BookWorms - endlessm/threadbare GitHub Wiki

BookWorms

Classification: Weave-dweller. Primary range: the EverLasting Library, Frays End. Diet: stories (borrowed, never kept).

"Never interrupt a BookWorm mid-chapter. They will forgive you, but they will make a little tutting sound, and you will hear it for a week." -- Page PaperPleat - Chief Librarian of the EverLasting Library
Known as BookWorms; Dotlings (young)
Nature Sentient, gentle, woven into the Great Weave itself
Found Wherever books are kept, read or left unfinished
Feeds on Finished stories, read one line at a time
Leaves behind WormHoles, known to Threadlings as plot holes
Sacred Element Imagination (proposed)
Associated with The EverLasting Library, Page PaperPleat, Figment FarFetched, The Remnant Realms, The Allegory Abyss, StoryQuests
Credit Sean Kelly, IntoFilm - www.intofilm.org

Overview

BookWorms are small, sentient reading worms, woven into the Great Weave itself, and they love reading more than anything else in the world. They read by eating, nibbling their way through a book one line at a time, from the first word to the final full stop. Unlike the creatures of the Void, a BookWorm takes nothing away. It borrows the words, and by morning they have crept quietly back into place, a little warmer than before.

What a BookWorm leaves behind is a hole, bored clean through the pages. And every hole a BookWorm leaves is a way in.

Look through a WormHole and you will not see the page beneath. You will see the world the book holds: its weather, its streets, its characters going about their business, alive and breathing on the other side. Climb through, and you are no longer reading the story. You are standing in it.

Appearance

  • Bodies like book cloth. BookWorms are plump and softly segmented, with a velvety nap in the colours of old bindings: oxblood, bottle green, faded navy and mustard. Fine gold tooling runs along their backs, like the lettering on a book's spine.
  • Reading glasses. Every BookWorm wears a pair of tiny round spectacles, perched on what passes for a nose. They polish them constantly, peer over them at anyone talking too loudly, and push them up with the tip of their tail whenever they reach a good bit.
  • Ribbon tails. A silk bookmark ribbon trails from every BookWorm's tail, tucked into whatever it is reading so it never loses its place.
  • Page-turner antennae. Two delicate feelers, perfect for turning one page at a time without ever creasing a corner.
  • Scarves. Older BookWorms wear little knitted scarves, almost certainly gifts from the KnitWitches, and they never take them off.

Personality

BookWorms are polite, curious, bookish, and just a little bit pompous. They have very strong opinions about stories, and they will share them with anyone, whether asked or not.

  • They never spoil an ending. This is the one law every BookWorm keeps. A BookWorm would sooner climb back into its full stop than tell you how a story ends.
  • They hum while they read. A soft, contented sound, a little faster during the exciting parts.
  • They gossip about characters as if they were neighbours, which, to a BookWorm, they are. "She should never have trusted the fox. I said so. I said so on page four."
  • They adore being read to. Any Threadling reading aloud by the fire will soon find a row of small, spectacled faces peeping over the arm of their chair.

WormHoles

A WormHole is the tunnel a BookWorm leaves as it reads, running through the book from cover to cover. Threadlings, who cannot resist a joke, call them plot holes.

What lies through them. Every book in Threadbare is bound by the three Sacred Threads of Memory, Imagination and Spirit, and a book bound well enough holds a whole world inside it: a small weave of its own, folded between the covers. A WormHole opens onto that world. A book about a lighthouse opens onto the lighthouse, with the spray on the glass and the keeper climbing the stairs. A ghost story set in an old mill opens onto the mill, and you had better hope it is daytime. The world within is living, breathing and fully immersive. Its people can see you, its rain will soak you, and its story carries on all around you.

How they look. From the outside, a WormHole is a small round hole framed like an illuminated capital letter, the opening letter of the story, glowing faintly gold around the edge. Put your eye to it and the book's world spills out in light and sound. The older the BookWorm, the wider the hole.

Peering and portalling. Most Threadlings only ever peer: an eye to the hole, watching a story unfold as if through a keyhole. Some step through, and portal into the book itself. A reader inside a story can walk its roads, talk with its characters, and even change its course, though a BookWorm will have something to say about that.

The way out. There are only two ways out of a book. The first is back through the WormHole you came in by. The second is to reach the ending: when a story is finished, it sets its readers gently down on the last page, and the book closes softly around them. This is why BookWorms will only bore through a book that has an ending. A door with no way out is no door at all.

Book to book. A WormHole does not only lead into a book's world and back out again. It can also join one book to another, so that a reader who climbs in through one book climbs out of a second book somewhere else entirely. Anywhere there is a book, a BookWorm can make a door to it, whether that is a single volume on a shelf in a ruined observatory or a library full of them. Libraries are where BookWorms specialise, and their best-known roads run between them: from a small town library to the EverLasting Library, or from the Lost Library home to Frays End. For anyone a BookWorm is willing to help, there is no faster way across Threadbare.

Manners. You do not climb through a stranger's WormHole without asking. The proper price is a story: read one aloud to the BookWorm, and it will happily hold the door open for you.

Lost Between the Lines

"Never close a book with a reader inside." -- Sign above the Reading Rooms of the EverLasting Library

A WormHole stays open for as long as its book lies open. Close the book, and the hole closes with it. Some Threadlings have been known to go into a book and never return, by choice or otherwise. Threadlings say they have been lost between the lines, and the Library calls them the Bookbound.

By choice. Some readers simply love a story too much to leave it. They settle in a cottage by the sea of their favourite book, or take up a post in a castle they first read about as a Patchling, and they make a new life there. Readers sometimes find them years later, written into the story as a new character who was never there before: a baker in chapter three, or a lighthouse keeper's apprentice who waves from the margins.

Or otherwise. Others never meant to stay. A book closed by a careless hand, a WormHole that healed over while its reader was still inside, or a story whose last page has gone missing, leaving no ending to carry its readers home. These Bookbound are not harmed. They are still there, living and well, inside a story that will not let them go. They can only be found, and brought home, by someone willing to go in after them.

The Threadbare keep a ledger of every reader known to be inside a book, and the Library's Listeners are sometimes sent in to bring them back. Every Threadling child is told the same thing: always tie a bookmark ribbon to your wrist before you go in.

Life Cycle

Hatching. A BookWorm hatches from the full stop at the end of a much-loved story. The more often a story has been read, the more likely it is that its final full stop will one day wobble, crack, and wriggle.

Dotlings. Baby BookWorms are called Dotlings. They are about the size of a full stop, their spectacles are far too big for them, and they can only manage picture books. A Dotling's holes are only big enough to peer through, never to climb through, which makes picture books the safest of all for small Threadlings, and gives the librarians a great deal of tidying up.

BookWorms. A BookWorm grows a little with every story it reads, and its holes grow with it. A grown BookWorm leaves a WormHole wide enough for a Threadling to climb through, and can run its holes from one book to another, wherever in the world those books lie. Any book will do, but libraries are where books are kept, so BookWorms are famous above all for linking libraries.

The eldest. The oldest BookWorms grow as long as a library shelf. The oldest of them all is said to lie coiled beneath the EverLasting Library, and to have read everything, except the endings that have not been written yet.

Habitat

  • The EverLasting Library, Frays End. The BookWorms' great nest. The lowest shelves are dotted with tiny glowing doorways, and the librarians long ago gave up trying to plug them. Every book on those shelves is kept propped open with a brass weight, just in case.
  • The Allegory Abyss. A feast, with whole cliff faces of poetry to read. The BookWorms who live there are notoriously smug about it.
  • The Remnant Realms. Here, BookWorms sit patiently, glasses on, beside stories that were never finished. A BookWorm cannot make a door from a story without an ending, so they wait, sometimes for centuries, for someone to come along and finish it.
  • The Archive of the Unfinished. The one place BookWorms find quite heartbreaking. Figment FarFetched keeps a basket of tiny handkerchiefs for them by the door.

BookWorms and the Void

Null cannot understand them. To Null, a hole is the perfect proof of nothing. A BookWorm's hole is always full of somewhere. It is said that Null once looked through a WormHole and saw a sunny kitchen with the kettle on, and has never forgiven the BookWorms for it.

The Obscurists' mischief. The Obscurists tear the last pages out of books and carry them off to The Lost Library in The SunSpun Sands. A book with no ending has no way out, so any reader inside it becomes Bookbound, and its BookWorms are left waiting, and very cross. No BookWorm is ever harmed by this, but every stolen ending leaves somebody, somewhere, waiting to come home.

MemoryMoths are no relation, and a BookWorm will be deeply offended if you suggest otherwise. A Moth, a BookWorm will tell you with a sniff, "skips straight to the end, and doesn't even taste it." (See MemoryMoths.)

Narrative Function

  • StoryQuest doorways. Every StoryQuest is a world inside a book, and the StoryWeaver enters it through a BookWorm's WormHole. This explains in-world why each StoryQuest can have its own characters, rules, look and sound: the StoryWeaver has climbed into someone else's story. Write a story, a BookWorm will read it, and the world grows a new door. This ties the creature directly to Threadbare's contribution mission.
  • Peep before you leap. Peering through a WormHole is a natural preview: a glimpse of a StoryQuest's world, art and mood before the player chooses to go in.
  • Leaving a book. A StoryQuest ends when its story ends, and the StoryWeaver is set down on the last page, home again.
  • Rescuing the Bookbound. Finding and bringing home a Threadling lost between the lines is a ready-made quest hook, and recovering the Obscurists' stolen last pages frees readers trapped in books across the world.
  • A companion. A BookWorm can travel with the StoryWeaver, riding in a pocket or on a shoulder, commenting on the world and refusing to spoil anything.
  • Reading aloud. Doors are opened by reading the right story to the right BookWorm, a natural mechanic for puzzles and progression.
  • Finishing stories. In the Remnant Realms, completing a stalled story gives a waiting BookWorm its ending, and a new door into a new world.
  • Content notes. BookWorms are never fought, hunted or harmed, in keeping with Threadbare's content rules for animals. They are coaxed, read to, and followed. Being lost between the lines is never a euphemism for death. The Bookbound are always alive and well inside their story, and can always, in principle, be brought home.

Wiki Notes

Open threads to settle as the entry firms up:

  • Dotlings replaces Inklings as the name for young BookWorms, because Inklings are already canon as the microbial creatures of the Ink Well. Alternatives: Commas, Bookmites.
  • The Bookbound. Confirm the name for Threadlings lost inside books (alternatives: the Well-Read, the Shelved), and whether the Listeners are the right order to send in after them, or a new order of the Threadbare is needed.
  • BookWorms and world travel. BookWorms link book to book, anywhere there are books, and specialise in linking libraries. In the Threadbare Plot, the BookWorm of the Lost Library carries the StoryWeaver back to the EverLasting Library in Act Two, and in Act Three the BookWorm beneath the EverLasting Library carries them home from the Observatory of the Obscure, whose shelves still hold the books of the University of the Unseen. There are no Grand BookWorms: every grown BookWorm can do this.
  • The BookWorm beneath the EverLasting Library needs a name. Candidates: Marginalia, Errata, Quarto.
  • The StoryWeaver's companion BookWorm needs a name. Candidates: Spectacle, Dog-Ear, Pip (for the full stop it hatched from).
  • Sacred Element and patron. Imagination is proposed, as every WormHole opens onto a world someone imagined. A link to If or to Muse, Keeper of the StoryQuests, is worth considering.
  • The world within a book may need its own term.

Connections

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Images

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Audio and source files

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