine, leading to many opportunities for complex conversation during a snakey's waste-removal moments.There's a taboo against a snakey's heads going into wildly differing fields. Once every few generations, the educated clerical class decides the taboo is foolish superstition and attempts to create a super-warrior by teaching a three-headed snakey the arts of fighting, magic, and thievery.
Too late they realize that while a snakey can read books on art history, necromancy, and corporate accounting simultaneously, a snakey running endurance laps can't pick locks or study conjuring at the same time. Inevitably, they wind up creating a jack-of-all-trades with no advanced skills in any field and a mild case of tripolar disorder. Then, they realize the reason for the taboo, and write it into a special kind of holy book reserved for taboos. They place that book in the holy library, for future generations of clerics. There is much irony to be found in the fact that they often place the new book right next to the unread old taboo books warning of the same thing. Indeed, the irony would be so dense that it would kill several million snakeys by suffocation if anyone could just be bothered to take the damn things off the shelf and read them.
Still, there's a saying among snakeys that a jack of all trades is better than an alien who can't read a map. The origin of this saying has been lost in time, which means it's probably in a book somewhere.
External links
Click here for the most recent recorded encounter with a Three-Headed Snakey Man.
