Ozcelerando 2: Uplifted animals of Oz (Discussion)

[baloonworld]

The creative process ran something like this :
There's some scenes in Ozma of Oz when we're told that eggs are deadly poison to Nomes.
By the Road to Oz, Bill has 10 children, and next time we see the Nomes, in The Emerald City of Oz Bill has more grandchildren (grandchickens?) than can conveniently be imagined: clearly, Billinda is a self-replicating bioweapon not adverse to exponential growth when conditions favor it.

Elmyra objected to this on the same basis she objects to the bible: Virgin births and incest, so I thought about it for a bit, and I've realized that although Bill is the first chicken in Oz, there is a potential father.

In Ozma of Oz, Billinda is captured and locked in a hen house (In Ev, another fairy country), with a bunch of (I believe) baseline chickens, by a mad head-swapping lady.

One of the my favorite bits of Bill's characterization was that she was a tough independent lady who beat up the cockerel (later on she got a bit pretentious and absurd). Reanalysing that scene, I'm really squicked, because she totally did it with a baseline, and then beat him up.

Story below. Really kind of uncertain about it, especially the coda.

Comments

[lucy-k-p.livejournal.com]

I like it. It's a bit disturbing and creepy, but those are good things. It does make sense in the context of Oz.

(Other things not to think about with regards to Oz: no one can die. But people are chopped to pieces, buried alive, stuck at the bottom of lakes all the time. And they are concious through all of it.

[baloonworld.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear that it makes sense and is actually disturbing: I was worried that I'd make the hidious and hilarious error of writing GrimDark Oz. While that would be awful, I don't think anyone would be upset by it: you wouldn't care enough.