Your Advent Calendar 2021

Day 1

MaKo

Dear Corinne, I thought a while if I should revive this project again and by the time I got to a solution, it was almost december already and so I hadn't had the courage to ask somebody to participate on such short notice🙈 But the reason I decided to do it was, that mum was again willing to fill some chapters/days, so I was motivated to also put some work in.

The story that I will publish here came to me while writing a math test, well it probably shouldn't have come at this moment, but, it did, because of the test, so I wrote the beginning down. I hope it succeeds in amusing you and also bring you a little joy to your christmas time.

Here is, the first part of:

Take-chi, the 40 dwarfs and at least 80 shoes in different sizes.

Once upon a time there lived a prince in a faraway land. He was handsome, his face delicate and his features almost feminine. He had beautifully curved lips and when he smiled, it seemed as if the sun was rising over the whole world. Yet he was also lonely, for in his kingdom there was not a single human being for miles to come, who cared about his beauty.

His family were the 40 dwarves, with whom he grew up. Unlike him, they were almost all rough and gruff, but although they raised him, the prince kept his qualities, that is, basically, for sometimes there were days when he became outrageous and spoke almost like one of the 'poison-spitting dwarves', as he called them. These were all of the small men with a shoe size over 24, so about 30% of the guys. Why the size of their feet mattered that much? Well, we'll get to that later.

The prince's name was Take-chi, given to him by his mother before she was hit by a section control, a laser that whizzed through the forest at a speed of 10m/s, knocking down everything in its path. Take-chi, therefore, possessed no actual memories of his parents, in general, not much of people' s kind was present where he lived, beyond the forty mountains, almost no one strayed there any more....

The only times Take-chi really came into contact with a creature of his kind was when he went to pick up the shoes he ordered for the dwarves from an online supplier at the post office and met the older woman there, she was one of the few people who knew what lay beyond the forty mountains and that little men lived there. She was pretty, but also a little creepy.

Again, Take-chi got his bike ready to go, but first the tyres had to be inflated and the spokes oiled. The distance was not far, but it had already happened to him that he was forced to walk from the halfway point. He wanted to avoid this, especially because he quietly called the woman a 'witch' and preferred to spend as little time as possible in her presence.

After this was done, he went through his list again with a slightly furrowed brow, he wasn't quite sure if all 40 of them had told him the right size, there were a couple of dwarfs among them who wouldn't surprise him if their feet had grown a size over the last year, but they just didn't tell him, no matter what the reason. Whether they wanted to spite him or not, it made no difference, if the shoes were too small, he was allowed to order some more. So this was now to be avoided.

The brown-haired man sighed, it was a big responsibility to have to take care of so many personalities, but he had been doing it for so long, and the 40 little men were like a family to him. So he immediately exchanged his scowl for a smile and mounted his bike. He put the note in the straw basket attached to the handlebars, which his loyal friend Ryu-chan had decorated with flowers. So he set off for the post office.

The path led through a part of the dwarf village, Take-chi loved this place, all the roofs of the brick-built, round houses were thatched with straw and looked truly fairytale-like. The front gardens were always beautifully laid out, taken care of by the nine dwarfs, whose feet were between 21 - 22. One could almost say they were 'feminine', although they too wore long beards that reached to their waists. A little vainly, they also sometimes braided, or dyed their hair, which made Take-chi giggle a few times.

What was interesting, the dwarves didn't need genders to be able to procreate, everyone who hears about it has a different theory on how they do it, Take-chi knew the truth, but he had sworn to keep quiet about it, it was embarrassing for them....

By now the prince with the light brown, softly curled hair and green eyes, had arrived at the marshland, it was almost entirely made up of swamps and ponds, but if he wanted to cross the village border to the post office, he would have to pass through the area, whether he wanted to or not.

"Eyes open, watch out and through, then nothing can happen to me," Take-chi said to himself, got on his bicycle and started pedalling.