Storystream Quest
Episode Two: All Quiet In The Western Fold
The opening part of this episode can be found in the ebook or as an NFT. You may also have read it as part of the Tales from the Storystream series.
And then...
And then...
“Nice place,” said Chloe, stepping out through the somewhat-anaemic-looking portal. “Where are we again?”
She glanced around curiously, trying not to look as if conjuring the portal had cost her most of her energy reserves. Manipulating flows of mysterious energy was much, much more difficult than it had been. She made yet another mental note to hunt down that bastard version of herself who had stolen her powers, and do something exceedingly unpleasant to her.
“Indeed,” said Dave the badger, following Chloe out through the portal and onto the bright, gently rolling landscape beside her. “The Sheriffs are very proud of their little domains.”
Chloe glanced around. The landscape seemed to her to be one of roiling grass meadows, on which glimmering, roughly spherical things pulsed and mooched around peacefully. She was pretty sure this wasn’t the fundamental nature of the place, however. New to her post she might be, but she had already learnt that the Storystream often existed in several extremely strange dimensions at once, many of which she was - for the most part - quite unable to perceive.
“Fair enough,” she said. “It’s very pretty. Very calm. Very…”
“Sickeningly bucolic and rife with an artificial sense of peace?” put in Dave with a disgusted sneer.
“Well, I wouldn’t put it exactly like that,” muttered Chloe.
The thing was, she knew exactly what her badger was getting at. There was a sort of…a sort of constrained feeling to this place. As if all the wildness had been scooped up and forcibly deported. Which was, she supposed, kind of what had happened. Wasn’t that the way of things in the Folds? Wasn’t that exactly what the Sheriffs of the Order stood for? Not that she had met any of them before, but she had met a number of entities now who had had dealings with them; and Dave the badger was quite clear on how he felt about them.
“Damn right you wouldn’t,” came a voice from behind them.
It was an odd voice.
A…a heavy voice.
A voice that had options.
Chloe very much had the impression that if that voice said jump, her body would be overwhelmingly inclined to obey, and wouldn’t just ask how high, but also be anxious to determine various other variables, too.
The badger sighed under his breath.
“Oh well,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”
They turned.
The woman who was striding towards them looked sort of superficially young, though Chloe had the impression that there was something old lurking behind those dark, hard eyes. She wore faded blue jeans and a battered brown hat. On her shirt she wore a golden star. It sparkled in a way which managed to be both, a) merry, and b) intimidating.
“Hi,” said Chloe, trying to look non-threatening. Even though the woman with the badge was slim and rather small, there was something imposing about her. Chloe was pretty sure that here was someone who would brook no bullshit. Which was fine by her. Bullshit was something of which she wasn’t a big fan, either.
The slim, wiry woman looked them up and down. If she found something surprising about being visited by a huge talking badger, she gave no sign.
“You wouldn’t put it like that,” the woman went on, “because you, Chloe, have more sense than this ragamuffin badger o’yours.”
Chloe tried to stop her eyebrows from going up. She failed.
“Indigo,” said Dave the badger, smiling thinly. “I would say how delightful it was to see you, only we both know that it isn’t.”
“Sheriff Shuttlecock to you, badger,” the slim woman said evenly. “And don’t act like you’ve forgotten how things went last time you came prowlin’ round here. I certainly haven’t.”
Something sparkled briefly in the Sheriff’s hand, and Chloe found herself peering, trying to work out what it was the woman was holding. Was it a coin? A piece of jewellery?
But Indigo Shuttlecock was already tucking the sparkling thing into a pocket and out of view.
Dave the badger leant back on his haunches and lifted his two front paws placatingly.
“Forgotten?” he protested. “Not a bit of it.”
“Funny,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “‘Cos I distinctly do recall tellin’ you that if you showed your maw here again I’d blast you with a Telling so powerful you’d spend the next thousand narrative cycles prancing round a riverbank having twee little adventures with various anthropomorphised woodland mammals.”
“Touché,” said the badger, though Chloe thought he sounded distinctly unimpressed. “And yet, here I am. Very much disinclined towards prancing, as you can see.”
“Oh, I can see,” growled Indigo Shuttlecock.
Chloe noticed the Sheriff’s left hand was clenching and unclenching. More troubling, the woman’s golden badge seemed to be shimmering at the edges. Chloe had spent enough time around mysterious energies that she thought she had developed a pretty good sense of when they were in danger of being deployed.
She smiled as disarmingly as she could and held up her arms.
“Hang on,” she said. “Please, just hear us out.”
Indigo Shuttlecock stared at her coldly.
“I am,” said the Sheriff. “This is me dealing with you kind-like. Giving you a chance. You don’t want to see what it would look like for me not to hear you out.”
Chloe glanced at her badger. Dave rolled his eyes, as if to say, see? Sheriffs. They’re mad.
“Well,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “I’m waiting.”
Chloe took a deep breath, and told the Sheriff what had happened.
She hadn’t been looking forward to this - partly because she had been pretty sure that the Sheriffs of the Order would see her as some kind of amateur idiot who had basically been begging for an evil version of themselves to come steaming in and steal their powers. But Indigo Shuttlecock was a surprisingly good listener, and she didn’t interrupt Chloe’s story until quite near the end.
“This ring,” said Indigo, holding a hand up. “What’d it look like.”
Chloe blinked at the Sheriff’s hand. It was only a small hand, but it had a sort of inescapable weight to it. In fact, the moment Indigo lifted her hand, Chloe had felt her story snag in her mouth. Which perhaps shouldn’t have been so surprising; Indigo Shuttlecock was used to shepherding stories after all.
“Had a sapphire in it,” she said. She frowned. “Well, three sapphires, I think. Some diamonds, too. And…”
“No,” said Indigo. Her voice was soft, but there were strange harmonics in her voice, and Chloe felt as incapable of talking over the Sheriff as she would have been of breathing in and out at the same time. “What’d it look like. Deeper. Inside of it, I mean.”
Chloe opened her mouth to protest that she didn’t know what the hell Indigo was tailing about, then closed it again.
To her surprise, she found she knew exactly what the Sheriff was asking about.
“It looked small,” said Chloe. “But it wasn’t. Not really. There was something…something very cold about it. And when she used it on me…”
Chloe shuddered and broke off. She remembered the way memory had swept through her, that raging torrent of involuntary recall. It had been…well, awful, really.
She closed her eyes a moment, took a breath, looked away.
“You shouldn’t have to remember things you aren’t ready for,” she said, surprised to hear the tremor in her own voice.
“Right,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “Finish, please.”
Chloe finished her story. She wondered if she should add the reason for them coming here, that they didn’t know where else to start, that they needed help, any kind of help. But she decided against this on the grounds that, a) it sounded pretty desperate, and b) she was sure Indigo had worked that much out already.
Indigo Shuttlecock looked at Chloe, then sighed.
It was a long sigh, rather sad, and - to Chloe’s surprise - it came with a side-order of sympathy.
Then the Sheriff turned her gaze on the badger, at which point it became considerably harder.
“You’re an idiot, badger,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “A real idiot. Ain’t ya?”
The badger looked shocked.
“Madam,” he said, trying to muster his dignity. “If I have done something to offend, then I apologise. But to call me…”
“You’re an idiot,” repeated Indigo flatly. “Not a small one, either.”
Dave the badger frowned.
“Now listen here…”
“No,” said Indigo, and once again her soft voice seemed suddenly to be louder than anything, louder than volcanoes erupting, louder than planets colliding.
The badger closed his mouth. He didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter.
It was then that Chloe saw in her eyes that Indigo Shuttlecock was angry.
Really angry.
Around them, the business of the Fold seemed to falter and fade. At the same time, Indigo Shuttlecock grew, looming over them until she was the size of a house, of a mountain; the size of the whole world.
“I told you, badger,” the Sheriff went on. “Last time we met. Told you that the mistake you’d made was a bad one. Told you it was your responsibility to clean it up. Told you what would happen if you didn’t.”
Chloe looked at her badger. She didn’t know what Indigo Shuttlecock was talking about, and though a part of her very much hoped this was simply some Sheriff-nonsense - something to do with the predilection for Order the Sheriffs loved so much - somehow she knew it was more than that.
A suspicion was growing in her. A nasty suspicion. A suspicion about where the other her had come from.
“I did,” protested the badger, and for the first time Chloe thought she saw fear in his eyes, real fear. “I agreed with you. I never should have let that girl…well, she got rather out of hand.”
Indigo Shuttlecock snorted derisively.
“That,” she said, “is putting things mildly.”
The badger shot Chloe a pleading glance. To her surprise, Chloe found that she didn’t have much sympathy. She was angry too, she realised. Some deep part of her had been putting things together. Even if she had not had a chance to talk to Dave the badger about the origin of the other Chloe, she found she already knew. Perhaps it was the last lingering powers that had been left her, or maybe it was just standard issue intuition. But it didn’t matter.
“I wasn’t the first,” she said, surprising herself by how harsh her voice sounded.
The badger looked at her as if she had stabbed him in the back.
“Et tu, Chlous?” he sighed.
“Me mainly,” Chloe corrected him. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said, turning back to Indigo. “There were other Chloes before me, and that…that horrible version who stole my powers was some earlier version. One that wasn’t - what? - as nice as me? Or just wasn’t as easy to manipulate?”
Indigo Shuttlecock smiled thinly. Chloe realised that the Sheriff had shrunk once more. Now the three of them were roughly equal sizes again, though the badger looked just as terrified as when the Sheriff had appeared big as mountains. Indigo, on the other hand, seemed rather tired.
“Oh, it’s not as simple as that,” sighed the Sheriff. “Believe me, if this…badger…had just been interested in manipulating you, I wouldn’t have gone so easy on him.”
“That was going easy on me?” protested Dave weakly. “I thought I was having a heart attack.”
Indigo stared at the badger, unimpressed.
“Tell her,” ordered the Sheriff. “Should’ve told her already. So get it done.”
The badger looked for a moment that he might protest, then he shook his head.
“Right,” he said. “The truth. Fine.”
He looked at Chloe.
“You’re right,” he said. “You weren’t the first. The first Chloe, I mean.”
Even though she had already guessed it, hearing her badger say the words caused a bolt of jealousy to shoot through Chloe’s chest.
“No?” she said evenly. “What was I? The second? The fifth?”
Dave appeared momentarily shifty, then looked down.
“Five hundred and seventy third,” he admitted.
“Oh, right,” said Chloe, wrong-footed by the sheer scale of the problem. “Good. I see.”
“I’d say they meant nothing to me,” the badger went on, a twinkle of his usual waggishness evident once more, “but some of them did. A few of them.”
“Right,” said Chloe again, trying to visualise five hundred and seventy two other Chloes, and finding she could not.
“Don’t listen to this rapscallion creature,” said Indigo. “I had occasion to see most every one of those others, and I can tell you now, Chloe - he might have tried to help them, as much as he could, but none of them meant as much to him as you do.”
Chloe stared at the Sheriff.
“What?” she said. “How can you say that? How do you know?”
“Because,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “This damnable badger used to come here and moan at me about them.”
“I most certainly did not!” protested Dave the badger.
“Oh, what am I going to do?” said Indigo, in a stuffy, deep voice which was actually - Chloe thought - not too bad an impression of her badger. “She’s supposed to be the chosen one, but she couldn’t choose her way out of a paper bag! Woe is me, I’ve got this chosen one to look after, only she’s too stupid to use the powers she has inherited…”
Indigo shook her head, disgusted.
“When he didn’t come round for a while,” she went on, “I figured he had finally found himself an iteration that fulfilled the promise. Either that, or he’d given up on the whole business after…”
Indigo trailed off, shaking her head.
“What,” said Chloe. “Iterations? What’s an iteration?”
“You are, girl,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “Well, we all are, I suppose. In a manner of speaking.”
“That’s the thing about infinity,” added the badger. “Not just infinite things. But infinite versions of the same thing.”
“And if there’s one thing that’s infinite,” said Indigo, “it’s the Storystream.”
“So…so you picked up these other versions of me,” said Chloe. “One after another, just trying to find the one that could - what? - do the job properly?”
The badger sighed, exasperated.
“I did not pick you up,” he protested. “Jesus, you make it sound like I’m prowling around in a sports car, finding unattached young women to prey on.”
“Pretty much how I meant it,” replied Chloe.
“Unfair, Chloe,” said her badger. “Unfair. But basically, yes. That’s what I did. That’s what I do. For you. For your blood line. I examine the versions. I look at the potential candidates, and then I give them that which is their birthright: the mantle of the Power Badger. I’ve been doing it for ages,” he added.
“Right, fine,” said Chloe, rubbing her temples. “So there were five hundred and seventy two other versions of me. Only none of them meant much to you. Except one of them has actually been lurking out there in the Storystream somewhere, just biding her time, waiting for her chance to get me?”
Dave the badger opened his mouth to protest, but Indigo was too fast for him.
“Right,” she said. “And looks like she managed it, judgin’ by the sorry state of your powers.”
Chloe felt a stab of hurt.
“What do you know about my powers?” she said, more stiffly than she meant. “I mean, it’s not like you can see them, can you?”
Indigo gave her a look.
It was a hard look. A sort of a sideways look. A look that very much gave the impression that the Sheriff wasn’t just looking at her, but was actually looking into her.
“Actually, she can,” said her badger, unnecessarily. “It’s kind of part of the Sheriff gig.”
“Damn right,” said Indigo. “And right about now I’d say you’re scraping the bottom of your personal barrel. Them other Chloe’s, when badger here brought them…well, they were just full of juice. But you…”
Indigo waved a hand vaguely up and down, indicating Chloe and - presumably - finding her distinct lack of Badgerly Powers an especial weakness for someone who was meant to be the Power Badger.
Chloe felt herself redden.
Some of it was shame, but a much greater proportion was anger.
“Only - because - she - stole it,” she growled, glaring at Indigo Shuttlecock.
“You let her steal it, you mean,” said Indigo, glaring back just as hard. “You know, you’re not the first Power Badger I’ve met, girl. Not even excluding them other versions of you. And let me tell you, if you’re forebears had come across some snarky bitch waitin’ to pounce on them and steal their powers…well, they wouldn’t have let that happen, that’s for sure.”
Chloe’s eyes widened. The shame and anger both twisted up a notch.
“That’s not fair!” protested Chloe. “No-one warned me about that…that…”
“No one warned you about that other bitch version of yourself?” sneered Indigo. “Wake up. You’re a wielder of ancient, mysterious forces. The Storystream is full of people like that, just waiting to get one over on you.”
“Shut up,” said Chloe. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears, very hoarse, very hard.
“Actually, you were a wielder of ancient, mysterious powers,” Indigo corrected herself, taking a step forward, eyes seeming to bore into Chloe’s very soul. “Not any more. Not since you let them be taken from you. I wonder what your great grandmother Mable would have to say about that?”
“Shut up,” said Chloe once more. Her fists were clenched, a vat of red anger was boiling in her belly.
“After what she went through to keep hold of that power!” exclaimed Indigo, who was standing next to Chloe now, pressing forward into her face, tilting her head, smirking at her. “That woman tore down more stories than I can count just to make things better! She fought back with every atom of her being to keep hold of that power, and you…well, you just couldn’t wait to give it away, could you?”
“Shut UP!” yelled Chloe, and she struck.
Her hand blurred through the air, but it wasn’t her hand that did the striking. Not really.
There was something that moved around her flesh, something that flickered through the air, snaking up and out from the deepest part of her. Chloe felt the utterest extent of her power dredged out from deep within, felt it zap across the space between them, felt it slam into Indigo Shuttlecock’s chest.
“Ooph,” said Indigo, shoulders rolling forward as her body recoiled.
The air seemed to flutter somehow, to become full of strange resonances. A light shimmered in Indigo’s chest, dark red and cloyingly brilliant. It formed a little bubble, and floated off out of Indigo and began fluttering around Chloe’s head.
Everything was very still.
In the background, Chloe could see that all the stories that had been idly grazing had stopped doing so. They were staring at her.
Hard.
She blinked, realising what she had done
She had struck Indigo. She had struck a Sheriff.
Presumably, her charges were not too thrilled about that.
“Oh,” she said, blinking. “Sorry.”
She looked at Indigo, waiting for an explosion of fury…but no explosion came.
The Sheriff wore an odd expression, half pain, half triumph.
“Well done,” said Indigo. “I thought you had it in you. With a little stoking.”
Chloe looked from Indigo to her badger, and realised suddenly that the two of them had been in cahoots.
“I told you,” said Dave the badger, addressing Indigo Shuttlecock. “This kid’s the shit. See what I mean?”
“Fair enough,” said Indigo, looking - Chloe had to admit it - rather impressed. “You did the right thing, holding out for this one.”
“At last,” said the badger drolly. “Vindication. Now my life has meaning.”
“You…you were just winding me up,” said Chloe, not sure if she should be angry, or hurt, or just surprised. Her anger felt all used up, at least for now, and she had already been hurt extensively in the last 24 hours, so she decided to go with surprise, and see where it led her.
“Right,” said Indigo. “Worked, though, didn’t it?”
Chloe looked at the dark red bubble of light. It was fluttering around her head like an unpleasantly demented butterfly.
“Did it?” she said. “What…what did I do? What’s this thing?”
“You prodded me,” said Indigo.
“Prodded?” echoed Chloe.
“Prodded,” confirmed Indigo. “Story-prod. It’s a Sheriff thing, really. Impressive that you could do it.”
“Especially without your powers,” put in Dave the badger.
“Thought you might be able to,” said Indigo. “Others in your line have. Had to push you, though. Sorry ‘bout that.”
Chloe lifted her hand gingerly towards the fluttering crimson bubble.
“Careful now,” warned Indigo. “Don’t get sucked in.”
Chloe frowned.
Sucked in? How could she get sucked into something so small…
But even as she thought it, the bubble seemed to pull at her. The world swam and rippled, and suddenly the fluttering crimson bubble was growing. It was the size of her head, then of her body, then of the whole world. She tried to scream, but the crimson was in her mouth, filling it, filling her. And what it tasted of was…
Anger.
Bile.
Bitterness.
And then…
And then Chloe blinked in shock, silent, unable to speak with the sheer surprise of seeing…well, seeing herself. And Dave the badger. And Indigo Shuttlecock. The whole Fold in fact, was spread out below her, very, very far below, but with a sort of preternatural, hallucinatory clarity.
“No one warned you about that other bitch version of yourself?” sneered Indigo. “Wake up. You’re a wielder of ancient, mysterious forces. The Storystream is full of people like that, just waiting to get one over on you.”
The words drifted up towards her, and Chloe realised she was watching the scene play out again - the scene she had just witnessed, the scene she had just been a part of. Only now…
Now she could see a whole sparkling array of things spread out behind the version of Indigo Shuttlecock down there below her. She saw them, spinning orbs of light and colour, and - most remarkably of all - she found she could understand them, somehow. One was pulsing with curiosity, and Chloe realised it belonged to Indigo - it was the part of the Sheriff that had been wondering if what she was trying would work. Another orb was filled with self-disgust; Indigo must have felt guilty about doing this, Chloe realised. And another…
“Careful, girl,” said a voice behind her, and Chloe started.
It was Indigo - the real Indigo - her head and shoulders seeming to project in from somewhere far beyond, her body telescoping away into that infinity far, far above.
“It’s…It’s a piece of you,” said Chloe, then laughed, because it was such an extremely strange thing to find she could knock a piece of someone out of themselves, and even more strange to learnt hat she could then somehow project inside that piece and explore it.
“Kind of,” said Indigo. “Piece of the story of me, technically. You prodded at it. Knocked it out of alignment. Out of context.”
“Far out,” said Chloe, only half ironically.
“Useful trick,” Indigo went on. “With a bit of playin’, I’m pretty sure you’ll find you ain’t bad at interrogating the fragments you prod out. Not this one, though,” she added, with a touch of finality.
“But…” Chloe started to say, then suddenly found she was back in the Western Fold, feeling unpleasantly nauseous.
“Nope,” said Indigo, flicking the suddenly small-again crimson bubble up in the air, then leaning back as the thing fluttered towards her and fused with her body once more. “There’s secrets in there. My secrets.”
Chloe shook her head, and concentrated very hard on not being sick.
“So…so why show it to me?” she muttered. “Dick move, if you ask me.”
“She did it to show you, of course,” the badger chided her. “Don’t you see? You’re more powerful than you thought! Even with that…that person having robbed you of the Power Badger, you are still a force to be reckoned with!”
The world stopped wobbling around her, and Chloe found that - with a great effort of will - the nausea was receding, too.
“So I can prod stories,” she said. “Great. Really useful.”
The thing was though, she suddenly found she felt more hopeful.
Considerably more hopeful.
The badger rolled his eyes.
“What, you were thinking it would just be a matter of showing up here, and getting Indigo to give you the answer to all your problems?” he said. “Quests don’t work that way. Didn’t you get the memo?”
“Memo?” said Chloe. “What, are you from the ’80’s? Who gets memos nowadays?”
“They don’t,” said her badger firmly. “Quests, I mean.”
“Fine,” said Chloe, sighing and rolling her shoulders. “How do they work, then?”
Indigo Shuttlecock and the badger exchanged a look.
There was something to that look, some glimmer of…of something…
Chloe felt a flutter of excitement in her chest.
“Well, they work in all sorts of ways,” said her badger, slowly. “Sometimes they are about getting somewhere. Or about getting something. Or about…”
“Sometimes,” put in Indigo dryly, “they are about finding out secrets. Deep secrets. Secrets you need to understand in order to…”
Chloe looked at her badger.
“You know something,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Don’t you.”
“I know many things,” said her badger. “But I don’t think I know the thing we need to know most of all.”
“Which is?” Chloe asked.
“Which is,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “How in the hell that no-good version of you managed to pull together enough power to rip your birthright out of you.”
“Not to mention,” added her badger. “Why she did it. What is she up to? And - most pressingly of all - how do we stop her?”
Chloe nodded silently for a moment.
“And I’m supposed to work that out,” she said, “by sneaking up on a story…and prodding it?”
Indigo shrugged.
“Not the only trick in a Sheriff’s toolbox,” she said. “But more effective than you might think. If you use it right.”
Chloe took a deep breath.
Well, you had to work with what you had.
“Fine,” she said. “Thanks for the lesson.”
Indigo nodded.
“Welcome,” she said. “Now go find out what the hell that damn version of you is up to.”
“I would love to,” replied Chloe. She turned to her badger. “Any idea where we go next?”
Her badger smiled thinly.
“A few, my dear,” he told her. “A few.”
To be continued…
She glanced around curiously, trying not to look as if conjuring the portal had cost her most of her energy reserves. Manipulating flows of mysterious energy was much, much more difficult than it had been. She made yet another mental note to hunt down that bastard version of herself who had stolen her powers, and do something exceedingly unpleasant to her.
“Indeed,” said Dave the badger, following Chloe out through the portal and onto the bright, gently rolling landscape beside her. “The Sheriffs are very proud of their little domains.”
Chloe glanced around. The landscape seemed to her to be one of roiling grass meadows, on which glimmering, roughly spherical things pulsed and mooched around peacefully. She was pretty sure this wasn’t the fundamental nature of the place, however. New to her post she might be, but she had already learnt that the Storystream often existed in several extremely strange dimensions at once, many of which she was - for the most part - quite unable to perceive.
“Fair enough,” she said. “It’s very pretty. Very calm. Very…”
“Sickeningly bucolic and rife with an artificial sense of peace?” put in Dave with a disgusted sneer.
“Well, I wouldn’t put it exactly like that,” muttered Chloe.
The thing was, she knew exactly what her badger was getting at. There was a sort of…a sort of constrained feeling to this place. As if all the wildness had been scooped up and forcibly deported. Which was, she supposed, kind of what had happened. Wasn’t that the way of things in the Folds? Wasn’t that exactly what the Sheriffs of the Order stood for? Not that she had met any of them before, but she had met a number of entities now who had had dealings with them; and Dave the badger was quite clear on how he felt about them.
“Damn right you wouldn’t,” came a voice from behind them.
It was an odd voice.
A…a heavy voice.
A voice that had options.
Chloe very much had the impression that if that voice said jump, her body would be overwhelmingly inclined to obey, and wouldn’t just ask how high, but also be anxious to determine various other variables, too.
The badger sighed under his breath.
“Oh well,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”
They turned.
The woman who was striding towards them looked sort of superficially young, though Chloe had the impression that there was something old lurking behind those dark, hard eyes. She wore faded blue jeans and a battered brown hat. On her shirt she wore a golden star. It sparkled in a way which managed to be both, a) merry, and b) intimidating.
“Hi,” said Chloe, trying to look non-threatening. Even though the woman with the badge was slim and rather small, there was something imposing about her. Chloe was pretty sure that here was someone who would brook no bullshit. Which was fine by her. Bullshit was something of which she wasn’t a big fan, either.
The slim, wiry woman looked them up and down. If she found something surprising about being visited by a huge talking badger, she gave no sign.
“You wouldn’t put it like that,” the woman went on, “because you, Chloe, have more sense than this ragamuffin badger o’yours.”
Chloe tried to stop her eyebrows from going up. She failed.
“Indigo,” said Dave the badger, smiling thinly. “I would say how delightful it was to see you, only we both know that it isn’t.”
“Sheriff Shuttlecock to you, badger,” the slim woman said evenly. “And don’t act like you’ve forgotten how things went last time you came prowlin’ round here. I certainly haven’t.”
Something sparkled briefly in the Sheriff’s hand, and Chloe found herself peering, trying to work out what it was the woman was holding. Was it a coin? A piece of jewellery?
But Indigo Shuttlecock was already tucking the sparkling thing into a pocket and out of view.
Dave the badger leant back on his haunches and lifted his two front paws placatingly.
“Forgotten?” he protested. “Not a bit of it.”
“Funny,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “‘Cos I distinctly do recall tellin’ you that if you showed your maw here again I’d blast you with a Telling so powerful you’d spend the next thousand narrative cycles prancing round a riverbank having twee little adventures with various anthropomorphised woodland mammals.”
“Touché,” said the badger, though Chloe thought he sounded distinctly unimpressed. “And yet, here I am. Very much disinclined towards prancing, as you can see.”
“Oh, I can see,” growled Indigo Shuttlecock.
Chloe noticed the Sheriff’s left hand was clenching and unclenching. More troubling, the woman’s golden badge seemed to be shimmering at the edges. Chloe had spent enough time around mysterious energies that she thought she had developed a pretty good sense of when they were in danger of being deployed.
She smiled as disarmingly as she could and held up her arms.
“Hang on,” she said. “Please, just hear us out.”
Indigo Shuttlecock stared at her coldly.
“I am,” said the Sheriff. “This is me dealing with you kind-like. Giving you a chance. You don’t want to see what it would look like for me not to hear you out.”
Chloe glanced at her badger. Dave rolled his eyes, as if to say, see? Sheriffs. They’re mad.
“Well,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “I’m waiting.”
Chloe took a deep breath, and told the Sheriff what had happened.
She hadn’t been looking forward to this - partly because she had been pretty sure that the Sheriffs of the Order would see her as some kind of amateur idiot who had basically been begging for an evil version of themselves to come steaming in and steal their powers. But Indigo Shuttlecock was a surprisingly good listener, and she didn’t interrupt Chloe’s story until quite near the end.
“This ring,” said Indigo, holding a hand up. “What’d it look like.”
Chloe blinked at the Sheriff’s hand. It was only a small hand, but it had a sort of inescapable weight to it. In fact, the moment Indigo lifted her hand, Chloe had felt her story snag in her mouth. Which perhaps shouldn’t have been so surprising; Indigo Shuttlecock was used to shepherding stories after all.
“Had a sapphire in it,” she said. She frowned. “Well, three sapphires, I think. Some diamonds, too. And…”
“No,” said Indigo. Her voice was soft, but there were strange harmonics in her voice, and Chloe felt as incapable of talking over the Sheriff as she would have been of breathing in and out at the same time. “What’d it look like. Deeper. Inside of it, I mean.”
Chloe opened her mouth to protest that she didn’t know what the hell Indigo was tailing about, then closed it again.
To her surprise, she found she knew exactly what the Sheriff was asking about.
“It looked small,” said Chloe. “But it wasn’t. Not really. There was something…something very cold about it. And when she used it on me…”
Chloe shuddered and broke off. She remembered the way memory had swept through her, that raging torrent of involuntary recall. It had been…well, awful, really.
She closed her eyes a moment, took a breath, looked away.
“You shouldn’t have to remember things you aren’t ready for,” she said, surprised to hear the tremor in her own voice.
“Right,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “Finish, please.”
Chloe finished her story. She wondered if she should add the reason for them coming here, that they didn’t know where else to start, that they needed help, any kind of help. But she decided against this on the grounds that, a) it sounded pretty desperate, and b) she was sure Indigo had worked that much out already.
Indigo Shuttlecock looked at Chloe, then sighed.
It was a long sigh, rather sad, and - to Chloe’s surprise - it came with a side-order of sympathy.
Then the Sheriff turned her gaze on the badger, at which point it became considerably harder.
“You’re an idiot, badger,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “A real idiot. Ain’t ya?”
The badger looked shocked.
“Madam,” he said, trying to muster his dignity. “If I have done something to offend, then I apologise. But to call me…”
“You’re an idiot,” repeated Indigo flatly. “Not a small one, either.”
Dave the badger frowned.
“Now listen here…”
“No,” said Indigo, and once again her soft voice seemed suddenly to be louder than anything, louder than volcanoes erupting, louder than planets colliding.
The badger closed his mouth. He didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter.
It was then that Chloe saw in her eyes that Indigo Shuttlecock was angry.
Really angry.
Around them, the business of the Fold seemed to falter and fade. At the same time, Indigo Shuttlecock grew, looming over them until she was the size of a house, of a mountain; the size of the whole world.
“I told you, badger,” the Sheriff went on. “Last time we met. Told you that the mistake you’d made was a bad one. Told you it was your responsibility to clean it up. Told you what would happen if you didn’t.”
Chloe looked at her badger. She didn’t know what Indigo Shuttlecock was talking about, and though a part of her very much hoped this was simply some Sheriff-nonsense - something to do with the predilection for Order the Sheriffs loved so much - somehow she knew it was more than that.
A suspicion was growing in her. A nasty suspicion. A suspicion about where the other her had come from.
“I did,” protested the badger, and for the first time Chloe thought she saw fear in his eyes, real fear. “I agreed with you. I never should have let that girl…well, she got rather out of hand.”
Indigo Shuttlecock snorted derisively.
“That,” she said, “is putting things mildly.”
The badger shot Chloe a pleading glance. To her surprise, Chloe found that she didn’t have much sympathy. She was angry too, she realised. Some deep part of her had been putting things together. Even if she had not had a chance to talk to Dave the badger about the origin of the other Chloe, she found she already knew. Perhaps it was the last lingering powers that had been left her, or maybe it was just standard issue intuition. But it didn’t matter.
“I wasn’t the first,” she said, surprising herself by how harsh her voice sounded.
The badger looked at her as if she had stabbed him in the back.
“Et tu, Chlous?” he sighed.
“Me mainly,” Chloe corrected him. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said, turning back to Indigo. “There were other Chloes before me, and that…that horrible version who stole my powers was some earlier version. One that wasn’t - what? - as nice as me? Or just wasn’t as easy to manipulate?”
Indigo Shuttlecock smiled thinly. Chloe realised that the Sheriff had shrunk once more. Now the three of them were roughly equal sizes again, though the badger looked just as terrified as when the Sheriff had appeared big as mountains. Indigo, on the other hand, seemed rather tired.
“Oh, it’s not as simple as that,” sighed the Sheriff. “Believe me, if this…badger…had just been interested in manipulating you, I wouldn’t have gone so easy on him.”
“That was going easy on me?” protested Dave weakly. “I thought I was having a heart attack.”
Indigo stared at the badger, unimpressed.
“Tell her,” ordered the Sheriff. “Should’ve told her already. So get it done.”
The badger looked for a moment that he might protest, then he shook his head.
“Right,” he said. “The truth. Fine.”
He looked at Chloe.
“You’re right,” he said. “You weren’t the first. The first Chloe, I mean.”
Even though she had already guessed it, hearing her badger say the words caused a bolt of jealousy to shoot through Chloe’s chest.
“No?” she said evenly. “What was I? The second? The fifth?”
Dave appeared momentarily shifty, then looked down.
“Five hundred and seventy third,” he admitted.
“Oh, right,” said Chloe, wrong-footed by the sheer scale of the problem. “Good. I see.”
“I’d say they meant nothing to me,” the badger went on, a twinkle of his usual waggishness evident once more, “but some of them did. A few of them.”
“Right,” said Chloe again, trying to visualise five hundred and seventy two other Chloes, and finding she could not.
“Don’t listen to this rapscallion creature,” said Indigo. “I had occasion to see most every one of those others, and I can tell you now, Chloe - he might have tried to help them, as much as he could, but none of them meant as much to him as you do.”
Chloe stared at the Sheriff.
“What?” she said. “How can you say that? How do you know?”
“Because,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “This damnable badger used to come here and moan at me about them.”
“I most certainly did not!” protested Dave the badger.
“Oh, what am I going to do?” said Indigo, in a stuffy, deep voice which was actually - Chloe thought - not too bad an impression of her badger. “She’s supposed to be the chosen one, but she couldn’t choose her way out of a paper bag! Woe is me, I’ve got this chosen one to look after, only she’s too stupid to use the powers she has inherited…”
Indigo shook her head, disgusted.
“When he didn’t come round for a while,” she went on, “I figured he had finally found himself an iteration that fulfilled the promise. Either that, or he’d given up on the whole business after…”
Indigo trailed off, shaking her head.
“What,” said Chloe. “Iterations? What’s an iteration?”
“You are, girl,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “Well, we all are, I suppose. In a manner of speaking.”
“That’s the thing about infinity,” added the badger. “Not just infinite things. But infinite versions of the same thing.”
“And if there’s one thing that’s infinite,” said Indigo, “it’s the Storystream.”
“So…so you picked up these other versions of me,” said Chloe. “One after another, just trying to find the one that could - what? - do the job properly?”
The badger sighed, exasperated.
“I did not pick you up,” he protested. “Jesus, you make it sound like I’m prowling around in a sports car, finding unattached young women to prey on.”
“Pretty much how I meant it,” replied Chloe.
“Unfair, Chloe,” said her badger. “Unfair. But basically, yes. That’s what I did. That’s what I do. For you. For your blood line. I examine the versions. I look at the potential candidates, and then I give them that which is their birthright: the mantle of the Power Badger. I’ve been doing it for ages,” he added.
“Right, fine,” said Chloe, rubbing her temples. “So there were five hundred and seventy two other versions of me. Only none of them meant much to you. Except one of them has actually been lurking out there in the Storystream somewhere, just biding her time, waiting for her chance to get me?”
Dave the badger opened his mouth to protest, but Indigo was too fast for him.
“Right,” she said. “And looks like she managed it, judgin’ by the sorry state of your powers.”
Chloe felt a stab of hurt.
“What do you know about my powers?” she said, more stiffly than she meant. “I mean, it’s not like you can see them, can you?”
Indigo gave her a look.
It was a hard look. A sort of a sideways look. A look that very much gave the impression that the Sheriff wasn’t just looking at her, but was actually looking into her.
“Actually, she can,” said her badger, unnecessarily. “It’s kind of part of the Sheriff gig.”
“Damn right,” said Indigo. “And right about now I’d say you’re scraping the bottom of your personal barrel. Them other Chloe’s, when badger here brought them…well, they were just full of juice. But you…”
Indigo waved a hand vaguely up and down, indicating Chloe and - presumably - finding her distinct lack of Badgerly Powers an especial weakness for someone who was meant to be the Power Badger.
Chloe felt herself redden.
Some of it was shame, but a much greater proportion was anger.
“Only - because - she - stole it,” she growled, glaring at Indigo Shuttlecock.
“You let her steal it, you mean,” said Indigo, glaring back just as hard. “You know, you’re not the first Power Badger I’ve met, girl. Not even excluding them other versions of you. And let me tell you, if you’re forebears had come across some snarky bitch waitin’ to pounce on them and steal their powers…well, they wouldn’t have let that happen, that’s for sure.”
Chloe’s eyes widened. The shame and anger both twisted up a notch.
“That’s not fair!” protested Chloe. “No-one warned me about that…that…”
“No one warned you about that other bitch version of yourself?” sneered Indigo. “Wake up. You’re a wielder of ancient, mysterious forces. The Storystream is full of people like that, just waiting to get one over on you.”
“Shut up,” said Chloe. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears, very hoarse, very hard.
“Actually, you were a wielder of ancient, mysterious powers,” Indigo corrected herself, taking a step forward, eyes seeming to bore into Chloe’s very soul. “Not any more. Not since you let them be taken from you. I wonder what your great grandmother Mable would have to say about that?”
“Shut up,” said Chloe once more. Her fists were clenched, a vat of red anger was boiling in her belly.
“After what she went through to keep hold of that power!” exclaimed Indigo, who was standing next to Chloe now, pressing forward into her face, tilting her head, smirking at her. “That woman tore down more stories than I can count just to make things better! She fought back with every atom of her being to keep hold of that power, and you…well, you just couldn’t wait to give it away, could you?”
“Shut UP!” yelled Chloe, and she struck.
Her hand blurred through the air, but it wasn’t her hand that did the striking. Not really.
There was something that moved around her flesh, something that flickered through the air, snaking up and out from the deepest part of her. Chloe felt the utterest extent of her power dredged out from deep within, felt it zap across the space between them, felt it slam into Indigo Shuttlecock’s chest.
“Ooph,” said Indigo, shoulders rolling forward as her body recoiled.
The air seemed to flutter somehow, to become full of strange resonances. A light shimmered in Indigo’s chest, dark red and cloyingly brilliant. It formed a little bubble, and floated off out of Indigo and began fluttering around Chloe’s head.
Everything was very still.
In the background, Chloe could see that all the stories that had been idly grazing had stopped doing so. They were staring at her.
Hard.
She blinked, realising what she had done
She had struck Indigo. She had struck a Sheriff.
Presumably, her charges were not too thrilled about that.
“Oh,” she said, blinking. “Sorry.”
She looked at Indigo, waiting for an explosion of fury…but no explosion came.
The Sheriff wore an odd expression, half pain, half triumph.
“Well done,” said Indigo. “I thought you had it in you. With a little stoking.”
Chloe looked from Indigo to her badger, and realised suddenly that the two of them had been in cahoots.
“I told you,” said Dave the badger, addressing Indigo Shuttlecock. “This kid’s the shit. See what I mean?”
“Fair enough,” said Indigo, looking - Chloe had to admit it - rather impressed. “You did the right thing, holding out for this one.”
“At last,” said the badger drolly. “Vindication. Now my life has meaning.”
“You…you were just winding me up,” said Chloe, not sure if she should be angry, or hurt, or just surprised. Her anger felt all used up, at least for now, and she had already been hurt extensively in the last 24 hours, so she decided to go with surprise, and see where it led her.
“Right,” said Indigo. “Worked, though, didn’t it?”
Chloe looked at the dark red bubble of light. It was fluttering around her head like an unpleasantly demented butterfly.
“Did it?” she said. “What…what did I do? What’s this thing?”
“You prodded me,” said Indigo.
“Prodded?” echoed Chloe.
“Prodded,” confirmed Indigo. “Story-prod. It’s a Sheriff thing, really. Impressive that you could do it.”
“Especially without your powers,” put in Dave the badger.
“Thought you might be able to,” said Indigo. “Others in your line have. Had to push you, though. Sorry ‘bout that.”
Chloe lifted her hand gingerly towards the fluttering crimson bubble.
“Careful now,” warned Indigo. “Don’t get sucked in.”
Chloe frowned.
Sucked in? How could she get sucked into something so small…
But even as she thought it, the bubble seemed to pull at her. The world swam and rippled, and suddenly the fluttering crimson bubble was growing. It was the size of her head, then of her body, then of the whole world. She tried to scream, but the crimson was in her mouth, filling it, filling her. And what it tasted of was…
Anger.
Bile.
Bitterness.
And then…
And then Chloe blinked in shock, silent, unable to speak with the sheer surprise of seeing…well, seeing herself. And Dave the badger. And Indigo Shuttlecock. The whole Fold in fact, was spread out below her, very, very far below, but with a sort of preternatural, hallucinatory clarity.
“No one warned you about that other bitch version of yourself?” sneered Indigo. “Wake up. You’re a wielder of ancient, mysterious forces. The Storystream is full of people like that, just waiting to get one over on you.”
The words drifted up towards her, and Chloe realised she was watching the scene play out again - the scene she had just witnessed, the scene she had just been a part of. Only now…
Now she could see a whole sparkling array of things spread out behind the version of Indigo Shuttlecock down there below her. She saw them, spinning orbs of light and colour, and - most remarkably of all - she found she could understand them, somehow. One was pulsing with curiosity, and Chloe realised it belonged to Indigo - it was the part of the Sheriff that had been wondering if what she was trying would work. Another orb was filled with self-disgust; Indigo must have felt guilty about doing this, Chloe realised. And another…
“Careful, girl,” said a voice behind her, and Chloe started.
It was Indigo - the real Indigo - her head and shoulders seeming to project in from somewhere far beyond, her body telescoping away into that infinity far, far above.
“It’s…It’s a piece of you,” said Chloe, then laughed, because it was such an extremely strange thing to find she could knock a piece of someone out of themselves, and even more strange to learnt hat she could then somehow project inside that piece and explore it.
“Kind of,” said Indigo. “Piece of the story of me, technically. You prodded at it. Knocked it out of alignment. Out of context.”
“Far out,” said Chloe, only half ironically.
“Useful trick,” Indigo went on. “With a bit of playin’, I’m pretty sure you’ll find you ain’t bad at interrogating the fragments you prod out. Not this one, though,” she added, with a touch of finality.
“But…” Chloe started to say, then suddenly found she was back in the Western Fold, feeling unpleasantly nauseous.
“Nope,” said Indigo, flicking the suddenly small-again crimson bubble up in the air, then leaning back as the thing fluttered towards her and fused with her body once more. “There’s secrets in there. My secrets.”
Chloe shook her head, and concentrated very hard on not being sick.
“So…so why show it to me?” she muttered. “Dick move, if you ask me.”
“She did it to show you, of course,” the badger chided her. “Don’t you see? You’re more powerful than you thought! Even with that…that person having robbed you of the Power Badger, you are still a force to be reckoned with!”
The world stopped wobbling around her, and Chloe found that - with a great effort of will - the nausea was receding, too.
“So I can prod stories,” she said. “Great. Really useful.”
The thing was though, she suddenly found she felt more hopeful.
Considerably more hopeful.
The badger rolled his eyes.
“What, you were thinking it would just be a matter of showing up here, and getting Indigo to give you the answer to all your problems?” he said. “Quests don’t work that way. Didn’t you get the memo?”
“Memo?” said Chloe. “What, are you from the ’80’s? Who gets memos nowadays?”
“They don’t,” said her badger firmly. “Quests, I mean.”
“Fine,” said Chloe, sighing and rolling her shoulders. “How do they work, then?”
Indigo Shuttlecock and the badger exchanged a look.
There was something to that look, some glimmer of…of something…
Chloe felt a flutter of excitement in her chest.
“Well, they work in all sorts of ways,” said her badger, slowly. “Sometimes they are about getting somewhere. Or about getting something. Or about…”
“Sometimes,” put in Indigo dryly, “they are about finding out secrets. Deep secrets. Secrets you need to understand in order to…”
Chloe looked at her badger.
“You know something,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Don’t you.”
“I know many things,” said her badger. “But I don’t think I know the thing we need to know most of all.”
“Which is?” Chloe asked.
“Which is,” said Indigo Shuttlecock. “How in the hell that no-good version of you managed to pull together enough power to rip your birthright out of you.”
“Not to mention,” added her badger. “Why she did it. What is she up to? And - most pressingly of all - how do we stop her?”
Chloe nodded silently for a moment.
“And I’m supposed to work that out,” she said, “by sneaking up on a story…and prodding it?”
Indigo shrugged.
“Not the only trick in a Sheriff’s toolbox,” she said. “But more effective than you might think. If you use it right.”
Chloe took a deep breath.
Well, you had to work with what you had.
“Fine,” she said. “Thanks for the lesson.”
Indigo nodded.
“Welcome,” she said. “Now go find out what the hell that damn version of you is up to.”
“I would love to,” replied Chloe. She turned to her badger. “Any idea where we go next?”
Her badger smiled thinly.
“A few, my dear,” he told her. “A few.”
To be continued…
A note on interacting:
You can find more information on interacting in the NFT and eBook versions of the episodes.
Basically, you can interact / manipulate a story / suggest an answer to a puzzle / suggest a way a story my evolve by commenting below.
You can find more information on interacting in the NFT and eBook versions of the episodes.
Basically, you can interact / manipulate a story / suggest an answer to a puzzle / suggest a way a story my evolve by commenting below.
Interact with StoryStream Quest by obtaining an NFT on Opensea or an ebook with the links below
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