Grznarb snarled. “Even the little black dress thing was better than this.”
Threkma straightened his thrice-broken spine at Grznarb’s words. “The little black dress of infidelity did have some good results.”
“Fah. You have been spending too much time around humans. Your speech offends me and not in a good way. Call the thing by its true name.”
Threkma’s spine began to curl, the previously broken vertebrae grinding against each other with excruciating pain. “The micro-mini of sluttishness, you mean, your Diseased Ferretbreathness?”
“Yes,” grumbled Grznarb, “but even it had limited effectiveness. The problem with cursed clothing is that the curse begins to fade too quickly when you take it off. Extended foreplay can lead to second thoughts. That’s a real structural dilemma in dealing with fornication fabrics.”
“Still,” squeaked Threkma, “we did have that high profile political success with the little blue dress variant made out of fellatio fabric…”
“Fah! You can’t rest on old successes for eternity.” Grznarb nested his pointed chin in his scabby hand, letting a talon hover just a millimeter from his own eyeball, just to unnerve his unworthy subordinate. “What we need is something people wear every day, like the old eyeglasses of impure thoughts. Why aren’t we making them anymore?”
Threkma trembled. “People switched to contacts, so we had to miniaturize and increase the potency of the cursed material. Then the humans switched to disposable contacts, creating a black hole in our supply and production budgets. Lately, they’ve started flocking to laser eye surgery. We rigged a few of the lasers to malfunction and boil the insides of the eyes ’til they exploded, you know, just to try to buck the trend, but the whole subgroup has completely fallen apart, your Metastasizing Worminess.”
“So, just what are you doing?” demanded Grznarb. “You keep requesting more and more of Hell’s powers of damnation for your department, but I’m just not convinced it’s being used well. The Dark One’s power to curse is finite, you know. Not like the infinite blessings of our… competitor.”
“Yes, your Festering Warthogness, but curses do last forever, so the total damnation in the world increases at all times. That should please you and The Horned Slayer.”
Grznarb tapped his talon on his eyeball lightly, causing a yellow trail of bubbling ichor to ooze out and eat through the scabs on his cheek. “The total damnation increases, but so does the population. Besides, these fabric curses are especially problematic. The power of the curse dissipates as the item wears, fiber by fiber, leaving the item ultimately ineffective and a level of damnation in most lint filters that swallows errant socks whole.”
The sock-less Threkma did not respond to the revelation of the answer to one of life’s great mysteries, so Grznarb continued. “That’s why hard items work the best-the curse can last for centuries, undissipated, especially with gems and gold. Why aren’t we using our limited power of damnation for the old classics, like the cursed sword that damages whoever the wielder loves most in all the world equal to the damage inflicted by the sword in battle? Death to kings and comrades, wives and wenches. Now, there was a good time.”
Threkma shuffled his feet, the claws clacking audibly on the rough stone floor. “Although occasionally used as fashion accessories, swords are really in the Cursed Weapons and Things That Blow Up Real Good Division, your Oozing Snotfaceness. In that vein, we did produce some wedding rings (in contemporary styles in both gold and platinum) of infidelity… er… sluttishness. Cursed diamonds really are forever, your Drooling Hideousness. But the humans took the damned rings off whenever the urge to be promiscuous took hold, generally well in advance of removing their clothes to rut. The rings were, accordingly, no more effective than the fornication fabrics and matching fetish footwear.”
Grznarb snarled.
Threkma blathered on. “Wedding rings of shrewish-ness and wife-beating have been much more successful in eliciting the behavior sought to be induced.”
Grznarb’s snarl turned into a full-throated roar, sending a glob of glowing phlegm onto Threkma’s foot. The minion endured the pain as it melted through to the floor. “Then why aren’t we producing more of those?”
“Unfortunately, the effectiveness is high, but the overall duration tends to be short, failing to justify the expenditure of curse power needed to infuse the precious metal. Women’s shelters, high divorce rates, and increasingly effective law enforcement in the area of domestic violence have all been an issue. And, once the ring is removed, whether because of divorce or incarceration, it is essentially a wasted curse. No one passes down family heirlooms anymore. High precious metal prices have resulted in the rings being melted down and the power of the curse diluted and spread across newly manufactured jewelry and electrical components, leading to hardware freeze-ups in most major computer brands and a general low-level of irritation across the population, but no more.”
Grznarb picked his nose with his tongue. “So, jewelry no longer is effective?”
Threkma brightened a bit, whether from the question or because the glob that had been on his foot had finally eaten its way deep into the stone floor. “We have had some success with bling.”
“Bling?” Grznarb hated human slang.
“Heavy, gaudy necklaces and rings worn by youthful enthusiasts of hip-hop music.”
Grznarb tapped his foot on the stone floor. “Get on with it. What sin is this ‘bling’ cursed with?”
Threkma smiled weakly. “It was meant to increase the popularity of the… er… singers.”
Grznarb’s brow furrowed. Threkma rushed on. “The so-called music is truly horrendous to hear, your Decomposing Vileness. It was hoped that insanity and mass suicide would result.”
“And did it?”
“No. We did achieve some midlevel chaos and sin, however.” Threkma didn’t look at Grznarb as he continued sheepishly. “Moderate hearing loss and theft of digital music.”
Grznarb thrust two razor-sharp talons into the nostrils of the minion and hefted him off his feet, blood flowing down Grznarb’s scarred and scaly arm as the talons bit deep. “There is something you are not telling me. You are not the Prince of Lies! You, underling, cannot fool me.”
“There was a production error,” gasped Threkma with a nasal gurgle from Grznarb’s talons and the blood flowing down the back of his throat.
Grznarb twisted his hand. “Yes?”
“Instead of cursing the bling, the bling causes the wearer to curse. It’s… it’s proven quite effective at that. Hip-hop music is full of emphatic and descriptive cursing of all types, including all known and several unidentified forms of damnation and graphic representations of all bodily functions. And a sin is a sin, your Cancerous Moldiness.”
Grznarb flung Threkma down into the minion’s desk chair. “Have you nothing else?”
“Just the usual. Post Office uniforms with the curse of rage, Mont Blanc® pens cursed with arrogance, pretension, and condescension, adult diapers cursed with incontinence, and candy striper uniforms cursed with kleptomania and/or nymphomania. We did some cigarette lighters of pyromania, but everyone uses disposables now, so fireballs have declined noticeably.” Threkma seemed to tense for a more localized fireball and the resulting incineration that he, no doubt, thought was coming.
Instead, Grznarb shook his head. Lice and sloughed skin spattered to either side. “When I brought you from the Cursed Furniture and Decorative Lawn Ornament Division, I thought you would shake things up here, Threkma. The cursed couch of false confession you placed in psychotherapists’ offices really caught my good eye. And using the skin of Chinese dissidents to upholster it was an especially loathsome touch. Lots of guilt, a steady stream of suicides, some sprees of murderous mayhem, and trafficking in human parts sewn together in sweat shops by slave labor. All evil work.”