Writing Request: What Really Happened to Amelia Earhart (Original Fiction)
Next writing request! For tiniago, who asked me to write about a half-dozen things but the one I picked (and I didn't even pick one of the braver ones!) was to write about the whacky hijincks of 17th century alchemists in a tower in Prague. So here's 2,300 words of:
What Really Happened to Amelia Earhart.
Good evening. I'm glad you have succeeded in locating our radio-wave transmission. Transcripts of this broadcast will be available at the usual drop-off points and safe locations. Please note that the train car on the defunct line parallel to Albrecht Boulevard in the Keyes is no longer considered a safe location.
The weather: tonight we expect snow, light as powder and cold as your heart. Tomorrow, if we're lucky, the sun will rise.
Our story will begin imminently. Please adjust the volume on your radio sets accordingly.
Damek, Dana and Dusan were brothers. Not in blood but in the alchemical arts. Subtle poisons, ground metal and greater love for the curve of a blown-glass flask than a woman's hip bound them more closely than blood ever could.
Our tale takes us to July second, sixteen thirty-seven, Prague. Dusan was staring at his brother Dana, who was staring at an unconscious woman of middle-years in odd attire (cured-skin jacket and hose), unconscious on his sketching table. Dana had been arranging her muscle-loose hand in a perfect replica of the complex mechanical hand on his shelf of curiosities when Dusan entered.
"Great Lord," he exclaimed. "Dana, you have taken things too far this time. Who is this woman and why have you dressed her as a man?"
Dana put his finger to his lips. "Hush, brother," he said. "I did not abduct her, I swear. Well, all right, perhaps I did, but I promise, it was in pursuit of higher ideals!"
"I have half a mind to call the constabulary myself and have them clap you in irons. You must return her immediately. Where did you find her?"
"On the roof," Dana responded. And upon seeing Dusan's frown, elaborated, "I swear it! She fell from the sky!"
"As happy a day as it might be if it were raining women, and as much as we might seek to enlighten ourselves in matters most common folk would deem magical, I do not believe you are telling me the entire truth."
Mollified, Dana hung his head. "You have seen through me. I confess, during last night's storm I tried the machine again."
"Dana!"
"But the results! The spectacular results!"
Dusan began to pace. "The results will not matter if you are hauled before a priest and accused of heresy, my young brother. Only God has the power to make and unmake time and who are we to skip ahead of his Almighty schedule? But you have a point. I must say, I thought you mad to even attempt it."
"I told you that my reasoning was sound. All I needed was a bolt of sky fire to power the machine, and look," he pointed to the sleeping woman. "The call was answered."
"I thought," Dusan noted, dryly, "that your call was to our brethren in the future - who must surely have discovered the secrets of panacea and chrysopoeia having had such a firm foundation from scholars such as ourselves in our present - and that they would be so impressed by your enterprising spirit, they would share their secrets with you gladly. Not summon forth women from the air."
"Not even the Church's much-vaunted Lord made the earth in a single day. This was my first attempt."
"And a right mess it may have landed us in; tell me everything."
So Dana told Dusan how he crept to the tower roof in the middle of the storm, began rotating the wheels and shifting the gears of his contraption. How there was a great explosion when the tower was hit by lightning, so bright he could not see for many moments. But when he did open his eyes, there was the woman, inside a frame of metal that looked something like a boat with platforms on each side. Electra, the boat was called. Like the light from the skies. An answer to his youthful prayers, and if he had outgrown those, to his mature and cunning scholarly pursuits.
"Perhaps," Dana concluded. "This woman is the answer to our call. Perhaps she has the secrets long denied us."
Dusan was skeptical. "A woman? In our high arts?"
"She wears men's clothing," Dana countered. "That must make some measure of her status."
Dusan leaned forward. "Here," he said. "What is this label? A rank, perhaps, or name?"
"Ear, heart," Dana sounded. "Well as labels go I suppose it is not entirely inaccurate for it does fall above her chest and on the left side, but I don't see how that could be any sort of name."
"Then a rank? Or perhaps in this far-flung future from which you have stolen her, where women dress as men, they have taken to naming themselves as the savages from the New World? Maybe she is quick to state her feelings on an issue and possessed of a keen sense of hearing?"
"Keen indeed, brother," Dana whispered. "Look, she stirs!"
"Damnation!" muttered Dusan. "Do you not hear the door at the base of the tower creaking? Damek is returning!"
Dana's eyes grew round as magnifying glasses at the thought. "Damek will not like this," he said.
"Indeed he will not. He never had any patience for your new ideas."
"He is old!" Dana countered, crossly. "And more interested in superstition than science!"
"Perhaps," hissed Dusan, trying to pull he half-conscious woman from the sketching table. "But now is hardly the time to discuss it. Help me get her to the sleeping couch in the parlour!"
Damek entered the laboratory to find Dusan and Dana smoothing a long piece of parchment over Dana's sketching desk. "Still idling away your mind with the impossible, Dana?" he asked, cheerfully, hanging his coat and hat on the hatstand.
"Always, brother," Dana responded, nervously.
Damek turned to admonish him gently, as was his responsibility to the cabal; he was the eldest and the mentor. He found himself, however, distracted by Dana's delicate mechanical hand gripping the doorknob into the parlour, keeping it locked.
"Tell me, Dana," he said, nodding at the hand. "Has your pet developed powers of self-determination, or does it -"
The interruption was the unmistakable sound of an individual attempting to open the door from the other side. Quickly, Damek stepped toward the parlour, calling, "Who is that in there?"
"No!" Dana threw himself in front of the older man. "You can't go in there!"
"Why ever not?"
"Because," Dana struggled. "Because..."
"Because it's haunted!" Dusan cried. "Haunted! Yes, we think last night that the power of the storm combined with the, uh, the powerful geographical lines that cross through this tower and the alchemical materials built into its foundations, we think that these properties summoned a...ghost...into existence."
If truth were told, Dusan thought the story weak, and likely to be disproven as soon as Damek pulled the hand free of the handle, but Damek paused, and was regarded the entrance with slightly more trepidation than he had had a moment ago.
It was at that moment, the mechanical hand shook to the floor, and with an eerie creaking, the door swung wide, and there in her outlandish gear, stood Miss Ear Hart, a look of fear and confusion on her sheet-white face.
"Where am I?" she asked. "Am I dead?"
Dana looked too shocked by his luck to respond. Damek blanched paler than the would-be spirit before him. Dusan shouted, "Yes!" before catching himself and repeating in a more sombre tone. "My poor lost one, come with me, I will explain everything," and hustling her back through the door.
Damek sat, heavily, on a stool near his experimentations desk, and very nearly picked up a conical of iodine rather than his decanter of absinthe.
"Yes," Dana said, pacing nervously. "A drink will calm your nerves."
"And yours, young one, it looks as though you need it."
Dana did not object to the glass passed in his direction.
"A ghost, eh?" Damek asked, before shaking himself and again assuming his regular, pompous tone. "I mean, I suspected such things existed of course, but to see one first hand..."
Wildly, Dana searched for an excuse to get Damek to leave the tower.
In the parlour, a shriek was heard, "What happened to my plane?!"
"Her plane?" Damek raised his eyebrows. "What can she mean?"
"Her spiritual plane, clearly," Dana improvised. "What else could she mean, having been pulled into our mortal realm so suddenly."
From the parlour, an even louder shriek - "You can't just pull people out of the air!"
"Indeed," Damek said, sagely. "Her manifestation must have been quite traumatic." Then he added, "What is Dusan doing in there do you think?"
"Well he's, I suppose, banishing her, brother."
"Of course, of course! Dusan is most clever."
"But," Dana said, slyly. "Dusan does not have the proper ingredients to conduct a banishing. I know for a fact that we are exceedingly low on wolfsbane and have nearly run entirely out of nitrates. I could...leave you here...alone...and go fetch them."
Damek considered this for only an instant. "No, no, Dana. There is no need. Something of this import requires speed and a sense of confidentiality. You might become distracted by the wonders of the marketplace. I will go. Fetch me my coat."
"Of course," Dana said, doing so, near to laughing such was his relief.
"Dusan," he shouted, once Damek had left. "Dusan I convinced him to leave. Quickly, we should get her out of here before he returns."
"And what, exactly," Dusan said, opening the door and allowing Dana to see the very red-faced and entirely unhappy woman looking as if she was about to physically attack someone. "Do you propose we do with her. We certainly can't simply allow her to walk out into Prague in this state."
"I don't know!" Dana said. "But the apothecary is only minutes away and Damek will be hurrying!"
"All right," Dusan sighed. "We will have to put her back in her cage on the roof, for now. Later, when Damek has left for his meeting with the priests to assure them that we are not heretics, or at least pay them to report that to their superiors, we will have several hours in which to come up with a scheme."
"I thought it more a boat than a cage."
"Does it matter? She cannot float away from a roof-top Dana!"
"True, true. Quickly, then, take her. She seems to...like you more than me."
The woman proved entirely intractable and in the end it took both brothers to bundle her up the winding staircase to the tower's roof; Dusan holding onto her feet, and Dana holding her beneath the arms. Both attempting to avoid her cursing, flailing limbs.
Oddly, Dusan thought, once they had reached the roof, she became much more pliable and entered the central part of the cage with little resistance. One there she even restrained herself in the seat.
Dusan stared in wonder at the metalwork and ran his hands along the platforms on each side of the central cell, awed.
"You know, Dana," he said. "I do not believe this is a cage or a boat."
"Dusan, we have no time! I can see Damek returning from the apothecary from here! Hurry!"
Clattering down the stairs, waving the dust from the air, they made it back with moments to spare. Damek stepped through the door with several brown packages in his arms. He noticed the open parlour door. "The ghost?" he queried.
"Gone," Dusan replied. "Vanished as swiftly as she appeared. Such is the way of these things."
Damek looked both relieved and disappointed. "Perhaps we ought to scatter at least a little nitrate to ward against her return?" he asked.
Dana sighed, but Dusan gave him a sharp look and agreed with his elder. "A wise notion."
In Latin, he began reciting certain powerful names, lifted the rug and inscribed a glyph of power in chalk on the floorboards. As he put the final flourish on his inscription and spoke the final syllable of his incantation, a rumbling began to shake the tower. The floor where he was kneeling, the walls, the ceiling - the spiral staircase to the roof.
Dusan knew a split-second of fear and joy, wondering if these small, silly superstitions that Damek swore by, had truly summoned something that could shake the foundations of an entire building. But of course not; and he knew what had truly done it. Still, the knowledge did not fill him with the serenity knowledge usually provided. It seemed instead, to have rendered his world smaller. He found he was jealous of Dana, who did not seem convinced this was a metaphysical phenomenon, but certainly was still lost in the wonderful mystery of its possible origins. He was even jealous of Damek, who looked as though the foundations of his worldly beliefs had been vindicated, but that the notion terrified him; a small man brought before a god he feared.
Dusan bolted for the spiral staircase. Half a step behind him, his brothers followed. The trio staggered to the roof, but it was empty. There was nothing to see.
Squinting into the sun, Dusan thought he saw a black bird against its brilliance, but it was too bright to be sure.
Thank you for listening. The question inherent in this story is, of course, whether Amelia Earhart was fluent in seventeenth century Czech, or whether the brothers Damek, Dusan and Dana were fluent in seventeenth century English and this allowed them a rudimentary understanding of Ms Earhart's modern dialect.
Our next broadcast details are as follows:
Fifty-three, forty-nine, forty-nine, twelve.
Until next time, take care and good night.
***
Authorial Ramblings have become a bit of a tradition, but I'm not sure I have anything to say here except CRACK. I really hope it read okay because honestly I think reasoning out why I wrote any of this might break my brain. I don't know what the hell I was doing. I know I at least find it vaguely amusing and not terribly written, but I did have a bit of a rabbit-in-headlights approach to this story where I had no idea what to do with the prompt and just, bit down on the bullet and plunged in. Which I suppose is what this whole project is about.
Well, that's a whole paragraph which I figure is a respectable ramble. :)
Next up, if I can come up with something by tomorrow (THINK BRAIN, THINK!) is girlslash for projectjulie. The goal is tomorrow, but I have to work and I can't do any more on it tonight, so it may end up a day late. That said, I'm quite attached to my one-day-deadline. So we'll see... ;)
What Really Happened to Amelia Earhart.
Good evening. I'm glad you have succeeded in locating our radio-wave transmission. Transcripts of this broadcast will be available at the usual drop-off points and safe locations. Please note that the train car on the defunct line parallel to Albrecht Boulevard in the Keyes is no longer considered a safe location.
The weather: tonight we expect snow, light as powder and cold as your heart. Tomorrow, if we're lucky, the sun will rise.
Our story will begin imminently. Please adjust the volume on your radio sets accordingly.
Damek, Dana and Dusan were brothers. Not in blood but in the alchemical arts. Subtle poisons, ground metal and greater love for the curve of a blown-glass flask than a woman's hip bound them more closely than blood ever could.
Our tale takes us to July second, sixteen thirty-seven, Prague. Dusan was staring at his brother Dana, who was staring at an unconscious woman of middle-years in odd attire (cured-skin jacket and hose), unconscious on his sketching table. Dana had been arranging her muscle-loose hand in a perfect replica of the complex mechanical hand on his shelf of curiosities when Dusan entered.
"Great Lord," he exclaimed. "Dana, you have taken things too far this time. Who is this woman and why have you dressed her as a man?"
Dana put his finger to his lips. "Hush, brother," he said. "I did not abduct her, I swear. Well, all right, perhaps I did, but I promise, it was in pursuit of higher ideals!"
"I have half a mind to call the constabulary myself and have them clap you in irons. You must return her immediately. Where did you find her?"
"On the roof," Dana responded. And upon seeing Dusan's frown, elaborated, "I swear it! She fell from the sky!"
"As happy a day as it might be if it were raining women, and as much as we might seek to enlighten ourselves in matters most common folk would deem magical, I do not believe you are telling me the entire truth."
Mollified, Dana hung his head. "You have seen through me. I confess, during last night's storm I tried the machine again."
"Dana!"
"But the results! The spectacular results!"
Dusan began to pace. "The results will not matter if you are hauled before a priest and accused of heresy, my young brother. Only God has the power to make and unmake time and who are we to skip ahead of his Almighty schedule? But you have a point. I must say, I thought you mad to even attempt it."
"I told you that my reasoning was sound. All I needed was a bolt of sky fire to power the machine, and look," he pointed to the sleeping woman. "The call was answered."
"I thought," Dusan noted, dryly, "that your call was to our brethren in the future - who must surely have discovered the secrets of panacea and chrysopoeia having had such a firm foundation from scholars such as ourselves in our present - and that they would be so impressed by your enterprising spirit, they would share their secrets with you gladly. Not summon forth women from the air."
"Not even the Church's much-vaunted Lord made the earth in a single day. This was my first attempt."
"And a right mess it may have landed us in; tell me everything."
So Dana told Dusan how he crept to the tower roof in the middle of the storm, began rotating the wheels and shifting the gears of his contraption. How there was a great explosion when the tower was hit by lightning, so bright he could not see for many moments. But when he did open his eyes, there was the woman, inside a frame of metal that looked something like a boat with platforms on each side. Electra, the boat was called. Like the light from the skies. An answer to his youthful prayers, and if he had outgrown those, to his mature and cunning scholarly pursuits.
"Perhaps," Dana concluded. "This woman is the answer to our call. Perhaps she has the secrets long denied us."
Dusan was skeptical. "A woman? In our high arts?"
"She wears men's clothing," Dana countered. "That must make some measure of her status."
Dusan leaned forward. "Here," he said. "What is this label? A rank, perhaps, or name?"
"Ear, heart," Dana sounded. "Well as labels go I suppose it is not entirely inaccurate for it does fall above her chest and on the left side, but I don't see how that could be any sort of name."
"Then a rank? Or perhaps in this far-flung future from which you have stolen her, where women dress as men, they have taken to naming themselves as the savages from the New World? Maybe she is quick to state her feelings on an issue and possessed of a keen sense of hearing?"
"Keen indeed, brother," Dana whispered. "Look, she stirs!"
"Damnation!" muttered Dusan. "Do you not hear the door at the base of the tower creaking? Damek is returning!"
Dana's eyes grew round as magnifying glasses at the thought. "Damek will not like this," he said.
"Indeed he will not. He never had any patience for your new ideas."
"He is old!" Dana countered, crossly. "And more interested in superstition than science!"
"Perhaps," hissed Dusan, trying to pull he half-conscious woman from the sketching table. "But now is hardly the time to discuss it. Help me get her to the sleeping couch in the parlour!"
Damek entered the laboratory to find Dusan and Dana smoothing a long piece of parchment over Dana's sketching desk. "Still idling away your mind with the impossible, Dana?" he asked, cheerfully, hanging his coat and hat on the hatstand.
"Always, brother," Dana responded, nervously.
Damek turned to admonish him gently, as was his responsibility to the cabal; he was the eldest and the mentor. He found himself, however, distracted by Dana's delicate mechanical hand gripping the doorknob into the parlour, keeping it locked.
"Tell me, Dana," he said, nodding at the hand. "Has your pet developed powers of self-determination, or does it -"
The interruption was the unmistakable sound of an individual attempting to open the door from the other side. Quickly, Damek stepped toward the parlour, calling, "Who is that in there?"
"No!" Dana threw himself in front of the older man. "You can't go in there!"
"Why ever not?"
"Because," Dana struggled. "Because..."
"Because it's haunted!" Dusan cried. "Haunted! Yes, we think last night that the power of the storm combined with the, uh, the powerful geographical lines that cross through this tower and the alchemical materials built into its foundations, we think that these properties summoned a...ghost...into existence."
If truth were told, Dusan thought the story weak, and likely to be disproven as soon as Damek pulled the hand free of the handle, but Damek paused, and was regarded the entrance with slightly more trepidation than he had had a moment ago.
It was at that moment, the mechanical hand shook to the floor, and with an eerie creaking, the door swung wide, and there in her outlandish gear, stood Miss Ear Hart, a look of fear and confusion on her sheet-white face.
"Where am I?" she asked. "Am I dead?"
Dana looked too shocked by his luck to respond. Damek blanched paler than the would-be spirit before him. Dusan shouted, "Yes!" before catching himself and repeating in a more sombre tone. "My poor lost one, come with me, I will explain everything," and hustling her back through the door.
Damek sat, heavily, on a stool near his experimentations desk, and very nearly picked up a conical of iodine rather than his decanter of absinthe.
"Yes," Dana said, pacing nervously. "A drink will calm your nerves."
"And yours, young one, it looks as though you need it."
Dana did not object to the glass passed in his direction.
"A ghost, eh?" Damek asked, before shaking himself and again assuming his regular, pompous tone. "I mean, I suspected such things existed of course, but to see one first hand..."
Wildly, Dana searched for an excuse to get Damek to leave the tower.
In the parlour, a shriek was heard, "What happened to my plane?!"
"Her plane?" Damek raised his eyebrows. "What can she mean?"
"Her spiritual plane, clearly," Dana improvised. "What else could she mean, having been pulled into our mortal realm so suddenly."
From the parlour, an even louder shriek - "You can't just pull people out of the air!"
"Indeed," Damek said, sagely. "Her manifestation must have been quite traumatic." Then he added, "What is Dusan doing in there do you think?"
"Well he's, I suppose, banishing her, brother."
"Of course, of course! Dusan is most clever."
"But," Dana said, slyly. "Dusan does not have the proper ingredients to conduct a banishing. I know for a fact that we are exceedingly low on wolfsbane and have nearly run entirely out of nitrates. I could...leave you here...alone...and go fetch them."
Damek considered this for only an instant. "No, no, Dana. There is no need. Something of this import requires speed and a sense of confidentiality. You might become distracted by the wonders of the marketplace. I will go. Fetch me my coat."
"Of course," Dana said, doing so, near to laughing such was his relief.
"Dusan," he shouted, once Damek had left. "Dusan I convinced him to leave. Quickly, we should get her out of here before he returns."
"And what, exactly," Dusan said, opening the door and allowing Dana to see the very red-faced and entirely unhappy woman looking as if she was about to physically attack someone. "Do you propose we do with her. We certainly can't simply allow her to walk out into Prague in this state."
"I don't know!" Dana said. "But the apothecary is only minutes away and Damek will be hurrying!"
"All right," Dusan sighed. "We will have to put her back in her cage on the roof, for now. Later, when Damek has left for his meeting with the priests to assure them that we are not heretics, or at least pay them to report that to their superiors, we will have several hours in which to come up with a scheme."
"I thought it more a boat than a cage."
"Does it matter? She cannot float away from a roof-top Dana!"
"True, true. Quickly, then, take her. She seems to...like you more than me."
The woman proved entirely intractable and in the end it took both brothers to bundle her up the winding staircase to the tower's roof; Dusan holding onto her feet, and Dana holding her beneath the arms. Both attempting to avoid her cursing, flailing limbs.
Oddly, Dusan thought, once they had reached the roof, she became much more pliable and entered the central part of the cage with little resistance. One there she even restrained herself in the seat.
Dusan stared in wonder at the metalwork and ran his hands along the platforms on each side of the central cell, awed.
"You know, Dana," he said. "I do not believe this is a cage or a boat."
"Dusan, we have no time! I can see Damek returning from the apothecary from here! Hurry!"
Clattering down the stairs, waving the dust from the air, they made it back with moments to spare. Damek stepped through the door with several brown packages in his arms. He noticed the open parlour door. "The ghost?" he queried.
"Gone," Dusan replied. "Vanished as swiftly as she appeared. Such is the way of these things."
Damek looked both relieved and disappointed. "Perhaps we ought to scatter at least a little nitrate to ward against her return?" he asked.
Dana sighed, but Dusan gave him a sharp look and agreed with his elder. "A wise notion."
In Latin, he began reciting certain powerful names, lifted the rug and inscribed a glyph of power in chalk on the floorboards. As he put the final flourish on his inscription and spoke the final syllable of his incantation, a rumbling began to shake the tower. The floor where he was kneeling, the walls, the ceiling - the spiral staircase to the roof.
Dusan knew a split-second of fear and joy, wondering if these small, silly superstitions that Damek swore by, had truly summoned something that could shake the foundations of an entire building. But of course not; and he knew what had truly done it. Still, the knowledge did not fill him with the serenity knowledge usually provided. It seemed instead, to have rendered his world smaller. He found he was jealous of Dana, who did not seem convinced this was a metaphysical phenomenon, but certainly was still lost in the wonderful mystery of its possible origins. He was even jealous of Damek, who looked as though the foundations of his worldly beliefs had been vindicated, but that the notion terrified him; a small man brought before a god he feared.
Dusan bolted for the spiral staircase. Half a step behind him, his brothers followed. The trio staggered to the roof, but it was empty. There was nothing to see.
Squinting into the sun, Dusan thought he saw a black bird against its brilliance, but it was too bright to be sure.
Thank you for listening. The question inherent in this story is, of course, whether Amelia Earhart was fluent in seventeenth century Czech, or whether the brothers Damek, Dusan and Dana were fluent in seventeenth century English and this allowed them a rudimentary understanding of Ms Earhart's modern dialect.
Our next broadcast details are as follows:
Fifty-three, forty-nine, forty-nine, twelve.
Until next time, take care and good night.
***
Authorial Ramblings have become a bit of a tradition, but I'm not sure I have anything to say here except CRACK. I really hope it read okay because honestly I think reasoning out why I wrote any of this might break my brain. I don't know what the hell I was doing. I know I at least find it vaguely amusing and not terribly written, but I did have a bit of a rabbit-in-headlights approach to this story where I had no idea what to do with the prompt and just, bit down on the bullet and plunged in. Which I suppose is what this whole project is about.
Well, that's a whole paragraph which I figure is a respectable ramble. :)
Next up, if I can come up with something by tomorrow (THINK BRAIN, THINK!) is girlslash for projectjulie. The goal is tomorrow, but I have to work and I can't do any more on it tonight, so it may end up a day late. That said, I'm quite attached to my one-day-deadline. So we'll see... ;)