Kim’s rampage of critiquing continues! She’s ahead of me at this point, on chapter 15. I’d better get to it, starting with the summary:

“As the Lords Ley make contact with Parlay, Mean and Trisk continue to ascend Tenny’s Tower for training.” Yeah, this will be a short one.

Mean needs to look at a picture first so she can feel the correct emotion to move on.

• Brushstrokes formed shapes with jagged lines that contrasted with rounded streaks: Bodies on dirt and limbs twisting out from underneath rocks.
• Kim – Not sure what the formed shapes are. Or what the rounded streaks are. Maybe just omit?

The colon is supposed to tell you that the shapes and lines ARE the bodies underneath rocks. Gosh, describing art is too complicated. I should just hire that Thomas guy that did the cover. He can paint an entire mural and then I can just paste it into the book.

Although I’d have to figure out how to describe it to him anyway. Nevermind. I’ll just TRY HARDER I guess.

Mean keeps telling Trisk her story about how she escaped to Jesice as a child. As the two experience fear they are transported to the next floor.

• Mean settled back into the cushion.
• Kim – The cushion came with them?

Yeah, it did! But now I’m realizing there might be a problem: how would the cushions be there if Trisk and Tenny went up the tower first? Did Tenny send them back down to the earlier floors when he was done? Or are you supposed to supply new cushions each time you enter the tower?

Now they move to the next floor.

• Mean set the frame on the side of her cushion.
• Kim – So the cushion came with them again? That cushion must’ve had an interesting life too.

Ha,ha, wait, do you think that the cushion is also feeling the emotions required to move on to the next floor? That’s Toy Story, you goof!

• Her words ended there, with a muffled pop as she and Trisk vanished.
• Kim – But did the cushion vanish too? Or stay behind?

As the chapter closes, Mean and Trisk teleport a third time to the final floor. Man, I didn’t think Kim would care about the cushions this much. And I certainly didn’t think the blog post for this chapter would be NOTHING but cushions. But as I look back in Kim’s chapter critique I see that every other margin note is way too boring to mention.

So here we are. Let’s talk about the hex doors and cushions.

I don’t mention this anywhere in the book, but hex doors do not discriminate. When they activate, they move everything within a pre-determined area to another pre-determined area. People, cushions, air–that’s why there’s a popping sound every time. And a vacuum is momentarily created at the destination hex door so that all of that incoming matter doesn’t overlap onto anything. The sending hex door won’t activate if a person or animal is occupying the destination hex door though.

So yes, the cushion will go with Mean IF she is sitting on top of it. Or if she had it on her head. But if it was a few feet away from her body it would stay.

Maybe I should explain all this in the book somewhere, ha,ha.

Now for the other important question: How do the cushions get back to the lower floor if you DO happen to sit on them as you go through the hex door? Is there a way to send them back down? Nah. I’ll just say that the cushions are re-created by a saved pattern. A magical machine outside that floor will check for a cushion every hour. IF no cushion is found it will create a new cushion where the old one was.

This means that the final floor could be filled with all the cushions that every person sat on while they meditated their way to the top. It’s funnier that way.

See you next time!