TOWERVALE PATRICK CARMAN © 2019 by Patrick Carman No part of this publication may be produced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. All rights reserved Published by PC Studio, Inc. www.patrickcarman.com Printed in Canada 1 2 Must read before starting! This is a very strange book. Here’s why: You are the hero of this adventure. You have done all the things you will read about, you just don’t remember doing them. This is because our friend Merrick cast a spell on you that makes you forget. He did this to protect our story, because our story is very dangerous. But now you must remember! And that begins right now. In your story, you made a video game. You created this game! I watched you do it! You just don’t remember. The levels of the game you made are like keys that unlock our story. If someone doesn’t know how to win the levels of your game, they won’t have the keys to unlock everything we have done. Your game levels are like a super powerful encryption, protecting our story from anyone we don’t want reading it! When you read a paragraph that tells you to play a level of the game, you have to go play it! If you don’t, the next thing you read in this book will be the wrong part of the story. You can find the game at towervalegame.com, or in app stores under the name Towervale. When you beat a level in the game, it will tell you what page to turn to in the book. 3 There are seven written sections to your story and six game levels to beat. You must win all the game levels to read your entire story in the right order. The only way to get the passwords and know how to beat the levels is to read the book. The book is also where you find the secret clues for how to win game levels. You can’t read your adventure without the game, and you can’t play your game without the book. You designed everything this way to protect it. Not just anyone can discover your story, only those who know how to use the keys. But you can! Are you ready to remember all that you have done? This is your chance. Be on the lookout for the first prompt to play the game. It could pop up anywhere! Let’s get to it! 4 Your Adventure Begins My name is Winnie, and I am a scribe and a metal worker in the Caves of Iron. I would tell you what these things mean, but you already know. You’re a metal worker, too. You’re also my best friend and my constant companion. Somehow I have known all my life that you were different than everyone else and that you would change everything. I can’t say why I have always known these things, but it’s the truth. What lies ahead is an adventure, but I am not the adventurer. I am just the one who will write it down. You are the adventurer, and your destiny is set in metal and stone. In my world, we have a saying: Walk another person’s path, and you will know more than their journey. You will know their heart. And so we begin. 5 I am watching you while you work on a tiny gear, so small you can barely see the teeth that run in a tight circle around a solid metal core. There is a magnifier on your left eye, held in place by a leather strap that runs around your head. The magnifier is cone shaped and shiny black, projecting an inch off your face. It is one of your most prized possessions. It’s not hard for you to imagine what this tiny gear will do within the machinery that surrounds us on all sides. Like me, you’ve been working in the Caves of Iron your entire life. There is very little about this place you don’t understand. “Got it,” you say with satisfaction. You push the magnifier up onto your forehead, where it always rests while you’re not using it. “This one’s ready to insert; can you give me a hand?” We both turn to the center of the work table, where a contraption that looks like the inside of a giant watch sits between us. There are dozens of gears and small metal levers intricately built together. The whole thing is about the size of your head and roughly the same shape. And it’s about to come to life. “Two months of our lives and it all comes down to one tiny gear,” I say. I can never believe that such a small piece of a puzzle can be so important, but you always remind me that sometimes, the smallest things matter most of all. 6 You look at me as you hold the tiny gear between a pair of tweezers. “Look all around you, Winnie. None of this would work without us.” I know what you’re implying: you and I are both eleven years old. We’re small, almost invisible inside the maw of this thing we serve. You look all around our little room - we both do - and you see what I see. The machine surrounds us on every side and overhead. We are inside a cocoon of parts, a forest of connected gears. The very walls of our tiny home are made of metal and machine, and beyond these parts, millions and millions more that fill the Caves of Iron to bursting. Some of these gears are much bigger than we are, but they only move occasionally. Usually, they are still and we can travel among them without fear of being swallowed up by millions of teeth, churned to dust as the gears carry us away, never to be seen again. This has happened to many people in the Caves of Iron, it could happen to you. But today, like a hundred days before it, the machine that surrounds us is silent and still. We know it will move again very soon. It always does. There are narrow passageways leading in many directions. They travel for miles throughout the Caves of Iron, with hooks and bars to hold onto as we go. We are often moving inside the machine, replacing or adding parts, preparing it for something we do not understand. “I’m doing that thing again,” I say. “I’m wondering what this is all for. Aren’t you the least bit curious?” “Of course I am,” you say as you set the tiny gear in 7 place, holding it steady as I secure it with a pin. “But no one will ever tell us, so I try not to think about it. Besides, you think about it enough for both of us.” You are right about this. I think about the machine all the time. I think about how I’m inside it, like it’s my mother and I’m never going to be born into the world outside. What’s out there, beyond the machine, and what does the machine do? I think about these things a lot, but you think more about the work. This is why you are better at the work than I am. “Okay, let’s test it,” you say, placing the tweezers into your belt. You take up another a tool with a handle and an elbow- shaped bar. At the end of the bar, there are teeth that lock into the machine we’ve just built. You turn the handle and we hear the gears beginning to move. There are over 300 of them in this one piece of work we’ve done together, precise and perfect. “Hand me the oil can,” you say, transfixed by this thing we’ve built. You drop dots of oil in four different places and the sound of the wheels spinning falls to a whisper. Then you remove the handle and the gears keep turning and turning. “It’s perfect,” I say. “Bravo! You really are the best builder in the Caves of Iron.” “Thanks, Winnie. And you’re the best scribe. Let’s go insert this thing and see if it makes the machine start up.” 8 You place the thing we’ve built into a leather cradle and hoist it onto your back and I think about what you’ve said. Am I really a good scribe? Maybe you’re just an easy audience, and I’m the only writer you spend all day with. You never write. You prefer to make game levels on the tablet they gave us. They being the cloaked ones who run the Caves of Iron, the tablet being a tool designed for testing our work and communicating with our superiors. You have found that you can make games with the tablet, too, and this is like writing for you. If I’m holding a pen and paper, you are coding more levels into your game. I’ve played every level you’ve ever made, but I’m not as good at games as I am at writing. Here are a few things I like about the game you’re making right now: - There are lots of coins, gems, and stars to pick up.