Goopa crawled out from beneath her rock as she did every morning, and cursed the universe for letting her survive the night. Her temper was short, but her attention span was even shorter, and she forgot her anger as soon as she saw the TV.
No one in Little Keltarr would ever be able to afford a television, since such wealth belonged strictly to their human masters. But the humans had been kind enough to give their servants public televisions, like the one outside Goopa's hovel.
It was playing her favorite show, Embers of a Burning Heart. Embers was everyone's favorite. In fact, it was the highest rated show of all time and the reasons were obvious:
"There's a man to see you, Mrs. Burns," said a female troll on the screen. "What should I do?"
"Send him in!" the beautiful Ember Burns answered.
He entered - a mysterious man; tall and bronze in a very expensive black suit. Probably it was all the way from Krin.
"Do I know you?" Ember asked calmly.
If only I could be so bold, thought Goopa.
The man on the screen smiled. "How could you forget your own long lost brother's ex-ex-ex-ex-ex girlfriend's cousin's doctor's third illegitimate son by your mother's old bridge partner?"
Ember thought for a second. "Jake Mead!" she shouted. "I can't believe it! You've changed so much!"
Goopa's heart almost broke when the man said, "I've come to ask you to marry me."
"Oh, Jake..." Ember lowered her head. "I'm already married."
"Geeze!" he whined. "It's always like this when I'm the lover from the past. I mean, Ember, we could have had it all."
Goopa was near tears, but then:
"We can still go out..."
Jake looked shocked. "You would really cheat on your husband for me?"
An evil smiled danced across the woman's face. "Take me, Jake," she whispered.
"Well, okay."
The scene was over, and a message appeared on the screen. A voice read it aloud, for those viewers who were illiterate:
EMBER BURNS WORKED HARD FOR WHAT SHE HAS.
WORLDCORP DEPENDS ON EVERY TROLL'S WORKING HARD, TOO.
PERFORM YOUR DAILY DUTIES,
THEN WATCH SOME MORE TV.
Goopa took the message to heart. She crawled back into the hole under her rock, and pulled out her metal pail. Her duty was simple: she'd fill it with water, report to her station at the chemical testing center, and wait for something to come along that she could dump it on. Usually there were only fires, but every week or so one of her fellow trolls would go into shock after tasting or being injected with some new formula or another, and she'd be there to splash him - or her, or it, as the case often was with trolls.
Hard work. That was where the action lay for her kind. Toil and trouble, overtime's double. It was one of those rhymes they made up so the dumber trolls would remember that they got two cents an hour if they worked extra long. Goopa didn't need the rhymes, but those two cents would do her some good someday - when she was rich and famous like Ember Burns...
Maybe someday she'd be on TV with Ember. Why not? She was just as cute. If it weren't for her tail and the little horns on her head, she'd be prettier than any sixteen-year-old human girl.
When the TV began to repeat its inspirational message, Goopa knew she'd been daydreaming. She was still a troll, and WorldCorp was still counting on her hard work.
She lived in one of the more grandiose areas of Little Keltarr, with both a TV and an aqueduct within three spitting distances. She went to the aqueduct now, both to fill her pail and to greet her brother, Nabuu.
The little tyke was sound asleep in the murky waters. She made sure her pail knocked him upside the head as she filled it. He awoke in a foul mood, as was only fitting for a troll.
He popped to the surface, spraying her with water from his gills. "Go away," he snapped.
"Oh, wake up, Nabuu," she said, grabbing him by his soaking shirt. "You've got work to do."
Nabuu was only seven years old, but he'd been assigned an aqueduct-cleaning job because of his ability to breath underwater. Even the humans had to admit that every once in a while, the mutations of trollkind had their uses. Like her tail - she could hold her pail with it, and thus keep her hands free to grope the wealthier trolls who would pay a few coins for that sort of thing from a pretty girl, or pick the pockets of those who wouldn't.
Goopa put her brother down on the ground, and followed him as he slunk off towards the edge of town. Facing this way, they could see the towering skyline of Keltarr - the real Keltarr, Capital of the World, and home of John C. Frockeneller, chief executive officer of WorldCorp, the United World Corporation. They stopped and bowed their head for a moment as WorldCorp Tower came into view.
Other trolls were wandering around here and there and Goopa traded friendly snarls with one or two of the more handsome fellows. In Little Keltarr, as in all troll villages, more handsome meant more human.
By those standards, the man that approached her was repulsive. He was green, like her brother, but worse: he had fifteen eyes, ears the size of dinner plates, and a four-inch underbite that gave insects a nice place to rest whenever they grew too tired of eating his dandruff.
"Hello, Ralphie!" said Nabuu, before Goopa had a chance to turn her nose up at the monstrosity.
"Hey there, little buddy!" said the elder troll. Why he must have been thirty years old - about five years too long for any honest troll's lifespan. "Have you been working on your positive life outlook?"
"Sure, Ralphie!" Nabuu chirped. "Like you said, a positive life outlook can lead to positive life rewards!"
Ugh. Self-help junk!
"Let me read you something, little buddy. And, ah, you too, my dear-"
"I'm not your dear," Goopa growled.
He ignored her and pulled out a paperback book. The man had a copy of Bunt's Guide to Self-Improvement! What kind of degenerate was this? She could almost imagine Ralphie cavorting and carrying on with hundreds of filthy non-corporation dregs. He was definitely not a good influence on little Nabuu.
She grabbed her brother by the arm and led him towards the cleaning station he was supposed to be checking in at.
"Listen!" Ralphie called after them, "You don't have to go to work today! The humans don't! They can just say they're sick, and it's A-okay. And you're just as good as any human!"
That sent icicles down Goopa's spine. Hadn't she, just minutes ago, compared herself to Ember Burns? Sure, she was smart and pretty, but she was a troll and always would be. Dreams were fine, right? But Ralphie was suggesting that she actually act as if she were equal to a human. Unthinkable! Yet didn't she always dream of being rich and powerful someday?
She realized she'd drifted off again, and snapped her attention back to the real world. Ralphie and Nabuu were staring expectantly at her.
"What are you looking at?" she growled.
Ralphie spoke up. "I asked if you knew what Herbert Bunt says is what makes a human a human and not a troll or a biot or something."
"What's a biot?" Nabuu asked.
"It's a bad word!" Goopa said, grabbing Nabuu again and hauling him away.
"It's their Attitude!" Ralphie called after them, but Goopa lost him in the morning rush.
Nabuu had been working faithfully for three hours. It was fairly simple work: he'd swim through the aqueducts of Little Keltarr, looking for anything floating around in them. Then he'd toss it over the side and keep swimming. He tended to do it without thinking, and of course he had the imagination of any seven-year-old, so naturally he found himself hallucinating regularly. In all the time he'd been swimming and tossing, though, he'd never once imagined anything like this.
The little man appeared to be walking towards him - which was to say, he appeared to be walking straight up from the bottom of the aqueduct. In fact, he seemed much farther away than the floor. And if Nabuu swam away, when he looked down the man would still be there, and getting closer.
Except for the white paint he had all over his face and the great pink wig that stuck out in all directions from his head, he appeared to be human. He was dressed in a bright green bathrobe, with about twenty gold chains around his neck. There was a champagne glass in one of his hands, and a bottle in the other.
"Hello," said the man, as clearly as if he'd been standing on land and not underwater.
"Who are you?" Nabuu demanded as well as he was able through his gills.
"My name's Revel. And you," he said, "are a very lucky guy."