Warnings: It's pretty much K-Rated. Nothing to worry about.
(…)
You know what a dahlia is?
It's just a flower for most of you, isn't it?
I can't blame you for that. Who cares about specifically dahlia more than any other flower?
I'll answer that. Four penguins.
You can't see a dahlia when you enter their habitat. You can't say dahlia when you enter that habitat. And you definitely can't remind them of dahlia when you enter their habitat.
What was that word again? Taboo? Yes, that's what a dahlia is for them. A taboo.
But… Do you want to hear a secret?
These four penguins have a secret base under a fish bowl. Yes, that fish bowl in their habitat. In the base, there is a wall clock that works perfectly. Seriously, you can't find such a perfect time measuring unless you have access to a good laboratory. But that's no the point. The clock is a key to reveal seven buttons. You press those buttons in a not-so-random order, and discover an elevator. You direct to floor minus eight using it, and face with the hugest laboratory you can ever see. While passing across it, you realize the lab on the floor zero is just a miniature of this one. But that's not the point either.
In this laboratory, your eye catches a flower. You wonder what it is.
It's a dahlia.
And it's completely black.
It just lays there. With no water, no soil, no sunlight - or even just a light, no other feeding sources around.
I can't honestly say it has been 'laying there' for whole this time, but I can guarantee that it has been away from all 'feeding sources' for ten years.
Have you ever heard of a penguin named Johnson?
That Johnson loved dahlias. He actually didn't care about flowers or the color pink, but for a reason that will never be revealed, he had a soft spot for pink dahlias. Someday, he finally got himself a pink dahlia, even though he knew his teammates would mock him like hell.
Then… Well, you probably realized the past tense usage. You guessed right, Johnson died. Exactly ten years ago.
On that painful day he died, his pink dahlia went all black. No one still knows how it happened. After his funeral, his teammates found the dahlia in a pure colorless of black. They suspected an intruder and checked this possibility in every way possible, but there was no break in. It was the same flower.
Back to the four penguins. The shortest one suggested burying the flower with Johnson, but the tallest one absolutely refused. He took the dahlia and examined it. And by 'examined', I don't mean 'stared at'. He did countless test and experiments on the dahlia, watched it for months, studied its DNA… He got a clear nothing. He never got the answer of the question why it turned into black, or the answer of another question that popped out after a while: why didn't it get any less fresh?
After three years, the tall penguin lost it. He completely went crazy about the dahlia. Seeing this, the flat headed penguin ordered to get rid of the flower. His juniors tried to do as he said. Key word: tried. They threw it away, blew it up, sent it to Uranus, broke it into its molecules, ripped it apart, fired it up, froze it, teleported it… No matter what they did, they always found the dahlia on a laboratory desk.
The scarred penguin claimed that the flower was an undercover demon, but the tall penguin and the flat headed penguin refused to accept such an unrealistic theory. The shortest penguin was no more able to sleep at nights, and the scarred penguin always ran to hide out of blue; so the flat headed penguin decided to put an end on it, considering the tallest one was still going more and more mentally unstable. Besides, even he was also getting chills in the dahlia's existence, although he would never admit it.
In the end, the flat headed penguin no longer let the tallest one study on the dahlia, and they just left the black dahlia on floor minus eight, pretending to forget that even the flower ever existed.
But whenever they see a dahlia, stuff gets messed up. The tallest one goes totally paranoiac while the shortest starts trembling like nothing you can ever think of as the scarred one goes completely mad and starts seeing dahlias everywhere, and shooting all of them. And the flat headed one…
The flat headed one is always wearing a straight face.
But there is always a voice screaming in his head, coming from all the dahlias on Earth.