Writing Challenges
This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from Becky Jones: Turned out, the concert venue was a portal to another dimension.
My first thought was to take it meta, to have it be part of a game or an anime or a manga -- but I'd just done that last week, and while I could've had it be one of the games in "NPC's," now that I'm in the middle of putting that novella together, I wasn't sure I wanted to write another segment that would have to be made to fit into something that was becoming steadily more and more definite, with less and less wiggle room for new things.
Then I remembered the Big Messy Project, and how I hadn't touched it in ages. Maybe this portal could be between the regular world and the Hidden City, in the My Old School part. And then I was off to the races...
===========================================================================================
The Other Side of School
As I slipped behind the curtains of the stage, memories bubbled up of being up here for school plays and Christmas programs. Except none of them had ever enabled me to actually go backstage. I knew that the two little rooms that flanked the stage were entrances to the backstage area, although one of them was also a fire exit. But I'd never had any role that would require me to wait backstage for my cue - and even if I had, I doubt the teachers would've allowed me to wander around back here, looking at everything.
Although it was fitting that I should discover yet another secret door hidden directly behind the stage. Like the one I'd found inside the house where I'd grown up, it wasn't an actual sliding door. Instead, it was another of those permeable areas where I could push my way through - which suggested I'd be going to the Hidden City rather than Sly Fox's tunnels.
There was no sense of turning around, but I most definitely emerged facing the backdrop curtains on the other side. The slight differences in their texture and hanging let me know that yes, I was once again in the Hidden City.
How had its school system been organized? I had a vague memory of my counterpart in that world having lived in a duplex where the other unit was occupied by a difficult teacher by the name of Miss Reed or Miss Read - already I was playing with punnery in first or second grade. And when I'd transposed the childhood classic Mr. Pine's Mixed-Up Signs to it, there must've been some School Zone signs and the like, but whatever I'd imagined the actual schools and classes to be like, I'd long since forgotten.
As I slipped between the curtains, I paused to listen. The last thing I needed right now was to emerge into the gymnasium to find a PE class in progress and have to explain myself to a teacher I knew nothing about. For that matter, I had no guarantee the teacher would even be human, given how many of the inhabitants of the Hidden City were anthropomorphic animals or toys come to life.
But I heard nothing, so I decided to chance it. I slipped through the curtains to an empty gymnasium lit only by the light filtering through the glass-block windows set high on the walls. Everything was laid out pretty much like the gym in the Henning Elementary Building - the doors, the bleachers, even the old scoreboard hanging over the entrance to the boiler room. Except there were differences, like the clock on the scoreboard having what looked like two sweep second hands, or the presence of secret doors in various places, which meant Sly Fox wasn't even bothering to conceal his activities here.
When I was school-aged, I would've jumped right down from the stage. Now I carefully sat down on the edge and lowered myself to the gymnasium floor.
I could hear voices from the direction of the lunchroom, which meant that school was in session. Best to be wary, since I doubted I could pass myself off as someone who'd have plausible reason to be in a grade school. I might be a college professor, but right now I wasn't exactly dressed like one.
As I headed toward the main entrance, I noticed that the doors to the storage areas under the bleachers were open. I looked into them, and immediately wished I hadn't.
Some of the stuff in there was unremarkable athletic equipment: a whole rack of basketballs, buckets of baseballs and bags full of bats. But there was also some weird electronic stuff, big cabinets with gauges and dials and long coiled cables leading to metal hemispheres with knobs and electrodes on them. At first glance they made me think of the typical media portrayals of a futuristic computer back in those days, the sort that seems laughable to anyone from the Twenty-first Century, who's carrying a computer with more power and using it to make calls and watch cat videos.
In the context of a school, I had a feeling they were some kind of “learning machine.” However, I doubted they were benign devices for allowing immersive learning by feeding sensory data directly into students' brains. In this time the whole idea of cyberspace and full-sensory-immersion virtual reality weren't even visions of science fictions. They were non-ideas, and wouldn't become ideas for another decade, until William Gibson gave them life.
No, that equipment would be for something nasty, especially with the evidence that Sly Fox was operating openly here. Maybe something that blurred the lines between education and outright brainwashing, or something that effectively installed “control software” in their victims' minds, like the Caps in that one science fiction series I'd read at about this time, about teens fighting a desperate Resistance against an alien conquest.
Whatever those machines were, I had no great desire to find out. However, I knew that trying to destroy them, or even render them inoperable, would just draw attention to my presence in the Hidden City. No way would the school administration, or the civil authorities, overlook the vandalism of what would have to be incredibly expensive equipment, however cobbled-together it might look to someone accustomed to the sleek lines of a modern laptop or smartphone.
Forcing myself to a measured pace, hoping no alarm was showing on my face, I climbed the stairs to the entrance door. As I reached the landing for the main entrance, I noticed that the door to the library was open, but the lights were off and nobody was in it. Odd, because as I remembered it, the librarian had always closed the door when she wasn't present.
Curious, I sauntered in. The first thing I noticed was the aquarium atop the low bookshelves that lined the outer wall of the library, just below the windows. It was astonishingly large for something set right over materials very susceptible to water damage - but then again, nothing in a grade school library was apt to be rare or expensive.
The first thing I noticed was the big, colorful fish. And then I realized that no, the divers were not just plastic ornaments like the castle or the sunken ship with its treasure chests that hid part of the aeration system. At first they seemed to be just swimming around in circles, suggesting they were in fact some kind of automaton.
But then one of them looked directly at me. Moments later all of them flashed off to take refuge in one of the caves at the bottom of the big structure that was probably intended to represent part of a coral reef.
Tiny divers, just like the ones at A-2 Pets here in the Hidden City, just like the ones I'd seen in the puddle in the basement of the Primary Building, when I'd first realized that no, I hadn't just gotten tossed backward in time by the storm that had brought me here.
Which raised the question of what exactly they were. Were these plastic ornaments come to life, like the toys and dolls one could see going about daily life in the streets of the Hidden City? Or were they actual frogmen, captured and shrunk to action-figure size by that white-coated mad scientist in his secret laboratory under the seafloor, who might or might not be in cahoots with Sly Fox?
Did it even make a difference? Did inanimate objects automatically gain rights when they came to life, or did it matter how they gained animacy?
How awkward it felt to recall how casually I'd thought up all those things back in grade school. The ethical aspects of all the handwavium that allowed the existence of tiny divers never even occurred to me.
But then most of the fantasy I was reading at that time was whimsical fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland where magic cakes and drinks and mushrooms could make you shrink to the size of a mouse or grow into a giant, but it didn't matter because at the end it all turned out to be a bad dream and the upended pack of cards was actually a bunch of autumn leaves falling on you. It's only when you try to apply systematic worldbuilding logic to it that you start getting uncomfortable with some of the elements in it.
I became sharply aware of the ticking of a clock - a difference from classrooms in the world above, which invariably had electric clocks that had to be reset by the janitor or one of the teachers if we had a power outage. I looked to find it hanging behind the librarian's desk. At first glance it seemed to be an unremarkable if old-fashioned Regulator - and then I realized that, like the clock on the scoreboard, it had a couple of extra hands. Not to mention a second pendulum, half the length of the main one, to what purpose I couldn't imagine.
One thing was certain - I'd lingered here dangerously long. Suppressing an urge to get the heck out of here as fast as I could, I walked calmly and purposefully to the front door and descended the stairs into a very different landscape than I'd left.
The Henning Elementary Building is at the north end of town. Even in the 1970's, when the town was still thriving, there weren't more than one or two houses between it and open agricultural land.
Here, the building was surrounded by town, to the point I could look all the way down the street either way and not see any fields, any farm buildings like barns or grain bins and silos. This part of the Hidden City had a more suburban character to it, individual houses on their lots - but in some ways that might make things even more risky for me. A stranger would stand out in an entirely residential area far more than in a commercial or mixed-use area.
===========================================================================================
And there I leave it, after having to swap out mice because the left-click button gave out on the one I've been using for ages with my laptop (I prefer a mouse to a trackpad, although I'll use the latter at need). It's been fun revisiting a story I started back when the pandemic was first beginning, and haven't done much else with since life started returning to something resembling normal.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.
My first thought was to take it meta, to have it be part of a game or an anime or a manga -- but I'd just done that last week, and while I could've had it be one of the games in "NPC's," now that I'm in the middle of putting that novella together, I wasn't sure I wanted to write another segment that would have to be made to fit into something that was becoming steadily more and more definite, with less and less wiggle room for new things.
Then I remembered the Big Messy Project, and how I hadn't touched it in ages. Maybe this portal could be between the regular world and the Hidden City, in the My Old School part. And then I was off to the races...
===========================================================================================
The Other Side of School
As I slipped behind the curtains of the stage, memories bubbled up of being up here for school plays and Christmas programs. Except none of them had ever enabled me to actually go backstage. I knew that the two little rooms that flanked the stage were entrances to the backstage area, although one of them was also a fire exit. But I'd never had any role that would require me to wait backstage for my cue - and even if I had, I doubt the teachers would've allowed me to wander around back here, looking at everything.
Although it was fitting that I should discover yet another secret door hidden directly behind the stage. Like the one I'd found inside the house where I'd grown up, it wasn't an actual sliding door. Instead, it was another of those permeable areas where I could push my way through - which suggested I'd be going to the Hidden City rather than Sly Fox's tunnels.
There was no sense of turning around, but I most definitely emerged facing the backdrop curtains on the other side. The slight differences in their texture and hanging let me know that yes, I was once again in the Hidden City.
How had its school system been organized? I had a vague memory of my counterpart in that world having lived in a duplex where the other unit was occupied by a difficult teacher by the name of Miss Reed or Miss Read - already I was playing with punnery in first or second grade. And when I'd transposed the childhood classic Mr. Pine's Mixed-Up Signs to it, there must've been some School Zone signs and the like, but whatever I'd imagined the actual schools and classes to be like, I'd long since forgotten.
As I slipped between the curtains, I paused to listen. The last thing I needed right now was to emerge into the gymnasium to find a PE class in progress and have to explain myself to a teacher I knew nothing about. For that matter, I had no guarantee the teacher would even be human, given how many of the inhabitants of the Hidden City were anthropomorphic animals or toys come to life.
But I heard nothing, so I decided to chance it. I slipped through the curtains to an empty gymnasium lit only by the light filtering through the glass-block windows set high on the walls. Everything was laid out pretty much like the gym in the Henning Elementary Building - the doors, the bleachers, even the old scoreboard hanging over the entrance to the boiler room. Except there were differences, like the clock on the scoreboard having what looked like two sweep second hands, or the presence of secret doors in various places, which meant Sly Fox wasn't even bothering to conceal his activities here.
When I was school-aged, I would've jumped right down from the stage. Now I carefully sat down on the edge and lowered myself to the gymnasium floor.
I could hear voices from the direction of the lunchroom, which meant that school was in session. Best to be wary, since I doubted I could pass myself off as someone who'd have plausible reason to be in a grade school. I might be a college professor, but right now I wasn't exactly dressed like one.
As I headed toward the main entrance, I noticed that the doors to the storage areas under the bleachers were open. I looked into them, and immediately wished I hadn't.
Some of the stuff in there was unremarkable athletic equipment: a whole rack of basketballs, buckets of baseballs and bags full of bats. But there was also some weird electronic stuff, big cabinets with gauges and dials and long coiled cables leading to metal hemispheres with knobs and electrodes on them. At first glance they made me think of the typical media portrayals of a futuristic computer back in those days, the sort that seems laughable to anyone from the Twenty-first Century, who's carrying a computer with more power and using it to make calls and watch cat videos.
In the context of a school, I had a feeling they were some kind of “learning machine.” However, I doubted they were benign devices for allowing immersive learning by feeding sensory data directly into students' brains. In this time the whole idea of cyberspace and full-sensory-immersion virtual reality weren't even visions of science fictions. They were non-ideas, and wouldn't become ideas for another decade, until William Gibson gave them life.
No, that equipment would be for something nasty, especially with the evidence that Sly Fox was operating openly here. Maybe something that blurred the lines between education and outright brainwashing, or something that effectively installed “control software” in their victims' minds, like the Caps in that one science fiction series I'd read at about this time, about teens fighting a desperate Resistance against an alien conquest.
Whatever those machines were, I had no great desire to find out. However, I knew that trying to destroy them, or even render them inoperable, would just draw attention to my presence in the Hidden City. No way would the school administration, or the civil authorities, overlook the vandalism of what would have to be incredibly expensive equipment, however cobbled-together it might look to someone accustomed to the sleek lines of a modern laptop or smartphone.
Forcing myself to a measured pace, hoping no alarm was showing on my face, I climbed the stairs to the entrance door. As I reached the landing for the main entrance, I noticed that the door to the library was open, but the lights were off and nobody was in it. Odd, because as I remembered it, the librarian had always closed the door when she wasn't present.
Curious, I sauntered in. The first thing I noticed was the aquarium atop the low bookshelves that lined the outer wall of the library, just below the windows. It was astonishingly large for something set right over materials very susceptible to water damage - but then again, nothing in a grade school library was apt to be rare or expensive.
The first thing I noticed was the big, colorful fish. And then I realized that no, the divers were not just plastic ornaments like the castle or the sunken ship with its treasure chests that hid part of the aeration system. At first they seemed to be just swimming around in circles, suggesting they were in fact some kind of automaton.
But then one of them looked directly at me. Moments later all of them flashed off to take refuge in one of the caves at the bottom of the big structure that was probably intended to represent part of a coral reef.
Tiny divers, just like the ones at A-2 Pets here in the Hidden City, just like the ones I'd seen in the puddle in the basement of the Primary Building, when I'd first realized that no, I hadn't just gotten tossed backward in time by the storm that had brought me here.
Which raised the question of what exactly they were. Were these plastic ornaments come to life, like the toys and dolls one could see going about daily life in the streets of the Hidden City? Or were they actual frogmen, captured and shrunk to action-figure size by that white-coated mad scientist in his secret laboratory under the seafloor, who might or might not be in cahoots with Sly Fox?
Did it even make a difference? Did inanimate objects automatically gain rights when they came to life, or did it matter how they gained animacy?
How awkward it felt to recall how casually I'd thought up all those things back in grade school. The ethical aspects of all the handwavium that allowed the existence of tiny divers never even occurred to me.
But then most of the fantasy I was reading at that time was whimsical fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland where magic cakes and drinks and mushrooms could make you shrink to the size of a mouse or grow into a giant, but it didn't matter because at the end it all turned out to be a bad dream and the upended pack of cards was actually a bunch of autumn leaves falling on you. It's only when you try to apply systematic worldbuilding logic to it that you start getting uncomfortable with some of the elements in it.
I became sharply aware of the ticking of a clock - a difference from classrooms in the world above, which invariably had electric clocks that had to be reset by the janitor or one of the teachers if we had a power outage. I looked to find it hanging behind the librarian's desk. At first glance it seemed to be an unremarkable if old-fashioned Regulator - and then I realized that, like the clock on the scoreboard, it had a couple of extra hands. Not to mention a second pendulum, half the length of the main one, to what purpose I couldn't imagine.
One thing was certain - I'd lingered here dangerously long. Suppressing an urge to get the heck out of here as fast as I could, I walked calmly and purposefully to the front door and descended the stairs into a very different landscape than I'd left.
The Henning Elementary Building is at the north end of town. Even in the 1970's, when the town was still thriving, there weren't more than one or two houses between it and open agricultural land.
Here, the building was surrounded by town, to the point I could look all the way down the street either way and not see any fields, any farm buildings like barns or grain bins and silos. This part of the Hidden City had a more suburban character to it, individual houses on their lots - but in some ways that might make things even more risky for me. A stranger would stand out in an entirely residential area far more than in a commercial or mixed-use area.
===========================================================================================
And there I leave it, after having to swap out mice because the left-click button gave out on the one I've been using for ages with my laptop (I prefer a mouse to a trackpad, although I'll use the latter at need). It's been fun revisiting a story I started back when the pandemic was first beginning, and haven't done much else with since life started returning to something resembling normal.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.