The Wunderkammer

The Wunderkammer sat, unassumingly, in a dusty corner of the old variety store Earl's Magic Box, that much like its contents rested, largely unnoticed, in a sparsely trafficked corner of town its residents called "The Oubliette", but which was officially on record as being "West Westerly". The town in which the Oubliette found itself was small, hardly visited, and quite on the outskirts of more notable urban centers. The town's name was "Outston", and belonged to Longway County -- the smallest in the state. The state itself, New Billingshire, was recently amalgamated into the nation in a purely diplomatic act of annexation from a larger neighboring country, which didn't really want to bother with it in the first place. New Billingshire thus came to be the property of an obscure country unknown to most of the world's populace, except maybe a few industrious geographers with a fascination for the minute. Though the country's actual name was "Peripheralis", these geographers had taken to calling it "Abandia", partly out of mean-spirited amusement, but also to emphasize its great irrelevance. Abandia was situated to the very southernmost edge of the world's smallest continent, really a smattering of islands that had recently, for political reasons, been permitted to separate from a larger continent and form their own faction of sorts. Calling "Fracturia" a "continent" was a comical gesture, the few who paid attention to such matters agreed, and its total land mass covered only one one-hundred thousandth of the surface of its parent ocean, the Pitiful. The Pitiful Ocean was so called because it was in fact little more than a saltwater lake separated from more notable aquatic bodies by a paper thin isthmus that could scarcely be walked across.

Inside the Wunderkammer were a collection of smaller boxes, the smallest of which was entirely non-descript and unworthy of note except for its size. Inside this box, which was little more than an inch across, was an assortment of spheres of varying diameter. If you were to extract the smallest sphere and place it beneath a microscope, you would be able to discern that it was an extremely accurate model of a planet, containing in minute detail all the oceans, continents, and countries of a fully inhabited world. With an extremely powerful microscope you might be able to peer deeply into the sphere's surface, and deep down you would indeed find a store called Earl's Magic Box. And through the window in the front of that store you would be very likely to see the Wunderkammer sitting unobtrusively in a corner. But I would not recommend that you do this, because the man you would see staring into the small sphere he had fetched from the Wunderkammer with a microscope would not be you. And that stranger might turn around and look at your big eye with an open expression of awe, and you would in turn be forced to look behind you. And there is no telling what you then might see.