An emergency admission to the Wu Cheng-En Memorial Hospital, Beijing was to prove a historic day on many levels, not least because the facility had been previously dedicated mainly to treating injuries sustained during competitive table tennis.
Meikovah, a fastidious young Russian milkmaid from Irkutsk had been on the trail of an errant lactating heifer for some months, and had no sooner realised she was several thousand miles from home when she contracted an alarmingly violent case of crabs from, she claimed, practising yoga on damp grass.
Since the hospital was full of recuperating international level ping-pong exponents, she was temporarily placed in the psychiatric ward, which had up until then been solely occupied by former Bulgarian number three and topspin specialist, Banvar Gormand. Gormand had been admitted nine years earlier after a particularly traumatic semi-final loss in Shanghai, which had ended with him trying to shred and ingest his own bat in a fit of shame. Coincidentally, he was also a well-respected entomologist, and when initial experimental treatments of tequila shots on the hour failed to produce results, he was reluctantly called in as a consultant.
Allowed close inspection of Meikovah's crotchal region, Gormand was astounded to find that the area was infested with a species thought extinct since Jurassic times - a subspecies of parasitic crab that had never in fact been seen before, except for in fossilised form and in some incredibly detailed cave paintings uncovered in Cordoba some years earlier.
Hastily thrust into the probing glare of the world's media, the press conference took an unexpected turn when some respected naturalists invoked an archaic international law and had Meikovah immediately pronounced a national park. A furious bidding war developed over the next few weeks, Meikovah finally being purchased by the British Natural History Museum, and transferred to London via hermetically sealed jumbo.
Encased in a tiny glass ecosphere, Krystal quickly attracted the attention of a crack team of international smugglers, who broke into the museum intent on purloining the rare species by any means possible. Their initial assault on the cage was thwarted by the heroic actions of fellow exhibit Mumento More, who had been previously concealed behind giant x-ray screens with a rare intestinal tapeworm.
This act of bravery initiated a passionate love affair between the two. Their illicit courtship, spurred on by mutual infestation, took place nightly amongst the fake foliage of the stuffed birds section in the ornithology wing of the museum, and amongst the petrified exhibits, their love bloomed, and was to be consummated in the ginormous ribcage of a nearby skeletal diplodocus.
Sadly, the concentrated effort of lovemaking caused such abdominal stress that Mumento's tapeworm voluntarily ejected itself, immediately asphyxiating him. Such was the mental trauma to Krystal that she regressed to her days as a simple milkmaid, and spent the rest of her time in the museum's travelling international stuffed cattle exhibit, in a state of bovine-handling delirium.
By the time the exhibition reached her home town of Irkutsk, her condition had been identified as a monumental misdiagnosis, and she was immediately discharged. Returning to her dairy, she wept tears of joy, only to be trampled to death by her overexcited, milk-filled and long-expectant herd.
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