Porcelain Paradise by LadyAkhana

Disclaimer: I (sadly) don't own Labyrinth or all related characters. Neek, Blar, and Qinty are iffy, since they're goblins but I decided to characterize them. Go ask Jim Henson people, or Lucasfilm. I'm sure they'd be only too happy to accept ownership of yet SOMETHING ELSE. Until they take my three little goblins, they're mine. Contrary to them, however, Crystal is ENTIRELY mine. She's MY O/C and no one is taking her without permission!

You have been warned!

Prologue: SOC Opening by Crystal

(A/N: SOC, for all you non-language-arts people, means "stream of consciousness." It's like a narrative, but better, since you get all the character's impressions and thoughts rather than just the actions.)

All of us have a little magic inside. The only thing that matters is what we do with it.

Some of us use our "talents" for practical things like healing—-we become doctors or nurses. Some paint mystical scenes in unbelievable detail; that's the subconscious reminding us of the things that really do exist, if only in our imaginations. Others use it to write vastly delightful books filled with the dragons, unicorns, wizards, sorcerers, and powers in the aforementioned paintings and creating new worlds of their own. People do these good things with it.

Some people misuse their magic. They turn it toward evil purposes like killing, or extortion, or blackmail so well thought out that they get away with it for years. Only those who turn their magic to solving those cases, those detectives and policemen, can stop them.

Still others bottle it up inside and never let it out because we are afraid of what it might do.

Me? I let it out of that bottle whenever I get the chance, in the form of what I have come to call "tangible imagination." Whatever I imagine, if I really want it to, becomes real until I banish it.

Lemme give you an idea: I came home when my mom had just left. I found a note on the fridge telling me she'd be home in an hour and a half; she'd had to run in because a coworker had gotten sick and had to leave early. Immediately, I put my magic to use. Flowers bloomed pink and purple and rainbow from my room's green carpeting. Faeries tended them. Baby dragons alternately lounged and flew throughout, finding the sunlit portion of my carpet a very nice place to rest. I stepped out the back door and whistled for two robins, my best friends. Little sparks of blue and green and pink and white and gold flitted about the room while I used a ball of scarlet fire to cook my pizza for dinner. A can of Pepsi ® opened itself in midair at a snap of my fingers.

My room is rather large for just a seventeen-year-old. Around it, from left to right starting with the door (which is set in the middle of a wall) are a desk, a canopy bed on the far end of the next wall, in the corner. Then there's a window, my makeup table, my dresser, my closet on the next wall with its full-length mirror on one door, shelves of books next to that, and then, on the wall with the door, was my art project, called Porcelain Paradise, because I love puzzles. I can see the whole in the pieces or the pieces in the whole, depending upon what type of puzzle I'm doing. I had done that sculpture for art class, obviously. It now displayed itself on a stand I had made to support it. It was a miniature labyrinth. There were three parts to it: one with walls of stones, a hedge maze, and then a forbidden forest. On the border of the forest and the stone maze was a bunch of green beads in a sculpted hollow, signifying a bog. There was a little bridge to the forest leading from a strip of land leading into that bog from the wall. In the center of this labyrinth was a city, rather small as those go, even in models, and at the heart of that city was a castle. All of it was made out of a certain clay which, when it dries, looks and feels like porcelain, but is not.

It was my representation of what I thought the Labyrinth looked like. Liking puzzles, I had seen the title of that little book and read it. Instantly falling in love with it, I had my inspiration when the teacher asked for a sculpture in art class. So I made a tiny Labyrinth, humming quietly over it after school when the teachers were still there but classes were over. I suppose I had put some of my magic into it, to make it so detailed as I wanted it to be. But I never really had a clear sign that I did, unless it was my singing.

Doubtful. I don't work magic like that. Perhaps it was my imagining it as I worked that did the trick.

At any rate, my room was swarmed with fantastic elements, both flora, fauna, and inanimate, and I was having fun with them. What was unfortunate about the situation was that after an hour, I had finished my dinner and was explaining the concept of walking to the lady robin when my mother walked in.

She had gotten home early because another coworker had shown up early, as I found out soon after the event I am about to describe.

She stopped dead still when she came into my doorway. Nothing left her open mouth for a good ten seconds, in which time I banished everything and sent the two birds winging their way out my open window. When she finally found her voice, it came out in a sort of raspy whisper, as if she had lost or was losing her voice. "What…is…or was…going on around here, Crystal?"

I took a deep breath, certain I was going to be grounded for life. "Mom, let me try to explain. I—-"

"Try to explain? Try? You won't just try—-you'd better explain, because you're about to see nothing but this room for the next full year! And I don't want any childish fairy stories!" She continued under her breath, muttering on about being out of her mind with stress and hallucinating and really needing to take a vacation.

I tried for nigh on five minutes to come up with something that my mother would accept to explain my talents. Every time I started to tell her, I saw that she wouldn't believe it. Finally, I had to give up. There was just nothing I could do. "All right, then, Mother," I said with a sigh. "Nothing I can say will help you believe or accept my talent, so I'll have to take being grounded for a full year. I think that's a little heavy for only having the gift of a tangible imagination, but there's nothing I can do." I sat on my bed and stared at the ceiling. "I'll be down to do the dishes in an hour." In my mind, however, I was planning something very different.

Mom stood there for about thirty seconds trying to decipher exactly what I meant and how I could just give up my case so easily. Normally I was a rather stubborn seventeen-year-old. At length she turned to leave, turning back at the last moment to ask, not quite mockingly but definitely disbelievingly, " 'Tangible imagination?' "

In answer, I conjured a fairy dancing on my hand. It fluttered over to my mother, sitting on her hands for perhaps ten seconds. "All I have to do is imagine it and will it to be so, and it is," I explained feebly. I snapped my fingers and it vanished.

Wild-eyed, my mother quickly left.

I swore for perhaps two minutes before considering what would happen. My mother, I knew, was not above calling the psych ward to pick me up. She hated me; that was God's own truth. I sighed. I had freaked my mother with a single mistake. How was I going to get myself out of it this time?

I read for the next fifty minutes to calm myself down. It was my favorite book, if a little short. "The Labyrinth." Ah, what a good book. I often found myself wishing myself to the Goblin King, just in case it happened to be true. My mother and I weren't on the best terms—more often than not, at each other's throats. But occasionally we had our close moments—once a millennium or so.

Believe me, the bad far outweighed the good. That's why I wished.

It wouldn't work. I don't know whether someone else had to wish me or whether it was because I was an only child and had no older sibling to do it. I didn't even have a younger sibling to wish.

So night after night, I wished myself away, and day after day, I awoke in my bed, the same as always.

Anyway, I went downstairs when my hour was up and stood at the sink turning on the water every forty-five seconds for ten minutes so my mother would think I was doing the dishes. Between every set of faucet-twists, however, I pointed to the rack and another dish vanished from the sink and appeared in it, clean and sparkling like my mom wanted. At the end of those ten minutes, I waved my hand and the dishes went to their proper places in the cabinets.

All right, so I cheated. Who cares? I was getting tired of doing things the mundane way and since my mother knew about them, I figured she could deal with it. After all, she was a mature adult. Since I were only a teenager who could cope with them, why couldn't she?

I turned around to leave and saw my mother standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Damn. I knew right away that she had seen my little trick. Damn again.

"That was fast," she remarked acidly.

I knew she wanted to start something, and by God, I wasn't going to take it. I was going to start it for her. "No shit, Sherlock," I retorted. I couldn't help it. When I'm angry, things seem to pop out of my mouth, but I know perfectly well what I'm saying.

"Watch your language, young lady!"

"Or what, you'll ground me to my room for three years? Four? Five?" I was shouting now.

"Don't you dare mock me!" Her voice had risen as far as mine.

I could be louder, and I proved it. "Are you that so emotionally vulnerable, mother? Hmm? Does everyone have to treat you like the Queen of Sheba, or is it just me?"

"Now see here, young woman! You're going straight to bed after you do your homework and with no supper for a week!"

"Like I'm really gonna do that, Mother. Like that's really going to solve all your problems. Oh, I know! Just kick me out of the house! Go on! Send me to social services like you always wanted to do! Aw, what the hell—-why don't you get it over with and just wish me away!"

"I just might!"

She had to be over the edge to say that. Never in her right mind would she consider that. It was in the realm of fantasy. The rules for wishing someone away weren't the rules of this world. They were the rules of a world without our rules.

"Well, then? What are you waiting for? Say it! I dare you!"

In a flash Mother's temper got the best of her. "I wish the goblins would come take you away right now! That way I don't have to deal with you!"

"Thank you! Bet you feel better now! Maybe this time it'll actually work!"

Thunder rolled outside and I knew I had nothing to do with it, even if I could summon up an entire thunderstorm. Our conversation dropped to silence as the power went out in our house.

I didn't do that, either.

The moon had risen that night happening to be full. It shone in our glass doors, creating two rectangular patches on the floor divided by the strip of darkness marking the metal frame. A gust of wind blew the doors impossibly open and I felt the tingle in the base of my skull that strong foreign magic brought on—"foreign" being defined as "not mine."

An owl drifted in on that forceful breeze, flying a circle around my mother and I and landing back on the rug before the sliding glass. The shadow grew, and suddenly we found ourselves facing a man dressed all in black—boots, leggings, peasant shirt, vest, gloves, cape, the whole works. The only thing that had color on him was a silver pendant, like a crescent moon melded with a triangle on the outer curve and a large topaz or something stuck in the center of that resulting shape. The two horns were free of any entrapment, possibly tipped in gold. I wasn't concentrating on the pendant, though. What drew my attention, besides the unnerving, almost obscene tightness of the black pants, was the mismatched pair of eyes, one brown, the other green, beneath the exotic eyebrows. His wild, platinum hair was harnessed, for the moment, by a high black collar on the billowing cape. His skin was paler than his hair. As for height, I came up to his eyes.

My jaw dropped, and not just because of the power he exuded. This was—-he was—-I was in the presence of—-I couldn't believe it. The only thing I could think to say was, "You're him, aren't you? You're the Goblin King."

Pain flashed through his eyes and then he nodded. "Yes, I am he." He shot my mother a feral grin. "Your mother wished you away to me." It was more a question than a statement, but the certainty was unmistakably there. "You'll come with me now."

"Where? Who are you," my mother asked tersely. She was at the end of her rope, having dealt with me, been frightened by an unexplained power outage, an owl flying in the room and transforming into a man, and now by someone she must have deemed crazier than me by now. When she got scared, she got angry and defensive.

"My name is Jareth," he said simply, "the King of the Goblins. You wished your daughter away to me; she will go. To get her back, you must make your way through my labyrinth to the castle within thirteen hours. I must suggest we hurry; you're wasting time standing here chatting."

"What? We? Me? What about you, prattling on about all this nonsense?"

"I have my entire life ahead of me. It's only forever." He pulled his gloves on a little more snugly. "Not long at all."

Mother scoffed. "Why would I want to waste my time on a selfish, stubborn thing like her? It's bad enough I have to live with her until she's eighteen. I don't need to run around for her, too." She shrugged, scowling at me. "Go ahead. Take her," she spat, "and good riddance."

She stalked past me into the kitchen to get some aspirin from the medicine cabinet. Jareth put his hand on my shoulder. I saw feathers blow past my face as I felt a strong tingle over my entire body, and then I was standing in the center of a large stone room.

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This is LadyAkhana's Author's Note. You have come to the end of the prologue. Thank you for reading.

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