In a city on a flat world atop four elephants atop a giant turtle there is a building, the High Energy Magic building. Within this building exists another world, not a sensible flat one, but a truly absurd spherical one. This is the Roundworld.
The Roundworld universe began life as an industrial byproduct of splitting the thaum into its constituent flavours. These days it is maintained by the ever watchful eye of HEX and the wizards of the university take care of it as they would an exotic pet, and it is exotic. There is no magic, due to the lack of basic elements like narrativium, there aren't even any gods, despite it's inhabitant's best effort to create them.
It was an ordinary day for Ponder Stibbons when he took a routine glance into the omniscope used to monitor this fascinating but impossible world. He was soon to realise that all was not right on the Roundworld...
"Hmm,that's interesting"he said to himself,adjusting his glasses. (Nobody ever says this sort of thing to themselves but the laws of narrative causality require him to in order for the audience to understand what he's thinking,how he knew there was an audience watching I have no idea.).
The great magical looking glass before him showed a distorted image of the scenes on the planet below:
The Roundworld humans were corralling chimps, gorillas and orangutans on a massive scale. He watched as they were tortured and baited into sweeping the streets, pouring water into jugs and sorting mail.
Shaking his head disapprovingly he turned the omniscope off and went about his daily tasks, he would be sure to bring this up at the regular meetings the wizards held on whether or not to interfere in Roundworld affairs...
"Order order!"shouted Ponder to the assembled wizardry gathered around the flimsy wooden table that had been set up in front of the omniscope.
"I'll have a distressed pudding and a pint of beer,"muttered the Bursar to himself.
"Ook," ooked the Librarian, his coconut face fixed into an expression of curiosity.
Almost immediately the committee fell silent and Ponder cleared his throat, "I've called you here because I have noticed some strange happenings on the Roundworld," he declared, aware that the older wizards' attention spans were very short when it came to matters of high energy magic. He cleared his throat again and continued, "To save the hassle of aiming the omniscope I've taken some iconographs of what I've seen happening over the past few weeks."
He reached into his pocket and produced a bundle of paintings which he placed in the centre of the table, without much argument they were grabbed and passed around. Various gasps and "hmm"s echoed around the room.
"Ooook!,"a dismayed Librarian mouthed as he examined a painting of Orangutans being whipped into sorting books.
"So they're using apes for labour,what's wrong with that?" the Archchancellor scoffed, "We do that."
"Ook!" said the Librarian.
"Yes, but, but this is different"replied Ponder, "We only have one and we don't torture it, erm, him. Can we really let them continue?"
Ridcully thought for a moment then replied, "I was told that when you first created this planet you agreed that you had to protect and enrich the humans that lived on it, not its ape population. This is making their lives so much more comfortable isn't it?.Perhaps this is just how society develops without magic. It poses no threat to the well being of those people, its not like the apes are going to rise up and destroy them is it? Haha! The very idea."
Ponder nodded, "Very well sir I will just continue to observe and make my reports as normal."he agreed, "Ok next order of business, do we let them continue to develop what they call...New-clear capabilities?"...
The meeting ended after discussing more mundane management of the Roundworld, when the agenda was complete one by one the Wizards returned to their dwellings. The Librarian made his way alone back to his nest under the library desk full of thought. He thought of those poor apes he had witnessed, always being ordered about by their human masters, he chuckled as he realised he was in a similar situation. Even though he had once been human and as far as he could tell the apes of the Roundworld were just ordinary animals, he could tell they were not happy.
A burning idea forming in his simian skull, he lifted himself from his nest and headed into the library's maze of books. He had felt the itch to visit the Roundworld out of curiosity many times but now the time felt right. He rearranged a few books and dived through a book-wormhole. He wouldn't be missed, its not like students ever used the library...