Queen Mab

> Confirm. Transponder I.D. is shift-ship "Queen Mab"

> Last ident, hijacked by Some time ago, a group of genius-level transhumanist radicals.

> Skill-set - genetics, cybernetics, direct AI-HUman integration, bleeding edge dimensional technology. > > Transhumanist Views -  Hyper-aesthetic 'new humans'. Something they consider Optimal Beings.

> Be aware, possible development of, extremely dangerous dimensional tech, and access to "True" non-relativistic time-travel. Queen Mab appears and disappears in wildly different volumes. Sometimes seems to dash back and forth across the Galaxy, at other times hovering like a fly around a handful of Suns. 

> Queen Mab itself exists in an variety of states. Sometimes seeming no bigger than a paperclip lost in space, its nature revealed only by its enormous energy emissions and dangerous 'siren song' EM emission sphere. At other times it looms like a moon-sized battle station, blotting out suns in orbit.

> Interior scans ineffective but suggest mycelium web of parasitical, unstable, dimensional conduits to various different realities and paracosms.

> Numerous abductions reported. 

> Mindcrime - Many who encounter the ships EM emission sphere obsessively track it.

> Piracy - stole every perfect circle on the surface of a Omicron III.

> Status and capabilities of the Queen Mab, whether they are developing sequentially or not, may be entering an even more potent and developed phase.

> Suns have gone missing.

> It is feared the Queen Mab may become a Pirate of Worlds.

> Now, by chance, You have encountered the Queen Mab in orbit around a pale and silent moon. 

> Ship is both accessible (at a normal size) and apparently, quiescent. 

> As if it were sleeping.

> Bounty on ships confirmed destruction.

> Bounty on high-status individuals recovered from within (if still living and effectively still coherent individuals.

> Bounty on any post-singularity tech recovered from the Queen Mab includes full pardons, personal A.I.-run paracosm and, through negotiation and dependant upon confirmed results, your own planetary-scale Biosphere.

> Incursion????

"Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;

The subject, not the citizen: for kings

And subjects, mutual foes, forever play

A losing game into each others hands,

Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man

Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys."

"Oh lord oh lord, the Fae Knights of the Faerie Queen came not three dawns past.

Through a magic door to the otherworld!

They have ensorcelled your beloved, taken them to Queen Mabs palace!

Yet the door remains, yes it does. And if the tales are true, not for long.

Take this horse-shoe of cold iron (hide it well).

Remember, the Fae are beautiful, strange, terrible and capricious (really they are bonkers but you should never say that out loud). 

They love beauty and music, and they like to be praised.

Be polite and deferential, yet, never give nothing all away, not even your name.

And you must accept no gifts, make no promises, and *never eat anything*. 

And beware the Faeries charms, for they can be seductive.

And remember that time in the Otherworld is not like time here. You might come back a moment after you left, or a century.

No matter to that. Be quick! The Faerie door awaits!"

"Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites,

Without a hope, a passion, or a love,

Who, through a life of luxury and lies,

Have crept by flattery to the seats of power,

Support the system whence their honours flow..

They have three words:- well tyrants know their use,

Well pay them for the loan, with usury

Torn from a bleeding world! - God, Hell and Heaven."

"Dreams. I have such dreams. Do you know that if I dream of a place I will go there? And I dreamed that I learned that time is a place, and so I could go there too, and did, the moment I dreamed it could be, what was all moments.

But if one can dream, and awake in the time and the place of the dreaming, weaving in my sleep, if one weaves a man and meets a man or dreams of him, and weaves a dream, and remembers that one will remember.. Well then, what is a dream at all?

It is a sleep. All dreaming.

Did I make you? Did I weave you and seed you and set you to sprout in that river-realm from which you came with a memory in your mind, a dream of loss to bring you to me?

That is why I made these. The butterflies. Lao Tze no? He was a butterfly, a very nice butterfly, but he woke a man."

"The sensitive extension of the world.

That wondrous and eternal fane,

Where pain and pleasure, good and evil join,

To do the will of strong necessity,

And life, in multitudinous shapes,

Still pressing forward where no term can be,

Like hungry and unresting flame

Curls round the eternal columns of its strength."

> Confirm that object is a miniature warp nacelle.

> Not a remote. Repeat, not a remote.

> That is an active, I say again, active interstellar-capable warp engine drive element that she is waving.

> Configuration unknown. Albedo high. Its bright. Hard to see.

> Materials unknown.

> DO NOT LET IT TOUCH YOU.

"The restless wheels of being on their way,

Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,

Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:"

> Seeping entropic loss around the prime biform. Query, is it warm?

> Right eye registers darkness, gloom, cold space.

> Left eye, bright area..

> Check your six, check your feet.

> The floor is Her, the walls are Her.

> Reaffirm Transponders on contact, check H.U.D. for E.M. Manipulation. Eyeballs only, don't trust your screen.

> Crypto is good.

> Confirm, six transponders.

> Query, team is five strong.

> Repeat, we are a five strong team.

> Identify.

> Identify.

[fading]

> identify

"My left eye is a hive of bees..

Would you like to see? See. Little bees, all looking out. A hundred million eyes. Eyes within an eye.

They were not born bees, I made them so, and they may not be bees now.

Be bees. be be be be-be bees. [laughter]

They said a word that pleased me not.

And I made that realm as pale as air and as light as ash, and it blew away in a golden wind from a summer-ripe sun. And.. pop!

Do you know how not to become bees?

No?

You must. Say. PLEASE."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Queen Mab!

A book, that may one day hopefully exist!

A strange new thing in this world.

Made by me and......              AlcopopStar!

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(not entirely SFW)

Will it happen? Hopefully! Early days yet, still just brainstorming development.

A Meeting In Marginalia

1.    Cir Talox Blithe

Call me 'Blithe', it was the name of my creator, or so I have written to myself from long ago.

More fully named I am 'Cir Talox Blithe', Knight, made, sworn and chosen for a path of honour and truth. One glance will show you that I am no man of woman born. I was made, long ago, from gears and levers, steel and screws. My eyes are crystal lenses, my guts burn charcoal and my heart is Iron. This gave me my title "The Knight with the Iron Heart", though it has never pleased me for I have always fought to be a Knight of Franchise and of Grace. My mind, I am told is a labyrinth of magic and glass, packed away within my steel skull in directions inaccessible to mortal hands, though I have never seen it.

Why I was made, I cannot say, for no precise instruction remains from that deep time, and even when that was is also lost. I have traced my personal history back near one-thousand years, chasing myths and legends of a knight of steel who likely was myself in former times.

My memory is little better than your own. I can recall perhaps one hundred years in detail. Past that I depend on written records and on this rod of enchanted glass which I carry always with me. This slender wand holds a library of my memories, however much I could retain, sometimes memories of memories of memories, condensed, abstracted and reorganised. This is my record of my deeper self which I can read by sliding it into my skull through a port at its rear. I must do this only when the fullness of my thought is directed entirely upon that act, should my focus slip my consciousness might become lost in memory, or irrevocably and chaotically changed by what it finds. This truly is my greatest treasure for it gives me knowledge of myself, and my place within the world.

Many quests have I undertaken in my long existence, but my current trial is perhaps the strangest I have known, for I must journey to Marginalia, the Hyphos, that uncertain realm of timeless madness, there I must find the Fey prince 'Shadowed-Summer' and bargain with him for the ownership of his Incalculable Palace of Lies.

Impossibility upon impossibility, for many do not believe in Marginalia at all, thinking it fiction, or hallucination. I though, do believe, I sense in the deeper structures of my memories that I have been there many times, though the details escape me, and I suspect that I have been dogged and bothered by the attentions of its residents before.

Still, this is the mission impressed upon me by my obscure yet mighty patron, and it was made clear that, odd though it is, this task is of utmost and absolute importance for the safety of reality itself.

Hence, I come to the Mountains of Reality, for it is here, if anywhere, that access to Marginalia can be found.

Soft D&D Monster Brainstorm

Latest in the somewhat-ragged series;

Basic Idea

Char Gen

Shinto-style worldbuilding

Adventuring without Violence

Monster Brainstorm / 

Goose-Gold & Goblins / 

Looking for a Mechanic

Rude Orcs

Other Orcs are poor but these are very rich and pink and loud and will not go away. These Orcs move in groups, riding horses to death and breaking carriages on bending roads. They move into villages and sometimes ruins and have raucous loud and unending parties where they demand to be entertained loudly and endlessly.

These Orcs are very corse, cruel and rude and upset everyone. As well as being very strong, so you can't just force them out, they are also very rich, and have a lawyer, either with them, trapped in a silver mirror, or easily summon able by midnight bat.

Tangling with the Rude Orcs can mean you get humiliated, laughed at, have drinks and food spilled on you, have your clothes torn and be thrown in a ditch.

If the Rude Orcs really take against you they can come to your house, eat and drink everything, break furniture and shout, sing and fight all night, making the place unliveable.

How to get rid of the Orcs?

Magic perhaps, as Orcs are very scared of it. Some other Stranger or Spirit, which would mean making a deal. Or persuading them to go elsewhere for some unknown reason.

Rude Orcs love to bet and hate to be seen to welch on a bet, so its possible to out-gamble them, they also love competitions of eating, drinking, being loud, being strong and breaking things and it can be possible to trick them into such an event.

Moon Mage

Moon Mages live in Silver Towers on the borders of night and are very active under a changing moon.

(This means you can usually only find them around dawn or dusk, unless you have a silver key, or a dream compass to locate them.)

Owls know about the Keys and the Compasses.

Moon mages are very powerful and strange. Distracted and odd. They do not pay much attention to the normal world and are focused very deeply on their moon magic. 

They become dangerous 

Their main danger is that they can massively alter the world around them. 

Transform sheep into cheese, which means you need to hide them from mice until they can be turned back.

Lock the sun so it won't rise properly; "It was getting in my way!"

Freezing a river totally solid.

Playing strange music which makes all the trees dance in the night whether they like it or not.

They are not so much 'bad' as they are strange and difficult to deal with, as well as insanely powerful - there is almost no material thing which you can offer them. Most Moon Mages think the daylight world does not understand them, and they might be right, so why should they care too much about it.

To stop or change what a Moon Mage is doing, you have to understand why they are doing it and try to deal with that problem.

Getting through to a Moon Mage can be very hard. They are difficult beings to introduce yourself to and difficult men to get to know.

(Most do have some specific and particular obsessions though, and if you find those out it can help you get to know them.)

Moon Mage servants are often creepy shadows with silver rims and silver smiles in their shadow faces. They creep into villages at dawn and dusk and do the Moon Mages business - usually acquiring things the Moon Mage wants.

MOON MAGE MOTIVATIONS - Lost love. Something in the Past, needs time travel to correct it.

Fear of Nemesis. Wants to change own personality somehow. I guess these are all old-man problems. Old friend died and is trying to make a moon-replica. Had his magical staff stolen by the Master Thief. The Moon on a stick? To travel to the moon and map its cities? Animals from the white low gravity jungle on the moon. Building a spell that can let them travel to the moon?

Loan Troll

(Greedy for credit cards)

CREDIT TROLL

LEND TROLL

'Toll-Troll' is taken I think? Or did I come up with those already?

These Trolls are extremely greedy... for CASH. (Credit will do fine).

They hide under bridges like most Trolls but instead of eating people they offer them bad deals and make them sign unwise legal contracts. Then they come in the night to collect goods, clambering into the house. But there is nothing the person can do because legally, everything is above board and they owe the Troll.

If Trolls capture someone, they will accuse them of trespassing and make them work picking Oakum or breaking small rocks into smaller rocks, or baking bricks, or weaving baskets, or making snacks to be sold.

They capture children and debtors and take them away to Lend-Land, where they much forever work.

Defeating the Troll - they can be tricked or scammed. If the contract or records of the Troll are lost or destroyed then they have no legal right to what they take and can only caper impotently.

If a Troll can be tricked into breaking its word or ignoring the letter (not the intent) of its own promises - then all the chains of the Troll will spring open and its prisoners will be freed

Crime Bird

Creepy crimes have taken place. Could the answer be this disturbing bird?

Answer = YES

And, am I going back to this excellent, and now SEVEN YEAR OLD post?

Yes, yes I am.

Catching the Bird will be a problem, as will absolutely everything else to do with the bird.

Bird or birds may be employees of the Worlds Most Evil Dog as seen below.

THE WORLDS MOST EVIL DOG

Yes, another EXTREMELY OLD POST, this time, one of my own.

The Dragon Equivalent, Final Boss and Ultimate Nemesis of Soft D&D

Goblins

Honestly, what can be added to Goblins that has not already been, by myself and also literally anyone else. They are already pretty much perfect for Soft D&D.

Tricks. Lies. Mischief. Low-Level Magical Powers. Transit through the Otherworld. Riddles. Transformations. 

SAD QUEEN -mmmm, no

SUPER PHILOSOPHERS - nnooo

Ghost

Ok this should be do-able surely?

Dealing with a ghost is like solving a mystery, looking for clues and records, interviewing people. Can range from friendly-and-workable to FUCKING TERRIFYING.

Dealing with Ghosts also has a range of possible solutions;

- Investigate and fix the situation which created the ghost.

- Form a relationship with, and sooth, the Ghost.

- Get religion involved and either banish or lay to rest the Ghost.

- Super-Science, like Renaissance Ghostbuster stuff where its more like a strange technology, like maybe you can hoover a Ghost into a green glass tube with certain equipment. Ghost is still in the tube but it’s a temporary solution at least.

Wide range of threats, responses and fixes makes this a pretty good monster for Soft D&D

For extra child-friendly quality, make it..

THE GHOST OF A SINISTER PIG

Oh My this is troubling

Maybe instead of aging you prematurely the Ghost just steals the last lunch you ate and makes you extremely hungry. Or quietly eats your shoes, like you look down and they are gone..

The pig moves by night, rattling cans and eating pies in the pantry by moving through its walls. 

Well Dweller

WELL SPOOK

WELL WITCH

I think I like 'Well Dweller' the best as its quite indistinct, could be a troll, a Witch, a Ghost, a Jenny Greenteeth, you don't really know what it is, except that its down the well.

You can hear it, and it pulls on the bucket when you go out for water, and asks for things..

Possibly there is a big claw that comes out.

That might be the limit of my description here.

A Well-Dweller could be the opposite of a Hearth Spirit, they are both persistent, connected to the home and family, perform some kind of exchange for information, (for the Hearth Spirit you agree to keep the Hearth Fire burning and also feed it small specific things to eat, for the Well Dweller it asks you to throw things down the Well), but while the Hearth Spirit, largely good, or at least pro-social, gives you broadly legal and decent advice about what you need or how to achieve your goals, the Well-Dweller, while possibly sociopathic and predatory, can also give you advice of a more chthonic character.

A Hearth Spirit might be a little like Google with the safe search on; "Now now, [POP & CRACKLE] Moon Mages are said to be sad and solitary men, obsessed with their Moon-Work. But they often have hobbies, or a special tobacco, or something of that kind. Perhaps that might be a way to speak to him?"

While a Well-Dweller would be more like trawling the dark web, /pol or advice from your sketchy friend who often has speed on them and who's parents went on holiday without telling him; "Ssssteeall the sssilver stafff of the mooon maaan, for his sssorows are in the ssstaff and without it he sssshal forget them and hissss magic sssshalll be losssst. NOW. Ffffeeed eee Mothhhherr Hitttons Litul Kittonsssss asss weee agreeeed."

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God damn it anime

The Master Thief

Ah, the master thief.

The way I used him before was really as a kind of meta-agent, setting up impossible situations, always escaping, interacting with the world almost like an uncatchable god who sweeps through invisibly and re-arranges everything around him.

In many ways that's not that good for a game. You can put him (or HER) in an adventure as you can control the interrelationship of elements more easily but as a piece of world-building technology they are a bit irritating.

Could be someone that you call on in an emergency, like maybe they owe you a boon.

Could be that only a deranged plan created by children can catch the Master Thief, but you can only catch them once, and they must answer a question or do you a boon if you request it to let them go.

Sticky Mimics

Mimics but they don't actively consume you but just adhere to you in a friendly but disastrous way, like Acme glue.

Like they use you as if they were a tree parasite and eat any food coming to you before you can get it, and obviously no-one wants to be around you while you have a cupboard with a mouth on it hanging off you.

So - appears as an ordinary piece of furniture- but being dumber than a normal Mimic, will often just 'double' something else like a chest or a sink. So now there are two.

If you interact with the wrong one, it sticks to you and you can't get it off. So you are walking around like a complete tool with this piece of furniture hanging off you except it has a gawping, chattering cartoon mouth with a super-long tongue that comes out and snaffles your lunch.

Corn Goblins

We are doing Goblins again? Ok. 

The fact that these are out in the Corn, still and watching, maybe made of corn, makes them feel rather more disturbing than just "Goblins". Why is that?

They steal your hair and come back for your eyes - that's a nice escalation. Small things go missing, and someone’s like 'oh ho look out for the Corn Goblins' and then someone wakes up without fingernails, and then without hair. Then its like o fuck we have to sleep tonight.

And the thing with agricultural monsters that live in the same crop the community itself grows is - you can always destroy them, or remove the threat of them, by destroying the crop;

Corn Goblins - burn the corn.

Rice Imps - crack open the gates and let the paddies dry out.

Apple Kings - just cut down the apple trees.

But then your family or household are 'thrown into poverty' and what do you do then?

So you have to look around to find some other way to deal with this. (Obv, talk to the Hearth Spirit or Well Dweller first).

Sky Witch

How is a Sky-Witch different and/or better than any other kind of witch and didn't Adventure Time do this first?

So - if her house is in the Sky, and her power comes from the Sky, then presumably if you are *under* things, like roofs and trees and under the earth or under your bed, then her power is limited.

If 'the floor is danger' is a common childrens game then 'the sky is danger' should also work as a kind of game?

How does the Sky Witch come down from the sky? Presumably with a Sky Ladder, so if you can find that ladder (and its glass, to keep it secret, and so heavy people can't get up it) then you can find the Witches Sky-House.

She wears and very heavy hat, which squashes her down, and heavy shoes, to keep her on the ground so you can spot her in disguise that way, and if you can trick her into taking off the hat and shoes then she will float away, up into the sky again. (But she will hold a grudge). Also she might grab someone on the way up so you will have to go and rescue them.

Snail Knight

I guess these would be extremely honourable and very slow and quite mad. Like a slow Quixote invading the village doing all kinds of crazy stuff like duelling scarecrows or marrying shadows, fighting an army of bread loaves.

You can't really hurt them as they are not a bad person. You couldn't anyway as they are pretty heavily armoured. So you have to see inside their madness to try to get them to stop, go away or be less insane.

You would need to find out their quest I think.

Mirror-Gibbons

Gibbons which stand on each others shoulders and wear long coats, trying to act human. Or steal paper and write letters trying to lure people out to the trees; "PLS COM KWIK 2 TH GIBON TRES I UR MOFER NED U I AM NAWT A GIBON RITING TIS"

Then you wander out there and BANG, you are in a Gibbon-Sack and some Gibbon is in your house pretending to be you.

They act human by doing a crayon drawing of your face and sticking it to the front of their Gibbon face, and also wearing human clothes on their Gibbon bodies.

CREATURE FROM THE UNKNOWN

The Vortex of Agnes Miller-Parker

The title was a trick, this is actually a review of the book 'The Wood Engravings of Agnes Miller-Parker' but I knew if I said the words 'wood-engravings' and 'review' then you probably wouldn't click. 

But now there is art to look at so you don't need to think. Just scan onwards.

Some of you may remember her from one of my 'Artists of the Faerie Queene' posts, as that is where I encountered her. She was an artist working mainly in wood engraving book illustration and largely in the inter-war years for private presses in the UK.

This is my review of a rather fancy and quite large book of her work.

This was published in 2005, written by Ian Rogerson.

Its a brave effort and a good book. Rogerson has discretion and sensitivity but sadly lacks vividness and imagination, which leads his assessment of quality to be totally utterly wrong. 

Nevertheless, these are only the faults of his class and neurotype and can be easily amended by me, now, so we should award him at least the silver for effort and intention.

And I did find his brief view into the history of Private Press publishing in inter-war Britain fascinating. Thank Christ for the internet, the old ways seem specifically designed to annihilate artists and creators in order to fatten a managerial class. What a terrible waste.

The only thing Rogerson and I can agree on is that AMP's Aesops Fables pictures are really good.

Scan quality is imperfect but look at that frog!

Beyond that, her best images are for The Forest Giant and the Faerie Queene. These are also the images where AMP's vorticist leanings collide most energetically with nature and form.

Rogerson likes the boring images, made with skill and a medium emotional range but fundamentally AMP was a genre illustrator, the more intense and gothic the situation the better she generally does.

Rogerson John Clare is a fair shout. I am not super-familiar with his poetry but AMP being more obsessed with the hyperreality of objects than their symbolic meanings makes perfect sense. More precisely - shes really really interested in focusing on the object in particular, in the beauty of that precise form, and because everything is black and white, light and shadow and shape are all there is.

Vortex Mole

Beasts Rotating

AMP really likes animals. Aven a poor AMP animal is usually pretty good.

From Welsh Folk tales

These animals often appear in pairs or groups, usually crossing each other in the image, facing slightly different directions, with different sides and dimensions and aspects showing. I get the sense that these are in a way, all the same animal, (though there are a few cases where they are clearly not), but, in the way that animals in heraldry are flattened and invisibly twisted so more of the animal 'presents' to the viewer than would ever naturally be seen from one point of view and in the same way that cubism fractures the view of something so that, in a different way, you see it from multiple directions and multiple fragments of it at once.

So these are post-vortcist animals maybe? Done in a naturalistic way. Not that she was trying to save time or cheating but that she was so totally absorbed by the animal as a living breathing object-form-being, that she was looking for some way to hyper-represent the creature but without going into modernist techniques. So we get these pairs and crowds of animals moving around each other showing different sides, different aspects of movement and in-sense.

Shadowed Faces

I do know know why AMP was so much into shadowed faces. Faces turned away. It is as if she was uncomfortable with faces somehow. She can do them, and pulls them off a handful of times, but in almost every case if there is some possibility that she can occlude a face, she does.

Storms, Water, Light, Forest, Hills

What is a storm but a dangerous series of sky-things

about to fall upon you like the toys from a shelftop box?

The wonderful thing about light, weather, forests and anything in the background of a good AMP image is that it is a field of forms.

I think Scot McCloud said US superhero comics were like a cornucopia of objects, and AMP makes a world, not necessarily of mere objects, because her objects live powerfully,life is central to her work, but or forms.

I feel as if I could reach into the image and run my hands across the hills, pick up clusters of buildings like lego blocks, smooth my fingertips across billows of wind like fine clay and grasp crystal shards of light.

Our old friend MVTABILITY

Tubular Clothes

Apparently there were some complaints that her clothes for poverty stricken characters weren't ragged enough? Thats because her clothes were tubes, shapes before they were textures or material.

Floral Explosions

These are pretty great.

The really great thing about AMP is how she smashed together the world of forms and that of living breathing emotion to produce an intense hyperreality.

From 'The Forest Giant'

That is not best shown in her later works which are merely literary.

She should have been given more weird shit to do, and should have been paid a lot more.

I Could Not Get This Snail Knight Story Right

And I am currently swamped in other things and will not be able to get back to it for a while. So now its 'content'. It's long so you may want to PDF or copy/paste it.

The Tale of Sir Babbling of Bromborough

We turn now to the tale of Sir Babbling of Broms-Burgh, called by some "The Nonsense Knight", so layering his names by three for he was never dubbed so by the King, nor did his mother call him "Babbling" in the crib (even when he babbled for sure), but named him Silence, for she despised clamour and hated noise above all things. Her heart was tuned too neatly to the world and buzzed like a wire in wind. Elf-Blood bubbled in her veins, she fizzed when spoken to and boiled at every shout. Only in the silence was she free, away from the banging of man. Only in the still calm could she smile and laugh her soundless laugh. Silence was her joy, so hence the name.

Perhaps she should have spoken to him more. Perhaps it was the old elf-blood (from Silences Great Grandfather Raven-Bone Brok, the Elfin Knight). Or perhaps it was neuropathology.

Sir Silence had a flaw upon his tongue. That flaw was like a notch in gold, for in courtesy, in courage and in kindness he bore the bell (meaning he would lead the herd of knights, if knights were goats).

He was also both clever and calm, though neither are really chivalric virtues and are distantly regarded by most knights, like an abandoned spanner, and his calmness breathed only in the presence of just acts. When witnessing injustice he was death.

He was as beautiful as summer and warm as wet wax, though his storm-coloured snail Thorgool claimed plutonic temperament, reserved and dark. Yet when mounted on Thorgool the glistering sharpness of his arms, the butter-bright summer of his looks, the fiery courage of his heart and the glacier-melting kindness in his smile made him seem like a bright sun rising from a storm. He was like an ice-age ending. There was one fine day in the middle of the Knight.

The Watchmaker and his Wife

The cracked face in the mazed obsidian door won't open up.

"Find me the time, the time the time. When _is_ it? WHEN? Find me the time and we'll see. Till then I. AM CLOSED."

Around is piled clock scrap, hourglasses and tilted sundials. And a big clock key.

The scraps decay to rust.

The hourglasses breathe in and out altering the flow of sand. If you ask they will try to purse their glass lips but its like holding their breath and they can't do it for long.

The sun is an orange baloon flown by mad goblins in the sky, and won't stay still. They mock and throw pins.

But nearby you can hear a ticking, the tick-tocking of clocks.

There is the door of the Watchmaker.

Inside is the Watchmaker and his Wife.

The Watchmaker is old and slow and kind and tired. He thinks everything alive has a clock inside it, "Listen, you can hear it...".

He is happy to help you tell the time, but all his clocks are off, and he is so tired and slow, he keeps falling asleep.

He has a hole in his back for a big clock key.

"Don't WIND HIM UP!" Says the Watchmakers Wife. "You won't like it, and I will SCREAM!"

The Watchmakers Wife is vain and dusty, wearing ninety-nine lace dresses, each atop the other. She is surrounded by a thousand mirrors, hanging from silk threads woven by the tiredest spiders imaginable. "Hold them straight, you USELESS BUGS! Not THIS way, THAT way!" The mirrors twist and turn. Her eyes are everywhere, reflected. She sees everything. But she is doing her mascara and refuses to get up.

If you try to wind the Watchmaker, she SCREAMS. It hurts so much you can't do anything.

The Watchmakers Wife is very vain. You could flatter her.

The spiders have low self esteem, "We're useless, the worst spiders imaginable." If you boost their confidence they may revolt and drop the mirrors.

If you wind up the Watchmaker he gets younger and faster, but crueler and cleverer! Now he is fast and nasty.

"I told you you wouldn't like it!" Shouts the wife.

He can fix a clock to tell the time. But you must be tough to hold him to his promise.

As you leave, the Watchmaker and his Wife are arguing about the mess.

"Oh! Why won't you just wind down? I liked you slow!"