The hulking, anteater-esque form of the transformed warlock loomed over Pamela, snickering as she spoke.

“Alright, Sleazy Jones,” she readied her crossbow, “I’m going to have to ask you to put your claws up and come with me. By order of the Royal Gourd.”

“Comes with yous?” the Sleazy Jones readjusted his bowler hat quizzically, “Hows am I supposed to dos thats when you’re ins your underwears?”

“What?” Pamela looked down to see her standard issue metal-clad skirt. “I’m not in my underwears!”

She looked up to see Sleazy Jones dashing down the street, pantsing passersby and cackling maniacally.

“Cockhamnit!” Pamela tossed her crossbow asunder.

TWNNNG

An arrow shot from her bow on impact, nearly impaling the left ear of a nearby soup vendor.

“Oh my gourd!” Pamela rushed over to the riled lady, whose crow’s feet seemed to be deepening by many magnitudes, “I’m so sorry, Mama Starface!” The lady was nicknamed as such after the large star tattooed on her forehead.

“Are you gonna buy any soup?” growled Mama Starface.

Pamela dug through her coinpurse, finding but a handful of dust. “No.”

“Then get outta my clucking face.”

Pamela hung her head low as she collected her crossbow and sulked away, doing her best to prepare herself for the arduous task of reporting the incident to Dorma, her superior officer.

***

“Are you clucking kidding me? Another escaped perp? ”

Faint light beat through the semiopaque windows of the Royal Gourd station as the brutish, imposing form of Dorma paced around the musty room, her heavy armor squeaking and scratching against itself.

“I mean, you’ve got to be kidding me, right? Tell me you’re clucking kidding me.”

“I’m clucking kidding you,” Pamela rasped weakly.

“Really?” Dorma perked up, halting her pace.

“Really what?”

“Are you really clucking kidding me, Pamela?”

“Well, no.”

Dorma growled like a leopard as she snatched the glass of brandy she’d only just poured and chucked it at the stone wall.

KSHHHKSKKHKKK

Shards of glass sprinkled over Pamela’s sullen face.

“Then why in the cluck did you say you were kidding me, you miserable little vitch?”

“B-because you told me to say that I was clucking kidding you?”

Dorma thrust off her gargantuan helmet and combed a hand through her thin crew cut. With a clunk she slammed her elbows on the table between them and glared at Pamela with her piercing yellow eyes. “You need to learn how to do you what you’re told, Pamela, and you need to learn quick.”

“But that’s exactly what I did?” Pamela shrugged, flabbergasted.

“Stop sassing me around. I’m not just another brainless scrub like all your pals at, hmmm, what was it now?” Dorma pulled out Pamela’s file and rifled through it like a dog in heat, “Ah, yes. Business School. This isn’t Business School, Pamela, this is the real world. The suit you’re wearing is made out of metal, not a wool and polyester blend. If you want to keep your job, you’d best remember that.”

Pamela wanted to launch into a diatribe to explain that truthfully she’d hated going to Business School and hardly identified with anyone who’d completed the process, but held her tongue.

“Just imagine, Pamela, imagine for me that the Royal Gourd was virtually unable to enforce practically any law. Imagine that we were incompetent and biased to all hen and created as many problems as we solved.”

Pamela attempted to imagine this.

WMPHHHH

Dorma slammed a fist on the table and blurted in indignation, “Why are you staring into space like that?!”

“I was trying to imagine all those things you said!”

“Well stop it! Stop imagining things, Pamela, unless you want to imagine me sewing a set of testicles onto you and then walloping them off!”

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to remove my ovaries if you’re actually planning on mutilating me?”

“Pamela,” Dorma heaved in frustration, gripping the side of the table as if it were a large, wooden stress ball, “They call me Dorma the Emasculator, not Dorma the Oophorectomy Technician. And I aim to keep it that way.”

“Okay then.”

“Now,” Dorma took a deep breath, pulled herself away from the table and resumed pacing, “Tell me everything about the perp and what went down.”

Pamela’s heart dropped down to her cervix as she beheld her monogrammed Royal Gourd notebook, flipping to the most recent page with shaking fingers. She squinted forcefully but found herself completely unable to decipher even a sliver of meaning from her own rushed scrawling, which was so sloppy and haphazard that it might has well have been written with a spaghetti noodle dipped in ink rather than a pen.

“Um, well, I think they were a wizard. Or a witch? I’m not really sure. And they, um, they transformed into a giant…a giant…what was it then…some sort of a giant antelope or something. I think they were wearing a top hat? Or maybe a monocle.”

“Great cock, Pamela, that’s a mess of a perp description if I’ve ever heard one. You’re not certain about any of those things you just mentioned?”

Pamela slammed her notebook face down on the table and stammered, “Well of course I’m not. The human mind is a fallible thing, Dorma, and even were I to feel I remembered the scene perfectly there are various subtleties and nuances in my own perception that could still easily lead me astray. It’s a huge flaw of our system, in a way, that I even have the authority to make such disastrous mistakes as the ones you’re witnessing.”

“Ugh,” Dorma grumbled and reached for her now shattered glass of brandy, “Pamela, hownowsabout you just tell me what exactly it was that this perp did and why you were pursuing them so I can enter it into the database and we can move on with our lives.”

Pamela gulped, realizing she didn’t remember that either. She looked back in her notebook, the only word of which she could decipher was ‘RAMEN,’ which she decided to vamp off of.

“They were, ehrm, smuggling crates of ramen noodles.”

“Excrete me, Pamela? Ramen noodles, you say?”

“Yes. Boxes and boxes of ramen noodles. Which they were, um, selling to street vendors tax-free.”

Dorma muttered something about tax-dodging scumbags as she wrote Pamela’s testimony down on a scroll in near-perfect print.

“Excellent. Now, Pamela, seeing as this is your thirty third strike, we’re going to have to demote you.”

Pamela nearly collapsed into herself. “Demote me?”

“Yes. Pamela, you are no longer a member of the Royal Gourd. You are now a member of…the Loyal Gourd.”

Pamela groaned and slammed her palms into her face.

Dorma opened another scroll and read from it blankly, “As a member of the Loyal Gourd, your standard issue steel-plated Royal Gourd armor will be replaced with standard issue paper-plated Loyal Gourd armor. Instead of a crossbow, you have now been issued a slingshot with a couple of pebbles for ammunition and a bendy straw that you may use to fire spitballs at perpetrators.

“As a member of the Loyal Gourd, your station will be as thus: you will watch, you will wait, and you will wave.”

“I’ll wave?”

“Yes, you’ll wave. Members of the Loyal Gourd must be exceedingly friendly to every civilian they encounter, and that is why you are required to wave at every single one of them, regardless of what you are engaged in at the time. Failure to wave will result in a demerit.”

“A demerit?”

“Yes. Each demerit you recieve will lower your number of merits. Whatever you do, Pamela, don’t let your merits get to zero.”

“How many merits do I start with?”

“Stop asking questions, Pamela, or I’ll issue you a demerit.”

“Okay.”

“Twerk on your tone of voice. If I were a stickler I’d say that ‘okay’ almost sounded like a question itself.”

Pamela swallowed what felt like a pool of venom bubbling in her throat as she choaked out the words, “Yes, misirrah.”

“Excellent. Now, go ahead, take your armor off and give it to me.”

“Wha—right now? Can’t I change in another room or something?”

“Remember what I said about questions, Pamela?”

Pamela sighed and began the laborious task of removing her Royal Gourd garb, setting it in a cluttered pile atop the table until she wore nothing but her beloved Royal Gourd dungarees.

“Take off the dungarees, Pamela.”

“But Dorma, I’m not wearing anything under the dungarees!”

“Time is of the essence.”

Pamela unhooked her beloved dungarees and handed them to Dorma, doing her best to cover her extremities as she shivered.

“Excellent,” Dorma chuckled and “Now that you’ve been stripped of your position you can head on home. You’ll be briefed on your new assignment soon.”

“Um, Dorma?”

“What?”

“I don’t have any clothes.”

“Ugh. Look, you’re really twisting my arm here, but I’ll see what I can do.”

Dorma fished around the room, eventually producing a large sweatshirt with an acorn on the front and large, white lettering on the back that read ‘I’M NUTS ABOUT SOCKINGBALLFOOT!’

“Thanks, Dorma,” Pamela wore the sweater as a dress easily.

“It’s back from my old days as a member of the EastSouthWestern Sockingballfoot Team.”

“I figured.”