The Nominal Hero, chapter 12: Perlocutionary Acts
He stood to one side of a stage that was made from boards laid across haybales. The woman running things had given him a microphone. That was it, as far as sets and equipment went. Presumably most people brought their own.
Two other stages flanked his. One of them held a crew in the middle of building some sort of complicated scaffolding. On the other, a line of women in Santa hats and short skirts did a dance routine to recorded Irish music. They looked cold.
There wasn’t really much of an audience for any of this. People passing by looked curiously at Caden’s stage and at the dancers, but mostly didn’t slow down. The Winter Carnival’s main shows were in the evening, Mushroom had explained. Right now was for a grab-bag of amateurs, just to have something going on so there weren’t a bunch of empty stages dragging the ambience down. The Noun had seemed miffed at that.
Well. Maybe they’d surprise people.
“Um,” Caden said. He hadn’t really planned this. His hands were clammy inside his mittens, and his stomach felt almost as unsettled as if he were expecting a battle.
But this was different. This was a story. Caden understood stories.
“There was a world,” he repeated, “and it was full of people, but not, like, human people. Some of them were part magical beings, like monsters and stuff.”
He took the Noggles out of his coat pocket and put them on.
“Sphinx,” he said deliberately. “Gryphon. Kappa. Dryad. Triton. Yeti.”
They appeared on the stage, in swirls of digital dust and snow and leaves. Mushroom and Duck, positioned to either side of them, quickly approached them to give whispered explanations.
“And some of them were partly machines and science equipment and that sort of thing,” Hunter added, leaning over the microphone.
“Dirigible,” Caden said. “Syringe. Shinkansen.” Hunter had really wanted some sort of train, but they still weren’t sure about compound words and Caden didn’t want to try bullet train for fear of getting bullet. “Streetlight. Beaker. Orrery.”
The words had to be unusual enough to create new Nouns, and they had to be the sorts of things it would be good to have in the world. He’d avoided magical creatures that were outright bad, orcs and demons and things. Likewise he’d stuck with science stuff that he’d want to have around. He’d seen pictures of dirigibles, big floating airships, and they looked awesome. Streetlights were useful; syringes were a good thing even if nobody actually liked needles much. As for orrery, there was just something neat about a model of the planets and stars, but more importantly it was definitely in the spirit of science. The first thing the story needed was new people, new Nouns, on every side.
Caden took the glasses off.
“So there were all these different people,” he said, “and they were called Nouns, by the way, and also there was a whole lot of them that weren’t really magical or scientific, just, you know, normal stuff. Capybara. Yogurt. Scroll. Chocolate.”
The stage was starting to get crowded. The groups of Nouns were eyeing each other suspiciously, despite Mushroom and Duck’s rapid explanations. The boards around Dryad’s feet had begun to sprout leafy shoots. Dirigible was floating a little ways above the stage, suspended from their gas-filled balloon head. Passers-by were starting to point and stare.
Probably nothing in the past had changed yet. (Could you say “yet” when it was the past? Caden wondered.) And even once it did, it might take hours or days. Things could get pretty tense here meanwhile. He’d better hurry.
“And, um, the different kinds of people didn’t always get on,” he continued.
“But mostly they did!” Masami put in.
“Yeah, mostly they did, and luckily they all had special places they could go to, magic or technology places, when it was better for them to not be around other people for awhile, like when you get put in time-out for not being able to share, or for getting paint in someone else’s sandwich, or--”
A snowball flew over Caden’s head. He dodged, and it hit the stage, followed by another and another, like tennis balls from a launcher. Yeti, yipping with excitement, had jumped off the stage into the snow and was surrounded by a whirling tornado of snowballs. Orrery, perhaps thinking their spinning planets were being made fun of, stomped toward them, looking furious. Gryphen roared. All the streetlights around the parking lot flicked on.
“Places where they could go and be happy!” Caden continued loudly. He fumbled the glasses as he put them back on. They felt lighter in his hands, somehow, almost fragile. “Henge! Glade! Laboratory! Schooner! Starship!”
It had been hard to think of places. Lots of the places where people did magic in books, like towers and castles and libraries, were such common words that they probably already existed as Nouns, and wouldn’t change anything. Ruth had thought of henge, and shown them a photo on her phone of a circle of standing stones. They certainly looked magical, or mysterious, anyway.
The Noun Henge mostly looked terrified. Duck and Mushroom were trying to push their way across the stage to the latest group, but the boards around Dryad had grown up into a little forest, making it hard to move. Beaker, seeing this, tried to help by pouring bright-coloured chemicals from its bubbling glass head. The liquid hissed and smoked when it hit the stage and started dissolving the obstacle--trees, boards, haybales and all. Starship took one look at this and vanished into the sky. The thunder of their launch sent a howl of feedback through Caden’s microphone and blew out the Irish dancers’ stereo.
“But mostly they did fine together!” Caden continued desperately, abandoning the microphone in favour of shouting. "Because the world was full of adventures and cool places to go and stuff to do! And everyone knows adventures go better if you have as much cool science and magic as possible! Like, um--” He lost his train of thought for a second.
“Movies!” Masami put in.
“Movies!” Caden echoed. “They’re better with lasers and dragons!”
He realized he was still wearing the glasses when a movie-projector-headed Noun popped out of the air in a flashbulb-lit burst. He hadn’t noticed. The glasses were lighter, he wasn’t imagining it.
Laser appeared, flaring red. There was a barely audible *crack* and Caden’s left lens splintered into pieces. Dragon-headed Nouns popped into existence, dozens of them, each one no taller than Caden’s knees. They gave tiny roars and spat match-sized gouts of flame as they ran gleefully in all directions. Some members of the audience, which had grown to a crowd while Caden wasn’t looking, screamed and fled. Others applauded.
“Lil Nouns!” Paz shouted, and charged after one of the Dragons, her hands outstretched, the way she sometimes chased seagulls. Ruth made a grab for her collar and missed.
Caden tried to ignore this, focusing on the next thing. He’d written down some notes, and he pulled them out of his pocket now, squinting through the cracked lens. Adventures--
“Let me try?” Hunter asked. Caden nodded, and handed his friend the cracked glasses. Hunter took them carefully, gently running his thumbs over the broken lens as though he were smoothing out a piece of clay. And, strangely, it seemed to be working. The cracks faded to mere scratches, and disappeared. Hunter was frowning, though. “They feel light,” he said. “Sort of--thinner, I guess. Like you’re using them up.”
“Yeah,” Caden agreed. He guessed it made sense: he’d called up a lot of Nouns. Dryad and Glade seemed to have joined forces, turning one side of the stage into a forest. Syringe was drawing something orange and bubbly out of Beaker’s head. Sphinx, whose head looked like a cartoon human’s but whose body resembled a lion stuffed into a t-shirt, was pouncing on Dragons and batting them with broad forepaws so that they tumbled into the snow. The streetlights were fizzing and sparking in rainbow colours.
Caden focused on his notes. “Cavern. Quicksand. Coral.” Make the world bigger, make it full of adventure. “Hideout. Arch--” He faltered, and hurriedly shoved the paper toward Ruth. A Noun with a head like a crumbled stone archway stared around themselves in confusion.
“Ark-a-PELL-a-go,” Ruth whispered.
“Archipelago,” Caden repeated, and the map-headed Noun appeared, green glasses over an island chain. New lands to explore. “Treasure. Galaxy.” New worlds, a universe of worlds. The Nouns’ world might be bigger than the human one.
The Nouns’ world might even help the human one. Caden didn’t know, and couldn’t really guess; but if there was some spillover between the two, some connection, and the Nouns went out into space and thrived there, then maybe--
Maybe.
He read on. The crowd of Nouns around him seemed to be settling down, strangely, more and more of them simply watching him, and then others following suit as they saw their fellow Nouns standing still. The glasses felt like a soap bubble against Caden’s face. He could hardly sense their weight at all.
Even Paz had stopped running about, and was beside Caden now, looking up at him. He’d finished his list, and seeing Paz, he knew how to end the story. Bookshelf had warned him about immaterial Nouns, and that was what had caused all the trouble in the first place--but it felt right. He was Caden the Summoner, and he finally knew exactly what to do.
“Peace,” Caden said.
The glasses vanished.
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