The Malicarn #2
Glenn knew Jules was stressed. The act of running the realm became as important as the job of telling stories, and the weight of ensuring harvests didn’t fail, housing was available, and people had enough money to live became a real headache.
Jules hated dealing with it, even though he had become the point person for all the Madeiran officials who needed some political cover for their constituents, upset about Malicarn land or water or road use.
The Madeirans were always asking for more from the Malicarn, and after Jules ran out of no-show jobs and money to bribe the politicians with, he just started ignoring their requests entirely.
Why should he care? They weren’t part of the story.
Plus, he had plenty of Malicarn-based problems. Food production was dangerously low, and every year they ended up importing more food to avoid famine.
But Jules hated it, said it wasn’t a “story outcome.” Plenty of farms were failing or left vacant, and finally Jules found a solution that pleased the local politicians as well as his own sensibilities.
A Portuguese MP set up a work exchange program with the Cameroon government and allowed a few hundred people a year to move from Cameroon to the Malicarn under the condition that they work the farms and pay a very steep tax to the Madeiran authorities.
They were mostly placed on vineyards. This consoled the politicians concerned about the dip in productivity of the Madeira wine economy, provided essential farmwork in the Malicarn, and didn’t interfere with the story, since Jules kept the Cameroonians offscreen as much as possible.
They were only there to farm, to prevent the set from totally collapsing.
It was easy enough. No one in the Malicarn spoke French, so they treated the Cameroonians as outsiders.
Glenn had nothing to do with the program, except that Malicarn farmers consistently blamed him for it anyway.
The native-born characters, never scanned, were growing up, too.
This was an opportunity. Unaware of their world’s fabrication, they didn’t see the Malicarn as anything except reality, and in a way it was.
Jules called them “our best untapped resource,” and looked forward to when the Malicarn was majority-native and a whole new set of stories could be built around them.
The young queen was the most prominent native-born character of all.
Hannah was inescapably involved in most plots at least tangentially, though Jules had never given Hannah much in the way of her own story.
She was mostly in the background. Even now, as she was entering adulthood and with the regency soon to end, Jules hadn’t planned anything significant for her.
She was sharp and clever and knew how things in the Malicarn worked.
Glenn assumed Jules would want to use her.
But maybe he agreed with certain vocal fans that the Council of Heroes provided more traditional role models, and that a disabled mixed-race girl wasn’t the model the Malicarn series wanted to project.
Or maybe Jules was just running out of ideas.
In truth, Glenn found Hannah’s absence from storylines a relief. If she wasn’t being written into an ongoing arc, there was little chance she would encounter real danger. She could stay mad at him for now, that was fine. It meant she could also, at least for a little longer, stay safe.
The queen’s safety had been assured when Jules figured out a way to resolve the issue of the Necromancer quickly after Prion’s death.
It was his idea to make Gregorian “negotiate” with the Necromancer directly, ending the threat in exchange for the banishment of all magic in the kingdom.
This would align the prequel story they were telling with the beginning of the original films, still some decades ahead in “story time.” But there were practical considerations, as well.
It was cheaper not to worry about so many special effects.
The studio could lay off a number of technicians and engineers.
Jules’s only regret was that he could no longer use his mechanical dragon.
Glenn didn’t protest to any story beats.
He didn’t even continue to express his outrage about Prion.
He didn’t want to draw attention to Hannah.
Glenn saw Hannah as often as he could, making excuses to visit the castle on royal business.
The tutors, nurses, and advisors who raised her meant well, but they were scanned characters and knew barely more about the world than she did.
Glenn tried to let her in on what knowledge he could without totally disrupting the reality of the set.
He slipped her little nuggets of truth, comic books, and facts about science.
If Jules or a producer ever saw him doing this on one of the camera feeds, they never mentioned it.
Maybe Glenn could explain more to Hannah about the reality of the Malicarn, if he ever managed to find a spot on set that wasn’t being observed and recorded.
He had no particular obligation to the girl, he knew, but wanted her to have as normal and safe a childhood as possible.
Perhaps Glenn did this for whatever responsibility he felt toward Prion and Evangeline, but on his more lucid days, when the shame stung especially hard, he knew he actually did it for Lilly.
Glenn never found out what happened to Lilly after she burned down the lab and ran away.
Perhaps she was dead. Perhaps she was hiding in Marrakech or Hong Kong or even back somewhere in the United States.
Maybe the studio knew where she was and was waiting for the right moment to retaliate.
Glenn didn’t know and was too afraid to ask.
And so he agreed with Jules’s wild story ideas and all the other changes that occurred.
“Goddamn teens!” Jules yelled at one of the camera feeds.
A pair of Madeiran teenagers were driving a car around a farm in one of the southern sectors.
They weren’t hurting anyone, though the farmer and his wife were yelling at them as they ran over a vegetable patch.
“It’s so easy to keep people from leaving the set, why can’t we invest in keeping people out?
” The teenagers had become a hobbyhorse for Jules since their vandalism had increased over the last year.
“Any future plans you can fill me in on?” Glenn asked, trying to redirect. “I have a convention in the States next week, I could use some guidance. Something to pepper in during my talks with fans?”
“No, I don’t care about all that.” Jules turned his focus back on the letter in his hands. That was Glenn’s cue to leave. Annoyed that he had traveled all the way to the Citadel for nothing, Glenn made sure to get out the last word before leaving the room.
“You know, anybody who walks in here can see the neuroscanner,” he said, and pointed to the covered mound in the corner.
Glenn returned to his apartment and spent the morning looking over emails and planning his upcoming travel.
There was no one else left for these publicity events.
The other Reals had long since quit. Jacob and Darryl took a job back in California, and all of the fight trainers one by one followed other opportunities.
Technically, the Cameroonian farmers were Reals, but of course that was different.
The only original Real who remained other than Glenn was Brian Doyle.
And Doyle hated publicity. He hated leaving the Malicarn in general.
And without the neuroscanner, scanned heroes couldn’t be temporarily de-sequestered and carted out for the media.
That left Glenn as the last character who would attend conventions, press junkets, premieres, and anything else the studio wanted.
Next week was a Comic-Con. Cons were the worst—physically exhausting, with the traveling, the taking of pictures, and the signing of autographs—but at least they were mentally quite easy. Nobody ever asked anything surprising.
Not that Glenn loved to travel but it did get him off the island a few times a year.
And it was obvious how the Malicarn no longer consisted of the carefree strolls and nature excursions he and Lilly had once enjoyed.
When he arrived at the castle in midafternoon, Glenn had to push through a crowd of commoners who had camped out before the main gate.
They were dirty, emaciated, and Glenn thought they would swamp his cart before he could make it inside.
The city of Kingstown, whose growth Jules had encouraged, had nevertheless taken on a life of its own.
Glenn preferred the old days, when there was just the castle and nothing else, but the people of the Malicarn were inventive and tenacious, and Kingstown had grown into a sizable urban center, with all the drawbacks that entailed.
He struggled through the crowds and onward to the castle gates.
Hannah was sitting inside in the main courtyard, watching the Players unload their sets from their cart.
“It might be better if you were in a somewhat more secure area of the castle,” Glenn said to her.
She rolled her eyes. “Nothing’s going to happen to me, Gregorian. But look at the Players. One of their backdrops got smashed by the crowds in the street.”
A few of the actors were huddled around a slashed canvas, arguing with one another what they should do. Glenn considered offering a helpful theatrical pep talk but thought better of it.
“Well, all the more reason to keep you safe.”
Just then someone shouted from a window in the nearest tower. Glenn looked up to see Sanderson gesturing down at the queen.
“Get back into the tower at once!” he shouted, before hastily adding, “Your Majesty!”
Hannah groaned and stood up. “You know, you said the dragon wasn’t a big deal but everyone’s still on edge.”
“I think everyone has been on edge since you tried to run away.”
“Ah, there it is. Thank you, good sir!” Hannah had been especially sarcastic to Gregorian since her escapade, and he wasn’t sure to chalk this up to the dragon situation or general teenage malaise.
He gave Sanderson a thumbs-up as Hannah headed back inside, but Sanderson just shook his head and disappeared back through the window without a word.
It had been Glenn’s idea to appoint several regents to assist the young queen, characters who could actually run the kingdom, and while Sanderson and Quentin didn’t seem to like Gregorian very much they did a decent enough job of keeping things in order.
Glenn ate in the hall with the rest of the court, stuck next to Bariol, who droned on about his gout.
Glenn was relieved when the tables were cleared and the stage erected.
He sat next to Hannah, and the actors took their places as the hum of conversation in the hall dimmed.
The oldest of the actors, costumed in kingly fashion, walked forward and took the hand of the actress standing center stage.
“Now, fair Hippolyta,” he began, “our nuptial hour draws on apace.”
Glenn chuckled aloud to himself as the players leapt into a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The actors were good, hitting the right comic notes, keeping the action fleet but engaging.
The actor playing Nick Bottom was bossy but buffoonish.
Sanderson laughed loudly at his antics. The characterization reminded Glenn a bit of Jules.
Hannah was delighted, and her earlier annoyance seemed to abate. She leaned over and whispered into Glenn’s ear. “Gregorian, what are they doing?” Hannah always liked to ask Glenn questions when the court hosted a play.
“They are actors putting on a play.”
“Obviously, but what is happening?”
“I am sorry, I was not clear. The actors in the play are also playing actors, who are also putting on a play.”
“That is strange.”
But she enjoyed what she saw. When Bottom’s head was transformed into a donkey’s, and the actor playing him put a large donkey-shaped mask onto his head, Hannah burst into hysterical giggles, unable to control herself.
It was an infectious laugh, the carefree laugh of a young woman still partially a child, and Glenn was soon laughing as well.
“Oh!” Hannah squealed. “He’s human again!”
The actor playing Bottom stretched and woke up, groaning and holding his head. “I have had a most rare vision,” he said. “I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.”
Glenn began to feel better about things.
Theater could do that. Yes, Jules was acting strange.
But when wasn’t he strange? And soon people would forget about the plane.
Glenn would be around to help shape whatever story came next.
His contract was up soon again, but he could extend it.
Or not? Maybe he could do some other kinds of movies, ones where people cry a lot and win awards?
There were possibilities. Lilly was long lost, that was clear, but whose heart hasn’t been broken?
There were other girls. Maybe Glenn would ask Jules to introduce him to one of the production assistants who worked at the Citadel.
There was a cute redhead in the props department.
And even on the set, things were good. They had a strong core of characters.
Glenn considered many of them genuine friends.
Oh, sure, they didn’t know who Glenn really was, but not all friends do.
Hannah was like a niece. How lucky he was, living in an interesting place doing interesting things.
And it was he who helped make it all. Even the bad parts were something he could be proud of.
At the end of the play, when Bottom and his troupe acted out their failed production, and the other characters mocked it, Hannah began laughing so hard she fell off her chair. The characters filed off the stage, leaving the fairy Puck alone at center.
“If we shadows have offended,” the actor said, “think but this and all is mended: that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear.”
The cast bowed, the audience clapped, the musicians returned, and the court broke out into a dance. Glenn’s shame melted away.