Job Offering at Cheerful Potato Mountain Farm—Excellent Pay

We are in need of an assistant and are willing to pay good wages for excellent work. Namely, about a dollar a day, or ten cents per hour, which we believe to be fair compensation.

We are a large farm in a beautiful mountain valley, with many charming animals, rolling pastures, golden fields, silver brooks and green-bright woods. The stones of the mountain are covered in moss and dripping; the snow is falling lovely in the day. Dragons, elephants, and sphinxes frolic in joviality in the fragrant meadows, while the mountains are ringed around with chicken-harpies and monkey-horses.

Some of the tasks of the year include:
— Ploughing thirty acres with a toy plough
— Turning the twenty-foot-tall compost pile with a table fork
— Making sure the dragon gets his medicine—take a spoonful from the jar in the kitchen with the black liquid. Be careful, he can be mouthy.
— Drawing up water from the well with a drinking straw

Also, when you come, don’t be afraid of the Chimera. Feed her three tons of poppyseed meal every day and then set her out to pasture so she can nibble her fill.

Visit the goats. They should all be given cheesecake and cookies twice a day, and you need to make sure their carpet is clean and their napkins are folded right.

Also, gathering eyebright straw with which to thatch the farmhouse.

Accommodations are a lavish dollhouse with running water and hot showers, provided free of charge. Some prefer to stay out in the lean-to, but they sometimes complain of ghastly apparitions coming out of the fire and so we recommend the former.

If this sounds right for you, send a reply or PM and I’ll get you set up right away!

Important question:
which is cheerful? the potatoes, the mountain, or the farm?
I feel this would be a deciding factor in my decision. I don't know if I can deal with cheerful potatoes.

Actually, none of those in particular. The farm was founded in 1795 by Enoch Cheerful, son of Draco Cheerful, a Revolutionary War soldier who settled down in the area after the war, and Mary Glum of the long and famous lineage of Glums, and a painter of battle scenes acclaimed for not only technical skill but honesty and lack of glorification. We have a number of her lesser-known works hanging in the farmhouse.

And Potato Mountain is the nearest mountain, so called due to its shape. However, many potatoes do grow here. Hopniss also is abundant by the river’s edge, and so is wapato and tuber bulrush, the latter of which was planted and carefully tended by Enoch Cheerful and his descendents.

Samuel Cheerful, Enoch’s son, began importing unusual stock such as chimeras, dragons, lions, and monkey-horses, and many others. Our Chimera milk sells excellently down in the valley, where it is available from the general store. Monkey-horses turned out to be more of a bother than anything, as they escaped into the surrounding countryside and have a habit of raiding fruit trees, trampling crops, etc. But we are now making good money off of tourism in the surrounding lands.

Chicken-harpies are excellent guards; we have no trespassers or meddlers, ever, due to their watchful eye. They are highly argumentative and verbally harass anyone who comes in without permission.  However they do sometimes get eaten by wolves and coyotes.

As for the goats, they are a rare breed of unknown name who have an uncanny ability to levitate.

Is the Chimera with or without dragon wings?

This is a semi-accurate depiction:

Good! The ones with wings are really annoying.

No one has taken the job yet, and so we are increasing wages to a dollar a day and a lifetime’s supply of pie so that you can post in cider press whenever you want. Frankly, I am offended and believe that our previous offer was more than tempting, but in fact, quite compelling.

You will be served ginseng soup every day and we also offer free massages from the house ghoul, unrestricted access to oil of immortality, and access to the entire treasury of silken clothes, gold, silver, and jewels to borrow and wear (not to sell), and a choice of swords as well.

We are interested, not so much in the work for hire offer, although it seems, on a temporary basis to fit nicely with our hobby of cultural exchange. Importantly however before we can commit, does your location offer docking facilities for a small craft? Specifically, a circular area by your measure of approximately ten square miles and that can tolerate full suspension of planetary gravity for the duration of our visit. Objects and entities not firmly attached including atmosphere may drift unpredictably and at extreme velocity or even, if an upward force is applied, ejected into space. It is strongly advised that entities of any sort not enter the area without proper tethering, which we will provide on request and free of commercial contract.  Alternately it is possible to reduce the suspension of gravity to intervals of .000000008772 of your minutes but just on arrival and departure.  In this second option a smaller area of 1.00082 of your miles square will be significantly heated and compressed with all life extinguished. Some entities we visit prefer the second option, despite its setbacks, because and if the proper chemical components exist the area is converted on departure to solid diamond which they seem to regard as pretty. We plan to be sightseeing in your area for a while longer. If you would like to discuss further and if we have moved out of range of your communication devise, just give us a holler with your magic thumb.

I think the first option sounds better. We can use the opportunity to transport some hard to move things—for instance we were thinking of moving Hawthorn Hill a bit further north so we’d have more room on that side for peas and potatoes. And if you’d help us bring up some lake mud for to fill the gaps, we’d be grateful.

Be careful though. If gravity is suspended, that means the monkey-horses can fly. And the wingéd pigs, whose wings are normally just for intimidating wolves and coyotes. Oh, and the dragon doesn’t tolerate leashes—either he’ll be floating around or may grip onto your vessel. You can come so long as you agree that any damage caused by loose dragons is not on us.