Sohna - The Star Kingdom

“Star Wars????!!!!!” Tony’s grin stretched from ear to ear as he bit his knuckle absently in gleeful anticipation. “No kidding, really, the real thing with lightsabers and spaceships and Darth Vader and ... and ... and Princess Leia in a gold bikini?”

“There was a gold bikini?” asked Wolf hopefully.

“Not yet, Wolf, she hasn’t even been born yet where we’re going ...” Virginia rolled her eyes at her own words. “What am I saying? There’s no way we could really go there.”

“Well, I don’t know, Virginia,” her father remonstrated. “We got here, didn’t we? That didn’t seem very likely, but here we are.”

“For which I remain eternally thankful,” put in King Wendell as he entered the room. “Did I hear you planning to leave already?” he added, not bothering to hide the disappointment in his voice.

“It’s a matter of life and death, Wendy,” Wolf assured him.

“Good heavens, what happened?” Wendell exclaimed.

Virginia cut in, physically inserting herself between the two men.

“Nothing,” she said flatly. “Wolf’s just managed to get himself worked up over the plot of a play.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Virginia ...” her father protested.

“Dad!” she said, clearly wanting him to stop encouraging her impressionable husband.

“What?”

“Oh, it is not ‘just a play,’” Wolf declared, though mostly under his breath. He growled softly.

“I think maybe I should hear the whole story,” Wendell suggested, and seated himself.

Virginia started to protest again until she saw Wendell gesture to her to sit next to him, and realized that her father, too, was sitting with rapt attention. She glanced back at Wolf, who, still standing, winked at her, before beginning to speak:

“Long ago, in a faraway land, there lived a beautiful young queen named Padme. She had not long come to her throne and was determined to rule her people fair and justly, but unbeknownst to her or to anyone else, her chief advisor was an evil wizard whose plan was to take over not only her kingdom, but all the kingdoms in the land. To this end he disguised himself and convinced the kingdom’s enemies to surround it, intending that the queen, who was no more than fourteen years of age, should rely entirely upon himself for advice. But she surprised him and escaped on a ship disguised as her own handmaiden, with a white wizard and his apprentice whom she had secretly invited to the kingdom ...”

Wolf continued on giving the entire prequel trilogy in that manner, surprising Virginia, who had not realized the entire story could be set on a fairy-tale earth, without any sort of space travel involved. In fact, the telling entranced her so much, she forgot to immediately discount its significance, until she saw Wendell’s eyes sparkle.

“Oh, Wendell,” she began, “It is a good story, but that’s all it is ...”

“Now, Virginia,” he retorted indulgently. “Things work differently here in the kingdoms than they do where you come from. Or,” he mused almost to himself, “Perhaps they work in tandem ...” She was just about to cut in when he continued, “But!” He looked up at Wolf, his eyes fully focused, “But none of this has any bearing on the real question, which is: What specifically do you hope to accomplish?” He held his hand up against the quick reply on Wolf’s lips. “Yes, I know you mean to keep Anakin from falling for this evil sorcerer’s lies. But how do you expect to accomplish that? Say you find a way to get to their land. What then? If he’s been conditioned since the age of ten to believe this dark wizard is his friend, he’s hardly likely to believe the word of a complete stranger that he isn’t, wouldn’t you think?”

Virginia turned to Wolf with a look of vindication, but her man was having none of it, and fired back a rejoinder, which caused her father to jump in, firmly on Wolf’s side. She sat down tiredly, wishing, not for the first time, that Tony had not been present for the discussion. As much as she loved getting to see him, she knew his only reason for entering the debate was that he wanted desperately to personally visit the Star Wars universe. She could just imagine what kind of disaster that would create.

In then end, however, both she and Wolf got their way. Since the dwarves were the only ones who really knew exactly how all the mirrors operated (and since Tony was persona non grata with the dwarves after the mirror massacre incident), they arrived in the underground Ninth Kingdom alone, just the two of them, with good King Wendell’s letter of request for assistance.

The dwarves’ union leader immediately got down to business.

“You say you’d like a traveling mirror re-set to visit a different location?” he asked.

“Well ... er ... yes,.” Virginia replied. “If that’s possible, of course. We understand that it ...”

“Perfectly possible,” the dwarf replied. “A traveling mirror wouldn’t be of much use if it only led to one place.”

“You see, Virginia?” Wolf declared, “I told you ...”

“You understand the destination we had in mind was in a different dimension entirely?” she pressed, ignoring her husband’s outburst. “And different from the Tenth Kingdom dimension too.”

The dwarf looked at her steadily.

“Nicholas is our master of traveling mirrors,” he said. “You’ll have to speak to him about the specific uses and limitations. I’m sure he can set you up with the directions on how to tune it as well.” He turned and pointed to his left. “Through that door, down the hallway, past the first two corridors on your right, turn at the third, it’s the third door after that. Can’t miss it.”

“Thank you,” said Virginia, getting up to leave. Wolf was already in the hallway by then, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet with excitement, waiting for her.

“Always happy to help a friend of the House of White,” the dwarf replied as she left.

Nicholas was a grizzled, ruddy-faced dwarf with a mass of unruly white hair. They found him poring over an enormous tome with a magnifying glass. He looked up as they entered his office.

“We understand you’re the resident expert on traveling mirrors,” Virginia began politely.

Nicholas looked at her rather blankly.

“Oh, huff puff!” her husband abruptly exclaimed. “We need a mirror re-set so we can rescue someone in a galaxy far away.” (Virginia noticed he conveniently left out the “long ago” part.)

The dwarf blinked twice and raised his eyebrows. Carefully, he placed a green ribbon down the center of his tome and slammed the book shut, raising a sizeable cloud of dust. Then, still without speaking, he got up and walked away. Virginia was just about to protest his rude behavior (no matter how abrupt her husband had been, how could he just ignore them like that?) when the old dwarf drew aside a rough brown curtain at the rear of the room. Behind it was a large bank of hand-cranked moveable shelves. He stared at them a moment, finger tapping his bottom lip, then began to crank. Three shelves went past, then four, then five, six, seven more. There seemed an almost endless number, as if they extended far back into some recess much larger than the room they were in. At last he stopped them and set the brake.

As he pulled the access ladder into place, Virginia stepped closer, fascinated in spite of herself. She could see that the shelves were set with tome after tome, most of them as tall as her arm was long, and all of them dusty and ancient. Then, to her disbelieving ears, she finally heard Nicholas’s deep voice as it quietly murmured, “Galaxies, galaxies ...” as he searched among the volumes.

“You’re kidding!” she burst out without thinking. “You mean there’s really ...”

Nicholas ignored her comment, but turned to them and asked, “You wouldn’t know the name of the galaxy in question, would you?”

They looked at each other helplessly.

“Err ... no,” Wolf admitted.

“How about a planet, then?” the dwarf pressed. “Wouldn’t do to throw you out into deep space, anyway. Wouldn’t last very long there.”

Virginia looked at Wolf.

“Which one?” she asked. “Naboo? Tatooine? Coruscant? Genosis? Some other one?”

“Coruscant,” he replied decisively.

Nicholas nodded and pulled down a heavy tome. Virginia started to help him with it, but something in his glance warned her off. He carried it to the table, pushed the other book aside, and set it down. On its black cover were no words, just the silver-embossed emblem of a spiral galaxy. The dwarf opened the old book carefully and began to page through it, licking his fingers as he went along, staring at the pages through his magnifier. At last he seemed to find the page he wanted, and ran his middle finger down a column of microscopic print. Three-quarters of the way down the page he stopped, transferred the magnifying glass to the hand which held his place, and drew a pencil from behind his ear.

“A25038593CTCHDZLD9230521876433JIEDNEF48T67ETJOEE,” he repeated carefully as he copied the digits down on a scrap. When he finished writing, he carefully checked it against the reference in the book, then set the magnifier down and handed the slip of paper to Virginia. “There you go,” he said. “This will get you to Coruscant. Once you have the mirror set to that location, you can fine tune it visually to find the specific destination you want.”

He closed the book and prepared to put it away. Virginia stood there, numbly holding the piece of paper.

“Umm,” she said. “Excuse me, but ...”

He turned to look at her.

“How do we enter this number?” she asked.

Nicholas seemed startled.

“You mean you don’t have the key?” he asked, incredulously. “But I thought you regularly used your mirror to travel all the time. You’re taking a terrible risk using it with no key.”

Virginia and Wolf looked at each other.

“What key?” they both asked in unison.