Spiralheart Witchcamp

Summary

Dorothy, who has grown up, is struggling with Kansas life and gets summoned back to Oz. She learns that Ozma, the rightful ruler of Oz is missing and Emerald City has been taken over by the Porcelain country- and that her previous friends have despaired since she hasn’t returned until now.  With the help of the Wizard, a patchwork girl and boy named Tip, she sets out to defeat Porcelain country and rebuild the Emerald City and Oz.

Chapter 1

Dorothy, now an older woman, has not been to Oz in a very long time. It’s hard to travel anywhere when you’ve lost your farm and your family and she has achieved an age where she is not sure the adventures of her youth were real anymore. Life in Kansas is getting harder and all she has wanted is escape. Home is no longer home. In her mailbox one day she discovers a broken pair of green glasses with the Oz logo and a photo of a painting. This sparks a memory. She keeps the painting in her attic. Trying to uncover it, she falls into it. She arrives near the outskirts of Emerald City.

 But something has happened. The emeralds are gone and there’s a sheen over everything. In certain light it looks shiny, almost as bright as the emeralds used to be, but looking closely as she can, she realizes that the walls have been covered with ceramic. The walls, ceilings, homes, roads, people, everything in this area. She is surprised to see her friend the Wizard. He is older, but not nearly as much as he should have been. The Wizard takes her to his hideout. The last time she had been here, everyone in the Emerald City was given a pair of green glasses to wear. Dorothy pulls out the photo and glasses, and shows him. The Wizard explains that after her first visit, he was found to be worthy to study real magic by Glinda. Glinda told him it was his desire to help those that came to him and the kindness he treated them with that made the difference.  He tells her that he has been working with Glinda to restore what has happened but they need assistance.  He said that they have had to use some of their magic to keep themselves safe during the changes that have been going on.

Looking around the Emerald City he explains that the Porcelain country’s new leader, an orange and white colored ceramic figure, decided that Oz only works for everyone if everyone is as breakable as he is. He decided to show the flaws in the Emerald City by first smashing the eyeglasses of those who lived there, which endeared a lot of people to him, but then realized that it wasn’t enough. The Wizard tells Dorothy that Glinda found the painting that her friend, Ozma, the queen of Oz, managed to hide, before Ozma was put under a spell. The orange and white porcelain man, Porcy, stole a look at Glinda’s book of spells and, deciding he didn’t want to be ruled by a woman, managed just enough magic to create one spell-to make the rightful Ruler of Oz forget who she is. But Ozma has disappeared. Nobody knows where she is, and fewer and fewer people care. Porcy was about to do the same to Glinda but she doesn’t need her book to use magic, so she was able to deflect the spell but had to flee. She and the Wizard have gone into hiding for now, but summoned Dorothy for the first time in ages because they need her help. The Wizard explains that since she didn’t come back after having been back and forth for many years, her friends from the original trips were sad and then easily conquered by Porcy’s minions -including a muskrat. All of the minions, Dorothy notes, from the pictures she has been shown, are all made of.. white porcelain.  The Wizard Gives Dorothy- the brains he had once placed in the scarecrow’s head, the heart that the Tin Woodman once had placed in his chest, and the medal reading ‘courage’. (He couldn’t give her the liquid form of courage he had given the lion, because the prices were too high, because they had to be imported from somewhere else.) He tells her that they need to work together to defeat Porcy, and his muskrat minion. He tells her that she will have help along the way.

Chapter 2

Dorothy knocks on a door when she leaves the Wizard looking for a place to crash for a bit. She heard voices outside so she knew someone was there. A boy answers the door. His name is Tip. His age is hard to determine but he seems to be around an early teenager, before the chaos of puberty has started. Dorothy asks for some food and shelter for a short time. He tells her it’s not his house but it should be ok, as the magician who lives here with his wife often take people in, as they had done for him. He said the magician’s wife was working on a project with fabric. She was nearly done, and the magician had been working on creating a powder of life. Intrigued, Dorothy sits with him as they watch the last of this.. person, with innards made of cotton and exterior made out of rags and quilt piece leftovers of all different colors being put together into the form of a girl. As the magician stirs and whirs his spoon over a pot to create the dust powder that will bring the girl to life, the wife goes to look for additional pieces to add. Tip wanders around the room and looks at the shelf and sees lots of jars- one labeled amiability, one labeled cleverness, one labeled posey, etc. The wife comes back talking about how she needs a servant, but one not too clever. Not clever enough to think of herself as beautiful, or she would not want to be a servant anymore.

Dorothy and Tip talk quietly to each other about the unfairness of this. When the powder is ready, the magician bottles it up and locks up the powder, to be used the next day. He and his wife, after providing food for Dorothy and Tip, decide they’re going to turn in the for the night. Dorothy takes the brains she had been given by the wizard and places them inside the figure, and Tip adds the contents from all of the jars. In addition to the obedience, truth, amiability and a little cleverness the wife had given, this figure now has courage, learning, judgment, ingenuity, self reliance, poesy, and a double dose of cleverness. The next day comes and the magician sprinkles the powder of life on the figure. Scraps, the patchwork girl is born. She flings her arms out, startling the magician and his wife, who accidentally dump a different potion on themselves that turns them to marble. She is a wild, carefree personality, independent spirit, seen as the ‘opposite of beautiful’ (yet she finds great beauty in her multi colored patchwork appearance), is enchanted by the natural world around her, prone to recite nonsense poetry, considered slightly ‘crazy’ but charming and is accepted by everyone for exactly who she is. She doesn’t have  a heart inside her body so Dorothy offers her the one the wizard provided, but the materials it’s made out of are already other parts of her body so Scraps turns them down. Tip tells her the couple meant to make her a servant, and after learning what that means, she decides she is Tip’s servant. Scraps brings joy, laughter, wonder and curiosity to everyone around her for the remainder of the story.

Chapter 3

Dorothy asks Tip why he was there. He said that the couple took him in, but isn’t sure for how long he’s been there. It’s all he’s known. He didn’t know who he was aside from the name Tip, and somehow he felt like there wasn’t anyone who could provide answers unless they had something to do with magic, so he found his way here. They took him in and over time made him the person to do their chores and busy work. They did this with the promise that they would tell him about his background but thus far never did and can’t, now that they’ve been turned to marble. He has always felt that something was off. He doesn’t remember his early childhood, family, nothing. He states that he has always felt that he doesn’t have a choice but to live as Tip, even though something inside of him is saying that that may not be who he really is. He has felt this way for as long as he can remember.

Dorothy tells him a little of how she got here and that the Wizard is a friend of hers and that he has been learning real magic, so maybe he could help. They travel back to where Dorothy first re-met the wizard and he appears. The Wizard tells Tip he brought him there after a spell was cast, but the spell had turned him into a young boy, and he was trying to keep him safe. He didn’t know what spell was cast, and knew nothing of him before he was this boy. The Wizard said that before they could do anything else for Tip they need to defeat the muskrat and Porcy.

A wall had been erected around the sides of the land surrounding the Emerald city, with big gates and locks to keep people out. The Wizard comes up with an idea. He tells everyone to close their eyes. Scraps cannot close her eyes, since they are buttons, so a scarf is tied around her and they all join hands. They are led by the Wizard straight forward one hundred paces, then told to remove their blindfolds. They are told that the walls are very real when looked at, but does not exist at all when not looking at it, and that many walls are like that. To get through them, sometimes other senses and other people are needed, since more people, more senses. The group realizes they need to get into the castle. The Wizard remembers he has the broom that Dorothy gave him many years prior, so he magics it to himself and they pile onto it and fly into the city. But not having flown before, they have rough ride and a bumpy landing. So hard, that they slam into an outer building, a church, that was now made out of porcelain. It shatters. Someone says ‘welp, no harm done’. But then Tip points out that the people here are made out of the same material the buildings are.  The group finds somewhere safe to hang out.

Chapter 4

They march into the castle and confront Porcy and want to know what happened to their Queen. The Muskrat shoves screens in their faces and states that he and Porcy have made Oz and EC better than it ever was before. They see images of their friends, the Scarecrow, TM and Lion, in despair and unable to even resume the lives they had before hand because everything had been taken by these two. A scuffle breaks out when Dorothy grabs the broom and smashes the screens out of the Muskrat’s hand, which cracks. Inside his hand Dorothy looks realizes that it’s full of bills. Of all kinds. Green bills, multicolored bills of various denominations.  The screen flies out of his hands and hits Porcy in the face and embeds itself in the wall. The cracks start to grow and the walls start to separate. Two big sections of the wall have split. Scraps sits down in the bottom of the split in the wall and as the top portion is about to fall down, she grabs it with her cloth hand. She is soft enough that the walls don’t break further. They look at Porcy. His face is cracking. Dorothy doesn’t want to kill anyone so she takes a small piece of Scraps’ fabric and asks for a needle and thread. (Scraps happens to carry them in her apron, being made out of fabric as she is) and Dorothy stitches the fabric onto Porcy’s face. Somehow it holds. In a daze, Porcy is realizing that they are not here to kill him. They take him and lock him up somewhere in the city. On the way back they find the emeralds that had been removed.

Chapter 5

The group realizes that this is how to fix the Emerald city- it is not porcelain anymore, and is not as Emerald as it used to be, but becomes a patchwork of it’s own: Emerald, porcelain and now loads of fabric, provided by the magical Scraps. Scraps has discovered that now that she is alive, if she pulls out one of her scrap pieces, they grow longer until they are cut. They go about mending the building and people with needles and thread and a lot of hard work. All the townspeople come and help once they see what they are doing. As they do this, they free Glinda, who although in hiding had been incapacitated in a porcelain prison. She reveals that Tip is actually Ozma, rightful Queen of Oz. This is the answer that Tip has been waiting for. He knows in his gut that this is not only the truth about his background, but that Ozma is who he needs to be, wants to be, IS, from the inside out. But he’s scared. Tip asks his friends if they will treat him differently or love him less if he is a girl rather than a boy, and they reassure him they will not. Glinda asks if he wants to do this and he agrees. Glinda performs the transformation spell, and Tip is now gone, with Ozma in his place. Ozma recognizes that she needs to be Ozma as the rightful ruler, but also realizes that she can’t get rid of Tip entirely, so she recognizes that her truth is that she may need to be both, or ‘they’. Ozma frees Scraps from their servitude. Scraps decides to stay in the Emerald City anyway because it now looks like her. Scraps decides that she will return just a little of her extra brains to Dorothy as a thank you for her freedom. The Wizard helps Dorothy to find her friends and she restores them back to life with their brains, heart and courage (and the bills she had taken when they fell out of the Muskrat.) Ozma pledges to restore the painting and that Dorothy can return home and come back whenever needed.  Instead of going back to Kansas, however, Dorothy would like to stay in Oz. She has found her community here, but knows she will sometimes need to go back. She pledges not to stay away too long. If she has to go back to Kansas, she will take Oz with her -in the form of needles and thread and fabric.