annotated floorplan - simple floorplan

“You have now seen almost the entire house,” Wanda said cheerfully. “Or at least all the interesting bits. I saved my favourite part until last, though.”

“It’s been fascinating,” Leo conceded. Some of it he’d seen at relatively high speed, with Wanda walking into a room, doing one circuit at normal speed, and leaving again, while other parts had included lingering for stories or to chat with someone. Tarragon had seemed highly amused by the situation, as had Jake. Despite all that, he had a general idea about the layout and what the house held. “And it’s been a very smooth ride without being dropped or anything, for which I’m grateful.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Wanda said. “You could get badly hurt that way, and that’s no fun. So, over here past the music room, I introduced you to Dora remember, we have what used to be called the card room but now we use it for games of any kind. Card games, board games, spin-the-bottle, whatever.”

“It, um, looks perfect for that.”

Wanda set the ball down on the table, which was mostly tightly-stretched soft green fabric with a wooden rim, and twisted it to separate the halves. “I’m not sure how much longer Fi’s potion is going to last. She usually makes them so they last around an hour. I wasn’t really keeping track but we’re probably getting close to that. You’ll have to see the loggia, that’s where Thalia has her plants, and the library on your own. And we missed Cosmo because of the route we took. But we made it through most of the rest, so that’s something.” She deposited the bag of Leo’s belongings on one of the chairs that ringed the table, then sat on another. As near as he could tell, she rested her chin on her hand. “I love this room. I think playing games with my family is probably my favourite thing in the whole world to do.”

Cautiously, Leo stood up, and stepped out of the plastic hemisphere, which rocked beneath him. Finally standing barefoot on the table, he looked around. The world was a lot more disorienting at this size than it felt while trapped in a glorified hamster ball. A little intimidating, even.

“What game do you like best?”

“Anything with lots of interaction is great. But then, you can make most games pretty interactive. It’s not so easy with something like chess, where it’s just two people and everything is about planning strategy and that kind of thing, but some card games, some board games...” She lifted her head from her hand and tilted it to one side a bit, the earring on one side suddenly swinging free. “Do you like games?”

“Sometimes.”

“Would you like to make a bet?”

“That depends on what I’m betting on and what the stakes are.” He walked around on the table, stepped onto the wooden rim, and looked down.

“Be careful you don’t fall.”

“Oh, I have no intention of falling.” He retreated from the edge. “It looks like a long way down.”

“Relatively, yes. Anyway. Pick a game. If you win, I will do my best to answer any question for you, although the caveat there is that there are rules I can’t break even if I want to.”

“And if you win?”

She grinned. “Oh, I’ll think of something you can do. The kinds of things you could fall into on your own tonight. Nothing nasty.”

Leo considered that, then shrugged. It seemed highly unlikely she had malevolent intentions. “Okay. I’m not very good at most card games, sorry. Something like Monopoly could take all night. I’d say maybe Clue? If we can find at least one more person?”

“Perfect! And a third person is easy. If she wins, hm, let’s say we let her decide? She could go either way, believe me.”

“I can go with that.”

“I’ll be right back.” Wanda bounced to her feet. “Sally?” she called, on her way to one of the doors. “You busy?”

Vividly blue goop oozed down from the top of the doorframe; Wanda held up both hands, and the gelatinous stuff redirected itself to them, flowing down her arms and coiling around her body. Wanda walked back to the table, still wrapped in goo.

Interestingly, Leo thought he could see body-shaped gaps within the goo even though the body itself was invisible.

Wanda held her arms over the chair she’d been in a moment before, and the goo dripped down to the seat of the chair. It drew itself together into a translucent blue woman.

“Sally, Leo,” Wanda said.

“Hello!” the blue woman said brightly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She giggled. “You’ve obviously met Ophelia already.”

“Hi,” Leo said. “Feel like playing a game?”

Sally giggled again. “Wanda talked you into one? Sure. What are we playing?”

“Clue,” Wanda said, choosing that box from the stack. “Usual stakes. If you win, you can choose me or Leo.”

“Sounds like fun. I’m definitely in.”

Leo had to move out of the way while Wanda opened the board onto the table. She sorted out the cards, chose a random one from each type to slip into the central envelope, and shuffled the rest together into one pile. Then she gathered up the six playing pieces.

“Let’s see... Peacock for you, Sally. Leo, lion, lions are yellow... Mustard for you, Leo?”

“Sure, I’m good with that.”

“And I’m wearing purple so I’ll do Plum.” She set all the pieces, including the unused white, red, and green pieces, in their places around the board. “Turns will be Leo first, then Sally, then me, since it starts at Scarlett and goes around. You should be able to roll the dice even before the potion wears off, Leo, but we can wait and start playing after it does if you’d rather.”

“I think I’m okay,” Leo said. “As long as you’ll be patient, because the cards are pretty big and I think looking through what I have might take a little longer than usual.”

“We’re used to working around different conditions,” Wanda said. “We can help hold your cards without looking at them, if you need us to.” Sally nodded agreement.

“Then let’s play. Why waste time when we don’t know how long it’s going to take?”

Playing a game when the dice required some significant effort to pick up and toss was certainly an experience. So was needing help with looking at cards that were half his own height. So was walking onto the board to move his playing piece to its destination. But the company was wonderful.

He paused mid-sentence, glancing down, and running a couple of fingers around the inside of the waist of his borrowed pants. “Um, these are feeling kind of tight all of a sudden.”

“We’ll disappear for a minute,” Wanda said, getting up quickly. “Your clothes are all right there. Here, let me help.” She scooped him up with great care and set him on her now-vacated chair.

Sally had already melted into a puddle and was oozing rapidly in the direction she’d come from before the game; Wanda caught up with her.

“Just call when you want us to come back,” Wanda said, without looking behind her. “And no changing anything or peeking at the envelope!”

“I would never cheat,” Leo said. “Thanks!” He untied both knots on his pants with some relief, since the ties were starting to dig in uncomfortably.

It didn’t take all that long for him to revert to his normal size. He checked himself over briefly, establishing that everything was as it should be, then dug his clothes out. It felt good to be dressed again, less vulnerable and more in control, to whatever extent he had any control at all tonight. Absently, he tucked the crystal necklace into his bag, since he wasn’t going to need it.

“Wanda? Sally? I’m about as decent as I get.”

“Coming,” Wanda sang out, and the two women came back into the room—Wanda walking, Sally oozing as a blob. Leo moved the bag containing his running shoes and messenger bag off the chair and sat down on that one. Wanda reclaimed her seat, and Sally flung part of herself up onto her chair and pulled the rest of herself up to join it, reforming into her human shape.

“Feel better?” Wanda asked.

“That was a majorly unusual experience,” Leo admitted. “Memorable, even, although it has competition.”

“That happens,” Sally said. “Whose turn was it?”

They kept playing. It was difficult, even at full size, to read the expressions of the two people he was playing with, since he could see only Wanda’s clothes and makeup, and while Sally did have detailed and attractive facial features they were not as easy to make out, being a uniform blue. His intuition tried to make up the difference, but it was an uphill struggle.

Wanda won.

“Muahahaha,” she chuckled, in the world’s cutest evil chortle. “You’re at my mercy now.”

Leo spread his hands. “Fair and square.”

“Sally? Can you think of any really fun books?”

“Hmm.” Sally pondered that, while Wanda and Leo packed up the game. “Oh, I know! I’ll meet you in the library.” She melted off her chair and flowed along the floor at considerable speed.

“Your bag is okay here,” Wanda said. “No one will touch it.” She put the lid back on the box but left it on the table. “Coming?”

Leo went with her in the direction Sally had gone.

Obviously, the library. They were surrounded by books and furniture conducive to reading said books.

Sally set a book on a standing reading desk or podium sort-of thing, opened it, and flipped through pages.

“Here, this one. Just come and read what’s on the page.”

It couldn’t be any more peculiar than being in paintings and being eight inches tall.

Leo shrugged to himself and approached the book. It looked old-fashioned, probably about the size of a three-ring binder but bound properly.

It was hand-written, in ink that still looked fresh and sharp and black with no fading, and the letters were precise in shape and bold in style.

With fervent hopes and prayers, we followed the same heading that the griffins we spotted took, and sure enough, it brought us to blessed land. The whole crew badly wants shore leave, but so far the Captain has restricted landing to an exploratory team and, once we had found a source of fresh water, she permitted a team to start refilling the barrels on the ship. I was, of course, part of the exploration team. It’s a marvellous island—for I’m certain it must be such, though of quite substantial dimensions.

This is based on the amount of space needed for the thriving wildlife, of highly varied sizes, that we have identified. The griffins were likely a hunting party in search of the wild pigs and what I think might be some mid-sized species of antelope, or perhaps the abundant sea life in a large sheltered shallow lagoon.

As Leo read, he began to hear the words somewhere in his head, in the voice of a youngish man with an unfamiliar accent.

Even that changed as he went on. Still aware of every word, he also saw the island, saw the bright sand along the beach and the dense vegetation farther from shore and the rocky outcrop at the centre. The wild pigs weren’t cute or complacent, they were fierce-looking beasts that squealed in warning and made charging motions, although the “cute” label could be applied to the cluster of small ones behind the protective adults. The antelope, in contrast, were shy and he caught only glimpses of their red-brown bodies before they vanished into the deep undergrowth, the fine white striping breaking up their outlines and rendering them virtually invisible.

The trees were full of birds. The narrator named some, and the mental camera focus swung to those ones, but Leo had never heard of any of the names before and some of them looked... odd. He thought there might be a real-world bird that had a wing-claw when it first hatched but lost that when it was old enough to fly, but he didn’t think there were any that had a trio of digits midway along a fully-feathered wing. Fanciful tails and crests and colouring were standard for birds, but he saw one gliding that, instead of normal wings plus legs, had four wing-like limbs and flew between trees with all of them outstretched, before landing on the trunk like a sugar glider and climbing up out of sight with claws on all four limbs.

The trees also held what the narrator called terrestrial octopodes, which was explained when he came face to face with a small octopus that was clinging to a tree-trunk. The body was the size of a baseball, and each arm maybe a foot long. The eyes tracked him quite actively without the rest moving, and Leo wasn’t sure octopus eyes were supposed to do that. There were others living in the trees, most of them smaller, only one or two possibly larger. A diminutive one dropped off a branch onto his shoulder; the narrator expressed his delight and his insistence to his companions that it was harmless, and allowed it to come along for the ride. It looked around inquisitively as they walked.

The creatures in the lagoon were equally odd, distracting him from the sheer beauty of the scene. There were turtles that were hard to see because their shells were transparent, refracting the light in the water to hide even the more substantial parts of themselves from easy detection. More alarmingly, there were glimpses of something that might be shark-like, of something like six feet in length, that fascinated the narrator because part of its colouring was on what he called the negative spectrum, so its prey literally might never have any idea what had just eaten it. Conversely, there were huge schools of fish whose brightly-coloured bodies shimmered and rippled like they were a single entity, disorienting the eye.

Aside from a single small tree deep in the jungle that the narrator identified as carnivorous and easily avoided—one would have to step right into the circle around it that was devoid of any vegetation aside from vines lying on the ground, and then stay there for several seconds while the vines reacted—he determined that the island was generally no more dangerous than any other unexplored area, and that it should be tolerably safe for the Captain to allow the crew to take turns stretching their legs. Meanwhile, the narrator had much more investigation to do.

The entry ended, and Leo blinked, reorienting on the library and the book and the two women with him.

“Oh my goodness,” Sally said in delight. “I’ve never seen that happen before!”

“Maybe Leo just gets really deeply into things?” Wanda mused.

“What?” Leo asked, then he caught motion from the corner of his eye and twisted to look at his left shoulder.

A tiny octopus waved at him with one arm.

It was the same colour as his blue-and-green sweater, and was even approximating the pattern. The whole creature could have fit on his palm, he was sure, even with arms fully spread.

“Is it dangerous?”

“Of course not,” Sally said. “I’ve read all of this author’s journals. He makes it very clear that they’re harmless. Like the aquatic kind, they mostly depend on camouflage and being able to fit into ridiculously narrow spaces to stay safe. Unlike the aquatic kind, they’re frugivores. They live on fruit. That’s why they evolved to live in tropical trees. Or maybe the other way around.”

“And this one is utterly adorable,” Wanda said. “Hi, little guy. Welcome to the Mallory house.”