Strangeworlds Travel Agency

by L. D. Lapinski

  And up.

  “—!” she squeaked. She braced herself to plummet back to the earth, but instead she descended slowly, like a penny dropping through gel, back down until her shoes settled neatly on the ground. “I can fly!” Flick cried. She jumped again, bouncing off the ground and shooting up like a rocket.

  “Yes.” Jonathan rolled his eyes. “You can almost fly.”

  Flick laughed as she reached the peak of her jump. This time, she tried a somersault, remembering how she’d tried over and over to do one on the trampolines at Skegness Pier until her time ran out and she had to get off. She was sure, with this sort of height, that she could manage it.

  She turned in the air but got stuck halfway, landing softly on the ground on her back. Jonathan appeared in her vision, shaking his head.

  “You need more height for that sort of thing. Come on, there’s a place I think will do the trick.…”

  It was difficult to walk with dignity when the world made everything springy, but Jonathan managed it somehow, even though Flick was bouncing all over the place like a slow-motion rubber ball. Occasionally, Jonathan would give a delighted bounce, sailing up into the air before coming down gracefully, all the time trying and failing to hide a grin.

  They bounced on through the countryside of deep purple bushes and the bright green grass. The lilac stones that made up the path were large and egg-shaped, though gradually the path began to thin, the stones giving way to grass before running out entirely.

  “Where are we going?” asked Flick.

  “Somewhere we can fly.”

  There were no people around, but she could see small gray animals, like rabbits but with six legs, watching them from large hump-like burrows in the ground. They twitched their pink noses as Flick passed them.

  “What are they?”

  “Animals. I don’t know if they have a name; I’ve never thought to ask.”

  “Do any people live here?” Flick asked, thinking of the city she had seen in the distance and wondering why they hadn’t seen any other humans.

  “Oh, yes. This is a quiet part of the countryside. We can go to the city later and meet the people.”

  “It must be so fun to live here and be able to bounce around everywhere,” Flick said wistfully, taking a rather large bounce herself as she said it.

  “The people who live here have evolved to deal with the gravity,” Jonathan responded. “I remember when I came with my father. They thought I was extremely odd for bouncing all over the place. Some of them laughed at me.”

  Flick watched Jonathan’s careful strides. That explained why he was taking such pains to walk normally over the surface. Strange; she wouldn’t have thought of him as someone who cared much about what other people thought.

  They went up a small incline, the deep green grass giving way to chipped shale in a delicate lilac-silver, and stopped on the top of a hill. It crested outward like a wave, or perhaps a generously wide diving board.

  “We’re going to jump off this?” Flick’s eyes went wide.

  “Only if you’re not afraid.” Jonathan gave her a condescending look. “We can always go home.” He patted the suitcase.

  Flick edged to the lip of the hill and peered over.

  Below, dropping many, many feet down, was a canyon. And within it, great globes of translucent somethings rolled around together, like bubbles in an enormous bathtub.

  Torn between wanting to see closer and wanting to do a commando roll away from the edge of the cliff, Flick frantically tugged at Jonathan’s arm. “What are those?”

  “A sort of plant, with fruits kind of like giant grapes. They’re attached to vines that grow from within the canyon,” Jonathan said. “They’re sturdier than they look—they won’t pop when you land on them.” He flexed his arms a little. “A running jump can be best, if you’re nervous.”

  “What makes you think I’m nervous?” Flick said, hiding her trembling hands in her pockets.

  “Nothing whatsoever. I’ll see you at the bottom.” Jonathan smiled. And with a spin on his heel, he tipped backward off the edge, the suitcase still in his hand.

  Flick gasped and leaned over the edge.

  Jonathan was falling backward as though he were resting on a pool float, one hand under his head, ankles crossed, giving Flick a cheery wave with the hand that still held the suitcase.

  Well. If he could do it…

  Flick took a deep breath and, sending a silent apology to her mother, shut her eyes tight and leapt off the edge of the cliff.

  She tensed horribly as she launched herself into the air, her stomach feeling as though it had chosen to stay on the top of the hill. Despite seeing Jonathan do it first, she still half expected to plummet down like a rock.

  But the wind didn’t whip at her face; it caressed, and Flick opened her eyes to see the side of the cliff falling away gently, like a delicately peeled fruit.

  The air was like a cushion beneath her body, plumped up under her back. But she found that, if she angled herself like so, with her arms and legs tight together, she could drop like an arrow. Or, as she flung out her limbs again, she could float downward like a dream.

  “Enjoying yourself?” Jonathan appeared beside her.

  “You were below me!”

  “Yes, but this isn’t like falling. This is like swimming. See?” He pushed his arms up above his head, and brought them down firmly, rising up in the air as though pushing himself through water. “You don’t have to settle for falling. Not if you can fly.”

  Flick tried to right herself, kicking her legs a little, and ended up on her side before dropping downward again.

  “Maybe next time?” Jonathan called after her.

  Flick felt, rather than saw, the spheres meet her. They were, as Jonathan said, soft and squashy, and gave way under her weight. The suitcase lay on top of one. She grabbed it by the handle and bounced her way free of the bubbles, back to more solid ground.

  Above her, Jonathan was treading air, occasionally kicking his legs like a frog.

  This is ridiculous, she thought. Then she grinned, propped the suitcase against one of the cotton-candy trees, and started up the hill again.

  This time, Flick didn’t hesitate to jump.

  Jonathan lowered the leaf he’d been fanning himself with as Flick collapsed onto the ground next to him, after completing a triple backflip on her latest jump.

  “Enjoying yourself, are you?” he asked, with a knowing smirk.

  Flick gazed up at the rose-tinted clouds. “Maybe.” She was suddenly brimming with questions. “Are the worlds other planets?”

  “Other worlds can be any size whatsoever. They might contain a planet and a sun. Maybe a moon. Or they may not be what we think of as a planet, at all. There are worlds made entirely of the fires of burning rock, the edges of cut-crystal, or simply pure darkness, and the shadows that twist within. There are worlds where you can sail to the edge and right over, and then there are worlds we can’t even visit because the air is toxic to us, or the entire place is underwater. Each one different, each one a miracle in its own way.”

  “And can we get to each one through a suitcase?”

  Jonathan shrugged. “I don’t know how many worlds there are in the multiverse. Likely I don’t have access to them all at Strangeworlds. I doubt it. But I have more than enough.”

  “How many cases do you have?”

  “Seven hundred and forty-three,” he said automatically. “That, in the grand scheme of things, is not a large number at all.”

  Flick thought about the cases stacked in the travel agency. There had been a lot of them, but definitely less than one hundred. Where were the rest of them?

  Jonathan stood, and brushed off his trouser legs. “We should head into the city now. This visit can’t be all fun and games.”

  * * *

  Coral City was as twisty as its namesake. Spires of rock and stone and glimmering pearl spiraled into the sky, moving ever so slightly to and fro as though in a breeze.
Translucent vehicles that looked like bubble-cars made of frosted glass rolled slowly on three wheels over white stone roads. The people, and there weren’t as many of them as Flick would have expected in a city, looked completely unremarkable, aside from the fact a lot of them had pastel-colored hair. One or two of them had little pets that looked like long-eared cats with six legs trotting beside them on leads. Once they were among the buildings, Jonathan took out his magnifying glass. He seemed satisfied with what he saw and handed the instrument to Flick, who delightedly peered through it to see swirling magic wafting through the streets and rushing between the buildings like water around rocks. There were no trees lining the paths, but there were tall jagged rocks that reminded Flick of the salt lamp in her parents’ room.

  “Where do you think your dad would have gone?” she asked, reluctantly giving the magnifier back.

  “The confectioner’s,” Jonathan said. “He always went to a specific one whenever he came here—it’s the only place in the multiverse that sells Wilson’s Whirly-Wax in buzzberry flavor.”

  It turned out the sweet shop was on the fifteenth floor of a building that had seemed to be made of semi-solid gel. Flick could see her footprints slowly disappearing from where she’d walked on the gummy-like floor.

  The entire sky-scraper structure was filled with shops—two or three on every floor—that sold different kinds of food. There was fruit with reaching tentacle roots, oblong vegetables with skins as thick as car tires and a shop selling bottles of pop that fizzed and bubbled in every color of the rainbow.

  The sweet shop itself wasn’t large and had the look of an old-fashioned corner shop, but it was crammed full of so much candy that it was a wonder it hadn’t fallen straight down to the floor below. There were packets of spiral gummies filled with fizzing sherbet known as Salisbury Twists (not to be sold to the under-fives, as they could cause mild levitation), small pink and blue jelly beans called Doctor Stobbart’s Immersion-Caps (if you ate one, you developed an insatiable urge to take a bubble bath), and great slabs of chocolate-covered honeycomb, that (for some reason) had to be sold by the customer’s blood type. There were chocolates and tubes of powders, twisted paper bags of chunky toffee, bricks of cake toffees and liquids in glass bottles decorated with glitter.

  Flick stuck to the sweets that came with the smaller warning labels, using a tiny golden scoop to choose. Jonathan was reading the label of something called “Indescribable Badger Bits” with a frown on his face.

  “I wouldn’t, unless you’ve got a spare set of teeth,” the woman behind the counter called to him. Her purple hair, the exact same shade as her nail polish and eye makeup, was in such a large beehive that it almost brushed the ceiling. “They use that stuff to break up the roads, you know.”

  “Fair enough.” Jonathan straightened up. “I’ll stick to something I know.”

  “What’s in these, please?” Flick held up a tub labeled MELTING FROBISHER LEAVES.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” The woman raised her eyebrows.

  “What gave us away?”

  “You’ve got no idea what it is you’re after.” It didn’t sound as though she thought this was a bad thing.

  Jonathan picked up the nearest jar and took it over to the counter. “This isn’t my first time here. It’s just been a while, that’s all.”

  “You’re from over Silver Gate way?” she asked, taking a silvery pair of tongs and starting to weigh out the confectionery onto a set of scales.

  Jonathan gave a noncommittal hum, as if he couldn’t care less about giving the lady information. But his fingers were tight on the suitcase. As the woman screwed the lid back onto the jar, Flick noticed Jonathan glance in her direction.

  She frowned. Was he nervous about her being with him? If they needed to keep Strangeworlds a secret, she wasn’t about to blow their cover.

  The owner of the sweet shop bagged up Jonathan’s candy and handed it over. “That’s two and a half,” she said.

  Jonathan took something shiny and hexagonal from his pocket and gave it to her. “Thank you. Do you have buzzberry Whirly-Wax, at all?”

  The woman’s smile fell. “Oh, I’m afraid not. We can’t get hold of buzzberries anymore.”

  Jonathan looked surprised. “Really? Why not?”

  “All the trouble over Mount Fission way,” the shopkeeper said. “Nothing’s been growing at all, not just fruit. Something to do with the weather, I think. Snow coming down in the midst of summer, red-hot days in winter, the whole thing isn’t right.”

  “Oh, what a shame,” Jonathan said lightly, but Flick could tell he was covering his shock. “I suppose I’ll just have to get a different flavor, then.”

  “Truth be told, you’re taking it better than the last person who came in asking for them—a gentleman a couple of months ago. When I said there was none to be had, he ran out of the shop.” She chuckled.

  Jonathan laughed along with her, but he looked very troubled.

  Flick came over with her own chosen jar. “Is this good?”

  “Oh, Cloudfloss!” The woman looked delighted. “Lovely stuff. Just don’t eat it all at once—gives you stomach-fog.”

  Flick didn’t know what that was, but she didn’t fancy finding out, either.

  They paid and said goodbye. They left the shop and walked onto a balcony that leaned out over the road. Below them, shining vehicles like polished beetles trundled down the white roads. People dressed in clothes of glittering gossamer and slices of lurid plastic strolled on the paved sidewalks, and there was a street musician leaning against a wall, playing an oversized guitar. If Flick gazed into the distance, she could see the wobbling of the soft landscape moving like little waves lapping at bases of the buildings. It made her feel slightly seasick.

  She glanced at Jonathan. “Think it was your dad who ran out of the shop?”

  He was opening his paper bag. “Mm. Annoying, if it was. This is the only place I know he would have come to in this world and we didn’t learn anything about where he might have gone to next.” His uncertain look became a smile and Flick realized she was drifting upward, very slowly, like a particularly sneaky balloon.

  She grabbed the balcony railing and pulled herself back down again. “At least we know he was here. Even if we don’t know why. And we saw that there’s plenty of magic floating around,” she added, remembering her new Society responsibilities.

  “That’s true. But still… I am disappointed.” Jonathan sighed, then tore the pincer off a gummy scorpion with his teeth. “These are not as tasty as I anticipated.”

  Flick snickered, then steadied herself as she started to float away again. “That was only our first try, Jonathan. We’ll keep looking for clues. We’ve got a whole list of places to try.”

  “A whole travel agency, if it comes to it,” he said. “Seven hundred suitcases, and billions of things to see in each one.”

  A soft feeling, somewhere between happy and sad, grew in Flick’s chest. She stared out at the strange city. This place was unfamiliar, and strange, but… she loved it. And she might never come here again.

  “I want to do it properly,” she said. “Become a proper Society member. Pledge, badge, everything. I want to see as much as I can.”

  Jonathan gazed at the mist in the distance. “The first new Strangeworlds Society member in a long time.” He smiled warmly at her. “Welcome, Felicity Hudson.”

  * * *

  “You’ve already got a copy of the guidebook,” he said when they got back. “It’s yours now, so you may write your name in it. As a Custodian, you’ll have to record new places you visit, what you find out, what sort of currency they use, even what the weather is like—it’s all useful. And, if you’re with me, you can use a magnifying glass.”

  Flick turned the pages of her guidebook, feeling the soft edges of the paper. She wanted to squeeze it, give it a hug, but thought Jonathan might raise an eyebrow at her. “Why can’t I have a magnifying glass of my own?”

&
nbsp; “Society rules.” Jonathan folded his arms. “Head Custodians only. To prevent misuse. Now, there are a few other rules of course. The most important being that you mustn’t share the true nature of the travel agency with anyone who is not magically conscious.”

  Flick frowned. “But what if I don’t know if they are or not?”

  “Then don’t say anything to anyone. Err on the side of caution. And that includes your parents.”

  Flick hadn’t even considered telling her parents. They weren’t the type to believe in magic. But now she wondered about something. “If I’m magical, does that mean my parents are magical too?”

  “Not necessarily. These things can skip a generation or two. Has there ever been anything… interesting about your family?”

  Flick thought about it. If either of her parents were magical, they were doing a brilliant job of hiding it. As for extended family… her dad was an orphan and had grown up in children’s homes. Her mom’s parents, Nanna and Grandad Pitchford, were special to her, but they weren’t exactly magical. She didn’t have any aunts or uncles. “Not really,” she said.

  Jonathan pulled a sympathetic face. “It isn’t important, I don’t think. Who knows? It’s unpredictable—sometimes it can simply crop up out of nowhere.”

  Flick couldn’t help feeling slightly put out. “This is something I’m good at. And I can’t even tell anyone.”

  “You can tell me.”

  “You already know,” Flick said.

  Jonathan shrugged. “That’s the price, I’m afraid. The price of adventure.”

  Flick nodded and put the worn and battered guidebook into her bag. “I’ll be back. As soon as I can.”

  “Oh, I do hope so. Now, the real work begins.”

  Two frustrating, parent-filled days later, Flick was back in the travel agency. She had whispered about Strangeworlds to Freddy, trusting him not to blab her secrets, but otherwise had no one to talk to. How could she concentrate on mundane things like trying on her school uniform or choosing between German and French when there were whole worlds that wanted her attention?