CHAPTER 2
I am come to lock all fast,
Love without me cannot last.
Love, like Counsels of the Wise,
Must be hid from Vulgar Eyes.
'Tis holy, and we must conceal it,
They profane it, who reveal it.
—Mystery
From the opera "The Fairy Queen" by Henry Purcell
The streets of Lazytown were gradually drained of their noise and commotion. As families headed home to their beds, all that was left was the quiet ringing of the crickets and the whisper of the far-off highway.
Sportacus could not return to his airship yet. His head was full of things he needed to pacify. As he left Town Hall, his pace quickened to a jog – instinctively, he fell back upon the comfort of exercise.
Without noticing, his feet took him uphill to the wealthier part of town, along a tree-lined road where a collection of large, ornate mansions stood as proud surveyors of the skyline. The night had now well and truly fallen, and Sportacus absently wondered how close it was to 8.08. He came to a sharp curve in the road which continued ascending higher up the hill.
He almost ran completely past it before he realised what house he had just come across.
The tall iron gate was bedecked in chains and padlocks. Neglected hedges sprawled up over the walls. Peering inside as best as he could, Sportacus thought the large garden looked like some deep dark forest. A brief moment of common sense glided through his head before natural curiousity overcame him.
A broken parlour window allowed him entrance. Dense, dense quiet pervaded the house, making every little movement of the nimble elf seem loud and invasive. Made somewhat reverent for these surroundings, Sportacus slowly began creaking across the aged floor.
Dust was everywhere. The intruder kicked up massive clouds of it with every footstep. A black piano sat in the corner of the parlour. Its small seat was pulled out, the lid to the keyboard was left up and a music score was set open on the stand. It looked as if the long-forgotten instrument was ready to be played, expecting someone to favour it with the stroke of their fingers. A part of Sportacus dearly wanted to touch it.
He leant in to examine the music score, forgetting that the delicate strands of notation would be indecipherable to him. All he could read in the gloom was the title of the piece:
"'Tu, Tu, Piccolo Iddio!' Libretto di Luigi Illica e Giuseppe Giacosa. Musica di Giacomo Puccini."
A dull, unrecognisable noise rang out somewhere in the distance. Sportacus nearly jumped out of his skin.
Heart galloping, he dashed across the floor, leapt out of the window and bounded back out onto the street.
"Sportacus!" Someone called out.
He turned around to find himself face to face with the children. Ziggy barreled into him with a child-sized bear hug. Stephanie stepped forward, a concerned look on her face.
"We thought it was you. What are you doing here?"
"I… wait, how did you guys find me?" The elf suddenly became concerned about his little charges being out and unaccompanied at such an hour.
"We're having a slumber party at Stingy's place tonight, and I saw you running along the road out the window," Pixel explained.
Sportacus' first instinct was to go into role model mode. "That doesn't mean you guys can rush out onto the street after dark. Do Stingy's parents know?"
The group suddenly assumed a collective expression of guilt.
"Come on, I'll walk you all back."
They obeyed him. As the children turned around, Stephanie cast a fearful look in the direction of the old house before joining them.
"You shouldn't have been in there, Sportacus," she scolded him as they sidled along. "Deverhill Manor is still private property."
"Yeah," Stingy said with a shade of iniquity, "the mansion of crazy old Doctor Devil!"
"The mad scientist of Lazytown!" Trixie added, moaning like a Hollywood monster for dramatic effect.
Ziggy's grip on Sportacus' hand tightened considerably.
"I heard he did experiments on Robbie Rotten's brain in there!" Stingy claimed.
"And his ghost eats little kids for dinner!" Trixie elaborated.
Ziggy squealed in terror.
"Guys, knock it off!" Stephanie exclaimed, managing to voice Sportacus' own opinion. "You're scaring Ziggy!"
"Why were you in there, anyway?" Trixie inquired brassily.
"A spot of ghost hunting?" Pixel helped.
Sportacus tried to find a placating answer.
"I… suppose I was just curious."
"Did it have something to do with what Bessie said to you today?" Stephanie asked delicately.
Dear Odin, but the girl was sharp.
The elf didn't say anything for the rest of the journey.
That night, the children all stayed up far past 8.08, concocting evermore elaborate theories on what their hero had really been doing inside 'Doctor Devil's' haunted house, and what sort of tantalising mystery Bessie had divulged to him in the quiet of her office.
**
A tiny beacon in the dim, the crystal continued to blink.
As Sportacus wrestled himself free of slumber, apprehension gradually began to claim him. Lazytown had always been utterly dormant at night. In all his time as its protector, with a few exceptions, not even a leaf had dared drop after sunset. If something had happened, it was bound to be a dreadful affair.
And yet, when he tried to feel out the source of distress, he detected nothing. It was as if the darkness had blinded his usually indispensable crystal.
The seconds passed him silently, like blood seeping from a deep, damaging wound. The elf finally organised his sleep-encrusted mind enough to summon his intuition.
Who amongst the citizens was most likely to be in danger?
Leaping out of bed, opening the airship door and casting down the ladder, he rushed off towards the outskirts of town, trepidation pursuing him with an uncomfortable nearness.
The weighty, insistent raps Sportacus made upon the hatch to Robbie's lair boomed in the night air before fading, unanswered. He repeated the action once more, to no avail.
"Robbie!" He hollered. "RO—"
In the space of less than a second, the hatch door rocketed open, and the poor elf found himself being scorched by a pair of unforgiving grey-green eyes.
"What the hell do YOU want!?"
And then, a very extraordinary thing happened. Seeing Robbie in the flesh prompted the mass of knowledge about the man's life, only a few hours old in Sportacus' view, to be conveyed to him anew. The plump newborn, the distracted toddler and the delicate child of five or six were all there in that indignant, careworn face. A mother's generous love and a father's harsh neglect were etched into the shades of his body language. For Sportacus, Robbie had ceased to be a mere object in space, and had become an event in time. It was as if he had truly seen this curious being for the first time.
"Well?"
The elf realised his mouth was hanging open. He tried to simultaneously close it and explain himself.
Robbie rolled his eyes. Before he could fire any scathing wisecracks at his rival, Sportacus blurted out a response.
"The crystal… my crystal, I mean. It was beeping. And since no-one has seen you around for so long—"
The taller man displayed his right hand, a swathe of band-aids covering his ring finger.
"Don't worry Sportadork, I think I'm capable of fixing boo-boos."
As Robbie indulged in a sneer, Sportacus absorbed other marks of the villain's aspect. It seemed that he was not at his best. Strands of unkempt hair drooped upon his brow, the characteristic dark circles of sleep deprivation hung under his eyes, and his rumpled clothes were covered in a sort of white, grainy dust. He could also see that the man had lost some weight in the weeks of his absence.
"Are you sure you're alright?" Sportacus queried, reaching out to brush some of the strange residue off of Robbie's shirt.
His hand was frantically swatted at, and Robbie purposefully drew away from the hero.
"For your information, I've been working on my latest project. And I don't appreciate being so rudely interrupted."
Sportacus felt his chagrin arise as his axiety eased. As worn-out and irritated as Robbie was, at least he wasn't in any danger.
"…Sorry."
As Sportacus loped away, already trying to reconsider his crystal's signal, Robbie called out:
"It's a creation that will help me to finally conquer you, Sportatwit!"
His spiteful laughter disappeared underground with him.
For another hour or so, the elf wandered the deserted streets. His crystal still emanated a faint glow, which gradually weakened to nothing as the night wore on.
He shook himself. What exactly had taken place? Had it been a false alarm? The crystal had never led him astray before… perhaps Robbie's 'boo-boo' had been the emergency. After all, he had been called upon for equally low-key scrapes involving the children.
Another possibility prowled about the back of Sportacus' mind. It was not unlikely that a true crisis had taken place, and that he had been far too late in approaching it.
Clueless about what to do, the hero returned to the quiet chamber of his airship, and fought with a discomfited heart as he returned to sleep.
**
A/N: Come to think of it, by and large this story is just as much about Sportagoof as it is about Robbie. He has to make sense of a lot of things, and ultimately it's his role to drag Robbie into action. In an interview, Magnus said the series was really about the middle ground between the two extremes of the hero and villain, rather than siding wholly with one or the other. I love the whole idea of complimentary opposites in a give-and-take exchange, it carries so much truth in it. It's certainly more interesting than the us-vs-them ethos of many other superhero mythologies.
Oh, listen to me, what typical freakin' arts student psychobabble. _