Scrapped KQ Scene: "Roadtrip"
Ok, so I've been working on Goblin Graham again, and I was more or less following my outline from 2021, which is not the most coherent thing in the world. (That happens when the story is actually the decision, partway through a challenge, to see if you can force all the prompts to relate to each other.) And honestly, sticking with that original outline is no longer serving the story. Because I realized I had made Graham run away from Daventry while the castle was being besieged. mainly because I want his family to show him lots of love after the whole goblin transformation thing. Also back then I had never shown the Crackers, and I wanted to explore them. But - none of this works character-wise. Graham would die before running away from Daventry in its time of need. He is brave, and ready to fight for his people. He might falter, but not to the point of running off to Llewdor! And by this point, I've shown the Crackers many times. I don't need to shoehorn them in. I do need to do some rethinking to figure out how to keep certain things from the original storyline, because as clunky as Rippling Consequences is, I want it to work, at least technically. The setups are paid off, etc.
I was really grateful to @captmickey for talking this through with me and offering some helpful insights. She suggested that I take the scene where Graham flees and just make it its own thing. I don't think I'm going to reshape it, but I do like some of the things I did with this scene, so I am going to post it as is just for fun. It'll help me move on from the sunk cost and get the story back on track. So here we have it - the non-official, out of character scene where Graham behaves like a coward and runs, but also has bonding time with a bridge troll.
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Those who have never journeyed overland in the palm of a bridge troll might assume that such a mode of travel saves time. Ordinarily, they would be right. Though trolls are a clumsy, lumbering lot as rule, the gigantic length of their stride makes up for it. Further, trolls never worry about following the twists of the road, or detouring at mountains and rivers. As long as you have no plans to cross the sea, you can more or less travel as the crow flies when you ride with a troll.
But if secrecy is an issue, well, you’re better off overloading a lame donkey with luggage and not watering it the whole way. You will get there faster.
Every day Graham and Olfie got just a bit further north, by way of an awful lot of east and west, and a significant amount of south. They chose secluded routes through the wilderness, giving towns and farms a wide berth. Bridge trolls weren’t unheard of outside of Daventry, but most surrounding nations distrusted them. Graham suggested that the best way to avoid attracting monster-slayers was to keep their heads down, sometimes literally. Olfie crept through the Miser’s Hills on his hands and knees. Graham rode on the bridge, trying to keep his balance. There wasn’t much to hold on to unless he sat by the very edge. That seemed unwise, but he tied himself in place with his cloak. His body lost height each day. The cloak was now about twice as long as he was, giving him lots of material to work with.
“Isn’t that the cape with big ol’ pockets?” his enormous friend asked after the first few hours. “Olfie could tie it to something. You could just ride in one of the pockets.”
But the experiment did not go far. The splint and poultice helped, but getting in and out of pockets proved difficult with Graham’s ankle. Besides, he found it easier to keep it from bending at odd angles if he rested on a flat surface. Once past the Hills, he spent most of his daylight hours in Olfie’s hand.
He leaned back against the tremendous cupped fingers. and watching Serenia’s hinterlands thicken as they passed. By daylight, his vision blurred and most colours washed out, but the contrast between light and shadow was sharp. The sunshine itself felt glorious on his clammy skin. When night fell, the world came back into focus, alive in luminescent purples and greens. Even under the new moon, he could pick out insects crawling a quarter mile off.
Scrub gave way to forest. Graham enjoyed trailing his hand on the overstory, much like he used to dip his hand into the water when he tagged along in the rowboat with his sister. Forest gave way to… well, a forest that clearly went to the gym and ate five dozen eggs every day. Massive paleghost trees dwarfed even Olfie, great-trunked and covered with what had to be the world’s thickest moss. Sometimes Graham snatched a leaf or a tree flower as they passed, just to give his overlong fingers something to fiddle with. He’d always been a fidgeter, but his goblin fingers were impossible to satisfy, just for sheer restlessness.
It did help that he and the troll talked so much.
Roadtripping with Olfie was a revelation. They had always gotten on well, and Graham had never felt he needed to put on a kingly act for him the way so many had needed him to since his crowning. But Graham had never taken him exactly… seriously. He was grateful to him for all the times he has been kind and useful. But, well, he was Olfie.
But with nothing else to do day in and day out, they talked more than they had in the four years since the tournament. Olfie had infinite patience for his too-short tongue and stiff lips. He never once interrupted Graham as he tried to sort out his pronunciation. After the king had offered his fifth or sixth awkward apology for speaking unclearly, the troll had said, “Frankly, Goosie, Olfie doesn’t really notice. All us trolls got some got teeth that go outside our mouth, not in, so learning you tiny people’s words takes a while for us too.” He considered. “Kinda nice you slowed down, actually. Olfie can’t keep up when people talk too fast.”
And oddly, it was kind of nice. If the path was slow and circuitous, the stories were allowed to be too. At first, they talked little besides choosing which way to go, when to stop and forage, when to bed down for the night. Then Olfie pointed out a ravine with flowers growing up its steep sides, which apparently looked something like the chasm where he had grown up.
“Funny,” said Graham. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen flowers like those in Daventry.”
“Olfie’s not from Daventry. Started out in the lowlands here in Serenia. Kind of far from here, though.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.”
“Yup,” Olfie said, a tad wistfully. “You’re not the only outsider.”
The silence lingered. “When did you come to the kingdom, then?” Graham asked at last.
“I’m not great at keeping track. Maybe fifteen years? Ish?”
“And…” Graham’s ears sank a little despite himself, “you still think of yourself that way after fifteen years? As an outsider?”
“Nah! Livin’ the dream,” said Olfie heartily, stopping to ginger his way over a boggy patch which probably qualified as a whole bog. Then he swallowed. “But kinda.”
“I’m sorry.” Maybe he should have said more, find out if Olfie wanted to talk about it. But Graham wasn’t sure he had the stability himself, even to listen.
“Hey, it’s not the worst thing to be,” said Olfie, with a consoling, toothy grin. “Least you got an outside to go back to sometimes, ‘stead of being stuck inside.” He raised his hand up to his face so he could look Graham in the face. As usual, it was a little overwhelming to be so close to Olfie’s eyes, one of which had passed as his “eye of a hideous beast” entry. But right now ‘hideous’ was very much a relative sliding scale. “‘This is just a guess, but with all this heading north - you’re going back, right? Home?”
Graham nodded, staring down at his lap.. “Yeah. Home.” He hoped so.
“Good idea.”
Graham shrugged. “Maybe.” He could think of a few cynical responses to go on with, but cynicism hadn’t got him and the villagers through the caverns. He took the second option - curiosity. “So, what’s it like to grow up in a troll chasm?”
And so the stories began properly. They compared earliest memories, roared over most embarrassing moments, and traded lighthearted gossip about Daventryfolk. Nothing too recent at first, but one thing bridged another. By the fourth day, Graham started to haltingly share the story of what had happened after Olfie had left him in the town square that night. Of the aching choices he’d had to make, and of the enchanted cell he’d been thrown into when his first escape attempt failed.
Olfie didn’t have much to offer by way of insights or comfort. But by gum, he listened, listened in a way that was almost better than talking. “And then what happened?” he would say every now and again.
It was… a lot easier than he’d anticipated telling his story would be. Maybe it was because Olfie wasn’t human either. Or maybe it was just the nature of this strange journey that didn’t quite feel real, this step-by-step rise and fall with no crisis, no escape to plan, no friends to guess how to keep alive, no split second decrees to make, no previous king to live up to. Would the words come so freely when they arrived in Dapplethorpe and everything became real again?
Even wondering began to make it grow real again too soon.
One night, as the campfire in the clearing burned low and they finished off the last of their hunter-gatherer supper, Olfie cleared his throat. “So, King Goosie,” he said hesitantly. “You were pretty quiet today.”
“I guess so,” said Graham, gathering up the greasy pheasant bones. He could feel that with a little pushing, the day’s new thoughts would come out, and he wasn’t sure it was wise to share them.
Olfie pressed on. “Yeah. It must get a little boring for you. Anything Olfie can do to liven things up?”
Graham dropped the bones into the ashes and began raking them over with the roasting stick. “You’ve been great. Honestly the problem’s all on my end.” He should have stopped there, but something unruly in him went on. “ It can’t exactly be your fault when you’re just following the King’s orders.”
“Gosh.” Olfie raised an eyebrow. “Orders. Makes it sound all official.” He sounded slightly hurt.
The king sighed, trying to backpedal. “Sorry. I’m just a little out of sorts tonight. And I’m also sorry for… for dragging you into this. I can’t imagine this is how you were planning to spend your week.” But here it was again, the urge to pedal forward. “And, and if anyone gives you trouble when you get back for abandoning the siege, I want you to tell them it was on my order. Then they won’t blame you.” (Blast it, he knew where this would lead. Why push it?)
Olfie’s great eyelids narrowed. “You walked all the way to Daventry on that leg. You tried to get in but couldn’t ‘cause of the magic.You found out the goblins and little Manny Man had the place surrounded, and they’d grab you if they saw you, probably. You didn’t exactly just abandon the siege.”
Graham didn’t look up from the ashes. A note of anger he himself didn’t quite understand crept into his voice. “OK, to make it plainer - I’m pretty much running away. When i said we should try not to be see, I admit I wasn’t thinking as much about monster-slayers as that… my own guards might be following us. To take me back. Because I ran away, like an idiot.”
“You got Baker Man and the rest of the little town people home safe. And you tried -”
He raised his voice further. “I’d been steeling myself to be okay with my friends seeing me as I am. But when my doctor screamed and crawled backward to get away from me, I chickened out. And ran away.”
“But home.”
The roasting stick snapped. “Even worse. Home with my tail between my legs and everything I tried for trailing behind me. Again. Don’t you get it?” The goblin snarl rose to the surface.
Olfie frowned and reached round the firepit with his thumb and forefinger. For a moment Graham thought the troll was going to grab him. But he stopped, and instead laid his hand down on the grass, right next to Graham. “So why are you going home anyway?” he said, lowering his great voice.
Graham didn’t answer. There were several things he could have said, but they all sounded childish. Funny how you could try to verbally whack someone over the head, trying to prove to them how stupid and cowardly and maybe even treacherous you’d been, and yet still have an inner eight-year-old who thought sounding babyish was worse.”I don’t know,” he said at last, the snarl gone. “I had all kinds of half-plans when I first told you we had to go. I thought I might make things worse. Or that there was nothing I could do. I mean, Daventry’s being attacked by goblins. And Manny. And Manny came to my cell while I was transforming, and he stopped me at the door to the surface. And, and I didn’t know what to do either of those times.”
“You kicked him,” Olfie reminded him encouragingly, clenching a fist and smiling.
“Yeah, I kicked him. Big deal. My point is - Daventry’s trying to defend itself right now. Even if they recognized me, they couldn’t trust me. Aren’t you constantly asking yourself what I might do, what I might try, now that I’m a goblin?”
“No?” said Olfie, puzzled.
Graham laughed grimly. “Thanks. But you’re you. Not everyone sees things like you. And even if they did… Look, I still plan to go back and handle this responsibly. Really. But I need to figure out what that would involve.” Olfie began to speak, but Graham cut him off. “I’m sorry I blew up just now. That wasn’t fair to you.”
The troll nodded soberly, and rose to his feet. The ground shook under him and Graham had to dodge a few unsettled sparks from the fire. “Ya know, this clearing’s a little cramped, and Olfie spotted a nice queen-size ditch just the other side of that treeline. Maybe we both could use the space tonight.”
(You know, I'm glad they had that conversation, because it was what alerted me to the fact that this scene felt all wrong. So - now we've had the scrapped scene, I can get on with writing stuff that works better.)