The Toymaker's Labyrinth (short story)
The Toymaker's Labyrinth was a Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids short story written by Lupan Evezan and illustrated by Aristide Twain. It properly introduced Madame Tarsa.
Contents
Plot
In his office in the Cupid Homeworld, Department of Assignments head Taskmaster-523 is relaxing and reading a comic book when Larrikin-1029 and Pessimist-242 burst in, each outraged to have been assigned a mission with the other. However, he remains deaf to their complaints, threatening to report them to the Department of Discipline, and they are soon forced to head out into the Multiverse in Pessimist's Fog Ship.
Though they asked to go to Dimension 8696-2537 as ordered by Taskmaster, they instead rematerialise in a mysterious giant room. Trotting around on the absurdly large wooden floor, Larrikin soon happens upon what appears to be a huge table-leg. Before long, he finds an enormous spool of ribbon lying on the floor and decides to use it to climb up the table-leg, and manages to persuade Pessimist to accompany him. Once they make their way to the table-top, they are confronted with a huge, talking marionette, who cheerfully introduces herself as one of the creations of Madame Tarsa. She explains her size by pointing out that Tarsa does business with all sections of the Multiverse, and that the default size of a humanoid being naturally varies across the infinite spans of worlds. When Larrikin asks if he and Pessimist could meet this Tarsa, the marionette replies that she's already here, as borne out by the fact that the marionette's strings are in fact being pulled by the enormous hand of a “real” woman up above.
Noticing the tiny visitors, Tarsa shrinks herself into a small, coloured ball and lands on the table-top in front of the Cupids, unfurling back into a now human-sized woman. She is quick to unwrap Pessimist from the ribbon into which he'd gotten tangled, and then pops open his back to have a look at his interior mechanisms, being fascinated with what slick automata the two Clockwork Cherubs are. Intent on getting a closer look, she spins on herself until she shrinks further, and climbs into Pessimist's insides, where she roots around, taking note of the fact that his Gemstone Heart appears to be an actual lump of coal. She flies out again and cheerfully voices her intent to start manufacturing “toy Cupids” of her own from the same pattern as them. When Pessimist and Larrikin try to stop her by loosing a Cupid Arrow at her, she simply plucks it out of the air and decides to try and figure out the formula for the Love Potion so as to make her toys as authentic as possible. Forgetting what kind of a being he's dealing with, Larrikin makes to fistfight Tarsa into submission. She responds by shifting not just in size but in shape too, her limbs extending like a spider's and her fingers lengthening into claws. Larrikin tries to defend himself by hurling the marionette at her; it misses, but breaks an arm as it clatters to the fall. This actually makes Tarsa angry; forthwith, she grabs both Cupids and throws them into her toy chest, slamming the lid shut after them.
There, they find themselves at the top of a mountain made of marbles. Climbing down, they find an enormous gate, slightly ajar, to the Toymaker's Labyrinth; Pessimist is initially not keen on entering it, but the choice is taken away from him by the early stages of an avalanche of marbles, and they hurry in, slamming the door behind them. While they set out into the Labyrinth, Tarsa makes a start on prototypes of a Toy Cupid and an ersatz Love Potion, neither quite right yet, but both encouraging. After over an hour of wandering, the two Cupids reach “a large, empty room with four walls and a door on each wall”. Larrikin impulsively opens one of the doors, releasing a battalion of wind-up toy soldiers who march out in formation, blindly firing their muskets in front of them every few seconds. Dodging the aimless gunfire, the Cupids duck into the door on the right, which leads into a further corridor. At the end of the corridor is a further door, latched closed. Larrikin opens it despite Pessimsit's warning, and a fantastically strong gust of wind blasts out from behind them, pushing the two in.
Meanwhile, outside, Tarsa, who has multiplied herself to work on all aspects of the project at once, has moved on to examining the Fog Ship. It protests and uses its laser cannon, installed as a defence mechanism following the dromedary incident, on Tarsa, stinging her hand. Peeved, Tarsa takes out the Ship's dimensional warp drive, shrinks it, and throws it into the Toybox after its two passengers.
In the Toybox, Larrikin and Pessmist find themselves in the middle of a toy Wild West Town, in front of the bank. Larrikin is about to walk in when the bank is held up by a trio of outlaws riding rocking-horses: a plastic elephant, a china doll and a plush duck. At their approach, Larrikin jumps into a barrel, into which the outlaws soon coincidentally toss Pessimist on the assumption that he is “some sort of substitute sheriff”. They manage to tumble out of the barre, and meet the panicking Frog Mayor of the town. The real sheriff belatedly arrives, and, misconstruing the situation completely, wastes precious time arresting the two Cupids while the real outlaws, now identified as the Plush Posse, run out of the bank, carrying bagfuls of play money. They make for the train headed to “the big city” and are pursued out of town by the Sheriff. With the commotion over and the door out of reach, Pessimist and Larrikin begin to discuss the practicalities of living in Wild West Town from now on. Irritated and bemused by their antics, the Mayor quickly thinks better of his claim that there's no way of the Town and fetches them a ladder.
Back in the Workshop, Tarsa uses her Mechanical Fortune Teller to check on the Cupids' progress in the Toybox. She is upset to hear that the Frog Mayor failed to keep them captive in the Town as he is usually wont to do, and instead decided to pressure them to leave for fear that they would be too annoying and drive all the other citizens into the surrounding desert. Unwilling to risk letting them escape before she's done creating her prototype Toy Cupid, she decides to send in “a few of [her] first-rate toys” to slow them down.
When the Cupids exit back into the big square room with three doors, with Larrikin eager to check what's behind the third, the toy soldiers are gone, but in their place is a mysterious lump of clay. Larrikin pokes it, and it instantly bubbles and twists until it reshapes itself into an exact duplicate of Larrikin. The creepy clay Larrikin shambles towards the two and, with Larrikin dodging out of its way, strikes Pessimist instead, transforming into a copy of Pessimist upon making contact with him. Speaking for itself for the first time, it looks down at itself to deem the results “interesting”, and then transforms for a third time into a huge, hydra-like beast with a Pessimist head and a Larrikin head.
However, before it can eat them, the Clay Thing is defeated by the miniatiurised Fog Ship flying to the rescue and ramming through its clay chest “a bunch of times” until it finally manages to hit the Thing's Life Crystal, causing it to melt into a puddle again. The Fortune Teller reports on this in real time to Tarsa, who is irritated further, but the two seem confident that the Cupids will not be able to make it through the “Doom Room”, the final trial just before the exit.
Indeed, the Cupids enter this final room, spotting the exit at the far end of the room at the top of a tall staircase. The room contains an alarming number of skeletons, and a disembodied voice tells them that they must complete three trials before they can leave. The first involves giant chess pieces, but is actually simply to defeat the chess pieces once they come to life, rather than any kind of traditional chess game. After getting over his outrage that the chess pieces insist on moving every which way instead of following the rules, Larrikin manages to defeat the army by climbing inside one of the Rooks and using a marble-catapult mounted onto its battlements to shoot down all the other pieces.
The disembodied voice confirms their victory, but leaves them no time to breathe before initiating the second trial as a giant bundle of something unidentifiable drops down from the ceiling. It unfolds itself into a giant, wind-up Mechanical Skeleton. The Skeleton quickly “eats” Pessimist, imprisoning him in its ribcage. This turns out to be fortunate, as, from within, Pessimist is able to spot a weak spot in the Skeleton's inner clockwork; though initially hesitant to even try, he makes up his mind to make the attempt, and pulls the master-gear out of the mechanism, causing the whole mechanical giant to freeze mid-punch and fall over. Larrikin pulls an intact Pessimist from the wreckage, and the voice announces the third and final trial, which turns out to be simply to win against Madame Tarsa herself in a swordfight.
They are initially unsuccessful thanks to Tarsa making liberal use of her shapeshifting, flying, teleporting, and other miscellaneous magical abilities, but manage to gain the advantage when the shrunken Fog Ship uses its laser to shoot one of her eyes after she catches it in her grasp and brings it to her face to examine it more closely. With her regeneration factor being fairly slow, she is unable to stop the two Cupids and the Ship from making their way up the stairway and out of the exit, which turns out to be the keyhole of the Toybox, out of which they tumble. Before Tarsa catches up with them, they also take the opportunity to destroy all her Cupid research by exposing the not-yet-cooled Love Potion to the air, which causes an explosion.
When Tarsa catches up to them, her eyes having “finally” regenerated, she sees the damage they've done to her work and, to their surprise, her anger instantly dissipates; the picture of the graceful loser, she commends them for making it through her Labyrinth and even repairs the Fog Ship, returning it to its natural sight. Before the two Cupids head back home aboard the Fog Ship, Larrikin, struck by her kindness, decides to do her a favour in turn and suggests another possible new toy to make up for the Toy Cupid: plush toy versions of Lord Thymon. They discuss the idea on the way, with Pessimist naturally dismissing Larrikin's apparent belief that they will be “really popular”.
Worldbuilding
Universes
- This story begins in the Cupid Homeworld.
- Taskmaster-523 acquired his comic book in an unidentified Prime-adjacent universe.
- Pessimist-242 and Larrikin-1029 were meant to go to Dimension 8696-2537.
- Most of the plot unfolds in the Workshop of Madame Tarsa, within the titular Labyrinth inside Madame Tarsa's Toybox.
- The very ending of the story takes place in the Void.
Other
- Taskmaster-523 is head of the Department of Assignments, which boasts a building to itself as a HQ. His job is to decide “which Cupids would go on which assignments, who would be partnered with who, and which dimensions would be on the day’s roster”.
- A week before the story's opening, Larrikin-1029 tried to prank Pessimist-242 by putting a tack on his chair.
- Taskmaster threatens to report Larrikin and Pessimist to the Department of Discipline.
- On a past occasion, Larrikin attempted to modify himself to replace his arms with “large mechanical claws”.
- Larrikin mentions the Gemstone Mines.
- The Clay Thing was created from Tarsa's “last batch of Clay for the Struggling Artist”. She grumbles that she'll “have to import another load of shiftstones from the mines of Swaatch to make more”.
- Larrikin off-handedly mentions that he is a “chess connoisseur”.
- Pessimist's Fog Ship put in a request with the Cupid Parliament for non-Cupid residents of the Cupid Homeworld to start officially getting vacations.
Continuity
- This story properly introduced Madame Tarsa after she was teased in the previous tale, PROSE: Misadventures in the Interdimensional Black Market.
- Pessimist-242 reflects that if Larrikin-1029 disappeared during the course of their paired mission, “they’ll pin the blame on me, and probably make me romanticise a thousand creatures in the desert or something”. This references the punishment Juliet-178 was assigned for a very different bit of misbehaviour in PROSE: The Labors of Juliet.
- The burlap sack running gag begun in PROSE: Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race, and last seen in PROSE: Misadventures in the Interdimensional Black Market, continues with Tarsa putting Larrikin in one prior to throwing him into the Toybox.
- It is mentioned that Pessimist's Fog Ship was given a defense mechanism after it had been captured by a crazed dromedary several months before”, referencing the events of PROSE: Pessimist and the Dromedaries.
- Wild West Town was seen again in PROSE: The Time of the Toymaker.
- The Fog Ship's request for non-Cupid residents of the Cupid Homeworld to start officially getting vacations was elaborated on in PROSE: The Cupid Suggestion Box and its outcome revealed in PROSE: Conspiracy-1263 Publicly Accuses the Gang of the Green Gorillas, which also picked up the thread of the Thymon Plushies.
- Taskmaster-523 reappeared in PROSE: Magic Trick in the Cupid Parliament.
- Tarsa and her Workshop made their next full appearance in PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine, which also mentioned that Larrikin-1029 had told Technophile-963 about the events of The Toymaker's Labyrinth and his role in the inception of the Thymon Plushies.
- Larrikin-1029 and Pessimist-242 would again be paired up as reluctant co-protagonists in PROSE: The Metafictional Meddler.
Behind the scenes
Read online
The story can be read for free on the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids website.
