The Queen was pretty. But not in a special sort of way, which made the insecure ex-trailer park beauty-contest winner dependent upon all kinds of magical gizmos. One thing she had was a magic toaster, with shiny sides that somehow accented some of her more beautiful parts. The toaster talked, being a magical toaster, and while it did not make a very good slice of toast, it lied, which the Queen counted upon.
"Toaster, toaster on the counter.... tell me who is just friggin' gorgeous." The Queen could not rhyme either.
"Oh, you, I suppose. Want a burnt pop tart?" it would usually reply, but since it was a liar, the pop tart would usually be undercooked, and cold.
"No, I made pancakes," replied the Queen, who was also a liar, since she was such a bad cook, she could burn water. But this reply made her happy until the king would call out her name from bed, asking for her to feel his forehead because he was SURE he was sick again today.
And this sort of pathetic thing went on for year after endless year, until one day, the toaster shorted out in an attempt to make the pop tarts so undercooked, they would come back as a puff of flour, an egg, and some polymer-filling that resembled artificially flavored strawberries.
"Toaster, toaster who lies smoking on the floor, tell me, am I cute or what?" asked the Queen.
"Dang, compared to Yellow Snow, you look like a rotting meat wagon!" replied the toaster, partly because it was shorted out and not thinking properly, and partly because it was hoping the Queen would get so mad she would kill it, thus letting the toaster enjoy toaster heaven. But the toaster gods were angry with this lying toaster, and would not let it die.
"Who's Yellow Snow?" asked the Queen, looking for the reference to a possible rock band in her Columbia House CD collection. It might be helpful to the reader to point out that the Queen was so occupied in her own gold-digging affairs, that she had no knowledge she had a stepdaughter at all. She just assumed it was one of the servant's children who happened to sleep in a room called, "The Princesses Chambers", wore royal clothing, and called her "step-mum" when they bumped into each other during royal balls.
But it was true. Yellow Snow was the most beautiful woman in the whole kingdom, which isn't saying much, considering her competitors were spawned from trailer parks in the shadow of the castle, but it was enough for the toaster to notice. She wore little clothing in all the right places, had a body as smooth as moonlight, a porcelain face, and roamed about barefoot with rings on her dainty toes. She also had the kingdom's biggest hairdo, which boasted both art and skill in design, as well as rock-hard neck muscles capable of holding her body erect when she looked downwards.
"Well," said the Queen, after she figured out who Yellow Snow was by asking a local stable boy to which she had been giving sexual favors to, "this is a fine how-do-you-do!" So she set upon an evil plan. She phoned Arron Spelling and convinced him to do a new series based on LA Cheerleaders that are training to be EMT's but can't quite get the hang of it because they are too busy stabbing each other in the back over men who are all muscle and no brain. After she did that, she remembered Yellow Snow again, mostly because the girl was in front of her was complaining that she never paid much attention to her. So she sent her out in the woods to be killed.
The man who was to do the deed was supposed to bring back the immense hairdo as proof of her death, but it was a wig, and to the relief of both of them, Yellow gave the man the wig to take back, and she would strike her fortune in the recording industry. On the way back, the man was shot and eaten by a mad nephew bear from the last story.
Yellow wandered in the forest, looking about and obeying the nature trail signs. Suddenly, she came across a small flat building in the middle of nowhere. She went in, and immediately a long-range rifle barrel was pointing straight at her crotch.
"Where do you think you're going..." and the voice paused, as if it couldn't find the words, "... Mr. Guy wearing a dress?"
"I am Yellow Snow," she answered to the short shadow in the darkness. "And I am a girl."
"Duuuh..." said the voice, and stuttered out a warning cry, "G-G-Girl! No, really, a girl at our house!"
Yellow followed the short and fat man into a room dimly lit by over a dozen computer screens.
"Paranoid's stuttering again," said another short and fat man sitting amid a pile of Mountain Dew cans, and then turned around in shock. "Where'd you download THAT?"
Another short and fat man waddled through a pile of pizza boxes and stared at Yellow, blinking as though a lizard in strong sunlight. "Wow... you're... p-p-pretty?"
More small fat men waddled into the main area, looking at Yellow. All of them had glasses, bad haircuts, and were wearing badly fitting tee shirts with various software logos on them. Yellow had stumbled upon a nest of Nerds!
"I'm Paranoid," said the Nerd that had the gun. "Or so they would have you
believe."
"I'm Unhygienic," said another, wiping his hand across his nose before offering
a handshake.
"I'm Asthmatic," said another, sucking on his inhaler.
"I'm Myopic," said another, shaking hands with a swivel lamp.
"I'm Nosey," said another from inside Yellow's backpack.
"I'm Uncouth you whore," said another.
"I'm Analytical," said another, "and technically you're not."
"I'm in the wrong story," said a tall and handsome man, who immediately left.
"I am Yellow Snow," said Yellow, "and is this place always so soiled?"
Right away she began to clean through all the pizza boxes, soda cans, and all kinds of loose trash lying about the house. For days she swept, burnt trash, and tried to find carpeting. After weeks of this, she not only found carpeting, but an entire lower floor.
Back at the Palace, the Evil Queen was having a bad day. So bad, in fact, that she actually cared about it. It started, of course, with the toaster:
"Toaster, toaster, in the repair shop, I have to be the best now, face-wise, you know…"
The toaster had been fixed, but a bit too much. It in fact, saw the error of its ways and joined a New-age toaster church. "Would you care to buy a flower for the Church of Eternal Toasting Consciousness?"
"No!" said the Queen. "Just say I'm beautiful and all that junk!"
"Hah!" was all the toaster said before it was launched across the room by an angry Queen, who wanted very much for the toaster to say something along the lines of, "My Gawd, Lawdy lawdy you is fiiine, girl!"
"Then tell me, who is the most beautiful in the whole kingdom?" she demanded from the toaster parts.
"Uh…. including Yellow Snow?"
So, she was still alive! Thought the Queen, grinding the rest of the toaster parts with the heel of her shoe. She was determined to do something about this right away, because the "Fairest in the Land" Beauty contest was only a week away, and she didn't trust the judges, one of whom was a mechanical fortune teller left behind by a travelling circus.
So she went to the local thrift shop, and bought an old lady costume. She then got a mango, and injected it with so many poisons, it fizzed a brown froth from all of the needle holes. She then went into the forest, whereupon she discovered the remains of the hit man she sent to have Yellow killed. The wig was nowhere to be found, and in an unrelated story, it had run off and made it big in Motown. The woman followed the footprints of the little Yellow's tiny bare feet, which were now so hard from years of barefoot walking, they crushed tree roots and left scratch marks on stone. She finally came across a small little flat house, which had several dozen piles of pizza boxes and soda cans left for the trash man to pick up.
"I am old and weak, and poor… and in need of help. Did I mention I was old?"
Yellow was alone, in the middle of making a Power Point presentation for her roommates on why daily changing of socks would be good for them in the long run. She didn't hear the old woman at first, mostly because of the dozens of screen savers on all the Nerd's computers competing with each other to see just how loud they could be. But when the old woman finally screamed at the top of her lungs for an hour, Yellow looked up from her monitor and went to go see if this was just another noisy neighbor complaining about the volume of last night's Quake tournament.
"I am asthmatic, dying, have gout, poor, a wretch, need assistance, dar assitencia por favor-"
"Can I help you?" asked Yellow. The old woman was shocked. Yellow looked much different. Gone were her splendid robes and big hair. The girl in front of her wore no makeup, had on a pair of small round glasses, and her hair was twisted into two neat, tight braids. She was wearing a Comdex tee-shirt, a pair of faded jeans, and Birkenstocks. "Now that you have stared at my clothing to the point of its embarrassment, is there anything you want, or shall I just take Paranoid's laser prototype and reduce you to a pile of crystalline dust?"
"Uhm…" stammered the old lady, having not really thought out her "Old Lady Act" far enough. An inspirational thought suddenly dropped into her brain, and she threw herself to the ground. "I've fallen…" she stated, and then tried to remember the rest of the line, "… and … and I can't get up!"
Yellow was not convinced. Maybe it was the fact that the costume the woman was wearing was a cheap plastic mask held on by a thin rubber band, or the plastic poncho she wore was a picture of an old woman and had the words "Old Lady" written on it in disco-style lettering.
"Well, it's not like you are a turtle or anything, just flip over." Yellow pressed a button on her pager.
"Please eat my fruit!" said the woman, seemingly as a non-sequiteur , tossing Yellow the mango.
Yellow looked at the mango. The poisons had reduced it to a shriveled rock coated with a gray dust. "What, this potato?" asked Yellow.
"It's a poisoned mang--, I mean a juicy, wonderful mango, you idiot."
"Uh, huh." Said Yellow. Well, this was going to be an interesting day, she thought, watching the grass near the mango turn gray and shrivel.
There was a long an uncomfortable pause. "Did you eat it yet?" asked the old woman from the ground.
"Uh, yeah, sure…" said Yellow, kicking away the hard object with her foot into the undergrowth. "Not bad, for a potato-mango." There was another long pause. "Listen, lady, I don't know what you're selling, but we're a bit short on money this week, so if you could, would you just l-"
"Aha!" yelled the Queen, jumping up and ripping off the plastic poncho. "Now you will die, Yellow Snow, and I shall be the prettiest woman in all the land!"
"Man, what-EVER!" said Yellow. "I am making so much more now as a network engineer than I was as a princess. You can have the title for all I care."
"Not now she won't!" screamed a voice from the undergrowth, and a rocket grenade suddenly shot from a shrub and blew a hole the size of a roasted turkey into the Queen, who as you may have guessed, immediately died. But true to the Sam Pekinpah nature of this story, she died in slow motion. As the grenade blasted a hole in her chest cavity, a spray of super-heated entrails blew out of a large hole where her upper back used to be. They flew like from a seltzer bottle, splattering the forest with bits of meat and bone, with just a hint of melted vinyl that once used to be the frontispiece of a royal gown. The explosion launched her body a few feet off the ground, where it sailed in the air for about 12 yards before landing against a tree, shaking like a trash bag filled with sticks and Jell-O. Bits of melted royal jewelry tangled across the surprised Queen's face, as her last vision on this earth was that the royal jewels were in fact, made of plastic.
"Good show, Yellow!" said Paranoid. "Now let's hide this body, and pretend this whole thing never happened."
Yellow removed a large chunk of Queen that somehow ended up in her hair, and said, "Me? You are the one who launched that grenade!"
"Me??" asked Paranoid, as he pulled out a body bag from a dispenser near the mailbox. "I wish! I didn't do it!"
"Well if you didn't, who did?"
"The Queen is dead, long live the Toastanistas!" screamed a voice, and a toaster with a smoking grenade launched burst forth from the undergrowth.
So, in the end, Yellow ended up a certified Cisco routing engineer, and ended up so rich, she didn't know what to do with all the money. The dwarves, based on a dare, formed a rock band, and toured for a large wig in Memphis who now owned a recording studio. The Kingdom was overthrown by a violent toaster regime, partly funded by the US Government.
The moral of this story is, who needs to be treated like a princess when you can be a network engineer?