“Well, I saved your ass, and then you broke my arm. I’ll tell you where you can put the old hatchet.”

“The arm, of course! What a clumsy muttonhead I was! It wasn’t the first time I’ve found myself culpable of the offense. Dare I say, it won’t be the last.”

“Yes, it all sounds really innocent, doesn’t it. Almost charming. Like something out of an Oscar Wilde play, really. My God, I should be on my hands and knees thanking you for gracing me with your presence. Oops, I mean hand and knees.”

“Come now, buddy, lift yourself out of those dumpy doldrums! Why dwell, when you can…” Russet, in mid sentence, hopped to his feet on the table, then sprung off it like a diving board, doing a double somersault over Herbert’s head. In midair, he plucked the cape-sling free from Herbert’s limp arm. The cape was back around Russet’s neck before he landed from the somersault. “Dance!”

Russet’s pose complemented the word, as if he was about to begin a soft jazz tap routine. The cape was billowing in soft velvety waves, suddenly in perfect condition. And so was Herbert’s arm. It actually felt stronger than ever. He felt like he could halt a charging rhinoceros with that arm, or at least use it to punch out a smug son of a bitch in a cape. “What did you do?” Herbert asked, warily.

“Consider it a humble, and merely preliminary token of reconciliation for my boorish deeds, fine Wizardy.”

“Nice spell, Russet.” Beatrix commended.

“But I’ve only yet begun my repairs!” Russet slid his silver wand from its sheath, and with eyes closed, raised it like a conductor. He drew a breath, then shot the wand’s tip towards one of the moldy beds.

“We’re together! At last!” Russet swelled melodically.

“Ohhh, no,” Herbert protested. The bedding bloomed into a froth of pink blankets and satin.

“Albeit a bit tardy!”

“No, you are not starting a musical number right now. Not in here, not now. No way.” Another flick of the wand had the room in warm décor with a burgundy paintjob and dark trim, fully furnished. It looked a bit like a lounge, and now merely lacked an aging gentleman in a robe with a snifter to complete the effect.

“Friends forever! And fast!” Russet grabbed Beatrix’s hands, swooping her up to her feet. Surprised, she had a look of nervous amusement, but played along. Russet spun her around in a mock-waltz.

“Get that singing bullshit out of here!”

“Me, Beatrix and WiiiZARDYYY!”

SLAM.

Herbert shut the door after their waltz swept them out of the room. He locked it, then crawled between the pink satin sheets and went to sleep.

Beatrix stood with her mouth slightly open. “That was quite a performance, Russet.”

Russet, mid-bow, lifted his head and winked. “All in the due course of gladdening a lady.”

Beatrix made a bemused inspection of the now well-lit corridors of the bunker. “And you certainly did wonders for the atmosphere in here.” She was referring to what transpired during his vigorous musical number, the full, dogged narrative for which we’ve been mercifully spared. Set to his tune though, rest assured, was an ensemble of lively cavorting, graceful Terpsichore, and, yes, majyyks, not the least of which was a handy spell allowing one to make up clever rhyming lyrics on the fly.

The majyyks also called upon the environment to come to life. The frightfully peeling paint on the walls crawled like a kind of supple flesh, and smoothed itself into a seamless plane of pale green. The garbage tumbled through the halls in a horizontal avalanche, dissolving into nothing, leaving a polished, metal surface. Light fixtures above their heads sprung to life with new, steadfast bulbs, supplanting the impotent flicker of the decades-old ones.

“I never did get to thank you for saving us. From those skeletons.”

“And there’s simply no need. Our mutual acquaintance, Wizardy, has already returned the deed in kind, helping me out of my own pickle. You must forgive me if I stay discreet with the embarrassing details of the event, but in any case, he and I are square. Square as can be, as if we’ve taken our mothers to the prom! But from you, Beatrix, all I need to see is your smile to have the exchange turn in my favor. We are more than square. What is that slanty type of square called?”

“A rhombus?” Beatrix felt herself blushing, the first time she could recall it ever happening over a conversation about geometry.

“Yes, a rhombus it is, then. We are fully rhombussed in the transaction.”

“I have to say, your magic is really impressive. You have a lot of talent.” Beatrix tensed her face with critical self-reprimand. “Sorry, I probably sound like a gushing fool.”

“Nonsense! I’m humbled by your remark. Majyyks really are the spice of life, I find,” he said. “Second only to fine tailoring,” he added, after a sly pause.

Beatrix nervously fidgeted with the belt loops on her pants. Despite her most noble efforts, it was proving hard to feel terribly self-chastising in the glow of Russet’s friendliness. “So, is that Cyrillic?” she asked conversationally.

Russet looked to the wall she was referring to, and examined the painted letters with an air of one about to give really complicated directions to a lost motorist. “Umm… you know, I think it’s Russian.” He nodded, becoming more comfortable with this appraisal. “Yes, must be. That’s the one with all the backwards R’s and such.”

“Yeah. Must be.” She stifled a yawn. Now that she thought of it, she couldn’t remember feeling so exhausted. Or dirty. “Say, Russet… When you tidied the place up… you know, with your magical song… did you by any chance fix the running water? I could really use a hot shower.”

“I can assure you this facility, dear Beatrix, is now a veritable shrine to exemplary plumbing standards! The ablutions you crave may occur on your whim. And I imagine,” Russet’s voice escalated to a tenor of excitement, “you may be interested in doing a bit of laundry, no? Say no more, I can see it in your eyes. (Not to mention your clothes!)” He tapped his wand like he was ashing a cigarette. A medium-sized white satchel appeared in his hand. “Just put everything you want to have cleaned in there—darks and whites together even, it doesn’t matter—and give it a little shake, and it’ll all come out clean as the day you bought it!”

“Oh, wow. Thanks!”

“And if you care to have anything pressed, let me show you…” Russet went on with tittering glee at their indulgence in what was likely one of his favorite subjects. As extensive as Russet’s arsenal of magic (majyyks, dammit) was, you could wager dollars to detergent that half the spells related to the maintenance of a proper wardrobe.

The next morning, Herbert shuffled groggily down a corridor while rubbing his eye. In his slumber-addled state, it took him a moment to notice the place was tidier, less rat crap-infested. It didn’t take much more time to guess it had something to do with Russet and his Broadway shenanigans. It took even less time for him not to give a rat’s crap about it. Today, he had bigger fish to fry.

Though the rest of the fort was up to hospital sterilization standards, the rec. room was as dilapidated as ever. He wondered briefly why Russet’s magic hadn’t permeated this room, guessing rather linearly that there might be some anti-magic barrier surrounding it. The musty computer persisted in its loyal display of its banal Windows screensaver. The great shrunken warriors idled, pitched at angles on the foosball table, fused to their iron staves of agility. The bookshelf was jammed with moisture-crinkled, yellow-paged books. They looked like they were recovered from someone’s dead grandmother’s attic, but Herbert recognized many of them as contemporary titles. Most had been printed in the last five years, and in keeping with contemporary literary trends, most invoked a particular theme.

There was an aggressive representation among the shelves of the most popular book series, arguably of all time, the “Rutherford Trick” collection. Rutherford and his friends sought out the Treasures of the Thousand Kingdoms, often dipping into their cache of devastating magic spells. In each book, it was not uncommon for the gumptious youths to bring entire kingdoms to their knees if it meant inching them closer to treasure. Despite heavy-handed overtones of sovereignty violation and militant conquest, the tales always sported a lighthearted, fancifully zephyrous breeze throughout their pages.

Also smattered about the shelves were volumes of the hip, outrageous, and oft in-your-face series, “ALASHA-ZAMMM!” It chronicled the adventures of several rival gangs of youngsters who sparred for turf, riches, and something that rhymed with “riches” which would best be left understood as “women”, all fought out through the arcane, and often “dope” vagaries of street magic. The author, though given a slack leash in having tapped into a vein of “cred” with youth culture, was notorious for putting editors through the ringer with textual deluges of questionable material and profanity, all broadcasted through capital letters (“caps lock”, for the author, was not merely a keyboard key, but something to punch like a timecard, signaling the beginning and end of a day’s work).

Herbert recognized those titles, but hadn’t read any of them. But one he had read was—to his sudden palpations—sprinkled on the shelves liberally. “Vera Valera and the Secret Sorceress Sorority”, a series of tales involving magically-inclined coeds, led by Vera, a vivacious and caper-savvy university socialite. Together they’d solve mysteries and become entwined with the affairs of the many eclectic secret societies on campus. Herbert, though he’d never cop to it, found all the characters and scenarios very charming. Fans of the series, however, would invariably have to endure the curiously salacious flavor to everything, from lengthy descriptions of the coed’s sorceress outfits, and the ways the scant material tended to hug the contours of milky, vitamin-enriched skin, to a narrative style which was absolutely fixated on details of a certain ilk, such as the way Vera’s slender hand would hover, almost trembling with excitement, over a heaving bosom as she revealed her theory on how old Dean Brimstale had fled the enclave with the Palladium Mortarboard.

And then there was another book which Herbert didn’t recognize at all, called “Harry Potter”. Though treated to favorable reviews by a few publications, and indisputably housing some endearing tales about children and witchcraft, the series remained relatively obscure, and few kids had ever heard of it. But for those who had, the existence of the book itself would serve as a story of inspiration, reminding everyone that in this country, even a young black man from Harlem plagued by poverty and violence could shake off the shackles of the ghetto, and by dint of perseverance alone write one hell of a children’s book. As inspirational as that notion may be, and it is, the real world will always require its pound of flesh. Publishers, leery of frightening off potentially squeamish readers by peddling a book written by a black man from the ‘hood, or anyone with an unpalatably “ethnic-sounding” name, persuaded the author to truncate his credit to initials only, and when the issue was ever pressed, claim to be a young white woman from the U.K., as was a fashionable trend among such literature at the time.

Herbert removed one of the Valera novels and, making sure the coast was clear, slipped it in his back pocket.

He applied his attention towards the telephone, which was the reason for this visit. Though first, in a sort of double take, Herbert found himself looking at the bizarre gizmo the phone was hooked into. It was about the size and shape of a sidewalk mailbox, though it wasn’t metal. The case was composed of clear plastic, exposing convoluted clockwork inside. Two dominant interior features were a couple of thick discs, one big, one smaller, like gears on a bicycle. They spooled a kind of tape between them, perhaps magnetic. Between the discs was a label, which said “3π”.

Concluding nothing about the device and surprising no one in doing so, Herbert picked up the phone. There was a dial tone, a sound he was relieved to hear. He punched in the number to his house, and waited with the phone to his ear.

And waited. And waited some more. Just as he was about to remove the phone from his ear, he heard something. It was faint and low-pitched, but was gradually becoming louder, higher in pitch. The noise seemed to reach its peak, a sound like holding down the lowest key on an organ. It then began its sliding descent down the octave on the other side. It was as if Herbert had just rolled over a lazy hill of sound. He waited. And waited. And then exactly as before, it began again.

Herbert hung up in disgust. He debated over whether to try again, which of course he would. Naturally, he thought, it couldn’t be that simple. It never was, certainly not in a place like—

“I love those books.”

Herbert jumped. “What?”

“The book in your pocket! Vera’s so great.” Carmen was standing behind him. For someone responsible for such a clomping pandemonium in her boots the night before, she now seemed like the model of stealth. She could have garroted him if she wanted to, and Herbert invested no certainty whatsoever in the assumption that she didn’t. “Is that volume 18? Or no —Silly!— 19? ‘Soiree of the Pillowfight Valkyries’, I think it was?”

“What? Oh, this. I just needed something to kill a spider with.”

Beatrix held the worn, folded piece of paper, still debating whether it should play a role in this encounter or not. She was nervous about bringing the subject up, but she had to start somewhere. And for some intangible reasons, as well as some quite tangible ones, she’d begun to trust Russet. And now that she thought about it, she wasn’t so much preoccupied by the matter of business at hand as she was with the idea of seeing him again.

Standing outside Russet’s door, she unfolded the Xeroxed sheet. Creases in the paper carved straight, toothy lines of white through the photograph of the boy’s face, intersecting through his black eye patch like crosshairs.

She folded it up and made a motion to knock on the door, but found it ajar. “Hello? Russet?” A sleepy, grumbling noise wafted from within the room. “Oh, sorry… I didn’t know you were still slee…” She was interrupted by more guttural shapes of sound. She thought they were, very much non-lingually, conveying that the intrusion was fine. She opened the door cautiously.

She was startled by what she saw. The room was in horrible shape, worse than before his fit of tidying. Dust coated everything, the bed coverings were stained and moldy, and the one working bulb flickered pitifully. There was a rasping cough from under a soiled mound of bunched-up blankets.

“Russet?” She stepped closer, trying again. “Russ…” Russet bolted upright with a prize sow-caliber snort. She nearly leapt out of her shoes.

His eyes were clenched shut like shy clams, and his hair was like a nest prepared by mentally handicapped birds. He looked partly like someone with a world class hangover, and partly like something you’d find in a cemetery assuming you were equipped with digging apparatus.

“Let me watch a little more. This Epiphany Collection is just incredible,” he slurred deliriously.

Beatrix looked around, generously giving him the benefit of the doubt that he might be saying something coherent, but only briefly. She gently tapped him on the arm. “Hey, I think you’re still dreaming there.”

He took in a short breath and opened his lids wide, revealing bloodshot, darting eyes. They settled on Beatrix.

“Are you feeling alright?” she asked.

“Fine. Better than ever,” he said in a tone that would suit someone poised atop a dunking booth, filled not with water, but dead puppies. Beatrix hesitated, putting a finger to her lip. She thought about Grant, and his pursuit of his friend. Didn’t he say something about medicine?

“Well you don’t really look fine. Are you sure you’re not sick?”

“Pff. Yeah. Sick, that’s what I am,” he said with a sarcastic edge.

She struggled to fathom the disconnect between last night’s Russet and today’s. Maybe some people just weren’t morning people, she thought. “What happened to this room? You cleaned everything up so well last night, and now…”

“Oh. I suppose the magic wore off. It happens. All kinds of stuff like that happens to me.” He sneered in an unbecoming way. Though Beatrix noted, contrary to last light, just about anything he did with his face this morning was unbecoming. It was proving to be a stubborn medium.

“Why do you think that?” she asked.

“Who the hell knows. God’s got a real bone to pick with me. Yeah, He really likes to gnaw on that bone.”

“Come on. That can’t be it. We all get a little down, sometimes.”

“What, don’t you believe in God?” He asked, with a hint of petulance. Beatrix faltered. On another occasion, this might have led to a whole debate on the subject, the kind of conversation in which she tended to thrive. Though at the moment, she was understandably trigger-shy on matters of theology.

“I… don’t know,” she said, toying with her hair.

“Well, what is it? Yes or no?”

“I guess not. No.”

Russet released a guffaw. “Sorry, don’t mean to condescend, you know,” he said. He flashed her an insecure look through his baggy eyes. “I’ve just never fully understood that point of view. I just don’t get it.”

“Why not?”

“Well, something’s got to have it out for me, I figure. If not God, someone very important then. A terribly vindictive prick.”

“That’s your reason? That’s awfully…” She shrugged instead of saying ‘specious’, usually one of her favorite words in such conversations. The fact was, it wasn’t even specious so much as it was merely pathetic.

“And somebody’s got to be responsible for making me into such a perfectly, elegantly miserable puke.” He reclined with some effort into his musty den of blankets. “I’m like an orchid in midnight bloom. Or the falls of Shangri-friggin’-La. If you can’t tip your cap to God for that, you simply have no sense of majesty.”

Beatrix breathed a heavy, but carefully soundless sigh. This was not at all how she’d intended the morning to go. She restively toyed with the folded paper.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, suddenly hopeful. “Maybe you could, if you feel up to it I guess, do some kind of breakfast spell?”

“Oh. Yeah. Well…” He pulled blankets over himself in a voice-muffling heap. “I hope you like burritos.”

She frowned, then looked at the paper. She slid it into her pocket.

“Contact with the outside world is a little tricky around here,” Carmen tried to explain to Herbert, summoning every ounce of her limited patience and attention span. “There’s a rift between this world and yours.”

“Is that what that weird contraption is for? Getting through the rift?”

“I honestly don’t know. —Stupid!— But yes, I think so.”

“I think it’s a broken piece of junk. The phone doesn’t work.”

“Well of course not. —Shh!— Everything around here is really old, in case you didn’t notice.”

“I noticed. So what’s this rift, anyway? Some kind of force field maintained by wizards or something?”

“Wizards!” She laughed, almost choking from the sheer absurdity of the remark. “Of course not! —Shh!— Sorry.” Herbert silently awaited clarification. Carmen gathered herself. “Um, right. You see, this world is different from our world. Earth, that is.” Herbert was about to say something sarcastic, but she went on. “Hear me out! It has to do with the summer. It’s always summer here. And as such,” she leaned closer, as if imparting a jewel of wisdom which was guarded by a battalion of coy mountain-top monks for centuries. “As long as it continues to be summer here, camp will never end, and you will never be able to leave.”

“What? Why?”

“Because it is summer here, while it is not summer on Earth. —Er! What?— No, wait. That doesn’t sound right.” Herbert sighed. He was wondering why he ever thought trying to have a coherent conversation with Carmen was a good idea.

Carmen shifted her glance towards the rec. room’s entrance. “Oh, hello, Junior Camper… —Darn!— I mean, Beatrix. Just Beatrix!”

“Herbert, I think there’s something wrong with Russet.”

Herbert made a series of overly animated head bobbing motions, squeezing as much sarcasm out of the body language as he could. “You think??”

“He’s just… so different. I don’t know what…” Herbert interrupted her with a hand in the air, turning back towards Carmen.

“Hang on a sec, Beatrix. We’ll talk about it in a minute. Carmen was just explaining something to me.”

“Right.” Carmen regrouped. “The bottom line, I suppose, is…” Her hands addressed the frizzy disaster of hair above her as she searched for the words. “This rift in time between the two worlds, it makes it really hard to leave. But probably not impossible. I mean, we all got here, didn’t we? It stands to reason we can all leave. And I would guess Campmaster Thundleshick is the one to decide whether you stay or go.”

“Thundleshick.” Herbert hissed to himself through pursed lips as he brandished a fist, the way Seinfeld does when cursing his portly neighbor, Newman.

“So he just decides one day, on a whim, that we can go?” Beatrix asked, trying to connect some dots.

“Oh, probably not. I’m sure he’s long forgotten about each of us, individually. He’s not really like Santa, keeping lists and such.”

“I’d sort of gathered that,” said Herbert.

“I’d guess if you wanted him to let you leave, or do anything at all for you, you’d have to do something for him.”

“Like what…” Herbert said, as if responding to the exact same statement, only made by someone holding a rubber suit, a tub of Vaseline, and a poodle.

“Like Camp Quests! —Shh!— Yes, that would have to be it.” Her revelation was met with silence, prompting her to continue. “If there’s one thing he seems to be interested in, it’s Camp Quests. You see, next to the bulletin board there,” she flailed in the direction of a cluttered board. “The computer. From time to time a quest will be posted online, and any camper who’s inclined can go on the quest. Of course, it’s been some time since anyone’s been around here to try. I’d go myself! —Shh!— But then, nobody would be around to hold down the fort here and provide orienta—”

“What’s the point of these quests? Treasure or something?” Herbert asked.

“Badges! Magical merit badges!”

“Oh, well why didn’t you say so? It sounds like it’s clearly worth the effort.”

“For each quest completed you receive one badge. You put the loot in the Vend-o-Badge over there, and it gives you your badge.” They followed her pointing finger towards the peculiar object which looked like a modified snack vending machine.

“Okay, so, you get a badge,” Herbert reasoned, “and then you give it to Thundleshick? And he gets excited about it, for whatever sick reason, and then lets you go home?”

“Possibly!”

“Possibly?”

“But I don’t think only one would cut it. I’d think he’d have to be sufficiently impressed. I’m guessing a whole book of badges would move him. I’ve never known anyone who’s collected a whole book, though. It’s hard!”

“Alright. It’s a start, I guess. Maybe if we all work together at it, and put in the hours…” Herbert looked pained, as if he was already calculating the time budget. “How many are in a book?”

“Three!”

Herbert started to say something, then stopped. “Three? That’s it?”

“M-hmm!”

“Well, hell, we can do that. Can’t we, Beatrix?”

She shrugged. “I guess so. We can give it a shot.”

Carmen clapped her hands, bubbling up with energy. “This is great! It’s been ages since anyone went on a quest around here!”

The cardboard box slapped against the concrete floor. It’s hodgepodge of contents made it look like something you’d find on a lawn during a yard sale. At home on its face would have been a hand-written sign reading “50¢”.

“You’ll need to be prepared before you go gallivanting on quests, ‘kay?” Carmen rummaged about the box, clinking and rustling through items.

“We could pack some sandwiches…” Herbert suggested.

“I mean magic items, silly. You’ll need to know your way around a nifty spell or two if you want to stand a chance.”

“I’ve already got one. See?” Beatrix held out her ring hand. “But maybe there’s something in there for Herbert?”

“Come on, I don’t need…” Herbert began dismissively.

“Sure! Just have a look.” Carmen gestured towards the interior of the box.

“Herbert, I know you have some weird hang-ups about magic, but it really is useful. Honestly, you should give it a try,” Beatrix said as she fiddled with her ring. The object, in its silent way, had endeared itself to her, and so had by mysterious proxy the art of magic. She now felt like an unlikely spokesperson for the cause.

Herbert made a small noise of reluctance. Beatrix stooped over the box and delicately pulled out one of the objects. “What about this?”

“Is that a flute?”

“It appears to be.”

“Let me make this perfectly clear. You will find me resorting to many desperate measures to leave this camp. Virtually any you can imagine. But what you will not do is catch me frolicking all over the place with a damn flute, I’ll tell you that much right now.”

Beatrix replaced the item. She pulled out what looked like a little plastic toy monkey. She did not present the item’s candidacy to Herbert immediately, though. “Are you sure this one’s magic?” she asked in Carmen’s direction.

“Oh, no. —Shhhh! — You don’t want that one. No, no. —Idiot!— Let me take that.” Carmen cradled the monkey, then put it back in the box. “No, the naughty monkey belongs in his box. There he goes.”

Beatrix looked at Herbert with raised eyebrows. “Alriiight. Moving on then.” Another object surfaced. “What about this?”

Herbert glowered at the ornately decorated Oriental fan, not dignifying it with a response. “Right,” Beatrix said, putting it back. She sat up, putting her hands on her waist. “Well, you tell me, Herbert. I don’t know. There are some spoons in there, there’s some kind of weird statue-thing, there’s a crowbar, there’s… I think… some kind of replica of a ship… there’s…”

“What’s that?” Herbert peered into the box, suddenly fixed on something. He moved some objects aside, including a hand mirror, a whip, a power strip for a computer, and a really tall pepper grinder like they use in restaurants. There it was in Herbert’s view, plain as day. He lifted it out of the heap.

“Is that a gun? Like a real gun?” Beatrix reacted.

“It’s an M9 Beretta pistol. Yeah, it looks real.” Herbert was one of those guys who, for some inexplicable reason, knew things about guns.

“Is that thing magic?” she asked Carmen.

“If it’s in the box, then yes, it should be magic. Everything in there is.”

Herbert inspected it with, in Beatrix’s judgment, an eerie facility. It was black, with various components plated in silver, the grip in particular. He released the ammo magazine, then slid it back in with an authoritative locking sound. “It’s loaded, too. Fifteen rounds.”

“Oh. That’s… good. I guess.” Beatrix was never comfortable around guns. “Well, if that’s your pick, Herbert,” said Beatrix, who could tell the two were already inseparable, “why don’t you try some… magic?” She sounded unsure.

“Oh. Alright,” Herbert said begrudgingly. In his mind, guns had nothing to do with magic. Performing incantations with a gun seemed like a form of disrespect to the weapon, a kind of misuse. It was almost as if he was being asked to keep his new Lamborghini under the 20 mph speed limit.

He held the gun out, raised to an elevation slightly higher than his head. He then held out his other hand, as if he had the slightest notion about what he was trying to accomplish. “So… what exactly am I doing, here?”

“Just picture something you want to achieve. Magically. Anything, really. But I guess try to start small.”

“Small, huh? Gotcha.” Herbert focused. His face increased its strain. And harder still. Nothing at all was happening, not even a spark. He felt like a paraplegic trying to move his legs. In frustration, he started stabbing at the air with the gun. The other two crouched defensively.

“Whoa. Watch it!”

“Relax, guys. I’m not going to shoot anyone. Look, the safety’s on.”

“Wow, that’s so unbelievably reassuring!” Beatrix mocked.

“Well, there’s obviously something wrong with it. I don’t think it’s a magic gun.”

“Are you sure you’re doing it right?”

“Not even remotely.”

Beatrix watched the M9 warily. She made the reluctant offer. “Here, let me see it.” Herbert shrugged. With his finger in the loop, he flipped it over adroitly and handed it to her grip-first. She took it from him, but halfheartedly, not properly holding the grip.

The moment she made contact with it, the gun began glowing red and was hot to the touch. She held it up, and prongs of creeping flame spilled from its aura. The flame tendrils, giving her little time to react, grew larger and collected into a ball of fire in front of the barrel. The ball became bigger and hotter in fractions of a second.

She gasped and dropped the gun. It instantly ceased its self-incanted spectacle. She held her fingers, which had felt as if on the verge of suffering burns. “I’d say it’s definitely magical,” Beatrix not so much remarked, as lamented.

Herbert tried again, putting on some of his most fearsome “I am really using magic now” faces, though they came off more as “I am really feeling constipated now” faces. The weapon remained lifeless. “Yeargh…” Herbert let out as he surrendered. “What’s the deal? What am I doing wrong?”

“I don’t know, Herbert. That thing practically exploded the second I touched it. It’s not for lack of magic potency inside it.”

“I guess I’m just no good at magic.” He looked at her helplessly, as if expecting a theory. She held up her hands, like a hobo had just asked her for spare change.

“You know,” Carmen stepped in. “Some people have trouble using certain kinds of magic. It’s like any talent, ‘kay? There are always areas that need work. But it’s also sort of a combination… you know, between the magic item’s capacity, and yourself. What’s inside you. So, if there’s something inside you that’s not quite right, then your magic doesn’t work quite right, ‘kay?” They nodded slowly. She continued, “Okay… like, say you have some fear. Like a fear of flying. Well logically, it doesn’t stand to reason you’re going to be doing any flying spells soon, right! But it’s more than that. If you’re a really good person without any bad stuff in you, it would be really hard for you to hurt someone with magic, or cast any ‘bad’ spells, kay? Or if there’s something dark inside you, something evil, then you won’t be able to do any good spells. Like healing magic and stuff like that. Get it?”

“Makes sense, I guess” Herbert said. “So what does that say about me?”

“You?” she said, looking skyward, presumably at the onerous prospect of psychoanalyzing Herbert.

“Yeah. What does it say about a person who can’t seem to use any magic at all?”

“In that case,” she considered, “I might guess there was some very significant underlying issue. I hate to presume to know anything about you, Herbert. —Shh! Dummy!— But my best guess would be some kind of terrible incident in your past. Like a posttraumatic stress thing. Maybe.”

“Hmm. Nope. I really don’t remember anything like that happening.”

“A lot of times people don’t remember those things.” Beatrix suggested.

“I dunno. It doesn’t really sound like me. I’ve lived a pretty boring life,” Herbert said as he pulled the gun’s holster strap out of the box. He looped it around his waist, fastened it, and holstered the M9. “Anyway, I think I’ll take the gun. I mean, even if I’m not going to be doing any magic with it, at least it is a gun, after all. One that shoots bullets.”

“Hmm. Okay…” Carmen didn’t seem completely satisfied with this. It struck her as only proper that one should be, if embarking upon magical quests, armed with magic and not relying on things that fired bullets through such a literal, mechanical process. But it was clear Herbert was going to be a slow study. “You’re ready for a quest, then.”

Beatrix, however, wasn’t ready. She was dwelling on something Carmen had said earlier, about those who had trouble with healing magic. She was starting to feel that some of her earlier intuitions were becoming justified, but rather than produce a feeling of satisfaction, it just made her worry. It was a worry she couldn’t pinpoint. Maybe it was mixed with newly percolating feelings of concern for Russet. Or maybe it was a reminder of the seemingly ever-expanding dominion of malefactors bent on her misfortune, for reasons she still didn’t understand.

She held the blue doll in her hand, giving it a pensive shake. Decisively, she opened it, then stuck both halves in her pocket.

Under the merciless morning sun, Grant and his two orphan deputies traversed desert dunes on lumbering mounts. The children each rode a more diminutive incarnation of Grant’s more nobly-proportioned mount, an 800-pound bull Frogasus. He’d originally had no intention of expending the magical collateral on any kind of transportation, preferring to marshal his reserves for a more pressing occasion. But listening to two orphans bemoan the discomforts of a lengthy march through a desert was just not something Grant’s conscience was going to permit.

Samantha and Simon were sound asleep on their smaller frogasus mounts, a sight which would almost look cute if the creatures weren’t drooling strands of white mucus. The frogasus, though durable and loyal to a fault, was hardly a premium summoning. It was better known for its economy. Tiny wings left it flightless, and a tough, bumpy back made it difficult to ride. A minor concession Grant did make, eventually, was giving them the legs of a goat. This was after the instantly apparent non-viability of traversing sandy dunes in great leapfrogging bounds for hours.

Grant halted and dismounted his frogoatsus, and examined his map with a look of frustration. He held a compass up to the map as if it would be of the slightest benefit to his current navigational quandary. Samantha was rubbing sand out of a sleepy eye. “Why have we stopped, mister?”

“We should have arrived by now.”

“You mean we get to have pizza soon?”

“No, no. It’s... never mind. There just won’t be pizza. Or probably not. I’ve never been to the fort, myself.”

“Well, how can you know, then? Maybe there’s lots of pizza!” Simon was suddenly awake and offering his groggy pizza theories.

“I guess you could be right, but don’t get your hopes up. As it stands, I can’t even find it, or even the village it’s supposed to reside by. It should be right here, but it’s not.”

“Well, I’ll go back to sleep on my frog. Wake me when we’re there, unless I wake up first from the smell of pizza.” Simon rested his head on a collection of shiny warts.

“What village are you looking for?” Samantha asked, and meekly added, “If there’s no pizza, will there be some food there? A crust, maybe?”

“Probably. We’re looking for the village of Jivversport. It’s a nice place, and there’ll be accommodations. Well, there would be. If it was here.”

“Where did it go?” she asked, as Simon initiated a low snore. Grant was silent. His mount inflated its chest, exhaled, and bent down to rest on the knees of its front quarters, exactly as a tired goat might.

“Where did she go?” He rhetorically broke his silence with.

“Who?”

“Okay. I really have no choice now. It’s pretty clear she didn’t really go this way. God, how did she give me the slip?” Samantha was reluctant to repeat her question, but looked sympathetic nonetheless. Grant held his red doll, thinking.

She ventured more curiosity. “What’s that?”

Grant seemed to be composing his words carefully before he spoke them. “Deputies… Samantha, Simon, listen to this closely.” Samantha poked Simon. He was immediately upright, as if he’d never been napping. “I’m going to activate this doll. And when I do, one of a few things is going to happen. It might just… well, first it’s going to turn blue, and then…”

“Turn blue?? Wow, why?!” Simon enthused.

“It just will. That’s not important. Now listen. It’ll turn blue, and then I’ll disappear. Then it’ll just fall to the ground, on the sand there.”

“Cool…”

“Yeah. So if that happens, I want one of you to pick it up, and hang on to it. Keep it safe for me, okay?” They nodded. “Another thing that might happen… actually, this is pretty likely, so listen. What might happen is, it’ll turn blue,” he nodded towards Simon as he said the word. “And then a girl will appear where I’m standing.”

“Is she the girl you’re looking for?” Samantha gathered.

“Yes. Exactly. But I’ll be gone, so what I need you to do is…” Grant felt his head and winced, as if he was getting a headache. “God, I hate logistics like this. Let me think.” The orphans waited with interest. “Okay, if she appears, just give her a message for me. Tell her to stay here, and just put the doll down. In the sand. Like, over here.” Grant marked an ‘X’ in the sand. “Then I’ll come back. Got it?”

They bobbed their heads slowly. “How do we know if it’s the right girl?” Samantha asked.

“Ask her if her name is Beatrix,” Grant responded. Samantha’s eyes widened, and turned to see Simon looking at her with a similar expression.

“Okay, here I go. Remember what I told you, deputies!” He twisted the top half of the doll. A few moments passed. Nothing happened.

“It’s still red, mister.”

“Yeah. I forgot to mention. This is another thing that could happen.” His posture sunk into dejection. He became lost in silent thought about this turn of events.

Samantha took the opportunity to wonder quietly towards Simon, “You don’t think Beatrix is… that Beatrix, do you?” Simon didn’t respond, but had a goofy Christmas morning smile on his face.

“Alright, here’s what we do now. Samantha,” Grant smiled, adopting an encouraging older brother tone. “I need you to be in charge of the doll.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Well, if Beatrix ever puts her doll back together, she may try it to come find me. And I need to be able to see her when she does, so that means I shouldn’t be the one to disappear. If you’re holding it, you’ll disappear and go to wherever she was.”

“Disappear?” she said, looking at the doll with sullen reluctance.

“Um… okay, I phrased that really badly. It’ll just be for a second. We’ll make sure you come back really soon and…”

“I’ll do it!” Simon volunteered.

“Great. Here you go, Simon. Be really careful with it. You have an important mission!”

“Cooool. I can’t wait to disappear!”

“Mister, what is that? Is that the village?” Grant turned around to see something on the horizon, something he hadn’t seen before. It was hard to see through the violent refractions in the hot air rising from the sand. It looked like a small building, maybe a cottage.

“No, too small to be a village.” He looked closer. There were two figures on top of it. Human figures. They were waving.

“Questpro Plus v. 3.1” was a peculiar application, unlike any Herbert or Beatrix had used. The main window was complex jumble of lists and statistics on older quests. Some were completed, others were failed, while many had expired, never being taken up by anyone. Beatrix struggled to make sense of the application, a process made more difficult by the blurry, faded colors on the monitor. Though it didn’t seem possible, it had surely been running for decades.

“This is such a strange program.” Beatrix complained. “I wonder who programmed it?”

“Who the hell knows.” Herbert’s eye was scanning the cluttered bulletin board. The pinned-up documents showed their age even more than the computer. It all struck him as evidence of a once thriving summer camp organization. Lists of names, loosely catalogued notes on magic, tidbits on the lore of the realm—it looked like the trappings of a long dead bureaucracy. There was one document that was curiously more interesting than others in its simplicity, though he didn’t reach for it.

“Actually, everything about this computer is weird. Even the fact that it’s here at all seems a little weird to me,” she said.

“I know what you mean. How’s that thing get updated, anyway? I checked for an internet connection before, to send my dad an email. No luck, though.”

“Maybe it’s a closed network connection? Or maybe it’s magic. I don’t know much about computers. Or magic, for that matter.”

“Computers and magic are an idiotic combination, if you ask me.”

“And the date’s out of whack. The computer thinks it’s 2055!” she said, as she opened the system clock. “So we got here on the third… that makes it the fifth today?” She muttered to herself. She applied the correct date, June 5, 2004.

“Maybe the computer’s from the future,” he said dryly.

“Yeah. Or maybe, unlikely as it is, someone just typed in the wrong date. Or maybe,” she sported, “someone took a modern computer back in time, to the year 1950 or so, and it’s been running here all this time with its clock ticking away.”

“Huh.” It was a thought-provoking idea, even if it was facetious. It brought Herbert’s attention back to document he’d noticed on the bulletin. It was handsomely concise, and neatly written. There was something faintly familiar about it.

The computer made a sound, one of those default noises meant to be perfunctorily informative of some event which was terribly important business from the computer’s perspective, but usually trivial to its human pilot. This event, however, was far from it. The Questpro Plus item in the taskbar blinked expectantly. Beatrix clicked it.

“Wow. It looks like a new quest has just been posted.”

“Oh yeah? What’s it about?”

“Let’s see… It looks like it has something to do with wizards.”

With this, Herbert redoubled his attention on the document, going as far as to pluck it from the thumbtack securing it to the board. He furrowed his brow as he concentrated on the text.

Things to remember:

1. Stay away from wizards. They are unpleasant company, and are to be avoided.

2. Dragons don’t exist.

3. There’s no such thing as time travel.

“Yeah? What about wizards?” he said, not mentioning the document. There wasn’t much to it, he thought, other than coincidentally addressing a couple of pertinent topics, with little elaboration.

“I think…” she ventured, combing the window for information, scrolling through lines of poorly formatted text. “We’re supposed to gather ‘wizard’s whiskers’.”

“Whiskers?”

“I suppose it means hair. Like, his beard and such.”

“Oh. How much hair?”

She scrolled further.

“Well?”

“Three pounds.”

“Is that a lot?”

“It sort of sounds like a lot to me. Hair doesn’t really weigh very much.”

“Yeah, and I bet an old wizard’s hair is extra fine and wispy. Like dandelion fluff. The bastards.” Herbert reread item 1) on his sheet. He was beginning to perspire slightly. “I guess it doesn’t sound that hard. So we just find a wizard somewhere and ask him for some of his hair.”

“What if he doesn’t want to give it?”

“Then… I guess maybe we best him in a duel of magic or some ridiculous nonsense like that.”

“Don’t you think that might be a little difficult? Wizards are known for their great skill in magic. We’d probably be done for if we challenged one.”

From behind them there was an unmistakably sardonic “Pfff.” They turned to find Russet standing there. Though ‘standing’ would be putting it in a flattering manner. It was more of a hunched torso floating in midair, which only happened to be supported by a pair of legs underneath. His clothes were wrinkly, and his cape was on crooked. His face had deep scowl-lines, and might remind you of the face of someone’s cranky grandma who’d just been in a fight, and won. “Are you kidding me?” he spat.

“Oh, Russet… hey.” Beatrix swiveled her chair to face him.

“Yeah. Hey.” His face only marginally eased its sourness out of courtesy. “Guys, wizards don’t use magic. Don’t you know anything?”

“Well, no. We don’t, actually. What do you mean?”

“I mean, wizards…” he put his hand on his face, as if to regroup from a misfired attempt to explain something so obvious, he’d never considered putting it into words before. “Wizards are not the jolly old guys who have stars and moons on their hats and fondle big crystal orbs all day. It’s not like popular culture presents. I mean, sure, yeah, there are guys like that, with the hats and magic talking owls and stuff. They’re just not called wizards.”

“What are they called?” Beatrix asked.

“Anything else, really. Are you guys serious with this? I thought only imbeciles didn’t know this stuff,” he said. Herbert nudged Beatrix and raised a furtive eyebrow in her direction, as if to validate his earlier remarks on Russet.

“Go on…” she said.

“Sorcerers, mages, illusionists, magickers, enchantment engineers, charm consultants or whatever B.S. titles they’re spinning out these days. But not wizards.”

“So…” Herbert said, pausing, making a motion with his hand as if about to carefully throw an imaginary object into a waste bin across the room. “What does that make wizards, exactly?”

“Wizards are disgusting, crazy old men! They don’t use magic at all. They probably don’t even have the mental capacity for it. They generally just stand around babbling incoherently, being dirty.”

“Does that mean you qualify?” Herbert quipped.

“Har, har.”

Beatrix rested her head on her hand, looking puzzled, less so at Russet’s diatribe on wizards than at his erratic behavior, which she still couldn’t solve.

“Wait… wait a minute,” Russet suddenly had a sinister look of amusement. “Do you mean to tell me, Wizardy Herbert, that you had no idea what the significance of your name was?” Herbert responded with a blank look. Russet erupted, “Oh my God, that’s so funny! I thought it was just some sort of ironic, self-effacing nickname! But it turns out you never knew all along! Ha!”

It was true. Herbert never took pride in his unusual name, and in fact had spent the better part of his life nurturing an understandable umbrage about the whole situation. But he’d never guessed that in reality, or at least this sub-reality he found himself in, that his name was actually a form of slur. It was tantamount to wandering around with a name like Poopey Hubert, or Shitty Higgins. Or perhaps, within a more risqué quadrant, something like Tarty Walter, or Hussie Andrew.

Furthermore, Russet was dead-right about wizards and what they really were. There are innumerable types of people who we might consider to be wizards, and even refer to as wizards in our naïveté. A character like Elwin Thundleshick who, despite certain ignobilities, might be thought of as a wizard, though he isn’t. He is in actuality a kind of bum who wields an advanced facility with kinds of magic most expedient to his petty designs. Or if you crave something from a pool of legitimate-sounding vernacular, he could be classified as a mid-to-high level rouge-thaumaturgist, with cross-class shades of the gnostic-swindler’s discipline. Other better-known examples such as Merlin or Gandalf would more rightly be referred to simply as sorcerers, though in reality very few individuals could be poured into such an archetypical mold. Instead, individuals are sprinkled diffusely across a wide spectrum of sorcerial classification. Examples can be produced copiously, both from within fiction and reality, citing for instance the esoteric hijinks of urban-legerdemancer, David Blaine, or the flamboyant creature summonings of beastmajyykers, Siegfried and Roy, or the slippery elusions of premier ephemera-shaman, Harry Houdini.

None of these people would ever be called wizards, though. A wizard would more properly be likened to a kind of deranged hermit whose indigenous habitat tended to be deep within unpioneered forests. Herbert’s short document held sound advice, for you’d never want to get that close to one, even though in truth most of us have at some point. Maybe due to vanishing habitat, or a primitive and ornery stock of wanderlust, a stray wizard will occasionally find himself in more populated areas, including dense cities where he might occupy a street corner shouting unpleasant and incomprehensible things to himself and passers-by. It’s uncertain why the term “wizard” in regular parlance had come to take on a magical connotation. It is possible that the association became logical since so many who wield magic (such as Thundleshick) often exhibit wizardly traits, like terrible hygiene, unkempt facial hair, ratty attire and bizarre sociopathic tendencies. In truth, there is a lot of crossover between wizards and notable practitioners of magic, the way a sterile, dull mule has much intersection, though ingloriously, with the majestic kingdom of the equine.

For those interested in a more strict taxonomy of the subject, it’s true no pure wizard uses magic, but not all who are like wizards don’t use magic. This logic may seem odd, but once reconciled, there follows quite a sprawling, exotic tree of classification. Many a spare coin’s been pried from spontaneously generous coin purses by the Order of the Hobo-Magi. Few have ever been swept away in admiration for the pungent bouquet of the bindlestiff-grimoirians. Legendary individuals have arisen within the strata of these classes. The pungent kleptomaniac Thundleshick, the little grubby, doublespeaking swamp hermit Yoda, and of course no such list of notables would be complete without mention of the greatest vagabond-sorcerer of all time, Jesus Christ.

Herbert smirked. “Go on, laugh it up. I don’t care if it’s true. It doesn’t bother me.” Russet continued his blustering amusement, but it quickly began to look forced. His impish laugh fizzled into a weak cough.

“How are you feeling, Russet? If you don’t mind my asking?” Beatrix asked. “Alright, I guess,” he replied in a way that suggested he was anything but.

“Herbert and I are going to go out for a while. We’re going to look for this wizard. Do you feel up to coming along?”

Russet milled towards the box of magic trinkets and gave it a small kick. “Going out and messing around with a filthy old wizard sounds like about as fun as getting mauled by a tiger. I think I’ll just hang tight here. Maybe watch some TV.” He stooped down, idly plucking something out of the box. It was a plastic toy monkey. Printed across its shirt was the phrase “Singe Vilain”. He looked at it abstractedly, as if he’d picked up nothing more than a dull stone.

“I’ve got no problem with that.” said Herbert.

“Okay, then,” Beatrix sighed. “Guess we’ll see you when we get back.”

“Ahoy there, desert travelers! Avast ye, and rest your dune-weary feet!”

Grant was never sure what the literal meaning of the word “avast” was, aside from being something generally piratey, which pirates said. This made sense though, because the boy who shouted it, along with his female comrade, did look roguishly nautical with their bandanas and their buckles and their swashes (he wasn’t sure what a swash was either).

Settling on the idea that the two teens were something like pirates, albeit in the middle of a blistering desert, Grant moved his attention to the ramshackle structure on which they stood. It was a cube of wooden planks, about the size of a two-story house. There were no windows in the disorderly façade of planks. On the roof, a crooked wooden pole supported a torn, wind-whipped flag bearing, unsurprisingly, a skull and crossbones. Written on the façade in large letters with smeary black paint were words and phrases conveying a bravado characteristic of pirates. “DEATH TO SLURPENOOK!” swept prominently across the upper portion. “SPIES BE DAMNED” was another that stood out from the more singular expressions, including “HALT”, “BE WARNED”, and “AVAST” (there is was again). But most noticeable of all was “FORT PIZZAHUT” at the top.

“Hearty salutations!” the boy persisted with his rugged seaman’s affability. He waved a short dagger as he spoke. “The shelter of our great fort can be considered yours, travelers. If ye can be sworn to claim no unfriendly allegiance, of course!” He gave them a dubious look from behind his long, partially braided hair in the process of having itself dashingly windswept across his face.

“None whatsoever,” Grant replied. “So… this is Pizzahut, then? Really?”

“‘Tis, mate!” he rebounded with cheer. The girl remained stoically silent, and glanced at her partner. She wore an odd, vaguely nautical hat, and had a telescope tucked into a waist-sash. “First officer Nemoira and I are its protectors. We’ll let no unsavories press the planks of these decks. Captain Counselor Daniel James at your humble disposal.”

“Thanks, Daniel. I don’t suppose you’ve seen a girl around here recently?”

“Would that I had!” He nudged Nemoira jocularly. “The sight of another fair wanderer’d prove a diversion not unwelcome!” Nemoira rolled her eyes at what was probably not the first bawdy remark she’d ever had to endure. “What use have ye with the lady?”

“Just some business. It doesn’t matter.” Grant again sized up the building, which was no closer to being a spa resort than the shed of a serial killer. But anything offering shade at this moment would seem inviting. “Can we come in?”

“Can ye come in?” Daniel echoed, smiling. “Can ye come in,” he said again, with further rhetorical inflection. He stroked a nonexistent beard. Grant waited for an answer. He glanced back at the apprehending orphans, suddenly becoming more aware of the acidic streams of sweat on his face. “I’ll tell ye what you can do. You can…” He raised the dagger into the air, then stabbed it into the wooden roof beneath him.

“Die!”

The two pirate youths vanished.

“Where’d they go, mister Grant?” Samantha asked.

“No idea. Strange people.” He felt the hilt of his sword presciently.

The fort jolted. A cloud of sand blossomed around the base of the now trembling wooden structure. It grew out of the ground revealing hidden height to it, and then soon, hidden breadth as well. As it rose, it became a great edifice of similar box-like wooden structures cobbled together somehow, creaking deeply and frightfully from the stresses, as a loud but soft shushing could be heard from tons of white sand spilling from its recesses. A column of tangled wood, like an appendage, ripped itself out of the sand with alarming swiftness, and brought a mighty claw of planks down hard in front of the travelers. The thing had a massive arm. Another one made itself known in similar fashion. The peak of the mass, the original, now humble-looking fort, showed a cracking fissure across its middle. It opened wide to resemble a splintery, awful mouth. It roared.

Daniel and Nemoira stood behind the ghastly thing at a distance. Daniel shouted over the shushing sand, “Slurpenook rogues! Regret ye will blackening our doorstep! Now reap ye the spoils of a woken clubhouse-golem!”

The golem pounded the ground in front of the party with its monstrous limb, sending them tumbling skyward through a plume of sand and earth, dark from the depth from which it was dredged. The three frogasus mounts, spurred to courage through loyalty (or maybe through an intellect afforded by cashew-sized brains), operated their puny wings with all their might. They took to a wobbly flight and with a great earnest resolve, flew directly into the golem’s open mouth. The golem closed its mouth, and did not chew.

With the brief distraction, Grant crawled out of a pile of sand, finding himself caked in grit which clung to his sweat. He hustled to a strategic position and waited with his sword at the ready. He stood in the path of another mammoth swinging limb, and at the last moment brought his blade in an arc over his head, severing the huge boxy claw at its wrist. The ponderous thing came crashing into the sand, making a sound like an antique boat hitting the ground after being slung from a large trebuchet.

The monster roared at Grant, spitting splinters at him sloppily, though as the fragments rained around him, they looked less like splinters and more like crooked javelins. Grant dropped to a knee to brace himself for, judging by his expression, a substantial follow-up attack. He aimed his sword, steadied by both hands, at the beast’s heart. A beam of bright, scorching white struck its center as Grant bore the stiff recoil. A frosty cloud enveloped the flailing clubhouse-golem. Ice crystals sprouted all over it, making it resemble a tub of ice cream that’s been in the freezer for too long. Then all at once, it was enveloped by a huge block of ice which looked cut like a jewel, manifesting in a breakneck instant, much like the way an airbag deploys. The immobilized monster tipped, then thundered to the ground, becoming completely obliterated. All that remained were boulders of ice, dirty with soggy chunks of mangled embedded wood. Geysers of steam burst forth from the prolific rubble as the tremendous cold met with the heat of the desert.

Grant kept his composure and approached the two pirates. He’d surely spent most of his magical capital on the impressive trick, but made an effort to convey there was more where that came from in case the aggressors were determined in their rapscallionism. Daniel and Nemoira appeared to bicker with each other frantically as he approached. Grant stopped in front of them, putting his sword in front of himself like a cane as a kind of portentous warning. “I’m sorry I had to destroy your fort,” he said, somewhat sincerely.

Daniel squirmed in his frilly, loose-fitting attire. “That’s…” He stopped short of calling it ‘okay’. It was hard to view what had just occurred as ‘okay’. “Truth be told, mate, t’wasn’t our fort. More of a line of defense. And, I suppose…” A frown took over. “… a pet.”

In the thick forests surrounding Fort Crossnest, Herbert and Beatrix had set about tackling the unusual quest. An eastern region of the forest, near the base of the northern mountain range, was an area purported to yield a significant population of indigenous wizards. This was information retrieved from the Questpro Plus terminal, which they had little choice but to accept on good faith.

They’d decided to set up a station at a clearing, a kind of wizard observation station, which would consist of little more than a hiding place in some shrubs with a clear view of their wizard trap. The trap itself would consist of little more than an elevated tree branch with a string dangling from it, and a twenty dollar bill tied to the end, where it would flutter in the breeze. Another indispensable tidbit supplied by Questpro Plus was that wizards, though volatile in manner and capricious in taste, could be counted upon to be swayed by cash. This bit of intel, again, they would have no choice but to invest with a blind, supremely abiding conviction.

Herbert sat on a hefty toadstool which yielded pliably to his weight. He removed the bill from his wallet and looped the string around it, making it look like a bowtie. He’d figured this location was as good as any, admitting his wizard tracking skills was an area that could stand a little polish. He did notice nearby a deposit on the ground which might have been wizard leavings, but just as well could have belonged to a feral dog, and he somehow managed to suppress his woodsman’s remorse in not being able to tell the difference. Beatrix sat on a sturdy low branch of a tree with her legs crossed, hunched so her long hair draped over her knees. To Herbert’s eye, she looked bored, but this wasn’t exactly it.

“What do you suppose is wrong with him?”

“What?” Herbert said as he firmed up the knot around Andrew Jackson’s crumpled face.

“Russet. I thought he might be sick. But I don’t think so. Not like a normal illness, like the flu or such. He just seems… sad.”

“He is sick. And sad. It’s got to be a kind of depression. That, and he’s a jackass. Both things can be true, you know.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. I think he’s a good person.”

Herbert gave a sort of wobbly nod, the kind someone makes when politely agreeing to disagree. “He’s probably hopped up on pills. I found an empty prescription bottle by him, you know.”

“Oh? What was it?”

“Don’t know. Maybe some kind of methamphetamines. He probably downed the whole bottle and started hallucinating or something. And then crashed when it wore off, and started acting like a jerk. That’s what drug addicts do, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well he’s on some kind of drugs.”

“Don’t you think it might be a kind of medication to treat a condition he has? Maybe it was empty because he’s run out, and now he’s having these problems because he can’t take his pills?” she postulated, secretly armed with a bit of knowledge on the subject Herbert didn’t have. But then confessed, glancing off to the side, “Or, that’s what his friend seemed to suggest.”

Herbert, still focused on his craft, replied, “Friend?” Then looked up after a moment. She said nothing. The only acquaintance of Russet’s that Herbert was aware of was a not terribly intelligent soup can, and he would hardly describe their relationship as friendly. Herbert was about to inquire further when he noticed something in the air. A sound. It was a soft whizzing sound, and didn’t last very…

THWOP.

The acorn ricocheted and bounced away from him several feet. He rubbed his stinging forehead. “Ow. What the hell was that?”

Beatrix stared blankly, and slightly cross-eyed, at the red mark between his eyebrows.

Whiiiiiiiz. Herbert stood up and looked around. “What th…”

THWOP.

This one hit harder. The small nut caromed off his head, sending him tipping backwards, but not quite enough to fall over. He looked around wildly. The dreadful whizzing began again. “Hit the deck! We’re under attack!”

Beatrix stood up, looking confused. Then she spotted something. “What’s that? There, through the trees?”

Herbert peered out from behind a rock like a groggy turtle, leaving nothing to chance. He saw what Beatrix was facing. It was a frail, filthy old man with a ratty beard and a loincloth. Before Herbert could register any more detail, the old man’s hand disappeared into a small pouch, and in a surprisingly athletic move, wound up like a Major League pitcher and sent it sailing with a blur of wrinkly arm skin.

Herbert ducked behind his rock at the last moment, and the supersonic acorn skipped off his barricade just inches above his head. Herbert smelled a slight burning and ventured an inspection of the rock’s surface, which had a skid of scorched acorn residue across it.

“It’s a wizard.” Herbert said, with a look of grave alarm. “It’s a damned wizard!”

“I hope you don’t mind if I cut the pleasantries short,” Grant said with a sheathed sword and relaxed demeanor. “Wasn’t there a village nearby, or am I mistaken?”

Daniel looked quickly at Nemoira, who shook her head slightly. “That…” Daniel paused. “It’s a funny subject, you know. Villages, that is. I don’t…”

“And what about the fort? You say that wooden creature was not Fort Pizzahut. Then where is it?”

There was more silent communication between the two. To Nemoira’s woe, Daniel conceded. “To hell with it, then. Our golem, as I made claim of earlier, was a trap. A ruse to catch Slurpenook flies. Turn ‘em back whatsuch they came, or not, if ye know what I mean. The real fort’s up in the village. Jivversport, I reckon ye know?”

Grant nodded. Daniel turned to Nemoira and bowed his head in an unsolicited affirmative. She reluctantly drew her silver telescope from her sash and elongated it. She brought it to her eye and twisted the heavier end, while pointing it towards a vast region of empty desert. The moment she did this, blurry colored forms appeared across the landscape. As she brought the lens to a focus, so focused the forms into crisp shapes. Specifically, hundreds of house-like shapes with roofs, streets, walls, and most conspicuously, an ocean of cobalt blue. The ocean met with the town at a port, and docked at the port was an eclectic variety of ships, some quite old, others modern. It all looked like a striking optical illusion, but once complete, it was a convincing, colorful portrait of civilization brought into the desert. It was suddenly hard to imagine it hadn’t always been there.

Samantha hoisted herself out of a pile of sand, becoming transfixed by the sudden colors of the town, jewel-like compared with the fierce desert bleakness. “Ooh… Simon, look!” Some distance away, too far to hear or be heard by his sister, Simon poked his head out of a sand dune.

“Psst.”

Simon tapped his head to knock sand out of an ear, and used his other hand to brush some off of his tongue.

“Psssst.”

It was coming from behind him. He turned to see the one attempting to conspire with him. He had to look down. Way down. The thing spoke. “Boy, listen to me. I would like a frank answer. Why do you trust that person you are following?”

“Huh? Who’re you, mister?” It was only out of politeness, possibly as well as youthful orphan innocence, that he did not ask “what are you?”

“Your new best friend.”

Simon’s face took on delight at this, even though he knew deep down that friendship was something earned over a period of time greater than three seconds. He’d never seen a horse before, and the sight was welcome, even if it was a kind of perverse variation on the experience. He’d also never seen a lobster before, either.

“Listen, boy. Leave your party and come with me.”

“You? Why? Mister Grant seems awfully nice.”

Terence grew impatient and his oddly elastic horse features scowled. “He’ll lead you to a swift ruin. Now quickly, this way.”

“Gosh, I don’t know…” Simon’s worried hand felt in his pocket the doll he was charged with protecting. Terence’s eyebrows narrowed together and lowered, like two dragonflies making abrupt landings. His lower lip jutted forward and his nostrils flared, pointing upward. With an indignant snort, the air became faintly colored in a cloud around Simon’s head. Simon’s eyes unfocused, and rolled above his eyelids. He collapsed into the sand, sound asleep.

There would soon be a boy-sized trail dragged in the sand, leading into Jivversport. The others wouldn’t notice it.

Beatrix hid behind her tree with her back flush to it. She snuck a peak through some leaves, keeping herself camouflaged. The wizard crouched low to the ground, as if examining it, but then perked up and made his way closer to them with a half-walk, half-insane-looking dance. His face twitched through a permanently worn look of menacing delirium. His eyes were wild, and seemed to glow extra-white in comparison with the soot-black filth smeared on his skin. He muttered to himself incomprehensibly, sometimes spiking in volume.

“Okay…” she spoke nervously. “What do we do now?”

“Why don’t you see if you can distract it, and I’ll try to sneak up on it?”

“How should I do that?” She didn’t sound thrilled with the plan.

“Just… get his attention somehow. Use your magic!” Herbert urged.

She thought for a second, then shrugged. “Alright.” She stepped into the open. The wizard brought his mad gaze to her at once with nostrils flaring, like a velociraptor honing in on some prey. Beatrix held her ring close to herself, concentrating. The gnarled, calloused hand clutched another nut between middle and forefinger, and let it fly. It bounced soundlessly off an invisible bubble around her. The wizard became startled, as if someone had set off a firecracker near his foot. He reached for more projectiles.

Herbert walked in a swift crouch along an outward perimeter to flank the unpleasant old man. He watched as it drew back its arm, curiously sinewy and taught when the limp ancient skin settled around the muscles the right way for a brief instant. It ripped another acorn at Beatrix. In spite of her force field, she flinched. The nut again bounced off it without losing speed, but this time came right for Herbert.

THWOP.

“Aaaugh!!” Herbert crumpled to the forest floor, clutching his head.

The wizard turned towards Herbert, muttering strange things in a tongue probably unique to him alone. “Thhgerrrunge! Ep, ep. Frrrrrrajerflaxus!” He plucked a hefty handful of nuts from his satchel, and winged them relentlessly at Herbert’s soft, vulnerable mass.

THWOP-thwop-thwop-THWOP-THWOP-thwop-THWOP-THWOP!

“Ow, ow, OW! Quit it! OWW!” Herbert’s body would later be peppered with small bruises.

THWOP-thwop-thwop-THWOP-thwop-BANG.

The wizard froze. His angry, rotten-toothed countenance melted into a look of tragic mortification. A strand of acrid smoke rose from the barrel of the M9, which was now out of its holster and pointed skywards. The smell of gunpowder, Herbert found, fit his current mood well. “Okay, that’s about enough of that nonsense,” he said, inching towards the trembling old man.

“Herbert, don’t shoot him, okay?” Beatrix said, looking nearly as alarmed as the wizard, albeit ever so slightly more photogenically.

“Relax. That was just a warning shot. He’s got nothing to worry about if he stays calm.” He raised his voice. “You understand that, wizard? Yes? No acorn, or bang-bang!” He sounded like an American trying to speak to a lost foreigner.

The wizard nodded along with Herbert, who was demonstrating the proper responding gesture for him graciously. He settled on his hands and knees in the language of submission even madmen seem versed in when the timing is right. He spat some strange sounds, now with a more conciliatory inflection. “Thhburzz ef! Ef jrrrifflizbit shuuu…”

“Hey, Beatrix. Come over here and help, won’t you?” Herbert was standing with his gun aimed nearly pointblank between the twitching eyes of the wizard, who was shaking like a leaf.

Beatrix sidled up. “So this is a wizard?”

“It’s gotta be. Fits the description.”

“Somehow it still isn’t what I pictured.”

“Well, the thing is crazy and dirty. It’s got a beard. I get the sense it doesn’t use any magic. Oh yeah, and it can whip an acorn like no one’s beeswax.”

“Oh, so a textbook wizard, then,” she scoffed.

“Okay, we’ve got to get his hair somehow.” The wizard sniffed, darting his eyes, possibly with a form of primitive comprehension. Herbert suddenly looked puzzled, automatically patting his pocket with his free hand. He cursed their lack of foresight in setting out to collect wizard hair without any kind of cutting implements.

“How do we do that?” Beatrix asked.

“Damn. I’m not sure.” He lowered his gun slightly, but brought it back to the ready when the wizard convulsed with something ghastly that might have been a sneeze.

Beatrix tapped her foot thoughtfully, then made a fist with her ring hand. She closed her eyes and pictured forms, as if drawing their shapes with a pen in her mind. Two looping shapes, one bigger, one smaller. Then two long, pointy shapes, and an axle. And then the thought of shiny metal, and sharpness. She opened her eyes to find a pair of scissors floating over her ring.

“Hey, nice!” Herbert congratulated. “Now just clip off his beard while I keep him at bay. That thing’s gotta weigh at least three pounds,” he said, referring to the monstrous thing on his face you might call a beard once you’d exhausted all other lingual options.

Beatrix made a distasteful sneer, but at the same time sized up the project, like one might in the first few moments of a mission-critical hog manure shoveling gig. It wasn’t fun, but the scientist in her knew it ought to be done. She’d been curious about seeing what happens upon actually completing one of these ludicrous quests.

She slowly brought the open blades towards the wizard’s face, which eyed the cold, surgical implement, but remained like a statue, aside from the nervous quaking. The beard was thick with hardened grunge and detritus. Foreign objects like twigs, plastic six-pack rings, and small ketchup packets were entwined in it. Herbert was probably right. It likely did weigh more than three pounds from the non-hair mass alone. The blades at their tips surrounded a bit of the hair, and she delicately clipped it. The wizard flinched on the clip, and she recoiled on the flinch.

“Herbert, I can’t do this. This is just way too weird. It’s kind of disturbing.”

“What? No, come on. You were doing great.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t! I’m not cutting the beard off a mangy old wizard! If you want to, be my guest.” She held out the scissors.

“Well… okay. Here, take the gun and make sure he stays in line.”

“No way! Last time I touched that gun, it almost set me on fire.”

Herbert sighed and felt his head, still aching somewhat from the nutty onslaught. It was all too often the he was called upon as the last resort to carry out dirty work in situations like this. (Not much like this, mind you. Few situations were.) He’d wondered if he’d been sentenced to a lifetime of squeamish companions.

He flashed an ironic smile as he flipped the on the gun’s safety. He held the grip tight, and brought it down on the wizard’s head, knocking him unconscious.

It was a dark afternoon in the Eggwood residence. There was not a single light turned on in the house, except for one lamp in an unoccupied room upstairs. In fact, all the rooms upstairs were unoccupied, and so were all the rooms downstairs. The stairs themselves, however, were a different story, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Downstairs, photographs were hanging on walls and resting on various domestic surfaces. Most were portraits of goofily smiling boys. In a few years, there would be three boys in total. Two-thirds of them would be chubby lads, and among all three, they would boast a grand tally of five eyes. The names of the boys would be Louis Eggwood, Seymour Eggwood, and Wizardy Herbert. Herbert would later ruefully ponder why he, as the third child, had been spared the surname in favor of the somewhat less conventional naming syntax. But then on further reflection, the feeling was less of rue than of relief. Maybe “spared” was the right word, as an occasional shudder would travel his spine at the thought of the name Wizardy Herbert Eggwood.

Yes, these are the photographs that would be there, portraits of three boys, if it were a few years later. But at this moment there were portraits of only two boys. Herbert’s parents had not yet decided to hang pictures of him, and they had a very good reason for this. This was not a reason Herbert could remember. Then again, there were many things, almost everything in fact, Herbert could not remember before the day of December 25, 1998, as well as many things during that day itself.

That day was today.

The stairs, previously alluded to as the busiest part of the house, practically its peak-hour Hong Kong marketplace by comparison to other locales, was stage to some curious goings-on. Between two worried-looking boys was a bit of heavy freight which made a deliberate “Thump” with each stair traversed. At the lower end of the freight was Herbert, taking up the determined lead in bringing the freight downstairs. At the higher end was Seymour, who was pale and moist. His head looked like a white dewy melon.

“Her… Herbert… say something, won’t you?” Herbert said nothing, continuing to stonewall his brother. Seymour anguished as two more Thumps marked the passing time.

“Excuse me… Herbert…” he tried again, more politely this time.

The freight settled heavily at the bottom of the stairs in the foyer. Herbert stood up and staggered backwards into the dimness of the living room, illuminated only through windows by an overcast afternoon sky. If Seymour could see him better, he’d notice his brother was pale too. Herbert shifted his eye around as if following an angry wasp. He rested on the arm of a sofa.

“Herber…”

“I heard you!” Herbert snapped. Seymour silently crept down the stairs, just as he had early that morning to see if there were any presents under the Christmas tree they didn’t have. There weren’t any.

“What are you doing?” Seymour asked with a pleading whimper.

“Weren’t you the one who said you wanted it out of the house?”

“Um… yeah.”

“Yes. A house is no place for such a thing.” The vacant look in Herbert’s face deepened as he paused. “… Why do you want it out of the house, exactly?”

“Why?? Why do you think?! If mom and dad come home and see this…”

“Mom and dad?” he asked honestly.

“Yes, mom and dad. I know it probably doesn’t matter to you. Why would it? I don’t understand you, or really one thing about what’s going on here, but…”

“Right. Mom and dad. And I imagine there will be trouble if they find this. Or if anyone does, for that matter.”

Seymour looked at Herbert as if he’d just fallen out of the sky, and then pointed his finger at a dog, asking “what’s that?” Then, upon further clarification, was found to be not talking about the dog, but his own finger. “Trouble? Sweet Zombie Jesus! Are you kidding, Herbert?”

“Yes… trouble…” The vacancy haunted his face again. It had especially staked claim on his eye, practically squatting in it like a beggar. He looked dizzy. He braced himself on the sofa cushion behind him.

“You okay?”

Herbert was whispering to himself. Seymour inched closer, trying to hear. “… gotta [mumble] the damp. Wonder [mumble] damp’s in session…”

“What was that?” Seymour thought he heard the word ‘damp’ several times, or at least perhaps a word that rhymed with it.

“… [mumble] back to the dumber lamp…”

“Huh? Did you say ‘dumber’, or ‘summer’?”

Herbert turned to Seymour with another look. It wasn’t a look of vacancy. It was hard to say exactly what it was, but the vacancy had been vaporized like a dry leaf in the stream of his new mood’s flamethrower.

“Well, are we gonna get this thing outside or what?” He sprung off the sofa arm and grabbed the freight by fistfuls of loose cloth. He suddenly handled the thing with ease, a thing which had to weigh at least 150 lbs. Seymour found it remarkable and sort of disturbing that a nine-year old could display such strength.

From the back yard, it sounded as if a frightened boar was loose in the house, crashing into furniture and clinking various china objects. The back door swung open and the two boys spilled out with the bulky cargo. Herbert continued to muscle his way with the load toward the back of the shed. Jets of vapor blasted out of his nostrils into the cold air. He dumped the freight on the dirt, which was so frozen-solid, the contact made a cracking sound no different than if it were pavement.

Seymour, breathing heavily with his own personal vapor clouds, stumbled to the shed’s rear. He looked down at the pitiable heap. “Get a shovel,” Herbert ordered.

“What? You’re going to bury him?? Here?! Sweet Zombie Jesus, Herbert!”

“Stop saying that. What’s that even from, anyway?”

“Isn’t this…” Seymour clawed his face with stubby fingers. “Isn’t this crazy? Shouldn’t we call the cops?”

“No. No cops!” Herbert became startled. He listened as the faint sound of sirens became louder.

Several blocks away, an ambulance was followed by police squad cars. In the trailing vehicle, a portly officer croaked something into his radio through a thick New Jersey accent. He seemed jaded, not one terribly moved to alarm by the notion of a singular crime in the Newark area, and at this moment he paid little attention to his vehicle’s singular passenger. The nine year-old girl sat in the back seat with her hands folded in her lap. She had a vacant expression. A kind of vacancy that would be familiar to anyone who’d witnessed Herbert a moment ago. The vacancy was only briefly unsettled as the car passed by the Eggwood abode. She turned as it went by, apprehending it with a dim recognition. She then felt without looking at it the hollow locket around her neck. She did not notice the two boys in the back yard, nor did they notice her, but for the agitating noise her motorcade was bellowing.

With held breath, the boys waited for the bellowing to subside, relieved they did not appear to be targets of the pursuit. Seymour exhaled. “Look, Herbert, I don’t know what’s going on… maybe you’re in some weird trouble I don’t know about. That’s fine, you don’t have to tell me. I don’t even want to know. But we can’t bury some dude here in our backyard! Pleeease let me call someone. They can take him away and we can pretend we didn’t know anything about it.”

“No. Now you listen to me… uh… uh…” he stammered erratically.

“Seymour?”

“Yeah.” He pushed Seymour against the shed, pinning him there, again with a show of unsettling strength. “Seymour. Listen up. No one knows about this. Not the cops. Not any school teachers. Not ‘Mom and dad’,” he said mockingly, as if doing an impression of his older brother. “Understand?”

Seymour shook like a wobbly pudding. Seemingly inherent in his fear, invisible, yet plain as day, was a nod of understanding. Herbert paused, mumbling to himself again inaudibly. When he halted and took a moment to think, he barely understood or remembered why he was angry or why this was all so urgent. He just knew he had to be, and that it was. He continued vehemently. “Otherwise, if anyone hears a peep, I’m going to pin it on you, and I’ll make it stick. They’ll get the cadaver dogs out here, and you know how they’ll know it was you?” he demanded, as he handed a garden trowel to Seymour, held between fingers like a cigarette. Seymour took it obliviously, and then Herbert took it back from him, holding it with the kerchief he’d been wearing around his neck..

“N-n-n…”

“Because your fingerprints will be on the murder weapon.” Herbert plunged the trowel into the corpse’s chest. Seymour began to cry.

“Sweet Zom…”

“Understand, Seymour?” Seymour, wiping away some snot, nodded gingerly and looked down at the body. It was male, older than they were, perhaps eighteen. On his white, lifeless face he wore a moustache.

“Who do you suppose he is?” Herbert said, with a sudden strange casualness.

Seymour looked at him with a little surprise. “Don’t you know him?”

Herbert shrugged as he leisurely picked up a larger shovel. “Clothes are odd…” He examined them, again assuming an abstracted vacancy. Seymour agreed on that point. It wasn’t every day you saw someone walking around in—let alone deceased in—a burgundy suit, a white shirt, and a purple cape.

Herbert, drifting in some rarified mental space, became aware of something cold he was holding. He looked to see it was the handle to a shovel. He had momentarily forgotten what he was doing.

The sight of the body reinvigorated the urgency, although the nature of it was becoming more vague by the passing seconds. He wasn’t even sure what had just happened five minutes ago. Something about some stairs? It was all slipping away.

He had to dig.

The shovel’s pressure against the sole of Herbert’s foot caused a sharp pain as he stomped it into the frigid winter earth.

The stainless steel letters, in a font that might appear in a 50’s diner, spelled out “Vend-o-Badge” at the top of the machine. Occupying the majority of its surface was a plate of glass, through which could be seen many rows of brightly colored square badges, held up by metal coils which undoubtedly twisted to surrender their prizes to gravity. It might have been remarked that the machine resembled a large prophylactic dispenser, if the children were more seasoned in such matters.

On the side of the machine was an unassuming hatch. It was unlabeled, but Herbert and Beatrix surmised that this was where one was supposed to place the loot, in lieu of depositing coins, to release a badge. The loot in question was a grotesque four-foot severed wizard’s beard, which Herbert clutched in both arms like a pile of dirty laundry. The thing easily weighed more than three pounds, and Herbert would swear if it didn’t weigh at least twenty pounds, he’d eat the thing right then and there. He hoisted it into the hatch putting the kind of oomph into it one uses to heave a large bag of dirt over a fence. A metallic thud signaled the beard’s arrival at the bottom.

“Alright. Here we go.” Herbert stood back and watched for interesting developments. Beatrix too waited, scouring the merit badges for signs of the slightest jostle. Moments passed, but the machine remained as inert as it had been before it was fed a pile of dirty whiskers.

The two were surprised, and Herbert was a little surprised to find himself surprised. Ultimately, what had they just accomplished besides the equivalent of hoisting a homeless man’s beard into a kind of metal dumpster? (It would surprise no one if the beard had actually visited such a location regularly in the past.) If they really expected anything amazing to follow such an act, Herbert thought, weren’t they guilty of harboring foolish, downright wizardy expectations?

“What gives?” Herbert muttered. Beatrix threw up her hands.

There was a beep. A button on the side panel became illuminated. ‘E6’.

Herbert and Beatrix were suddenly covering their ears. What they were attempting, in vain, to prevent from entering their ears was a robust rendition of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever”, played at a volume no doubt intended to roust the patriotism of long-dead American presidents. The machine was suddenly dancing to its own tune, hopping around on its little peg-and-coaster feet, much like the way the toaster danced when they laced it with spooky slime during that scene in Ghostbusters II. Its metal slot at the bottom gnashed open and closed like an excited mouth.

Then it stopped, and there was silence. Position ‘E6’ uncoiled, and a bright green badge fluttered to the bottom.

Herbert reached for the metal flap to retrieve the badge, but stopped when it again clanged open and shut. It repeated this behavior vigorously, and it was hard for Herbert to tell whether it was an act of aggression, or of overexcitement, like a small dog yapping at its master. Herbert looked around and spotted by the coffee table a box full of old VHS tapes. He picked up one labeled in badly faded ink “GB II”, and lodged it into the flapping maw. He then slipped his hand in and out of the chamber, recovering the badge, pulling it out of the slot a millisecond before the flap shattered the cassette and chewed the plastic pieces and magnetic tape.

“Nothing’s easy, is it?” Beatrix commiserated.

They both huddled over the shiny green badge. It was an attractive item, in its way, and boasted a kind of quality craftsmanship. It was made of an odd material, not quite cloth, not quite leather, but something in between, and reflected with a metallic sheen. There was a peculiar aura around it which made it feel heavy, or not heavy so much as resistant to being turned in certain ways, the way two magnets can behave stubbornly when held near each other at like poles. Through intricate stitching on its surface was a rendering of a lively wizard dancing in the woods, nude.

“Okay, one down,” Herbert said. “What do you think Thundleshick likes about these so much? You’d think he wouldn’t covet them considering he’s probably the one that made them in the first place.”

“Maybe he’s more interested in the achievements they represent? Getting kids to rise to a challenge? Teamwork, and all that?”

“He’s a real sick son of a bitch, isn’t he? If I ever meet him I wouldn’t mind giving him a piece of my mind.”

“We’ll have to collect two more of these if you want the chance. No use in going to see him without the book.”

“The what?”

“Three badges.”

“Oh. Right.” Herbert looked into the machine which was simmering down from its fit. He browsed the badges, each bearing an icon depicting some inscrutable triumph of child over magical absurdity. “I think that’s enough for one day. We’ll try another quest tomorrow. I’m beat.”

Russet rubbed his eyes with his sleeve. He paused to take another swig from a bottle of lukewarm, near-flat orange soda before addressing Beatrix’s question.

“I’ve never been better. I was actually just thinking, just this moment now, about the majesty of life and all things. Each breath is a gift. A nectarean treasure pumped from the billows of sweet Mother Gaia Herself. A kind of gusty ambrosia which…”

“Okay, okay…” Beatrix said, yielding to his sarcastic volley. If anything could be said for Russet, it was that he could really lay it on thick no matter what mood he was in. “It’s just, finding you down here all alone in this…” she trailed off, her gaze becoming lost in the cavernous surroundings. She made her way back to a view of Russet’s dangling feet, his nice shoes clicking together. She gulped. “I know it’s none of my business, Russet, but… it’s your medication, isn’t it? You need more, right?”

His shrug appeared to serve as an affirmative.

“Maybe I can help? I ran into your friend. He’s been looking for you.”

He looked up this time, surprised. “You mean Grant? Where is he?”

“Yes. I’m not sure where he is at the moment…” She felt a little swell of guilt at the thought of first having ditched his well-intended friend earlier, and then not getting around to mentioning it to him until now.

“Well…” he sunk again. “Don’t worry about it. You shouldn’t trouble yourself on account of me. I don’t know if I feel much like seeing him anyway.” She started to respond, but idled. She found herself relieved that he wasn’t terribly eager to see his friend, which might have further fueled her guilt. But still, she was a little frustrated by his reluctance to accept her help.

“How did you find me down here, anyway?” he asked.

“I… heard you,” she admitted sheepishly. It was just a moment ago that Beatrix left the rec. room, debating with herself over whether to go right to bed, or to venture a visit with Russet to check on him. She’d nearly talked herself out of the idea—perhaps due to the mysterious inertias pertaining to gathering the will to approach certain members of the opposite sex—when she heard noises. They were a faint blend of whispers and muted sobs, coming from vents along the corridor floors. Beatrix charted a route to the lowest point in the bunker, which lead her to this room.

Though ‘room’ would be about as apt as referring to the inner volume of the Goodyear blimp as a ‘nook’. It was a vast space, damp and dimly lit. The concrete floor was sloped slightly towards the center, like a shallow funnel. It was wet, and streams of water trickled towards the middle, spilling into a large circular hole, about the size of an impressive park fountain. Russet sat perched at the edge of the hole, with his feet swinging freely over the ledge.

Beatrix approached the opening, then halted, shuddering at the drop-off into darkness below. Clinging to the cylindrical interior was an iron ladder, which emerged from the pit and bent over the edge to meet the floor. “What were you saying, anyway? Before I came in?” Russet remained silent. She risked another look into the pit. Holding her breath, she reached for one of the ladder rails, grabbed it for support, and sat down on the ledge.

“This soda is horrible. Sometimes not being able to use magic is a real pain in the ass.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t help that it’s not cold. Unfortunately the refrigerator doesn’t seem to be able to do anything other than keep things frozen.” They both made unpleasant faces, as the mention of it brought their awareness into the domain of hideous microwaveable Mexican food. “Maybe you should have something hot instead?”

She caught herself, and gave her forehead a scolding slap. “I’m sorry, I’m probably sounding like your mother. I’ll give it a rest, I promise.”

“That’s alright. I never had a mother. Except for Grant, of course.” He paused, and then leaned on an ironic note. “He’s about as maternal as they come, you know.”

“Oh? I didn’t realize…”

“Yep. I’m an orphan. Never knew my parents. We’re talking some seriously Dickensian shit, here. Terribly tragic.” Russet took a breath, halting his overly animated volley self deprecation before it spun out of control. “Anyway, how about you? I gather by your obviously well-adjusted nature that you have a rich family life. Something in an aristocratic vein? Big house with a tennis court and swimming pool? Dog named after some literary figure? Wait, don’t tell me, I’m really good at guessing these things. Was his name Tennessee Williams?”

“No,” she smirked.

“Vonnegut, then? I can just picture it now. ‘Here, Vonnegut! It’s time for your Saturday constitutional, and then you may join us for a light supper on the sun porch!”

“No!” she laughed.

“Oh, yes, I think so. His name was Sir Edgar Allen Bones, and he wore a little canine’s frock as you trotted him from one box social to another to cause your elite circle of friends to swoon with envy over his championship pedigree and his exquisitely shampooed coat.”

“No, it’s nothing like that at all!”

“I know. I’m just messing with you. It’s never like that for people like us.”

“Like us?”

“Well, kids. Kids on weird, miserable adventures. We’re always orphans, you know. I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re an orphan too, then?”

“Um… yes, actually.”

“See what I mean? Kids like us. I’m telling you.”

“Herbert says he’s not.”

“Yeah, well, Herbert’s not a lot of things.” She nodded. It was a fair enough point. Russet stirred, not content with the direction of topic. “So did you ever know them? Your parents, that is?”

She hesitated. What purpose did it serve to keep it from him? At times, her need for secrecy verged on the dysfunctional, she felt. She wanted to tell him. Even so… “I have vague memories of family,” she stated noncommittally. “What about you?”

Russet looked away. He clicked the plastic of his soda bottle. “I think you’re right. I could probably go for something hot. Maybe some cocoa.” He made a motion as if about to chuck the undesirable beverage into the pit.

“Wait. Let me see it,” she interrupted. He offered it curiously. She sized up the bottle carefully, then raised her ring and closed her eyes. She opened them right away, though, startled by how quickly the spell took effect. Unlike the assiduous process of mentally sculpting a pair of scissors, it happened nearly all at once. The bright orange liquid flushed into a dark brown. Its plastic cocoon became malleable, as if melting, and fell away into a sturdy, white, open-topped vessel. It sprouted a loop for a handle. Steam elevated gently from the mug’s open top.

“You’re really getting good at this, aren’t you?”

“I guess so.” This belied her own satisfaction. It had been more natural and effortless than any spell she’d previously “cast”, if that really was the right word. It began to seem that it wasn’t, though. “Casting” spells was something you did in RPG video games, like Final Fantasy. This was more like a fluid engineering process through imagination. “Imagineering”, if you wanted a term that smacked of corporate lingo-babble.

Russet accepted the reconstituted beverage. “Thanks.”

Herbert was looking forward to a time of decompression and solitude, even if it was confined to a disheveled rat’s nest of a rec. room, which could have grabbed a featured spread in Good Housekeeping’s special edition, “Domestic Bloopers, Tidying Boners, and Egregious Hellholes of 2004”. Before properly unwinding on the couch with his burrito, he double-checked the Questpro Plus terminal. Seeing no new quests posted, he quit the application and reclined in the chair.

Amidst the clutter of the desk, a blinking green LED light caught his eye. The light was embedded in a small object, about four inches tall, conical in shape, resting on top of a dusty VHS cassette. It was made of black plastic, rounded at the tip, with a small hole pointing up at the ceiling. There was a cord coming out of the base. Herbert followed the cord to the rear of the computer, where it was plugged in via USB port.

Herbert, having an idea, reached down to unplug the cord, then plugged it back in. The computer supplied its characteristic plaintive chime, alerting the user to some new hardware found on the system. A window opened, recommending an application. Herbert clicked it.

The application’s window was small, quite plain and unlabeled. The only features were a checkbox labeled “Active”, which was checked, and a sliding meter from a scale of 1% to 100%. The marker was currently set to 80%. Herbert dragged the marker down to 50%, which seemed to have no effect. Then, with the spirit of experimentation most of us are born with when it comes to technology, randomly dragged the marker back and forth rapidly. Out of the corner of his eye, and just above him, he saw something flicker in the room. Something bright, and fast.

He looked up. There was nothing there.

He then dragged the marker slowly, and quite warily, down to 10% as he looked up. There it was, but not flickering. It was fixed in space, poking out of the ceiling as if it was stuck in the concrete. It was rotating slowly.

Again, cautiously, he lowered the marker further, to 5%. The object unstuck itself from the ceiling, shrunk by half, and lowered, hovering halfway between the desk and the ceiling, directly above the plastic cone device.

It was now immediately recognizable to Herbert. It was the spinning icon displaying a picture of his own face. It appeared to be a type of hologram.

He dragged the marker the rest of the way, and the icon reduced to the size of a silver dollar, hovering just over the tip of the cone. Herbert picked up the cone, and the icon moved with it. He found the bottom could be unscrewed. He opened it. The base, once separated, was like a small dish. There was nothing inside.

But Herbert looked again, noting it wasn’t quite empty. There were a few strands of hair inside. Herbert pulled them out, and identified three separate strands, two short, one long. Respectively, they were brown, sort of dirty blond, and the long one was black. In the interest of science, he removed them and closed the device. The hologram did not reappear. It reappeared, as he suspected, once he placed the hairs back into the device.

He was about to place the device back where he found it, but hesitated, placed it to the side, and picked up the VHS tape. “Seinfeld: season 5,” it read. He swept enough dust off its surface to ball up into a wad the size of a quail’s egg. The tape looked old, the way an antique VHS tape would look if they’d been invented in the 1950s.

In any case, he hoped the tape worked. Seinfeld was one of his favorite shows. It was one of those syndicated programs you could count on seeing if you flipped the TV on at nearly any hour of the day, and Herbert feasted off the aggressively regurgitated comedy without compunction. His imagination at times dwelt in the vacuous canon of Jerry, Kramer, George, and Elaine’s lives, and their frequently intermingling crises, which were always superficial, but highly amusing. Herbert related to it all in some absurd way that could only possibly make sense to himself.

He tucked it under his arm and assessed the condition of the burrito he’d left to cool. He was encouraged. It had only burned through three layers of paper plates.

“It’s good, then?” she inquired, regarding the conjured cocoa.

“The finest I can remember having.” He rebounded for another sip, and his mouth behind the mug—she almost, almost thought—cracked a smile. “If you must know…” He placed his mug on the concrete thoughtfully. “I was praying.”

“Hmm?”

“When you heard me. Before you came in.”

“Praying?”

“Yes, I know how it must sound. To a girl like you, who doesn’t believe in God. No, you’re too smart for that, I guess.”

She searched his tone for derision. It was the kind of sentence that usually carried it. But couldn’t detect any. “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“You don’t have to. In any case, it doesn’t matter how you put it, or which diplomatic cap you propped on it. It’s true. Hell, maybe if I were smarter, I wouldn’t believe either.”

“Isn’t that sort of a contradiction? If you actually think believing in God is illogical, or something unintelligent people do, then why bother?”

“It’s not that simple. In a way, I feel it’s all I have. Well, that and the Home Shopping Network.”

She started to reply, but snickered at his oddball addendum. “So it’s more like a dependency thing? I’m not trying to talk you out of it or anything. It’s great to have a passion for something. But just because something fills a personal void, does that give it credibility as truth?”

“Again, that is a very logical assessment. But here’s what I’m trying to say. During those more pressing times, when life pukes on you, as it inevitably always will, something in you gets worn down. Something you guard with your horde of treasures like pride and dignity and such. I mean, those things are long gone, mind you, but one of the last things to fall are basic ideas about the way everything has to be. You might call these ideas part of the intellectual faculty.”

“I would think that would be important to hang on to in times like that. Once that’s gone, you’ve really lost it all, haven’t you?”

“To some extent, yeah, you don’t want to turn into a gibbering madman, or God-forbid, some kind of dirty wizard. I’m talking about what happens when certain assumptions are let go of, or driven out of you by circumstance. This isn’t even about atheists, either. It could also happen to someone who believes in God, but until it all hits the fan, he didn’t quite know he believed. Or really Believed, you know what I mean? Haven’t you ever felt chewed up by life, and found yourself looking inside?”

“Yeah. I think so. I can’t say… I can’t say it’s driven me to see God, though. Is that what you see when you look?”

“Not God per se, but I think it is a perceived cusp of some great, all-around benevolence. That’s what I mean. When hard times soften some of the rigid features of yourself, it gives you a different view of things. And that has to be a good thing, right? And I feel what I’ve experienced, that benevolence and all that jazz, points to God for sure. Also that God’s word is spoken through His son, Jesus Christ.”

She almost laughed. “Whoa, that’s quite a leap, isn’t it? Why Jesus?”

“Well, you pick a horse and you stick to it, you know? I’m sure there are lots of fine horses out there. But when you pick a horse and bet on him, suddenly there’s no other horse in the universe. It must be glory and victory for my horse, and all the other horses can go eat hay for all I care.” For a moment Russet became very animate with a lively jockeying pantomime. “That’s how I think about it, anyway. I suspect you’ve seen more than you give yourself credit for. I’m sure you pride yourself in staying analytical and whatnot. That’s great. It’s who you are. But not everyone can stay alert one hundred percent of the time. I’d bet glimpses of understanding seep through sometimes.”

Beatrix considered her response carefully. “Maybe. If whatever it is seeping through really is understanding, and not something else. Like some kind of delusion. I’ve never been sold on the idea that a complete understanding isn’t accessible through rational thought. And maybe the conclusion that God doesn’t exist is wrong rational thought. Like, faulty logic that could eventually be demonstrated. But it’s hard to imagine rational thought itself would be an impediment to understanding.” She seemed to be ruminating on what she’d just said, and then switched gears. “So what happened to all that ‘God responsible for making you miserable’ stuff?”

“I was just being a dick.”

“Oh…”

“I don’t really believe that. Well, maybe sometimes I do when I’m really tanking. I’m only human, you know.”

Beatrix wanted to respond to the broader thread of the conversation, but found her usual avenues on the subject unsatisfactory. Russet had caught her off guard. She was finding him not only difficult to categorize personally, but religiously as well. In any case, she had the strange feeling he was getting inside her head, and against all odds, managing to make her think about her own beliefs. Maybe the truth was, at her most honest level, she didn’t quite know what she believed.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Russet breached the silence. “What do you think about Jesus?” She looked into space abstractedly. It was an odd question, one that more often than not was answered with something on the order of, ‘Okay, I’ll take your brochure, but I have something on the stove inside and must go now.’

“I think he was likely a great person. Compassionate, probably a tremendous philosopher of his time.”

“Well,” Russet nodded, after a moment. “That sounds good enough to me.” He then, startlingly, produced a smile. It soon dissolved though, and the dark circles under his eyes resumed their dominance over a gloomy face.

“You should get some sleep,” she said.

“I will. In a bit.”

She stood up carefully, backing away from the dark void, and before she turned to leave, said, “So you were praying to Jesus, then?” He nodded.

“About what?”

“I was just praying that…” he said with a deadpan expression. “He would give me the strength now to stop myself from jumping into this pit.”

JERRY
Hey, my parents are just as crazy as your parents.

GEORGE
How can you compare your parents to my parents?

JERRY
My father has never thrown anything out. Ever.

GEORGE
My father wears his sneakers in the pool. Sneakers!

JERRY
My mother has never set foot in a natural body of water.

GEORGE
Listen carefully...

Herbert laughed, as George paused with the serious magnitude of one about to play his trump card in a critical dispute.

GEORGE
My mother has never laughed. Ever. Not a giggle, not a chuckle, not a “tee-hee”. Never went “Ha!”

Herbert continued to guffaw at the exchange of family dysfunction. No one was ever going to one-up George when it came to a showdown of hard luck or neurosis. He wore his achievements in those fields like medals, or patches, or maybe something sewn onto a sash as a symbol of merit. Herbert admired that, for some reason. In fact, he admired a lot about George. He always thought it would be great, in his own strange way of romanticizing stupid things, that if he ever had to live a humble life of quiet failure, he’d like to model some of his affectations after George Costanza. It would all be terribly eccentric in some grand way to wander around pretending he was an architect, and when things didn’t go his way, shout funny trademark phrases like “You’re killing independent Herbert!”

This was only one of numerous quaint ambitions he harbored. When he saw shows on the Discovery Channel about space and astronauts, it really stirred his inspiration, and with stars in his eyes he imagined, one day, with enough hard work and dedication, he might be able to land a job at space camp. Preferably something in upper-management, though he would operate one of the rides if he was asked. He even began entertaining vague ideas about a future in accounting while he was packing for his trip to summer camp. If he gained enough real world skills over the summer, he might be able to parlay that into an internship with the IRS when he turned 16. It might look good on a résumé later. Nowhere on his list of ambitions, you’ll note, was the notion of having magical adventures.

He aimed low in life, preferably trying to take out its knees. This was a conservative assault tactic, and in a harsh way, merciful.

The din of typical sitcom noises continued in the background of Herbert’s awareness as he spaced out at the coffee table. The paper plate of caked-on burrito residue rested there. Next to it was the M9, dormant in its holster.

That gun.

The more he got to know it, the more he felt a strange sense of presence from it. And by the same token, the more he felt a disturbing ease with it. It was comfortable in his hand. The balance felt perfect. Aiming and firing was proving to be an act which suited his nature as well, which was simultaneously exhilarating and unsettling. He wondered whether there was a type of Bourne Identity thing going on. He recalled the summer he saw the film in the theater with his parents. He’d found it entertaining enough, but now chuckled at the notion of a George Costanza-like character playing the lead, rather than the ever-assured tough guy Matt Damon. George with a killer’s instinct sounded like a force to be reckoned with. If they didn’t believe he was an architect, he’d make them believe.

In becoming acquainted with the gun on a personal level, whatever that meant, he’d learned more about its unique characteristics. After firing the warning shot to keep the wizard at bay, he later checked the clip. He found no rounds spent. He later fired more shots to verify his theory. He then emptied ten clips worth of ammo into a nearby oak, while Beatrix covered her ears, looking impatient. The M9 had a marvelous rhythm of rapid fire, with fluid semiautomatic action. He might have kept firing, but stopped upon hearing a crack from the badly eaten away tree trunk. As the great oak toppled, he checked the clip. Sure enough, all fifteen rounds remained unused. It truly was a magic gun, or at least had a magic ammo clip.

He went to polish the grease from the silver grip when he noticed another detail. There was a tiny engraving, “F.H.C.”, perhaps the initials of a previous owner. Speculating about this person was fascinating to Herbert, and served to deepen the weapon’s mystique. He suspected the more time he spent with it, the more it would establish a subtle power over him. Even when it wasn’t at his side, it probably wouldn’t leave his mind in peace.

Herbert exhaled, and tuned into the show again with the not-terribly-keen kind of awareness one treats to an episode you’ve seen two-dozen times already. He was simply happy to be engaged in the familiarity of vegetative inactivity again. As long as his vision’s funnel stayed on the TV, he could imagine himself sitting at home.

KRAMER
You know that Leslie is in the clothing business? She's a designer.

ELAINE
Oh?

KRAMER
In fact, she's come up with a new one that is going to be the big new look in men’s fashion. It's a puffy shirt.

Herbert snickered, as the low-talker made an inaudible clarification on the subject. The puffy shirt episode got him every time.

KRAMER
Well, yeah, it's all puffy. Like the pirates used to wear.

ELAINE
Oh, a puffy shirt.

JERRY
Puffy?

KRAMER
Yeah, see, I think people want to look like pirates. You know, it's the right time for it, to be all puffy, and devil-may-care... BZZ.

BZ-ZZZZZZZ... ZZZ... ZZZZZZZ
FSHWERRRRRR... RRR... RRRRBERT, OR WHOEV...
ERRRRR... FSHHH... HAVE FOUND THISHHHH...
SHHHHHHHHHHHHH...

Herbert sat up, alarmed by the sudden lapse in tape quality. It had already been nothing to write home about (assuming that was actually an option). It was now an erratic display of noise, distorted images and fluctuating sound. Though the image was no longer clear, one thing was. This was no longer an episode of Seinfeld. Instead, it appeared to be footage of some guy sitting in a chair.

SOME GUY
FZZZZZZ... confusing to you... ZZZZZSHH... ZZZ... you’ve already... ZZZZZSHH... by now, if you’ve made it here.

On closer inspection, though not much closer, since it was plainly obvious, the guy was wearing an eye patch.

SOME GUY WITH AN EYEPATCH
You’re here for... FZZZZ... don’t just mean here, now, in this place. This underground ZZZZSHH...ever it is. ZZZ... ZZZ... FSHHH... alive... FSHHHHHHHH... this world for a purpose, unlike us. Unlike... ZZZZZSHH... cruel mistake. Some terrible... FZZZZZ... going to die because of... ZZZ... very important. You all... ZZZ...

And on the subject of the obvious, Herbert could not escape noticing this guy bore a striking resemblance to himself. Or what he very well might look like in a few years. The young man had short, dirty blond hair, and wore a rough stubble, which bloomed at the chin into a modest goatee. The eye patch covered the same eye. And there, slung in its holster around the guy’s waist, was the M9.

Beatrix sat up in her bed, leaning against the wall. It was a monastic space she’d carved out, with no personal effects in the room (a possible side-effect of having one’s luggage incinerated). But it was beginning to take the shape of her personality, as lived-in spaces do.

On a table there were notes she’d taken on preceding days’ events. Resting on the scraps was her ring, as if a tiny paperweight. It didn’t weigh much, but whatever potency the piece of jewelry concealed, it made you suspect those pages might hold fast in a stiff breeze.

On a sheet in her lap, she was drawing. Her pen made trails of ink, which took the shape of quirky doodles, reflecting what was on her mind. There was a cartoon sketch of an eel with a human head. Next to it was a bearded old man in hysterics, tossing enormous stylized acorns. In the corner was a more detailed rendering of Herbert’s face. Not immaculate, as it was done from memory, but enough character put into the expression to be convincing. There was a similar rendering of Russet, which she was scribbling away at now. Unlike Herbert’s expression which rankled with some unaccountable aggravation, Russet’s was calm, permitting a more careful flattery of his fair features. She concentrated on their lines, as if gently sculpting the whitespace they bound.

She wrinkled her brow, turning her thoughts to him. She shuddered at the thought that he might hurt himself, and gritted her teeth at the prospect, as if serving as a prayer of dental self-sacrifice to ward off the event.

She wondered what he might do. (Well, no, not that He.) He always seemed to be facing adversity himself, whether legal trouble or financial woes. He never let anything distract him from his creative projects, never lost sight of his dreams. It struck her, in his absence especially, that he’d been as much a father figure as any she’d had. He encouraged her to be creative too, and keep pursuing her art. She wondered if she’d ever see him again.

But… what would he tell her now? About Russet? What a tragic waste it would be if he didn’t get help. She had to help him. That’s exactly what he would say. You’ve got to do anything you can to help a friend who’s in trouble.

She felt like a charlatan. Like barely a person, even. Would anyone else have given it even a second thought in helping him get his medication the first moment it was possible? Wouldn’t Herbert have done that? Even a guy who didn’t seem to like him? Why did she hide it? Why was she hiding everything from everyone? Why couldn’t she let Herbert in on at least the basics about her situation? And his? Maybe she didn’t even deserve to like someone like Russet.

Her neck sagged under the weight of her head. She felt exhausted thinking about it. She put the paper aside and flipped the light switch beside the bed. She tried to drift to sleep, unable to stop tormenting herself, her eyes threatening the strain preceding tears.

The darkness was interrupted by a faint trim of light around the door’s edge. It was coming from the corridor outside.

She forced herself out of bed, finding it hard to move. She felt like a bag of cement with arms and legs. But she needed to know what it was. There was something otherworldly about the light. The hinge squealed as she opened the door. There was nothing there, but the light was moving. It seemed to have just disappeared around a corner.

She followed, but the source of the light remained elusive. The fort was silent. She crept after it, not wanting to disturb the silence, fearing she might scare it away. It led her to the surface, out the main entrance, and into the woods. Outside, there was no sign of the glow, or anyone she may have followed. The woods that night seemed different than they had before. Especially still, not a breeze or sound, and the starlight gave all the trees and plants a soft, milky quality.

There was someone behind her.

She turned around. There was a tall man standing there. He had long brown hair and a beard. He wore a simple white robe. All around him, where his edges met the darkness of the forest, there was a subtle shimmer, one that seemed to vanish if she tried to examine it directly. He had calm, deep eyes. It seemed as if they were fixed in space, and while everything in the world around them moved and changed, they would remain a constant.

HERBERT?
FZZZ... guess I... ZZZFSH... the obvious point. FZZZZZ...fusing one... FSHHHHHH... look like you. Well, that’s... ZZZZZZ... Sort of. No, not a clone. FSHHHHHH... future, e... ZZZZSHH... same... FSHHHH... later in... ZZZZZZZZZ... I know, I know, it doesn’t make any... ZZZFSHH... promise. I just don’t... ZZZZZZZSHH... it. Dying... ZZZZZZ...

Herbert watched with the stupor of an experimental lobotomy recipient. The older boy ranted through a cacophony of magnetic tape faults, then paused. A female hand presented him with an object from off-screen. It looked like the locket Beatrix carried, only it had something in its center. Herbert couldn’t make it out clearly.

HERBERT?
This... ZZZZZ... Mobius Slip... ZZZFSHHHH... this world, how we all... FSHHHH... how, just list... FZZZZZ... when it’s assembled. It co... SHHHHHH... locket part with one of... ZZZZZFSHHH...edallion part with ano... ZZZ... ZZZ... leave a copy of... FZZZSHHH... help you figure some of this stuff out. Don’t have a... ZZZZ... ZZZZZZ... you probably got it by now... FZZZ...

Herbert looked around wondering if there was anything obvious he’d missed, which might have been a “copy of” something he “probably got by now”. Nothing jumped out at him.

HERBERT?
ZZZZZ...portant it stay sep... FSHHHH...den. That’s why we’ll... FZZZZZZ... you guys... SHHHH... book. The... ZZZZZ... keep it away from Slinus Marle... FZZZZ... killed us, in case you didn’t... ZZZZZSHHHHH... cure before then. God, I hope... FSHHHHHH... cover our bases, and that’s why... ZZZZZZ... he’ll be looking... FZZZZZZZZ... security of the world depends on it. Yes, big surprise, I kn... ZZZ...

The boy grew more agitated as the tape progressed. He spoke hastily, short of breath, either due to nerves or some anomaly in the medical sphere. It made him even harder to understand, even disregarding tape quality. Herbert brought his listening resources to such a focus, you could fit them on the head of a pin.

HERBERT?
ZZZZZZZZZ... We’ve been trying for some... FZZZSHHH... what happened to us. FZZZZZZZZZ... who can help you... ZZZ... Slinus’ agents. God only knows... SHHHHH... figured it out yet, time... ZZZ... ZZZZZZZZZ...
FZZZZZZZZZZZZSHHHHHHHHHH...

Here, there was a long interruption of indecipherable noise.

HERBERT?
Speaking of time, ours is run... ZZZZZ... a few notes on the... FZZZZ... this for you here as well. Good luck. Enjoy... FZZZZSHH... love the puffy shirt episode.

His older doppelganger lumbered from his chair, visibly perspiring. He removed the gun from the holster, showing to his audience, and slipped the harness from his waist before moving off-screen.

Jerry and Kramer were suddenly on the screen, hashing out some hysterical misunderstanding. Herbert watched the rest of the episode blankly, quietly. It was similar to the feeling of noticing the car radio still running right after a major accident, playing something cheerful like a Beach Boys tune.

JERRY
I... I can't wear this puffy shirt on TV! I mean, look at it! It looks ridiculous!

KRAMER
Well, you gotta wear it now! All those stores are stocking it based on the condition that you're gonna wear this on the TV show! The factory in New Jersey is already making them!

JERRY
They're making these?

KRAMER
Yes, yes. This pirate trend that she's come up with, Jerry. This is gonna be the new look for the 90's. You're gonna be the first pirate!

JERRY
But I don't want to be a pirate!

Beatrix stood in unapologetic stupefaction. She had the impression that this was sort of what it was like to run into a huge celebrity in the grocery store. Like hearing someone clear his throat behind you, and turning around to discover Tom Cruise with a host of polite questions about produce.

“Do you know who I am?” He asked. The voice was deep, and kind. She shook her head slowly, though not very convincingly. He continued, “I was a great sorcerer in my day, before I Rose.”

“Rose?”

“The Rising is a profound incantation. Few are more difficult. You may be ready for it one day. It all depends on what’s in you.” He smiled. His smile had the same strange quality his eyes had. Gentle, but potent, and completely arresting.

“I don’t think there’s much good in me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I…” She hesitated, but knew immediately that she could not lie to this man if she was inclined to. And perhaps most amazingly, she wasn’t. “I’m not a very honest person. I lie all the time. I feel like a phony. I don’t think there’s anything genuine or redeemable about me. Even all my good acts have been selfishly driven, I think.”

He offered a nod of compassion. “My Father has given men words to live by. He’s enumerated the sins, guidelines for those choosing a path of devotion. But it is not the only path. For those travelers walking a more independent road, it does them well to travel light. There is only one true sin to bear in mind, from which all others follow. The one great sin is not to realize who you are.”

“Your Father?”

“And yours.”

“I hope this doesn’t sound like a silly question, but you are… Him, right?”

“I’m a man who did what His Father asked of him, who did what was necessary for mankind. I didn’t have to die that day. I had more than enough powers to elude my enemies. I died because I had to. For you. For everyone.” The man paused, then his smile took on a different meaning, one surprisingly playful. “Besides, as you can see, death is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

Beatrix’s head was spinning in a way that made her feel clueless about everything she thought she knew. It was not an entirely unpleasant experience, but at the same time, she felt foolish and childish for daring to think she had ever had anything figured out.

“So, what is it I really am, then?”

“You are not selfish. Your heart is in the right place. You genuinely wish to help your friend. He knows this, and I can tell you he does appreciate it. To him it is uncommon kindness. You are not a liar, or a phony, or any of those things.”

She felt somehow that just having him say it, it instantly became true. A previously unknown weight had been lifted. The real answer to the question suddenly seemed like it didn’t matter. No hardship mattered at that moment. Everything was okay.

“You are not your sins. They become nothing in the light of the divine. They wash away like stains, perhaps with a bit of club soda, or some white wine, leaving the fabric of your soul white and spotless.” He felt his pristine garment between his thumb and finger.

Amidst her spellbound face, an eyebrow crept upwards. “Huh?”

“Yes, I’ve gained much acclaim regarding matters of the spirit, but not many are familiar with my miracles in the realm of laundering. Did you know I once got Worcestershire sauce out of the shroud of Turin?”

She leaned forward just a bit, examining the man suspiciously.

“OxyClean is phenomenal stuff, too. I once thought about purchasing it in bulk from the Home Shopping Network. I would give it my full endorsement, though I’m afraid such gestures present a conflict of interest for me. There are too many in the world already who believe I pick sides.”

“… Russet??”

At once, the bearded man morphed through a display of intense luminance into Russet. He stood with his hands in his pockets and a broad grin, simmering magically. By the signs of his tailoring, his cheerful demeanor, and his devastating good looks, he was back in rare form.

Beatrix was catatonic with surprise. She tried to say something, but the words bottlenecked in her throat. The bottleneck was then cleared by laughter. She laughed—harder than she could remember laughing in recent memory—at the absurdity of the charade. Russet laughed too.

“Oh, wow.” She paused, yielding to the final throes of laughter. “You actually had me going there.”

“Nothing terribly duplicitous intended, I assure you. Other than, you know, convincing you I was the Son of God. But other than that, all in good fun.”

Beatrix looked like she wanted to ask another question, or maybe she wanted to ask every feasible question at once. She settled on the tone one uses when addressing an incorrigible prankster. “So, was this supposed to be some kind of religious awakening or something? Like, to really open my eyes?” She chuckled a bit more at the notion.

“I guess I sensed you were in need of… well, I dare not presume what. Faith, belief, it’s all your business of course. A friend, I suppose. But, you seem well now, yes?”

She did. She nodded, and evaluated herself more discerningly. She actually felt quite good, sort of cozy and warm even though standing in the cold night air. Then she noticed it wasn’t really cold, but for the idea that it was. And now that she thought of it, she couldn’t really feel her body at all. Not in the usual sense. She looked around. It was all stunningly quiet, and the visuals were crisp. It was all surreal.

“This is a dream!” she realized.

“Yes!” he nodded.

“Are you really here?” she asked, suddenly looking slightly worried. “Or is my mind just imagining you? And all this?”

“Do you figure I’m really ‘there’ when you’re awake? What about that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s a good question. But… come on, seriously. Are you?”

“I will at least give this assurance. I’ll be fully aware of this encounter in our waking lives. In fact, I will be there to greet you when you wake, if you would like.”

“Ah! So it really is you!”

He nodded again. “I’d supposed the concept of such an encounter would come over as less… obtuse, played out in the comfort of your own mind. Though I hope, on the flipside, you did not find it invasive or impolite.”

“No. Not at all.” She thought about it. If anyone had mentioned their plans to do something like this in advance, it might have seemed creepy to her. But in the timeless here-and-now of a lucid dream, it was perfectly comfortable. A pleasant rendezvous point, in fact. “And I would like,” she added.

“Hmm?”

“For you to greet me. When I wake up.”

“Grand.”

“Hey… all that Jesus stuff… you’re not actually that serious about it all, are you?”

He shook his head slightly with a devious smirk. “Nah.”

“You have a pretty strange sense of humor.”

He pleaded guilty as charged with a subtle expression.

“I like it,” she said with an expression to match his coy brand of guile.

He reached for her hand, and held it.

She was suddenly sitting up in bed in darkness. It barely felt as if she’d been asleep at all. Her mind was still bubbling in a way, feeling vibrantly fertile from the experience of the dream.

There was a polite knock on the door. Her lips curled into a little smile.

Part 3

“Where’d you find this old thing, anyway?” asked the boy with the sleeping cap, which had stars and moons painted on it with glow in the dark paint. It was by now flecking off in an unbecoming way, like the leprous skin of a jaundiced zombie.

“On a quest,” said the boy with the brass curtain rod, which you might mistake for a really cool magical scepter if you were quite gullible, or otherwise unfamiliar with the concept of drapes.

“Was it a quest for some type of… large munitions?” asked the plump boy squeezed into an inaccurate Sailor Moon cosplaying getup.

“No, it was a quest for…” The curtain rod boy paused, grimacing with exasperation. “I don’t know why I’m even repeating this nonsense. It was a quest for a unicorn’s song. A unicorn’s song. How do you even… how do you go about collecting, and then containing a song? It doesn’t even make any sense. I didn’t think unicorns even sang songs. Don’t they just whinny?”

“I gather they whinny quite magically,” chipped in the boy with a fake beard hanging around his neck. It looked as if on a prior, lighter occasion, it had been worn on the face with the gusto of a zealous masquerader. “And perhaps they whinny melodically as well?”

“I guess you could maybe translate it into sheet music if you knew how…” said the Sailor Moon boy.

“Can we bear down here? Who cares about the unicorn and its song or dance or its ground up horn processed into some kind of black market aphrodisiac? If we pull this off, we’ll be free, and I won’t have to worry about being punished for failing the quest. Pass me one of those shells. Carefully.”

“Has anyone here ever completed a quest?” earnestly wondered the sleeping cap boy.

“Has anyone here ever been fed?” hungrily wondered the fake beard boy.

“Okay, let’s rehearse this a second.” The boy lifted his curtain rod and tapped it on the long metal barrel. “If we blow this, I don’t think I have to tell you what happens.”

The Sailor Moon boy wore an expression of sudden shame and guilt. “I really wish I had a change of skirt.”

Elsewhere, in his fastidiously maintained industrial loft, Counselor Slinus blistered away at a keyboard. Line after line of cryptic-looking code streaked across the monitor at a pace that appeared to have trouble keeping up with his keystrokes. Though he seemed less focused on the programming than he did on the conversation he was having into his wireless headset.

“M-hm. No. I don’t know. I can’t get a hold of him. He must have his phone turned off for some reason.” His conversation partner murmured something through his earpiece. “I don’t know. I’ve stopped trying to understand how that little horse brain of his works. Listen, that’s why I’m calling you. It looks like someone’s been into the Quest Pro system at Crossnest. It seems someone’s actually been completing quests. Can you believe it? I wouldn’t mind seeing some of that initiative around here.”

As he said this, he made an accusatory glance towards his right hand man, Gilbert. Gilbert withered in his tragically snug camper’s outfit.

“The point is, it means there’s someone there. It could be her, or any one of them. And since Terence is busy with God knows what, I need someone else to check it out.”

Gilbert’s eyes darted back and forth. He added to the moisture gathering in the cloth sandwiched by his armpits.

“Don’t we have someone stationed there? Isn’t your other half there?” Slinus sniggered. “Your better half?” The murmurs in the earpiece did not sound like laughter. “Yes, okay. Calm down. Sounds like someone could use a milk bone.”

Gilbert eyed a digital clock as it ticked another minute. He was wringing his sash with pudgy fists, as he was prone to do when he was nervous, which was always.

“It’s just that this is all coming together finally. I’m almost done hacking this targeting system. It was a real doozy of a job, but when you’re blessed with skills like mine…” He caught himself before plunging into one of his self-aggrandizing spiels that are compulsory to the trade of hacking. “Anyway, I need those codes. Trust me, those I can’t hack, not even with some killer magic algorithm. Just get in touch with our Crossnest man. You can do that, right? You have some sort of… telepathic thing, don’t you? A kind of beastly communion?”

There was a begrudging murmur to the affirmative through the earpiece. Slinus hung up the phone, marking the first time he’d removed one hand from the keyboard in the last several hours. He used the opportunity to grab his bottle of Mountain Dew and take a swig. The bottle felt cool on the scar on the palm of his hand. It was a circular shape, lined by infinity symbols around the perimeter, and one larger infinity symbol in the center. If you inspected it closer, it might look more like a seared brand than a typical scar. The other hand kept typing.

The most annoying thing about computer hackers was that their infuriating lack of modesty always seemed to be justified. This was especially the case with those who incorporated the practice of magic into their programming methods, and there were few who did this as effectively as Slinus Marlevort. Such practitioners of this obscure craft have sprouted numerous branches in the categorization of magickers. Along one branch, you had your siliconjurers and your binary prestidigitators, to name a couple of the obvious ones. Among the more nefarious offshoots were your IT druids, your open sourcerers, and those who reveled in the arcane religious practice of Wiki. These were all fine traditions, but none were quite apt in describing what exactly Slinus was, and he personally felt the most appropriate classification for himself was “1337 dark mage arch-h4xx0r”, and when asked about it, that was the term he would supply.

Magicians of this ilk were generally capable of some dreadfully potent feats. Combining computers and magic in most people’s minds was a highly unintuitive proposition, and even widely thought of as (and this is a verbatim quote) “kind of a stupid idea”. But for those with the aptitude for it, it held some possibilities which were downright unfair to other magic users. It was unfair in the same way it would be inequitable to other students if some were allowed to outsource their homework assignments to Einstein’s living brain, floating in a jar containing a substance suspiciously similar in look and taste to pickle brine.

The digital clock struck 11:59. Slinus paused his typing, leaned back, and stretched. He turned to look at Gilbert, who was also watching the clock, which might as well have been a sunlamp by the way he was sweating.

“Just about lunch time, then. What do you say, Gilbert?” By which of course he meant it didn’t matter what he had to say about it.

“Um… sounds good. What… uh… would you… uh…”

“Is something wrong, Gilbert? Why do you keep looking at the clock?” Slinus stood up, evaluating his stuttering lackey with increasing suspicion. He placed his hand, more casually than menacingly, on his holstered sidearm. It was an old Zapper for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. It was refitted to have a shiny silver barrel and grip, ensconced in the original gray, angular plastic. It naturally no longer had a cord, as it was now presumably a weapon of potent self-contained magical energies. He thought it was a very cool and original solution to his magical weapon needs, although to be fair, he had never seen or heard of the cartoon show “Captain N: The Game Master”. He probably would have liked it. Notwithstanding, it arguably was cool, at least with respect to those who shared his mindset. The piqued nostalgias of retro gaming could always be counted on for a great deal of traction in those circles.

“Gilbert? Hey, buddy, down here.” He snapped his fingers in an ineffectual attempt to bring Gilbert’s attention away from the clock.

“Oh. Yeah. Uh… could you… please… um…”

Slinus folded his arms. “Yes? Could I what, Gilbert?”

“Maybe, please, um… move a few steps to the right?”

With arms still folded, Slinus humored him. “Okay, Gilbert. I am moving a few steps to the right. Here I am, a few steps to the right. Now what?”

“Okay… um… just…” Gilbert stalled as he watched the blinking ‘:’ in the middle of the clock’s digits, ‘11:59’.

“Yes?”

The clock struck ‘12:00’. Gilbert drew his tiny wand and waved it through the empty space next to him. Four boys materialized, and materializing with them was a large metal object, terminating in a long, 105mm-wide metal tube aimed at Counselor Slinus. The counselor made a motion for his Zapper sidearm, but did not reach it before the tube made an earsplitting BANG.

Two things at that point were instantly evident. The first was that Slinus was now just a pair of legs standing on the floor. His upper torso, which had been ripped from the legs, was tumbling through the air. The second was an explosion in the back of the room in the direction the tube was pointing. The blast rocked the ground, causing the disembodied legs to topple.

As the smoke from the tube cleared, and as the smoke from the smoldering wreckage took its place, the boys stood speechlessly by their high-powered armament. The sleeping cap boy finally spoke up. “Did… we do it?”

The question was in the process of being given a grim answer. The upper stump of Slinus’s torso was dragging itself across the floor towards the lower stump. His severed abdomen was leaving an unbroken streak of deep red across the metal. He was now much like a human paintbrush.

He pulled the Zapper from the holster, propped himself up, and pointed it at the motley rebellion. “Yeah. I think you did it.”

The large cross-dressing boy wistfully examined the final moment of his tragic life. “This is the worst summer camp ever.”

With four Zaps, the boys were reduced to a sparse cloud of cooling embers. The only remains were a sleeping cap, a curtain rod, a fake beard, and a Sailor Moon outfit.

Gilbert tucked his wand back into his belt, and breathed a sigh of—it almost seemed—relief, as he anticipated his demise. It didn’t come.

“Gilbert, will you follow me to the safe, please?” Slinus left a shiny trail like a garden slug on his way to the safe in the wall. He paused to pick up a tall, slender staff. It was black, with occult runes and dire imagery carved into it. He gripped it with both hands, and used it to help him drag his mangled torso along.

He used it to tap the safe, and the combination quickly entered itself. The door popped open, revealing many stacks of books. Though they weren’t really books so much as stacks of plain white 8.5”x11” paper, bound by black rings, like manuscripts one might submit for review. They were all identical.

“Hand me one of those books, won’t you? Shut the safe when you’re done.” Gilbert complied. “Thank you.”

The book’s cover was blank, except for the title which was blacked out with a rectangle. Beneath the black rectangle, the number ‘Seven’ was printed. Slinus smeared blood over the fresh white pages as he flipped the book open to a spot marked by a yellow Post-it. He read a passage.

“Spirit’s of the 00000000 000000 give me you’re powers and vanquish my eniemieeEEE…”

“EEEEAAAAARGH!!!” shouted the young man who was suddenly standing in the room. His arrival was ushered in by a brief flurry of pyrotechnics. The young man was striking a dramatic pose, with his hand raised in the air, his fingers curled into a claw as if clutching an object he was no longer holding. His hand was smoking, the smoke rising from a freshly seared circular scar on his palm. This was not the only similarity between the young man and Slinus Marlevort. In fact, there were no differences at all. The two young men appeared to be identical.

The new Slinus brought his smoking hand in front of his glasses, ogling it with mystification. “Oww!”

The half-Slinus held his staff like a gondola rower holds his rowing pole, and stood himself up on his severed abdominal base.

“Where did it go?” asked the confused duplicate. “Who are you people?”

“Those are good questions. But I’ve had this conversation for the sport of it too many times already. It never goes anywhere that interesting.” Slinus aimed his staff and shot a current of ghostly energy into the forehead of his nonplussed doppelganger. He then dropped the staff, and fell over backwards, dead.

The fresh, non-bisected Slinus stooped over and picked up the staff. He then nodded towards the mess of his bisected previous incarnation. “Gil, clean that up, won’t you? Oh, and get rid of that, too,” he said, gesturing towards the hulking Howitzer cannon. “It was an admirable try, but I think it’s time to get back to business.”

“Um…” Gilbert said as if he was trying to swallow a potato. “Okay, sir.”

“And for God’s sake, put out that fire.”

“Counselor? Why didn’t you shoot me, too?”

“Gilbert, you may learn some day, if you find yourself in my position, that it always pays to have someone around who fully appreciates the futility of mutiny. Now what about that lunch?”

Herbert trudged up the side of a hill, snapping the tall, dry grass under his feet. It was one foothill of many which preceded the great mountain range as if they were the marching band blazing the trail for the impressive floats in a highly stationary, geologically-themed parade. Herbert paused, waiting for Beatrix and Russet to catch up. He looked over the forested valley they’d left behind. The spinning icon maintained its serviceable vigil over the hidden fort Crossnest, now some distance away.

Another Camp Quest had recently popped up on the Quest Pro terminal, and they were at the moment pursuing the dubious prize listed in the quest profile. Though you would never suspect they were pursuing anything with determination, the way Beatrix and Russet were carrying on.

“Oh, what about the one where Trick broke into the… what was it? The crypt, or vault of…?” Beatrix wondered aloud.

“Volume 23. Rutherford Trick and the Vault of the Prurient Oracle.”

“Oh yeah! And the vault just turned out to contain the king’s pornography.”

“That’s right,” Russet nodded. “And when Trick found out there was no gold there, he got so mad he set it all on fire. This sent the king, and thus the whole kingdom, into a period of grieving. While the king was distracted by grief, Trick made off with the Elysian Manacles of Pulchritude. He sold them for a fortune.”

“That was great.”

“The best part was how the Oracle King predicted it all in a dream. On the first page! And he still couldn’t stop Trick. What a rascal.”

“What about…” she paused, as she searched her memory. “The title was some pun about bacon.”

“Volume 35. Rutherford Trick: Bacon Business.”

“Yes! He swapped the wife of the evil Governor for a prize sow he won at a fair. It was kind of a joke in a plot to hold his wife for ransom, but throughout the whole book no one noticed the difference. People just repeatedly commented on how the Lady’s table manners seemed to have improved. And the Governor kept being ‘taken with her beauty’, as if only noticing her for the first time.”

“‘Florentine, my succulent truffle, why, if I wasn’t sure the cognac had got the better of me, I’d swear your skin was softer than the day we met.’” Russet quoted.

“Ha! And later, Trick for some reason forgets about the whole ransom plot, or just loses interest. Then he and the real Governess loot the historic cemetery of all its most valuable mummies. She became kind of like a mother figure to him, and at the end, he promises to return all the mummies if the Governor would legally sign over his wife to become Trick’s mother. But when he does, Trick just sells the mummies and gives the money to an orphanage.”

“It was a treat to read. We were lead to believe Trick had finally found the mother he never had. But it turned out he was only wooing the Governess to gain access to her key to the fabled chest of Yggdrasil wood. He then ditched her and fled by steamboat across the Mississipiatic Ocean. We wouldn’t find out what was in the chest until the next volume.”

“Wow, there were just so many. I haven’t even read half of them. I’ve read other series, though. There’s one I like, but you may not have heard of it. Harry Po…” She was interrupted by a glaring Herbert. He’d been maintaining an impatient posture as he’d waited for them to catch up.

“Well, aren’t you two just like a couple of peas in a pod?” he sneered. Beatrix giggled at the remark for no apparent reason. Russet smiled in her direction, then threw his cape behind one shoulder before addressing Herbert.

“Come, dear Wizardy. It’s such a lovely day. No need to assail its serenity with a foul disposition.”

“Wait, let me check and see if I’m receptive to your advice on foul dispositions. I want to be totally sure your opinion on the subject holds the least bit of credibility with me.” Herbert theatrically groped his skull, invoking the discredited science of phrenology. “Okay. Nope, I’m not a retard.”

“We were just talking about some books we’ve read, Herbert,” said Beatrix.

“Yes,” added Russet. “Some really all-around smashing tales. Trick is one of our favs. What about you? Maybe we’ve some common ground yet?”

It took a surprising amount of restraint, Herbert found, not to blurt out the time Dean Brimstale attempted to crash one of Vera’s séance slumber parties by concealing himself in the stuffed torso of the late varsity mascot, Heidegger the walrus. Little did he know, though, that Vera had been aware of his spying, and during the séance, misinformed him by confiding in the other girls with a false location of the coveted Laurels of Erudition. The avaricious dean then spent the entirety of the semester probing for the Laurels by shouting the magic phrase “I would fancy a lengthy gander at your bottom, miss” into each toilet in every public ladies’ lavatory in Cambridge.

“In case you’ve forgotten, we’re out here to do something Vera, I mean, very important.”

“Of course. What was it again, if you don’t mind refreshing my memory?”

“We’re supposed to be looking for…” Herbert checked his notes. “The spiraled incisors of a…” Again, back to his notes. “Central Asian reticulated snoogerfitch.”

“Does it say what a snoogerfitch looks like?” Beatrix asked.

“Well, I imagine it has spiraled incisors, for starters,” Herbert replied.

“It is also reticulated,” said Russet.

“How so, do you think? Like a snake?” The two boys shrugged.

“Have you tried using some…” Russet grabbed the page of notes from Herbert, and read. “Guds root? Maybe if you place some out in the open the…” He read on. “Aroma will tantalize its sensitive and curious proboscis?”

“Gee, Russet, I think I used up my last batch trying to lure African spoonfoodles and European dippety-flumsnarks. Gotta catch ‘em all, you know?”

“A pity.”

“Hey, Russet!” Beatrix was suddenly excited. “Can’t you magically create those things? The guds root, or even the snoogerfitch itself? I think doing that is probably beyond my own abilities, but you…”

“Would that I could, Bea. Unfortunately, I don’t know what either of those things looks like. If I did, it would be no problem at all.”

“How convenient,” Herbert griped.

“I see. Makes sense. Could you… you know, just guess?” she said with a facetious turn in her voice.

“Hmm. Maybe you’re on to something!” Russet played along.

“I mean, we already have a pretty good loose physical description. Maybe we can piece it together.”

“A la some sort of Frankenfitch!”

“Yeah!”

“Let’s see… spiral incisors, check. Curious proboscis… check.” Russet checked the air with his wand as if checking off a real, physical list in front of him. An ambiguously animalistic form took shape in the grass. It was a small, hunching bipedal thing, roughly exhibiting the contours of a furry baboon. It had corkscrew fangs and a long, pink snout, like that of a proboscis monkey. It sat unintelligently, twitching its absurd nose. “What do you think? Is that proboscis curious enough for you?”

“Hmm…” Beatrix considered the proboscis carefully. “No, I don’t think it’s nearly curious enough.”

Russet waved his wand. “How about now?” The pseudo-primate’s nose tripled in length, as well as pliability. It was suddenly quite frisky, and instantly magnetized towards Beatrix. It aggressively sniffed up and down her pants, its nose making little slapping noises against her leg with each sniff. It tickled ferociously.

“Ha-ha! No! Too curious! Too curious!”

“Oh, no. I think it is just right!”

“What about the reticulation?” She brought her ring towards the nasally zealous creature, and magically supplied it with the body of a snake. As it wriggled, its bulbous nose continued slapping the dirt.

Herbert eyed the proceedings with a grim void of humor. They obviously weren’t taking this seriously. But that wasn’t even what was bugging him. It wasn’t even Russet’s cocky flamboyance that was getting under his skin, either. It was Beatrix, and the way she was now behaving with Russet. What happened to the two of them? Where before he felt at least a vague rhythm of personable interaction with her, it now seemed like she and Russet were both in their own world together. And it was becoming clear he had little hope of visiting that place.

Whatever was going on, it did not inspire him to trust her. She’d already supplied some of the fuel for that sentiment herself, with her peculiar habits of secrecy. He was thinking last night that today he would discuss with her the baffling message he’d found on the Seinfeld tape. But seeing her act this way with Russet made him quickly reconsider. If she wanted to keep things from him, couldn’t two play at that game?

His muscles tensed involuntarily at the thought of the tape. It hadn’t allowed him much sleep last night. What did it mean? If only the message weren’t so irritatingly incomplete. What did it have to do with the locket? A curse? Death? A book? Was it that book? The one that had so infatuated him?

And the list he found on the bulletin board. That bugged him too. The list appeared to be right about wizards, in its own editorial, qualitative way. The other statements were more absolute, though. “There’s no such thing as time travel?” That tape would beg to differ. Herbert couldn’t think of a better explanation. What else could it really be, other than his future self traveling back in time to warn him about something? The scenario played itself out a thousand times in movies. Why not in reality, especially in a reality revealed to be rife with all sorts of magical nonsense? Unless of course it also happened to be a reality in which time travel didn’t exist by law. But what about dragons? “Dragons don’t exist?” That was just…

The mock-snoogerfitch was now laboring under some highly impractical and outlandish physiological modifications. It was finding it difficult to sate its proboscis’ curiosity with its tentacles getting tangled up in its own antlers. Herbert pulled out his gun and shot the thing, with the same casualness Indiana Jones used to blow away the sword-flailing Arab in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

“Hey, Russet,” he said, as he holstered the gun. “Can you make a dragon?”

Russet looked somewhat sad. He flicked his wand, and the indecipherable carcass disintegrated into the earth. He turned his attention to Herbert’s question, seeming to only now realize one had been asked. “Oh. A dragon…” He spoke slowly. “I… don’t…”

“You don’t think you can? Is that because dragons don’t exist?”

“That is what I’ve heard.”

“But, come on. You can create anything you want, magically. And if you create it, then it exists, doesn’t it? Who cares if it doesn’t occur naturally otherwise?”

“I suppose that is true.”

“Well?” Herbert gestured toward a patch of land that, by implication, might make a sensational location for a conjured dragon.

“I just… don’t…”

“Don’t you know what a dragon looks like?”

“Of course I do!”

“Then hop to it! Big, scaly, and mean!”

“I really don’t think it’s a good idea though. It just doesn’t sound right.”

Herbert sighed, frustrated. He had an idea. “Okay, how about this. You know what dinosaurs look like, right? And they exist, don’t they? I mean, they used to. At least they aren’t completely fictional.”

“Right…” Russet agreed.

“Well, how about you just start by creating a dinosaur. A big one. Like a T-Rex.”

“Yes, that I can do.”

“Sounds pretty hard,” Beatrix said. “I’d love to see that.”

Russet concentrated, using more effort than either of them had seen him use previously. Shortly, there was a mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex milling about on an adjacent hill, a reasonably safe distance from where the kids stood. It produced an authentic-sounding roar, or at least authentic if you used the film Jurassic Park as your guide.

“Great. Fantastic. I couldn’t have asked for a better dinosaur,” Herbert commended. “Now comes the tricky part. Listen carefully, Russet. Can you cover the dinosaur in scales?”

“Scales?”

“Big, green scales. Lots of them. All over.”

“Uh… yeah…” Russet agreed very cautiously. His attitude towards this entire experiment seemed odd to Beatrix. It was strangely lacking the usual bravado he put into things like this.

A coat of shiny, emerald-green scales swept across the dinosaur’s skin. It now shimmered attractively. It sniffed the ground, still appearing unaware of its guinea pig status. “Super. Now how about some wings?”

“W… wings?”

“Big and leathery. Like a bat. You know.”

The dinosaur suddenly had two huge wings protruding from its shoulder blades, and began to strongly resemble a you-know-what. It took to the air with a couple of powerful flaps. “Now bigger teeth! And claws! And give it some horns!”

Russet began to sweat. As the features Herbert named grew in length and deadliness, the T-Rex seemed to notice the kids. It flapped toward them and issued a monstrous half-squeal, half-roar.

“Uh-oh…” Beatrix said.

“Now one last thing! Make it breathe fire!”

“Herbert, are you crazy?!” she yelled. Russet, in an odd stupor, mindlessly complied. A small cloud of white-hot flame puffed out of the beast’s mouth, but it instantly became extinguished. The Tyrannosaurus, now officially a dragon, rolled its eyes back into its sockets to reveal the white of surrender. It came thundering to the ground, plowing a deep, dark scar into the hill as it slid to a halt, several yards away from Herbert. Smoke rose from its nostrils.

Herbert reached up to its massive neck to take a pulse. He looked at the others and shook his head solemnly. He gulped. He felt dismay at this event, and he was troubled to admit he didn’t know what the dismay, or the event, meant at all.

Jivversport was a very different place from the one occupying Grant’s memory. Years ago, it was a thrumming hotbed of trade, intrigue, and of course, adventure. But he knew in this realm, a lot could change in a little time.

It was once a melting pot, an intersection of so many factions and interests that even the lifelong native had difficulty cataloguing them. There was naturally a thriving pirate’s district, but really, what respectable seaport hub didn’t have that? There was an active underbelly. Baffling networks of street urchin guilds clogged the alleys and sewers. They bartered magical secrets and pickpocketed goods, and the savvy ones climbed the ranks of power through inscrutable political machinery. A high-ranking urchin could rival the sway of even a “legitimate” city politician, which was usually just a puppet figure for pirate interests, or the Charmsmith Union, or the Consortium for Binary Prestidigitators, or outside military interests, or the Jivversport Wizard Herders’ Association… you get the idea.

That was all far from the case these days, as Grant noted with a bit of melancholy. He strolled a cobblestone thoroughfare with his motley band of allies, the two pirate counselors and Samantha, as they searched for her brother. There was an alarming number of places for a lost orphan boy to tuck himself away.

“Siiiiimon!” This was not the first time Samantha had sent her brother’s name echoing through the vacant streets.

There was no response. The sound bounced off the dilapidated façades, knocking loose a slate shingle, sending it shattering on the ground. The architecture was eclectic, to say the least. It resembled in places a dense, poorly organized villa somewhere in Italy or Switzerland or France. It might give you the queasy feeling of unfocusing your eyes at the whole palette of European atmosphere. The resulting jumble of awnings, shingles, beams, siding, glass and stonework seemed a good approximation of the environment. But you couldn’t get too caught up in that comparison, because not infrequently you’d see signs of modern American suburbia. You’d turn the corner and find yourself in the shadow of a badly deteriorating, but otherwise modern 7-11. They might have represented thresholds of heavenly commercial sanctuary, if not for the fact that the broken windows all but assured the Twinkies and savory Hostess snack cakes had been plundered long ago, not even to speak of the highly collectible plastic Big Gulp cups. But it would be clear to any visitor that Jivversport at one point had anything you needed to lead a civilized life (albeit a life of charmsmithing or street urchinning). It had restaurants, hotels, post offices, a Walmart and a Target, and even a Six Flags amusement park, complete with several Batman-themed roller coasters, all ground to a halt by decades of rust and scarcity of power.

“Siiiimon! Where are you!” Samantha tried again.

“Samantha,” Grant began with his style of kid-handling diplomacy, “I’d dearly like to find your brother too. But I think if he were in the position of hearing us shout, he’d have responded by now. Besides, all the noise may attract the wrong kind of attention. Why don’t we let these good folk take us to their fort, and we can make a solid plan for recovering your brother?”

“Siiiiiiiiimon!”

“Aye, friend, it be a tall order if ye wish to get a lass to stop pinin’ for her brother,” Daniel said in his pirate’s drawl, which somehow managed to seem less like a stylish affectation, and more like something he was actually raised with. “But not to worry too much. ‘Hospitality’ of any persuasion in this place is seldom and little between. E’ryone’s been spirited off by the Slurpenook rogues over the years. Or found themselves some sense and fled. Or they’re dead. But we’ll get ye to our fort swiftly. It’ll be yer best bet at anything like comfort in these parts.”

Daniel nodded toward his silent partner, Nemoira, who said nothing, narrowing her eyes under the brim of her silly hat.

“That is a really &$#@£ nice outfit. I should be taking some #!%@$ %*#Ω& notes on that $#!@,” Russet said, referring to the 80’s street attire of the break dancer known as ‘Ozone’.

“It’s $&@!# unbelievable,” Beatrix agreed, continuing to be startled and amused by the profanity spontaneously emerging from her mouth.

“What do you think? Long, dangly $*©#@ earring in one ear, tiny $!#¢® vest with no shirt to show off my rock-solid &β#$© abs, and some sort of ∑@%& Jheri curl formula. I’d be some Ф$!¢##& smooth #@€ $#!Л.”

“You’d be one bad Δ!%§® &λØ$°#,” she confirmed, unable to suppress the laughter at her own crudeness.

The rec. room’s VHS video library left something to be desired, and that something was good movies. After rummaging through the cardboard box and passing over such cinematic jewels as “Look Who’s Talking Now”, “Patch Adams”, and “Mr. Holland’s Opus”. There was a copy of “The Goonies”, though to their dismay, the case contained a copy of “Ernest goes to Camp”. This proved to complement a bold blend of camp-themed entertainment, including a number of taped episodes of the late John Candy’s “Camp Candy” and Nickelodeon’s “Salute Your Shorts”. They eventually settled on a diamond in the rough (albeit diamond-like for reasons the filmmakers didn’t intend), a movie called “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”. It was a film about young break dancers who fought against evil corporate forces to save their dance studio from demolition, and tragically, against all odds, succeed.

The two spectators erupted with profanity-laden laughter as Michael ‘Boogaloo Shrimp’ Chambers—after stealing the lunch of a workman charged with demolition the studio—fell down a long flight of stairs, shattering several bones.

“Oh Ф$#£Э! Poor Turbo!” Beatrix lamented.

“I think this film is probably a kind of &∑#ф$ modern tragedy about the ¥®β@Иμ American Dream. Sorry, Turbo. It doesn’t matter how totally πЯ@Ψ¢# sweet your moves are. I don’t Ж!#!фΩ give a Ø°ξ$& §#!Ψ how sick your pop-n-locks are. If you Θ##^®¥ get in the way of progress, you will be @фΔ# $Э§∑% crushed.”

Beatrix wholeheartedly agreed with the statement in the facetious spirit it was intended. She turned her attention to the gradually subsiding ‘whirring’ noise in the room. It was coming from an object on top of the cinderblock coffee table. It was a plastic toy doing a lively mechanical dance, now slowing to a stop.

“Do you think we should wind that #фΔ$!$! up again?” she asked.

“I don’t see why the πф$®β# not,” Russet said while reaching for the monkey. “He really livens up the ¢ИфЯЭ% $#ΔЛ out of conversations, doesn’t he?”

The ‘Singe Vilain’ was one of those obscure charmed items that could perplex an advanced sorcerer for a lifetime. He could open its plastic frame manufactured in Hong Kong, and scour its humble mechanical components to no avail. Even the most learned occultist might never fully understand to what purpose it gives its vast magical energies, until one day by chance, he happened to wind it up and place it near the right kind of subject. It was hard to guess by its cheaply crafted shell and badly painted exterior that the Singe Vilain, when dancing, causes children to swear.

The monkey now had an extra spring in its step, which nicely complemented the onscreen cavorting of the Breakin’ 2 hospital scene dance number. Funky synth-rhythms rousted the wheelchair-bound and open heart surgery patients, as if they were the dead responding to a grim song of the damned. Scantily dressed nurses, probably hired from stripper agencies by production, executed vaguely lewd choreographed procedures with spiral telephone cords. Boogaloo Shrimp, maybe through a woeful dearth of facility with the art of acting, looked simultaneously exhilarated and horrified as his rowdy dance troop pushed his sickbed through the hospital like it was a shopping cart on an “all you can grab in a minute” shopping spree.

“Am I completely ®&#∂@ or does this $Δ#!Ø make no ©#@%-#*Θ?¥ sense at all?” Russet pondered.

“I think it’s ЯЭ$$!$ marvelous. His §@§§%!¢ friends are coming through for him, and healing him through the beauty of Ф°ξ$& song and dance. This movie is clearly all about friendship and Ψ$!¢# !%§®@ like that.”

Russet tacitly agreed with the wisdom of the remark. “So where the ЛИ#°Ø £&!!& is good friend Wizardy? It’s getting on in the &$#∑$ evening, wouldn’t you say?”

After the unsettling dragon debacle, Russet and Beatrix had informed Herbert that they were getting a little tired. After hours of searching for the reticulated snoogerfitch, they didn’t hold much hope of finding the creature. Herbert dismissed them gruffly, in his way, though he had no intention of giving up on the quest. He was determined to get his badge even if it meant shooting every goofily-named woodland creature he could find, and prying out their teeth, spiraled or otherwise.

“Beats %Ξ@Δ me.”

“What do you make of that bit of ф!ЯΨ#$ dragon silliness? What do you think Herb was @@Ж$π$ on about there?” Russet wondered.

“I guess you can $%λ% ask him now,” Beatrix said, facing the door. Russet turned. Herbert stood with a dismal expression, covered in dirt from head to toe, and under one arm carried something bulky, limp, and bleeding.

The pair of ungainly lobster claws grappled with the shiny red doll. Through some effort, the claws managed to twist the upper half until it was facing the other way, and then back again. This action produced no effect. A snort of distaste fogged up the doll’s happy face.

“Mister… um, mister small horsey-crab. That is mine and I have to protect it for mister Grant.”

“Regard for duty is a noble quality. You seem like a fine young man. But I am going to keep this doll for a little while, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

“Oh. Okay.” Simon frowned. He did have regard for duty, but at the same time, he was not one for challenging statements of fact.

Terence scuttled across the damp stone floor, rattling off a chorus of rhythmic, echoed clicks. He placed the doll on top of a pockmarked, mossy pillar, and scowled at the mocking cheerfulness of its demeanor. There was a sound of a lone drop of water hitting the head of a tied-up orphan boy. Terence about-faced quickly and looked his captive up and down. Behind his intensely still pupils, a tiny, yet frighteningly powerful brain was calculating.

“What are you going to do with me, horsey?”

“The name is Terence. And I have no plans for you as of yet, other than to keep you tied to that statue as my prisoner until further strategic opportunities present themselves.”

Simon exhaled the exaggerated sigh of a child warned about the cancellation of dessert in the event that any uneaten vegetables were found loitering on his plate. Another drop of water pelted the top of his moist head. He looked up at the leaking stalactites covering the high ceiling of the underground chamber. Surrounding him in this chamber was a great deal of ancient stonework, an indication of a once very different-looking Jivversport, paved over and forgotten with time. And judging by the modern-day Jivversport, this seemed to be a frequently occurring cultural/geological phenomenon.

He squirmed against the unforgiving relief-marks in the statue he was tied to. He couldn’t see what it looked like, but he could see the other eleven in the room, spread out radially and spaced by the hours of a clock. They were wise-looking bearded figures, possibly authorities of their day on facets of the arcane. One of them looked like a Chinese wise man, and another had a beard that curled to a point which came back to almost touch his face.

“So am I in trouble, mister horsey Terence?”

“Trouble? Unless being tied up suits your convenience, yes, I’d say you were in some trouble. Your life is in no immediate peril, if that’s what you were after.”

“It isn’t?”

“No more than it is with that sword-flailing delinquent you’ve been following about.”

“Mister Grant?”

“If you knew who he was, you wouldn’t put your trust in him.”

“But mister Grant was going to get us some pizza!”

“There will be no pizza! He is lying about his intentions. In fact, I believe he intends to steal something from someone dear to you.”

“No way!”

“An older girl you know. She has helped you before.”

“You mean miss Beatrix??”

Terence held his head still, a gesture which seemed to suffice as a nod for him. Simon erupted, “Whoa! I thought I heard mister Grant say something about Beatrix and my sister was all like ‘whoaaaa’ and I was like ‘is it really her?’ and I thought ‘whoa, no way!!’ but then we didn’t ask him if…”

Terence grunted a deep, brooding whinny of displeasure. Simon remained undeterred. “He wants to steal something from Beatrix? That can’t be right. He is a very nice man!”

“Believe what you will. The only thing I want from you is that doll there, and I already have it. I have no reason to tell you false stories.” Simon looked worried. He was trusting to a fault by nature, and this presented a conundrum when faced with blindly trusting, as he always did, the multiple conflicting accounts of others.

“But Grant is my friend…”

“No more than I am.”

“You’re not my friend?”

“Well…” Terence was caught off guard by the question. “No, it doesn’t look like it, does it?”

“Can I be your friend?”

Terence deliberated silently behind his gruff horse features. “… Maybe.”

Simon beamed. “Do you want to play some games to pass the time?!”

“… … Yes.”

“Wizardy, good &Э©!¢# chum!” Russet said with genuine delight.

“What in the #&!!$!! name of Ω@ΩΩ$-Δ°@!&-$€*€Ж? is going the $*Ø@!?Ξ?© on in here?” Herbert asked, followed by a look of absolute disbelief at what he’d just said. He’d simply meant to say “What’s up?”

“Nothing %%Ф#μ! much to report, friend. We’re spending a little И^¢¢$ quality time with one Sir Boogaloo §&%!@!!ф Shrimp.”

Herbert wrinkled his brow at the baffling response, hoping it didn’t mean what he thought it meant.

“What the ##Ω§%! is that?” Beatrix asked mildly, belying her own coarse language.

Herbert’s look of confusion was seamless from moment to moment. “Oh. This &*λ@?&. I $πΘΔ# found it. The snoogerfitch.” He dumped the lifeless load onto the floor, and presented in an open palm two long, spiral-shaped teeth. He again screwed up his face and sort of twitched, feeling like he was a malfunctioning robot whose blown fuses were causing him to curse.

“That’s the $#Э*& snoogerfitch??” Beatrix said in disbelief.

“Sweet Э$$© Ж!#!фΩ. Who’d have thought the πЯ@Ψ would look like that!” Russet said.

“Hold on a Δ!%§® second. If I can just &#∂@ interject a little #*Θ? sanity here before we get carried away with snoogerfitches and &Э©! reticulated curious proboscises or whatever the # $Э§∑%. Since when did everyone around here turn into $!¢##& Andrew Dice Clay, including my-Ψ$!¢#-self??”

“It’s the $Δ#!Ø monkey,” said Beatrix plainly, as if answering a question on the current cost of postage stamps. Herbert looked at the toy monkey. It pranced around via cheap mechanically whirring parts. It was almost as if it gained a little more energy with each foul word issued by the mouth of a child.

“You mean that ®&#∂@ thing is making us say all this @¥#?Θ $β@Иμ?” Herbert flinched with each involuntary obscenity surfacing in his speech. They were almost like belches bubbling up uncontrollably after eating some terribly gassy food, like a microwaveable burrito, to name just one, completely random example.

“Only when the #Ω§% dances,” she clarified.

Herbert was about to say something, then stopped himself. While Beatrix and Russet seemed to be having fun with it (and with the way they were acting lately, he thought they would probably manage to have fun with a sack of rattlesnakes together), something felt unnatural about it to Herbert. Something subtle about the medium of their reality, of which they were all only barely aware, tugged at his mind persuasively. It was an invisible force which funneled all of his intent and actions into a discrete compartment, an alphanumeric sector of human behavior labeled ‘PG-13’.

“Well, I’m going to £&#°& stop it now, okay? It’s getting a little &λØ$°# distracting.” Herbert picked up the Singe Vilain and sped up the dance with the winding key to exhaust its wound-up state. The plastic whirring became shrill, and the monkey’s limbs went into spastic quadruple-time. The kids helplessly spat furious volleys of unspeakably excremental language until the monkey became still.

“€°%@§$ $!?Θ*% Ø#^!#@ $#§ @%Ω&!&^$%Э@§∑$ &©©@$&$Ф$^& %!@&¥#Ω #&$Л&Л$&ф @ΔΔ &#Δ&§$Я*& πΔ&!@##&@§Я&@β @Ψ#%%β% @&%§Ф@%%@ Ф♦%♀♪Θ$ ♣$☺ $@ ♂$$&^☺♪$#@♥♫$ &☻$!”

Beatrix and Russet sat frozen, with their lips open. Interspersed crudeness throughout casual conversation was one thing. It was an entertaining novelty, like watching a fireworks display. But that volley was like lighting up the entire fireworks barge at once. Beatrix wondered if she would ever feel the same way about her mouth again after such an unusual sort of violation. Herbert had already moved on from the incident, though, and was sizing up the Vend-O-Badge machine the way one might do with a budding arch-nemesis.

“These teeth better work. I went through hell to get them. Seriously, I probably shot the last snoogerfitch on Earth.”

“It looks… well, the creature doesn’t look like I pictured at all.” Beatrix tilted her head, scrutinizing the carcass.

“Nasty son of a gun. The thing bit me. Those corkscrew teeth hurt like hell!” Herbert massaged a small wound consisting of two holes and a stained pant leg.

“So that’s two badges down, I guess.”

“Yeah, we’ll see about that. Fingers crossed.”

Herbert dropped the teeth into the hatch. They rattled metallically at the bottom. They all waited, holding their breath. And waited.

Beep. ‘G14’ lit up. Stars and Stripes Forever followed, at its typical skull-jarring volume. “YEAH! IT WORKED!” Herbert yelled.

“WHAT?”

Upon finishing its clunky yet highly patriotic dance routine, the machine halted, and the position G14 unscrewed, sending a badge forward. Herbert, with an enormous grin of gratification, picked up a VHS copy of ‘Hook’, and held it at the ready for jamming into the machine’s flapping maw to retrieve the badge.

The badge stopped. The coil at G14 snagged the front badge together with the one behind it. Neither fell. Herbert dropped the cassette, and his jaw, simultaneously.

“$&©#@$!!!”

Beatrix and Russet turned to see if the Singe Vilain had begun dancing again. It had not.

Fort Pizzahut was not what Grant was expecting. This was not for lack of speculation, though. In one far-fetched variation, he imagined the fort as a rugged treetop village, complete with rickety suspension bridges, makeshift elevators involving large buckets of water, and foolhardy children precariously swinging on vines for no good God damned reason. While this cliché might have made for a fun read, it was not to be.

“This way, mates.” Daniel said, entering a deteriorating storefront. The building had a shallowly slanting red roof peppered with missing shingles. Unlike most businesses, the roof of this establishment was its trademark feature, causing it to be instantly recognizable.

“So wait,” Grant just wanted to be clear on this. “You mean fort Pizzahut actually is a Pizza Hut? Like, literally?”

“Aye. Inasmuch.”

“I knew it! Simon was right, there is pizza!” Samantha enthused.

“Well…” Daniel hedged. “I’m ‘fraid to disappoint ye, but the pizza reserves have been dried up for ages. But we’re not without hope. The good lady Nemoira here is a crackerjack with the culinary magicks.” Nemoira nodded graciously. She was a girl for whom communication seemed a tiresome chore, but she wouldn’t stand by while an incredibly true fact went unverified. “She might even set ye up with a pizza, if you wish. Though she’s never quite got the hang of that stuffed crust trick.”

Samantha’s mouth watered at the mention of hot, edible things. She frowned. “I wish Simon was around to have some too. Oh, Simon, where are you?”

“Don’t worry, Samantha. We’ll go in and rest for a while, and then go find your brother as soon as we can, okay?”

Inside, there were only a few sad traces of a once functioning restaurant. It appeared to be gutted of anything valuable. The cash register, the beverages from the case, and even those huge spatulas used to take pizza out of ovens, all were gone. The only things left were either too big to carry out, or actually bolted to the floor, such as the pizza ovens themselves. The space was small, gloomy, and hot.

“This is your fort? I know you said there weren’t many people left, but isn’t it kind of small?” Grant asked.

“‘Tis only the gateway, friend.”

While the actual location of the fort caught Grant by surprise, he was at least aware “Pizzahut” was not its original name. According to the lore of the camp, as operations expanded and mingled with the energetic Jivversport economy, the fort too evolved. To compete with other forts, enterprising counselors sought to attract endorsement dollars from major corporations to subsidize the increasingly complicated affairs of camp participation. They’d be cashing a healthy paycheck every time they competed in the exhilarating and oft-calamitous Dr. Scholls Capture the Flag Tournament. And the Fruit of the Loom Musical Bonfire Jamborees were so riotously spirited, the kids would almost forget that the levity was made possible by the snug, soft support offered by the undergarments of Fruit of the Loom. But the real windfall came when the Pizza Hut corporation, caught up in the frenzy of carving up endorsement space in this property (the way one slices up a hot pie), offered to bankroll the fort’s activity for exclusive representation. Thus the fort’s name changed officially to Pizza Hut Presents Fort [the fort’s former name], and this colloquially was soon truncated to simply Pizza Hut. Soon after, the company realized the endorsement, in addition to costing them a fortune, was pulling in very little revenue for them. It also did not prove to be the tremendous tax write-off initially indicated. The U.S. government, instead of viewing it as the charitable bolstering of an organization focused on the enrichment of character and physical fitness among youngsters, regarded it as a confusing and possibly nonexistent entity serving as a tax shelter, and slapped the company with some stiff fines. (The accountant who made the original recommendations would later prove to have attended a less than credible Accounting Camp earlier in life.) Needless to say, Pizza Hut pulled the plug on the deal after it didn’t pan out (one of many pizza puns now associated with the fort as time-honored tradition). The name remained though, and became further truncated to simply Pizzahut, with corporate watchdogs no longer present to ensure brand fidelity, or that the crucial ‘’ symbols were positioned properly.

Nemoira turned the temperature dial on a large pizza oven back and forth as if entering the combination for a safe. She then tapped the oven with her silver telescope, and it opened. The party crawled inside.

“That was quite a story,” Russet said, as he held the unassuming Xerox copy.

Beatrix smirked in acknowledgement. Russet reclined in his luxurious, magically crafted bed, pondering the related events quietly. Beatrix sat in a handsome armchair. The two furnishings complemented a rich décor of antiques, wall coverings, fully-stocked armoires, and cluttered vials of lotions, colognes, and obscure cosmetic supplements. Beatrix wasn’t sure when Russet manifested the interior upgrade, but figured it was during the surge of his recent meteoric upswing.

His fertile synapses turned the information about. On one hand, he was titillated to learn some of the more intimate historical facts about the ever-cagey Beatrix Tipplepot, and was so in direct proportion to their sensitive nature. On the other hand, the darkness of the tale jostled something hazy and troubling from his own memory. Things that rarely surfaced with everything else that preoccupied his busy mind (such as whether to opt for a lavender or puce dust ruffle for his conjured king-size bed). But in his current unflappable condition, the affirmative side of the dichotomy would prevail. His smile broadened, as if a simple token of gratitude for her confidence.

“So what do you think? About Herbert?” she asked.

“I think many things about Herbert. And in spite of those things, above all, I think highly.” He laughed the jovial laugh of a consummate good sport. He continued, more frankly. “But I’m sorry to say, Bea, that I don’t know the foggiest thing about Herbert. Never met him before in my life.”

“Oh. I guess I didn’t actually expect you to have met him. I just wanted to run this all by you in case you could tell me anything. Doesn’t any of this sound familiar? Anything at all?”

“Hmm.” Russet again looked at the grainy black and white image of Herbert. He focused on the eye patch, but the focus soon became more like a trance. “You know, now that you mention it, I believe Herbert seems familiar to me. But then, this was always a subtle impression I had, ever since I met him. If I think about it for a moment, the familiarity becomes a little more palpable.”

“Can you think hard, about where you might have seen him before?”