Greenglass House (7 page)

“Morning,” Milo mumbled to his mother, who was helping Mrs. Caraway start the dishes.

“There are pancakes in the oven,” Mrs. Pine said. “Plenty for you to have seconds, too,” she added as Milo's father came into the kitchen and stuck his hands under the faucet to wash up.

Milo piled up a plateful, sloshed maple syrup over it, and headed into the living room to have a little alone time before the day properly began.

Meddy had encamped herself in another of Milo's favorite places, the space behind the Christmas tree, where the corner of the room made a twinkly sort of cave. “Morning,” he grumbled, not pleased to have another of his spaces overtaken, and sat on the hearth next to the tree.

“Morning. Ready to get started with our campaign?” Meddy asked, looking up from a pile of loose pages and a bigger pile of oversized hardcover books.

Milo stared in horror. The papers looked like homework, and despite their garishly illustrated covers, the books looked uncomfortably like textbooks. Warily, he chewed a mouthful of pancakes. “What's a campaign, exactly?”

“It's an adventure within a game world. Our game world is your house, and our adventure—our campaign—is going to be figuring out the mystery behind that chart.”

“Okay . . . how?”

She beckoned Milo closer, and he clambered off the hearth to crawl down behind the tree beside her. “We're going to explore the house and investigate the guests,” she explained, “and along the way we're going to look for clues. But first, you need a character.”

“Why?”

She tilted her head. “It's part of the game. You make up a character and play as that person. Do you know anything about role-playing games?”

Milo frowned. “No. Like the kind with monsters and dungeons and dice with a million sides? That's what we're doing?”

“Yeah. But for a real game we'd need more people and a game master and all that stuff. We're kind of making up something of our own.”

“Why do I need to pretend to be someone else, though?” Milo protested. “It seems a little . . . well, a little silly.”

It also made him feel a little guilty. This seemed to be coming dangerously close to something he did in secret that he wasn't entirely proud of.

One of the problems with knowing nothing about the family you were born into was that you never really stopped wondering about it. At least, Milo didn't. He wondered who his birth parents were, where they lived, and what they did for work. He wondered if they were even still alive. He wondered how his life would be different if he had grown up with his birth family, how it would be different if he actually
looked
like his parents and people couldn't see immediately that he didn't belong. He wondered how
he
would be different—and sometimes when he did this, he imagined himself to be very different indeed, which sort of felt like imagining a character version of himself.

And sometimes, wondering all this made him feel he was being unfair to his mom and dad: to Nora and Ben Pine, who were his mom and dad as truly as the parents who'd given him life.

But what Meddy was talking about . . . this was for a game, so maybe . . . maybe it wasn't something he needed to feel guilty about.

“It's not silly,” Meddy said patiently, her face tinted first green, then blue from the blinking lights on the tree. “Because for starters, that's how the game works. Second, you can make the character anything you want. It's fun. You can be anything, almost. You can be anybody.”

Meddy swirled one of the stacks of paper around on the hardwood floor with her index finger so it faced him. It looked suspiciously like a move she'd spent time practicing. “These are your character sheets.” She set a pen on top. “This is how we figure out who you are.”

Who you are.
Milo shifted uncomfortably and speared another bite of pancake from the plate balanced on his knees. “Who my character is, you mean,” he muttered.

She shrugged. “In the game, you
are
your character.”

Once again, Milo thought a little guiltily of all the times he'd secretly daydreamed about his biological family, or (extra secretly) other families he might have been matched with. Who he really was, who he might have been. But this was different, he reminded himself. This was a
game.

“Okay.” He set his food aside and picked up the pen. “Show me how it works.”

“Well, tell me where you want to start. Actually—” Meddy held up a finger. She opened a battered and dusty old notebook to a clean page of graph paper. “Let's make this easier. A good adventuring party ought to have at least one each of four kinds of characters: a captain—somebody who has leadership and strategic capabilities; a warder—that's your big, hit-a-bunch-of-people-at-once offensive fighter, usually a wizard or magic-using type; a warrior—that's like your
best
fighter; and a blackjack, which is your trickster type. Our campaign will be different because it's just the two of us, but just off the top of your head, which of those sounds most interesting?”

“I . . .” Well, none of them sounded like Milo, if he was honest. All of those roles sounded like jobs for people who had things under control. “Probably the captain,” Milo said finally. “Since I'm the oldest.” Might as well aim high. “I am older than you, aren't I?”

Meddy leaned on her elbow, chin in her palm, and looked coolly at him over her knuckles. “Don't be an idiot. You don't get to be the leader just because you're older. Not even in the real world do you get to be in charge just because you got born first.”

Milo opened his mouth to argue, but Meddy shook her head. “You're looking at this all wrong, you know. First of all, you
aren't
the oldest. Not in the game, I mean, not necessarily. I could decide I want to play a centuries-old dwarf or an immortal sage or something—”

“That's ridiculous,” Milo protested.

“No, it's not!” she exclaimed. “Not in the game, at least. That's the whole
point.
In the game, you can be whatever you want. Look at it that way. I mean, there are rules about it, but—Milo, what do you
want
to be?”

What do you want to be?

Well, for starters, Milo thought, it would be nice to blend in for once, and not to have people stare because he looked out of place. And it would be nice not to feel so out of control whenever unexpected things happened. It would be cool to be more athletic, too.

“That's a good start.” Meddy's voice jolted him to attention. She was nodding thoughtfully and jotting things in her notebook. With horror, Milo realized he'd been speaking out loud.
Blend In, Control In Unexpected Situations,
and
Athletic
were written in a column down one side of the page. Now she was drawing arrows and making notes in the margins.

“Blending in sounds like some class of blackjack, somebody who can disappear. Maybe a graffitist, or a kind of thief, like an escaladeur. Escaladeurs are masters at getting over walls and through fortifications and sneaking around things like castles and fortresses. They're reconnaissance experts, one of the types of characters you send to gather information.” She jotted something at the pointy end of the first arrow. “The second part does sound like a captain thing. Grace under fire, right? I don't see you as a warlord or a whip, so maybe a schema or a fangshi . . . or a sortileger, even. A sortileger's a warder, but they have this whole divining thing based on deriving meaning out of randomness.”

Milo blinked. “I have no idea what that even means.”

She was scrawling in earnest now, drawing arrows all over the place. “Doesn't matter. I'll explain if we get to that point. Now let's think about abilities. If our campaign is this house, what skills would be particularly useful, do you think? Lockpicking, maybe?”

“Are we going to be breaking into rooms?” Milo asked warily. The guest room doors were the only ones that were likely to be locked, and his parents would kill him if he went into an occupied room just to poke around.

“Game world, Milo, not real world.”

“Oh. Right. Then yes, probably. And . . . well, moving around quietly, for sure. It's a noisy house, especially when there are people in it.”

“Good. This is all blackjack stuff, perfect for an escaladeur. I think we're getting closer to figuring you out.”

“Hang on.” Milo frowned at the page she was rapidly covering with notes. “What about you? Don't we need to figure out your character, too?”

She shook her head. “I'll build mine to go with yours. Whatever our adventuring party needs to round it out.”

“That doesn't seem like much fun for you.”

“Making up the character is only part of it. We'll be a team. My fun will be building the other half of that team. Now, back to you.” She glanced up with a grin. “What else?”

Milo found himself thinking of one of the stories he'd read the night before, the one called “The Game of Maps.” In it, a kid who took a bet to spend the night in a supposedly haunted house got lost inside it. Each time he tried to make himself a map of the rooms he'd been through so he could find his way out again, he failed—that, or (as the story seemed to imply) the house kept shifting around him. Only when he figured out how to listen to the house as it moved was he able to make sense of his surroundings.

“I want to be able to listen to the house,” Milo said slowly.

Meddy pursed her lips. “I don't get it.”

“Well, if we were in a—a forest or something, I could listen to the woods and the trees and the wind and figure things out. Like if we were being followed, or if there was a river, or whether someone built a fire somewhere . . . that kind of thing.”

“Tracker stuff?”

“Right. Well, what would you call someone who had those kinds of skills, but inside buildings?”

“Ooooh.” Now she sounded excited. She started flipping through the pages of one of the big books. “That could be a roamer—roamers have all kinds of weird knowledge gained from centuries of wandering through different places. As a roamer, you could understand how to listen to a house and read it because you've spent years and years learning how to do it in the course of your travels. Or you could be a savant. Like houses make sense to you because they just always have.”

“Hey, what's all this?”

Meddy dropped her pencil as Georgie Moselle sat on the corner of the hearth and reached between them to pick up Meddy's notebook. Milo glanced at Meddy, not sure whether to be embarrassed. “It's for a game,” he said awkwardly.

“Looks like a good list of skills for a thief,” Georgie said in a voice that was just a bit too loud and just a bit too casual to sound natural to Milo's ears.

The room went so silent that the sounds of his mother and Mrs. Caraway doing dishes in the kitchen suddenly seemed ridiculously loud. Milo peered out from behind the tree and reddened. While he and Meddy had been making notes, the guests had begun to migrate into the living room, and now everyone in view was staring at him.

If Georgie noticed, she ignored them. “Blending in. Lockpicking. Athletic. Sounds like just what you'd need if you were some sort of cat burglar.”

Meddy poked Milo. “Control in unexpected situations,” she hissed. “Remember.”

It was hard to feel in control when that many people were looking at you. “Actually,” Milo said, his voice squeaking just a little, “it's for a kind of blackjack called an . . .”

“Escaladeur,” Meddy supplied.

“An escaladeur. A reconnaissance guy.”

Milo's father leaned past Georgie to add a couple of logs to the reluctant fire. “Since when do you play Odd Trails?” he asked with an eyebrow raised.

“What's Odd Trails?” Milo asked.

“It's the game all this stuff comes from,” came Meddy's hissed answer from Milo's other side.

“I mean, I—I don't know,” Milo stammered. “Some kids at school play it.”

“Well, what do you know?” Mr. Pine said, pleased. “I used to play that as a kid.”

“Really?”

“Sure! I used to be a tiercer-signaler. I was the guy who'd scout ahead and report back—kind of like an escaladeur, actually—but if things got tough, I was awesome with a sword. A tiercer usually carries a rapier, but it's too long a blade for a scout, so I used butterfly swords.”

From the depths of the twinkling cave, Meddy made a quiet but definitely impressed humphing noise.

“Maybe we'll play sometime,” Mr. Pine said, standing and dusting himself off. He ruffled Milo's hair with a hand that smelled like fireplace, then headed for the kitchen.

Meanwhile, the tension in the room had diminished. Milo glanced around and discovered that most of the guests had lost interest. Only Mr. Vinge was still flicking glances Milo's way from the chair opposite the tree.

Georgie handed the notebook back. “Neat. Sorry to interrupt.”

As she got up, Clem Candler strolled over with a cup of coffee in her hand and crouched beside the hearth. “You know,” she said cheerfully, “if you ever do want to make up a cat burglar, I can probably give you some pointers.”

“You play too?” Milo asked, surprised.

“Nope.” Clem grinned. “But I
am
a cat burglar.” She winked at him.
Just kidding,
that wink said. When she straightened up again, Milo saw her sneak a look over his head to Georgie Moselle. “Or you could ask Blue, there,” she added. “Bet she has some thoughts too.” Then she padded away, calling, “Is there more coffee?”

What was that all about?

“Boring.” Meddy scooted back over next to Milo and fluttered her fingers at the note pages. “Let's get back to work. Let's talk ability scores. I'm going to suggest we rate you pretty high in dexterity, intelligence, and charisma. Those are probably going to serve you best.”