The Storyteller recounts a story about himself; after angering the royal cook, the Storyteller is told by the king to tell him a story each day for one year. If he can supply a story each day he will be pardoned, but if he fails to give a story for even one day he will hand him over to the cook to be boiled to death. This goes on perfectly fine for the year... Until on the final day, the Storyteller can't come up with a story.
This episode provides examples of:
- Ambiguously Human: The Beggar. He exhibits numerous magical abilities and can bend reality. He can seemingly influence luck, transform the Storyteller into different animals, make the Cook lose body parts (and later bring them back), conjure a magic rope and ball, making people vanish and reappear, and survive in boiling hot oil. This could be either chalked up to him being a powerful wizard or fae.
- Character Witness: The Hero is helped out of his predicament by a beggar he aided.
- Cruel to Be Kind: The Beggar puts the Storyteller through the worst day of his life so that he has a story to tell the king, preventing his execution from being a story short.
- A Day in the Limelight: The Storyteller is the main character of the episode. Aside from a bit part in "Hans, My Hedgehog" he does not directly appear in any other stories.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The episode features the storyteller, his wife, the beggar, the cook, the king, the queen, and the prince. None of them have names. None of them are ever referred by other names than their occupations.
- "How I Wrote This Article" Article: The Storyteller is forced to tell a new story every day. On the last day, due to an outlandish series of events, he doesn't have time to think up a new story, so he tells the story of why he couldn't.
- Karmic Trickster: The Beggar turns up to torment the Cook —because The Cook is an asshole— and the Storyteller —because The Storyteller helped him at the beginning of the story and all that grief made for a fantastic story on a day when the Storyteller was facing execution for not having a story to tell.
- Old Beggar Test: This is the lesson the Storyteller learns. It's alluded to before he begins telling the story:Storyteller: Yes...yesterday, I forgot a story. And that is why I went straight out and gave my supper to a beggar.
Dog: Our supper.
Storyteller: Now, of course, this will strike fools as foolish and wise men as wise. A fool eats his last potato, a wise man plants it. Apart from which, everyone knows beggars are never what they seem. - Scheherezade Gambit: The Storyteller is challenged to give the king a new story every day for a year, with food, lodging, and a gold piece for every day he succeeds, and death by boiling oil if he fails. It's only on the final day that he finally runs out of stories, but a friendly beggar he had helped get fed in the opening act gives him a fantastic dream vision for a final story.
- Stone Soup: Appears but is the
Broken Aesop that rather than learning the value of cooperation, the cook is infuriated at being deceived and humiliated and demands that the Stone Soup makers be executed for stealing. In the end, though, he changes his ways.
