She Doesn't Know the First Thing About Halloween, but She Can Make You Into a Ghost

A pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09

You already know that someone is having a bad day when you walk in on an 82-year-old admiral back from retirement talking with a 95-year-old commodore also back from retirement, and the admiral is saying to the commodore, "No, this is just human nature at work. We're just so old that we can't remember when we were this arrogant and stupid."

The commodore lifted his head off the conference table and responded, "Admiral, you don't live to be our age if you don't forget how to be this arrogant and stupid -- what in the trick-or-treat foolishness is this incident?"

"That's what I'm saying," Adm. Benjamin Banneker-Jackson said. "That was eight decades ago for you and seven for me, and almost as many decades since we were young men. We don't even remember what is like to see the glory and say things like 'I'm not going to let some horned pumpkin king keep me from what I came for!'"

"Well, as last words go, that's pretty memorable," Commodore Wilhelm Allemande said, "although he did, in fact, get kept everlastingly from what he went for."

When you look carefully at a Vergildian Budding Queen Mother, you can see the deceptively vague resemblance to a humanoid shape holding a long scarf or coat with a horned pumpkin for its head. But if you look carefully you can see its children budding off it from almost every angle, and also its many long tentacles. This is an amphibious aquatic creature, occupying the seas above the rich mineral deposits of Vergild 5, a planet that is 95 percent water.

Both the consortium star fleet and sea fleet had made the note -- Admiral Dietrich Bonhoeffer had done the study in his lieutenant days in the sea fleet of how Vergildian Budding Queen Mothers were intolerant of anyone disturbing their territory while they were budding, and how they could organize their colonies to overrun the islands on which land-based animals had to set up their bases. The star fleet had not allowed commercial interests to set up shop on the planet -- but a medical emergency on a nearby plant had called the guardians away.

Enter the gutsy individual who had been waiting and planning for this opportunity ... and also author of the famous last words "I'm not going to let some horned pumpkin king keep me from what I came for!"

Today, the budding queens of Vergild 5 reign supreme and untroubled, not knowing about Halloween or pumpkins, not needing to know. It is enough for us to leave them alone, and not be made into ghosts for our trouble.