Weekend Reads #28: Writing Myths #7, #13, & #17: The Baboon King

November is more hectic than I expected. Good thing I didn’t bother with NaNoWriMo but now I’m behind on my Writing Myths posts. It’s the 20^th of the month and I’m just on prompt 7. There are 20 prompts total so I have 10 days to complete the remaining 13. Can I do it? We’ll see.

This post is longer than usually because I got carried away a little. For this one, I’ll combine three prompts:

Write a myth to explain why birds fly and fish swim.

Write a myth to explain why snakes have no legs.

Write a myth to explain how bees got their stings.

It’s the baboon king that made all the animals in world. The Creator made the first baboon out of pure idleness. His mind fancied a character and the Creator was so entertained by what he thought of that he made the character real. That’s how the baboon king came to be.

The baboon king was the Creator’s companion and friend. He spent so much time with the Creator that he adopted some of the Creator’s mannerisms and grew to be almost as wise as the Creator. Though he cherished his friendship with the Creator, he longed for others like himself to populate the world so he made more baboons and branched out to make other creatures that we now know as animals. He even made wee insects, at first to see what’s the smallest thing he could make.

Back then, all the animals walked on land, even fishes and birds. One day he called a meeting, set for noon, to discuss the state of the animal kingdom. He was aware that some animals were growing weary of these meetings so he secretly decided to bless the first arrivals with a great ability.

As you probably guessed, the birds were the first to show up. They were out since dawn pecking the ground for worms. For being punctual, the baboon king gifted them the ability of flight to give them an advantage over all the other animals that must remain on land. By half past noon, the majority of the animal kingdom had shown up, all except the fishes, and though the baboon king wanted to wait for them, he knew it was silly to keep the animals cooped in one spot for long so he began.

It was a short meeting, no more than 30 minutes, but to this day, no one recalls what it was about. You see, there was a distraction a few minutes in. The snakes had been whispering in the ears of the grizzly bears, trying to incite them to rebel. They wanted to overthrow the baboon king and install one of their own species as king (many of them wanted the anaconda to lead because he’s so big but some looked towards the black mamba because she’s lethal).

Their plan: Throw the bears in an uproar by telling them that the baboon king planned to ban their yearly hibernation vacation, which would make them argue with other animals and start chaos; reveal the baboon king as a weak leader because he won’t be able to stop the chaos; set all to rights and put a snake in charge. They thought it was a decent plan.

What they didn’t know was that the insects were the baboon king’s little spies. One of the bees overheard the snakes’ whispers to the bears and, thinking something was up, told his swarm to see what the snakes’ plans were. They did so and reported to the baboon king. Annoyed by this silly plan, the baboon king sent a bee as a mediator to pacify the bears and assure them that their hibercation would not be banned. A few grizzlies were pacified but others roared in anger because they wanted the snakes to succeed with their plan. Noticing this, the baboon king gave the bees stingers and instructed them to sting them into submission, inconspicuously.

The other animals were so distracted by the bears’ odd behavior that they hardly paid attention to the baboon king’s speech, especially since he paused so frequently to converse with the bees. By the end of the meeting, the snakes were so furious that their plan had failed that they openly tried to convince others to rebel; but, realizing this, the baboon king altered their tongues so it would always interrupt their speech and, to further punished them, took away their legs so they’ll always crawl on their belly.

Around this time, the fishes finally showed up. They were all bleary eyed since they were all hung over from a crazy party they threw on the beach the previous night. They drank too much water, got drunk, and slept out the meeting. The baboon king was so angry by then that he banned all fishes to the ocean so all they’ll ever do is get drunk on water.

This is also a Weekend Reads post so here’s what I’m reading this weekend:

I FINALLY completed She. I’m so happy to be done with the book. It was so boring. I hope Warren the 13^th and the All-Seeing Eye will be loads better. I requested the ARC of this book back in October from Quirk Books and intended to read and review it before November 24^th, which is when it will be published, but She ate up all my reading time. But better late than never.