Enter a strange and amazing new world you've never seen before, but you most likely already live inside. Follow Theodore, a lonely kid who has to Travel through the 7 Layers of Space in order to find a brick and probably save the universe. Unfortuna...
[PART 1: .....THE HOUSE OF THE MAGICIAN DETECTIVE.....]
I want to tell you about The 7 Layers of Space.
Depending on how you tilt your head, they look something like this:
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You live in one of them. I'm guessing Earth, right? Wonderful Layer, Earth. Donuts and dolphins and the approximation of freewill – lots of good stuff. For now, let's start our journey down on a Layer known as Clank, with a boy named Theodore.
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Theodore lives in The House of The Magician Detective. Depending on where you stand (and how you hold your book), The House looks like this:
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Theodore sat and stared through the prism of stained glass that made up the ornate (if ill-kept) front window of The House of the Magician Detective. More precisely, he sat and stared at a very large and very strange Bird. This Bird's unlikely ample head violently pecked up and down in what appeared to be a tireless effort to eat The House.
Being that he'd lived in a magical House surrounded by frequent magical doings for much, but not quite all, of his eleven years, this particular incident didn't alert Theodore so much as it stirred a kind of deep alarm, like an irritating BEEP BEEP BEEP at the edge of a dream.
You see, moments before, Theodore had enjoyed a rare sliver of relative contentment on this damp and dreary Scrunday morning. Not for the first time, he'd sat swallowed in an over-sized and well-worn leather chair, toes dangling inches above the ancient and perpetually dust-covered wooden floor. He deeply admired the resident Magician Detective's keen and enchanting card tricks, and he'd been devoutly practicing at the craft himself through a fog of fumbling perspiration. But just now, he'd allowed himself a hard-earned break from the task. Instead, he doodled in the margins of a beloved book, lost in the moment.
He doodled with an automatic efficiency, his eyes idly flitting from the lines he created to the words he read. This particular paragraph painted a vivid picture of a benevolent and wise turtle from the Ancient of Order of Magicians, who had once decreed, "Before the work is truly begun, we must accept ourselves for who we are!"
