A/N: This story is part of or an offshoot from my Plotseekers milieu, but you don’t need to know that to understand it. Please review but keep concrit nice; this is my first piece of original fiction in a while.

I carir quettar—(complex noun.) Those who make words. Origin: Quenya (fictional language created by J.R.R. Tolkein)

The sign was large, posterboard, orange, and surprising. Surprising because it was both relevant to Percy’s schoolwork and managed to catch his attention. It hung in the window of an empty store, a bare, white-floored room between GameSite and Canterbury Candles. It read:

Plots For Sale.

Serious Inquiries Only.

Specializing in Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Shakespearean.

5 Dollars- 50 Dollars

Quetelme Quenya.

I, thought Percy, need that.

He had come to the mall to put off writing a short story for seventh-grade English. Monday the story was due, and today was Saturday. He didn’t understand the last line of the stenciled sign, but plots, he knew, were what stories needed.

He hesitated at the front of the store before stepping off the small tiles onto the large ones. The store was bright silver inside, white from the ceiling lights, the walls, and the podium-like desk. There were no shelves, but rather cardboard packing boxes. One employee, a man perhaps twenty or thirty years old, stood behind the desk, reading something. The store didn’t even have a name displayed yet, just the sign. The only other sign in the window said “open”.

Percy inched into the middle of the store, nervous.

The single visible employee looked up at the sound of the boy’s footsteps. The man wore a brown suit-jacket, and had brown hair pulled back from his long-jawed, clean face. An expression like a smile but more serious and therefore respectful crossed his stubbled face.

“Hello,” Percy mustered. “I need to buy a plot.”

“Of course.” The employee’s name tag read ‘Constantine’. “Tell me a price range and what sort you want. We’ll see if it’s available.”

“Erm, I need a short story.”

Absently the employee typed something into a computer set into the desk. “Anything more specific?”

“…something good.”

“Okay. I’ll be back in a second.” He gave a small smile.

Percy watched without comment as the man walked to the back of the store. He shifted a few steps to look past the retreating back, expecting to see more boxes stacked there.

There weren’t more boxes. There was a girl, her eyes closed as if she were sleeping or unconscious, reclining in a tilted, black-leather chair. Around her, mounted on the walls, were computers, black Dell screens displaying white pages of text. She was blonde-haired, dark-clothed, stocky, could have been of any age between sixteen and twenty-three. The door closed again in front of Constantine before Percy could cry out.

“What--?” He exclaimed, bursting out shouting when Constantine turned innocently toward him after looking at the girl. “Is she supposed to be there? What is this—” Staying out of this strange store suddenly made a lot more sense than going in.

Constantine was suddenly wary, glancing into the mall proper as if afraid that a passerby might hear. Percy edged toward the door. “Listen to me,” Constantine said. “She’s in there willingly. There’s nothing wrong."

“I should call mall security—”

”Look at this place!” Constantine shouted. He gestured toward the makeshift sign, thin lips pulled over his clenched teeth. “What do you think that sign means? An unconventional store has unconventional operations.” His voice lowered, his shoulders relaxed, to prevent anyone outside from noticing the conflict. “She’s doing her job, giving you your plot, right now. She’ll wake up in a moment and come out to meet you just like a waitress at a restaurant brings out your food.”

Percy released a tight-held breath. “You’re serious? What’s she doing in there? I thought you were going to write a story for me.”

“We’re going to find a story for you.”

“Go on,” said a deep voice from the door. Percy spun to face the newcomer. This isn’t how stores work, no one talks this portentously in the mall—“Tell the boy the difference.”

The newcomer was dark-bearded, dark-clad, and almost overweight. He stood in the doorway holding a briefcase in one hand. His eyes were small, glinting, and blue, startlingly so unlike the so-normal navy blue of the t-shirt visible between his jacket’s folded collars.

Constantine was unperturbed by the interruption. “The good stories aren’t made up, out of the detritus in the author’s head. Rather, he puts out the bait of himself for the fish of story to swallow. Characters will do things he did not expect, which lead to events he did not expect, which lead to a fascinating story. Many famous writers have spoken of this act of creation. But there are also those who pledge their lives to destuction.” He looked up, sharply at the newcomer, and the loose tail of hair at the back of his neck flapped. Percy, the boy realized, had been unconsciously putting Constantine between himself and the new man. Constantine moved casually, as if he were simply conducting a sale while another customer browsed. “This boy isn’t one of us,” Constantine said, and those words scared Percy more than he thought they should. “He has nothing to do with this, Jake.”

The big man made a sound like harrumph before walking, casually and without protest from Constantine, toward the back of the store. He looked over his shoulder as his feet paced over the tiles, one shoe-heel clicking in each square. “I suspected that he wasn’t your apprentice.”

“Why?” Constantine’s breath caught on the end of the interrogative, as if he were finally afraid. “What have you heard?”

“That she’s odd.” Jake reached the door in the back wall and pulled it open to reveal the unmoving girl; his swarthy face had gained a disdain now, as if he knew exactly how constrained Constantine was by normalcy and shielding Percy. “And that she’s a girl.”

He laughed softly at his own repetition as he pulled the girl out of the chair, arms under her knees and shoulders. Blonde hair poked out next to his arm like short grass. Constantine stammered, a few sharp syllables bitten back, as Jake turned and, still with that look of disdain, carried the apparently unconscious apprentice toward the storefront. Percy itched to do something, to help, but he was drowning in references he didn’t understand.

“I’d warn you about not coming to rescue her,” Jake said to Constantine, “but, oh that’s right, you don’t even know who we are.”

“Thanks for telling me you’re a group,” said Constantine, composed, “and that you expect her to need rescuing. I’m sure she’ll be very amused.”

The girl thrashed. It wasn’t a random enough thrash that Percy couldn’t see the little, deliberate fist lash out and punch Jake under the chin. With a loud, baritone cry the man lurched backwards. He tried to hold on to the girl but she wriggled out of his arms and landed on her feet on the ground. She snapped another punch toward him; he blocked it with raised forearms—the thud of skin on skin was nothing like Percy had heard on television-- but a strike following it snaked past his guard and did something in the region of Jake’s neck that caused him to step back again, shaking his head.

“No,” said the girl, aside to Constantine, “I’m not.”

“Meet Morn,” Constantine said. “Do you really want to make a scene here, Jake? There are mundane cops all over.”

Jake didn’t seem to care. He and Morn began to circle, his fleshy hands stretched toward her like a sumo wrestler, her steps even like a lioness’ stalking its kill. Her eyes, Percy could see intermittently, were green. A thin, pink scar, like from an animal’s claw, cut from the hairline above her left eye to where her nose began.

“Maybe we should leave,” Constantine said softly.

Jake’s grunt of amused assent was drowned out by Morn’s hissed reply: “Him too?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

Percy blinked, and suddenly he wasn’t in the store any more. He had seen swirly time-travel vortexes on television too, things accompanied by music and poor special effects, and the stone-strewn plain before him made him think he’d gone back to the building of Stonehenge. But there hadn’t been that cliché time-tunnel: if he had had to compare the transit to anything on television, it would be to the changing of channels. Click, store. Click, open field of grass, with a blue sky above and the stone columns lying about, some curved like bridges to nowhere, some cubes apparently dropped where they lay. A warm breeze rustled his hair and sweat started to form beneath his jacket.

The other three people stood beside him, Jake swaying a bit, Constantine and Morn hard-eyed.

“But...” he stammered, “Where’s your book? Where are we?”

Morn smirked and clapped her hands. “Look mom, no book.”

Jake grimaced. “Where are we?” He repeated angrily.

“I’m not sure. It might be original. I might’ve invented a nice creepy monster just for you that’s gonna rise up from behind one of these rocks any time now…”

The big man fished around in his briefcase, face paling. From the bag he pulled a leather-bound book. His eyes started flicking across the pages as he read silently. Constantine took a few swift steps and knocked the volume out of his hand. Suddenly one of Constantine’s hands was on the bag and the other grasped Jake’s collar, tightening the black fabric beneath his fingers.

“Who sent you?” said the shopkeeper, low and threatening. Percy seriously considered backing away and running through the field until he came to a road and a town where perhaps people could explain to him about this teleportation craziness and put him on a plane home—

“The SPCP.”

“Of course. You people have gotten increasingly annoying recently. I’m sorry to say that you’re not going back there, not until you tell us what you’re up to…”

“I’m just the first wave. They’re after your girl there. She’s the key.”

“Who is? The whole SPCP”—he condensed the acronym with the ease of repetition, Espeeseepee—“or just a few?”

Morn walked toward Percy and crouched beside him, her hands between her knees. “Society for Plot and Canon Preservation.”

“What?” He dragged his gaze away from the townless horizons.

“Elites,” said Jake to Constantine. “We know what we’re up against.”

“It’s an organization," Morn continued. "Society for Plot and Canon Preservation. They try to keep worlds separate and art stifled, or, as Constantine would say, they’re the Catholic church to us Methodists. Strict guardsmen of the realms of fiction, but a bit too strict for us—the Plotseekers—to do our job well. They invent half their missions just to mess with us.”

From this web of confusion Percy extracted “Realms of fiction?”

Said Constantine, “So does she.” He looked over at the two younger people. “Let’s get going. Morn, send this one to the back of the store please. Lock him in.”

“Sure, oh captain my captain,” she replied with a hearty dose of sarcasm.

Percy closed his eyes in fear, or simply to match the blinking of the world, as the store appeared in front of him again. Shoppers wondered by outside—a woman with a toddler, a gaggle of Goths. He heard the click of a lock and blinked again, clearing real or imagined obscurations from his eyes. Morn came toward the front of the store from locking the back door.

Constantine was behind the counter again, leaning on one arm, looking at Percy.

“Sir,” the boy said, “are we hallucinating?”

“No.” He replied. Percy approached so the desk was less of a barrier between them; instead of a teacher’s desk it was Socrates’ podium with his followers lounging around it. “Like I told you before, we find plots. We’re writers, but in a more literal sense than the usual. Writers think about a void, and stories come in. But sometimes there are people for whom it’s a little backwards; if they read something, they can feel the world of the book slowly replacing the one around them, creating a new, filled space. If they’re the right person, that space becomes physical and you’re inside the world of the Lord of the Rings or whatever, able to touch it, smell it.”

“So I read Tony Hawk’s biography and meet him because of it?”

“No, because that’s not fiction. It’s biography. But that’s the idea.”

“Most people need to read to do the transit.” Morn said. She neared and leaned an elbow against the podium. She wasn’t, Percy noticed, all that much taller than him. “I don’t.”

“Why?”
“Natural talent,” she said, perfectly seriously but with a pompousness unseen before that suggested it wasn’t serious at all.

He looked down at the scuffed tiles, at the corner of a box. “So what’s this store going to be when you’re finished with it?”

“We’re not going to finish,” Constantine replied. “It was a trap for someone from Jake’s group. Now that we’ve got him, our mission is complete.”

“Wow.” Something like fog washed over his thoughts, and Percy continued looking down, ‘wow’ running through his muddied head.

Morn asked Constantine, “Want me to wipe his memory?”

“No,” was the immediate reply, to Percy’s shock and subsequent relief. “He came here for a story, remember?”

“Oh yeah.” Percy looked up, started fishing in his pocket for a five.

“I think you got one for free today, didn’t you?”

He looked up and met the storeowner’s—the master Plotseekers'?—eyes. “For free? You’ll let me write down what just happened?”

“Who will believe you?” Morn asked. She smiled, a thin baring of white teeth. Her face, he thought, with the quickness and the green eyes, reminds me of a garden snake.

“Good point…” but the more he remembered, the more he was curious. “Do you think I have this power too?”

“I doubt it,” Constantine said. “You’d know.”

Percy shoved his hands into his pockets. He’d gotten his story for free, and had not expected to pay for one in the first place…that mental shift was rather like the one he experienced when he thought about going into a fictional place. Had that air really been born of words? “Okay,” he murmured, and turned to go.

After a few steps he turned around, one last question managing to pull itself out of the tangle of others. “What’s the last line on your sign mean?”

Morn replied, “’We speak Elvish.’”

After a moment, Percy decided that the best and perhaps only thing to say to that was “Oh.”