Legendarium - Jennifer Bell

 

I am delighted to be kicking off the Legendarium blog tour this week with my review of the book and also a sneak peak of the beginning, just to whet your appetite!

Arthur, Ren and Cecily are back and, just when they thought they were in for a quiet summer, they are transported through a portal in a garden pond, hundreds of years forward in time into an in-reality adventure game (I-RAG).  Once there, they discover that a raider who goes by the name of Deadlock is intent on recreating dangerous time-way technology that was supposed to have been destroyed.  It turns out that only one piece remained in existence and Deadlock has it.  In order to save the universe, Arthur, Ren and Cecily are left with no choice but to enter the dangerous isports Irontide tournament, posing as their own children.  Together, they need to ensure that they aren't the slowest competitors in each round in order to stay in the tournament and find stop Deadlock but also find their way out.

It was wonderful to be back with Arthur, Ren and Cecily (not forgetting Cloud, the robo-dog) and, once again, you are drawn into the plot and the action quickly.  The relationship between the trio is strong and there are nods to their adventures in Wonderscape as the book progresses (meeting with old friends and statues of the Pipsqueaks to name but two).  The danger feels even greater in this book for the team, as they are not only battling the time-limit until their bodies break down into protoplasm, but they are also taking on the other competitors in the Irontide tournament.  Danger seems to be coming at them for all directions and they need to keep their wits about them. 

As with Wonderscape, this is a clever plot that combines, gaming, science-fiction and history in an action-packed, immersive book that will have you gripped.

So many of the children in my class have been desperate to get their hands on Legendarium since they read Wonderscape that I know I won't see this book when it lands in my trolley!

And just to tempt you even more, here's chapter one of Legendarium for you to enjoy!

1.

 

The hotdog-eating contest was going badly.

“It’s not funny,” Arthur whinged, clutching his bloated tummy. “It feels like my stomach’s about to explode.”

His friend Ren laughed and slid another hotdog across the picnic table on a plate. “Ready to forfeit?”

She was much smaller than him, but dressed in her ripped black jeans, hooded tank top and massive combat boots, she looked ready for battle. Her silky black hair was fixed in a high ponytail with a thick fringe covering half her face. Arthur doubted that his baggy shorts and The Mandalorian T-shirt were as intimidating, so he adopted his most threatening game face as he pulled the plate towards him. “No chance.”

They’d wagered that if Ren ate the most hotdogs that afternoon, Arthur would be her spotter every time she went rock-climbing during the rest of the summer holidays; but if Arthur ate the most, Ren would give him her copy of the latest Spider-Man game on Xbox – something he’d need five weeks of paper-round money to be able to afford otherwise.

“Can one of you please puke already? This is getting ridiculous,” their friend Cecily complained beside them. If Ren had dressed for battle, then Cecily had styled herself for a photo shoot with a fashion magazine. Her amethyst-purple braids had been twisted into an impossibly intricate up-do, and she was modelling a vintage denim jacket and floaty maxi-dress. Sat in her lap was a scruffy white terrier, who yapped excitedly as Cecily unfastened the lead from around his red collar, and then scampered off to the pond at the bottom of Ren’s garden. “See – even Cloud’s had enough.”

“It’ll all be over when Arthur admits defeat,” Ren promised, lifting her hotdog to her lips.

But as she opened her mouth to take a bite, a splash sounded at the end of the garden. Arthur glanced at Ren’s pond and spotted the tip of a stubby white tail disappearing below the strangely misty surface…

“Cloud?” Cecily sprang to her feet. “Cloud, be careful! You might not be able to swim!” With the dog’s lead flapping in her hand, she raced towards the bottom of the garden.

Arthur felt way too full to run anywhere, but Cecily was right to be concerned. Although Cloud looked like a typical West Highland terrier – with a fluffy white coat, round face and pointed ears – he was, in fact, a very advanced robot, or mimic, from four hundred years in the future. He’d been entrusted to their care by a twenty-fifth-century inventor named Milo Hertz, and there was still so much they had to learn about him … including whether or not he could swim.

With a glance at the back door to check all their parents were still inside, Arthur pushed himself up and hurried after Ren and Cecily. When they all got to the pond, the mist had dissolved and the water was still. A dragonfly darted over the surface, but there was no sign of Cloud anywhere.

“I don’t understand,” Cecily said. “I saw him fall in.”

Arthur knelt down and thrust his arm in up to the elbow. Wiggling it around, he could only feel slimy weeds. “Maybe he jumped out and we missed it?”

“Couldn’t have,” Ren said, nudging the pebbles at the water’s edge with her boot. “These are all dry.”

Cecily surveyed the rest of the garden. “So, then, where is he? Cloud!” she called. “Here, boy!”

Arthur waited for an excited ball of fluff to come bounding out of the bushes, but it didn’t appear. His gaze drew nervously to the abandoned cottage behind Ren’s garden, where, last year, the three of them had accidentally followed Cloud through a portal to the year 2473. After getting trapped in an in-reality adventure game, or I-RAG, called the Wonderscape, they’d barely escaped with their lives.

With a growing sense of unease, he searched the pond again. Buried in the silt at the bottom, he saw something glinting and reached towards it…

“Arthur, look out!” Ren yanked on the back of his T-shirt, just in time, as a jet of mist shot out of the pond with a loud hiss, narrowly missing Arthur’s head.

“What’s happening?!” Cecily cried.

Arthur’s pulse quickened as he scrambled to his feet and saw that the mist had swirled around them, caging them in a spinning vortex that obscured Ren’s garden. He grabbed his friends’ arms and pulled them closer. “Stay together!”

There was a thunderous boom and the vortex rippled. Arthur felt a stab of brain freeze followed by the stomach-lurching sensation of ascending in a fast-moving lift. “Werrrr—!” As he spread his arms and legs for balance, the taste of fried onions burst at the back of his throat and before he could do anything to stop himself, he leaned forward and vomited. He briefly hoped the vortex wouldn’t function like some kind of puke-nado and hurl the contents of his guts right back at him. “Ren?” he croaked, watching the mist curl around his toes. “Cecily?”

He flinched as something brushed his arm.

There was a high-pitched bark and Cecily yelled, “Cloud!”

Staring at his trainers, Arthur tried to steady his breathing. The vortex seemed to be moving slower and the mist was thinning. He could almost see the ground. He wiped his mouth clean on his T-shirt sleeve, lifted his head …

… and let out a small yelp.

Ren’s garden had vanished. They were all now stood on the floor of a vast concrete warehouse, filled with industrial-sized shelving units. Dim spotlights dangled from the ceiling, illuminating hundreds of coloured metal crates, organized in rows of blue, green and red. Several nearby crates had toppled over and a trail of sooty footprints led away from them, into the shadows. As the residual mist faded around Arthur’s feet, he rubbed the sides of his face, convinced he was hallucinating. This couldn’t be real.

“What happened?!” Cecily spluttered, pressing Cloud tightly to her chest. Strands of pondweed clung to the dog’s damp fur, but his tail was wagging. “Where are we?”

Arthur shook his head, lost for words. He scanned the perimeter of the building, checking for whoever had made the footprints. At one side of the warehouse, stairs climbed up to a balcony with doors leading off into other rooms, but there was no sign of movement anywhere. Goosebumps prickled along his forearms as his skin adjusted to the cold. The place had to be a storage depot, although there were no clues on the walls or crates to indicate who it belonged to.

Shaking, Cecily fastened Cloud’s lead to his collar and lifted him to the ground. “Hello?” she called. “Is anybody here?” Her voice echoed several times, but there was no reply.

“Never mind where we are,” Ren muttered, rubbing her mouth on the shoulder of her tank-top. (Arthur guessed she’d suffered her own post-hotdog-eating misfortune.) “I’m more concerned about when we are. I got brain freeze. Did either of you?”

Arthur went rigid. The dull headache you sometimes get after eating ice cream too quickly was also a side effect of time travel. “For a split second,” he admitted. “But there’s no way we’ve time-travelled.”

“No,” Cecily said. “I mean – yeah, I felt brain freeze, too – but we can’t have time-travelled.”

They all looked at each other uncertainly.

“Maybe we should check our phones,” Arthur suggested. “When we time-travelled before, they stopped working.” He slipped his Samsung out of his pocket and his blood went cold. The screen was blank.

Cecily frantically pressed the power button on her dead iPhone. “But this makes no sense! We haven’t walked through a Wonderway.”

It was an excellent point. The portal they’d time-travelled through last year, a Wonderway, was opened using a small obsidian prism called a time-key; and Arthur hadn’t seen either device in Ren’s garden. He replayed the details of everything that had just happened, searching for an explanation. “When Cloud fell into the pond, there was mist on the water,” he remembered. “It might have been the same fog spinning around us. Maybe when we thought we saw him sinking under the water, what we actually saw was him disappearing through the same portal we have?”

“So, it wasn’t a Wonderway,” Ren said. “It was a portal made of … gas?”

“You can only get into the Wonderscape through a Wonderway,” Cecily reasoned, starting to pace, “which means if we’ve travelled here through this … this mist-portal … we must be somewhere else in the future.”

Arthur cast a nervy glance around the warehouse, knowing they could be anywhere – a different planet, a different solar system, a different galaxy… His chest tightened as the true horror of their situation hit him.

They were lost. In space and time.

“Great, and now we’re facing the prospect of being turned into slime again,” Ren grumbled, jamming her phone back into her pocket.

With a jolt, Arthur realized what Ren meant. When they’d time-travelled before, they’d upset the balance of the universe, triggering a sort of astrophysical autocorrect mechanism. As a result, if they hadn’t returned home soon enough, their bodies would have broken down into a gloopy substance called protoplasm. “Oh no…” He fumbled to set the stopwatch on his Casio. “We don’t know when it will happen.”

Cecily stopped pacing. “What do you mean we don’t know? We had fifty-seven hours to get home last time.”

“Yes, but some of our variables will have changed, so it’ll be different now.” Arthur wished he’d paid more attention to the formula Sir Isaac Newton had used to make the calculation. The famous scientist had been one of many real-life heroes they’d met in the Wonderscape. “All we can measure is how much time has elapsed since we arrived – that’s why I’ve set a stopwatch.”

“So then … it could happen at any moment,” Cecily realized. “One minute we’ll be standing here, and the next we’ll be you-know-what.”

Arthur tried to think of something positive to say, but there was no silver lining to this nightmare. He didn’t know where they were, how they’d got there or how long they had to get home. The truth was, there was only one thing he knew for certain:

… a countdown had begun.

 

Legendarium is out now!