The Malicarn
If the villagers had asked him, “What is it that drives you onward, Gregorian, without your magic or purpose?” he would have said, “Shame! I am driven by shame!”
The dozen or so fire engines that roared out of Funchal that evening, all heading north, were odd, but Glenn didn’t think much of it until he had been driven back to the Citadel’s underground parking garage, where Jules and half a dozen Madeiran officials were yelling at one another.
“I am telling you, no one can enter the set until we clear the sector of characters!” Jules said.
The man Jules was yelling at was the fire commissioner, whose English was poor but whose anger was great. “If we cannot stop the fire soon, forests will burn. This is a serious issue. You have not seen Madeira burn before, I have.”
Glenn found one of the other writers, hanging back by the elevator, and heard the whole story. A fighter jet from what appeared to be the Chinese air force had crashed in one of the northern sectors. No word on casualties, but it was burning pretty good.
“Wow,” Glenn said. “What were they spying on?”
The crash site was not very exciting, when Glenn and Jules joined the firefighters to survey the damage the next morning. The plane was charred, little more than a crumbled mess of metal. No bodies were found in the wreckage.
“No characters killed,” said Jules, “as far as we could tell. Pilot must have ejected. Could have happened over the water. Who knows, but he’s probably floating in the ocean somewhere.”
“Did a camera catch the moment of the crash?” Glenn asked.
Jules was evasive on this point. “I dunno. Who cares? We couldn’t use the footage anyway.”
When the pilot continued to not turn up, the Malicarn had its very first foreign policy crisis.
Larry was getting pressure from his contacts in the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who in turn were getting pressure from various high functionaries within the European Union and a slew of members of the Chinese Central Committee.
Everyone wanted to know where the pilot was, if he was alive, and if so, why hadn’t anyone given him back yet?
Glenn had no insight into any of these things, mostly because nobody told him anything and also because he was consciously avoiding the discussion of the plane as much as possible.
He had worked in the Malicarn long enough now to know nothing but shame could come of it.
Indeed, Glenn had other things to worry about, like placating Hannah.
She was skeptical of the plane from the beginning, which didn’t surprise him.
She was a smart girl. The day after the crash, she called him using the trick he’d taught her: shouting his name loudly and demanding his presence, which would get picked up on the feeds and forwarded to his inbox, via a little program Glenn had paid one of the tech guys to write.
And when he rode out to the castle she was indignant that no one was keeping her in the loop about “the dragon.”
“Sanderson and Quentin did not know much about it,” she said to him in the castle courtyard. “Took their time even telling me.”
“Well, there’s not much to tell. What is left of it is well charred.”
“You have seen it?”
He probably shouldn’t have mentioned this. It would just stoke her imagination.
“I think I should see the remains. Reassure the people—”
“No, it is really not necessary,” Glenn said. “Trust me, the faster the people forget about the dragon the better.”
He gave her points for tenacity, but even Glenn didn’t expect she would try to sneak out to view the wreckage.
Jules or someone else in the Citadel noticed her on the feeds and shut that expedition down quick.
Glenn didn’t like when they controlled Hannah in that way.
She was very angry with him after her attempted escape, scoffing each time he visited the castle.
Glenn tried hard to assure the rest of the court that everything was fine, the dragon didn’t mean anything, it was nothing to worry about, but she continued to doubt him.
And the commoners weren’t buying the story, either. Rumors continued to fester.
Today would provide some distraction. It had been over two months since the plane crash, and Glenn was off to a production meeting to figure out if there was any story business he needed to prioritize.
He left his tower, did some standard mingling among the commoners, and then snuck off to the underground tunnel and headed for the Citadel, where Jules was waiting for him to talk over some upcoming story beats.
Jules sat alone in the writers’ room, surrounded by televisions and paper and handwritten notes.
His writers, mostly freelancers at this point, only met sporadically, but Jules stayed in the conference room all the time. Glenn thought he slept in there.
When Glenn walked into the writers’ room Jules was hunched over a series of photocopies. He hadn’t showered in several days. His beard was long and unkempt. In the corner sat a mound, covered hastily in a blanket. Classical music played loudly from a speaker.
“What’s on for today?” Glenn asked, looking up at the bank of TVs cycling through camera feeds all over set. Glenn could guess but Jules liked it when he asked. The court was hosting the Kingstown Players, and Glenn had been invited by Hannah to come watch.
“Huh? Ah!” Jules sat up as if realizing Glenn was in the room for the first time.
He picked up the papers he was reading and waved them around.
“You see these? Beinecke Library sent them over, from their special collections. All this correspondence from Wendell Highsman, stuff about Souard’s early drafts, what they changed, what Souard was thinking.
I mean, a lot of it is Wendell bitching with his lawyers, trying to get out of his contract with Souard, but some of it is good. ”
Jules’s quest for story ideas had long rested on nuggets from Jean-Danton Souard himself. Whenever Glenn thought he had probably exhausted every possible avenue of inquiry, Jules found some other tidbit, some other note, some other scrap of information.
After Prion’s death and the fire in the implementations lab, the studio brought in a new producer to help right the ship.
Jules wasn’t fired, but only because he had way too much knowledge about the inner workings of the set, and if anyone replaced him the entire operation might just fall apart.
Jules did find himself in quite a bit of legal trouble with the family of Marvin Powell, however, and nearly lost his visa.
Fortunately, extradition was never enforced, the family was paid off, and Jules was allowed to remain on set, though he was rather forcefully warned that returning to the United States was not in his best legal interest.
The Return of the Necromancer, the film that resulted in Jules’s shenanigans, was not very good but managed to make even more money than The Return of the Council and so, as far as the studio was concerned, nothing bad really happened.
Oh, there was plenty of online discourse about the film’s ethics.
But it turned out, as much as people thought it was incredible to watch their favorite characters become “real,” even more than that they wanted to watch these real people die.
Jules remained the series showrunner, with even more producer oversight, but the years following Return of the Necromancer ushered in a new and unique writing approach to the franchise.
It was born out of necessity. With the neuroscanners destroyed and the lab in shambles, Jules and the writers couldn’t introduce new characters with specific story purposes, so Glenn and the other Reals became more important in shepherding along character and story.
Brian Doyle, in particular, began driving the Council of Heroes onward toward various quests and adventures.
Glenn, on the other hand, became a living exposition dump, always available to explain to a scanned character some bit of lore or backstory.
Fans jokingly referred to Gregorian as “the Wikipedia Wizard.” His recent tour around the Malicarn, speaking to guilds and churches and children in town squares about the lost art of wizardry, was partly about shoring up goodwill for the queen and partly about making sure characters remembered basic backstory for future films.
“So, what are we doing?” Glenn asked again, shouting over the music. “Could you maybe turn it down?”
“Ah, ah.” Jules reached over, tried to turn the speaker off, and when he couldn’t he bent down and unplugged it. “Sorry. Messiaen. It’s a recording of a German quartet in the seventies. They did it in West Berlin in front of the Wall. You like it?”
“Sure. What are we doing today? I’m supposed to go to the castle but I have no notes.”
“Okay, yes, let’s talk about that. I’m done with notes, Glenn. You’re constricted by them, they are bringing you down. Let go, let go. That’s what I say. No more notes. Just live, be in the moment. It’s all real, it’s all happening.”
“But don’t you have the Tristan and Heloise thing—”
“No!” Jules’s face twitched, and he spasmed in his chair. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore. Just be a wizard. That’s what you’re good at.”
Glenn wasn’t sure if that was true, but he also didn’t feel like arguing with Jules. Talking to him felt like talking to a chatbot. He spit out human-sounding language with very little sense behind the words.