The Myth of Penguinisteus, The God of Antarctic Penguins and Fish

During the Great Antarctic Seal War II of 2000 BC, the penguins were losing the war due to lack of equipment. Penguinisteus was sent to dig all the way to the seal’s headquarters.

At first, Penguinisteus did not want to fight in this war. So, he pretended to be insane so he would not be sent. He put on a tuxedo jacket and a blue crown covered in fish drawings and started waddling around the town. This did not work, however, because everyone thought if he was insane he would be the best person to spend days underground, so they decided he was the best penguin for the job. Unknown to the rest of the penguins was the fact that Penguinisteus was a demi-god, and was immortal.

Penguinisteus then started digging to the seals’ headquarters. While digging he met a god by the name of Glaucus. He gave Penguinisteus a scroll named “The Scroll of Thee Tiny Penguin!” Using this would make him tiny for five minutes.

“To use this scroll you have to count to ten, then spin around 3 times, eat a piece of wheat bread, and then say I WILL BE A TINY PENGUIN,” Glaucus told him. “And then sign it with the tiny pen that comes out, oh – and here is a piece of wheat bread.”

“What can I do as a tiny penguin?” Penguinisteus asked him. “Anyone can just catch me.”

Glaucus laughed his loud, fishy laugh. “That is what is so great about The Tiny Scroll,” he said. “You will retain all the strength of a full-sized penguin.”

Penguinisteus thought that this sounded pretty good, so he thanked Glaucus and kept digging. Soon he heard a deafening chomping sound. The ice around him began to shake. Then he saw rows of sharp teeth heading straight for him! As quick as he could, Penguinisteus constructed himself a super-sharp spear made of ice. He had done this many times back home when he wanted to spear fish with his friends. However, he thought maybe it would not work when he saw the huge, 8-foot-high, 9-foot-wide piranha in front of him. Penguinisteus said a quick prayer to Glaucus because he was a fish god and piranhas are fish – and then, with all of his might, he thrust the ice spear into the back of its throat. It did not die, but it started to cough and got distracted, so Penguinisteus quickly dug himself away from it.

Penguinisteus kept digging and then he heard rumbling noises; there were tiny snow chunks falling from the top of the cave. Suddenly, snow started coming down rapidly. He was suffocating, but he started to eat the ice and was having good progress. Soon he had enough space to breathe, and then he kept digging.

 He started to feel really full from eating all that ice. “Well,” he thought to himself, “Since I’m stuck here anyway, I will just take breaks when I need to and get out of this eventually. As long as I chew away enough space to keep breathing between breaks, I should be OK.” This seemed like a good idea, and it worked for about four hours. But then something went terribly wrong.

He heard a digging noise approaching directly in front of him and prepared for battle quickly, making a new ice spear. Once it got close enough for Penguinisteus to see it, he discovered it was an enemy seal digging to the penguins’ headquarters! Penguinisteus stabbed the seal, which gave him an idea: “I should kill this seal and wear its skin.” So, he grabbed the ice spear with his flipper and stabbed the seal in the throat. It was a fatal hit, and the seal soon died. Then, Penguinisteus put on the skin of the seal and kept following the path the seal made.

Penguinisteus was pleased with how much easier it was to reach the headquarters once he found the seal’s path. With his seal costume, he was getting very confident that he would be able to execute his plan with ease now. Alas, Penguinisteus was too confident, and he stopped being cautious as he approached the end of the seal’s ice tunnel; he popped up out of the ice, without looking around first.

Once he got up, nine seals noticed him, and all of them were asking, “Did you make it to their headquarters?” Clearly, they all thought he was the enemy seal Penguinisteus had conquered in the tunnel.

“Oh yeah, I did, um…” Penguinisteus was panicking. He hadn’t planned for how he would explain returning as a seal without any equipment. Then he remembered that back home where his brothers and sisters were, they had no equipment, which was the whole reason he started digging towards the seals’ headquarters in the first place. “The thing is, once I got there, it turned out that they have no equipment, so there was nothing to steal,” he told them, trying to make his voice sound seal-like.

Then one seal named Rob Boss noticed his webbed feet poking out from under Penguinisteus’s seal suit, and realized something was off.

Rob yelled, “HEY DAT SEAL GOT WEB FEET!” Everyone then started looking at Penguinisteus’s feet and then jumped on him, knocking him unconscious. 

When Penguinisteus woke up, he knew something was wrong. He could open his eyes, but other than that he could barely move. And even though he was a penguin, he was quite cold. When he tried to look around, he noticed everything seemed blurry and distorted. “What’s wrong with my eyes?” he wondered, and tried to move his fins to rub them – but they were frozen at his sides. The seals had trapped him in a block of impenetrable ice! “Good thing I am immortal,” Penguinisteus thought to himself. “This is definitely a setback, but I can wait until this ice melts just the tiniest bit, and then I can use my secret weapon to get out of this. And the seals will never see it coming!”

Penguinisteus waited for hours and hours until the ice started to melt, he took out his wheat bread, counted to ten, spun around three times, ate the wheat bread, and then said I WILL BE THE TINY PENGUIN. Then he signed his name to the scroll with the pen that was 0.000000001283921783412 micrometers smaller than a normal pen.  He started shrinking drastically until he was only .000000001283921783412 micrometers tall. Then he got out of his ice block and prayed to Apollo to perform Bunshin no Jutsu, making a clone of himself. Then he put the clone Penguinisteus inside the ice block and hurried away.

Now that Penguinisteus knew the seals had no weapons either, and that a tunnel leading directly to their lair had been dug by the dead seal, he returned to the land of the penguins with a new plan. At first, his journey was easy because he was infinitesimally small, but after five minutes he began to grow back to normal size, and the tunnel was a bit tighter. But he made it back in record time and leapt up out of the ice hole to exclaim to his penguin friends: “New plan everyone! The seals are also out of equipment, but now we have a direct path coming up from under their headquarters! Let’s use it to sneak attack them before they figure out it’s there and try to do the same to us.”

All of the penguins dove into the tunnel, but Glaucus told Penguinisteus to stay behind. Once everyone left for the sneak attack, Glaucus told Penguinisteus to sit down and close his eyes. Then Penguinisteus did another special ritual: he ate a piece of white bread, spun around 23 times, jumped 24 inches in the air, and then counted to 142. After that, Glaucus told Penguinisteus to open his eyes. Then Glaucous said, “You are now a god.”

It was not long before the penguins returned, having successfully overthrown the seals when they took them by surprise. Only 18 penguins perished in the battle. This put a stop to the seal war, and the penguins gained access to a new headquarters.

That night, the penguins had a huge celebration. Everyone jumped into the ocean and caught a ton of fish. Then Glaucus called for everyone’s attention.

“Fellow penguins,” Glaucus said. “I present to you your new god – Penguinisteus, the god of Antarctica and anywhere else penguins live.

From now on you will all have to put nine fish in front of the Penguinisteus statue we will build. These nine fish will represent the nine seals who almost captured our god. Also, you will have to blink in morse code the number nine to this statue every day. And if you do these things, you will always be blessed by Penguinisteus. 

If you do not honor Penguinisteus in this manner, he will ensure that all the fish in the area are repelled by a special force field that keeps them away until you all starve.”

And then all of the penguins cheered and started making Penguinisteus’s statue of honor.

And they all lived penguin-ly ever after.

• by Sid, Grade 6