Enter a strange and amazing new world you've never seen before, but you most likely already live inside. Follow Theodore, a lonely kid who has to Travel through the 7 Layers of Space in order to find a brick and probably save the universe. Unfortuna...
The House of The Magician Detective works in mysterious ways.
And while it bears The Magician Detective's theoretical title, and indeed he minds many of its matters, many folks come and go through its countless doors without him noticing.
It isn't as if he holds all of the keys (or even knows where all of the doors are).
***
Theodore woke with a start. He'd fallen asleep in the Hall of the Sock Puppet Portraits, but he'd somehow found his way into his small bed a few floors down. This in itself was not unusual, but he felt strange.
His mind chattered, unable to let go of different ideas all at once. Just as he let himself hold on to some excitement over school with the Magician Detective, an image of Mister Caruthers rushing up a giant squid leg would surface, leaving a knot of worry behind. Even if he had wanted to go through a magical unknown doorway to another Layer of Space, he didn't know how. He'd lost count of the number of times he and Isobel had dared to run up to one of those mysterious red doors and pushed with all of their secretive might. Not once had the doors budged, at least not for him.
He lay staring at the wooden beams crisscrossing the ceiling for long enough to know that sleep would not return. In times of stress and confusion, he regressed to the comfort that Nanaface had instilled – he ate. He got up and out of bed and headed for the Night Kitchen.
Residing snugly behind the sitting parlor where Theodore had first witnessed The Bird, conveniently located just three doors down from Theodore's modest bedroom, The Night Kitchen is known only as "The Night Kitchen" in the evening, between 8:18pm and 5:21am. At all other times, it is simply "The Kitchen." The two spaces are found in the same location, and indeed look quite a bit alike, but there is something quite different about The Night Kitchen. Something wild.
Perhaps it is the moonlight that streaks past the latticed window and refracts again through the multicolored spice jars. Perhaps it is the draft that kicks up from the damp and mystery-filled basement that leads to the Layer of Then, stirring the errant pots and pans that hang from the ceiling to clink a lost little tune. The sum total is that, in the evening, and in the absence of the daily bustle and clamor, a sacred space is born. And through trial and error, Theodore had found that this was also the best time to find interesting flavors of ice cream.
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He'd tried hundreds of flavors during his many dalliances into The Night Kitchen, but Splurnk was the time-tested finest. This flavor-treasure featured a perfectly balanced combination of creamy vanilla with a deep twirl of syrup, and mingled throughout a sublime combination of moist peanut butter cookie chunks, mooshed bananas, a dash of pudding, and the ingredient that really put the SPLURNK in "PHANTASM SPLURNK," – some salty potato chips that somehow kept their crunch. A properly melted bite felt something like taking a warm bath inside a frozen castle. His mouth watered just seeing its name.
