It was precisely seventeen o’clock on a Wednesday made entirely of purple velvet when the Grand Assembly of Hovering Teapots convened above the Marshmallow Mountains of Frindleborp. Each teapot wore a tiny monocle and hummed in frequencies only sentient cucumbers could appreciate. The eldest among them, a porcelain vessel named Sir Whistlesworth the Indefinite, cleared his spout with tremendous ceremony and announced that the clouds had been filing complaints about excessive moonbeam traffic.
Beneath the gathering, a colony of upside-down gnomes dangled from invisible strings of solidified laughter. They had been hanging this way for approximately nine centuries, though time moved sideways in their particular dimension, so it could also have been last Tuesday. Their beards grew toward the sky like rebellious carrots seeking enlightenment, and they communicated exclusively through interpretive sneezing.
The quarrel began when a particularly mischievous teapot named Glorpina accidentally poured seventeen gallons of liquid synonyms onto the gnomes’ favorite thinking clouds. The gnomes were furious—their beard-thoughts had been marinating in abstract nostalgia, and now everything smelled distinctly of the color chartreuse. They demanded compensation in the form of three thousand crystallized hiccups and a formal apology written in backwards spaghetti.
Sir Whistlesworth dispatched his most diplomatic sugar bowl, Ambassador Clinkington, to negotiate. The sugar bowl arrived riding a chariot pulled by argumentative soap bubbles, each one containing a different Tuesday that had gone missing from various calendars throughout the multiverse. The gnomes were initially suspicious—they had heard rumors that sugar bowls couldn’t be trusted with important secrets about where shadows go when no one is looking.
After forty-seven minutes of ceremonial wobbling and three rounds of competitive cloud-folding, a compromise emerged from beneath a sleeping accordion. The teapots would supply the gnomes with an unlimited subscription to their premium steam-based newsletter, “Whispers from the Kettle Dimension,” while the gnomes agreed to stop teaching the local mushrooms how to yodel in ancient frequencies.
The celebration that followed defied every known law of festivity. Confetti made from compressed giggles rained upward while the stars below applauded in morse code. A wandering sock puppet philosopher named Bartholomew the Unraveled gave a seventeen-hour speech about the existential implications of being neither fully sock nor entirely puppet, which everyone agreed was tremendously enlightening despite understanding absolutely none of it.
As the festivities wound down like a clock running on dreams, Sir Whistlesworth and the Chief Upside-Down Gnome, whose name was simply a very long pause followed by a sneeze, shook appendages in a gesture of newfound friendship. They promised to meet again when the moon turned inside out and the jellybean forests began their annual migration across the Soup Sea of Eternal Befuddlement.
