Topic
The Legends of Ur
These legends were written by players like you as part of the Legends of Ur challenge. These legends have been on display in my tower, but I decided to share them here as well.
So, without further ado, here they are! If you would like to write a legend of a creature in Ur as well, feel free to post it as a comment here. To help get you started, here are some of the creatures in Ur: fireflies, firebog lizards, sloths, chickens, flying kittens, salmen, pigs... :)
***The Legend of the Elusive Fox, by Frodo Alpha-Turkey***
The fox was once a lonesome cave creature in the mountains of Ur, before the eleven giants even imagined Glitchen of the modern day.
Humbaba, one of the eleven giants of Ur, wished for a cloak made of the finest material. She sent out her finest huntsman: a pig: the strongest pork chop in shining silver armour; a butterfly: a creature with wings as blue as the sea; and a chicken: the most-sought after creature for its golden eggs.
They set out across the Great Plains of Xalanga, trudged through the muddy marshes of Jethimadh, and ended up in the caverns of Callopee.
The chicken turned to the pig, saying, "How now pink pig? Thou art our leader. Where to go now?"
The silver-laden pig is about to answer when a batterfly screeches at the other end of the cave. He turns quickly, then turns back, only to find that chicken is gone.
He snorts in the fashion of a pig, knowing that the chicken would have been no help anyway. He turns the other way; the butterfly follows close behind.
All of a sudden, an orange creature leaps in front of the pig. The pig snorts again, thinking this will be an easy match. The fox gobbles up the pig in a heartbeat.
The fox lunges for the butterfly, but misses. The butterfly- having a quick and clever mind- flys off toward Sura. The fox follows close behind, lured by the beauty of the butterfly.
In Sura, the butterfly remains quiet. The fox remains enticed by the butterfly. Humbaba comes down with a brush: the fiber of the fox is the finest material for a cloak in all of Ur.
Humbaba addresses the butterfly. "You have done well, young one. The foxes shall remain here, as their fiber will be useful for all future generations of Ur. I will always remain in debt to you; your wings will now forever be plated in sapphires as a token of my gratitude."
And so, here ends the legend of how the fox came to the forests of Ur. All because of one butterfly.
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***Zille and the Worm, by Momo McGlitch***
Zille was sitting on a rock, idly picking cherries and flicking them into the air, when a buttercrawl wandered by and nearly got brained by a falling cherry.
"R U Crayzee?" asked the creeping creature, "'m tryin' 2 walk here!"
Zille picked up the wriggling beast and looked at it. "What are you?... and why?"
"'Me Buttercrawl" the worm said proudly.
Zille turned it over "So where's the butter?"
The worm was silent.
"You don't want to crawl, buttery worm" Zille said flicking it into the air like a cherry, "You want to FLY!" and zap! the little worm sprouted wings and looped the loop.
"OMG! Ur Gr8!" shouted the Butterfly as he fluttered by.
"But remember worm - I want my butter!" warned Zille "... and cheese and milk products of all kinds - or else!"
Which is why the butterflies are so keen to make us milks and why we should give Zille cheesy reverence.
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***Friendly and the Butterfly, by Yeti Spaghetti***
In the beginning, there were fruit trees. All of Ur was covered in pink and red and the giants could harvest all the cherries they needed without ever staying far from their shrines. One day, as Friendly was out harvesting cherries to make his signature fruit platter, he noticed a tiny bit of blue flying around his tree.
"What is this creature?" he thought.
"Give me a massage," the creature said. "My wings are oh so tired."
Friendly did as was requested and the creature rewarded him with a glass bottle full of milk. Not sure what to do with this, Friendly shook the bottle. To his surprise, it turned into a stick of butter! But having never seen butter before, Friendly accidentally compressed it between his hands while trying to get a grip on the slippery object. When he opened up his hands again, he found that he was holding cheese!
"This would go great with my fruit platter!" he exclaimed.
And so the world of Ur got a taste of its first animal product. And it was cheese.
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***Tii and the Fireflies, by PANsy***
Tii was floating high above UR. The blue ethereal sky was spread out in all directions. Tii was not sure which Giant had imagined the sky, perhaps it was Tii's self. Tii did not keep track of such things. Elements. The combination of elements. Which compounds could be made with exactly 63 red, 109 blue, 82 green and 77 shiny. Which compounds could be made with the same amount of elements but with 23 shiny and 18 green left over. Those were the things that Tii kept track of. Things of interest! Things that mattered! Tii was thinking, “16 combinations of 4 that can be drawn from this set except if the number were prime…” There was a commotion in the distance. The other Giants were gathered together watching as Spriggan had just imagined something new for the Glitchen. There was a crowd dancing and singing; praising Spriggan for now they had….corn. Corn. Tii floated away dejectedly. There had never been that much praise over Abbasidose or Rubemycin.
Finding a rather dark deserted street to hide on, Tii settled in to do some relaxing number crunching. Noticing a light out of the corner of a few eyes, Tii looked to find a swam of fireflies nearby. They fascinated Tii who spent a long time watching them and coming up with various quantitative mass formulas. “I wonder if I could imagine something for the Glitchen that would be appreciated as much as the corn. Perhaps THEN they would praise me.” Using a few barnacles and the fireflies, Tii created something that was sure to be worthwhile. Floating back to the Glitchen crowd, Tii calculated the odds of success. “Shimmery, glittery, orderly, repeating pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions…they will love it.” Tii presented the crystal to the Glitchen and waited. They examined it and thanked Tii politely. They named it “PLAIN crystal” and then went back to the corn festivities. To this day, Tii still hates corn.
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***The Story of the Sloths, by Sequoia Baer***
This is not the story of how the sloths came to be.
That story is old, and dangerous, and far too long to tell on poles. For the sloths have been in Ur far longer than most suppose. Before the first butterfly flapped it's wings, before the first chicken warmed an egg, the sloths hid in the trees and quietly watched the world pass them by.
They did not go entirely unnoticed. Legends passed from glitch to glitch of strange creatures hidden up in the dry rocks of the north-eastern heights. It was said that if you mined the right kind of rock next to the right kind of tree, if you were very lucky you might hear a soft voice singing of copper and tin. These legends eventually came to ear of the Giant Zille.
Now normally Zille has no interest in animals, leaving them to her sister-Giant Humbaba. But these animals sang of stone and metal, not of meat and grain, and Zille was determined to hunt them out. Perhaps she had dreamed them herself, and then forgotten about it.
After much searching, Zille found the sloths and heard their song. She found it beautiful, and told the sloths, and they were glad. But they would not share their song with the glitches of Ur, because they were shy.
"What if the glitches loved metal too?" said Zille. "From your trees you can only watch them mine. If you spoke to them they could give you metal, and you could share your song in return." The sloths had not thought of this, and decided to give it a try.
And so Zille found an acolyte who loved metal with all their heart, and asked them to share their metal with the sloths. The sloths took the metal, and chewed it, and sang, and the acolyte was overjoyed to find themselves inundated with little metal snails, just the perfect size for building and crafting.
And so the sloths came out of hiding, and their songs of metal rang across the hills of Ur.
