Peter was awoken by his door bursting open an elf girl in a French maid uniform tumbling head first onto the floor. Both the sound of the frozen door shattering free of the jamb and the sound of the maid’s skull cracking against the wooden floorboards boomed like cannon blasts, and Peter shot up in bed. Although conscious, sleep numbed his brain, and his eyes refused to focus on the elven carnage. There on the floor spilled a black and white frilly uniform, the girl broken like a contortionist.
“Holy moly, are you ok?” he asked.
The elf maid peeled her forehead from the floor. Golden hair a mess, eyes flooded with tears, and lips quivering uncontrollably, she sniffed bravely and whimpered, “Y...y...yes…”
He was about to help her up when she leapt up and covered her face as if she were about to start crying. From behind her hands she whispered, “You’re okay. Don’t cry. You’re not a crybaby. Be strong, Yumeka. You’re not a crybaby.” And then she took a deep and slow breath and stealthily wiped her eyes. As she was doing this Peter thought to himself what a big poofy skirt she had, and why couldn’t more girls dress up in leggy, fetishy dresses?
Yumeka handed Peter his normal winter sweater and jeans, dried, fluffy, and unusually warm. When she flung opened the curtains, no daylight shone in, only night and the faint glow of a blue and green aurora.
“What time is it?”
Yumeka patted her pinofore pron pockets, then her skirt, then her chest, becoming more panicked after each touch. “Waah! I forgot my pocket-watch back at the dorms! I’m so stupid!” And then her voice raised an octive as if she might cry, “I think it’s almost eight o’clock, maybe?”
“P.M.?”
She sniffed. “No. A.M.”
“What time does the sun rise here?”
“Well… probably not until…. mid-March,” she said.
“Holy—! Are you kidding me?”
And kidding she was not! For the Earth does not stand up straight upon its axis— it is crooked and wobbles quite drunkenly, like the dear reader’s old man after a few drinks, and because of this imperfect imbalance there are corners of the Earth that do not have a normal day and night cycle. And no place upon this little blue marble is more out-of-whack and topsy-turvy than the North Pole. In fact, in place of four seasons, the North Pole has four times of day which stretch on for months. Spring is dawn, summer is daylight, autumn is twilight, and winter is a dark and endless night. So plan your future excursions accordingly! Yumeka explained it all in her own childish and roundabout way.
To give a fair and balanced description of Santa’s workshop, of all the dormitories and wings and towers of which it consisted, would be a laborious and exhausting endeavor. For its architecture, dear reader, was a dazzling panoply of decorative motifs. Not a single window was without stain glass or bevel glass. Every wall was papered with intricate floral motifs and adorned with rococo oil paintings of winter wonderlands and creepy orphan children. Intricately carved newel posts punctuated every twisting staircase. Great gothic fireplaces blazed in drawing rooms and parlors, tended occasionally by a passing elf who would throw on an extra log or rake the ashes away.
But a continual motif of the workshop were the colors green and red. Red camelback sofas lounged in green wallpapered rooms. Boughs of holly wilted forgotten atop cherrywood mantles. Red tile floors burst with green stars. And the floorplan, to Peter’s mental mapping, made hardly any sense at all. With Yumeka he wandered from room to room, each one more exhaustively elaborate than the last, occasionally stumbling upon a supermodel elf puffing away at a long stemmed pipe or carrying a chamber pot. I
n short, it was as if a madman took one of those awful stores that sold Christmas decorations all year round, and an Addams Family haunted house, and then smashed the two together, and from the unholy union of these two things, Santa’s workshop emerged as the architectural abomination.
“Where are we going?” Peter asked.
“Ah…” Yumeka looked down one hallway, and then another, and then a third. “This way. No, wait, it’s this way.”
After much wandering Yumeka rediscovered the dining hall and escorted Peter to his seat beside Santa’s throne, but the regal chair for the patron saint of Christmas remained empty, and no food awaited her on the perfectly pristine plate before it. As Peter sipped at a sludgy morning cup of hot chocolate and nibbled at the breakfast pastries he was given, he waited for Santa to arrive, to maybe clue him in on what exactly the Holy Spirit was and how she hoped he would kill it. But there was no Santa at that breakfast. Only Peter and a gaggle of giggling elves fluttering their eyelashes at him and taking creep shots with their cameras when he wasn’t looking.
Feeling a little awkward at the elevated position above the elves, and finished with breakfast, Peter went off on his own through the workshop, not quite sure where he was going. He passed some elves wrapped up like Eskimos in great furry jackets, carrying empty buckets out of a room. He entered the next room and stepped into a great habitat of snow and ocean water, indoors and absolutely freezing, and about a ja-billion squawking and waddling penguins.
It was a feathery madhouse. A pandemonium of pygmies and emperors, of adélie and fairies— a penguimonium. Not so gentle gentoos hopped after their unrequited soulmates in a squawking mosh pit of slapping flippers. Elves all bundled up in guano-stained jackets snatched eggs away from nests and angry mothers. Great auks mobbed a poor girl tasked with feeding the unruly hoard, like a tuxedo ferrofluid crowding around a magnet. Peter found a spot away from the crowd crush and picked up one of he smaller birds to admire its cuteness.
“Hey there, little buddy,” he said. “Aren’t you a little cutie pie. Do you want a fishy?”
But immediately after being lifted off the ground the penguin thrashed its flippers and kicked its webbed feet and squawked insanely at him. Its razor sharp penguin beak snapped at Peter’s fingers, so he instinctively dropped the vicious beast. But the penguin’s savage lust for revenge was not quenched and it furiously waddled after Peter, resolved to preen him to death from the feet up.
“Hey, fuck you.” Peter jumped away. The pissed penguin chased him in circles. “You little shit. You fucking trying to bite me, motherfucker?”
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At that moment a deep sea diver emerged from the simulated ocean and beheld the battle between boy and birdy. She spat out her respirator.
“Peter? What are you doing in the habitat?”
If you think elves are skinny, wait until you see one in a neoprene dry suit. All wrapped up in her diving suit, ears tucked away, face masked with goggles, the elf looked like an Atlantian in a gimp suit. She pulled her slender self out of the water and removed her goggles and hood, revealing yet another blonde haired and blue eyed face that he couldn’t put a name to.
“I was just walking around.” Peter stuck out his foot to push the penguin away and then guided it gently into the water. “Trying to figure this place out.”
“Oh. Well this is the penguin sanctuary. They’re not native to the North Pole, but we like to breed them for food. Not much reason for you to be here, not unless you want to help brushing their beaks after breakfast.” Over on the other side of the habitat several elven girls sat with penguins lounging in their laps, and they gently brushed the inside of their beaks with toothbrushes. They waved to Peter.
The scuba elf pulled on a rope that fell deep into the water below and hoisted out a large net, and within it contained a few dozen large rockets. She jerked them up onto land and kicked them away from the shore.
“Whoa. Are those real?” Peter asked.
“We’ve been trying to weaponize them into a penguin army,” she said. “But the rockets keep coming off in the water. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Scuba elf flipped and flopped with great goofy strides in her flippers, dragging the wet sack of explosives behind her. Her drysuit clung to her elfy body like a rubber skin, and Peter oogled her slender legs and slender waist when her back was turned. When a flight of stairs appeared and Peter realized she was about to go down it, he wondered if the explosives were black powder, C4, or atomic, and was about to tell her to be careful when she descended, the rockets banging and bouncing off each step with a cantankerous clatter of clunking. Peter clasped his head in fear— sure he was about to see the elven oceanographer vaporized in a fiery storm.