Duff Herm Sacrifices Praying Mantis
A concerned Ba Herm came to our Duff Herm Department early yesterday morning asking about one of his Duff Herms which had apparently developed a religious connection with a praying mantis. According to the Herm, he had heard loud noises coming from his only Duff Herm’s bedroom and rushed to see what was the matter.
Fearing that it was a Conspiracy Theorist or HDHG raid aimed at capturing his Duff Herm and converting him to homelessness, as had happened in the past in his area, believed to be the location of a particularly violent band of Conspiracy Theorists known as the Alta Agressors, he grabbed his hoe from his bedside and rushed down to the room on the lower floor.
When he ran through the door, however, expecting to see a band of masked Duffs taking away his Duff Herm, he found his Duff Herm laughing villainously and looking up towards the heavens with a hammer in his hand and a jar full of praying mantises on his bedside table. A dying mantis shrieked as it fell and died instantly upon a second blow from the Duff Herm’s hammer. Not knowing what to do, the Ba Herm grabbed the hammer and the jar of mantises and took them to us in the HermPost office as evidence of his story.
“How could he kill such innocent insects? This is not the Duff Herm way,” said the Duff Herm’s owner in an interview with our Duff Herm expert who was as stumped as we all were. Duff Herms never fight or harm anything smaller than they are; this rule is a well known part of the Duff Herms’ code of morals. What could be going on?
The Duff Herm was brought in for a medical examination and was determined to be having hallucinations: Whatever the problem was, it was likely taking place within his head. Something had turned him violent in his state of hallucination. Also, something had to have caused the hallucinations in the first place.
Suspecting that the local Conspiracy Theorists who had poisoned those who resisted them in the past might have tried to poison him, we sent our top investigators to the rumored location of the headquarters of the organization and found two fat Duff Herms who claimed to be in charge of the organization and who confessed to a multitude of crimes to our reporters who turned them over to the authorities after feigning that they were taking them back to the local HermPost office for an official interview.
The Duff Herms, of course, denied any correlation to the Duff Herm’s hallucinations, but the evidence was sufficient to have them locked away on the accounts of several other crimes. We thought the story was over, but the Duff Herm expert went to the editor, and he told us to keep writing, saying that there was more to this story than what we had already discovered.
And, how right he was. Under his leadership, we sent several reporters to the area where the Conspiracy Theorist band has been known to strike and set about looking for the substance that they used to make Duff Herms so deranged.
Meanwhile, he had us look into the source of this alleged “poison” in the old medical records which yielded no results. However, by next morning, the case had developed in another way: All seven of the reporters in the Alta suburb had reported break-ins, ranging from a single aggression to entire neighborhoods with broken windows and vandalized sliding doors.
It was clear the Duff Herms we had detained were not truly behind the band’s movements and were little more than attention seeking puppets. Even for this band, such a large organized crime event is a rarity, and, so far, experts reckon that it could be the third most damaging organized terrorism event in the past century with a total of over two hundred broken windows and over ten thousand stolen cans of corn.
Corn was not all that was stolen, though at first it appeared that way, a cricket and grasshopper farmer reported that his entire inventory of insects had been stolen. Across the target area, these farms were the most consistent indicator of which areas had been attacked, and it was estimated that 10,000 Herm Dollars worth of grasshoppers were stolen in all.
It wasn’t long after the event that the hallucinating Duff Herm returned to his senses and explained what had happened to the press. He said, “So, I was watching a praying mantis fight a stick insect on top of a can of green beans. When the praying mantis won, which never happens, weird things started happening…. When I opened the can of green beans and started eating, they all tasted really weird, and that’s when I looked at the can of green beans and realized all of the round green things I had been eating were grasshoppers!
“I should have known that that was why the praying mantis had been so interested in the can, but the packaging was just so confusing! Like, who puts round green things on a can that Duff Herms will be tempted to eat from! So, it turns out grasshoppers are slightly poisonous to us Duff Herms, so I started hallucinating that the praying mantis, who was the last thing I saw before I started hallucinating, was some kind of deity and I was sacrificing all of the praying mantises in the garden to the praying mantis overlord when my Ba Herm found me … I’m lucky he caught me when he did. If he hadn’t, more innocent praying mantises might have died! Oh no!”
We left the Duff Herm to deal with his grief and shame and decided that now the story was long enough and we were going to publish it whatever the editor said! Only one menacing question still remains: What will the Conspiracy Theorists do with thousands of poisonous grasshoppers? How many Duff Herms are at risk? The Berm announced right before we released this that they have hundreds of doctors at work as you read trying to find a cure for this grasshopper-based Duff Herm poison.
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