Plotseekers #1 (metafiction novel)

[Cy Skywalker]

A/N: This is set in the same universe as my short story Li and my fanfic The AntiSue, though you don't need to be able to tell to understand any of them. This might be a novella, I don't know. I really love these characters so tell me if they seem as interesting to you. Don't worry, it's supposed to be a little confusing untill about the third chapter.

I

Rain beat down on the Miata so hard that the wipers were not fast enough to catch it, and a constant pulsating layer of water remained over the windshield.

Constantine Kipling recalled for the hundredth time how much he hated driving as he crept around another block in the gray, near-nonexistent visibility. Mailboxes with their numbers in various states of obscurity slid past, but he did not doubt being able to find the yellow police tape of a crime scene on this clean street. The young woman beside him still made him nervous.

“Lower that cowl while in the car, will you.” said he.

She shrugged the black sweatshirt’s hood to around her shoulders, revealing short blonde-brown hair and a pointed face with a thin scar running above her right eye. It made that face less attractive and more intense. Said she, “You get used to it. All movie bad guys wear them, they’re so comfortable.”

“You’re not a movie bad guy.”

She smiled, more like a smirk than a smile actually.

Constantine sighted, with difficulty, the tape around a house and section of sidewalk ahead. He drove a way past to find somewhere to not parallel park, even though three Miatas could fit in some of these spaces.

Not long after the awkward silence of their last exchange his companion said, “All this rain. It makes you think we could be in a story, that the scene’s set to match the mood.”

He said quietly, “If it is, how can we enter other books and manipulate them?”

“I’ve had this conversation before, but backwards.”

Together they crossed the street and the police tape. Only Constantine’s confidence gave them any look of belonging; other than that his neat business clothes, brown leather jacket, and messy brownish hair with loose, long tail didn’t seem to belong to any modern social setting. He obviously carried a switchblade and three duct-tape-bound softcover books. They climbed the stairs to the white, rather beat-up split level’s porch.

Before they could knock or make another sign a young, Hispanic-looking police man opened it. Constantine’s nervousness jumped a notch; he did not usually deal with authorities in the so-called Real World. Usually authors did not murder their fans for writing copious tie-in fiction.

“We’re here on special investigations for the death of Marie Shandler.” He said.

“Scene’s mostly cleared away.” replied the man. “Let me see your ID.”

Constantine’s partner spoke firmly, looking up at the cop. “This is master Constantine Kipling and I am Mourn.” She spelled it. “You will grant us entrance and wait outside until we’ve finished, keeping quiet.”

The cop nodded and walked out on to the dripping porch as Mourn stepped aside.

Constantine entered the house and went up started up the stairs. He had to shake his head and worry, but also said, “Thanks.”

To her credit Mourn only replied with, “I have a friend who watched a lot of X-Files. Police are just people.”

The living room had a pink carpet, various Catholic-theme paintings in neat formation on the walls, and no body remaining as evidence. The weapon lay just outside the spraypainted outline on the carpet, set straight beside the painted leg as if the girl had been wearing it. It was a long, European sword, silver until the red blood on the last foot of the blade, the hilt carefully styled in gold and with a wide Spanish guard.

Mourn hissed a foreign curse.

Constantine just flicked his gaze to her and then back to the outline, wondering how little he could know. “What?”
“Just the blood.” Then she knelt down beside the stained blade and gently touched the guard with the back of her hand.

So she was used to cleaner weapons? Instead he asked, “Could this be one of the swords from the book?”

“I’m not sure. I just read it. He didn’t describe them as so Spanish.”

Constantine’s cell phone trumpeted the first few tones of a techno ‘Amazing Grace’ and then he snatched it from pocket to ear. “Hello.”

His mother’s voice came over from the store. “Trouble! Get you two back here!” Then she hung up.

Constantine and Mourn traded glances and jogged out. The police officer gave a quick salute in response to the girl’s as they went by.

[Denithar]

It's confusing like you said. But I think I understood well enough, and it has an exciting pulse. I like it.

[Cy Skywalker]

Thanks, denithar.


II

The hair/nail/Plotseekers headquarters place had all the black curtains drawn in the storefront, causing only a few concerned glances from Main Street passerby wondering why it had closed so early. While the two agents worked in the tie-in writer’s house the rain had slowed, stopped, and allowed the heated summer sun to light this section of the earth through the threatening gray clouds. Mourn, closest to the sidewalk, put down her window and expertly vaulted the convertible car’s door instead of just opening it. Constantine exited the driver’s side the normal way and ran to the storefront door with key in hand.

“You’re going to draw too much attention, Mourn.” he said while bent to the complex lock.

“I could divert attention like Hercules could water. Don’t deny me making this feel exciting, please.”

He attacked the six-digit keypad with his fingertips and shoved the door open. The sign hanging just to the immediate right, which could usually be seen from the outside, said the store’s walk-in hours, “specials for woman”, and some graffiti in Tolkein’s Elven language Tengwar, which read “if you can read this you probably need a hair cut.”

The emergency lights only were on, making the wide tables and cocked, hanging hair styling equipment look like props from Frankenstein’s laboratory despite their pink or coral color scheme. The five or so ‘regular’ staff were crowded in a back corner, and Constantine’s mother along with two silhouetted people stood on the opposite one looking down into the basement stariwell.

His mother’s perky voice shouted and echoed, “Out, foul spot!” and all the lights and appliances came back on. Constantine switched off a massive blow-dryer that had shuddered to life beside him.

His mother Vern or Veronica Kipling approached the newcomers with open arms and a wide smile as the store staff shakily returned to their places. She was a short, slim, wrinkled and wavy-haired woman wearing a while dress and apron. “Blasted sidhe!” she said, rather out of breath. “They’ll leave if you nip the interearth tesseract and quote mangled Shakespeare; remember that, boy!” She poked him on the chest for emphasis. Swooping over to the entrance desk to reshuffle papers as other pulled up the black curtains, she continued her high-energy speech. “It’s what people’ve been bringing in here lately! Aren’t we supposed to be keeping the worlds separate? “ Sigh. “Jessie brought a Dalek in last week. Between that and the half-breed of course the sidhe--a Dalek!”

Constantine said, “Mother, when you called I thought there was serious trouble.”

“Oh? I’m sorry.” She sat down at her desk and suddenly her kindness was for the mundane customers and her curt protection or ignorance for her son.

“We found the sword, at the crime scene, but nothing different. The author has disappeared.”

“Then for now, leave it to the police. Unless you can think of something brilliant, we’ll have to wait for the meeting Friday.”

Lucky--in two days we can meet with people more knowledgeable than a writer and a supernaturally-aided entrepreneur. “Okay”.

He headed for the front again to get out of the way of customers, and noticed that Mourn was missing.

[scarecrow]

I love this story. It's perplexing in a maddening way, as if I almost know what's happening but I can't quite understand it. I have some reservations about some of the dialogue in the first chapter, but I think it's mostly because I don't know what's going on. Nice job.

[Cy Skywalker]

III

He found her in the ‘back’, between the storefront in the mall and the one on Main Street, Clovestown, Pennsylvania. Boxes were stacked on metal shelves for the two sections of salon, but also a corner had been furnished with a simple wooden writing desk and a round, pink rug. Mourn sat slumped over the desk with her bare feet burying into the pink, looking at the wall.

Constantine looked in quietly, entered quietly, and waited for something unknowable to tear at his inner and conscious thoughts.

When it did not he went and sat cross-legged, looking almost at that apprentice’s eye level. “What’s wrong?”

She said, deadpan, “Your mother hates me.”

He tried to stay calm. “I’m sorry. She’s--

“She has called me half-breed. I’m not. Not physically, or fictionally.”

“I was explaining. She is under a lot of stress. You realize, stuff like this doesn’t usually happen. The sidhe and the obvious things. That’s not our purpose. We Write, we let the Plot flow through us--it has to come out, from wherever it exists, to ArEl, the Real World.” He looked to see if she understood, and she had turned toward him slightly. “Do you understand?”

She asked, “What’s a sidhe?”

Constantine smiled a little and said, “Not the Celtic fairies they’re named for. They’re a kind of security system actually; any place where Plotseekers gather they tend to appear, like...well, they look rather like eels. Too much weirdness, they become physical and block the place from sight.”

Mourn nodded. “A Somebody Else’s Problem Field.”

“Ah, that’s from Fforde?”

“Adams.”

“Some think that sidhe are muses come to life. Personally I think someone Wrote them into the Real World a while ago, as one little victory in the war against a boring reality.”

Mourn had retreated again into thoughts which sunk her gaze, the only thing that changed. He wondered how her past had come to the present so much, that all the Plotseekers’ business seemed to remind her.

“Sorry.” He got ready to move.

“If I wanted you dead you couldn’t move well enough.”

“You’ve never actually killed anyone.”

She said nothing.

He dropped the bravado gently. “This has to stop. I know you have power. I know you like to threaten people so they don’t know what you’ve really been through. But I am the adult here, I am the one who can pull rank on you. No death threats. I have resources. But we’re supposed to be partners.”

She was silent for a long time, then pulled her eyes to his. Constantine just wondered what she knew. Could she sense his thought patterns, how afraid he was, how much of this came from Security and his mother? Finally she asked, “Can you treat me like a normal teenage girl? I never wanted that before. Now...” She shrugged.

He could not be sure where she was going with this. “I suppose I could. You need to get on that online course to take your SATs this fall. Mom might give you a free haircut. I won’t ever let you drive, or...ah, or I’ll make you eat vegetables.”

She nodded a little, then, “Ok. That’ll help. But...I want to go to college in Pullman’s Oxford. Study Elvish in Rivendell. I’ve never heard a jabberwocky scream...”

“No. No, Mourn.”

She met his eyes again.

“No fiction. You will never step into fiction again.”

Pause. “I’ve never stepped into fiction. It stepped out.”

“Don’t go remembering anything nasty.” He snapped. He, his mother, and the teens who had rehabilitated Mourn had picked up on keywords she would snap at. That it was flying close to one of them. “You want to go for ice cream and talk about Internet trends?”

“Sure.” She said. Constantine’s fear fell down a notch. “Then we research the murder.”

“Back to normal.” He droned, and stood up away from the pink, which she also evacuated.

[scarecrow]

So far as I can pick up, it's got something to do with them being able to enter fictional worlds, or fictional worlds coming real? I dunno. I'm even more confused than before, you liar, but I love it.

All these references to things I know I've heard somewhere before are what's bothering me. Isn't a Dalek one of those robots from Dr. Who? There are the obvious LotR references. A tesseract ... maybe from A Wrinkle in Time? And I think, just a little, that jabberwockies come from Lewis Carroll, but I'm not sure.

[Cy Skywalker]

Yep, you caught all the references. Though tesseract is not a word restricted to WiT, and I don't think it originated there, though there the concept was popularized. I love 'em too--thanks for your input and following. Though you're more confused now! Heh...

[Cy Skywalker]

IV

There is, Constantine reflected, a certain strange atmosphere around the potential inherent in choosing a book. Perhaps mundane people did not feel it...that cloudy sense that it is the world which tips and recedes when you turn your head to see the titles of shelved books.

More so with free pushed aside each heavy hardback with deliberation. He enjoyed science-fiction and mysteries, but the purpose here in the back hall of the technical school’s public library was more ambiance, less literature. Surrounded by unread stories he could sense Plots flitting, soaring by, unspecified and as full of potential as the oily skin on a scrier’s pool.

He rounded a cart and bent to the next one, let randomness guide him to a few brightly colored tomes in the highest shelf and then higher, to a halfhazard pile on the cart’s center.

If Matt August, the writer, killed Marie Shandler, why had he disappeared but not taken the weapon? Did he even have a motive? So far neither he and Mourn nor any other ‘seeker had gained a web address or cache of her tie-in works, though Mourn had guessed that its content angered the author due to characterization abuse. But why ever would that be enough to kill the fan for? It was so far the only connection found between the individuals.

And August’s book, Roaring Thane, lay half-finished in Constantine’s car right now, a mildly entertaining fantasy novel with the stains visible to the mind’s eye.

He cast about with expanded senses and his eyes drifted partly closed.

The main character from the story, Kaythe, surfaced in his deep thoughts as if he were beginning to be Written. He walked in the woods of high fantasy, in the seeds of sequel.

Constantine sighed, glanced up, and caught Mourn at a shelf inside the library a glass wall away, just reaching for a comic book.

She turned around at the instant of his glare, and jerked her hands down as if he held her leashed at the wrists.

That evening they arrived at another library, the tiny Burton Public, and descended its basement steps into the crowd for the bimonthly meeting of the Regionals.

Constantine stepped around stacks of papers, boxes of books, the occasional safe, and many vigorous handshakes to reach Davis, an old friend. The dark-skinned, mature looking apprentice clasped his hand purposefully and said, “Hey, so you survived that fan fiction mission with the containment?”

“Ah, yeah...” Constantine clapped the girl standing behind him on the shoulder to steer her forward. “This is my apprentice, Mourn.”

“That’s with a ‘u’,” she mumbled, and shook hands with Davis curtly.

Davis smiled. “Congratulations. You know, I really thought they should have kept the kids on that one, but you must have done well.”

Constantine nodded, noncommittal, and moved with the others when the librarian rang a pushbell for the meeting to begin.

They sat around a long, unadorned oval table.

Plotseeker skills are not rare, or only slightly more so than published writer’s, but motivation and destiny choose just enough. Typically one organization services one country, as books written throughout it are distributed evenly, though the United States has two, one for each Coast. About sixty people sat or stood in the gathering in the library basement, the junior canon protectors’ department to one side and the others to the other.

Issues were raised and discussed in a circular order . Typically pairs or small groups reported, and sometimes larger sections like Vern Kipling’s pack were spoken for. The kids laughed to themselves under the direction of Sondra Neits, spokesfan, in all her Klingon glory. Most reported quietude.

After Vern’s railing against touchy sidhe, Constantine addressed them, glad of the purpose. He squeezed Mourn’s elbow as she hesitantly stood beside him, just trying to assure that she had his protection. “My cohorts.” He smiled. “I’ve gained an apprentice,” She nodded, no more, “and a mystery of fluctuation in the novel Roaring Thane, a fluctuation which peaked the day its author committed a murder. We need resources to see a connection, but so far they’re all in the Real World.”

Knowing silence reigned, until one portly agent stood, glanced obviously at Mourn, coughed uncomfortably, and rushed the words, “I can get his file out of the local police station, I’m sure. My day job is as an officer.”

Constantine kicked Mourn under the table and she understandably stepped around and on his foot.

“Ow--good, you know, if you could.”

The policeman nodded and sat. “And your forces confirmed the victim was dead, not sent into a fiction?”

Constantine nodded. He said, “They have the body.”

A few times after the meeting, as people milled about or sat among the bookshelves and the atmosphere as if they had become lizards and the library the sun, someone would ask about how Constantine’s capture of the girl running rampant in fan fiction had gone.

“It didn’t end up quite as a capture or containment.” He would say, with Mourn always at his shoulder like a gawky pet raven. Suddenly he felt desirous to protect her, to prioritize first his apprentice as a person, and second as an enemy in another mission, whom he had found to be one of those very confused powerful teenagers. “More like a rehabilitation, and it’s still going on. The only true problem was she had an embattled ‘seeker’s duties and didn’t know she was one.”

“And why didn’t the franchise canon kids get this one?”
“Because she was from outside fan fiction. Almost like now; we’re having to work in the context of the Real World...” And he would draw the conversation into some anecdote of his terrible driving.

[Denithar]

While the two agents worked in the tie-in writer’s house it the rain had slower, stopped, and allowed the heated summer sun to light this section of the earth through the threatening gray clouds.

This sentence is awkward, there are many like it throughout the piece. Is this intentional?

-down into the basement stariwell.

Not a word.

She was a short, slim, wrinkled and wavy-haired woman wearing a while dress and apron.

Okay, I'll stop editing small stuff. This is a word but I believe you mean "white".

It's VERY creative. You have done an awesome of making it just plain fascinating. However, it is far from plain, and combined with the messy wording can be troublesome to understand. On the other hand, I think you do need a lot of ambiguity in this story to give it the mysterious air.

[Cy Skywalker]

I know I have some typoes left--thank you for pointing those out so that I can change them in this version. Any other ambiguity is meaningful.

[scarecrow]

Now I'm finally starting to pick up on what's happening. The fog is slowly clearing (though I hardly think that I'll ever fully understand).

There's just one sentence in the fourth chapter that seems sorta odd to me:

"More so with free pushed aside each heavy hardback with deliberation." - It seems like you wrote this deliberately, but I've read it and read it and all I do is get a headache. Did you write this way on purpose, and if you did, what does it mean?

Other than that, it's all gelling. The fog's starting to clear, the plot is starting to move, and some questions are being answered, with new ones popping up all the time. Endlessly fascinating.

[Cy Skywalker]

Gasp, I think there is a ""More so with free, he thought as he pushed aside each heavy hardback with deliberation." supposed to be in there. I'm so glad you thought I made it weird on purpose! It does sound kinda nice that way, doesn't it? But doesn't make sense. (p.s., you're reviews have such lovely wording to them.)

V

Midmorning of the next day Mourn sat at the kitchen table leaning her head on her hand next to a glass of iced tea and the louvered 2-D towers of a solitaire game. Constantine, watching soup boil a half-wall away in the kitchen, thought quietly about the mission, and about when they would have time to go shopping for furniture for Mourn’s borrowed room, which used to be a library. The apartment was new and modest, between salary-stereotype of his night job as an otherwise unoccupied assistant karate instructor and his day job as a ‘seeker to whom many pirates’ and dragons’ hoards were available.

Mourn said, “I am bored, Constantine.”

“Good morning to you too.” He poured the chicken soup and brought it over to the tables in bowls for his lunch and her breakfast.

“I have no books, no movies, no writing, no straying out of someone’s sight. I’m bored.”

He glared at her. Whose fault is that? He understood the boredom, but glared.

She growled softly and dug her spoon into the soup.

“Our contact finally found something. “ Constantine said. “August’s only family live in Toronto. Canada. We can interview them, possibly.”

‘How exactly does being Plotseekers help us here?”

“It doesn’t.” He said, thinking with loathing of Interstates .

“And you’re sure this is big enough to go on a road trip for? By the way, I don’t have a birth certificate.”

“Ah...you could do that hypnosis job, if there are no cameras. Why precisely don’t you have a birth certificate?”

“Because I don’t exist.” She said. “I’ll check with your mom about the cameras.”

Mom had Internet connection. “It is important. One of our readers picked the weirdness in the novel up, but the timing...I just feel it.” He knew his voice to infuse with certainty, passion. He knew, as he knew where the Plot lead.

Mourn nodded. After a time in which they ate quietly and his thoughts flitted about the roads to Canada, she asked, “Can I join your dojo?”

He looked at her for a moment, weighing the danger with the distraction. The danger of martial arts training would not worsen Mourn, he thought. The distraction might put a good camaraderie of fighters around her when she needed them. “Sure.”

And so in the evening they walked downtown, not so far as the mall and hairdresser’s, and Constantine sat alone for a moment fingering the thin clean blade of his katana, breathing , clearing his mind in that way which discipline brings without an accompanying name.

[scarecrow]

lol. "Your reviews have such lovely wording to them." Now if only I got get someone to say that about my work.

Not to seem rude, but this chapter seems like filler to me. It's a bit on the short side, and it doesn't have do much in way of plot advancement. If you don't mind me saying, it sorta seems to me that you're a bit like Mourn, and in your boredom for something you decided to just drop in a new chapter. lol

Still, short as it is, this chapter has my favorite line: "...clearing his mind in that way which discipline brings without an accompanying name." It's so deep and true, and I felt like I was filling up with a cheesy sort of inner peace when I read it. But that's just me, the hopeless romantic. Keep on with it, and hopefully the other chapters will confound me in that delightful way that is your wont.

P.S. I don't normally pick at the spelling/grammar specifically, but "Mom had internet connection."

[Cy Skywalker]

That one was meant to be character-building. Perhaps I shall tack it on to another?

I fear for the validity of some of my concepts...


VI

Mourn made the eight-hour drive to Niagara Falls look intensely boring in the moments Constantine dared avert his eyes from the road to look at her. The music of changing radio stations kept her nodding, almost sleeping, as he maneuvered like a jet fighter on the long highway. His concentration andresolve died more with every intersection. They had packed clothes, water, and a couple katanas.

I don’t belong here.

Not here on this mission–missions came so close to being plots. Here, in this world where to cross the highway meant only more asphalt, and where to succeed meant only more money.

He prayed that the promised escape would bring him peace in purpose.

Just across the river in Niagara Falls, the two agents looked toward clouded skies for cameras under the security booth between the two countries.

Constantine just eased toward the station. “Find it?”

Mourn looked brightly now, scanning the walls with her eyes drifting shut. “There.” An ugly twist of expression served her for magic wand. “I don’t know how long until someone fixes it. I just snapped cables.”

“Good enough.”

An armed guard in a blue uniform came around to Constantine’s open window.

Mourn quietly snarled, “We can pass.”

“You can pass.” said the guard. Constantine slowly accelerated

Constantine found a motel in the suburbs of the Falls and gratefully ordered adjacent rooms. Shakiness from the long drive plagued him. Dusk fell soon after they unloaded the car, so soon after he ordered himself and the apprentice to sleep. The door between them remained cracked open. She had never tried to escape at home...

For a few hours ticked endlessly by on the clock with hits digital lime-green font, Constantine could not sleep. Too hot, or too cold, or too alien. Thoughts would not rest but settled on the futility of asking the author’s family for information relevant to a universe they did not know existed.

Worry, worry–finally he got up, dressed in shorts and with his hair wild, and in the dark paced out a section of floor to practice karate.

This, he thought, is one of those restless night described only as those two words in a book. Not that this was any adventure worthy of a book. It was prior missions in which he had escorted particularly powerful fictioneers in and out of the Real World, deflected the attacks of vicious Webspeak epidemics, or followed a novel for three weeks until it submitted to his pen.

Suddenly a cry for help split the gentle waves of his mind into speedboat’s wake whitewater. “Master–“ Mourn’s voice.

Constantine sprinted to her room, glanced over the bared and empty white sheets, and flung himself out the door to the motel’s porch.

In the darkness under the awning the girl stood in her day clothes facing a dark-cloaked man whom Constantine’s stare slid off like oil on water. Two sensations burned into him; the shredded lines of Mourn’s Plot (?) and an image of eyes, blood or fire red around strange black somehow like neon gases falling into a black hole.

He grabbed hold of the metaphor as a lifeline and prepared to bind the rogue fictioneer to his ink-black unfound origin.

Then the rush was gone and only he and Mourn stood there with their hands on the grainy, real heat of the porch railing.

Mourn fled to him or her room at a run. Constantine caught her in a hug, but at the touch of his skin she flinched away and stood staring up at him.

She said, “I’m sorry.”

“That was your old friend, wasn’t it? Some how you gave him a Plot in the Real World. Him and you. He won’t stop coming.” He breathed heavily, tried to read back and could not. Such a strange corner of the universe he had waded in to!

Mourn also gasped as if after a run. “He’s frightened of Plotseekers. Of other realities, after...I pulled him out of his...” She turned to face the same direction Constantine was, and her shoulders shook.

“So you’re okay now.”

“I can’t wish I never–“ She turned and slammed a fist against the wall. Immediatly he took hold of both wrists.

“Don’t fall into the drama. This is real.” He shook her. “Real.”

She leaned against the wall, quieter at each word. “I’ll tell you the true story.”

[scarecrow]

See, this is what I mean! I'm totally wowed here!

I hope no one else guts me for this, but I have to say that you are one of the best writers here. I think most of the other people here, including myself, are ... immature, in that we don't realize that we shouldn't let the conventions of genre rule the content of our stories. When I read what you write, I can just tell that this is somehow who is conscious of what genre she's in, but doesn't let her awareness of it stray into conformity. I can tell you are very conscious that you have a style, and you know what you want to write, and not only did you do it with skill (which anyone can do), but you also have the added bonus of being distinct. I'd bet that you're the kind of person who can write something that's been written about so many times before and still make it unique and interesting.

In short, when I read what you write, I feel like I'm reading the work of someone smarter than me. That's the highest praise I know how to give. Top-notch job. A++.