Thank you for reading my novel! Everything I wrote during the month of November has now been posted, and I tidied up all the plot threads I could think of. The dangling ones will have to remain for editing, possibly to take place in the spring.
However, Captain Peg Paw, the villain I didn't know I would desperately need and who therefore isn't in any of what I have posted, is poking me madly with his wooden paw. Moirayoung, one of the ladies who was at the Final Word write-in in New Westminster, gave me the idea for him on the final night of NaNoWriMo, and I think it will be my December challenge to work him into the book.
Once that happens, or if it looks like it won't happen because I am too busy, I will be making a spiffy ol' PDF with the whole kit and kaboodle, and possibly some bunny icons. If I'm feeling creative and have time. If you would like a copy of this, please leave a comment here or on facebook or send me an email ( gwen underscore echlin (at) yahoo .dot. ca ).
02 December 2010
Epilogue
Epilogue
"Ah," Patricia sighed, leaning back in her rocking chair and smiling at her granddaughter, seated on the couch across from her, and both with a cup of tea in their hands. Patricia lifted her own to her nose: the warm, comforting scent of caramel-flavoured Earl Grey greeted her, and she wondered how she could possibly have gone her life without trying it. Thankfully she had had the opportunity to stop into a nice little tea shop in San Francisco the day after the Night of Writing Dangerously.
A fluffy shape shifted in her lap, and Patricia smiled down at Alfalfa, who twitched his ears at her.
Patricia had just finished explaining to her granddaughter the whole long story, with additions from what Flopsy and Alfalfa had explained during her dreams after she had returned to her hotel room after the Night of Writing Dangerously, and May had forgiven her for not calling before heading to San Francisco. It helped that, sometime during the adventures in the ballroom, or possibly during Flopsy's ordeal in the realm of the plot bunnies, whatever had been happening with Alex, Chrissie, and May had suddenly stopped.
In fact, it had stopped, and Chrissie had dumped Alex, who had immediately left Chrissie's place and gone to the storytelling workshop where May had been, and after it had finished, the two had sat and talked for hours, and were now the best of friends – with none of the awkwardness that had crept into their relationship over the previous few weeks.
It was now the evening of the 5th of December, and Patricia and May had just returned to Patricia's apartment after attending the Thank God It's Over party for Vancouver, at which Jamie had shown Patricia the section of his novel that dealt with the solution he had come up with for the plot bunny army in his novel. Patricia had laughed until she cried, and May had stopped talking excitedly with Zale in order to check to see if she was okay. Jamie had come up with exactly the solution that Patricia had proposed, modified to include a dragon monitoring the daycare centre and the peace between the humans and their pesky bunny neighbours.
Kara and PJ had agreed to meet Patricia there, and Kara had already started plotting the novel that she planned to write the following year – and agreed to help with the Plot Bunny Daycare whenever Patricia needed an extra hand. PJ had also agreed to help, and had managed to convince Hopert to share dreams with him in the coming days, for PJ was desperately interested in seeing what sort of creativity the input of a plot bunny could make in the dreams that formed the basis for PJ's employment.
The plot bunnies had been present as well, and Alfalfa had pointed out to Patricia the two bunnies, Earry and Flopsy, snuggled together under a table in the corner.
In fact, the TGIO had been the first of the non-National Novel Writing Month events at which Patricia and Alfalfa had arranged for storytelling of narratives, and it had gone exceptionally well. Harey and Hopert had teamed up with a pair of the Vancouver writers and together they had told a chilling story of murderous mayhem, and then Alfalfa had provided a love triangle plot for a comedian from Granville Island who had had everyone present splitting their sides with laughter. Chance had spilled his Guinness all over the lap of Sarah, and somehow that had ended up with the two deciding to go to dinner together after the TGIO party.
There, someone with a smart phone and wireless access had also shown Patricia what had happened to the collective word count of the National Novel Writing Month novelists throughout the world: after November 21st and the Night of Writing Dangerously, the count had exploded – even with NaNoWriMo novelists doubting they could possibly reach either 50,000 words or the ends of their novels in just the final nine days.
And now, here Patricia was with her granddaughter and her favourite plot bunny and a very nice cup of tea. She breathed in its aroma, and took a big sip.
"Feel like getting trounced at a round of air hockey, May?" she asked, and settled her now-empty cup down into her saucer.
"Ah," Patricia sighed, leaning back in her rocking chair and smiling at her granddaughter, seated on the couch across from her, and both with a cup of tea in their hands. Patricia lifted her own to her nose: the warm, comforting scent of caramel-flavoured Earl Grey greeted her, and she wondered how she could possibly have gone her life without trying it. Thankfully she had had the opportunity to stop into a nice little tea shop in San Francisco the day after the Night of Writing Dangerously.
A fluffy shape shifted in her lap, and Patricia smiled down at Alfalfa, who twitched his ears at her.
Patricia had just finished explaining to her granddaughter the whole long story, with additions from what Flopsy and Alfalfa had explained during her dreams after she had returned to her hotel room after the Night of Writing Dangerously, and May had forgiven her for not calling before heading to San Francisco. It helped that, sometime during the adventures in the ballroom, or possibly during Flopsy's ordeal in the realm of the plot bunnies, whatever had been happening with Alex, Chrissie, and May had suddenly stopped.
In fact, it had stopped, and Chrissie had dumped Alex, who had immediately left Chrissie's place and gone to the storytelling workshop where May had been, and after it had finished, the two had sat and talked for hours, and were now the best of friends – with none of the awkwardness that had crept into their relationship over the previous few weeks.
It was now the evening of the 5th of December, and Patricia and May had just returned to Patricia's apartment after attending the Thank God It's Over party for Vancouver, at which Jamie had shown Patricia the section of his novel that dealt with the solution he had come up with for the plot bunny army in his novel. Patricia had laughed until she cried, and May had stopped talking excitedly with Zale in order to check to see if she was okay. Jamie had come up with exactly the solution that Patricia had proposed, modified to include a dragon monitoring the daycare centre and the peace between the humans and their pesky bunny neighbours.
Kara and PJ had agreed to meet Patricia there, and Kara had already started plotting the novel that she planned to write the following year – and agreed to help with the Plot Bunny Daycare whenever Patricia needed an extra hand. PJ had also agreed to help, and had managed to convince Hopert to share dreams with him in the coming days, for PJ was desperately interested in seeing what sort of creativity the input of a plot bunny could make in the dreams that formed the basis for PJ's employment.
The plot bunnies had been present as well, and Alfalfa had pointed out to Patricia the two bunnies, Earry and Flopsy, snuggled together under a table in the corner.
In fact, the TGIO had been the first of the non-National Novel Writing Month events at which Patricia and Alfalfa had arranged for storytelling of narratives, and it had gone exceptionally well. Harey and Hopert had teamed up with a pair of the Vancouver writers and together they had told a chilling story of murderous mayhem, and then Alfalfa had provided a love triangle plot for a comedian from Granville Island who had had everyone present splitting their sides with laughter. Chance had spilled his Guinness all over the lap of Sarah, and somehow that had ended up with the two deciding to go to dinner together after the TGIO party.
There, someone with a smart phone and wireless access had also shown Patricia what had happened to the collective word count of the National Novel Writing Month novelists throughout the world: after November 21st and the Night of Writing Dangerously, the count had exploded – even with NaNoWriMo novelists doubting they could possibly reach either 50,000 words or the ends of their novels in just the final nine days.
And now, here Patricia was with her granddaughter and her favourite plot bunny and a very nice cup of tea. She breathed in its aroma, and took a big sip.
"Feel like getting trounced at a round of air hockey, May?" she asked, and settled her now-empty cup down into her saucer.
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
46... 47... 48.
"Wow," Patricia said softly, staring at the notebook page held between her fingers. That meant, at a rough average of 175 words per page, that she had written 8400 words in her notebook since she had left Vancouver.
And that meant that not only had she finished her story, with her widow confronting the killer of her husband in a scene which had ended with the hard-boiled detective and his unusually cooperative police officer friend shooting the killer to prevent him from killing her, but she had also reached the 50,000 word goal.
"Wow," she repeated, and stood. She was going to ring the cowbell, and this time it was for the bell's actual purpose.
Her tablemates had gone from asking what she was wowing about to cheering her on, even without any actual response from her – she was heading for the podium with a definite purpose, and on that night, in the middle of a word war, there was only one thing that could mean.
But before she could reach it, and in the midst of a "hip, hip hurray for Patricia", she felt a sudden craving for carrots – and then Patricia fell to the floor in a dead faint.
Alfalfa was keeping out of the way, absent-mindedly munching brain carrots from Chris Baty, who had a refreshing tendency to take the most divergent ideas and rumple them into something hilariously rambunctious. He also always had romance in his stories, for he was a sucker for that sort of thing, and so he always seemed to welcome Alfalfa's narrative. Bun-Bun had told him to stay out of the way, and since the elder archetypes had decided to exclude the Office of Letters and Light team from narrative confusion, creative endeavours with Chris Baty seemed a good way to pass the time. Besides, Alfalfa had gathered a taste for his creativity over the past year of watching over the OLL.
And Patricia wouldn't even be annoyed, he thought cheerfully, for the creative energy he gained from Chris didn't go back to Bunniption Base. Not that she knew all the details about that, but Alfalfa felt better for it.
But that cheerfulness disappeared when Patricia went crashing down.
Alfalfa was halfway across the room towards her by the time she hit the floor – wasn't she considered old, by humans? Was she in danger just from a fall? Oh, why didn't he know more about humans!
Think, Alfalfa, he told himself, and forced himself to halt his headlong rush across the room, hiding under the candy buffet. What could he do for her? The humans were clustering around her now, and surely they could take care of her.
The important thing was... why. Why had she fallen. She hadn't displayed any tendency to faint during the whole time that he had known her, and none of the narratives in which she had become tangled (not that she knew, poor dear lady!) had any faint-prone women.
That meant he had to consider rabbit influence, and that might mean Flopsy had lost. But what could he do against them? Alfalfa's narrative was about love triangles, for harvest's sake, and while he had some power stored from working with Patricia and Chris, who would he even use it on?
No, it was time to call in the troops. Alfalfa scampered out of the room to the coat check – Bun-Bun's black-spotted white shape lay complacently floating in the middle of the rack of coats, not bothering to be physical at all while he happily fed murderous thoughts to the writing of the woman running the coat check. She didn't even look up as Alfalfa crossed the lobby and Alf offered a grateful shake of his ears and whiskers to Bun-Bun in appreciation of the engrossing nature of his narrative.
"What's up, doc?" Bun-Bun asked, nonchalantly biting the tip off another brain carrot. The woman must be prolific, Alf thought appreciatively.
"Patricia just fell over for no apparent reason," Alf answered.
"Cleaners," Bun-Bun said, springing upright and alert. "Sorry, toots," he told the coat check lady as if she could hear him. "Gota go. C'mon sprout, they'll get you if I leave you alone – you're probably their target, unless it's me – I didn't hear anything about this, and neither did my team – oh famine, Bunnicula, why did you have to pull this now – that girl was just my type -"
Bunnicula? Cleaners? Alfalfa shook his head, and followed the lop-eared Bun-Bun towards the ballroom.
The two passed the curtain-draped entrance to find a scene of chaos.
Someone was losing his head to a series of explosive sneezes, Alfalfa noticed first, then saw the cluster of humans still hovered anxiously near the stage where Patricia had fallen, but all the humans besides these were staring in horror at the candy buffet.
Rabbits were appearing, one by one, and although Alf didn't recognise any of them, they all had the stupid pirate patch that had recently entered vogue. He glanced at Bun-Bun; sure enough, one of the black spots on his white fur surrounded an eye. Somehow Alfalfa was sure that Bun-Bun's was at least natural – and, interestingly, his was on the left while the one on each of these others was around the right eye.
Perhaps it indicated group identity – what had Bun-Bun said? Cleaners.
Oh, he realised, shrinking deeper into the curtains by the door, a euphemism.
"Stay here," Bun-Bun growled at him, and disappeared from view.
But while Alfalfa had no intention of being "cleaned", neither did he have any way of checking on Patricia from here. Still, he thought, watching the pirate plot bunnies (there must be dozens of them!) spread across the ballroom, Bun-Bun and his team would surely counter-attack soon, and then his attempt to reach Patricia would be hidden. He hoped.
Even as Alfalfa formed his plan, Bun-Bun's team was acting. They had of course been in the ballroom to monitor events; they must have had contingency plans.
Those plans were obviously working in conjunction with violent narratives, Alfalfa noted, as gunfire and screams and thus echoed across the ballroom.
None of the injured seemed to be human though, Alfalfa noted in absentminded appreciation of professionalism. Someone obviously had a tight lock on the "no humans harmed in the making of this narrative" rating, and Alfalfa hoped that was maintained.
He also noted a clear path through the melee where plot bunnies on both sides had moved to help buddies on other stations, and Alfalfa was already moving through it. This attack had started with Patricia, and he needed to check on her.
Alfalfa had just reached the table nearest her, and was huddled behind the skirt formed by its tablecloth, carefully nestling where he was free of the power cables plugged into the outlets attached to the legs of the table. If he needed to move, he didn't want to be trapped by their tangle.
The small brown rabbit was dark enough to blend into the shadows beneath the table, so he allowed himself to move to a gap in the tablecloth where he could check his surroundings. Nothing nearby – he winced at a particularly loud gunshot nearby – above him? Perhaps on the table. Yes, he thought sadly, watching the brief shower of Mistral-set type. Alfalfa spared a moment's thought for the stories that plot bunny would no longer have the chance to write.
He would have to be careful, Alfalfa told himself, but he couldn't see Patricia from this gap in the tablecloth.
Alfalfa waited for a count of ten: nothing else nearby, no gunshots, no thuds, no screams. He decided to risk it. What would one more bunny be in the crowd already out there?
He darted out from the gap, just enough to look at where he had last seen Patricia, intending to hop right back in, but – he froze for just an instant, there was no one there. Where was she?
A familiar grip surrounded Alfalfa's midsection and lifted him up, and he relaxed. Patricia! If she was up, she must have recovered.
Alfalfa twisted in her grip to look up at her, to signal hello to her with his ears – and froze again.
The hands were hers.
The face was hers.
But those eyes, seeming somehow to have an orange sheen, belonged to someone else.
He had seen her like that before, but then it had been his own team who had done it to her.
Patricia had been taken over by plot bunnies.
"Bye-bye, Alfalfa," said the voice of the woman Alfalfa had worked with for the past month, and he closed his eyes. That it would end here – like this – without evening knowing who it was who was controlling her...
But nothing had happened. The room had gone quiet. No gunshots. No thuds. Not even any screams.
Alfalfa opened his eyes again, and looked straight into ... Patricia's eyes. Her own, not controlled by some plot bunny, and he stared in wonder. She stared back, and he thought, perhaps, that he saw a softness there... but had she forgotten Alfred? he wondered, and wished he hadn't. He was a plot bunny. What could possibly be between the two of them?
"Earry?!" a soft feminine voice came from behind and above him, and Alfalfa tore his gaze away from the lovely grey eyes that blinked at him so delicately.
Flopsy? When had she arrived? His team lead was sitting on the podium, and looking straight at him. He did the best he could to crouch from his position in Patricia's grip, and sensing his struggle, she set him on top of the nearest table – the one he had crouched beneath, and he edged away from the type scattered across its surface. She couldn't see it, he reminded himself, and she didn't know what it was, or she wouldn't have set him on top of it.
Alfalfa looked around the room – all the plot bunnies present were staring at him – no, at Patricia. What had happened? Earry, Flopsy had said, he thought, but where was he?
"Ahem," the small white rabbit's voice came from close by, and Alfalfa turned back to Patricia: Earry was sitting on Patricia's shoulder. "Sorry about that, Alf, but I had to make them think you were going to die or they would have killed you."
What? Who? Alf wondered, then realised he'd asked aloud.
"The cleaners, Alf," Earry explained. "You were their target, for you were the only one here who scared Bunnicula. When you disappeared at the beginning of the month, Bunnicula put out a kill order on you, and he only rescinded it to see what you were up to here – but when he heard that the sergeant had been killed, he put it on again. He was sure you the one who had killed him, and he used that against Flopsy – even though you hadn't done it."
"Bunnicula?" Alfalfa repeated.
"The vampire the elder archetypes had invited into their midst in order to stop the deaths of plot bunnies due to National Novel Writing Month. The leader who has been absorbing all our energy this month, rather than pouring it into plotlet kits – and who Flopsy has now destroyed."
"Flopsy?" Alfalfa said, before he could stop himself from sounding like an idiot.
"Yes. You can catch up later, Alf. You can communicate with your human, can't you?" Flopsy asked.
"Yes ma'am," he said. "To a point."
"Well, it's time that we started, then," Flopsy said, and stared around the room from the top of the podium. "Plot bunnies, the elder archetypes have given me the authority to end this battle in whatever way I see fit. That means you, cleaners," she said, glaring at the bunnies she could see with eye patches. "And I'll have you know that your leader, Bunnicula, is now enjoying the harvest without you, so you'd best settle down or you'll find yourself doing proper cleaning under the direction of my dam and kept in line by Bun-Bun, both of whom are more than capable of making your lives miserable. Is that clear?"
The plot bunnies scattered around the room all assented.
"Right," she said. "You lot, all of you, gather on that middle table there," she indicated the table on which the candy buffet had once stood, but which was now not even covered by its maroon tablecloth. The rapid influx of plot bunnies had cleared everything from it, and now all the chocolate squares and caffeinated marshmallows and cinnamon-flavoured hard candies and chewy watermelons and all the other delectable treats had joined the sour rabbits in turning the floor treacherous for the humans. The plot bunnies obediently made their way there, carefully skirting around the humans but, some of them at least, sheepishly avoiding their gazes.
The humans seemed confused, because of course they couldn't hear what was said by the plot bunnies, but they were mostly silent, seeming to understand that something important was happening, only talking quietly to one another and pointing to the rabbits. Except the man at the table near the corner, who was standing with a cloth over his mouth and nose but was still sneezing violently.
"Alright Alfalfa," Flopsy said. "We are after a peaceful result with the humans, and it's up to you to make it happen. Now, the elder archetypes have authorized an expenditure of energy from Bunniption Base for this, so you'll have a voice the humans can hear. Are you ready?"
"Um," Alfalfa stammered. What was he supposed to do?
"Not to worry, Alf," piped a rabbit voice from near the central table, and Alfalfa turned his head sharply.
"Hops! Harey!" he cried, for the dark pair were settled comfortably beneath the candy buffet, absentmindedly flicking bits of sugared confection at one another.
"Gang's all here," said Harey. "Now get up on that podium with your lady-friend, and work out a deal with the novelists. Even if you can't come up with anything, surely she can – she's been rather smart so far."
"Right," said Alfalfa, and he looked at Patricia, then raised himself up on his haunches and settled again, and repeated it for a total of three times, giving the signal that he had something to tell her.
"Yes?" Patricia asked, and Alfalfa turned and hopped to the podium, with her following.
"Alright," Alfalfa said to Flopsy, and she executed some strange maneuver that he couldn't quite follow.
"Patricia?" Alfalfa said, tentatively, and the stately lady started. His ears twitched in amusement. "I only have a few minutes of talking time, and you and I have to come up with a solution to the dispute between the plot bunnies and the novelists."
Alfalfa turned to the microphone on the podium. "Novelists, I represent the plot bunnies. Each November, your novelling creates a big surplus of creative energy for our people, and we have a sudden rush of plotlet kits becoming grown plot bunnies. However, by the time the month finishes, novelists drop out or finish their writing and move back to their lives – leaving us with not enough creative energy to support our new higher numbers.
"So this year, one of our leaders decided to try something different, and in the process managed to both betray our entire species and to lead us to try to disrupt your work – but it doesn't have to be that way. That leader has now been killed, although I haven't had the full story on that yet," Alfalfa paused to give Flopsy a dirty look, then continued, watching Patricia and not noticing the stunned expressions on the faces of the humans in the ballroom.
"Our remaining leaders have expended significant creative energy in order to give me the power to speak with you now, and to hopefully resolve our differences."
Now Alfalfa looked out at the novelists in the room. "You are a group of people who feed us, nourish us, and this month we decided to take that out on you. It doesn't make any sense, and it is ungrateful of us. We enjoy the fruit of your labour as you benefit from our input into your creative pursuits.
"My people have given me the honour of representing them in order to come up with an answer to our difficulties, but I need your help. What can we do together to ensure that our population is not decimated by the fluctuations in creative energy caused by the National Novel Writing Month endeavour?"
Alfalfa looked up at Patricia, who was watching him with glowing eyes. "Patricia?" he asked.
"I did have an idea..." Patricia said slowly. "Novelists?" She said into the microphone, looking around at the room. "The plot bunnies want a solution that allows us to co-exist productively. I have an idea, but it might take a bit of work on our part. The plot bunnies have accepted Alfalfa's role as mediator on their behalf; will you accept me in this role? Will you accept my suggestion?"
The novelists in the room looked around at each other, and then one woman from the back called out, "If Chris Baty agrees, I'll follow along!" - and there was general agreement throughout the room. Chris Baty headed to the stage, and stood listening to Patricia whisper for a few moments. Alfalfa watched her, admiring her straight back and high-held head. He supposed, after this, he would go back to his usual rounds, or perhaps something new with Flopsy, and wouldn't get to see her any more.
Somehow the thought completely lacked in appeal.
Patricia finished discussing with Chris Baty, and the two humans returned to the podium. Chris nodded to Alfalfa, and leaned past him to the microphone. "Novelists and plot bunnies, I believe Patricia has come up with an idea which will satisfy all of our needs. Patricia?" He stepped back, making way for her, and she stepped forward, softly caressing Alfalfa's head with a special smile for him before turning to the novelists in the room.
"Novelists, this plot bunny, Alfalfa, has lived with me this month, due to a bizarre arrangement of circumstances that perhaps ought to be a NaNoWriMo novel next year. He has helped me write a completely new type of story in addition to my novel, with a love triangle and romance and all kinds of things I never would have written about, for my NaNoWriMo novel is a murder mystery in the Film Noir style. He's been a huge inspiration to me, and I have thoroughly enjoyed having him in my life.
"So I propose something a little unorthodox, and which will hopefully continue to bring our two peoples together: a plot bunny daycare centre." Patricia paused, and looked around again. "The plot bunnies need humans to write and tell stories based on their narratives, because that gives them the energy they need to live. We can give them that without needing to write novels all the time. We just need to form storytelling groups, which this daycare centre would help encourage. Plot bunnies who needed extra energy because their narratives had been somewhat out of print for a while would simply need to come to the daycare and a storytelling or writing group would adopt him into their fold.
"We would need someone to take charge of the daycare, and I propose Alfalfa and myself for the task. We already know how to communicate with one another – even when Alfalfa isn't expending his people's hard-earned energy on being able to speak.
"Chris Baty has agreed – Alfalfa, do you think this would work, and would you be willing to work with me for its success?"
"Yes," Alfalfa said, thrilled at the prospect of continuing to work with her. She had the warmest, brightest energy he had ever had the pleasure of working with, and this project would enable him to share her energy with the other plot bunnies – something he was sure would help to bring the plot bunnies and humans together.
"Novelists?" asked Patricia, and there was applause, starting from Chris Baty standing at the back of the stage and spreading quickly throughout the room, even to the plot bunnies crowding the candy buffet table, who in place of clapping, jumped up and down in place – even the rabbits with the patches covering one eye.
Alfalfa carefully didn't look at the black-spotted white bunny glaring at the rest of the pirate-patched rabbits from his perch on a table next to the candy buffet.
"And now," Patricia said, reaching for the cowbell. "I was interrupted before I could do this..."
And she rang the cowbell briskly, to increased applause throughout the room. As it started to die down, Patricia leaned into the microphone again. "Now, novelists and plot bunnies both, we have nearly an hour left before the end of the evening – let's work together, this time, and get some word count in!"
46... 47... 48.
"Wow," Patricia said softly, staring at the notebook page held between her fingers. That meant, at a rough average of 175 words per page, that she had written 8400 words in her notebook since she had left Vancouver.
And that meant that not only had she finished her story, with her widow confronting the killer of her husband in a scene which had ended with the hard-boiled detective and his unusually cooperative police officer friend shooting the killer to prevent him from killing her, but she had also reached the 50,000 word goal.
"Wow," she repeated, and stood. She was going to ring the cowbell, and this time it was for the bell's actual purpose.
Her tablemates had gone from asking what she was wowing about to cheering her on, even without any actual response from her – she was heading for the podium with a definite purpose, and on that night, in the middle of a word war, there was only one thing that could mean.
But before she could reach it, and in the midst of a "hip, hip hurray for Patricia", she felt a sudden craving for carrots – and then Patricia fell to the floor in a dead faint.
Alfalfa was keeping out of the way, absent-mindedly munching brain carrots from Chris Baty, who had a refreshing tendency to take the most divergent ideas and rumple them into something hilariously rambunctious. He also always had romance in his stories, for he was a sucker for that sort of thing, and so he always seemed to welcome Alfalfa's narrative. Bun-Bun had told him to stay out of the way, and since the elder archetypes had decided to exclude the Office of Letters and Light team from narrative confusion, creative endeavours with Chris Baty seemed a good way to pass the time. Besides, Alfalfa had gathered a taste for his creativity over the past year of watching over the OLL.
And Patricia wouldn't even be annoyed, he thought cheerfully, for the creative energy he gained from Chris didn't go back to Bunniption Base. Not that she knew all the details about that, but Alfalfa felt better for it.
But that cheerfulness disappeared when Patricia went crashing down.
Alfalfa was halfway across the room towards her by the time she hit the floor – wasn't she considered old, by humans? Was she in danger just from a fall? Oh, why didn't he know more about humans!
Think, Alfalfa, he told himself, and forced himself to halt his headlong rush across the room, hiding under the candy buffet. What could he do for her? The humans were clustering around her now, and surely they could take care of her.
The important thing was... why. Why had she fallen. She hadn't displayed any tendency to faint during the whole time that he had known her, and none of the narratives in which she had become tangled (not that she knew, poor dear lady!) had any faint-prone women.
That meant he had to consider rabbit influence, and that might mean Flopsy had lost. But what could he do against them? Alfalfa's narrative was about love triangles, for harvest's sake, and while he had some power stored from working with Patricia and Chris, who would he even use it on?
No, it was time to call in the troops. Alfalfa scampered out of the room to the coat check – Bun-Bun's black-spotted white shape lay complacently floating in the middle of the rack of coats, not bothering to be physical at all while he happily fed murderous thoughts to the writing of the woman running the coat check. She didn't even look up as Alfalfa crossed the lobby and Alf offered a grateful shake of his ears and whiskers to Bun-Bun in appreciation of the engrossing nature of his narrative.
"What's up, doc?" Bun-Bun asked, nonchalantly biting the tip off another brain carrot. The woman must be prolific, Alf thought appreciatively.
"Patricia just fell over for no apparent reason," Alf answered.
"Cleaners," Bun-Bun said, springing upright and alert. "Sorry, toots," he told the coat check lady as if she could hear him. "Gota go. C'mon sprout, they'll get you if I leave you alone – you're probably their target, unless it's me – I didn't hear anything about this, and neither did my team – oh famine, Bunnicula, why did you have to pull this now – that girl was just my type -"
Bunnicula? Cleaners? Alfalfa shook his head, and followed the lop-eared Bun-Bun towards the ballroom.
The two passed the curtain-draped entrance to find a scene of chaos.
Someone was losing his head to a series of explosive sneezes, Alfalfa noticed first, then saw the cluster of humans still hovered anxiously near the stage where Patricia had fallen, but all the humans besides these were staring in horror at the candy buffet.
Rabbits were appearing, one by one, and although Alf didn't recognise any of them, they all had the stupid pirate patch that had recently entered vogue. He glanced at Bun-Bun; sure enough, one of the black spots on his white fur surrounded an eye. Somehow Alfalfa was sure that Bun-Bun's was at least natural – and, interestingly, his was on the left while the one on each of these others was around the right eye.
Perhaps it indicated group identity – what had Bun-Bun said? Cleaners.
Oh, he realised, shrinking deeper into the curtains by the door, a euphemism.
"Stay here," Bun-Bun growled at him, and disappeared from view.
But while Alfalfa had no intention of being "cleaned", neither did he have any way of checking on Patricia from here. Still, he thought, watching the pirate plot bunnies (there must be dozens of them!) spread across the ballroom, Bun-Bun and his team would surely counter-attack soon, and then his attempt to reach Patricia would be hidden. He hoped.
Even as Alfalfa formed his plan, Bun-Bun's team was acting. They had of course been in the ballroom to monitor events; they must have had contingency plans.
Those plans were obviously working in conjunction with violent narratives, Alfalfa noted, as gunfire and screams and thus echoed across the ballroom.
None of the injured seemed to be human though, Alfalfa noted in absentminded appreciation of professionalism. Someone obviously had a tight lock on the "no humans harmed in the making of this narrative" rating, and Alfalfa hoped that was maintained.
He also noted a clear path through the melee where plot bunnies on both sides had moved to help buddies on other stations, and Alfalfa was already moving through it. This attack had started with Patricia, and he needed to check on her.
Alfalfa had just reached the table nearest her, and was huddled behind the skirt formed by its tablecloth, carefully nestling where he was free of the power cables plugged into the outlets attached to the legs of the table. If he needed to move, he didn't want to be trapped by their tangle.
The small brown rabbit was dark enough to blend into the shadows beneath the table, so he allowed himself to move to a gap in the tablecloth where he could check his surroundings. Nothing nearby – he winced at a particularly loud gunshot nearby – above him? Perhaps on the table. Yes, he thought sadly, watching the brief shower of Mistral-set type. Alfalfa spared a moment's thought for the stories that plot bunny would no longer have the chance to write.
He would have to be careful, Alfalfa told himself, but he couldn't see Patricia from this gap in the tablecloth.
Alfalfa waited for a count of ten: nothing else nearby, no gunshots, no thuds, no screams. He decided to risk it. What would one more bunny be in the crowd already out there?
He darted out from the gap, just enough to look at where he had last seen Patricia, intending to hop right back in, but – he froze for just an instant, there was no one there. Where was she?
A familiar grip surrounded Alfalfa's midsection and lifted him up, and he relaxed. Patricia! If she was up, she must have recovered.
Alfalfa twisted in her grip to look up at her, to signal hello to her with his ears – and froze again.
The hands were hers.
The face was hers.
But those eyes, seeming somehow to have an orange sheen, belonged to someone else.
He had seen her like that before, but then it had been his own team who had done it to her.
Patricia had been taken over by plot bunnies.
"Bye-bye, Alfalfa," said the voice of the woman Alfalfa had worked with for the past month, and he closed his eyes. That it would end here – like this – without evening knowing who it was who was controlling her...
But nothing had happened. The room had gone quiet. No gunshots. No thuds. Not even any screams.
Alfalfa opened his eyes again, and looked straight into ... Patricia's eyes. Her own, not controlled by some plot bunny, and he stared in wonder. She stared back, and he thought, perhaps, that he saw a softness there... but had she forgotten Alfred? he wondered, and wished he hadn't. He was a plot bunny. What could possibly be between the two of them?
"Earry?!" a soft feminine voice came from behind and above him, and Alfalfa tore his gaze away from the lovely grey eyes that blinked at him so delicately.
Flopsy? When had she arrived? His team lead was sitting on the podium, and looking straight at him. He did the best he could to crouch from his position in Patricia's grip, and sensing his struggle, she set him on top of the nearest table – the one he had crouched beneath, and he edged away from the type scattered across its surface. She couldn't see it, he reminded himself, and she didn't know what it was, or she wouldn't have set him on top of it.
Alfalfa looked around the room – all the plot bunnies present were staring at him – no, at Patricia. What had happened? Earry, Flopsy had said, he thought, but where was he?
"Ahem," the small white rabbit's voice came from close by, and Alfalfa turned back to Patricia: Earry was sitting on Patricia's shoulder. "Sorry about that, Alf, but I had to make them think you were going to die or they would have killed you."
What? Who? Alf wondered, then realised he'd asked aloud.
"The cleaners, Alf," Earry explained. "You were their target, for you were the only one here who scared Bunnicula. When you disappeared at the beginning of the month, Bunnicula put out a kill order on you, and he only rescinded it to see what you were up to here – but when he heard that the sergeant had been killed, he put it on again. He was sure you the one who had killed him, and he used that against Flopsy – even though you hadn't done it."
"Bunnicula?" Alfalfa repeated.
"The vampire the elder archetypes had invited into their midst in order to stop the deaths of plot bunnies due to National Novel Writing Month. The leader who has been absorbing all our energy this month, rather than pouring it into plotlet kits – and who Flopsy has now destroyed."
"Flopsy?" Alfalfa said, before he could stop himself from sounding like an idiot.
"Yes. You can catch up later, Alf. You can communicate with your human, can't you?" Flopsy asked.
"Yes ma'am," he said. "To a point."
"Well, it's time that we started, then," Flopsy said, and stared around the room from the top of the podium. "Plot bunnies, the elder archetypes have given me the authority to end this battle in whatever way I see fit. That means you, cleaners," she said, glaring at the bunnies she could see with eye patches. "And I'll have you know that your leader, Bunnicula, is now enjoying the harvest without you, so you'd best settle down or you'll find yourself doing proper cleaning under the direction of my dam and kept in line by Bun-Bun, both of whom are more than capable of making your lives miserable. Is that clear?"
The plot bunnies scattered around the room all assented.
"Right," she said. "You lot, all of you, gather on that middle table there," she indicated the table on which the candy buffet had once stood, but which was now not even covered by its maroon tablecloth. The rapid influx of plot bunnies had cleared everything from it, and now all the chocolate squares and caffeinated marshmallows and cinnamon-flavoured hard candies and chewy watermelons and all the other delectable treats had joined the sour rabbits in turning the floor treacherous for the humans. The plot bunnies obediently made their way there, carefully skirting around the humans but, some of them at least, sheepishly avoiding their gazes.
The humans seemed confused, because of course they couldn't hear what was said by the plot bunnies, but they were mostly silent, seeming to understand that something important was happening, only talking quietly to one another and pointing to the rabbits. Except the man at the table near the corner, who was standing with a cloth over his mouth and nose but was still sneezing violently.
"Alright Alfalfa," Flopsy said. "We are after a peaceful result with the humans, and it's up to you to make it happen. Now, the elder archetypes have authorized an expenditure of energy from Bunniption Base for this, so you'll have a voice the humans can hear. Are you ready?"
"Um," Alfalfa stammered. What was he supposed to do?
"Not to worry, Alf," piped a rabbit voice from near the central table, and Alfalfa turned his head sharply.
"Hops! Harey!" he cried, for the dark pair were settled comfortably beneath the candy buffet, absentmindedly flicking bits of sugared confection at one another.
"Gang's all here," said Harey. "Now get up on that podium with your lady-friend, and work out a deal with the novelists. Even if you can't come up with anything, surely she can – she's been rather smart so far."
"Right," said Alfalfa, and he looked at Patricia, then raised himself up on his haunches and settled again, and repeated it for a total of three times, giving the signal that he had something to tell her.
"Yes?" Patricia asked, and Alfalfa turned and hopped to the podium, with her following.
"Alright," Alfalfa said to Flopsy, and she executed some strange maneuver that he couldn't quite follow.
"Patricia?" Alfalfa said, tentatively, and the stately lady started. His ears twitched in amusement. "I only have a few minutes of talking time, and you and I have to come up with a solution to the dispute between the plot bunnies and the novelists."
Alfalfa turned to the microphone on the podium. "Novelists, I represent the plot bunnies. Each November, your novelling creates a big surplus of creative energy for our people, and we have a sudden rush of plotlet kits becoming grown plot bunnies. However, by the time the month finishes, novelists drop out or finish their writing and move back to their lives – leaving us with not enough creative energy to support our new higher numbers.
"So this year, one of our leaders decided to try something different, and in the process managed to both betray our entire species and to lead us to try to disrupt your work – but it doesn't have to be that way. That leader has now been killed, although I haven't had the full story on that yet," Alfalfa paused to give Flopsy a dirty look, then continued, watching Patricia and not noticing the stunned expressions on the faces of the humans in the ballroom.
"Our remaining leaders have expended significant creative energy in order to give me the power to speak with you now, and to hopefully resolve our differences."
Now Alfalfa looked out at the novelists in the room. "You are a group of people who feed us, nourish us, and this month we decided to take that out on you. It doesn't make any sense, and it is ungrateful of us. We enjoy the fruit of your labour as you benefit from our input into your creative pursuits.
"My people have given me the honour of representing them in order to come up with an answer to our difficulties, but I need your help. What can we do together to ensure that our population is not decimated by the fluctuations in creative energy caused by the National Novel Writing Month endeavour?"
Alfalfa looked up at Patricia, who was watching him with glowing eyes. "Patricia?" he asked.
"I did have an idea..." Patricia said slowly. "Novelists?" She said into the microphone, looking around at the room. "The plot bunnies want a solution that allows us to co-exist productively. I have an idea, but it might take a bit of work on our part. The plot bunnies have accepted Alfalfa's role as mediator on their behalf; will you accept me in this role? Will you accept my suggestion?"
The novelists in the room looked around at each other, and then one woman from the back called out, "If Chris Baty agrees, I'll follow along!" - and there was general agreement throughout the room. Chris Baty headed to the stage, and stood listening to Patricia whisper for a few moments. Alfalfa watched her, admiring her straight back and high-held head. He supposed, after this, he would go back to his usual rounds, or perhaps something new with Flopsy, and wouldn't get to see her any more.
Somehow the thought completely lacked in appeal.
Patricia finished discussing with Chris Baty, and the two humans returned to the podium. Chris nodded to Alfalfa, and leaned past him to the microphone. "Novelists and plot bunnies, I believe Patricia has come up with an idea which will satisfy all of our needs. Patricia?" He stepped back, making way for her, and she stepped forward, softly caressing Alfalfa's head with a special smile for him before turning to the novelists in the room.
"Novelists, this plot bunny, Alfalfa, has lived with me this month, due to a bizarre arrangement of circumstances that perhaps ought to be a NaNoWriMo novel next year. He has helped me write a completely new type of story in addition to my novel, with a love triangle and romance and all kinds of things I never would have written about, for my NaNoWriMo novel is a murder mystery in the Film Noir style. He's been a huge inspiration to me, and I have thoroughly enjoyed having him in my life.
"So I propose something a little unorthodox, and which will hopefully continue to bring our two peoples together: a plot bunny daycare centre." Patricia paused, and looked around again. "The plot bunnies need humans to write and tell stories based on their narratives, because that gives them the energy they need to live. We can give them that without needing to write novels all the time. We just need to form storytelling groups, which this daycare centre would help encourage. Plot bunnies who needed extra energy because their narratives had been somewhat out of print for a while would simply need to come to the daycare and a storytelling or writing group would adopt him into their fold.
"We would need someone to take charge of the daycare, and I propose Alfalfa and myself for the task. We already know how to communicate with one another – even when Alfalfa isn't expending his people's hard-earned energy on being able to speak.
"Chris Baty has agreed – Alfalfa, do you think this would work, and would you be willing to work with me for its success?"
"Yes," Alfalfa said, thrilled at the prospect of continuing to work with her. She had the warmest, brightest energy he had ever had the pleasure of working with, and this project would enable him to share her energy with the other plot bunnies – something he was sure would help to bring the plot bunnies and humans together.
"Novelists?" asked Patricia, and there was applause, starting from Chris Baty standing at the back of the stage and spreading quickly throughout the room, even to the plot bunnies crowding the candy buffet table, who in place of clapping, jumped up and down in place – even the rabbits with the patches covering one eye.
Alfalfa carefully didn't look at the black-spotted white bunny glaring at the rest of the pirate-patched rabbits from his perch on a table next to the candy buffet.
"And now," Patricia said, reaching for the cowbell. "I was interrupted before I could do this..."
And she rang the cowbell briskly, to increased applause throughout the room. As it started to die down, Patricia leaned into the microphone again. "Now, novelists and plot bunnies both, we have nearly an hour left before the end of the evening – let's work together, this time, and get some word count in!"
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
"How much has your lover bunny told you about me, Miss Team Lead Flopsy?" the arrogant grey rabbit asked, then laughed. "Oh yes. You can't answer me. Well," he said, with exaggerated politeness and an precisely executed crouch. "Allow me to introduce myself. I am Bunnicula, vampire, and now in charge of Bunniption Base and all of your people."
Flopsy shuddered where she sat hunched into a caricature of a crouch. The grey rabbit had bodily picked her up and dropped her beside Earry. The two were still incapacitated, paralysed by the shrill piercing that the grey rabbit didn't even seem to notice. His voice, which also seemed to ignore the sound, cut through the keening sound without trouble, almost countering its effect as he spoke.
She could feel the power pulsing from and through him and huddled closer to Earry - but felt no response from him. HIs poor ears, she thought, and waited. Surely there was something more she could do. This seemed the perfect opportunity for the plucky detective and his persistent police friend to pull out the stops and achieve something - anything. Flopsy reached for the narrative strength that had helped her with the other elder archetypes, but couldn't even sense its remnants.
Harey and Hopert's efforts had no power here.
Flopsy shivered, pulling her ears a hint more closed - but the sound drove into her, striking even more truly now that she had lost her hidden hope for justive to prevail simply because the story said so.
The grey rabbit laughed again. "That's right, my dear! There is nothing you can do against me, although I must admit it has been amusing listening to your darling Earry try to pretend he has no affection for you during his council reports on the efforts you have done for other endeavours."
Flopsy closed her eyes. She didn't want to listen to this. Affection? Whatever there might be was just team-based, nothng more, wasn't it? And either way, she wanted to hear anything there was from Earry - not this sharp-tongued vampire. And yet, while she had no interest in listening to what he had to say, the rabbit's voice seemed to offer a hint of relief from the piercing sound, so for Earry's sake she wished he would continue. Besides, as long as he was talking, he wasn't hurting them.
"Dear me," Bunnicula said in jolly tones. "What can be taking them so long? Tell me, Miss Flopsy, have you ever heard of the cleaners? Your friend here is one, although," the grey rabbit's ears twitched in amusement, "it seems that today it is his turn to be cleaned."
Bunnicula examined Flopsy's lack of reaction.
"No, I think not. They perform a very necessary service, Miss Flopsy, and one which should be applauded, but as it is, here in Bunniption Base, we hide it away as if it were shameful! Can you imagine?" The bunny shook his grey head.
"In fact, Miss Flopsy, your team performed a cleaning service for me just this afternoon. Very useful, actually. I hadn't planned to send anyone after the sergeant until after this month was over - let the old fool have his time to shine and then die happy, yes? - but your choice suits my purposes much more neatly. Very tidy. After all, I now have all the excuse I need to go public as the sole leader of the rabbits, for I can point to this deadly conspiracy, this killing of our valiant combat commander, and say how vital it is for us to have a wartime leader.
"And because you and Earry are here to confess..." Bunnicula let his voice trail off and Flopsy quailed inside, the guilt she had felt over her orders to Harey and Hopert turning into anguish at having helped this evil creature. The shrill shrieking was getting into her head and she tried to think how he could possibly know, but it was too hard. Somehow he knew; surely that was enough. Too much.
Bunnicula laughed again at her evident discomfort, and hopped the length of the space and back again. Oh no, thought Flopsy suddenly. From her new perspective at the foot of the room, she realised what the room was: not a room, but a coffin. What little she knew of vampires told her that this made the space his restful solace, his own home ground, and again she shivered. No wonder her team had no power here.
Oh, how she wished her friends with the vampire hunting narratives were around. Dear Buffy, named after the human TV show star she had helped create; humourless Torg, who tended to hang around web comic creators more than text authors; sweet small sparky Buns, who carried a stake with her on a thong around her neck. All of those had been victims of the previous year's National Novel Writing Month - or so she had been told. Flopsy held her face still, tight, as she felt sudden anger at the knowledge that her friends had probably fallen victim to Bunnicula's "cleaning" crew.
Flopsy felt anger rising in her, and helplessness, and - the room changed.
For a moment, she couldn't put her whiskers on it. The shrill sound continued to pierce, and Bunnicula was still laughing maniacally while hopping around, and Earry's still frame remained tense and immobile. She herself hadn't moved, yet Flopsy was certain something external had changed.
So what was it?
The energy. While Flopsy had been able to sense it before, pulsing around and into Bunnicula, seeming to fuel him and possibly increase his inane laughter, that pulse had disappeared.
If only - she felt for Harey and Hopert's narrative again, despairingly, but there was nothing there. Earry then, or his narrative - didn't the spy always get the bad guy in the end? She tried checking the inner sense of Earry that she had used to find him here, but could only sense his closeness and a clear awareness of danger and inner echo or resonance with the shrill noise around them. Nothing.
No comforting sensation of narrative enveloping her, taking her into her needed role, as there had been when she began answering the questions posed by the elder archetypes. No awareness of the needs of the story, of what she must do in order to get to the next stage of the plot.
She was a team lead. She was supposed to have people who could help her, people she could manage, people she could lead. But here she was, on her own, and there was no role for her to play. Nothing she could do.
Nothing.
Except, of course, for invoking her own narrative.
She was on her own. Yes, Earry was with her, but he wasn't doing anything, and certainly wasn't up to saving the day. Her team couldn't help her: Alfalfa was probably in the midst of his own troubles, and Harey and Hopert had done the best they could just to get her here. The elder archetypes certainly weren't going to solve anything. They were the ones who had gotten the plot bunnies, including specifically one team lead Flopsy, into this mess.
If this wasn't a case of abandonment, Flopsy didn't know what was.
Flopsy steadied herself. She had been shivering too much. She was no frail little thing, unable to handle any little thing that might come up: she was a team lead. She was one of the best team leads in the business, and that was not something a plot bunny got to be unless she had some steel at her core.
Yes, she felt her ears reverberating painfully to the shrill piercing. Yes, she felt her heart breaking at Earry's continued immobility. Yes, she was in the coffin of a crazed vampire plot bunny.
But the rest of the plot bunnies were counting on her, and she had a time limit. The cleaners were coming, Bunnicula had said.
What was the motto of that National Novel Writing Month thing again? Flopsy was sure she had heard it when she was monitoring the Office of Letters and Light... something about just needing a deadline to make anything possible.
Now was not the time. She had a deadline, but she didn't know what it was, and she didn't know what to do. How did you defeat a vampire?
There was the stake through the heart option, which was classic, but she didn't have a stake, nor any good options for making one. Besides, what kind of stake would be impermeable for a plot bunny?
She was similarly suffering from a sore lack of holy water, nor did using daylight to disintegrate the vampire seem plausible. He had been outside plenty of times - all the greys had - but perhaps the light of Bunniption Base lacked some critical ingredient for the process, and the greys never left the Base. Or perhaps the bunny's fur offered him protection.
But then - in both cases Bunnicula's status as a plot bunny was helping counter his vulnerabilities. Perhaps instead some vampire trait could be exploited as a plot bunny's weakness, or perhaps she could target him as a plot bunny instead of as a vampire... And now, with whatever had happened to cut off his power source - he still hadn't noticed, Flopsy noted: he was still hopping in circles and laughing madly. Perhaps he had short-circuited? - his vampire side must be weak.
Stakes. Of course.
Flopsy straightened up from her huddled crouch, though she kept her ears tightly curled, and pounced.
Bunnicula wheeled on her, laughter silenced mid-ha, grey fur fluffing with aggression, ears standing straight up - but she hadn't pounced on him, or even tried to reach him: she had pounced to Earry's side, and was wrestling to move him.
She was small, but Earry was smaller. Flopsy drew on her narrative: she had to be able to do this, she knew she did, there was no one else, and besides, it was her own story. She would prevail. "I bet," she whispered. "I bet I can do this."
Then her paws somehow took a better grip, and she was carrying the small white rabbit, who now curled into a ball as if he were a hedgehog. Oh Earry, Flopsy thought, her heart aching for him, and she admitted it, finally: she loved him - but this was it. She had no time. Bunnicula was laughing at her again, and readying some attack. He had to be; that was his own narrative. Attack attack attack. That's why he had been chosen. There was no time! She had to do it now.
"I bet Earry," she said, stronger now, but still not audible even to herself with the incessant shrieking still filling the air. "I bet Earry, my love, my heart, that I can do this."
Bunnicula turned to her, raising up onto his haunches, and looking as if he were ready for whatever he was going to do - she couldn't let him - she threw Earry at him. Somehow her little rabbit arms did exactly the right thing, somehow her legs provided her exactly the right leverage, and she felt her own narrative course through her veins in a way it never had before when she had called on it to lend her strength.
The small white rabbit flew through the air, reaching Bunnicula at his chest level, exactly as she had intended - and then Earry flew right through Bunnicula, exactly as she had expected. They were both plot bunnies: they would both become immaterial automatically.
Except for one thing.
Plot bunnies were vulnerable to puns.
They were literary creatures, from the very beginning. While they were now branching into other media, literary techniques were very real to them. And Flopsy had just turned her love, her heart, into her stake in a bet, and thrown that stake through the heart of Bunnicula. His plot bunny side made the stake real, and his vampire side made it fatal - immaterial or not.
Silence fell, and in that sudden absence of volume, the pain of enduring the constant shrieking hit Flopsy suddenly. She fell, stunned, and stared at Bunnicula. She could see no sign of Earry.
The coffin flooded, suddenly, with words upon words upon words, black and red and printed in a Gothic typeface, barely a millimeter thick but so many hundreds and thousands that they rose in a cascade to jam the coffin to its brim. All the words ever written under the influence of Bunnicula, Flopsy thought sadly, scrabbling through them to find poor Earry. He wasn't a vampire, surely he would live...
But that was the quirk of her narrative. The protagonist would rise up against whatever threat was there, but the very means of her victory would mean a severe loss.
There were no words from Earry, but neither was he there. Flopsy felt within - nothing - no sign of Earry.
What had she done, she thought despondently, kicking at some of the letters, but they fell right through her. There was no space for her physical form in the coffin any more: she was immaterial.
She'd killed him; she supposed she needn't disrespect his legacy too.
Flopsy sighed softly, then headed back to the tower of the elder archetypes. Now she had prevented the takeover by Bunnicula, but what about his "cleaners"? And the novelists? And where was the energy from brain carrots going now?
As her mind teemed with questions, Flopsy forced herself not to think about Earry, but the question remained, burning beneath her calm exterior.
"How much has your lover bunny told you about me, Miss Team Lead Flopsy?" the arrogant grey rabbit asked, then laughed. "Oh yes. You can't answer me. Well," he said, with exaggerated politeness and an precisely executed crouch. "Allow me to introduce myself. I am Bunnicula, vampire, and now in charge of Bunniption Base and all of your people."
Flopsy shuddered where she sat hunched into a caricature of a crouch. The grey rabbit had bodily picked her up and dropped her beside Earry. The two were still incapacitated, paralysed by the shrill piercing that the grey rabbit didn't even seem to notice. His voice, which also seemed to ignore the sound, cut through the keening sound without trouble, almost countering its effect as he spoke.
She could feel the power pulsing from and through him and huddled closer to Earry - but felt no response from him. HIs poor ears, she thought, and waited. Surely there was something more she could do. This seemed the perfect opportunity for the plucky detective and his persistent police friend to pull out the stops and achieve something - anything. Flopsy reached for the narrative strength that had helped her with the other elder archetypes, but couldn't even sense its remnants.
Harey and Hopert's efforts had no power here.
Flopsy shivered, pulling her ears a hint more closed - but the sound drove into her, striking even more truly now that she had lost her hidden hope for justive to prevail simply because the story said so.
The grey rabbit laughed again. "That's right, my dear! There is nothing you can do against me, although I must admit it has been amusing listening to your darling Earry try to pretend he has no affection for you during his council reports on the efforts you have done for other endeavours."
Flopsy closed her eyes. She didn't want to listen to this. Affection? Whatever there might be was just team-based, nothng more, wasn't it? And either way, she wanted to hear anything there was from Earry - not this sharp-tongued vampire. And yet, while she had no interest in listening to what he had to say, the rabbit's voice seemed to offer a hint of relief from the piercing sound, so for Earry's sake she wished he would continue. Besides, as long as he was talking, he wasn't hurting them.
"Dear me," Bunnicula said in jolly tones. "What can be taking them so long? Tell me, Miss Flopsy, have you ever heard of the cleaners? Your friend here is one, although," the grey rabbit's ears twitched in amusement, "it seems that today it is his turn to be cleaned."
Bunnicula examined Flopsy's lack of reaction.
"No, I think not. They perform a very necessary service, Miss Flopsy, and one which should be applauded, but as it is, here in Bunniption Base, we hide it away as if it were shameful! Can you imagine?" The bunny shook his grey head.
"In fact, Miss Flopsy, your team performed a cleaning service for me just this afternoon. Very useful, actually. I hadn't planned to send anyone after the sergeant until after this month was over - let the old fool have his time to shine and then die happy, yes? - but your choice suits my purposes much more neatly. Very tidy. After all, I now have all the excuse I need to go public as the sole leader of the rabbits, for I can point to this deadly conspiracy, this killing of our valiant combat commander, and say how vital it is for us to have a wartime leader.
"And because you and Earry are here to confess..." Bunnicula let his voice trail off and Flopsy quailed inside, the guilt she had felt over her orders to Harey and Hopert turning into anguish at having helped this evil creature. The shrill shrieking was getting into her head and she tried to think how he could possibly know, but it was too hard. Somehow he knew; surely that was enough. Too much.
Bunnicula laughed again at her evident discomfort, and hopped the length of the space and back again. Oh no, thought Flopsy suddenly. From her new perspective at the foot of the room, she realised what the room was: not a room, but a coffin. What little she knew of vampires told her that this made the space his restful solace, his own home ground, and again she shivered. No wonder her team had no power here.
Oh, how she wished her friends with the vampire hunting narratives were around. Dear Buffy, named after the human TV show star she had helped create; humourless Torg, who tended to hang around web comic creators more than text authors; sweet small sparky Buns, who carried a stake with her on a thong around her neck. All of those had been victims of the previous year's National Novel Writing Month - or so she had been told. Flopsy held her face still, tight, as she felt sudden anger at the knowledge that her friends had probably fallen victim to Bunnicula's "cleaning" crew.
Flopsy felt anger rising in her, and helplessness, and - the room changed.
For a moment, she couldn't put her whiskers on it. The shrill sound continued to pierce, and Bunnicula was still laughing maniacally while hopping around, and Earry's still frame remained tense and immobile. She herself hadn't moved, yet Flopsy was certain something external had changed.
So what was it?
The energy. While Flopsy had been able to sense it before, pulsing around and into Bunnicula, seeming to fuel him and possibly increase his inane laughter, that pulse had disappeared.
If only - she felt for Harey and Hopert's narrative again, despairingly, but there was nothing there. Earry then, or his narrative - didn't the spy always get the bad guy in the end? She tried checking the inner sense of Earry that she had used to find him here, but could only sense his closeness and a clear awareness of danger and inner echo or resonance with the shrill noise around them. Nothing.
No comforting sensation of narrative enveloping her, taking her into her needed role, as there had been when she began answering the questions posed by the elder archetypes. No awareness of the needs of the story, of what she must do in order to get to the next stage of the plot.
She was a team lead. She was supposed to have people who could help her, people she could manage, people she could lead. But here she was, on her own, and there was no role for her to play. Nothing she could do.
Nothing.
Except, of course, for invoking her own narrative.
She was on her own. Yes, Earry was with her, but he wasn't doing anything, and certainly wasn't up to saving the day. Her team couldn't help her: Alfalfa was probably in the midst of his own troubles, and Harey and Hopert had done the best they could just to get her here. The elder archetypes certainly weren't going to solve anything. They were the ones who had gotten the plot bunnies, including specifically one team lead Flopsy, into this mess.
If this wasn't a case of abandonment, Flopsy didn't know what was.
Flopsy steadied herself. She had been shivering too much. She was no frail little thing, unable to handle any little thing that might come up: she was a team lead. She was one of the best team leads in the business, and that was not something a plot bunny got to be unless she had some steel at her core.
Yes, she felt her ears reverberating painfully to the shrill piercing. Yes, she felt her heart breaking at Earry's continued immobility. Yes, she was in the coffin of a crazed vampire plot bunny.
But the rest of the plot bunnies were counting on her, and she had a time limit. The cleaners were coming, Bunnicula had said.
What was the motto of that National Novel Writing Month thing again? Flopsy was sure she had heard it when she was monitoring the Office of Letters and Light... something about just needing a deadline to make anything possible.
Now was not the time. She had a deadline, but she didn't know what it was, and she didn't know what to do. How did you defeat a vampire?
There was the stake through the heart option, which was classic, but she didn't have a stake, nor any good options for making one. Besides, what kind of stake would be impermeable for a plot bunny?
She was similarly suffering from a sore lack of holy water, nor did using daylight to disintegrate the vampire seem plausible. He had been outside plenty of times - all the greys had - but perhaps the light of Bunniption Base lacked some critical ingredient for the process, and the greys never left the Base. Or perhaps the bunny's fur offered him protection.
But then - in both cases Bunnicula's status as a plot bunny was helping counter his vulnerabilities. Perhaps instead some vampire trait could be exploited as a plot bunny's weakness, or perhaps she could target him as a plot bunny instead of as a vampire... And now, with whatever had happened to cut off his power source - he still hadn't noticed, Flopsy noted: he was still hopping in circles and laughing madly. Perhaps he had short-circuited? - his vampire side must be weak.
Stakes. Of course.
Flopsy straightened up from her huddled crouch, though she kept her ears tightly curled, and pounced.
Bunnicula wheeled on her, laughter silenced mid-ha, grey fur fluffing with aggression, ears standing straight up - but she hadn't pounced on him, or even tried to reach him: she had pounced to Earry's side, and was wrestling to move him.
She was small, but Earry was smaller. Flopsy drew on her narrative: she had to be able to do this, she knew she did, there was no one else, and besides, it was her own story. She would prevail. "I bet," she whispered. "I bet I can do this."
Then her paws somehow took a better grip, and she was carrying the small white rabbit, who now curled into a ball as if he were a hedgehog. Oh Earry, Flopsy thought, her heart aching for him, and she admitted it, finally: she loved him - but this was it. She had no time. Bunnicula was laughing at her again, and readying some attack. He had to be; that was his own narrative. Attack attack attack. That's why he had been chosen. There was no time! She had to do it now.
"I bet Earry," she said, stronger now, but still not audible even to herself with the incessant shrieking still filling the air. "I bet Earry, my love, my heart, that I can do this."
Bunnicula turned to her, raising up onto his haunches, and looking as if he were ready for whatever he was going to do - she couldn't let him - she threw Earry at him. Somehow her little rabbit arms did exactly the right thing, somehow her legs provided her exactly the right leverage, and she felt her own narrative course through her veins in a way it never had before when she had called on it to lend her strength.
The small white rabbit flew through the air, reaching Bunnicula at his chest level, exactly as she had intended - and then Earry flew right through Bunnicula, exactly as she had expected. They were both plot bunnies: they would both become immaterial automatically.
Except for one thing.
Plot bunnies were vulnerable to puns.
They were literary creatures, from the very beginning. While they were now branching into other media, literary techniques were very real to them. And Flopsy had just turned her love, her heart, into her stake in a bet, and thrown that stake through the heart of Bunnicula. His plot bunny side made the stake real, and his vampire side made it fatal - immaterial or not.
Silence fell, and in that sudden absence of volume, the pain of enduring the constant shrieking hit Flopsy suddenly. She fell, stunned, and stared at Bunnicula. She could see no sign of Earry.
The coffin flooded, suddenly, with words upon words upon words, black and red and printed in a Gothic typeface, barely a millimeter thick but so many hundreds and thousands that they rose in a cascade to jam the coffin to its brim. All the words ever written under the influence of Bunnicula, Flopsy thought sadly, scrabbling through them to find poor Earry. He wasn't a vampire, surely he would live...
But that was the quirk of her narrative. The protagonist would rise up against whatever threat was there, but the very means of her victory would mean a severe loss.
There were no words from Earry, but neither was he there. Flopsy felt within - nothing - no sign of Earry.
What had she done, she thought despondently, kicking at some of the letters, but they fell right through her. There was no space for her physical form in the coffin any more: she was immaterial.
She'd killed him; she supposed she needn't disrespect his legacy too.
Flopsy sighed softly, then headed back to the tower of the elder archetypes. Now she had prevented the takeover by Bunnicula, but what about his "cleaners"? And the novelists? And where was the energy from brain carrots going now?
As her mind teemed with questions, Flopsy forced herself not to think about Earry, but the question remained, burning beneath her calm exterior.
30 November 2010
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Eighteen
The Night of Writing Dangerously was almost a third of the way through and so far everything seemed normal – as normal as any room containing 200 speed-novelists could appear, at any rate. Patricia, like her tablemates, were hard at work on another word sprint, trying to get as many words written in fifteen minutes as they could.
Patricia glanced up at her tablemates: each of them had the same phantom rabbit ears as she had seen during the kick-off party, but as she watched, they faded from her view.
It was the same thing she had seen during her time at the coffee shop the previous night: she herself needed to be plotting for her to be aware of the plot bunnies. She supposed it might be the same as at the kick-off party – once she had decided that she was indeed going to write a novel, the back of her head had been bubbling with plot ideas and stories – so perhaps that did indeed fit a pattern.
Everything else seemed normal, she thought with a quick glance around the room, and she returned her attention to her novel.
A short time later, after the pandemonium caused by three novelists ringing the cowbell together, signs of confusion began to appear.
The first indication was likely only apparent to Patricia. They were word sprinting at her table while the rest of the room wrote or relaxed as they pleased, for one of the girls was only 4,000 words away from 50,000 and she really wanted to win here at the event – especially now that she knew about getting to ring the cowbell. The table members were doing their best to support her, and this extra little sprint was part of that.
However, when Patricia looked up, the rabbit ears over each of her tablemates' heads were no longer the stable phantoms that she had seen earlier. Instead they were flickering rapidly, and it seemed that from one flicker to the next the ears changed, perhaps from a brown rabbit one moment to a white the next or a spotted the third. Patricia wondered if it was a sign that the plot bunnies were making their move.
She looked around for Alfalfa, but was not surprised when she didn't see him anywhere... but found herself wishing she could stroke his fur for even the smallest hint of reassurance that might give her.
The next sign came a few moments later, when a man in a top hat, scruff, and a nicely tailored black suit screamed and ran out of the room. He was probably the single most recognisable person in the room, known even to Patricia, who was on the very fringes of knowledge about NaNoWriMo.
The man was Chris Baty, the founder and director of National Novel Writing Month, and not only were most of the room's occupants women, most of those had a certain level of affection for him.
Most of the other members of the Office of Letters and Light, who were mostly seated at the pair of tables near the door, dashed after Chris, but the tall dark-haired woman, who Cait had explained was Sarah Mackey, the special events coordinator and woman in charge of the night's event, bravely stayed to strive for calm in the ballroom.
Given the elevated levels of excitement and distress in the women, all of whom were currently vocalizing their emotion in high-pitched voices and many of whom were reaching the point when they would get up in order to Do Something, Patricia wished Ms. Mackey the best of luck. She wondered if there was anything she could do to help – she had come to this event in order to help stave off issues if the plot bunnies attacked, but what was she, one grandmother in the process of re-discovering her creative stamina, supposed to do now? If this was part of the attack by the plot bunnies, Patricia felt that she would be vastly disappointed if she was unable to stop it from achieving the plot bunnies' aim.
Violent sneezing erupted, another sign of chaos, Patricia thought, startled out of her paralysis of sudden self-doubt at the same time as the women who had been preparing to move into silence and a chorus of “bless you”s as everyone looked at the source – the fourth sneeze, and fifth, were louder than the first three, and the man sneezing fell over, hitting the edge of the candy buffet and starting an inexplicable slide of the tubs onto the floor.
Several others had been at the table, and they grabbed at the various tubs and tablecloth, trying to prevent the suddenly imminent disaster. Their efforts were mostly successful: only the giant plastic jar full of soft sour gummies in the shape of rabbits spilled onto the floor, scattering sugar-coated squishy bits all over the centre of the room, and showering the poor man who was still sneezing from his location on the floor – now on his ninth and gearing up for his tenth.
A woman, dressed in jeans, a black hooded sweater with white NaNoWriMo text, and a fetching black trilby hat, all of which matched the man on the floor, dashed to his location, squirming her way past the many novelists blocking her path.
“Oh Howard!” she said, kneeling next to him and covering his mouth and nose with a cloth, and supporting his head with her other hand. “There, now, hopefully you won't breathe in anything else...” She looked around at the group clustered closest. “Have any of you got a pet rabbit?” she asked accusingly, and Patricia started in her seat, bending down and checking under the tables between her and the candy buffet. There – she saw Alfalfa hiding between the legs of nearest table – she carefully held open her bag under her chair, and beckoned to the rabbit. He needed to get out of sight quickly, before they started a rabbit hunt.
“Howard is ferociously allergic to rabbits,” the woman was continuing, but the man had apparently finished sneezing and was holding the cloth over his mouth and nose on his own. She helped him back to their table – and everyone in the room calmed down and returned to their writing.
Interesting, Patricia thought. Perhaps that had not been a sign of chaos – perhaps it had been Alfalfa's way of solving the situation over Chris Baty – as if everyone who had felt the need to take action now felt that, with the second crisis resolved, the first must be resolved as well, or was no longer at the top of their minds – she wasn't entirely certain how that worked, but she thought a heartfelt “thank you” to Alfalfa.
“Alright, my lovelies!” Sarah Mackey's voice came over the microphone. “We've had a little bit of excitement, and you should all know what that means.” She paused, and everyone waited expectantly. “It's time for another word sprint, of course! We've got to use that excitement to barrel our way towards the finish line! Fifteen minutes – and...” she counted down the seconds on her watch. “GO!”
Patricia nodded in approval – that would keep everyone occupied, but she herself was going to keep an eye on things. “I'll be right back,” she told her tablemates. “Just going to go find the ladies' room.” Patricia left her notebook on the table, but reached under her chair to pull out her bag. No sense leaving Alfalfa in here if she didn't have to – he might be useful.
The entryway was empty, except for a girl sitting in the coat check typing on her laptop. The girl glanced up with a smile, and Patricia smiled back, asking about the bathroom - “the restroom is just around the corner and to the left,” the girl pointed, and Patricia headed that direction. At least she could have a quiet check-in with Alfalfa in there.
The bathroom was empty – surprising for the ladies' room by this point of the evening, but Patricia wasn't about to complain – and as luxuriously appointed as the rest of the event. Patricia smiled in appreciation as she saw the basket of helpful necessities, likely provided by Sarah, displayed to perfection on the vanity counter. Smart lady, Patricia thought,noting the painkillers alongside the feminine hygiene products, as well as several other odds and ends: toothpicks, mints, gum, caffeinated gum (what would these people come up with next).
She left the basket undisturbed and headed for a stall. It probably wouldn't be good for a woman to find her in the ladies' with a rabbit after that whole incident with poor Howard.
The sound struck Flopsy like a slap across the face.
It must have been building in the background for some time. It was constant, loud, penetrating, yet Flopsy hadn't become aware of it until she hopped through that last wall – when the sound had struck her still and she involuntarily crouched in on herself.
Ah, she realised as she looked inward to check for Earry's direction. The inner certainty of danger rang inside her head with the same frequency as this pounding, penetrating noise – Flopsy thought instantly of Earry and lifted her head. The sound still hurt her, made her wish she were snuggled against the homey fur of her Mama rather than here struggling against noise, but she could fight it. For Earry.
With those ears of his, there was no way he could do anything in here – but she knew from that inner sense that she was close to him, and from the volume, she must be close to the source of the sound.
Taut with effort and determination, Flopsy hopped onwards, finally peeking through what she was certain would be the last wall between her and Earry.
The room within was completely outside her expectations and experience. It was wide but short – she felt she could hop across it in one bound – and lined in maroon-coloured silk. To her, it looked as if it should muffle sound, rather than amplify it, but the sound was even more harsh here. It seemed to reverberate through the small space, and she was glad she had not yet brought her ears fully through the wall.
At the far right – which actually wasn't that far, she realised; it only seemed so in comparison with the distance from the wall across from her – was a contraption of some kind, and it pulsed. She assumed it to be the source of the noise, and knew she should focus on it more, to somehow discover how to stop the infernal racket -
But at the opposite end of the room was Earry. Her heart seemed to shatter at the sight of him, for he was huddled in on himself, his ears curled as tightly as possible in on themselves. Her own tensed even more, almost painfully, in sympathetic response. That poor white form – Flopsy felt an irrational desire to just go to him. The new inner ability to track him ached for her to be beside him.
Yet that would also do him no good.
Flopsy resolutely turned from him, looking at the device across from the white rabbit.
It seemed simple enough.
It was a dark matte grey box-like thing. The part that moved, a silvery disc, was somehow attached or mounted on the front, and it vibrated away and then towards the main box. The box was solid except around the edges of that disc, through which Flopsy could just see what looked like strings.
Wires, she thought suddenly, thinking back to the power cords she had seen humans use at the write-ins. She had heard enough of the novelists joking about their computers being “about to die” to know that the wires somehow fed the machines energy, but she also knew that they had to “plug” into the source of nourishment. Flopsy wondered what this device was plugged into, for she had never heard of anything like it in Bunniption Base.
But things were changing, since this month's mission had started. Perhaps the vampire wanted a new way to power things, so that he could keep more creative energy to himself.
Flopsy glanced back to the left, at Earry, curled so tightly in on himself that he couldn't possibly even be aware of her.
She had no other option. She had to do something.
She resolutely turned away from Earry and towards the device.
Flopsy sidled along through the wall until she was as close as she could get to the noisemaker. Her ears were clenched so tightly now that they did hurt. She couldn't take this volume much longer, she thought, as she felt her bones start to vibrate. She inhaled deeply, and pounced forward, squeezing her nose past the edge of the disc, wincing as the disc moved, pressing against her cheek again and again, and shoved her mouth forward. Just a little more – Flopsy bit through the nearest wire.
One blessed moment of silence.
After a beat just long enough for Flopsy to relax her tightly held ears and pull her face – ouch! her whiskers – back out of the device, a shrill keening replaced the earlier harsh pounding. It seemed to come from the walls themselves, and with its total unexpected arrival, entering into relaxed ears, it hurt far more acutely than the harsh dull ache of the earlier noise. Flopsy fell into a paralysed huddle, the same pose she had seen Earry in at the other end of the room.
“Ah, Flopsy. How nice of you to join us,” a familiar arrogant voice, full of power, cut through the sharp, shrill sound, and Flopsy sank in on herself inwardly just as she had physically.
Trapped, she thought. Trapped...
Twenty minutes after entering the bathroom with Alfalfa, Patricia returned to the ballroom, but not to her table. The plot bunnies were divided, Alfalfa had explained after she managed to narrow her questioning down sufficiently. She had already decided that if she needed to consult him again she was just going to have a nap in her chair. She'd been up a long time that day and her brain was very nearly as overwhelmed as it had been in Chinatown – surely it wouldn't be too hard to fall asleep despite the busy surroundings.
Regardless, she now had a job to do.
Alfalfa said the plot bunnies were close to decimating the novels of almost everyone present, but he had also given her a clue earlier, when he had been talking to that other rabbit, and it had just clicked in her head – she was sure Alfalfa didn't understand why she had stopped questioning him in the middle of a chain of thought, but there was no time to lose.
Patricia marched to the front of the room, up the stairs, and paused at the top. Oh no. Chris Baty had come back in her absence and was in the middle of a speech.
“The first little boy who answered my question summed it up for the rest of them: 'At first, I thought it was a lot of words... and then I got excited.'” Chris Baty was saying, then paused before repeating that last point. “'At first I thought it was a lot of words, and then I got excited.' I think that just about sums it up for all of us.”
Again Chris paused, but this time not for emphasis. This time he was listening to the people in the crowd who were shouting and pointing to the side, where Patricia stood frozen at the top of the steps.
“Oh, hello,” Chris said to her. “Another winner?”
Silently she shook her head.
“Can it wait until I've finished, then?”
Patricia sank down to a seat at the top of the steps. Chris Baty. She was on stage with Chris Baty, however accidentally it had happened. The room was laughing, but she didn't care, and she settled in to wait.
Chris spoke about all the good things NaNoWriMo was achieving: the creative endeavours, the individual and collective accomplishments, and most of all, the introduction of novel-writing into the classrooms of America with the innovative Young Writer's Program. This is what she had interrupted, she realised, and Patricia listened as Chris eloquently described the wonderful world that everyone in the room was a part of.
He was witty, he was charming, he was clear. Every detail contributed to the sense of collective wonder and hope and optimism and drive towards making everything go that little bit farther: if we could each write the bare bones of a novel in thirty days, what more could we achieve?
But it was there that the speech went off the rails. While Chris's description of the programs had been sharply defined, his attempt at exhorting the room to greater efforts, at eliciting increased creativity and word counts, was lost. He spoke about octopi hugging monkeys and space pirates become ballerinas, and everything in and of itself was quirky and wonderful and was probably something Chris could have turned into a brilliant speech or a hilarious story – at any other time, with any foe but the plot bunnies seeking to thwart him.
As it was, the speech was like listening to one of those stories that you write a sentence at a time with a big group of people, in which you are only allowed to read what the person before you wrote: hilarious, in its utter incoherence, but not particularly inspiring.
Patricia wondered if Chris had any idea how crazy what he'd just spouted had sounded, then realised that this was her cue.
She pulled herself up, and went to join the dapper Chris, in his black suit and top hat, at the podium.
“Thank you Chris,” Patricia said. “May I take this opportunity to follow you with a few words?”
“Certainly, Ms...?”
“Patricia,” she told him. “From Vancouver.”
“Novelists,” Chris told the room through the microphone. “Patricia from Vancouver would like to take a few moments of your time.”
Patricia took the microphone and smiled at the room. My goodness, she thought. Two hundred people certainly looked like a lot from up here in the limelight.
“Friends,” she greeted them. “I have two challenging questions for you. Please answer me honestly.”
Patricia paused. Which to ask first?
“How many of you have found your novels slow going this year, with more of a life of their own than usual? If you haven't done this before, as I haven't, perhaps you have had your initial characters go one way while your novel goes another. Perhaps your setting has changed drastically, or your plot gone from a romance to a murder mystery or an action adventure. How many of you, in fact, have been writing ideas for more than one novel into your book?”
Every hand in the room went up. She nodded.
“There's a reason for that. Second question. How many of you found Chris Baty's speech absolutely amazing and inspirational?” The room exploded into applause, and she waited for it to die down. “So did I – until the end. How many of you can say the same about the the part of his speech about working on your novel? Is there anyone in this room who did not find the octopus hugging the monkey just the confusing start to a confusing conclusion?”
The only people who put their hands up were the staff at the Office of Letters and Light, seated around the table at the back of the room near the door, and Patricia nodded again. “There's a reason for that too – both most of us who are not with the Office of Letters and Light being confused, and the OLL staff understanding. There's a reason,” she said, and paused, looking around at the novelists in the room, at the people with their laptops open, and she smiled. “And there's a way we can fight back.
“Are you interested?”
A loud sneeze exploded at the back of the room, and Patricia caught a glimpse of brown fur moving by the windows at the right-hand side of the ballroom. So that's where he had gone... She nodded at her audience.
“Yes Howard,” Patricia smiled across the space, finding Howard's face next to that of his wife, at a table at the back right. “Your sneezing is confirmation of the problem plaguing us all: plot bunnies.
“I don't know why yet, but this year, the plot bunnies are out to get us. In the past, they have helped us, feeding us countless ideas and rescuing novels with too little imagination. But this year they are tossing and turning us about, throwing us at one idea after another and another and another – and yet another.
“Perhaps it's because so many of us abandon their plots and their writing as soon as the month is over. Perhaps it's because they are somehow offended by the cavalier approach this whole project shows to the sacred craft of writing. I don't know. But right now, what matters is that they are plotting against our novels.
“But we have a solution, for we are novelists. Plot bunnies give us ideas, complications, complexities – and these are fantastic and wonderful and give our novels interest and vivacity. But we are the ones who link everything together. We are the ones who pull together the wild free-wheeling threads of the plot bunnies and tie them into neat tidy packages.
“Some of us have already started this. Several people have come up here to ring this bell,” Patricia said, picking up the cowbell and giving it a shake. “They may already be wrapping everything up – and they may already be having an easier time of it, for the plot bunnies have a much harder time hijacking novels at this point than during the generation of ideas.
“They also have a much harder time trying to harvest power from us during that process. And that power is what we need to target. We need to deliver a major blow against the plot bunnies tonight – together – for we here tonight will be their major source of power. The Night of Writing Dangerously is a night of creative mayhem, but if we allow the creative energy to go to the plot bunnies, they will win.
“They will win,” Patricia repeated softly. “They will win, and our initiatives, our programs to support the creativity of young writers, of bringing this delicious madness to our classrooms and our young people, will die. The chance for folks like me to rediscover ourselves and our ability to innovate and be creative and be alive, will die.
“I don't want that to happen,” she said, and paused, looking around the room, making eye contact with everyone she could see.
“So tonight, fellow novelists,” she continued in a peppier tone, grinning at them. “Wherever you are in your story, I challenge you: start tying up those loose threads.
“It's time. It's time for us to start that process, and take the creative power back into our own hands.
“If you aren't already at a point in your novel where it makes sense to tie things up, skip ahead, start a new page, and write 'epilogue' at the top. Where are your characters in five years? Who gets married? Who is still getting into trouble, just as they did at the start of the story you've already started writing?
Patricia looked around the room one more time.
“Are you with me, dear novelists?” she asked softly.
In the silence that followed, the silence that seemed to stretch for eternity, Patricia drew in a deep breath. She, the quiet, domestic grandmother who liked tea, had just given a speech. In front of 200 people! But would it work?
Applause broke out across the room, and Patricia breathed out slowly. She could really use a cup of tea now, actually, she reflected, then stepped aside as Chris Baty put his hand on her shoulder.
“Thank you Patricia,” he said with a broad smile, then leaned into the microphone. “Alright you lot! Fifteen minute word war! You've got one word to start you off already: epilogue!” He glanced at his watch.
“And... 3! 2! 1! Go!”
The Night of Writing Dangerously was almost a third of the way through and so far everything seemed normal – as normal as any room containing 200 speed-novelists could appear, at any rate. Patricia, like her tablemates, were hard at work on another word sprint, trying to get as many words written in fifteen minutes as they could.
Patricia glanced up at her tablemates: each of them had the same phantom rabbit ears as she had seen during the kick-off party, but as she watched, they faded from her view.
It was the same thing she had seen during her time at the coffee shop the previous night: she herself needed to be plotting for her to be aware of the plot bunnies. She supposed it might be the same as at the kick-off party – once she had decided that she was indeed going to write a novel, the back of her head had been bubbling with plot ideas and stories – so perhaps that did indeed fit a pattern.
Everything else seemed normal, she thought with a quick glance around the room, and she returned her attention to her novel.
A short time later, after the pandemonium caused by three novelists ringing the cowbell together, signs of confusion began to appear.
The first indication was likely only apparent to Patricia. They were word sprinting at her table while the rest of the room wrote or relaxed as they pleased, for one of the girls was only 4,000 words away from 50,000 and she really wanted to win here at the event – especially now that she knew about getting to ring the cowbell. The table members were doing their best to support her, and this extra little sprint was part of that.
However, when Patricia looked up, the rabbit ears over each of her tablemates' heads were no longer the stable phantoms that she had seen earlier. Instead they were flickering rapidly, and it seemed that from one flicker to the next the ears changed, perhaps from a brown rabbit one moment to a white the next or a spotted the third. Patricia wondered if it was a sign that the plot bunnies were making their move.
She looked around for Alfalfa, but was not surprised when she didn't see him anywhere... but found herself wishing she could stroke his fur for even the smallest hint of reassurance that might give her.
The next sign came a few moments later, when a man in a top hat, scruff, and a nicely tailored black suit screamed and ran out of the room. He was probably the single most recognisable person in the room, known even to Patricia, who was on the very fringes of knowledge about NaNoWriMo.
The man was Chris Baty, the founder and director of National Novel Writing Month, and not only were most of the room's occupants women, most of those had a certain level of affection for him.
Most of the other members of the Office of Letters and Light, who were mostly seated at the pair of tables near the door, dashed after Chris, but the tall dark-haired woman, who Cait had explained was Sarah Mackey, the special events coordinator and woman in charge of the night's event, bravely stayed to strive for calm in the ballroom.
Given the elevated levels of excitement and distress in the women, all of whom were currently vocalizing their emotion in high-pitched voices and many of whom were reaching the point when they would get up in order to Do Something, Patricia wished Ms. Mackey the best of luck. She wondered if there was anything she could do to help – she had come to this event in order to help stave off issues if the plot bunnies attacked, but what was she, one grandmother in the process of re-discovering her creative stamina, supposed to do now? If this was part of the attack by the plot bunnies, Patricia felt that she would be vastly disappointed if she was unable to stop it from achieving the plot bunnies' aim.
Violent sneezing erupted, another sign of chaos, Patricia thought, startled out of her paralysis of sudden self-doubt at the same time as the women who had been preparing to move into silence and a chorus of “bless you”s as everyone looked at the source – the fourth sneeze, and fifth, were louder than the first three, and the man sneezing fell over, hitting the edge of the candy buffet and starting an inexplicable slide of the tubs onto the floor.
Several others had been at the table, and they grabbed at the various tubs and tablecloth, trying to prevent the suddenly imminent disaster. Their efforts were mostly successful: only the giant plastic jar full of soft sour gummies in the shape of rabbits spilled onto the floor, scattering sugar-coated squishy bits all over the centre of the room, and showering the poor man who was still sneezing from his location on the floor – now on his ninth and gearing up for his tenth.
A woman, dressed in jeans, a black hooded sweater with white NaNoWriMo text, and a fetching black trilby hat, all of which matched the man on the floor, dashed to his location, squirming her way past the many novelists blocking her path.
“Oh Howard!” she said, kneeling next to him and covering his mouth and nose with a cloth, and supporting his head with her other hand. “There, now, hopefully you won't breathe in anything else...” She looked around at the group clustered closest. “Have any of you got a pet rabbit?” she asked accusingly, and Patricia started in her seat, bending down and checking under the tables between her and the candy buffet. There – she saw Alfalfa hiding between the legs of nearest table – she carefully held open her bag under her chair, and beckoned to the rabbit. He needed to get out of sight quickly, before they started a rabbit hunt.
“Howard is ferociously allergic to rabbits,” the woman was continuing, but the man had apparently finished sneezing and was holding the cloth over his mouth and nose on his own. She helped him back to their table – and everyone in the room calmed down and returned to their writing.
Interesting, Patricia thought. Perhaps that had not been a sign of chaos – perhaps it had been Alfalfa's way of solving the situation over Chris Baty – as if everyone who had felt the need to take action now felt that, with the second crisis resolved, the first must be resolved as well, or was no longer at the top of their minds – she wasn't entirely certain how that worked, but she thought a heartfelt “thank you” to Alfalfa.
“Alright, my lovelies!” Sarah Mackey's voice came over the microphone. “We've had a little bit of excitement, and you should all know what that means.” She paused, and everyone waited expectantly. “It's time for another word sprint, of course! We've got to use that excitement to barrel our way towards the finish line! Fifteen minutes – and...” she counted down the seconds on her watch. “GO!”
Patricia nodded in approval – that would keep everyone occupied, but she herself was going to keep an eye on things. “I'll be right back,” she told her tablemates. “Just going to go find the ladies' room.” Patricia left her notebook on the table, but reached under her chair to pull out her bag. No sense leaving Alfalfa in here if she didn't have to – he might be useful.
The entryway was empty, except for a girl sitting in the coat check typing on her laptop. The girl glanced up with a smile, and Patricia smiled back, asking about the bathroom - “the restroom is just around the corner and to the left,” the girl pointed, and Patricia headed that direction. At least she could have a quiet check-in with Alfalfa in there.
The bathroom was empty – surprising for the ladies' room by this point of the evening, but Patricia wasn't about to complain – and as luxuriously appointed as the rest of the event. Patricia smiled in appreciation as she saw the basket of helpful necessities, likely provided by Sarah, displayed to perfection on the vanity counter. Smart lady, Patricia thought,noting the painkillers alongside the feminine hygiene products, as well as several other odds and ends: toothpicks, mints, gum, caffeinated gum (what would these people come up with next).
She left the basket undisturbed and headed for a stall. It probably wouldn't be good for a woman to find her in the ladies' with a rabbit after that whole incident with poor Howard.
The sound struck Flopsy like a slap across the face.
It must have been building in the background for some time. It was constant, loud, penetrating, yet Flopsy hadn't become aware of it until she hopped through that last wall – when the sound had struck her still and she involuntarily crouched in on herself.
Ah, she realised as she looked inward to check for Earry's direction. The inner certainty of danger rang inside her head with the same frequency as this pounding, penetrating noise – Flopsy thought instantly of Earry and lifted her head. The sound still hurt her, made her wish she were snuggled against the homey fur of her Mama rather than here struggling against noise, but she could fight it. For Earry.
With those ears of his, there was no way he could do anything in here – but she knew from that inner sense that she was close to him, and from the volume, she must be close to the source of the sound.
Taut with effort and determination, Flopsy hopped onwards, finally peeking through what she was certain would be the last wall between her and Earry.
The room within was completely outside her expectations and experience. It was wide but short – she felt she could hop across it in one bound – and lined in maroon-coloured silk. To her, it looked as if it should muffle sound, rather than amplify it, but the sound was even more harsh here. It seemed to reverberate through the small space, and she was glad she had not yet brought her ears fully through the wall.
At the far right – which actually wasn't that far, she realised; it only seemed so in comparison with the distance from the wall across from her – was a contraption of some kind, and it pulsed. She assumed it to be the source of the noise, and knew she should focus on it more, to somehow discover how to stop the infernal racket -
But at the opposite end of the room was Earry. Her heart seemed to shatter at the sight of him, for he was huddled in on himself, his ears curled as tightly as possible in on themselves. Her own tensed even more, almost painfully, in sympathetic response. That poor white form – Flopsy felt an irrational desire to just go to him. The new inner ability to track him ached for her to be beside him.
Yet that would also do him no good.
Flopsy resolutely turned from him, looking at the device across from the white rabbit.
It seemed simple enough.
It was a dark matte grey box-like thing. The part that moved, a silvery disc, was somehow attached or mounted on the front, and it vibrated away and then towards the main box. The box was solid except around the edges of that disc, through which Flopsy could just see what looked like strings.
Wires, she thought suddenly, thinking back to the power cords she had seen humans use at the write-ins. She had heard enough of the novelists joking about their computers being “about to die” to know that the wires somehow fed the machines energy, but she also knew that they had to “plug” into the source of nourishment. Flopsy wondered what this device was plugged into, for she had never heard of anything like it in Bunniption Base.
But things were changing, since this month's mission had started. Perhaps the vampire wanted a new way to power things, so that he could keep more creative energy to himself.
Flopsy glanced back to the left, at Earry, curled so tightly in on himself that he couldn't possibly even be aware of her.
She had no other option. She had to do something.
She resolutely turned away from Earry and towards the device.
Flopsy sidled along through the wall until she was as close as she could get to the noisemaker. Her ears were clenched so tightly now that they did hurt. She couldn't take this volume much longer, she thought, as she felt her bones start to vibrate. She inhaled deeply, and pounced forward, squeezing her nose past the edge of the disc, wincing as the disc moved, pressing against her cheek again and again, and shoved her mouth forward. Just a little more – Flopsy bit through the nearest wire.
One blessed moment of silence.
After a beat just long enough for Flopsy to relax her tightly held ears and pull her face – ouch! her whiskers – back out of the device, a shrill keening replaced the earlier harsh pounding. It seemed to come from the walls themselves, and with its total unexpected arrival, entering into relaxed ears, it hurt far more acutely than the harsh dull ache of the earlier noise. Flopsy fell into a paralysed huddle, the same pose she had seen Earry in at the other end of the room.
“Ah, Flopsy. How nice of you to join us,” a familiar arrogant voice, full of power, cut through the sharp, shrill sound, and Flopsy sank in on herself inwardly just as she had physically.
Trapped, she thought. Trapped...
Twenty minutes after entering the bathroom with Alfalfa, Patricia returned to the ballroom, but not to her table. The plot bunnies were divided, Alfalfa had explained after she managed to narrow her questioning down sufficiently. She had already decided that if she needed to consult him again she was just going to have a nap in her chair. She'd been up a long time that day and her brain was very nearly as overwhelmed as it had been in Chinatown – surely it wouldn't be too hard to fall asleep despite the busy surroundings.
Regardless, she now had a job to do.
Alfalfa said the plot bunnies were close to decimating the novels of almost everyone present, but he had also given her a clue earlier, when he had been talking to that other rabbit, and it had just clicked in her head – she was sure Alfalfa didn't understand why she had stopped questioning him in the middle of a chain of thought, but there was no time to lose.
Patricia marched to the front of the room, up the stairs, and paused at the top. Oh no. Chris Baty had come back in her absence and was in the middle of a speech.
“The first little boy who answered my question summed it up for the rest of them: 'At first, I thought it was a lot of words... and then I got excited.'” Chris Baty was saying, then paused before repeating that last point. “'At first I thought it was a lot of words, and then I got excited.' I think that just about sums it up for all of us.”
Again Chris paused, but this time not for emphasis. This time he was listening to the people in the crowd who were shouting and pointing to the side, where Patricia stood frozen at the top of the steps.
“Oh, hello,” Chris said to her. “Another winner?”
Silently she shook her head.
“Can it wait until I've finished, then?”
Patricia sank down to a seat at the top of the steps. Chris Baty. She was on stage with Chris Baty, however accidentally it had happened. The room was laughing, but she didn't care, and she settled in to wait.
Chris spoke about all the good things NaNoWriMo was achieving: the creative endeavours, the individual and collective accomplishments, and most of all, the introduction of novel-writing into the classrooms of America with the innovative Young Writer's Program. This is what she had interrupted, she realised, and Patricia listened as Chris eloquently described the wonderful world that everyone in the room was a part of.
He was witty, he was charming, he was clear. Every detail contributed to the sense of collective wonder and hope and optimism and drive towards making everything go that little bit farther: if we could each write the bare bones of a novel in thirty days, what more could we achieve?
But it was there that the speech went off the rails. While Chris's description of the programs had been sharply defined, his attempt at exhorting the room to greater efforts, at eliciting increased creativity and word counts, was lost. He spoke about octopi hugging monkeys and space pirates become ballerinas, and everything in and of itself was quirky and wonderful and was probably something Chris could have turned into a brilliant speech or a hilarious story – at any other time, with any foe but the plot bunnies seeking to thwart him.
As it was, the speech was like listening to one of those stories that you write a sentence at a time with a big group of people, in which you are only allowed to read what the person before you wrote: hilarious, in its utter incoherence, but not particularly inspiring.
Patricia wondered if Chris had any idea how crazy what he'd just spouted had sounded, then realised that this was her cue.
She pulled herself up, and went to join the dapper Chris, in his black suit and top hat, at the podium.
“Thank you Chris,” Patricia said. “May I take this opportunity to follow you with a few words?”
“Certainly, Ms...?”
“Patricia,” she told him. “From Vancouver.”
“Novelists,” Chris told the room through the microphone. “Patricia from Vancouver would like to take a few moments of your time.”
Patricia took the microphone and smiled at the room. My goodness, she thought. Two hundred people certainly looked like a lot from up here in the limelight.
“Friends,” she greeted them. “I have two challenging questions for you. Please answer me honestly.”
Patricia paused. Which to ask first?
“How many of you have found your novels slow going this year, with more of a life of their own than usual? If you haven't done this before, as I haven't, perhaps you have had your initial characters go one way while your novel goes another. Perhaps your setting has changed drastically, or your plot gone from a romance to a murder mystery or an action adventure. How many of you, in fact, have been writing ideas for more than one novel into your book?”
Every hand in the room went up. She nodded.
“There's a reason for that. Second question. How many of you found Chris Baty's speech absolutely amazing and inspirational?” The room exploded into applause, and she waited for it to die down. “So did I – until the end. How many of you can say the same about the the part of his speech about working on your novel? Is there anyone in this room who did not find the octopus hugging the monkey just the confusing start to a confusing conclusion?”
The only people who put their hands up were the staff at the Office of Letters and Light, seated around the table at the back of the room near the door, and Patricia nodded again. “There's a reason for that too – both most of us who are not with the Office of Letters and Light being confused, and the OLL staff understanding. There's a reason,” she said, and paused, looking around at the novelists in the room, at the people with their laptops open, and she smiled. “And there's a way we can fight back.
“Are you interested?”
A loud sneeze exploded at the back of the room, and Patricia caught a glimpse of brown fur moving by the windows at the right-hand side of the ballroom. So that's where he had gone... She nodded at her audience.
“Yes Howard,” Patricia smiled across the space, finding Howard's face next to that of his wife, at a table at the back right. “Your sneezing is confirmation of the problem plaguing us all: plot bunnies.
“I don't know why yet, but this year, the plot bunnies are out to get us. In the past, they have helped us, feeding us countless ideas and rescuing novels with too little imagination. But this year they are tossing and turning us about, throwing us at one idea after another and another and another – and yet another.
“Perhaps it's because so many of us abandon their plots and their writing as soon as the month is over. Perhaps it's because they are somehow offended by the cavalier approach this whole project shows to the sacred craft of writing. I don't know. But right now, what matters is that they are plotting against our novels.
“But we have a solution, for we are novelists. Plot bunnies give us ideas, complications, complexities – and these are fantastic and wonderful and give our novels interest and vivacity. But we are the ones who link everything together. We are the ones who pull together the wild free-wheeling threads of the plot bunnies and tie them into neat tidy packages.
“Some of us have already started this. Several people have come up here to ring this bell,” Patricia said, picking up the cowbell and giving it a shake. “They may already be wrapping everything up – and they may already be having an easier time of it, for the plot bunnies have a much harder time hijacking novels at this point than during the generation of ideas.
“They also have a much harder time trying to harvest power from us during that process. And that power is what we need to target. We need to deliver a major blow against the plot bunnies tonight – together – for we here tonight will be their major source of power. The Night of Writing Dangerously is a night of creative mayhem, but if we allow the creative energy to go to the plot bunnies, they will win.
“They will win,” Patricia repeated softly. “They will win, and our initiatives, our programs to support the creativity of young writers, of bringing this delicious madness to our classrooms and our young people, will die. The chance for folks like me to rediscover ourselves and our ability to innovate and be creative and be alive, will die.
“I don't want that to happen,” she said, and paused, looking around the room, making eye contact with everyone she could see.
“So tonight, fellow novelists,” she continued in a peppier tone, grinning at them. “Wherever you are in your story, I challenge you: start tying up those loose threads.
“It's time. It's time for us to start that process, and take the creative power back into our own hands.
“If you aren't already at a point in your novel where it makes sense to tie things up, skip ahead, start a new page, and write 'epilogue' at the top. Where are your characters in five years? Who gets married? Who is still getting into trouble, just as they did at the start of the story you've already started writing?
Patricia looked around the room one more time.
“Are you with me, dear novelists?” she asked softly.
In the silence that followed, the silence that seemed to stretch for eternity, Patricia drew in a deep breath. She, the quiet, domestic grandmother who liked tea, had just given a speech. In front of 200 people! But would it work?
Applause broke out across the room, and Patricia breathed out slowly. She could really use a cup of tea now, actually, she reflected, then stepped aside as Chris Baty put his hand on her shoulder.
“Thank you Patricia,” he said with a broad smile, then leaned into the microphone. “Alright you lot! Fifteen minute word war! You've got one word to start you off already: epilogue!” He glanced at his watch.
“And... 3! 2! 1! Go!”
29 November 2010
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Seventeen
The Night of Writing Dangerously.
With a soft brown bunny cradled in her arms, Patricia stood on California near the corner with Montgomery, in San Francisco, very close to Market Street and the Port building. She eyed the gold lions decorating the building with appreciation. They had a pure clear elegance that she found soothing after a long day of sightseeing that had, she admitted, been a touch overwhelming.
She had started with Chinatown, which was probably for the best as, after a couple of hours, her brain had decided that everything was just too much: too many sounds, too many sights, too many people. Patricia had in one moment turned from wide-eyed wonder to yawning desire for sleep, but had thankfully been able to find a cab close by and had returned to her hotel room for a long nap – which had been strange. She still wasn't sure, for it had been faint and almost forgotten by the time she woke, but she felt that Alfalfa had been talking to someone while she slept, and she had caught the edges of that conversation.
Nothing had been particularly clear. She had understood Alfalfa far more than the other voice – perhaps due to her familiarity with the brown bunny. “She is a storyteller – she must be the one to tie everything together,” she had heard, and had warmed to the protectiveness in his voice, somehow certain he was talking about her. Storyteller, he had called her, and in her dream-like state she had felt suddenly more confident in her creative capacity. “Plot bunnies can only add complications, not end them – we need her,” he said later, louder, clearer, as if arguing, and then his voice had subsided into a softer, more persuasive tone, before fading from her awareness altogether. She had dreamed of Alfred, afterwards, and drifted into a warm and happy nest of nothing.
She had woken fully refreshed, wondering what Alfalfa had meant, but too pumped for getting out and about again to sit still long enough to discuss it with him. Besides, she felt like she had been eavesdropping, so instead she tucked the information into the back of her brain, and went to Pier 39 and enjoyed some delicious fish, then took another cab to the tea shop Alfalfa had requested she visit in Ghirardelli Square – where she also had quite a few delightful little chocolates. The intense darks were divine, and she had bought a big box of them to share with May and Laura. The rest of the time there had been even more uneventful than the previous night's trip to the tea shop in Mission, without even a single plot bunny sighting, but she had managed to get quite a bit more done on her murder mystery. She had already started tying up the loose ends, and hoped to finish the story – and the 50,000 word count – in the next few days. In fact, she rather suspected that if tonight's event went smoothly, she would be able to finish it tonight – before the had left Vancouver and her desktop computer she had done a check of her digital word count and had been over 42,000, probably thanks to all the writing she had done during her carrot-crazed phase, and had already written nearly 4,000 more words, by her rough count of her hand-written notes.
After the brief sojourn in the coffee shop, Patricia had returned to her hotel room and dressed herself up for the evening, topping her black dress and pearls with the pillbox hat – the Night of Writing Dangerously was Film Noir themed, so she felt it was only appropriate that she wear the hat inspiring her own Film Noir novel.
Alfalfa had asked her to bring him with her to the event, but she didn't want to carry a huge cage in with her, and he had indicated that he would behave himself, at least before they got to the ballroom, so she had just picked him up. She had space in her bag as well – it just carried her wallet, two notebooks, assortment of pens, and keys to her hotel room – but for now she was happy to carry him. He was soft and light and, Patricia thought appreciatively given San Francisco's chill air and brisk wind, he was warm.
Still, staring at the beautiful building in which the evening's festivities were to take place, Patricia shivered from more than just the cold. There was no way the plot bunnies would let a night like this, of such importance to the novelists and their leaders in the Office of Letters and Light, pass unmolested. She no longer harboured any doubts about the plot bunnies' malevolent intent.
Well, standing out here wouldn't solve anything.
Patricia shifted one hand free from Alfalfa's fluff, pushed upon the door, entered the lobby, and punched for the elevator.
“Ready, Alfalfa?” she asked the bunny, and he signalled yes. She set him down on the elevator floor, and tried not to look at him as the arrival ding sounded and the doors opened onto the 15th floor.
Two tuxedoed waiters greeted the arriving elevator with trays of what looked like martinis and ... red martinis with lime instead of olive. Patricia shook her head; it had been many years since she had had martinis with Alfred, and tonight she needed to keep her wits about her.
Instead, she headed to the coat check at the back of the lobby, handing over her wool coat and looking out the window at the breathtaking view of the city her position on the 15th floor provided.
“Hello there,” a young woman dressed in a fedora and a grey tweed suit with a black under-vest and one of the red drinks in her hand said to Patricia as they both moved away from the coat check and towards the group of people congregating around the couches by the closed door that seemed to promise the evening's excitement – once the staff were ready for all the novelists. “I'm Cait.”
“Hi Cait, I'm Patricia,” she answered with a smile. “Are you from these parts?”
“Sort of – I live up near San Jose, which is a bit of a drive, but not too far,” Cait answered. “How about yourself?”
“Vancouver, in Canada,” Patricia said. “I've never actually been this far from British Columbia before. Yesterday was my first plane flight – I'm so excited to be here.”
“How exciting! Did you come down just for this?” a man from the near edge of the group they were approaching asked, having overheard Patricia's comment. He was dressed in jeans and a NaNoWriMo t-shirt, with large brown frames on his glasses. “I'm Tom, by the way,” he added, holding out his hand to shake Patricia's.
“Hi Tom,” she said, shaking his hand. “Yes, I did come down for this. I realised this month that I haven't been so excited about anything, or been so creative, since my husband died four years ago, and I wanted to show my appreciation for the sheer exuberance of the whole thing and maybe get to meet some of the people who make it happen.” Patricia had decided it would be wiser not to tell anyone here about what she suspected about the plot bunnies, and if she kept quiet about her forum name perhaps no one would connect her with that appeal either. She didn't want to draw attention to herself in case the plot bunnies were listening in on the conversation, gathering the means to bring the whole gathering that night to a halt.
“How about you, Tom?” asked Cait. “Where are you from?”
“I just live on the East Bay,” he said. “This is my second year coming to the Night of Writing Dangerously, and I'm even more excited tonight than I was last year – my novel isn't exactly going swimmingly, and I'm hoping that tonight I can get some inspiration from the people I speak with. So Patricia,” he grinned at her. “I might have to put someone on their first flight in my novel. Tell me about your experience!”
Patricia smiled and allowed herself to be drawn into the conversation – surely the plot bunnies would leave them to converse into a sense of security and community before they pounced – and these seemed like such fascinating people- she began to tell Cait and Tom about the lightning striking her plane the day before.
The double doors opened and a tall dark-haired woman in a long black gown stepped through, throwing her arms extravagantly wide: “Welcome to the 2010 Night of Writing Dangerously!”
She stepped aside and waved the novelists past her into a zone of red velvet curtains and lush gold decorations. There were tables for signing in, and Patricia joined the line for the K-P crowd.
“Knox, Patricia, k-n-o-x,” she spelled for the pretty girl in the steampunk goggles who sat behind the table. Not exactly Film Noir, thought Patricia, but quite striking, and thanked her with a smile as she checked Patricia off her list.
Patricia followed the crowd past another entrance draped in red velvet and entered the gold-gilted ballroom. It was fabulous, she thought, unable to produce any more descriptive adjectives, and she allowed the press of people behind her to push her in amongst the maze of tables and chairs.
“Here, Patricia,” she heard a voice call, and turned to see Cait pointing to a chair. “Come and sit with us,” the fedora-topped young lady invited.
“Oh, thank you, Cait,” Patricia said gratefully and settled into the indicated chair.
The table was near the edge of the ballroom, on the left side up near the stage but out of the way enough to offer a good view of the whole space. Patricia found it much easier to take in everything now that she was sitting down, and she took a good long look around.
No sign of Alfalfa, which was a good start, she thought, but she had a lot of other things to see without looking for a single small moving brown furry creature. There were the people, of course, a mosaic of different colours and textures and movement and conversation. There were the tables, in matching maroon tablecloths and shiny stars, beneath gold-hued chandeliers. There was another table in the centre of the room, surrounded by space rather than chairs, which was covered in brightly-coloured bowls and tubs. She wondered what was in them, and as if in reply she heard Cait ask someone else at the table, “Have you checked out the candy buffet yet?”
Patricia couldn't hear the reply, but she nodded in understanding of the bright multi-coloured contents of the centre table.
Near to her own table, only a few feet from the far side of Patric'ias seat, a small stage was set up, perhaps 18 inches high, with a podium and a microphone set up at its front. Patricia wondered what the cowbell on the podium was for – perhaps announcing dinner?
Behind the stage was a large gold-framed fireplace, crowned by a gold owl.
The space was indeed decadent, Patricia thought, and turned to greet her tablemates.
The novelists hadn't even all finished sitting down and setting up their laptops when Patricia saw a petite woman in a sleek red dress and a black silk flower in her blonde hair scurry up onto the stage, grasp the cowbell firmly, and ring it twice quickly overhead. She stood on the stage grinning giddily and dancing from foot to foot until – moments later – the tall woman who had opened the ballroom doors swept up onto the stage, beaming.
“We have our first winner of the evening!” the woman said into the microphone after a brief conversation with the lady in red. “Claire of Santa Barbara has just crossed the 50,000 word victory line!”
Everyone, even the many people with their heads tucked under the tablecloths looking to plug their power cables in, erupted with applause and catcalls.
“Now for the rest of us, should we manage to reach the same lofty heights this evening, come and ring the cowbell and I'll be right up to congratulate you and give you,” her eyebrows waggled and her voice suddenly became more mysterious, “your winner prizes!”
The two women left the stage, heading for some piles Patricia couldn't quite see in the back corrner. She smiled at the room's enthusiasm, and began writing in her own notebook.
Flopsy was pacing.
She never paced: it was far too clear an indication of nervousness, and one never knew when someone was watching unseen.
Now, however, she was in her own carefully spelled and protected base, the head administrative office in the basement of the ferry building, where no humans would enter for at least another day, as the main administrative officer was on vacation until December 1. The outer office was more than sufficient for the needs of the rest of the staff.
As for other threats, she was guarded by Harey and Hopert, in whose skills she had unparalleled faith thanks to over a year of working closely with them, as well as Earry, whose ears had proven themselves time and time again. She felt safer than she had since she had become a full-fledged plot bunny, ironic given the danger that was giving rise to the nervousness that caused her to pace. In other words, she felt safe, and so was able to show how scared she was.
She felt for a moment guilty that she had never felt this safe when it had been Harey, Hopert and Alfalfa who were watching over her, and she suppressed – again – a desire that Earry would be allowed to remain on her team after this was all over.
Of course, when this was all over, either things would be quite different than they had been before, or Flopsy was unlikely to have a team at all. Either way, Earry's assignment was unlikely to coincide with her own. She felt an irrational desire to blame Alfalfa, and she scolded herself for it again. This was not his fault, nor was it his fault that she was feeling more than team-based interest in Earry, and blaming him only meant she wasn't dealing with the situation.
Flopsy flipped her ears in irritation and forced herself to sit still. She wished there was something left for her to think about, but there wasn't. No more planning, no more organising, no more figuring things out. There would be more to do soon – possibly more than it was possible to get done – but not yet. Still, she couldn't help herself reviewing what had happened so far in her head.
The message had come in from Bun-Bun almost an hour previously.
The note, directed to Earry via Bunniption Base, wasn't very long: it simply said “op ears go”. Flopsy hoped desperately that none of the elder archetypes or their helpers had read it, but even more that they had decided it was just a note between friends and not something more sinister. Still, both Bun-Bun and Earry were operatives of the elder archetypes themselves, which meant that they tended to have quite a bit of leeway and trust from their compatriots – she hoped. Perhaps they would think that there was some sort of collaboration in the taking down of Flopsy's team in the works, for she had agreed with Earry that it was a good idea to let the higher ups know that Alfalfa had been spotted in San Francisco. If nothing else, it gave them an excuse to communicate – and it also gave both Flopsy and Earry an excuse to hop back to base, because from there they could travel quickly to San Francisco. Finding Alfalfa was still listed as their primary mission. At least, that's what the official listing said; Flopsy guessed that Earry's primary mission was actually to watch her.
So far, so good, for getting them an excuse to head up, then. Bun-Bun's message meant that he had reported Alfalfa and that he was ready to support the next stage. Flopsy was still trying to work the details out for that. She was sure that there was something critical in the assignment Alfalfa's human had given to that other human boy, the one who was writing the plot bunny army. While she was relieved that the woman had not told him to simply destroy the whole plot bunny army, for she had no idea how much hopeless destruction that would have wrought amongst her people, Flopsy was unsure what kind of message to take from it, or how to work it into her own plans.
Obviously the human thought there was some way for plot bunnies and humans to be aware of each other and somehow work things out. Flopsy supposed that her interaction with Alfalfa had fuelled or at least influenced that impression, and found herself scared by the level of hunger it woke in her: she wanted her human partners to know that she was there, working with them on the creative endeavours that they so enjoyed. She wanted them to know that they weren't alone.
She also wondered if it might make some of them less likely to simply abandon projects in the middle – but she wasn't about to bank on it.
Besides, that was for the future, for after something was worked out, if anything could be worked out.
They had to deal with the elder archetypes first, and that meant finding some way to access them, some way to exploit their vulnerability, and some way to ensure that the vampire did not get lost in the fray.
Flopsy had several ideas for that, but none that she was sure would work. She didn't have a vampire narrative of any sort, and – strange – most of the bunnies she had known who did had died the previous year at the end of NaNoWriMo.
Actually, she thought, that was extra strange, for vampire stories were really big in the human world. There should be more plot bunnies around who focused on them – but no, of course not, she realised, and her ears flopped forward in bitter amusement. The vampire had already been in a position of power, and of course he would have had the ability to get rid of competition for his nourishment. She supposed that, now that he was no longer finding his own brain carrots, nourished as he was by Bunniption Base's collection mechanisms, he had made some sort of arrangements (or had simply manipulated them, as there was no guarantee that any particular type of plot bunny be smarter than the average, and she guessed that he would have killed off any that were more likely to compete or to question) to ensure that their power reinforced his own invulnerability. She knew that different stories held different to different qualities and characteristics, and Flopsy supposed that the vampire would only have allowed bunnies to continue to serve who had the right sort of descriptions. That way, even if the vampire didn't alter their nourishment uploads to the Base, the re-telling of their stories would reinforce the qualities in himself that he valued most highly.
Flopsy shivered. How was one little plot bunny supposed to stand up to him? she wondered, unconsciously crouching in on herself, making herself small.
“Flopsy?” Earry's voice broke into her reverie. “Are you okay?”
Right, she thought. She had allowed herself to feel safe and secure, but had forgotten that she still needed to maintain enough self-control to provide a front for the boys. She blinked her eyes open.
“Yes, I'm fine,” Flopsy said, but chose not to add too many obvious body language cues to make that point – Earry would respect her decision to lie more if she chose to make it as flat as possible.
He nodded, and swivelled his ears back towards the rest of the world. She twitched her ears in appreciation, and let herself settle her weight back onto her haunches.
It was almost time, she realised, and she hoped once more that they had been able to get enough power in Harey and Hopert for what they were about to do. Alfalfa's human had definitely helped, for Alfalfa was right: she was a complete powerhouse. But worrying about power was just an excuse not to think about the plan itself. Flopsy shuddered. She did not like this part, nor did she like the uneasy feeling that Earry had already crossed this line. Not only had he suggested it, he simply hadn't been appalled enough.
She didn't have time to slide down that slope again. It was time for her to be team lead.
Flopsy hopped over to Hopert's perch, part-way through the wall between the office and the front administrative area.
“You ready, Hop?” she asked, leaning towards him in a rare display of physical affection, letting her nose brush the fur of his neck.
He flicked his ears in what was normally amusement, but the gesture was stiff, and she softened even more, knowing that he had just shown her what Earry had not: Hopert was very uncomfortable with the idea of his role in this mission. But he was on her team, and he had more discipline than pretty much every other plot bunny Flopsy had ever come into contact with.
“You betcha, Flops,” he said, with nearly his usual bravado.
She flicked her whiskers at him. “I'm counting on you, Hopert,” she said seriously, then waved her ears in mock panic. “You're step one in this plot, and then I'm going to need you to keep your wits about you out here. Who knows what might happen without me here to keep an eye on it?”
“Yes,” Hopert said darkly. “Or what that Harey might do with all that power he'll be hanging onto.”
Her ears twitched involuntarily. “Don't let being my deputy go to your head, Hops! Harey might have some good suggestions.”
“Yes, and all of them will have you upset with us the minute you get back,” Hopert twitched his ears in imitation of hers. “So I'll only use the ones that I can pretend were my ideas.”
She laughed. “Good hunting, Hops,” she told him, and gave him a half-crouch, which he returned in full. Good ol' Hops... Flopsy left him and went to Harey's vantage point upstairs, where he was curled in a pillar. The boys were putting to good use their practice hiding from San Francisco: even plot bunnies tended not to notice people who were in the middle of objects physical to humans.
“Hey Hare,” Flopsy greeted him, touching his cheek with her nose as she had done with Hopert.
“Flops,” he answered. “All clear so far.”
“Good,” she said softly. All business. The clearest sign of worry she had seen from Harey yet. “Just don't steal a brain carrot out from under anyone else's nose and we'll get through this just fine,” she said, getting an ear twitch out of him – good. That had been his favourite prank – he'd nipped in neat as you please and taken a brain carrot almost from between the teeth of the top dog of the murder mystery world and Flopsy wondered if perhaps he had been assigned to her team so that she could give him the discipline he needed to know when that sort of thing was inappropriate.
Of course, most of their bureaucrat types thought it was never appropriate, but Flopsy thought there was a time and a place for everything. Especially when her team was under stress.
“But maybe you could do a little sanctioned pranking against Alf when we all get back together, hm?” Flopsy murmured. “After he's gone and put us through all this trouble...”
Harey perked right up. “Oh, I know just the thing! If I -”
“Don't tell me, Hare!” She interrupted. “How am I supposed to feign innocence if I know what was supposed to happen?”
His ears flicked and she relaxed a bit. He was tense, sure, but he'd be alright. “Okay Hare. Keep an eye on Hop, and make sure the story holds, right?”
“Sure Flops, you got it.”
“Happy hunting,” she said, tickled his whiskers with hers, and hopped back through the floor to the administrative room.
“You need a pep talk too, Ears? You probably heard those two already,” she wrinkled her nose at the white bunny seated in the administrative officer's chair as if he worked there, head cocked, ears open.
“Thanks Flopsy, I'm alright,” he said absently. “Sounds like the sarge might be coming a bit early.”
“Are you sure?”
Of course he was. She took a deep breath. No time to back out, no time to change the plan, no time to figure out what she should have done instead of this betrayal of her people... no, she told her brain, and wished her emotions would listen to. She was helping her people. She was saving them. It was the sarge's boss who had betrayed them.
But it was she who would be labelled the traitor if she failed.
Flopsy breathed in again, one long slow inhale, and settled herself comfortably onto the mouse pad she'd been enjoying since she chose this office.
Rhythmic hollow noises announced the sergeant's arrival. Flopsy wondered once again why had chosen that affectation – surely he, the primary intermediary between the elder archetypes and the mass of plot bunnies, needed no such heavy-pawed indications of authority. And surely there was something that could be done about the white tufts, sticking in all directions like that – surely the elder archetypes would be willing to help him out with those, for from what Earry said it would only take a minor use of the power from Bunniption Base – but it was a waste of energy that did nothing to consolidate their power, so of course it would never happen.
Again Flopsy scolded herself: now she was focusing on trivialities when she needed to be alert.
Flopsy crouched deeply in greeting.
“Flopsy,” the grey tufted rabbit greeted, offering the barest hint of a crouch in return, and she tried not to bristle at the insult.
“Sergeant,” Flopsy replied.
“Earry,” the sergeant added as an aside to the rabbit crouching on the chair a level below the two leads, but did not wait for a reply.
“Flopsy, your team has been found delinquent,” the sergeant started in on her. “The elder archetypes gave you an order,” he spat the word. “You may not have intended to disobey, but whatever your intent, you and your team failed.
“It's not the third week of November, three quarters of the way through our mission – a mission of vital import to the livelihood, no, the very survival of our people – and you have failed to find your lost little lamb,” the sergeant half-shouted in his parade ground voice, and Flopsy wondered how Earry handled the sergeant's volume in his sensitive ears. Focus, she told herself. “You know how much that little lamb knows about this mission and about our strategies and tactics – you know how much damage he could do to our cause and our people if he were to be captured, or worse, if he betrayed us to the novelists.”
The sergeant glared at Flopsy, tufts of hair seeming to strive for threatening angles. Flopsy felt a moment's amusement at them, as she always did, but the amusement disappeared instantly as she remembered her own plan. She tried to look contrite and not sorrowful, but it was hard.
“Now, the powers that be still like you, harvest knows why,” said the sergeant, continuing his patentable eyeball technique. “So they think you should know: your little lamb has been spotted in San Francisco.”
“Alfalfa?” Flopsy gasped, with every sign of shock. “What a relief!”
“Hah!” snorted the sergeant, full of derision. “You may wish he hadn't turned up – the elder archetypes have put Bun-Bun on his case, exactly because he may have become a weapon against us, and I know Bun-Bun well. He'll have no mercy for your little lost lamb. A word of advice,” he said, his ears twisting into a caricature of amusement as his tufts of hair took on newly divergent lives of their own. She was reminded of a poster she had seen once of a human sergeant with a huge cigar poking out one side of his mouth and a leer taking over his face. She had thought it ridiculous then, but she had not yet seen the sergeant at that point. “You just figure out a ay to get your little lamb back before Bun-Bun finds him.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, as he paused as if expecting a reply.
“That is all, team lead Flopsy,” he dismissed her,emphasizing her title with the clear meaning that he doubted she would keep it much longer, and bounded out through the door, Flopsy hurriedly crouching in case he looked back, but already turning to Earry as she did so.
“The boys will be busy some hours yet,” Flopsy said loudly, hoping to catch the sergeant's ears as he eavesdropped on the first words said after his departure, as he always did. “Are you up for a short hop to San Francisco, Earry?”
“Always, ma'am,” the white bunny replied, only the glint in his eye indicating that the subservience might be for show. “I just need to report in to the elder archetypes on our way.”
“Of course,” she said, shaking her head at the glinting amusement, and the two bounded through the narrative divide into Bunniption Base.
Flopsy spared a moment's thought for Harey and Hopert – they had the toughest part, and without it she and Earry would be unable to put their own part in motion.
The only window they had was the length of Earry's report to the elder archetypes. They had spent the past few days elongating that window, with Flopsy helping Earry devise excuses to delay returning to Bunniption Base, and both of them hoping that the delay would increase suspicion of her and encourage the greys to ask more questions – especially since Earry would make it clear that she was in a hurry, and that he himself was willing to stay to answer questions as long as they were asked.
The careful planning on that part meant that they created the exact current situation: Flopsy with nothing to do outside the elder archetypes' tower, obviously impatient, obviously fretting.
She was fretting much less over what others might assume, however. She knew exactly what Alfalfa was doing in San Francisco, or at least, she knew as much as she needed to know. Flopsy hoped he was successful but knew that her own part needed to be complete in order to support him. Instead, she was fretting, and this time she had no team to protect her vulnerability, so every sign she gave had to signal concern over Alfalfa, and not over Harey and Hopert, nor over herself or her people.
She could only hope that she would be able to do something – anything – before she started pacing. Not that the next part of the plan was any better than this, she admitted, but at least then she had a role to play besides looking anxious to get moving.
Flopsy let her ears twitch once, and prayed to the harvest that none of her fears about what could go wrong would actually happen to Harey and Hopert.
Thankfully the boys always did have excellent timing, and before she could work herself into a frenetic frenzy a small brown rabbit bounded into view from the human world. He was nearly identical to Alfalfa but for the patch of darker fur around his right eye – a pirate patch, the plot bunnies called them, and Flopsy wondered if his was real, for they were presently in style and quite a few plot bunnies had taken to dyeing their fur with the mark.
The plot bunny looked at her, where she sat crouched respectfully, waiting outside the elder archetypes' tower and sanctuary. She was sure she had given no offence that would justify his eyeing her with such suspicion, but she refused to react. The plot bunny, with no indication of respect or acknowledgement of her presence, bounded past her into the building.
So it was done, she thought, and prayed to the great garden plot for Harey, Hopert, and herself.
No going back.
She forced herself to remain calm, despite the erupting turmoil within her.
“Flopsy?” Earry's voice broke into what was turning into a bout of self-loathing. “The elder archetpes request your presence, since you are so close.”
“Of course,” Flopsy said, then followed Earry's white form into the tower. She sensed his sudden tension as soon as he entered, but before she also noted its cause: there were only elevent grey rabbits waiting for them.
This was not according to plan.
“Your eminences,” Earry broke the silence before it stretched too far, and Flopsy shook herself into a deeply respectful crouch.
“As requested, I have brought Flopsy, my team lead, before you. Now I must crave a boon of you – the news we have heard came as a great shock, for the sergeant trained me personally, and I would beg of you time to collect my thoughts... and perhaps to begin querying my sources.” He paused, crouching more deeply. “As Flopsy and I came directly here after the sergeant spoke to us, I understand that she is a sensible place to start, but I assure you she had no part in this.” Flopsy's eyes softened as he defended her to the greys in a way that she was privileged to hear. “I have come to value her insight and would appreciate her input on what information I am able to gather, so perhaps you might expedit your discussion that she might join me.”
“We will ascertain the facts, Earry, and that will take as long as it may,” one of the grey rabbits replied. “But thank you for your report, your patience, and your input. You may go.”
Flopsy kept her breathing from changing pattern. The plan had called for both she and Alfalfa to distract the elders, all 12, until circumstances allowed Earry to take on the vampire. Since he wasn't here, of course he would leave to find him. Of course. It would probably even play more into the narrative he had shared with her... Flopsy nodded to Earry, a pit at the base of her stomach causing her suddenly to wonder if she had the capacity for this without him – but also knowing, deep down, that not only had she managed without him well enough all her life, but that this would actually strengthen her ability to draw power from her own narrative.
She had already been capitalizing on its power due to her perception of the grey elders as having betrayed and abandoned her people, but this more personal abandonment, necessary as it was, was far more direct and gave her proportionately more power.
Flopsy turned away from the white bunny, and as Earry bounded out of the tower, she crouched respectfully once more, bravely facing the eleven members of the plot bunny leadership.
Phew, Flopsy thought as she made her final bows to the elder archetypes and scooted out of their chamber. That was one of the strangest interrogations she had ever experienced, and she had experienced a few.
She paused, noting that she was still in the character that she had adopted from Harey and Hopert's novels: the hard-done police officer, chasing down the by-the-seat-of-his-pants detective – Earry. She had never been in an interrogation before. Her narrative was about overcoming adversity, for goodness' sake.
However, she had kind of enjoyed playing the role. It had almost been fun to stonewall the questions about who and what and why (especially why – were all investigators this obsessed over finding motive and keeping it to themselves until they were ready to entrap the culprit?), and even more fun to experience what it was like to throw herself into a role in a narrative, instead of providing the ideas behind the narrative.
All in all, Flopsy admitted, it was far better all around that she had gotten out of there before she had gotten too deep into the role.
For a moment, Flopsy wondered if the grey council she had grown up with, the decisive group of twelve whose decisions had shaped her growth and character, would have been quite so willing to go along with an alien narrative. That wasn't fair, she told herself. They were under the thumb of a narrative they had chosen, for good or for ill, and that it was now going all wrong left them much more vulnerable to a new narrative. Hopefully together the story cooked by Harey and Hopert would be enough to keep them curious about what had happened to the poor old sergeant.
Of course, the thing about murder mysteries was that they tended to end by revealing the murderer and his motive, and Flopsy desperately wished that wouldn't happen.
Flopsy shook off her remaining concerns. Now she was done the first part of what she could do, and it was time for her to go give the detective a hand. Promising to send her at least something to go on, Earry had told her to check by her team's usual location, the little alcove third from the back on the right-hand wall of the plot bunnies' large meeting space.
A surprisingly large rabbit filled the alcove, and Flopsy stumbled as she recognised the dam who had watched over her during Flopsy's own development from plotlet kit into full-fledged plot bunny.
Of course, if no more plotlet kits were becoming grown, what would she have to do?
But how had Earry known which had been Flopsy's dam?
“Mama,” Flopsy greeted with her deepest crouch for the bunny with the coarse but very clean fur, and withheld her whiskers from quivering with emotion. She hadn't visited her dam in years.
“Flopsy dear,” Mama replied – all the dams were known as Mama, for together they were the mothers of all the plot bunnies. She rubbed her whiskered cheek against the top of Flopsy's head, just as she had done before Flopsy became a plot bunny in her own right, and despite herself Flopsy's whiskers vibrated.
“Mama, how did Earry know you were my dam?” she asked, wondering at the comfort she took in that half-remembered domesticity from her youth.
The big black bunny laughed and laughed, a hoot completely at odds with the comfortable and comforting Mama. “Oh dear,” Mama said, then burst into hoots again. “Dear Flopsy,” she said finally. “Did you think you were the only plotlet kit I mothered? I was his dam too.”
“Oh,” said Flopsy.
“Earry asked me to teach you one of our secrets, dear,” Mama told her. “We dams have always been able to keep track of our plotlet kits, because we have the greatest talent for this work, but any old plot bunny can do it to track another plot bunny inside Bunniption Base once she knows the narrative. Earry said you knew his, yes?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Think of the narrative, then – the special quirk that differentiates his own from anyone else's – have you got it?”
Flopsy thought carefully. Earry had told her that his was a spy story, with a strong surveillance focus (of course, given those ears of his, she had thought), but had told her more, more than any rabbit usually told even his closest friends. That narrative quirk was almost the same as a trade secret, and she had been both surprised and touched when Earry had told her his – but she had not told him hers. She hadn't been ready for that.
Focus, she scolded herself. She was far too scatter-brained.
Earry's narrative was a semi-typical good-guy-versus-bad-guy story, with the spy always the good guy, and the spy always winning. What made Earry's narrative unique was that the bad guy always knew who the spy was from the very beginning and was always able to exploit the spy's biggest vulnerability, but that some third party who had fallen in love with the spy over the course of the story somehow saved the day.
With this in mind, Flopsy thought fondly of Earry, picturing him as a spy with big beautiful ears – but before she could continue, to find her own obvious place in that story, her ears stiffened in shock.
“And I didn't even have to tell you step two,” Mama said approvingly.
Flopsy could feel where Earry was, knew the exact direction in which to head to get to him. It was like... a tingle, in her ears and her whiskers and even her nose and tail.
But she also knew, with absolute and sudden certainty, that he was in trouble.
“Mama -” she gasped. “Mama, I have to go.”
Flopsy quickly bumped her head against her Mama's, then bounded through the wall, straight towards where her heart knew she could find Earry.
The Night of Writing Dangerously.
With a soft brown bunny cradled in her arms, Patricia stood on California near the corner with Montgomery, in San Francisco, very close to Market Street and the Port building. She eyed the gold lions decorating the building with appreciation. They had a pure clear elegance that she found soothing after a long day of sightseeing that had, she admitted, been a touch overwhelming.
She had started with Chinatown, which was probably for the best as, after a couple of hours, her brain had decided that everything was just too much: too many sounds, too many sights, too many people. Patricia had in one moment turned from wide-eyed wonder to yawning desire for sleep, but had thankfully been able to find a cab close by and had returned to her hotel room for a long nap – which had been strange. She still wasn't sure, for it had been faint and almost forgotten by the time she woke, but she felt that Alfalfa had been talking to someone while she slept, and she had caught the edges of that conversation.
Nothing had been particularly clear. She had understood Alfalfa far more than the other voice – perhaps due to her familiarity with the brown bunny. “She is a storyteller – she must be the one to tie everything together,” she had heard, and had warmed to the protectiveness in his voice, somehow certain he was talking about her. Storyteller, he had called her, and in her dream-like state she had felt suddenly more confident in her creative capacity. “Plot bunnies can only add complications, not end them – we need her,” he said later, louder, clearer, as if arguing, and then his voice had subsided into a softer, more persuasive tone, before fading from her awareness altogether. She had dreamed of Alfred, afterwards, and drifted into a warm and happy nest of nothing.
She had woken fully refreshed, wondering what Alfalfa had meant, but too pumped for getting out and about again to sit still long enough to discuss it with him. Besides, she felt like she had been eavesdropping, so instead she tucked the information into the back of her brain, and went to Pier 39 and enjoyed some delicious fish, then took another cab to the tea shop Alfalfa had requested she visit in Ghirardelli Square – where she also had quite a few delightful little chocolates. The intense darks were divine, and she had bought a big box of them to share with May and Laura. The rest of the time there had been even more uneventful than the previous night's trip to the tea shop in Mission, without even a single plot bunny sighting, but she had managed to get quite a bit more done on her murder mystery. She had already started tying up the loose ends, and hoped to finish the story – and the 50,000 word count – in the next few days. In fact, she rather suspected that if tonight's event went smoothly, she would be able to finish it tonight – before the had left Vancouver and her desktop computer she had done a check of her digital word count and had been over 42,000, probably thanks to all the writing she had done during her carrot-crazed phase, and had already written nearly 4,000 more words, by her rough count of her hand-written notes.
After the brief sojourn in the coffee shop, Patricia had returned to her hotel room and dressed herself up for the evening, topping her black dress and pearls with the pillbox hat – the Night of Writing Dangerously was Film Noir themed, so she felt it was only appropriate that she wear the hat inspiring her own Film Noir novel.
Alfalfa had asked her to bring him with her to the event, but she didn't want to carry a huge cage in with her, and he had indicated that he would behave himself, at least before they got to the ballroom, so she had just picked him up. She had space in her bag as well – it just carried her wallet, two notebooks, assortment of pens, and keys to her hotel room – but for now she was happy to carry him. He was soft and light and, Patricia thought appreciatively given San Francisco's chill air and brisk wind, he was warm.
Still, staring at the beautiful building in which the evening's festivities were to take place, Patricia shivered from more than just the cold. There was no way the plot bunnies would let a night like this, of such importance to the novelists and their leaders in the Office of Letters and Light, pass unmolested. She no longer harboured any doubts about the plot bunnies' malevolent intent.
Well, standing out here wouldn't solve anything.
Patricia shifted one hand free from Alfalfa's fluff, pushed upon the door, entered the lobby, and punched for the elevator.
“Ready, Alfalfa?” she asked the bunny, and he signalled yes. She set him down on the elevator floor, and tried not to look at him as the arrival ding sounded and the doors opened onto the 15th floor.
Two tuxedoed waiters greeted the arriving elevator with trays of what looked like martinis and ... red martinis with lime instead of olive. Patricia shook her head; it had been many years since she had had martinis with Alfred, and tonight she needed to keep her wits about her.
Instead, she headed to the coat check at the back of the lobby, handing over her wool coat and looking out the window at the breathtaking view of the city her position on the 15th floor provided.
“Hello there,” a young woman dressed in a fedora and a grey tweed suit with a black under-vest and one of the red drinks in her hand said to Patricia as they both moved away from the coat check and towards the group of people congregating around the couches by the closed door that seemed to promise the evening's excitement – once the staff were ready for all the novelists. “I'm Cait.”
“Hi Cait, I'm Patricia,” she answered with a smile. “Are you from these parts?”
“Sort of – I live up near San Jose, which is a bit of a drive, but not too far,” Cait answered. “How about yourself?”
“Vancouver, in Canada,” Patricia said. “I've never actually been this far from British Columbia before. Yesterday was my first plane flight – I'm so excited to be here.”
“How exciting! Did you come down just for this?” a man from the near edge of the group they were approaching asked, having overheard Patricia's comment. He was dressed in jeans and a NaNoWriMo t-shirt, with large brown frames on his glasses. “I'm Tom, by the way,” he added, holding out his hand to shake Patricia's.
“Hi Tom,” she said, shaking his hand. “Yes, I did come down for this. I realised this month that I haven't been so excited about anything, or been so creative, since my husband died four years ago, and I wanted to show my appreciation for the sheer exuberance of the whole thing and maybe get to meet some of the people who make it happen.” Patricia had decided it would be wiser not to tell anyone here about what she suspected about the plot bunnies, and if she kept quiet about her forum name perhaps no one would connect her with that appeal either. She didn't want to draw attention to herself in case the plot bunnies were listening in on the conversation, gathering the means to bring the whole gathering that night to a halt.
“How about you, Tom?” asked Cait. “Where are you from?”
“I just live on the East Bay,” he said. “This is my second year coming to the Night of Writing Dangerously, and I'm even more excited tonight than I was last year – my novel isn't exactly going swimmingly, and I'm hoping that tonight I can get some inspiration from the people I speak with. So Patricia,” he grinned at her. “I might have to put someone on their first flight in my novel. Tell me about your experience!”
Patricia smiled and allowed herself to be drawn into the conversation – surely the plot bunnies would leave them to converse into a sense of security and community before they pounced – and these seemed like such fascinating people- she began to tell Cait and Tom about the lightning striking her plane the day before.
The double doors opened and a tall dark-haired woman in a long black gown stepped through, throwing her arms extravagantly wide: “Welcome to the 2010 Night of Writing Dangerously!”
She stepped aside and waved the novelists past her into a zone of red velvet curtains and lush gold decorations. There were tables for signing in, and Patricia joined the line for the K-P crowd.
“Knox, Patricia, k-n-o-x,” she spelled for the pretty girl in the steampunk goggles who sat behind the table. Not exactly Film Noir, thought Patricia, but quite striking, and thanked her with a smile as she checked Patricia off her list.
Patricia followed the crowd past another entrance draped in red velvet and entered the gold-gilted ballroom. It was fabulous, she thought, unable to produce any more descriptive adjectives, and she allowed the press of people behind her to push her in amongst the maze of tables and chairs.
“Here, Patricia,” she heard a voice call, and turned to see Cait pointing to a chair. “Come and sit with us,” the fedora-topped young lady invited.
“Oh, thank you, Cait,” Patricia said gratefully and settled into the indicated chair.
The table was near the edge of the ballroom, on the left side up near the stage but out of the way enough to offer a good view of the whole space. Patricia found it much easier to take in everything now that she was sitting down, and she took a good long look around.
No sign of Alfalfa, which was a good start, she thought, but she had a lot of other things to see without looking for a single small moving brown furry creature. There were the people, of course, a mosaic of different colours and textures and movement and conversation. There were the tables, in matching maroon tablecloths and shiny stars, beneath gold-hued chandeliers. There was another table in the centre of the room, surrounded by space rather than chairs, which was covered in brightly-coloured bowls and tubs. She wondered what was in them, and as if in reply she heard Cait ask someone else at the table, “Have you checked out the candy buffet yet?”
Patricia couldn't hear the reply, but she nodded in understanding of the bright multi-coloured contents of the centre table.
Near to her own table, only a few feet from the far side of Patric'ias seat, a small stage was set up, perhaps 18 inches high, with a podium and a microphone set up at its front. Patricia wondered what the cowbell on the podium was for – perhaps announcing dinner?
Behind the stage was a large gold-framed fireplace, crowned by a gold owl.
The space was indeed decadent, Patricia thought, and turned to greet her tablemates.
The novelists hadn't even all finished sitting down and setting up their laptops when Patricia saw a petite woman in a sleek red dress and a black silk flower in her blonde hair scurry up onto the stage, grasp the cowbell firmly, and ring it twice quickly overhead. She stood on the stage grinning giddily and dancing from foot to foot until – moments later – the tall woman who had opened the ballroom doors swept up onto the stage, beaming.
“We have our first winner of the evening!” the woman said into the microphone after a brief conversation with the lady in red. “Claire of Santa Barbara has just crossed the 50,000 word victory line!”
Everyone, even the many people with their heads tucked under the tablecloths looking to plug their power cables in, erupted with applause and catcalls.
“Now for the rest of us, should we manage to reach the same lofty heights this evening, come and ring the cowbell and I'll be right up to congratulate you and give you,” her eyebrows waggled and her voice suddenly became more mysterious, “your winner prizes!”
The two women left the stage, heading for some piles Patricia couldn't quite see in the back corrner. She smiled at the room's enthusiasm, and began writing in her own notebook.
Flopsy was pacing.
She never paced: it was far too clear an indication of nervousness, and one never knew when someone was watching unseen.
Now, however, she was in her own carefully spelled and protected base, the head administrative office in the basement of the ferry building, where no humans would enter for at least another day, as the main administrative officer was on vacation until December 1. The outer office was more than sufficient for the needs of the rest of the staff.
As for other threats, she was guarded by Harey and Hopert, in whose skills she had unparalleled faith thanks to over a year of working closely with them, as well as Earry, whose ears had proven themselves time and time again. She felt safer than she had since she had become a full-fledged plot bunny, ironic given the danger that was giving rise to the nervousness that caused her to pace. In other words, she felt safe, and so was able to show how scared she was.
She felt for a moment guilty that she had never felt this safe when it had been Harey, Hopert and Alfalfa who were watching over her, and she suppressed – again – a desire that Earry would be allowed to remain on her team after this was all over.
Of course, when this was all over, either things would be quite different than they had been before, or Flopsy was unlikely to have a team at all. Either way, Earry's assignment was unlikely to coincide with her own. She felt an irrational desire to blame Alfalfa, and she scolded herself for it again. This was not his fault, nor was it his fault that she was feeling more than team-based interest in Earry, and blaming him only meant she wasn't dealing with the situation.
Flopsy flipped her ears in irritation and forced herself to sit still. She wished there was something left for her to think about, but there wasn't. No more planning, no more organising, no more figuring things out. There would be more to do soon – possibly more than it was possible to get done – but not yet. Still, she couldn't help herself reviewing what had happened so far in her head.
The message had come in from Bun-Bun almost an hour previously.
The note, directed to Earry via Bunniption Base, wasn't very long: it simply said “op ears go”. Flopsy hoped desperately that none of the elder archetypes or their helpers had read it, but even more that they had decided it was just a note between friends and not something more sinister. Still, both Bun-Bun and Earry were operatives of the elder archetypes themselves, which meant that they tended to have quite a bit of leeway and trust from their compatriots – she hoped. Perhaps they would think that there was some sort of collaboration in the taking down of Flopsy's team in the works, for she had agreed with Earry that it was a good idea to let the higher ups know that Alfalfa had been spotted in San Francisco. If nothing else, it gave them an excuse to communicate – and it also gave both Flopsy and Earry an excuse to hop back to base, because from there they could travel quickly to San Francisco. Finding Alfalfa was still listed as their primary mission. At least, that's what the official listing said; Flopsy guessed that Earry's primary mission was actually to watch her.
So far, so good, for getting them an excuse to head up, then. Bun-Bun's message meant that he had reported Alfalfa and that he was ready to support the next stage. Flopsy was still trying to work the details out for that. She was sure that there was something critical in the assignment Alfalfa's human had given to that other human boy, the one who was writing the plot bunny army. While she was relieved that the woman had not told him to simply destroy the whole plot bunny army, for she had no idea how much hopeless destruction that would have wrought amongst her people, Flopsy was unsure what kind of message to take from it, or how to work it into her own plans.
Obviously the human thought there was some way for plot bunnies and humans to be aware of each other and somehow work things out. Flopsy supposed that her interaction with Alfalfa had fuelled or at least influenced that impression, and found herself scared by the level of hunger it woke in her: she wanted her human partners to know that she was there, working with them on the creative endeavours that they so enjoyed. She wanted them to know that they weren't alone.
She also wondered if it might make some of them less likely to simply abandon projects in the middle – but she wasn't about to bank on it.
Besides, that was for the future, for after something was worked out, if anything could be worked out.
They had to deal with the elder archetypes first, and that meant finding some way to access them, some way to exploit their vulnerability, and some way to ensure that the vampire did not get lost in the fray.
Flopsy had several ideas for that, but none that she was sure would work. She didn't have a vampire narrative of any sort, and – strange – most of the bunnies she had known who did had died the previous year at the end of NaNoWriMo.
Actually, she thought, that was extra strange, for vampire stories were really big in the human world. There should be more plot bunnies around who focused on them – but no, of course not, she realised, and her ears flopped forward in bitter amusement. The vampire had already been in a position of power, and of course he would have had the ability to get rid of competition for his nourishment. She supposed that, now that he was no longer finding his own brain carrots, nourished as he was by Bunniption Base's collection mechanisms, he had made some sort of arrangements (or had simply manipulated them, as there was no guarantee that any particular type of plot bunny be smarter than the average, and she guessed that he would have killed off any that were more likely to compete or to question) to ensure that their power reinforced his own invulnerability. She knew that different stories held different to different qualities and characteristics, and Flopsy supposed that the vampire would only have allowed bunnies to continue to serve who had the right sort of descriptions. That way, even if the vampire didn't alter their nourishment uploads to the Base, the re-telling of their stories would reinforce the qualities in himself that he valued most highly.
Flopsy shivered. How was one little plot bunny supposed to stand up to him? she wondered, unconsciously crouching in on herself, making herself small.
“Flopsy?” Earry's voice broke into her reverie. “Are you okay?”
Right, she thought. She had allowed herself to feel safe and secure, but had forgotten that she still needed to maintain enough self-control to provide a front for the boys. She blinked her eyes open.
“Yes, I'm fine,” Flopsy said, but chose not to add too many obvious body language cues to make that point – Earry would respect her decision to lie more if she chose to make it as flat as possible.
He nodded, and swivelled his ears back towards the rest of the world. She twitched her ears in appreciation, and let herself settle her weight back onto her haunches.
It was almost time, she realised, and she hoped once more that they had been able to get enough power in Harey and Hopert for what they were about to do. Alfalfa's human had definitely helped, for Alfalfa was right: she was a complete powerhouse. But worrying about power was just an excuse not to think about the plan itself. Flopsy shuddered. She did not like this part, nor did she like the uneasy feeling that Earry had already crossed this line. Not only had he suggested it, he simply hadn't been appalled enough.
She didn't have time to slide down that slope again. It was time for her to be team lead.
Flopsy hopped over to Hopert's perch, part-way through the wall between the office and the front administrative area.
“You ready, Hop?” she asked, leaning towards him in a rare display of physical affection, letting her nose brush the fur of his neck.
He flicked his ears in what was normally amusement, but the gesture was stiff, and she softened even more, knowing that he had just shown her what Earry had not: Hopert was very uncomfortable with the idea of his role in this mission. But he was on her team, and he had more discipline than pretty much every other plot bunny Flopsy had ever come into contact with.
“You betcha, Flops,” he said, with nearly his usual bravado.
She flicked her whiskers at him. “I'm counting on you, Hopert,” she said seriously, then waved her ears in mock panic. “You're step one in this plot, and then I'm going to need you to keep your wits about you out here. Who knows what might happen without me here to keep an eye on it?”
“Yes,” Hopert said darkly. “Or what that Harey might do with all that power he'll be hanging onto.”
Her ears twitched involuntarily. “Don't let being my deputy go to your head, Hops! Harey might have some good suggestions.”
“Yes, and all of them will have you upset with us the minute you get back,” Hopert twitched his ears in imitation of hers. “So I'll only use the ones that I can pretend were my ideas.”
She laughed. “Good hunting, Hops,” she told him, and gave him a half-crouch, which he returned in full. Good ol' Hops... Flopsy left him and went to Harey's vantage point upstairs, where he was curled in a pillar. The boys were putting to good use their practice hiding from San Francisco: even plot bunnies tended not to notice people who were in the middle of objects physical to humans.
“Hey Hare,” Flopsy greeted him, touching his cheek with her nose as she had done with Hopert.
“Flops,” he answered. “All clear so far.”
“Good,” she said softly. All business. The clearest sign of worry she had seen from Harey yet. “Just don't steal a brain carrot out from under anyone else's nose and we'll get through this just fine,” she said, getting an ear twitch out of him – good. That had been his favourite prank – he'd nipped in neat as you please and taken a brain carrot almost from between the teeth of the top dog of the murder mystery world and Flopsy wondered if perhaps he had been assigned to her team so that she could give him the discipline he needed to know when that sort of thing was inappropriate.
Of course, most of their bureaucrat types thought it was never appropriate, but Flopsy thought there was a time and a place for everything. Especially when her team was under stress.
“But maybe you could do a little sanctioned pranking against Alf when we all get back together, hm?” Flopsy murmured. “After he's gone and put us through all this trouble...”
Harey perked right up. “Oh, I know just the thing! If I -”
“Don't tell me, Hare!” She interrupted. “How am I supposed to feign innocence if I know what was supposed to happen?”
His ears flicked and she relaxed a bit. He was tense, sure, but he'd be alright. “Okay Hare. Keep an eye on Hop, and make sure the story holds, right?”
“Sure Flops, you got it.”
“Happy hunting,” she said, tickled his whiskers with hers, and hopped back through the floor to the administrative room.
“You need a pep talk too, Ears? You probably heard those two already,” she wrinkled her nose at the white bunny seated in the administrative officer's chair as if he worked there, head cocked, ears open.
“Thanks Flopsy, I'm alright,” he said absently. “Sounds like the sarge might be coming a bit early.”
“Are you sure?”
Of course he was. She took a deep breath. No time to back out, no time to change the plan, no time to figure out what she should have done instead of this betrayal of her people... no, she told her brain, and wished her emotions would listen to. She was helping her people. She was saving them. It was the sarge's boss who had betrayed them.
But it was she who would be labelled the traitor if she failed.
Flopsy breathed in again, one long slow inhale, and settled herself comfortably onto the mouse pad she'd been enjoying since she chose this office.
Rhythmic hollow noises announced the sergeant's arrival. Flopsy wondered once again why had chosen that affectation – surely he, the primary intermediary between the elder archetypes and the mass of plot bunnies, needed no such heavy-pawed indications of authority. And surely there was something that could be done about the white tufts, sticking in all directions like that – surely the elder archetypes would be willing to help him out with those, for from what Earry said it would only take a minor use of the power from Bunniption Base – but it was a waste of energy that did nothing to consolidate their power, so of course it would never happen.
Again Flopsy scolded herself: now she was focusing on trivialities when she needed to be alert.
Flopsy crouched deeply in greeting.
“Flopsy,” the grey tufted rabbit greeted, offering the barest hint of a crouch in return, and she tried not to bristle at the insult.
“Sergeant,” Flopsy replied.
“Earry,” the sergeant added as an aside to the rabbit crouching on the chair a level below the two leads, but did not wait for a reply.
“Flopsy, your team has been found delinquent,” the sergeant started in on her. “The elder archetypes gave you an order,” he spat the word. “You may not have intended to disobey, but whatever your intent, you and your team failed.
“It's not the third week of November, three quarters of the way through our mission – a mission of vital import to the livelihood, no, the very survival of our people – and you have failed to find your lost little lamb,” the sergeant half-shouted in his parade ground voice, and Flopsy wondered how Earry handled the sergeant's volume in his sensitive ears. Focus, she told herself. “You know how much that little lamb knows about this mission and about our strategies and tactics – you know how much damage he could do to our cause and our people if he were to be captured, or worse, if he betrayed us to the novelists.”
The sergeant glared at Flopsy, tufts of hair seeming to strive for threatening angles. Flopsy felt a moment's amusement at them, as she always did, but the amusement disappeared instantly as she remembered her own plan. She tried to look contrite and not sorrowful, but it was hard.
“Now, the powers that be still like you, harvest knows why,” said the sergeant, continuing his patentable eyeball technique. “So they think you should know: your little lamb has been spotted in San Francisco.”
“Alfalfa?” Flopsy gasped, with every sign of shock. “What a relief!”
“Hah!” snorted the sergeant, full of derision. “You may wish he hadn't turned up – the elder archetypes have put Bun-Bun on his case, exactly because he may have become a weapon against us, and I know Bun-Bun well. He'll have no mercy for your little lost lamb. A word of advice,” he said, his ears twisting into a caricature of amusement as his tufts of hair took on newly divergent lives of their own. She was reminded of a poster she had seen once of a human sergeant with a huge cigar poking out one side of his mouth and a leer taking over his face. She had thought it ridiculous then, but she had not yet seen the sergeant at that point. “You just figure out a ay to get your little lamb back before Bun-Bun finds him.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, as he paused as if expecting a reply.
“That is all, team lead Flopsy,” he dismissed her,emphasizing her title with the clear meaning that he doubted she would keep it much longer, and bounded out through the door, Flopsy hurriedly crouching in case he looked back, but already turning to Earry as she did so.
“The boys will be busy some hours yet,” Flopsy said loudly, hoping to catch the sergeant's ears as he eavesdropped on the first words said after his departure, as he always did. “Are you up for a short hop to San Francisco, Earry?”
“Always, ma'am,” the white bunny replied, only the glint in his eye indicating that the subservience might be for show. “I just need to report in to the elder archetypes on our way.”
“Of course,” she said, shaking her head at the glinting amusement, and the two bounded through the narrative divide into Bunniption Base.
Flopsy spared a moment's thought for Harey and Hopert – they had the toughest part, and without it she and Earry would be unable to put their own part in motion.
The only window they had was the length of Earry's report to the elder archetypes. They had spent the past few days elongating that window, with Flopsy helping Earry devise excuses to delay returning to Bunniption Base, and both of them hoping that the delay would increase suspicion of her and encourage the greys to ask more questions – especially since Earry would make it clear that she was in a hurry, and that he himself was willing to stay to answer questions as long as they were asked.
The careful planning on that part meant that they created the exact current situation: Flopsy with nothing to do outside the elder archetypes' tower, obviously impatient, obviously fretting.
She was fretting much less over what others might assume, however. She knew exactly what Alfalfa was doing in San Francisco, or at least, she knew as much as she needed to know. Flopsy hoped he was successful but knew that her own part needed to be complete in order to support him. Instead, she was fretting, and this time she had no team to protect her vulnerability, so every sign she gave had to signal concern over Alfalfa, and not over Harey and Hopert, nor over herself or her people.
She could only hope that she would be able to do something – anything – before she started pacing. Not that the next part of the plan was any better than this, she admitted, but at least then she had a role to play besides looking anxious to get moving.
Flopsy let her ears twitch once, and prayed to the harvest that none of her fears about what could go wrong would actually happen to Harey and Hopert.
Thankfully the boys always did have excellent timing, and before she could work herself into a frenetic frenzy a small brown rabbit bounded into view from the human world. He was nearly identical to Alfalfa but for the patch of darker fur around his right eye – a pirate patch, the plot bunnies called them, and Flopsy wondered if his was real, for they were presently in style and quite a few plot bunnies had taken to dyeing their fur with the mark.
The plot bunny looked at her, where she sat crouched respectfully, waiting outside the elder archetypes' tower and sanctuary. She was sure she had given no offence that would justify his eyeing her with such suspicion, but she refused to react. The plot bunny, with no indication of respect or acknowledgement of her presence, bounded past her into the building.
So it was done, she thought, and prayed to the great garden plot for Harey, Hopert, and herself.
No going back.
She forced herself to remain calm, despite the erupting turmoil within her.
“Flopsy?” Earry's voice broke into what was turning into a bout of self-loathing. “The elder archetpes request your presence, since you are so close.”
“Of course,” Flopsy said, then followed Earry's white form into the tower. She sensed his sudden tension as soon as he entered, but before she also noted its cause: there were only elevent grey rabbits waiting for them.
This was not according to plan.
“Your eminences,” Earry broke the silence before it stretched too far, and Flopsy shook herself into a deeply respectful crouch.
“As requested, I have brought Flopsy, my team lead, before you. Now I must crave a boon of you – the news we have heard came as a great shock, for the sergeant trained me personally, and I would beg of you time to collect my thoughts... and perhaps to begin querying my sources.” He paused, crouching more deeply. “As Flopsy and I came directly here after the sergeant spoke to us, I understand that she is a sensible place to start, but I assure you she had no part in this.” Flopsy's eyes softened as he defended her to the greys in a way that she was privileged to hear. “I have come to value her insight and would appreciate her input on what information I am able to gather, so perhaps you might expedit your discussion that she might join me.”
“We will ascertain the facts, Earry, and that will take as long as it may,” one of the grey rabbits replied. “But thank you for your report, your patience, and your input. You may go.”
Flopsy kept her breathing from changing pattern. The plan had called for both she and Alfalfa to distract the elders, all 12, until circumstances allowed Earry to take on the vampire. Since he wasn't here, of course he would leave to find him. Of course. It would probably even play more into the narrative he had shared with her... Flopsy nodded to Earry, a pit at the base of her stomach causing her suddenly to wonder if she had the capacity for this without him – but also knowing, deep down, that not only had she managed without him well enough all her life, but that this would actually strengthen her ability to draw power from her own narrative.
She had already been capitalizing on its power due to her perception of the grey elders as having betrayed and abandoned her people, but this more personal abandonment, necessary as it was, was far more direct and gave her proportionately more power.
Flopsy turned away from the white bunny, and as Earry bounded out of the tower, she crouched respectfully once more, bravely facing the eleven members of the plot bunny leadership.
Phew, Flopsy thought as she made her final bows to the elder archetypes and scooted out of their chamber. That was one of the strangest interrogations she had ever experienced, and she had experienced a few.
She paused, noting that she was still in the character that she had adopted from Harey and Hopert's novels: the hard-done police officer, chasing down the by-the-seat-of-his-pants detective – Earry. She had never been in an interrogation before. Her narrative was about overcoming adversity, for goodness' sake.
However, she had kind of enjoyed playing the role. It had almost been fun to stonewall the questions about who and what and why (especially why – were all investigators this obsessed over finding motive and keeping it to themselves until they were ready to entrap the culprit?), and even more fun to experience what it was like to throw herself into a role in a narrative, instead of providing the ideas behind the narrative.
All in all, Flopsy admitted, it was far better all around that she had gotten out of there before she had gotten too deep into the role.
For a moment, Flopsy wondered if the grey council she had grown up with, the decisive group of twelve whose decisions had shaped her growth and character, would have been quite so willing to go along with an alien narrative. That wasn't fair, she told herself. They were under the thumb of a narrative they had chosen, for good or for ill, and that it was now going all wrong left them much more vulnerable to a new narrative. Hopefully together the story cooked by Harey and Hopert would be enough to keep them curious about what had happened to the poor old sergeant.
Of course, the thing about murder mysteries was that they tended to end by revealing the murderer and his motive, and Flopsy desperately wished that wouldn't happen.
Flopsy shook off her remaining concerns. Now she was done the first part of what she could do, and it was time for her to go give the detective a hand. Promising to send her at least something to go on, Earry had told her to check by her team's usual location, the little alcove third from the back on the right-hand wall of the plot bunnies' large meeting space.
A surprisingly large rabbit filled the alcove, and Flopsy stumbled as she recognised the dam who had watched over her during Flopsy's own development from plotlet kit into full-fledged plot bunny.
Of course, if no more plotlet kits were becoming grown, what would she have to do?
But how had Earry known which had been Flopsy's dam?
“Mama,” Flopsy greeted with her deepest crouch for the bunny with the coarse but very clean fur, and withheld her whiskers from quivering with emotion. She hadn't visited her dam in years.
“Flopsy dear,” Mama replied – all the dams were known as Mama, for together they were the mothers of all the plot bunnies. She rubbed her whiskered cheek against the top of Flopsy's head, just as she had done before Flopsy became a plot bunny in her own right, and despite herself Flopsy's whiskers vibrated.
“Mama, how did Earry know you were my dam?” she asked, wondering at the comfort she took in that half-remembered domesticity from her youth.
The big black bunny laughed and laughed, a hoot completely at odds with the comfortable and comforting Mama. “Oh dear,” Mama said, then burst into hoots again. “Dear Flopsy,” she said finally. “Did you think you were the only plotlet kit I mothered? I was his dam too.”
“Oh,” said Flopsy.
“Earry asked me to teach you one of our secrets, dear,” Mama told her. “We dams have always been able to keep track of our plotlet kits, because we have the greatest talent for this work, but any old plot bunny can do it to track another plot bunny inside Bunniption Base once she knows the narrative. Earry said you knew his, yes?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Think of the narrative, then – the special quirk that differentiates his own from anyone else's – have you got it?”
Flopsy thought carefully. Earry had told her that his was a spy story, with a strong surveillance focus (of course, given those ears of his, she had thought), but had told her more, more than any rabbit usually told even his closest friends. That narrative quirk was almost the same as a trade secret, and she had been both surprised and touched when Earry had told her his – but she had not told him hers. She hadn't been ready for that.
Focus, she scolded herself. She was far too scatter-brained.
Earry's narrative was a semi-typical good-guy-versus-bad-guy story, with the spy always the good guy, and the spy always winning. What made Earry's narrative unique was that the bad guy always knew who the spy was from the very beginning and was always able to exploit the spy's biggest vulnerability, but that some third party who had fallen in love with the spy over the course of the story somehow saved the day.
With this in mind, Flopsy thought fondly of Earry, picturing him as a spy with big beautiful ears – but before she could continue, to find her own obvious place in that story, her ears stiffened in shock.
“And I didn't even have to tell you step two,” Mama said approvingly.
Flopsy could feel where Earry was, knew the exact direction in which to head to get to him. It was like... a tingle, in her ears and her whiskers and even her nose and tail.
But she also knew, with absolute and sudden certainty, that he was in trouble.
“Mama -” she gasped. “Mama, I have to go.”
Flopsy quickly bumped her head against her Mama's, then bounded through the wall, straight towards where her heart knew she could find Earry.
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