LOOWIT FLATHEAD

Loowit Flathead was the eighth king of the Flathead Dynasty. He came to the throne after his cousin Dimwit, and was succeeded by Duncwit. He reigned from Flatheadia in the years 789~813.

Dimwit Flathead and his eleven siblings died on the 14th of Mumberbur, 789 GUE. For reasons that remain lost to history, Dimwit himself was not nearly as excessive at procreation as was his father Mumberthrax. Although various grandchildren of the Insignificant Monarch did survive, most notably John D. Flathead II and Lucille Flathead (although secretly), in 789 GUE the crown devolved instead upon the eldest surviving male member of the house, Loowit Flathead, and would remain there for 24 years. John D's child would have been king had there been no older member of the family. Thus Loowit must proceed from Mumberthrax’s generation or older. As Fiorello, Mumberthrax's only known sibling, was himself close to the centers of power, it seems reasonable to conclude that Loowit was Fiorello's own son.

Loowit himself had never made the move to the Eastlands with Dimwit’s massive retinue some nineteen years before, and upon Mumberthrax’s death had preferred to retire to his country estates on the fringes of Mithicus. Clearly one of the most intellectual of the Flatheads, Loowit had spent the intervening time relatively removed from the excesses of his royal relative, pursuing instead the study of foreign tongues and ancient historians.

No doubt, given Loowit's distance from the capital in the east and his apparent lack of power, the group of royal advisors that assumed temporary control after Dimwit’s sudden collapse gave serious thought to ignoring the surviving members of the dynasty and elevating one of their own to the throne of Quendor. The seeming disinterest in the issue among members of the royal family, as well as the complacence of the Quendoran military, would have assured the success of such a scheme, and it seems that the capable Lord Feepness himself was on the verge of reaching for the throne. However, through a series of events still unclear today, someone in Aragain had managed to get word to Loowit, perhaps through the means of magical communication. Although what remains of Loowit's personal writings make it clear that the recluse did not relish the thought of assuming the throne, his sense of duty to Quendor and family drove him to send word to the castle that he would soon arrive to receive his crown.

His journey from Mithicus to the capital took several weeks, delayed by Loowit's desire to stop in several major cities on the way and announce his ascension to the throne in front of a public audience. As the news of Dimwit's death had spread from the Eastlands, the closer Loowit got to his destination, the more dangerous the situation in any given city was likely to be. Although the newly-summoned monarch had been able to leave Mithicus inconspicuously, the locals having heard none of the disturbing rumors from the east, by the time Loowit reached Borphee, things were clearly amiss. Mysterious and distorted reports of the Curse had already begun to float across the ocean, and the coastal cities in the west were already beginning to show the first signs of unrest. By the time Loowit's chartered frigate arrived in Antharia, the port cities of Marba and Anthar had already erupted in riot. Apparently unconcerned with the death of their not terribly popular ex-king, the citizens of Antharia were much more disturbed by malicious reports that the Curse of Megaboz had included a spell to transform all granola in the Kingdom of Quendor into well-hardened yipple waste. For the time being, Loowit was able to calm the populace by suggesting that they look in the granola mines; no such transformation had occurred. Nevertheless, the seeds of granola unrest had been sown in Quendor, and the whole issue was destined to rear its ugly head once again some 75 years later in the form of the Granola Riots that nearly destroyed all forms of civilized life on the island of Antharia.

In his own collected letters, it is clear that Loowit himself had little idea of the magnitude of the crisis. Although he certainly knew of the collective death of his twelve relatives, Loowit's summons to the capital had contained little information about the exact nature of the Curse in question, and in fact seems to have been deliberately misleading. If the infamous Delbor Telegram is not actually a forgery, it can provide us great insight into Loowit's state of mind during his voyage across the country to the capital:
 

To Loowit Flathead:

Statue of Dimwit annoyance to residents at Fublio. Stop. Annoyance revealed by

Megaboz at dedication banquet. Stop. Dimwit dead. Stop. Brothers and sisters all

dead. Stop. You king. Stop. Empire to collapse in 94 years. Stop. Come quickly.

Stop.

Delbor, son of Mumbar, son of Goobar, for the Regents of Quendor.

 
If it is indeed true that copies of this telegram circulated throughout Quendor from the first day of Loowit's reign, then it is not surprising to see how quickly the situation had deteriorated in the east. By the time Loowit arrived at Port Foozle, much of the surrounding countryside had been captured by rebels, and the deliberate destruction of tunnels and caverns that would continue for another ninety years had only just begun.

Although Dimwit Flathead was certainly the most flagrantly indulgent ruler in the history of The Great Underground Empire, most of the Flatheads who followed him did their best to upload the tradition of excessiveness. The next hundred years would prove to be a very trying time for the people of Quendor, as the high level of taxation continued, although the money was increasingly spent not on massive construction projects but on extravagant parties and long vacation trips for members of the royal family. The descents were also panicky lots, each one trying harder than the last to remove the curse on the land.

However, the roughly one quarter of a century during which Loowit ruled from Aragain, was actually noted for being a relative period of rejuvenation for the provinces of Quendor, both politically and culturally. It does seem clear that much of the empire fell into decay; almost at once, sections of the underground caverns in the Eastlands fell into disrepair without Dimwit’s obsessive interest in the subterranean lands to ensure their upkeep. Even parts of the truly immense royal palace itself quickly became forgotten, as the less excessive and somewhat more austere King Loowit found little need for the square bloits of bedroom and bathroom that Dimwit so loved. While some people have seen this trend as an immediate indication of the empire's necessary decline, it seems more likely that the people of Quendor were instead simply recovering from a period of ridiculous excess, and returning to a more normal situation. If parts of the underground empire fell into disuse, it was not out of helpless and pathetic decline, but instead out of an increasing disgust and annoyance at the outrages of the previous regime.

As a matter of fact, regardless of the continued taxations, most people who have written about the history of Quendor after the death of Dimwit Flathead have noticed a decided improvement in the living conditions and general morale of the population as a whole, as well as a remarkable rebirth and reinvention of stable, normal royal government. Faced with the remarkable problem of coming quickly on the heels of one of the worst monarchs of all time, Loowit spent the greater portion of his long reign carefully analyzing and reorganizing every facet of Quendoran government. In the view of many experts, the hard work of purging the bureaucracy at every level, as well as carefully and systematically rewriting every law that Dimwit Flathead every enacted, was the only thing that kept the Great Underground Empire from collapsing right then and there.

Although some of the more crushing burdens, such as the annual levy of first-born children to work in the Antharian granola smelters, would continue even into the era of Idwit Oogle Flathead, the sudden loosening of other restrictions brought about a virtual renaissance in the older provinces of the west. The ancient magic guilds, long invested with the secrets of magic that had remained hidden during the Period of Dim Lighting, had found a renewed vigor after the events of the Endless Fire of 773. Now, with the removal of the few restrictions that Dimwit had placed upon the guilds, the newly recreated institutions emerged from the confusion to play a new and dominating role in the government of the western half of the kingdom. With Loowit’s Acts of Dismissal, passed in the early months of 790, every provincial, regional and urban government official was promptly fired and told to “go somewhere else”, and although this abrupt dismissal worked wonders to end generations of corrupt local government in the west, it was often many years before Loowit found the time to find suitable replacements for every single one of the spots on the nearly endless list of necessary positions. More often than not, the resultant vacuum on the local level was filled by officials within the local guilds, if not controlled directly by the guilds themselves. Although this illegitimate source of authority would be a constant source of difficulty for the remaining Flathead monarchs, it would become, after the collapse of the empire, one of the most stable sources of power throughout the entire west.

For the first time since the New Year's Revolt over 130 years before, a king of Quendor took it upon himself to issue a thorough and wide-ranging compilation of every law, decree and enactment that had come forth from the royal government. This massive work, the Analecta Loowitica, is considered by many to be Loowit's crowning achievement. The final 23 volume work, released in 801, represented the first and only attempt to keep track of the ridiculous proliferation of royal legislation that had begun with Duncanthrax and his Unnatural Acts and ended with the 3,459 tax bills passed by Dimwit Flathead on the day of his death.

What makes the Loowitica even more impressive is the fact that Loowit poured over every law one line at a time and edited each one to either reaffirm the law or declare it to be out of date. The end result of this effort was a massive loosening of restrictions; in one fell swoop nearly all of Dimwit's horrendous tax laws were cleaned from the books, preserved only in the final editions for the sake of historical thoroughness. It is for this reason that Loowit today is remembered as one of Quendor's most popular monarchs. Although he himself proposed little that was new or original, his willingness to undo some of his family's worst mistakes was a characteristic much appreciated by the bulk of the Quendoran population.

Duncwit Flathead succeeded Loowit Flathead in 813.