Chapter 32

The Way of the Puppet

It was annoying how long it took for the Puppet Master to stop laughing. A good two minutes. That should have given Ty plenty of time to think and come up with a way out of his predicament... but he was all out of ideas. He was restrained by two puppets way stronger than him, his sword was taken, and he was forced to sit there and listen to a mad man rant and laugh.

He fell back onto his first and only idea. “Ben, please. Come on, man.”

The Puppet Master was in his face at once, all traces of laughter gone. The feeling he gave off screamed San. “Really? Again?” His voice was low, anger waiting to jump out from behind each word. “The first time it's cute, but twice?”

He grabbed Ben by the head and forced him down to Ty's level.

“Eyes. I despise the things. They give away so much of not only someone's emotions, but their innermost thoughts as well. The right person can look you into your eyes and read everything you're thinking, predict your every action. It's why I rid myself of mine a long time ago.” One of his fingers traced the outline of his empty sockets. “And, much like me, a puppet does not need feelings. Those new orbs reflect everything that is still inside—emptiness, void of thought or emotion.

“And now, it's your turn, kiddie.” His arm darted skyward, his longest finger pointing, a blue glow forming around the tip. “Time to join your friend, time to grow up, time... to become a puppet!”

Ty saw his perfect smile once more, sparkling in the night like a half moon tipped over, then his finger pounded onto his forehead and pain overrode everything else.

#

Have you ever wondered what it must have been like for Pinocchio to have his whole body changed from wood to flesh? Ty never had. He assumed that it was a painless, seamless, magical transformation. Oh, how wrong that was.

Flesh to wood felt like hundreds of needles—no, thousands of tiny splinters, their points not fine and precise, each one a different shape and size, tore in thousands of unique ways. The pain was indescribable, unbearable.

Until it stopped. Ty felt a sort of shifting inside of him, the pain reaching such a level that, to protect himself, his mind pushed it away. Now, he felt almost like he was in limbo, watching his body suffer from afar.

Watching. Was that all he could do? Sit here and hide in a corner of his mind and wait to be turned into a piece of wood? And, really, would that be so bad? He would be like everyone else. No more worrying, no more walking around in a daze, trying and failing to make sense of everything...

Then he thought of Gentry and the way his grandfather built him. He was a puppet—same as everyone in this messed up world—but did that fact bind him in a system? No; he was in control of his own strings. He followed the rules of the dreamworld, not because of an evil overlord, but from his own obligations. He could follow rules if he wanted, but he chose not to.

Even that whole deal with the darkness stuff—he fought against it. And wherever he was now, Ty knew that he was still fighting. Because he was in control of his own strings, his own destiny.

Things clicked inside Ty's head and he knew what he had to do.

He was going to become a puppet.

#

The scene—as the Puppet Master saw it—was like this: one moment he was laughing while the boy screamed in horrendous pain (the way it should be) and the next the screams stopped, his head rotated slowly and unnaturally to look right at him. The eyes that he saw did not belong in the sockets of a boy turning into a puppet. They showed no pain, no fear. There was this look—this infuriating look—that seemed to say he knew something that the Puppet Master did not.

He had to refrain from plucking the little brat's eyes out right then and there. Surely this was just an odd occurrence before the boy's end.

There is nothing he can do, the Puppet Master thought as he watched his forehead turn to wood. He will soon be a harmless puppet, just like the rest, and I will have those smug little eyes.

He giggled a bit, his good cheer returning to him as the final stages of the transformation began. Parts of the wood worked its way down his nose while also spreading up his legs, his arms, his torso—all rushing to meet at a single point: his mouth.

The wood conquered the skin under his nose, past his chin, over the side of his head and then...

What?

Flesh had become wood but the mouth...it was all wrong. Where were the moveable pieces? Why was it made of paint?

He poked him. No movement. His eyelids closed sometime during the transformation and had remained shut. That was yet another oddity; for other puppets their eyes would be open, ripe for the taking. He had never seen this before, it was almost a display of disobedience, a last attempt to protect his fleshy self.

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We cannot have that.

The Puppet Master stepped back and held his hand down above Ty's head. The pale blue escaped from between his bony fingers like smoke, building into a thick fog. A new group of strings emerged from within, inching out toward Ty, seeping into his joints like drops of water.

The Puppet Master smiled. “You are mine now.”

The boy's head looked up, his eyes opened, and his painted mouth moved. “No, I'm not.”

#

One would think that, after being turned into a puppet, you would kind of freak out, fall all over yourself in your new body while maybe attempting to run in circles. Ty felt none of this. He was almost mellow about the entire thing; he’d never felt so calm before, calmer even than sleep.

He got immense satisfaction seeing that the Puppet Master was feeling just the opposite. As with San, his eye sockets grew to hilarious proportions, an expression that could only come from someone who was not used to their plans going astray.

And it was only going to get worse.

Ty's new painted mouth turned into a sly smile.

“No, quit it—I didn't tell you to do that!” The Puppet Master moved the strings all around, desperate to regain control of the situation.

Ty rose from the ground. Judging by the Puppet Master's reaction, that was not one of the things he was trying to make Ty do.

“Stop! You, sit down! Right this instant!” All of his fingers were extended, his whole body tense with concentration, every inch of him sending out his harsh commands.

Ty walked closer, his smile widening as his tall foe increased efforts with his every disobedient step.

“You are... my... puppet,” he said through his grinding teeth, the friction of tooth against tooth sharpening them even further. “You... must do as I say.”

“Wrong.”

Then, the strings moved from the ends attached to Ty's joints. They squirmed like worms, their motions growing faster and more abnormal until they reached a kind of boiling point, colors exploding out of Ty's body, into the strings.

The colors were a perfect match with Ty's sword, and they reacted the same way his charged slash would have: moving at a blinding speed, destroying anything in its path. Which, in this case, was the string. The colors devoured the blue as they rode the line, leaving a brief, sparkling trail behind them before burning the string all together.

The Puppet Master flailed his arms around in a panic, trying to make the strings vanish like he normally did, but nothing worked. He even resorted to trying to cut it. His hand slipped through it in the same manner as Ty's earlier attempt. He could do nothing as the light traveled the rest of the way into his fingertips. The sparkling trail hung in the air before dying out, leaving none of the string behind.

And that was it.

The Puppet Master stared at his hand, waiting for something else unforeseen to happen. He looked it over, checking for any alterations but found none.

“Ha!” He pointed his still intact finger at Ty. “Nice trick there, kid, but I guess that's all it—”

His taunt was cut short as he screamed in pain and fell to his knees, his hands clutched to his chest. The colors returned, lighting up the inside of the Puppet Master's hand, appearing to cause him massive amounts of pain.

His hand jerked into the air, too fast and unnatural to have been of his own doing. The colors grew brighter and the pale strings of energy appeared from his fingertips, every single one he had, wrapping the whole town in blue as the strings stretched out to all the puppets they imprisoned.

Now, not only did the colors have somewhere to go, they had a sprawling expressway to get there with. There was one last intense flash of light, then they were off, streaming down the lines, filling the tiny world with colorful light and sparks.

The strings burnt away from the Puppet Master's fingers, freeing him. His hand flopped down into his lap, burnt and smoking. But he didn't even notice it, shock and pain robbed him of most functions save for the most basic.

The colors already made it to the closest puppets, finishing their destruction of the strings and entering through their joints. Their bodies glowed from the middle of their chests, rapidly spreading until they were more light bulb than puppet.

Ty's attention focused on Ben, one of the first that the light entered. To his relief, it didn't appear to hurt him at all. He had a wide grin on his face; bliss written there, not agony.

In the time it took Ty to walk over to him, the wood on Ben receded, shriveling away to reveal fresh human skin underneath. All around them, other puppets had the same miraculous transformation—even the ones that he was forced to cut up. From the corner of his eyes he saw limbs pulled along by the strings, back to their bodies.

“Here, you don't need these anymore.” Ty plucked the glass orbs from Ben's sockets. He held them back out to him. “Care to do the honors?”

He didn't even have to ask Ty what he meant. He took them in his palms and crushed them. In his empty sockets, as the wood around them returned to flesh, a living eye appeared. Not in a creepy cell by cell reconstruction, thankfully, but more as if someone was drawing it in, the final touch to a lifelike painting.

“Thank you,” Ben said, still smiling as he handed Ty his sword. “For everything.”

“No problem... but do me a favor.”

“What?”

Ty started to walk away, looking back over his shoulder as he said, “Go back to that toy store and buy yourself that LEGO set!”

Ben beamed. “I can do that.”

Ty waved, continuing toward the door. But, first, there was one last thing he needed to do. He stopped beside the Puppet Master where he sat on the street.

“How? How is this possible?” There were less strings in the air now, most of the puppets already turned to flesh or in the early beginnings, at least.

“I proved you wrong. You can't control me, and you can't control these people, either. Is there a system to the world? Sure. But that doesn't make any of us simple cogs in a machine. We're people, we have minds of our own. And all it takes is one person to decide to try something new. If one of your precious cogs stops turning the way you want, more will follow.”

Ty continued on to the door, holding his sword at the ready. This was the part where he knew San would have snapped out of his shock and run after him in a blind rage.

Instead, he spoke.

“You won.”

Ty stared at the Puppet Master's crumpled form on the ground. For the first time he saw him as something apart from San. Before, his appearance, his aura, his every move was a slanted mirror of what Ty considered the “original.” But now, looking at this defeated figure who was able to acknowledge and admit he’d been beaten... San would have never done that. He was physically and mentally incapable.

Deep down, the Puppet Master might not be such a bad guy after all. And Ty got the impression that he had more strings in him than any of the puppets he claimed to control. In a way, he felt sorry for him.

With a touch of sadness, Ty turned his back for the final time on Ben, the Puppet Master, and the rest of the small world. He stepped through the doorway without fear of what awaited him next, falling again into the unknown.