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Girl Genius

A Lapinemoth[1] is a 9-foot-tall, talking, fanged, flesh-eating white rabbit wearing a bow tie. Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

We haven't seen any of these critters yet in the main story, but they play a key role in the radio play Revenge of the Weasel Queen, when Agatha, Zeetha, Krosp and Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer show up at the town of Zoggletonk to Do Good and Slay Evil. This town has recently fallen afoul of the eponymous Evil Weasel Queen, Ferretina, who uses Lapinemoths as muscle, although our heroes don't understand the connection immediately. Three of them (evidently named Flopsy, Mopsy and Nietzsche) are menacing the unconscious Jorf Oxclonker when Agatha, et al., show up and dispatch them in various creative ways.

This might be the end of the story in a normal, boring world, but in the Foglio-verse, things are never that simple. Othar, who's not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, draws a catastrophically mistaken conclusion about the young, oddly-dressed woman on the scene — none other than Ferretina herself — and soon puts himself in a position where he needs rescuing, from another, subterranean pack of Lapinemoths among other things. Agatha and company figure this out, and Agatha decides that the way to invade Ferretina's lair and deal with her (maybe rescuing Othar if it's convenient...) is for the party to disguise themselves as 9-foot-tall, talking, fanged, flesh-eating white rabbits, tie optional. They just happen to have appropriate supplies of rabbitskin (lapin) laying around after doing their dispatching, what a coincidence! Agatha builds a Fashion Clank to do the haberdashing, although it has decidedly different views of how its creator and her friends should be attired, and is mortified to find out just what it was made for.

In Part 3 of the saga, with costumes complete, Agatha attempts to break Ferretina's hold on the Lapinemoths by slipping the villainess a load of garlic, thus altering her smell and rendering her less terrifying to the creatures. Unfortunately, it turns out the real draw of working for the Ferret Queen is her offering free health insurance. Agatha does still have her trusty carrot-shooter, but the resulting Final Ultimate Battle is thrown off the rails when the Fashion Clank convinces Ferretina to run off to Paris with it and start a clothing salon. Along with Our Heroes, the Lapinmoths watch this development in various states of surprise, happiness and resignation. (Time to hit the Want Ads again..) What happens then is not revealed, but it is shown that the cast of the radio play is now being threatened by (more?) Lapinemoths who have all equipped themselves with knives. Stay tuned to the next exciting chapter! Any day now!

References

  1. Pronounced "lah-PEE-neh-moth" (according to this performance of the radio play), being an evident portmanteau of "lapin" ("rabbit" in French), and "behemoth". The "-moth" part might also refer to "mammoth", as in "mammoth-sized rabbits", or a sideways opposite of "mimmoth".
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