Nothing, and a Lot More
In this time, when the real world is all too real, we've still been spending some time escaping into the world of monster-eating Monstervores I've been helping my daughter create, and it felt like time to share some of her stories.
We had some scraps of furry fabric in the craft bin, and she pieced them together into a bag. "It's my princess bag," she told me. I asked: a purse? "No," she corrected me, "A bag like the one princesses in Kabos carry on adventures."
It shows the strength of her memory that I had to search through my notes to find what she was talking about, a story she had told me two years ago about 'mookeika', girls who set out from small towns in search of adventure. But they aren't allowed to do so until they make a 'nothing bag', sometimes from pieces of monsters. True to the name, the bag has nothing in it when the girl sets out from her home, but the bag has a magical link to a rock in her home town and anything her friends and family place on the rock to support her adventures will appear in the bag each morning at sunrise. So, naturally, I've been spending the week surprising her with tiny tools and treasures 'appearing' in her bag.
(Can the princess send things back to her family using the nothing bag? "No, but they can use a butterfly bag"--which turns out to be a pouch that turns anything you put in it into a butterfly of equivalent mass that will fly to wherever you whisper to it, which lets travelers let people know they're okay by sending a butterfly each day.)
She misses hanging out with other kids, so kids have been showing up a lot in her stories and ideas. The Lord Sailor, who loves children, now has a pirate arch-nemesis, the Daring Deviler, who sails the "Cold Daring", a ship he stole from Lord Sailor. The Deviler likes to train kids to be his pirate crew, if only because it annoys Lord Sailor, and keeps them in line with his pet witchcreature, a doggot named Fung, part dog and part parrot.
Witchcreatures are the creation of witches, who use their powers to mash two animals together--but only animals. However, in proof that my kid can sometimes terrify me, witches can have or raise children they call 'witchel', who sleep in _tubs full of monster blood_, and who can make witchcreatures that include an animal and a person....or on rare occasions, two people!
More kids: The Monstervores gone astray who have fallen under the sway of the rogue candy-making Mastervore known as the Sparrow now have their own name: the Sweetsters. It turns out that the minions of the Bandit-Mage, one of her earliest creations, are mostly kids and known as the Rascals.
She's had other tales and surprises for me, too: it turns out dwarves carry tools in their beards because their hair is alive, and they live underground because they dug their way out of the monstergod Sobak, who ate them in the days before Sobak was in turn eaten by Rukos to form the world. Playing Stardew Valley clearly inspired her creation of the Chur'lee, secret farm spirits bound to a family's land. Painting some of her toys black led to the legend of Praeko, the unicorn who left at sunrise on a flight to deliver a present to the sun goddess Daemelani but got there almost too late and was devoured by the night, returning completely black except for her sun-shining front hoof.
Looking at the map of Kabos hanging on our wall, our talk of the riders of the Horsebone Hills led her to tell me of the cowboy-warrior Coward Bold, who I told her lives in Scepter House, a palace made from slabs of the Crystal Cliffs that she told me he's converted into a giant stable. Asking her about the House of the Six Hundred Swords she had me mark on the map and asking why they needed so many swords, we told each other about the Stone of Shapes, a statue that turns into a new monster each morning, and how the Lord Warrior living there awakes before dawn to fulfill his duty of defeating the Stone so that it collapses into dust until the next day.
Reading Harry Potter together inspired her to create the Weatherfast, a ship of wizards that can control the winds, hated by the living clouds and the Rain Queen. Watching baking shows she made up 'cakestone', a rare stone that's like a hard sponge until you soak it in a mix of egg and water overnight and heat it in a fire to make a cake.
Heart-poems, cloud music, Mother Riddle, digestum, wishseeds, firedogs, turgles, leaf hawks, mud paws, woofins, jelash, screambabies, balloon dogs, the Crown of Keys, skulletons...
I'm watching Hamilton, like everyone else. "Why do you write like you're running out of time?" Because I'm writing what I can under the stress of the New Normal, but the torrent of ideas is....well, non-stop.
Back to it.
