Wonder Made

Twenty-Five, Part One

•••

Wondering why a creator never meets its creations? Thinking it might be fun to meet a character you created? Think again. Of what you've put that character through. The struggles, the insecurities, the miseries. You've written for them an inescapable, living hell because it's what sells, right? It's what gets you clicks, and reads and noticed. 

Cruel gods, that's how they would see you. So no, don't meet your creations. At the very least, it's awkward. Like sharing opposing political views over family dinner awkward.

Peneloper Auttsley, face to face with Captain Ire Stormholden, her Ire Stormholden, his fingers grasping her hoodie, his stare steadier and more singular and hot than she could have ever envisioned wants to run. In fact, the eldest Auttsley desires nothing more than to run, which, she could have done so, had her legs not reverted into sacks of melting Jell-O.

But she's steeled herself. Braced herself for the worst to come. And here it was, all two hundred pages shoved into a pair of shockingly - I mean, did she really write them that way? - tight trousers, his muscles bulging under a stained tunic. His anger raw and palpable.

He pushes her away and she manages to collect herself on the nearby foyer table, above which sits a mirror. Peneloper catches a glimpse of herself and feels drawn, as though invisible strings are tugging at her limbs and drawing her toward it.

She starts to think in fragments, all of which start with "I" and assert her feelings, all of which she's currently feeling so there's no real reason why she ought to be narrating them, other than shoddy writing.

Peneloper shakes her head. She will not monologue so late in the game. Monologues are for flatter characters with fewer dimensions. Ones whose own feelings confuse them for entire arcs.

No. She knows how she feels - caught off-guard, curious, amazed, and most of all, ashamed. She looks into the face of her story and recognizes the scars - the ones from the war, from the Scarlet Reef, competing pirates, a few fingernail slashes from a scorned mermaid. She spies the burn mark on his neck, from when his father had been too drunk and accidentally splashed scalding hot water on his then not yet eight-year-old son.

Peneloper had written all that tragedy and here it was, walking, talking, breathing. Pissed off. She can't blame him. Stormholden has every right to hate her.

The captain, meanwhile, feels complicated. More complicated than he ever has. For he's always seen the world in stark black and whites and here was the devil that plagued him from his first breath and would see to his destruction upon his very last and she is small. Thin. Malnourished perhaps.

A curly mop of dark brown hair and eyes the color of deep water. The kind where the stars reflected in the ocean's surface the best, but that also grew rowdy and vengeful when the weather soured.

A child. His creator, his tormentor, his undoing, within his grasp, and she is, unlike Gideon, not frightening in the least as far as first impressions went.

This silent reunion displeases Gideon as he expected something more exciting, more fruitful, to come out of the introduction. Slipping back into the state of being which causes the most destruction - that of boredom - he claps the Cap's shoulder.

The chapter, that'd been waiting, bound to a chair and seated around the Auttsley's kitchen table, shimmies free of its binding and comes into the room. It breathes out, as it knows what comes when a heroine meets her story's antagonist - conflict.

In fact, so late in the game, it's Conflict, the capital "C" important, intentional. It sags its corners and braces, for Gideon's storm has finally met its match, even if he remains ignorant. Gideon will learn. In stories, the best characters always learned.