Categories > Original > Fantasy > The Prince of German Bight
The Prince of German Bight
- The First Story in the /Dumplings Series by Curlyjimsam/ -
- Chapter 1: Unsurprisingly, the Beginning -
Our story begins with one of the most unlikely characters.
He is a man, of sorts, seven feet tall and perfectly bald but with a long, blond beard. He is very old, and (probably largely for this reason) covered in wrinkles and warts; his skin is a darkish shade of purple. He has only one eye, which is shrivelled and shrunken - the other is covered with a black velvet patch. His nose is small, and pointed, but his ears are huge, almost to the level of a politician's. His right hand has six fingers but no nails, his left four fingers with nails that are at least eighteen inches long each. One of his legs is missing, and has been replaced by a shiny steel tube like an overlong relay baton. He has two leathery, batlike wings (literally: each wing is like an entire, rather impossibly large, bat - not simply reminiscent of the flight appendages of such a creature) that hang from his shoulder blades. He wears nothing but a pair of swimming trunks, though he doesn't seem to get cold. His name is John Smith, which after everything else about him probably seems incredibly boring. It is.
As pointed out previously, one of the most unlikely characters.
John Smith's involvement in this story does not end here, but we are going to leave him for a short time. Far more important in our tale is a young boy, known by the somewhat pleasing name of Georgie. Georgie is not Georgie's real name (he is actually called George Alberich Haverington Julius Penguin Milton Keynes, which is rather funny - Georgie's parents, or someone, had a strange sense of humour - but not nearly so pleasing), but it is the name he shall be known by for the remainder of this story.
Georgie is not nearly so interesting to look at as John Smith. He is a few inches over five feet, with a pleasantly boring face (except for his nose, which is rather rounded and slightly larger than average), blue eyes, and brown or blond hair (the exact colour being a matter of opinion, lighting and weather conditions). His exact age is not going to be disclosed, although it could be anywhere between eleven and eighteen, and perhaps older or younger if it suits you. He is white, and English (although also partly Welsh, partly Scottish, and with a smattering of Sardinian in his blood), and at the time this particular part of the story is set he is walking down a muddy dirt track on a wintry day - dirt tracks in winter are invariably muddy - on the way home from school, although he isn't really bothered about getting home, something that is clearly illustrated by the fact that he actually lives two-and-a-half miles away in the opposite direction.
If you are worrying that this story is going to be primarily concerned with an everyday British boy of indeterminate age taking what can only be described as a pointless walk, don't. It isn't. In fact, the pointless walk ends roughly now. Georgie is just about to stop.
Georgie stopped. He hadn't got a clue where he was. Yes, he knew that he was in the countryside a short distance from his place of residence (which happens to be located in a town I can guarantee you have never heard of -and, in fact, are never going to), near to a collection of buildings that smelled of pig carcasses - known by some coincidence as Deadham Farm - and presumably close to that famous rolling wilderness, Burrow Down, but he had not troubled to look at a map before leaving his final lesson of the day (Geography), and therefore had no idea of how he had got here or how he was going to get to anywhere else. What was more, it was getting dark (another invariable aspect of wintry days, though primarily in the evenings), Georgie's mum had even less idea of where he was than he did (though she was used to him being missing by now - as long as he was back within a week she wouldn't worry too much), and Georgie himself was actually rather hungry, tired, and still carrying a heavy schoolbag. This whole journey was stupid. He didn't know what had made him do it. Well, actually he did, but it wasn't something he was going to reveal in public.
This wasn't what had made him stop however. If it hadn't been for the strange figure a few yards up the path - and various other things that were directly or indirectly associated with him - Georgie would still be walking. But when a man who is seven foot tall, with incredibly long fingernails on one hand, with a false leg, purple skin, huge ears and - most startlingly of all - a pair of very strange wings, and wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks, is blocking your path, it is normal human behaviour - in fact, normal anything behaviour, except perhaps for a rock or a particularly stupid Member of Parliament - to stop and contemplate the situation for a few moments. Or else to run, but Georgie didn't really feel like that. So, instead, not being a rock or an MP, he was contemplating the situation. Unless you are slightly dim-witted or have a memory problem, you will have noticed the similarities between the description of the man blocking Georgie's path and that of a man described at the beginning of this story. This man was none other than John Smith.
John Smith had his back turned to Georgie, and was facing a most remarkable vehicle. It looked a bit like a spaceship from a rather clichéd science-fiction movie, except that it had wheels. These wheels were probably the most unremarkable thing about the vehicle: they were about a foot wide, with black rubber tyres and metallic hubcaps, and there were three of them, one at the front and two at the back.
Unless you lead a particularly boring life, you are probably totally uninterested about the vehicle's wheels, and would rather learn about the more unusual features of the transport. I will, therefore, tell you, keeping it as brief as possible, because no one wants to be bored to death with long descriptions of objects that don't actually have huge relevance to the plot, or indeed bored to death with anything, especially a large drill. And so I begin:
The vehicle was vaguely triangular in shape, although its three sides were not straight but curved slightly inwards. The name of the craft's model - a Calvetia 5000 - was written in a snazzy logo near the front. At the back three large metal cylinders - which the majority of people born in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries would undoubtedly recognised as rocket engines - had been set side by side into the Calvetia's end, imposing but currently dormant. It was by these engines that John Smith was standing, apparently carrying out some sort of repair work. Two doors opened into the craft on each side, leading to one of three cabins which were visible as large, blue bubbles - one larger, nearer the front, and two smaller (though still each the side of a two-seater car), side by side closer to the back. The car - for that was what it was, despite its gross unusualness - was mostly a dull red-orange in colour, painted with the occasional narrow white stripe from back to front, where a headlight was set into the vehicle at either side: they were turned on, intense glowing ovals of whitish yellow shining out into the near-twilight. Between these, on top of the vehicle, was a plain yellow number plate, which was nearly as uninteresting as the wheels, and for that reason will not be detailed further.
Having contemplated the situation and come to no useful conclusion whatsoever, Georgie took a step forward; John Smith clearly hadn't noticed his presence. Georgie opened his mouth to say something - "Hello", perhaps - but was cut short by something quite amazing which the man in front of him had just done. He had surrounded the car of dozens of little brightly coloured balls - red, yellow, blue, green, purple, pink - which had combined into a glistening ring and rotated the vehicle by a full forty-five degrees, so that the man was now standing right next to one of the doors leading to the main cabin. Still not noticing Georgie - who was now standing, gobsmacked, with his mouth open in a somewhat comical manner - he opened this door and climbed into the vehicle, shutting it behind him with a soft click.
Georgie collected himself, and closed his mouth. He had never been the sort of person to miss an opportunity - something which had led to numerous detentions in his years at school - and was fully aware that if he didn't get into this vehicle before it drove off, he would in all likelihood never see it, or anything like it, ever again. Ignoring anything anyone had ever told him about strange men (and John Smith certainly was a strange man) and their cars, he took another step forward, only to find his ears filled with a terrifying - even to someone like Georgie - roar. After clapping his hands to his ears and beginning a prayer for salvation, he realised that the noise was simply the sound of the engines, which were now spewing out flames and smoke like a match in a barrel of oil. Relieved, Georgie took his hands down again and changed his prayer to one of thanks, and then realised that the car was likely to drive off any second, becoming just another strange memory in Georgie's mess of a mind. Lowering his head for maximum speed, Georgie sprinted at the back door, grabbed it by the handle and threw himself inside just as the vehicle shot forward.
Georgie lay panting - without any good reason, because he had barely been running for two seconds - on the plush red carpet inside the vehicle. He was in a narrow corridor, with pale pink walls and ceiling, which were curved so that if you had made a cross-section it would have had a shape somewhat reminiscent of an egg. The door had slammed itself shut when the car started to move, and clearly there was some sort of insulation inside the vehicle for Georgie could barely hear the roar of the engines and was barely aware that the craft was actually in motion.
Georgie scrambled to his feet, realising guiltily that he had managed to transfer mud from his shoes all over the carpet, and also that he had no idea what he was going to do. There was no real option of jumping out of the vehicle - who knew how fast it was going? - and his only other choice was to ask the man to let him go, and hope that he wasn't anything like a pirate even though he looked like one. He walked down the corridor - splattering more mud everywhere - arriving shortly in what was obviously one of the side cockpits. There was a pair of comfortable-looking leather chairs facing forward out of the bubblelike blue windows -looking out of these, Georgie realised to his horror and surprise that the car was not travelling along the ground or even above it, but seemed to be speeding down some sort of rocky tunnel - and in front of these another doorway which presumably lead to the main cockpit where the man was. Hesitating, Georgie put his hand to it, looking over his shoulder to see if there was anything that might help him.
Conveniently enough, he found it. Under the chairs - indeed, their main support - was some sort of black box or cupboard, with an opening in the front. Perhaps - he could hide, and get out once the car had stopped and the driver left. The box was certainly large enough to take someone of Georgie's build - he removed his bag, swung open the door, which luckily wasn't locked, climbed in, and lay down.
If getting into a strange car is a bad idea, getting into a strange cupboard inside it is probably even worse. Cupboards are, in general, rather dark and rather uncomfortable, especially with the doors closed. Georgie closed the door. He was, by all accounts, rather lucky. This particular cupboard was lit from the inside, and was padded all the way round so as to be very comfortable indeed (in fact, it was in this cupboard that John Smith usually went to sleep when on his longer journeys, which is rather odd but nevertheless how things were, but Georgie wasn't to know this). Remembering how tired he was (being faced with multiple dilemmas usually drives all thought of tiredness out of a person), Georgie closed his eyes and fell asleep.
He was woken some time later - he couldn't say how long, due to the complications of having been asleep, and in a closed cupboard with no way of telling the time - by the door of the cupboard being suddenly opened, which can come as quite a shock even if you are unconscious at the time. What shocked Georgie even more, however, was that the figure standing at the door was not the man he had seen earlier, or even something that could vaguely be described as human - it was humanoid, certainly, but not two feet high (by this I mean slightly less than two feet high, rather than five feet high or sixteen-and-a-half feet high or any of the other things which 'not two feet' could be taken to mean literally) with mottled green skin and a round and disproportionately large head with a small amount of spiky black hair and some of the largest ears Georgie had ever seen. It was wearing a pair of goggles on its forehead (not because it had eyes in its forehead, but because it wasn't using the goggles at present) and a smart suit on its body, but no shoes or socks.
"Eeeiiiyaaaiii!" said George, even though the only language he spoke fluently was English.
"Evening," said the creature. "The boss asked me to take you to the main cockpit."
"Oh," said Georgie, reverting to something vaguely correlating to his native language. "Okay."
He scrambled out of the cupboard - noticing that the blue window had turned a solid black, as if some sort of curtain had been pulled over it - grabbed his bag from the floor, and nervously followed the goblin, or leprechaun, or alien, or whatever it was (I, of course, know exactly what it was, but Georgie didn't - yet) along the passageway into the main cockpit.
The cabin was large enough to hold three large swivelling leather chairs, a huge dashboard (currently switched off), and a coffee machine, and indeed it was holding all of these things. The domed window here, too, was blacked-out. In the chair farthest to the right sat the man Georgie had seen earlier, and he spun around as Georgie entered, rather like the villain in a tacky film, except he wasn't stroking a cat. He was, however, holding a plastic cup containing some hot, steaming liquid that smelled like a mix of pineapple and roast beef.
"Er - hello," said the man, not at all unkindly, looking at Georgie through his one eye. "May I ask who you are?"
Georgie told him exactly who he was - that is to say, his full name (which, in the highly likely event that you have forgotten it, can be found near the start of this chapter).
"Blimey!" said the man. "Er - isn't there anything shorter I can use?"
"Georgie," said Georgie.
"Er - okay," said the man. "Alby saw you on the monitor." He motioned towards a blank screen on the dashboard, and to the little green man.
"Who are you, sorry?"
"No, I'm called John Smith."
"I'm really sorry about this, Mr. Smith," said Georgie, feeling he may as well get it over with quickly.
"Er - call me John." Georgie made a mental note to look for someone who said "er" more than this man did. "And don't worry about it ..."
"Aren't you angry?"
"Anger never got anyone anywhere," said John, smiling slightly. He gave the impression of being the sort of person that anybody could like without trying, which is quite a rare condition. "Er - I s'pose you want to get home?"
"Not particularly," replied Georgie truthfully, surveying the strange buttons in front of him. Something like this was almost a dream come true, except that he'd never had a dream remotely like this. "Though - my mother might worry ..."
"Bother not," said John, switching to archaic syntax for no particular reason. He took a sip of the pineapple-and-roast-beef drink, and seemed to take several seconds to recover. "Er - we can contact your mother. So - Alby -"
"Sorry - what is Alby, exactly?" asked Georgie, unable to fight back the temptation to ask any longer.
"He's my chauffeur," replied John, then, sensing this wasn't the answer Georgie was looking for, "Er - he's a gremlin."
"Oh," said Georgie for the second time, unable to think of anything better to say.
"C'mon, let's go," said John, tipping the rest of his drink into a bin under the dashboard - where it sizzled evilly -
and standing up. "Follow Alby, Georgie."
Georgie followed Alby, who led him out of the cockpit and into the corridor leading out of the vehicle. All fear and nervousness had left him completely - John Smith may've looked a bit like a pirate, but he certainly didn't seem to act much like one.
These thoughts of comparison were thrown from Georgie's mind like a policeman from a drug-trafficker's ship as he stepped out of the car. If before they had been in a tunnel (which I can assure you they were), they were now in a cavern - but it was a cavern like no other. The roof was a massive dome, half a mile high at its centre, and at least four times as wide. They were standing on the driveway of a massive house, four storeys high, carved into the side of the dome itself, which was at the end of a road on which hundreds of smaller houses, all made of the same rock as the walls of the cavern, were standing. The cavern was lit by thousands of lights strewn like fake stars across the ceiling, which gave an effect of twilight that was only heightened by the evening-like chilly breeze that rippled the leaves of the strange trees and other plants standing on the pavements and in the gardens of the houses. You probably think this is completely implausible. You are wrong. Georgie was looking at it.
"My God," he breathed, his rare blasphemy a sign of his astonishment. "What is this place?"
"Er - Hole," said John, climbing out of the car and closing the door behind him. "Stupid name I know ..."
"How - on - earth?" said Georgie, stressing each word individually, though he soon realised that 'how in earth' would probably have been a better term.
"Well ..." said John. "The thing is - er - we're not quite like people on the surface world here ..."
"It's like magic," Georgie exclaimed. "Amazing!"
"Er - not magic, no," said John. "Only a few people can do that - no, we call it Dumple."
"Dumple?" said Georgie, almost as astonished as by the cavern. "What -?"
"We call it Dumple, and we - er - we're the Dumplings. The ones who can do Dumple."
Georgie stifled a snigger. 'Dumpling' was a name almost as stupid as his own. "How long can I stay here?" he choked.
"Well ..." said John. "You see ... that's the problem. We have a law here in Hole - and it's the same in all the Dumpling nations - L'Hanquer D'Or, German Bight, Utsire - there's about a dozen in all - er - once someone from the Surface World finds out about us ... we're not allowed to let them go."
Georgie felt as if he had swallowed a pound of coal - he'd accidentally ate a small piece once, and it hadn't tasted too nice. "I promise not to tell anyone."
"That's not enough," said John sadly. "You're allowed to contact anyone you like - your parents, your government - er - your friends, perhaps - but you're not allowed out ..."
"That's stupid!" said Georgie, forgetting all about the cold. "If the government already knows about it ..."
"I know it's stupid!" retorted John. "But I don't make the laws - I'd vote against it in the elections, but - er - none of the parties have it in their policies and wouldn't follow it if they did."
"So I have to stay?" Georgie asked.
"Yes. Er - come on, let's get inside ..."
It is on this depressing note that our chapter ends.
- The First Story in the /Dumplings Series by Curlyjimsam/ -
- Chapter 1: Unsurprisingly, the Beginning -
Our story begins with one of the most unlikely characters.
He is a man, of sorts, seven feet tall and perfectly bald but with a long, blond beard. He is very old, and (probably largely for this reason) covered in wrinkles and warts; his skin is a darkish shade of purple. He has only one eye, which is shrivelled and shrunken - the other is covered with a black velvet patch. His nose is small, and pointed, but his ears are huge, almost to the level of a politician's. His right hand has six fingers but no nails, his left four fingers with nails that are at least eighteen inches long each. One of his legs is missing, and has been replaced by a shiny steel tube like an overlong relay baton. He has two leathery, batlike wings (literally: each wing is like an entire, rather impossibly large, bat - not simply reminiscent of the flight appendages of such a creature) that hang from his shoulder blades. He wears nothing but a pair of swimming trunks, though he doesn't seem to get cold. His name is John Smith, which after everything else about him probably seems incredibly boring. It is.
As pointed out previously, one of the most unlikely characters.
John Smith's involvement in this story does not end here, but we are going to leave him for a short time. Far more important in our tale is a young boy, known by the somewhat pleasing name of Georgie. Georgie is not Georgie's real name (he is actually called George Alberich Haverington Julius Penguin Milton Keynes, which is rather funny - Georgie's parents, or someone, had a strange sense of humour - but not nearly so pleasing), but it is the name he shall be known by for the remainder of this story.
Georgie is not nearly so interesting to look at as John Smith. He is a few inches over five feet, with a pleasantly boring face (except for his nose, which is rather rounded and slightly larger than average), blue eyes, and brown or blond hair (the exact colour being a matter of opinion, lighting and weather conditions). His exact age is not going to be disclosed, although it could be anywhere between eleven and eighteen, and perhaps older or younger if it suits you. He is white, and English (although also partly Welsh, partly Scottish, and with a smattering of Sardinian in his blood), and at the time this particular part of the story is set he is walking down a muddy dirt track on a wintry day - dirt tracks in winter are invariably muddy - on the way home from school, although he isn't really bothered about getting home, something that is clearly illustrated by the fact that he actually lives two-and-a-half miles away in the opposite direction.
If you are worrying that this story is going to be primarily concerned with an everyday British boy of indeterminate age taking what can only be described as a pointless walk, don't. It isn't. In fact, the pointless walk ends roughly now. Georgie is just about to stop.
Georgie stopped. He hadn't got a clue where he was. Yes, he knew that he was in the countryside a short distance from his place of residence (which happens to be located in a town I can guarantee you have never heard of -and, in fact, are never going to), near to a collection of buildings that smelled of pig carcasses - known by some coincidence as Deadham Farm - and presumably close to that famous rolling wilderness, Burrow Down, but he had not troubled to look at a map before leaving his final lesson of the day (Geography), and therefore had no idea of how he had got here or how he was going to get to anywhere else. What was more, it was getting dark (another invariable aspect of wintry days, though primarily in the evenings), Georgie's mum had even less idea of where he was than he did (though she was used to him being missing by now - as long as he was back within a week she wouldn't worry too much), and Georgie himself was actually rather hungry, tired, and still carrying a heavy schoolbag. This whole journey was stupid. He didn't know what had made him do it. Well, actually he did, but it wasn't something he was going to reveal in public.
This wasn't what had made him stop however. If it hadn't been for the strange figure a few yards up the path - and various other things that were directly or indirectly associated with him - Georgie would still be walking. But when a man who is seven foot tall, with incredibly long fingernails on one hand, with a false leg, purple skin, huge ears and - most startlingly of all - a pair of very strange wings, and wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks, is blocking your path, it is normal human behaviour - in fact, normal anything behaviour, except perhaps for a rock or a particularly stupid Member of Parliament - to stop and contemplate the situation for a few moments. Or else to run, but Georgie didn't really feel like that. So, instead, not being a rock or an MP, he was contemplating the situation. Unless you are slightly dim-witted or have a memory problem, you will have noticed the similarities between the description of the man blocking Georgie's path and that of a man described at the beginning of this story. This man was none other than John Smith.
John Smith had his back turned to Georgie, and was facing a most remarkable vehicle. It looked a bit like a spaceship from a rather clichéd science-fiction movie, except that it had wheels. These wheels were probably the most unremarkable thing about the vehicle: they were about a foot wide, with black rubber tyres and metallic hubcaps, and there were three of them, one at the front and two at the back.
Unless you lead a particularly boring life, you are probably totally uninterested about the vehicle's wheels, and would rather learn about the more unusual features of the transport. I will, therefore, tell you, keeping it as brief as possible, because no one wants to be bored to death with long descriptions of objects that don't actually have huge relevance to the plot, or indeed bored to death with anything, especially a large drill. And so I begin:
The vehicle was vaguely triangular in shape, although its three sides were not straight but curved slightly inwards. The name of the craft's model - a Calvetia 5000 - was written in a snazzy logo near the front. At the back three large metal cylinders - which the majority of people born in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries would undoubtedly recognised as rocket engines - had been set side by side into the Calvetia's end, imposing but currently dormant. It was by these engines that John Smith was standing, apparently carrying out some sort of repair work. Two doors opened into the craft on each side, leading to one of three cabins which were visible as large, blue bubbles - one larger, nearer the front, and two smaller (though still each the side of a two-seater car), side by side closer to the back. The car - for that was what it was, despite its gross unusualness - was mostly a dull red-orange in colour, painted with the occasional narrow white stripe from back to front, where a headlight was set into the vehicle at either side: they were turned on, intense glowing ovals of whitish yellow shining out into the near-twilight. Between these, on top of the vehicle, was a plain yellow number plate, which was nearly as uninteresting as the wheels, and for that reason will not be detailed further.
Having contemplated the situation and come to no useful conclusion whatsoever, Georgie took a step forward; John Smith clearly hadn't noticed his presence. Georgie opened his mouth to say something - "Hello", perhaps - but was cut short by something quite amazing which the man in front of him had just done. He had surrounded the car of dozens of little brightly coloured balls - red, yellow, blue, green, purple, pink - which had combined into a glistening ring and rotated the vehicle by a full forty-five degrees, so that the man was now standing right next to one of the doors leading to the main cabin. Still not noticing Georgie - who was now standing, gobsmacked, with his mouth open in a somewhat comical manner - he opened this door and climbed into the vehicle, shutting it behind him with a soft click.
Georgie collected himself, and closed his mouth. He had never been the sort of person to miss an opportunity - something which had led to numerous detentions in his years at school - and was fully aware that if he didn't get into this vehicle before it drove off, he would in all likelihood never see it, or anything like it, ever again. Ignoring anything anyone had ever told him about strange men (and John Smith certainly was a strange man) and their cars, he took another step forward, only to find his ears filled with a terrifying - even to someone like Georgie - roar. After clapping his hands to his ears and beginning a prayer for salvation, he realised that the noise was simply the sound of the engines, which were now spewing out flames and smoke like a match in a barrel of oil. Relieved, Georgie took his hands down again and changed his prayer to one of thanks, and then realised that the car was likely to drive off any second, becoming just another strange memory in Georgie's mess of a mind. Lowering his head for maximum speed, Georgie sprinted at the back door, grabbed it by the handle and threw himself inside just as the vehicle shot forward.
Georgie lay panting - without any good reason, because he had barely been running for two seconds - on the plush red carpet inside the vehicle. He was in a narrow corridor, with pale pink walls and ceiling, which were curved so that if you had made a cross-section it would have had a shape somewhat reminiscent of an egg. The door had slammed itself shut when the car started to move, and clearly there was some sort of insulation inside the vehicle for Georgie could barely hear the roar of the engines and was barely aware that the craft was actually in motion.
Georgie scrambled to his feet, realising guiltily that he had managed to transfer mud from his shoes all over the carpet, and also that he had no idea what he was going to do. There was no real option of jumping out of the vehicle - who knew how fast it was going? - and his only other choice was to ask the man to let him go, and hope that he wasn't anything like a pirate even though he looked like one. He walked down the corridor - splattering more mud everywhere - arriving shortly in what was obviously one of the side cockpits. There was a pair of comfortable-looking leather chairs facing forward out of the bubblelike blue windows -looking out of these, Georgie realised to his horror and surprise that the car was not travelling along the ground or even above it, but seemed to be speeding down some sort of rocky tunnel - and in front of these another doorway which presumably lead to the main cockpit where the man was. Hesitating, Georgie put his hand to it, looking over his shoulder to see if there was anything that might help him.
Conveniently enough, he found it. Under the chairs - indeed, their main support - was some sort of black box or cupboard, with an opening in the front. Perhaps - he could hide, and get out once the car had stopped and the driver left. The box was certainly large enough to take someone of Georgie's build - he removed his bag, swung open the door, which luckily wasn't locked, climbed in, and lay down.
If getting into a strange car is a bad idea, getting into a strange cupboard inside it is probably even worse. Cupboards are, in general, rather dark and rather uncomfortable, especially with the doors closed. Georgie closed the door. He was, by all accounts, rather lucky. This particular cupboard was lit from the inside, and was padded all the way round so as to be very comfortable indeed (in fact, it was in this cupboard that John Smith usually went to sleep when on his longer journeys, which is rather odd but nevertheless how things were, but Georgie wasn't to know this). Remembering how tired he was (being faced with multiple dilemmas usually drives all thought of tiredness out of a person), Georgie closed his eyes and fell asleep.
He was woken some time later - he couldn't say how long, due to the complications of having been asleep, and in a closed cupboard with no way of telling the time - by the door of the cupboard being suddenly opened, which can come as quite a shock even if you are unconscious at the time. What shocked Georgie even more, however, was that the figure standing at the door was not the man he had seen earlier, or even something that could vaguely be described as human - it was humanoid, certainly, but not two feet high (by this I mean slightly less than two feet high, rather than five feet high or sixteen-and-a-half feet high or any of the other things which 'not two feet' could be taken to mean literally) with mottled green skin and a round and disproportionately large head with a small amount of spiky black hair and some of the largest ears Georgie had ever seen. It was wearing a pair of goggles on its forehead (not because it had eyes in its forehead, but because it wasn't using the goggles at present) and a smart suit on its body, but no shoes or socks.
"Eeeiiiyaaaiii!" said George, even though the only language he spoke fluently was English.
"Evening," said the creature. "The boss asked me to take you to the main cockpit."
"Oh," said Georgie, reverting to something vaguely correlating to his native language. "Okay."
He scrambled out of the cupboard - noticing that the blue window had turned a solid black, as if some sort of curtain had been pulled over it - grabbed his bag from the floor, and nervously followed the goblin, or leprechaun, or alien, or whatever it was (I, of course, know exactly what it was, but Georgie didn't - yet) along the passageway into the main cockpit.
The cabin was large enough to hold three large swivelling leather chairs, a huge dashboard (currently switched off), and a coffee machine, and indeed it was holding all of these things. The domed window here, too, was blacked-out. In the chair farthest to the right sat the man Georgie had seen earlier, and he spun around as Georgie entered, rather like the villain in a tacky film, except he wasn't stroking a cat. He was, however, holding a plastic cup containing some hot, steaming liquid that smelled like a mix of pineapple and roast beef.
"Er - hello," said the man, not at all unkindly, looking at Georgie through his one eye. "May I ask who you are?"
Georgie told him exactly who he was - that is to say, his full name (which, in the highly likely event that you have forgotten it, can be found near the start of this chapter).
"Blimey!" said the man. "Er - isn't there anything shorter I can use?"
"Georgie," said Georgie.
"Er - okay," said the man. "Alby saw you on the monitor." He motioned towards a blank screen on the dashboard, and to the little green man.
"Who are you, sorry?"
"No, I'm called John Smith."
"I'm really sorry about this, Mr. Smith," said Georgie, feeling he may as well get it over with quickly.
"Er - call me John." Georgie made a mental note to look for someone who said "er" more than this man did. "And don't worry about it ..."
"Aren't you angry?"
"Anger never got anyone anywhere," said John, smiling slightly. He gave the impression of being the sort of person that anybody could like without trying, which is quite a rare condition. "Er - I s'pose you want to get home?"
"Not particularly," replied Georgie truthfully, surveying the strange buttons in front of him. Something like this was almost a dream come true, except that he'd never had a dream remotely like this. "Though - my mother might worry ..."
"Bother not," said John, switching to archaic syntax for no particular reason. He took a sip of the pineapple-and-roast-beef drink, and seemed to take several seconds to recover. "Er - we can contact your mother. So - Alby -"
"Sorry - what is Alby, exactly?" asked Georgie, unable to fight back the temptation to ask any longer.
"He's my chauffeur," replied John, then, sensing this wasn't the answer Georgie was looking for, "Er - he's a gremlin."
"Oh," said Georgie for the second time, unable to think of anything better to say.
"C'mon, let's go," said John, tipping the rest of his drink into a bin under the dashboard - where it sizzled evilly -
and standing up. "Follow Alby, Georgie."
Georgie followed Alby, who led him out of the cockpit and into the corridor leading out of the vehicle. All fear and nervousness had left him completely - John Smith may've looked a bit like a pirate, but he certainly didn't seem to act much like one.
These thoughts of comparison were thrown from Georgie's mind like a policeman from a drug-trafficker's ship as he stepped out of the car. If before they had been in a tunnel (which I can assure you they were), they were now in a cavern - but it was a cavern like no other. The roof was a massive dome, half a mile high at its centre, and at least four times as wide. They were standing on the driveway of a massive house, four storeys high, carved into the side of the dome itself, which was at the end of a road on which hundreds of smaller houses, all made of the same rock as the walls of the cavern, were standing. The cavern was lit by thousands of lights strewn like fake stars across the ceiling, which gave an effect of twilight that was only heightened by the evening-like chilly breeze that rippled the leaves of the strange trees and other plants standing on the pavements and in the gardens of the houses. You probably think this is completely implausible. You are wrong. Georgie was looking at it.
"My God," he breathed, his rare blasphemy a sign of his astonishment. "What is this place?"
"Er - Hole," said John, climbing out of the car and closing the door behind him. "Stupid name I know ..."
"How - on - earth?" said Georgie, stressing each word individually, though he soon realised that 'how in earth' would probably have been a better term.
"Well ..." said John. "The thing is - er - we're not quite like people on the surface world here ..."
"It's like magic," Georgie exclaimed. "Amazing!"
"Er - not magic, no," said John. "Only a few people can do that - no, we call it Dumple."
"Dumple?" said Georgie, almost as astonished as by the cavern. "What -?"
"We call it Dumple, and we - er - we're the Dumplings. The ones who can do Dumple."
Georgie stifled a snigger. 'Dumpling' was a name almost as stupid as his own. "How long can I stay here?" he choked.
"Well ..." said John. "You see ... that's the problem. We have a law here in Hole - and it's the same in all the Dumpling nations - L'Hanquer D'Or, German Bight, Utsire - there's about a dozen in all - er - once someone from the Surface World finds out about us ... we're not allowed to let them go."
Georgie felt as if he had swallowed a pound of coal - he'd accidentally ate a small piece once, and it hadn't tasted too nice. "I promise not to tell anyone."
"That's not enough," said John sadly. "You're allowed to contact anyone you like - your parents, your government - er - your friends, perhaps - but you're not allowed out ..."
"That's stupid!" said Georgie, forgetting all about the cold. "If the government already knows about it ..."
"I know it's stupid!" retorted John. "But I don't make the laws - I'd vote against it in the elections, but - er - none of the parties have it in their policies and wouldn't follow it if they did."
"So I have to stay?" Georgie asked.
"Yes. Er - come on, let's get inside ..."
It is on this depressing note that our chapter ends.
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