A change in tone?
This journal is now officially a "creative" journal as well. I've received consistently positive feedback on my Nano novel, so I'm considering finishing that off and posting it up here, but I need to get back into the "Creative Non-Script Fiction" groove, so here's a short piece set in All-That-Is, in the Year of the Blenny. It's nothing substantial, but writing non-journal or dialogue sentences is tricky when you haven't done it for a while. Settling into a groove is the trick, and the only way to do that, is to write.


Frankel nervously looked up from his scroll. He wasn't scared exactly; if he was going to get killed, it was going to be loud and it was going to be public. The Queen was angry, sure, but she wanted to make an example of him. He wasn't a huge threat in himself: his writing was inflammatory, but it was the idea that he would open the floodgates for other political writers. She wanted to wipe him out in front of an audience, so that the message would be clear.

Mess with the Queen, and she'll mess you up.

Thebaz Isle used to be...well, not idyllic. In all the scrolls it had sounded pretty idyllic, but if you read a scroll written by the TITA - The Thebaz Isle Travel Agency - then you have to take it with a grain of salt. But it had been nice. After he'd had a dispute with PAT, PET and PITA - the Peedling Actor's Troupe, the Phantelia Entertainment Team, and the Peedling International Theatre Agency, Frankel had decided that perhaps his temperament wasn't right for Ellay.

But he had settled in quite nicely to his new home in Az. Originally, the plan was to live somewhere nice, somewhere country. Maybe find a nice fairy wife, have a farm, and...well, obviously not have children, but grow cage trees, sell them to the other farmers.

Of course, under the new Queen's regime, the market wouldn't be farmers, it would be slavers. Slavers, in Az. When he'd first moved here, the idea would have been laughed at.

His attempts to live a quiet country life were thwarted, however, by his own nature more than anything. He was a Peedling, which meant that he was hairy, creative, and above all, craved the big city. Ellay, homeland of the Peedlings, consisted of big city after big city, with nothing but stretches of country in between. Besides which, he was a terrible farmer.

So he had moved to Byntol, the capital of Az at the time. He had found a job pretty easily, writing stories for a weekly scroll, "Children of the Isle." It was widely distributed throughout all of Az, most of Eb, and he occasionally even received letters from Thlandish children, though these were few, far between, and frequently unreadable. Education over in Th was reserved for noblemen only, and anyone who could afford an education was not going to let their children read anything as idealistic as Children of the Isle.

So Frankel had a good life. Not idyllic, true, but who had idyllic lives nowadays anyway? The food was plentiful (living in Byntol meant that he had his pick of colours) and while he never found that fairy bride to settle down with, he did have a few good gnomish buddies who were always up for a hand of poker or a game of ducart. (though there were a few Peedling clubs, and even a theatre or three, Frankel tended to avoid others of his race. They were temperamental, bitchy, and worst of all, turned him into an argumentative fellow, far from the good-natured persona people identified with Frankel, author of the Uncle Chum and Aunt Lovely series.)

However, the day that King Azzle died, everything changed.

The new Queen was initially celebrated, and for good reason. Azzle had not been a terrible ruler, in fact he was a fairly beloved King. However he was predictable to the point where his presence in the throne-room wasn't even required. He was absent for a whole week once (a simple wompter kurse had him bed-ridden, not wishing to show his face and lose the illusion of dignity) and the public didn't even notice. His stern, no tolerance policy on slavery was appreciated, however his stern, no tolerance policy on mermaids was considered fairly ridiculous by most of the country.

The new Queen, however, was determined to shake this up, and looking back, Frankel was embarrassed to remember that he had initially supported her. It had taken a full year for him to start to doubt her, and another year after that before he had actively opposed her decisions. Her acceptance of mermaids had won him over, however her acceptance of vampires, werewolves, and dragons had been the act which had cast the first seeds of doubt in his mind.

The passing of a law banning magic, however, had been what had completely turned the nation against her.

Magic, the very essence of fairy society. Most people had refused to believe it, and had laughed off the law, continuing to cast magic nonetheless. However using Thebaz's alarmingly large army (which were given royal permission to break the law as they pleased) the Queen had started enforcing the ridiculous law.

True, one could apply for a magical permit, but it was a lengthy process, and only allowed one a limited range of spells. No one was happy about this.

While Frankel wasn't particularly reliant on magic (a Peedling only has roughly a fifty-fifty chance of spell success anyway) he was among those who thought the law was intrusive and ridiculous. So, he had struck back the only way a Peedling really can.

Piggy-backing off his success with the name he had made for himself through his Uncle Chum and Aunt Lovely stories, he released a simple, seemingly innocuous multi-scroll, "The Vizard of Az." It told the tale of a human (Chum and Lovely were humans too - fairy children got a real kick out of seeing the big lumbering creatures in ridiculous situations) who was whisked over to Az by the gods themselves. With the help of her newly-found friends, she destroys the imposter royalty, and (most importantly) learns that magic isn't the evil some would have you think it was.

The Queen, however, had ignored this message, and focussed on a different theme that could be found in the scroll, the importance of listening to the true royal line, and ignoring any imposters. Vizard of Az had actually made it onto the Queen's 10 recommended childrens scroll list. She had even offered Frankel an invite to the palace, which he had politely but determinedly refused. Instead, he had used the time to prepare to leave the city, because he knew that the Queen would not be happy with the rest of the Vizard series.

Carefully biding his time, Frankel quietly released a second Vizard scroll, "The Wonderful Land of Az", which could easily be mistaken for the Queen's own propaganda. Again, the book was a hit among the fairy children, and the Queen personally commended Frankel for his work.

However, the series wasn't done yet.

The third scroll, which he knew would be snapped up quickly due to the success of the first two, introduced a character which you'd have to be an ogre not to realise was a caricature of the Queen herself. Spoilt, bossy, and above all stupid, she started creating regulations which closely mirrored the actual Queen's. Dot, the human girl who was the heroine of the first scroll returned, and due to the fictional queen's ridiculous resolutions, finds herself in many perilous situation in the once-safe land of Az.

The night after it was released, Frankel sneaked out of town. The major daily scrolls all pronounced him dead, and the Queen's statement was that they had lost a brilliant writer.

After the fourth Vizard scroll was released, Frankel started to lock the doors at night, and sleep underneath his bed.

The Queen wasn't a bad monarch - no, that wasn't true. The Queen was an incredibly bad monarch, however she did have good intentions, however her good intentions were having a hard time being appreciated while Frankel continued to churn out Vizard scrolls, and so she had offered a bounty on his head - dead or alive, but Frankel knew that the average bounty hunter was not proficient at capture, preferring to kill, while an ogre hitman rarely even knew the meaning of the word capture.

As he was technically dead, other people had started to write Vizard scrolls - the Queen, from what Frankel had determined, had hired a Peedling of her own to write them in such a way that the new fictional queen was the hero of the scrolls, rather than the incompetent villain. They attempted to convince the reader that use of unsanctioned magic was comparable to murder, a complete contrast to Frankel's themes of freedom.

Despite the Queen's efforts to ban them, Frankel's scrolls continued to be published, and children everywhere bought them, easily able to differentiate between his genuine stories, and the stories of the imposter. Additionally, they were popular among the adult fairies, particular those who were members of the resistance groups who published the scrolls for him.

So Frankel's head went back down to his parchment, and his quill continued to scratch words onto it. He was up to the eleventh scroll in his series ("The Last Princess of Az") and until he was caught and physically prevented from writing any further, he had no intention of stopping. Whether or not his scrolls were making a difference in the world, he wasn't sure, however he did know that public dissent was rising, and several catchphrases which he had coined were in common use. He missed the money, he missed his ability to leave the house during the day, but more than both of those, he missed free Thebaz.

He wasn't born there, but Thebaz was his home, and he would write one thousand scrolls, and die one thousand deaths before letting an inept Queen ruin the country he loved.






Blech. Couldn't work out how to finish it, so I just went "overly patriotic." It's a bit clunky, and doesn't go anywhere in particular, but hey, walk before you run, and it's helped me flesh out Frankel.