The Oracle of Strategy
Once, sometime before this time, the crew of the Psyche had set sail on the Collecuncon Ocean.
It was a different sort of ocean. Its waters were a pale, bleachy white, for one thing, like a blank canvas of paper. Unwritten words and unimagined images churned beneath its surface, almost surfacing with each wave.
It was a different sort of ship, for that matter. It had been crafted out of vast beams of red oak, and had a single sail, shaped like a pale porcelain mask.
And, as you might have put together by now, it was a different sort of crew. The Psyche was captained by a tiny red imp named Nagle--if you could call what he did captaining. It mostly involved steering. He left most of the decisions about where to actually steer to up to the ship's navigator, a bearded old intellectual by the name of Professor Zeus.
But even Professor Zeus didn't have much of a clue as to where they were going. They had all been on this ship for so long that they had forgotten why they were on it in the first place. But luckily, the professor had plenty of books and sea charts to consult, and one day, after his consulting, he navigated the ship to an island that he thought might help their situation.
It was the Isle of Strategy.
"Yes.. yes, you see.. once, long ago, this mass of land had been part of the continent of Ches Ord.." he explained to Kara.
Kara was a valkyrie (although she had obviously strayed a long way from both Valhalla and Norse mythology). Her duties on this ship mostly seemed to involve ship's security. So she was always a bit wary about any place that they stopped at. That was a big part of her job, being wary, and speaking up about her wariness; and so she responded to Professor Zeus: "Well, I think I get that. It even seems to have the same sort of geography as Ches Ord.. lots of squares. But why does it seem like some of the squares are staring at us? That doesn't seem like the type of thing that geography of any sort is supposed to do."
"Oh yes.. the Great Eyes. Certainly. The Great Eyes belong to the Oracle of Strategy, you see." The professor explained, even though that didn't add up to much of an explanation to Kara.
They soon docked at the port of this island full of squares and the occasional Great Eye, and the professor climbed down the side of the ship. "I'll be back in a moment." he said, as he stepped onto a red square at the edge of the dock. This square was covered in tiny blades of grass. And these blades of grass were also red, like the rest of the square. And they also were sharp, like actual blades.
The professor hadn't seemed to notice the blades cutting apart his boots. Fortunately his boots were quite thick. Grumdorf, the gnome-like bootsmith on board, always made certain to supply the crew with plenty of high quality boots, presumably for just such an occasion.
"I think I'd better come with you." Kara said, grabbing a new pair of boots out of Grumdorf's vast stockpile of them on her way down.
"Oh? Well if you must. Yes, there is so much about this island to be curious about! For instance.." he began, but Kara had arrived in front of him with the new pair of boots, and gestured for him to put them on. "Oh. Oh yes. It seems my old boots have been destroyed, haven't they? They fell apart so easily.. I must tell Grumdorf to implement some sort of quality control process! Now then."
And so, the pair climbed over the many squares of the island. Squares made out of panes of red stained glass. Hissing squares made out of quicksand. Pearlescent squares made out of the shells of some sort of gargantuan, ancient snail. These squares functioned as a sort of walkway, but also sometimes as a stairway, and also sometimes as a bridge, over vast tracts of purple and yellow water.
Finally, after hours of this sort of thing, they arrived at one of the Great Eyes of the Oracle of Strategy. The professor approached this rather bloodshot Eye with great curiosity and scant caution, even as it winked at him with razor sharp eyelashes. "Hold on.. don't you think I'd better take a look at that thing before you just walk up to it? It doesn't look entirely safe." Kara said.
"Now Kara!" Professor Zeus reprimanded her. "We must take care not to offend the Great Eye!"
The Great Eye, being little more than a giant eyeball, really didn't have much of an expression, so it was pretty difficult to really tell if it was even capable of taking offense.
"My apologies." Kara said stiffly.
Then the Professor approached the Eye, and stared deeply into it, and the secrets of strategy were revealed to him. After about a half an hour of this, he turned back to Kara. "Well. That was fruitful." He said. "Now let's be on our way." And so, they went on their way, and they made the long, harrowing, wondrous, square-filled journey back to the ship--only to discover that the ship wasn't there anymore.
In its place were pale gargangtuan waves and sharp winds pelting them with pulpy white rain.
"Well.." said Kara, shielding herself and Professor Zeus with an umbrella that Grumdorf had insisted she bring along with her, "We're not about to be on our way anytime soon. There doesn't seem to be much of a way to be on! Where is our ship?"
"Oh dear. Well then, it is useless to fret about it, is it not? We must simply return to the Great Eye to discuss what to do next.." the professor said.
"That's what got us into trouble in the first place!" Kara protested. "And besides, if your 'Great Eye' didn't bother telling you about the storm to begin with, what makes you think that it's going to tell you what to do about it now?" But the professor was already heedlessly hopping along the squares toward the oracle. Kara hurried after him.
When they arrived this time, the Great Eye was closed. But the square above the Eye had become a whiteboard with infinitely branching diagrams scrawled upon it, and great jagged line graphs, and multicolored wheels within wheels of pie charts within pie charts. "Ah, yes, I can see it now.." the professor said, as he scrawled notes in the ancient tome he carried with him everywhere.
After much note-taking and beard pulling, the professor announced: "I have determined our next course of action. Yes. You see, we are to build a new ship in order to find the old ship; based on the principles of strategy."
"Oh 'we' are to build it, are we?" Kara knew the professor well enough to know that whenever he said "we are to" do whatever, there was a pretty good chance that he just meant everybody else besides himself. And besides, all this ship building business seemed a bit redundant, considering that they wouldn't have had to build a new one if they hadn't lost the old one. But then, what choice did she have? She didn't want to stay on this island with the professor and the Eye forever.
She fashioned a saw out of the sharp red grass of the island, and a hammer out of the ancient snailshells, and a boat out of the surprisingly sturdy stained glass. Professor Zeus, for his part, provided the specifications for this miraculous vessel, and before long, the project was complete.
But when they returned to the shore, after dragging this vessel from square to square, wonder to wonder, terror to terror, they discovered that there was no ocean to put it upon. They had hardly noticed, in the midst of all their work, but the storm had dried up. The red sun that burned above the Collecuncon ocean had evaporated it, and in the process, it had evaporated the ocean itself. In fact, the bottom of the Collecuncon ocean could be seen, as could an inky, prismatic patchwork of all words unwritten, and all images unimagined.
The Professor was not entirely surprised by this turn of events. "Such instances are not without precedent--historians have frequently commented on the great ocean droughts of--"
"There!" Kara shouted, interupting the professor. Somehow, in the midst of the dazzling display of all that was unknown, Kara had caught sight of the one thing that she did know: the Psyche, stranded at the bottom of the ocean.
"Oh! How curious.. it seems to have sustained remarkably little damage as well. But let us proceed with caution.. it may be a ghost ship, after all! Perhaps it would behoove us to return to the oracle and--"
"Hold on. I can't believe my ears. How is it that you're the cautious one all of the sudden? Trust me, I plan to be careful, but I don't need some so called "Great" Eye to tell me whether or not I should go down the ship and check on our friends."
But the professor could hardly be bothered to listen to Kara. For he had turned back toward the Oracle of Strategy, only to discover that the entire island had become an elaborate, shimmering infographic, a living map of all of the infinitely branching paths through time and space, with chattering numbers and letters and symbols floating about him, whispering to him secret data about every permutation, every possibility, of everything. "Ah! Of course.. it is all so simple. Yes. We should proceed to the Psyche at once!" Professor Zeus said, after what seemed like only a few moments of this sort of thing.
But then he noticed that the sun had set. "My goodness.. how long have we been here?" he asked Kara, but Kara was nowhere to be seen. Then he turned to look upon the ocean, and could see that the pale, pulpy waves of the Collecuncon had returned, and had filled the empty ocean basin back up.
Of course, the Professor had foreseen such a possibility, as he had foreseen all permutations of every possibility. Given that time didn't flow normally upon oracle islands, and that the Collecuncon was so unpredictable, and that Kara wasn't always patient, and that there were other crewmates in need of her attention, this was all to be expected. "It would have behooved her to take my guidance into account, though!" the professor protested to no one in particular, but mostly because he wanted to say the word behoove again.
He then determined that it would have behooved himself to ask for the oracle's guidance again, but he found that his heart was too heavy to do so. For he missed his companions. And so he crawled into his vessel of thick red stained glass, and examined the multiple stratagems hidden within its panes, and discussed these with himself as he shoved the boat off onto the waters of the Collecuncon to search for the Psyche.
The Collecuncon was a dark grey beneath the night sky, barely illuminated by the burning pinpricks of the stars above. And so, it came as some surprise to Professor Zeus when the Psyche came sailing into view. Apparently it had been in search of him. He had foreseen this possibility, of course--he had simply forgotten that he had foreseen it.
To his delight, the crew of the Psyche was completely unharmed. They reported having been sucked into a whirlpool, at one point, but Grumdorf had long ago manufactured diving helmets for the entire crew on the off chance that something like this might happen, so noone had drowned.
"I've been worried sick about you!" Kara said, as she hugged Professor Zeus. (Of course, she had also been worried sick about everyone else, which is why she had left the professor to his own devices.) "I was wondering when you were going to get things figured out and get away from that oracle.."
"Indeed! Indeed, I have learned so many wondrous things. Yes.. yes, but it seems as if there is another lesson to be learned here. We must make haste back to the Oracle at once to determine what it is!"
And from that moment on, Professor Zeus was no longer allowed to navigate the ship.
Comments