The Secret Fox
For the last couple weeks, her life has been all about secrets and spies after she and her friends at school formed a "Spy Club”, and that's spilled into Kabos, the world of stories and kid monster-fighters called Monstervores that she’s making up.
At school they call their club the Secret Fox, and it turns out that in Kabos that's the name of a spy network led by girls who can change into animals. She is, of course, Agent Alicorn. Thinking that the spies might be nefarious agents in Kabos, I asked if the group was run by someone like the fallen mastervore and poison candy-maker Sparrow. I was told that people think so, but the group is actually led by his mysterious (“no, VERY mysterious, Daddy!”) sister Fox, who tells people the story about Sparrow and wears a fake beard and dark goggles to throw them off the track.
That last part came as we dressed up as spies to find and decode the secret messages I’d hidden around the house. I asked if we were just wearing goggles as part of our disguise, but apparently the Secret Fox has goggles they wear at night that let them see in shadows and protect them from being possessed by nightmares when they sleep.
Color returned as a major theme in Kabos as she explained that the Secret Fox has “color codes” but also messages written in smells that only their animal forms can smell but only people can understand. (Whether or not her animalpeople races like the giraffos and hoggins can understand them remains to be discovered.)
I reminded her that long ago she had told me that there was another group of spies in Kabos—the Crowguard and their bird spies, operating out of the high-tree crow towers. I then asked if there were any spies out in the oceans and seas, and she said there were lots of little fish and some guango (her dolphin-people) who are spies, but the best spies are octopuses called “octabo”. When I asked what made octabo such good spies, she explained that they're good because they have eyes in each of their eight tentacles. You might guess as I did that they have eyes on the ends of their tentacles and can use them like periscopes, but no: octabo collect eyes from other creatures using magic that then lets them both see out of the collected eyes like they're part of the octabo's body but also see through the eyes of other nearby creatures of that type. Oh, and throw the eyes around like balls so they can see through where they are. (However, if you guessed that we were playing with balls while figuring all this out, you would be right.) But Octabo have to choose the eyes in their collection carefully—once they have eight eyes, one for each tentacle, they have to pluck out their own eyes. (Yikes.)
She accepted my suggestion of “Wavewhisperers” for the group of underwater spies, and looking at our big map of Kabos on the wall we decided that they operate out of a secret hideout in Kanubo, the city atop the giant manta ray plying the southern seas around Kabos.
I asked if the Wavewhisperers ever trade information with the Secret Fox or Crowguard, and she said that yes, they do have meetings. Poking at how much she understood espionage, I asked how they kept their meetings secret—and how they knew that the information they were getting was true!
When they meet and really need to be sure that the information is true, they get together at a restaurant (the fantasy trope of ‘inn’ hasn’t quite taken root in her yet) where there are seven magical bells hanging from the ceiling. Spies and very bad people meet there because they are forced to tell the truth or one of the bells will ring.
As we found a place for the Seven Bells Inn on the map of Kabos, I asked if there was anywhere else spies could meet. It turns out that they can meet anywhere, but they like to meet around magic campfires that make the area dark so that other people can’t see them talking. Why do they make the dark? Because their fire is black, she said, like it should be obvious. And that’s how the spies who meet between the various spy networks became known as the Black Fire which is such a cool name it makes me want to start a band.
Other miscellany I’ll be writing up over on Monstervore Tales soon: revelations about the mysterious Jum, creator of the even more enigmatic glass ruins called the Circles of Jim-Chi and tiny indestructible toys, the Deepnap and its connection to the Nine Nappers and the long-missing Sleeping Cities, and the Zand River, which finally explains why spellwagons can’t cross the northern desert.
