A Trio. An Old Observatory. A Question. A Problem.

The Observatory Annex

When I moved into the Annex that was attached to the observatory that July, I knew I was going to stay in one place for a while. My life had been boarding school, airplanes, hotel rooms, and living on other people’s schedules and I was tired of it. I toured the high school and got registered, then I met Todd Baskerville and Anna Ko one day mid-tourist season when the line at Mel’s Over Easy was out the door. I had been worried about not getting a seat, but when it was finally my turn, Mel asked if I’d mind sitting with two kids my age. That’s how our friendship started.

Over the weeks, the friendship solidified into something solid and we became inseparable, and that’s when I knew this was real.

– Charles Mandrake

Book Synopsis

The machine in the basement of the observatory has one function. The journals of its inventor, Myles Pibbles, describe it in plain mechanical terms: a specific frequency, a magnetic bearing, and a room that opens onto somewhere else. The notebooks fill three shelves. The math took most of the summer.

Charles Mandrake arrived in East Bay, Maine in late July with no particular plan to stay. He met Anna Ko and Todd Baskerville at Mel’s Over Easy when the tourist season line was out the door. By September the three of them were spending most of their time in the basement of the annex, working through Pibbles’ notebooks together.

When they finally get the frequency right, the room opens.

Skelderheim is a working city. Dockworkers, guild foremen, coin runners, and the Veil moving through it all with quiet authority. It runs on dues and curfews and ward bells and the kind of institutional memory that takes years to read correctly. It is the kind of place where every action has a price attached and the price is posted in advance.

Anna’s face is recognized the first day. What the locals read in it is older than her name, older than anything she was told about herself growing up in East Bay. The city’s reaction to her arrival is immediate and specific, and the three of them have to work out what it means while Skelderheim is already moving around them.

This is a portal fantasy about three people who became inseparable and the city that tested whether that was true. The world is detailed enough to smell. The relationships are earned.

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