The Death of the Dinkin Peacock

Setting: Dinkin Docks. Small town by a river delta. Formerly an industrial hub, now all the factory buildings are closed down, oceans of asphalt and concrete are cracked by grasses and shrubs on the dusty plains. The immediate area around the town is surrounded by farms and has a small, well-maintained wooden dock at which several fishing boats are moored. The town proper is only a few small buildings, likewise old but maintained. The population has declined in this area precipitously from its high point. Ruins of huge factories in the distance, abandoned and allowed to rot. Large factory right at the mouth of the river, looks like a boxy monolith in the distance.

Characters:

• June: Powerful, capricious visitor from another world. Has magical powers.
• Daphit: Older than the other kids, about 13, probably too old to be hanging out with the little kids but he likes that he can boss them around. Wears a polo shirt with a plaid vest his parents paid some money to get him, nicer than what the other kids wear (he's apparently got some sort of privilege in the town).
• Rene: Younger girl, believes in June.

Plot Beats:

• Daphit is riding home on some massive, rickety tram from his school. It's old, but still works on the few branch stops available in town. He notices out the window a group of kids he visits hanging around a woman in a bright fuschia dress. Something feels wrong about it, but he ignores it.
• He enters his home, and gets ready to get immersed in an expensive video game that's not available to other kids when a commotion draws him outside. (mention that he used to try to get kids to come over to play his game, but once the novelty wore off they quickly stopped (hinting he has issues connecting with others) and so now he plays alone?)
• The commotion turns out to be kids gawping loudly and cheering over some parlor trick or other that has just taken place (June just disappeared).
• She's totally gone for several minutes. Daphit interrogates them, berates some of them for believing in obvious "Boo-Shiet,"
• June appears, so suddenly and stealthily there's no way she could have evaded their notice as she was approaching-- it was as if she materialized where nobody was looking.
• Daphit challenges her-- she accepts it and plays some tricks that could be done with a sleight of hand, some of which are so basic even he knows ("pick a card, any card!") but the younger kids are easily impressed by it.
• Finally, she disappears down a sewer grate-- the clang confirms this is what she did. Since he's been playing there his whole life, he knows that grate only empties one place, so he tells the other kids to watch the grate for him while he runs to the other end to catch her.
• She shows up impossibly behind him, having made no sound on her approach and him having checked around only a half a second before.
• Demands to know where she comes from-- while it's only him and her, she begins to employ her more "impressive" tricks-- guiding him down paths he's already been down before, causing him to meet with and get in an argument with himself several seconds in the past.
• Finally, he asks what she's done to him. I'd like to get some instances where he believes she's doing something to manipulate him earlier to set this up. But she shows him the true nature of his world. That what he believes is reality is actually extremely unstable-- people change into other people, their presences extend and retract as they become more and less important in one's life. That everything is relational, and that it doesn't just depend on the outside world, but you as well. If the whole world changes, including your memory of it, did anything really change?
• This is too much for him to take, and he regresses and loses interest in anything creative or imaginative for the rest of his life, completely sealing off that part of his consciousness. He also loses interest in playing with the other kids, but he doesn't really enjoy the rest of his life either.
• "I think Daphit has had enough playing from now on. He just had to grow up. Some people do, and then they forget everything about fun and magic. It'll be OK-- he'll always be your brother. He's still the same... he's just gotta pretend to be big now. Some people when you show them how big things really are, they don't get excited like you and René-- it just makes 'em feel small. And!" she said, slapping a copy of The Book of Now and Forever on the kitchen table in front of them, "small they will stay."
• I maybe want him to overhear this speech from June, and be silently enraged by it, but hint that maybe he can overcome himself. I kind of want to hint, but not explicitly say, that this was a challenge directly from June, maybe an attempt to get him to try. Slow and low burn. Maybe hint that it bothers him for years afterward, but not say how he resolves the tension.

Scenes

Tram ride

Intro. Daphit rides a tram home from his perparatory school he attends off world. The only other passengers are a little girl named René and her family-- they had to go offworld to get her prescription glasses. She tells him about June.

Home

Daphit prepares his own lunch-- his family could afford "help" but refuses to because it makes them feel awkward around their neighbors. They're recent immigrants to the area-- he was born here but they're from out of town. Daphit feels more in common with the people from out of town at his prep school and can't wait to escape this little encapsulated place for the wider world. Talks about how stupid his family is, and he's right in a lot of ways but he's also just kind of a jerk too. He has his reasons iow, his traumas that are only hinted at unintentionally. He relaxes into his video game and is able to forget about everyone and everything around him temporarily.

Outside

René is friends with Daphit's sister, Phera, and calls her. For some reason she calls for Daphit too, and their parents try to force him into hanging out with the kids. He goes out and interrogates them arrogantly and condescendingly about June. June appears, and "proves" her power with a set of obvious parlor tricks which the kids all adore. René and Phera's role is as a foil to Daphit's skepticism in this scene.

Home again

Daphit believes that June is using nothing but parlor tricks and intends to prove it the next day. He's sure she's some kind of a con artist scammer, maybe a hynotist. Maybe a witch.

Next day Tram

Skim over the next day, maybe mention how much more at ease Daphit feels in the "bigger" world. How much more possibility, how many more people he could meet, more opportunities-- why would ANYONE ever opt to live close to nature like Daphit's parents did? Coming home, René is on the same tram, asking if he's gonna come play with June again. He resolves that yes, and he's going to prove it this time.

Outside Redux

June does a couple tricks, but she relents to Daphit that maybe they're not impressive for a sophisticated kid like Daphit. She plays an obviously bad disappearing act, vanishing down a culvert-- Daphit happens to know, from his own childhood playing on these back alleyways, that this culvert only has one exit point. He tells another kid, maybe one who has been kind of a lieutennant to him to watch that culvert while he runs to the other side to catch her emerging. He begins to crawl inside himself when, faster than she could have possibly approached him, and with no hiding places in sight, she appears right next to him. She disappears again when he looks away, and "teleports" several times in this way. She eventually appears some 50 yards away, running to a distant alleyway, and Daphit gives chase. He's sure this is some kind of trick, and no reality manipulation is happening here.

Chase

The climax of the story, and the one in which I need to develop the imagery most clearly... But high points I want to hit are Daphit being led through things that warp his perception of reality, the forced perspective object that grows as you approach it, things shifting as soon as they go out of sight, and being led into an argument with himself. He realizes how unstable the world really is, how much it resists categorization and being pinned down. He sees what's possible, he sees what he could be, but there's an inherent "wrongness" to it, it's just outside of his comfort zone, he has to turn away from it and close himself off from it.

Denouement

Realizing how large his reality actually is, and by comparison how small he is, Daphit loses all interest in any magic or whimsy that the kids get up to, on having seen it himself willfully decides to forget it all and become something limited, persistent, and concrete. This is how he lives the rest of his life. June explains to René and Phera that Daphit had to grow up, and as a result he's become too small to see the wonder anymore.

Old prose scraps

Dinkin Docks was the kind of backwater anyone would forget about. While it was once considered a promising manufacturing hub due to its plentiful indiginous water supply and convenient interstices with several industrial Crann, it was found to be narratively unstable... Subtle effects caused base metrics in unobstructed space to become unreliable-- questions would inevitably come up where formerly ironclad rules and processes would become ambiguous. "Were we supposed to cut this to 5 thousandths of an inch or 10? Or were we using metric?" This unreliability rendered the entire reality useless for the manufacture of precision instruments. With this news, enthusiasm vanished and the Crann was completely abandoned by international capital. While still technically a territory of the United States, its power was rarely felt there, rarely imposed-- it just wasn't worth dealing with. The only people remaining were those few decided not to seek work elsewhere, and mostly became subsistence farmers.

The town now stood, much smaller than its boom days, a sprawl of asphalt and concrete, cracked by the searching roots of grasses and shrubs, massive highways cleared for g-barges used only by the occasional light pickup truck or sedan.

The old meditech plant had been abandoned since long before any of them were born, and was a common focus of urban exploration for the locals, but Daphit had never seen such a commotion at one of its entrances-- some thirty children were gathered by a side service entrance, carping to look at something inside. He had to struggle through the press of other children to get a look through the tiny window, but after laying out two of his lietennants he was disappointed.

"Wot? There's nothing in here. Nobody's been in there for years-- that dust is inches thick! Why're yall gettin' excited over here?" he shouted.

"June's gone inside to get the magic!" René, a girl in shorts and an oversided sweat shirt said. "You didn't see her?" A couple of the other children echoed her sentiment, and began talking over each other of the amazing things they'd seen.

"Who the hell is June?" he scoffed sullenly.

"She does magic, Daphit!" René said.

"Magic?" Daphit scoffed. "Peh.... Bo-SHEEEIT," he added, shouting at the top of his lungs for emphasis. "Nothin but Bo-SHEEEIT!"

The other startled out of their excitement, now looked at him warily, worried he might start beating them indiscriminately as was his wont, but René didn't waver in her composure, "No she already showed us," the girl replied. "She took Jermine to the roof of the Wal Mart!"

"No way!" Daphit said.

"Yuh huh! She even brought us back some Mello Bars!"

"You children," Daphit began condescendingly, "always believe in the dumbest, ape hanging boSHIET!" He continued shouting each 'shiet' to keep their attention focused on him.

Suddenly a dusky drawl rang out from behind them, "Hey, what's this? A non-believer? In little old me?" She was standing in front of the side door everyone had been gathered around for the last ten minutes, but nobody ever saw her step out or even heard the door open... or close for that matter.

Daphit whirled around to face her, pointing accusingly "who--who the hell are you?" he stammered. "Where d-did you come from?"

"Name's June! Charmed to meet'cha!" she said, reaching out and giving a vigorous handshake to his still pointing finger.

Daphit wilted and tried to reassert authority. June isn't impressed, joking at his expense. He gets more angry.

She shows her "magic" and it's all parlor tricks, obvious tricks the kids seem to pretend to believe in.

Daphit thinks it's all a hypnosis trick everyone is being taken by, so he demands that she prove she's really magic. "Just being able to see through the trick isn't enough to beat it y'know! I have more than one kind of magic." June says.

Finally, she agrees to demonstrate magic that he can actually see. "This is a trick that will make everyone like you." He finds himself in a box being burned by a gigantic figure with a magnifying glass or something.

When he returns, he keeps his disbelief in magic, but he no longer has to pretend to be the leader. He is much diminished as a person. Legends persist for generations of the Dinkin Docks Witch that will drain your soul.

No! I think what she does is show him that his reality is constantly changing all the time, and everyone's memories update with the new changes. His reality is actually one of the less stable ones-- hence why the meditech firm that originally set up a huge manufacturing plant there had to leave. She disconnects him from the normal process that mediates his reality and temporarily attaches him to hers. It's too much for him to understand, but he does see his friends changed into ever-morphing constructs, completely different people he doesn't recognize, and his home town the same. When he's returned, everyone is calling him by a name he doesn't know.