Her tiny friends—each one carrying their own boxed lunch—set out into the backyard. Keiko put the plane down on the ground for them. Laughing and chatting, Storyteller, Bossman, and the rest all boarded the vague, hazy aircraft.
And then… Well, it was hard to tell what was going on, but it seemed like the engines got started okay. The character in the front seat grabbed the control wheel (or whatever that thing was called) and did some other stuff, and they took off. Keiko really didn’t understand how any of it worked.
“Uh… Hmmm…”
She was feeling her inability to properly portray the airplane now more than ever. “Lovely” or not, the whole thing felt kind of sloppy. She started to wonder if she’d made a mistake.
But then she heard the laughter of her characters over the sound of the engines. They didn’t care about the plane’s imperfections. They were just enjoying the sensation of flying, whirling, and zooming through the air in every direction.
I knew it! I knew giving them this was the right choice!
As Keiko watched them fly, she felt her doubts drift away, and soon she was smiling, too.
But that feeling didn’t last. Suddenly, the plane wasn’t moving so smoothly anymore. It had started shaking, and the engines made an ominous spluttering sound. Before Keiko could even process what was happening, the hazy little aircraft fell apart in midair.
“Whaaat?!”
Keiko’s cry of dismay mixed with her characters’ screams as the parts of the airplane and its five passengers hurtled toward the ground. They fell with a sickening crunch in one corner of the yard.
“Oh no… My description must have been too vague for the plane to hold itself together…!”
She watched the scene unfold in horror but soon snapped out of her daze. This was no time to stand around and analyze things. She dashed over to where her friends had fallen.
“Everyone, are you okay?!”
Over at the tiny crash site, there was no sign of the hazy airplane or the people who’d been riding in it. They were all just letters now. The same messy writing that had sat on the pages of her notebook before. They weren’t even words or names anymore, just a random jumble of letters, mostly lowercase, with a handful of uppercase ones mixed in.
“No… It can’t be…”
Keiko sank to her knees in shock. After a moment, she began picking up the letters. She found the ones that had made up the word airplane first and put them on the palm of her hand.
“Guys, I…I’m so sorry. I feel like such an idiot for letting you fly in a cheap excuse for an airplane.”
She looked around for the other letters, taking care not to leave a single one behind. Once she had them all, she clutched them tightly, tears streaming down her face.
But then, she felt a strange squirming sensation in her hand.
“Huh…?”
She opened her hand again and saw a new word looking up at her: foøl
“What?”
Fool? Was her own hand insulting her now? It was true she’d been a fool over that stuff with the airplane, but still.
“No, that’s not right. Oh, could this be…?”
Keiko gazed down at her hand to see that the other letters were recombining as well.
reply
tells
quivers
“Um… ‘Reply tells’ what? Or is it tells like when people give away when they’re lying? And quivers… That means shaking, right? Or maybe those things you keep arrows in?”
As she looked down at them, reply formed itself into an envelope like someone would send an old-fashioned letter in. The word tells had formed into a face that kept twitching despite trying to keep its expression neutral. And quivers had become several little cases filled with tiny arrows. She was right—the letters were trying to put themselves together again but were in different combinations from before. Now they were making new words that were also coming to life.
The next phrase to emerge was Curvy airplane. The result didn’t look much better than Keiko’s original airplane, but its lines and textures looked a lot softer, almost like a plush toy.
“Huh? Wait a minute. I don’t remember there being a C in any of those words or names…”
Before she could think too deeply about that, another new phrase formed itself: Steam Bottles. A few seconds later, she had a collection of glass bottles in her hand, filled not with liquid but with swirling white gas. They were warm to the touch, and it was kind of cute how miniature they were.
“Ah-ha-ha… It’s almost like they’re turning into new ideas I could use in my stories.”
It was a small comfort, although it didn’t make the pain of losing her friends go away. None of these new creations shared any kind of affinity with Keiko. In a way, that made sense—most of them were things rather than people, after all. But it was still a far cry from the way Keiko and her original characters had become friends right off the bat. That must have been the difference between characters she’d written herself and things that had come together independently.
There weren’t many unattached letters left now, and the remaining ones were crawling closer and closer together. As Keiko watched them, she mulled over her question from before.
“I’m sure I didn’t write anything with a C in it… Come to think of it, why did the second o in fool have a line through it? And where did the q in quivers come from?”
Then the answer hit her.
“Oh, I get it! The bar from the G in Glutton must have fallen off to make it a C. And then it joined up with one of the os to make the q tail! Same for the line through that other o. It’s actually the dash from five-seater!”
Apparently, it wasn’t just the letters; separate parts of them had gotten mixed up, too. That explained the Curvy airplane and other strange words.
“Let’s see… I started with Storyteller, Glutton, Mage, Hurryup, Bossman, and lovely five-seater airplane. So far, they’ve turned into foøl, reply, tells, quivers, Curvy airplane, and Steam Bottles. What does that leave these last ones to make?”
The letters on her palm wriggled closer and closer together. Soon enough, they’d arranged themselves into two new words:
Hungry Maneater
And just like that, a tiny, vicious-looking monster appeared on Keiko’s palm. It looked up at her with a wicked smile and licked its lips.