Chatterbox: Blab About Books

WARNING: Long story ahead. If you do not have about a half-hour on your hands, I strongly advise you to turn back now. Now, I present to you, the CB story!

POSTSCRIPT: You may have seen this on an old thread that died a while ago. Ignore it. Also, I'm still working out a couple kinks in the plot. I'm not done yet. Pt. 3 will be arriving. Might take a while. DEFINITELY will be shorter than this pos.

Let us begn the tale:

Act One: In Which the General Acquires a Strange Device

Who am I? Are you sure you want to know? The story of my life is not one for the faint of heart. If someone said it was a happy little tale, if somebody said I was just an average guy, not a care in the world… somebody lied. But like any other story, mine starts out at home.

    My mother was a dimension-hopping time-lord. My father was the general of the army of the Breakfast Kingdom. That left me with some pretty unusual skills. I can hop dimensions, regenerate, and I had the training of my father and his father before him and his father before him, and back, and back, and back. I was a mishmash of strange abilities.

My adventure started at age 12, year 2487. I was an an old stone bridge in the woods by my house, my feet dangling off the side. I was sitting with Jamie, a black-haired boy who has been my friend as far as I can remember. We were in the middle of a fierce debate, and I was about to push Jamie into the water.

    “I tell you,” he said, “Mjolnir can summon thunder! Sting was only used to spread butter on Lembas Bread!”

    “Ah, but does Mjolnir glow when your enemies are close by? No. It does not.” I pointed out.

    “Thor doesn’t need to know where his enemies are because Mjolnir can blow up mountains! MOUNTAINS!”

    “Tell me, Jamie, have you ever heard of the words collateral damage?”

“Good point. Mjolnir is still WAY cooler, than your stupid halfling butter knife.”

I was growing irritated. “Will you ever give up?” I asked.

“Nope! Mjolnir is cooler than Sting, and nothing you say will convince me otherwise.” Jamie said, grinning.

I sighed. Jamie’s determined, I’ll give him that, but sometimes he’s kind of annoying.  

    “Where’s Very, anyway?” I asked, looking around, “He was supposed to be here.”

    “He’s busy with violin class, but he’ll be here soon,” Jamie answered.

Very Bad was Jamie’s older brother, and had recently joined our little group. He had been a great supplier of ideas, and he had a strange affiliation for music. Despite his name, he was a pretty nice guy, and mature for his years. He had promised to meet us at the old stone bridge, but it looked like he had other plans for the time being.

“Shall we head off to the bunker?” Jamie asked. I pondered for a couple seconds.

“Will Very know where we are?” I asked.

“He’ll figure it out. He’s pretty smart.” Jamie said.

“Let’s go then!” I said, and jumped down from the bridge onto the shore. Jamie followed, and soon we came to a tunnel in the ground. We both knew the way, so navigating through the various trick passages and getting to the trapdoor was easy. When we arrived, Jamie looked up at the ceiling, skeptical.

“Through the Floor Door?” asked Jamie.

“I thought it would be fun to try out,” I replied.

“That’s OK. I don’t have a problem with it.”

I opened the trapdoor, climbed in, and helped Jamie up. The bunker was a large underground building that we found one day, and refurbished (with the help of my parents) to act as a kind of secret base. It had a lab where we conducted tests on my powers, a comfortable living room, three bedrooms, a bathroom (obviously), and a couple other rooms that aren’t worth mentioning. We dusted ourselves off, and took a look around the lab. Nothing was out of the ordinary at first glance. But then I noticed the police box in the corner.

The police box was just standing there, not doing anything. I knew what it was because we learned about them in history class. I don’t know what one was doing here, though. Jamie stared with me for a little bit, but then he began to walk towards it. I followed, but when he opened the door, I stopped him.

“What are you doing?” I yelled at Jamie.

“Going inside.” he said.

“Do you know who this belongs to?” I asked.

“No. What's your point?”

“My point is that we shouldn’t just waltz inside a random box that appears in our hidden bunker!” I shouted.

“No need to shout. I know you, aren’t you the littlest bit curious about what’s inside?” he said.

“Yeah, but do you really think that this is a good idea?” I asked.

“Good as any idea you’ve had. Come on!” He walked inside, waving for me to follow. I followed, albeit reluctantly. When I saw the inside, I gasped. There was a huge console in the center with a large tube coming out of the center. We were walking on iron walkways above a floor that seemed to be steaming. Jamie busied himself with the console, while I walked around the various rooms that branched off of the central one.

As I was walking, I came across a room full of strange objects. They were glass tubes sitting on large panels with TARDIS written across the bottom. I stared at the tubes, and called Jamie over. “What’s up?” he asked.

“I found this weird tube thing, and I think I should go inside.”

“Can’t hurt that much, can it?” he asked.

“I dunno, it’s possible. Do you know what the word TARDIS means?”

“Never heard of it. You should try going in!”

“Alright, but if I die, I’m blaming you,” I said. I took a deep breath and went inside the glass tube.

Much to my surprise, the inside of the ‘TARDIS’ mirrored that of the area I had just left, with the console in the centre and pathways the sides of it. There was one difference from the one I had just left. This one had a key on the console. I grabbed the key and stepped out of the TARDIS. Jamie was waiting with baited breath, and when he saw me come out with the keys, he started speaking frantically, “There’ssomeonehere! Gogogogogogogogo!” he said and started to shove me back in the TARDIS thing. I tried to resist, but the caught me off balance, and I tumbled backwards into the tube, Jamie right behind.

As we groggily sat up, I spotted a shiny keyhole on the console. I got to my feet, ran over to the console, shoved the key inside the keyhole, and turned. I heard a loud ‘VWORRRP! VWORRRP!’ and the floor began to shake.  I looked at the console, and saw a bunch of levers and dials, and for some odd reason, a teapot. I pulled the levers and twisted the dials, hoping to somehow deactivate the machine. No such luck. The ‘VWORRRP! VWORRRP!’ noise grew louder, and then, all of the sudden, everything slowed to a dull hum. Jamie and I both walked to the door, nearly in sync, curious to see what happened. I stared at Jamie. Jamie stared back. With a nod, we both pushed the door open. I gasped. Jamie gawked. We were in an entirely different world.

Act Two: In Which We Meet a Wolf of Ice and a Leaf of the Autumn

    The world in which we found ourselves now was nothing to like anything we had ever seen. It was a bustling and crowded garden of neon and brick. It reminded me of Coruscant from the Star Wars movies. Buildings rose up to the sky, dots against a sheet of cloudy grey. Some buildings were tall and thin, others squat and short. Each of them were glowing with light and life. The sky was a dull, cloudy grey that cast the city into a darkness lit by neon signs and streetlights.

There were hordes and hordes of people of all shapes and sizes bustling in and out of buildings and on the streets. Nobody seemed to notice a couple kids coming out of a strange tube. Now that I looked back however, the tube was gone. In it’s place was a telephone box with it’s red windows and tempered glass. Jamie and I hesitantly stepped further away, and onto the cobblestone street. As soon as we did so, we were swept away by the crowd of people heading down the street. I gripped my keys tightly before putting them in my pocket. As Jamie and I came further away from our TARDIS, I noticed a sign with the words ‘Newcomers Here!’ and ‘Nexus Welcome Center’ written in small print below it. I pointed to the sign, and Jamie nodded. We waded our way through the crowd to the building below the sign, and entered.

After we caught our breath, we looked up, and surveyed our surroundings. The inside was small, with wood paneling and contained shelves lined with brochures. As I studied the brochures, something about them struck me odd. They were all advertising for other dimensions. I had known that I had the ability to dimension hop for years, but I’d never known how to do it, or what I would do if I did. Maybe this place has something for me after all, I thought, it wouldn’t hurt to stay for a bit. There were two girls at the counter, the one at the right was carving a pumpkin, and the one at the left was doodling on a paper plate. The girl at the pumpkin was tall with long curls of red-brown hair hanging from her head, a faceful of freckles, and a look of concentration. The girl on the left was shorter, with long blond hair icy blue eyes, and a thin smile crossing her face. Jamie seemed pretty occupied with the brochures on the walls, so I cleared my throat and walked up to the desk. The one carving the pumpkin looked up and nudged the other on the shoulder. The one on the left looked up, noticed me, and hustled to put the plate away. “Hello,” said the one on the right, “I’m Autumn Leaves, but everyone calls me Autumn. How can we help you today?”

“I need to know where in the world I am,” I said, then, thinking that was a bit rude, added, “That is, if you don’t mind.”

“You’re in the Nexus, a meeting point for all dimensions. Also, technically you aren’t on any world, since the Nexus is in dimensional limbo,” said Autumn.

“Oh, sorry. I’ve never been here before,” I apologized.

“Well there’s a first time for everything!” said the girl on the left, “name’s Ice Wolf, but most people call me Wolfy. May I ask your name, stranger?”

“Waffleson,” I replied, “General Waffleson. I need a little bit of help with something.”

“What’s up?” Wolfy asked, “We are the welcome people, so it’s kinda our job to help people out. Even if they’re bonkers with a razor. Or if they have a name like Waffleson.”

“HEY!” I objected, “Not cool.”

“She insults everyone, I think it’s her way of greeting people. Don’t take it too seriously. The bad thing is, because of her habit, word gets around of the whole razor incident, and we don’t receive many customers,” Autumn said, with a small, and not very angry glare at Wolfy,  “I believe you had a problem?”

“I have no idea where I am. Well, that is to say, I know I’m in the Nexus, but I don’t know how I got here,” I said.

“Well, it looks like you have a story to tell, Mr. Waffleson

“I’m from the Breakfast Dimension, and I was going into my lab, and there was this police box, and I went inside, and it was huge, and there was this tube thing called a TARDIS, and I went inside and pressed some buttons and BOOM I was here,” I gabbled very quickly, and exhaled deeply.

“Wait, did you say TARDIS?” Autumn asked.

“Yeah, what of it?” I answered. Wolfy and Autumn exchanged glances.

“And you said there was a police box?”

“Yeah.”

“Did this police box happen to be bigger on the inside? Did it have any hats? I would KILL for a good hat,” Wolfy interjected.

“Yeah, how did you know that?” Neither Wolfy nor Autumn supplied an answer. Instead, they walked to an empty corner, and withdrew into a whispered conversation in which the words ‘doctor’ and ‘cricket’ were mentioned many times. After a couple minutes of patiently waiting, and me glancing over at Jamie to see if he was OK (which he was), they came back to the counter, with an air of people who had just created a plan. “So… can you help me?” I asked.

“Not right now, but we think we know a place with weirdos like you. Follow us. Oh, bring your friend too,” Wolfy said, coming out from behind the counter. They walked out the door and into the street. I tapped Jamie and pointed to the door. “We’re leaving,” I said.

“OK,” he said and began to look back down at the book he found.

“You’re coming too!” I yelled, dragging him away from the shelf. With a yelp, he shook my hand off and followed. I darted my eyes around the crowd, spotted Autumn and Wolfy, and hurried to catch up.

Once I was side-by-side with them, I cleared my throat, to let them know I was there. They looked, and noticed me walking beside them. “May I ask where we’re going?”

“You’ll see…” Autumn answered cryptically.

“What is THAT supposed to mean?” I muttered under my breath. Then I noticed Jamie coming up from behind us. “Hey, Jamie,” I greeted.

“Hey,” he replied. There was a moment of awkward silence, which Wolfy broke.

“So, Mr. Waffleson, about how much do you know about dimensional travel?”

“Not as much as I probably should, seeing as my mother was a time lord AND a dimension hopper,” I answered.

“Wait,” said Wolfy, her face scrunching up in concentration, “was your mother the famous Katrina Waffleson?”

“Her name is Katrina, but I don’t know anything about famous,” I said.

“Your mother is a hero around these parts. She saved the entire Nexus from destruction,” Autumn said.

“Twice,” Wolfy corrected, “but I didn’t know about her having a son. Or a husband for that matter.”

“Well, here’s your proof. And I thought my dad’s side was noble lineage,” I said, absorbing this new information, “come to think of it, that explains why she kept coming home with bruises and burns.”

“Who’s your dad?” asked Autumn.

“General Waffleson. He’s the leader of the armies of the breakfast kingdom.”

“Huh. Never heard of him,” Wolfy said.

“Well you wouldn’t unless you came from the Breakfast dimension,” I replied

As we kept walking I felt that I was being watched. I turned to see three figures in black robes a short distance behind us. They looked quite sinister in the dark of the Nexus

The alley was thin, and we only had enough space to walk single file. Autumn and Wolfy went in front, Jamie went next, and I held up the rear. As we came to the end of the alley, I noticed Autumn pull out a strange screwdriver-shaped thing. She tapped it on the wall, and it opened up to reveal of all things, a coffee shop.

“Welcome to the Cricket!” Autumn and Wolfy said in unison. Then they laughed. Then, in mid-laugh, their faces fell suddenly.

I turned to see the black-robed people that I had had spotted earlier. They were walking straight for us. I couldn’t see their feet, which made it look like they were floating. When they looked up, I saw stark-white faces with blazing red eyes. As they drew closer, I saw them pull out jagged silver knives. I turned back to see that everyone was running inside the coffee shop, and I was standing in the middle of the alley, watching the robed people come closer. I saw Wolfy beckoning frantically towards me to follow the others into the shop, and Autumn poised to seal the door with her screwdriver thing. I took a glance at the robed people, now only a few feet away, and sprinted as fast as I could to the opening. Jamie pulled me in, and I saw the wall seal up behind me. I got up, panting, and looked up at Wolfy and Autumn.

“What in the worlds just happened?” I asked.