Welcome to Chapter 3 of Writing to Order!
For anyone who wants to catch up:
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
So far we have a shy asexual librarian who has been pushed through a time portal by a excessively large and excessively lazy cat. The precise nature of the cat has yet to be established in the story but there are things going on that will hopefully become apparent.
While the cat is asleep on the radiator back in 21st century England, Jamie has menaced by a peculiar, knife-wielding entity in Victorian London. I’ve had requests that this entity should be Jack the Ripper, to which my reply is “I’m away ahead of you” 🙂
Fleeing from the Ripper entity, Jamie has stumbled out into 19th century Whitechapel.
Further requests include: an explanation of what the hell is going on and for the incidental prostitute to be important (though, oddly enough, not the incidental sailor).
Chapter 3
my instrument is
lost
hounded by my enemies
known
& unknown
visible
& invisible
i send
thought forms
to seek him
among the phase trees
to no avail
i fear i must abandon the blanket.
Well, this was awkward.
Jamie didn’t like asking strangers directions at the best of times but he was particularly hesitant to walk up to a randomly selected Victorian ne’re-do-well and say, “Excuse me, could you please direct me to the nearest temporal portal.”
The full enormity of his situation was beginning to settle on him, in equal parts depressing and panic-inducing. He was, quite simply, stuck: Robinson Crusoe, marooned in time. Short of single-handled achieving a scientific breakthrough that the great minds of the twenty-first century would have considered impossible, his choices were to wait for rescue or wait for death. The first was unlikely, the second unappealing—and potentially imminent, given his recent encounter with a murderous entity of uncertain provenance.
In fact, the more he thought about it, the only thing that could conceivably have made his situation worse was the socially embarrassment of being prepositioned by a streetwalker while he reflected on how utterly screwed he was.
“Looking for a good time, guvnor?” It was the young lady he had observed parting from a sailor not a four minutes earlier. If nothing else, he rather respected her work ethic.
“In the abstract yes, in the specific no.”
“S’allright. I do it in the abstract too. Just costs extra.” She put her hands on her hips and swayed in a manner he thought was probably intended to be provocative.
Jamie flinched. “No really.” He tried to imagine what a heterosexual Victorian might say. “I’m just browsing, thank you.”
“Look here, mister—“ she leaned in, drenching his senses in a wash of cheap perfume “—you want to come with me right now.”
Good God, nineteenth century sex workers were committed. He was supposed this was what what they called Victorian values. “I’m honestly very sure I don’t.”
She sighed. “For fuck’s sake. You’re not from around here. I’m not from around here. You’re being chased by a man with a big knife. I’m being chased by a man with a big knife. We have quite a lot in common and I’d really like it if you stopped drawing attention to us and let me help you.”
It sound good. Too good, in fact, to be true. “How do I know this isn’t a trap?” he asked.
“Oh my days. You don’t. But, right now, what choice you got?”
She had a point. “Very well. But if you try to murder me, I’m going to take it very personally.”
She grabbed his hand and whisked Jamie into the maze of alleyways. He soon abandoned all hope of working out where they were or how to get back, particularly since back was a relative concept when you were lost in time and space.
“I don’t suppose,” he said, as they hurried along, “we could, at least, exchange names. It would make this peculiar situation somewhat less intimidating.”
“I got lots of names.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“I mostly go by Mary or Mary Jane, or Black Mary, or there’s some as calls me Ginger, though I ain’t.”
“Then … why?”
“Tell you what, my love, we may have just met but I’m pretty sure you don’t want to know.”
He tried not to catalogue possible explanations. “I’m Jamie,” he said, hurriedly. “I’m a librarian.”
“About time they sent someone useful.”
That, also, was not reassuring. But, before he could comment, he was ushered up a rickety iron staircase outside a building that smelled, if possible, even worse than the rest of the city. A creaky sign identified the shop below as Wick’s Leather Merchant and Tanners.
“Place was bargain,” Mary told him, “on account of the persistent reek of piss.”
Jamie’s eyes were watering. “Doesn’t it interfere with, well, with your profession?”
“I’m not the sort has gentleman visiting. Strictly a bridges and alleys girl. Besides, amazing how few people will come poking around a place like this. Gives me privacy.”
She opened a door and Jamie stepped into a small, dank room. The only items of furniture were a bed, a chair and some of sort of device, which emitted a strange, electric glow that filled the space with pale, blue light. It illuminated his companion, who was tall and slim and, he supposed, was probably pretty by somebody’s standards. It also illuminated piles and piles of books, magazines of papers, many of which were open to reveal illustrations of a rather explicit nature.
“Make yourself at home,” said Mary, closing the door behind them.
Jamie blinked. “Make myself at home where? On top of your mountain of pornographic literature or next to your unexplained machine from the future?”
She let out a relieved breath. “Oh thank God, so you do know what’s going on. I was starting to worry I’d got the wrong person.”
Jamie thought he’d been doing rather well up until this point but the suggestion that he was somehow “in on it” proved the final straw.
“No,” he cried. “I don’t know what’s going on. I inherited a bookshop I didn’t want and a cat I didn’t want, and the cat I didn’t want pushed me through a hole in the universe whereupon I was attacked by a man with a knife and static for eyes and then accosted by—meaning no offence—a strange prostitute who has brought me room that smells of urine and is filled with mystical technology and Victorian London’s largest wank bank. I am very confused and quite upset. And I would really like it if someone would tell me what the bloody hell was happening.”
Mary eye’s widened in the eerie glow and then she pushed him firmly into the chair. His legs buckled and he sank down gratefully, realising belatedly that he had made a bit of a fuss. “I’m sorry,” he added. “I’m just … overwrought.”
She patted his shoulder awkwardly. “There there. I can see you’ve had a bit of a day. I’d offer you a cup of tea but the cholera’s going round.”
“No cholera, thank you. But some kind of explanation would be really helpful at this juncture.”
“Okay.” She shifted a few issues of The Pearl out of her way and perched on the edge of the bed. “So here’s what I’ve been told. In the future, a really long way in the future, there’s this big Empire what doesn’t believe in anything physical, so it’s all made of information flying around in space and there’s no bodies or anything like that because they’re just thoughts. They can move through time and talk to people and do things but somewhere not quite so far in the future there’s these other people who don’t want the Empire to win because they think not being made of information and having a body and that is the right way to be. And they can send stuff back in time too and they use folk like me to get them weapons to fight in the future.”
This was a lot to take in and Jamie was starting to wish for that cup of tea, cholera be damned. “So,” he said slowly, “let me get this straight. You’re a trans-temporal arms dealer and part-time prostitute?”
Mary thought about it for a moment. “Basically … yes. Except because, in the future, everything’s made of thoughts, the weapons are ideas.”
Jamie picked up the nearest book. It turned out to be a copy of The Romance of Lust so he put it down again quickly. “Do you mean these ideas?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re fighting a war against bodiless time-travellers from a post-singularity future armed only with nineteenth century pornography?”
She burst out laughing. “Lord love you, don’t be ridiculous. I know for a fact there’s some bloke in 1811 collecting the Romantics. Lots of stuff about daffodils and dead sparrows.”
Jamie put his head in his hands.
Okay folks. We now have a plot, of sorts, a setting, an antagonist and an incidental prostitute. Plus a cat from a post-physicality future trying to convince itself to get off a blanket and rescue its Mortal Instrument (Jamie). I’m still kind of short on a love interest here. Any ideas for who else, and what else, may be involved in the textual war? Any preferences for other time-hopping adventures. And how the hell do I get the cat off the blanket?
Alexis Hall is wastrel with a good hat. You can find him on his website, onTwitter, and occasionally on Facebook, which he doesn’t know how to use. He’ll be at Love Bytes on the 14th of every month, writing something he doesn’t yet know.
Re getting cat off blanket – open Frontline ampule and duck….
Re love interest – please finally give my favourite dreadfully sexually frustrated poet Gerard Hopkins a really good time…..he died in 1889 so the history is stretchable perhaps?
Thanks for the story I am enjoying it.
Haha, I love this, you keep making me laugh 😀 And, on Jack the Ripper, I *knew* it was him, because he said “Boss” 😉
Hm, well, it strikes me that it’s getting more & more difficult to make suggestions. Because, at this point, you’ve already got stuff in mind that limits the direction the story can go. But it’s hard (for me, anyway) to come up with random ideas that are not tied to a story, because it’s sort of only in imagining the story that the details reveal themselves. If we give you story you have to scrap because it contradicts what you’ve already got planned, you can sort of cannibalize characters & interesting details, but it basically just more props & scenery to decorate the stage, so to speak, doesn’t move the story forward.
That said, not sure how else to do this, so here goes: I still like the idea that his love interest is a pathologically shy scientist, programmer, even an engineer of sorts, presumably from the future who has retreated to the past for some reason. Maybe he wrote the program or invented the technology or process that resulted in the far-in-the-future time where there are no bodies but only thoughts, but later realized its potential for harm & tried to sabotage it only it had sort of become “self-aware” & tried to kill him in self-defense, forcing him to flee into the past? Or maybe he’s a whistle blower who learned the truth about the technology before it went live but was thwarted in stopping it by its creator(s).
I’m trying to think of why someone would want a world in which there are only thoughts & ideas, divorced of people. Maybe that’s something you might want if you don’t have a physically functioning body & can communicate only thru your mind & technology, ala Stephen Hawking. Or, maybe thoughts & ideas *themselves* achieve self-awareness through – something like virtual reality, or the internet, & sort of “declare their independence” from the restrictions of physical bodies?
Ooh, another thought, since ideas are “weapons”, maybe instead of being a scientist or programmer or engineer, the extremely shy love interest is . . . . a writer! 🙂
He doesn’t necessarily have to be from the future, he could be from the Victorian era, or any era, from further in the past, or some intermediate point between the Victorian era & Jamie’s time. And his writing is possibly a weapon they can use in the war of ideas? Hee, maybe he even wrote some of the pornography! I sort of like the idea of pathologically shy writer of pornography 🙂 But maybe that doesn’t make sense, if the love interest, as well as Jamie, is supposed to be on the ACE spectrum?
As for how they meet, I feel like Mary has to have some sort of connection with the love interest guy. She works with him or they are friends or she’s related to him. Or, maybe it’s the cat who brings them together. Whenever he shows up. Maybe he shows up *with* the cat?
As for other times they could visit, hm, well, some interesting eras are The Roaring Twenties, the 1950’s, the 1960’s. Or you could go the other direction, further back in time.
Oh, hey, may you could take them back to the 17th century at some point & somehow involve the John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester 😉 He is a poet, after all, goes with the war of ideas.
As for how to get the cat off the blanket – catnip? Make bird sounds? Turn a dog loose in the room? Or a mouse? Throw a bucket of water on him?
Good grief – disembodied evil empire and wank banks as weapons – love it! Pam Faste has boggled my mind so I’ll just drop in some small ideas. I like the idea of Jamie’s love interest being a shy writer but rather than porn maybe they can have a time-travel adventure to Ancient Greece where shy, pretty, androgynous looking writer, Plato composes love poetry of the romantic and abstract variety – no porn ( in Greece!! 😉 ) as it holds no real interest for him. The prostitute and Jamie travel to find Plato (?), as they discover that the ideal and idea of a pure ‘unsullied’ love is the ultimate weapon against the Empire! (Play on the modern interpretation of Platonic Love) – maybe before Plato they can visit Byron and win a major battle with She Walks in Beauty!
Maybe cat could be chased from Blanket and into action by digital dog!
Haha, I definitely boggle my own mind sometimes BJ, though not always in a good way 😛
But omg, “digital dog” & winning a battle with She Walks in Beauty, you’ve boggled mine now too!
And the Platonic idea makes total sense 🙂
Thank you Pam 🙂