Ah, yes. The sebuchap. My favourite of the three chaps (much kinder than the ranchap but not as perverse as the bolochap).
Most modern people, when asked about the sebuchap, have a tendency to reply in sign language. The signs often include narrowing their eyes in confusion, shrugging their shoulders, and even the occasional non-verbal clue, such as a “huh?” or a pensive “hm”.
And yet, just a few decades ago, sebuchaps were almost as common as buttholes.1 2 The tragic story of the sebuchap is one of manic frenzy. A storm of exploitation that came out of nowhere and disappeared into nothing.
Sebuchaps are small burrowing creatures formerly found in plains and grasslands. It’s been claimed that their cognitive ability, paired with highly developed larynxes, allowed them to speak in short phrases and even hold simple conversations. Their true intelligence is unknown. Unlike parrots and corvids, the sebuchap’s speech is more refined and not limited to simple repetition. Early encounters with sebuchaps were often attributed to spirits.
Before the 20th century, sebuchaps were kept a secret by the neighbouring villages. Even search engines like Googgle3 would produce no results. An elder once mentioned to me that her parents didn’t want her being friends with the creatures because they weren’t “real people”, even if they could talk. Apparently, their odd syntax and occasional out-of-pocket answers could indicate that they weren’t really thinking in the same way we do. Sadly, I can’t verify this for reasons that should soon become apparent.
In the 1990s, circuses started incorporating sebuchaps, dressed in extravagant costumes, into their acts. Their newfound popularity caused hunters to start coveting and eventually selling them as trophies. Before the decade was old enough to read, everybody had seen a sebuchap head mounted on a wall somewhere. By the end of the millennium, circus acts had to start employing short performers in masks, placed far away from the audience. Fake taxidermies made of bulden skin circulated the (now black) market.
I saw a living sebuchap at a carnival in 2018. They were inside a glass box, dressed up as a fortune teller. I asked what their favourite colour was, and got “the sea”. I asked if they knew what colour the sea was, and they said no.
- The word “almost” is doing a lot here. For if we presume that every sebuchap has a butthole (a fact I can’t confirm but which would make sense for balance, given that they have mouths) the numbers would never match up. The only scenario that would allow for an equal number of sebuchaps to buttholes would be a mass-extinction event where every other creature with a digestive track was wiped from existence.2 This is, of course, the opposite of what happened in real life. So let’s not concern ourselves with silly hypotheticals. ↩︎
- The word “wiped” is doing a lot here. While a worldwide extinction event would, in theory, be capable of killing every other species, their buttholes would still remain as long as the bodies weren’t destroyed. The question of whether to include dead buttholes in the sebuchap-butthole ratio, as well as the probability of a catastrophe of such scale leaving sebuchaps alone, are both explored in Craigory Plack’s The Last Sebuchap. ↩︎
- Search engines were mechanical contraptions created during the Age of Tinker. They would roam the land taking pictures at random in an attempt to stumble upon new discoveries. A disgustingly soulless approach to adventuring, in my opinion. Googgle was one of the most prolific SEs, operating since the first few months of their introduction until everybody collectively realised the idea was stupid. ↩︎
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