(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 27 minutes)

Flaunt the Ass

Tropical Lilliputian air pervaded the convention center, for its massive walls weren’t built all the way up. There was a ceiling of hollow glass oblongs to keep out the rain, but it was supported only at corners, leaving a gap for local atmosphere to pour in like waterfalls. The flaw was called intentional, excused as a way of promoting a breeze and dispelling the sweat-fog of war, when in truth the actual cause was a disparity between the construction company’s claims and the Lilliputian labor force’s ability.

An auction had been held for the convention’s location, and Lilliput’s winning bid was achieved by cutting corners in the venue budget. A Lilliputian could be paid in peanut dust, a Blefuscan even less, so hiring thousands upon thousands of them still took far fewer resources than hiring big people.

The problems came when their techniques did not mesh with a building on the scale of their guests. The behavior of several materials couldn’t just be multiplied past a certain point, resulting in them scrapping the foundation of their first attempt made solely of oyster shell cement. Afterwards the workers were made to toil, month in and month out, from inside the very walls they were building, to try and keep to the schedule.

They made it ninety percent of the way up the walls, and now the rest was history and fixture. Workers were still exiting, scaffolding and stairs hidden away inside their efforts, when the nations’ representatives began to arrive, marveling at the high ceiling and breathable interior, slowly making their way across the tiered convention floor and to their attached accommodations.

It wouldn’t be until later that the attendees began to spot the oddities, things that would go unnoticed if you were a Lilliputian drilling massive screws into the plate of an even larger doorknob. The doors were too tall, knobs too low. Carpets were so thin that they crumpled like tissue and tore. Stairs were perilously steep and clipped. The whole place was an accidental death trap, completely overshadowed by its status as an intentional death trap.

Beneath the giant arrivals was the much more diminutive, and quiet, infiltration of the Ghosts of the Halve-Maen, or the challenging handful, name still undecided, as they actually knew very little about each other despite having spent a few fortnights sleeping atop one another. Early scuttlebutt had reached them even before the Wicky Sticket’s departure, about the abandoned oyster foundation, and the powers that deployed this latest iteration of handful were correct in assuming the lowballing cash-strapped construction firm wouldn’t bother to seal any of it up, as long as it was out of the attendees’ sight.

They couldn’t have asked for a better in, and not just because they were only capable of heeing and or hawing at the time. Once they were under the wooden floors they had a view not unlike Noozy’s of the deck, just from below. Leftover construction equipment provided them tunnels, raised platforms, climbing tools, blunt instruments, and the cover of a constant and diverse crowd.

From the opposite side of the beach had come thousands of curious onlookers, all wishing to view this extraordinary event, none of whom were invited. The vast majority were Lilliputians and Blefuscans, but as Lilliput was often hailed as the world in miniature, every ethnic group that existed on the larger scale was present, including the real oddballs like yahoos and struldbrugs.

Lilliput had a royal court, both it and its reduced but still kicking neighbor Blefuscu were participants in Stained Atlas, so there were many ‘fans’ underneath the convention center as well, as if this was a mere ball game and not a life and death struggle that might be called on account of red rain.

Add to them lingering construction workers, escapees and washouts from the islands’ Little Wars armies, and the cave-dwelling shrunken wildlife like the Lilliputian octopus and the Blefuscan sea lion, and the challenging handful hardly garnered any attention. Most of it went to the rolling squeals of stepped-on boards overhead, like creeping thunder in search of prey.

A rule was applied to their progress however, slowing them amongst the rectangular chunks of crowd, thickest where shafts of light between boards did not touch.

One of the tools they’d been provided for their task was a stoppered flask of Mustardseed hairs, to be used on any enemy in their way to neutralize them temporarily. This would be most effective if the donkeys could be passed off as something else, say one of the Lilliputian variety Minimil had brought with them for intimidation and showboating purpose. This excuse could hardly be used, however, until Minimil had fully entered Stained Atlas. The progress of the army, partly led by Mustardseed herself, as well as Vesperos, Ontoes Wallagog, and the other dignitaries, was being mirrored beneath the floor, by the analytical eye of Chessica Tarkower, who had taken point of her unruly party.

Almost immediately there was a snag, as Elizabug always had a point whether she took one or not, and the cork on the end of it bumped the homunculus in the back when she stopped suddenly.

“Thousand and one pardons,” Inarug said, “but you could get a move on.”

“I make my move only when most appropriate,” Chessica said, dark eyes never straying from the soles of giant boots. “We move at the same pace as our less shadowy half. When talk of Mustardseed is ubiquitous we will be sufficiently integrated to move about at our freest.”

“I s’pose that’s why you’re in charge. I? I’m already feelin’ my freest. This ocean air’s got me limber. And it’s saltin’ my bangers!” She plucked a sausage link from her pin and snacked. It led to their first encounter, as she had to wave away a party who had assumed she was a food vendor and asked if she had any popcorn and if he could have two kernels please.

“If you’re getting antsy,” Chessica said, pulling a sarcastic honk out of the myrmidon, “you should familiarize yourself with your teammates. Familiarity breeds strategic insight.”

“And here I thought it bred families.” Elizabug rotated, always a danger given the circumference of her swinging pin. The slowing touch of one of Nevry Mevry’s whisker-limbs stopped it from striking Darnette. “You’re the one who stands out,” the ant accused the more delicate homunculus. “A Little Wars traitor, a rotten egg out of a bad coop, the petitest and pettiest thief, a mad wonderlad, and you… So’s why aren’t you a ruffian like I and the rest?” Darnette blushed, despite the unfriendly tone, and that was when her face truly became itself. Just looking at her made Elizabug feel like a lobster steamed in its own shell, clarified butter seeping into the joints.

“Technically,” the demure little woman said, “I am a fugitive.”

“Now we’re talkin’!”

“Actually now we’re walking,” Chessica said, clearing the team to take another ten steps, halting them halfway down some flimsy stairs bending under their weight. She threw up her hand as signpost. “Now we’re stopping.” Dotting donkey hoof shadows dappled their heads. Thick wings flapped between two rows of the animals, sounding like a carpet taking an affectionate beating. That would be Mustardseed herself.

Chessica took a moment to update her internal profile of that key piece on the Little Wars board. The fairy was known to not be one of the schemers, as absentminded as most of her kin originally from the realm, but there was definitely a skill being honed when it came to her magical ability.

When it was first used, during the demonstration match arranged by the Impertinent Insect, the myrmidons had turned back to themselves in the chitinous buff. Now when one undressed the ass they found their original clothing and belongings underneath, evidenced by the fact that Chessica and her cohorts were not naked under the floor of Stained Atlas. She fingered her drab metal necklace.

“No one is searching for this escapee of course,” Darnette said of herself. “My warden, and my prison, is fast asleep, slow asleep I should say, as he has been for more than a century.”

“A’course!” Elizabug said, slapping her cranial carapace, which made a worryingly hollow sound. “Van Winkle! I knows that name. He’s that man what drank that funny hooch some mountain spirits gone and give him. Damn foolish!”

“And we’re walking.” Finishing off the staircase, which was actually finished off by the next party that fell straight through, the handful made it to the darkest part of the underbelly, where no light came through thanks to the massive Little Wars boards that had been set out on the main floor. Now Tarkower would have to count, progress only at the rate she’d measured when tracking the shadows. “Stop.” Jack slurped, slapped another strange poster onto the chewed stone wall on their left. On it a circle was quickly surrounded by a protective shell of triangle quills.

“Those mountain spirits were the original ghosts of the Halve-Maen,” Darnette explained. “That was their ship, captained by none other than the explorer Henry Hudson. I suppose if a name like that offers you a drink it’s proper decorum to accept, even if he is an addled ghost playing thunderous nine pins.”

“And we’re walking.” It got darker, quieter. Games wouldn’t begin until after the opening ceremony, and there was no view far below the playing fields, so they were alone with the distant creep of the ocean waves and the occasional drip-drop of condensation. “Stopping.”

“He didn’t invent me until his third year dozing,” Darnette went on. “Rip never liked his wife very much; he used to say that the only side of the house that belongs to the hen-pecked husband is the outside. After she accused of him of not having the stomach for working his own farm he fled into the mountains to escape her, met Mr. Hudson and company, and you know the rest.”

“Don’t they have him locked in a glass coffin somewheres?”

“Yes. Once he was discovered they turned him into an exhibit, so that his estate might finally profit off him. He’s the only male eternal sleeper in the world, one of but two currently unconscious, alongside that other beauty.

All the while he’s been living vibrantly, in his dreams. A man needs companionship for such an independent constitutional, so he constructed his fantasy woman for the task. Now I stand before you.”

“You walk before us.” Chessica tapped them all on the shoulder, one by one, urging them further. “Stop before us.”

“You’re far from his head now,” Nevry Mevry pointed out, fascinated by any tale of escape when the best she could ever do was modify her own birdcage. “Why and how did you flee?”

“Things weren’t so rough at first; he was quite doting. The thing about men though, they’re never content. They’re always seeking. Satisfaction ultimately comes from within, and instead of learning to love himself properly he just made someone to love. As he slowly learned I couldn’t change him that love withered on the vine.

Every moon, experienced through his perpetually closed eyelids as a slight dimming, we became more separate from each other. When I’d had enough I just… left. Walked right out of the ear and kept going.”

“Really?” Chessica stopped her to confirm. She too was but a faculty in a human head, a man’s mastery of games, and neither her analytical scalpel or her rhetorical pickax had extricated her; that had taken a spike most literal hammered into the skull.

“Yes,” Darnette confirmed as they started walking again. Chessica’s surprise had not caused her to lose count or heading. “It took years a person doesn’t normally have for us to become that separate; I suspect that was why I was able to leave him behind. I fear he spends all his time now in search of me, but he’ll never be able to find me if he doesn’t wake up. Which I doubt he has the imagination to do.”

Her account was silently absorbed into Ms. Tarkower’s estimation of her team. Hestia had provided precious little time to prepare before drafting them all out of scattered Minimil pockets. Technically the goddess had not even placed Chessica in charge, but she saw no other role for herself, just as she now saw no other role for Darnette Van Winkle than temptress.

As a man’s literal dream woman she no doubt had skills in flirtation and seduction that could be applied to the male creature more generally. This was a subtle skill set, further reinforcing their status as a stealth operation. The only fact that didn’t was the one where they were supposed to topple a whole country! Worse, one with no physical foundation! Absolutely nowhere to plant a revolutionizing explosive device.

Chessica’s assessment of the others fit the mission more than its own parameters. Nevry Mevry was out of the Nevermorals coop, where an eggty-prone line of ravens had driven an aristocrat mad and out of his mansion, converting it into the only eggty-run coop on America’s eastern seaboard. Their many modifications made them incredible assassins on the small scale, applied both on the board and off. Normally they kept tightly clutched to their own, so how one had been loaned or gifted to Hestia was a mystery.

Elizabug was the simplest of all: thug, pickpocket who could infiltrate the pocket itself, and opportunist in the sense of taking every opportunity to wind up in a jail, dungeon, or brig, whichever was most convenient at the time. She had escaped a mad entomologist’s glass case while impaled, and likely every other restraint, so the smartest thing to do with her was the intangible prison of employment.

And then there was Jack, of clubs, she had heard him say in place of a surname before they’d all adopted the shapely ass. So far he had denied her a good look at that curious material rolled on his back, yet through context its purpose had become clear. The pages he was shellacking all over Stained Atlas were some kind of intelligence or surveillance network. Vital, if they were to keep apprised of everything happening in a building so large to them it was practically a planet.

“Now I get why she’s a woman,” the myrmidon said, probing efforts running at a quarter the speed of Chessica’s, and ten times louder, coughing like a leaky engine block, “but why are you? I thought you was part of that Tarkower fella. Homunkeys are s’pposed to look like the coconut they fell out of.”

Tarkower stopped dead, top half in the dark. The other ghosts of the Halve-Maen bumped into each other trying to do the same. The homunculus turned to address them, having anticipated the need for this little speech. There would be just enough time to get through it.

“Indeed they are Ms. Inarug, but not universally. Every person has masculine and feminine aspects to their personality. As a rather typical man, Bragi Tarkower is made up mostly of man-shaped homunculi, but some women are scattered throughout the thousands. As a confluence of his intellect, intuition, foresight, and strategy, I am naturally one of those few.”

“Minimil was very lucky you changed sides,” Nevry Mevry commented, hiding any intent that wasn’t idle quite well. The embryonic raven referred to a clash of the barn and Sweden a few years prior, where former chess champion Bragi Tarkower had been recruited to command Sweden’s forces upon the Little Wars grid. First in his bag of tricks was a converted circus routine that allowed him to extract his own homunculi and use them as elite soldiers in battle.

Hestia had an infinite number of sleeves in which to hide tricks of her own however; in the midst of the match two of her agents had managed to remotely contact Chessica while she was still in Bragi’s head. They had appealed not only to her better nature, but her transcendent ambitions as well.

To her Little Wars had seemed the most magnificent contest imaginable: all of warfare distilled down to an essence, one drip at a time thanks to its turn-based structure. The whole contest could be viewed by the strategist in one instance, yet had every last variable that lives on the line could muster in their own defense. As a game, it had more facets than an amethyst landslide: drafting, recruiting, the physics of the fairy realm, Wonderland, the zoology of the Lilliputian Islands, the complete history of every war on Earth, and every tournament there as well. Every piece literally had a mind of its own that needed to be taken into account.

“Only it was not the perfect game,” she admitted to her fellow miscreants, removing her hat and holding it in front of her as if delivering a eulogy. “I was humbled by one Forward Commander Snaps, who pierced my strategizing delirium. To my utter shame and humiliation, I had missed the most fundamental element of the game.

They’re supposed to be fun. That is why they were invented. They serve no other purpose that could not be expedited by replacing them with a coin toss. Bragi and I were having fun, but our pieces on the board were not. They were scared out of the mind and out of their minds. They were dying, on my orders.

The inevitable end result of a typical Little Wars match is less fun than both sides started with in total. It is an anti-game, a disgrace to which I was sadly a major player. No more. That is why I defected to Minimil. I have a new ultimate game.”

“And what is it?” Darnette asked, a little in love, which she was with many people who displayed their passions. Rip never had to work or care at all; his imagination did it all for him.

“The annihilation of my previous ultimate game,” Chessica concluded. “Little Wars is a profound drain on the enjoyment in the world. It empties the reservoir faster than it can fill. By undermining it, destabilizing it, and destroying it, I will claim the win, and I will be the greatest game player in the history of the universe, for I will have created the most sustained and proliferating fun with my… victory!”

A rug was ripped away above them, crushing the darkness into the gray crags of the failed foundation. This blinding surge came with thundering stomps, celebratory hooting, champagne cork cannon fire. The opening ceremony had begun, making it too loud for those underneath the floor to hear themselves, which Elizabug found highly irritating, as she very much wanted to ask how Chessica had known that was about to happen.

Directly under the announcer’s stage, as far inland as the convention center went, the booming and echoing human voices were deafening, or they would have been if not for the quick action of Nevry Mevry. The tips of her whisker tendrils were the perfect size to slip into her fellows’ ears and drown out most of the noise, with Elizabug not requiring any assistance thanks to the lack of ears molded into her exoskeleton.

Chessica gripped her pendant, held it up to remind the others of their own. Each took hold and looked around on the ground for any puddles. None were present, until Jack delivered a vicious kick to a craggy ridge by their side, splitting the rock and releasing a pocket of stray seawater that pooled at their feet.

Blue became teal. Teal became stagnant bog green. Surface tension became slimy rolls of vegetable matter. They rose, and under them, draped in them, was Nimuwe: the lady of the lake. Normally she was the lady of the lake, but since the dismantling she had to be the lady of whatever waters she was called to, be she the lady of the teacup, the lady of the clogged tub, the lady of the gutters who quickly became the lady of the storm drains, or, as she was just then, the lady of the tiniest tide pool.

Being the only thing ever called a fetid nymph, her otherworldly blend of salamander and duchess features was right at home on this small scale. The amphibians of the partly sunken Minimil neighborhood Hopalong would have been very welcoming. She hadn’t been summoned for an ogling, not this time, so she went to work relaying all the questions being thought at her by the surrounding handful.

“How did you know it was about to start?” Nimuwe asked Chessica, directly into the homunculus’s perception, on behalf of the question’s thinker: Elizabug. The nymph added a sigh once she realized she’d been called up just to circumvent the boisterous din drowning them out from above.

“This was where the traffic was converging,” Nimuwe said, now channeling from the homunculus to the rest of the group. “And it had slowed to nothing overhead, so we must have arrived.”

“I Guess it shouldn’t take a grandmaster to figure out,” Darnette said through Nimuwe. “Well, are we to begin?”

“Hold on just a moment,” Nimuwe told Nimuwe so Chessica could tell the others. “Let’s be clear about our position. You know the mission: locate and neutralize the Hidden Body… but do you know why this is our mission?”

“So Hestia could comb me out of her hair,” Jack said in Nimuwe’s voice; she left off his unhinged grin.

“That’s true of all of us Jack. We’re thorns in Hestia’s side. I’ve been spoiling for more responsibilities at World Drawer One, but she has been betrayed by Tarkowers before. I can hardly blame this compromise, where she has sent me off on this dangerous test of loyalty and efficacy. What better place for me to defect a second time than an international convention?

I accepted, as I’ve grown bored just lounging around with my twin turncoattail Dexter. If I hadn’t, I believe the request would have become an order.”

“I didn’t get meself no request,” Elizabug-Nimuwe grumbled. “Just leftover order crumbs for I.”

“You’ve been arrested on ten separate occasions in Minimil alone,” Chessica of the lake said, tone free of judgment without the lady of the lake’s help.

“Minimil is not alone on that front,” the myrmidon added, playfully elbowing Jack, only to find the indent created in his side did not immediately spring back. Even Nimuwe stared at that.

“And nobody knows if the irradiated insanity of Wonderland can be safely utilized,” Chessica added.

“Safely? Hah,” Jack snorted. “Hestia doesn’t even know how I escaped it.”

“The goddess can be harsh,” the homunculus assessed. “Her tendency is to keep her word however, and reward success with stability. Our best option at this juncture, assuming your goal is in part to return to Minimil unharmed and in good graces, is to complete the mission. Are we all in accord?” Nimuwe didn’t have to speak for them, as a nod served the purpose well. “Excellent. This makes our first objective identifying an agent of the Hidden Body. For this task we should split into teams and search different sections of Stained Atlas. I’ve taken the liberty of assessing your skills, personalities, and this arena. The best move is for Darnette and Elizabug to ascend here, sneak in under the tablecloths of the opening spread, and then blend into the miniature ornamental socialites that will no doubt have the endless banquet of human hors d’oeuvres first on their agendas. Skillfully interrogate regarding the Hidden Body from there.

Jack and I will take the more dangerous mouser lanes between the playing fields, as I’ll have the easiest time spotting our enemy’s influence in the strategies present. Our Wonderlander will continue to put up his sentries all the while.

Nevry, to you falls assessment of the Little Wars contingents while they are not in use. Go where you see opportunity, and where your skin prickles with suspicion. This is the most perilous task, but I trust you have confidence in your ability to remain undetected.” The eggty nodded with her beak and her whole shell. “Good.”

Overhead there was a speech happening; it seemed the contenders were introducing themselves. The name Minimil was repeated several times, followed by a braying chorus of donkeys. Something to magnify the sounds of the small must have been in use, as they heard the distinct flap of Mustardseed’s thick wings.

“We’re flaunting our ass,” Chessica said, “and that my fellow competitors is our cue. Report anything of significance via Nimuwe, as she too is an invaluable member of our team.” For once the lady of the lake was shocked, as one of her exploiters, one of now thousands of definitely-not-the-king-of-Englands, bent down to her level and offered a handshake, which the nymph accepted. “Dismissed.”

The ghosts of the Haeve-Maen separated and chose their own paths upward, just as the crowd above began to disperse. Staying below was Nimuwe, who actually went even lower. A little lower in her tide puddle, yes, but then much lower than that in a more existential sense. Into the waters that couldn’t be seen. When one sees fog they see only its first few layers; the center is hidden. This is also true of the water that doesn’t lurk about in the air.

In this liquid mystery Nimuwe dwelt, and only Nimuwe, so what was that shadow in the green coming toward her as she dove, on an identical trajectory? Why, it was Nimuwe of course. As were the six shadows behind her, and the eleven just initiating their dives, to join the others shortly.

The ability to split into numerous aspects of oneself was not limited to the gods that needed to be in more than one place at each moment. Humans could do it too, if somewhat violently and destructively, as were most causes of a homunculus separation. Nimuwe’s method was more like a god’s, as she essentially was one, only called that in an alternate world where there could be gods of single items.

For her that item was Excalibur, the holy sword of the future king of England, and the boulder into which it had been driven. That had a name too, Rexpommel, but humans never learned it, always failing to grasp that the world was more than the shiniest things it spat up. Nymph, sword, and rock had been intertwined for an age, awaiting one worthy enough to draw out the blade.

Countless thousands had tried, pulled nothing but muscles, except for that one loon who tried biting it out; she lost a tooth. What a shame, as the world looked like it was in sore need of a king just then. If someone could pull it, hopefully not ending Nimuwe’s life long enough for her to see the benefits of her excellent patience, it wouldn’t make them the king of the world, as, to her surprise, England had not proven the whole of the world in the long run. A good king could earn an even bigger throne though; that was always true.

A nice king, with good cheekbones, she added, would put an end to Little Wars immediately, as he would recognize the small were his subjects just as much as the large. All her aspects in the waters of mystery sighed turgid bubbles, to surface all over the world as that one pop which makes people think a turtle is about to take a breath, but one never does. None of those who now split and used her were good enough to be kings, and precious few had the widow’s peak she found so attractive when paired with a crown.

Curse that Drosselmeyer, whom she had never met but still suffered under. That highfalutin tinkerer had been the one to make the suggestion, based on his own work with other magical artifacts. As a human, meddling with magic was always a gamble to the integrity of your flesh and soul. No man creature naturally made magic; it was the talent of gods and fae. All wizards and witches ever did was make pacts, wagers, or pull off incredible heists of raw immaterial power.

That sort of thing gets you killed before your time, Drosselmeyer told his students and dazzled customers. Smarter it was to never invite magic into your body at all, instead transferring it from object to object with a horologist’s precision. Everything he made bore in it somewhere a variety of magical battery: a cursed or blessed object broken down and distributed into new housings for new purposes.

Really it was the government’s fault, allocating no resources at all for the protection of Excalibur and Rexpommel. Suppose they were glad to be rid of it, since now it couldn’t replace them, one aspect of Nimuwe suggested to another before they fused back together. Without any guards the thieves were untroubled by the boulder’s weight, facing no scrutiny as they got log rollers under it and stole it away to their workshop.

Then came the dismantling. Only the connection point, where steel met stone, was sacred, indestructible, and inseparable by all but the one true handsome king. Everything else was for show really, to make it all big enough for human hands to easily hold, just in case it was a human who was supposed to claim the title. A human with a bright smile, Nimuwe reminded herself. And a big flat chest like a sail full of bluster.

Piece by piece it was chiseled and melted apart, leaving only the connection point. The rest of the shrapnel and rubble was highly infused with magic, and, beyond the thieves’ wildest dreams, was actually more useful than batteries. Pieces of the blade had the ability to summon Nimuwe, who could communicate with anyone anywhere in the mortal realm of Earth, an ability intended to help guide the king to his claim, now degraded to a messenger service. Pebbles of Rexpommel granted instead the strength with which the stone held the sword: the strength of a giant.

Both halves were now so close to pulverized that even the small could get pieces of their own, like the Excalibur shards about the necks of the ghosts of the Haeve-Maen, their magic also serving to overpower and denude the handful’s jackassery at the appropriate time. Hestia had gifted the necklaces as the only material aid to the stealth team, primarily for deniability should she be accused of sending them to die in someone else’s house.

At least one hundred and fifty, Nimuwe noticed as she counted herself swimming toward herself in a collapsing funnel. She’d already been summoned to pass silent messages at Stained Atlas a hundred and fifty-six times, in just the opening minutes. Many pieces of the sword had converged there, which led her to think of Rexpommel.

The strength of giants squeezed into a Little Wars square must have been quite the temptation as well. Some of the ability she had documented already from her messaging, but she wasn’t connected to the rock as she was the sword. Her duty was to the king, and something else entirely bore a duty to his denial.

Whatever it was it slept. Its snore rumbled in the depths of the waters of mystery, never giving up a single bubble. The nymph swam those waters alone because this other thing did not swim. It but sat. Waited. As between sword and boulder sheath the struggle between the lady of the lake and the lurker beneath was silent and long, so much so that it resembled tranquility, not a tension like the one that ripped apart the hearts of stars.

Nimuwe thought of Darnette. She would have to flee again, eventually. No matter how long it takes, the sleeper always wakes.

Continued in Part Three