Reflections of Reality

[On a building across the city a Light glowed.]

Varne " Lord, that is a Dong with a Luminous Nose."

[Magnus muttered something under his breath and looked vaguely startled as three asterisks and a question mark appeared in front of his face.]

Magnus " Florestan, it seems that Baranz was right. The other explorer of the Interior was Lear and it looks like there has ben some overlap since he and Caroll were working."

Note Baranz is somebody I have never heard of but Magnus has.

Just beyond the scene of the death of the so-called "troll", there was a potions and supplies shop. No one owned up to being the source of its aspect as Mr. Hooper's store on Sesame Street.

Galvanized by Eloise's assignment to themselves of the Quest of the Story of the Trouble, the Fourth-Eighth-Nth team provisioned themsleves and departed the shop with more alacrity than their compatriots and set off in the direction of the castle.

"Ah, the smell of adventure," said Eighth. He and Fourth were leading the party with Eloise walking between them.

"Do you really smell anything?" Eloise asked.

"No," said Fourth, "we're just happy to be finally moving along."

"Much as it might seem different from the rest of me's behavior," said Eighth, "I really do prefer action to words."

"Now's my chance to set things in motion," said Fourth.

Just then the entire party stepped on a portion of the landscape that had been left out by mistake. The motion of which Fourth had been speaking turned out to be downward, as the ground benath them collapsed. It seemed to go on forever - then there was a general thump, and a few moments of silence.

Eloise was the first to shout, "Anyone hurt?" There was a ragged chorus of negatives.

"Where are we?" Romana One asked.

"A Pooh Trap for Heffalumps," Sarah Jane groaned. Though there had been no outright injuries, everyone was regaining their feet rather delicately.

"You mean, they ..." Adric made a hand motion that must have been an obscure Alzarian cultural referent. "In here? Yuck!"

"*Winnie-the*-Pooh," Sarah Jane elucidated.

"That's not what I see," said Sam. "I see the Tunnels from the 80s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST programme."

"I was just making a joke," Sarah Jane grumbled. But several people were chiming in:

"It's the Indian caverns from SMALLVILLE," said Grace.

"The natural tunnels on Jastanilic VII," said Romana Two.

"Old New York from 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes'," said Fitz.

"I see sewers," said Spike.

"Our perceptions are beginning to diverge," said Nth.

"That's not good," Eloise said. "We need to try to converge them, or we may get to a point where we can't relate to each other. What do we see out of the corners of our eyes?"

There was a moment's silence, and a ragged chorus of, "Sewers."

Eloise looked at Spike. "Have you been seeing through the illusions all along?"

"Nah," said Spike. "I just expect to run into sewers when I'm undergound. 'Ts how I get around during daylight hours."

"It may mean you'll find your way around down here best of all of us," said Eighth. "Come up here with Eloise and mes."

"Right," said Spike. "Let's all earn our filthkicking merit badges, boys." He brushed past Eighth who waved everyone forward after him.

"I knew it," said Fourth to Eloise as they trudged on.

"Knew what?"

"I knew there'd be a weightless/falling sequence eventually, as soon as I lost my scarf earlier. The same thing happened in 'Planet of Evil'."

"Direction is a state of mind
That is what you should find."

"'Down', maybe?" Fifth hazarded. "Or 'up', I suppose..."

"Oh, this is just stupid." Jonah kicked at a tussock, glowering. "Who, why, how or what - so which one of those is this supposed to be anyway?"

"Dreams unwind, love's a state of mind..." Rhiannon sang, doing a little dance that would win her top prize at the Night of a Thousand Stevies. "Oh you know that your dreams unwind and your love's a state of mind..."

"Man I love that song," Molly said. She sat down against a nearby tree and began giving herself a manicure with one of her daggers.

"Always gets me through the times when I'm really depressed."

The Trader raised an eyebrow at her. "Did you just say 'depressed'?"

"Yeah, wha...?" Molly looked at the Trader, then at the two Doctors, who both had an expression approximating an "A-HA!" with no words on their faces.

"That's it!" the Fifth Doctor exclaimed, and quickly pushed the entire inscription with his hand.

Nothing happened.

"And the winner for most anti-climactic scene is..." Imran said, miming opening an envelope.

"Hmmm. Perhaps--" The Fifth Doctor unknowingly stepped into a small depression in the dirt in front of the inscription, and was suddenly cut off by the loud grinding of centuries-old machinery. The wind picked up, and then the entire party was decending slowly into the ground.

"So the Doctor was right," Jonah muttered. "It was 'down'."

It was indeed 'down'; and after a moment it suddenly began to be 'up' as well. At least as far as the back of the platform was concerned.

Molly yelped, and clutched at Rhiannon, beside her, whose cat-reflexes had somehow kept her on her feet. They were not, however, designed to cope with being grabbed suddenly from one side. With a final indignant "Hey!" the black-haired warrior woman lost her footing and found herself sliding downwards with a bump on top of Molly, the Fifth Doctor, something spiky that turned out to be Jonah's helmet, and the entire rest of the party, who had all been taken unawares a few moments earlier. The floor they had been standing on was now tilted to an acute degree, and the section of the chute in front of them, while considerably flatter, appeared to be almost ice-slick in comparison.

After a few seconds' vain scrabbling, the complete struggling heap of questors found themselves sliding inexorably over the edge; and then, very rapidly, along the smooth surface in a helpless tangle until no-one was quite sure whose limbs were whose, let alone whose elbow was in whose mouth. The whole thing lasted only a few seconds, which was probably just as well.

OOOF!

"Where are we?" Fifth enquired, trying to remove Imran's pointy hat from over his own eyes, where it was completely obscuring his vision.

"I don't know!" Sixth, underneath him, had hit the ground rather hard, and was feeling less than charitable towards silly questions.

"Well, it looks as if we've taken a short cut." Imran retrieved his hat and climbed to his feet, surveying their surroundings. The flickers that had gone past them in the last few instants were clearly the tree-trunks of the large and somewhat gloomy forest in which they now found themselves. But in the distance--

"What do you mean, a short cut? Clearly, we've gone onto the next Looking-glass square," Rhiannon said crossly, trying to groom her hair back into some semblance of order. (Interestingly, Biggles, inside Jonah's tunic, appeared to be having exactly the same reaction to their journey.) "I bet there's a brook-jumping railway carriage somewhere round here."

"Well, first of all, the inscription took us here, so we must have been intended to go *somewhere* specific," Imran explained.

Varne, eyes like daggers, was assisting Candy to her feet and, incidentally, out of her somewhat intimate proximity to Magnus, who appeared distinctly ruffled by the experience. Mrs Harcourt bestowed upon them both a sleepy and entirely untroubled smile.

"Secondly," Varne added, without apparently having looked round to follow Imran's gaze, "there is a large tower in the distance which might very well be what we are looking for."

Sixth straightened his coat and coughed loudly. "Of course it is," he stated with supreme confidence. He glared at the rest of his party, now more or less upright. "Well, come on then. What are you all waiting for?"

"Who will have one last chance to patch things up before the bell tolls for Whom," said the Rabbit, ignoring the babble. " I see a foul-mouthed child in an orange parka. I see a token sacrifice, a misplaced stick of celery, and a rousing musical number. Beyond that, my vision fails."

[Okay. We've had the foul-mouthed child in the orange parka, and we've had the token sacrifice. Now we just need a misplaced stick of celery and a rousing musical number.]

"Tegan," said Nyssa, "how did you get *that* there?"