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03/02/2005: "The Pied Piper of Hamactor – Part 2: TooYoo’s Axe Cuts"

While life was definitely better without the rats, the townspeople were quickly getting used to their new prosperity and couldn’t abide the thought of sacrificing any of it to pay Laugher. He was eventually driven out of the town by the soothsayer guild. What the townspeople didn’t understand was that the only real effect of Laugher’s music was to drive the rats to reproduce at an ever increasing rate. Jorjee, who took over as mayor after Ronee retired, was concerned enough about the growing population of rats outside of town to ask the people for axes to kill the rats, but this made the people angry because they had read on his lips a promise of no new axes. Thus Bilee, one of Jimee’s clan, became the mayor. His approach was to lead expeditions to collect the rats and lock them up in a big box. This started to work, and the townspeople began to hope that the rat problem was solved once and for all. Unfortunately, when it came time for Bilee to retire, his apprentice, Woodee, called Owl, was overheard babbling about the box that Bilee had used to lock up the rats. Thus the townspeople instead elected TooYoo, Jorjee’s son, whose praise for Laugher caused the townspeople to fondly remember Ronee and his wizard. Soon the strains of Laugher’s music were again wafting through the town, but this time the rats didn’t flee. Indeed, not only did the population of rats up the river start to grow again, but the rats locked up in the box soon exploded out of it. The townspeople started to get uneasy, but they still trusted TooYoo, whose folksy ways reminded them of their beloved Ronee. They allowed TooYoo to let Laugher keep playing. The result was a terrible tragedy. The more Laugher played, the more the rat population exploded. And no longer were the rats content to stay up the river where they had been. When some of them saw that their fellows had escaped from the locked box, they started joining them back in Hamactor. “Don’t worry, axe cuts will kill them!” shouted TooYoo, but the more axe cuts they took, the more the rats advanced, slowly but surely.
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