Sir Pants and Sir Reddy Talk to the Magician

The magician asked Sir Pants and Sir Reddy to please come in. They went into the magician's room. It was small. There was a table in one corner, a stool near the door, a wooden bed frame and mattress in another corner, and one small window. The table, stool, bed, and floor were all heaped with piles of things. It was hard to tell what the things were because they were lying all on top of and tangled around one another. The window showed them just how high up they were in the magician's room at the top of the castle tower. Sir Reddy almost fell over looking at how far it was down to the ground.

"I know it's here somewhere," mumbled the magician, meanwhile. The magician was throwing things from the piles up in the air in order to see what was underneath them. The magician was looking for something.

"May I help you?" asked Sir Pants politely.

"Oh, I was just looking for my tea cup so I could offer at least one of you a cup of tea. But I don't see it anywhere."

"May I?" asked Sir Pants again, reaching toward the magician's scraggly hair.

"Yes," said the magician.

Sir Pants pulled the china cup out of the magician's nest of hair and wiped it off with a hanky he carried in his pocket. Although Sir Pants often looked dirty because of the strange dark bronzy color of his armor, he liked to clean things up. So he always kept a hanky with him in case it were needed.

"Thank you!" said the magician delightedly.

Sir Reddy stood up again. It had taken him a while to get up because, while he was laying on the floor, he could see the most fascinating kind of fluorescent green and black striped spider spinning a web on the ceiling. Eventually, that got boring.

He got up and said, "Who are you? I know you're a magician, but what's your name?"

"Sir Reddy!" said Sir Pants. "That's not very good manners. Excuse him," he said to the magician. "I am Sir Pants and this is Sir Reddy. And you are...?"

"Nellawellabella," said the magician. "But everyone calls me Nella."

The magician thought for a minute.

"Actually, that's not true," the magician said. "Not everyone calls me Nella. I think only two people know who I am. And now you two. So about four, total. If you'll call me Nella, then I can say that all the people who know about me call me Nella."

"Certainly," said Sir Pants in his deepest, most self-conscious polite voice, "Nella."

"My mom used to call me Red," said Sir Reddy. "It was shorter, you know."

Nella nodded.

"We're looking for a mirror," said Sir Reddy. "By the way. Have you got one?"

"Sir Reddy!" said Sir Pants again.

"I have a mirror," said Nella.

Sir Pants gasped. "You have a doubler?"

Nella pursed her lips. (The magician was a woman.) After a while, she said, "Not sure. What's a doubler?"

When Sir Reddy and Sir Pants had taken turns interrupting each other to tell Nella their ideas about mirrors, she nodded her head slowly up and down.

"I think I understand," she said. "Well, come here and look."

She opened a door that neither Sir Pants nor Sir Reddy had seen before.

to be continued...