Author’s Note: The Magnificent Maron Maloney

Over the last week, I wrote a 12k-word novelette responding to four Reedsy prompts, all about cats. I’d wanted to write a cross-posted story across their prompts for a while, and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to bring it up.

The story’s origins come from a 2017 D&D campaign where I created a showman villain that went about the countryside transforming children into animals. As the animals with the intellect of children were easier to control than regular animals, he could train them without a great deal of hassle. Eventually, the players would catch on to the ruse and need to fight Maron to free the children.

When I originally wrote him, I imagined him as something akin to the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In this retelling, he’s an archetypal villain, even with the waxed handlebar mustache. He’d go around to various towns and small villages, lure children to his cart of splendors, and feed them a potion that’d turn them into an animal - the first animal that came to mind when they sipped the potion. That’s pretty much who he is here, too, except in this story, he indirectly captures children and directly transforms an adult drunkard.

I think of him as a failed alchemist and a mediocre wizard. The one thing he could make well was something like a permanent polymorph potion, and the spells he had were primarily defensive spells; Gaseous Form, Expeditious Retreat, and so on. The idea was to make him slippery and difficult to pin down during gameplay. When he escaped the party's clutches, he’d no sooner show up again in another town, and the party would have to try and capture him again. There were at least three separate incidents where the party ran into him before actually killing him.

In this story, Maron’s motivations are unclear, but he’s foiled by Benzie Fernbottom, a character I introduced A Thyme of Trouble as a side-kick to Elina Hogsbreath. That tradition continues in this work where Benzie works for Elina at the Swindle & Swine and discovers something completely wrong with Maron’s animals. Benzie tries to tell people about it, notably Elina, but he’s dismissed, mostly because people are too busy and enamored with Maron. Luckily, Elina provides some kitchen magic to help reveal the truth, and combat scenes are led by Kindle Muckwalker.

This was Kindle’s first written fight scene. I imagine Kindle as a haggard, blunt halfling, a bit like Norman Reedus’ Daryl Dixon of The Walking Dead. Complementing him was a druid named Ginny Greenhill, a D&D character I made for a quick campaign at an RPG con in 2018. I saw Ginny and Kindle working together as a team, he being the muscle and she providing support. I think it played well given the word constraints, but I would like to draw out the conflict to add more richness in later editions of the story.

At the end of the story, I have Maron’s psyche consumed by a flumph, for I saw the flumph as really humoring Maron and taking advantage of his wagon to see the world outside of the Underdark. I really like the idea of a spooky visage of Maron Maloney with this tentacled creature with eye stalks sitting atop his head, wandering the dark forest, essentially sightseeing on top of a mental zombie.

The flumph is an imaginative creature and nearly a joke in D&D as a whole. I saw the flumph as an opportunity to suggest that it was Maron’s first attraction, his only real animal, and when it didn’t draw the crowds, he added children transformed into animals. The flumph uses Maron as much as Maron uses it so that it can feed on emotion and explore the world. But it’s also a wonderous possibility, a weird unbelievable thing that we want to touch, and it kind of speaks to the premise of the story. In the end, it wanders, traveling the world in wonder, seeing things for the first time. Do you remember what that was like?

A big part of this story is the power of imagination and how, as working adults, we’re often caught up in the moment and we aren’t open to possibilities. Benzie believes the animals are more than what they seem and senses a danger, yet his intuitive ideas are ignored, risking everything. Kids are like that. They see something at the moment and bring our attention to it, but we’re quick to dismiss them. If halflings are analogous to children, then Benzie is our 7-year-old, tugging at our pants, trying to get us to pay attention to what they’re experiencing.

At the end of the story, I make some big reveals about transformed people, and I specifically carved out Kimchi, an orange cat that was the favorite of Maron Maloney’s. First, I wanted to instill a wonder of who she was and where did she go. Second, I wanted to keep the character for myself; the idea of a sentient cat roaming around the Swindle & Swine causing grief for Elina was just too good to pass up.

The commercial re-write of the story will likely span 20k+ words and include more depth into the characters and the events. There was only so much I could put on the page with a 3,000-word limitation.

The story is a cautionary tale: we ignore our intuition and our imagination at our peril. If we stay too rooted in our working world and fail to listen to our hearts, then we’ll end up in a place we don’t want to be. I thoroughly enjoyed writing it an hope that I didn’t piss off the Reedsy judges for cross-posting as 12k-word story. :)

As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking around.

R