Floods 8 by Colin Thompson Page B

across the country.’
    â€˜Brilliant,’ said the Queen Mother, ‘and they’ll have to stay at our B&B&B, which is right in the middle.’
    â€˜We’ll build a pub next to it to make them feel at home,’ said Merlinmary.
    So very late at night they went to a sleepy old English village, stole a really old half-timbered pub called ‘The King’s Arms’ and transported it back to Transylvania Waters, where it was renamed ‘The Severed Arms’.
    By an incredible bit of good luck and timing, the Duke Of Elvistown discovered an unknown talent 55 for making beer and produced a range of fantastic beers that became world famous 56 and brought huge numbers of thirsty tourists to Transylvania Waters. Not only did the beer tastefantastic, but when people drank too much of it they turned into bright pink, very happy rabbits instead of the usual angry, falling over idiots. And when the bunnyness wore off they had no headache, just a memory of being very happy. This effect only happened in Transylvania Waters. In other countries they behaved like idiots who drink too much do everywhere: fighting, falling over a lot and singing awful songs really badly.
    Boring tunnels through several miles of incredibly hard rock is something that even the most powerful spells cannot do. And thank goodness they can’t, otherwise some loony wizard would have bored a hole right through the world and all the boiling hot lava in the middle would have burst out like hot jam from a doughnut and burnt everyone to death. There are, however, a few rare wizards who have special talents to do just that, and Merlinmary was one of them. As he/she had already shown before, 57 Merlinmary could generate massiveamounts of electricity, and one of the things you can do with massive amounts of electricity is to power awesomely, terrifyingly, brilliantly powerful lasers. And if you can make a laser that is a thousand times more powerful than the sun, then you can bore through solid rock with it.
    So Winchflat made Merlinmary a Great-Big-Laser-Hat, which Merlinmary put on her head and pointed at a mountain. As Merlinmary walked slowly forward the laser beam burnt into the rock and vaporised it. By moving her head around, Merlinmary could make the tunnel as wide and tall and she wanted. It had already been decided, very wisely, that absolutely no coaches or trucks would be allowed into Transylvania Waters, so Merlinmary kept the tunnels very narrow and full of tight bends so that only cars could travel down them.
    There was also a special caravan and camper van filter at the entrance to the coming-in tunnel because, as everyone knows, caravans and camper vans are evil devices invented by the devil to cause traffic problems. There was also a bumper stickerfilter, which rejected any car with stickers on it, even if the stickers looked as if they were saying sensible things, because bumper stickers are even more evil than caravans. If a car towing a caravan that had bumper stickers on it tried to drive into Transylvania Waters, there was a big flash of light, a very loud rude noise and the car, the caravan and everyone inside it was instantly transported to a remote rubbish dump in Belgium that had no signs anywhere to tell people where they were. 58
    Even worse than a car and a caravan with bumper stickers is a car and a caravan with bumper stickers that have aon them. The bumper sticker filter sends these ones into the middle of the busiest intersection of the busiest city in the world at the busiest time of day, then makes the car engine break down beyond repair, turns everyone in the car completely naked apart from a really disgusting cardigan with leather buttons that is way too small to hide all their rude bits, fills the car full of fleasand piles of seven-week-old mouldy pizzas and even older dirty nappies, and covers the caravan in graffiti that insults the people of the country they have been transported to. Naturally, all