The Travelling Storyteller
Read part 1: The Itinerant Storyteller
The whine coming from the plot hook was deafening, though for Odin it barely rated as pleasant background noise. The engineer tended the dials in the dark underbelly of his ship with infinite care, tweaking here and there as needed, but mostly trusting in his captain’s ability to just get things right.
Odin barely moved as his captain and the new guy arrived, their various aspects coalescing until they were once again solid forms. Instead of looking around he simply held out a bucket to his side, his calloused fingers lightly gripping the rim. The new guy, a scrawny twenty-something with a mop of black hair, grabbed gratefully at the bucket and immediately threw up.
“Told you he’d chunder” growled the burly engineer as various drones hovering around his head focused lenses corporeal and ethereal on the pair, checking and rechecking for anything that might cause a problem later down the line.
“Yes, yes” dismissed the captain with a gentle smile and a wave of the hand. “You win the bet. Here.” He threw a book in a graceful arc towards Odin, who caught it by the spine without turning his head.
“You know I can tell if this thing ain’t real, right, Abel?” he grumbled, finally turning to look at the pair. Where his left eye should be a strange conglomeration of metal and stone jutted from his face, faint blue lines glowing across the surface. The drones that swarmed around his head were similarly designed, odd looking runes scrawled on chunky riveted steel, delicate circuits weaving in and out of nests made from feather and bone. None of them were alike.
Abel wasn’t paying attention, instead kneeling down on the deck, where the new guy had almost stopped throwing up. Odin sighed, shrugged and stomped away, his drones flocking around him like macabre birds
“So sorry about that. Usually we don’t rip people out of their narrative framework that violently, there tend to be thresholds or discontinuities we can use, but that was a bit of a special case.”
He paused and looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling.
“Actually.. It’s still a bit of a special case. Come with me!”
Abel dashed off, his shoes clanging on the metal grating floor. He disappeared through a round, riveted doorway of the kind you might find on a submarine, then slowly appeared back around the rim.
“Glen? Are you coming?”
Glen looked up, eyes watering and face pale but set in a grimace of determined fury.
“What. Is. Happening.” he demanded. Abel’s eyebrow rose slightly, as did the corners of his lips.
“Explanations are always better on the bridge. Follow me!”
And he was gone again. Glen knelt for a moment, then spat into the bucket and rose to his feet, seeming to use sheer willpower to pull himself off the floor and through the doorway.
— — —
A few minutes later Glen found himself in the bridge. He knew that it had been a few minutes, he knew that he’d been travelling to the bridge, but he couldn’t figure out exactly how he’d got there. The look of confusion on his face must have caught Abel’s eye, as the Captain clapped him heartily on the shoulder and gestured grandly.
“Behold, the bridge of the SS Unfathomable!”
The room was small, barely large enough to hold three chairs, a few consoles and a motley assortment of people wearing clothes that would have looked more at home at a cosplay convention. There was a lot of brass and wood, with mysterious clockwork ticking away in the background (though Glen immediately spotted one arrangement of gears that couldn’t possibly turn). One console glowed like the touchscreen of Glen’s phone, another seemed to be nothing but a slab of granite etched with arcane markings that crackled eerily. Levers and switches of unknown provenance covered almost every available surface, making the inside of the bridge look like the cockpit of a shuttle put together by a mad scientist. At the centre was an old wooden ship’s wheel with clunky mechanical buttons fastened to it with twine and ribbons, surrounded by antique-looking gauges and varying sizes of touchpad over which lines of code scrolled at a mind-numbing pace. Through the window Glen could see a swirl of colour, blurry images always seeming familiar but never resolving into anything defined. It was hypnotising. Glen imagined he could see great mountain ranges, cities clambering ever higher, forests stretching beyond the horizon.
Abel’s voice from just outside the threshold to the bridge snapped him back to reality.
“…already met our engineer, Odin. One of the greatest engineers of the Mundus empire. Found him dying of thirst in the Whispering Desert almost two weeks after a sand geyser killed his crew and downed his ship. These two…”
Abel pointed with both hands at two girls sat in the two swivelling chairs that flanked the central wheel. One had jet black hair and wore a simple red gown, the other an almost iridescent blonde and a blue shift. Both seemed intent on the consoles in front of them.
“…Are Elana and Alene, twin Priestesses of the goddesses of the Pah-Muht island chain. Sentenced at birth to be locked in the mausoleum-temple to appease the spirits of fire and water, poor girls.”
The two girls turned together to nod silently at Glen, and he immediately noticed that their eyes matched their clothing. They turned back to their work.
“And this is..” started Abel, only to be cut off by the man who had been leaning lazily against the wheel.
“Sir Haldon of the Kingdom of Mercia, doer of good deeds and defender of the realm!” The man bounded forward, his large frame and seeming bulk belying his agility. He also had a grip like a vice as he took Glen by both shoulders.
“Yes, Abel. I can see why you like this one. He has a keen eye on him! You are a good egg!”
“Erm.. Thanks?” stuttered Glen, nonplussed by the big man’s ebullient proclamation.
“No thanks required!” replied Sir Haldon “And upon my arm is the Lady Chiel, our medic and as lovely a maiden as ever graced a kingdom.” He inclined his head to his right.
Glen’s brow furrowed. Sir Haldon was still holding him by both shoulders. Nobody was ‘on his arm’.
A slight movement caught his eye. Draped across Haldon’s right shoulder was a pale brown and blue piece of material that Glen had taken for leather. Now it contracted in some places, stretched in others and whipped a fine tendril of flesh towards Glen’s face. He flinched, but the appendage stopped as soon as it got to the hairs on his chin, softly brushing down his cheek. If vibrated faintly as it went.
“Chiel says hello.” chortled Sir Haldon.
“The language of her people takes some learning” Abel piped up “but sooner or later you’ll get used to it.” His smile broadened. “Now then folks, I’m sure you’ve got work to be doing.” He swivelled the captain’s chair to face Glen and gestured at one of the empty seats. “Why don’t you take a seat, Glen?”
Glen stared, nonplussed for a second by Abel’s presence in the captain’s chair. He’d have sworn that he was outside the bridge a second ago.
“Ah” Abel said, drawing the syllable out until it was almost a sentence in its own right. “You noticed that, did you? Try not to think too hard about it until I’ve had a chance to explain. Sit down.”
Glen sat, staring around the empty bridge as though he’d never seen it before. There were three chairs. He was sat in one of two observer’s chairs, Abel in the other, the central chair was still empty. But the priestesses had been…
“Try not to think about it!” commanded Abel. “You think about it too much you’ll give yourself a headache. Focus on me”. Glen looked at Abel, whose gentle smile and calm blue eyes seemed for a second to be the centre of the universe.
“There we go. Now, you’re probably very confused right now”
Glen nodded.
“Good. That means you have questions.”
Glen nodded again.
“And I have answers. I pulled you out of that hospital because you didn’t belong there. They had no reason to be giving you those drugs, and frankly I hate stories like that even if the end is happy, and yours wouldn’t have been. Drink?” Abel paused and extended one of the glasses of water he was holding towards Glen, who merely shook his head and tried not to wonder where they’d come from.
“You’re also a fast learner. Which is also good. See, I’m a storyteller. I take care of stories, of the flow of narratives. Usually people don’t stop to notice the stories they’re in. They don’t spot the patterns.”
He paused and took a sip of his whisky.
“So when things are different they don’t notice. Like the crew just now. Each of their stories had them in the bridge, then somewhere else. They didn’t spot the transition because it wasn’t important to them. But you? You spotted it. You noticed my shoes changing…”
Glen felt a slight vibration in the deck plating, and his alarm showed as he looked down.
“Don’t worry about that.” continued Abel “See, this ship flies between worlds, or more specifically between narratives. Stories. It’s not strictly necessary but I hate having to find just the right way to get from one narrative to the next. It’s so tiresome.” He paused again, a quizzical, unfocused look on his face.
“What?” asked Glen nervously, looking around the empty bridge which had taken on an eerie multicoloured glow from the various consoles. “What’s wrong?”
Abel’s mouth opened slightly, then closed again. His eyes refocused.
“You’ve got to ask the next question. I can’t pre-empt the answer.” He shrugged “Sorry.” His eyes glittered blue, and for an instant Glen couldn’t see anything else.
Glen sat in silence for a couple of seconds, letting the ticking and gentle humming on the bridge surround him. Abel sat patiently as Glen turned question after question over in head, trying to find something to ask that didn’t sound insane. He didn’t find it, so he just asked the first thing that came to mind.
“Flies between stories? So where are we going?”
Abel smiled. The ship shuddered faintly again.
“We’re headed for Odin’s homeworld. It’s a fairly safe place where we can train you up in a variety of things, combat, magic, high technology, the like. Mostly we’re trying to get you out of the Imperator’s territory. We shouldn’t really be here. That brute of an Elf that tried to get you? Definitely not a friend of ours.” Abel gestured around the bridge. “The Unfathomable is a fast, stealthy little ship though. We should be safely away in half a chapter unless something happens” He smiled brightly. A console behind him lit up orange.
“What?” said Glen, brows furrowed. “What do you mean half a chapter?”
Abel’s expression changed instantly. He span the captain’s chair around to face the window and the consoles around the central wheel, which one by one were flickering from green to orange to red.
“Ah. damn.” He reached out and flicked a small bell. “Odin? Check the fourth wall shielding for me, would you? Looks like we’re about to breach.” As he spoke his hands danced over the consoles and switches, pulling some, toggling others and gently stroking a what looked like a taxidermied field mouse. There was another almost imperceptible shudder in the flooring.
When the reply came it was tinny and distorted, the bell resonating with the engineer’s gruff tones.
“I know Cap’n, some kind of pulses just blew half of the relays down here and they’ve thrown navigation all out of whack! Haldon is fighting fires in the main engines and the sisters are somehow keeping the Arcane section from unleashing holy hell. What in all of the fragments just hit us??”
Glen stood and looked over Abel’s shoulder. The storyteller’s hand was midway to a console, shaking faintly as though he couldn’t quite believe the message pulsing from the screen.
“We’re headed back” he said, voice low but quivering with excitement.
“Believe it or not, that was a distress call.”
