Long, long time ago in the days of yore in the prosperous kingdom of Elephantiston of Intermediate Earth, King Pacificus Atomus lived the life of enforced celibacy. The reason was quite simple but extremely convoluted. It was in fashion (you know… the in-thing) to have romantic encounters with divine entities, or at least magical (dwarfs, giants, fairies, elves, etc.).
So, one fine day, Pac (we are friends of his, we can call him that) decided that he, too, wanted to be part of the in-crowd. Consequently, he thinks of hooking up to a divine entity (preferably female), who:
- Was not claimed as a lover by his contemporaries, or else matching the stories with each other would be an added problem.
- Was accessible, so that he didn’t have to take too much time off from his general party life
After lots of searching in the hefty semi-religious tomes, he singled out Lady Gargles (Lady G. to us), goddess (lowercase “g”) of a brook which was nearby, and of divine origin to boot. So, he starts roaming the banks of Gargles, in search of the human personification of the brook.
Why?
See, claim whatever he may, but having connubial bliss with life-size jars of water from the brook was not (and still ain’t!) a conducive thought.
One fine day, he chanced upon an ethereal looking woman moving along the bank. He runs like a mad man, accosts her, and asks, “Are you Lady Gs?”
She says “Yes. So what?”
Well, she had no other choice than answer in the affirmative, did she?
You can’t “assert” to the king of the area, that he is nuts, especially when he has displayed exactly the behavior that supports the aforementioned omitted assertion.
Pac is all “Yo, I am part of the in-crowd”
He wastes no time, and conducts Elvish Marriage, with the damsel (another fashionable thing of the times, where you marry a woman but with certain deletions in the elaborate marriage rituals…. namely the start and the middle… keeping only the end…. which as all enlightened kings knew was the real reason for all the shekaboom!)
After an enjoyable (for Pac, i.e.) interval of time, he “realized”, that this was no goddess (note consistent usage of lowercase), just a girl from the nearby village, who kept sobbing uncontrollably and telling everyone what a bad BAD BAD man King Pac was. So, he cooked up a story, that Lady Gargles and he shall be away from the public eye, as she was shy of mortal eyes. Except his of course!
After a year of this enforced exercise in PR (enunciate it, if you may, in the reportedly national language of India), a baby boy was born.
The alleged Lady G, between heart-rending sobs: “All my earlier kids born this “elvish” way, I drowned in the river yonder. Please get this terrible kid out of the way. I promise I won’t tell anybody about all this.”
This gave Pac an idea. He tells the damsel to get lost (“and here is some radish moolah to help you remain lost”), and sends his truth-sayers to town with this “divine” proclamation:
The divine Lady Gargles bore to King Pacificus Atomus, thirteen (13) divine sons. They all were in turn divine incarnations of some distant divine stars (of the blinking type… not singing, duh!!). Hence, she divinely put them to their divine “salvation” (read “death”) but the last divine one, by divine chance could not be sent to his divine salvation.
TRUTH-SAYERS OF KING PACIFICUS ATOMUS. KINGDOM OF ELEPHANTISTON
The prince was named Terribelus, after the first adjective his mother thought up for him. Pac really “liked” the toothsome damsel, Lady G or not!
So Terribelus came to being:
- Son to a King (TRUE)
- Heir to a great nation (TRUE),
- Rumored to be the true-blue son of a real Goddess (FALSE).
Hey, don’t be this judgmental. Two out of three is commendable, when it comes to veracity of public opinion.
One small problem!
He believed the story. With all the bells and whistles!
He took to be all virtuous (holier than thou… and thou… and thou too!) And making really annoying visits to his “mother”, moving along the banks of the brook and calling out “Mommy dearest!”, in his exceedingly irritating contralto.
And Pac…. was very very sore (this went on for 12 years, you see)!
Why? Ok, please consider:
- He made up a story about marrying a goddess… Right?
- The goddess is the brook actually … right?
- The brook is still there ….. right?
So he can’t marry again, least of all from amongst the mortal women. However delicious looking they all may be to his celibacy-tinted eyes.
So he joins Terribelus on his sojourns to the river banks. MAY be, in search of the girl (who, we may safely guess, had relocated en famille to an arid desert far far away. in terror of regal love and its consequences!)
And there on the banks of Gargles, one day Pac saw a beautiful woman, in a skimpy fisher-woman dress. Definitely of non-divine fleshly origins. Pac had better words for that, but we shall not repeat them! As you MAY have guessed, his drooling wouldn’t stop for even the time required to exclaim “I want that babe!!!” Note the two extra exclamation marks. We will discuss them. At length.
And therein started the bad times for Terribelus.
Random Mythoscopy 
Yes, still there
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