Today's #flashfiction The Elegant Ogre

“Can you hear me now?”

Harvey the Rabbit*

Today I went to my collectible card game thingie and much fun was had. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

The Elegant Ogre

         Ogres are normally the most beastly of beasts. A common fact that could hardly count as trivia but people feel like mentioning it so often just because people just don't understand how beastly the beasts are. And the people who underestimate the beastlyness of these beasts are the ones that end up with their heads on a pike. But sometimes there are those that know of the ogres terrible nature that have terrible fates anyway by some unfortunate turn of circumstance.

         But there was one of the beasts who wasn't so beastly. Well, he started out just as beastly as the others. However by circumstance he found a book about manners left behind by human merchant ambushed in woods by his fellow ogres. It fascinated the ogre. The beasts knew how to read because it helped keep records for war and their history, human books of many kinds hardly ever interested them. However this one just clicked with this ogre for some reason.

         The book on manners was massive and covered even dancing. It was a book for nobles to do pretty much every single thing a noble was meant to do at those social occasions that nobles did to butter up their backstabbing politics. The ogre practiced the manners in the night and when caught shifted positions and claimed he was experimenting to invent a new battle style.

         Eventually the ogre mastered the manners and a few years after his deviant hobby met an incoming storm. Humanity had tired of the armies of ogres and countered with their own. A massive nation had decided to exterminate them. Ogres had pillaged their villages and attacked their tradesmen mid-route for far too long.

         Several ogre villages fell but before the army fell upon the full populace the ogre that discovered the book of manners managed to find their camp and enter it unarmed except for a elegant suit he had secretly crafted. A suit he crafted to match the most noble in the book of manners. The soldiers brought the ogre to the captain. They were confused at the suit but still expected an execution.

        The ogre used the manners in the book to command a human charisma like no other and befriended the captain in a single night. The next morning he swayed the soldiers as he appeared as one of the nobles that they served with both pride and fear. The soldiers held back for a few days at first for the ogre to meet with the nobles. The next few weeks had the ogre swaying the nobles with his manners and elegance. Soon the war was over as the elegant ogre managed to turn the ogres into mercenaries for the large nation. The beastly beasts started adopting manners in order to negotiate, though they kept their beastly nature so they kept the ability to become employed. Beastly at work and noble at home the ogres found happy lives in the end.