Just what IS that thing?

[Maxwell]

"Mary, come on. Come with me." Maxwell's desk was along the row of its fellows at the Inquisitory. Mary's was near the door, even though she'd been pushed back a little, no longer serving entirely in a secretarial role. She's had just as many successes as setbacks over the last half a year. Success was rewarded. Setbacks were punished. It was a meritocratic place, the Inquisitory.

Therefore, the bespectacled young man was technically her superior. "No one likes a whiner, Maxwell." She put her nose up and tried to look down at him, particularly hard since she was sitting and he was standing

His inhale was sharp and intense. "And no one likes a snooty farmgirl who isn't any help, Mary Ford!"

The inhale was matched by a gasp that was just as forceful. "You take that back right this instant!"

"Come with me, then. Prove me wrong." Perhaps his gambit would work better if he wasn't grinning wide upon saying it.

She crossed her arms and shook her head. "I will not. I've nothing to proof. The Burden of Proof is yours." She pulled a finger out pointing at him dramatically.

That caused his eyes to cross as it was rather close to his face. "Urm. How?"

Mary tried ever so hard, she really did. She read her books, even if it took her a bit longer to get through them than some others. She had worldly discussions. She used big terms. Sometimes, she got them wrong, and when Maxwell took on that tone, she knew she'd made a misstep. "Wh..what?" She bit at her lip nervously.

"The burden of proof," his nasally voice rang out, "was put upon you when I made the claim you're not useful because you wouldn't come with me. Now you have to come with me or else I'm proven correct."

Her eyes narrowed as she thought through it. "Oh... oh drat! Fine. Just because you annoyed the Governor again, I don't see why I have to tag along. You're just a big scardey cat ever since Catch gobbled up your brain." She flayed her fingers out and wiggled them speaking with a spooky ghost. "Chairwoman Kaczmarek has maggooooots.. Ooooh. There are spiders in the..."

"Stopit! Stopit! Stopit! Don't talk about the spiders." Maxwell stomped. "Don't you make light of that. I can't help it if Agnieszka has worms!" He hissed and squirmed nervously. "Let's just go."

She stood up with a shrug, satisfied by his little outburst. "Fine and fine and fine. We'll go. I want to find out about this Phlynn character anyway. But whatever we find out I get half the credit, fair and square." She clapped him on the shoulder, almost knocking him over.

Maxwell jumped, prompting another snort from Mary. Then he started on towards the door, fuming. "He's been seen interfering with the flora around the Broken Dagger. We'll find our clues there. Come along."

Behind his back, Mary would follow, mimicking the words 'come along' silently with a back and forth wobble as her head once she was sure he couldn't see what she was doing.

The door to the Inquistory shut behind them.

[Rance]

There had once been bountiful gardens along the porches of the Broken Dagger. Winter had strangled them, of course, but over the past few years, not even the most diligent hands –- without any kind of preternatural persuasion –- could keep the weeds from suffocating the color of spring blooms and stout azaleas.

The soil just beyond the latticework of the porch had been tossed time and time again, skewered through, broken of its ice and cleared free of its browned leaves. The crumbling earth had been turned, some of the roots dislodged and discarded. There were gaping holes in the soil of the flowerbeds, where browned, rotten tulip-bulbs had been extracted and thrown with disdain into the snow-crushed fields beyond the tavern’s perimeter.

A vandal would have, in their malice, destroyed something. In this case, however, destruction had already been wrought by nature itself –- since winter’s first frost, gaps had been torn through the earth, as if waiting patiently for seeds. Amid the sifted soil, there were puddles of black, wretched fluid as thick as syrup. The muck was half-frozen but had the sour reek of bile and the acrid stink of rotten compost.

Work had been done there, some kind of laughable mimicry of planting, of fertilizing. And for all the diligence that had been poured into the ground, it merited only a single, almost forgettable reward:

A single white tulip leaned tiredly to the side in the garden, its stalk healthy and young and green, its tightly-petaled head weighed down by a coating of frost. It was a memento of the coming spring, grown well before its prime, long before the cold had broken.

[Maxwell]

It had been a long walk.

How did one know? Well, this was the seventh time Mary had asked the same question. "Who memorizes his scholarly paper?"

And why did she ask that? It may have had something to do with a very particular recitation, one that was in its fourth chapter now. Maxwell was well supplied for this trip. He had his notes, his protective padded clothing, his giant butterfly net, and his specimen jars. Mary rather wished he had a muzzle. He continued to drone on, which in itself wouldn't be that bad. It was just that he kept going on about how Suede Roschen was the weasel who lived in his head every fourth passage.

"And anyway, it's all of Myrken." She turned her nose up at him as the Dagger began to come into view. "It's not just the Dagger. Your whole theory is fallacious." She splurted out another of her big words. "it's not some grand marketplace of evil and destruction. It's just on the edge of town so people end up there more often than not when they first get here, especially if they've come out of the woods. There's absolutely no proof to your crazy theory that the bones of the Baie are buried under it."

The bespectacled man inhaled a good degree of winter-induced snot and all but snarled at her. "I have done statistical analysis upon a carefully prepared and collated tally of the strange and preternatural incidents in ..."

"Blah-be-de-blah-de-blah-blah-blah-blah." Mary droned. "Enough. We're here. You can do your statistical tally on that dirt over there." She minced forth careful not to disturb anything. When it came to this, she knew more than he did with all of his book learning and expensive tutors. She was a Myrken farm-girl, and she knew a thing or two about dirt farming. "Actually, don't. Look here, instead." She pointed. "That is a tulip..."

"Actually, it's scientific name," he began.

It's as far as he got, before she shot him a stultifying glare. "Actually, it's a tulip, Maxwell, and it shouldn't be growing this early in the season, no it should not."

[Rance]

From his place at the edge of the Lake, where he toiled amid the cat-tails and the other things he had Done, he thought he felt an echo through the mud. A tremor that rolled through the winter soil. Whispered into the soles of his feet. Spiraled up into his spine and ribs. Echoed like the drums of war inside his ears.

Feet around his Marks. Feet that did not pass by, or drunkenly stumble into the blinding day. Feet that stood, and admired, and wondered why such little babies should be growing this early in the season.

The boything turned, dragging his wretched hands through the mud, listening to everything and nothing at all. He had a love -- but no liking -- for the winter birds, for the sun filtering in through the black branches, but all their noises were subdued to him; they did not whisper the way the babies did, his baby, and so when their shadows blocked its hunger for the sun, he thought he heard it wailing, screaming.

With a palm crashing over and over against his temple, trying to shake their shouts free of all the old things inside his poison-eaten brain, the boything trundled through the woods, the vines grown around his waist, his thighs, and his wrists hissing like snakes across the icy snow. He did not have the weight enough to break through the frozen top layer, never leaving footprints, never losing balance -- though he never truly had it in the first place.

When he reached the open expanse before the Broken Dagger, when he saw them--

the pear of them--

the too of them--

won and two--

none of it was right, the two of them, the pair of them--

--he hunkered down into the tall grasses that had yet to be crushed down by winter's burden. The sun did not boil his skin or crash down on his bones. He was born of the sun. He crawled through the underbrush of the untended grasses until he thought he could smell them. He took in a whole throat-stink full of the Man's phlegmy congestion, the odor of the intruder's snot clogging the boything's brain and his nose even from yards away. And there was the Lady, too, who knew his baby was a tulip, and she was pretty even though perhaps she was not pretty at all.

His palms parted the grasses, and with his bare belly against the ground, he whispered, "You are m-...making it s-...starve." He spoke it as if he were a part of them, a member of their little tribe, a fellow visitor skulking along. His elbows were half-consumed in the snowy mud, and when he smiled, the boy's black teeth were like stalactites in his mouth.

"Blah-be-de-blah-de-blah-blah-blah-blah," he repeated, even managing to catch the Lady's sarcastic tone, her disdainful impatience.

And with moss-covered head bobbing like a too-heavy counterweight, he scrambled to his knees, and to his feet, clawed hands scraping against the snow.

[Maxwell]

"Oh!" Mary and Maxwell shrieked in unison. Mary's was a bit tougher, but that didn't really seem to phase Maxwell too much. He cleared his throat quickly. "The Phlynn creature. Quickly, Mary. Pick up my net." He had dropped it in the monetary panic. "We need to isolate the specimen and then it can live with the chamberlain and the princes and princ ... oof!"

That would be the sound of Maxwell responding to getting cuffed on the shoulder by the Junior Inquisitor girl. "You stop that talk right now! Your little butterfly net can stay right on the ground right there, Maxwell." She huffed looking from the bespectacled man to the strange-handed boything emerging from the grass. "I think your tulip is lovely. The last thing we'd do is starve it. It's very smart of you to have grown it in winter."

Another sniff from Maxwell and a little grumble as he rubbed his arm. He said things like that sometimes, superficial little Catch things, but they never affected his decision making. They were just momentary lapses. Granted, that might be why he had been tossed towards Phlynn instead of something more pressing. "I don't think it's very smart to grow something in winter outside at all."

[Rance]

Talk of a net. Specimens. Royalty. A creature with a name. The boything watched both of them with those never-blinking eyes, occasionally forcing the likeness of a smile –- people smiled, did they not, that was what they did when they were amused –- though his broken, blade-like teeth were just little rocks.

"You w-…would not mean t-…to starve it, but if you give it y-…your shadow for too much time, it will wither and d-…die."

It was not a warning he spoke, or a possibility. It was fact. Innate. Absolute. The tulip would starve in their black-oil shadows. He watched the two of them with those unflinching eyes, though what he saw of them was incomplete –- to him, they were blurs, imprecise and ghostly, his unfocused eyes flicking past them to find the shining head of that sagging tulip.

Modesty was not the boy’s concern, and the vines did not wholly cover his emaciated body. His hips were ivory cups, his bare ribs like the ridges of a whalebone corset. Yet, without seeming to understand that it was cold at all, the half-naked creature nudged his shoulder between them, trying to pass them by, en route for the lovely, lonely baby.

"I am v-…very smart,” he said, squatting down beside the tulip, his toes digging into the soil. Do you s-…see," he asked not them, but the flower. "Do you see that Mary is good and th-…thinks you are dashing. And Maxwell, he is c-…cautious and a loves Winter so much, but n-…not you."

They had mentioned their names only in whispered conversation to each other, but yet, he attached the sounds to them, their identities, the things they were, the words that had been lashed into their souls when they were just tiny little babies--

babies, so many of them
their fathers dead in b
battle
bodies half-buried in red seas of g
guts
and you could have walked f
from
one end of the battlefield

to the other

on the c
corpses
alone--

babies--

"Do you want to show her your brothers," he said, tilting his pointed ear to the lips of the tulip, angling a bladed finger against his lips as if to tell Mary and Maxwell to stay silent.

His eyes flicked left and right. He listened to nothing. He waited for the tulip to finish its response, gave it a kiss upon the stem, and then started to crawl once more to his feet.

"Mary can come s-…see. I do not like it around the bad stew. Do you want t-…to come," he said to Mary, then, pressing his palm into his forehead. "Do you want to come see its lovely brothers, too? Maxwell c-…cannot come," the boy added. "He d-…does not think it is very smart to grow something in winter outside at all."

[Maxwell]

"He talked to the plant." Maxwell had retrieved his net somewhere in there and was brandishing it around like a riding crop. "He's likely connected to the potion-maker or the Fae." That just made sense. One or the other. The fae supposedly lived in a tree or something like that. No one took much of what he said seriously, for good reason. The potion-maker was supposedly insane. They were still examining that potion. Maybe there wasn't a connection. Still! If there was, he said it first and that mattered. Not that Mary would give him credit. And.."where are you going! I'm the one who's working on his file."

Mary Ford turned her nose up once again at her companion, her red hair partially escaping its ponytail due to the definitive nature of the motion. "You don't get to come. I'm going to look at tulips. You can go move so that you're not shading that one."

The bespectacled young man sniffed, and sniffed, and sniffed again. "Fine, but then bring him back. I have questions. And stop repeating me!" This last bit to Phlynn as he flailed about with the net.

[Rance]

"You can g-…go move so you’re not shading that one." He repeated this command for Maxwell, his bladed hands flexing, twitching, shuddering – the strain of their weight straightened out his fragile arms, and the claw-edged tips dragged in the soil alongside him.

But for Maxwell, there was something else: "I am g-…going to show Mary. I will chew a bear’s b-…bones if I need to. I am a fine protector."

The boy looked up to the woman. He had a likeness for women, for ladies, that did not entirely extend toward men, a patience for their softer, more cordial nature –- or the more gentle nature he believed females were meant to have –- that belied his gnarled fingers.

The boy’s skin was milk in the winter sunlight, pockmarked by black bruises, strewn with splatters of mud along his legs. He was a thin workhorse of tirelessness as he trudged through the weeds, the snow, the underbrush, taking greater strikes, hacking out great swaths of snow with his mangled hands. Clearing the way for Mary, even breaking into a skip once or twice.

"I have left them there," he said, pointing out a random patch of grass, "and th-…there," before his arm swept over to motion toward the edge of the woods, "and there, so nobody can find them."

What they were he did not say; the information was enough.

As they got to the woodline, he bared a frail shoulder and pressed it through thorny bushes and nagging ferns. He held them back, stretched them away so that Mary could pass unmolested by the stickers and brambles, even as they pierced underneath his papery skin. His blood glimmered in little black beads on his skin; he never flinched, he never even seemed to register the pain.

He led her toward Silver Lake. The boything seemed to know the winding way through the woods all too well –- and on the trees, perhaps she noticed the marks of his fingers just at around shoulder-height, like maps and progress-markers carved into the wood so he would never lose his bearings.

"You c-…cannot hurt them," he whispered. "I am a g-…good carer; I p-…protect them like pretty ladies, but they are babies.

"I made them all. They are b-…better than tulips. King Bug sh-…showed me. Promise t-…to be good, and maybe Maxwell, maybe he c-…can see too."

And before them, the frozen sprawl of Silver Lake –- which had suffered so much over the past few years -– greeted the boything and his new companion. But no tulips colored the lakesides. Just cat-tails as far as the eye could see around the rim of the great lake, swaying in the wind, waving their spongy heads. "Do you w-…want to see them?" he said to Mary, looking up to her.

"If you make a promise t-...to give me a nightgown--" did she know he once collected them like precious trophies, "you can see my babies."

[Maxwell]

"Just don't chew Mary's bones." Maxwell grumbled as he moved two belabored steps to the left. Once Phlynn had turned, he stuck out his tongue and scowled with his best wolf teeth impression. It wasn't very good.

Mary, however, had not looked back. No, she walked with Phlynn. The fact of the matter was that they didn't know much of anything about him. The second fact of the matter was that he was ultimately rather unimportant in the grand scheme of things. He was more so once, or Burnie suspected as much. There were so few people he could ask, though. What was he going to do? Question Treadwell about it? No, best to go to the source. Unfortunately, the source was a little confusing.

King Bug. "I'll be good." Mary nodded. "I'm from here you know. Not far. My Ma and Pa have a farm, but I never knew you. I never went into town much when I was younger. You were here but I was there. Maxwell's not from here," her nose scrunched a little. "So he doesn't always understand. He thinks he does though, about everything." King Bug, he'd said. She didn't like the sound of that. Who or what was King Bug. "Did you go away and come back? Where did you go? Did they have tulips there?" One question followed the next, leading them to have a rather disjointed conversation.

She did punctuate it all, however, with a .. "Of course I'd like to see. And if you want a nightgown, well, maybe we can have one made for you." She wasn't offering up one of hers, no she was not.

[Rance]

The boy listened to her the way one listened to the pieces of a puzzle -- they stared, wondered what kind of jagged edges they had that connected to other jagged edges, and realized that pieces of a puzzle should not talk at all, but that was what made her fascinating; that was what made him think she was so pretty.

I'm from here you know. Not far. My Ma and Pa have a farm, but I never knew you. I never went into town much when I was younger

"I n-...never knew you," he said. "Th-...that is people. They d-...don't have to know each other."

The boy hunkered down into the cat-tails, his bare feet squelching through the mud, his doorknob knees breaking down some of the stalks of water-thriving flora. He sifted through them, whispering to himself when she spoke, occasionally counting out invisible numbers on his bladed fingers as if keeping track of something vastly, terribly important.

Maxwell's not from here...So he doesn't always understand. He thinks he does though, about everything.

"I would k-...kill a man," he said, very simply, as if it were just a thought on the side. "He is n-...not as nice as you are. I will Mark his neck if...if he hurts my babies."

Did you go away and come back?

"No."

Where did you go?

"Right here, t-...to the bottom."

Did they have tulips there?

He did not answer that. He could not answer it. There was no need to answer it, not as he found a spot along the damp, icy shore, one he knew quite well, and his bladed fingers parted the brown cattails. There, an uncanny thing: a little oasis of the wildest, greenest ferns and plants amid the rotten blackness of mid-winter, a number of multi-colored tulips ushered from the ground by whatever wretched talent the boy had thriving within him.

Between the plants, there were fingers -- fingers like his, little skinblades standing up like tubers from the snowy mud, sharp and bladed things as if he were growing parts of himself on the shores of Silver Lake. But they were not just there in that little patch of thriving spring. The fingers were all over the shoreside, between the cat-tails, pale and waxy and young, some twitching, some grabbing for nothing. Hundreds of them.

"They have tulips here now," he said, very quietly.

And maybe Mary saw what made the tulips so special, for if she looked upon them, they would look right back, their tightly-wound petals cupping in each one of their blooms a wet, glistening eye. Human. Blue. Just like his. Staring at her.

"I can f-...fix my bad stew," he said. "I can fix it, Mary."

[Maxwell]

The ferns and tulips came first. "Oh this is beautiful, Phlynn. However did you.."

Mary Ford had seen quite a few things. She was a Myrken Girl. She was a farm girl, albeit a relatively young one. There were vague memories of spires, of the Flux, of the Ashfiend and of cultists. Of dragons and channelers and drow. There were acute memories of Catch losing control in a very dark, very enclosed space and of a mob and an axe and the dead come back to life. She'd seen things. She'd read things. She'd heard things.

None of that prepared her for this.

"Oh." Her hand went to her mouth. It was ladylike, and in another situation she might be proud of the carefully hone reflex. Here and now, though? In the here and now, she could not lie to herself. In the here and now, she was trying not to scream and trying not to vomit. In fact, through holding in BOTH impulses, they somehow cancelled each other out. "No, no, no, no, no." It was a soft whisper. "No, oh, no, no, no, no, no, nonono." She clenched back sudden tears from the horror of it. One leg stepped and then the next, a cross between swaying and marching in place.

Fingers, blades, eyes. Mary knew how to talk to someone like Phlynn. She knew how to talk to Catch. She meant it too, most of the time. She knew what not to do. But she was only human and even a lifetime of Myrken Horrors had not prepared her for this. She held in her screams. She held in her vomit. She could not hold in her loss of consciousness. Eyes rolled back into her skull as the young woman fainted.

[Rance]

Oh this is beautiful, Phlynn, however did you...

"I Did it," was the boy's explanation, a proud smile on his face revealing the blackened nubs of wretched teeth. "I Did it b-…because it is all that I know. I cry to the flowers when they die."

He turned to give her this explanation, to draw his hands and his gaze away from the patch of living spring he had been working so desperately to maintain. The disembodied eyes tried to blink, but he had not perfected eyelids yet, so some of them were withered little fruits that could no longer see, half-frozen. White jelly.

Mary whispered over and over again, a protest, and as he looked upon her, he watched her fall. Folding back into the cattails. Dropping into the mud like a half-broken doll.

"Mary?"

He pulled himself away from his babies and scuttled close to her, his toes digging into the sediment and mud, his bladed fingers settling upon her sleeve, her shoulder. In that moment, he breathed her in, sniffed her, and he could hear--

the brown marrow in her bones throbbing, calling out to him, gritty and full of taste like smoke and old blood, you are hungry, Phlynn, we are just a few crunches away--

the red stuff pumping through her veins at the whim of a wildly-beating heart, and he could just bury his broken teeth in her skin, find one of those cables, rip it free, stain himself and everything around him red--

his brain starting to shrivel, twist, define his will. Rotten teeth started to spill from his mouth, shed from his gums so that new ones could take their place, sharp and as white as pearls, serrated, vicious, hungry for skin--

"No," he chattered, hammering a palm against his own forehead and nose, blasting hand against cartilage until black droplets oozed from his nostrils. "No."

What the boything did do, however, was roughly lift her shoulder at the urge of his bladed fingers, twining his elbow underneath hers. With his arm hooked into hers, his vines hissing behind him, he dragged the unconscious Mary through the ferns, through the grasses and underbrush. Only when he reached the woodline did he drop her body so that the sun could see her.

So it could know he had done nothing wrong to her.

The Broken Dagger loomed in the distance as, with pebbles in his throat and mud in his voice, he cried out Maxwell's name and hovered like an alabaster gargoyle over Mary's body.

[Maxwell]

Phlynn's voice shouting his name.

There are no situations where that would be either appropriate or a good thing. Maybe it was better it wasn't Mary's voice. Maybe not. Maybe Phlynn had already eaten her. With his strange, dangerous hands, and his strange dangerous everything else. He didn't fit any catagorization that Maxwell had encountered before and he knew them all, all of them. He knew most things after all! "I will have to write an academic paper on the Phlynn. The Maxwellian Phlynn, we shall call it," he muttered as he moved with no great haste towards the sound of that scream. "Perhaps I can take it in a wagon to Razasan, present it in front of the king as a sign of.."

Oh, something WAS indeed wrong. Obviously the thing to do was to care for Mary, to see if she was alright, to blame the creature and threaten him with a large and pointy stick. Instead, however, Maxwell had seen the brush move as if the Phlynn creature had just gone past it. More than that, he smelled something, putting his nose up in the air and sniffing. He felt something, somehow. There was something just on the other side, and he had to document it, had to record it! It had to go into his paper. He knew it.

So he would burst back the child-creature and past poor prone Mary and he would see for himself.

"There's an Eye!" He shouted, suddenly, staring at what the deformed thing had wrought, memories not his own, recent ones, hammering into the front of his head. "There is an EYE at the bottom of the lake. Cloud-Hair! Cloud-Hair! An Eeeyyyyyyeeeeee! Eiyeeeee!" He began to stomp about, though not towards the monstrous flora. He stomped in a circle three times, before getting down on all fours and charging at Phlynn.

[Rance]

"You sh-…should wake up, I d-…did not Do this, I did not," he chattered, squatting with an uncanny worry over the unconscious Mary's body, his jittering, bladefingered hands touching her sleeves, her cheek, her neck, never slicing, never cutting, but scraping, as if he were hoping he might find a lever to turn her gears back on, to right her unconsciousness.

Maxwell, despite his summons, thundered past. The boything was left with the unconscious Mary. He hammered his palms against his temples, squeezing, pressing, as if he thought that pressure might instantly relieve the sudden noises within his head, a twisting, rattling cacophony of old sounds and memories, a hotness within his guts that suddenly threatened to come bursting out of him.

It was like pretty ladies Genny, a helpless woman, wanted to rip into her, snap her ribs in the mess of her guts like they were little wishbones, but that was improper. Not right, not right--

not like

all

the other

things

It was Maxwell's shrieking cry that jarred him from the things spilling over in his overturned cup of a brain. The boy's bony knees tightened in their bend, and his naked spine was a serrated blade of dull vertebrae.

There's an Eye!

Maxwell was stomping, or dancing, though the only dancing the boy had ever witnessed had come after a battle, watching Fury-of-the-Winds feast on the part of a little Omtohpa girl that needed shoes and twirl, twirl, twirl like a madman near the smoke of a great fire. Then, Maxwell rushed toward him, his hands and feet the awkward, poorly-bending imitation of something that wanted paws.

There is an EYE at the bottom of the lake. Cloud-hair! Cloud-hair!

Strangeness, peculiarity, and oddness was no distraction, no threat for the boy -- they were things that did not even exist, for the world itself seemed like nothing more than a hallucination, the old architecture of memories, not quite alive or dead but just somewhere suspended in a place full of bad stew, bad stew--

It was several feet from Mary that, if Maxwell did not stop, the boything would collide with him, his bony shoulders like a small battering ram. Despite his thinness, the boy's muscles were knotted iron, his bones like misshapen granite. If he hit right, he would try to knock Maxwell back, sprawl him into the mud and grass, clamber atop him. Vines spilled everywhere from his hips, his arms. The dirty clawfingers threatened so much to squeeze, shatter, and sink within Maxwell's skin, find the good parts, rip them out.

Black tears splattered from the boything's eye-corners. Broken, rotten teeth spilled out of his mouth like the crumbs of brown sweets.

"D-…do you want to die," the boy snarled, bubbles of saliva popping between his teeth. "I d-…did not Do it, she is hurt, sh-…she is hurt, sleeping, d-…dreaming, fainted, not working.

"Help her," the boything crowed, before slamming one of his malformed palms into the ground beside Maxwell. "Help her."

[Maxwell]

The Lake. The statue. The statue held the eye. The statue kept the eye from seeing all of them. An angel. She'd gotten out of the lake. The angel had gotten out of the lake and the eye was opening! And there she was. All he had to do was pick Mary up and get her to the lake. Deep, deep within the la...

Maxwell smacked hard into Phlynn's terribly thick frame. He bounced off of it and then tumbled, once, twice, three times. His spectacles were askew and he had found himself in the brush. Still, he managed to dust himself up and get to his feet. There was a rather large branch in his hair and he seemed oblivious about it.

"So, then, and you'll excuse my lack of notetaking, but please be aware that my memory is utterly perfect, the greatest that the world had ever seen, legendary and the winner of many contests real and some that just exist in my head as truly daring academic events that I Shall some day create and then win, and then will be renamed after me after I win seventeen of them in a row." He sniffed, swatting at the branch, not entirely sure why, and missing completely.

His voice was far more focused than before and three times more nasally. "As I was properly expounding for you, my memory is immaculate, and thus, even though I have nothing to take notes with currently, know that all of your answers will not just be recorded, but also improved upon; that is, I know what you are thinking better than you do. I am a professional, after all." A dignified clear of his throat. "So as Mary sleeps, answer me this. Are the eyes and the fingers because you feel alone as the only one of your kind, and unwitnessed by he world at large, an when you walk through your grove, you feel important and truly the center of the universe, for look at all those captive eyes upon you. And the fingers," were problematic, but still, he pressed on. "the fingers are because you wish to intertwine your own with them in order to wish a hundred wishes everyday!" Pinky wishes. They were a powerful draw for a creature so strange!