Mellisande threw open the door to the small rented room above the tavern and unbound her hair with a sigh. [...] She had most of the main conflict, if she could figure out what made Allyra suddenly human, and turned the giant with all his demanding questions into a villainous enemy set on stopping Peter and Allyra from escaping... something. The bottom line was that the story was there, she just needed to do some thinking that would bring it within arm's reach so she could write it!
[...] The young librarian flopped on the creaky, lumpy bed and began scribbling her notes with a pencil in a small book of blank pages.
The fact that she was so frequently dreaming of a carnival setting had to carry some significance--but how to get Peter to a carnival? Perhaps one visited the town where he lived? Such a thing was not out of the ordinary in Crossway--about a dozen or so caravans regularly made the circuit from one end of the country to the other, each having a different composition of acts.
[...]
Mellisande whirled back to the bed and picked up her pencil and notebook. "Fawkes", she wrote, picturing a man with thick whiskers, sly and cunning as a fox, with a boisterous attitude and thick hands. Along with him was a narrow-faced, keen-eyed woman she named "Kitt", a fresh-faced young damsel with wide emerald eyes who loved fancy dresses and clean and pretty things, and generally spent most of her time gossiping, spreading rumors, and listening closely to the things people revealed about themselves. She had no idea how these two would interact with Peter, and whether they'd actually be a help or a hinderance, but Mel had been writing for long enough to know that once her ideas started to take shape, the story itself tended to fall into place fairly quickly.
She wrote in spurts, some parts going quickly, some needing quite a bit of thinking before she could come up with a suitable answer. The giant definitely presented a considerable conflict for Peter to overcome, but it didn't take long for Mellisande to decide that he wasn't going to be the main villain, there was someone more important, more powerful, working behind the scenes, controlling the chaos swirling around the intrepid heroes.
Her eye fell on the pile of papers that were all of her early drafts for the swan story, which went into great detail describing the wizard responsible for transforming the princess, a dark, bearded man with a rich cloak trimmed in gold, and a harsh, raspy voice. In her mind's eye, Mel thought about the cloaked wizard in the context of this strange, inescapable carnival, and ever so slightly, the wizard's appearance shifted into a round-faced, man with frizzy silver hair, a large smile, and a shiny black top-hat. Mellisande smiled and noted in her book Wizard = Ringmaster. Yes, a magical wizard as the master of a "freak-show circus" where he displays a variety of strange and bizarre creatures... Someplace that would definitely be interested in procuring a mermaid.
[...]
"That's it," Mel said aloud to herself in the empty room. "That's the story." She sat at the small, rickety table and pulled out her quill and inkwell. At the top, she wrote the title of her story, Peter and The Carnival, by M. Sande. The characters came to life under her pen, the words streaming from her hand to the page with relative ease. [...]
Peter stood to the side as the crowd dispersed, she wrote, wringing his hands and staring up at Allyra, who frantically darted from one end of the tank to the other, searching for some means of escape.
"Ain't that a sight?" grunted a voice next to him.
Peter glanced over to a burly man in a round bowler hat and a long trenchcoat, who appeared next to him from out of the shadows. The stranger had already noticed something in Peter's gaze, and he said, "This wouldn't happen to be a friend of yours, would it?"
Peter could only nod at first. When he found his voice, he said, "I met her in the water. She saved my life long ago. I would very much like to return the favor, only I'm not sure how!"
Bowler-hat Man chuckled, his bushy beard bristling in the light of the lanterns. "Well, you're in luck, kid! I happen to be in the business of figuring out tricky situations."
Peter blinked. "You would help me? But I don't even know who you are."
The man grinned and stuck out a hand. "The name's Fawkes, kid. What's yours?"
Peter shook it, feeling the strength in the man's grip, and watching his dextrous fingers curl around his hand. "Peter; that mermaid up there, her name is Allyra."
"Charmed, Peter! Now see, we ain't strangers no more; let's go cause some mayhem!"
Mellisande wrote long into the night, as the sky darkened and a blanket of fog settled over the streets of Willemstone. By the time she'd introduced Kitt into the mix as the character who would provide the diversion for Fawkes and Peter to be able to pull Allyra out of the tank (at which point she could effectively shed her tail and walk with them), her eyelids were beginning to slip closed and her hand ached so much that she almost dropped her pen. But she smiled as she surveyed the pile of pages while massaging the pressure points in her palm. It was a start, for sure!
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