M H nine Story Studios giving story a voice. Welcome to the Lift,
Get ready to take a ride. M Victoria's Lift to those who Thrive in
the Dark. Chapter two That Blooms Well Bears Well by Christopher Long. You
ever hear your people talk about disaster. They talk about it like it's lurking
out of sight, ready to pounce when their backs turned. I don't mean
the sort of thing that happened here. I mean something sudden, something unforeseen,
plane crash, forest fire. Of course, people act like disaster is
cunning because it's easier than facing the truth. Disaster is in a bullet.
It's the tip of a very long sword. The trouble starts way before breaks
fail on your car, or you take the wrong medication. The doctor needs
to be tired when they're writing that prescription. The ground crew needs to be
distracted enough to miss any problems before the plane takes off. The wind has
to shift for a forest to burn. Disaster is simply the last card to
be played in a game where you people forget. Safety is never a fact.
It's an optimistic gamble. Take the little girl who's rooted part of herself
in your head. For instance, she's always felt safe in her routine.
In fact, she probably didn't even acknowledge herself as being safe. She was
simply home or out doing what was expected of her. The universe kept Victoria
too busy to worry about anything else, not that everyone noticed how busy she
was. I haven't got time. Don't give me that. You can sleep
whenever you want, you can eat whenever you catch something. Some of us
have things to do regardless of what we want. Hey, give it back.
I've looked that girl in her green eyes. I've felt her understand me
in less time than it took me to blink. She's sharper than Scalpels when
it comes to people. She could speak five surgically precise words and leave a
king sobbing on his knees. Yet, that morning, I have to wonder
if she sensed it coming running through her endless building trying to get a hair
ribbon back from her new adopted cat. Do you think that's the closest she
got to dropping her guard. I'm serious, I have places I'm meant to
be. When you have all that power and so many questions filling your head,
do you even have a guard to keep up? Maybe she'd always just
been so powerful as a reflex before. Maybe someone had finally figured that out.
Ah, now I got you. There's nowhere to run, so hand
it over. Let me put it another way. If someone dressed a bomb
and a coat and a hat and stood it next to you in the queue
for the bus, do you think you'd notice before it went off? We
all like to think we know the answer, but we also know we'd be
pretty focused on the time or getting wherever we're going, right up until the
moment something flashed before our eyes and what's that? Boom? No, don't
do that, can't you see? It's delicate? In fact, it shouldn't
be here. A well growing out of the floor of her library, Victoria
had found a plant, not much of a plant, even barely a leaf
and a stock, a seedling, struggling to survive in a place where no
plant should be able to grow. Still, there it was, without sunlight,
without soil, an impossible plant for the impossible girl in her impossible library.
However, these got here. It needs all the help it can get.
It all need some water, although it should have already needed water to
get this far. There's not a lake above it. Maybe there are pipes
under this floor. It doesn't make any sense. Victoria's library is the most
impossible room in her whole building, which is saying something when you consider what
the rest of it can do. She'd always known there was a great deal
of power bottled up between the shelves, a lot of clever little secrets which
would scuttle to the spines of their books if you tried to read them before
you were ready. Still, it had never conjured life. So she fetched
water for the seedling and built a little wall of books around it to keep
her feline house guests from digging it up. I told you leave it alone,
give it a chance to grow. She clearly didn't understand. Cats can
see disaster coming a mile off. That's why you people always assume they have
more lives than you. It's got nothing to do with time. It's far
more to do with their peripheral vision. If chaos is the universal joke,
then cats have learnt to see the punch lines lingering on the horizon. Life
in the buildings started to feel different after Victoria had discovered the plant. She
tried to keep up with her tasks, only her new charge kept nagging at
her. She asked the occasional soul she ferried in her lift for gardening tips,
or she would drop them off near nurseries or allotments so she could borrow
a little soil or fertilizer, or have a nose through the gardening magazines.
Not that any of her efforts seemed to help the strange little plant grow.
Stop that it will have us both over and you know what people say about
breaking narragants. There sunlight, it's not a lot. But you didn't need
it to start growing, did you. Maybe it'll do the trick. It
didn't. It failed to help any more than the miracle grow, or the
eggshells, or the tea leaves or the bumblebee. Victoria took ages to catch,
and dusk took seconds to flatten. When her back was turned, she
tried putting other pot plants around it. They all wilted away. Not that
this little girl gave up. Victoria would always happily set aside some time out
of her day to fume over questions which refused to be answered. She raced
back from her lift after every trip, a smile on her face, hoping
for some sign, some change. Nothing like Nogo was having some effect if
you at least looked a little worse. Famous botanists received letters in the post
asking for advice. The return address never made a lot of sense to them,
but it hardly mattered. They wrote their replies, left them to post
later, and found they were gone when they went to collect them. A
group of drunken Cornish whastling singers woke one morning swearing blind. They'd found a
strange building in the middle of their orchard the night before, and danced around
its art corridors behind a little girl in a purple dress who didn't know the
songs but certainly knew all her guests names. Victoria became so distracted by her
project that she failed to feel a pair of eyes watching her as she passed
back and forth along the corridors of her home. Those eyes followed her nearly
constantly. Now their owner secure in the knowledge that their plan was working,
all they had to do was wait. After all, they knew their warden
couldn't resist a puzzle. I could try digging you up, led you outside
somewhere, only I don't know how to get you out without hurting you,
and I don't know where you'd be happy. Curiosity turned to confusion. Confusion
turned to irritation. Victoria still did what was act it of her, Only
it all felt so flavorless, so distant. Maybe it was because so many
of those things had been put upon her. None of it had ever really
been her choice. The little plant, though, the little plant was hers.
She had all the time she needed to help it. She had access
to so many tools, so many places, so many people. Surely she
could make one little plant grow. So desperate was she to see it flower
that she found herself dreaming of it. She could picture the petals blue,
perhaps electric blue. Her old friend Nicolo would approve of that. They would
be radiant and elegant, and dense and gentle breezes. Come the morning,
she would wake thinking she could smell its blossoms, And then she would wonder
how often she actually dreamt in that strange home of hers, and feel a
little colder for the question. The eyes in the dark watched on. Deals
had been struck down, the more desolate corridors. Wheels were in motion,
the dominoes were starting to fall. No, I told you to stay away
from that. You could have killed it. How am I ever going to
get it to grow? If you won't leave it alone. That's when it
hit her the reason why she couldn't let this plant die. It reminded her
of her own life in that place, without sunlight, without water. She
was growing without everything a person should need. So what did that make her?
Exactly? What was she changing into when on the outside she only ever
let herself grow so much? Sometimes Victoria liked to think her appearance was a
memorial to the life she'd lost, the life she'd sacrifice to a greater cause.
Other times she told herself that she was as much herself as she was
anything else her calling required of her, Except she was stuck, held fast
by expectation, rooted in stone, unable to flourish. The eyes in the
dark narrowed. The final card was played, Oh look at the cry baby?
Hello, cry baby? Was that your cat I saw running away?
Are you done with it? I could do with some entertainment, and I
love the noises cats make when you make them go digging for their extra lives.
Merrit disaster had arrived. Thank you for making this mini series and our
show possible. We hope you're enjoying the mini series. Today's episode featured Cynthia
Lohman as Cuckoo Stone Urtal's narrator, Amber Collins as Victoria and Louis Pollard as
Merrit. Sound design was created by Davis Walden, our new sound designer and
the creator of The Viridian Wild podcast. The Verdian Wild as a fantasy adventure
audio drama podcast following mytho zoologist Sebastian Verwood as he travels the world studying magical
creatures. You can find the show at the Viridian Wild dot com. That's
v I R I D I A N, or you can subscribe to it
wherever you get your pod casts. Today's custom score was created by our resident
composer, Nico Vedes of We Talk of Dreams. Find Nico at We Talk
of Dreams dot com and streaming on Twitch. Artwork is by Janette Andromeda,
illustrator, artist, YouTuber and all around amazing human. Find her being creative
at Jenette Creations dot com. Our author is Christopher Long. You can find
him at Cjlongwords dot com. Chris has been featured on Victoria's Lift, Shadows
at the Door, and The Wicked Library multiple times. More of his work
is available on Amazon. Story editor and producer is Daniel Foitzec of ninth story
Studios, that's me, M.