Episode 1: The Pale World
The cozy red tomato-ship drifted gently through the quiet stars, and aboard it, Emil and Tom sat together with the great ancient Wanderer's Atlas spread open between them, searching its endless pages for their next destination.
They turned page after page — worlds of fire, worlds of ice, worlds of glass and song — until Emil's finger came to rest on a page that seemed, at first glance, to be... nothing at all.
It was completely blank.
Tom leaned in, squinting at the empty parchment. "Is that... nothing?" he asked. "An empty page? Did the traveler forget to write on it?"
"That doesn't seem like him," Emil murmured, frowning. "Every other page is so carefully done. Why would he leave one blank?" He lifted the page up toward the warm light of the cabin, turning it this way and that — and then he gasped.
For as the light shone through the page, something began to appear. Faint, shimmering letters glimmered into view across the blank parchment, written in a silvery, secret ink that could only be seen in the light. And below the words appeared a set of glowing coordinates.
"It's hidden!" Emil breathed. "The page isn't blank at all — there's secret writing on it, only visible in the light! Listen to this, Tom." He read the shimmering words aloud, slowly:
"Where the unseen dwell, and colors fade to white. Seek the heart of the pale world, and restore the light."
The two friends looked at each other.
From the control panel, Tomato the ship's AI gave a long, electronic groan. "Oh, marvelous," said Tomato. "Another cryptic riddle. 'Where the unseen dwell, colors fade to white' — wonderful. Perfectly clear. Because the last riddle we followed went so very well, what with the collapsing library and the burning page and the ancient Guardian of Doom and all. Truly, I cannot wait to see what fresh disaster this poem leads us into."
Tom grinned over at the glowing panel. "Oh, admit it, Tomato," he teased. "You love a good mystery. Secret writing! Hidden coordinates! A pale world that needs its light restored! It's thrilling."
"I love not dying," Tomato muttered. "That's the mystery I'm most invested in solving. The mystery of how to keep you two from getting us all squashed, frozen, eaten, or set on fire. That's a riddle I'd happily spend my days on."
But Emil was already entering the coordinates, his eyes bright with curiosity. "A pale world, where colors fade to white," he said softly. "And we're meant to restore the light. I've never heard of anything like it. We have to see it. Set the course, Tomato — gently, now."
"Setting course," sighed Tomato. "For the spooky riddle-planet. Naturally."
The cozy red ship turned toward the glowing coordinates, and after a time, it dropped smoothly out of warp near the place the secret writing had described.
But when they looked out the window... there was almost nothing there.
"That's strange," said Emil, frowning at the empty-looking patch of space. "The coordinates say there should be a whole planet right here. But I don't see anything."
"Neither do my scanners," said Tomato, puzzled. "Or — wait. No. There is something. But it's faint. Very, very faint."
Emil adjusted the scanners, peering hard through the window — and slowly, he began to make it out. There, hanging in the dark, was a planet — but a planet unlike any they had ever seen. It was barely there at all: a faint, ghostly, see-through outline against the blackness of space, shimmering like a soap bubble or a pane of frosted glass. He could see the stars behind it, twinkling right through its body, as though the whole world were made of mist and memory.
"It's here," Emil whispered, awestruck. "It's right here in front of us. It's just... almost transparent. The planet itself is fading away — like it's barely holding on to being real at all."
"'Where the unseen dwell,'" Tom quoted softly, a shiver in his voice. "The traveler wasn't being poetic. The whole planet is unseen. It's vanishing."
Carefully, gently, Emil guided the ship down toward the ghostly world. And as they descended through its faint, pale atmosphere, the planet slowly came into focus around them — and what they saw took their breath away, and made their hearts ache all at once.
It was a world entirely without color.
Everything — everything — was white, and grey, and pale shimmering silver, like a photograph from which all the color had been carefully drained away. There were forests, but the trees were ghostly white, their leaves the colorless grey of ash. There were rivers, but they ran silver and clear, glinting like liquid glass with no blue in them at all. Gentle hills rolled away in every direction, soft and pale and washed-out, beneath a sky the color of old pearls.
And there were people — but they too were pale and translucent, drifting quietly across the colorless land like soft-edged shadows. They were faint and see-through, like the planet itself, moving slowly and silently about their business, barely more solid than the mist. They did not seem unhappy, exactly — but there was a deep, faded sadness to them, the look of people who had forgotten something wonderful and could not quite remember what.
"Oh," Tom breathed, gazing out at the colorless world. "Oh, Emil. It's so... empty. So sad. Everything's gone grey. The whole planet — the trees, the water, the people — all the color has just... drained away." His little voice was hushed. "What could do such a thing? Where did all the colors go?"
Emil shook his head slowly, his own heart heavy. "I don't know," he said. "'Colors fade to white'... the riddle was telling us exactly what we'd find. This world has lost its color. And somehow — somehow we're meant to bring it back. To 'restore the light.'"
He brought the ship lower, skimming over the pale, ghostly landscape, searching for some clue, some place to begin. The colorless forests slid by beneath them, and the silver rivers, and the faded, drifting people — on and on, all of it grey, grey, grey, as far as the eye could see.
And then — Tom spotted it.
"Emil!" he cried, pointing with the tip of his tail. "Down there! In the middle of that valley! Look!"
Emil looked — and his eyes went wide.
Below them, nestled in the heart of a wide grey valley, surrounded on every side by the colorless, washed-out world, stood a single, solitary house. And it was not grey at all.
It blazed with color.
It was, in fact, the most colorful thing Emil had ever seen — a tall, cheerful, higgledy-piggledy house painted in every shade imaginable. Its walls were brilliant red and sunshine yellow. Its roof was deep ocean blue. Its door was bright grass green, its window-frames glowed orange and purple and pink, and its little chimney was striped like a rainbow. It stood there in the middle of the drained, pale valley like a single drop of paint spilled on a blank white page — vivid, glorious, and utterly, impossibly colorful, the one bright spark in a whole world gone grey.
Tom let out a long, low whistle. "That's..." he said slowly. "That's not exactly subtle, is it?"
"No," Emil agreed, staring down at the riot of color in the middle of all that emptiness. "No, it certainly isn't." A slow, certain feeling settled over him. "The whole planet has lost its color — every tree, every river, every person. And yet one house, right in the very center of it all, is bursting with every color there is." He looked at Tom. "That can't be a coincidence. All the color of an entire world, drained away to nothing... and all of it, somehow, seems to have ended up there."
"You think whoever lives in that house," said Tom slowly, "took it? Took all the colors? Stole them, from the whole planet?"
"'Seek the heart of the pale world, and restore the light,'" Emil quoted softly. "The heart of the pale world. The very center." He pointed at the rainbow house standing alone in the middle of the grey valley. "I think the heart of this world is right there. And I think the answer to where all the colors went — and how to give them back — is waiting for us inside that house."
He turned the ship toward the brilliant, lonely house, and began, slowly, to bring it down to land in the colorless valley.
"Well," sighed Tomato, as the pale grey ground rose up to meet them, "I suppose we're going to go knock on the door of the one suspiciously colorful house on the entire ghost-planet, are we? The single most obvious 'something fishy is happening here' house in the whole galaxy?"
"We are," said Emil cheerfully, reaching for his helmet.
"Of course we are," said Tomato. "Why would we not. Do be a dear and try not to get your colors stolen too."
And as the cozy red tomato-ship settled gently onto the pale grey grass, the friends gazed out at the dazzling rainbow house — and wondered just who, or what, was waiting for them inside.
To be continued in Episode 2...