While I'd never been in Minneapolis before, in a rather real way, I'd spent two years here.
You see, there was once an online role-playing game called--
Excuse me.
Wha? Oh... hi, Mirella. Are you going to explain Teatime?
(An indignant sniff.) It might've been a game to you, but to me it was the Game, and my entire reality, so yes, I'd like to.
Okay. Folks, this is Mirella Wintering, a character I created a couple years ago for a particular online roleplaying game. She'll be helping me with today's entry.
Thank you. As my creatrix has said, I'm fictional. Of course, so's she, and don't think I haven't tried to find her author once or twice...
M'learned friend has read too much of the later works of Heinlein, I think. Then again, I did give them to her, so it probably means I did, too.
If I may continue? I swear, you're as bad as my brother Archer.
Oh, by all means. It only makes sense I'd be as bad as Archer, anyhow -- you and Archer shared a brain, and Phil and I practically did. You'd better introduce yourself; we're confusing the audience.
Yes. Well. At any rate, I, like my author, here, also hail from Cleveland, although I never aspired to be as technical as she. I received a degree in Library Sciences from a local community college, and had an excellent job ministering to the remarkable occult collection at the Cleveland Public Library. After a, ah, run-in with a notable older, one-eyed patron who I hear is quite familiar to much of our audience, I was given to understand that I was a troll. They wouldn't know anything about that but the extant mortal lore on that, would they?
Um... a couple would, most won't.
Ah. Well, it's one of those tales where things greater than, or at least different from, mortal walk the earth. We masquerade in human suits, pretend to be you most of the time, but we're really not. Not to delve too deeply into alternate cosmologies, a 'troll' in this case is one such variant that, in its true form visible usually only to others of its kind, would be a muscular blue-skinned humanoid, a couple feet taller than the average human with small horns. We usually have black hair, although mine is golden-blonde in a braid down to my waist, thank you. You wouldn't see all that -- in the face you would normally see, I basically look like Lorrie, if a bit taller and without the glasses. Trolls are honourable to a fault, doughty in battle, and not usually given to a scholarly bent -- I'm more than a little unusual for preferring books over swords. Is that sufficient?
Yeah. But back to the story: Odin reminded you you were a troll......
Yes, yes. In my reality, about a year or two after that, I inherited a bookstore in Uptown Minneapolis from a great-aunt I hadn't known I had -- the will apparently said something about finding she'd had a librarian niece, but I'm pretty convinced Someone had a hand in that: it arrived just before a letter from an old friend asked me to look after a particular magical library for him. In any case, I moved to Minneapolis, and overtook stewardship of both, and thus began my involvement in the Great Game.
Or, out here, my husband found a new MUSH to play, set in the Twin Cities, and wanted me to come along. I made up a sort of Barbarian Librarian character, who ran a bookstore on the one hand, but also managed one of the three great magical libraries in town. Intellectual trolls, while not against type as portrayed in the game's books, were definitely out of the ordinary, and besides, Mirella proved a useful place to play with some concepts I certainly wasn't ready to handle, like devotion to the Norse Gods. At the game's end, I sent her off into the Dreaming -- a place where all the stories are so, and with sufficient effort, you can get anywhere... including your author's head. Long before that, she found out, as an intrinsic part of the in-game plot, that she was fictional.
Quite. At any rate, it's my experiences in the Twin Cities that familiarized Lorrie with some salient features of the Twin Cities, and so guided her tour today. You'll be seeing more from me off and on in today's journal entry.
Thanks. After we woke up and I ensured I had clean, dry pants, we drove into the city. I'd put together a list of important places I'd remembered from the MUSH. None of them were typical tourist places -- why would I want to go to the Mall of America, anyway? -- and all of them had been important to Teatime in general and Mirella in particular.
First off, though, we were all hungry, so we drove with all deliberate haste to Mickey's Diner, a railroad car that'd been converted long ago into, well, a standard American diner.
It was always Archer's favourite place to eat lunch -- that's Miles Archer, he's my brother. Anyway, he was head librarian at... bother, I can't remember the name of the branch anymore, it was only a place he went for a day job to stave off going batty from doing too much magic and not enough reality. You only ever heard about it when he was fencing with the board again. You could almost always find him at Mickey's for lunch, though, having a couple double burgers and a shake -- well, he is eight feet tall, on his trollish side, anyway. We have pictures, yes?
Sure. Here's one of the front of the diner, as seen from across the street.
Dani, Chris, John, and I trooped inside. It was primarily soda shop-type barstools at a long counter, although there were four tables clustered at one end. We sat at one of those.
Where I come from, these booths are much bigger -- Archer's terribly claustrophobic and bigger than I am, in either shape. We get into, ah, trouble with the Reality Police if we take our human-sized bodies into places our troll-sized bodies don't fit. Anyway, in my Saint Paul, the booths are bigger.
However, the food was every bit as good as Spring promised it would be -- that was Nell's player, Mirella. She wrote your version of the diner.
Uh huh.
Here we have a hamburger -- the first I've had all month, I'll have you know -- with Monterey Jack cheese, fries, some of their baked beans, and a Coke. That's Chris's shake back there. The baked beans were a bit of a curiosity -- they were good and all, but they had a chili texture and there was a bit of ground meat in it, not sure if it was beef or pork.
After lunch, we saddled the ponies and drove to one of the several Ax-Man Surplus stores that litter the Minneapolis area.
In my world, Ax-Man Surplus was the primary gateway into the magical library I took care of. There was this billiard table, see, and if you broke the set using the, hm, dark blue solid ball (what number was that? I forget.) instead of the cue ball, the table would swing out of the way, revealing the entrance to a labyrinth. Walk the labyrinth, pass the gate-guards, and... Lorrie, they're going to laugh at this.
Well, maybe, but Spring wrote this, not either of us.
I suppose. All right, the last few yards of the labyrinth, past the guards, were actually bookshelves, full of books that had gotten there one way or another, mostly from the squirrelish scriveners. The bookshelves opened onto a broad, hrm, well... may as well say it... plain. With a great large tree in the middle, from the bottom of which wound many paths, and you could get to several other unusual places from its limbs and branches. This was all generic enough, but when I found out my staff consisted primarily of anthropomorphic squirrels, I knew right off why Corwyn had sent for me -- who better than a Norse-obsessed troll to take care of this off-hand cousin of Yggdrasill?
I'm not sure how off-hand it was, really. Or how cousiny -- but I doubt the readers are much interested. We went to Ax-Man next.
The important thing to note here is that Ax-Man is not an army surplus store. It is, in fact, an everything surplus store, with an inventory that can contain anything from random rolls of cloth, spools of twenty kinds of wire, and eight-track tapes. It's also one where the staff has a bit of a wicked sense of humor.
I was always finding little magical odds and ends in here. So many people came through here, with so many ideas on what to do with what was inside... those ideas accumulated, had power. You could find, oh, as many as half a dozen things in a week with enough of a dream inside to power a spell or two.
I really can't explain the glory that is Ax-Man Surplus. Here are some more pictures, though.
The mannequin's wearing a touk. You could walk off with the dentist chair for only three hundred, too.
Yup, horribly poor Franglish. But there are signs all over the store like this.
What I'd like to know is how my brother's assistant got a job here, when he doesn't even belong in this reality!
Archer's assistant was the Librarian from Terry Prachett's Discworld series, who happens to be an orangutan. I'm curious how he got the gig, too, but he left his trademark "Ook" on several of the more humorous signs.
One of several ceiling-mounted displays at Ax-Man Surplus, yes, those legs are navigating those bicycle inner tubes sideways. Shoot, at least one of those pairs of legs actually has hands on the bottom, which may well be more of the Librarian's handiwork. This place is just too incredible for words.
Two of my boon touring companions bought bowling pins, and we were off, across the river and into the Minneapolis neighborhood of Uptown -- here's Mirella again.
We lived here! This was really one of the hearts of the duchy. The apartments above Magers and Quinn, my bookstore, were quite popular, especially because I cut a nice rent deal if you were of fae blood -- why not? I owned the thing free and clear, the rents paid for the utilities, general upkeep, and were frankly the only reason the whole place turned a profit some months. It seemed as though half the fae population in town was rooming with me at one point -- it was in neutral territory, and I never swore fealty to any of the local nobility. It was safe, and a real hotbed for social activity. And if you were bored in your apartment, you could always step into the store and browse, which more often than not led to more excitement. In most towns, this happens in bars -- believe me, I was more than happy to provide a more intelligent place for get-togethers.
Yeah, Uptown was her stomping ground, all right. I'd been given the name and general concept of the M&Q by the admin, and ran with it having no idea what the actual store actually looked like, and only a vague idea of their inventory. I figured Mirella would've done whatever she liked once she was in town anyway.
On the main floor, I kept most of the general-interest books, and kept the occult works, paraphrenalia, and herbs in the basement with Mort. He meant well, but he was definitely a couple runes short of a futhark, if you ken my meaning. I was quite excited to learn that Lorrie was going to this world's Magers and Quinn -- we were both keen to see if it was anything like the one back home.
Er. Oh, my. Well, it's conceivably large enough, but those aren't posisibly apartments up there, unless they're some sort of drafty converted warehouse live/work spaces, and I assure you, that's not the case where I'm from.
What really, profoundly pissed me off was the Borders sitting across the street from Magers and Quinn, battening off it. Sucking it dry. I solemnly resolved to buy something, partly to help fight off Borders, but mostly because I felt kind of guilty having put on a made-up version of their store for so long.
I'm not commenting on the Borders across the street. I don't have the words to do it justice. All right, so it's not mine, mine's a shadow, or this one's a shadow, or whatever -- I'm still peevish. If this were back home, I'd assert that this was clearly the work of Smith, the bastard.
Er, Smith was the personification of those crushing, soulless forces that want to make everything blandly the same, rational, and regimented. A Borders would be right up his alley. Anyway, I went inside.
Inside, behold a bookstore! Tall ceilings, many books, rather a large selection of first-edition works in tasteful glass cases, with an odd specialization in Oz books. Used books of all nations were here, somewhere, yours for the finding -- like the book of card tricks I found, written in Icelandic. It wasn't what I'd written, but would've done the job better, I think. If only the selection had been better -- I kept finding a resolutely Germanic-sized hole in things. No Norse myths, although they had others. No books on Germanic topics in the old occult section, but lost of Afro-Carribean, Buddhist, and New Age. Lots of books on Tarot, but not even the crappier ones on runes.
I walked to science fiction, and was a little disappointed -- the selection wasn't all that great. I pointed this out to my hosts, and they offered to take me next to a science fiction/fantasy specialty used and new bookstore, which would work fine for me.
On a lark, I looked for books by Diana Paxson. Count: just one, a trade paperback of one of the four volumes of the Great Arthurian Novel, and this in an Arthurania section. Perhaps I'd do better at this "Uncle Hugo's."
Hmpf. The selection wouldn't've been nearly this poor if I were running the store. Still, it echoed true... I could nearly see Thomas, my pet imaginary raven (you must understand, that which is imaginary is quite real to my kind) peering out at us from the tops of shelves or swooping across the store as he had back home. It was like home, and yet utterly unlike, all at once. Overall, an eerie effect.
It was bad enough that I almost saw Thomas, and what do you call a creation's creation? Bloody nuts, if you ask me. What's more, this literary conceit of mine in this entry is getting on the edges of automatic writing. Yippee.
I did buy one book, though, one of the Legends anthology that's essentially cheap samples of a dozen different epic fantasy works: you buy the one featuring the author you do read, and the publisher hopes to hook you into those you haven't. Anyway, having been disappointed by the meagre science fiction and fantasy selection at Magers and Quinn (in their defense, it was obviously not their primary business to sell such), we drove over to this Uncle Hugo's, and... hoo, boy.
Now, this I like.
Used books covered all available wall space, with shelves of new works in the middle. I pulled out the last of my cash (there were still traveller's cheques left), and snapped up Bimbos of the Death Sun a murder yarn spun at a science fiction convention, The Last Continent, one of Pterry's latest Discworld works, The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring, a pair of Niven novels set on a breathable ring around a gas giant, A Gift from Earth, one of Niven's Known Space works, and....
Hey, Arlie, you can have your copy of Brisingamen back now. Uncle Hugo had one for me.
I have to say, grudgingly, I found the selection somewhat better than that at Uncle Hugo's Berkeley counterpart, The Other Change of Hobbit. Sorry, gang.
We had just enough time to squeeze a visit to the Sculpture Garden in before meeting folks for dinner at the Green Mill, a pizza place I knew was good from, well, Twin Cities by Teatime. The Sculpture Garden was important because, in the game, it was the way into Starspire, the biggest honkin' freehold (magical faery holding) in the game. Mine was a pitiful also-ran second or third in this race. Mostly, i wanted a picture of the gate, if I could find it, but other known landmarks from the online version would be nice.
Yeah, it's a ring of benches surrounded by a high hedge. But each bench has something different and surreally pithy on it. This was my favorite.
She started out using first-person plural, but now she's strenuously denying we're a we. You don't know how hard she had to work not to write 'our favorite' in that sentence up there. Isn't that funny?
It says:
You can make yourself enter
somewhere frightening if you
believe you'll profit from it.
The natural response is to
flee but people don't act
that way anymore.
Chris and I strolled around the garden, looking for something gatelike. I found the Cherry Spoonbridge:
And then... I saw this.
Yes! Yes, that's it! At least, assuming I remember it correctly... it has been awhile, after all. If you look hard enough, you can almost... well, no, I can't see it, I'm stuck being a passenger in your head.
I thought it looked right, too. It seemed to feel powerful and gate-ish to me, anyway. I carefully walked around it, and not through. Not forwards, anyway. I stepped to it, around and peered through from the backside, from which the park stubbornly remained a park.
But, listen: there was a melted path in the snow, through the grass, right up to this double curve thing. The path doesn't continue through to the other side, doesn't branch off to any place else in this niche of the hedges. Look at that picture again, you'll see I'm right.
After all that surreality, it was time for dinner. I carefully grounded, made sure all my own parts were in my own head, and bid Mirella a fond farewell -- as I do again now. Farewell, Mirella!
Farewell, my creator. Not that I'm ever all that far away...
I know. And thank you.
Any time you want to look like a madwoman mumbling into a shopping cart, you know where to go, hm? All the same, thank you for letting me speak again: it's been awhile. Hail, then, and farewell.
So! Off to the Green Mill, where we'd meet up with a couple more RetroMUD folks.
I had a pint of Sam Adams, and caused a plate of wings and nachos to be shared around the table, then settled in for a nice pizza, prepared properly, which here they were calling pescera.
"Properly" to me, you see, means that the dough is dought -- not crunchy, and for gods' sakes not soggy. A "Chicago style" stuffed pizza, which has sauce, then toppings, then cheese and bread, it all right if done competently (Zachary's of Berkeley is competent, the Gino's of the other night wasn't), but this thing, which I've never heard named pescara anywhere else, is the Right Thing for me, pizza-wise, and was of course done most competently by a pizzaria in Cleveland that since had a kitchen fire and had to close.
After good food and good conversation, all of which was with people outside my own head, we went back to Chris and Dani's, where I worked on journal entries while others drank, then crawled into bed. It'd be another travel day in coach tomorrow, with the train proposing to leave at eight AM. Ugh.
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