(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 24 minutes)

Invitation to Bickering Hall

On the Occasion of Mister Godswallop’s String-Snapping

An aerial view of the homes and structures of Pilgrim’s Anchor revealed a great many things, the least consequential of which was the only area within the fencing that could contain the temporary tents and stands of the autumn fair, though even light questioning would reveal that too was deeply tied to the political rifts in the marooned colony.

Anchor was a cluster of tight bricks at its core: Independence Hall, the Franklin laboratory, the Jefferson Library and Drafting Hall, as well as the armory and the ink coven. Surrounding them was a loop of empty space, ostensibly a road and walking paths, but functionally an invisible barrier between the Founders and those they had struck a thorny peace with, despite being responsible for their new castaway lives in the first place.

None of them could have predicted the event of course, quite unlike anything in recorded history, be it record or myth. It was the hope, now, of all of them that it had actually happened before, and been remedied as they now planned with their Second Declaration, with the affected parties choosing not to share their ordeal with the larger world in fear of disbelief and ridicule.

Whether it was the first such occurrence, or the hundredth, that mankind suffered of such a rift hardly mattered now that it was done. When the various delegates and diplomats of the thirteen colonies gathered to declare their independence from the British crown, founding a new nation and almost certainly an open range war at the same time, they drafted a document to make it true.

It was already true in their hearts and minds. They thought they had the physicality of the truth as well, experiencing it as revelation, as intellectual calm, in the institutions of the new world. All that was left was to construct a legal truth. It should have been easy, at least compared to the deluge that would be the king’s response.

All of them learned otherwise when they signed their names, unwittingly casting a spell that made use of magics much more common on other worlds. This Declaration of Independence was so powerful, so profound, and meant so earnestly that the men practically bled onto the parchment. The bloody spirit, the pen clenched in gritted pink teeth, scribbling as the hands frantically load powder and ball into a musket, was counted as blood sacrifice without the need of a spilled drop.

Independence was declared, not from the British, not from the British alone anyhow, but from the Earth they knew in its entirety. Ripped away, sent spinning and skipping through time and space like a cyclone over a paradoxically calm lake, the hall took not only the Founders, but a trail of others, who must have had some relation to the proceeding, though no human had the authority or understanding to say what each exact relation was.

Educated guesses were abundant however. It could hardly be a coincidence that the act of signing the First Declaration transported them to a world where paperwork was more than legally binding. And if that safe assumption was a genuine connection, then it could be surmised that some document was responsible for each addition to the initial population beyond the Founders.

The free blacks of Pilgrim’s Anchor did not begin that way. Legally considered the property of many of the Founders, it was surely the heinous documentation of that process that bound them together. Where the slaver went so too went his belongings, all fairly typical procedure in the world of record keeping.

As for the Lenape, any connections to the colonists were far more tenuous and lost to time. As far as they were concerned no invader had the right to decree anything, whether that decree came on paper or was shouted at them from across their own hills.

Almost one hundred years prior, and all but unknown to those caught hapless in Anchor’s chain links like startled fish, there was a signing, one legitimate enough to snag the powers of Pursuitia, to pull the Lenape from their home like an old net from the river’s blanketing mud. Signed by William Penn and the chief of chiefs, it was called the Treaty of Shackamaxon.

Its declaration was one of eternal peace between the native clans and the colonists; short-lived were its promises. Nothing ever broke the binds of the document however, not to Pursuitia’s standard. People were broken. Cultures. Trust. But not the intent immortalized in ink.

The many Lenape taken from Earth were nowhere near Independence Hall that fateful day, but they were descended from those who signed the Treaty of Shackamaxon, which occurred within what were, by 1776, the boundaries of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

That left only the handful of white women to explain, all of whom could be waved off as employees of one Founder or another, who distinctly recalled signing a contract, but never reading any clause that required them to travel more abroad than the word ‘abroad’ could ever imply.

Pursuitia provided much initially, and both the enslaved and the Lenape were not fool enough to let opportunity pass them by. Gone were the power structures of both king and colony, only a shack of matchsticks left to defend them in the form of the Founders. So those enslaved made their own declaration, though, crucially as will be seen and explained shortly, not on the page. They made themselves free. Together with the Lenape they came and went as they pleased, ignoring any appeal to law and custom made by any white man. Nothing was customary in the place they’d never been, and the concept of law might not even hold water. Only time could tell them, not some powdered wig trussed up in more buttons than was practical.

An opportunity was there for the Founders as well, to admit the inherent misdeeds of their empowered positions, to step down into the sea-level-and-beneath perspective of the downtrodden man. Instead they stayed the course.

Fears of reprisal and retribution motivated them, and could still be seen by their children in the frantic scratchy hand they hurriedly drafted new founding documents in. While all three parties came to understand the magic of Pursuitia together, mostly through the early strikes and trickery of the Bickyplots, which cost seven people their lives and one their soul, the Founders were the only ones able to take advantage of it.

Former slaves had been kept illiterate, and so could not draft in the early days. Nor had the Lenape come to rely so much on legal documentation, and were naturally slower to adopt it. Therein slipped the Founders’ grip, which found the vulnerable windpipes of their fellow men.

Most of the women who could bear were black or Lenape, and every tick of the clock convinced them they needed to invest rather than destroy, so the Founders did not use drafting to reestablish slavery, but to cement their own position as leaders by codifying many resources as their sole property.

Food grown in and around Pilgrim’s Anchor belonged to them, as laid out in the charter. Water as well. Any attempt to partake without their implicit permission resulted in violent rejection, something like vomiting but before any chewing took place. Also immortalized in the charter were the white man’s authority over Independence Hall, all weaponry cast in the foundry, and the powers of the Liberty Bell, which warded off the prowling dangers of Pursuitia.

No longer enslaved, or technically colonized, the others had little choice but to acquiesce, to unite in the face of a common enemy, though they were uncommonly absurd in nature. All came to rely on the plans for the Second Declaration, as second chance and perhaps first salvation.

And so things stood, with Founders inside the road and the others outside, the parties never bleeding together as much as they did that day: the autumn fair. It was after the final harvest of many crops of Earth, of Pursuitia, and of their localized hybridization: corn, long beans, acorn squash, (of Pursuitia) lemony folios, nutty knobalongs, pink gushfruit, (and of the anatimals) yolk dew, marrow logs, bat tarps for frying, and the silk of the spider beads.

All rules went lax that day, and while the politics didn’t stop they did turn away from each other and focus into a single beam, intended both to heat them in the coming winter and incinerate any Bickyplot that may come too close. Festivities included a great many indulgent recipes made in large batches and handed out freely, carnival games that never managed to set too high a bar of challenge for the young soldiery, and friendly competitions judging marksmanship, anatimal husbandry, and acts of stage drafting.

None of which Blueberry Kidd would be competing in. Thoroughly in disguise, as a carefree young woman in a sun dress enjoying herself, she actually went about her Junior Congress-assigned task of spying on Founder Joseph Hewes. The matter proved simple, as Hewes was in his sixties, and it was a sluggish sixties at that. The greater danger was in overtaking him, something his shadow seemed to do some of the time as he shuffled along.

Taking advantage of the fairgrounds’ layout, Kidd twice lapped him entirely to get back behind him in the least suspicious fashion possible. Back on Earth he was a man with much mercantile experience, and he was giddy at the play-economics of the festival, but so far he’d done nothing suspect. His tail had been assigned because of a post on one of the public bulletin boards in preparation for the fair. The dreary charcoal ink didn’t help it escape the attention of the young. Anatimal ribbons: to be judged by Founder Joseph Hewes.

Kidd needed no more explanation than that. I’m the perfect one to follow him. I know everyone in Anchor who can tell a drifting frog throat from a toad throat. Hewes is no anatimal lover. Once he tried to tell me I couldn’t bring Wagner into the chapel, on account of it being unholy, without a soul.

The nerve, especially when Arthur Middleton had been wheeled in that day as well. Autumn thinks the sun through the stained glass helps him. None of us would ever write the truth to her, that nothing of her father is left but breath. They’ve taken his soul, and done who knows what with it. Pickled on a shelf. Grated over a rotten fish head.

Regardless of the poor man’s fate, he’s every bit as soulless as my Wagner, so if he belongs in the chapel so does a well-behaved tail or two. But he doesn’t like them. That’s the point. So why has he been assigned to judge them this year?

All the activities of the Founders were relevant until proven otherwise, as every whim could affect their handwriting, which could alter the Second Declaration, which could have cascading effects upon the Carve-Out if they weren’t careful.

Blueberry assumed she could sneak in some fun here and there, only half-watching the man as he came close to creating anatimals by talking ears off, as he normally didn’t cross paths with the other communities or have them trapped behind their own stands. But a problem arose, one exceedingly heavy, that no man could move on his own, hence the notice posted on its haunch that allowed it to move under its own power.

A tin horse. One of the flagship marvels of Pilgrim’s Anchor drafting, which made the Master of Sciences overflow with jealousy, seeing as he could not engineer a similar solution to the problem of a world full of gentlemen equestrians and precisely zero horses. There wasn’t even a horse analogue in the Pursuitia bestiary, for while there were large worms that folded themselves into the shapes of quadrupeds so as to gallop at high speeds, their serpentine backs refused to hold a saddle, with those that attempted to grip them with thighs reporting both wet trousers and the most unpleasant sensation they’d ever felt, akin to strangling a large eel with their legs.

Mr. Franklin used the least drafting he could in making his kites fly and bottling lightning, hoping to one day recreate the mechanism sans magic back on Earth, but even he had to confess that the tin horse was a most elegant solution. Cast entirely from tin, the most abundant metal they’d found, the resulting golem-creature had the exact proportions of an earthly equine, owing to a few diagrams in some of the books of the Jefferson Library.

None of the younger generation had ever seen a full horse, only their hooves that had adopted the lifestyle of barnacles, and the occasional broom-like tail sweeping its way back and forth across the road, perhaps trying to make itself as useful as its original owner had. Despite this gap in their experience they would think nothing of seeing it in the flesh, for the tin reproduced it flawlessly, albeit with much heavier footfalls.

A deliberate decision had been made not to paint them, despite there being just as many, and just as vibrant, paints as inks in Pursuita; polish was frequently applied instead. It kept them shiny, like the miniature toys the Founders had in their youth, and these larger versions were of course not shared widely either.

What came from the foundry was theirs alone, and rare was the occasion a non-Founder was allowed to ride one, even counting their children. Muster of course had the most time on them among the young, and could likely handle one as well as Kidd managed Wagner.

Only ten of them existed, as they were of little use in open warfare, not that many full battles had been fought against the Bickyplots. Most altercations were finished on one page or another; it was just a matter of which set of archives that page called home.

A tin horse was made to move by the application of an expertly drafted notice attached to its flank by a wax seal, but they’d discovered no way to make that authority extend remotely. Those who encountered the horse, who could read, would always be able to understand its nature and its weaknesses. An enemy would quickly learn that if the decree was removed, or shredded, or severely damaged, or rained on, the steed would become nothing more than a statue. Retrieval, when it had occurred far afield, was a most annoying chore.

The Founders rode them for show and sport, about town and in the immediate outskirts. Sometimes one of the elderly, who had lost leg function, would participate in some public ceremony on tin horseback.

They were given names, which Blueberry often scoffed at, considering most of the Founders turned up their noses at the idea of naming anatimals, never even considering that at least anatimals had body heat, and even became inactive at night or day based on the diurnal, nocturnal, and crepuscular habits of their parent animals, so they slept too. They were far more alive than the horses.

Still, she knew all their names by heart, as Blueberry was not one to ever forget a name, or to wound unintentionally by using the wrong one. There was so much in a name, to a name, and after fighting to acquire one she knew she would never make anyone else struggle uphill just to be recognized and shaped by the speech of their kin. Even if they were in an inert lump of tin.

Happystance was the name of the one that was led out of the storage stable by the reins, stopped and handed off to Joseph Hewes so that he might rest his quaking legs and strike a dignified pose when it came time to hand out the ribbons. Like all the tin horses there was heavy pitting across its body, flaws from the casting, and while they could have been filled it was generally agreed that the dappling of quarries and craters helped to identify each individual.

One big pit cutting out both the eyes and three bar notches on the raised tail meant she was sneaking glimpses at Happystance. As Hewes was assisted in mounting he was careful not to scrape his boot across the decree. Blueberry wasn’t close enough to read it, but the text was nearly identical each time, with the main difference being who had signed it. Like all drafting, the more figures relevant to the alteration one tries to make who consent to it by signature, the more effective the spell will be.

Decree of Happystance the tin horse

It is here declared that this creation of the Pilgrim’s Anchor foundry will manifest these specific capacities of the Earth animal known as the horse, occurring in the order that is most natural and helpful in the given circumstances. This tin horse will trot and gallop where directed. This tin horse will leap when required. This tin horse will go still and quiet when directed. This tin horse shall suffer no dearth of stamina, ever. This tin horse shall require no food, nor fuel, nor water. This tin horse will come to any authorized personage of Pilgrim’s Anchor if currently riderless, and it will come to the name of Happystance, hearing it across the greatest distance at which any horse of Earth ever heard such a sound.

John Hancock     Samuel Adams     Edward Rutledge

Her task of shadowing seemed much more awkward with him so far off the ground, and drawing more attention than ever, so Blueberry reassessed the situation. His final destination was already known, as the anatimals participating in the competition were being penned in, as much as such slippery things could be penned in, on the pasture just outside the Franklin laboratory.

If there was any information to glean about his unorthodox judging position it would most likely be got at the show itself, so Kidd resolved to make her way there and meet her target in an hour’s time for the awards. Until then she could relax, observe the fair, take the temperature of their political climate now that everyone was letting the blush show in their cheeks.

Franklin kites were in the sky, dancing in a big circle over the road, posted as decoration rather than sentries or ammunition depots. Even with the colorful streamers hanging from them, blowing in the wind like octopus tendrils, there were still nervous glances thrown their way. The first time the Master of Sciences put them up during the fair, some five years prior, the event saw record low attendance, and pursuant to that a chilly Stoking Dramas, which made for the harshest winter on their short record.

Everyone was mostly accustomed to them now, some even delighted now that they’d been fitted with bells underneath. On the hour, when the Liberty Bell invigorated them all, the kites would follow along in a festive concert, rocking back and forth as if in the wake of Helios’s chariot.

Watching them a little too idly, Kidd nearly stepped into the path of an ax-throwing competition. It was the tickle of Wagner’s fuzzy tip on her underarm that stalled her. The target, already heavily scored, about five throws from becoming two targets, was attached to a large log posted upright, and there was another decree at the top, well out of range of the throwers.

It said that anyone who got a bullseye would receive one of Miss Cleopatra’s pear and molasses hand pies. The pastry shell hid the obvious fact that they were not pears, which didn’t make the skip across the maelstrom, but the Pursuitia fruit called sugarwart, which was very similar once the skin, like the cover of a book, was sawed off.

Kidd witnessed one such bullseye, and then the decree following through on its promise, as the ax disappeared out of the fissure it left and was replaced by a pastry in the thrower’s hand, still steaming too. The reward, transported by drafting magic from one of the nearby stands, or the oven it seemed, proved more dangerous than the blade they’d just tossed, forcing the poor thrower to juggle the molten object between hands. What the reward would be for that was anyone’s guess.

She had some hunger of her own, but she wasn’t in the mood to toss, knowing as she did that it would be difficult to avoid the muscle memory of hoisting it into the air, what with Franklin kites about. Normally such an interaction would imbue the weapon with wicked rotation for a short duration, as it did the bayonets on their muskets. Charging a Bickyplot alone was madness, but to do it without an electric-empowered weapon was doubly so. A turkey could be carved, but a Bickyplot had to be eviscerated, not even accounting for the heart you would then unleash if you had aimed at the wrong body part, which one almost always did, thanks to the law of averages.

Instead she moved along, watched some of the Lenape women make beaded shirts and jewelry, casually dropping completed pieces into baskets they had woven in the first part of the day. The Founders had not seen fit to seize authority over clothing, as that gaggle of men proved adept at only one kind of needle, with which they had sown Kidd’s generation. Their incompetence was lucky, for some sort of Founder tailor’s shop would have them all feeling like their collars were a pair of hands about their necks. It didn’t please those stuffy sorts that the Lenape making all their children’s uniforms were incorporating bead work and bold colors, but it was too late to address the matter now, bound as they were to make no more such decrees by promises to children who would cease helping them altogether should they be broken.

Past the new clothing she and Wagner went, past the barrels of cider, past the carpenters fielding opinions on stage alterations for the upcoming dramas, and past her two friends, so caught up in each other at the moment that Kidd politely averted her eyes and kept on toward the laboratory.

In fact she had just missed a meeting of the Junior Committee of Five, forgivable considering that it happened so swiftly and loosely, like a lump of duckweed forming and disbanding in a strong current, that they couldn’t be accused of having organized it, which was necessary in the full view of Pilgrim’s Anchor.

The purpose of the meeting was to congratulate President Muster Hart on his oath of office and approve the next round of thefts to be committed by Unmarked Rodney. Muster accepted the thanks warmly, but not so warmly as he received the squeeze on his arm when Crow Eyes, Oakes, Pony, and Sassafras departed.

Bonfire Lucretia Paine had slipped behind him, taken his arm, and whisked him off to a corner behind bales of shredded drafting waste where only sharpened eyes like Kidd’s could spot them, which they only did in passing. Their surroundings were not quiet, but she seemed to make them that way. All other laughter was softer than hers, and she wasn’t even, just grinning. She smiles louder than the fair. What did I do to be so lucky? Of course… I became the president. No one gets such admiration for nothing.

Sharp of nose and bold of eye, with the elegant neck of a heron, Miss Paine was always a very fixed presence, as if she had been pinned onto the world of Pursuitia instead of smeared across it like the others. If she’d ever sat still long enough for a portrait, unlikely by Muster’s estimation, the object would become permanently stuck to the first wall on which it hung, coming down only when the dwelling did.

Like Blueberry she had no intention of missing the anatimal judging, but there was a matter to attend to first, that of making herself the first lady of the Junior Congress. The term would not come to be used in any world for some time, but if it had she would’ve grinned doubly at the notion of being the first first lady, and immediately her mind would’ve pored over various possibilities of tacking on a third ‘first’.

All worlds were hers to have and to hold, but at the moment the world of love had to be conquered. Muster certainly felt conquered looking at her in her dress, raven blue with orange bead work and foggy crystals hanging from the sleeves. An elegant hat, almost an adventurer’s hat thanks to the quill of a plot-hole worm stuck in its brim like the feather of a phoenix, topped her head as crown. Her expression suggested she’d never worn anything less fanciful in her life, including when she wore nothing at all.

“You will of course value my congratulations above all others,” she said with her smarting voice, like a switch to the thigh. “So congratulations Mr. President.” Her arms slid across his higher shoulders, wrists crossing behind his head. If the Founders witnessed such intimate public posing on Earth the punishment would have been more physical than the gesture, but they all lived in Bonfire’s world.

At worst they would pull them apart and scold, because no one was more prepared to escalate a situation to its utmost extreme than the young woman called ‘fire’ by friend and foe alike. Any attempt to strike her would be reciprocated, and political avenues would quickly find the roadblock that was her mother Louise, who was head nurse for the more ailing Founders. If her daughter was displeased it stood to reason all of Pilgrim’s Anchor was, and surely it was due to the sudden shortage of bandages, salves, and bedside manner that had everything to do with the ‘conviviality of the community spirit’, and nothing at all to do with her family.

So the girl was bold in her affection with the Founders’ favored son; she went to kiss him. He responded in kind, but the tiny diplomat inside his mind, always clad in pots and pans and shouting as he clanged bumbling into peaceful corners where he did not belong, made a clamor. Now is not the time. Something is being announced today Scudder! I can feel it in my kettle and my griddle! You want to be a part of it! So break your lips off you cretinous-

“It comes just in time too,” he said as if he hadn’t prolonged the process with excuses like insufficient reading light, having also blamed an innocent Wagner for distracting him the other night with incessant wagging. “Word is they’ve figured out what Bickering Hall plans to do with all the opera worm they harvested. If so it’s the first time we’ve known their plans in years. It will be an opportunity to strike at them.”

“With a stroke of the pen most likely,” she dismissed, not relenting in her closeness, though she didn’t disregard what he said. His Bonfire could multitask the same way a true fire could give equal attention to all logs fed.

“If we can strike just prior to the first freeze we should,” he argued. “We still don’t know how they survive the cold, but they’ve never been spotted about during the same months we’re trapped inside. We could cripple whatever plot or device maintains them during that time… wipe them all out with a natural blizzard by just finding a way to break their door and leave it flung open to the elements.”

“It wouldn’t work,” Bonfire said with confidence that would be difficult to justify. “They go back to where they came from in winter, so they wouldn’t be in Bickering to do the freezing.”

“You’re so sure?”

“Chattelpool.” The name evoked his disturbing abstract visage: a featherless eyeless bird of pocked flesh perched inside an antler cage and attached to the neck via an umbilicus of bulbous knots. All Bickyplots had roles in their tight knit family of thirteen, and while a few purposes were unclear to the humans the one called Chattelpool was understood to be a naturalist, or an unnaturalist as it were, and a physician for creatures that should receive no healing whatsoever, undoing the just wounds and tortures of Hell out of amused spite.

“What of rotten old Eggnonce?” Muster asked with a grimace.

“We’ve seen him produce animals not of Pursuitia, as pets, as objects of study… as hunting dogs.” She suppressed a shudder that Scudder could not. Both remembered the ‘hunting dog’ that had been brought sniffing around Pilgrim’s Anchor but once before. If the Liberty Bell had not driven it off they would all be bones stored in Bickering Hall’s cellar with the other dry goods. “Notice we’ve not seen that last one again. At its size it would need far more food than they could give it to keep it in their service, and so they sent it back.”

“Or they slaughtered it and ate it themselves. To grant them the capacity of affection for their pets is entirely too much. There are no rules with the Bickyplots, not with so little information about them, and then add to that the myriad possibilities of their drafting. I could contrive a hundred ways they bring forth these monsters without having a connection to their home world. We don’t have one to ours.”

“Yes we do,” she insisted, looking at him as if his head was an empty cup dropped on a stone floor. “We were born here.”

“Yes of course, you know what I mean Bonfire. But we can’t stay, not forever. The Carve-Out won’t work if we try to stay.”

“No, I suppose not,” she agreed. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you about something that will work. Us.” A blank expression indicated to her that he was listening intently, that he was doing his best to have no reservations until he knew the entire shape of the idea he might absorb. “We can be torn from any world, but I won’t have you ripped away from me by any force small or petty.” He knew there was more, could hear it wasn’t her final sentence. Those struck singularly; those could brand. “I want you to give this to me today, and in plain view for all to witness.”

Out from a hidden pocket, perhaps sewn into the dress just for that occasion, came a golden ring, however the material was far less notable than the setting: a large disc topped with a glass face. Within, plainly visible, was a tight spiral of paper. Before he could speak she opened it via a hinge even more expertly hidden than the pocket. Gently unfurled. Delicately and sensuously scrolled by his eyes at an alluring angle. Climbing stairs chasing the dress of a radiant woman.

“These phrases were excised from some of the love letters you’ve sent to me,” Bonfire said breathily. “You can see the inks of your different moods. You’ve loved me in peat green, flame red, a purple I still don’t fully understand despite hours staring into the wells of its O, P, and A letters… where you called our courtship operatic.

A little drafting has fused these snippets into one. They’re all leading somewhere. Right here. See?”

Never seen a heart fall out of a sleeve

you spoke as if you knew

dire retelling of mythical fated lovers

sink in your absence

heal faster when you laugh in my cuts

where the dead go we will go together

you sing at my resonance

please walk around in my life, and twirl

“That one…” Muster said numbly, face curiously lifeless now, like his breath had been lost through a hole in the hull. “I rewrote that one many times. It started as ‘walk in the garden of my life and twirl’. Was that better?”

“It has all turned perfect in my memory,” she assured him, hand caressing his cheek, thumb shining it like an apple. “And I will not allow such wonderful words and feelings to sit on a shelf in a journal that is already full of schemes and their much dingier details. Muster, my Hart, my sole, we must be married.” Her eyes glistened with righteous enthusiastic tears.

But the diplomat. His pots. His pans. His proximity to some very fragile things which did not belong to Scudder.

“Only the Founders can marry us Bonfire. None of them will. Not yet. I have to keep working on them. Hancock, soon I think. He’ll sign anything.” She exhaled out her nose, nostrils flared like a cobra hood.

“We only need the Founders for a certificate of marriage. That makes us husband and wife in terms of military service, inheritance, and custody of children. I want it in a real way. For that my mother will happily bind us. If not her High Water will do it. And if not her, Missing Moon will do it. We have many friends who love our love almost as much as we do. It is time to be done with the charade that you will be with any other woman. They did not successfully raise themselves a white girl to force on you, and now it is too late for that offensive dream of theirs. There is only the consuming fire.” She grabbed him again, by the waist, as if she planned to adjust his spine until he was brave enough to admit the truth of what she said. “It eats their certificates, same as all else.”

The full force of her spirit working on him, practically making him sweat beads of glass, he grabbed her back and they kissed passionately, but after a few moments he could hear something, both flat and sharp against his inner ear. Was it the little diplomat? The fair? Whichever prompted it, there was an objection. He pulled away, let her see that he was about to fail her. Already anger smoldered in her drawn jaw, a hue of red cedar.

“Bonfire, please listen. This isn’t our letters. This isn’t even our lives. It’s everyone’s. Now I’m on the path to be treated as a signatory for the Second Declaration. Think of it. They will have me sign it, as their equal! My birth here will likely grant additional authority to the drafting magic. And yes, I know any of us born here could do that… but they won’t accept anyone else.

It’s wrong of them. Plainly you would be the better choice! You know so much more about Pursuitia than I do, and you are so in love with it that perhaps only you know what it would take to leave it behind. But we’re not dealing with wise mountaintop priests. We’re dealing with half-dead fathers reaching for what is out of reach. While they yet draw breath their children need to be seen reaching for that same nothing.”

“They would not dare exclude you from the second signing,” she said, the target of her fury now unclear, blazing in all directions, threatening the scraps they presently hid behind. “They’d only be hurting their own chances.”

“Am I the one overestimating their reason?” he said like a blast of blizzard air. “If we are wed they very well could punish me by revoking that privilege, and all my others. I might not even be allowed to scrape out tin horse hooves. And while I would happily, euphorically, debase myself into the filthiest degenerate, clothed only in rags held only in place by caked grime, to be your husband… it would be evil in its selfishness.

Without me there no one can attach the Carve-Out. We’ve all discussed it, and every last one of us has voiced fears Bonfire. You as well, lover of any world. If they succeed in going back, not just to the place of the first signing but also the time, all of us will be erased. The form may be confusing, but our fears are instinctive and thus do not lie. This will kill us, my love.

Everyone we’ve grown with will die. Blueberry, Pony, Unmarked, Crow, Rush, all dead because I signed what we wrote for ourselves instead of what the Founders wrote.”

“I do not shy away from the life I am to live because of the power of evil,” she said resolutely, both of them recognizing her miraculous control of her anger. It wasn’t quite over yet, and this was already the most brutal disagreement of their two year courtship. Each was very hurt, and their hearts didn’t understand how they had been sharing breath just moments before. “Every time you cringe from the shadows you give them room to grow.”

“I’ll be sure to tell the others, as we’re marched by Death into a black portal, that oblivion is worth it, as long as I get to keep my principles. That skeletal robed figure will appreciate my decision on their behalf.”

“Muster Hart. Am I hearing you refuse me? You will not sign this coil of your own loving words, which I have already done, and you will not present them to me in the ring today?”

“Yes, I’m refusing to murder our friends this afternoon, this evening, tonight, and on all other days.”

“So we have no future!?” she nearly exploded. The argument could not carry on, or the entire story of the ring would be public anyway. “Know this then. If you will not tell the other girls that there are no other girls, then I do not know if there are no other boys.” Once she had the coil back in the ring she started to storm off, all the angrier he did not reach out to stall her. “There might be a worm out in the woods somewhere with more backbone!”

Eventually, when Muster found his feet again, he would make his way to the anatimal competition, but Blueberry was already there, and Wagner already ahead of her. Several temporary structures had been erected in the pastures outside the lab, mostly pens to keep the contestants from wandering away. Some anatimals were so adept at burrowing that if you dropped them they might be out of sight the moment they hit the ground, so half the pens were raised onto floorboards, requiring anyone cutting across rather than walking through to constantly step up and down.

No sooner had Kidd entered the checkerboard than Wagner slithered down the side of her body under her clothes and departed between the nearest slats. Unless there were secret meetings no human was aware of, this was the largest annual gathering of anatimals of all different sorts, which led Kidd to assume that her pet left in order to socialize. Typically it would not leave her side for anything, and without her tail her bicep felt disconcertingly naked.

“Don’t you go stealing the silver,” she warned Wagner’s vanishing tip. “I don’t want an encore of last year.”

Founder Hewes must still have been hobnobbing on horseback, so Blueberry went in search of her best friend, excluding dear Mustard, in all of Anchor. She would no doubt be on the premises somewhere, wrangling several of her own pets, at least one of which would be receiving a ribbon no matter how inexpertly Hewes judged. The man could even spin in a circle with his eyes closed, pointing in a random direction, and still pick one of hers, so numerous and large were the anatimals in her care.

On the way Kidd was almost overwhelmed by a forest of halved, quartered, and nearly powdered animals. Some of the stalls were decorated with antlers, but others grew there naturally, impossible to tell apart. The air was thick with wafting frog and toad throats as well as their peeping and croaking songs.

Teeth peeked out of the soil and disappeared back down their burrows. A skunk tail, thankfully divorced from its scent glands, slithered across her path, posturing when she got too close anyway. Why exactly the anatimals were forced along in the accidental independence from Earth was unknown, but Kidd assumed it was because of a full animal’s capacity: somewhere between property and being.

The Founders undoubtedly owned livestock, pets, and the game on any property that was legally theirs, but where objects, if they came along at all, came in their entirety, no entire animals did so. They were alive, and so not fully property, but at the same time could not defend themselves in script, assert identity with signature. The world’s compromise was a half-measure, making them measure half, and often much less than that.

Kindred spirits us, she thought. With none claiming her she too was missing some crucial element of life: the thread connecting her back to everything else. She was stranded on a separate gulf, the rest of her sailing in a mist somewhere, but she still had to make due when and where she was.

As strongly as she felt united with the various anatimals, it didn’t keep her from admitting that she wasn’t the most skilled in their care and training. That honor went to the friend she was about to visit: Honey Whipple. Founder daughter, Lenape daughter, half-sister to junior committee member Sassafras, Honey was but sixteen years of age, and made herself both nuisance and asset in her anatimal obsession, it and her age having kept her from active military service as of yet.

Wagner and Kidd were close to inseparable, the tail treating her like the rest of the dog it had lost in the transition, but that bond did not extend to any of the other anatimals. They were friendly to her, and she in kind, but Honey had a way with them all her own, so much so that those owned by her almost always grew to an inordinate, sometimes unsettling, size. Whatever her secret technique, she refused to share it with any Founder or journal, though she undoubtedly continued to hone it, as the limits of anatimal size were pushed at the fair every year, for which she had a pile of ribbons she could sleep on as proof.

Blueberry found her in the most closed-off but spacious stall, no doubt built in part by her own two hands to her specifications. It was past a row of massive anatimal udders and their moist, glabrous, barnyard stink. Big as hogs they were, tied in place by each and every teat to keep them from tackling passersby and smothering them with something like affection but more like excess lactation.

The udders were not Honey’s doing, they belonged to the competition, as she tended to focus more on partial-creatures initially deemed less useful; always she challenged herself by trying to find a use for them or their byproducts, a process of experimentation that usually began with helping them grow.

In Honey Whipple’s stall she found engorged horsefly eyes hanging on cords as jewelry, though their constant buzzing made them quite irritating to wear, half-shell clams working on their hemispherical pearls openly, cat whiskers as long and thick as bootlaces springing, climbing, and coiling everywhere, and of course the girl herself perched on a stool, polishing a rattlesnake rattle larger than any corncob as it emitted a kind of clicking purr.

“Just the scoundrel I wanted to see,” the younger girl said upon looking up and seeing Blueberry enter. “I’ve got something for you to sign.” Setting aside the buffing rag, she grabbed her journal and expertly opened it to a dog-eared page with her thumb.

“You know I only sign at night when I have more time to think things over.” Read them five times, just to make sure the first four aren’t my eyes lying to me.

“Yes, but I think this is urgent. Take a look.” Honey was well aware of her difficulties with reading, especially when put on the spot, but she did not intend for Blueberry to do so when she held out the open page for her. Without reading Kidd could still easily recognize an individual’s handwriting, and the entry, with its long-necked and tailed letters, was clearly in the hand of Unmarked Rodney.

She also understood it was unlikely he had written it directly into Honey’s journal. The young had mastered many inks in building their correspondence network, and one mixing cobalt and purple was capable of remotely casting an entry from one page to a predetermined distant one. Most of them opened their journals each night to find new messages sent from multiple people. Blueberry’s signature on whatever document Rodney needed authorized could also be given at a distance.

“What does it say?” Kidd asked.

“He needs someone to take custody of the unmarked rod, says he’s concerned his quarters might be searched soon. We all agreed he should make the encapsulation device, so anyone can hide that, but the rod was his own doing. He thinks you’ll be understanding enough to hold onto it for him. Are you?”

“It’s like he’s trying to give me the gift of a few severed fingers,” she said with a shake of her head. Honey giggled, her infectious energy nearly sparkling in her numerous freckles. Unlike Sassafras her appearance took more from her white father, and there was little doubt her ability to pass as one of them added to the privilege she was afforded when requesting supplies for her anatimals, or when tolerating their blundering about in the public square.

Some effort had been made to encourage Muster to court her despite many other girls being closer to him in age. Only the Founders’ broad disinterest in a third human generation of Pursuitia spared them being locked in together each night.

If Blueberry were to be locked in a small room with the unmarked rod, that too could be a treacherous affair. Like his mentor Franklin, Rodney had an undying itch to tinker, and when he gathered supplies to prototype something he, reliably, would think of some other use for all the leftover scraps he might not have needed to requisition in the first place.

Such a process, running through his current project related to the Carve-out, had produced the item now called the unmarked rod. Blueberry hadn’t seen it in a while, so its appearance had likely changed some with modification, but the base was always the same: a rectangular beam of wood a touch longer than her forearm.

On it would be a smattering of tightly sealed drawers, many without metal knobs to open them. Between their seams would be random extrusions seemingly placed without rhyme, reason, or caution: springs, bars, grates, handles, perhaps a nozzle or two, and a giant pen nib wasn’t out of the question.

Rodney had assured his peers that drafting was involved in its construction, and was solely responsible for its many unusual functions, requiring as it did not a single zap of electricity. Whatever decrees or notices powered it were not visible, rolled up and stored inside the sealed drawers, most never to be opened again.

The internal papers were signed by the Master of Sciences, unaware of what it was he had put his name too. Some of the young had signed it, similarly unaware, but dissimilarly aware of their unawareness. That was the point, according to Mauler of Sciences Rodney.

It was his hope that the unmarked rod could eventually be perfected, for use as a weapon against the Bickyplots in melee engagements. When bloody conflict occurred, the range too close for drafting, then too close for discharge of ball and bolt, those of Pilgrim’s Anchor had to be very careful not to leave their weapons behind for the Bickyplots to scavenge and study.

Bickering Hall was not likely to reproduce Franklin’s efforts, but they were keen on sabotage. Every abandoned piece of equipment was something they could attach an infernally drafted notice too, interfering in the production and use of all its siblings in unpredictable but certainly disastrous ways.

They wouldn’t dare try such a thing on the unmarked rod. Its features were so chaotic as to make it extraordinarily difficult to understand, and by extension, perilous to toy with. Rodney insisted that much of what he wrote within he purposefully forgot, and phrased poorly, and placed with muddled inadvisable inks.

It worked, if the goal was to make something that no one could handle effectively. The young man’s hands were already heavily scarred from it, for sometimes it snapped closed from unexpected angles like an animal trap, and never the same angle twice. Occasionally there was fire, and not necessarily at a point of contact.

If the unmarked rod was a weapon, it was to be used against whatever party was currently in possession of it, and he wanted Kidd to possess it for him. He might kill me, but he’s not trying to. The way he sees it there’s nobody else who would even approach the risk. If I’m caught with it I could be banished from town entirely, but I could survive on my own.

Would they kick me out? They have few better soldiers in a real skirmish. And one of them is my father. A jewel of affection, hidden ashen in the cinders of their industry, may still exist whether or not he shows it. One of them might want to keep me.

“I don’t think I can take it, at least not this way,” Blueberry told Honey, pushing away the thought that she was as dangerous to claim as the rod itself. “If it’s urgent he’s using drafting to move it, which means as soon as I sign it appears in my quarters.”

“And?” Honey said, blowing a frog throat away from her face. She looked over her shoulder, listening for something on the wind.

“And I don’t have any quarters,” Kidd reminded. “It might pop up anywhere that I’ve slept, which is the entire town. It could appear in the belfry.”

“If you- really? How did you get up there?”

“It’s a long story, for another time, don’t you think?”

“Yes, and that time is tonight. I need something to read this evening, so send it to my journal.” Honey knew how long it would take for her to do that, so she must have really wanted the details. Kidd could hardly blame her; few people were allowed close enough to the Liberty Bell to touch it. Back on Earth it had been recast due to flaws, spurring much worrying it could split with each toll and leave them voiceless and defenseless against the Bickyplots.

“As for the rod, Unmarked knows how to draft. He won’t have left that to chance. If it’s meant to come into your possession then it won’t go anywhere you won’t receive it.”

“Which could be with a Founder standing right next to me!”

“Are you signing or am I telling him he’s on his own?” Kidd hissed more than the nearby rattlesnake anatimal had ever been able to. Who else will do this? Nobody. If I don’t do it he gets caught with it, loses privileges, and suddenly the whole Carve-Out is in danger. I’m not permitted to write it but I can get maimed on the road to it. Still, nothing else looks more like my purpose at the moment.

Blueberry took the journal and a provided quill, which was actually a quail anatimal, but it was even-tempered enough to remain still in her hand.

Blueberry Kidd, at your service

“No need to make him feel guilty for asking for help,” Honey said when she took back her journal and glanced at what she’d written. “If I needed to hide Emperor I would come to you in much the same way.”

“Emperor has no means of killing me,” Kidd countered.

“Oh yes it does.” Honey rose from her stool and went to the back wall, recognizable as a pair of double doors only when she opened a latch made from antlers that were no longer alive enough to grow on the wood. “It’s now easily big enough to smother you.”

“Speaking of the porker, where is it? You must’ve entered it for the competition.”

“Of course. I hear it coming just now,” Honey chirped, beaming as she threw open the doors to the daylight, only for it to immediately be blocked again by the flapping of something larger than any Franklin kite coming in for its landing. Honey was the perch; she threw out her arms just as she had the doors to catch the anatimal with the biggest disparity between its starting size and its current mammoth incarnation.

She called it Emperor, and it was a rather common type of anatimal: the pig-ear butterfly. Formed from two pig ears joined, their thick leathery bodies didn’t initially seem capable of flight, and at first they weren’t, but after much practice their flopping did eventually occur mostly airborne.

Perhaps in indication that it had grown again since the start of the fair, Emperor’s fleshy wingtips brushed against the walls as it settled onto its master, who had to fall back onto her stool to support it.

“Honey? Are you being smothered?” Blueberry asked, craning her neck around but seeing only more pig’s ear.

“With affection,” was her muffled answer. “Help me get them outside; it’s soon to begin!” Chaperoning Emperor could’ve been a three person job and still gone awkwardly, so by the time they got it out into the open and resting on a custom post, like a large wooden music stand, and scooped up the rest of Honey’s smaller more decorative efforts and placed them in the appropriate enclosures, Judge Hewes was pulling up on Happystance with much of Pilgrim’s Anchor behind him.

Upon making herself scarce, blending in with the onlookers, Kidd resumed the now trivial task of spying on Hewes, but was none the closer to understanding why he had been selected as judge. If it could be figured out everyone would do so in the course of him attempting the duty. All these things we have to do because our own fathers won’t speak with us. And they listen even less. If it’s not an echo they can’t hear it.

A few things surrounding the man did stand out as unusual. Honey’s father William appeared and stood beside her, arm on her shoulder. Such plain pride was uncharacteristic of the man, so much so that Honey kept absentmindedly trying to shake his hand off, her muscle memory telling her it was another stubborn pig-ear butterfly of a more typical size.

In addition the crowd for the anatimal ribbon ceremony was the largest she’d ever seen it. Some rumor or announcement must have happened between her decision to visit Honey and now, but there wasn’t time to ask anyone, as it was underway.

Many fine efforts were shown off, with the dense throngs of people having more difficulty than usual in bending out of the way of errant anatimals. Training them was nearly impossible most of the time, with successes being more like regular exercise, giving these isolated muscles the simplest form of memory. Being currently in show was no deterrent to misbehavior, and it was the audience’s responsibility if they were splashed with a squirt of milk when an udder big enough to ride lolloped in their direction.

Red ribbons of recognition, the lowest honor, went to a pair of chipmunk cheeks that could store and delivery jewelry reliably, a crow bill affixed to a wristband that would caw accurately only on the daylight hour, and an overgrown snapping turtle’s foot which had successfully reoriented onto its side fully, allowing it to use the webbing between its toes as a fish’s back fin for graceful swimming.

Third place was a bronze medal and ribbon, which went to Honey and her overgrown mantis claw which functioned as a more effective nutcracker than any one of metal in the whole settlement. She received her reward with aplomb, but her father took it and set it aside, laughing over her attempts to explain technique until they moved along to silver.

Second place was given to a ball of sheep’s flesh no bigger than a fist, but the wool it produced made it altogether the size of a hay bale. Kidd had seen it around earlier that year, always partly shorn to help measure its rate of growth. It wouldn’t have surprised her to learn it was supplying almost five percent of Anchor’s wool all by its lonesome. And that’s only silver? If Emperor has won, is it on size alone? Where’s its practical use? I know Hewes wouldn’t hand the gold over on scientific merit.

“And finally,” Hewes announced, louder than all the other prizes, “this year’s golden medal and ribbon go to… Honey Whipple and her astonishing pig-ear butterfly known as Emperor!” There was applause, but William Whipple was bowing before the first clap, pushing his daughter forward in the midst of it as if he’d trained Honey to train the anatimals and had won the award by proxy, like putting a beetle’s feet in paint, placing it on the canvas, and selling the result.

“A full demonstration!” he boomed while many of the Founders bled to the front of the crowd, condensation on a glass. They had thirsty looks in their eyes, and it was not the result of all the fried cornbread practically infused into the air.

Her father’s odd showmanship at least allowed Honey to finally assert herself, moving into the open and pulling out a whistle from under her shirt. Its piercing note was too high for adults to hear, so only the young winced, and only Emperor responded by flailing once and taking flight.

Ungainly as an albatross, its initial glide served only to bring it to Honey’s raised hands. From there she ran straight, granting it additional speed and thus allowing much greater height when it flapped again. After that it was nearly as graceful as a drunken stork, successfully encircling several Franklin kites, albeit at wide berth.

When its shadow passed over the crowd Blueberry spied a tail on it. Get down here! Perhaps in response to the thought, Wagner dropped off Emperor’s lobed back and fell. Kidd threw up her arm straight as a lightning rod, catching an already spiraling Wagner. As soon as the anatimal disappeared down her sleeve she pulled her arm back, but the damage was done, as she felt the musket ball holes of angry Founder stares all over her body.

The whistle they couldn’t hear blew again, making Emperor flap, and several hats were lost. She did that to distract them. Kind, but it doesn’t matter. Their hatred never leaves me. I can withstand it all. The worse it is, the older and weaker they are. When they’re all buried I’ll dig them up and post notices on every breast, demanding my father come forward. With no shame left a dead hand will be thrown up and then I will know they fought me for no reason.

After a truly impressive flight time, Emperor came in for a landing on Honey’s arms again, and she managed to catch it without fully tipping over and return it to its stand to rest. To the surprise of everyone who didn’t draft within Independence Hall, Honey was then pushed into the background by several Founders marching in a line: Joseph Hewes, William Whipple, Edward Rutledge, John Adams, and his second cousin Samuel Adams. Samuel quelled their whispers with a hand, addressed them.

“I’m sure you all recognize the attention garnered by this particular contest this year, and we are here to explain that in full. We would have done so earlier, but we needed confirmation of one key element, which has thankfully been provided-“

“By Miss Veronica Whipple,” Founder Whipple ejaculated, clapping for himself via his offspring once again.

“Yes, yes. Miss Whipple has all our thanks, but her creation called Emperor has a difficult task ahead of it. Now that we’ve seen its capabilities, it will need to act as transportation for an elite company of soldiers… who will be making an incursion into Bickering Hall.”

Now there was no quelling the whispers. Even if they could, the resulting thoughts would be powerful enough to be heard racing around the mind. No human had stepped foot inside Bickering Hall since the early days, and all those that had were killed or left similarly empty of spirit. Not once had the building been infiltrated by clandestine mission or outright assault, nor had they been attempted, given the security measures previously deemed insurmountable. Why now? Of course… there’s only so much that has changed. The extra worm harvested, and now Emperor’s flight. Together they must present some kind of opportunity.

“Independence Hall has developed a promising strategy,” Adams continued, “thanks also to our Master of Sciences, who is occupied with its details, so he couldn’t join us here for the unveiling.” Nonsense. If the plan hinges on an anatimal he likely doesn’t even care, for there’s no need for any new electrical devices. Also I witnessed him on the way here, occupied only with breaded chicken feet.

“With a new model of Franklin kite, empowered by special ordinance, we were able to perform a surveillance flight over Bickering Hall and gather information from its residents. Through its returned record we have learned of a party the Bickyplots will be throwing for themselves on November the seventh, for which they have procured a glut of opera worm meat.

The exact nature of the occasion has eluded us, but we do know that all thirteen Bickyplots will be present and distracted at their feast, off their guard and on their appetite. It is the ideal time to strike, to firstly kill as many of them as possible before retreat, and to secondly capture or coerce their signatures on pre-prepared nullifications of their Evidentia land ownership.”

A surveillance kite? If Mr. Franklin advances the scientific front any further there will be no need of us. Though it seems a clockwork soldier has still eluded him. But how are we to get in? Bickering Hall has but three openings, as all the windows are sealed with metal grates. The front doors are under constant guard and heavily posted with drafting. The back bay is locked and strange monsters have been seen lurking there. That leaves only…

“The sluice will be our point of entry,” Adams said with a quivering lip. He could barely admit it without gagging. “We’ve considered it before, but always discarded it thanks to the constant presence of fluid that would reveal our footfalls to the Silhouettes, who would then raise the alarm and have one of their masters present with a pitchfork in moments, ready to poke us back to the ground.

That is where our magnificent Emperor makes its entrance.” He turned to make sure the anatimal was still resting upon its stand, was relieved to see it so. “One at a time, our soldiers will be carried from the bottom of the sluice to the top by pig-ear wing, circumventing the fluid entirely, and giving no warning. From there they will infiltrate, storm the dining room armed in the extreme, and assault the Bickyplot collective.”

Finally, many thought as one. Despite every faction’s differing plan for a future, all humans were united against the Bickyplot scourge, for no drastic action could be taken without somehow neutralizing their magical-legal grip on Pursuitia. None could leave without their permission, and none could draft to its fullest potential.

This new plan seemed almost too simple, like it could not justify waiting over two decades for its arrival. If all it took was one creature large enough to fly a man a short distance, why could they not have drafted a solution prior? The frustrating factor was always in what had been laid out before, before they arrived, before they knew, before they had a chance.

So firm was the Bickyplots’ grasp on their own lands that independently drafted magics lost effectiveness over their borders, or ceased to work entirely, or combusted violently. An anatimal was no such magic however, subject only to the legal constraints of other animals and animal-like constructs.

The Silhouettes, with their large circular eyes, not unlike the opera worms, presented initially as most observant, but the reality was that their vision bore some quirk of intent-sight that was focused on the peaceful unambitious intent of their own kind, and not that which dwelt in man.

To the natives, human beings and anatimals were entirely invisible, as was everything on their immediate person like clothing and weaponry. The Bickyplots had been this way too, upon their own meteoric arrival in Wormland, but as they were in need of more effective servants they duped the Silhouettes into signing over many changes, including the ability to visually perceive their masters.

Beginning on the back foot, it would’ve been folly for mankind to do the same, so to this day they remained undetectable, allowing them great stealth in regard to the Silhouettes, who were ineffective guards in the first place given their placid and timid souls. However, they were reasonably skilled at alerting their masters, with panic spreading in their ranks quickly, and various drafted promises made it impossible for them to disobey.

A Silhouette could not see a man, nor his boot, but they could see the print he left in mud, or as would be the case with the sluice, vomitus. Originating in a third floor window, the only one not barred, the sluice was a flat metal chute on which was frequently dumped large amounts of matter expelled from Bickyplot mouths, and occasionally one of their orifices too horrific and individual to ever be labeled.

In the long list of repulsive aspects to Bickyplot anatomy and life cycle, their diet was chief among those known. Subsisting entirely on rotten and putrid matter, a Bickyplot would not be able to ingest food upon immediately acquiring it, but have to age it in the foulest of conditions most antithetical to its composure. So it was that a starving Bickyplot could, theoretically, come across an entire opera worm roasting over an open flame, and keep down not one bite, and die on the spot waiting for it to putrefy.

This knowledge initially vexed the humans, after it disgusted them. If the Bickyplots were so eager to devour all manner of rot and refuse, why were they so prone to vomiting their meals back up? So prone to it that they had a dedicated exit from their fortress meant just to process the expulsions in some fashion?

A simple answer was missed, for no Founder could voice the possibility without doubling over at the thought of it: to consume it again of course. Rot with the added spice of gastric acid was just the previous meal enhanced. Furthermore, its slow tumble down the sluice caught some impurities, like a filter, and made what dripped into the buckets at the bottom all the more sublime when it was drizzled on newer meals as syrup or dressing.

Silhouette guards were always posted atop it, and aiding those who dumped the vomitus, for while they could not see any trespassing humans they could see the splashes that would inevitably be created should they ever try to ascend the sluice. But not anymore. Not if Emperor could fly them straight over and to the ledge, where they could then pass unseen by all of the Bickyplots’ unwitting servants.

“And this is how we of Pilgrim’s Anchor will, for the first time, declare a true victory against our enemy!” Genuine applause and cheering bolstered the Founders, whose chests swelled nearly to the point of tipping over. Blueberry hopped within the crowd, as enthused as the others over the potential of the plan, but mostly to see past the waving arm reeds to the faces of her fellows.

Several glimpses were caught, of Honey, Muster, Rush, and others, who all seemed as jubilant as the rest of the town. This was unity, an experience so rare for the young that some of them were already shedding tears, despite knowing they would be the ones to undertake this mission; even among the Lenape and black adults who were spry enough to fight they were not permitted to train with the military technology owned by the Founders.

Blueberry was so caught in it herself that she almost missed the completion of her mission. The speech had, anticlimactically, revealed a somewhat mundane reason for Hewes’s judgeship: his mercantile experience. In excess of twenty years it had been sine he last saw a ship make port or a supply wagon arrive, but there were none with a better memory of such things than him. Today he had been judging Emperor in motion to guess at whether or not it could be made to adequately carry a man. He has deemed it a worthy cargo vessel, and we the cargo.

“Everyone, please! Gentlemen!” Something cut through the crowd toward the Founders, and only one thing in Pilgrim’s Anchor had the power to do so: another tin horse. Atop it rode their brother in governance Benjamin Harrison, aged into his seventies but often astride a tin horse due more to his corpulence. Kidd recognized his anxious feet as a flare of gout and his steed as the one named Fiddlegreen, after the impure oxidized stripes down its mane.

“Mr. Harrison, to what do we owe the interruption?” an Adams asked.

“A bigger interruption!” the old man spluttered, ankles flicking in the air like he walked on needles. “A Bickyplot is at the gates!” The field of eyes around him blinked, brows furrowed into the scrambled footsteps of frantic gophers. “And he’s requesting entrance! Says he’s got an invitation to be delivered to a Founder only.”

“Which is it?” a woman in the crowd asked before any Founder could adequately compose himself.

“Lord Spywulph,” Harrison answered her. Spywulph. Those crafty blighters. The only one we’d ever consider letting in. But why send him into our very heart? We could capture him, extract a signature, kill him, anything! No, they wouldn’t risk it. He has something on him that would neutralize our home advantage. Just as we’re planning to infiltrate them they come to us. Have they gleaned our plan already?

Similar thoughts occurred in all of them. A Bickyplot come calling was just as unprecedented as a tour in Bickering Hall. What was to be done? If their first olive branch, rotted as it may be, in years was immediately turned down, would that not make them extremely suspicious?

“Has Jefferson been informed?” Founder Whipple asked, suddenly ready to disappear from the public eye.

“The Committee of Five, sans you sir,” he acknowledged John Adams, “has already advised we allow entry. As everyone is gathered here, Lord Spywulph faces the greatest opposition precisely on this spot. One of you is asked to receive him and his invitation.”

“I will do it,” Samuel Adams offered, after being given a nod from his cousin. “Bring him here.”

“Veronica dear, off with you and Emperor, quickly!” Whipple ordered Honey. Clearly it was best their foe not witness the crux of their plan. Rushing to the stand, she took the pig-ear butterfly onto her hunched back, sprinted, and then held two cartilaginous folds on its underside. Together they took off, demonstrating the validity of the plan. Kidd watched her friend hang with tucked legs and glide, all the way into the clustered stalls where Emperor was quickly hidden behind a boarded wall.

Rather than take his horse all the way back to the outer gates, Mr. Harrison brought out a leather envelope with backing board, flipped it open, and accessed both quill and ink pot built into Fiddlegreen’s saddle. With them he scratched a message rapidly and signed it, its drafting magic sending it off to some similar document in possession of the outer guard. They have to open the doors to a Bickyplot. I don’t envy what they must be feeling.

Minutes later, tensions only heightened, the crowd parted prematurely, in a way they hadn’t cared to do for Harrison’s tin horse. More space was given up to the approaching threat than Emperor had given to the hovering Franklin kites. The berth they tried to grant was what the clangorous terrible steps demanded.

Clomp of wood. Warble of plate metal. Snore of saw. Scowl of tightened rope. All these noises together marked the Bickyplot’s equivalent to the tin horse, a four-legged golem empowered by drafting to a trudging near-life and occasionally a speeding gallop so haphazard that it could shake itself to pieces, from which a Bickyplot might dismount straight into a terrible run of their own.

On uneven and misshapen feet came a hulking mound of dry refuse: all the waste from carpentry, landscaping, metalwork, ceramics, and glassblowing that the Bickyplots could find no better use for. A hanging velum notice on its backside was covered in their wild handwriting, declaring many of the same things that were made true on the side of a tin horse.

Blueberry made no attempt to read it, but she would be able to, despite its alien lettering and their nonsensical orientations in relation to each other. Bickyplots wrote out from the corners, toward the center, the words overlapping in a hopeless dark void-tumult on every document’s center.

Only one piece of written legislation in Independence Hall bore their chaotic markings, and it was the mutual agreement that made their languages intelligible to each other through the power of inked accord. Man first understood Bickyplot, then how much harm they intended. Bickyplot first understood man, and then how all of them were on their back foot. That signing set the stage for their simmering twenty year war.

The steed was called a shackleram, and there was no specific name Kidd had for the one shuddering its way toward the line of Founders, its firewood head and bent nail eyes buzzing on and off like a forgetful wasp. Unlike tin horses, the much more massive shacklerams were not kept maintained; any time a piece was worn away or fell off a new scrap of garbage was slapped on and affixed with knot or hammer. Sometimes she recognized a body or a leg, but she’d never seen the same exact one twice.

Much more familiar, that familiarity seeded with seeping dread that turned sweat sharp and cold, was the towering fiend that rode it, dressed malformed head to ogre toe in black leather stripped from unknown monstrosity. Hunter’s coat. Silver buckles. Boots twisted all the way up to the knee.

Off his shackleram the Bickyplot would still stand thirteen feet high at the tips of his wet displaced tongues. That was how those at the fair got to see him, for when he slapped the neck of his mount it bent one knee and then partly collapsed, allowing him to swing a leg over, slide off, and stand before them all.

Long riding gloves also obscured his hands and forearms, so all that was revealed of his flesh was his head, but that was the most unique aspect of any Bickyplot. There was no uniformity to the heads of their kind; each was an assemblage of the natural and artificial devilishly interwoven. United only were they in their mysterious origin. No mother could have birthed them, no kind god shaped them of clay. No clay they were made from could have ever experienced the warmth of a hand. Perhaps the chill of a claw.

The head of Questinking Spywulph took the vague shape of a horseshoe, with each prong resembling a horse’s black head facing away from its twin, eyeless but not mouthless. Always did his poles gnash their chalk teeth, gnaw on bony bridle and lash pink tongues like confused worms that had found the threshold of the corpse in which they’d been born. In the empty space between these spreading equine heads was a taut spiderweb of gut string, and sat in the web’s center was a cyclopean eye, its pupil an irregular patch of pond scum green growing on over-polished scratched silver sclera.

It took only four long strides for his shadow to overtake the Founders, and when he stilled he placed his long hands on his hips, swiveled this way and that to take in the swarm of fairgoers pooling around him.

“Greetings pilgrims,” the Bickyplot said, voice emanating from both horse mouths even as the teeth continued to gnash and battle bridle of bone. His deep resonating words, out of a throat like a well built from silver bricks, were felt on the exterior of the ear like a lizard’s crawl, on the interior like an invading probe, and in the joints of the skeleton like whatever fear stones might feel when the encroaching waters threaten to weather them away.

This was Lord Questinking Spywulph, the black veil, the raven harbinger, a stern and unyielding darkness upon two limb-snapping boots, and he was far and away the most agreeable of the Bickyplots. As far as Blueberry knew, Spywulph had not taken a human life directly like many of his ilk. Something like dignity hung in the air about him, a statue’s solemnity, as long as one did not focus on the madness moving his muttering mutton-breath maws.

He was a Bickyplot that thought before he spoke, more often than not thinking that he should speak seldom and let the cold between himself and other parties remain. If any Bickyplot were deemed truthful, it is him before us. If he has an invitation then he has an invitation, and the evil within is contained to a later date, transcribed in a hand crueler than his.

Yet he would still deliver it. He was unquestionably devoted to the others of his kind, though what bonds legal or hereditary that bound them were utterly unknown. They shared a manor, and a few tenets of a creed. If the vote of the Bickyplots was to slaughter all of mankind the moment the Liberty Bell rusted out of character, then Questinking would follow through and so too would his saber. All of his kindness would be in killing quickly, burying the heads somewhere where plants might grow out of them.

“Have I come at a poor time?” the Bickyplot growled in his most neutral tone.

“It is our autumn fair; we celebrate the last of our harvests,” Samuel Adams answered. His worming posture made it clear he wished to stand as the tall evil’s equal, but there was just no physical way to accomplish it. “We would offer you some of the foods, but we know they would be as poison to you.”

“I’ll help myself on the way out and keep it. Poison now, treat later.” His single eye roamed across the field, sparking concerns that he’d gained entrance only to gather information about their town’s structures and vulnerabilities. Those more levelheaded recalled that the Bickyplots had penetrated that far once before, on the first day the Liberty Bell was struck and its power against them realized. Spywulph already knew the grounds, but then, what was that roaming eye searching for? I wonder if he can see through the cracks in the boards. If he can spot Emperor’s hide from here can he tell what it is? If they’re that intelligent there’s no hope for us.

“I’m told you have some sort of… invitation for us?” Samuel inquired, bracing himself for a blunderbuss blast. Questinking reached a glove into his coat, extracting a black envelope large as any tome to a human, sealed with a glob of fool’s gold wax either hacked up by a Bickyplot or scooped out of one. Their seal was impressed into it: mushrooms growing from the skin atop a full cauldron in the shape of an owl-eyed Silhouette skull. Adams took it and suffered no injury for it.

“Please open it,” Spywulph requested. “I may have to answer a question or two before I depart.” Careful not to touch the wax, which proved difficult with the amount of force required to break it, Adams cracked the envelope open and produced a self-unfolding page. He could’ve used it as a cape. Upon it was the Bickyplot writing, like four pillars descending into a shaft, but thanks to the long-drafted agreement his mind deciphered it and he read it aloud to all gathered as those on the fringes rapidly copied it into journals that transmitted it to the furthest corners of Pilgrim’s Anchor. A few of the most cloistered Founders in Independence Hall watched, mouths agape, as it appeared line by line.

We Cordially Invite You!

On the evening of November the seventh Bickering Hall will be feasting in celebration of Mister Licketysplit Godswallop’s much-awaited string-snapping. On this joyous occasion we have agreed it prudent to invite our mortal enemies the humans of Earth to join in, so that they might understand the brilliance of our illuminating culture.

Appropriate food will be provided, and we require one guest only, who must be an original Founder so that his report on return will be taken by the other humans without any doubt as to its veracity!

Dress in your best, and be prepared for original musical compositions, performance of comedy, and, of course, intense political discussion.

We promise no harm will come to him who joins us. He will be returned alive and in possession of all his faculties, in addition to the new ones his cultural enrichment will provide.

Do sign the guest’s name and return this to us post haste, so that we might prepare a plate.

Sincerely we sin and sign,

Blacknib Bileby             Incontible Bludgehaven             Oolbook Dudgewhistle

Impestle Hissmidge             Pumpwine Cult-on-Sea             Questinking Spywulph

Hamishand Glazemouth             Eggnonce Chattelpool             Voluptogast Devalming

Licketysplit Godswallop             Xylofont Phanny-upon-Twone             Middlebitch Flaywood

Cadavawing Wighthall

“A… string-snapping?” the Founder holding the invitation asked what could soon be his gracious host. “What does that mean?” Spywulph mulled over how best to answer, a foggy sigh pouring out of his twin mouths and their nostrils with a sound more like a true horse than anything the tin ones could produce.

“It is a sign of Licketysplit’s… maturing. He has advanced to the next stage of his life. This does not happen often. He is the first one in Wormland to do so, and we have decided it is a major event.” There was quiet as Adams looked back and forth between the Bickyplot’s lone eye and the dark splotch at the center of the paper. “You do not have to answer in my presence.”

Spywulph turned and strode back to his shackleram, its structure having loosened and collapsed at a steady rate since his departure. Once his lanky legs straddled it again, all the scattered pieces rolled backward, fell up, and found positions near their original. It began to trot away, though the word ‘trot’ did not do justice to the discomfort it caused the ear.

“Attach your response and it will return on its own,” Spywulph said, his unwieldy head unable to turn enough to speak over his shoulder. “Now what treat do I want two months from right now?” Adams was about to ask what the response needed to be attached to, but the shackleram answered that question by splitting in two. The front half, and its two legs, continued on with its master, while the back half came to a stop, drooling some debris at the point of separation, the curl of its wide ordinance-tail bouncing.

In the following days it would stand dormant, creaking only in the wind, awaiting the nail that would attach their answer to its flank.

Beware the Bickyplots!

An independently produced leaflet series created and distributed with absolutely no thanks given to the white folks of Independence Hall

And done so by

The Mad Letterman

Anonymity alone allows me to operate. If a single Flounder learns there’s a black man out there with the quickest of brains, who learned his letters and everyone else’s with nothing but glances when the masters weren’t alooking, and before any of us even knew we would need ’em so much mind you, I will be made to stop, made wounded, made to sit in a grave and think about what I’ve done.

I’ve always had funny ideas and now I get to write about ’em. All you youngsters get to read ’em because my madness that motivates me to learn with the best of ’em also tells me where to stuff these so you’ll be finding ’em. My letters’ll jump out and scare you, but only mild like, instructive, not fooling.

A little fright will help prepare you for a big one. And me and my letters’ve got big ones in mind. That is the bigness of the Bickyplots. Heed these startling pages, and beware the Bickyplots! To a man!

Beware Hamishand Glazemouth! The candleburning cook! The pastry chef who’s alayering with rot, acharring with hellfire, and adusting with the oldest jar of dandruff on his shelf! Know him by his head: the fattest ham you ever did see, one bony eye centered in its flat pink face, with sputtering butter candles erupting and flaming and aflowing in a line along the middle seam of his scalp.

This one is the cook, master of larder and pantry. Remember that each Bickyplot has a role, a role that says where they might be, so if you find yourselves in those places you know exactly what to beware!

Silhouettes work under him, but he’s in the kitchen ten times a day. Bickyplots take that many meals, if you count their sicking out the window that he has to supervise. The flames upon his head are small, but they keep the stink of him at bay so that he smells more of brined pork than decay.

Always he advocates for our deaths, then waits impatiently for our putrefaction so we might be spread on toast. He’s angry he hasn’t fully figured out the menu of man, so don’t count on him to consider anything else.

Beware Middlebitch Flaywood! The howling huntress! The relentless rider whose shackleram is aridden to rubble in every chase! Know her by her head: a velvet mace of four yawning snapping hound heads fused from neck to forehead and facing the cardinals. The eyes stand alone in the wrong place, between the mouths that stand open with unnaturally fleshy and tendril-bearing gums and inner cheeks colored in the pinks, greens, and purples of poisonous tropical plants.

She hunts game, going far afield to do so. But two Bickyplots will often patrol alone; Spywulph you may survive, Flaywood you will not. Across her back she carries a crossbow, and its bolts would be used by us to make iron gates.

Hatred she has for us, a coursing river of it. To her we are not good game, scheming instead of running, shooting back when only the hunter should shoot, not their quarry. If you strike her, especially by ball and bolt, she will pursue you individually, disregarding all else. Do it with a friend so you can die together.

Beware Blacknib Bileby! The ink spiller! The beak scraper who asets himself and his many appendages to endless drafting! Know him by his head: a crystal bowl mostly enclosed and filled with watery ink, an ink which hides the devilfish stuffed inside, its fishy eyes seen only when pressed against the crystal, while the beak pierces beneath and gabs the way the parrots do. Tentacles clad in suction cups, tipped in beaky nibs, hang from the bowl like palm fronds, do most of the work while the hands sit idly by.

He is both ink warlock and draftsman. All are likely capable of the skill, but Bileby ends up responsible almost always. His orders, in his slithering hand, upon his hide and sawdust pages, have ownership of Wormland. Keep us out of their business. Put ’em in ours. Slap the shacklerams so they go. Chain the poor silly Silhouettes.

Locked away in his chambers, stirring and scribbling, we see him on the rare. He oppresses us from afar, aflattening our lives like flowers in a book. Unlike the Mad Letterman, he doesn’t care to help anyone with his talents.

Beware Incontible Bludgehaven! The impounder! The muzzled comrade of swallowing cages! Know him by his head: a dull metallic cube like a safe, complete with door. When it opens, in fits of rage, an eyeless bulldog emerges, only from the waist forward, gray and slavering and toothy, never succeeding in pulling its bulk loose.

On occasion he is the jailer, but we’ve managed to deprive him of prisoners for years. I assume he has to lock up Silhouettes for his laughs, and that they don’t give him much in response. Should a Bickyplot ever betray their own it would be his job to restrain ’em, bring ’em to whatever black pit they have justice festering in. Also he stands guard, and walks the perimeter of Bickering Hall day and night, his inner mongrel grumbling about having nothing but the occasional piece of our contraband to lock away.

He won’t kill you. The cage will. And there is no better bridge between freedom and cage than Bludgehaven.

Beware Impestle Hissmidge! The sopping inspiration seeker! The muse murderer! The reason for whatever ghastly celebrations make Bickyplots clap their hands and stomp their feet! know her by her head: a wilting paintbrush dripping many colors, the fibers of which hide a cluster of eyes.

Artist, by their standards. Decorator. Event planner. Social hostess. Master of ceremonies. Hissmidge is known to us by her hissyfits! If every detail is not perfect she astorms about, breaking the rest of the details to match. Her scream can practically kill you while it’s shattering all the crystal.

She knows no reason, and panics when confronted. At her size and strength that panic is like a dragon caught on a fishhook, and while I can’t tell you whose bones as it might reveal their affiliation with mad mad me, I can assure you her flailing has smashed many a bone to powder.

Beware Cadavawing Wighthall! The minded manor without manners! He who builds on plots and plots in builds while his designs redecorate his spirit! Know him by his head: a bony mansion in miniature, a doll house of their very own Bickering Hall papered in skin with eyes behind square windows and tongue carpet rolled out the front door. Planned expansions, wings of raw meat, are tacked to each side and rearrange constantly as he mulls his intentions for agrowing Bickering Hall.

Architect. Carpenter, metalworker, craftsman. It was Silhouette labor and drafted spells that built the hall, but everything’s place came from him. Who knows what Silhouette villages really look like; he’s redesigned ’em and torn down everything original. Minimized the number of steps it takes for those poor worms to get to their masters.

Whip smart that one. Not as sneaky as the Mad Letterman they say, but he cannot be fooled, no matter the gap in our ways that should make lying all the simpler. The way I see it he built a house where the truth would be comfortable, then opened the door and found it there, and as its guest he learned to separate it from fiction. The Bickyplot snares, physical and not, are his. Cold to us. Very dangerous, if not as frightful in the way he aleaps out.

Beware Pumpwine Cult-on-Sea! The gravedigger and flowerbedder! He lays with the ground carnally, rakes it with his spade teeth! Know him by his head: a slouching ghourd backed by a spade, featureless until the crowning metal teeth descend and rake across rind and flesh, opening a gash which reveals speaking mouth, or poking a hole for staring eye, only for the fruit to seal itself again immediately. These hidden features move about to new positions under the rind.

He is their groundskeeper, gardener, and the one who tends to the shackleram stable. Produce comes from his patches, goes into his jars in his cellars to badly age. The creature lusts for the world of Wormland, has been seen writhing around in its topsoil and mud lewdly and nudely.

All of the implications of this seem foul, but foulest is that when a human steps upon the skin of his woman, anywhere within their gates, he is all rage. Upon your wrong step on his rights he will attack and not cease until you are naught but a drizzle of fertilizer to his greatest love.

Beware Xylofont Phanny-upon Twone! The shrieking shirker! The do-nothing who still does evil! The one who hates our Liberty Bell most of all! Know him by his head: a sparse sapling of tightly wound wire bearing scattered leaves, the borders of which barely contain many eyes and few mouths.

Ostensibly he serves as the musician of their court. He awrites and performs the garbled noise that Bickyplots call songs, but he does so only when pressed. This one is spoiled. Perhaps something like nepotism? That singing voice mostly awhines and amoans. He fights with ’em, but they don’t hurt him back. They should let us handle it, but none of ’em would, not even ol’ Wulphy.

Frustratingly, the only time he lifts his hand is to strike at us, and he won’t sit out of a fight where he might have the pleasure of pulling a man apart like a roast chicken, laughing all the while.

Beware Questinking Spywulph! The chilly shadow who marks the approach of the rest! The best friend to us among ’em, and yet still a terribly treacherous foe! What he fights for I can’t say, only because I don’t know, but he does it through his kin! Know him by his head: black horse-head horse-shoe strung with gut and bearing one green and silver eye.

Scout, explorer, messenger to Silhouette and us. Spywulph carries within him an overcast curiosity that troubles us with hope of accord, but not once have we gotten one. The Mad Letterman is no stranger to sneaking around, and in so doing I’ve seen him, unbeknownst to all other men, astanding outside Pilgrim’s Anchor, watching us, pushing any sympathies further into the future so that he might more effectively drop the executioner’s ax when asked.

Given the chance, I would end him without hesitation. He would understand why. Do not, youngster, forget to beware him. Listen, just this once, and just to this one, to your elders.

Beware Eggnonce Chattelpool! The unnaturalist! The one who dissects and hangs what’s left from the ceiling as reminder of what else needs taking apart! Know him by his head: a capsule antler cage containing a tethered, featherless, eyeless bird. With its beak he speaks in squawking rasps and intruding whistles.

Physician to ’em. He heals what ails, and what I wouldn’t give to know what ails a creature that eats the wettest part of the refuse heap with the utmost intention. Also in his purview is any experimentation that afalls outside Bileby’s drafting and Wighthall’s industry. He is the keeper of the menagerie, which we know they have, for sometimes they appear on Bickering Hall balconies with little pets not of Wormland, and even further afield of our widowed Earth.

He concerns himself with animals. Let him. Keep those dissection tools pointed away from you. If one of ’em has a process for extracting a soul, it is him. He keeps to his laboratory, but sometimes forages for specimens. Do not be a specimen.

Beware Oolbook Dudgewhistle! The slave driver and archiver! The Silhouettes suffer most under his crop, but he can provide plenty more! Know him by his head: a musty stood book of yellowed page. From its spine emerges two arching gray arms that reach forward, opening his expression just enough to glimpse eye and mouth in the cracks between pages.

Head of staff he is, which means he manages and mangles the Silhouettes, finding all the best ways to give those peaceful sorts motivation to cook, to clean, to guard, and to serve, and to do it all quickly despite their sessile nature.

One wrong Flounder signature and we’ll all be trapped under him just the same. It’s good to know now he is among the cruelest. An everyday inescapable evil. The evil of the master, who is upset by his inability to grab the thoughts right out of your head. You don’t need those; they don’t help you serve.

Beware Voluptogast Devalming! The lady of their kind of night! The seductress that could never seduce anything such as man! The comfort in their beds, if they even have beds! Know her by her head: a giant pair of red lips pressed together. And held in their pucker is a mask of white porcelain which she swallows and remakes to appear human when engaging with our kind. Its blank features might be called beautiful if not for the constant downpour of brown fluid across its surface. It moves like rain streaking down filthy glass.

She is courtesan to all the other Bickyplots, regardless of whether or not they are relation. The mingling of Bickyplot bodies in any lustful way is not an appropriate topic for youngsters, or adults with only a typical level of stomach integrity, even excluding our lack of knowledge on the subject.

No jealousy seems to exist between any of ’em, not in this respect, and she moves from arm to arm in what we assume are daily appointments. Do not be fooled by the half-swallowed face she employs; it’s just bait.

Her failure to conceive Bickyplot youngsters is one of our few blessings, whether it be barren inside those lips or their multiplication happens by other means. Should that ever change, the Mad Letterman will be delivering advice to a ghost town, hoping it can draw eyes back out from the grave.

Beware Licketysplit Godswallop! The whipping boy! The receptacle of punishment meant for us! Know him by his head: two smooth masses of crimson flesh piled atop one another and afused, listing always to one side or the other. At his crown are truncated yet tangled tubes open to the air, issuing nothing, thankfully. It resembles a man’s heart, but so squeezed in a fist that it became shaped more like an hourglass.

Lickety-Bickety’s only role is to suffer. So overflowing with cruelty is your average Bickyplot that it must go somewhere, and that somewhere is his scarred desensitized hide. When they walk by he is acknowledged with a kick, a bite, a slap, or a strike from whatever they carry. If the object breaks upon his shoulders he is expected to run off and fetch a replacement, then allow it to be tested. The resulting cycle has been measured at more than an hour at least once.

We don’t know if he complains, what with no mouth to do the complaining. Sounds come out of his tubes, muffled, nothing more than whimpering and moans. All they communicate is that he feels pain. Tears can’t fall without eyes, and he can’t cringe from an approaching blow with no ears to hear it coming. Whether he even knows we exist is a mystery.

Why he stays is another mystery, but the Mad Letterman will tell you it has something to do with whatever bonds the Bickyplots together when their behavior suggests they should all be wandering the hills alone, pillaging whatever civilizations they come across. Yet they are close knit. Yet Spywulph does not strike out on his own.

The Letterman knows this is their greatest weakness. They must need each other. They have no kindness to bind ’em. Find the invisible tether connecting plot to plot. Sever it youngster. Know more than the Mad Letterman, who spent his life doing nothing but learning.

But until then beware the Bickyplots! When next the Mad Letterman scares you it will be about your other foes, the dreaded Flounders, who try to author your lives themselves, with no guidance from you or god! Beware!

(continued in part three)