Beyond, the party was very clearly getting started. It wasn’t all that crowded yet… as we’d just seen, people were enjoying the chance to be out at night and taking in the sights. The tower had a great big basement lounge, and it seemed like students of multiple disciplines had helped prepare it.

The walls and ceiling had been covered with a dungeon chic illusion. There was thick fog swirling around everyone’s ankles. Hovering pumpkins were everywhere. Harpsichord thrash that reminded me of Viktor was playing ambiently, with no sound crystals to distract from the illusion. It was punctuated periodically by flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder.

A disappointingly large number of the students who were already present had skipped costumes, or done lame things like wearing a “This Is My Costume” t-shirt. One guy had on that stupid t-shirt with a picture of a chain mail vest on it. It seemed like a lot of the early crowd was made up of those who just wanted an excuse for a party.

There were some people who’d made the effort, though… some of them quite ghoulish. There was one guy with a bunch of what were probably modified spectral arrows sticking out of his body at different angles, the wounds appearing to bleed. Another kid had a meat cleaver stuck in his head, and there was a girl walking around with bleeding stumps just below her elbow. The drink hovering about a foot past the end of one of them did little to make the illusion less disturbing.

I was kind of relieved to see that most of those who’d gone the “monster” route had thought of undead versions. I had a moment of weird deja vu and nostalgia when I spotted the exact same model of cheap rubber ghoul mask that had been my hidden treasure so many years before.

“Steff’s going to kick herself for missing this,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah,” I said. I had a suspicion she’d appreciate the stump girl. “Seems like this would be her kind of scene.”

“Yeah, but also, there’s that gladiator that she likes,” Amaranth said, pointing.

She hardly needed to… it was Pala the semi-giantess that she was talking about. She’d left her spear behind for the night. It took me a moment to figure out what her costume was… she was wearing a skintight one-piece that seemed to terminate in the briefest miniskirt imaginable and barely contained her massive chest. It had a pattern of green diamonds, varying from very pale to almost white. There was something vaguely familiar about the style of it, but I didn’t put it together until she turned her head a little and I saw she was wearing pointed ears.

She was dressed as an elf, complete with an elven-style dress in what was probably the largest size she could find. It was a really lucky thing that elven gowns had the whole flowing, trailing thing going on, or else she would have been completely indecent.

“The real shame is that if Steff had just waited to take the potion, she could have come here and then used it,” I said. “I guess I can understand her excitement, but I can’t believe she’d miss a chance to dress up… it seems right up her alley.”

“Do you think she might have taken the potion in the morning because the dance was tonight?” Ian said. “Like, she wanted to jump on the chance to go… filled out?”

“I really doubt that,” I said. “Dee told her it would take the whole weekend and she’d be incapacitated for it.”

“Yeah, I guess she’d have to be almost suicidally foolish with a simultaneous delusion of invulnerability or something to try it,” Ian said. “Seriously, did I misunderstand what was happening or was she not up and trying to walk around like everything was normal earlier?”

“Point taken,” I said.

Pala was talking to someone who would have looked like a kind of big hulking guy, if he’d been standing by anyone else. He was wearing what looked like motorcycle gear: leather for more flexible protection than metal armor gave, and a helmet adapted from the typical jousting helmet with a modern transparent visor.

He didn’t look like he was doing a Mecknight, specifically. Their cycle suits had even more of an armor look. There was something odd about the proportions of it… then he turned and started walking and I realized it wasn’t the outfit but the body beneath it.

“Is that Moeli?” I said.

“Yes, baby,” Amaranth said. She sounded a little irritated and I wondered at what, but then she said, “I never thought about how being a nymph takes some of the fun out of a masquerade.”

Then I realized he was in the same leather jacket I’d seen him with down at his post behind the desk. Without the headgear, I hadn’t been able to tell what he was going for.

“Give me your coat and then let’s go say hi to them,” Amaranth said.

“Why?” I asked, handing her my coat.

“Because we’re at a party and we just spotted people we know,” she said, helping me get my cape on. “It’s a dance. Let’s be sociable. If we wanted to stand around talking to each other, we could have stayed in your room.”

“I’d say ‘people we recognize’,” I said. “Do we really know Pala?”

“She’s nice,” Amaranth said. “Ian, you know her, right?”

“Um, kind of,” he said. “I mean, we use different locker rooms. I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with her.”

“Well, let’s go rectify that,” she said.

Alone, I would have felt weird about walking up to two people who were already talking and jumping into their conversation. With Amaranth leading the way… I still felt weird.

But I would obey.

“Yeah, I’m actually building a motorcycle as an auto shop project,” Moeli was saying as we approached. “Well, a model of one. But it’s full-sized.”

“My friend has a motorcycle,” Pala said. “She drinks at the inn I stay at.”

“Not a real one, though,” I said, disbelief crushing my awkwardness aside.

“No, it is very real,” Pala said. “Just not so easy to find. The Inn of the Black Doors. You have heard of it?”

“I mean, it’s not a real motorcycle,” I said. “It can’t be.”

“No, I suppose it’s really a wolf.”

It made as much sense as anything else, so I let it go.

“You know,” Moeli said, turning to me, “just because something’s not real doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with enjoying it. Some of us have a little thing called imagination.”

“Hey, I like them, too!” I said quickly. “I just… I like to keep what’s possible separate from what’s not. What’s your automata teacher think about your choice of project?”

“He hasn’t said anything,” Moeli said. “I’m going to keep it for when I get my enchantment degree.”

“You’re an enchantment student?” I asked.

“Armoury,” Moeli said. “I’m going to get enchantment after that.”

“A lot of the classes are the same,” I said. “Why not just double major?”

“I like to focus on one thing at a time,” he said.

“But won’t you be in school forever that way?”

“The second degree won’t take as long.”

“Don’t you want to get out there and start earning money, though?” I asked.

“I’ll take what I can get, but I’m not a gold farmer,” Moeli said. “I just want to be able to make really cool shit.”

“Oh,” I said, and I couldn’t figure out what to follow it up with.

I could understand what he meant… I wanted to make neat stuff, too, like figures that could enact more complicated scenes… but the idea that he’d go to school for a bunch of extra years and not be looking for a pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow was a little foreign to me.

“My friend has a motorcycle,” Pala said again.

“What’s her name, honey?” Amaranth asked.

“Oh, it is a he,” Pala said. “His name is Skald. She lets me pet him sometimes.”

“She?”

“My friend,” Pala said.

“Skald… is… her motorcycle,” Ian said. “Who is really a wolf.”

“Yes,” Pala said, nodding enthusiastically.

“It’s an interesting world you live in, isn’t it?” Ian asked.

“Oh, I don’t live there,” Pala said. “I board there. Not many connections remain between the world I live in and this one, but the inn has doors everywhere.”

“Black doors,” Ian said.

“Yes,” Pala said.

Ian gave Amaranth and me a look that said, very eloquently, this is why I don’t have many conversations with her.

“You should go say hello to Coach Callahan,” Pala said.

“Wait, is she here?” I asked.

“No, it is just Moeli and I,” she said, looking around in confusion. “Coach Callahan is over there.”

I didn’t want to look, but felt compelled to. There she was standing in a corner of the room, along with an adult man I didn’t know who wasn’t in costume… Coach Jillian Callahan.

Dressed as a slutty Universal School Girl.

She was looking around the room while the guy next to her nattered on. She spotted us looking at her and I would swear that her eyes lit up, but she looked around a little and then scowled.

“Ooh… Steff is going to absolutely kick herself,” Amaranth said.

“I don’t think she’s going to have to,” Ian said.

“Steff is the alfr whose penis Coach Callahan likes to tread on, yes?” Pala said.

“Um…” I said.

“Yes, yes, she is,” Amaranth said.

Pala’s face looked a lot like Two’s did when she required clarification. I thought I heard a tiny rumble of thunder that wasn’t coming from the atmospheric effects. She shook it off, though.

“Coach Callahan takes sex perverts very seriously,” she said. “She keeps images of them in her desk so she can recognize them if she sees them.”

“Yes, I know, I’ve seen them,” Ian said. “So many times.”

“So, did you get a tan?” Moeli asked Amaranth.

“Oh, no, my skin doesn’t tan,” she said. “It’s bark color.” She grabbed a length of her green hair and held it out. “I’m a dryad, see?”

“Oh, I thought maybe you were a mermaid,” Moeli said. “One of them has the green hair. I saw the other one outside, walking around glammed as a harpy or bird woman or something.”

Iona’s truer state was as feathery as it was scaly… I wondered if she’d decided to dispense with a costume entirely and come as herself?

“She didn’t seem to be heading this way, though,” he said. “I guess maybe she’s going to a private party.”

It was possible… but the other possibilities chilled me. Hell, that possibility chilled me. Iona, slinking off in her natural form to go to a private party. Catered, maybe?

“I’m sure this isn’t the only Veil party on campus tonight,” Amaranth said. “One of the reason the school holds these events is to give a supervised alternative to the student ones.”

“There’s your roomie,” Ian said. I looked back towards the entrance, where a party of four had just entered: Two, her friend Hazel, Hazel’s cousin Honey, and Oru. Hazel and Honey were keeping as much distance between each other as they could while still being with the group.

Oru looked… the only word for it was ghastly. She’d had her skin tinted a white, but it looked pallid and corpse-like, particularly in the eerie lighting conditions. Her thick, spiky hair had been curled somehow, but it looked more like springs than burrow gnome hair. She was wearing one of Honey’s actual dresses. That part she carried off well enough… Honey’s dresses weren’t flattering enough to depend on the chest of the wearer.

Really, she looked like nothing so much as an evil little porcelain doll.

Then she smiled.

Goblins have very wide mouths, in proportion to the rest of their heads. They have no lips to speak of, but they do have lots of teeth, which are sharp and set at no particular angle.

“Sweet Khersis, I’m going to have nightmares for a month,” Ian said.

“Well,” Amaranth said, “I, for one, think she looks… um… very in keeping with the spirit of the occasion?”

“You’ve got that right,” I said. “If they give a prize for the scariest costume, I don’t see how anyone’s going to top that.”

“Mackenzie?” a voice said from behind me. A hand fell on my shoulder and I turned around as thunder pealed, then jumped six feet out of my skin at the sight of a scarecrow, covered in shadow.

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Yeah, I had a major crisis coming up in the next day, but it wasn’t like I could deal with that and then go to the Veil Ball on Sunday. So, I let Ian take the costume bits he wanted with only a little more grumbling.

I also got confirmation that Semele wasn’t actually fixated on me in particular as we were heading out of the theater… I heard her telling another girl she wanted to “crawl inside her and start redecorating”.

I wasn’t exactly the queen of smooth-talking myself, but she really needed to get some better pick-up lines.

Still, as creepy as she was, it was reassuring to know that she was spreading the creepiness around.

“So, when’s your last class get out?” Ian asked as we stepped out into the chilly Calendula afternoon.

“Five thirty,” I said. “Republican history.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to scrounge up some accessories, and then I’ll meet you outside Smith… we can get some dinner and then go change.”

“Smith?” I repeated, not sure what he was talking about.

“Smith Hall,” he said, right as it fell into place for me. “The history building?”

“Oh… right,” I said. The name had never really stood out to me.

“You didn’t know it was called that?”

“I did,” I said. “I don’t usually think of the school buildings by name. It’s easier to remember what classes are there. I mean, they’re not all named after somebody like Lazar.”

Ian shook his head and snorted softly.

“What?” I asked, wondering if I was supposed to know who “Smith” was.

“Nothing,” he said.

“No, don’t do that,” I said. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“You do know that they’re all named after actual people, right?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s not like they’re all anybody important… I mean, your dorm’s just named after some jerky cavalier who didn’t want to let girls into the clubhouse. Probably most of the buildings on campus are named after some dead white human guy.”

“Khersis, Mackenzie… did you start dating Sheel when I wasn’t looking?” he asked.

“Shiel,” I corrected. “And no… though I did have a conversation with her earlier about Veil costumes.”

“Oh, I guess that explains your response back there a little,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to… oh, never mind,” I said. “What’s the deal with Mr. Smith? Was he a hotshot skirmish hero or something?”

“How about I tell you the story when I pick you up after class,” Ian said.

“How about you tell me now?” I asked.

“I don’t have a seven hour lunch break hour like you do.”

“I don’t have a seven hour lunch break,” I said. “And I had a perfectly reasonable schedule picked out at first… it just got shuffled around a bunch.”

“Yeah, well, mine’s still reasonable,” he said. “And anyway, I think you’ll appreciate the story a little bit better after you’ve jogged your memory a little.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look over the door of the building when you’re going into history class,” he said. He gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Maybe it’ll make more sense then.”

“Okay,” I said. I was a little frustrated by the pointless mystery game, but I figured I’d used up my quota of stubborn arguments for the day. “See you then, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Ian said, and he headed off towards Weyland Hall.

I still had a few hours to kill before my logic class started. I realized that if I hadn’t been such a bitch about Winnie, I probably could have stayed to hang out with Dust and the other theater kids… as disconcerting as it was to be known to a bunch of people I didn’t know, they seemed like a pretty casual and non-judgmental bunch.

Ian hadn’t just been shopping for costume ideas… he’d been trying to expand my social circle, and I’d flubbed it, even after he’d pretty much told me that was what he was doing. Oh, well. I’d apologized, and Dust didn’t seem like the sort to hold a grudge. It would be weird to turn around and walk back in there, trying to insinuate myself into their group without Ian… but maybe there would be a next time. The drama crowd would probably be all over the Veil Ball. I’d have to make a point to watch for anyone I recognized and be ready do my best imitation of an actual person if somebody waved at me or said hi.

With Two as an example, how could I go wrong?

A bath seemed like it was asking for trouble. I could have used a nap, maybe, but I was feeling a little wandshy about that… I didn’t know what I would see if I closed my eyes, or what fresh trap might be waiting in my room when I woke up. Probably I should have been more freaked about the whole thing, but the way I was gliding from crisis to crisis while trying to have a college life it was hard to keep even one of them in perspective. When I stopped and thought about it… demon father in my dreams, gray elf assassin queen after my ovaries, mermaids want to eat me… it was… well, I couldn’t really think about it and do anything else.

I remembered the thought I’d had in the morning to go to the library… it wasn’t terribly pressing, just more curiosity about the history of other cultures. That made me remember with a jolt that I still had the somewhat open-ended grudge assignment from Hart, to give a presentation on the history of the region. I had those history books back in my room… they would give me something to do, to keep my mind occupied in a productive fashion until it was time for class.

I headed back to Harlowe and went straight up to my room, managing to avoid any entangling encounters with Feejee or Trina or anyone else. I had a brief moment of confused panic when I realized I didn’t know where the books were… they weren’t on my desk, or on my dresser. Two hadn’t stuck them in the closet. I didn’t remember putting them under my bed, but I looked anyway… in fact, I didn’t remember taking them out of my book bag. Chagrined, I suddenly realized how bulky my backpack was: I’d been carrying around four extra books.

I dug them out, putting the Under Enwich one aside… that one was the most personally interesting one but had the least to do with my assigned topic. The other three, from the history of the plains series, weren’t as conventionally exciting but they were interesting. Before the Magisterian Era, Merovia had been the only human power that really formed a challenge to the Nameless Emperor’s hegemony.

Merovia the Double-Blessed was a theocracy. The Merovian King-Priests worshipped their patron Kharolinus alongside Khersis… they followed the Khersian creed that Khersis was the greatest of gods and all humans were his children, but they believed Kharolinus had blessed their line in particular and so it was their duty to honor him as the Lord of Merovia even as they honored Khersis as the Lord of Man. There were some theological splits about whether that meant the two were to be honored equally, or their duty to their personal god was more important, or their duty to the supreme god of humanity was greater, but all their spiritual leaders at least agreed that no other nation was as blessed as they, and their international relations had usually reflected this.

The Merovians had been very enthusiastic crusaders back in the day, waging bloody war in the name of their deity… at least until another major power rose up in the west. With both the Old Empire and the Imperial Republic to contend with, and frequent incursions by orcs… as the Merovians had been slow to learn not to kick that particular hornet’s nest… they had eventually mellowed a bit.

I’d learned all of that on my own, after having embarrassed myself in class by earnestly repeating what my grandmother had told me: that Carolinus had been a white or silver dragon who’d made a deal with the first King-Priest, and that all the Merovians were idolaters who paid lip service to Khersis to maintain his favor while putting on a bunch of pompous airs directed at their false god.

The Merovian colonization of the Westering Lands had taken place during their crusading days. It seemed that they’d pushed further inland faster than the Empire had. When Merovia’s power waned and the newly-fledged Imperial Republic expanded westward, a lot of the Merovian colonists had already died out or went home. Some of the remaining holdouts resisted, and some welcomed the encroachment of greater civilization after having clung onto survival in the wilderness for so long.

The volume from the time of the revolution had a map of the remaining settlements in the area of Prax and Blackwater, a lot of them nestled in the Enias River Valley. A lot of the names were in Kharoline: Le Cratère, Bellevue, Des Arbres… but the one that jumped out at me wasn’t:

Cerridwen.

It was just a dot and a name written on a map. It might not have jumped out at me at all if I hadn’t just spoken to Winnie Champlain. It stood apart from the others, at what would have had to have been a few days’ hike from the river, if I hadn’t any sense of scale. Winnie had said she had a lot of family in the area… and now that I thought about it, “LaBelle” was a Kharoline name, too. “Cerridwen”, no matter how it was spelled, wasn’t.

Was the family naming kids after this settlement, or had the settlement been named after a member of the family?

It was kind of interesting… like finding a piece of a puzzle. A pointless and not actually that interesting puzzle, after I thought about it a bit. As bad as I might have felt for ragging on Winnie, the LaBelles still collectively bugged the hell out of me… and in Puddy’s case, that wasn’t even the worst of it. Unless they’d played some huge role in the politics of the prairie around the year one, it didn’t have anything to do with my assignment. Knowing how Keri LaBelle felt about her given name, I could try to irritate her by dwelling on it in an oral presentation, but that was probably a notion best kept as an idle fantasy. Ms. LaBelle was the sort of person who made a headache contagious. However annoyed I managed to get her, her complaining would be a hundred times worse.

Still, my curiosity was piqued… it was weird that it was out there all by itself, not along the waterway and without any trade roads marked on the map connecting it to other outposts. I flipped to the index at the back of the book, and the only listing for it was the page with the map.

If not for the possibility of a LaBelle connection, I would have just assumed it was not a Merovian settlement. The name “Cerridwen” sounded more… well, I didn’t know what it sounded like. It definitely didn’t seem to be Draconian-derived, though. It wasn’t Pax, it wasn’t Elvish, it wasn’t Dwarvish. It didn’t sound like any kind of goblinoid language… I could conceivably ask Shiel if she recognized it. That would probably be the safest way to phrase the question.

There weren’t any mountains on the plains of Prax so there wouldn’t be any kobold settlements. What I really wanted to know is if she thought it was Gobol. I didn’t figure I could ask her without provoking an indignant response since that wasn’t her language, though really it was a safe bet she’d recognize it. I would have gone straight to Oru, but we weren’t really on speaking terms.

Then I remembered there was at least one other goblinoid in the building, and I knew where he was likely to be. I took the book and headed down all the way to the basement, where Moeli was on duty at the front desk. He’d ditched his usual garb for a black leather jacket. It was an interesting choice… didn’t really fit him that well, with his long, gangly arms.

“Uh, hey,” I said. I’d been all excited and proud of thinking of him, but now I was beginning to feel awkward. The way things had gone at the dance… yeah. Maybe Shiel would have been better. But I’d already spoken.

“Hey,” he said, neutrally.

“I… um… I was looking at a history book and there’s a name I don’t recognize,” I said, putting the open book on the counter and turning it around towards him. “I was wondering if you knew what it was, if it was Gobol or something?” I said, pointing to the village.

“You mean if it’s Fae,” he said.

“Uh… no, actually, I meant… wait, is it?” I asked.

“Cerridwen,” he read. “It’s Fae.”

“How do you know what Fae sounds like?’ I asked.

“Why are you asking me in the first place?” he asked.

“Well, I thought you might know,” I said.

“I do,” he said. “It’s Fae. Look at it, it’s back in the forest and everything. Who else would have been living there but faeries?”

“Are you saying it’s Fae because it’s back in the forest or are you saying it’s Fae because you know it’s Fae?” I asked.

“How many times do I have to tell you I know it before you’ll believe me?” he asked.

“It’s just… it’s marked on a map of human settlements,” I said.

He looked up and down the page.

“I don’t see where it says that,” he said.

“Okay, but that’s what it is,” I said. “There had to have been elves here back then, and goblins, but they’re not marked on the map. All these other towns are Merovian outposts. Why would they make a map that was just the human settlements and one sidhe village?”

“Why would they make a map that was just the human settlements?” Moeli asked.

“Does making one that’s just human settlements and one sidhe village make more sense?” I asked.

“A little bit.”

“How?”

“It leaves less out.”

“Okay, but that would be so completely arbitrary,” I said.

“Arbitrary like only showing the human settlements is arbitrary?” he asked.

“What, did you start dating Shiel?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t kick her out of bed. She’s got substance,” Moeli said. “She’s not shallow.”

“Look, never mind… are you sure it’s a Fae word?” I asked.

He looked at me before he answered, and I started to feel uncomfortable before he finally answered, “No. No, I’m not. I have no idea what I’m talking about,” and I realized my incredulousness had carried me a little too far.

“Moeli… I’m sorry, I don’t mean to doubt you,” I said. “I was just trying to figure out… I mean, I’m actually pretty sure this is a human settlement, is the thing. Not for some arbitrary humanocentric reason. It’s just I think that I know some people who came from there.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, it’s still a Fae word.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

I took my book and headed back upstairs, where I spent the rest of the time before logic class flipping through it and the other two in the series in a kind of desultory fashion. All the internecine turf wars of the Kharolinian paladins, all the skirmishes with the goblins and with the lizardfolk to the south… somehow, it was all less interesting than that one anomalous village in the woods.

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We poked around the shops in the upper city, then took a public coach across the canal and browsed through the bazaar for a bit before we finally made our way towards the gate and the school carriages.

“Well, this has been fun,” I said when the carriage pulled into the turnaround back on campus.

“Yes,” Sooni agreed. “Don’t forget to think about everything.”

“I won’t.”

“Oh, hey!” she said brightly. “The golem said there were arena fights tonight! Do you want to go watch?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Gladiators aren’t really my thing.”

“Oh, okay,” Sooni said. “I guess… I guess I will see you later?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Later.”

She seemed reluctant to part company with me… I didn’t mind her presence, but I really wanted to either hook up with Amaranth, or failing that, get some alone time in my room. Even getting along with her, being with Sooni was mentally fatiguing. I was wary of stumbling into traps or unprovoked ambushes.

“Hey!” she said, her face lighting up. “You should come swimming with us tonight!”

“Sooni,” I said. “We’ve gone over this… I don’t have a swimsuit, and honestly, I’m not entirely confident about getting into a big pool.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, when we… if we get our business started, maybe I’ll make you one.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Have a nice afternoon.”

“You, too!”

The next bit was a little awkward, as we’d just said our goodbyes and then immediately started walking across campus in the same direction. Duh… even if we were just going back to our respective rooms, they were right across the hallway from each other.

“I think my father has some trading partners in the East Reaches,” Sooni said after we’d walked near each other in silence.

“Does he?”

“Yes,” she said. “I wonder if he knows anybody who…”

She trailed off. I understood why. “Knows anybody who died?” It was a morbid thought. A hundred thousand people… we’d avoided the topic since leaving the Crystal Palace, but it was hanging there in the background. It felt like the whole world had changed, shifting under our feet while we walked on oblivious.

The sort of men that Sooni’s father did business with could probably afford every protection imaginable, but who would imagine a giant wave that smashed whole towns and then swept people by the thousands out to sea? Even if you could afford a resurrection, how would they ever find the body among all that open water?

I suddenly wondered if there were mermaids in the eastern sea.

“Do you think it will hurt his business?” I asked. It seemed a little cold, but it was easier to think of the impact on things than people. And from Sooni’s point of view, that could be an important question.

“I… I do not think so,” she said, but she sounded worried. “He did not export very much until recently. Most Yokano business stayed within Yokan. He only started expanding in the last few years.”

“What does your father do?”

“He manages several enchanteries,” Sooni said. “That is why I am majoring in applied enchantment. I am going to help him with his business!”

“Was that his idea?” I asked. Unless Mr. Hoshinotama was as good at blocking out reality as his daughter was, I couldn’t imagine him thinking she would be a valuable addition to his team.

“No, he said I could study whatever I wanted,” she said. “It will be a surprise.”

“I bet it will,” I said. “Aren’t you minoring in transportation?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is father’s dream to make carriages that are the envy of the world. I will need to understand them, too, in order to take my place at his side.”

“If the dress thing takes off, though, you can have that as a back-up plan,” I said. “I mean, since you enjoy making them anyway.”

“That may be a fun hobby, but my destiny is with my family’s business,” Sooni said. “My father wanted a son to raise and teach, but the gods blessed him with me instead. So when he retires, I will become the first woman to head a major company ever in the history of Yokan.”

“Uh, good for you.” If women didn’t run companies in Yokan, I didn’t really see them making an exception for her, but who said it was my job to crush her dreams? She was going to spend at least four years in college, with many opportunities for reality checks along the way. “I’ve got to go downstairs and check my mail,” I said, as we were nearing the dorm complex. “See if the replacement mirror arrived.”

“Alright,” Sooni said. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the arena?”

“Positive,” I said.

“Then I guess I’ll just go to the pool again,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“After you think about the weavesite!”

“I’ll be thinking about that for a while, Sooni,” I said. “I won’t necessarily have an answer the next time I see you.”

“Oh,” she said, frowning. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay.”

There were no red envelopes in my mailbox, though there were coupons and a couple things for Two to prove that the mail had arrived. Had she given up? That would be great timing… no letters meant that I’d be able to obey Amaranth’s order without doing anything. Neither of us would have to be exposed to my grandmother’s guilt and poison.

Two had something from the student work office, a letter from a Miss Ruth at Hearts of Clay, and one other thing that I almost missed: a hand-addressed envelope from a Stephen Callaway in Logfallen Shire. That was a little weird. Why would a gnome be writing to her? Well, I could ask her, but otherwise it was none of my business.

I flipped through the coupons and flyers looking for anything good or even interesting for a bit before shuffling over to the counter, where of course Moeli the hobgoblin was on duty again. I always felt at least a little awkward talking to him… I felt even more awkward at the prospect after our disastrous “double date”.

“Hey, Moeli,” I said. I smiled nervously. “It seems like you’re always down here, doesn’t it?”

“Well, you seem to come by in the afternoon,” he said in his slow, rumbly voice. “That’s my shift, you know.”

“Yeah… yeah it is,” I said.

“The first time, I thought it was a coincidence,” he said. “The second time, I started to wonder…”

“Still coincidence,” I said.

“Oh. Have you, uh, talked to Oru since the dance?” he asked. “She’s on your floor, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, I’ve ran into her,” I said. “She’s a little mad.”

“At me? Or you?”

“At me,” I said. “She kind of bit me, actually, after the dance. On the leg. It really seemed kind of random… does it mean something, uh, culturally?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“What?”

“She doesn’t like you very much.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Men get in fights over girls and things, but women just bite each other,” he said. “Though that sort of thing is becoming frowned upon. Too many fatalities.”

“From the fights, you mean?”

“No, we use our fists,” he said. “The bites. Did you see her teeth? Goblin women can bite clean through an arm. ”

“Yeah, I guess I kind of noticed that,” I said.

“Oru’s an old-fashioned kind of girl,” he said. “Too old-fashioned for me. She wants to chain herself to a man and start popping out babies. Anyway, I’m sorry she bit you, Mackenzie. Why don’t you let me make it up to you by…”

“Moeli, you seem like a nice guy,” I said.

“Oh, here it comes,” he said, waving one of his oversized hands dramatically. “The ‘nice guy’ speech… I thought that was something only hobbish girls did.”

“I think some things are universal,” I said. “I’m just… well, my personal life is kind of involved to begin with. I don’t see how another person… any person… would fit in it right now.”

“So if you weren’t seeing anybody else?”

“Moeli, I… well, probably not,” I said. “Sorry.”

“You don’t date hobgoblins?”

“I’m just not interested,” I said. “Don’t take it personally… there aren’t a lot of guys I, you know, notice.”

“What if I was a woman?”

“I… I like women with breasts,” I said. “Mammals, you know? And maybe mermaids. I’m trying not to be racist, but goblinoids and reptiles just don’t do anything for me… physically. Sexually. But that’s moot because you aren’t a woman.”

“So it is because I’m a hobgoblin.”

“You aren’t my type,” I said. “And if you got to know me better, you’d probably… well, a lot of people think I’m annoying. I’m socially oblivious, I’m clumsy, I’m forgetful…”

“You smell nice,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, blushing like mad. Damn. It sucked having hypersensitive cheeks. “I could… well, I could stand to hear that more often, but… there isn’t any alchemy, Moeli. Sorry.”

“Oh, it’s not your fault,” he said. “Do you want me to talk to Oru?”

“What would you say?”

“That it isn’t your fault I don’t want to be with her,” he said. “I can’t stand her voice, and the way she clings…”

“Yeah, no, that’s fine,” I said. “I’ll deal with her.”

“I just thought I’d offer.”

“It’s sweet, really,” I said. “Um… anyway… I’m looking for a package that was supposed to have been rushed over?”

“We don’t usually get packages in on Saturday,” he said. “Unless it was the imperial mail, and they just came an hour ago. I don’t remember any packages.”

“Well, please check,” I said. “This would have been like a special delivery. It’s from my lawyer…”

“Oh, that sounds important,” Moeli said, and he turned and headed back into the office. “What size would it be?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just a mirror, but it might have packing stuff.”

“Found it!” he said. He came out carrying a small padded envelope with a rectangular bulge. “It was the only one on Gwen’s desk. Just sign this slip for it.”

“Okay,” I said. I signed it, and he gave me the envelope. I tore it open, pulled out the box and got out the new mirror. It was sleeker than the old one, a polished black octagon case that flipped open. The interior was lighted, and there was a sparkly purple powder in the bottom compartment. “Ooh, what’s this?” I asked, sticking my finger in it. Some of the dust adhered to the tip, but I couldn’t feel it, and when I pulled my finger up to my face it faded. “Some kind of illusion,” I said. I poked my finger in the dust again, and then prodded the mirror. The dust made a glowing dot on its surface. “Oh, it’s a smart mirror!” I said, noticing there was a little brush recessed near the hinge. I pulled it out and started doodling a little face. “This is awesome.”

“Your lawyer sent you that?” Moeli asked. “Did you win a big lawsuit?”

“Uh, no,” I said. “It’s just a loaner. They were having some problems and I guess they had to get all new ones.”

“Wish I had those kinds of problems,” Moeli said.

“I should probably let him know I got this,” I said. I picked up the box and handed Moeli the envelope. “Can you toss that for me?”

“Sure, why not?” Moeli said.

My drawing disappeared when I invoked the mirror. Lee didn’t answer, though I didn’t really expect him to. If he was still working that late in the day on a Saturday, he was probably too busy to grab a mirror. I left him an echo saying that the new one had arrived, obviously. The picture came back when his echo catcher faded.

“Oh, cool,” I said. I willed the image away, then held the compact up to my face. “Reveal your functions to me,” I said, extending my will towards it. Immediately a series of tiny images fluttered into view. One of them practically jumped out at me: ethernet.

I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my afternoon.

She seemed pleasant enough when we first came up to her, and she smiled when she took our claim ticket and she returned our coats, but then as she was retrieving our weapons off the back wall, Ian pointed to a jar of coins on the counter and asked me how much I thought we should tip.

“That isn’t a tip jar!” she shrieked, whipping around and waving his sword belt in one hand and my pitchfork in the other. “That is a donation jar for the potion fund! Donations… like I donated my time to person this stupid box for the stupid dance so you two could play teenage romance while I have to put up with stupid come-ons… people who throw their coats at me… people who can’t find their claim tickets… people who I see throw their claim tickets away before they even get five feet away from me… people who throw their weapons at me… people who think it’s funny to give me a spectral weapon that’s about to expire… and this stupid fucking hick thing always getting in my way.”

She lifted her left hand with the pitchfork in it as she said this. She looked like she was about to start frothing at the mouth, or even jump over the counter and attack us. Ian and I looked at each other in absolute, total mortification… she was seriously going off.

“Do you have any idea how many times I tripped over this fucking thing tonight?” she asked. “How many times I had to move it out of the way?”

“Well… we’ll just get it out of your way, then,” Ian said, taking the items from her.

“Uh, thanks, and… have a good night?” she said.

“Did you really have to bring this damned thing?” Ian asked as we headed off through the crowd to look for my dormmates. “It’s too big, it’s ugly, and it makes us look like a couple of rednecks.”

“Well, it’s not a showpiece, but it’s mine and I like it,” I said, reaching out and taking hold of the haft.

“Honestly, Mackenzie, you’re such a stupid fucking cunt sometimes,” Ian said as I took the pitchfork from him.

There were people milling about all around us in the area around the entrance, and more than a few of them were paying extra close attention to us after the outburst at the counter. I knew people had heard it. Whatever little jolt I might otherwise have got from the “c-word”, I was still reeling with embarrassment from the claim check girl’s tirade, and so this kind of attention wasn’t doing anything good for me.

“Not that I don’t appreciate that, but… save it for when we’re alone, okay?” I said.

“Uh… yeah, sure,” he said, blinking in surprise. “Sorry.”

“I don’t mean to jump on you,” I said. “I love when you talk to me like that… mostly… though I’m not sure how I feel about ‘stupid’… but, anyway, I think it’s a time and a place thing.”

I looked at him, searching his face for clues about how he was taking this. It could be so hard to coax that kind of language out of him. I didn’t want to kill the impulse by sending a lot of mixed signals.

“I’m sorry, I was just thinking… I don’t know what I was thinking, actually,” he said. He put on his belt, then took the gladiator flyer back from me. “Maybe I need this more than I thought.”

“Or maybe you need to think it through some more,” I said. “I mean, I know you’ve said you could handle yourself in a fight… and, okay, you can handle me pretty well… but you’re talking about going down into the arena with trained fighters.”

“Look, it says all experience and proficiency levels are welcome,” Ian said, holding the sheet up in my face.

“But.. what about your band?” I asked.

“Well, it’s not like I’m going to quit it… yet,” he said. “But if things don’t come together…”

He shrugged and let the thought trail off. My heart lurched. Ian was good… but much like Steff and her drawing, he’d never see it as clearly as I could. Why couldn’t they see how talented they were? I wasn’t the most self-assured person in the world, but I knew I was a pretty decent writer. I mean, I didn’t go all falsely modest when I sat down in front of a piece of paper or a crystal ball and turned out something that I knew was actually pretty good.

Any response I might have come up with was forestalled by the arrival of an exuberant Oru, with Moeli shifting around uncomfortably a little bit behind her.

“Hey, guys!” she said. Her mottled green skin was shiny with sweat, and she was talking a mile a minute. “Wasn’t this a fun dance? I had an awesome time… I can’t believe it’s over already. It seems like we just got here, doesn’t it? I guess that’s why humans say that time flies when you’re having fun. I heard that in one of my Tuesday-Thursday classes, and I think the professor was being sarcastic, but seriously…”

“This was the most boring night of my life,” Moeli said loudly to nobody in particular… but in particular, not Oru… and he turned away and started heading for the door without another word.

Oru looked like she’d been slapped.

“I… I thought it was going well,” she said.

Before either of us could figure out what to say or how to react, Moeli was out the door and she’d gone charging after him.

“Um… we should probably follow them,” I said to Ian.

“Yeah.”

While we’d had to struggle to keep from getting too far ahead of Moeli and Oru on the way to the dance, we fought the urge to catch up with them on the way back. Moeli was moving with determination if not speed, resolutely ignoring Oru who followed and tried to get a response out of him. She had a really unfortunate resemblance to a small puppy yapping at somebody’s heels. Ian and I stayed about twenty feet back, sharing awkward glances and not really daring to say anything.

Soon after we got to Harlowe, Oru broke down in the middle of the first floor hallway when she saw Moeli disappearing into the stairwell on his side without sparing a glance back. She threw her head back and began to wail. I’d thought that Two sounded like a child when she was upset, but Oru managed to get about four times the sound out with only half the lungs. It would be a wonder if the seniors couldn’t hear her up on the second floor.

Ian and I just stared at her, not knowing what to do.

“Poor Oru,” I said quietly. “Well, thanks for a nice night, anyway.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Um, is she going to be okay?”

“I really don’t know,” I said. “I’ll try talking to her… but you should probably go.”

“Okay,” he said.

Not wanting to start making out in front of a crying person even if her back was turned, we shared a very quick kiss and said our goodnights, and then I turned and walked with more than a little trepidation to the bawling goblin.

“Um, Oru?” I said timidly. “Are you okay?”

That was the logical question to ask somebody who had enough tears streaming down her face to water a whole town’s crops, of course.

“Would you like to talk to me about it?” I asked her, coming closer.

She turned and said something, but either it was in her own language or the sobs just made it impossible to make it out.

“What was that?” I asked. “I’m sorry, I can’t understand that.”

She tried to bring her sobbing under control, then took a deep breath, opened her mouth and lunged across the few feet that separated us. Her jagged teeth went right though my jeans leg to close painfully around my calf, and she held on.

“Ah, Oru!” I yelled, trying to shake her off without hurting her. Her teeth couldn’t break my skin, but she had a fantastically powerful jaw and it felt like my leg was being chomped in half. “Let go of me!”

I got ready to kick the little shit against the wall hard enough to make her let go. Then we’d see how well the dungeon rat could bite people if she didn’t have any teeth… or a lower jaw. Or a head. That would teach her to ruin my sexy new jeans just because she couldn’t keep a man.

She bit harder, and my legs buckled. The pitchfork clattered to the floor. I howled in pain, crying as I tried ineffectually to pry Oru off. Finally, after giving my leg a fierce shake, she let go and fell back, panting and sobbing.

“That really hurt,” I said, or tried to. It seemed like it was my turn to blubber incomprehensibly. “I was just trying to help.”

She seemed to have calmed down all at once. She got to her feet, took a handkerchief out of her dress and wiped her eyes then blew her bulbous nose.

“Don’t ever speak to me again,” she said, and then she stomped past me towards the girls’ staircase with her nose in the air, leaving me alone with my tattered jeans and the shooting pain in my leg.

In order to let her get a little ways ahead of me… and because I couldn’t fucking walk yet… I waited in the hallway for a little bit before I headed up. I leaned on my pitchfork for support, replaying the memory of that ugly little monster with her fright-mask face and hideous forest of braids leaping at me like some kind of animal.

What the fuck made her think she could get away with that? And then, to add insult to injury, she’d looked down her fat nose at me and tried to tell me to fuck off. Something would have to be done about that.

When I got to my room, I leaned my pitchfork on the door while I dug my key out of my pocket. The sound of knocking at the end of the hall caught my attention, and I looked to see Oru standing in front of the shirelings’ room. She’d let her hair out, and it looked like a badly wilted bush. She just looked sort of deflated overall. I felt terrible for her… I couldn’t help if Moeli was interested in me, and I didn’t even know if that was the reason for his lack of interest in her, but I felt unaccountably guilty all the same.

I quickly looked away when it looked like her head was turning towards me, not wanting to add to her embarrassment.

The door opened up in front of me and my pitchfork pitched forward. Two caught it before it could fall, and then stood there in the doorway looking at me expectantly. I thought she’d started to smile when she first saw me, but the lower half of her face was impassive and her eyes were slightly narrowed.

She was wearing one of the sets of gauzy see-through undergarments that were among her more disturbing examples of “pajamas”. Actually, they seemed to be new… or at least, I didn’t recognize them. It was more than a little bit disturbing to see her standing there with my pitchfork in hand, still as the clay statue she had once been, with her nipples and other private areas clearly visible through a thin curtain of peach-colored fabric.

“Um… is something wrong?” I asked her.

“You could say hello first some of the time,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. Hello, Two.”

“Hello, Mack! Also, I really would like it if you would stop leaving your clothing on the floor,” she said. She turned and moved away to let me into the room. “I suppose you are going to want me to fix those jeans, too.” I shut the door behind me and she went to put my pitchfork in the closet, talking as she did so. “And I would like to know why the lunch room cannot put a label on the gelatin so that I could tell if it was cherry or strawberry before tasting it.”

“Isn’t the cherry a little bit darker?” I asked her as she slid the closet door shut.

“A little,” she said, turning around with the big smile I’d missed when she first opened the door. “But sometimes it’s hard to tell. Did you have a nice date with Ian?”

“Yeah, mostly,” I said. “I mean, it was good. Ian was great. The ending was just a little… surreal. I think I’m going to take a bath and go to bed.”

“Okay,” Two said. “Just leave your jeans on my desk.”

“Thank you, Two,” I said, and I hugged her. “I don’t want you to think I take you for granted.”

“You’re welcome, Mack,” she said. “I don’t want you to think I take you for granted.”

Feejee was lightly snoozing in one of the bathtubs when I got to the bathroom, so I changed my plans and just had a long, hot shower instead. She was still dozing when I left.

Two had already turned out the light and gone back to bed when I got back to the room, so I tiptoed quietly to my bunk, pulled the curtain back, climbed in, moved the pitchfork aside and curled up around it.

I was asleep before I knew it.

Just a reminder: the Tales of MU print books will be increasing in price in a few weeks, so if you’ve been thinking of ordering, it’s a good time.

If my coat didn’t impress Ian, Oru couldn’t seem to make up her mind about it.

“That’s such a beautiful outfit,” she said when we came out in the hall, looking up at me with her rapidly fluttering eyelashes. Oru had really long eyelashes, but they were wiry and coarse-looking. She was wearing a heavy necklace of twisted metal chain with a pendant that looked like a lock. “Are you wearing it to the dance?”

“Um, I’m wearing it on the way over,” I said. “But I’ll probably check it when we get there. It’s actually just my coat.”

“Oh,” she said.

Moeli was waiting for her in the downstairs lounge. He’d put on what seemed to be more traditional hobgoblin clothing: a long black tunic cinched at the waist with a broad leather belt, with a leather vest over it.

“Moeli!” Oru said, running towards him.

“You look nice,” he said to me before he even looked at her.

“It’s just a coat,” Oru said. “She’s not even wearing it into the dance.”

“Oh, hello, Oru,” Moeli said. He reached down with one long, gangly arm and gave her a pat on the head, squishing down her braids. They sprang back up as soon as his massive hand was removed. “Ready to go?”

“Uh… yeah,” she mumbled, seeming to go incoherent at that passing act of affection. She looked like she was going to melt into the carpet.

Similar culture and aesthetics aside, I really had to wonder why she was so fixated on Moeli. Not counting her spiky hair, Oru was the shortest girl on the fifth floor. Moeli was twice her height. He looked like he could crush her skull in his hand. Maybe he was the closest thing to a male goblin around, but if the most human-like person in the area had been a giant I couldn’t imagine seeking him out for dating opportunities.

The fitness center wasn’t actually that much farther from Harlowe than the student union was, but we were slowed down by Oru and Moeli. Oru had short legs, and Moeli seemed most comfortable moving at a pace that could be best described as “ambling.”

I didn’t want for us to get too far ahead of them… what Oru had said about goblins wandering around after dark had stuck with me, especially as there seemed to be a few groups of students heading in the same direction as us, led by pairs of armed and armored fighting students. Even if it was just a couple wannabe heroes being jackasses, I didn’t want anybody’s evening to be ruined because of their race.

It really was pretty cold out, but on the plus side I got to find out how awesome my coat really was. Ian could turn up his nose at it, but with the hood pulled low over my face, the only parts of me that felt the chill were my hands and my ankles, where the night air crept between the cuffs of my jeans and my shoes.

It was the latter that got to me the most… it was like there was a chink in my armor. I could warm my hands up one at a time by switching which one held the pitchfork and sticking the other in my pocket, but my ankles and lower calves were freezing.

“Hang on, guys,” I said when I decided I couldn’t stand it any more… which was about twenty yards outside the nexus. I put my trident down on a bench and focused on remembering my insulating spell. I didn’t want to spend a lot of energy, but I could slap a quick fix on.

“What’s wrong?” Ian asked as I put my foot up on the bench and reached out to find the relevant properties in the fabric.

“Fixing my socks,” I said, once I was done muttering my way through the spell formula. I did the other one, too.

“Nobody’s going to be looking at your socks,” Ian said.

“I’m just putting a temporary enchantment on them,” I said. “To keep the cold out.”

“Are you cold?” Oru asked me as we headed off again, walking slowly in the direction of the dance.

“Aren’t you?” I responded. She was in a dress that didn’t even cover her whole flat, smooth torso… I guess, if anything, that should have been a clue that the cold didn’t bother her.

“No, I was just thinking what a nice night it is,” Oru said. “Don’t you think it’s a nice night, Moeli?”

“Too bright,” Moeli said. He was squinting against the omnidirectional glow which extended upwards from the sidewalk.

“Yeah, it really is,” Oru said. “But… I wouldn’t go wandering off the path for anything. It’s just not worth the risk.”

“You’re being quiet,” I said to Ian.

“He’s probably just shy around new people,” Oru said. “I noticed that, the other night.”

“I just don’t want to say the wrong thing,” Ian said.

I shifted my pitchfork so that it was under my arm, so I could give him one hand and put the other one in my pocket.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to say anything.”

“Nice night,” Moeli remarked, and we walked the rest of the way in silence.

The fitness center was open twenty-four hours, but external light orbs had been placed in front of a high-roofed extension that I took to be the arena. The dance was already in progress, and I could hear the thudding pressure of the bass as we drew close. There was a banner by a set of massive double doors, declaring that the alumni association welcomed us.

There were campus guards spread in a semi-circle around the approach to the dance, and a pair by the doors. The perimeter guards converged on our group as we approached, with swords half-drawn.

Oh, great. This was just what I needed. We could have stayed back in the room, fooling around… but we’d made the right decision and now we were going to be hassled for it.

“Are you students?” one of them asked, directing his question at Moeli.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Let’s see some ID,” the guard said, looking back and forth from Moeli to Oru as he said this.

“Oh, I’ve got it somewhere,” Moeli said, taking a large pouch off his belt.

“Here’s mine,” Ian said, holding his card out.

“Don’t be a smartass, kid,” the lead guard said. “If we want it, we’ll ask for it.”

“Here we are,” Moeli said, holding his out. The guard snatched it from his hands and looked it over skeptically.

“Oh, um… I don’t seem to have mine on me,” Oru said.

“Dance is only open to students, shortstuff,” one of the other guards said.

“And their dates,” Ian said. “Right?”

“That’s not how it works,” the lead guard said.

“No, it is,” Ian said. “Non-students just have to be escorted by a student. You’ve seen his ID. You don’t need to see hers.”

“I… I can just run back and get it,” Oru said.

“That’s a good idea,” the lead guard said. “How about you two just run along back to Harlowe, and stay there? It can be dangerous… wandering around campus at night, like a couple of monsters in the dark. Your friends can escort you, if you don’t feel safe.”

“Aren’t… aren’t you supposed to keep us safe?” Oru said shakily.

“I’m telling you how to stay safe,” the guard said. “We can’t be held responsible if you don’t listen to safety instructions.”

With that, and the unmistakable implications it contained, I felt a surge of hot hatred flaring up within me. These assholes were being painfully transparent. It didn’t matter if they were actually willing to kill a couple of non-human students for straying outside the acceptable bounds… it only mattered that said students believed that was likely enough to be cowed by it. If they chose to fight it… the guard hadn’t said anything explicit.

The worst was that they probably wouldn’t give a shit if a couple of town kids decided to crash the college party, as long as they behaved themselves, but they were harassing the obvious non-humans before they even got to the door in order to keep them away.

They thought they could get away with it, because Oru and Shiel were “monster” races… but they didn’t have any idea what kind of monster was really standing in front of them. They didn’t have any idea what I could do to them, before they even had their stupid little swords out of their scabbards.

I pushed it away, taking a painfully deep breath of the icy air to center myself. The situation was already pretty fucked to begin with… it needed a slightly more rational response.

“Hey, guys… I’m not human, either,” I said, tipping my head up and pushing my hood back. The guards looked at me in confusion for a moment… then recognition reached their faces. “You didn’t ask for my ID.”

One of the three guards went pale and tightened his grip on his sword. I thought for a moment that I’d miscalculated here, and something inside me rejoiced at the prospect of bloodshed. His boss held up a hand to caution him. He relaxed. I pushed the feeling away.

“Just this once,” the lead guard said to Oru. “Make sure you carry your ID with you next time.”

We headed on towards the arena.

“I never carry my ID if I don’t have my backpack,” Oru said quietly. She was shaking all over. “My goblin clothes don’t have any pockets, and my jean pockets are all too small.”

“You could get a lanyard or some kind of clip thing,” Ian said. “Anyway, Mackenzie, are you sure it’s a great idea to threaten armed security guards?”

“That wasn’t a threat,” I said. “I figured they must have got a ‘don’t mess with this Harlot’ memo, with the arbitration pending.”

“You’d think they would clean up their act altogether, at least for a little while,” Ian said.

“They probably would, if it was just one single act,” I said. “I don’t think the university has a Dean of Evil Racism overseeing every single act of dickery… just the dicks at the bottom who know they can get away with this shit because the dicks at the top won’t care. They probably would care, now, but they’ve never paid attention before and they’re only starting to now.”

We let the conversation drop when we got in easy earshot of the door guards, who looked with a mixture of curiosity and confusion at our group, but didn’t say anything. I figured they must have seen at least part of the confrontation with the outer guards.

The arena interior was done up in an old style, with purple velvet and gold-colored trimmings. It had a box office for when they held fighting events and exhibitions, but that wasn’t open now. Instead there were a pair of long tables with posterboard hanging from the front, with the same two basic messages repeated in various ways: “Contribute to the Harvestend Fund” and “Pay What You Can”.

“They’re having a dance to pay for the Harvestend Dance?” I said to Ian. He just shrugged and dropped a pair of silver coins in a middle-aged volunteer’s bucket for us.

“Thank you, and Lord Khersis bless you both,” she said. A wave of pain and vertigo swept over me, and I swayed, grunting. “Oh, is she okay?”

“Coat check?” Ian replied, steadying me. I felt a little bit nauseous. I was really glad that casual blessings weren’t nearly as common among our generation as they had been for the previous ones. It might have said something sad about the state of spirituality or civility or something, but it was pretty darn convenient for me.

Of course… that kind of attitude was probably a pretty decent indicator of my evil nature, but it was true. I couldn’t pretend otherwise.

“Right over there,” the volunteer said, pointing. “Is she going to be alright?”

“She’s fine,” Ian said. He led me over to a counter set into the wall just past the box office.

“Hi there!” the girl behind the counter said. She looked more like a current student. “Check your coats and weapons, guys?”

“Yes, please,” I said.

“You want separate claim tickets?”

I looked at Ian. I was starting to recover and was now sure I wasn’t going to lose anything that remained of my dinner, but I was still leaning on him in a literal sense.

“Better make it one,” he told her. “She’s a little… accident-prone.”

I put the pitchfork on the counter, and Ian helped me out of my big bulky coat.

“That’s a big coat for this early in the year,” the attendant said as Ian handed it to her, then took off his denim jacket and sword belt.

“It’s really cold outside,” I said.

“Really? It wasn’t that bad when we were setting up,” she said, filling out the ticket. She grinned. “Maybe I should hope that somebody forgets to claim their coat so I have something to wear on the way back.”

“Ha, yeah,” Ian said.

“Last name?” she asked.

“Mason,” he said.

“Here you go, honey,” she said, tearing off our ticket and handing it to him. He pocketed it. She threw my coat over her shoulder and picked up his belt and jacket. “You guys have a great night, and don’t lose that.”

“Thanks,” Ian said, and we headed onwards towards the dance proper as she turned to stow our coats and Ian’s weapon, with the pitchfork still sitting on the counter.

“I think I’ll take ‘have a great night’ over ‘bless you’,” I said.

The arena was octagonal, with a sunken floor in the middle and tiered seats on six sides. One side was given over to the entrance area, and the one directly across from it was an empty stage. The overhead lights had been mostly doused. Sound crystals and assorted light orbs were set up around the edge of the pit, which served as the dance floor. We couldn’t see down inside yet, but if the crowd at the entrance and around the edges were any indication, this dance was a lot bigger than the welcome one had been.

We’d just made it to the steps that would take us down to the next tier when the sound of a scuffle behind us cut through the throbbing dance music and crowd noise. I whipped around to see what was happening.

“Looks like there’s something going on by the coat check,” Ian said. He pointed, but as soon as he’d said “coat check” I’d zeroed in on it. There was a cluster of people blocking off view of whatever was happening, but I could hear shrill, angry screaming.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Is it Oru and Moeli?”

He scanned the crowd near the entrance.

“No,” he said, pointing to the concessions stand. “See? There they are. I guess somebody just flipped their shit over something.”

I felt relieved. I wondered if it was at all racist of me to keep expecting them to get into trouble for being goblinoids… but considering the experience we’d just had outside, it seemed more like I was just being sensible.

“Want to go see what’s going on?” Ian asked.

“Not really. Come on,” I said, tugging on Ian’s arm. “Let’s head downstairs.”

If the fight or whatever didn’t concern us, I didn’t want to make it my concern. I had already decided there would be no pushing of luck tonight.

I hadn’t really noticed it the time we’d gone to town, though. While even the public parts of the interior were done up in a style similar to the chancellor’s office, the outside wasn’t that impressive. It looked like it sat very low to the ground and seemed to blend in with its surroundings. I got the impression that the only thing that prevented it from apologizing for taking up any space at all was that it didn’t want to draw attention to itself.

At the moment, it didn’t have much choice in the matter.

The day was getting on towards noon, and word of the protest was probably spreading through classes. If there had been a hundred students in front of the building the last time somebody gave the chancellor a headcount, the crowd must have grown since then… and it was even larger if you counted the gawkers and onlookers who weren’t obviously participating but hovered around the edges. Those were all humans.

The group actually in the midst of things was a lot more mixed. In addition to Harlowites, there were also humans and about a dozen or so dwarves, including—I was pretty sure—my former classmate, Karl, son of Krieg. Feejee and Iona, the mermaids, stood among them. It was kind of an odd juxtaposition.

Everybody I expected was there, of course. To my surprise, the centerpiece of spectacle seemed to be Dee.

In spite of the sunlight and very public setting, she had thrown off her hooded cloak and her robes. She sat completely nude right in the middle of it all, cross-legged beneath a large parasol with her eyes closed. She’d set up placards around herself, with a single word written in multiple languages, one on each line. I recognized the two elvish scripts and high draconic, but the only one I could actually read was the Pax: “SHAME.”

I supposed it must have made some sense to her.

The crowd gave her a wide berth, out of what I hoped was respect. Some people seemed to be either gawking or very clearly averting their eyes, but both seemed to be in the minority.

Amaranth was the center of a rather large knot of mostly human, mostly male students that she addressed enthusiastically while they looked on attentively. Steff stood on a table with refreshments and banners for the Prism Pride Coalition and GSH, surrounded by what I assumed were those groups’ members. It took me a moment to spot Celia. Rather than leading a group in chanting slogans as I might have expected, she was being led by Shiel the kobold, who stood on a retaining wall holding a sign that said “WHO WILL BE NEXT?”

There was kind of a party atmosphere. Some people batted around balls, and there were a couple pairs of people sparring here and there. Some of the humans had brought music boxes or sound crystals, and several different songs competed with the jumble of talking and chanting, but they all lost out to the band that had set up on the edge of the crowd. It took me only a moment of wondering where they’d come from before I recognized the shirtless lute player, his head bowed low as he concentrated on his playing.

Sooni and her nekos were present, as well, though none of the cats looked very happy. They all held signs. Kai’s was bilingual, and said “End Oppression Now!” in precise block letters and (presumably) the same message in Yokano symbols. Maliko’s just had the big red circle-and-slash “NO” symbol on it, with nothing in the middle… probably a cultural mistranslation. Suzi’s read “SAV MAKCEN Z” in big loopy handwriting.

To my great surprise, Sara and Tara Leighton were also there… though while the hand on Sara’s side of their body held a sign that said “BAN TELAPORTS NOW”, Tara’s sign read “I’m Not Here.” They were both glaring at each other and it looked like they’d been fighting with markers. Finbar was a short distance away, clearly trying to pretend he wasn’t with either of them.

I took all this in within the first few moments of stepping out into the bright sunlight. The chancellor and I had come out without any announcement or warning, and the crowd didn’t notice us all at once. The chants stopped, the conversations died, and the general buzz and murmur faded away. Finally, the only sound left was from Ian, pouring all that he had into the lute. Once again, I was impressed by how good he really was.

Then, he noticed the lack of noise around him and stopped, looking up sheepishly.

So cute.

“Hi, Mack!” Two called from somewhere in the crowd.

“If I may have your attention, please,” the chancellor said.

Dee’s eyes opened in tiny slits.

“You’re supposed to say ‘hi’ back!” Two complained, and this time I spotted her. She was among the group around Amaranth.

“Hi, Two,” I said, waving.

“As you can all see, our missing student has been recovered safe and sound, thanks in large part to the efforts of Professor Scott Smith of the delving and discovery department.”

The applause at this statement was mingled with boos and hisses, especially from the group with Shiel and Celia. Chancellor Davies ignored this.

“As many of you will already have heard, Mis… Ms. Mackenzie has spent most of the morning in the university’s famous labyrinth,” the chancellor said, putting her hand on my shoulder. I resisted the urge to pull away. “Though she suffered no lasting injuries, she’s no doubt greatly fatigued and was only recently discharged from the healing center for magical exhaustion. Therefore, I ask that you do not burden her with a lot of questions about her ordeal. The faculty of Magisterius University joins you all in celebrating the safe return of one of our own. A celebratory luncheon will be served shortly in the area of the pent and the student union plaza, provided by Sloan Food Services.” She paused, and then added, “Students with particular dietary requirements may let the catering staff know, and every attempt will be made to meet them.”

It was pretty obvious that the purpose of the lunch was to move the crowd away from the administrative building as quickly as possible now that the crisis was over. Few things appealed to a college student more than free food.

The chancellor made a big show of shaking my hand and giving me a quick hug, then disappeared back inside. The guards who had been standing all along the front of the building closed ranks, blocking the door.

Amaranth tried to run to me as soon as the chancellor finished speaking, but her crowd of admirers was reluctant to part for her. Dee rose seemingly by just straightening her legs. She was quite a vision to behold, nude, with her white hair framing her head and torso like a halo of light. Ethereal beauty and grace were not exclusively the province of surface elves, though their darker cousins generally kept themselves hidden away one way or another.

She pulled on her robe, which she’d folded up and placed on top of her spread-out cloak. She donned the cloak, and drew the cowl over her head and face. Watching her dress herself was a bit like watching some kind of transformation. I’d never before noticed how bulky her garments made her look compared to her actual size. Now, I was reminded of fighters donning heavy armor.

While I watched Dee’s transfiguration, Steff reached me ahead of anybody else. She crashed into me, wrapping her arms around me in a crushing embrace and kissed me, open-mouthed, to pronounced whooping and hollering from the pride contingent. For a moment, I was too stunned to reciprocate, and she drew back, hurt and confused. I pulled her to me and kissed her back. There were wolf whistles and applause… and a few calls of derision.

We broke the clench as more people approached, Two and Ian among them. I hugged Two, then passed her into Steff’s arms and kissed Ian. Dee seemed to have vanished completely… parasol, placards, and all. I looked around for Amaranth, but she was still looking for a way through the crowd, too gentle to shoulder her way through it. Now that the crisis was over, too, she was starting to attract more interest from the guys around her, who crowded in closer and groped at her.

She stood on her toes and shot me an imploring look over the heads of the people in front of her. I wanted to run for her, but suddenly a boy was in my way. I tried to get around him, but he moved to block me.

“Hi, there… I’m Kent Angstrom, with the Gazetteer,” he said. “Is the pitchfork supposed to be some kind of statement?”

“Um, hi,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’m trying to…”

“I just have a few questions. Did I hear the chancellor call you Ms. Mackenzie?”

“She gets abused by the healing center and dumped into a dungeon and that’s all you want to know about?” Steff asked. “Her choice of title?”

“Well, you have to admit, it’s an unconventional form,” Kent said. “I just wondered what it’s supposed to signify.”

“Conventions are for nerds and salesmen,” Steff said. She stepped between us. “Everybody has the right to be addressed as they see fit.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like ‘Ms. Mackenzie’ to speak for herself,” Kent said.

“Hey, man,” Ian said. “She just wants to see her friends.”

“Considering the cross-section of the campus that turned out in support of her, that seems a little selfish,” Kent said. He turned to me. “People have questions. They’re going to want answers.”

“Look, I understand that, but I’m not sure I should be talking to anybody right now,” I said. Would doing so help or hurt my case? I really probably did need a lawyer.

“So, you’re planning to sue the school, then?”

“I didn’t say that,” I said. “Look, I just want to get to Amaranth.” Looking past the student reporter, I could see that she was being positively mobbed now.

Kent glanced over his shoulder. She’d just been lifted off her feet, a pair of men holding her legs and another moving between them. Clothing was being flung carelessly away.

“I think you’re going to have to get in line,” he said with a smirk.

My hand was in a fist and came up.

“Honey, no!” Steff cried. She and Ian both grabbed me. I let them pull me back.

“Look, man… back off,” Ian said.

“I’m just doing my job,” Kent said.

“Go do it somewhere else,” Ian said.

“I can take a hint,” Kent said, holding up his hands. “Stories are going to be written either way. I just thought you might like to have some input in what they say.”

Celia, Shiel, and some of their group had drifted over by this point.

“Hey, is this guy bothering you?” Moeli the hobgoblin asked. “You heard the chancellor, man.”

I couldn’t even see Amaranth any more, there were so many people around her now. I wanted to cry.

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” Kent said.

“Why don’t you, mammal?” Celia said, getting her snake-eyed visage right up in his face. Shiel, along with Oru and a couple of male goblins I didn’t know, partially surrounded him. He paled and stepped back.

“Fine,” Kent said. He looked at me. “I’ll talk to you later, though.”

“Fine,” I said. “I look forward to it.”

“Good,” he said, straightening his shirt and then walking away through the crowd.

I’d kind of expected Sooni, in her capacity as my self-declared “best friend”, to have led the charge towards me, but she seemed too busy with her own admirers to think of that. There were a few boys, but it was mostly girls, obviously fixated on her ridiculous hair or lavishing attention on the nekos. They were petting and scratching them, like they were actual animals.

Maliko and Kai looked murderous… but Suzi seemed to be into it.

“Hey, sweetie, you want me to try to dig Amy out?” Steff asked.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “She’s working.”

“Are you sure?”

I wasn’t, but I was sure enough. I wanted to sink into Amaranth’s warm curves and forget the arrows and hellhounds and everything else, but I didn’t want to disrupt her work. Giving her body to whoever wanted it was her sacred responsibility.

“Let’s just go to the lunch thing,” I said. “We can get some food and make an appearance and then go back to Harlowe. Amaranth can catch up.”

“Okay, you’re the boss,” Steff said. She gave me another kiss. “I’ll just run and go tell her the plan.”

She was off before I could say anything, using an odd combination of agility and boldness to get through the wall of onlookers and participants around Amaranth. She came back with a big grin on her face.

“That girl really knows how to take it in stride,” she said. “Or in anywhere else.”

Two ran up to grab my hand when we started walking.

“Where’s your friend, Hazel?” I asked her.

“She wanted to come, but her cousin Honey made her promise not to,” Two said. “She said, ‘What if the police get involved?’ But we weren’t breaking any laws. I checked.”

“I think Honey’s just a little sheltered,” I said.

“She’s a little goody no-shoes, you mean,” Steff said.

“I’m sure she means well,” I said.

“You really are Amy’s toy,” Steff said, shaking her head.

“And proud of it,” I said. To Ian, I said, “I, um, heard you playing, a little bit.”

“We were just sort of messing around,” he said.

“It was good,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Not yet,” he said. “But maybe we will be.”

They’d set up a bunch of portable grills and picnic tables in front of the union, with hot dogs, hamburgers, and chicken breasts. We hung around for a bit, and people kept coming up in ones and twos to introduce themselves or tell me they were glad I was okay. A lot of people seemed to just be there for the food, though, and I overheard quite a few people asking what it was there for.

I got my share of incredulous and even dirty looks from those who apparently couldn’t believe it was somehow in my honor.

When I judged that I’d done my duty, we went through the line. I made a pair of chicken sandwiches with hamburger buns and some mustard, and got a few carrot sticks and two little strawberry swirl ice cream cups. I saw Two take another ice cream cup after I got mine, and smiled.

“Your butt’s going to keep getting bigger if you keep eating like that,” Steff said.

“What do you mean, ‘keep getting bigger’?” I said, scowling. I tried to twist around to look behind me. “It’s the same size it’s always been.”

“No,” Two said, shaking her head. “It’s bigger.”

I looked at Ian. “What are they talking about?”

He threw up his hands and shook his head. “I’m not saying anything.”

“My butt is not big,” I said.

“I didn’t say big, I said bigger,” Steff said.

I started to put one of the ice creams back, but she grabbed me by the wrist.

“I didn’t say it’s a bad thing,” she said. “You’re starting to fill out, is all.”

“Why can’t it go up top instead?” I said, though I still didn’t quite believe her. I didn’t feel any different.

“Wait and see,” Steff said. “Maybe it’s working its way up.”

“I like your little breasts,” Ian said. I glared at him. “I mean, I like the size they are.”

“Thanks,” I said, deciding to take it in the spirit it had been intended. I’d almost died at least twice in the past week… possibly more times, if I counted the attacks of the previous weekend. I didn’t want another stupid, pointless fight with Ian.

We had to use both hands to carry our floppy paper plates, except for Steff who somehow managed with one. Two walked as close to me as she could on the way back to the hall. I would have liked for Amaranth to be there, too, but the company of two of my lovers and my adopted sister was enough to make me feel safer and more comfortable than it seemed like I’d felt in a long time.

“Hey, Two,” I said as we left the union. “Would you like to help me deliver my campaign letters?”

“Okay,” Two said.

“That’s a wonderful idea… I’ll see you guys at dinner, then,” Amaranth said, giving me a kiss on the forehead and then on the lips while Two received her accustomed tokens of affection from Steff.

When we got back to our room, I was startled to find two more of my grandmother’s letters waiting on my desk, along with the unfinished campaign letters.

Well, startled probably wasn’t the word. There was a moment I thought I’d been petrified.

“What the hell?” I asked, staring at the letters.

“I brought the mail up,” Two said. “You can get it Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and I will get it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That’s fair.”

“Okay,” I said, wishing my heart would start beating again. For a moment, I thought my grandmother had actually started delivering her letters in person. I held them up. “Two, if I get any more of these, just have whoever’s on the desk vanish them.”

“Okay,” she said. “But… I can vanish paper.”

“You can?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Would you like me to vanish those?”

“Yes, please,” I said, handing them to her. For a moment I had a crazy image of her tipping her head back, opening her mouth extra wide and swallowing them. Instead, she just waved her hand over them and they dissolved into smoke.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Why did you not would like to read them?” she asked.

“Because there’s not going to be anything good in them,” I said.

“I thought they were letters from yourself,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Just make sure you vanish any more that show up,” I said. “Anyway, let’s get to work.”

I started quickly signing the bottoms of the letters and then passed them to Two to address, until we finished enough for our side of the hall, then I let her go deliver them while I finished up the rest.

A short time later, a letter slid under our door. Smiling at Two’s relentless completism, I went over to pick it up and saw that she had addressed it to both herself (with her name written in runes) and me.

I was standing close enough to the door that I clearly heard the sound of the next door over opening, and one of the Leighton twins saying, “Hey, what are you doing, messing around with our door?”

“I am not messing around with your door,” Two said. “I am putting letters under it. Could you please close it again? I have two more letters that I need to…”

I opened my door just as the Leightons’ slammed closed. I hurried up to Two to give her support, but she simply said “Thank you!”, crouched down, and slid the other two letters under the door. They came sliding out almost immediately, followed by another one, which was crumpled up.

Two was already on to the next door, absolutely untroubled.

“That’s real mature, guys,” I said through the door, picking up the letters.

“Dork!” the two girls said, not quite in concert.

“Seriously, did you guys go straight from fifth grade to college?”

“Who is that?” one of the twins said. “I’m looking out through the peephole and I can’t see anybody there.”

“Maybe she’s standing too close.”

“Maybe it’s one of the gnomes.”

“Or the kobold.”

“I am not that short,” I said.

“Hey! I hope you know we wiped our ass on that letter!” one of them said.

“Tara did that, actually,” (apparently) Sara said. “That was all her.”

“Only because you’re such a prissy little wuss about everything.”

“I am not a wuss!”

That was followed by a sound of impact and simultaneous exclamations of pain, and then what sounded like a miniature brawl.

It was no wonder they were in counseling. I shook my head and headed after Two.

“I was going to pick those up after I finished with the letters,” Two said, pointing at the discarded letters. “We’re not supposed to leave trash in the hallway.”

“This is actually Twyla’s letter,” I said, looking at the one that the Twins had apparently defaced. I held it by the edges, though there was no obvious sign they’d actually put it to the use Tara had claimed. “I’d really like to get it… well, a clean copy of it… to her, but I don’t think the Leightons are going to make that easy.”

“I can fix this,” Two said, taking it from me.

She concentrated on it, moving her lips in the silent recitation of a spell. The crinkles in the paper smoothed themselves out as she stared down at it, her forehead furrowed.

“There,” she said when it was once again completely flat. “It’s restored.”

“Thanks, Two,” I said. “Um, would that have cleaned anything off it?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding.

“That’s good,” I said. “Now I just have to figure out how to give it to her. I hardly ever see her around the hall.”

“You could put it in her mailbox,” Two said.

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Unless the twins check the mail first. I guess I could put it in an envelope, though. If I had an envelope.”

“I have envelopes,” Two said. “Would you like me to do that?”

“Sure… wait, no,” I said, remembering the copy I’d made of Twyla’s angel drawing. This would be a good chance to get it to her. “Let’s do it together, after we get the rest of these delivered.”

“Okay,” Two said. “I did all of these doors so it’s only fair if you do the others, but I do not mind keeping you company.”

I smiled.

We started at Hazel and Honey’s door. Two crouched down and took the marker board off and started writing on it while I slid the letter underneath. She bent down and reattached the board. I stepped back so I could see what she’d written.

Hi, Hazel. How are you? Mack’s delivering campaign letters and I’m helping. Goodbye.

-Two.

After that, it felt like I was going into hostile territory. The next door down was Hissy and Belinda’s. I strongly considered skipping them, given the letter’s references to the events of the weekend, but Two prompted me to act when I stood frozen in front of the door.

“Mack, you’re supposed to be delivering letters,” she said.

“You’re right,” I said, taking a breath. I crouched and slid the letters under the door, quickly moving on to Sooni’s room, and then the nekos’.

I hadn’t even stooped down in front of the next door when it opened and Leda the swan maiden almost crashed into me on her way out of her darkened room. I stared at her, startled.

“What?” she said. She had bags under her eyes and her accent was thickened, making it sound like “vhat?”

I held out her and Rocky’s letters. She snatched them out of my hand without giving them a glance. Her eyes were fixed on me. She stood uncomfortably close, and it hurt my neck to look up at her.

Somehow, it didn’t occur to me until just that moment that I could step back.

“You are friends with Steff?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, remembering how Steff’s problems had seemed to start after the encounter Dee had told me about. “What happ…”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “Tell him, neither does he.”

She slammed the door in my face. I stared at the wood, a strange fury building up inside me.

Steff claimed not to care how people referred to her, but the way she latched onto me thinking of her as a girl said otherwise. I wondered how much of her current problems could be chalked up to a world full of people who’d treat her as a freak or a confused guy… it sure couldn’t have helped things.

“Steff’s a she!” I yelled. “And what do you mean, you don’t remember?” There was no response. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

The continuing silence infuriated me. I knocked on the door. Well, I pounded on it… kind of gently, though.

“Come on out here and say she’s a she!” I said. “Hey, I’m talking to you, you…” Words escaped me. “Stupid!”

The door opened, and I opened my mouth to give Leda a further piece of my mind… and choked on my words when I saw it was Rocky, with her sword out.

“Give me an excuse,” she said. She had the campaign letter in her other hand. “You think anybody’s going to vote for you? You may have some people fooled with your helpless little nerd act, but I know what you are.”

“Do you have any idea what Sooni is?” I countered.

She shut the door. I let out a frustrated grunt through my closed mouth. I was getting the sick, shaky feeling I seemed to get after violence, even though nothing had actually happened.

“Come on, Two,” I said. “Let’s go get Twyla’s letter taken care of.”

“But you have two more letters to deliver,” Two said.

“No, I don’t really feel like tempting fate any more today,” I said, since those letters belonged to Puddy and Mariel. “Let’s just do Twyla’s and call it a day.”

“Okay,” Two said, though she sounded slightly disappointed at the thought of leaving the task uncompleted.

“Well, I guess we could put theirs in their mailbox, too,” I said.

“Okay,” Two said, more sincerely.

That was probably a better idea. My days of trying to please Puddy were over, but she might feel hurt if she thought I’d intentionally left her out, and that could lead to bad things. I wouldn’t kowtow to Puddy, but I wouldn’t do anything to provoke her if I could avoid it.

Two produced three envelopes when we got back to our room and started addressing them. I’d just planned on asking whoever was at the desk to put the letters in their mailbox, but she hummed as she filled them out so I let her do it.

“Don’t put a return address on Twyla’s,” I reminded her, after seeing her do the ones for Puddy and Mariel.

I scrawled a quick note on the bottom of Twyla’s campaign letter, explaining that I’d scribed off a copy of her picture in case she decided she wanted it later, then folded the picture and letter up and sealed them while Two did the other two.

We took them downstairs. Moeli the hobgoblin was on the desk again. Oru the goblin was sitting on the counter, picking cheese off a convenience store hamburger and talking to him when we approached. He put a hand almost as big as Oru’s head up to her when he saw me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” I said. “Um, I don’t mean to interrupt…”

“It’s okay,” he said. “You got some mail to go out? I can put postage on it for you.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s actually intra-campus.”

I handed him the envelopes. He looked at them, then looked at me.

“These are all on your floor,” he said. “Can’t you just stick them under a door or something?”

“Could you please just take care of it for me?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll do it now.”

He lumbered off behind the row of mailboxes. I gave Oru a shy smile.

“Hi,” she said, a little snippily.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi!” Two said.

“You know,” Moeli said, returning to the counter, “if you ever do have any outgoing mail, if you make sure you come by when I’m on duty I can totally take care of the postage.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Two said.

“Thanks, Moeli, really,” I said. “But there’s absolutely nobody I’d want to write to.”

“Not even your pen pal with the red envelopes?”

“Especially not her,” I said.

Oru was glaring at me.

“Come on, Two,” I said.

“Tonight is bingo night,” Two reminded me on the way back up the stairs. “My friend Hazel is going and her cousin Honey might, too. Do you think you will go?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll have to see how I feel.”

“Do you mean because of your period or because you do not like bingo?”

I smiled.

“Bingo’s okay,” I said. “It’s just not my favorite thing. I’ll think about it. Ask me at dinner.”

“Okay,” Two said.

When we got back upstairs, I received yet another shock: Sooni was hammering furiously on my door.

“Um… can I help you?” I asked.

She turned on me, her face a snarling mask.

“Just what is the meaning of this?” she demanded, the letter clutched in her hand.

“It’s my campaign letter,” I said.

“Hi, Sooni,” Two said.

“How dare you insult me like this?”

“I gave one to everybody,” I said, thinking she must have thought I’d singled her out or something.

She stomped her sandaled foot. I jumped, feeling an odd tingle for some reason.

“Well,” she said, “you had best start getting them back before anybody else reads them!”

“When somebody says ‘hi’, you’re supposed to say ‘hi’, back,” Two said.

“What exactly do you object to in my letters?” I asked Sooni.

“I’m not giving you any more cookies if you won’t say ‘hi’.”

“You should probably let it go, Two,” I said.

“Listen to what you wrote!” Sooni said. She began to read, tossing her head back and forth and speaking in a mocking sing-song. “‘I hope that you all will vote for the candidate you think will do the best job, not the one who is the more socially acceptable race.’”

She finished and glared at me, a triumphant smirk on her face as if she dared me to deny I’d written such damning words.

“Uh, yeah?” I said. “So?”

“I am the more socially acceptable race!” Sooni raged.

Was that some kind of insult, to her?

“In a lot of people’s minds, yeah,” I said.

“That means you think people should think you are the best candidate!”

I stared at her, trying to figure out where she was going… and eventually figured out she’d already arrived.

“Well, that’s why I’m running, Sooni,” I said. “Because I think I can do a better job than you.”

“Ooh… you take that back!” Sooni said, stomping again. I stared at her foot. She had such tiny, delicate feet and she wore such big, clunky sandals. She said something else. I started to form a reply and then I realized I hadn’t quite caught exactly what she’d said.

Did she paint her own toenails, or did one of the cats do it?

“You… aren’t… even… listening!”

“What?” I said, looking up just in time to get smacked in the face with a wave of green energy.

After the past weekend, though, what could I actually say? I’d spooked the shit out of Trina with my burning eyes, tried to eat Rocky, and… well, I didn’t really understand what I’d done to Hissy. Of course, it was pretty likely that none of those girls had been among my ardent supporters to begin with.
In fact, I was sure Trina had voted against me. As a triclops, she was half-human, and she seemed to believe the most outlandish rumors about demonkind that were around. Not that the truth was a whole lot better, but I sure as hell hadn’t eaten somebody’s face to gain human appearance.

I got another surprise when I came out of the stairwell and into the fifth floor hallway. The door to the R.A.’s room actually opened, and Kiersta started to come out with a little sticky note in her hand.

She froze when she saw me, looking guilty for some reason.

“Uh, hi,” I said.

“Um… I was going to put a note on your door?” she said, her voice high and quavery. “Gwen says you haven’t been checking your mail?”

“Yeah, well, I haven’t been expecting any,” I said, wondering how they knew who checked their mail and if I should be worried or offended.

“She said the box is getting full and you need to go down and pick it up,” Kiersta said.

“What is it, coupons and stuff?” I asked. “They can just dump it.”

“I’m just saying what she told me to say,” Kiersta said, and I believed her. Outside of floor meetings, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen our residence advisor. She’d gone from forcefully chipper on the first night to a nervous wreck in record time.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go down and get it, then.”

She backed into her room and shut the door. I heard it lock, and then what sounded like a chain sliding into place.

If she was that afraid of her residents, why didn’t she quit or ask to be reassigned?

When Celia had questioned the presence of a human R.A. in the non-human dorm, I’d put it down to the same knee-jerk anti-humanism that had made her suspicious of me in the beginning. Now I could see a little bit of wisdom in her view. At the very least, they should have made sure their Harlowe R.A. candidates were prepared to co-exist with a variety of races.

The mailboxes were in the basement by the front desk, which had three pizza boxes stacked up at one end. A bunch of empties were on the floor beside it… the remains of the free meal catered in to give the non-human students an alternative to using the cafeteria and disturbing the more sheltered humans.

There were some people sitting in the chairs closest to the big TV, at the far end of the room. They were talking and eating. I thought one of them might have been Trina, but I couldn’t tell from just the top of the back of her head, and I didn’t want to draw their attention by staring.

The desk attendant on duty was a hobgoblin, with floppy ears and a mottled green-gray complexion like Oru up on my floor, only about as tall as a human. I wondered if he was actually an R.A., or if he was just in on some kind of work-study program.

“Um, how do I know which mailbox is mine?” I asked him, after staring at the mailboxes and realizing that despite having been given a key, I hadn’t been told which box it went with.

“They’re by room number,” he said.

“Oh, right,” I said, feeling profoundly stupid. “Thanks.”

“You’re Blaise?” he asked “Mackenzie Blaise?”

“Yeah,” I said, wondering what wild rumor I was about to be treated to.

“You should check your mail more often,” he said. “It’s getting really hard to jam stuff in there.”

“It’s only been two weeks,” I said. “How much could I have?”

He shrugged.

There were four rows of boxes. The 400s were on the bottom, thankfully. If they’d been the top row, I would have had to stand on my toes. How did the shorter races manage? That was something else to think about.

I found the one labeled 417 and opened it.

I knew who was sending me mail as soon as I opened the box and saw red… the same thick red paper envelopes I’d used to send off my college applications, with the same return address stamped in the corner:

M. Blaise
823 Hawthorne St.
Little Turning, Treholme Province

There were eleven of them… eleven letters for two weeks. The first one was dated from the day I left. There were also some coupons and promotional flyers that had probably been stuck in everybody’s mailbox, but those eleven letters in their bulky, hard-to-fold envelopes constituted the extent of my personal mail.

I started to dump the whole thing in the little wastebasket that sat on the floor beside the mailboxes, but it was close to overflowing with other peoples’ junk mail, and it occurred to me that to somebody like Trina or Sooni, the lure of somebody else’s unopened mail might prove irresistible, even before they saw who it was addressed to.

“Hey… um… do you have a vanisher back there?” I asked the guy behind the desk, holding up the letters. Upon second thought, it seemed like a good idea to at least look at the coupons and stuff. Who knew? There could be something good there.

“Yeah,” he said. He held out a hand for the envelopes. “You don’t even want to open them?”

“Just vanish them, please?” I said.

He shrugged again, and started feeding them one by one into something beneath the counter. Little puffs of reddish-pink smoke drifted up.

“All gone,” he said.

“Thanks…”

“Moeli,” he supplied.

“Thanks, Moeli,” I said. “Um, is there any way you could just do that if any more of those come for me?”

“Couldn’t,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t sort the mail every day, anyway.”

“Oh, okay,” I said.

“Bad break-up?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“The letters,” he said.

“I guess you could say it’s something like that,” I said. “Anyway, thanks.”

“No problem,” he said. “I’m always on duty. Well, not really. In a little bit I get to go to lunch, and then I have class.”

“You didn’t eat the pizza?” I asked.

“Dairy gives me stomach cramps,” he said. “Most goblinfolk can’t handle the tit juice, you know. I usually just get something from the store, anyway.”

“You ever eat in the dining hall?” I asked.

He gave me an incredulous look, as if to say, “Seriously? Me?” and then waved one big floppy hand dismissively.

“It’s got more choices than the corner store,” I said.

“I show my face there and they’re going to be shish kebabing me,” he said. “Anyway, I got in the habit of going to the store last year and just kept it up. What’s that saying about hobgoblins and foolish consistency?”

“Isn’t that a stereotype?” I asked.

Moeli shrugged.

“When I applied for this job, the lady looked right at me and said, ‘At least we know you’ll always show up,’” he said. “If I’m going to be stereotyped for something, consistency’s not a bad one. It beats bad hygiene. I picked out all my clothes to look the same because I can’t see in color, but a lot of people assume I’m just not changing them. Yet, you could go around wearing the same thing every day and nobody would…”

“Hey, I don’t wear the same clothes every day,” I said, my mouth running ahead before my brain registered the “could.”

“Huh, what?” Moeli said, a little shaken. “Sorry. I was speaking, what’s the word? Hypothetically.”

“Sorry,” I said, blushing. I’d have to tell Amaranth I’d lost my temper at somebody. That was automatic punishment. I’d been getting better at it, though. “Um, I should probably get going.”

“Alright,” Moeli said. “Nice talking to you.”

“Bye.”

I started to head back up to the fifth floor, but I stopped halfway up and went back down to the first floor hallway. I did have time to kill, and I needed to do something if I wanted to have any chance of winning the election. If nothing else, I could try to write some kind of damage control letter.

This time, the ballroom wasn’t empty. Twyla, the horned girl from my floor, was sitting in front of one of the crystal balls. Horns aside, she looked pretty human… a little on the heavy side, but she seemed to carry it well.

I wasn’t really looking at her, though. Suspended in the air in front of her was an image of a beautiful ivory-colored woman… no, an angel or other celestial of some kind.

I knew the school’s balls didn’t have projection abilities on their own which meant that she was evoking it herself somehow. I vaguely remembered that she was a divination major. The crystal balls that were mass-produced for ethernet gazing were just good enough that even an untrained scryer could see into the ethereal plane and then follow the network of silver threads to other nodes.

With sufficient practice, or a better ball, a diviner could pierce the veil twice in order to spy on distant locations. By law, ethernet balls had that blocked, but “h3xx0rz” usually figured out how to work around that. Twyla didn’t seem the type, but if she really had a talent for divination she’d probably be able to get a standard issue crystal ball to do all sorts of cool things.

She hadn’t heard me coming in, but when the door swung shut behind me, she jumped and started waving the image away.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Just… it’s just something I was working on,” she said, as the last of the picture faded.

“You made that?” I asked, amazed.

“I envisioned it,” she said.

“What’d you erase it for?” I asked, dumbfounded. “It was beautiful!”

“It… it w-was nothing,” she stammered. She grabbed up her books. “I have to go. Excuse me.”

She tried to stand without pushing her chair back first and almost toppled it over, then got her leg tangled up with it and nearly tripped before she finally made it to the door.

I was looking at the ball she’d left behind, though. She’d cleared the image out of the air, but the original figure was still visible within the orb, bobbing up and down in the ether. Without her focusing on it, it started to fade around the edges. I quickly touched my hands to the orb and willed it to scribe off a copy.

The resulting picture was two-dimensional and lacked some of the definition of the original, but I figured Twyla might be glad to have it anyway. If nothing else, she could use it as a reference if she ever wanted to re-create it.

I set the copy aside and got to work on my next letter. Where to begin, though? I didn’t want to come off defensive… and what if somebody hadn’t even paid attention to the latest rumors, until I went and put them in their face?

I decided to keep things vague.

By now you’ve probably heard some version of the events of this past weekend. I’m not about to drag a personal conflict out into the open, so all I’m going to say is that no matter what you heard, I was not the aggressor… and that I regret my part in it all the same.

There. I wasn’t exactly bucking responsibility but I wasn’t letting myself take the blame, either. It was a good enough opening, anyway, and I could use it to lead naturally into the next logical point, which obviously was… which was?

After a little more thought, it turned out to be this:

If these incidents have proven anything, it’s that we the non-human and marginalized students of Magisterius University should stand together instead of fighting among ourselves.

The fact is, we are all different. We all have different needs. The dining situation is only one example of that, but it’s a good one. Some of us can’t eat meat. Some of us might eat nothing but meat. Some of us like raw eggs and live rodents. Some of us can’t handle dairy products or wheat.
Some of us require a little bit of blood.

Yes, blood. That’s all I need to eat. Not a whole lot, and only once a month. If I forget, it can be dangerous, but that’s something I will be very careful about in the future. If I remember, I’m pretty safe, and no more likely to go around eating people than any of you are.

Of course, to some people on this campus, we all might as well go around eating people. We’re monsters. We’re ugly, scary, or just plain embarrassing. They let us come here to get an education because of an ideal of tolerance, and because of treaties and laws, but they don’t really want us here.

Not everybody feels that way, but if we don’t speak up… if we don’t act up… then it becomes that much easier for those who do to push us into a corner and keep us there.

We pay the same tuition as everybody else. Those of us who live in the I.R.M. are subject to the same taxes as everybody else. We have the same rights. We just need to remind people of that more often, and if you elect me as your student senator, that’s what I will do.

To those that I hurt

I stopped and erased those last five words, then began the paragraph again.

To those who were hurt attacking me, I offer my sincere apology. I really would have rather the whole thing hadn’t happened.

My composition teachers had always told me to avoid the passive voice, but it seemed the best fit here. I’d almost put “to those who hurt themselves”, but that didn’t sound right. The fact was Rocky and Hissy hadn’t hurt themselves, I had hurt them, and I did not feel great about it.

I tried not to think about it… the memory of Rocky’s flesh in my mouth, the crunch of her finger… the way Hissy had clawed at her face before she passed out…

I shuddered. Inside the orb, the letters began to writhe and curl, turning red. I regained my focus quickly and forced them to stabilize, then resumed writing.

I hope they can put it behind them, as I’ve put their actions behind me. When the re-vote is held on Friday, I hope that you all will vote for the candidate you think will do the best job, not the one who is the more socially acceptable race.

I scribed the letters off. I would add the signatures and salutations by hand for the personal touch. I wasn’t completely satisfied with it… the part about “those who were hurt” bothered me, and the whole “put it behind them” thing almost read as a threat; you blow the whistle on me and I’ll blow it on you. It seemed like it might be an effective letter, but it bothered me all the same.

I didn’t know how to get around those things, though. I really did want to put the last weekend behind me. I didn’t want to think about the things I’d thought about in my hungry state. I didn’t want to relive the things I’d fantasized about. I didn’t want to go through life remembering what blood hot and fresh from the vein was like. I didn’t want to remember the sweet candy taste of flesh or the crunch of bone between my teeth…

There was a wastebasket in the corner, and it received the remains of my sandwich and the lemon pudding. I hunched over it shaking for several minutes before I gathered up my things and headed upstairs.

I could finish the letters later. Right that minute, what I really wanted was a good, hot shower or bath… or failing that, an oblivion potion.

Well, not really. It would have been nice to forget, but probably dangerous, too. At least as long as I remembered, I knew I wouldn’t be making the same mistake again.