October 28, 2021 • 15 mins
Disaster comes in many forms. It can start with something as simple as a stolen ribbon, but it always ends with a nasty surprise.
Victoria has never lived a life troubled by a lot of spare time. What little she has is about to be consumed by a project which is far more dangerous than it might first appear.
Someone has been watching her closely and they've realized the one thing this girl can't resist is a puzzle.
Cast (in order of appearance):
Cuckoo Stone, Narrator: Cynthia Lowman
Victoria Bigglesworth-Hayes: Amber Collins
Merritt Bigglesworth-Hayes: Louie Pollard
Author: Christopher Long
Editor/Producer: Daniel Foytik
Art: Jeanette Andromeda of JeanetteCreations.com
Score: Nico Vettese of We Talk of Dreams
A 9th Story Studios Production, All rights reserved. | Foytik, Collins, Vettese
Support us on Patreon for ad free episodes and extra content.
Listen and Subscribe: iTunes | iHeart Radio | Spotify | Google Podcasts | TuneIn | Stitcher
THEMES:
"The Lift Arrives, (Opening Theme Music):
"Victoria's Music Box, (Victoria's Theme)"
The Lift Closing Theme Music
Composed and Recorded by Nico Vettese of We Talk of Dreams
www.wetalkofdreams.com
FX:
Sound FX: freesound.org, audioblocks.com
AUDIO RECORDING
Sound Design by Davis Walden, of The Viridian Wild audio drama podcast.
Producer/ Creator: Daniel Foytik
Executive Producers: Amber Collins, Nico Vettese
Visit The Lift: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Victoria's Lift and all core characters, places, and situations are property of Daniel Foytik, 9th Story Studios, and 9th Story Publishing and may not be used in any form without explicit written permission.
Victoria has never lived a life troubled by a lot of spare time. What little she has is about to be consumed by a project which is far more dangerous than it might first appear.
Someone has been watching her closely and they've realized the one thing this girl can't resist is a puzzle.
Cast (in order of appearance):
Cuckoo Stone, Narrator: Cynthia Lowman
Victoria Bigglesworth-Hayes: Amber Collins
Merritt Bigglesworth-Hayes: Louie Pollard
Author: Christopher Long
Editor/Producer: Daniel Foytik
Art: Jeanette Andromeda of JeanetteCreations.com
Score: Nico Vettese of We Talk of Dreams
A 9th Story Studios Production, All rights reserved. | Foytik, Collins, Vettese
Support us on Patreon for ad free episodes and extra content.
Listen and Subscribe: iTunes | iHeart Radio | Spotify | Google Podcasts | TuneIn | Stitcher
THEMES:
"The Lift Arrives, (Opening Theme Music):
"Victoria's Music Box, (Victoria's Theme)"
The Lift Closing Theme Music
Composed and Recorded by Nico Vettese of We Talk of Dreams
www.wetalkofdreams.com
FX:
Sound FX: freesound.org, audioblocks.com
AUDIO RECORDING
Sound Design by Davis Walden, of The Viridian Wild audio drama podcast.
Producer/ Creator: Daniel Foytik
Executive Producers: Amber Collins, Nico Vettese
Visit The Lift: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Victoria's Lift and all core characters, places, and situations are property of Daniel Foytik, 9th Story Studios, and 9th Story Publishing and may not be used in any form without explicit written permission.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
M H nine Story Studios giving storya voice. Welcome to the Lift,
Get ready to take a ride.M Victoria's Lift to those who Thrive in
(01:12):
the Dark. Chapter two That BloomsWell 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 pouncewhen their backs turned. I don't mean
(01:34):
the sort of thing that happened here. I mean something sudden, something unforeseen,
plane crash, forest fire. Ofcourse, people act like disaster is
cunning because it's easier than facing thetruth. Disaster is in a bullet.
It's the tip of a very longsword. The trouble starts way before breaks
(02:00):
fail on your car, or youtake the wrong medication. The doctor needs
to be tired when they're writing thatprescription. The ground crew needs to be
distracted enough to miss any problems beforethe plane takes off. The wind has
to shift for a forest to burn. Disaster is simply the last card to
(02:23):
be played in a game where youpeople forget. Safety is never a fact.
It's an optimistic gamble. Take thelittle 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 evenacknowledge herself as being safe. She was
(02:45):
simply home or out doing what wasexpected 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 eatwhenever you catch something. Some of us
(03:09):
have things to do regardless of whatwe want. Hey, give it back.
I've looked that girl in her greeneyes. I've felt her understand me
in less time than it took meto blink. She's sharper than Scalpels when
(03:30):
it comes to people. She couldspeak 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 throughher endless building trying to get a hair
ribbon back from her new adopted cat. Do you think that's the closest she
(03:52):
got to dropping her guard. I'mserious, I have places I'm meant to
be. When you have all thatpower and so many questions filling your head,
do you even have a guard tokeep up? Maybe she'd always just
been so powerful as a reflex before. Maybe someone had finally figured that out.
(04:17):
Ah, now I got you.There's nowhere to run, so hand
it over. Let me put itanother way. If someone dressed a bomb
and a coat and a hat andstood it next to you in the queue
for the bus, do you thinkyou'd notice before it went off? We
all like to think we know theanswer, but we also know we'd be
(04:40):
pretty focused on the time or gettingwherever we're going, right up until the
moment something flashed before our eyes andwhat'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 outof the floor of her library, Victoria
(05:03):
had found a plant, not muchof 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 forthe impossible girl in her impossible library.
(05:30):
However, these got here. Itneeds all the help it can get.
It all need some water, althoughit should have already needed water to
get this far. There's not alake above it. Maybe there are pipes
under this floor. It doesn't makeany sense. Victoria's library is the most
(05:53):
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 theirbooks if you tried to read them before
you were ready. Still, ithad never conjured life. So she fetched
(06:17):
water for the seedling and built alittle wall of books around it to keep
her feline house guests from digging itup. 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
(06:39):
more lives than you. It's gotnothing 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 thepunch lines lingering on the horizon. Life
in the buildings started to feel differentafter Victoria had discovered the plant. She
(07:01):
tried to keep up with her tasks, only her new charge kept nagging at
her. She asked the occasional soulshe ferried in her lift for gardening tips,
or she would drop them off nearnurseries or allotments so she could borrow
a little soil or fertilizer, orhave a nose through the gardening magazines.
(07:21):
Not that any of her efforts seemedto help the strange little plant grow.
Stop that it will have us bothover and you know what people say about
breaking narragants. There sunlight, it'snot a lot. But you didn't need
it to start growing, did you. Maybe it'll do the trick. It
(07:44):
didn't. It failed to help anymore than the miracle grow, or the
eggshells, or the tea leaves orthe 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
(08:05):
this little girl gave up. Victoriawould always happily set aside some time out
of her day to fume over questionswhich 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
(08:28):
you at least looked a little worse. Famous botanists received letters in the post
asking for advice. The return addressnever made a lot of sense to them,
but it hardly mattered. They wrotetheir replies, left them to post
later, and found they were gonewhen they went to collect them. A
(08:48):
group of drunken Cornish whastling singers wokeone morning swearing blind. They'd found a
strange building in the middle of theirorchard the night before, and danced around
its art corridors behind a little girlin a purple dress who didn't know the
songs but certainly knew all her guestsnames. Victoria became so distracted by her
(09:11):
project that she failed to feel apair of eyes watching her as she passed
back and forth along the corridors ofher home. Those eyes followed her nearly
constantly. Now their owner secure inthe knowledge that their plan was working,
all they had to do was wait. After all, they knew their warden
(09:35):
couldn't resist a puzzle. I couldtry digging you up, led you outside
somewhere, only I don't know howto get you out without hurting you,
and I don't know where you'd behappy. Curiosity turned to confusion. Confusion
turned to irritation. Victoria still didwhat was act it of her, Only
(10:01):
it all felt so flavorless, sodistant. Maybe it was because so many
of those things had been put uponher. None of it had ever really
been her choice. The little plant, though, the little plant was hers.
She had all the time she neededto help it. She had access
(10:22):
to so many tools, so manyplaces, 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 friendNicolo would approve of that. They would
(10:48):
be radiant and elegant, and denseand gentle breezes. Come the morning,
she would wake thinking she could smellits blossoms, And then she would wonder
how often she actually dreamt in thatstrange home of hers, and feel a
little colder for the question. Theeyes in the dark watched on. Deals
(11:11):
had been struck down, the moredesolate corridors. Wheels were in motion,
the dominoes were starting to fall.No, I told you to stay away
from that. You could have killedit. How am I ever going to
get it to grow? If youwon't leave it alone. That's when it
(11:33):
hit her the reason why she couldn'tlet this plant die. It reminded her
of her own life in that place, without sunlight, without water. She
was growing without everything a person shouldneed. So what did that make her?
Exactly? What was she changing intowhen on the outside she only ever
(11:58):
let herself grow so much? SometimesVictoria 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 shewas as much herself as she was
anything else her calling required of her, Except she was stuck, held fast
(12:22):
by expectation, rooted in stone,unable to flourish. The eyes in the
dark narrowed. The final card wasplayed, Oh look at the cry baby?
Hello, cry baby? Was thatyour cat I saw running away?
(12:43):
Are you done with it? Icould do with some entertainment, and I
love the noises cats make when youmake them go digging for their extra lives.
Merrit disaster had arrived. Thank youfor making this mini series and our
(13:24):
show possible. We hope you're enjoyingthe 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 byDavis Walden, our new sound designer and
the creator of The Viridian Wild podcast. The Verdian Wild as a fantasy adventure
(13:45):
audio drama podcast following mytho zoologist SebastianVerwood as he travels the world studying magical
creatures. You can find the showat the Viridian Wild dot com. That's
v I R I D I AN, 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 Talkof Dreams. Find Nico at We Talk
(14:07):
of Dreams dot com and streaming onTwitch. Artwork is by Janette Andromeda,
illustrator, artist, YouTuber and allaround amazing human. Find her being creative
at Jenette Creations dot com. Ourauthor is Christopher Long. You can find
him at Cjlongwords dot com. Chrishas been featured on Victoria's Lift, Shadows
at the Door, and The WickedLibrary multiple times. More of his work
(14:30):
is available on Amazon. Story editorand producer is Daniel Foitzec of ninth story
Studios, that's me, M.
M H nine Story Studios giving storya voice. Welcome to the Lift,
Get ready to take a ride.M Victoria's Lift to those who Thrive in
(01:12):
the Dark. Chapter two That BloomsWell 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 pouncewhen their backs turned. I don't mean
(01:34):
the sort of thing that happened here. I mean something sudden, something unforeseen,
plane crash, forest fire. Ofcourse, people act like disaster is
cunning because it's easier than facing thetruth. Disaster is in a bullet.
It's the tip of a very longsword. The trouble starts way before breaks
(02:00):
fail on your car, or youtake the wrong medication. The doctor needs
to be tired when they're writing thatprescription. The ground crew needs to be
distracted enough to miss any problems beforethe plane takes off. The wind has
to shift for a forest to burn. Disaster is simply the last card to
(02:23):
be played in a game where youpeople forget. Safety is never a fact.
It's an optimistic gamble. Take thelittle 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 evenacknowledge herself as being safe. She was
(02:45):
simply home or out doing what wasexpected 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 eatwhenever you catch something. Some of us
(03:09):
have things to do regardless of whatwe want. Hey, give it back.
I've looked that girl in her greeneyes. I've felt her understand me
in less time than it took meto blink. She's sharper than Scalpels when
(03:30):
it comes to people. She couldspeak 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 throughher endless building trying to get a hair
ribbon back from her new adopted cat. Do you think that's the closest she
(03:52):
got to dropping her guard. I'mserious, I have places I'm meant to
be. When you have all thatpower and so many questions filling your head,
do you even have a guard tokeep up? Maybe she'd always just
been so powerful as a reflex before. Maybe someone had finally figured that out.
(04:17):
Ah, now I got you.There's nowhere to run, so hand
it over. Let me put itanother way. If someone dressed a bomb
and a coat and a hat andstood it next to you in the queue
for the bus, do you thinkyou'd notice before it went off? We
all like to think we know theanswer, but we also know we'd be
(04:40):
pretty focused on the time or gettingwherever we're going, right up until the
moment something flashed before our eyes andwhat'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 outof the floor of her library, Victoria
(05:03):
had found a plant, not muchof 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 forthe impossible girl in her impossible library.
(05:30):
However, these got here. Itneeds all the help it can get.
It all need some water, althoughit should have already needed water to
get this far. There's not alake above it. Maybe there are pipes
under this floor. It doesn't makeany sense. Victoria's library is the most
(05:53):
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 theirbooks if you tried to read them before
you were ready. Still, ithad never conjured life. So she fetched
(06:17):
water for the seedling and built alittle wall of books around it to keep
her feline house guests from digging itup. 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
(06:39):
more lives than you. It's gotnothing 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 thepunch lines lingering on the horizon. Life
in the buildings started to feel differentafter Victoria had discovered the plant. She
(07:01):
tried to keep up with her tasks, only her new charge kept nagging at
her. She asked the occasional soulshe ferried in her lift for gardening tips,
or she would drop them off nearnurseries or allotments so she could borrow
a little soil or fertilizer, orhave a nose through the gardening magazines.
(07:21):
Not that any of her efforts seemedto help the strange little plant grow.
Stop that it will have us bothover and you know what people say about
breaking narragants. There sunlight, it'snot a lot. But you didn't need
it to start growing, did you. Maybe it'll do the trick. It
(07:44):
didn't. It failed to help anymore than the miracle grow, or the
eggshells, or the tea leaves orthe 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
(08:05):
this little girl gave up. Victoriawould always happily set aside some time out
of her day to fume over questionswhich 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
(08:28):
you at least looked a little worse. Famous botanists received letters in the post
asking for advice. The return addressnever made a lot of sense to them,
but it hardly mattered. They wrotetheir replies, left them to post
later, and found they were gonewhen they went to collect them. A
(08:48):
group of drunken Cornish whastling singers wokeone morning swearing blind. They'd found a
strange building in the middle of theirorchard the night before, and danced around
its art corridors behind a little girlin a purple dress who didn't know the
songs but certainly knew all her guestsnames. Victoria became so distracted by her
(09:11):
project that she failed to feel apair of eyes watching her as she passed
back and forth along the corridors ofher home. Those eyes followed her nearly
constantly. Now their owner secure inthe knowledge that their plan was working,
all they had to do was wait. After all, they knew their warden
(09:35):
couldn't resist a puzzle. I couldtry digging you up, led you outside
somewhere, only I don't know howto get you out without hurting you,
and I don't know where you'd behappy. Curiosity turned to confusion. Confusion
turned to irritation. Victoria still didwhat was act it of her, Only
(10:01):
it all felt so flavorless, sodistant. Maybe it was because so many
of those things had been put uponher. None of it had ever really
been her choice. The little plant, though, the little plant was hers.
She had all the time she neededto help it. She had access
(10:22):
to so many tools, so manyplaces, 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 friendNicolo would approve of that. They would
(10:48):
be radiant and elegant, and denseand gentle breezes. Come the morning,
she would wake thinking she could smellits blossoms, And then she would wonder
how often she actually dreamt in thatstrange home of hers, and feel a
little colder for the question. Theeyes in the dark watched on. Deals
(11:11):
had been struck down, the moredesolate corridors. Wheels were in motion,
the dominoes were starting to fall.No, I told you to stay away
from that. You could have killedit. How am I ever going to
get it to grow? If youwon't leave it alone. That's when it
(11:33):
hit her the reason why she couldn'tlet this plant die. It reminded her
of her own life in that place, without sunlight, without water. She
was growing without everything a person shouldneed. So what did that make her?
Exactly? What was she changing intowhen on the outside she only ever
(11:58):
let herself grow so much? SometimesVictoria 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 shewas as much herself as she was
anything else her calling required of her, Except she was stuck, held fast
(12:22):
by expectation, rooted in stone,unable to flourish. The eyes in the
dark narrowed. The final card wasplayed, Oh look at the cry baby?
Hello, cry baby? Was thatyour cat I saw running away?
(12:43):
Are you done with it? Icould do with some entertainment, and I
love the noises cats make when youmake them go digging for their extra lives.
Merrit disaster had arrived. Thank youfor making this mini series and our
(13:24):
show possible. We hope you're enjoyingthe 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 byDavis Walden, our new sound designer and
the creator of The Viridian Wild podcast. The Verdian Wild as a fantasy adventure
(13:45):
audio drama podcast following mytho zoologist SebastianVerwood as he travels the world studying magical
creatures. You can find the showat the Viridian Wild dot com. That's
v I R I D I AN, 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 Talkof Dreams. Find Nico at We Talk
(14:07):
of Dreams dot com and streaming onTwitch. Artwork is by Janette Andromeda,
illustrator, artist, YouTuber and allaround amazing human. Find her being creative
at Jenette Creations dot com. Ourauthor is Christopher Long. You can find
him at Cjlongwords dot com. Chrishas been featured on Victoria's Lift, Shadows
at the Door, and The WickedLibrary multiple times. More of his work
(14:30):
is available on Amazon. Story editorand producer is Daniel Foitzec of ninth story
Studios, that's me, M.
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