Music: Majestic Nature by Craig Stuart Garfinkle
Artwork by Steve English
The script:
Episode 18 - The Rise of the Evil Empire
Manor Rott, Grott & Snott hadn’t really been itself – at least, not since the 'incident'! Quite what the 'incident' was and when it had happened, no one could remember. All people knew was that, ever since then, things had been different, including, and maybe especially, the Manor.
Of course, if you live with 'different' for long enough, it stops being different and becomes the new normal. But even so, Manor Rott, Grott & Snott still felt, still presented itself and still was different.
Externally, the Manor no longer looked like a friendly country Manor house. Instead, it had taken on the appearance of a rather nasty little castle. Outside, what should have been pleasant gardens had become miserable woodlands, threaded with dark, eerie pathways. There was the tree-lined drive at the front of the Manor, but that went to the gates and, through those, no one from Rott, Grott & Snott could go; only visitors oblivious to the situation were able to come and go at will.
The gargoyles, of course, you know all about! Whoever heard of large, restless, hooved gargoyles on a Manor?
Oh, and the towers and turrets? As well as the fact that they liked to rearrange themselves from time to time, it was a challenge to find out how they were connected to the Manor. Some of them did seem to have entrances and exits, and these moved with their turrets, somehow fitting in with the layout of the Manor as they shifted. However, others seemed to have no known entrance or exit and remained a mystery.
Then, of course, probably linked to the turrets, were the rooms and cupboards that came and went, sometimes even taking people with them, like Lady Pinchinthorpe and her maid Ayton. Because of this penchant for turrets to move and rooms to appear and disappear, the Manor also had a tendency to rearrange its internal layout. The things that remained unchanged included the front and back doors, along with the grand entrance hall at the front, and the boot room and kitchen at the back. Additionally, several corridors with connections to the entrance hall or the kitchen had little choice but to remain in place. They assumed that the attic and the cellar also stayed in place but, as they were visited so infrequently, in truth, they could be doing anything although, on the rare occasions people had visited them, they had tended to be at the top and the bottom of the Manor respectively.
The end result of all this variation was that you could be heading to a particular room only to find yourself in a different part of the Manor, sometimes even ending up on a different floor, or simply unable to get to where you’d hoped! This could be very frustrating, and it wasn't unusual for people to get quite lost. Everyone, that is, except Horatio, who seemed to know the exact way to go no matter how the Manor reorganised itself (and even more quickly at mealtimes).
I think it was the shadows that set people most on edge. Many thought it an unholy thing that shadows could be independent. Some people felt so uneasy that they refused to go anywhere near the Manor. You see, the shadows in the Manor didn't see the point of playing the same game as all the other shadows outside, and so they didn't.
Most disconcerting of all was when your own shadow got bored! This happened quite a lot in the Manor, and it soon became apparent that shadows don't have a particularly long attention span. So, within a few moments of entering the Manor, your shadow would wander off without you, leaving you with no shadow until you left the Manor and it was forced to return to normal.
Even if your shadow did come back before you left the Manor, there was no guarantee it would act normally and, more often than not, it would return with several other shadows (as shadows were both nosey and fickle) and hold a very animated silent shadow...
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