Sunday, May 29, 2005

Mall of Mâvarin, Part Eleven

Okay, I've been worrying about this all week, and putting it off all night. I am now two entries beyond where I got hopelessly stuck the first time I tried to write this thing, and I have very little idea what I'm about to write. But I'll think of something, I hope!

Actually, I've handwritten many pages of stuff for this story that you guys haven't seen yet. You won't be seeing it any time soon, either. It's my flashback to what's been happening in Mâvarin while all this stuff was going on in Dewitt. Problem is, since it takes place about a few months after Mages of Mâvarin, it's a total spoiler for that book / trilogy / whatever. A few of you are currently reading this in manuscript, and I don't want to mess it up for you! Everyone else, well, you'd probably be confused by it. So let's stick with our Central New York cast for now, shall we? --Karen

Synopses to Parts One through Six can be found at the top of Part Seven.


Art by Sherlock

Part Seven: Cathy and her friends meet Joshua Wander, an interdimensional traveler who followed his mysteriously shrunken castle from Mâvarin to Shoppingtown. He claims to have no knowledge of the others' predicament, although a policeman who remembers being the Captain of Cathma's Palace Guard is dubious about this. Josh's castle has arrived looking a quarter its normal size, and his magical abilities are severely reduced. As the stranded mage looks through a spell book for answers, Fabian asks if he can look at the spell that brought Josh to Dewitt. Although the spell is written in an unknown language that resists translation, Josh reluctantly hands over the book--and Fabian discovers that he can read it anyway.

Part Eight: Fabian announces that the spell is written in Lopartin, the ancient, magical language used on Mâton. Although the spell's footnotes mention the dangers of two much traffic between worlds, it offers no help for the current problem. Based on a vision, Fabian correctly identifies Josh Wander as a former student of nearly Syracuse University. Josh is astonished (and not especially pleased) to learn that he's "home." Fabian speculates about whether this fact contributed to the leakage between realities, and everyone wonders what to do next. Randy advises everyone to simply "wait."

Part Nine: Randy predicts that something is about to happen that determines what they will do next. He's right. The mall starts to bend and fold itself, and yet there's no apparent damage. Everyone starts running toward Joshua Wander's castle. Josh points out that, having been miniaturized, it's too small to hold much of anyone. Fabian dashes inside it anyway. He reappears in the doorway a moment later, looking a quarter his normal size. He urges everyone to run into the castle.

Part Ten: Fabian convinces everyone to go into the castle, because it's far safer than the mall at the moment. From the inside, sizes seem normal, but everything goes dark as the mall around the castle disappears. Beneath their feet, the castle starts to move.


Part Eleven: Relocation

Cathy grabbed the nearest wall as the floor beneath her began to tilt and pivot. “We’d better sit down!” she called out, and immediately followed her own advice. The angle and movement of Josh’s castle was not so great that she was likely to slide too much once she was sitting on the floor. She just hadn’t wanted to trust her ability to keep her feet as it moved unpredictably in the dark.

Around Cathy, the others could be heard (and in some cases, felt) as they also slid to the floor. There was much grunting and whispering. Somewhere behind her, a child was crying to her mommy.

Cathy herself was tense but excited. Wherever they were going, it was quite a ride.

“‘When hinges creak in doorless chambers…’” Randy intoned. Someone in the back laughed.

“Where’s the Ghost Host when you need him?” said Wil, or whatever his name really was.

“I’m your host, and I’m not a ghost,” said Joshua Wander. “Usually.”

“What is happening? Where are we going?” someone else asked. It sounded like one of the Tilen brothers.

“Another world, almost certainly,” Fabian said. “Probably some version of Mâvarin.”

“Maybe, but maybe not,” Josh said. “In my experience, it’s not always easy to get Toujours Chez Moi back to a place it’s been before. We could end up someplace else entirely.”

“Great,” Jamie said, somewhere off to Cathy’s left. “If we land in Oz, I’m going to be very annoyed.”

“It’s theoretically possible,” said Joshua Wander. “I’ve been to a few worlds that had literary equivalents.”

“Really?” Sheila asked. “I would be quite interested to hear about that sometime, when our situation is less perilous.”

“I told you. We’re safe, at least for the moment,” Fabian insisted. “I’m not sure how safe we’ll be once we arrive, but this castle—“

“This castle is used to traveling between worlds unscathed,” Josh said. “Yes, I should have realized it would protect you folks from that bit of collapsing reality back there. It’s just that I don’t usually travel in my castle. Normally I go first, and Toujours Chez Moi follows after.”

“So you keep saying,” Carl said. “How do you do it?”

“Oh, sometimes I initiate it with magic, but mostly it’s something that happens to me,” Josh said. “It’s left over from a very foolish and dangerous series of experiments I participated in when I was young. It’s an interesting life, but not a comfortable one. I can’t really recommend it.”

Cathy noticed that the castle now seemed to be rocking very slightly as it seemed to slowly rotate, as if on a giant turntable. She hoped that wasn’t literally the case. The faces of other people were slowly becoming visible around her. Either her eyes were getting used to the gloom, or the dim light outside the heavy glass windows was getting brighter. As Cathy watched, the light slowly grew from twilight gloom to midday sunshine.

With one last heavy thump, the castle came to a stop.

“Well, that was interesting,” Fabian said cheerfully. “Let’s go see where we are, shall we?”


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Saturday, May 21, 2005

Mall of Mâvarin, Part Ten


To Whom It May Concern:

Karen sprained her left ankle and injured a finger today when she fell outside the back entrance to her friend Eva's 100th birthday party. She should therefore be excused from writing this week's installment of Mall of Mâvarin.

No? Hey, my ankle and finger really do hurt, but I suppose that doesn't let me off the hook in my self-imposed obligation. It's another short one, though.

See Part Seven for the summaries of parts One through Six.

Art by Sherlock

Part Seven: Cathy and her friends meet Joshua Wander, an interdimensional traveler who followed his mysteriously shrunken castle from Mâvarin to Shoppingtown. He claims to have no knowledge of the others' predicament, although a policeman who remembers being the Captain of Cathma's Palace Guard is dubious about this. Josh's castle has arrived looking a quarter its normal size, and his magical abilities are severely reduced. As the stranded mage looks through a spell book for answers, Fabian asks if he can look at the spell that brought Josh to Dewitt. Although the spell is written in an unknown language that resists translation, Josh reluctantly hands over the book--and Fabian discovers that he can read it anyway.

Part Eight: Fabian announces that the spell is written in Lopartin, the ancient, magical language used on Mâton. Although the spell's footnotes mention the dangers of two much traffic between worlds, it offers no help for the current problem. Based on a vision, Fabian correctly identifies Josh Wander as a former student of nearly Syracuse University. Josh is astonished (and not especially pleased) to learn that he's "home." Fabian speculates about whether this fact contributed to the leakage between realities, and everyone wonders what to do next. Randy advises everyone to simply "wait."

Part Nine: Randy predicts that something is about to happen that determines what they will do next. He's right. The mall starts to bend and fold itself, and yet there's no apparent damage. Everyone starts running toward Joshua Wander's castle. Josh points out that, having been miniaturized, it's too small to hold much of anyone. Fabian dashes inside it anyway. He reappears in the doorway a moment later, looking a quarter his normal size. He urges everyone to run into the castle.


Part Ten: A Wrinkle in Time (or something)

Cathy hesitated. Scary as the mall had suddenly become, the interior of the scaled-down castle was equally alarming.

“Come on!” Fabian called out. “It’s perfectly safe in here, which is more than I can say for the mall out there!”

“But Fabian!” Cathy protested. "Look at you! You're tiny!"

“Only relative to this mall, and that won’t be true for long,” Fabian said. “But if you’d rather be folded, spindled and mutilated by a collapsing bubble in space-time, by all means, stay out there!”

Cathy and Carl looked at each other. “Fayubi’s never steered us wrong,” Carl said.

“Neither has Fabian,” Randy added.

“All right, all right!” Cathy said. After one last glance at what was left of the mall (the storefronts were now all as flat as cardboard, and so were some of the screaming people), she ran toward the little blue castle. By the time she got inside, it wasn’t little any more. Or maybe she herself was smaller. Well, no time to worry about that now. The uncollapsed portion of the mall, which strangely enough did not look huge from her new vantage point, was clearly shrinking by the second. Those people who had not been already caught in the event horizon (or whatever) were rushing toward her, shouting and crying and screaming. Cathy got out of their way, stepping carefully to one side in the castle’s darkened front hall. From what little she could see, it looked cavernous. Fabian stood beside Cathy in silent support as the others followed her lead.

The first person after Cathy to reach the castle interior was her brother Carl, followed by Randy, Jamie, Sheila and Josh. Wil Masan’s policeman counterpart stood in the doorway, ushering in people single file, calmly calling out instructions to avert a stampede or a panic. The shrinking box of three dimensional space lasted just long enough for the last straggler to make it into the castle. The policemen jumped inside and pulled the door shut, just as the mall disappeared in a flash of refracted light. For a moment Cathy saw a spectrum of colors so strange that some of them didn’t even have names. Then there was only darkness.

The pitch-black castle started to move.



Welcome to Mâvarin (info on the books and characters)

Past installments of this and other past fiction are on the sidebar.

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Mall of Mâvarin, Part Nine

It's short this week. I hope you don't mind! I was feeling particularly stuck and particularly sleepy, and when the cliffhanger popped up after only a page or so, I decided to go with it. Oh, and by the way, I was wrong before about the size of the castle as it appears in the mall. It's a quarter the size it ought to be.

See Part Seven for the summaries of parts One through Six.

Art by Sherlock

Part Seven: Cathy and her friends meet Joshua Wander, an interdimensional traveler who followed his mysteriously shrunken castle from Mâvarin to Shoppingtown. He claims to have no knowledge of the others' predicament, although a policeman who remembers being the Captain of Cathma's Palace Guard is dubious about this. Josh's castle has arrived looking a quarter its normal size, and his magical abilities are severely reduced. As the stranded mage looks through a spell book for answers, Fabian asks if he can look at the spell that brought Josh to Dewitt. Although the spell is written in an unknown language that resists translation, Josh reluctantly hands over the book--and Fabian discovers that he can read it anyway.

Part Eight: Fabian announces that the spell is written in Lopartin, the ancient, magical language used on Mâton. Although the spell's footnotes mention the dangers of two much traffic between worlds, it offers no help for the current problem. Based on a vision, Fabian correctly identifies Josh Wander as a former student of nearly Syracuse University. Josh is astonished (and not especially pleased) to learn that he's "home." Fabian speculates about whether this fact contributed to the leakage between realities, and everyone wonders what to do next. Randy advises everyone to simply "wait."


Part Nine: Into the Castle

“What do you mean, we wait?” Cathy asked.

“Wait for what?” Carl asked.

Randy turned to Fabian. “Can’t you feel it? Something’s about to happen. I don’t…I don’t think we’re going to be in Dewitt much longer.”

“Where will we be, Randy?” Sheila asked.

Randy shrugged. “I’m not sure, specifically. But I think we’re going, you know, home.”

“Mâvarin is not home,” Cathy said. “It only feels like home.”

“Are you saying that we will soon travel physically to the world for which we have been mentally prepared?” Sheila asked.

“Yes,” Randy said. “I don’t—I don’t really want to go, but I think it’s going to happen.”

“How?” Cathy asked.

Randy shrugged again. ”I don’t know.”

“All right then: when?” Jamie asked.

“Now,” said Joshua Wander. “Look!”

All around them, especially on periphery of this part of the mall, floors and walls and ceiling started to bend, subtly at first and then into increasingly dramatic and unlikely shapes. Colors started to run as store logos dripped down walls, and fluorescent lights expanded far beyond their hardware. Even people turned the colors of their clothing as they ran away from the stores, headed directly toward Cathy and her friends. And yet, the glass walls of storefronts warped but did not shatter, and not a single flake of plaster fell from the suddenly convex ceiling.

“Come on, everyone!” Fabian shouted suddenly. “Into the castle!”

“Are you crazy?” Josh Wander shouted back. “It’s too small for one person, let alone a hundred!”

Fabian shook his head. “Haven’t you ever seen Doctor Who? Come on!”

“Haven’t I seen what?” Josh said, but he followed Fabian toward the little castle. Fabian stepped aside to allow Josh to open the three foot high front door, made of engraved wood panels but seemingly painted purple. Then Fabian bent over and ran forward, like a tackle at a football game. Everyone else watched as he disappeared inside the tiny structure. After a moment, he peered out again, his head seemingly about a quarter the size it ought to be.

“Well?” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

Welcome to Mâvarin (info on the books and characters)

Past installments of this and other past fiction are on the sidebar.

Saturday, May 07, 2005

Mall of Mâvarin, Part Eight

Art by SherlockThis is the last gasp of what I've written to this point. I hope Randy knows what he's talking about!

See Part Seven (below) for the summaries of parts One through Six.

Part Seven: The middle-aged man with the book turns out to be a magician (or wizard, or mage) named Joshua Wander, an interdimensional traveler who followed his castle from Mâvarin to Shoppingtown. He claims to have no knowledge of the others' predicament, although a policeman who remembers being the Captain of Cathma's Palace Guard is dubious about this. Josh's castle has arrived looking a quarter its normal size, and his magical abilities are severely reduced. As the stranded mage looks through a spell book for answers, Fabian asks if he can look at the spell that brought Josh to Dewitt. Although the spell is written in an unknown language that resists translation, Josh reluctantly hands over the book--and Fabian discovers that he can read it anyway.


Part Eight: "Reality Has Sprung a Leak"

Josh’s mouth fell open. “You can read it?”

“Pretty much, yes. It’s in Lopartin. Let me just read it through properly for a moment.”

Everyone stood watching as Fabian read the page, his supple face a mask of frowning concentration. Finally he nodded and smiled. “Interesting book you have here. It doesn’t help us much, but it’s interesting.”

“What does it say?” Cathy asked.

“The relevant bit is a footnote. It cites a theory by Danali that too many transactions between worlds might weaken the integrity of each reality. For this reason, Danali tried to prevent the Otherworlds spell from being passed on. The original author of the present text, whoever it was, thought his completely language-based version of it was safer to use than an Otherworld portal, because no permanent link between worlds was created.” Fabian seemed to be staring straight ahead at nothing as he held the book out. “Oh, my. Take this, please.”

“But something’s clearly gone wrong anyway,” Joshua pointed out as he retrieved his book from the teacher-mage. “Whatever it is, it must have something to do with these particular worlds. I’ve used this spell before without negative effects, and so has my friend Onclemac.”

“Well, I can see why Mâvarin would be at risk,” Randy said. We—I mean they—have had several active portals recently between Rani Fost’s world and Rani Lunder’s. But what about this world? We have nothing to do with this interdimensional stuff.”

“No, we don’t,” Fabian said. “But this man does.” He took a deep breath, and his eyes seemed to focus again as he looked directly at Joshua Wander. “Where did you go to school, Chris?”

Joshua looked startled. “Syracuse University. How did you know that my real name is Christopher?”

Cathy thought she knew the answer. “You just had a vision, didn't you?” she asked Fabian. “A real, Fayubi-style vision.”

Fabian nodded. “Yes, my dear,” he said. “I really did.” He turned to address Josh again. “My vision linked you with a news report I remember seeing many years ago, back when I was in college myself. Are you aware that S.U. is about five miles from here?”

Josh (or Chris) stared at him, open-mouthed (again). “You mean, after all these years, I’m finally back in my home reality?” He reached out and touched Fabian. Then he drew back his hand, looking disappointed. “No, it can’t be. In my few visits home, I’ve always been noncorporeal.”

“Yes, I remember that claim about you from the news report,” Fabian said. “But I assure you, this is definitely Dewitt, New York. And a student named Chris Stein definitely disappeared from our version of Syracuse, about…let’s see, about twenty-eight years ago. I remember it was during my first year of grad school.”

“I’m home,” Chris said. “I don’t believe it. I’m home.” He looked up at Fabian. “But you know what? I don’t think I want to be here.”

“That’s good news,” Fabian said, “because you probably shouldn’t be here.”

“Why not?” Carl asked. “If he came from here, why shouldn’t he come home again?”

“Fabian is correct,” said Sheila. “It seems likely that this interdimensional Billy Pilgrim has weakened the divide between the worlds by returning to his point of origin.”

“So what are you saying?” Cathy said. “Reality has sprung a leak, because of this guy and his castle?”

“He almost certainly contributed to the problem, at the very least,” said Sheila.

“Great,” said Randy. “So how do we patch the leak?”

“Wait a minute,” said Carl. “We can’t patch it yet, not while we’re like this, half Mâvarinû and half American. Much as I like the idea of being a king, I feel a little odd here, where it’s not true and never will be. We need to resolve this.”

“That’s right,” Cathy said. “And this cosmic leak theory doesn’t really explain what’s happened to us. I—that is, Cathma—didn’t mentally become Crel after being stranded in her world. Not really. And Crel and Cathma have gone between worlds a lot since then, and their memories never leaked into each other. Why should the memories of lots of Mâvarinû suddenly leak into the minds of Americans, just because one American stopped off in Mâvarin on his way home?”

Joshua Wander looked at her and nodded. “You’re right. That doesn’t make sense.”

“So what do we do?” asked the cop who was partly Wil Masan.

“I know what we do,” said Randy. Everyone stared at him. He looked at them apologetically, and shrugged. “It just came to me. We wait.”


Welcome to Mâvarin (info on the books and characters)

Past installments of this and other past fiction are on the sidebar.