Cloudy bulbous gray jellyfishes sprout from the ground, shadowing the tallest buildings in their bodies of noxious gases. The leaders of the thirteen nations of Petidol were generously planting these bulbous jellyfish trees in other leader’s backyards, the only downside was that the byproduct of the planting process killed things. Leaders would look upon the growing bulbous jellyfish that were gifted to them, salute the generous offering, and then immediately command their armies to return the favor with more bulbous jellyfish or otherwise be tormented with the guilt of debt.

The use of guilt as a weapon of warfare had started three-hundred years ago. Queen Generous had ruled a ferocious throne for three decades, her methods being to submit her citizens to pangs of guilty conscious. She was known to invite those that spoke out against her reign to tea and shower them in confections, cakes, and chocolate candies, depositing in their hand four gold coins on departure. Such overwhelming generosity disorientated her target’s with waves of emotional indebtitude that clung to their brains like leprey eels. Speaking vile of a person – especially one of royalty – who had treated them so generously was like trying to coax water uphill.

One day in a small town in the queendom, a brutish gal became enraged when her husband returned home late drunk for the tenth night in a row. She grabbed a tin opener and used it for a purpose it was not intended for, but managed to complete successfully: open the skull of her husband. Hearing of this terrible crime, the queen took immediate action to make a statement of the woman’s vile act and invited her on a ten-day getaway on the queen’s largest cruise ship, The Extravagore. The gal was pampered every morning with beans on toast in bed and a steaming cup of coffee, brought to her by a parade of ten men on walking on their knees. Morning pastimes involved a round of eighteen-hole golf or a dip in the top deck pool heated by hand-shoveled hot coals. Luncheon came in the form of a two-hundred page volume that alphabetically listed every possible meal the queen’s personal chefs could prepare, salivating descriptions and gourmet photos provided. In the afternoon the queen booked thirty minutes out of her daily schedule to talk to the gal over remote video conference and check that she was relaxing and that any person demands or dislikes were attended to. The sun would set each day on a gal that was curled inside a cocoon of sheep-silk, auto-plumping, thermo-piped blankets. Since that benevolent smothering, neighbors say they haven’t seen the gal leave her house again.

When Queen Generous’s rule ended it ended abruptly. She died laughing, laughing because she saw what had been done to her, how her own game had been set against her, but by her time of realization it was too late. It was the first day of winter when the first package arrived. Frost had seized the castle like angry cellophane and the guards inside were struggling to keep the fires lit to keep her majesty warm. The queen’s supply of sheep-silk, auto-plumping, thermo-piped blankets were at the mechanics and wouldn’t return for another day or so. Queen Generous didn’t think much of her parcel because parcels of importance came to her all the time, she usually delegated them to other nobles in managerial positions to process. This parcel had written on it, “Please deliver to her majesty by hand. Sincerely, One Who Wishes Her Well.” Whoever this OWWHW was, the Queen was intrigued by the personal message which was signed using the pet name a past lover of her’s had given themselves. Inside the package was a hook-silk, auto-thumping, magma-piped blanket – a blanket of architectural warmth so radiant, so inductively seductive, that any blankets within a ten mile radius could be heard shuddering. The Queen would be warm that night.

After sleeping in the massaging embrace of the hole of a volcano, the Queen was in good spirits the next day. She started out covering for a few managerial duties when staff members had to call in sick due to sudden afflictions of flu from the cold weather. Despite her taste for generosity, Queen Generous had been the only body to come in contact with the auto-thumping blanket. The scale of the shortages of nobles and serfs and clergy was overwhelming by the time the sun had stopped climbing for the day. The Queen was furious that affairs such as tax documents that had failed the automation system due to poor handwriting or measuring the change in heights of the royal garden floral arrangement were now being handled by her. She was desperate and exhausted. And that’s when a second parcel arrived, on it were the words, “Please deliver to her majesty’s tired hand, by hand. Truly sincerely, One Who Wishes Her Well.” The Queen was exhausted, but again, intrigue found her the energy to investigate the parcel. Inside she found a typewriter that was a funny shape. It had extra arms, one for scissors, one for every color of colored pencil, another for a comb, and three that worked in unison to hold a flower stem and measure it’s height with a tape measure. One of the keys of the typewriter was bright red and said “PUSH” and so Queen Generous pushed it. The Queen slept soundly that night knowing that the administration for the day was being done – the multi-armed typewriter whirring through the night.

Parcels came everyday as minor ailments poked out of cracks in the Queen’s governance. Soon the Queen got into the habit of relying on the contents of parcel’s to complete the tasks that needing completing for a given day. Each parcel was the footstep of an invisible assassin – an assassin of the mind – stepping through the guilt quarters of the Queen’s mind. Through years of careful attendance, the Queen had suppressed any feelings of guilt or indebtitude that she was so attuned to by her own craft. The final blow was like a roaring leviathan meeting its end on a sharp needle that had been pinned between two rocks on a beach for ten years and the screaming giant just happened to trip and slip its head right onto the needle’s fine point. Thousands of parcel’s worth of debt crashed through the gate in her cranium and the Queen, for the first time since the start of her reign, felt a pang. A hunting knot at the base of her abdomen that grew like a snowball until the panging radiance beamed into a mushroom cloud of guilt and dread that swallowed the once-sturdy mind of the Queen. She was helpless to these new emotions which cawed for her attention like a sea of crows and smothered any other thought she might have tried to hold in her head. Queen Generous, driven by her own emotional snare of guilt, channeled all her generosity towards trying to climb the valley of guilt that OWWHW had built around her.