Storystream Quest
episode Five: The Big Deal
The opening part of this episode can be found in the ebook or as an NFT. You may also have read it in the collection The Land Before Life...
And then...
And then...
The queue stretched on for ever. Folds of white nothingness drifted off into the far distance, billowing streamers of light glimmering from the masses of Poor Souls stretching off in front of them.
She frowned slightly.
Something was wrong, wasn’t it?
A queue? That didn’t sound right…did it?
There was a sequence of hurumphing noises from behind her, a slight disturbance in the gently drifting substances in which she waited.
“Excuse me, coming through, pardon me…”
The voice rose steadily as someone approached from behind.
It was a familiar voice, she thought.
A voice she should know.
In fact, it was…
“Ah, there you are!” Exclaimed Dave the badger, looming into view as Chloe turned to stare back down the infinitely regressive queue behind her.
“Am I?” Asked Chloe, caught of balance.
“Yes,” said her badger firmly. “Most definitely.”
Chloe thought about this.
“I don’t…feel particularly there,” she observed.
“No,” grumbled her badger. “I can see that you don’t. Come on.”
He reached out a large black and white paw and caught her by the arm, and the exact moment he did so, Chloe realised that she did - in fact - have an arm (two of them, in fact), a notion she had been quite unaware of while she had been waiting placidly in the queue.
“Oh,” she said, blinking and stumbling forward. “Right. Yes. Hands?”
She waved her hands in front of her eyes. They seemed extremely familiar, but somehow alien at the same time. She realised that none of the other entities in the queue had anything that approximated hands. Not a limb between the lot of them, in fact.
“Hands,” agreed her badger, grasping her tightly by one and leading her briskly along the queue.
“Hang on!” Chloe protested. “What are you doing! We can’t just…just push through!”
Her badger turned, regarded her with his large, inscrutable eyes, then scooped up a great dollop of cloudy nothingness, and splatted it into her face.
To her surprise, it felt rather cool and refreshing.
“Ugh,” she said automatically. “Why’d you do that you bloody worm-eating…”
And then she cut off, memory slamming into her like a freight train into an exceedingly unlucky ferret.
She remembered.
She remembered everything.
Her name, and who she was, and what the hell she was doing out here…wherever here happened to be.
“The quest,” she muttered, wiping the nothingness out of her eyes. “What are we…what am I…?”
“What are you doing, queuing with all those Poor Souls like some kind of lobotomised seal?” Muttered her badger. “Search me. I’d have thought the Power Badger would have more sense that to get caught up in the narrative resonances of a story she was visiting.”
“Wow, really sensitive of you,” Chloe shot back. “Next time you get your powers stolen, remind me to give a shit.”
Her badger rolled his eyes, but she thought he looked ashamed, too. Just a little bit.
“I suppose this place does have pretty strong resonances,” he admitted grudgingly. “Pretty easy to get sucked in here. If you’re not watching yourself, I mean.”
“Right,” said Chloe. “And where is here, exactly?”
“The Land Before Life,” said her badger. “Don’t you remember? We watched the story together. The salesman? Quince? All those silly little Lives of his?”
Chloe opened her mouth to say she didn’t know what the hell the badger was blathering on about, then closed it again.
She did…she did sort of remember that stuff. It felt a bit like a dream, a dream she hadn’t recalled dreaming until that very moment.
“Quince,” she said vaguely. “Makes me think of runcible spoons.”
“Hey, whatever floats your boat, lady,” said her badger. “Point is, I think Quince might be able to tell us something useful. Or don’t you remember us discussing that, either?”
Chloe thought for a moment. Now that he said it, she did remember something of the sort.
“The Land Before Life,” she repeated. “The Beginning. The very beginning…”
Her badger shrugged again, looked vaguely off over her shoulder in the direction from which the queue emerged.
“Sort of,” he said. “Near enough that you can see it on a clear day, anyway.”
Chloe looked at the Poor Souls, arrayed in a serene, sedate line stretching away into the far distance. Every now and then a ripple would come down the queue, and the line would shuffle forward. Just looking at them, so still, so soft and perfectly, swayingly passive made her…made her feel…
She looked away, scrunching her eyes up tight.
“No,” she said firmly. “I’m not a Poor Soul. I have hands. Definitely.”
“Indeed,” agreed her badger mournfully.
She took a deep breath.
“Right,” she said, snapping them open and peering off into the distance. “What are we waiting for?”
It was difficult to know how long they were walking. Time definitely moved differently here…well, if it could be thought to move at all, she supposed. In any case, after a while a dot appeared on the horizon, and swiftly grew until it resolved itself into the shape of a desk. Behind the desk stood…
Well, an entity, she supposed.
That seemed the safest way to describe him.
“Next,” came Quince’s voice, as one more Poor Soul vanished in a flash of luminescent brilliance.
“That’s us,” said her badger firmly, shouldering them forward and pushing in front of a gaggle of (apparently completely un-put-out) Poor Souls.
Quince turned his thousand-Watt smile on Chloe and her badger, then faltered as he took them in, realising that they were very much not his usual clients.
“Wonderful,” said Quince, smiling thinly. “Non-Souls. Just what I was hoping for.”
“Oh, we have Souls,” said the badger, with just a glimmer of an edge to his words. “It’s just that they are currently in use. We have no need of new Lives in which to house them.”
If Quince was intimidated, he didn’t show it.
“Very well,” said Quince, managing to communicate quite clearly that he did not think it was. “How can I help you fine…you fine entities?”
“This,” said the badger, before Chloe could open her mouth, “Is the Power Badger.”
“Indeed?” Said Quince, without much interest. “Looks more like a Selina.”
“Actually,” said Chloe, “I’m a Chloe.”
“Or a Chloe,” admitted Quince breezily. “One of those people-ish names. Doesn’t look much like a Power Weasel, or whatever it was you said.”
“Power Badger,” said the badger, firmly enunciating the capital letter. “You know. The being of ultimate power, destined to bring balance to the Storystream.”
“Right,” said Quince thinly. “And how’s that going for you? No, don’t tell me,” he went on, holding up a forestalling hand. “Let me guess.”
“Oh,” said Chloe, somewhat surprised. She could have sworn Quince had exactly zero hands a moment ago. “You have hands. Same as me.”
“Very observant,” muttered Quince. “What a clever little mammal you are.”
Chloe narrowed her eyes. She thought briefly about summoning her vast resovouirs of power and using them to eviscerate this pompous little creature, then remembered she no longer had any. She settled for glaring scathingly.
Quince raised an eyebrow. He seemed entirely unscathed. Then he shook his head, as if getting into a scathing match with someone as lowly and inconsequential as her was beneath his dignity.
“Nature of the job,” he said briskly. “I tend to have whatever appendages and accoutrements seem normal to the being with which I am conversing. Makes for instant empathy. Very useful.”
“Oh, you are making us feel extremely empathic,” said the badger, sarcastically.
“Anyway,” said Quince, sounding bored, and peering over Chloe’s head to look at the line of Souls stretching off into the far distance, “I was just about to guess how things were going for you, wasn’t I?”
He looked her up and down, peering over a pair of non-existent glasses, and shaking his head slightly.
“My, it’s not going well, is it?”
“Well…” Chloe started to say, but Quince held up a brisk hand.
To her surprise, she found herself shutting up. There was something in Quince’s manner, some disdainful, supercilious power which made it very difficult for her to say what she really thought - what she really thought in this case being a selection of choice swear words and a definite suggestion as to where Quince could go and stick himself.
“So,” he said at length, “you’ve lost your powers. No, don’t pretend to be offended,” he went on at once, brushing over her attempt to bluster, “I’ve had a lot of practice at peering into things. Vast and eldritch energies are not something you currently possess. Actually, you’re not much more full than any of this lot.”
Quince waved a hand vaguely at the endless expanse of gently bobbing Poor Souls. Chloe felt slightly aggrieved on their behalves, but the Souls were apparently too devoid of pride to take any offence.
“That’s a bit harsh,” opined her badger. “Even if she had lost all of her powers, she’s still got far more character than these empty so-and-sos.”
“Hardly,” said Quince. “So, that’s it, isn’t it? Someone or something has stripped you of your powers, and now - what? You thought you could march back here, come stomping back to the very beginning, and then set about stealing powers from my end of the table? Pretty bloody rich of you, that’s what I say!”
The badger laid a soothing poor on his brow, then shot Chloe a long-suffering look.
“First off,” he told Quince, fixing him with his inscrutable dark eyes, “the presupposition that we are in fact thieves, and that we have only come traipsing back here to rob you, is more telling of your own neuroses than anything else.”
Quince glared, and though he remained very still, Chloe couldn’t help but notice that those new-found hands of his had crept beneath his desk, and were reaching around, as if he were searching for something.
“Second,” her badger went on, “you’ve said yourself that your charges are empty, hollow things. What kind of power do you think a Power Badger would even want to steal from them?”
Quince smiled at that, but it was a cold, sarcastic sort of a smile. Chloe saw that his hands had stopped searching now, and that he had apparently located what he was looking for.
She tensed, a feeling of unease growing inside her. She wasn’t sure what Quince was planning, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t something pleasant.
“Third,” said her badger, spreading his paws like he was an exceptionally ungainly chorus-girl and even waggling the fingers slightly, “what the hell d’you think gives you the right to talk to people that way? Next to these Poor Souls you might seem like you matter, but in the vast scheme of things, you’re not such a big deal. Just a little man who likes bossing little people around.”
Quince looked briefly - very briefly - upset. But before the faintest tinge of pity had begun to form in Chloe’s mind, Quince was covering that expression with a supercilious smile.
“Thank you for your feedback,” he said, with complete insincerity. “I will definitely make sure to completely ignore it in the future.”
Chloe opened her mouth, because a thought had just struck her.
It wasn’t anything Quince had said, but the way he had said it. There was something in the way he had looked at them, that brief, reproachful, hurt look. It wasn’t just that she had felt sorry for him.
It was that it had seemed familiar, somehow.
But before she could say anything, Quince was moving. Those slim, clever-looking hands of his were whipping up from under the desk, and in them were a pair of glistening, translucent, hallucinatory things. Things that defied her ability to perceive, let alone describe. They thrummed and flickered, impossibly big and unutterably small at the same instant.
“Goodbye, now,” said Quince. “Have a nice Life.”
The salesman leant forward in one smooth motion, and swept the flickering, incandescent Lives towards Chloe and her badger.
Chloe saw the Life loom before her. She even got a scent of the thing, begun to feel herself drawn inwards, as if Shen were falling from a vast height into something unimaginably big.
Would it be so bad? She found herself thinking.
To fall into a new Life.
No doubt the Life would contain lots of problems and adventures of its own. But then, it would be so nice to be able to forget about her own problems. Only, she supposed that train of thought would probably go on for ever. How far into that Life would she get, before she started pining for the thought of another Life to fall into?
“Nope,” said Chloe’s mouth, apparently of its own volition.
A streak of purple-red fire leapt from her hand.
It struck the two Lives, immolating them.
There was a flash, a bang, and then a sad little wheezing noise.
A fine rain of dark dust pattered down into the cloudy nothingness on the ground, and was quickly resorbed into the endless, gently seething white infinity that floated there.
There was a susurrus of movement, then nothing. It was as if the Lives had never been.
Quince looked from the place where his Lives had dissolved, to his hands, then back again.
He looked quietly appalled.
Chloe looked at her badger.
Her badger gave her a mournful double thumbs-up.
“Hey,” said Quince, but without much conviction. “That was…”
He trailed off, apparently at a loss for words.
Chloe laughed.
It wasn’t a nasty laugh.
She just felt a sudden, surprising uprush of delight.
It seemed patiently obvious to her that Quince was not the sort of being who was generally at a loss for words.
Ever.
“If it’s any consolation,” said Chloe, “I didn’t actually mean to do that.”
“Right,” said Quince. He still sounded somewhat numb. “Thank you. It isn’t,” he added.
“You did just try to get rid of us by sealing us in two random Lives though,” she pointed out.
“True,” admitted Quince.
“Pretty bastardly thing to do,” said her badger.
“Also true,” admitted Quince.
He looked at Chloe then, and she somehow got the feeling that she was seeing him, really seeing him for the first time since they had met. His smile was gone now, which she was glad about. She hadn’t much cared for his smile. On the other hand, there was a faint - a very faint - lightness about his eyes, just the suggestion of…of something genuine. She wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but it felt encouraging, somehow.
“I’m sorry for the Lives,” she said after a moment. “I mean, they hadn’t done anything wrong. Have I just…just blasted a hole in the Universe? Or something?”
Quince shrugged.
“Not really,” he said. His voice was softer now, gentler. The energetic, slightly dangerous edge had faded. “I mean, well, sort of. Maybe. Lives intertwine wth other Lives. They don’t exist in a vacuum. But then,” he shrugged, “the Universe is a big thing. It can take care of itself. Mostly. It will shift, rearrange itself. And the dregs that you left will drain away of course, and they’ll end up…”
Quince cut off suddenly.
Chloe and her badger exchanged glances.
“What?” Said Chloe. “What is it?”
Quince looked away, and for a moment his old, guarded, sly expression was there.
He turned back to her, and she was sure he was about to come out with some balderdash…but somehow, between his mouth opening and the words coming out, he seemed to change his mind.
“My sister,” he said simply.
He looked at her badger, as if daring him to say something.
Dave the badger stared back, as inscrutable as ever.
“Your sister?” prompted Chloe.
“Yes,” said Quince, turning his large eyes on her. Chloe paused a moment, for she realised she hadn’t noticed Quince’s eyes before. They were large and luminous, somehow, as if they were filled with something florid and light. Why hadn’t she noticed his eyes before? She supposed he must have kept them hidden from her, somehow. When they had first met, his eyes had been constantly darting this way and that. Now they looked at her, steady and large, and strangely vulnerable.
“Silverlight,” he went on. “She’s over that way, of course.”
He gestured vaguely, his arm waving in the direction from which the line of Poor Souls originated. The portion of the Universe which passed for sky in that direction seemed lighter, but lit with a distant, swirling, orange-yellow brilliance which gave the impression of great but very distant heat.
“Silverlight,” repeated Chloe. “Sounds…sounds right, somehow.”
“Well, you do know all this,” said Quince, and he sounded irked now, or even hurt.
“We don’t,” said Chloe.
“She really doesn’t,” said her badger.
Chloe shot her badger a sharp look.
“What?” She demanded. “What are you saying?”
Quince was looking at her closely. His eyes seemed larger than ever.
He stared at her for the longest time. There was something searching in his gaze. She might even call it…what?
Desperate?
She thought that should make her feel uncomfortable, but for some reason it did not.
No, for some reason what she felt was…sad.
“He’s right,” said Quince at length. “It’s really not you. Is it?”
Chloe looked from Quince to her badger, and back again.
“Pretty bloody sure it is,” Said Chloe.
Then she realised.
“Oh,” she said.
She glared at her badger.
“You brought her here, too?” She said. “The other me. The other Chloe. Didn’t you?”
Her badger just stared at her, his whiskers bristling and flickering in the faint breeze that drifted through the Land Before Life.
“He did,” said Quince. “Then she brought herself. For a while…”
Quince didn’t say any more.
Somehow, he didn’t need to.
It wasn’t anything to do with being a parallel version of that other Chloe. It simply had to do with being a human. Or with being a…a person, maybe.
“That’s why you didn’t want to talk to us,” said Chloe. But she wasn’t talking to Quince. Not really.
Quince shrugged.
“Difficult seeing you again,” he muttered.
He looked away.
Chloe was silent for a while. She looked at her badger again, mimed being shocked.
Her badger shrugged, as if to say, a version of the Power Badger and the guy who hands out Lives at the beginning of the Universe - who are we to judge?
She shook her head.
She just couldn’t get her mind round it.
“So…so you two…you were an item?” She said. She was unable to stop from making it a question.
Quince looked at her sharply.
“Yes, so?” He said, a hint of his old superciliousness creeping back into his voice. “What’s your point? You don’t think pan-dimensional meta-entities deserve love, too?”
“What? No!” Said Chloe quickly. “I mean…well, that’s basically me too, isn’t it? I deserve love. I’m pretty sure I do,” she added, not liking how not-completely-certain she sounded.
“You do,” said Quince, and he sounded so simply sincere that she couldn’t decide for a moment if she wanted to smile at him or give him a thump.
She looked away.
“I think I preferred you when you were being arrogant,” she told him, trying - and almost succeeding - in keeping a faint echo of gratitude from her voice.
“Well, good,” said Quince, doing a passable impression of stretching into a yawn. “Being nice isn’t really in my nature. Takes it out of me. I much prefer it when I’m being arrogant, too.”
There was the sound of feet shuffling softly in the fluffy, cloud-like streaks of nothingness. It sounded much louder than it should have done.
“Yes, well,” said Dave the badger, at length, “as fun as it is watching you two squirm with embarrassment, we don’t really have the time for it.”
“Don’t really have any time here, as it happens,” observed Quince.
“Exactly,” said the badger. “All the more reason not to waste any of it.”
“I don’t recall inviting you,” said Quince pointedly. “I even tried expressly to get rid of you, in fact. Feel free to bugger the hell off at your earliest convenience.”
“Oh, we will,” the badger promised, showing a few more of his teeth than were strictly necessary. “But first…”
He trailed off, giving Quince a severe look.
Quince looked back blankly.
The badger turned to Chloe.
“What?” She demanded.
He nodded at Quince.
“Knows something,” said her badger, firmly.
“I don’t,” said Quince.
“Does he?” Asked Chloe.
“He does,” said the badger. “I know.”
“Oh, really?” Said Quince. “And how, pray? How do you know that I know?”
The badger tapped the side of his nose.
“When you’ve been around like I have,” he said evenly. “You see a thing or two. You get the…the nose for it.”
Chloe and Quince looked at one another, then at Dave the badger’s long, dark snout.
Chloe could feel something tugging at her. An idea. A half-formed thought.
Slowly, she lifted a hand.
“No,” said Quince flatly.
Dave the badger nodded.
“Right you are,” he told her. “Give him a prod. Just a little one. What comes out is sure to be…interesting.”
Quince glared at her.
“Don’t you…” he stared to say.
But by then she was already moving.
Prodding was quite fun, really.
When you did it right, at least…
To be continued
She frowned slightly.
Something was wrong, wasn’t it?
A queue? That didn’t sound right…did it?
There was a sequence of hurumphing noises from behind her, a slight disturbance in the gently drifting substances in which she waited.
“Excuse me, coming through, pardon me…”
The voice rose steadily as someone approached from behind.
It was a familiar voice, she thought.
A voice she should know.
In fact, it was…
“Ah, there you are!” Exclaimed Dave the badger, looming into view as Chloe turned to stare back down the infinitely regressive queue behind her.
“Am I?” Asked Chloe, caught of balance.
“Yes,” said her badger firmly. “Most definitely.”
Chloe thought about this.
“I don’t…feel particularly there,” she observed.
“No,” grumbled her badger. “I can see that you don’t. Come on.”
He reached out a large black and white paw and caught her by the arm, and the exact moment he did so, Chloe realised that she did - in fact - have an arm (two of them, in fact), a notion she had been quite unaware of while she had been waiting placidly in the queue.
“Oh,” she said, blinking and stumbling forward. “Right. Yes. Hands?”
She waved her hands in front of her eyes. They seemed extremely familiar, but somehow alien at the same time. She realised that none of the other entities in the queue had anything that approximated hands. Not a limb between the lot of them, in fact.
“Hands,” agreed her badger, grasping her tightly by one and leading her briskly along the queue.
“Hang on!” Chloe protested. “What are you doing! We can’t just…just push through!”
Her badger turned, regarded her with his large, inscrutable eyes, then scooped up a great dollop of cloudy nothingness, and splatted it into her face.
To her surprise, it felt rather cool and refreshing.
“Ugh,” she said automatically. “Why’d you do that you bloody worm-eating…”
And then she cut off, memory slamming into her like a freight train into an exceedingly unlucky ferret.
She remembered.
She remembered everything.
Her name, and who she was, and what the hell she was doing out here…wherever here happened to be.
“The quest,” she muttered, wiping the nothingness out of her eyes. “What are we…what am I…?”
“What are you doing, queuing with all those Poor Souls like some kind of lobotomised seal?” Muttered her badger. “Search me. I’d have thought the Power Badger would have more sense that to get caught up in the narrative resonances of a story she was visiting.”
“Wow, really sensitive of you,” Chloe shot back. “Next time you get your powers stolen, remind me to give a shit.”
Her badger rolled his eyes, but she thought he looked ashamed, too. Just a little bit.
“I suppose this place does have pretty strong resonances,” he admitted grudgingly. “Pretty easy to get sucked in here. If you’re not watching yourself, I mean.”
“Right,” said Chloe. “And where is here, exactly?”
“The Land Before Life,” said her badger. “Don’t you remember? We watched the story together. The salesman? Quince? All those silly little Lives of his?”
Chloe opened her mouth to say she didn’t know what the hell the badger was blathering on about, then closed it again.
She did…she did sort of remember that stuff. It felt a bit like a dream, a dream she hadn’t recalled dreaming until that very moment.
“Quince,” she said vaguely. “Makes me think of runcible spoons.”
“Hey, whatever floats your boat, lady,” said her badger. “Point is, I think Quince might be able to tell us something useful. Or don’t you remember us discussing that, either?”
Chloe thought for a moment. Now that he said it, she did remember something of the sort.
“The Land Before Life,” she repeated. “The Beginning. The very beginning…”
Her badger shrugged again, looked vaguely off over her shoulder in the direction from which the queue emerged.
“Sort of,” he said. “Near enough that you can see it on a clear day, anyway.”
Chloe looked at the Poor Souls, arrayed in a serene, sedate line stretching away into the far distance. Every now and then a ripple would come down the queue, and the line would shuffle forward. Just looking at them, so still, so soft and perfectly, swayingly passive made her…made her feel…
She looked away, scrunching her eyes up tight.
“No,” she said firmly. “I’m not a Poor Soul. I have hands. Definitely.”
“Indeed,” agreed her badger mournfully.
She took a deep breath.
“Right,” she said, snapping them open and peering off into the distance. “What are we waiting for?”
It was difficult to know how long they were walking. Time definitely moved differently here…well, if it could be thought to move at all, she supposed. In any case, after a while a dot appeared on the horizon, and swiftly grew until it resolved itself into the shape of a desk. Behind the desk stood…
Well, an entity, she supposed.
That seemed the safest way to describe him.
“Next,” came Quince’s voice, as one more Poor Soul vanished in a flash of luminescent brilliance.
“That’s us,” said her badger firmly, shouldering them forward and pushing in front of a gaggle of (apparently completely un-put-out) Poor Souls.
Quince turned his thousand-Watt smile on Chloe and her badger, then faltered as he took them in, realising that they were very much not his usual clients.
“Wonderful,” said Quince, smiling thinly. “Non-Souls. Just what I was hoping for.”
“Oh, we have Souls,” said the badger, with just a glimmer of an edge to his words. “It’s just that they are currently in use. We have no need of new Lives in which to house them.”
If Quince was intimidated, he didn’t show it.
“Very well,” said Quince, managing to communicate quite clearly that he did not think it was. “How can I help you fine…you fine entities?”
“This,” said the badger, before Chloe could open her mouth, “Is the Power Badger.”
“Indeed?” Said Quince, without much interest. “Looks more like a Selina.”
“Actually,” said Chloe, “I’m a Chloe.”
“Or a Chloe,” admitted Quince breezily. “One of those people-ish names. Doesn’t look much like a Power Weasel, or whatever it was you said.”
“Power Badger,” said the badger, firmly enunciating the capital letter. “You know. The being of ultimate power, destined to bring balance to the Storystream.”
“Right,” said Quince thinly. “And how’s that going for you? No, don’t tell me,” he went on, holding up a forestalling hand. “Let me guess.”
“Oh,” said Chloe, somewhat surprised. She could have sworn Quince had exactly zero hands a moment ago. “You have hands. Same as me.”
“Very observant,” muttered Quince. “What a clever little mammal you are.”
Chloe narrowed her eyes. She thought briefly about summoning her vast resovouirs of power and using them to eviscerate this pompous little creature, then remembered she no longer had any. She settled for glaring scathingly.
Quince raised an eyebrow. He seemed entirely unscathed. Then he shook his head, as if getting into a scathing match with someone as lowly and inconsequential as her was beneath his dignity.
“Nature of the job,” he said briskly. “I tend to have whatever appendages and accoutrements seem normal to the being with which I am conversing. Makes for instant empathy. Very useful.”
“Oh, you are making us feel extremely empathic,” said the badger, sarcastically.
“Anyway,” said Quince, sounding bored, and peering over Chloe’s head to look at the line of Souls stretching off into the far distance, “I was just about to guess how things were going for you, wasn’t I?”
He looked her up and down, peering over a pair of non-existent glasses, and shaking his head slightly.
“My, it’s not going well, is it?”
“Well…” Chloe started to say, but Quince held up a brisk hand.
To her surprise, she found herself shutting up. There was something in Quince’s manner, some disdainful, supercilious power which made it very difficult for her to say what she really thought - what she really thought in this case being a selection of choice swear words and a definite suggestion as to where Quince could go and stick himself.
“So,” he said at length, “you’ve lost your powers. No, don’t pretend to be offended,” he went on at once, brushing over her attempt to bluster, “I’ve had a lot of practice at peering into things. Vast and eldritch energies are not something you currently possess. Actually, you’re not much more full than any of this lot.”
Quince waved a hand vaguely at the endless expanse of gently bobbing Poor Souls. Chloe felt slightly aggrieved on their behalves, but the Souls were apparently too devoid of pride to take any offence.
“That’s a bit harsh,” opined her badger. “Even if she had lost all of her powers, she’s still got far more character than these empty so-and-sos.”
“Hardly,” said Quince. “So, that’s it, isn’t it? Someone or something has stripped you of your powers, and now - what? You thought you could march back here, come stomping back to the very beginning, and then set about stealing powers from my end of the table? Pretty bloody rich of you, that’s what I say!”
The badger laid a soothing poor on his brow, then shot Chloe a long-suffering look.
“First off,” he told Quince, fixing him with his inscrutable dark eyes, “the presupposition that we are in fact thieves, and that we have only come traipsing back here to rob you, is more telling of your own neuroses than anything else.”
Quince glared, and though he remained very still, Chloe couldn’t help but notice that those new-found hands of his had crept beneath his desk, and were reaching around, as if he were searching for something.
“Second,” her badger went on, “you’ve said yourself that your charges are empty, hollow things. What kind of power do you think a Power Badger would even want to steal from them?”
Quince smiled at that, but it was a cold, sarcastic sort of a smile. Chloe saw that his hands had stopped searching now, and that he had apparently located what he was looking for.
She tensed, a feeling of unease growing inside her. She wasn’t sure what Quince was planning, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t something pleasant.
“Third,” said her badger, spreading his paws like he was an exceptionally ungainly chorus-girl and even waggling the fingers slightly, “what the hell d’you think gives you the right to talk to people that way? Next to these Poor Souls you might seem like you matter, but in the vast scheme of things, you’re not such a big deal. Just a little man who likes bossing little people around.”
Quince looked briefly - very briefly - upset. But before the faintest tinge of pity had begun to form in Chloe’s mind, Quince was covering that expression with a supercilious smile.
“Thank you for your feedback,” he said, with complete insincerity. “I will definitely make sure to completely ignore it in the future.”
Chloe opened her mouth, because a thought had just struck her.
It wasn’t anything Quince had said, but the way he had said it. There was something in the way he had looked at them, that brief, reproachful, hurt look. It wasn’t just that she had felt sorry for him.
It was that it had seemed familiar, somehow.
But before she could say anything, Quince was moving. Those slim, clever-looking hands of his were whipping up from under the desk, and in them were a pair of glistening, translucent, hallucinatory things. Things that defied her ability to perceive, let alone describe. They thrummed and flickered, impossibly big and unutterably small at the same instant.
“Goodbye, now,” said Quince. “Have a nice Life.”
The salesman leant forward in one smooth motion, and swept the flickering, incandescent Lives towards Chloe and her badger.
Chloe saw the Life loom before her. She even got a scent of the thing, begun to feel herself drawn inwards, as if Shen were falling from a vast height into something unimaginably big.
Would it be so bad? She found herself thinking.
To fall into a new Life.
No doubt the Life would contain lots of problems and adventures of its own. But then, it would be so nice to be able to forget about her own problems. Only, she supposed that train of thought would probably go on for ever. How far into that Life would she get, before she started pining for the thought of another Life to fall into?
“Nope,” said Chloe’s mouth, apparently of its own volition.
A streak of purple-red fire leapt from her hand.
It struck the two Lives, immolating them.
There was a flash, a bang, and then a sad little wheezing noise.
A fine rain of dark dust pattered down into the cloudy nothingness on the ground, and was quickly resorbed into the endless, gently seething white infinity that floated there.
There was a susurrus of movement, then nothing. It was as if the Lives had never been.
Quince looked from the place where his Lives had dissolved, to his hands, then back again.
He looked quietly appalled.
Chloe looked at her badger.
Her badger gave her a mournful double thumbs-up.
“Hey,” said Quince, but without much conviction. “That was…”
He trailed off, apparently at a loss for words.
Chloe laughed.
It wasn’t a nasty laugh.
She just felt a sudden, surprising uprush of delight.
It seemed patiently obvious to her that Quince was not the sort of being who was generally at a loss for words.
Ever.
“If it’s any consolation,” said Chloe, “I didn’t actually mean to do that.”
“Right,” said Quince. He still sounded somewhat numb. “Thank you. It isn’t,” he added.
“You did just try to get rid of us by sealing us in two random Lives though,” she pointed out.
“True,” admitted Quince.
“Pretty bastardly thing to do,” said her badger.
“Also true,” admitted Quince.
He looked at Chloe then, and she somehow got the feeling that she was seeing him, really seeing him for the first time since they had met. His smile was gone now, which she was glad about. She hadn’t much cared for his smile. On the other hand, there was a faint - a very faint - lightness about his eyes, just the suggestion of…of something genuine. She wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but it felt encouraging, somehow.
“I’m sorry for the Lives,” she said after a moment. “I mean, they hadn’t done anything wrong. Have I just…just blasted a hole in the Universe? Or something?”
Quince shrugged.
“Not really,” he said. His voice was softer now, gentler. The energetic, slightly dangerous edge had faded. “I mean, well, sort of. Maybe. Lives intertwine wth other Lives. They don’t exist in a vacuum. But then,” he shrugged, “the Universe is a big thing. It can take care of itself. Mostly. It will shift, rearrange itself. And the dregs that you left will drain away of course, and they’ll end up…”
Quince cut off suddenly.
Chloe and her badger exchanged glances.
“What?” Said Chloe. “What is it?”
Quince looked away, and for a moment his old, guarded, sly expression was there.
He turned back to her, and she was sure he was about to come out with some balderdash…but somehow, between his mouth opening and the words coming out, he seemed to change his mind.
“My sister,” he said simply.
He looked at her badger, as if daring him to say something.
Dave the badger stared back, as inscrutable as ever.
“Your sister?” prompted Chloe.
“Yes,” said Quince, turning his large eyes on her. Chloe paused a moment, for she realised she hadn’t noticed Quince’s eyes before. They were large and luminous, somehow, as if they were filled with something florid and light. Why hadn’t she noticed his eyes before? She supposed he must have kept them hidden from her, somehow. When they had first met, his eyes had been constantly darting this way and that. Now they looked at her, steady and large, and strangely vulnerable.
“Silverlight,” he went on. “She’s over that way, of course.”
He gestured vaguely, his arm waving in the direction from which the line of Poor Souls originated. The portion of the Universe which passed for sky in that direction seemed lighter, but lit with a distant, swirling, orange-yellow brilliance which gave the impression of great but very distant heat.
“Silverlight,” repeated Chloe. “Sounds…sounds right, somehow.”
“Well, you do know all this,” said Quince, and he sounded irked now, or even hurt.
“We don’t,” said Chloe.
“She really doesn’t,” said her badger.
Chloe shot her badger a sharp look.
“What?” She demanded. “What are you saying?”
Quince was looking at her closely. His eyes seemed larger than ever.
He stared at her for the longest time. There was something searching in his gaze. She might even call it…what?
Desperate?
She thought that should make her feel uncomfortable, but for some reason it did not.
No, for some reason what she felt was…sad.
“He’s right,” said Quince at length. “It’s really not you. Is it?”
Chloe looked from Quince to her badger, and back again.
“Pretty bloody sure it is,” Said Chloe.
Then she realised.
“Oh,” she said.
She glared at her badger.
“You brought her here, too?” She said. “The other me. The other Chloe. Didn’t you?”
Her badger just stared at her, his whiskers bristling and flickering in the faint breeze that drifted through the Land Before Life.
“He did,” said Quince. “Then she brought herself. For a while…”
Quince didn’t say any more.
Somehow, he didn’t need to.
It wasn’t anything to do with being a parallel version of that other Chloe. It simply had to do with being a human. Or with being a…a person, maybe.
“That’s why you didn’t want to talk to us,” said Chloe. But she wasn’t talking to Quince. Not really.
Quince shrugged.
“Difficult seeing you again,” he muttered.
He looked away.
Chloe was silent for a while. She looked at her badger again, mimed being shocked.
Her badger shrugged, as if to say, a version of the Power Badger and the guy who hands out Lives at the beginning of the Universe - who are we to judge?
She shook her head.
She just couldn’t get her mind round it.
“So…so you two…you were an item?” She said. She was unable to stop from making it a question.
Quince looked at her sharply.
“Yes, so?” He said, a hint of his old superciliousness creeping back into his voice. “What’s your point? You don’t think pan-dimensional meta-entities deserve love, too?”
“What? No!” Said Chloe quickly. “I mean…well, that’s basically me too, isn’t it? I deserve love. I’m pretty sure I do,” she added, not liking how not-completely-certain she sounded.
“You do,” said Quince, and he sounded so simply sincere that she couldn’t decide for a moment if she wanted to smile at him or give him a thump.
She looked away.
“I think I preferred you when you were being arrogant,” she told him, trying - and almost succeeding - in keeping a faint echo of gratitude from her voice.
“Well, good,” said Quince, doing a passable impression of stretching into a yawn. “Being nice isn’t really in my nature. Takes it out of me. I much prefer it when I’m being arrogant, too.”
There was the sound of feet shuffling softly in the fluffy, cloud-like streaks of nothingness. It sounded much louder than it should have done.
“Yes, well,” said Dave the badger, at length, “as fun as it is watching you two squirm with embarrassment, we don’t really have the time for it.”
“Don’t really have any time here, as it happens,” observed Quince.
“Exactly,” said the badger. “All the more reason not to waste any of it.”
“I don’t recall inviting you,” said Quince pointedly. “I even tried expressly to get rid of you, in fact. Feel free to bugger the hell off at your earliest convenience.”
“Oh, we will,” the badger promised, showing a few more of his teeth than were strictly necessary. “But first…”
He trailed off, giving Quince a severe look.
Quince looked back blankly.
The badger turned to Chloe.
“What?” She demanded.
He nodded at Quince.
“Knows something,” said her badger, firmly.
“I don’t,” said Quince.
“Does he?” Asked Chloe.
“He does,” said the badger. “I know.”
“Oh, really?” Said Quince. “And how, pray? How do you know that I know?”
The badger tapped the side of his nose.
“When you’ve been around like I have,” he said evenly. “You see a thing or two. You get the…the nose for it.”
Chloe and Quince looked at one another, then at Dave the badger’s long, dark snout.
Chloe could feel something tugging at her. An idea. A half-formed thought.
Slowly, she lifted a hand.
“No,” said Quince flatly.
Dave the badger nodded.
“Right you are,” he told her. “Give him a prod. Just a little one. What comes out is sure to be…interesting.”
Quince glared at her.
“Don’t you…” he stared to say.
But by then she was already moving.
Prodding was quite fun, really.
When you did it right, at least…
To be continued
How do we open up the next episode? And what will it be?
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 either a) commenting after the story, or b) leaving a review of the ebook on amazon.
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 either a) commenting after the story, or b) leaving a review of the ebook on amazon.
Interact with StoryStream Quest by obtaining an NFT on Opensea or an ebook with the links below
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