Nolan got a notion. “Not necessarily. We came through the air, not on a trail. This may be a group of seven trails, not six. We just happened to be facing the other six.”

  “It occurs to me that the Dwarf Demon may not be able to outright cheat,” Apoca said. “But he may be able to distract. He may be at the end of the least likely trail.”

  “But the green should show the way,” Vinia protested.

  “To a reluctant Demon? Messing up colors, or at least fudging them a bit, could be, well, child’s play for him.”

  Vinia nodded thoughtfully.

  The baton was wavering uncertainly. What was its problem?

  “I think it wants to intervene in our choice,” Aurora said. She could see the baton because Nolan could; she was reading his mind. “I think it wants us to take the seventh path.”

  Now, this was really interesting. Was the baton trying to become part of the story, instead of merely observing and recording it? Why? Wouldn’t that be a breach of its protocol? That made him really curious.

  “Let’s try this one,” Nolan said.

  They tried the seventh path. The baton relaxed.

  At first the way was routine. It wound around assorted trees growing shirts, trousers, dresses, shoes, and hats. Nolan saw Apoca pause by a shoe tree, tempted but not yielding. Then came a grove of pie plants bearing apple, peach, cherry, and humble pies. Then a marshy area with milkweeds, the bottles full and fresh. Then beerbarrel trees filled with fine boot rear. Gent was tempted by those. Then pungent cookie flora of all types. Vinia dawdled briefly, then impulsively picked a fudge-mint cookie. Then a pantree, growing pans. Another pantree grew pants. And panties. That made both men pause. How would Apoca look in a pair of those?

  The baton seemed impatient.

  It occurred to Nolan that these were distractions. Was the Dwarf trying to divert them so that they feasted, drank, and dressed instead of getting on with their mission? It was probably best to ignore even incidental temptations.

  Then they passed through a misty glade, where nude nymphs were dancing. They twirled, flung their hair about, screamed cutely, and kicked their shapely legs high. One of them looked directly at Nolan and smiled as she inhaled, getting set to do her dance right up close.

  He felt Apoca’s firm hand on his elbow, steering him onward. He wasn’t freaking out, was he? After all, the nymphs wore no panties. Not that that would stop some men from freaking. Nolan’s eyeballs were steaming, but he wasn’t freaking, quite. He realized that the baton must have alerted her. For some reason women seemed not to like their men peering too closely at other women, even if they were only scintillationly bare nymphs.

  After that was a copse of TreeVees, with moving pictures on their shiny trunks. Nolan knew that if they watched more than half a moment the story lines would catch them and hold them until the shows were over. Mundanes were known suckers for that sort of thing.

  And a field of vines bearing big green gourds. Hypno gourds! “Don’t look,” Apoca warned; the peepholes would hold the attention of those caught indefinitely as their minds meandered in the hypnotic inner geography of the gourds.

  These were definitely distractions. “Stay on the path,” Nolan warned. “DD doesn’t want us reaching the end.”

  They focused on the path, ignoring the further beguilements along the way. Once they did that, the path promptly ended, disgusted. They were where it led.

  They stood before an array of containers, each of which held a special object. The nearest was a model of a winged Mundane horse. It was glossy black with white wings, mane, and tail, a lovely sculpture. The box was labeled creativity.

  The others seemed unimpressed. “Why are these empty boxes here?” Vinia asked.

  “Maybe raiders took their contents,” Apoca said.

  They could not see the horse? Then Nolan realized that it was imaginary, thus only he could see it. “It’s a winged horse, symbolizing creativity,” he explained. “Invisible to most folk, as the baton is.”

  The baton nodded.

  “A horse?” Vinia asked, her eyes starting to glow. “May I see it?”

  Nolan put his hand on her shoulder so that Aurora could extend her telepathy to the girl, enabling her to see what he saw.

  “Ooooh!” Vinia exclaimed. “What a beautiful creature!”

  Apoca joined them, resting one hand on his arm so that she could see too. “A magnificent stallion.”

  “It’s just a statue,” he said. He had never understood what girls saw in Mundane animals.

  The horse spread his wings, flapped them, and rose up out of the box, expanding as it did. It was becoming a full-size stallion.

  “Ooooh!!” both girls oohed together.

  “Well, I thought it was a sculpture,” Nolan said, taken aback. “A symbol of creativity.”

  The baton danced, indicating that there was something he was missing. Ah—if this was like the baton, it was more than a symbol. It was Creativity itself, coming to folk who needed it.

  The horse flew up into the sky and away, soon disappearing behind a passing cloud.

  “Why didn’t it stay?” Vinia asked.

  “And where is it going?” Apoca asked.

  “And why did it wait for us to see it before it left?” Nolan asked.

  “It received a call for its service,” Gent said, his pun curse abated in this setting. “It is going to do its job. There must be a reason for us to witness that call.” Gent was evidently getting over his tryst with Gina and returning his focus to the Quest. Presumably the giantess was reorienting similarly.

  “A reason,” Apoca said thoughtfully. “I smell another Demon hint.”

  So did Nolan. He suspected that they would not catch up to DD Talents until they knew how to handle him. He understood why the hints could not be too obvious, but he was experiencing some underlying frustration.

  Apoca leaned close to him. “Me too.” She kissed his ear.

  Nolan’s frustration segued from the Quest to romance. He wanted more than an ear kiss, but this was not the time for it.

  The box became a three-dimensional picture of a dull Mundane man sitting at a desk. There was a keyboard before him, and an oblong screen. The screen was blank.

  What was it? The picture seemed to make little sense.

  “It is a Mundane writer,” Gent said. “Trying to think of an original story to type. Mundanes like to read imaginative stories.”

  So they did, Nolan remembered. Their lives were so deadly dull that they had to escape into pretend stories about more interesting folk, such as those in the Land of Xanth. The absence of routine magic was the abiding curse of Mundania. No one would live there if they had any sense. Which was of course the thing about Mundanes: they lacked sense. They were also chronically boring.

  So why was this animated picture here? Even as a passing distraction it was too dull to be useful.

  The flying horse arrived at the scene, visible only to them, the watchers. It was now relatively tiny, no bigger than the Mundane writer’s head. The writer seemed not to be aware of it.

  There was a bookshelf beside the desk, filed with suitably dull tomes like A History of Imaginative Writing and P’s and Q’s of Syntax. Obviously they were not doing this writer much good. A few Mundane coins were on a shelf just above the writer’s head as he sat. Nolan recognized several pennies. He remembered that in Mundania pies did not grow on trees but had to be purchased from stores, weird as that seemed; maybe these were for the writer’s next meal.

  The horse landed on that shelf, folded its wings, sniffed the coins, then turned around and faced away from them. Had it checked them out and lost interest? Nolan doubted that. There was too much purpose in its actions.

  Suddenly the horse kicked back with its hind hooves, scraping them along the wood. The pennies shot off the shelf, right at the writer’s head. They plunged into the man’s forehead and disappeared. How could that be? They should have bounced.

  No, Nolan saw now that the pennies remained on the shelf. It was their shadows, or rather their spirits that had flown, assuming that coins had spirits. The invisible essence of the pennies had gone to the man’s mind.

  Vinia tittered. “He just knocked some cents into the writer’s head!”

  “Some sense,” Gent said, interpreting the unconscious pun.

  The writer clapped a hand to his forehead. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. They might not have heard him sonically, but they picked up his thought. “My writer’s block has ended. The most original, imaginative, evocative story idea ever! Boy meets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy recovers Girl. It’s never been done before, in all the history of literature!”

  Apoca shared a querulous glance with Nolan. This was originality in Mundania?

  “I understand it’s the template for their entire Romance genre,” Nolan said. “Variations on the fundamental theme.”

  “I always thought Mundanes were dull,” Apoca said. “Now I know it.”

  “Whatever works,” Vinia said wryly.

  The horse flew away. Its job was done.

  The writer started pounding the keys on his keyboard, his inspiration unchained. Words appeared on the screen before him. He was in the throes of imaginative creation. Indeed, the Winged Horse of Imagination had done its job.

  The words formed sentences. “Everyman saw Everywoman as she waited at the street corner for the light to change. She was gorgeous! He knew in that moment that they were destined to be together.”

  Apoca grimaced, her hair flashing plaid. “All that counts is her appearance?”

  “Maybe in Mundania,” Nolan said. “Not here.” But it was uncomfortably close to Xanthian reality too. He had never seen an ugly nymph.

  The sentences fuzzed and expanded, forming into the scene of a city street at an intersection. There was the man and there was the woman.

  And Nolan found himself drawn into the scene. Not the writer in his room; the picture forming on the screen. The story being told. He was sucked into the form of the man. There before him stood the woman: Apoca in all her beauty.

  The red light turned green.

  He stepped forward, guided by the ongoing narrative. “Miss, let me help you! There’s a nasty puddle.”

  Apoca looked down. Indeed, she was about to step into an ugly pool.

  Nolan ripped off his jacket coat and with a flourish spread it on the muck. Then he took her hand and guided her as they stepped together onto the jacket and safely crossed the mess.

  “You are so gallant!” she exclaimed as they crossed the street.

  That was the commencement of a wonderful association. Apoca was all Nolan had ever dreamed of in a woman, and he labored assiduously to persuade her that he was her dream man. Things looked good.

  Until the Evil Wizard NoGoodNick spied Apoca one day outside his Sinister Magic Shoppe. Smitten by her beauty, he assumed his Harmless Old Man guise and invited her in. He proffered her a vial of Enchant Him Instantly perfume, a favorite of women ready to settle down to housewifery with the right man. She took a single sniff and fell into his arms, unconscious. “Oops,” he muttered in mock chagrin. “I must have gotten the wrong bottle. This is Knock Her Out Instantly perfume.” A favorite of men not about to settle down yet.

  When Apoca woke, she was locked in a windowless, doorless pink padded cell, naked except for bra and panties. She wasn’t sure how she had come there or how she had lost her clothing, and she preferred not to conjecture. Her only remaining possessions were her decorative earrings.

  She stood and looked around. There was no apparent exit, only a screen set in one wall. So she was being observed. Par for the sneaky abduction course. “Who are you, and what do you want with me?” she demanded of the screen. Of course, there was only one thing a nasty old lecher ever wanted of a lovely young woman caught in his clutches, but she needed to learn more about the rest of her situation.

  A face appeared on the screen. It was the store manager. No surprise there. “I am the Evil Wizard NoGoodNick. You are beautiful; therefore I want to marry you and sire my evil progeny in you. If you don’t agree to this reasonable proposition, I will simply tie you down and ravish you endlessly until you wear out and have to be replaced by another pretty girl. Choose!”

  Apoca realized that she was in trouble. So she burst into tears and tore her hair, the way any captive maiden would. But while her hair masked her face she activated her special earrings and called Nolan. “Help! I am captive and about to be cruelly ravished until I wear out.”

  Nolan’s Smart Ring chimed. That was Apoca’s bell! He lifted it to his ear. “… about to be ravished until I wear out.”

  Horrors! He was the only one entitled to do that, when the time came. “I’ll be there pronto!”

  “Don’t let him know you’re my boyfriend. He has Knock Out Vapor, and probably magic defenses all around his store.”

  “I’ll be sneaky,” Nolan agreed.

  He zeroed in on her location, which was a back room of the store. He got there in no more than a pronto, as promised. He put on his best Innocent Customer manner and entered. The store was empty, but he knew the proprietor was close. He marched up to the service desk and bonged the bell.

  “Oh, bleep!” NoGoodNick swore villainously in the background. “A customer.”

  “They happen at the least convenient times,” Apoca said sweetly as she emerged from her torn hair. “I will wait.” She knew Nolan was on her case.

  NoGoodNick was not much amused. “Indeed you will.” His face disappeared from the screen.

  Nolan looked up from his ring as he muted it, leaving the connection to Apoca so she could hear. “Ah, there you are, Nick. I am looking for a woman, Apoca. She was last seen in this area. Have you seen her?”

  Of course the man had, right down to her underwear, which had not freaked him out because this was drear Mundania, where men appreciated well-filled panties and bras but merely labored to gain possession of them and their contents. “Maybe. What is your interest in her?” He was cautious because he did not want his dastardly deed to be found out; it would take an awful lot of bribes to cover it up.

  Now Nolan got clever. “Oh, nothing much. She owes me for a meal I bought her back when we were dating.”

  “You dated her?”

  “Yeah, once.”

  “Why did you stop.”

  “She was too ticklish.”

  The Evil Wizard was intrigued despite himself. “What’s wrong with tickling?”

  “She’s too ticklish. She couldn’t be touched. I couldn’t even dance with her without her going into a screaming fit of laughter. You could hear it all the way outside the building. It was embarrassing.”

  “No, I haven’t seen her,” NoGoodNick lied.

  Nolan shrugged. “Thanks anyway. I’ll keep looking.” He turned about and departed the store. The seed had been planted.

  The Wizard promptly returned to his control center. “Feathers,” he directed, “do your thing.”

  A flurry of feathers flew into the padded cell. They tickled Apoca mercilessly, brushing every part of her exposed body. She shrieked piercingly, trying to avoid them as she danced about, bouncing off the padded walls, leaving smears of spittle. Indeed, she could be heard outside the building.

  NoGoodNick hastily nulled the feathers, and Apoca collapsed in a shuddering heap. A padded door opened and she scrambled out. The Wizard was quietly getting rid of her, as it would be hazardously complicated to try to ravish her. He did not want to alert the neighborhood to her captive presence.

  She ran around the corner, where Nolan waited with a large shawl and a quaint Mundane vehicle called a car. She bundled into both and they sped off.

  “Thank you for rescuing me,” she gasped.

  “Well, I didn’t want anyone to ravish you before I did.”

  “Nobody did, thanks to you.”

  “Good thing he didn’t know you aren’t at all ticklish.”

  They laughed together. “I’m more of an actress. I’ll keep the secret if you will.”

  “I’ll keep it if you marry me.”

  “I’m thinking about it.” But it was clear that Boy had regained Girl.

  The story came to the end.

  They emerged from the scene and watched while the narrative went into fast-history mode. The story was published by a Mundane genre magazine, was an instant success, widely praised for its originality, and won the coveted Nebulous and Huggie Awards. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl; who would ever have anticipated that? The author was a success, thanks to the nudge by the Invisible Flying Horse of Imagination.

  “Something seems almost familiar about the theme,” Nolan said.

  “He had what he needed to save her and win her,” Apoca agreed. “In this case a clever take on her supposed ticklishness.”

  They were back with the others. The baton was getting impatient. It was time to move on.

  The next section was an array of Mundanish books on a shelf labeled fundamental answers. The title of one book was Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? Another was What Is the Nature of Ultimate Reality? A third was What Does Woman Want? Then Is There a God? And What Is the Secret of Consciousness?

  “Who cares about such dull stuff?” Vinia asked impatiently.

  Nolan picked up the book about Woman. “There might be something interesting here.”

  Apoca slapped it out of his hand. “I’ll let you know in due course.”

  They went to the next section. This showed a series of plaques bearing obscure statements, such as this statement is false, or you do not exist, or the final digit of pi, or the exact figure for the square root of minus one, or how can compatible peace and freedom for all be achieved?

  “Boooring,” Vinia said.