[Previously on “A Quick Word From“]
Bonjour. My name is Pierre, and I am the egg farmer in town. Recently, village strongman Gaston fell off a castle. Since then, my business has taken quite the hit.
It turns out Gaston accounted for about 75% of the egg consumption in our town. You may have heard him sing about how he ate five-dozen eggs every single day. That’s sixty eggs. Do you know that a chicken can only lay one egg every 24-26 hours? I owned sixty chickens that existed solely to make eggs for Gaston. I called them “Gaston’s chickens” and kept them in a special hen house.
Twenty other chickens supplied the eggs for the rest of the town, and that was more than enough.
For years, business was booming. I had been able to live a comfortable life with my wife and three daughters based solely on my egg sales to Gaston. See, when he was a lad, Gaston would eat four-dozen eggs to help him get large, so shortly after meeting this gigantic child, I had to quickly acquire 48 chickens. I was sure that when Gaston was an adult man, this number would increase exponentially. Instead, adult Gaston only ate a dozen more than he did as a lad, which has always struck me as odd.
It has recently come out that Gaston was not a great guy. Now, I don’t know anything about that. What I do know is, I had a roof over my head thanks to him, and I was able to buy my daughters matching dresses in different colors.
After Gaston died, I suddenly had an extra sixty unsold eggs a day. That’s 420 excess eggs a week. This is too many eggs for our provincial town. I tried selling the Gaston eggs to the Prince and the servants at the castle, but they have become addicted to only eating gray stuff.
Needless to say, not long after Gaston’s death, the village began to reek of unsold eggs. This attracted the wolves. They had normally stayed deep in the forest, but the magical gentrification of the castle area pushed them back towards the village. I lost the smartest of my three daughters to a wolf driven mad by the smell of rotten eggs.
It became pretty clear we needed to eat the extra sixty hens in an effort to curb that rancid stench of the eggs. In one of the few nice times since Gaston’s fall, the entire village ate chicken for a week! Unfortunately, the loss of sixty chickens meant I no longer needed to buy chicken feed from Lucas the grain farmer, and he quickly went out of business. This allowed the grain to grow high, giving the wolves perfect cover.
Once Lucas and I went out of business, the girls who would bring us
I could no longer afford to take care of my family. I begged the Prince and Belle to take them in for me, but the sudden influx of human beings in the castle meant there was a severe bed shortage. They turned me away. Unfortunately, I am not a witch and could not use this as justification to curse them.
Before Gaston died, I was a comfortable egg farmer. After he died, I became a beggar who is sick and tired of eggs. Now I know it was unwise to pin my entire career on a barge-sized man in a ponytail, but it was supply and demand. I did not expect the demand to plummet so quickly because of a rooftop tussle with a cursed beast. This is just not a thing you can plan for when you open a small business.
Now that the monarchy has been restored and our village has been ruined, we peasants have been searching for that witch to turn us into household objects. This way we can all fit inside a cabinet and the wolves will leave us alone. Please let us know if you find her. I no longer wish to eat eggs.
