Listening to Metal

the frozen north. a sword and black armour. lightning. a moonlit night. werewolves. a winter gale. ice floes. blood. axes. steel. the wind ripping through tree branches, waves crashing in the distance. the threat of sea monsters. fire. torches. stern brows. a dusting of snow on a man's beard as he gazes northward, at a force of approaching storm giants. Fire breath. Dragons. Sorcerers. A giant hammer striking the ground. A man's sword severing a giant's hand at the wrist. blood. fire. doom. doom. doom.

A Goblin Speaks

First of all, let me introduce myself as a goblin. My name is Zog. I am a red goblin. There are black goblins and orange goblins and green goblins too, and swamp goblins, and bogomils too. Hobgoblins are goblins too, I suppose. We red goblins is a little smarter than most of the other kinds, i suppose, and maybe we is the smallest too. People that walk around in the sun all day, men and elves and persons like that, thinks goblins are bad. We are not bad. We do what is in our nature, same as them. We steal from the two legged ones that build houses up there in the valleys and the plains, because that is what goblins do. If they did not like it they should not live there, above where we choose to live. We got there first.
People up there say we set traps for them and steal their children to live among our own. I suppose this is true. We set out traps because we like trapping and once again, if you do not like being trapped by goblins, you should stay away from goblins. We steal their children because they leave them where we can get to them and besides, some of them should learn our ways. What the surface dwellers do not know is that we send those children, as adults, go back among men and walk among them. We have our spies, same as anyone else, same as the elves and faeries. What the surface dwellers do not know is how many a beautiful young girl among them is charmed by a goblin friend and lead away to live with us willingly. They say the really wise among us, the tallest and the prettiest, have human blood, but i believe otherwise. Most goblins is ugly to surface dwellers and to be perfectly frank most surface dwellers is ugly to goblins. The flesh is so pale and fat up there, the living too easy, the teeth in the mouth lacking any sort of point and the nose a mere button on the face. There are a few of you that are beautiful to us though, and there are a few of us, usually kings and queens, that are beautiful to you, surface dwellers.
Most goblins is not that smart compared to dwarves or elves and such, but our smartest are even smarter than theirs. Goblin swords are second to those made by dwarves, and are better than eleven swords any day. Even elves know this. Goblin machines is as good as dwarf ones, and last longer. Nobody ever asks us how this happens, but the fact of the matter is that a few of us is very smart and those same goblins is usually stronger than the others too so as not to get bullied to death before realizing their true potential.
Goblins like to live under the ground, in caves, but we also live in tunnels we dig, and in houses we construct of stones, under dead forests and in places where the sun do not shine too much. We eat bread and meat, same as you, surface dweller, but spiders and mushrooms too and we farm the last two things underground for soup and such things.
Every kind of goblin has a king, or a queen, or both, and sometimes the goblins fight. Usually we do not though because usually we is in service of some kind of foreman; a dark lord of a god that lives at night or maybe an older dragon or some such creatures as i cannot name. It was us and the orcs that fought the elves and men in middle earth, yes, but the tales you read do not dwell so much on the many times we won, rather than lost. It is true that we hate gnomes but the gnomes started it by hating us and the same goes for dwarves too. We would hate elves too but they is too snooty to even notice us so we think little of them and spend our nights thinking of ways to trap gnomes and rid the land of them.
If there was one think i could say to a human, at least one of the humans that live on the surface and not the eyeless kind we have down here in the caves, it would be to give us a little respect and maybe leave a beer or two out unopened at night, because if you leave us a beer we will not steal your children or set fire to your house, and if you leaves us some food too we will take it as rent for that patch of surface you live on, above us, and we might even get used to you being up there and leave you alone.

What Exactly ARE the Yo Gabba Gabba Creatures??

Brobee is probably a shambling mound.

Ruby is 21 months old, and we watch a lot of Yo Gabba Gabba together. If you do not know about the show, you have probably googled it by now, so i need not explain it. My question, shared by nearly every viewer, is what the HELL are the protagonists. Sure, you can give the lame Richard Dawkins no mystery answer and say that they are cartoony creatures made by the designer Kid Robot to communicate a sense of otherness and friendliness combined, and to look cool to parents as they deliver repetitive diatribes, in song, on the virtues of sharing. Yes, fine, but from a more in-universe perspective, as Wikkipedia would define it, what the bloody hell are those things?? Dear Reader, at Blood on a Spaceguitar, we are uniquely qualified to identify monsters, so let me share my taxonimic assessments of them.


1) DJ Lance Rock is a well-known club DJ and is a real person. He really does have a sister, named Kemba Russel, by the way...so his sister Kimba is real. His character on the show has significant magical powers, most notably the ability to fly, and of course, to animate and de-animate the inhabitants of Yo Gabba Gabba land. Interestingly, he cannot enter that series of pocket universes without the aid of Plex.

Yes, Gabba Gabba land is a system of four linked pocket universes, with a common electrical grid understood only by Plex, who alone has the power to throw a switch and turn the lights back on if they go out. None of these places makes sense from a geometric point of view because Moono and Brobie need to be transported to a separate set, through the usual white void Lance Rock occupies, to go to a family house Moono must frequently return to. Each is linked to one, or two adjacent partners via a series of square dimension doors, though there seem to be invisible freeways running through the void that DJ rock walks through as he comes and goes about his business.

Dimension door? You heard me. That is a Dungeons and Dragons term and I use it proudly, because only Dungeons and Dragons gives people a perspective by which to answer such dorky questions in a way that has some objective structure. For instance, Dungeons and Dragons can tell you who would most likely win in a fight between a vampire and a mummy (almost certainly the vampire), or a goblin and a dwarf (advantage to the dwarf, but they are hereditary enemies and would never be fighting alone).

So, I picked up my field guides, a smattering of Monster Manuals from the first and third editions, and my memories of books I have lost.

The five protagonists clearly spend much of their time in a carrying case, as inanimate toys, by DJ Lance Rock. He also has a second, rarely-used case containing the members of Moono's family. Thus, they are animate toys, who enter a series of toy universes, by a godlike overseer. This, of course, including the extraimensional goofiness of invisible freeways and wierd geometry, usually going from couch to coffee table, is exactly how children play with toys. A toy will become animate, teleport to another room in the kid's imagination, or follow an illogical freeway through the air, to enter the frame of reference of other toys.

1) Plex. Plex really is a magic robot. Robots do not occur in any D and D campaign I would play, but they occur in some. The character is about a fifteenth level magic user, who is unaware or unconcerned with his vast powers, and plays the role of a loving caretaker to the others. The creature has perfect common sense and is incredibly patient and tolerant, he also has a sense of fun, friendship and play, though the concept of fun had to be explained to him, though when he realized what it was, he was able to put a name on feelings he had clearly been experiencing. Wierd Al Yankovik wanders through with his circus on his own somehow, and Jack Black, running out of gas on an invisible freeway, gets stranded there for a while, but mostly, Plex is responsible for beaming characters into and out of these pocket universes. He can even shrink the toy characters into a smaller frame of reference, the underground world of the oskybugs, with his amazing powers. For some reason, the logs in Brobieland need to be dusted by him, indicating that he is a caretaker of Yo Gabba Gabba Land in many unspecified ways. Clearly, this place is a sort of metaphor for a day care center or preschool, and he is a sort of babysiter. Give him teleport, dimension door, whatever, as long as it is not a combat spell, he probably has it. The character has an armour class of ten, by the way, and one hit point, because he is rendered comatose and nearly destroyed by a snowball in one episode, though his other powers are vast.

Now things get fun. Each creature clearly has elemental properties, of some sort, because the four pocket universes they occupy have an elemental logic symbolized by the character. Toodies is a land of perpetual winter and snow, Brobie's is an autumnal forest, Foofa's is a land of spring and summer dominated by flowers, and Moono's is a rocky and warm desert or moonscape inhabited by ants and talking cacti. Moono we know to have a nuclear family. and we have seen adults of his species, but the others we have not seen as adults. Each is in the mindset of a small child, and each has been an infant at some point in its existence. Brobie is four years old, but we do not know the ages of the others. Only Brobie required a diaper as a one year old. They all possess a stomach and eat food. Even Plex, the robot, comes from a design that must spend some time in the body of a small robot, with the mind of an infant, so childhood is universal even to the robot, who has the mind of a sensible but nonauthoritarian adult, has a baby niece. Presumably, Plex's highly intelligent mind needs to be educated like that of a human in order to function.

2) Easiest is Toodie, who is clearly a white dragon, or a white dragon with some blue dragon ancestry. She is a creature of a pocket universe dominated by cold, possibly also inhabited by winter fairies, where frozen lakes exist and salmon and trout swim under the ice. She may actually be dragonkind, with some human ancestry as well, because though the most energetic and impulsive member of the group, she clearly has a good heart and is far from evil. Even among evil species, such as blue dragons, there are good individuals, especially among the hatchlings, and Toodie is obviously a hatchling. It was not much of a stretch for her to pretend she was a dragon in the dress up episode, as it is not a stretch for Plex to dawn a wizard's cap. Toodie is human enough to get a cold, however, and need to be treated by Anthony Bourdain, the doctor. White dragons have some connection to that para elemental plane at the intersection of the elemental plane of water and the negative material plane, and that explains ToodieLand. It is scary to imagine how powerful and dangerous she will become as she ages, it is good that she will be extremely well-socialized.



3) Brobee is clearly some sort of shambling horror. This is not to say he is evil, and in many ways he resembles the DC comic character, the Swamp Thing, who was a person of the greatest possible virtue, comparing favorably to even Batman.



The DC comics character is actually an Earth Elemental, of the specialized type that represent the living part of the plane that is influenced by the positive material plane, and Brobee, since he has a human stomach and many other human attributes, is most likely a creature with an elemental bloodline which also includes humans, a genasi...though his shape and appearance suggest some affinities with the shambling mound..... It is my guess that Brobee will reach a point where he will assimilate and devour everything in his path, growing to enormous proportions, and the "party in his tummy" will be a very real apocalypse for Yo Gabba Gabba Land.



4) Moono is quite clearly a cyclops, but there is more to it than that. Cyclops are actually described in the volume Dieties and Demigods, with the Greek Mythology Pantheon, a rather obscure source. Heraclitus writes of a good cyclops, and they are clearly not all stupid and evil. Moono and his family are nice even by the standards of YoGabbaGabbaLand, a place where no real violence can possibly exist and evil is impossible. He is nice, even among very nice little monsters. He among all of them seems to have the stuff of a hero about him, Toodee showing the potential for deception and cruelty and Brobee being downright maudlin at times. He has a beast within him, and in the bacchanal of childhood play, bites his intimate friend Foofa.



Since we see his whole family, my prediction that the adults of his species were not borne out by future seasons of the show, he is essentially full size, though he towers over the rest of YoGabbaGabbaLand and is a giant by human standards. His family is very much like a human family. Unlike Brobee, he did not germinate from a spore, or like Toodee, hatch from an egg. I wonder about some attachment to the elemental plane of earth, however, possibly through a lineage including xorn, which would explain his columnar appearance.



5) Foofa is certainly the hardest to identify, so here my taxonomic skills are strained, but I think I have her figured out.




She is clearly connected to the Elemental Plane of Earth, specifically that current of living things that runs through it. She and the swamp thing, and Brobee, could share a summer home there. In the DC comic, The Swamp Thing, it was called The Green, and developed in detail. She also has faierie affinities, as evidenced by her desire to play the role of a faerie or faerie princess at every opportunity. She is the most analytically intelligent of the four children, though Moono is very inquisitive. She and Moono seem to be closer to each other than to the other monsters, though the two female characters, Foofa and Toodie, also share a bond, as do Moono and Brobie. She is a vegetable creature, a fact made obvious by the flower perpetually in bloom on her head. She is shaped like a sack, though a cute one, and it is my guess that she is neotenically arrested in some sort of larval form. Clearly, her bloodline includes high elves, faeries, and probably dryads or nymps as well, it includes some monstrous plant creature as well, my guess being a neo-otyugh, explaining her understandable pathos at having the mind of a sensitive and intelligent young girl in a body destined to, or suited to, grow into a horrible, devouring monstrosity.

A Goblin Poem

Oh, dark of night, may you last forever
And may the screech of the owl and howl of the distant wolf
beckon me along under your skies
to surprise the humanfolk in their beds
and take all their valuable possessions as they sleep,
to set traps for their brave warriors and foul the water
of their wells.

Oh, deep caves, may you stretch on forever underneath
the earth, feed and shelter me with your sweet batmeats
and endless rivers full of blind fish, may i smell the rock
below my feet and feel your coolness forever.

Oh, goddess of evil, Thuzok, queen of all goblinkind,
may you reach out your hairy arms to me and wrap me in
your bosom, for if I die under the foot of the Rok or
by the arrow of a treacherous elf, I will come to you tonight
beloved one.

Mighty Astaroth

A dangerous demonic prayer, revealed. DO NOT attempt to read this passage aloud, or it will have terrible consequences. IT is posted here for STUDY ONLY, in hopes that men of good souls will realize that such evil prayers exist.
Like everything else on Bloodonaspaceguitar, it is COMPLETELY CREDIBLE.

Holy Astaroth, please accept this offering of hot metal into your veins. I live to worship you, your foulness, you bringer of disease and corruption. Your power is decay, and sin, and the inevitable corruption of everything that is holy or beautiful. I live to bask in your ugliness. I would gladly sit at hour goat-heeled boot, your grotesque loveliness, an honor, to serve a demogorg such as you in Hell. In Hell, a landscape where you rule, alongside Satan, as almost an equal, a fallen angel in your own right, an enemy of Yaweh, the creator and the tyrant, an ally of Lucifer, the Lightbringer, fellow soldier in heaven and also in Hell, your cause is his cause, and our cause-to bring corruption to god's plan, to sour the milk, to smut the flower, to put a joint in the hands of a teenager, or a college student, to cause men to look at women with lust in their hearts, and feel stronger for it, for women to look at men, and at each other, with thoughts less than holy, of lust and sin, rather than childbirth and goodness, light and angels. Astaroth, it is you in your evil that seduce men into vanity, into believing that they know things that they do not, into believing that with their tools and technology, with their science and their antimagick, they can become gods, like us, glowing in platinum armour, holding swords of pure starlight. It is you that can convince a monkey, a beast of the fields favored by Yaweh with reason, that his insight can create wonders, legislate the nonexistence of god, deny the mercy of Jesus, the deceiver. Oh holiest of unholies, grant me this day that I may corrupt the minds of my fellow men, with thoughts of easy women and power, ideas about mathematics that distract from the true goodness of suffering for the celestial powers, tempt men with thoughts of beer and fine food, with drugs and sodomy and not hard work and repentance. Foul Astaroth, demon of the nine hells, I kneel before you, seeking your antiblessing.

Another Victory

The night was cloak-black. I could scarcely see anywhere without my special goggles. Its cranium was shining flame-yellow though, blinding my vision of anything but a cerebral cortex, outlined in greenish black, pulsing through a translucent humanoid skull.

I use the term "humanoid" loosely here. The beast had tentacled arms, but a recognizably human face with a gaping, idiot's jaw.

I circled round it with my energy sword drawn. It would fall before me like the others. It would not kill me with its death ray vision, because i was neither living nor dead, a robot. My silver skin glistened in its reflections, and I moved in for the kill. Under its quickly-moving right tentacle I went, but the second tentacle writhed around my foot just in time for me to cut it off at the shoulder. A foot kicked me then, and I went down with a shudder. Rolling in its direction, I cleaved both feet off of the thing, and then crawling to my robot knees as it cried, I beheaded it.

Glowing cranium pulsed at increasingly longer and longer intervals as the thing's head died in the black night.

The Flatlanders

I suppose I should start by mentioning that I am an unreliable narrator. This is either a story of doomed heroic exploits, a journey to the underworld, and a starship, or it is not. I may or may not be a human being. These captors of mine may or may not be doctors. It is no difficult task to imprison a man, but to imprison an ageless superbeing-that is another matter entirely.
How did I get to this place? I remember an ice field, the longship frozen in stasis, crippled in a drift of methane snow, leaking atomic power, its crew salvaging swords and skins for survival, set forth along the surface of the dark, lifeless planetoid. Lucidity comes to me gradually as I write this. The rocket was impaled by a meteorite. Its reactors spilling radioactive coolant into the void between its two hulls, it is amazing that the feeble humans at the helm were able to set it down in one place? piece. Yes, piece is the word. Tarterus is a dark world, adrift in the cosmos, ejected from a now-distant solar system by a planet intent upon devouring its siblings, like Saturn, devouring its children, its gaseous envelope thick and spinning with helium argon envelope, the methane frozen ing gossamer fields, as drifting snow. Here, ice is as permanent as stone and the wounded rocket, perilously balanced on its aft fins, sent up clouds of steamy gaseous mist. Elsewhere, there was quiet, and twenty nine men did trudge into the ether black plain with little but their courage. Little did they know the fate that awaited them. Elder beings, vastly more powerful, had designs of their own for the men and their crude machine.
"Mr. Anaeus?" It was a voice not unlike a carpet sample-bland and ordinary and promising huge amounts of the same. It was a beige voice full of beige overtones.
"Mr. Anaeus, have you been listening? It is important that you stick to your schedule o medication."
A sliver of terrestrial sunlight filters through the mostly-clothed miniblind. It is a grand sun, a G2 on the Hersprung-Russell scale, and the inhabitants of this globe are not worthy of it. Institutional walls, more beige, surround my corporeal form. Air ducts. These creatures breathe gaseous oxygen, suspended in a mixture of other gasses. I hate their sense organs, generally speaking, limited to three of the seven dimensions of spacetime Still, there is something to be said for the eyes of this tree-dwelling monkey. So many nuances of color, a narrow slice of the multitudinous radiation from its magnificent sun. I am restricted to an unlikely brane. They think the world they see is all there is. They are like flatlanders.
"I am a prisoner here, and the medication you speak of is engineered to prevent my eventual escape. It immobilizes my limbic system, obstructs the puny cerebral hemispheres of this monkey brain from higher function, and prevents me from psychotemporal projection into the othe dimensions. This mind here..." I say, pointing a blunt digit at the shelly test beneath my furry covering, a cranium, "It is a tendril, an extensionn of a far greater being, imprisoned on a world so vastly different than your own that you cannot comprehend the smallest particle. You, sir, are a blocked exit, and these alkaloids you prescribe are no medicine."
The creature adjusts the crude, wire-rimmed lenses in front of his eyes. He is aging. These bodies wear out so tragically. Free of predators, because generations ago their ancestors killed mighty sabre-toothed beasts with stone-hafted spears, their ancestors are free to grow old and weak, surrounded by notebooks an sterile walls.

It Raised a Black Sword

It raised a black sword. Ivory talons, glistening pale in the icy moonlight, gripped the pommel with an an ancient and terrible fury. The blade was longer that a man is tall, and by the look of it, still sharp after countless centuries in the abyssal void. Its owner roared.

In the surrounding forest, storm birds shook snow from the trees as they alighted. Ruin, they called, startled by beast and man alike.

I faced it with a gleaming axe. This nightmare thing was my enemy by chance alone, and yet, there was no escaping it. Were I to run, it would doggedly pursue me, crossing the threshold of every house I visited till doomsday if need be. A carrion giant, spawn of bloodbirds, from some world where giant mammals roam, forger of iron weapons, world wanderer. It would slip through the ether and find me in my dreams, gaining power with each passing moment.

Now, while it was new to the icy surface of Gondwana, the wraith vulture, worldbender, ebony eye, must be destroyed at the blade of my battle axe.

Its attack came as a sweeping downstroke.

In the dim Southern light, it closed the distance between us with three thundering footfalls, plunging its weapon at my head with an animal fury. Was it guessing I could not see the grey blade in the twilight? Or was it thinking nothing at all, driven by instinct? Its eyes were as empty as blown glass.

I spun to the right, dodging the blade, and swinging my axe in a great circle that intersected squarely the beast's right haunch. I did not hear the thing howl, though it did so. Black blood sprayed from it, bone crunched, and the thing fell forward to the frozen Paleozoic Earth. Even as it did so, it wrenched furiously sideways and backwards so that I would fall with it. I lay on the pebble bank of a frozen stream, solidly beneath the arm of a beastly giant.

What an arm it was Black-skinned, scaly in places, and covered with grey pinfeathers in others.

The vulture giant rolled to its back and brought me tightly against its chest as it did so. Bird hearts do not beat exactly like those of humans, and I heard its noisy blood as two clawed hands raked my armor-clad back and sought to secure a neckbreak hold on my head. By then though, my dagger was unsheathed, and I sought its heart with my blade. Deep and sure, up beneath the breastbone and through layers of muscle and sinew, I thrust the steel blade till my arm was elbow-deep. It flung me to the side, an awkward toss I was to feel for days afterward, but the thing was mortally woulnede. It crumpled into a ball and died.

Quickly, I reached for m notebook and dissection tools.

Beasts like this-betweenworld wanderers, do not last long after death. Something from the other side pulls them home. Maybe, they are resurrected, maybe they return their substance to a vast pool of humor, caloric, and quintessence, from which other monsters are built. Maybe they just die.

In the North, amid the flat forests and scaly trees, where the cockroach kings build mighty castles, our world harbors creatures with such capacity to travel amid the threads of reality; the blueback, the ebon-eye, the skinworm. I cannot imagine that those particular creatures, once fully-grown, are mortal by any means, in this world or another.

Parchment unrolled, quill in hand, I dip my stylus in black ink, warming the bottle between my hands. the moon comes out from among the clouds, and I thank the Metal Gods for helping me defeat my foe. Quietly, I pray to the great four; I pray to Metallica, hearing the sacred music in my head.

My first cut opens the chest cavity. I gaze in awe at all the structures. Tube, bone, and air sac, its ribs are hollow inside, and spongy. A sac near its heart is full of solid stones, polished smooth like gems, textured like fresh soap. I pocket a few of them, wondering if they were ingested on Gondwana or if they are from the creature's strange birthplace. Deftly, I cut its impaled heart from its chest.

It is heavy-perhaps the heft and size of a man's head. Rising, and taking two steps away from the body, I put it under my nose and breathe deep. The monster's essence is still escaping from it. Inhaling, I drink some of the creature's power for my own use.

Strange memories fill my mind.

I spend the next two hours sketching. Twice, I have to light a torch, and later have it blow out in the frigid wind. Three times, I stop and raise my axe, to ward off the strange nocturnal lopings of Lystrosaurs. Finally, the carcass dissolves in smoke, its substance passed back into the aether. I pull my greatcoat over me and sleep, restlessly.

Strange dreams overtake me. Bright fields, and cities made of sticks, rising a hundred hands tall and filled with thousands of birdfaced bests. The thing was a mere chick once.

In the morning, I raise its great sword, too heavy to carry, and heave it into the stony slope, a marker of where the thing perished.

The Tower

The thing rattles its cage it is a man it is a beast it is captive it is godlike. Black clouds gather, lightning, the vanguard of rain, crackles and illuminates through the cold cold window, its bars polished by centuries of clutching hands. In the city below, this tower can be seen from all points, a stone archolith, a black spire, stabbing the heavens, a spike held to the neck of pagan gods who crafted the earth out of venom so long ago. Gold coins fall into a wooden box. Far to heavy to carry, the treasure box sits along a row of such boxes in a deep vault, torch lit, location secret. One box for gold, one for silver, six for copper, nine for tin, bronze and the lesser metals. Even here, in the bowels of the black tower, gusts of wind from the north cause dust to rise in spiral eddies, torch flames bending and bending back again. More coins. A bony hand holds a particularly ancient one in its grip, admiring its age. It is from the time of heirophant Merovik, sixteen centuries ago, the face of the dead autocrat depicted in profile in its gold. In those times there was a second tower, and a third, one for each eye in the face of the true god. Coins drop. Cage rattles. The first downpour of rain starts suddenly.

Space Gnomes

Gnomes are our enemies. Anyone who does not know this is dangerously deluded. Consider this: when was the last time a gnome did anything but steal your possessions and make you late for work? Space gnomes are particularly odious. One thing about space gnomes I will never understand is their objection to relativity.....both general relativity and special relativity piss them off, presumably because it interferes with their plans for interstellar dominion.

Here is a space gnome trick, repeatedly tried, to circumvent relativity. Gnome 1 departs from a stationary object, in deep space, with no other point of reference. Gnome 2 stays on the stationary object. Gnome 1 accelerates, reaches a speed of 95% the speed of light, stays at that speed for ten years, turns around, and returns after accelerating to 95% the speed of light in the other direction. Gnome 2 stays put. When gnome 1 returns to the stationary object, usually someone's yard, it talks shit about how the YARD was not stationary at all, and that to think of it as such violates the entire principal of relativity. There ARE no privileged frames of reference. AND YET, gnome 1 has aged many more years than gnome 1, enough time to drink a great deal of beer. Gnomes are assholes for even bringing this up. In fact, the garden is never stationary, it is moving with respect to the rest of the universe, whether the gnomes choose to observe stars, planets, silver surfers, or not. There is no such thing as a stationary object. So, why the fuck was it gnome 1 did all the aging? This REALLY happens to gnomes.
I finally get it, what gnomes do not understand when they gripe like that.
It is the acceleration, both ways, and the deceleration, all of it, that broke the symmetry between the gnomes. In fact there was no symmetry to begin with. Not in this case. The gnomes usually try a new trick after pulling this one.

The next trick is to go to very distant points, with respect to each other, using their long lifespans as an aid to space travel, then accelerate to a good fraction of the speed of light, and cruise past each other, not accelerating, so that their combined velocities are greater than the speed of light. They do this because relativity pisses them off and they are trying to fuck with it. This trick is never really satisfying though, because from the perspective of each gnome, the other is receding at less than the speed of light. The Lorentz contraction of space, in the direction of movement, and time dilation, make it so that, to each other, they are receding at just shy of the speed of light. They can add a third observer, gnome 3 to the mix, as a stationary point between them, and this third gnome sees them receding from each other at greater than the speed of light, but this is not a violation of relativity and all three gnomes know it.

I remember a time when two gnomes, in separate spacecraft, accelerated to 99% the speed of light, using an enormous amount of fuel. They cruised at the same rate, relative to each other, one of them trailing a bit, and turned on their headlights. Both were annoyed because the light was not blue-shifted at all, since both were not moving with respect to each other. They even tried using a mirror, the one in the front turning around and shining its headlights on the gnome in the back, who was holding a mirror. Nothing, because from their perspective, noting in particular was amiss, even though, from the perspective of the rest of the galaxy, as they cruised, clocks were running SLOWER both aboard the gnome ships, AND in every distant planet (not faster there unless they mess it up by turning around and accelerating home), also, everything aboard the ships was very short in the direction of motion, from the perspective of distant planets, and all the distant planets were squished really flat in the direction of their apparent recession away from the gnomes....but none of this was apparent to the gnomes on the ship, even though it was happening, and that pissed them off.

The truth is that relativity pisses off gnomes because they have a belief that there is one, single, center of the universe that is NOT part of cosmic expansion, that is totally still in the absolute sense, and that they can put a planet, and a nice green lawn there, and sit, unmoving, forever.

The Morning of a Fierce Battle...My Thoughts

Listen to the drums in the distance. Skin stretched over bone of ancient beasts. Bronze shields reflecting the morning sunrise. The smoke of extinguished campfires. Our swords are sharp and our archers have the high ground. Elms sway in the distance. Earthworks have been built. Ready for battle. Their armies will come no closer to our homeland. Horses snort, their masters holding the reigns and speaking words into the beast ears of the nervous creatures.

In the distance, giants, their knees taller than the men they camp with. You can make out their crested helmets, their axes glint in the sun, the skulls of men strung around their necks like beads, a necklace, a warning. They are not immortal, though, giant, though they eat the flesh of men and drink beer by the keg instead of by the pint. An arrow between the eyes will kill one. On our side, we have witches, their black tresses falling to their shoulder, they pass one eye among them and take turns seeing, but with a word they can pronounce a giant dead, or a man, and the victim has no choice but to obey and die.

I fear one of them has put a charm on me because I cannot stop looking at her, her white shoulders, the curve of her hips, her strange and wonderful lips. Yet, where her eyes should be, there is nothing but smooth indentation. Sometimes, I dream of this creature and it is terrifying.

Horns blast. Dust clouds from a thousand hooves. The archers wait till the enemy cavalry is within range. The battle begins.

Doom

Doom. Under the weeping wood. In the gloom. In the darkness. In the cloudy twilight. The smell of sulfur-a finger pointing to another world, in the wisps and hollows, a volcanic spring. Strangeness. Nihil. Stillness. The nightbirds, their cries a forlorn compass, counting corners, marking time, circle like ghost ships. The nightmare visits, drops from the vine like an overripe plum. Abomination. Life reflected in its opposite-unlife. Nightshade. Atropine. Fire. Jimson Weed, its flowers open in the twilight of morning. Wolves cry in the distance. A stranger dies.