Another Begining

Here's the beginning of another story.  I've been super busy at work, and a bit stressed out, but when I had a moment to write, this is what needed to be written.  So that's what I wrote.  Still working on my books.... Focus is key :)
Without further explanation, the story begins as such:


Once upon a time, a small girl grew up slowly in a World all her own. The world that everyone else assured her was real, was so full of vanishing shadows she could never tell who was going to be there when she woke up. So she played games with her Imaginary friends who grew and changed, but were always themselves and never left her.


In the real world, people called her something like “mary” or “sally,” possibly even “jane,” but in the other world, she was simply Trowel (She heard her mother say it one day, before she could remember when. It had a nice growly sort of sound to it, but it turned out to be something useful for finding worms, making burrows, building dirt castles, magic making and all kinds of other things). The real world of suzie (or maybe beth) was hardly worth speaking of. There was a mother and a father somewhere in the background, and there were lots of noisy children (brothers and sisters they were called by the grown ups) who came and went with laughter, tears, snot, an occasional nibble, and lots of sticky fingers. There was a big house, plain as a shoe box before you put a diorama in it. There was a lawn with just enough weeds to make chains out of and just enough grass to turn cartwheels on. It was, to Trowel, a very vague sort of place where anything could (and generally did) happen, but the things that happened muddled themselves up so badly you couldn’t tell what they really were.

But in the Other world, stories grow thick as leaves in an enchanted forest. They fall lightly to the ground and begin to unfold as they are picked up by curious hands and held to the ever glowing light of imagining eyes. Here, when you asked a question, someone always answered you in words that you understood. So while the grown ups thought jill-jen-alice was sitting in her favorite tree, Trowel had actually just walked into a train station.

Trowel looked up, and as she looked, she slowly rose onto her tip toes, because the space was so vast she felt she had to fill a little more of it, or she might vanish in largness of it all. It was just like Grand Central Station, but with a little bit more room and a lot more magic. It was underground, just so the riders could feel the wind rush trough underground mazes and do silly things to their hair and cloths. It was well lit so you could see the intricate carvings in the marble walls and admire the bronze and gold inlay on the steam trains that chugged delightfully through an underground world full of diamond mines an and occasional gremlins (most of them had been scared away long ago, but every so often one got lost and lucky passengers would catch a glimpse of shining purple eyes in the dark tunnels).

Trowel was on a mission, the Empress of New York had sent her to this station to meet her friend D, and together they were to go on a quest that they had to win or Everyone in the World might Die. It was a very exciting proposition. Trowel scanned the crowed, filled with women in Victorian clothes, men in top hats, and children in covered in suspenders, bows, petticoats, and patches. The trouble with meeting D places was that he was awfully hard to find. D was different things on different days, so one never knew exactly who he was until he appeared. When Trowel finally felt a tap on her shoulder, she turned around to discover that D was actually Demitri today. He had on a loose white tunic top, baggy pants, and a decidedly Russian cap (I’m not quite sure how Trowel knew it was Russian, but she is better at that kind of thing than I am). He smiled his familiar smile at her, winked first one eye, then the other, and wiggled his shoulders in a burst of excitement.