The professor: part 4
Nothing ever goes according to plan
The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: Professor Simova of Fountain University is on the run. Lola’s new rebel friends need to intercept him before the Bruglian guard catches up. The exchange is about to take place…
Tupu.
3203. Late Frostfall.
The moon crouched low to the horizon, mirrored in the swamp waters. Insects lay low, dots on the surface, aiming to avoid the attention of the skimming bats. The only sounds were the creaking of boardwalks and the trilling of frogs, deep in the reeds.
“What happens now?” Lola asked, lying on her front to avoid giving away their position. She was with Pylpo and Daryla, holed up in the loft of an old watermill, looking out over the town from an open cargo window.
Daryla, crouched to one side, nodded in the direction of a small, narrow side street into which they could see from their elevated position. “Lykasra goes to make the deal. Hopefully everything goes according to plan, we get the location of Simova, retrieve him and get out of here.”
“And if it doesn’t go according to plan? Nothing ever goes according to plan, right?”
Pylpo, lying on the other side of Lola, rubbed her thumb and fingers together excitedly. “That’s when we bust some heads, right Daryla?”
“What worries me,” Daryla said, ignoring her, “is the city guard being here. They’re a long way from home, which means Simova knows something seriously important.”
Lola nodded, squinting against the dark. The moon was too low to afford much useful light into the crevices of Tupu. “Which makes it all the more critical we get him. He never struck me as the revolutionary type. I don’t see him as a troublemaker.”
“You said that Jyna claimed he was wanted for inappropriate behaviour against students?”
“Yep.”
Daryla snorted, having to suppress a laugh. “Yes, we can say with some certainty that the Bruglian city guard would not normally concern themselves with such matters, especially if it involved travelling several hundred miles to retrieve the suspect.”
“Maybe,” Pylpo said, “maybe he knows something about the Chancellor, or the faculty. Something incriminating, and so bad, they wanted to get rid of him. Something really juicy.”
Shifting her position, trying to stop her arms from going to sleep, Lola chewed on her lower lip. “Seriously, though, what’s the plan if it all goes to shit?”
“Lykasra can take care of themselves,” Daryla said. “Krystyan likely already knows the position of the city guards. I can take out a few from here, get in close if I need to. Worst case scenario, we fall back and get support from Slava, Maxim and Yana at the rendezvous out of town.”
“And Zlati,” Pylpo said.
“Sure, and Zlati,” Daryla said, not really listening.
Wriggling closer, Pylpo tilted her head towards Lola’s. “Me and Zlati go way back, you see. Way back.”
“How did you get involved with all this?”
Pylpo’s eyes sparkled, as if she’d been waiting to tell that particular story. “Well, I was in the employ of a doctor, years ago now. That’s how I learned so much about medicine — he got me to help out. Unpaid, obviously. I’m a city aen’fa, that’s how it goes. It was a roof over my head. Anyway, one day I meet this young girl at the market—”
“Can you keep it down?” Daryla glared at them both. “This is supposed to be a covert mission.”
Reducing her voice to a whisper, Pylpo moved yet closer, until Lola could feel the breath from her mouth on her ear. “So, I meet Zlati, who’s a worker in another family. But she’s treated really badly. Like, really badly. Which is when I started thinking differently about a lot of things. We decided to get out, and then on the road met this amazing woman called Laryssa. She convinced us to try to get through the portal to Mid-Earth, away from all this.”
Laryssa. That name seemed familiar to Lola, triggering an old memory from years earlier. A case, perhaps? One she’d done at the SDC, with Clarke. In fact, now that she thought about it, it might even have been that first case—
The memory was jogged free. That Laryssa? It couldn’t be.
“Anyway,” Pylpo continued, “we almost made it, but customs on the other side cranked open the container we were in. Me and Zlati got fast-tracked back to Palinor on a deportation deal, and I never saw Laryssa again. She wasn’t sent back with us so I like to think that she made it out, somehow. Found a life on Mid-Earth, maybe in London. Living all fancy, with a family and a job.” Pylpo sighed contentedly at the idea.
Lola had to tell her the awful truth, of course, but it wasn’t the time. When they were back at camp, then she’d have to explain all that she knew about Laryssa’s fate: that she was sold into the sex shops in the Barrel, until she was murdered. Feeling nauseous, Lola was unable to think of anything to say in response, so only nodded and smiled a thin smile.
“Here we go,” Daryla said. “Stop talking, eyes front.” She pulled her hood and mask up, her eyes narrowing.
As the team’s koth, it often fell to Lykasra to be the figurehead. The dealer. The negotiator. Sending a koth into a bad situation tended to result in the koth having a higher chance of survival than an aen’fa or human, given an even playing field. It was night, which would be suppressing any magical output from mages. Not a problem for a koth: their arms could rip a head clean off a body any time of day.
Plus, they could fly away if needed. Besides, they weren’t alone: Krystyan would be nearby, Daryla was up in the eaves somewhere. Pylpo wasn’t entirely useless, and the newbie human would at least stay out of the way until they had eyes on Simova.
It should have been simple, right up until they’d spotted Bruglian guards in the tavern. That had been unexpected. The rebellion was a splintered affair, despite Krystyan’s and Lykasra’s best efforts, comprising of many independent cells and unaffiliated groups. It kept the movement agile and almost impossible to quell, but it also made for communications challenges.
A cell from the north had acquired Professor Simova and was due to hand him over, but such events were not without ego. They would want recognition, or payment, or both. It was an unfamiliar group that they hadn’t dealt with before, which made Lykasra nervous. Unvetted could mean trouble. Or incompetence.
The temperature had dropped, even while the humidity remained at maximum. Lykasra had never much liked the swamps: the damp got in under their scales and plates, which could become rapidly very unpleasant if not managed. She’d read the horror stories. The sooner they made the exchange and got out, the better.
Movement at the end of the alley. A human male, with their hands in their pockets. They approached to within a few feet, keeping a respectful distance. “A little dark for a midnight stroll,” they said, the first part of the agreed handshake.
Lykasra sized up the human: he was slight of build, though carried himself as only someone physically confident would. “It’s quieter when everybody is asleep,” they said to the man.
He nodded. “Better to see the stars.”
The man seemed nervous, which wasn’t unreasonable.
“Bruglian city guard are here,” Lykasra said. “We should complete as soon as possible and go our separate ways.”
“Agreed.”
“You have the package?”
“In a warehouse by the docks. You’re sure you can keep it secure? We’ve gone through a lot to get it here.”
Lykasra smiled. “This isn’t our first go around.”
“You got your whole crew on this?”
An odd question.
“Enough to see it done.”
The man nodded. “Very well. Come with me, I’ll take you to the package.”
He led Lykasra out of the alley towards another area of the village, closer to the water, where the narrow streets and walkways gave way to a more open area. Presumably where cargo could be loaded, and no doubt a hive of activity during the day. Torches were lit, casting a flickering illumination over the dock and the water beyond.
“It’s just in here,” the man said, indicating a darkened doorway into a warehouse. “Go ahead.”
A bird whistled from somewhere up high. Lykasra paused, took a step back. “You first.”
The torches flickered, the flames bending towards the man. Lykasra felt as if a giant hand had gripped them, constraining their wings. The man removed his hand from his pocket, revealing a lantern strapped to his wrist, an intense fire burning within.
There was a flash from the roof of one of the buildings and a dark figure leaped down, a short blade in one hand aimed at the neck of the mage. Lykasra felt the grip around their body weaken as the mage spun to face the attacker, the blade sliding off an invisible barrier and sending the new arrival to the ground, where they rolled into a crouch.
Krystyan, always watching, had arrived, though a little later than was comfortable.
Taking the opportunity, Lykasra spread their wings and thrust into the air, simultaneously bellowing a jet of plasma at the mage.
As Krystyan flicked another blade from its sheath, the mage darted backwards to avoid Lykasra’s fire. There were shouts and the sound of doors banging open, and then the dock was swarming with city guard.
Lykasra sighed. It was going to get messy.
Meanwhile.
Apologies for the audio quality on this week’s voiceover. I had it all set up as usual, spoke into the Fancy Mic, and it was only afterwards that I discovered the computer had decided to continue using the laptop’s built in Crapola Mic. Most frustrating, and scheduling didn’t leave space for a re-record.
At the start of the week I published some thoughts about how to DIY a NaNoWriMo-style writing challenge:
Excitingly, this is loosely prompted at least a couple of people to give it ago! As such, if you’re interested in seeing stories come together in front of your eyes in real time, do check out what
and are up to:I’ve often said that the writing community that’s grown up around the newsletter space has the feeling of a comfy writer meet-up — the sort where you’d meet up down the pub and have a good ol’ chat about books and writing and your latest projects. I love it.
In other news,
had something interesting to say this week. Do click to read the entire thing:Short version being: allow people to celebrate their successes. Achievements are a good thing! Being an artist is especially difficult, and success is both elusive and fleeting.
I’ve never had much time for elitism. I encountered a lot of it when I was working at the National Centre for Writing — not from the organisation itself, or the people who worked there at the time (who were all fabulous), but from the literature sector more generally. It likes to judge people worthy and unworthy.
followed up with this:I have no problem with people celebrating when they accomplish something. It’s in the British psyche to downplay that kind of thing, and there’s certainly ways of doing it without being brash and tipping over into boasting. But being a writer (or being an expert in anything, really) is about climbing several impossible mountains, one step at a time, while everyone you know reminds you of how high the mountain is, and that you should really try something more realistic.
Until you get to the top. That’s when you celebrate, and plant a flag.
A lot of things are impossible until someone does it.
Author notes
Locations and a sense of place are tricky to do. Getting it right is vital, otherwise a story becomes somewhat unmoored in space. Including too much detail can bog down a story, though, can pull the reader out of the action.
As with so many aspects of storytelling, it becomes a continual cycle of compromise, looking for the right balance to serve the characters and the tale being told. Tupu is a good example: the previous chapter did a lot of heavy lifting in terms of setting the scene. In this week’s instalment we move through the village from the centre to the docks, and figuring out how to bring that to life was a bit of a challenge.
Often it’s about senses rather than direct observations. So we have the animal noises, or lack thereof. The mention of insect swarms, albeit at rest. The feel of still water, and a dark, quiet tension hanging over the place. A low moon, casting long shadows. A humid climate, but cooling rapidly in the night. All of that is about the feel of the place.
Then we have the positioning of the characters: Daryla, Lola and Pylpo up in the loft of the watermill, which gives us a sense of the limited verticality of the place: some buildings, at least, are tall enough to look down on others. We find that there are narrow streets and alleys, and we already know that the place is sodden and falling into the mud.
I hope it all builds a suitable picture, without having to be too overt or laboured in its description. As with all writing, it’s almost impossible to judge until readers get their hands on it — so let me know what you thought.
Tales from the Triverse has been restrained up to this point in the depiction of magic. We’ve had glimpses, and Lola witnessed a magic battle from afar back in ‘The escapists’ (January 2023), but it’s mostly been implied or small scale. Here we’ve already seen a physologist mage able to hold a koth in place, and it’ll be interesting to see how Krystyan and Lykasra do against him next week, along with all the other city guard. Not to mention Lola, Daryla and Pylpo who are going to be in the mix. Exciting!
Playing with genre is one of the real pleasures of Triverse. Much of the storytelling until recently was intended to have the grime and grit of a 70s movie thriller or a cop TV show like The Wire (the Gotham Central comic is another major reference point). The storylines we’ve had on Max-Earth, such as Clarke’s case on Ceres, was meant to invoke Asimov and Clarke and Robinson, and especially The Expanse. And here, on Palinor, we get to shift gears again into a more overt, fantastical tone. The setting affects the genre, which influences the stories themselves, and the way characters react. Palinor is a place where heroics can perhaps happen in a way that simply wouldn’t happen on Mid-Earth, or Max-Earth.
Whether all of that comes across as refreshing and exciting, or extremely confused and unsettled, I’ll leave up to you to decide.
The lantern in the pocket is a great gag. Well played.
Next week, the spinning blades with scatter the impacting excrement.