Reluctant heroes

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Not in a million years

  A few people have asked me about the unique world where Bella meets Jake. In the book, #3-Bella, there is quite a bit learned about the formation of that place. However, it is mostly from Bella’s viewpoint and from what she learns from casting her spells and interacting with the power-structures that hold the world together. There is no name for that world, although it does become known as Jake’s world, after he joins the Order and more people from there and other places in the multiverse visit it. The elves have a name for it, once they had discovered the lost tribe of their kin that had been moved there eons ago, but it is a long string of vowels and utterly unpronounceable.

  One might call that world Tapestry, as it is one of the Map-Worlds. A place, not a planet, that was constructed by several thousand wizards 1.3 Million years before the events told of in the SmallPowers sagas. It was constructed with an idealized notion of a mega continent with two great nations, one east and one west. In the east, kingdoms of men. And in the west a kingdom of elves. Along the north and south edges were vast mountain ranges for the dwarves and the goblins. Around it an endless ocean that grew more turbulent the farther you went from the single continent. Sailing, flying, or spells of travel would not permit you to delve farther than a few weeks away and get to the edges and see that the world ended very abruptly.

  It, the world, was the dream-world made real by the foundational wizards who constructed it, populated it, and set it in motion. And the dream was brilliant, for a very long time. But time does play its part, and time is a cruel master. For the first five hundred thousand years the place existed in the idealized framework envisioned by its creators. The kingdoms of men thrived, and generation after generation of them rose and fell in successions and cycles of both the great and the miserable. The elves, with the span of thousands, grew wiser and built great works of science and art that were unfathomable and enthralling. At some point, no one is quite sure when, but it was nearly the half million point, trolls emerged from the multiverse. With them came their sovereigns, the ogres. It has been suggested that the Titans had seen the place in their long treks through the multiverse and seeded a small colony of their pets. Others have said that the Titans, being evil, are delighted by sowing discord everywhere they go.

  All the while, mountains crumbled and mountains rose along the north and south edges, depositing an endless refilling of the central east-west valley. The spells that created the place grew stronger and led to another race evolving. The Kentmen spawned out of the wizardly people of men. Their skin became blue and they learned to revere the land itself. The other peoples did not like the looks of the Kent, nor did they like the direction in social forms that they took. They grew to be shamans, rather than wizards, and they also grew to hate the other races. Elves, men, dwarves, goblins, and ogres were destructive to the land. None of them loved the world, they all used it like it had no value beyond what they could wrest out of it to put in their purses and dominate with their armies.

  Another quarter million years would pass before anyone would notice that something had become a problem. Three quarters of a million years had passed since the creation, and there was a lack of any change, yet underneath there was stress building up. The creators, while wise and powerful they may have been, had not thought about how long the world would last and what pressures would build-up after thousands of years. What had been a center line of high hills midway between the east and west portions grew higher and then grew to mountains, distorting the whole structure. The lands of elves and men were soon, after a hundred thousand more years, were soon separated by a maze of new mountains. The dwarves found nothing to mine in these new mountains and the goblins found them to be too variable to build their homes among. The distortion was also reflected in the Kent, having emerged as a people of the world, the illness made them grow bellicose and violently antagonistic towards everyone else. Great wars between men, between elves, between all the races, filled the next hundred thousand years. History and social forms that had lasted for eons were ground into dust. Even the elves forgot the glorious past. Nine hundred thousand years of history were lost in that era. And all the while, the land grew more and more distorted, the end of the world was coming. Not quickly, it would be another three hundred thousand years before the stress pushed it all to the brink.

  A survey wizard of the Order would visit it, about the time the western half of the continent had also become pushed up to high mountains, and he would see that if something was not done soon this world would destroy itself and all the people perish. By the time the file made its way through the council of the wise the place was clearly past any hope of saving. However, Nepheron had an ace up his sleeve, Bella. She, and some fellow questing wizards, had saved a world that was said to be equally beyond the point of saving. And so, he sent her there. In part to learn more about worlds that were truly doomed, but also from an abstract feeling he had that her destiny, and that of the future of the Order, was tied to this world in some obscure way.

Riding towards doom.

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That's what she said.

The characters in the SmallPowers saga are quite diverse, and more than slightly strange.
Each of them have unique world-views and, for many of them, that view changes as time passes and the adventures bring new revelations. However, there are foundational attributes that reveal the inner motivations that drive each of them, and permits them to accomplish their purpose in life. That is helping save worlds from the horrors leading to the complete annihilation of universes. Non-existence is unacceptable, and they all strive to fend off the worst fates that can emerge in an infinite multiverse. This stridency can be noticed in the things they say. To that end, I have collected a list of key characters and a quote from each that illustrates this. I have also bolded the characters that star in a novel or short story, the others are supporting characters of importance.

Cindy: Stay behind me!

Squire Aresant: Don't get between the mage and the enemy!

Bella: I took them down too, in my own way.

Ronaldo: I am Ronaldo, of Faloncotte.

Sir Brendini: They didn't give me a chance, how many were there?

Manuel: Bloody hell!

Olivia: I think of the laws of the universe as recommendations.

Stella: I've been in one of those, it hurts, a lot.

Lakros: Horrid child, you should be beaten with sticks.

Grazzak: Good morning, is this an ambush?

Nepheron: Ultimate power is just the beginning.

Jake: Aye.

Goili: Come out with your hands up, or be dragged out with them chopped off, your choice.

Penta: There is evil, and then... there is me.

Hoonast: Good luck and bye!

Rock: To hell and back, it's what I do.

Beatrix: I didn't by this outfit to be out done by the wallpaper.

Rizz: Organization is the sign of a disturbed mind, and I am an expert at it.

Helmoz: They're administrators, they can't find their arses with a full committee to define what an arse is, and then they send someone else to find it.

Claire: Not in this bloody wind.

Kev: If it comes to that, I'll bring the boat-hook along with me this time.

The grand mistress: Total victory must be the sole objective of every member the Order.

Betkorn: ...lots and lots of sheep's blood.

Lorii: To battle!

Dash: After point three eight it is hard to tell the difference.

Bonny: Die more, you dick!

Ethan: Make one move and you all will regret it forever, twice.

Helga: I suggest you do as she says, she would do it, just to piss me off.

Jenny: Usually, they say 'urk'.

Fotlz and Tods: We came to kick the hell out -- All of it.

Of elves

The tales of elves are many and, as Thomas Keightley points out in his Fairy Mythology, they were originally of the same stature as those of men.
 As time progressed, and tales of the many denizens of fairyland were compressed and retold, they shrunk to match the size of gnomes. JRR Tolkien took the elder path and made his elves in the classic mode, as seen in the oldest of tales. As had Shakespeare, although he too included the small folk in the list. The modern view of elves is fragmented. Almost every fantasy story seems to redefine the size and nature of the elf kind. I chose to take a classical view of the elves, but at the same time assumed that there were more kinds of elves in the multiverse that reflect all the tales.
 There is a reason for this, and this entry. The next SmallPowers novel, the eighth in the saga, stars an elf of the stars. And here is a portion of the opening chapter of Lorii, which, with luck and persistence will be published and available for purchase very soon.

Chapter One: Rule and serve
It may be said that, the elves are not regular people.
 It is said, often, and often in disparaging terms. It is also said that, there are more kinds of elves than elves. Some are no bigger than your hand and some are taller than the people of men, they are very diverse in form. Elves, the size of men, of many worlds, seem to take on attributes that the people of men associate with groupings of elves. And names for them have been coined. Wood elves of the forests are generally spoken of as being one type, the unparalleled bowmen and deft masters of crafts of astounding beauty. The plains and meadows leading to another, and spoken of as sylvanian or meadow, the entrancing ring dancers and cunning cavalry of unworldly speed and devastation. Gray elves of the mists, wise with hidden lore and wielding powers beyond the ken of lesser-mortals, and the courtly dark elves above them, resplendent and aloof, unseen and unknowable. Those not of elves think they have an idea, by this grouping, of what elves are and do. But most of it is not very accurate, and yet, not wrong in many ways. Wood elves are seen in forests, tree covered hills, and sometimes in the mountain trees. Much of what they have is made of wood. The meadow elves are seen in the plains and steppe tending to horses and harvesting grain. The gray elves do spend a large amount of time in a place that is gray, but they are even more rarely seen than the others are. Still rarer, are the high elves.
 There are even more types of elves than that. Elves come in every shape and size. Some to the extent of designing themselves before they are even born, still others, the highest of the very high elves, before they make themselves. The elves known as the celestials, as some have spoken of them, are truly immortal and beyond explanation, but not to the point of obtuseness, they do manifest themselves and present a physical form. Participate in life and can create new life, or their own life again. Elves of the dark can do some of that, they are just slower and less able to fill in all the details, and reincarnation is less than reformation. Being flesh born, of elfmaiden and elflord, makes it a variable process, as it is for all that give birth. The very highest elves, however, may use the grotto. It is the sole privilege of the celestial that sets them apart from their peers of the dark. And much like the acceptance and reservations seen with in-vitro and ex-utero technologies, the elves vary in their opinions of the merits of it. Especially with the added result, of true immortality. Even a people as long-lived as the other elves are, they have some serious doubts about this idea. One aspect of that is that they use the grotto, which is where the dead go, their crypt, a repository to the remains of all of the greatest of them. Noble elves for the most part, but important elves of other tasks may have honour enough, to lay in state, and be absorbed into the gray-mist. The gray-mist being sort of an elvin limbo, although it is more like a walkway and abstract location between universes in practice. A generalized and infinite zone in between all the universes that they know about, a mushy, gray, and rather boring place. Inside it, eons and epochs in the past, some gray elves had constructed the grotto. A magical connection to all grottos, in each and every universe. And it has some awareness as a collective, as each grotto is constructed and endowed with essence, as needed by the gray elves, wherever any elves have migrated. The highest elves drift in and out of it with no regard for the slightly creepy aspect. It is as handy an emergence point as any other, and for the celestial, they don't see it as creepy. They see the grotto as a place of union, birth, and then reunion.
 It does set them apart in elvin society to some extent. The other noble and royal elves of the dark see them as being a tribe of their own, and as very useful political allies that can hold for longer than others may. There is great power in having someone alive who remembers the issues agreed on, in the past, firsthand. Continuity, of purpose and position, is preserved by a living being who had personal experience. Many elvin communities rely on the immortal elves to embody their history and culture. The pinnacle of their communities, and as such, the wood elves, the lords of elves, see them as more of the dark and their masters. They do think the use of the grotto is questionable and nearly necromancy, although they do know it is not. For the meadow, there is more, they know the stars, under the big dome free from branches. They understand the one part that makes the celestial elves truly special. They are of the stars, each of them is a particular one. Not to any design or intent, just it takes a lot of power and essence to keep yourself physically in time, and out of it, at the same time. Which star is not important in most ways, the nearest unclaimed in the universe that you wish to emerge into is what you attach on in the gray-mist when forming yourself. They don't really have much more than that, to make them that unusual, as elves go. The creation of new elves is one small thing that is unique, they are sterile and do not inter-breed with others of their kin. They hold hands, and each releases a portion of their essences into the mist at the base of their grotto, and that is that. Somewhere, in the gray-mist, it will settle and then emerge as a new celestial elf. When it wants to.

Magic Powers

In the small Powers multiverse there are many forms of magical power. Most magi speak of them as 'schools of magic'. And there are some kinds of magic for which there is no reference, other than a mage with a particular type of power. Cindy is one of those exceptions. She was born with an amazing level of power that seems to be unlimited, and of an unfathomable type, at least in the realms and universes known to the Order. Another with an unusual power base is Jake. He has a polymorphic ability to accomplish magical things with powers and energy that are not from any school of magic or from any sources of magic.
Most of the wizards of the Order are trained, or arrive with the ability, to cast spells from the elemental schools. Fire, Air, Stone, Water, and Energy. These are often very useful to a questing mage. Many have trained, or were born, as shaman. In the arts of prediction and revelations, the schools of metal as they are known, the wizards of the Order vary in their abilities and talents. The future, Brass, is one where there seems to be many places where it does not work well or at all, limiting its popularity. Of Iron, the present, there is wide usage, and the training wizards of the Order focus primarily on this school. Steel, the potential future, there are only a few who can command this power. The school of Gold, knowledge of the structure of things, is very rare. Rarer still is the school of Silver, the power to manipulate the structure of a universe. The school of Bronze might be the rarest, as manipulating the past calls for power that some have said that only the titans and gods have. There are several other schools of metal, and most of them are less useful for a questing wizard. The most complex schools include sorcery, bardics, and necromancy. The converse of those being drudics, geomancy, and augury. All of which have foundations in the elemental or metallic schools. There are many among the Order who study even higher forms of magic. Enchanters, illusionists, and theomages being the most well known of those.
In all, the wizards of the Order study as many of the various schools as they can. When faced with saving the world, they all quickly find out that it takes everything you can bring, and everything you can find in the place in peril, to accomplish the task.

Once upon a time, and yet, only the once.

In an Annamite saga a certain king wished to build a town on a site he had fixed upon. All at once a tree bearing an unknown foliage and strange flowers sprang up on the spot. It was determined to offer these flowers to the king; and sentinels were placed to see that no one plucked the blossoms. A rock still pointed out in the north of Annam was the home of a race of genii. A young and lovely maiden belonging to that race visited the tree, and was unlucky enough to touch one of the flowers and to cause it to drop. She was at once seized by the guards, but was released at the intercession of a certain mandarin. The mandarin's heart was susceptible: he fell in love with her, and, pursuing her, he was admitted into the abodes of the Immortals and received by the maiden of his dreams. His happiness continued until the day when it was his lady's turn to be in attendance on the queen of the Immortals. Ere she left him she warned him against opening the back door of the palace where they dwelt, otherwise he would be compelled to return home, and his present abode would be forbidden to him from that moment. He disobeyed her. On opening the door he beheld once more the outside world, and his family came to his remembrance. The Immortals who were within earshot drove him out, and forbade him to return. He thought he had only been there a few days, but he could no longer find his relatives. No one knew the name he asked for. At last an old man said: “There existed once, under the reign of I do not now remember what sovereign, an old mandarin of the name, but you would have some difficulty in finding him, for he has been dead three or four hundred years.” --Edwin Sidney Hartland

Time in the SmallPowers multiverse is a complex thing.
  As in seen all the great tales of yore, time does not pass the same from realm to realm. Who, other than some rather mad wizards of the Order, knows exactly what currents drive each universe's passage from beginning to end. In our universe, the question is equally difficult to ascertain. Many scientists and philosophers have found their assumptions and explorations incomplete. It has led to many proposing that time, and by that space, is infinite. An explanation that does not quite ring true to the mind. However, there are many things in universes that seem less than satisfactory to our minds. There are whole branches of mathematics and science that strike one as being nearly magical in their obtuseness and unfathomable complexities. Once grasping them, returning becomes much like the door of the immortals in the tale above.
  For the wizards of the Order there is but one concern, and that being the existence of a universe. The end of the world, and thereby the end of a universe, is the fate they wish to avert. Manufactured infinity in a sense. Perhaps that is why magicians in many culture's iconography are branded by the mark of infinity. The wizards of the Order might not get such, as they seek it and know every well that too many places are doomed to have nothing like it. Unless they can get there before the end, find a victory, and then slip off to seek the next place that is threatened by non-existence. Each story in the SmallPowers saga is a glimpse of what that takes, what it costs to them in mind and body, and what kind of person would be motivated to strive for infinity for everyone other than themselves. The price taken by fate and destiny for spoiling their plans is beyond infinite.

One world is not enough

In the SmallPowers multiverse, there are a host of worlds. At least one is in dire peril for each story. Each of the wizards called on to save the former come from another world. There are additional worlds that are bridging places for events before and after the primary stories, as well as places that are not worlds at all. Most of these worlds exist in universes that have limited contact with the other universes, beyond the wizards of the Order. However, the elves seem to wander between universes and to worlds within those universes, for their own reasons. Via a drab place between universes called the gray-mists. There are also other places, like the gray-mists, that span between universes. Hoonast, the ancient transport wizard, for example has built his wizard's keep in a space between a pair of universes. There is what is known as the 'cave of caves', which is a construction of time and space that links several hundred universes. And there are even zones outside of the concept of universes, such as the realm of Chaos. A self-aware entity that seems to have and be everything of every universe all mashed up and spread unseen all over the multiverse. There are even entities that look just like a planet, but are not exactly worlds.

There are a few worlds that are hot-spots of activity in the saga. Most have no names, other than 'the world', to the inhabitants. One that stands out is the home of the hillside caves that the Order has leased from a flock of fruit-bats. Other than the remarkably clever and avaricious bats, it is a rather plain and dull place in a suitably distant and obscure universe. Another spot is the world that is home to the high-tech barbarians that spawned a number of the more successful and important members of the Order. On it, other than a few locations and some general back-history, we get to see little more than the tropical island city of Hamilton. Home to Bella and Beatrix, and the rest of their family, including Stella and Olivia. In the upcoming novels there is another key world, that being the home to Penta and Bob. Their world is stuck in a feudal epoch and will, in time, become a major meeting and resting place for the questing-wizards of Order. Much as Hoonast's tower of gold and thorns has been among the transport-wizards for dozens of centuries.

Creating a list, maps or catalogues, of these places is not exactly necessary or of any help to readers. As it is the people that are much more interesting and important to look at in the SmallPowers stories.

Unedited Dreck

This comment, or castigation, seems to have been to be applied to all self-published fiction, and to a lesser extent non-fiction, since sometime around the late nineties. The SmallPowers saga is indeed unedited, and I would hope that it does indeed classify as dreck. Most pulp fiction, by definition, is dreck, and delightfully so. Stories full of tropes and obvious references, to a host of trends and ideas that have filtered into our collective memories, have remained popular throughout the history of publishing. Much to the dismay of pundits and social critics, since the very beginning of publishing. Yet, somehow, this derision has never stopped writers and readers from participating and even wallowing in what they call spurious and ill-conceived twaddle. Trashy romances to the mock-historical hack-n-slash and on to the turgid murder mystery, every one of them has been decried as being of no value and people should just stop reading them. And more importantly, authors should stop writing them. Of publishers, there the castigations seems suspiciously less strident. I would suggest this is due to the fact that most of the critics don’t want to end up unpublished themselves. All too many of them, in my opinion, could not exist without publishers and the tripe that has been published.

This leads back to the first part of the criticism, that being the unedited part. It is important to note that many of the publishers are themselves editors. The overlap is and has been quite large, and so is the overlap into the critics described above. As some of this wrath might be generated by the qualities of the material that a publisher must wade through, and yet, the quality and frequency of trash hurriedly stuffed onto shelves, in hopes of jumping a trending gravy-train, lends one to think some of that is mostly a reaction to being bypassed so effectively. Mark Twain, for example, ended up taking the self-publishing route as a reaction to the refusal of publishers to even consider many of his works. And what had been taken up was brutalised and reworked in such a way as to remove all of the parts he felt were the most important bits. Some of that was the insistence that grammar punctuation rules, as defined by that particular day and period, was, and still is in many ways, nearly a divine commandment. As though the same press that produce holy-books would somehow become defiled by the printing of a simple ain’t or an undashed damn. There also seems to be a trend among the publisher/editor crowd to reduce and remove simple words with the replacement of semicolons and colons. On one hand, as clear evidence of their heavy-hand. And on the other hand, a cost saving effort that, if applied with vigour, could save them from paying the author for mere conjugation. With a book, such methods can reduce the word-count by quite a bit. The length, and thereby pages consumed, is also reduced. Again saving a few coins, here and there. At the expense of clarity and desired qualities of the author.

The advent of cheap paper and now digital-book formats has thrown open the doors to whatever authors wish to present. And in whatever manner or style they wish to present it in. There has been an explosion of style, and an attending expansion of styles, that allows for more than a faux historical voice and small bits of racist patois. Venomous hip-hop to vulgar heathens, and on to nerds that cannot look at a semicolon without thinking it is the end of a statement in C, or some other programming language. Bring on the sporadic commas, Oxford for only half and run-on sentences to the end of the margins with the rest, fill your lines full of verbs irregular and contrived adverbs of purple, and be free to gerund every mother’s son. After all, the important bit is what is being said and whether the reader can find enjoyment in what an author has written.

What's it all about?

It is always difficult for an author to summarize their creations. More so when dealing with a collection, or sequence, of stories that span several universes, several dozen major characters, and nearly a thousand supporting characters. The SmallPowers saga is quite difficult to pin down as being about one theme or concept. That said, I can speak of each of them as being somewhat self-contained and rooted in a particular genre of pulp fiction. Here is a short and very general categorization.

Cindy: Fairy tale.

Ronaldo, Manuel, and Bella: High fantasy.

Bella: Political drama.

Jake and Goili: Low fantasy.

Stella, Olivia, and Beatrix: Romance adventure.

Grazzak: Classic fantasy.

Betkorn: Murder mystery.

There are more novels in the works, and I will do the same here for those next three too.

Lorii: Myth and fable.

Ethan: Surreal drama.

Helga and Beatrix: Hard boiled thriller.

Of the four novels that will follow that, the descriptions become more complex to state as being based around a particular genre. Much of that is due to the saga having enough backstory by that point in this project to be about the SmallPowers universe itself.

There is no place like home

One of the unique features of the SmallPowers multiverse is that there is no universe that contains Earth, not even one of them. Which might seem strange, what with the multiverse where these stories all take place being an infinite number of universes. This can be explained by the simple fact that infinite does not mean inclusive. There are infinite places that are not our world. This was a deliberate choice and almost an imperative when constructing these tales. There are already thousands of stories that rely on the history of our world, both actual and fictional. Alternate histories, pre-histories and parallel universes abound in literature. As well as the inevitable arrival of some characters from fiction created by someone from our universe. Sherlock Holmes wanders into a thousand times and planets, as writ, and in my opinion brings nothing new by that. There is nothing inherently wrong with using Earth, Fictional Earths, or Earth's History. There are plenty of good reasons to use the catalogue of characters, items and places in new fiction. There is the small problem of there being the weight of all the other renditions pressing in on a new tale and pulling the reader's mind to a direction that may not serve the story at hand. There is, of course, the necessity of using terms from our place and time. Elves, for example, renamed and modified never seem to resonate the same way an author might wish.

The SmallPowers multiverse has many people and items that are named and described in terms that are familiar to us. The people of men are mainly human, although some live longer or shorter than we do. Elves, dwarves, goblins and giants are found as often as dragons and griffins. However, they do not trace their origins to some mythic place named "Dirt" or Mother Earth Universe Prime. They are described as they exist in their own place and time as they are. The name is a description more than their foundation, essence, or formation.

In addition, each of the stories are set in universes that have very limited connection to one another. The connection, for most of them, is that a wizard of the Order has shown up to halt an impending apocalypse. There are a few places that do have serious connections to other places. The universe that holds the planet where the Order leases a bunch of caves for offices and workrooms is one. A witch named Penta and her husband, Bob the white wizard, have a small cottage that serves as an alternative meeting place for many of the senior wizards of the council of the wise. The gray-mists of the Elves is more a place between universes, as is the location of Hoonast's tower where many of the transport wizards meet and rest. The great henge is another unique place that has no place in a single universe, as seen in the tale of Stella, Olivia, and Beatrix. There are even places that are manifested entities, as seen in Betkorn's story.

In all; the items, places, characters and their histories are utterly unconnected to our universe. They are new and unencumbered by the threads of our past and our future. Nonetheless, I am sure you will find them all to be just as real as anything or anyone from our universe.

Introduction

SmallPowers:

A short comic to introduce readers to the concepts and themes of the saga.

For a more in depth story, you may wish to read the free illustrated short-story on Smashwords  "Marked Down From A Song To Tuppence". Also available from many ebook library system via a search of the title. The link to Tuppence will lead you to the seven inexpensive full length novels on Smashwords, or use your search function on your ebook provider site.

The LEGO Group requests this disclaimer for any publication utilising images of LEGO:

LEGO is a trademark of The LEGO Group who does not sponsor, authorize, or endorse this publication.