Going Back

As I'm writing the novel of young Rene XIV and Sebastien the usurper, I'm thinking ahead to the ending, and specifically to Cynthia Delacroix having to go back to Earth and her old life after she's had extraordinary adventures with the boy king.

It's something almost no world-crossing adventure novels address -- having to go back to the child role after having made adult decisions and shouldered adult responsibilities, and being given adult respect for doing so. When young people shoulder adult roles in an emergency in the mundane world that puts normal adult authority out of commission, at least they're recognized as heroes, and perhaps even accorded a little more respect, a little more latitude. People understand when they have trouble resuming the child role, if they aren't always quite as deferential, quite as quick to assume that adults are right by definition.

But if all those adventures have taken place in another world, and you're returned to your own world just moments after you left it, nobody knows what you've gone through. And you can't even try to explain, because it will only get you dismissed as delusional. If you have trouble slipping back into the child role after having been treated as an adult for what may have been months for you, it'll simply be assumed that you're being stubborn or sassy, as opposed to having trouble going back to ordinary life after extraordinary adventures.

Yet at the same time, I don't want to create a downer ending, in which Cynthia despairs of ever being able to fit into a world in which she is going to be but an insignificant, interchangable cog. Because realistically, there's no way she's ever going to rise in this world to anything comparable in status to what she briefly enjoyed in Ixilon, being a counselor to a king, helping him regain his throne from an evil usurper, and generally being one of the movers and shakers. Most likely she will be expected to slot herself into an ordinary, workaday job for the rest of her life, doing as she's told, perhaps rising to a middle-management position, but certainly never being one of the great decisionmakers.

I may be able to suggest at the end that somehow Rene did find a way to open a gate that would allow Cynthia to move permanently to Ixilon, but somehow that seems like sidestepping the very real problem of how can Cynthia ever return to ordinary life after her extraordinary adventure.