"Bless my soul," Chumley cried, throwing his last bone-dry canteen to the ground, where it crumpled into a pile of dust. He looked up from the small pile, slowly regressing towards the horizon as he moved ever forward, and surveyed the flat, dusty panorama of Nirrakal. Heat shimmered off its surface in ghostly waves, shaking the horizon in his vision. No water, nor plants, nor life of any kind was visible for leagues upon leagues. "This truly is... a vast and infertile plain." He was riding on the back of a tromedary camel, a strange leathery-skinned creature with three humps that he had rented - with a wooden nickel - from a crusty old man several days ago. The camel snorted and coughed, spewing saliva, and Chumley patted its neck tenderly. "There there, we'll soon be in Haidia. And there, we shall find Stephen Douglas!"

Little did Chumley know that he was entering the realm of the Megazord, a creature so terrible, indeed so vile, that no man dares come within a day's journey of it due to mortal peril. Chumley, what shall your fate be?

******

"Yes, I am on the trail of a great baggy beast," the wisened old fellow cackled, flipping a silver coin the size of a man's palm at the cringing old geezer. "My... client has many more coins much larger than that one to give to whomever can procure the beast. I promise to share the funds with you, if your information is revealed to be correct." They stood at the edge of the famed R'uuya, the spice fields of Fallien. In the distance, between the rows of unnaturally towering herbs, the tiny figures of migrant workers could be seen, sombreros clamped down on their heads, some taking hits from bongs they had constructed from potatoes. The coot stroked the silver lovingly, and then looked into this intruder's face.

He had a narrow head, with a hooked nose and curling gray moustaches in which black ribbons had been tied. His green eyes were sunken far into his pale skin at the base of his high forehead, upon which a pith helmet was perched. All in khaki, he stood in heavy tanned leather boots, smoking a cigarette from a half-foot long holder. Three of his bodyguards, minotaurs holding heavy cudgels, stood a few yards behind him, mooing softly to each other. Like most of those who lived by roaming across Fallien's infertile wastelands, this conniving old man hated foreigners, and wanted nothing better than to smear his own excrement all over this man's corpse while carving up his mother with a butcher knife. But the minotaurs prevented him.

"If you can answer my riddle," the man, shriveled under his black robes and bushy white hair hissed, "Then I will tell you where the elephant went." The pith helmeted man considered his options, and then nodded. With a screeching laugh, the old man leapt to his feet and began a fast dance, his feet flashing in and out of his robes in high-kicks, revealing shapely calves and delicately woven hemp sandals. Mildly surprised, the fellow in the pith helmet looked up as a loud humming began rising up from the spice fields. The migrant workers had tossed off their hats and were now shaking the herbs in time with the old man's stomping rhythm, creating plumes of colored spores that seemed to match each flat and sharp perfectly. Whistling a few very fast bars, the old man cackled again and opened his mouth with a rousing song:

"Though I live in a place with a lot of room
I can't stand it there, and I so must confess
That I flee, oftentimes, to an outside gloom
To quite another place where I take my rest!!

"A seaturtle," the man with the helmet said immediately, and the old fellow stopped in mid-dance, collapsing onto his rear end.

"I had four more verses!" he cried, shaking tiny, grimey fists. All he got was a shrug in reply, and so sighed. "Very well. The elephant asked where Haidia was. I don't know what Haidia is, so I rented him my oldest camel - for a wooden nickel - and sent him off into the Nirrakal. He'll be dead by now, I'd imagine."

"Thank you," the pith helmeted man said, kicked the old man in the stomach, and walked away, his minotaurs in tow, toward the Nirrakal.