vovat | Slow, Slow, Quick-Quick

Today's Oz post focuses on both an unusually slow and an unusually fast community. The former is Pokes, a Winkie city first introduced in The Royal Book of Oz. This is a dull gray stone city where the people, also known as Pokes, spend most of their time asleep. Even when awake, though, they shuffle along at a speed of less than a quarter mile per hour and speak a single word in a minute. Pet snails are popular among the Pokes, but they often move faster than the people. Anyone entering the town soon grows just as tired as the inhabitants, and the only way to successfully stave them off is to sing. Sir Hokus was a prisoner there for approximately 500 years, until Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion stumbled upon the city after getting lost in a thunderstorm. When all three of them sang together, they just barely managed to escape.

Quick City, which is sort of the opposite of Pokes, is also located in the Winkie Country, and appears in The Yellow Knight of Oz, which is in some ways a direct sequel to Royal Book. It isn't Sir Hokus who visits Quick City, however, but Speedy from Long Island and Princess Marygolden, who emerge there after leaving Subterranea. In Quick City, everything is so fast that even the buildings run around. The people are known as Quix, and they age rapidly, but then grow back down into children and start the cycle again. That would presumably make it difficult to maintain relationships, but we don't see any real indication that the Quix get involved in relationships. When Speedy arrives, the people immediately declare him king, crowning him with a Lively Hood that makes him age and de-age like the natives. He and Marygolden manage to escape, and it's never stated whether the Quix ever find a monarch who won't run away.