All was not well in the Magical Land. Depending, I suppose, on one's perspective.
The unfortunates in the Lullabye League now toiled alternately under the hot sun harvesting ripe poppies under the screeching direction of their flying monkey overseers whipping them gleefully with apple switches. Cart after laden cart creaked its un-lubricated way back to Munchkinland hauled by many-coloured horses exhaustedly flashing epileptically from inhaling the miasma of poppy dust drifting around them. Even in their stables the straw was sparse and thin and it moaned piteously whenever they dropped a fresh load of dung on it.
Things were no better for the Lollipop Guild, their syrup boiling skills now diverted to the production of opium cake, locked in dark and airless subterranean kitchens twenty hours a day while guards in Ruritanean uniforms marched maniacally around and around them chanting "O-Ee-Yah! Eoh-Ah!" dementedly.
Some looked to the South for salvation, some to the Emerald City and Oz, but since that unfortunate mid-air collision between a balloon and a floating bubble in a fog bank that mysteriously appeared out of nowhere, no hope was to be had from either quarter. Indeed, the great walls of the city had fallen and amid the rubble sat a sad figure opening and closing a little hatch in a shattered plank of wood reciting feebly "Not never, not no-way, not no-how..."
Away to the West in dank stone castle atop perilous grim crags the sole possessor of the alternative view of the state of things in the land, was cackling with delight as her bunion ridden feet sank into the cosy luxury of her new lion-skin rug while she relaxed a while before the gong sounded for the afternoon shift change. Then right on cue a tinny sound akin to someone beating an empty oil drum with an axe handle echoed through the gloomy corridors. The weary workers each staggered down one level and resumed their toil.
"Scrub scrub here, scrub scrub there!" Her Supreme Wickedness screeched malevolently, moving among her captives dry-scrubbing the floors on their knees and wielding a long-handled bath brush on any upturned posterior that took her fancy. There were fourty seven and a half levels in the castle: new prisoners started on the top floor and no-one really liked to think about what happened when they finally arrived at the bottom.
It was a very, very sad state of affairs.
I suppose it might have turned out differently for them if Dorothy and I hadn't pinched Miss Gulch's bicycle the day before the great whirlwind...
----oo0oo----
Inspired by lonely-bicycle-in-the-forest :-)