In which guests follow the instructions of the mysterious writer in the castle and encounter a town dedicated to pages and paper.
Hello all,
This year I’ll be, over the span of the next thirteen days, describing a Halloween-themed amusement park that I got to develop with Surena Marie, for fun, specifically for 13 Days.
As a big old imagineering nerd, this is a dream project and I’m so excited to share it with you all. Please excuse the shoddy sketches that accompany the overly written descriptions.
Enjoy.
Down the hill, along a winding path, and into a bright and sunny woods, guests will follow instructions from some local ravens that guide them to the book keep in the Paper Village. Like a good story, the way is pleasant and slightly meandering, but always with purpose and direction. Overhead, the comforting autumn sunlight drifts down, catching in the bits of dust and mist drifting through the treetops, illuminating the red and yellow leaves that tinge the woods in a gorgeous haze.
These leaves carpet the ground. Not crunching, not like in other parts of the park, but perfectly flush against the ground, pressed flat by previous guests.
It’s a lovely stroll. A babbling brook accompanies guests, populated by frogs and mud wasps keeping their own business. Waterfowl keep their distance except to squawk and quack loudly. These rivulets and creeks run off to ponds and lakes that guests will never visit, only imagine, possibly dream of. But know, they are serene out there, the water reflecting the autumnal shore perfectly in all of its ambers and golds.
Eventually the woods open up to a town, one of thatched roofs and sliding walls. The architecture here is modern and modular, with walls being sliding paper panels that open up the houses to the outside world letting in the afternoon air. Stalls are set up with food and drink, offered complimentary to guests. Corn is mixed with sugar and stirred in a large cauldron, and then scooped up into little paper cones. Syrups from the trees are mixed with bubbling water for cool and refreshing beverages that fill hollowed wood cups.
And at the end of the town is a modest building filled with the sound of moving plates and the patting of cloth. In there guests will find a studious werewolf busy at work pressing pages of prose and binding stacks of brown paper bundles into books and placing the finished products into labeled cubbies.
See, there’s a tradition in the park. Guests can sit out in the town square under the gazebo that itself sits in the middle of the bend of the creek and write about their experiences. Favorite memories and moments. Wishes. Dreams. Desires. Even fears.
And then they can take these pages and store them in one of the cubbies. And when they come back, they can add to the stack. And add to the stack. And add to the stack. Until all the pages are ready to be bound into a book.
Sometimes guests spend the whole visit writing and press their experiences into a book right then and there. And other times guests fill out a page at a time. Some books are brief. Some last an entire lifetime. Because books can do that. They can be brief. Others can be companions until one’s final days.
Just like this park, books can and will be whatever the guests seek. Even if they don’t know exactly what that might be.
But this trip will be a bit different. Guests sent on the mission will bring the bundle of brown paper from the castle and deliver them to the werewolf, along with the instructions read from the diary. And the werewolf will nod and think on this and then muse on what the author meant by “it’s our work together.”
It wont be obvious at first, but when asked to put their experiences down on paper and replying that in a way they have been the entire day, producing the scraps of paper they’ve been collecting in each part of the park [the paper apples were wrapped in at the Orchard, the carriage instructions scrawled down in the Midnight Forest, the memories that wouldn’t burn at the Bonfire Beach, and so on] the werewolf’s eyes will go wide as they realize what the author meant.
“It’s our work together.”
Using a delicate paper glue, the werewolf will stitch together the pages from the castle, and the scraps of paper the guests have been collecting all day, and once the glue has dried, the werewolf will flip the entire construction over to reveal: a map.
A map of the park. Not unlike the one guests received upon leaving The Orchard.
But this one is bigger. More detailed.
For there were sketches and lines on the back of all of the pages that seemed to mean nothing until combined.
Guests will compare the smaller map to the newly assembled bigger one, and notice one major difference: there’s an X against a wall that doesn’t appear on the smaller map.
“It’s our work together.”
And with the work combined, X marks the next spot.
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