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Foo, a fat, darkly colored, oversized mongoloid-featured child, began his backwards, solitary existence as an orphan, discarded on the doorstep of the Church of Umberlee in Port Avanthyr. The priests, not knowing the origin of the child, gave him over to the Dock-master to be brought up as nothing more than slave labor disguised as the noble gesture of adoption. He was raised in a 'crib' (which was nothing more than a hunting cage with the lock removed) and was fed with table scraps that the family mutt had rejected as inedible. As he grew older, his lack of intelligence forced the Dock-master to use him as simply dock labor mooring ships to the piers, unloading or loading cargo, hauling repair materials, and other menial labor such as slopping the hulls with tar, scraping barnacles off the pier supports, and cleaning out the relief-rooms in the shops around the pier.
At the age of 8 he was big enough to haul full kegs of ale to the Menacing Mariner on his own and was regarded as a general nuisance by the dock-workers because he had to be reminded of his duties, where he was to take cargo, or what boat needed what maintenance on a regular, almost frustrating, basis. They began to use nicknames when referring to him in conversation that would normally only be used as an expletive by the sailors and pier-hands and on one occasion, after dumping a crate of dinner-ware over the edge of the pier because he forgot to fasten his pants before returning from the outhouse and tripped over his own grossly large feet, one of the sailors looked at him, shook his head in disgust and said simply, "Aye, that beast-boy be nuthin but one, big, ugly SNAFU...". In reply to this, the captain shouted back from the deck that it looked like he had angered a mob of feral ogres who rearranged his face to the point of being FUBAR and that they should finally give him a name; Fubar the Snafu. Foo, being slow witted and not realizing he had been insulted, believed he had finally been given a name which meant something and made him important instead of simply "the dock boy".
[to be continued]
At the age of 8 he was big enough to haul full kegs of ale to the Menacing Mariner on his own and was regarded as a general nuisance by the dock-workers because he had to be reminded of his duties, where he was to take cargo, or what boat needed what maintenance on a regular, almost frustrating, basis. They began to use nicknames when referring to him in conversation that would normally only be used as an expletive by the sailors and pier-hands and on one occasion, after dumping a crate of dinner-ware over the edge of the pier because he forgot to fasten his pants before returning from the outhouse and tripped over his own grossly large feet, one of the sailors looked at him, shook his head in disgust and said simply, "Aye, that beast-boy be nuthin but one, big, ugly SNAFU...". In reply to this, the captain shouted back from the deck that it looked like he had angered a mob of feral ogres who rearranged his face to the point of being FUBAR and that they should finally give him a name; Fubar the Snafu. Foo, being slow witted and not realizing he had been insulted, believed he had finally been given a name which meant something and made him important instead of simply "the dock boy".
[to be continued]
