Chapter 5 Book 3 Lady Kissykiss
I appeared beside Farren in the dining area of his restaurant overlooking the bay. Farren gestured towards platters with plates of fish covering a long table. “Long live King Snipsnort.”
Around the area and outside there were echos of people wishing me a long life.
“Please rise and I thank you all for your good wishes.”
I started changing into myself and picking up platters of food and then stopped and looked at Farren. “Am I depleting you supply of dishes and platters? I could make you more but not of these materials and patterns.”
I realized that Lady Kissykiss had come with me when she kissed my forehead and gifted me several times in quick succession. “Now, King Snipsnort, close thy eyes and look at the plates. Look closely, make a gossamer copy, and then make them real.”
With my eyes closed, I could see, but not far and only a small area, but I could see details I had never seen before. With other gifts just given and taking hold, I copied the plate in my mind and was able to see how the ceramic worked. I had basic ceramic materials previously gifted, but nothing about glaze and color. I made several stacks of plates and several stacks of trays and then started putting away as many trays of fish as I had forms to hold them. With a few platters left, I sat and started eating. I gestured to Lady Kissykiss to join me, and she sat on the table and picked up some fish.
From another table, Oatis said, “Last thing we need is some foreign flying Fairy eating all our food.”
I already had a gateway near and one on me so I linked up the transitional world and took Lady Kissykiss, the table with the food and the chair I was in to a place where I had put a circle of statues on a hill near the lighthouse I had made in Grady’s image.
Lady Kissykiss said, “We have a lot to gift thee.”
I said, “I don’t have time to study the gifts. I need to rest for a few days, but thank thee for the gifts thou hast given me though.”
She said, “We can use thy transport Fairyland. We can make time.”
I started to balk and realized that free gifting was right in front of me, and I was about to be stubborn and ruin the opportunity. I held back and did as I was instructed.
“We need a name for your transport Fairyland, so let’s both call it ‘Happy Place! Open the gateway to thy Happy Place and lay it over this place and speed it all up!”
It got dark and I felt another gifting.
“Now let the light flow naturally from the Happy Place walls. There now, I see lots of other gateways here, so let’s add another one that doesn’t have anyone in it to bother us. Open that Gateway but just let light in so we have it look like this table and chair are in the other Fairyland.”
I activated the gateway to the storage Fairyland I had just slept in and altered the gateway to allow light to pass back and forth.”
“Nicely done. King Snipsnort! Look at all your sculptures! The next gifts are going to be complicated so warn me if it gets to be too much. One more gift to let you remember patterns, and then we test your skill so far.”
She kissed my brow and then flew around the area. “Speed time, speed time, we want to be done before anyone can come and tell us we were hasty! Here is a gossamer Go board with two bowls of pieces. Close thine eyes and study it all. Then learn it, then make it. Don’t cheat and make all the pieces the same. Each is different and you need to practice, practice, practice.
“We are still in Snipsnort, so thou hast all of the wealth of mass, but we are sped by being in thy Happy Place, and we can see thy beds and statues. Make a few beds and pillows come here.
She landed on the side of the bed I had just slept in and made a crinkling sound as she walked on the plastic cover I had decided to leave in place. She sat on the pillow I had used and made even more crinkling sounds as she shifted the plastic bag it was in.
I copied the board, and she dragged several of the pillows over to it, stacked them and then sat in front of the board examining it as I started examining and copying all the little game pieces.
Crystals and flaws and tiny swirls of stone and shell. One after another, tiny things yet large as a world once you were inside, exploring how they went together. Small universes of stone and shell. I was tired but wanted to finish. I lay back on the mattress with the last handful of stones and closed my eyes. One world after another world and the stones fell as I fell into dream.
#
I flew like a mote of dust in the wind drifting inside a double bass. Sheets of music drifted past as I remembered playing all these notes and carving the bridge. So many adjustments to make it sound perfect. I drifted over myself only, like dreams do, I was someone else arguing about the height of a sink while worrying that it was too many steps from the cutting board.
Long arguments drifted in fog and the fog and blur got worse as I made an oven that was not smart. I didn’t want it smart enough for a Fairy to move in, but I wanted it to know when the bread’s core was perfect and the crust would crack with a gentle bite.
Recipes tested in a fog too thick to see while a gentle Fairy’s voice said, “Maybe I should have stopped at a hundred gifts, maybe ten. We may have to just stay here forever so no one knows that we made thy mind mush.”
I woke up and smiled at the pretty Fairy and laughed.
She winced and said, “Be a good boy and make a nice big tank of water so we can clean things up. You had a boo boo.”
I smiled and laughed cause she said, “Boo boo.”
#
I was tired of fish. That was my first clear thought after days of nothing. My second clear thought was that my plan for a microwave wok wasn’t going to work. I tried to remember my name. I just remembered that Lady Kissykiss had me study fish to copy it so I could eat and had given me clear instructions on cleaning myself up and how I was to stay here so no one knew about her little over-gifting mistake. I looked over at the double basses I vaguely remembered making and started to remember making all the kitchen equipment. I got up and made my way through all the framed paintings and small statues that were keeping them from falling over.
I was Phil, King of Snipsnort. I didn’t feel comfortable with the name or implication that I was a Ruler of anything. I just wanted to go back to the swamps. I had a magic door to a swamp, so I opened it and went there.
I remembered I was an otter, so I turned into an otter and slid into the water. I was hungry as an otter, but I couldn’t face fish. I swam and saw a girl with her feet in the water on a pier above me. She looked familiar but only barely. I chased some minnows not really wanting to eat them but more for sport. Then I remembered that the girl was Etta and she wanted me to call her “Swamp Witch.”
I surfaced and turned into me as a person in a swimsuit. I was holding a platter with plates of cooked fish, bread, and vegetables. It was all ruined now from being in water. I knew I had more. Lots more but I didn’t want fish right now. The bread and vegetables seemed nice, though.
I walked up the shore and onto the dock. I changed into me, dry with another platter of food. I didn’t want the fish, but I set it down by the girl and sat beside it.
“Do you want some fish?”
She smiled at me.
I picked up a piece of bread and tasted it.
She was eating the fish, and somehow that reminded me of more things. I remembered that I was a Goblin who could turn into an otter and not an otter that could turn into me.
Thought and memory and then an effort of will pushed back the fog and I remembered who I was.
She said, “Good fish. Can you hear it?”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
I heard the hard-to-mistake sound of an airboat in the distance. “Airboat?”
She smiled a jagged-tooth smile. “Yes. Now everything changes. I have dreamt this a thousand ways. I am about to die, and you are about to avenge me. Take this card, don’t try to save me and remember not to kill the Dwarf girl. Take care of the efreet. He has a gun and flash grenades on the airboat. I will damage him so he will need a new body. Wait for him to come to you. You know what to do with him.”
I looked at the card as the sound of the airboat got louder. “Miss Marvoo’s Cleaning Service. No job too messy. Thorough discretion is our standard.”
Etta turned into a raven and took to the air. She flew out of sight. I heard the popping sound of gunfire in the distance. I saw a flash from behind trees in the direction she had flown and the sound of the airboat was coming from. The airboat looked like it was going to run into a cluster of trees before it reached me. A man with a white cloth over his head and a black band around his head was holding his hand at his face and there was blood on his hand. He adjusted the angle of the boat but seemed to be having trouble controlling it. When ge got it nearly pointed in my direction, he slumped over, and fell into the boat where I couldn’t see him anymore. The boat was still a long way away. I watched as it got closer and then backed up and got partial cover from behind the shack.
The boat ran ashore over the ground and hit a couple of trees before being stopped. The noise from the engine and fan drowned everything else out. I crouched ready to go into shadow when I saw a dark shape like a black cloth being blown in the air coming towards me.
Then I felt it. There was an evil spirit in me. It seemed lost. I took us to my Fairyland of death, bound him to it, and then made him a Fairy. I went to the Fairyland that Lady Kissykiss called my Happy Place.
#
It stunk. I didn’t know where to start cleaning it. I was still holding the card for Miss Marvoo’s Cleaning Service. I summoned Miss Marvoo.
“Woowee!” Shouted the small lady in a black and white maid outfit. “Was someone incontinent?”
She looked around at the paintings and instruments and mess on the beds. “Plastic sheets was a good idea. Someone must have been out of their mind.”
She walked over to where the gossamer chamber pots with gossamer lids were stacked and then looked at me and her eyes widened. “Oh, my. I had heard a rumor that King Snipsnort had gone dada with GADS, but I didn’t know gossamer art dementia got this bad. This may take a while what with everything so dried and crusted the way it is. Oh, goodness. What is that smell? Tell you what, run along, and by the time you come back, I’ll have this all clean and spiffy and everything I can’t recover with be discretely disposed of.”
Images of wounds, horrible wounds came to my mind. Images like I had made horrible head wounds. I was nauseous from the thought but had to know if I had done horrible things while I was not there mentally.
I pulled up horrid memories of making copies of parts of bodies that were my own parts and doing surgery on them. Horrible images of body parts, like mine if I had been vivisected, flashed through my mind, and I nearly threw up. I think Lady Kissykiss had made me a psychic surgeon, but I didn’t think I had the stomach to be able to face the job. I think the Cleaning Fairy might have some really dark suspicions about the sort of person I was.
I went back to the island with the shack. The boat was still running. I went over to it. The body of the man in the bottom of the boat had blood all over it. I found the throttle and shut down the engine.
I summoned Miss Marvoo, “I have a corpse and an airboat with weapons. Do you manage that sort of thing as well?”
She appeared and said, “This will be a pleasure after the last one. I’m not complaining, but are you okay?” She winced. “I’m probably asking too many questions.”
She climbed into the boat and examined the man. I looked away. There were some gross noises.
Miss Marvoo said, “Well, it looks like the sort of wound a raven makes when it does a suicide attack on a man’s eye. We see a lot of that in my business. Not like we used to, but it still happens every couple of hundred years or so. You’re shop is all clean, spiffy, and sanitary. About half the paintings were beyond recovery and the less said about the musical instruments the better.”
I walked out into the water and turned into the dirty me that had been making near mindless art while in a daze from having too many things gifted and too many things being practiced at once. I was swimming and my mind was getting fuzzy again when Goldilocks summoned me.
“Phil, are you rested and healthy?”
I said, “Physically, I’m not sure my mind is all together perfect.”
Goldilocks brought me to her.
#
I was dripping water while looking around at a Fairyland laid on top of a brightly lit studio.
Several well-dressed women looked at me.
A tall one said, “And this is the boy that needs artistic gifting?”
I went into shadow and hid and realized the shadow I was in was part illusion and unstable so I left shadow and was under a table looking up at the women standing with Goldilocks.
The tall woman said, “Come out and let’s see your work. Make a quick sketch of us.”
I crawled out from under the table and looked at the paints that were set up. I cringed and images of congenital deformities caused by exposure to the compounds common in a lot of paints ran through my head. I looked around in panic.
Goldilocks said, “Phil, what’s wrong?”
I overlaid my Happy Place here and gave myself access to Snipsnort so I could create. I made a canvas and an easel to hold it while working. I pointed at the art materials on the table, “I can’t use those.”
I looked at the paints and drawing materials they had out on a table and winced as medical book images flashed in my mind’s eye. “Please take them away. I will use my own paints.”
As I made a set of paints and drawing materials that would be approved for real world use by the Crossroads Council on Material Safety, I kept glancing at the horrible paints on the table and wincing at the images they brought to mind.
One of the women asked, “Have you ever seen such a case of GADS gone so far?”
Another asked me, “Was it really seeing Goldie that wrecked your mind?”
I said. “I love Goldilocks and no one else understands her the way I do.”
To practice, I did a quick watercolor wash with bright explosions of wet on wet color. Then I used Fairy powers and made the paint dry and started in with oil colors mixed with an emulsion of egg, calcium carbonate and purified stand oil. I added a touch of anise oil and a touch of mustard in the mix and frothed it before adding pigment, making a flat stone slab and smearing it.
Then with the knife I had been using to mix, I looked at Goldilocks and started pushing paint into place. I added the other ladies in the background but made Goldilocks stand out with golden light shining.
One of the ladies asked, “How about I gift him with some architectural lines? This is all very good but just emotional and abstract.”
I held the painter’s knife out in front of me. “I do architectural lines.”
She recoiled.
I said, “Don’t worry. I was told not to kill anyone today. Apart from the things that possess me. I can kill them.”
Another lady said, “Well, he is definitely talented, and this is as clear a case of GADS as I have seen. Perhaps no one should gift him right now. Pity about the architecture. Most of the best classic artists were also draftsman.”
I realized I was still a bit unstable and needed to slow things down, so I took some dark ocher paint and started putting a bridge in perspective behind the ladies in the painting. Now it was fuzzy watercolor in lovely splotches, an overly dramatic and shiny gold glowing Goldilocks and a group of ladies that I just realized were Daemons in the background on a path with an arched bridge. I started adding a tower and decided I may have put too much in the painting already.
Then I turned and saw the paints spread on the table and saw images of medical illustrations of congenital things best not seen and then saw images of my own body and my stitching things back together so I fell to the ground and begged them, “Please can you take the table with the paints away?”
Goldilocks took me to the shade of a tree on a hillside with cattle in the distance. I calmed down and mostly got myself together.
Goldilocks hugged me. “Phil, you are amazing. The best actor I have ever seen. How do you do it?”
I just nestled into the hug and relaxed in the warmth of it.
Goldilocks said, “Wait, someone else is summoning me. Yes, Olivia, you can visit, but we are going to one of those parties you hate. Yes, my apprentice is fine. Right here with me. No, definitely not dead and definitely not possessed. Yes, King Snipsnort. No, really, he’s alive and fine. Come on then and meet him.”
Another really pretty woman appeared. Long dark hair and a deep golden-brown tan. She sat by the trunk of the tree. “So, not that long ago I heard that there was a Fairy King in Snipsnort and the bets were strong that he wouldn’t survive a week. I didn’t pay any attention since Snipsnort didn’t seem like the worst repressed Fairyland and apart from its being connected to the Great Sea and being rather large, it wasn’t really that remarkable.
“King Snipsnort, no one has met you, and yet everyone knows you are dead, dangerous, insane and in love with Goldilocks.”
I said, “I love Goldilocks and no one else understands her the way I do.”
Olivia asked, “Phil have you ever seen the movie, ‘The Manchurian Candidate?’”
I shook my head. “I think I have heard of it.”
Goldilocks stroked my hair back. “Don’t try to confuse my apprentice and I will let him do a sculpture of you. Be careful, Phil, when people want an example of a troublemaker, Olivia is one of the first ones they mention.”
Olivia said, “Right back at you, Goldie. So, Phil, what are you up to right now?”
I looked at her and stood. “I need to find a woman named ‘Feile Griff.’”
Olivia asked, “Dwarf girl? She’s an odd one. Never quite made it into legend or a pantheon.”
Goldilocks said, “She showed up at Darla’s place. Phil, Darla belongs to one of the old families, and she’s one of the ones that can decide if you’re inspired or just sloshing paint around.”
Olivia said, “Make a sculpture of her, Phil. That would spark her interest in you.”
Goldilocks shook her head at Olivia. “Too obvious at this stage. No, Phil, we don’t want to rush this. We won’t be trying to present you as a serious artist for a hundred years. Until we have a definite style, there is no point in even trying. Phil, I’m going to visit Darla, but unless I signal you, you should stay hidden in shadow. It’s too soon for me to present you as an apprentice, and we haven’t even worked on your making clouds and stars yet. We also need a backlog of art before we can present you.”
Olivia said, “Phil, I know you love her, but be advised that Goldilocks and I have the worst records for bad planning. However, most of the stories about me can be dismissed as myths. There is solid archaeological evidence to the ruins Goldilocks has left behind.”
Goldilocks shook her head and her ringlets bounced. “Phil, anyone who live long enough has had their ups and downs. Everything falls eventually. Since Olivia is being a big pooty, I want you to go clean up and dress in something dramatic and nice.”
I changed into my church clothes.
Goldilocks shook her head. “This is not Sunday-go-to meeting. You need flair. Honestly, you are so brilliant and then—Well, that will never do. You look like a miserable eight-year-old dressed in a suit bought for an uncle’s funeral.”
I shifted Fairylands so I could appear to fade away.