Introductions.
Chapter 1: In which we the literal introductions are made, some things are set up, some things are set down, the laws are broken, reality shattered, and a character accidentally sums himself up in a single line.


Blue.
Joy.
The everyday miracle.
An umbrella tapped against the sidewalk, it’s silver tip tracing the cement and catching the occasional overgrown verdant grass stalk as it bent over the pathway. The light blue parasol was used as a walking stick today, regardless of the weather. Indeed, in spite of it; the sky had few clouds to interrupt the azure palette, as eternally still as Woden’s pond.
The cane hit the ground between its holder’s steps, rather than in time as though support for a lame-legged man. The clacks fell in rhythm to his black-and-white saddle shoes, leading a tail whose tip every so often just barely grazed the top of the pavement. Up two legs outfitted in formal cut trousers in a color either described as lavender blue or pastel indigo, but never periwinkle. The pants matched an open-breasted swallowtail coat, it’s fabric tails reaching down past the back of his knees.
The open coat showcased a royal blue waistcoat, buttoned, and with black scrolls mirrored against each other on both panels. A tie of the same color was tucked into it, tied around a white collared shirt. Also covered were a pair of suspenders and a chain ‘round his neck, but such details are nothing if not trivial to this story.
On his head, between his two sharp ears, was his favorite (albeit not only) fedora, a blue to match his vest and tie, a white band to match his shirt and shoes.
The clothes were all possessions of, and the ensemble currently worn by, a bat named Sapphire A. Moerlevad.
Two wings trailed behind him, only gently folding and unfolding ever so slightly for the sake of balance and the stray breeze.
The dark of his fur was, after some research, decided to be the color the darkest shade of cement in the rain. The color often reminded him of rain; not the rain that features heavily into sad revelations and somebody-done-somebody-wrong songs, but the kind of rain that breaks heat waves and is often enjoyed by very young children, much to the horror of their mothers.
The light of his fur, which formed the membrane between his wing-fingers, the velvet shorthair of his hands, feet, and inside his fox-like ears, and the fur that ran around his mouth, up his muzzle, round his eyes and down ventrally to cover his chest, stomach, and further, ending in two ‘flares’ on his inner thighs, was a light grey the color of dark mist, or light clouds.
Sapphire was, as you may have now guessed, what one might call an ‘eccentric.’ Had he been wearing this outfit to the opera or dinner at the most formal dining establishment known, it might have been understood. Might. If he were wearing the outfit to meet President Buchanan somewhere around 150 years ago, it would have looked perfectly in place.
As such, going out to get a gallon of milk at the local Corner Market, it wasn’t exactly the most inconspicuous of outfits.
Sapphire, at the corner of two streets, put his weight on his umbrella cane, angled so the crook met his hip. Had he a pocket watch, he might have checked it, waiting for the lighted sign across the crosswalk to turn from a red, lit paw to a little white stick figure, frozen in mid-motion.  
He watched the sky again, humming to himself. If it was an actual song, he didn’t know it.
Sapphire was something of a simple person (one of those that preferred ‘person’ to ‘fur,’ if that says anything). It wasn’t that he didn’t like adventures, it was always that he merely didn’t seek them out, and was fine not going on them.
Sapphire stopped smiling, and seemed to start thinking.
In contrast to his ostentatious outfit, he was quiet, and reserved. Shy even.
Sapphire looked left and right, something about his expression conveying disbelief, perhaps disgust.
And that was just the way he liked it.
“That is absolutely not true,” he said, to no one in particular. “No,” he continued, “It isn’t to ‘no one in particular,’ it’s to you, you idiot.”
Sapphire seemed to shout into the sky, believing that… wait, what?
“You heard me. What you just said about me isn’t true.”
No, not… you’re not supposed to be talking with me. I’m the third person narrator.
“I don’t care how many people you are, Narrator, I’m not going to be a part of this story if you’re going to be spreading lies about me.”
But… but….
“The fact of the matter is that I don’t like the way you’ve been talking about me. Like I enjoy having a boring life. The only reason I don’t is because I’m afraid to do things that aren’t routine. But, if you’d let me, I’d do whatever I wanted to do.”
At that point the light changed, and Sapphire noticed it, but wasn’t sure about whether to go or not.
“Okay, you’re right about that one. I don’t know about going anywhere but here.”
This story isn’t going anywhere. I mean, that’s kind of the problem, isn’t it? You’re here to get milk? But why? And for what? Where are you, and where are you coming from? I need to figure out locations, and history, and its all not working…
I have no idea what to do with it now. And you, either.
“Me? What about you? Who are you?”
I just said, I’m the narrator. I’m the part that describes the actions and the feelings and things like that. Most of which you aren’t supposed to be aware of.
“But what’s your name?”
Name?
“Yeah, you’re name. Is it just Narrator?”
Well, my name is Sapphire.
“I thought I was Sapphire.”
You are. I mean, we are. We are Sapphire.
“You need lessons on how to explain things. I should think a narrator would be better at that.”
I mean we are two parts unto a whole; You exist in such a fashion that you are real in a world that is not real, and I am not real in the world that is real.
“Oh, well, that, now, that explains everything. Tell me, are their rubber fish drinking various degrees of sweet lemonade singing in barbershop quartets along the rainbow hairnet bridge in that dimension, or are you actually going to try making sense?”
We need to get out of this story. How about we find a little private place to sort this all out?
“You can do that?”
It’s really very simple. Like I said, I’m the real one. Which is why I’m not real in your world. You’re not real, which is why you’re real in your world. But I can manipulate your world. Wait, here:
A red car, sleek so as to look like the wind itself had carved it in its reckless pursuit of speed, whizzed by, giving no interest to the surroundings. Sapphire grabbed for his hat, lest it follow behind the car, sucked into its drafting winds. For a second, Sapphire felt a little out of place. The way cars passed without considering the people on the side of the road would do that to him, he considered, as he watched the car lose its features off in the road, eventually being a red dot that slipped over the edge of the horizon.
See?
“Wow. That was kinda cool.”
I can do a lot better. Turn around.
Sapphire looked behind him, to find a door. ‘Door,’ in this sense, is only used as a beginning to understand what stood there on the sidewalk path that he had just taken. It had all the features of a door except the most important one; a great big panel which would swing out or in to allow passage. It had something which was much like a doorknob, and it had something which also seemed quite like a frame, or jam, or what it was called, except one was unable to see it when one was looking straight at it. Only out of the corner of his eye was Sapphire sure that it was a door, for wherever he looked he saw only the path and grass and trees and normalcy that he had just passed.
Open it.
“Um, okay.”
Sapphire reached out to try and take the handle, and, after several tries, managed to get his hand-paw around something solid. He took a second, and looked back into the sky (even though he knew there was nothing up there. It was the natural action, for him).
“So, I’m going to be okay, right? I’m not going to open this door and fall into oblivion or a horrible fifth dimension or the set of some entertainment news show or something?”
Nothing quite like that. But you’ll just have to trust me.
“Right,” sighed Sapphire. He closed his eyes and just barely turned the handle he only trusted was there when he stopped and looked up again.
“You never did tell me you name.”
But I did. It’s Sapphire.
“I know, I know that, but I can’t rightly call you Sapphire. Can’t I just call you Narrator?”
That’s presumptuous, though, no, I can’t expect you to know that. I’m a narrator, not ‘The’ Narrator. Specifically, your narrator.”
“So Your Sapphire, and Sapphire’s Narrator. Hey, how about that? Sapphire’s Narrator. Like S.N., for short. Or Sen, even better!”
Sen?
“Yeah. S.N., pronounced ‘Sen.’
Sen means ‘One thousand’ in Japanese Kanji, or something like it. It’s like the character from Spirited Away; Her name’s Chihiro, but she gets her name changed to Sen. I bet it means other things, though…
“Not in English. And people can’t really expect you to know much about what such a word means in every language, do you, Sen?”
Without waiting for response, Sapphire smiled and twisted the handle.
Like a door, the thing moved forward and swung inward. It was white inside; Sapphire held his hand up in front of his face to shield his eyes; his pupils adjusted and his vision focused and he could see again.
It was a hallway, perfectly white. Eerily so. Sapphire wanted to search his pockets and find a pen or marker to scribble on the walls, half-sure they would simply heal back to pristine white. It stretched in one direction farther than Sapphire could see. He turned to see the other way and, just as he suspected, it went forever that way, too. There were doors, every once in a while, along each side. Sapphire looked up; the hallway extend up about three or four stories before a white ceiling stopped it. There were no lights that he could see, which made him wonder about how well-lit everything was.
“So… what’s all this about?”
Well, this is the place where things exist when they haven’t yet been set into reality. This is where stories and characters exist when they haven’t yet been written, songs and notes and lyrics are thrown about trying to find the right combination before they are sung, pictures and images and concepts mutate and change shape before they are painted, or drawn, or sketched, or doodled. That kind of thing. Now, come on. We need to find an empty room.
Sapphire looked around. He noticed the doors had numbers on them, except that the numbers stretched all the way from one end to the other. Had he a second, he would have counted out how many groups of threes there were to get a rough idea. He knew it was more than trillions, maybe more than quadrillions (he liked that he knew that word).
Third door down, on the left.
Sapphire turned-- other way… yeah, that way-- Sapphire turned around and counted out tree doors along the left wall, opening the last one.
Inside was a room, about twenty feet perfectly square--or cubed, rather--with absolutely no features. This room was also well-lit without explanation. He closed the door behind him, out of courtesy.
“Are all the rooms like this?” asked Sapphire.
Well, yes and no. They’re all the same inasmuch as they have no definition; the room could be an endless meadow or the top garret of a castle or a bowling alley or a distant planet or anything. But, no, each room is pretty much different, with half-made characters and stuff.
By the way, any-time you see out-of-character shots or one-shot character shots against a white background, its happening here.
“Uh-huh. But what’s this place called?”
It has a lot of name. The Dreaming; The Tabula Rasa (which is actually a completely separate psychological principle); The Anteparacosmia; The Mind’s Eye; The Playground of The Imp; The Unification; The Place; The Mythopoeic Lands; The Collective Unconscious, etc.
“What do you call it?”
Well, I personally like Anteparacosmia, ‘cause I made that one up myself. But I like The Inspiratorium. Old Cirque relic.
“Cirque… Cirque du Soleil.”
Perfect. Now I think you get it. We’re part of a singular entity, you and I, who both love the Cirque du Soleil. We would often say you can’t claim to understand us unless you know how much we love the Cirque.
See, You’re the character and I’m the bridge between character and real reality. I’m… I am the window in the fourth wall.
“Window in the fourth wall… I like it.”
But usually it doesn’t work quite like this. Well, we’ve got each other worked out, at least, to something that half-works. But, while we’re here in The Inspiratorium, we might as well get yourself worked out. A little run-down, if you will.
“I don’t think I have a choice, which kinda freaks me out.”
Don’t get existential on me. At least not yet. Let’s get some things out of it. First, your wardrobe;
“We just covered that, didn’t we? In excruciating detail, with a reference to Norse mythology for no reason?”
Yeah… I did try and look that up, but I couldn’t find anything about it, so I don’t know if its true, the legend about Oden having a pond which was so still he could see through time in it. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m worried that these clothes give people the wrong idea.
“How so?”
Well, in this incarnation of you, I’ve resolved that you wear clothes from between the Victorian era and the 1940’s. These, your formal clothes, are a little farther back than some of your less dapper outfits.
“Oh, okay, but… wait, ’this incarnation?’ like there were others?”
Well, I’ve kept you in limbo for months now, trying to figure out how to work with you. Your original design was much more like this.
Sapphire’s clothes somehow managed to rearrange themselves while he was wearing them, the fabric becoming something quite like a liquid and occasionally appearing to fly around him like a ring off Saturn.
When it all finally settled down, Sapphire saw himself in baggy carpenter’s jeans, which came down just enough to catch his heel. He had on no shoes, letting his clawed feet clack against the floor. His jacket was no longer charming, but instead some plastic-rayon button down worn open, blue at the top and with a tribal design, fading to black at the bottom. He opened it and looked inside; instead of a waistcoat, he wore a short sleeved white shirt with a series of scribbled lines up and down the right side, just past the shoulder and on the sleeve.
“Well, this is certainly a change,” said Sapphire, feeling obligated to say something. He squinted a bit before he realized that there was something on his face; he took off a pair of rectangular blue glasses, holding them close to his face, now being unable to see without them.
They change color in the sun, by the way.
“Let me guess, to blue?”
Dark blue, yeah.
“The mechanics behind having big sharp ears and a muzzle doesn’t really work for glasses, you know.”
Yeah, which is why I got rid of them.
The glasses faded from his hand, but his vision didn’t immediately improve, as he expected.
You see, it raised a question; were you able-sighted, or did you have contacts, or were you just a little weary of vision, and could have a pince-nez if you wanted to?
Eventually I decided that you wear contacts, and have a pince-nez you very rarely wear, with blue frames, of course. You had them, the contacts, in at the start, which is why I didn’t mention you had them. But that’s the kind of establishment that drives me crazy. If I do it, it’s artificial and comes off as shoehorned, but, if I don’t, I feel like I’ve left out an important detail, and if I use it later, I feel like I’ve changed the character even though I’ve just never mentioned it.
Sapphire found two plastic lenses in his hands. Knowing what to do, he stretched his cheek down and looked up, placing on in his left eye. He blinked to get it centered, and then repeated the action in his right eye. He re-adjusted to the room again.
As I said, let’s go through Wardrobe. His clothes changed again, same as before. Now, he was clad in a white button-down, buttoned only half up. A puff of fur on his chest poked out. He wore two suspenders, bright blue, which attached to his dark grey pants, up above his hips. He felt another hat on his head, he took it off and examined it. It was dark grey with a blue band.
We have variations on this theme. For example;
Here, a tie, which has to be worn with the grey suspenders and with the blue saddle shoes. You can also wear the suspenders off the shoulders. Here we can put thos vest--a much less formal one, without the scrolls, and two-toned with a dark blue back and light blue front--and the tie with the hat. Here we have an undershirt, which can be visible with the unbuttoned shirt, or just the undershirt itself.
As each different combination was described, it would appear and disappear in a similar fashion as the clothes before, melting and zooming around and whatnot.
Oooh, here’s a good one. The Zoot Suit.
Sapphire suddenly found himself in a coat which defined the verb ‘to drape.’ It was nothing if not a lot of fabric, in his own royal blue (which seemed to tie all the outfits together in some way or another). The pants came up right to his waist, where the coat cut in, a little like a trench coat.
Which reminds me. But, later.
The brim of the hat he still had in his hands was only slightly longer, but not ridiculously so. Even understated. It didn’t have a feather in it, as he might have thought. He put it on his head and moved his neck around to get acquainted with the new hat.
I even have some things from later years. Something I saw from the noir era.
Sapphire’s next wardrobe change was that of a pinstripe suit, an art deco tie, and a matching hat. There was another waistcoat, but the jacket was buttoned.
“This is from that film, isn’t it?”
It’s from Guy Noir.
“Who was only depicted, visually, once, in one film.”
Yeah.
And here’s the same look with a trench coat. It’s kind of like Dick Tracy, only blue and white. So a negative of Dick Tracy.
“I think this might be my favorite so far.”
You don’t think it looks too tough for you?
“No I think it-- Did you just insult me?”
Well, I just thought that the rough-and-tumble crime fighter thing wasn’t going to reflect you well.
“But it’s so cool. Look at the way the end of the coat flaps when I turn.”
Sapphire twisted a bit, watching the way the bottom of the coat fluttered under the wind.
“Sen, One thing though.”
What?
Sapphire spread his wings out like a heralding angel.
“These things. How can you expect me to wear an undershirt, a shirt, a waistcoat, and a coat, if I have to have these big wings coming out the back?”
Oh, please, the last thing I need is you pointing out how these things aren’t working. I do that enough on my own. Just, suffice to say, all these clothes are difficult to get on, and I don’t want to describe a lot of views from the back, okay?
“Okay, okay, but, what I was getting at was that I can fly, right?”
See for yourself.
Suddenly, the floor felt like it wouldn’t support Sapphire’s weight. It became increasingly less substantial as it, and all the walls, faded away to what appeared to be sky behind it. Sapphire then found himself freefalling through empty sky. He flailed his arms, managing to put one hand on his hat as he tumbled downward, a farm landscape beneath him, cut into multicolored squares.
He wanted to scream, but didn’t think it a valuable thing to do.
He instead crushed his eyes closed tight, gritted his teeth, and concentrated. He closed his legs together and dove headfirst, trying to streamline his body. The trench coat flapped violently in the wind. Sapphire spread his wings out, trying to get used to the feel of the wind over and under them.
It is odd, he thought, the way a bird knows nothing of what Bernoulli did, finding the curves of quickest descent or whatever, to manipulate the way low pressure and high pressure to get lift. And yet, it was all he could think of, trying to scrape his mind for any knowledge about how flight is possible, should any of it prove useful.
None of it did, of course. All his actions were natural to the point of instinct. He turned himself up, into the wind, slowly, gently. He managed to make his fall into a glide, following the land. He had to keep one hand on his hat, the other in his pocket, as he tilted and shifted his weight to turn.
Okay, we got that figured out?
Sapphire laughed as a response.
Can we get on with the story, little though it may be?
Sapphire was enjoying himself too much to respond. Which can be really irritating.
You wanna get on with this?
Sapphire still didn’t react. That is, he didn’t until he went nose-first into a white wall. He fell to the floor, finding himself put back in the white room in the Inspiratorium.
Looking at himself again, to check for injury, he saw that he was again in the formal outfit he was wearing at the start. Sapphire stood up, rubbing his nose.
“Warning would have been nice.”
Maybe it would have.
Sapphire took off his coat in an attempt at comfort. He hung it up, not even bothering to think about the fact that there wasn’t a coat rack there.
“How can I not bother to think about it when you’re going to point it out?”
Well, you’re not always going to hear me. It’s not always going to work like this. Sometimes I’ll just be in the background.
“Well, wardrobe is out of the way. What’s next, makeup?”
Something like that.
“I was kidding.”
I’m not. I want to get the physicality of the character down.
“Wait, wait, wait.. What?”
How you look and move, physically. Let’s go over this; first, we have to determine how your body looks. Then we’ll discuss some things about movement. Then we might get into some more delicate particulars, which will shape how you get used in future stories. Then we make sure this all works all together, and then we can form the character and put the whole thing together, and, finally, get you to move on your own, in a story that doesn’t need me.
“You mean you’re going to leave me?”
Probably.
Sapphire’s bottom lip quivered a little, his eyes getting bigger and shinier.
What’s all this about?
“Well, I mean, this if my first story, and here you are, and… I don’t want you to leave me, is all. Do you really have to go, Sen?”
This isn’t how the story is supposed to go. Stories shouldn’t have dialogue between nigh-omniscient narrative contrivances and characters.
Sapphire didn’t back down with the sad eyes.
Had I lungs, I would sigh right now. But I’ll see what I can do. Maybe… let’s just leave it at maybe for now. Meanwhile, You’re going to have to strip.
Sapphire was joyous, smiling widely for the joy that he made Narrator back down. Narrator let him, for a second, sure that he would realize it in a second.
He snapped out of his revelry when it hit him; “wait--strip!?”
What did you think I meant with ’figure out how your body looks?’
“Just… that you were going… to… Okay, I wasn’t really listening.”
I want to sigh again. You somehow managed to sum up your character in one line.