“Dead fucking serious,” she said.

I had to admit… if only to myself… that there was something attractive about the idea of being in a different dorm from Puddy, especially as it would also mean that I wasn’t in the same dorm as Trina or Mariel or the Leightons or anyone else who managed to get on my nerves or make trouble for me on a more regular basis than Puddy bothered to.

But there were people in Harlowe that I wanted to be close to, and I wouldn’t give them up in order to put some distance between my problems and me… and I especially wouldn’t do it on Puddy’s say-so.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “That isn’t going to happen.”

“Why the hell not?” Puddy asked, with a surprising amount of vehemence. I could understand her enthusiasm for the idea, but why should she be surprised that I wasn’t going for it?

“Um… because I’m not about to upend my whole life to please someone else,” I said. I spit that out a lot more baldly than I might have otherwise, just because the question had surprised me. It seemed so obvious… there was nothing reasonable about what Puddy was suggesting. “I’m not saying that to be spiteful,” I added, in order to sound a little less testy. “It’s honestly got nothing to do with the fact that it’s you, or how I feel about you. I might change dorms to be with someone but I wouldn’t do it just to please anyone.”

“Bullshit,” Puddy said. She was getting louder and louder. I started to wonder if it wouldn’t be better to have this conversation behind a closed door after all… not that this would stop anyone from noticing that she was shouting. It just seemed like we were violating the decorum of a screaming match, or something. “Pleasing people is all you ever do. You tiptoe around everyone and bend over backwards for them all the time.”

That was a pretty accurate picture of how I’d interacted with Puddy at the start of the year, but things had changed… and to some extent, I had, too.

“You don’t know what I do or don’t do,” I said. “You don’t know what my life is like or what I’m doing when you’re not around.”

“I know you,” she said. “And so I know what you’d do. You did it for me when I was your friend, and since you’ve made it really clear that you don’t actually give a shit about me, you must be doing it for other people, too.”

“Other people don’t push me into bending over backwards as often as you did,” I said. “And anyway, Puddy, you don’t know me that well.”

I was thinking that I’d grown a bit since then, but I figured that the biggest part was that she’d met me right after I arrived at school… at a moment when I was feeling very small and naked and off-balance. I felt like if I had encountered someone like Puddy a couple of weeks into the school year, I could have handled her a bit better. She wouldn’t have been able to take such complete advantage of me if we’d met after I had my bearings and had a bit of a routine and had miraculously failed to have been expelled and or arrested for straying across a line that I couldn’t see but that everyone else knew was there or something.

I kind of wanted to say all of that to her… well, maybe not all of it, but the fact was I still hadn’t changed that much. I was giving myself major points for being able to get out a sentence or two at a time while standing relatively firm with her.”

“Oh, what, ‘still waters run deep’?” Puddy asked. “You’re transparent, Mack. You’re like glass.”

“I thought that was you, while I keep myself all hidden,” I said.

“I didn’t say you were good at keeping secrets,” Puddy said. “If I hadn’t been able to see right through you, I wouldn’t have been able to get you to confide in me so easily when you didn’t want to.”

“Puddy, you seem like you’re comfortable everywhere you go. I really don’t know if that’s an act or not… I’m really not saying it is, I don’t know… but you acted like you belonged here from the minute you arrived. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was afraid of messing something up and looking like an idiot, or getting in trouble, or… whatever. That was the moment in my life when you were able to take control.”

“You’re always like that,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’m like that way more often than I should be, more often than is healthy… maybe even more often than not, I don’t know. I haven’t exactly done a time use study on the subject. But not always. And less often when I don’t have people in my life who take advantage of those moments, who try to keep me backed into a corner or beaten down to the point where they can assert control.” It was possible that not every one of those words actually made it out of my mouth, but I was trying to say what I was thinking instead of just swallowing it. Puddy wasn’t quite the open book she claimed to be, but she really did have less of a filter between her brain and her mouth than I did, I was sure. I could stand to be less in my head during these conversations. “Anyway, this is a huge digression from the point, which is that I’m not going to leave Harlowe to make you or anyone else happy. If you really knew me as well as you think you do, you’d know that I mostly back down because it seems like the easiest thing to do at the time… packing up and moving dorms would be way too much effort to be the path of least resistance.”

“I’m not only thinking about myself,” Puddy said. “Wouldn’t you be happier? I mean, why’d you even come here in the first place? You’re all ashamed about not being a human… you shouldn’t have even come here if you wanted to play make-believe about your race.”

“I’m not like proud of my specific flavor of non-human blood, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not being fully human,” I said. “And I came here because I thought it would be safer for me, and I thought I could stay in Harlowe and still keep a low-profile about my non-human status.”

“Yeah? How’s that working out for you? From where I’m standing, I think you’re zero for two there.”

“It wasn’t the best thought-out plan,” I said. “But it’s not like I had the experience to know better, or that moving out now would change how things have already worked out for me. And for that matter… things have worked out kind of okay for me, anyway. No, my plan didn’t work, and yeah, I haven’t always had the best time, but it hasn’t all been terrible… if I could go back and do things differently, there are some things I would change but I don’t think living in Harlowe would be one of them.”

“You’d just pick someone else to live with from the start,” Puddy said.

“Believe it or not, that wasn’t even on my mind when I said that,” I said. “I’m trying not to bruise your ego, Puddy, but my life doesn’t actually revolve around you. But since you’ve brought it up… do you really think your freshman year’s any better because you were assigned me as a roommate?”

“I don’t know, things were going okay until you went all… I don’t even know, stuck-up and ungrateful and stuff on me,” Puddy said.

“So you were happy to have me as a roommate until I went and ruined it?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Exactly.”

“Puddy… do you realize what that sounds like?” I said.

“Like we could have had a good enough time if you hadn’t been such a bitch.”

“You’re the one who told me I was a bitch,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be a smart ass… words have more than one meaning,” Puddy said. “You know what I mean.”

“Well, it sounds like you’re saying you would have been happy to have me as a roommate if I’d never developed a personality,” I said.

“See? You twist my words so much. Seriously, why did you even come here?” she asked. I swallowed my guilt and hoped her powerful insight into my transparent personality didn’t tip her off that I wasn’t telling something. Telling her that it had been Mariel’s idea probably wouldn’t end well for anyone. “You say you want to figure out how to avoid pissing each other off, but when I give you a perfect solution you reject it out of hand…”

“Puddy, you telling me what to do and me messing up what little life I have to do it is not some kind of amazing compromise,” I said. “I wanted to see if we could come to some kind of resolution where we can, you know, co-exist in the same place.”

“And I’m telling you we don’t have to,” she said. “You could leave.”

“So could you.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me… I’m not leaving. I had to fight my family to get in to Harlowe,” Puddy said. “I’m invested. You leave.”

“Why does anybody have to leave?” I said. “I just thought I could tell you that I don’t have it in for you or anything and we could just both agree that we’re not going to have anything to do with each other and then I’d wish you well and leave. You’d know that whatever random thing you notice me doing isn’t me attempting to show you up and I’d know that you’re not trying to spy on me and we’d both just get on with our lives.”

“You’re making it sound like I’m all paranoid or something and you’re completely innocent in all of that.”

That actually filled me with an overwhelming urge to laugh, which turned into a sort of sputter as I tried desperately to stop it. I’d spent half my life feeling like I was far from innocent, like I was incapable of innocence… if she’d been invoking friendship a little more often instead of just shouting and trying to get me to do what she wanted, I probably would have felt guilty right then and there.

I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t thinking of myself as “innocent”. My brain just didn’t work that way.

“Puddy… you sent Mariel to spy on me,” I said, recovering myself. “And guess what? I wasn’t talking about you. I wasn’t even thinking about you. I don’t think you’re paranoid. I think you’re self-centered, and before you get all mad about that, stop and think about how in like thirty seconds from now you’re going to say that of course you’re always looking out for yourself because that’s what everybody does.”

“Oh, so now you know me so well,” Puddy said.

“I know what I see when I look at you, and according to you that’s what I get,” I said. “The point is that you can’t be proud of how self-centered you are one minute and then get mad when somebody calls you on it.”

“You’re going to tell me what I can and can’t do now?” Puddy said. “Oh, that’s really fucking rich. You’ve got a lot of nerve coming in here to lecture me…”

“I’m not here to lecture you,” I said. “I’m not here to tell you how to live your life. Seriously, the only thing I want from you is… well… nothing. Can we please just agree that you’ll do your thing and I’ll do mine and we won’t care about each other? Is that really asking so much?”

“You’re acting like I’m…”

“I’m not acting like anything,” I said. “Puddy… you sent someone to spy on me. Obviously you had some reason to think that I was… I don’t even know… doing something that had anything to do with you, so I’m here telling you that I didn’t, I wasn’t, whatever… and I don’t see any reason for that to change.”

“So, what,” Puddy said. “Are you saying you’re just… done with me?”

I stared at her. She sounded so incredulous… not angry any more, just like she was in utter disbelief at what her ears were hearing, what her mouth was saying.

I kind of knew how she felt… hearing her put it so simply and so starkly was a bit of a revelation to me. Done with her? I supposed I was… I’d been clinging to my curiosity about her ancestry and her own past, what had happened to make Puddy the way she was, but I couldn’t really have it both ways.

“That’s not what I would have said, but basically? Um, yeah, I suppose I am,” I said. “I’m done with you. You don’t have to worry about what I’m saying when you’re not around or what I’m up to, because it’s got nothing to do with you. I can’t stop you from doing what you want… and I don’t care to try… but if the only reason you sicced Mariel on me was in case I was talking about you, well… you know that’s not true. So…”

“So you’re done with me,” she repeated. “What if I’m not done with you?”

“You wanted me to move out of the dorm you live in,” I said.

“And you wouldn’t,” she said. “So…”

“So what?” I said. “Puddy, I’m not defying you or however you’re choosing to take this. I’m just living in the dorm I’ve chosen to live in, a fact that has never had anything to do with you, and still has nothing to do with you. All that would happen if I moved is you would think you can still push me around and then you’d be even less done with me, but you know what? I don’t care. I’ve already said what I came up here to say like three times already, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life telling you that I’m done talking to you.”

I turned to leave before getting trapped in another round of circling around the same conversational drain, but some instinct, or reflex, or… more likely, some basic knowledge of Puddy stopped me. I turned back and saw her hand reaching out for my arm. She had stopped when she saw me stop, perhaps because it seemed like I wasn’t leaving after all.

The thought of Puddy’s hand clamping around me made my blood run cold and my stomach turn over on itself. Even while every bone in my body was threatening to turn into jelly, I knew that I had to stand firm. This was why I was done with her, why I had to be done with her. For my own safety, physically and emotionally.

“Puddy,” I said, with as much calm as I could find within myself. “If… you… touch me… I am going to start screaming, and I’m not going to stop until somebody expels or arrests you just to shut me up.”

“What the…”

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said, in a voice that was clear if somewhat quavering. I made myself keep my gaze steady on her face even as the stress of confrontation was making my hands shake like crazy. “And I’m not threatening you. I’m telling you. Don’t touch me. This isn’t about who’s in charge or who’s the boss or who’s the bigger dog. I’m not touching you, either. I’m leaving, Puddy, and I am done with you. How much time you want to waste worrying about me is up to you.”

“Fine! Whatever! I wasn’t going to… you don’t have to shout!” Puddy said. “Leave, if you’re leaving. I’ve got better things to do!”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, and I wasn’t sure that I could have said anything more, and then I realized that I didn’t need to say anything… that was the point of being done.

I walked out, and got on with my life.

Soon: Well, obviously Puddy is never mentioned again.

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But this time she was keeping pace with me and she wasn’t being unusually gropey or otherwise acting like she was particularly hard-up, or even just her regular amount of it. If anything, she seemed to be more than a little bit on edge.

“Um… is everything okay, Steff?” I asked her.

“What? Oh,” she said. “Yeah, I’m fine… I’m just, you know, trying to stay close to you.” She threw an arm around me, a gesture that couldn’t help seeming necessary from her. “It’s not safe out here, you know.”

“You’ve never seemed particularly safety-conscious before,” I said.

“My safety? No,” she said. “Yours? That, as the frog said to the miller’s son, is a different story. Somebody’s got to look out for you, kitten.”

“I’d rather stay away from feline-based terms of endearment,” I said, thinking of the nekos.

“Okay, but I’m not calling you ‘poodle’,” Steff said.

“Deal,” I said. “Anyway, it’s not even dark out yet… so what’s really on your mind?”

“Well, it’s getting there,” she said. “Sort of. Ish. But not all the monsters are afraid of the light… especially not the kinds you have to worry about. I just don’t want anyone to see you walking alone.”

“That’s… sweet, I guess,” I said. “What brought this on?”

“Something Jilly said,” she said. I winced, but it was a step up from her full nickname for Coach Callahan.

“About?”

“About not being a good idea to let anyone see you walking around alone,” she said. “She says that when a group of people who are used to feeling powerful or invulnerable have been scared witless by something and then been reassured, some of them end up taking a swing at the thing that scared them in the first place.”

“Or the nearest convenient scapegoat, I suppose,” I said. “That sounds sound enough, I guess, but I haven’t really seen anything like that. Yeah, there’s a lot of relief, but nobody’s come up and punched me. I’m actually having one of my better weeks, in terms of things like that.”

“Well, let’s just work on keeping it that way,” Steff said. “I kind of trust her judgment when it comes to things like what evil lurks in the hearts, et cetera… and what stupid and scared lurks there, too.” She fluttered her eyelashes at me and put on a hurt tone. “Unless… well… you’re not saying that you mind my company, are you?”

“Of course not!” I said quickly. Even knowing that she was hamming it up, I still felt guilty. My heartstrings had to come equipped with great big handles for easy gripping. “I love spending time with you, Steff… you know that.”

I expected her to laugh or something, but she just shook her head.

“Oh, Mack,” she said.

“What?”

“You’re almost making this no fun,” she said.

“If teasing people isn’t fun, maybe you shouldn’t do it,” I said.

“Let’s not get crazy… I said ‘almost’.”

“Well, there are other reasons not to do it,” I said.

“Mack… let’s be honest,” she said. “If I told you that I would never tease you again, you’d be heartbroken.”

“Well, there’s teasing and then there’s teasing,” I said.

“Yeah… so just tell me which one you don’t want me to do anymore, and I’ll take you at your word,” she said. “And if you wouldn’t mind doing one thing for me?”

“What?”

“Walk a little faster,” she said. “I mean, seriously, this moving at a human’s pace is killing me.”

“What, you think I’m dawdling so I can enjoy the cold a little bit longer?” I said. “Anyway, technically it’s my pace… is that what elves say instead of ‘a snail’s pace’?”

“When we remember that snails move,” she said.

Mariel was waiting for me in the girl’s stairwell in Harlowe, standing there at the first landing up with both sets of arms folded. I stopped when I saw her… having a conversation while walking up the stairs seemed like an easily avoided recipe for tripping. There was traffic heading in both directions, but not heavy enough to cause a collision. We both waited while a few people threaded their ways around us.

“What do you want?” Steff asked her when she figured out why I’d stopped.

“Hey, be nice,” I said quietly.

“What, do you want to spoil all of my fun now?” she asked.

“She’s not doing anything,” I said.

“Puddy’s waiting for you upstairs,” Mariel said to me, ignoring Steff.

“What, is she looking for a fight?” Steff said. “Or maybe an audience? That seems a bit more likely. She probably hasn’t had IDA recommended daily dose of attention yet…”

“She’s just looking to talk,” Mariel said.

“Yeah, well, maybe Mack doesn’t want to t…”

“Steff, I can speak for myself,” I said. “And… yeah, for certain values of ‘want’, I do want to talk to her. Or at least, I feel like I have to.”

“What the loving fuck?” Steff said. “Is this like when you ‘had’ to go out on a date with Sooni instead of being with me, because in the secret forgotten tongue of crazy people you’d promised her that? If so: fuck that, and get Amy to fuck the horse it rode in on. I thought you were done with Puddy.”

“I am… I will be. I want to be,” I said. “This is just for closure. To make sure she leaves me alone.”

“Mack, feeding a starving dog is not how you get it to leave you alone forever,” Steff said. “In fact, if it’s really starving enough, not feeding it pretty much guarantees that it will leave you alone. Though I’m not sure this metaphor extends quite that far.”

“Okay, look, I only told you she was waiting for you so you wouldn’t be all surprised and try to squirm your way out of it,” Mariel said. “I told her you said you wanted to see her, so if you back out now she’ll be… well, I’m going to look bad.”

“Oh, honey, I’m sure she’ll avoid your face if you ask nicely enough,” Steff said.

“Steff, I said I wanted to talk to her,” I said. “She wouldn’t be looking to talk to me if I hadn’t… if I backed out now, she’d have every reason to be upset.”

“A reason,” Steff said. “One reason. Do you want to stack that up against all the reasons you have to be upset with her?”

“She has her reasons, too,” I said. I was having a hard time calling to mind the specifics of what she’d said in the shared dreamscape, but that was part of the general impression I had. “I mean, everyone has their reasons for doing things. I’m not saying that her reasons are good, but they make sense to her…”

“And that and five coppers will buy you a can of soda,” Steff said.

“I thought it was ‘cup of coffee’,” Mariel said.

“I don’t drink coffee,” Steff said. “Why are you still here?”

“I just want to make sure she doesn’t back out,” Mariel said.

“I’m not going to,” I said.

“You’re not going to talk to her alone,” Steff said.

“I’m not going to go off with her, or go anywhere with a closed door,” I said. “But Steff… I don’t want this to be a big confrontation… or even a small one.”

“I’m not going to abandon you, Mack,” she said.

“Then don’t,” I said. “Just stay close. I’ll shout if I need you.”

Of course, I wouldn’t need to shout any more than Steff would need to be in the room with us to hear every word that was said, and I hoped that by saying this I would remind her of that without giving Mariel a similar mental nudge. I understood why she wanted to be there… it was about keeping me in sight and within arm’s reach, as she’d done on the way back from class. I wondered exactly what Callahan had said that had got her so spooked on my behalf, but now wasn’t the time for that.

“Fine,” Steff said, nodding.

“So you’re going?” Mariel asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Is she in her room?”

“Yeah,” she said. “She t… asked me if I wouldn’t mind clearing off for a bit, so I’m going to go have dinner.”

“Alright, then,” I said. “I’ll, uh… see you later.”

I didn’t really have any plan on doing so, but it seemed like something needed to be said to end the awkward encounter. I’d barely said it when Mariel hurried away… though from her point of view, she was probably moving pretty slowly.

“Well,” Steff said. “Once more unto the bitch?”

“That’s not nice,” I said as we headed upstairs. “And it just barely works, as wordplay.”

“That’s your real objection, isn’t it?” she said.

“Puddy’s room is right next to the stairs, so when we get upstairs, you just keep walking,” I said. “I’d like her to have the impression that I’m alone.”

“Do you have any particular destination in mind?” she said. “Remember, this isn’t my floor or my side.”

“Here, let me give you my key,” I said. I dug it out of my pocket… in the process, I caught my foot on the lip of a step and went sprawling forward.

“Good job,” Steff said, helping me up. “Most people only manage to fall the other way. Don’t let gravity keep you down.”

“Very funny,” I said.

I handed off the key and we continued on our way… or ways, as she ended up ahead of me well before the top of the stairs. I was silently hoping that Puddy’s door was open. The thought of dealing with my former roommate had a tendency to put me back into the mindset I’d had during my first few days at MU, in which I’d been quite a bit meeker. If I went in feeling all weak and submissive, she’d just walk all over me.

That thought seemed dangerously close to Puddy’s own philosophy, which she’d charmingly expressed to me in the form of “big dog vs. little bitch”. But I didn’t want to juggernaut over Puddy… I just didn’t want her doing so to me.

Luck was with me, though… insofar as luck can arrive in the form of someone like Puddy waiting for you. She was leaning against the bit of wall between her door and the one to the stairs.

“Well, well,” she said. “A little sylph told me that you had something to say to me. Who’d've thunk it?”

“Do you mind if we get out of the hall?” I said, nodding towards her open door. I figured that wording was a little safer than suggesting we go into her room. We’d end up in her room either way, but it seemed to me like you had to go further in to “go into the room” than you do to “get out of the hall”.

“What, are you ashamed to be seen with me?” she asked.

“If I were, why would I want to be seen going into your room?” I countered, then winced when I realized what I’d said. Oh, well.

“See? You can’t even say that with a straight face,” she said.

“I’m not ashamed of you, Puddy,” I said. “I have no reason to be. There’s just a lot of nosey people on this floor who are way too interested in… people like us.”

I really didn’t know if anybody gave any portion of a rodent’s anatomy about what Puddy did, but it seemed like a diplomatic misstep to suggest that I was the more interesting person.

“Alright,” Puddy said. She ushered me towards her room. “After you.”

“Do you think we should leave the door open?” I said as I headed in. I just stepped to the side of the doorway, just out of sight of the hallway. “It might look less suspicious.”

“Probably. I don’t care,” she said, following me. “I really don’t know where you got the idea that I care what anybody thinks of me.”

“Well, you put enough effort into making sure everybody thinks you don’t care about that,” I said.

“Truth in advertising, Mack,” she said. “I’m not going to apologize for who I am. If that’s what you’re looking for…”

“Who you are was never the problem… it’s what you do.”

“They’re the same thing. I am what I do and I do what I am… that’s what you call honesty. No hypocrisy, no lies, no two-faced… ness,” she said. “What you see is what you get, with me.”

“Are you saying I’m different?”

“What? You know you are,” she said. “You don’t talk, you button up and keep everything to yourself. The first day we were here, you didn’t want to tell me what you were. I had to pry it out of you.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Oh? Because as I remember it…”

“You don”t have to pry anything out of me, or out of anyone,” I said. “You could have just as easily minded your own business and let me have my secrets.”

“It would’ve come out sooner or later anyway,” she said.

I nodded. There was no sense getting bogged down in side arguments.

“You’re right,” I said. “But that doesn’t make what you did right.”

“So you don’t mind your secret being found out, just as long as it’s not me doing it,” she said. “That’s petty. Really petty. I don’t know why I expected better.”

“Puddy, if you stole money from me, the fact that someone else might have done it later wouldn’t change the fact that you stole it, would it?” I said.

“We aren’t talking about stealing, though if you want to talk about money I was always generous…”

“And always quick to make sure I knew that I owed you,” I said.

“Well, no one just gives money without expecting something in return. That’s not how the world works.”

“And that’s not how generosity works,” I said. “Or friendship.”

“Friendship works on trust, Mack… you wouldn’t need secrets if you’d trusted me,” she said.

“And you don’t have secrets?” I asked.

“Not big ones, like my race,” she said. “I’m open and free about that.”

“So you get to decide what secrets are worth keeping,” I said. “And whose.”

“Well… everything’s worked out okay for you, hasn’t it?” Puddy said. “Not that I’m suffering. I get by… I always do. Ungrateful roommates, traitorous friends, accusations of cheating… I have problems you couldn’t even dream of, Mack.”

“Everyone has problems, Puddy,” I said. Her injured pose was kind of irksome, but there didn’t seem to be anything gained by getting into a “who has the bigger problems” pissing contest. I didn’t want to start up a new conflict with her and I didn’t want her knowing about my life.

That, and I could well believe that she had her life had its share of problems… more easily than I could believe that she wasn’t suffering. If there was one thing about Puddy I could believe without straining my imagination, it was that she wasn’t happy with her life.

“Look… you wanted to talk to me,” Puddy said. “What do you want from me?”

“After last night, I just wanted to… I don’t know, clear the air,” I said. “I guess I want to know what you want from me. I’m not going to be your ‘little bitch’, Puddy, but I don’t want to be your enemy or rival or whatever. I’m not interested in stealing your thunder. I have too much thunder in my life already. I don’t want the thunder I get.”

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t stop you from getting it,” she said.

“But you don’t have to take it personally when I do. I’m not trying…”

“And I am?” she said

“I didn’t say that,” I said. This was getting to be pointless, if it hadn’t been from the outset. I could dance around trying to avoid being confrontational and trying to avoid a fight all night and it wouldn’t matter if she wanted one. “But as long as we’re both here, we’re going to keep running into each …”

“Who’s stuck?” Puddy came back, shouting. “You don’t want to be here… that’s what the realproblem is. Why don’t you just go?”

“I’m not dropping out of school to get away from you, Puddy,” I said.

“I’m not talking about leaving school,” Puddy said. “I’m talking about getting out of Harlowe.”

Soon: Mackenize leaving Harlowe? DUN DUN D…okay, you already knew that. OR IS SHE?

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Of course my ex-roommate would be the next one to show up. Her blood was supposed to contain a smidgen of just about everything, including giants and sidhe. None of it could possibly be in a very large proportion to her human blood, but she’d have ties to more planes than anyone else on the floor, and possibly in the whole dorm.

She was wearing an indistinct, shimmering mix of outfits… she seemed to be cycling between her showy gladiator get-up, plaid boxers and a dirty gray t-shirt, and shorts and a collared shirt with coordinating neckerchief. There were flashes of other things in between them, and her strawberry blonde hair was also shifting styles and lengths. None of the outfits quite formed all the way before another one took its place.

“This is a new one,” she said. She sounded half-asleep, which I supposed was a bit of an accomplishment given that she was in fact all the way asleep. She was still looking at me. I was a little bit surprised at how easily I could meet her gaze. “Can’t say I’ve ever dreamed about you before.” She looked up at the owl-turtle thing. “Or you. Whatever you are.”

“That’s some sort of ridiculous owl-turtle thing,” Two said. “I like it better than I like you.”

“Well, that’s just real fucking special, isn’t it?” Puddy said.

“Y’know, I’m all about encouraging self-awareness, but I think I know when I’ve met my match,” the owl-turtle thing said, and disappeared.

“This isn’t like my dreams,” Puddy said. “This is more like… when someone falls asleep and dreams on a TV show, and they just bring out the same actors they always use on a dark set or something.”

“”It’s not your dream,” Two said. “It’s mine. I was here first, and I put my name on it.”

“You weren’t here first,” I said.

“Tied first is still first,” she said. “My friend Hazel said so.”

“Or like limbo,” Puddy said, looking around at the lack of surroundings. “Big empty space, confronted with my past failures… well, some of them. Maybe my most recent ones?” She looked at Two like she was studying a menu on the wall. “I’m not sure where you’d figure in there. Unless it’s because you took my place.”

“You don’t think we’re really here,” I realized. “You think this is just you, dreaming.”

“No fucking shit,” she said. “I know you’re not here because the real Mack wouldn’t dare look me in the eye. And also because it’s a dream. But even when you stand up to people, you shake like a leaf.”

“You caught me,” I said. I felt the urge to giggle and didn’t quite suppress it, and though I didn’t appear to giggle in the dream I had the feeling of doing so. “I’m not Mackenzie, I’m the dream incarnation of all your past sins remembered. Or a third of them, anyway. The non-blonde portion of your sins. I’m all your dark-haired sins remembered.”

Things had been weird and surreal before, but we’d all been coping with it pretty well. Somehow Puddy’s presence, and her blase approach to it all, was making me more aware of the strangeness of things.

“Oh, you aren’t even,” she said with a snort. “You’re just the one nice thing I tried to do that went wrong.”

“You can’t seriously believe that,” I said.

“You know what? You wouldn’t be worth arguing with even if you were here,” she said. “So why should I waste a dream on you?”

“You weren’t nice to me, Puddy,” I said. “I could almost buy that you were treating me like a friend, but that just means you’ve got a seriously skewed idea about what friendship means.”

Puddy’s face reddened and her eyes went big, but she clenched her jaw and squared her shoulders and with an almost exaggeratedly visible level of effort she forced herself to be calm. Her shifting clothing coalesced into what looked like a private school uniform now.

“Whatever the hell my subconscious is pulling, it’s a nice break from the usual routine,” Puddy said. “So I don’t even really care if you want to stand there running your mouth at me like you’ve got anything to say to me. Go right ahead. Feel free. I’ll enjoy it.”

“You know what? You’re the one who’s not worth it,” I said.

“Go ahead and think that,” she said, her outfit slowly drifting back to the shorts and neckerchief. It kind of reminded me of a girl ranger uniform, but not quite. “But you don’t even know the first thing about me. You just judge. That’s all you’ve ever done. You judged me for being a lesbian until you came out…”

“I never did that,” I said.

“… and now you treat me like I’m a rapist or something even though I never laid a finger on you.”

“Puddy… you hit me. You manhandled me. You beat me. You laid several fingers on me.”

“I meant I never laid a figurative finger on you!”

“Literal fingers are worse,” I said.

“I meant I didn’t rape you. Khersis Fucking Dei, you’ve got to twist everything around…”

“Puddy, I was so far from judgmental of you when we first met,” I said. “If I’d had any judgment in my head I would have seen what you were doing the first time we met and started making other plans immediately instead of waiting for things to come to a head.”

“What was I doing?” she asked. “I was just hanging out, trying to get to know you. You were the one who was being all secretive and untrusting while I was trying to make friends.”

“You were being a bully,” I said. “Manipulative. Right from the start, you were trying to get me under your thumb, using emotional blackmail…”

“That’s not how I remember it.”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t,” I said. “You never see yourself doing anything wrong.”

“You never see me doing anything right… and you have no fucking idea how I see myself, so seriously don’t even start.”

“I think I have a pretty good idea, actually,” I said.

“You’ve known me for a few weeks,” she said. “And you haven’t really spent any time with me for most of them. During that time I helped you make friends… who all stayed with you rather than me… come out of the closet, come out of your shell, get involved in campus politics… not that most of that stuck after you kicked me to the curb.”

“You moved out,” I pointed out.

“Because I know when I’m not wanted,” she said. “And you’ve treated me like I’m dead or a criminal or something ever since.”

“I’ve reached out to you.”

“For money to fix the TV you broke,” she said. “And let’s not even get into how I saved your ass after the fight in the bathroom.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Your skills in intimidating people and disposing of evidence really came in handy there.”

“See? Ungrateful,” she said. “This is what I meant when I said you’re not worth arguing with. Nothing I do is enough. You decided I was one of the bad guys and now you’ll never see anything I do as good. It’s no wonder you hang out with Princess Mecha Fox or whatever she calls herself. This is what happens when you grow up watching kiddy shows… or you watch kiddy shows and you never grow up. You end up seeing things all black and white.”

“Like your ‘top dog’ routine is the height of maturity,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s mature. I see the world as it is and I pick out the place I want to have in it. That’s realistic, not a fantasy like you try to live,” she said. “That’s not just me. Everybody does it, even if they don’t admit it. Who doesn’t want to be the best? Who doesn’t want to be the most popular? It’s why sports are so popular. It’s why you look down your nose at them… because you know you wouldn’t measure up, so you don’t want them to be used as a measurement.”

“That’s not… necessarily the only reason,” I said, though it did seem like she might have a bit of a point there. “The main reason that I don’t like sports is because they steal away focus from more important things.”

“The things you’re good at,” she said. “The stuff that would put you on the top of the shit heap, if they were the things that everybody idolized.”

“No, the things that matter,” I said. “The things that let you make something of yourself or make the world a better place. Anyway, it’s not that I don’t think you have some good qualities but they don’t change the fact that you lie, you push people around physically and emotionally, you cheat…”

“When do I cheat?”

“In the arena,” I said. “You were buffed to hell and back.”

“I wasn’t,” she said. Her garb faded into her armor. “Do you think that bitch Callahan would have let me get away with anything?” She pointed at Pala. “She threw a ringer at me anyway.”

“Oh, I’m not a ringer,” Pala said. “I’m a spear-maiden. They don’t trust me with the rings.”

“Whatever,” Puddy said. “I’m surprised anyone has the gall to accuse me of cheating while you’re around. That was a real dirty trick with your spear.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Pala tricked you into thinking you’d tricked her into throwing her weapon aside so you could grab it and turn the tables on her. It was the kind of complex, multi-layered plot that only a true mastermind could have devised.”

“I am just happy that you weren’t badly hurt,” Pala said. “If I had known that its protective qualities were mocked so perfectly, I would not have used even a phantasmal duplicate of the spear in the ring.”

“Don’t play innocent,” Puddy sad, right as a huge gout of water hit her from the side. We both spun around to see Two standing there, holding a large, old-fashioned wooden bucket… the kind that looks like the bottom of a barrel. “What the fuck?” Puddy roared.

“Oh. I was hoping that would wake you up,” Two said, just before the enraged Puddy grabbed the bucket and yanked it out of her hands. Or at least, that’s what I had expected to happen, but Two retained her grip on the handle and didn’t do more than stagger a bit. She let go with a shove and Puddy fell over backwards with a wordless shriek of rage.

“Oh, that is fucking it!” Puddy screamed, throwing the heavy bucket aside with much less force than I would have imagined. Her hair was up in pigtails now and she was wearing a set of faded and worn teddy bear pajamas.

“I think you would have to throw the water on her in real life to wake her up,” Pala said. Then she got a panicked look on her face. “What if throwing water on someone when she’s dreaming makes her body go poofing away in real life?”

“I’m not poofing anywhere,” Puddy said, getting to her feet. “But if I could wake up right now, I would. I don’t have to take this kind of abuse from anyone… much less an uppity golem and the resident good girl gone bad.”

“Is that really how you see me?” I asked.

“Well, I’d call you the campus slut but I don’t think you’ve got enough guts to really go all-out like that,” Puddy said. “You’ll have a couple of girlfriends and a boyfriend so you can revel in all the naughtiness of it, but you won’t relax and just have fun. Sluts don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. You probably think your little lesbian liaisons are like delightfully sinful or something.”

“I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong, either,” I said. “And now you’re the one who’s talking about stuff she doesn’t know anything about. I don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with my relationships.”

“So you don’t get all hot and flushed with shame when you go doughnut-delving with Amaranth?” Puddy said.

“I get hot and flushed… and yeah, okay, maybe I do have some ingrained shame issues,” I said. “But I know it’s bullshit. I get the feeling that in your mind, anyone who’s not having casual sex is repressed or a hypocrite. I suppose whether or not they want to have sex with you makes a handy test for that.”

“You think that this is all because you won’t have sex with me?” Puddy asked. “You must think you’re pretty hot shit. I’ve got so many chicks crawling into my pussy, I’m not even sure I could squeeze you in if I tried. Pun fucking intended.”

“Even if that’s actually true… I think the more girls who say yes to you, the more it’s going to bother you that I won’t,” I said.

“Yeah, here’s your problem… or one of them,” Puddy said. “You’ve got me confused with Barley. You always have. I might have come on a little strong, but she’s the one who actually tried to get your clothes off when you said no. She’s the one who’s gone absolutely bugbear insane because you fuck everyone else and not her. Me? I don’t care that much. I care that you ignored my friendship. I care that you kept up your shrinking violet routine just long enough to steal the spotlight from everyone around you. I care that people look at you like you’re the fucking face of Harlowe Hall when you didn’t even want to admit you were non-human until I dragged it out of you.”

“I think Sooni actually has that position,” I said. “She gets in the paper often enough.”

“Talking about you, most of the time,” Puddy said.

“Are you going to be talking about sex much more?” Pala said. “I am supposed to talk to the druids if I have dreams like this.”

“Yeah, I think we’re done,” I said. “I really can’t think of anything else I’d care to talk about less with Puddy.”

“Yeah, well I can’t think of anyone else I’d want to talk about sex with less than you,” Puddy said. She turned away. “This is a weird fucking dream, you know? And it’s coming on the heels of a weird fucking night, which probably explains where it came from but gives me that much less fucking patience for it. Sleep is supposed to be restful, last time I checked.”

“You said this was better than your usual dreams.”

“I said it was a nice break from them,” Puddy said. “But it’s like having a break from having pine cones shoved up my ass so I can eat them instead. The break’s wearing a little thin.”

“I thought you don’t eat anything you don’t like,” I said.

“I’m in charge of my life. I’m not in charge of my dreams. People can’t control what they dream.”

“I can,” Pala and Two said at the same time. “Sort of,” Two added. “I’m learning.”

“Whoop de do, good for you,” Puddy said. “But you are dreams, so that’s about as impressive as wind being able to control air.”

“Puddy, you should know… this isn’t a regular dream,” I said.

I just couldn’t keep it from her any more. I wasn’t entirely sure why… at least part of it was the way that the owl-turtle thing had been going on about missed opportunities. Puddy and I probably couldn’t have had a productive conversation in real life, and we weren’t having one in the dream… but I kind of wondered what might happen if she knew that I was actually there hearing her, and wasn’t just a reflection of some facet of her subconscious.

“No shit,” Puddy said. “I said that already. This is nothing like my normal dreams.”

“It’s not your dream,” Two said.

“It’s all of… we’re all dreaming,” I said, changing my intended sentence to avoid a side argument with Two. “The four of us are sharing a dream. The rest of the dorm might be sort of overlapping with us, too.”

Puddy looked at me, and I expected doubt or disagreement.

“So you brought me here?” she asked. “What gives you the right?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “It’s something in the air… that eyeless fish-beast that’s an emissary of the underworld. Our extraplanar blood makes us a little more susceptible, that’s why we’re all sharing a dream.”

“Yeah? Then why’s she here?” Puddy asked, jerking a thumb at Two. “Extraplanar mud?”

“I think everybody else is getting a more subtle version of what we’re experiencing,” I said. “And she hasn’t really mastered the subtleties of dreaming, I guess.”

“I’m learning,” Two said.”I practice every night.. They are very well-organized dreams.”

“So this fish… whatever… thing… is just invading our minds and disturbing our sleep?” Puddy said. “Fucking typical.”

“Um… I’m pretty sure this the least typical thing that’s ever happened to me,” I said. “And considering the semester I’ve been having, I think that’s saying a lot.”

“I just mean the lack of basic fucking consideration,” Puddy said. “Did anybody ask me if I want to have sharing and caring time with my former roommate and some of her groupies? Did I give my fucking consent to be dragged out of my bed… or my head, or whatever… and dumped into your dream?”

“It’s not her dream, it’s my…” Two said.

“Fucking shut your mouth!” Puddy screamed, loud enough and with enough force that even Pala was rocked back on her heels. Two just blinked.

“Okay,” she said, and then clenched her jaw shut. It seemed that her desire to obey orders was still strong enough to kick in if she was addressed forcefully enough, or if she was too shocked to do anything else.

Or maybe that was just the most obvious way for her to avoid a screaming match with Puddy.

“That’s not going to fly, Puddy,” I said.

“What? I didn’t touch her. But on the subject of touching, let’s talk about your best friend Sooni,” Puddy said. “Because you know what? She’s laid plenty of fingers on you, and you don’t seem to mind being her sidekick. She’s manipulative. She’s a bully. She put you into a freaking coma.”

“I passed out from energy loss,” I said. “That’s a little different.”

“You passed out from energy loss fighting her,” Puddy said. “And if we’re talking about, you know, imposing your will on people or whatever… I’m pretty sure her pussy posse isn’t strictly an all-volunteer force.”

“Well… she tries,” was all I could manage to come up with. It sounded horrifically inaccurate.

“Oh, she tries? Well, that makes a load of… fuck you! I try!” Puddy screamed. “And I try hard enough that I don’t own slaves and I never put you in the healing center. I don’t make you go on dates with me, I don’t inflict my company on you when it’s not wanted. Maybe what I really did wrong was give up too easily.”

“What Sooni does in the heat of anger is one thing,” I said. “I’m not excusing it but… well, okay, maybe I’m excusing it a little. But I woke up with you standing over me, holding a pillow down on my face. The day after I met you. That’s not a temper tantrum, Puddy. That’s not being the product of a fucked-up culture…”

“Bullshit, we are all products of fucked-up cultures,” she said. “Don’t act like you’re trying to understand me now when…”

“I am trying to understand you, Puddy!” I said. “I have been. You were the first person to call me a friend in a decade. Maybe you don’t know how huge that is…”

“Oh, so the problem is that I don’t value my friendly gestures enough,” she said. “Oh. Wow. Glad that’s cleared up! I’m really glad you could invade my sleep so I could find out that’s what the problem is…”

“I didn’t invade anything!” I said. “This is just happening. I’m not doing it any more than you are.”

“Well, at least you’re not blaming me for this,” Puddy said. “I suppose I should be grateful for that…”

“What’s the shouting about?” Ian’s voice said, sounding sleepy and distant behind me. I turned and saw him, looking somewhat indistinct… but quite distinctly naked. And pretty obviously aroused.

Weirdly, his dick was not only longer in the dream than it is in real life, but it also looked thinner… though the extent of that might have been exaggerated by the way he’d mentally lengthened it.

“Oh, fucking great,” Puddy said. “It’s the new coach’s pet.”

“What the hell are you doing in my room?” Ian asked.

“We’re not in the room,” I told him. “We’re dreaming.”

He looked around at the blankness.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “What do you see when you look around?”

“I see… okay, I don’t see anything,” he said. “But I’m thinking my room. Well, no. I’m thinking my room but thinking of the stuff that’s in your room. Which I’m thinking of as mine. Fuck. I hate dream imagery. Like when I have a dream about here but all the classes are in my old elementary building and it’s only when I wake up that I realize that, because while I was sleeping it was just ‘college’.”

“Is everybody going to show up here before the night is over?” Puddy asked.

“I really don’t know,” I said. “The owl-turtle thing made it sound kind of like the effect was based on physical proximity to extradimensional beings. If you’re sleeping with anyone tonight, they’ll probably be next.”

“Could you please be putting on some pants?” Pala said, her voice frantic and high pitched. She was covering her eyes, as was her stuffed pig. Two wordlessly held out a pair of baggy cotton shorts to Ian.

“Huh? Oh,” he said, accepting them sheepishly. He turned around and stepped into them. They disappeared as they slid up his legs. “Um… sorry. I guess I’m usually kind of naked in my dreams.”

“Are you always that hard up?” Puddy asked.

“You would be, too, if you were up against what I am,” he said, putting an arm around me.

“I need a druid!” Pala cried. “I need a druid!”

“Puddy?” a sleepy voice buzzed. Mariel came into focus. She was also naked, though nudity differed from the sylph concept of clothing by a mere technicality. Her blue hair was down to the space where a floor would have been, like it had been before her recent cut. “Why are all of these people in your room? You said we didn’t have to… oh.” Her big silver-blue eyes focused on Ian’s groin. “You told me that human guys were half the size of sylphs.”

“They are, babe,” Puddy said. “This is just a fucked-up dream. Go back to sleep.”

“Oh, okay,” Mariel said. “Wait… what?”

“Hold on,” Ian said. “That’s actual size, I’ll have you know.”

“Um…” I said, before thinking better of it. My thoughts were pretty close to the surface in the dream.

“What?” he said. “You know it, Mackenzie. Tell them.”

“Really don’t care about your wang, dude,” Puddy said.

“I don’t care about it-care about it,” Mariel said. “But it’s just that you said…”

“Hold the image, are you calling me a liar?” Puddy asked. “Because guys lie about their schlongs all the time.”

“I’m not lying,” Ian said. “I’m not even saying anything. I’m just… here.”

“It’s probably the right volume, more or less,” I said. “It’s just off a bit in the specific… shape?”

“I think I know my own dick a little bit better than you do, Mackenzie,” Ian said.

“You said it, not us,” Puddy said.

A sign appeared hovering in front of Ian’s crotch that read “Inappropriate For Some Audiences”. He jumped backwards like he’d been bitten, but it moved with him.

“Two… you can talk,” I said.

“I’m not good at all dreaming, but I’m pretty good at signs,” she said.

“Thank all the gods,” Pala said, calming down a bit.

“You know, this is a lot fucking zanier than I thought my night was going to be, after the day I had,” Ian said. “I mean, after… wait. This is actually happening? I mean… it’s real?”

“Yes. Well, it’s a real dream,” I said. “Except not with what that usually implies. Yes. It’s real. It’s happening.”

“Okay,” he said. “I guess it’s possible we won’t remember any of this when we wake up, but I don’t want to go blurting stuff out.”

“If this is about you knowing the shape of your dick better than your dyke of a girlfriend, it’s a little late for that,” Puddy said.

“Hey, I’ve had a longer acquaintanceship but she’s getting to know it pretty damn well, if I say so myself,” Ian said. “I mean, if it’s not enough that she’s pressed up against it all night, I pretty much fucked her silly earlier. We did everything, a lot more than you’ve done… I’m talking…”

Exactly what he was talking got lost as Pala finally just burst out crying. Well, not just… the three of us who were in the room with her all woke up at once a moment later when we found out what happens when a storm giant wets the bed.

Soon: Mackenzie gets a small taste of life outside Harlowe. And there’s an important non-ominous announcement about the exciting future of Tales of MU. But that doesn’t actually happen in the story. Though wouldn’t that be kind of cool, in a post-modern, meta sort of way? No? I didn’t think so, either.

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

I was treated again to fragmentary nightmares: running across the penthouse pool towards a rapidly fading Steff while dark shapes bit and slashed at my legs and pulled me down, Caron trussing me up to an X-shaped frame and hammering great big spikes through my parts of me, Mercy chasing me on a motorcycle.

My sex dreams had been strange and frightening to me before I’d been able to accept what many of them actually were… I would have hoped that being more at peace with my desires would allow me to enjoy them, but it seemed like I just plain didn’t remember them as often, if I was still having them… and in their absence I was getting these fun little scenarios.

None of my nightmares were complete stories. They weren’t even complete scenes… just snatches, vignettes. That made them worse. They could start at any time, repeat at any time, and they never ended. There was no conclusion until I finally woke up… or in this case, until Two woke me up with some less-than-gentle shaking.

It was a good thing sleep wasn’t ready to release me completely when she did, because it startled the fuck out of me to have a tiny, feminine hand grabbing my shoulder roughly at the same time when Mercy caught up to me and grabbed hold. I could barely manage a hoarse scream, much less a physical reaction.

“I’m sorry, Mack,” Two said. “I did not mean to frighten you, but you were shaking the bed. Also, it’s almost time to meditate with Dee.”

“Huh?” I said. “Oh… Dee.” I sat up slowly and yawned. “I haven’t really been keeping that up, have I?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Two didn’t even seem to hear it. Her eyes were locked on my bare chest. My first thought was that she was going to chastise me for not wearing anything to bed, despite Amaranth’s insistence that it was none of her business.

“You need to go to the healing center!” she said, her eyes huge as moons and luminescent in the darkness.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re hurt!” she said. She pointed at my nipple piercing. “You have metal stuck through you. You need to get healed.”

“Two, those are piercings,” I said. “Like earrings.”

“No they aren’t,” she said. “Earrings go in the ears and are pretty.”

“These are kind of pretty,” I said, trying to look down at my heart lock.

“No they aren’t!” Two said. “They’re stuck in your nipples. That isn’t pretty at all.”

“Well, thank you for your opinion, Two,” I said. “But these were a present from Amaranth, and they’re supposed to be like that.”

“Oh, okay,” Two said. “Are you going to come meditate today?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “Has Dee asked about me, other mornings?”

“No,” Two said. “I asked her if she thought we should wake you up and she said you would wake up or you wouldn’t.”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess that makes sense.”

“It does make sense,” Two agreed, nodding sagely. “You would have to.”

“I’d have to what?”

“Wake up or not,” Two said. “I don’t think you could not do that.”

“I suppose you’re right about that,” I said.

“Yes.”

It was just past five thirty in the morning… Two’s interruption of my troubled sleep meant we had time to shower beforehand, which I chose to do because I’d woken up all sweaty.

When we got to the bathroom I kind of wished I’d decided to forego it… the place was a disaster area. One of the sinks had been plugged up and left on, resulting in a swamp centered around the drain in the middle of the floor. There were sodden wads of toilet paper stuck to the walls and rolls draped over the stalls and the curtain rods of the bathtub. The mirrors had been smeared with soap and lipstick and what looked like blood but didn’t smell like the kind that came from a vein. The artists responsible had written “FEEJEE PLUS MACK 4 EVER” in soap across all the mirrors. There was water all over the floor around the far right stall that couldn’t have been from the sinks, and the place smelled like… well, like a toilet.

Not a place with toilets in it, but an actual toilet.

Two looked like someone had punched her in the gut, there was so much wrongness all around. I didn’t want to keep walking, even in my flip-flops… there was too much moisture on the floor between us and the shower and I didn’t trust that all of it was water.

“Feejee is going to be in big trouble,” Two said, looking at the mirrors.

“Feejee didn’t write that,” I said.

“You did?”

“No,” I said. “I’d bet platinum to peanuts it was the Leightons, but see if Kiersta lifts a finger to punish them. You might as well go back to the room.”

“I want to take a shower,” Two said, looking across the bathroom at the open curtain. I could tell from the conflicted look on her face that she didn’t want to keep walking any more than I did.

“You should be okay using the next one down,” I said. I figured I’d skip it… I was more likely to encounter hostility for simply being out of perceived bounds than she was. “Don’t take any orders from anybody while you’re doing it, if anybody asks what you’re doing there tell them that ours is out of order, and if anybody gives you a serious problem just leave and come back up here.”

“Okay,” she said. “You aren’t coming, too?”

“No, I’m going to have a little talk with Kiersta,” I said. “Probably best if you’re not around, that way she can’t hold a grudge against you.”

“Okay,” she said.

We left the wreckage of the bathroom, Two turning left and heading downstairs while I turned right. I waited until I couldn’t hear Two’s footsteps and then knocked, firmly enough that I figured it would rouse even a drunken resident advisor.

There was no immediate response, so I knocked again. This time I heard blankets moving and the bed shifting, and then a crash of breaking glass followed by a groan.

“Kiersta?” I said through the door.

“Fuck off…” she moaned.

“You need to come out here,” I said.

“I’m sleeping.”

“You’re the R.A.,” I said.

“What the hell do you want from me?”

“I want you to come look and look at what your drinking buddies did to the bathroom!” I said.

I heard her coming closer and thought she was going to open the door. Instead she stopped at the other side of it and said, slightly more clearly and awake-sounding, “That’s your problem now.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not my problem. Cleaning the bathroom is one thing, but that’s just nasty.”

“It’s a bathroom,” Kiersta said.

“It’s vandalism,” I said. “And it’s disgusting.”

“You should have thought of that before you had sex in the shower.”

“I don’t even want to guess what they did in the shower,” I said. “And don’t forget, you’ve got to use it, too.”

“Do you think I would actually go in there? I shower in the fitness center.”

“Do something about it, or… I’m going to report you for drinking.”

“Good!” she yelled. The door ripped open inward and she was screaming in my face. “Do that! And when you find someone who gives a shit what anybody does in this hellhole, let me know!”

She stepped back and slammed the door so hard it bounced back from the frame instead of latching, then did that again before finally closing it forcefully but with her hand on the knob and locking it. Other doors were opening down the hall… Mariel, Maliko and Suzi, the twins, and both of the gnomes.

“Oh, of course,” Maliko said, looking at me before turning and going back into her room while Suzi stood there blinking sleepily. Sooni’s door opened and Maliko jumped and turned right back around, but it was Kai.

“Will everybody be the fuck quiet?” Kai shrieked. “Some of us have an examination this morning!”

Suzi’s head lolled to the side and she looked at Kai for a second before lashing out with one paw-like hand and swiping at her face. It was so random it seemed instinctive. Kai just stepped back out of the way and glared at her. She looked around the hall and spotted me, her lantern eyes locking with mine. Kai had no subtle arts that I knew of, but she might as well have been a telepath for how loud and clear I got the message: this is your fault and if it affects my grades, I will kill you for it.

“What in Owain’s name is going on?” Hazel asked.

“Hazel Willikins, bite your tongue!” Honey said, pinching her elbow and then making a tossing gesture over her shoulder.

“Er, I meant Owain,” Hazel said. I must have misheard her the first time, because I was sure she’d said that.

“Of course you did,” Honey harrumphed.

The Leightons, of course, could barely contain themselves through all this.

“You think this is funny?” I asked, stomping over towards them. Sara got a gleam of panic in her eye while Tara looked defiant. “Other people have to use that bathroom!”

“Oh, yeah, I guess you’ll have to find somewhere else to take Feejee out,” Tara said. “Hopefully your next date spot will be almost as classy.”

“People are going to have to start getting ready for class soon,” I said.

“Oh, wow, better get cleanin’, then,” Tara said. “And, in case you haven’t seen the shower yet… brace yourself before you go in there.”

“I didn’t do that!” Sara said. “That was all…”

“Oh, shut your mouth,” Tara said. “We didn’t do anything… we just got up early and saw it.”

“Wait a tick,” Hazel said, which I guessed was like shire slang for “a second” or something. “What did you two do to the lav?”

“The lav?” Sara repeated, and they both snickered.

“They wrecked the place,” I said. “Water, toilet paper… other stuff. It’s disgusting. You wouldn’t want to go in there with your bare feet.”

“Oi!” Hazel said, turning scarlet and smoothing down the front of her floor-length robe. “You don’t have to tell the whole world about that!”

“I thought you said ‘everyone does it’,” Honey said, rolling her eyes.

“Not the point!” Hazel said.

“We don’t know what she’s talking about,” Sara said. “We didn’t do anything. It was like that when we got there.”

“Yeah, all I know is that I’d hate to be the one who has to clean it up,” Tara said.

“Well, you’re going to be, because I’m not doing it,” I said.

“Kiersta said…” Sara said.

“Fuck Kiersta,” I said. “What’s she going to do? One shout to my lawyer and she’d lose her job,” I said, not having any clue if this was true or not but pretty sure Kiersta could hear every word. “I’m not cleaning up your mess, and if you don’t clean it up, nobody’s going to be able to use the showers.”

“That’s not our fault,” Sara said. “You’re supposed to clean it up. Kiersta…”

“Shut up about Kiersta,” I said.

“Hold on,” Hazel said, shuffling over. “I have a headache, I’m queasy, I ache all over, and I’m not a big fan of being woken up early in general. I have to get up at the crack of eleven today and the first thing I’m going to want is a shower. Is it going to be fit to use then, or isn’t it?”

“Don’t talk to us, bunny,” Tara said. She pointed her thumb at me. “Talk to the help.”

“I’m talking to you,” Hazel said. “Call me bunny again and I’ll kick both your arse.”

“‘Arse’,” Sara repeated, and they both giggled.

“What is wrong with you? Were you born in a barn?”

“Were you born in a dollhouse?” Sara asked.

“I was born on a boat,” Hazel said.

“Hazel!” Honey said, more urgently than she had objected to Hazel’s evidently profane pronouncement earlier.

“I don’t care who knows,” Hazel said to her. “I’m proud of it.”

“Honestly, I wish you could hear how you sound,” Honey said.

“I am!” Hazel said. “I’m proud of where I come from.”

“Why in the world would you be proud of your mother’s smelly, rancid cunt?” Tara asked.

Hazel turned a shade of purple-red normally reserved for eldritch abominations.

“Hazel… think about your condition…” Honey pleaded, sounding terrified.

I took a step back. As I did, I remembered Steff’s description of Hazel “going orcshit” over the term “motherfucker”… but that was only after I’d started backing away. I didn’t have to know anything about Hazel or her past behavior to see where this was going. I’d step in if things went too poorly for Hazel… the twins seemed pretty athletic and she was no fighter, though I thought the way Sara seemed to be trying to turn and scramble away while Tara tried to stand their ground might take away some of her disadvantage

“Hazel, they didn’t mean it!” Honey shrieked.

“Oh, I fucking meant it,” Tara said. “What are you going to do, bunny? Dig me to death?”

With an angry howl, Hazel charged forward, barreling into their legs and knocking them down. Tara’s arm punched her in the face while Sara’s flailed around, but she might as well have been punching an ogre or a dwarf’s skull for all that it slowed Hazel’s fury. She pulled herself up until she was straddling the twins’ torso and started punching at Tara’s head with alternating fists.

“Kiersta! Kiersta!” Sara shrieked as Hazel pretty much beat Tara’s face in.

More doors had opened. Everybody who lived on the floor was out in the hall except for the skirmishers, Celia, Leda, Amaranth, and Dee… and Kiersta, naturally. I was trying to figure out how to get Hazel off of Tara without hurting her, especially given her “condition” as Amaranth had diagnosed it. Tara was trying to push her off with her one arm; Sara was useless, sobbing with her eyes squeezed shut.

Before I could decide what, if anything, to do, a powerful force wrapped itself around me and yanked me backwards off my feet. I flew down the hall away from the melee, passing the swishing robes of Dee as she flew forward.

“Hazel Willikins!” she called as I landed on my butt halfway down the hall. “Be at peace!”

That worked about as well as you might have expected it to. Dee waved her arms in the air and became too bright to look at. When my vision cleared, Hazel was floating up off of the twins, a placid expression on her face. Dee guided her mentally back towards Honey while she herself crouched by the fallen form of the Leightons and grew bright once more as she gave them healing energy they didn’t deserve.

“Hazel, I wish you’d think about your daughter!” Honey said.

“I am not having any daughters!” Hazel said, snapping out of the divinely-bestowed serenity at once, but fortunately not reverting back to her state of unreasoning rage.

Sara suddenly started shrieking and kicking spasmodically. Dee stepped back at once. Tara groaned and touched her head.

“I apologize for any unexpected familiarity,” Dee said to them.

“Get away from us, you cowl headed freak!” Sara said.

“Somebody provide a concise summary of events, please,” Dee said, looking around the hall. Her eyes settled on me. “Mackenzie?”

“They trashed the bathroom,” I said coming forward. “Because Kiersta said I have to clean it.”

“Why under earth should that task fall to you?” Dee asked. “Never mind. I think I can surmise.” She looked around. “And then one of the twins said a word against Two’s friend Hazel’s departed mother, I suppose?”

“Hey, that’s right!” Hazel said.

“Let it go,” Honey said, grabbing Hazel’s sleeve.

“I believe you owe Miss Hazel an apology,” Dee said to the Leightons. “And then she will apologize to you.”

“Like hell,” Tara said, as they got to their feet. She groaned and clutched at her head with her hand.

“That goes for double for me,” Hazel said.

“I can’t force you to apologize,” Dee said. “But I’ll ask again once I’ve finished healing you, as duty…”
“You’re not touching us!” Sara said.

“Please,” Dee said. “I would not be offering if it were not dire. The most superficial portion of your wounds healed first. I do not believe the underlying damage is…”

“Go fuck yourself, drow bitch,” Tara said. “I’m not letting you do any more black-ass demon witchcraft on me.”

The twins turned to go back into their room.

“Go to the healing center, then,” Dee said. They both flipped her off. “Don’t let her fall asleep!” Dee called after them as they closed the door. “Willful… willful idiots!” Dee shouted at their door, then let off a stream of what certainly sounded like swear words. She turned around to face Hazel, her eyes narrow and her nostrils wide. “And you! Your kinswoman has the right of it! Does avenging the memory of your mother take precedence over the safety of your daughter?”

“I… don’t… have… a… bloody… daughter!” Hazel yelled. “I can’t have a daughter, I won’t have a daughter, I don’t have a…”

There was a pop and a flash of light and Hazel was asleep on her feet. Dee’s mental powers caught her mid-slump, tilted her gently back, and then floated her past a very stunned looking Honey into their room, where I have little doubt she continued floating until she reached her bed.

“Please try to keep her calm when she wakes,” Dee said to Honey, who snorted. “And, out of curiosity, how do you know she’s having a daughter?”

“Oh… um… how do you?” Honey asked.

“I was merely repeating what I heard from you,” Dee said. “But it’s the default assumption… or it is, among my people.”

“Oh… the same,” Honey said. “For mine, I mean.”

“I did not realize gnomish culture was so gynocentric,” Dee said.

“Oh, well, if a woman’s expecting we say it’s a daughter and if a man is, we say it’s a son,” Honey said.

“Indeed,” Dee said.

“I should get back to bed,” Honey said, hurrying into her room and shutting the door, then locking it.

Other people, apparently deciding the show was over and realizing just how fucking early it was, were also drifting back towards their beds. Mariel was still standing in front of Puddy’s room, staring at the bathroom door and then whipping her head around in a dizzying pattern down the rest of the hall before staring at the bathroom.

“Don’t be so fucking dainty!” Puddy grumbled sleepily from the depths of her room.

I sighed.

“We’ve got to do something about the bathroom. Or I guess I do,” I said. “They only did it because of me.”

“That doesn’t make it your responsibility,” Dee said. “Is it simply untidy, or have they… befouled… it?”

“I think it’s beyond befouled,” I said.

“I will see to it then,” Dee said.

“Dee, you don’t have to,” I said.

“Somebody must… I have never cleaned anything beyond the chapel floor, but I believe I can remove the mess without having contact with it,” Dee said. “No one else, perhaps save for Two, could do that, and she does enough cleaning after others as it is. Do you intend to join me this morning?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Please go downstairs and reserve us a chamber. I will join you shortly.”

“Thanks,” I said. I hesitated, torn. “Uh… are you sure you don’t want any help?”

“I need not touch your mind to see that you are hoping I will say no,” Dee said. “Your offer is appreciated, but your efforts would not combine effectively with mine. Thank you, but no.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I turned and I headed past Mariel for the stairs. Dee followed behind me. I glanced back from just inside the stairwell and saw that she was turning to face Kiersta’s door.

Part of me wanted to know what she was going to do or say, but most of me didn’t want to be anywhere near the kind of ass-chewing I thought Dee just might be able to administer.

Discuss this story.

Of course, there were limits to how far removed we could be, living on the same floor as each other. The fact that we hadn’t spoken in forever hadn’t stopped her from seeking me out in an arena full of people to try to push me around a little more. If my vague, half-formed plan worked, it could be the basis for a new relationship between us.

Or to phrase it a little bit better, a new way of relating to each other, one based less on my fear of her and her… whatever she felt towards me. She didn’t intimidate me any more, but it was still her reflex to try to control me, to act like a word from Mariel should be enough to get me moving.

No, not a word… two words.

Puddy says.

At the arena I’d tried granting what I had thought was a not completely unreasonable request, and all it had got me was grief when Puddy expected that same level of accommodation for her next demand. Even if our paths crossed infrequently, I didn’t think we could make it through a whole school year the way we were going. I needed her to get used to the idea of interacting with me on a more equal basis.

Yeah, that was going to happen.

Probably it would be best to focus on the immediate goal of getting some money for the TV. Any secondary effects in reforming Puddy or changing the basis for our interactions would happen or they wouldn’t.

In any event, whether she answered or Mariel did, I couldn’t exactly expect to be welcomed with open arms… open hostility, possibly… or heavy arms, maybe. Or lots of arms and open garments, if it happened to be Mariel.

Really, there were a lot of ways the wordplay could go, and none of them were all that good.

In any sense of the word.

I was hoping for Puddy. Not just because she was the one I actually wanted to talk to, but also because I felt I could understand her better than I could Mariel’s unreasoning jealousy. Puddy was selfish and stubborn and vindictive and almost as deluded in her own small way as Sooni was in her big one, but she was predictable.
Mariel was not.

Tiny and delicate as she was, I could see Mariel lashing out with the same sudden ferocity as Oru had when she’d bitten my leg… and somebody who lived their moments at the speed of the wind could do a lot of damage with a momentary lapse of judgment.

“Well?” Kiersta said, from where she was still standing back by my room.

I realized I’d gone right up to the point of knocking and then froze. It was time to do it. I told myself that I just looked like an idiot standing there with my knuckles raised, and I’d only look stupider if I turned around and walked away without actually knocking.

Yes, Kiersta, my brilliant plan for fixing everything is too brilliant to be fully explained even by me, but it involves pantomime.

I took a deep breath and I knocked.

For several moments it seemed like nobody was in… there was no sound from the room except some faint music, which could have been a music box somebody had left on. Then there was the sound of weight… more weight than Mariel had, even before her haircut… shifting on a bed and heavy footsteps. I was in luck, so to speak.

The peephole went dark for a second and then the door opened. Puddy stood there. Every inch of her, from the curly blonde hair that was apparently a family trait to the thick forearms that bulged beneath her sweater sleeves, seemed to be radiating anger.

“What do you want?” she asked with a casualness in her voice that didn’t match the stabbing hatred in her eyes.

This would have been the perfect time to use a little finesse, to concoct a bold story about how I was going door to door, like it was a coincidence that hers just happened to be first… maybe even make her think that I didn’t want to be offering her this chance but I had to. That way I could dangle the bait in front of Puddy’s greedy little eyes and cunningly reel her in without letting her know how badly I needed her help in particular.

It wouldn’t be that hard… I was counting on Puddy’s predictability. She liked to manipulate people, but in the end, she was so simple and straightforward that she would be easy to manipulate herself.

Yeah. All I needed was somebody else to do the talking.

Somebody smooth, and suave, and better at lying.

“Hello? I asked you a question,” Puddy repeated. I could hear echoes of her cousin Keri La Belle in her voice. Even though Keri was a little prep girl and Puddy was a would-be demihuman radical lesbian whatever, there was a hint of the same style of obnoxiousness within both of them. “What… do… you… want?”

Her glare transfixed me. I didn’t have an answer composed, but my throat was sticking so badly that it hardly mattered. She started to close the door.

It seemed like it was now or never.

“Hey, um… did you know they don’t have any dorm funds for Harlowe?” I asked.

“So what?”

Yeah, so what? Puddy had latched onto the fight for equality because it gave her an excuse to throw a big fit about stuff and be the center of attention, to fight the good fight and be the hero without doing much more than getting in people’s faces… but just like Sooni and the senate, she’d dropped it when it hadn’t “worked”.

I had to make her care about it again… and that meant showing her how she could benefit from it.

“Well… it seems to me like somebody whose family had some gold could do something about that, if the administration won’t,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Well.. it’s a chance to do some good, and…”

“‘For a change’, you mean,” she said.

“I didn’t say that,” I said quickly.

“As if I didn’t pull your ass out of the fire a bunch of times already.”

“Thank you,” I said. She had got Rocky to back off, at least, and she had provided at least short-term fixes to some of my other problems, even if they weren’t worth her price in the long-term. “Really. But this is bigger than me… at the start of the year, you were pretty up in arms about this kind of thing.”

“Yeah, and that worked out real well for me,” she said. “I did all the groundwork and then you stepped in, pushed me out, and then abdicated to fuzzy-ears.”

“That’s not… look, Puddy, forget about me for a second, okay?”

“For just a second?” she asked. “You’re joking, right? I forget about you all the damn time.”

“Over in Ian’s dorm, this guy, Arthur Weyland? He has his name on a plaque by the TVs,” I said. I didn’t mention that the whole dorm was named after him. I doubted Puddy’s family had that kind of clout and I didn’t want her to think she was angling for the consolation prize.

“Who the hell is Arthur Weyland?” she asked.

“Well, he’s some lord,” I said. “But at one point he was a student here, and now everybody watches TV over there has a sign staring at them saying it’s thanks to him.”

“So?” she said. “TV is such a stupid, human thing. I don’t watch TV.”

“Yeah, but… they get them in the human dorms,” I said. “It’s the principle, right? It sends a message.”

“Don’t feed me that line of shit,” Puddy said. “I taught you that line of shit.”

“You did,” I agreed. “And outside the dorm, you’re still the one everybody knows.”

“Not like they know you,” she said. “Or Drow-lea Drow-ella.” I told myself that she didn’t mean anything personal by that. She was just venting. “Even fucking Two probably has her own little fan club now, I bet.”

“She has friends,” I said. “And a lot of that’s because of her love of food, which, you know… I guess you kind of helped?”

That much was true. Puddy had seen encouraging Two’s indulgent side as way more important than I had. Of course, at the time, I hadn’t exactly been eating food myself.

“Nice of you to give me some credit,” she said.

“Look, I get recognized because I was on TV. You’re recognized because you’re you. People who’ve never seen you go, ‘Oh, there’s Puddy.’ That didn’t change just because the rest of us got, you know, a bunch of news stories about us.”

“You shouldn’t try to flatter me, Mack,” she said. “You’re no good at it, and I don’t need it. I know who I am.”

“Yeah, you don’t need it,” I said. “I saw you in the arena… some of your fights. You were kicking ass. It took a giant to beat you… and that could have gone either way if her weapon hadn’t, you know. Smote. Smited.”

“Damn right!” she said. “That fucking spearchucker set me up .”

This was the woman who’d wanted to be the vanguard of the Harlowe struggle for equal rights? Pick your battles, Mack, I thought. Then I thought, when did I start calling myself Mack, even inside my own head?

That was a little bit weird to me. I’d changed quite a bit since I started college, but I liked to think I was the same person inside. I’d answer to Mack, because that was how my friends thought of me… most of them had been introduced to me that way… but I had been Mackenzie for most of my life. It seemed odd to think the weight of so many years could be shed so easily, that…

“If you think staring at my tits is going to be any more flattering, think again,” Puddy said. “I know you’re not that discriminating.”

“What? No, I just kind of look down when I think!” I said. “Fucking hell… anyway, if you’re not interested, just say. There are other people in the dorm from rich families, you know,” I said.

That was as close to cunning and sophisticated as I was going to be able to get, on my truth budget. Sooni was broke. I probably could finagle the money out of Feejee, but only if I gave her something in return… and I doubted Leda would feel charitable or be swayed by the prospect of having her name forever associated with this heap of bricks.

“Yeah? Who?” she asked. “You think the duck queen is going to chip in for a TV?”

“I don’t think it’s impossible that other people in the dorm might like the chance to contribute to making Harlowe a better place to live,” I said.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

She sounded torn. The fact that she didn’t say no made me think the answer would possibly be yes. Puddy liked to appear decisive and in control. If the answer was at all likely to be negative, she wouldn’t miss the chance yell “hell no” to my face and then slam the door… but if the answer was positive, she’d want to take her time coming around to it instead of giving in right away.

Time for one last attempt at slyness.

“Okay,” I said. “But… if you wait too long, somebody else might jump on it, you know.”

“I said I’ll think about it,” she said, with an air of finality, but she looked hungry as she closed the door.

I turned and gave Kiersta a weak smile, as if to say, “There, I did something.” It wasn’t much. It wasn’t final. It was more than she’d done, though, and she’d have to be happy with that.

“So… when are you going to talk to those other people?” she asked.

…or not.

You don’t tend to forget the face of the guy you light on fire.

Still and for all that, Ian had in some way been transformed. I’d seen the look of grim determination on his face, but it was weird seeing it at a remove, and not aimed at me. He wasn’t all bulked up, but his muscles seemed to have become emphasized. Maybe it was the way he carried himself. Maybe it was the arena lighting.

Maybe it was something else.

“He’s all… glisteny,” Steff said. “What’d he do, oil himself up or something?”

I realized she was right. The other fighters had worked up a sheen of sweat after they came out and started fighting. It hadn’t taken them long, but Ian came out looking like he’d just stepped out of a steam room.

“I think he looks like he just had sex,” Amaranth said. “Oh! Maybe he made a friend in the locker room?”

“That doesn’t sound like Ian,” I said, trying not to let jealousy at the idea creep into my voice when I was sitting there wedged between my two other lovers.

“Well, maybe not, but hope springs eternal,” Amaranth said.

“I think he looks like he needs a bath,” Two said. “If he falls down, he’s going to get muddy.”

“Well, the idea is not to fall down, so maybe he’ll be okay,” Steff said.

“I don’t think so,” Two said, shaking her head. “Mr. Drakon looks pretty strong.”

It was probably natural that our eyes would have gone first to the familiar form and face of Ian, but as soon as I looked at his opponent I felt like I’d somehow missed a very muscular forest for a comparatively skinny tree. He had a dark olive complexion and an elaborate sunburst tattoo on his back. Most of his head was shaved, but with one strip of fuzz going the center, like a very, very short mohawk.

“Sweet Khersis in a cage, that is a lot of person crammed into one person,” Steff said. “Did he get lost on the way to the heavy armored division?”

“Is Ian crazy?” I said. “He’s no fighter… he’s going to get creamed!”

“Now, baby, Ian does have a little experience handling people who are stronger than he is,” Amaranth said. “And win or lose, what really matters is that he tries his hardest.”

“My friend Hazel says that only matters if you lose,” Two said.

“Well, Two… your friend Hazel isn’t always right,” Amaranth said.

The crowd made further conversation difficult as the two stepped into the ring. I didn’t entertain any illusions that they were making that noise for Ian… I didn’t know if Drakon had a following or not, but the figure he cut was impressive.

Neither of them came out swinging. They both stepped forward cautiously, more like they were wading into a pool than wading into a battle.

As they came closer together, it became apparent that Ian wasn’t as badly outsized as he had first seemed… Drakon’s length of limb and his muscular build made his image register as “huge” when it was seen by itself. Still, his reach was an advantage, and a potentially overpowering one… as he showed almost immediately with a vicious-looking kick. There was little warning: a shift of his hip and then his foot snapped out and up in a high, wide arc.

Ian almost walked into it. He pulled back at the last moment, and the foot looked like it just grazed his chest, but he still rocked back and stumbled a bit before regaining his balance. Drakon followed the kick with another one, and Ian threw his arms up in front of him. It was a clumsy sort of block, but it worked… mainly, I think because Drakon hadn’t been expecting it. It broke his momentum, and put him momentarily off-balance, both literally and figuratively.

Ian pushed forward in that moment, not so much punching as shoving Drakon with both fists. The bigger man threw a punch that brushed by Ian’s head. Drakon went down on his ass, but the illusions showed a slow-motion version of the exchange focusing on his fist. What had seemed like a glancing blow looked a lot more devastating in the replay. Drakon’s large and surprisingly bony fist blazed a line across Ian’s cheek and hit his ear with deforming impact.

If not for that blow, Ian might have pressed his advantage, but he took a moment to recover and then had to jump back as Drakon’s powerful legs whipped out at him.

“Ian’s not moving as fast as he should be,” Steff said.

“Oh… you don’t think that hit to the head…?” Amaranth said.

“No,” Steff said. “That wasn’t a brain-box blow… I mean, since he came out.”

“Well… he’s not exactly running,” I said. “He’s probably saving his energy.”

“I don’t know how much he’s got to save,” Steff said.

Then Drakon was back on his feet and back in the fight. They circled each other warily. Ian had blood dripping from his ear, but neither of them had any disabling injuries yet. Ian kept his distance. Drakon tested him with several more kicks, but Ian was still playing things conservatively. Then Drakon faked like he was going to snap a kick forward with his right leg and came around with a high sweeping kick from his left instead that caught Ian on the chin. The whole crowd groaned with me.

Ian had been moving away, so it wasn’t a solid blow… but the way Drakon’s feet were moving a “graze” still looked pretty brutal.

“Oh… I don’t know if I can watch this,” Amaranth said.

Drakon took a step back like he wasn’t sure how far he could press his luck, then he stepped up again and snapped off another kick. As unsteady as Ian looked, he not only put up his hands to block but he caught Drakon’s leg and held it. Unfortunately for him, Drakon had two legs, and the other one came up and around to slam Ian’s legs just above the knee. I think the idea was that Ian would let go and fall, but he held on, and they both went down in a heap.

Whatever advantage Drakon had held on his feet disappeared in a jumble of limbs. The illusion view shifted and wobbled before finding the right angle and zooming in, by which point Ian was on top, his face was red and contorted with rage. The cliché was becoming reality: I did hardly recognize him. The crowd roared along with him as he pounded away at Drakon’s head, then lifted it up and hammered it into the ground.

“Holy shit,” Steff whispered. “That’s pretty fucking hardcore.”

Any impression that the fight was over quickly disappeared as Drakon got his bearings. Instead of attacking Ian, he flipped himself over onto his side. Ian scrambled for a handhold and ended up grabbing at the side of Drakon’s head. Drakon lashed out with both arms and knocked him loose, but not before the damage had been done.

“Now they both have torn ears,” Two reported blandly as Drakon got to his feet and Ian rolled clumsily away from the reach of his legs. “That’s more fair.”

Ian was up now, but was wobbling visibly. Drakon was reeling a bit, too, but not as badly.

“Here comes trouble,” Two said.

“He can still make it,” I said. “They’re both hurting.”

“Uh… I don’t think she’s talking about the fight,” Steff said.

I turned my head and looked past both of them, to where Puddy was pushing her way down the row of seats, ignoring the protests of the people she squeezed past. The arena had emptied out a bit, but not enough that someone could just make a beeline like that.

“Hey!” she yelled when she saw she had my attention. “What the hell did you think you were doing, watching my fights?”

“It’s called ‘she paid her admission so she gets to watch them’,” Steff said. “Now, fuck off. People are trying to watch.”

She didn’t just mean us… the people in the row above us were grumbling about the drama unfolding between themselves and the contest they’d come to see.

“Puddy, I left during your second match because I felt like doing you a favor,” I said. “But then Mariel came up and bitched to me about it. As far as I could tell, it didn’t make a difference, anyway.”

“Of course it didn’t make a difference because you didn’t leave!” Puddy said. She stomped her foot. Something about the action seemed to shock her… she got a confused look on her face, then she punched the air a couple of times over the heads of the people in the next row down.

“Everything working alright, Ms. Banks-LaBelle?” Steff asked in a sticky sweet voice. Puddy ignored her… she just turned and headed back the way she came, muttering to herself.

“That was very rude of her,” Two said.

“What the hell was that about?” I asked.

“Guess her super-secret illegal buff wore off,” Steff said. “I guess she’s lucky she got eliminated when she did.”

“Could you hear what she was saying when she stomped off?”

“‘Who the hell was it?’,” Steff said. “My guess? She took some combination of shit that left her paranoid and edgy, and the whole time she was down in the pit she had the distinct impression that somewhere, somebody was watching her.”

“Hey, guys…” Amaranth said.

“I know, I know, we’re supposed to love thy neighbors and give peace a chance,” Steff said.

“Not that,” Amaranth said. “Ian.”

My first thought was that Ian was in trouble, but when I turned my attention back to the fight I saw he was up close with Drakon and pounding away at him. There was something methodical about his anger. He threw punch after punch. Some, Drakon stepped away from or deflected with a forearm, but it looked like he was forced to accept as many hits as he turned away. They weren’t taking much of a visible toll on him, but I figured they had to be adding up. The fact that Ian was on offense and he was on defense seemed very telling to me.

“He… he might actually win this,” I said.

“Nuh uh,” Steff said. “Drakon’s wearing him down.”

“Are you crazy? Drakon’s not doing anything,” I said.

“Yeah, and Ian’s doing everything,” Steff said. “He’s figured out that Ian’s scrappier than he looks, and dangerous when cornered, so he’s letting him slug it out until he gets tired. Ian could be biting, scratching, kicking, gouging… but he’s throwing punches like he thinks a ‘real’ fighter would because he’s not being pressed into a situation where he needs to.”

I wanted to tell her that she was being ridiculous, that Ian was clearly in control of the situation and Drakon was hard pressed to keep up, but looking at the fight with her words in my ear put what I was seeing in context. Drakon’s expression was one of stoic determination. He did not look desperate. He did not look cornered. He looked patient.

And Ian did look tired.

“He’s falling for it,” I said. As focused as he was on the task in front of him, he couldn’t see the big picture… he couldn’t see the calm look in Drakon’s eyes. “You have to tell him, Steff!”

“Oh, honey, I couldn’t interfere in this…”

“Like you weren’t taunting Puddy during her fights,” I said. “Don’t pretend you found a bunch of moral objections all of a sudden.”

“I don’t care if I piss Puddy off,” she said. “But this is Ian, hon… if he gets mad at me, that’s going to affect your relationship with him.”

“I’m asking you to help him,” I said.

“He doesn’t want my help, Mack,” Steff said.

“You don’t know if…”

“Look at him… he’s in this trap because he’s being stubborn,” Steff said. “If I whisper to him that he’s being played, or that he should haul off and go for the throat, he’ll just knuckle down and do what he’s doing twice as hard.”

“You don’t know that,” I protested, but I had a sinking feeling as I said the words that they were not, in fact, true. Ian was not great at taking advice when he was struggling. I wanted so badly to see him win… to see him succeed… to not see him get beaten into the ground… but it was just like in class. I couldn’t help him if he didn’t want to be helped.

“He could still win,” Amaranth said.

“It’s possible Drakon could underestimate him and make his move too soon,” Steff said, though from the way she stressed “possible” it didn’t sound like she thought it was likely.

Ian was definitely slowing down. His punches were just plain missing more and more often the longer Drakon led him on.

“Well,” I said, “at least the whole thing’s going to be over relatively quickly for him… I mean, it’s probably better if he gets knocked out in his first match and is done with the whole thing. That way he doesn’t get a bunch of hope built up and he can get on with his life.”

“What, you don’t think he’ll keep coming back if he loses?” Steff asked.

“I don’t see why he would,” I said.

“But you don’t even see why he came in the first place,” Steff said.

The fight wore on, and so did Ian. The crowd had cheered enthusiastically when he first started hammering on Drakon, but now they’d grown quiet. It seemed like everybody had picked up on where it was heading… and that probably included Ian. He was, as Steff had said, being stubborn… keeping on his feet, keeping up the barrage as best as he could, but it was clear that he was spent. He might have been fatigued when he stepped into the ring, as Steff had suggested, but he’d been full of fight, as well. That was gone now. He’d thrown it away bit by bit, with blows the bigger man could afford to take.

When Drakon cut loose, it was, at least, mercifully brief. A series of lightning-fast punches to the head followed by a spin-kick, and then he swept Ian’s legs out from underneath him. Ian went down. He stirred a bit, but he didn’t rise. The marshal started counting. Drakon didn’t hit Ian while he was down, he didn’t jump on him and pin him, but he didn’t turn his back and start grandstanding, either. He stood in a ready stance, a kick’s length away, ready to seal the deal if necessary.

It wasn’t. Drakon was declared victor. Despite the rather anticlimactic ending, the crowd whooped and hollered. It had been the longest unarmed bout so far, longer than the previous two put together.

“That was a rip-off!” I protested. “Ian didn’t stand a chance… everybody else got matched up against somebody they could beat. Why didn’t he?”

“Hon, you might not want to share that opinion with your man,” Steff said. “Anyway, Ian could have beat him, if he’d walked out fresh and stuck to his strengths.”

“Yeah? Why didn’t he?” I asked. “What the hell did Callahan have him doing before the fight that had him so tired before it even began?”

“Honey, I don’t… ooh, pictures,” Steff said, shivering. “Not that… well, anyway, the fight was his to win or lose, and he lost it. It happens.”

“Baby?” Amaranth said.

“What?” I asked.

“Look,” she said. She pointed down on the field, where the healers were retreating, their work done. The bigger man was reaching out a hand towards Ian’s like he was going to shake it, but instead did some kind of forearm-clasping thing. The two of them both raised their other hands to the audience. The illusionists did a view sweeping around from one side of them to the other, showing their bare, muscled chests, their faces stained with blood from wounds that were no longer there. Drakon’s face was exultant, showing more genuine emotion than it had throughout the match.

And Ian?

Ian’s face was content.

“You didn’t promise to leave every single time she fights,” Steff said. “Anyway, she won one match with you in the audience and then won one with you gone, so obviously it doesn’t make any difference…”

She was cut off by a buzzing sound and a sudden wind that scattered our programs and food wrappers, and prompted protests from the people around us. Mariel was standing in front of the seats Two and Amaranth had vacated.

“Hi, can we help you?” Steff asked, with mock-cheeriness.

“Puddy says it’s really, really, really, really, really important that you leave,” Mariel said to me, ignoring Steff.

“That’s a whole mess of reallies, Mack,” Steff said in a carrying whisper… and nobody could make a whisper carry like an elf. “You’d better do what she said.”

“I’m really serious,” Mariel said. “She’s super pissed that you didn’t leave for the last fight.”

“Yes, I did,” I said.

“Puddy says you didn’t,” Mariel said.

“Yeah, I did… I went out in the hall until it was over.”

“Puddy says you didn’t,” Mariel repeated. I looked at Steff, helplessly… how was I supposed to argue with that?

“Yeah, hon… but, you see… by an amazing bit of coincidence, these stands here aren’t part of the universe that Puddy controls,” Steff said to Mariel. “So, if she says something happened, that doesn’t actually mean that it did.”

Mariel stomped her foot, and the hem of her insubstantially thin dress flipped briefly up past her navel.

“Look, you,” she said. “If you don’t go, Puddy is going to be really ticked, and it’s going to be your…”

“Hold on… I don’t control Puddy, Mariel,” I said. “I only went along in the first place because I didn’t feel like being a bitch, but if this is the thanks I get, you can forget about it.”

“ButwhatamIsupposedtotellPuddy?” Mariel buzzed frantically.

“That’s your problem,” Steff said. “And, hon, if you have to worry about what you tell her, then…”

This prompted a tirade from Mariel, the only part of which that was slow enough to be understood was the first four words: “You don’t even know…” The rest was lost in the rush, and then she was gone.

“Is it my imagination, or does she move a lot faster since she cut her hair?” Steff asked.

“I think she does,” I said.

Puddy hadn’t yet stepped into the ring in the time we’d spent talking to Mariel. Down in the pit, she was looking around. The illusionists weren’t doing close-ups, but from the way her head was whipping around, I imagined she was trying to scan the crowd.

“Should we wave?” Steff said. “I think we should.”

“Be good,” I said.

“Hiiiiii, Puddy!” Steff yelled, waving her hand up over her head. Puddy wasn’t looking, and though Puddy jumped like she’d been slapped, it was doubtful she could pinpoint the source of the shout over the crowd.

“Anyway… good on you,” Steff said. “Standing up that four-armed stick insect. Second time’s the charm, I guess.”

“I told you I was being nice the first time,” I said.

“You were being a doormat,” Steff said.

“Maybe the world needs doormats,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t see why I have to choose between always giving in and never giving in. There have to be more options than ‘doormat’ and ‘raging bitch’.”

“I’m not saying there aren’t,” Steff said. “But you shouldn’t be nice to people who would just as soon stab you as look at you. Especially when there are people like me who’d rather do both.”

“You know, I don’t think this is an argument that’s going to get us anywhere,” I said. “Our opinions are just too different…”

“Hold on,” Steff said. She got to her feet. “Wait right here.”

“What?” I asked.

“I’m going to get my doppelganger detector,” she said. “The real Mack wouldn’t pass up the choice to run an intractable difference of opinion into the ground.”

“Come on, Steff… I’m eighteen years old, I’m allegedly an adult… and I just want to start making some better choices,” I said.

“What exactly prompted this soul-searching?” Steff asked. “Assuming that word applies.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The thing with Sooni. The tsunami. Having a major divinity mention me on the news. The… what happened on Thursday. All of the above.” I sighed, as much to give myself a chance to pull my thoughts together. “It’s not exactly a sudden thing. I’ve been coming out of my shell since I got here, and finding out who I am… I’m just trying to put all that together now, I guess.”

“So… you’re turning into the person you think Amy wants you to be,” Steff said.

“No,” I said. “I mean, not exactly… I don’t think I could ever live up to her ideals. But I can try living up to my own.”

It was getting harder to talk, as the audience was growing restless as Puddy continued to balk at the line. Finally, a pair of marshals approached her, and after a brief exchange, she stepped into the ring.

“Wonder what the little wart’s afraid of?” Steff asked. “Is her super secret undetectable buff about to wear off?”

“You’d think that would make her less likely to stall,” I said.

Puddy was clearly trying to show more restraint than she had in her first fight, but it was just as clear that she still had way more strength than her body needed to move. Her opponent was a tall woman, built like Rocky without the interesting complexion, and wearing metal armor with a wolf’s head stamped or molded or something into the breastplate. She had a spear with a stone tip and a shield.

Watching Puddy bouncing around as she shuffled in place, I was forcibly reminded of the agile Schmidt and the way he’d danced around Dobbs, but the resemblance was ultimately superficial… Schmidt had been using his own strength to its fullest advantage. Seeing Puddy trying very hard to not make the sort of big showy leaps and smashing swings she’d done in her first match made it very clear how unfamiliar she was with the power she was displaying.

Her opponent, who seemed to be cursed with the name ASGEIRSDOTTIR, stood impassive… still as a statue. Gradually, Puddy stopped fidgeting. The illusionists caught a profile view of her face, then rotated around to the front. There was a look of resignation on it, which turned to determination. The giant image of her blipped away just a flash of gold below caught my eye… Puddy had quite literally leapt into action, and the illusionists had lost their focus.

They re-established the image as Puddy the mostly-human projectile was coming down from a high arc, her axe upraised. Asgeirsdottir raised her shield arm, and the shield took the blow. The axe stuck in the shield, and for a moment of time, the tall warrior woman was actually holding Puddy off the ground. This was the first good frame of reference I had for how tall she was… and that was about four feet taller than Puddy. Then she punched out with the fist clutching her spear and Puddy went flying halfway across the ring. The axe had gouged out a gash in the shield’s leather covering, but a close-up showed the “wound” healing.

“Whoa,” Steff said. “Why is this woman not in Harlowe, and why haven’t I met her?”

“Are you sure she’s not?” I asked.

“Do you think we could have missed her somehow?” Steff asked.

Having let Puddy make the first move, Ms. Asgeirsdottir strode forward towards her. Puddy’s grip tightened on her axe and she pitched herself forward and up onto her feet. Puddy charged, only to be hit with the butt end of the spear, which was capped off with a stone cylinder covered in runes. The blow lifted her up and pitched her back. She landed just inside the circular boundary.

“Puddy lucked out there,” I said.

“Nuh uh,” Steff said. “That wasn’t luck… she was aiming.”

“No way.”

“Did you watch her? She was holding back… that wasn’t a full hit, she basically scooped Puddy up and tossed her.”

“It looked like a hit to me,” I said.

“Yeah, well… human eyes,” Steff said.

Puddy was pissed. Her face was turning the color of her hair. Her next charge was less reckless, but she was swinging wildly before she was in reach. Asgeirsdottir stuck her spear shaft down inside the arc of Puddy’s swing, and the weapons hummed like lute strings as they reverberated away from each other. Puddy got a face full of spear handle and fell back.

I wouldn’t have laid odds that Asgeirsdottir could match her current strength, but it was close enough that Puddy’s advantage there wasn’t overwhelming. They clashed several more times. Puddy got a thump in the chest with the blunt end of the spear that left her breathing funny, and the first time her opponent brought the blade in play, it cut open a line in the shoulder of Puddy’s gold armor.

Puddy had been growing less and less aggressive with each exchange of blows, but her opponent was matching her retreat by stepping up, and her steps were pretty big. Her immense size and the length of the spear gave her a huge advantage in reach.

Puddy took a couple careful steps backwards, until she was almost to the edge of the ring. She raised her axe up in the air. I expected her to pull a spell out of it, but instead she knelt down and set it on the ground.

“What the hell is she doing?” I asked. “She’s going to get creamed.”

“She’s already being creamed,” Steff said. “So she’s changing the game… she’s figured out that Aggie’s one of those ‘honorable’ types. I don’t think it will make a difference for her, but it should make for a good show.”

Instead of rushing forward and finishing Puddy off, the enormous woman retreated to the far side of the circle. She cast off her shield and then threw her stone spear almost perfectly straight up. It soared ceilingward, then tipped over and fell back down to earth, landing upright and vibrating in the center of the ring.

The hall had fallen completely silent. Puddy let out an angry grunt that echoed throughout the pit. Asgeirsdottir took a deep breath and then let out a long, ululating battle cry. She took a giant step forward as Puddy launched herself through the air, and they crashed together before the second step was completed.

The clash was titanic. The clatter of metal on metal resounded throughout the arena. The illusionists caught it all: Puddy’s metal-clad feet striking Asgeirsdottir in the chest, the big woman reaching a bare hand for Puddy’s shoulder or throat and getting bit. Puddy hung onto her arm with one hand and pounded her with the other. Asgeirsdottir whipped her around, then finally succeed in knocking her loose. She stomped down hard, but Puddy rolled to the side. She wasn’t quick enough to avoid a kick in the side that sent her spiraling through the air. She hit the ground bouncing and rolling, tumbling right into the shaft planted in the center of the ring.

Her fine armor was dusty and dented. She’d completely lost one sleeve in the tumbling roll.

Asgeirsdottir stalked forward. Puddy pushed herself up off the ground and got to her feet with visible effort. She spat out a mouthful of blood.

“How do they decide a winner if they aren’t using weapons?” I asked. “This is supposed to be a fight to the not-death.”

“Incapacitation or submission counts, too,” Steff said. “Here’s hoping Puddy has the brains to submit.”

I shook my head, though of course Steff wasn’t watching me. Only the second day I’d known her, Puddy had made one thing very clear: she would never submit. She would die first. Instead of hoping for Puddy to get brains, I hoped for Asgeirsdottir to have mercy.

Puddy wrenched her helmet off, and I saw that one side was bent and broken and had cut a line down her cheek. She looked like she was on the verge of collapse. Asgeirsdottir made no move towards her. Again she was doing her statue impression. I thought… I hoped… that she was simply waiting for Puddy to fall down, and I hoped that Puddy would. A little dwarven toughness only went so far, and Puddy only had a very little dwarven toughness. I doubted women with their strength would have been allowed to compete in the unarmed division, whatever its source might ultimately be.

Puddy reached out a hand to steady herself on the pole… then her grip tightened. The look on her face changed to one of wicked triumph. A shocked “ooh” rippled through the crowd.

“Oh, you treacherous little shit,” Steff whispered. The illusionary face scowled. Puddy shook her head like she was shaking off flies.

For the first time since the match had begun, Asgeirsdottir’s face betrayed an emotion. Her eyes were wide with shock or fear. Her mouth framed an imploration and she shook her head frantically.

The muscles stood out on Puddy’s arm as she went to pull the spear from the ground.

Time seemed to stand still.

The world held its breath.

Then, it exploded.

A great big finger of lightning shot down from the center of the roof, splitting the air with a deafening crash. Puddy went flying, this time, to my profound relief, clear out of the ring… it didn’t matter if she spectral-survived the blast or not, it didn’t matter if she passed out from her real injuries or not, the fight was over.

The applause was… oddly muted and warbly. It took me a moment to put that together with the “deafening” crash. Down in the ring, Ms. Asgeirsdottir shook her head sadly and went to retrieve her spectral weapon, then walked to where Puddy had landed. Healers were already on the ground. The tall warrior knelt down and extended a hand to the recovering Puddy. The illusionists weren’t covering the action anymore… in fact, one of them wasn’t standing anymore and was being tended by another healer… but it was clear as day that Puddy brushed off the gesture angrily. She was on her feet a few seconds later, stomping towards the exit.

Puddy was out. Asgeirsdottir had won.

“Is that her armor or the school’s?” I asked. She definitely hadn’t kept it in the dorm when we were roommates.

“Probably a little of column A and a little of column B,” Steff said. “It looks like something from an exhibition match… when they don’t need them any more, or when they get replacements, they sell the old ones to students for a relative bargain.”

“So it’s a costume?” I asked.

“It’s a showpiece,” Steff said. “I mean, it’s actual armor, but whatever care and/or magic went into making it went towards making it all fancified like that. Our man Tomaso’s going to make mincemeat of her, extra fine.”

She pronounced his name like “Thomas O.”

“I don’t think that’s how you say it, Steff,” I said.

“Eh… tomato, Tomaso,” Steff said. “Either way, he’ll get the job done.”

I wasn’t nearly as confident as Steff was of his chances. First, Puddy had got a bye where neither he nor his opponent had, and Blake had beaten him essentially by having more power and a few lucky shots. Blake was a big guy, but I didn’t think anything he’d done was out of bounds of human strength. Puddy was much stronger than that, and at least competent enough to pass the elimination round.

“Is this part single elimination or double?” I asked Steff.

“Single,” Steff said. “Once you’re out, you’re out, and Puddy’s about to be out. Look at her hotdogging down there… she doesn’t know what’s going to hit her.”

She was playing to the audience, turning around in a full circle with her gold-plated arms up over her head, her double-bladed axe held in one fist as she pumped the crowd up. Tomaso was either feeling cautious or honorable. He took a few steps from the edge of the ring and assumed a ready stance, but waited for his opponent to turn and address him.

She finally did, about a couple seconds after playing out the crowd’s patience. She turned in place and gave a little bow to him that looked awfully curt from where I was sitting, and then proceeded to skip across towards the center of the ring, swinging her axe like a kid playing with a toy wand.

A moment later, my mind processed the distance between us and the actual size of the circle, and I realized she hadn’t been skipping… she was making great big leaping strides. It put me in mind of a documentary I’d seen: Giants at a Distance. Puddy was no giant, of course… of all the fantastical creatures she claimed descent from, the one she most resembled was the least fantastic: a dwarf. I knew the power in her arms, though, so I could well believe she had that kind of strength in her legs.

Steff, on the other hand, had never tried to arm-wrestle a drunken Puddy.

“That axe has to have a serious lightening enchantment on it,” Steff said, in an uncommonly awed tone. “She’s tossing it around like it doesn’t phantom-weigh anything.”

“She’s, uh… pretty strong, actually,” I said.

“She’s not that strong,” Steff said. “If that’s a real dwarven axe, it should weigh about a fuckload. That’s an Imperial fuckload, of course, not a naval one.”

“Yeah, of course,” I murmured, not really focusing enough on her words to sort out the thread of her humor. I was watching the scene unfolding below, with a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that I knew what was going to happen next.

I didn’t, of course… know, I mean. I didn’t have a clue. I was watching Puddy prance around an arena while dressed up like the theme park version of a Metropolitan centurion. She could have pulled Honey’s complete tea service out of her ass and offered Tomaso a crumpet, and it would have only been slightly more startling than her initial appearance.

But that’s how I felt… like I was watching an inevitability approaching.

Tomaso, for his part, looked either amused or bemused. Hell, if I were in his shoes… seeing this bizarre, really solidly built girl bounding across the ring at me with a brush on her head, I probably would have been D-All Of The Above-mused. I glanced up at the jumbo illusion to get a better look at his face, but the illusionists were favoring Puddy at the moment and so instead I got a shot of her in three-quarters profile, smiling like a cherub, with a few curly wisps of her reddish-blonde hair poking out from under the bill of her helmet.

She looked like she was on top of the world… and of course she was. A whole arena full of people had just cheered her appearance, and all she had to do to make them cheer again was win. Who needed friends when you had the roar of the crowd? She probably wouldn’t even know the difference.

I felt a little sorry for her.

I felt really, really, really sorry for Tomaso.

He was approaching her with small, careful, measured steps, like he was dancing a tango or a waltz or something that has small, careful, measured steps. I’ve never really been up on ballroom dancing. He’d decided to take the ridiculous-looking fighter seriously… that was probably smart. She had got a bye, after all, and he had to have noticed the quickness of the axe, and the fact that the armor didn’t begin to weigh her down…

Okay, so maybe there were stories in arena fights… this one even had a sympathetic but doomed protagonist.

Puddy made the first real move, swinging wildly and leaning forward to stretch out as far as she could before Tomaso realized he was inside the arc of her reach. It looked like she was holding her axe by just the very tip of the haft, in order to stretch out as far as she could. Considering he was a big tall guy with a big long sword, I couldn’t fault her the strategy, especially since she could manage a swing like that so blindingly fast.

It wasn’t quite fast enough, though. Tomaso’s caution saved him. He stepped back, pulling his arms in close and… though this may have been more instinctively reflexive than functional… arcing his back out so that his stomach seemed to draw in.

Puddy had jumped the mark a bit, but she kept up the offense. She reeled her over-extended weapon back in, raised it over her shoulder and vaulted forward, swinging it down vertically. Tomaso twitched to the side of this oddly sprite-like charge, and then narrowly avoided a flurry of further jump-and-chop attacks. He seemed to be practicing an economy of movement, never moving more than he needed to even when it was obvious he really had to haul ass to get out of the way. Their weapons clashed several times, but he never met her axe blade head-on with his sword… he brought his blade up to slap it off-course.

I realized I was picturing the fight in my head as an animation… there was an interesting contrast between Puddy’s weightless-looking leaps and Tomaso’s calculated evasions. Of course, with a tall, dark-skinned guy in gray armor versus a short blonde girl in gold, it probably would have had a different villain as a show…

There I went again. This was a sporting match, not a story. Puddy wasn’t a villain, particularly at the moment.

“She’s like you, with coordination,” Steff said.

“What?” I asked. The comment seemed to be completely out of the blue, and on top of that, it was of the same general species as, “Like Amaranth, only uglier.” Somebody like me but coordinated wasn’t like me.

“She’s not jumping, she’s stepping,” Steff said. “Bounding, the way you do when you run.”

“Told you she was strong,” I said.

“There’s got to be some heavy enchantments on that armor,” Steff said. “No way it’s a costuming department cast-off… I wonder who the hell rated it for the fight?”

Tomaso got a moment to slip out of Puddy’s sights and catch his breath when one of her bounding steps very nearly carried her out of the ring. That had been a forfeit during the elimination round… if that hadn’t changed, then it seemed like his best chance for carrying the evening here. I had a feeling he wouldn’t go for that. I didn’t know the guy, of course. Maybe it was the writer in my head enforcing a plot on the scene I was watching. Maybe I was subconsciously associating him with Gloria… was that racist? Whatever it was, I had a feeling he wouldn’t go for victory-by-technicality.

He brought his blade up, holding it vertically in front of him, and rotated it. There was a flash and he went all blurry and shifted to the side… to both sides, actually. Suddenly Puddy was facing two of him. One, presumably was an illusionary fighter, carrying an illusion of a spectral copy of his weapon, while the trio of illusionists kept the whole tableau going as a midair mirage.

Illusions of illusions of illusions… I wondered if the fights were being televised. That would be another level of illusion on top of things.

Both the Tomaso figures were moving more or less in the same pattern, though the spell apparently was good enough to give the duplicate slightly different “business” to carry out, as they were angling their weapons slightly differently and didn’t have the same exact expression fixed on their giant projected faces.

They both backed away from her at the same time, spreading out like the arms of a V. One circled around Puddy to the left and the other circled around to the right. Unless the duplicate itself had some kind of spectral body capable of inflicting spectral-spectral wounds with its spectral-spectral weapon… if that was even possible… it would be over when they came in for the attack. Whichever one Puddy swung at, her axe would probably blow through him like he wasn’t there… whether he was or not.

If she picked incorrectly, he might get a good solid hit in. If not, game over. If she pressed the matter by going after one, she’d be completely turning her back on the other. He’d turned what might have been her sure thing into a fifty-fifty chance.

“Why didn’t he use that in the first round?” I asked. “It might not have made a difference if he didn’t think to do it before he got hammered, but you’d think he would have gone for whatever advantage he could get.”

“They set arbitrary limits on using active enchantments like that,” Steff said. “Back when arena fights were real, enchanted weapons were rare, they weren’t given to gladiators lightly, and the fancy effects all had limited uses per day or long cool-down times… the mockboxes got around all that because you got a fresh copy every match, but people got tired of coming to see fights when everybody went for the meteor option right away. So, there are rules… if he’d used it in his first match, when he could lose without being eliminated, he couldn’t use it now. He probably wasn’t planning on using it until much later in the evening.”

“Well, he’s got a fighting chance now,” I said.

“Fighting chance, nothing,” Steff said. “Look at the rapey little twat chasing her tail… she’s rattled, Mack. He’s gone off program and she doesn’t know what to do.”

She was wheeling in place, trying to keep both in sight as they circled around to keep one behind her. They stalked in closer, cautious and slow.

But not quite cautious enough…

Puddy repeated a version of her first trick, spinning in place, her arm stretched out wide and her axe extended as far as it could go. It passed through one Tomaso with no apparent resistance and then struck the other one… who promptly fuzzed out and disappeared.

Yeah… the first Tomaso? Real.

Thanks to the magic of high-end mockboxery, he had once again been split in two, one real and one illusionary. The only thing that saved my cookies was that I was focusing on the actual size figures down on the floor.

The arena was silent. So, amazingly, was Steff. The only sound I could hear was the soft crunching of a sugar cookie, and then Two began to clap. She clapped very softly… probably what she considered to be the bare minimum… but it carried in the stillness, and seconds later, the rest of the crowd was up on its feet, clapping and hollering. The applause went on for longer than a lot of the preceding fights had, but when it ended it didn’t just fade out or die… it turned alarmingly and progressively ugly.

Somewhere out in the crowd, a ripple had started, and it grew into an undercurrent, and then that became the current. Some people were booing, other people were muttering or murmuring, and others were looking around at the rest of the people because they didn’t understand what exactly was going on.

Go ahead and guess which category I was in.

“She’s snuck in a ringer,” Steff said. “She must have brought in one axe for weigh-in with a bunch of regular blah enchantments, then she switched it out somehow for that monster when it was time to get it mocked. That’s the only way she could have got it into the arena.”

“Wouldn’t they check the enchantments on the weapons that come out of the mockboxes to make sure they match?” I asked.

It seemed to me like it should have been possible to load a weapon with a bunch of illusionary properties that wouldn’t take effect for the physical weapon… though whether or not that could be hidden from divination was another question.

Not that I thought that was what had happened here.

“They’re supposed to,” Steff said. “Maybe she bribed a marshal?”

“I really don’t think it’s the axe.”

“She’s buffing, then,” Steff said. “What a dumbass. She must have been decent enough on her own for Callahan to seed her into the second round, but she threw that away. When they get it sorted out, her ass is going to be more barred than a pack of minstrels… look, here comes the marshal and a pair of diviners.”

The black-and-white clad official was strolling across the field with a pair of wizards in gray. Callahan was stomping across the floor from the other side, yelling and snarling. She actually stomped on Tomaso’s legs… which unfortunately for him were apparently his actual legs, as the rest of him was coming into view above the waist. I thought she was going to go after the marshal, but instead she headed right for Puddy, screaming her head off.

I kind of wished I could have heard what she was saying. I kind of was glad I couldn’t.

Puddy started screaming back. She ripped her helmet off and whipped it at Callahan, but it was a wild throw and went way wide… and way far, too. It sounded like it crashed into the arena wall below us.

The crowd was rumbling all around, and it was hard to tell if more people were getting riled up over Puddy for having possibly cheated or the officials for stepping in after such an impressively brutal victory. Some people were actually chanting her name… her nickname, I mean… though they were pronouncing it more like “putty” and less like pudding. A small but vocal group of people on one side were chanting for Tomaso. A lot of people all over were yelling “Bullshit!”

The marshal had grabbed hold of Puddy’s axe, and one of the diviners was going over it while the other one surreptitiously held her hands out towards Puddy’s back. She shook her head, and the other one nodded. The marshal shook his head. I had no idea if that was good news or bad news for Puddy. He ambled over to where the two women were screaming in each other’s faces, their voices actually carrying above the crowd even if their words weren’t, and got Callahan’s attention. Even without any illusionists broadcasting it, the general gist of her expression was readable from the stands… and so was the triumphant sneer on Puddy’s face.

Somebody came hurrying over with a crystal and put it in Callahan’s hand. She didn’t bother to hide her disgust as she raised it to her mouth.

“After reviewing all enchantments on the weapon and the aura of the combatants, the marshal of the lists has upheld the ruling in the pit,” she announced. “Banks-LaBelle wins.”

“Hey, you got here pretty fast, chicky-baby,” Steff said to Two as we followed the flow of warm bodies up the steps . “You must have really booked.”

“No,” she said. She made a face. “Kyle made me leave early since I had plans and there wasn’t much cleaning to do.”

“The rat bastard,” Steff said. “You know, I have a really good feeling about the evening. I think we’re doing really well.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Our team keeps winning,” she said.

“Yeah, but they also keep losing.”

“Well, you know what Amy would say… you have to take the good with the bad,” Steff said. “Baby.”

“I hope she’s okay,” I said.

“Ah, she’s resilient,” Steff said. She giggled. “Trust me on that.”

As it turned out, Amaranth hadn’t gone very far… just to the top of the pit and then over to the bake sale tables, where she’d either been drafted or volunteered. There was a very big crowd of people, a surprisingly large number of whom were actually buying stuff. She and a short girl with a pixie cut were handling the sales. A couple presumably gay guys were sitting behind her in chairs turned around backwards, and it looked like they were trying to plait her hair while she accepted coins and handed out cookies and brownies.

“I don’t know why this isn’t working,” one of the hair guys said. “Maybe I’m just off today?”

“No, I told you, my hair just likes to stay the way it is,” Amaranth told him. “Uh, an old friend of mine, we tried to put each other’s hair in pigtails once and by the time we did the second one, the first one always shook loose.”

“Well, I’m not ready to admit defeat,” the other one said. “Hey, is that your girlfriend?”

Amaranth turned her head and looked up, seeing me through the crowd. Her face lit up like the sun. I saw that she was wearing a shifting rainbow ribbon tattoo on her cheek, like the other people at the booth.

Seeing that made me pause for just a second… enough time to think, “Hey, that’s what Barley was covered with the first time I saw her”, wonder if I should be shocked or stunned or something, and then realize it wasn’t a big thing.

Amaranth had been right: nothing that had happened was enough to drag me down… not Puddy, and not Barley. I wouldn’t be in any hurry to face either of them again, but that’s because they weren’t pleasant people. That didn’t mean that they had power over me.

And, of course, she’d also been right about the fact that I wouldn’t even have her in my life if I hadn’t wound up on the same floor as those others.

Steff gave me a shove through the crowd, then followed in the wake.

“Hey, you’re awfully smiley, baby,” Amaranth said. “Having a good time?”

“Just thinkin’ about you,” I said.

“Oh, listen to her,” one of her new friends said. “She’s smooth.”

Amaranth and Steff laughed.

“That’s our Mack, smooth as a dwarf’s cheek,” Steff said.

“Sorry for running out like that,” Amaranth said. “It was… more… than I had imagined it would be. I’ll come back down when they get to the unarmed bouts, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“So how’s your pie selling, Amycakes?” Steff asked.

“Hey… that kind of talk is degrading to women,” an anemically pale and thin girl with a pinched-looking face said, elbowing up next to Steff.

“Oh, Khersis, here we go,” said the darker-haired of the two guys.

“Yeah, don’t feed her,” the other one said. “Do not engage, Steff… repeat, do not engage.”

“Oh, guys, it’s okay. See, I’m not actually technically even a woman,” Amaranth said to the newcomer. “I’m a nymph.” She hefted her breasts. “It’s an easy mistake to make, but we’re much harder to degrade.”

“Do you think what you do doesn’t impact how men view women?” she asked.

“Oh, no, I try to be very conscious of that!” Amaranth said. “That’s why, earlier today, I made sure to erase the ligature marks on my neck before I went outside.”

“Hey, just so we’re clear… did you mean the part about pie or me calling her ‘Amycakes’?” Steff said, not bothering to hide her smirk. “Because I really thought… I mean, they told me there would be pie. This is a bake sale, isn’t it?”

“It’s a joke, is what it is,” the girl said. “‘Gay bake sales’ serve no purpose but to reinforce the misogynist stereotype of gay men as being caricatures of women.”

“Well, they also pay for the Prism Prom,” the dark-haired guy said.

“But I’m sure she can tell us why that’s a bad thing, too,” the other one said.

She picked up one of Two’s iced sugar cookies and waved it around.

“Just look at this disgustingly cheery smiley face, complete with rosy little dimples and fluttery eyelashes,” she said. “You can’t tell me that the queen who decorated this isn’t just positively reveling in an obnoxious stereotype.”

“Excuse me,” Two said, squeezing her way through the crowd that was now gawking at the drama almost as much as they were at Amaranth. “You’re mistaken. I decorated that cookie, and I am not a queen.”

“No, honey, you’re a princess,” Steff said, and she grabbed Two and gave her one of their signature double-kiss hugs.

“That… is… disgusting,” the irate young woman said.

“Oh, look at the homophobe,” Steff said.

“Exploiting a created person,” she said. “Infantilizing her like that, dressing her up like a glamour doll…”

“Stop,” I said quietly.

“If the movement has fallen so low as to steal labor from the defenseless…”

“Stop it,” I said, louder.

The two of them… I mean, Steff and the angry woman… stopped and stared at me.

“You don’t know her,” I said. “She’s our friend, not a ‘created person’, and she’s not feebleminded, so don’t talk about her like she doesn’t understand.”

“I’m also not defenseless,” Two said. “I have a shock mace. And I know defense spells. And my friend Hazel says that if somebody attacks me, it’s okay to go for the stones. That means testicles.”

“Just for that, your friend Hazel’s a princess, too,” Steff said.

“She cooks because she likes to,” I said. “She helps her friends because she likes to. These things are big bright spots in what used to be a shitty fucking life, so don’t… make them into a bunch of… things that they aren’t.”

Okay, so it’s possible my eloquence kind of failed me at the end there, but on the positive side the beginning wasn’t very eloquent, either.

“Sorry, sweetie,” Steff said to the angry girl. “You just got told.”

“Hey, I’m not your ‘sweetie’,” she said. “Why don’t you back up and check your male privilege?”

“I’ll check my male privilege when you check your cis privilege,” Steff said. “And your human privilege, and your fullblood privilege, and for that matter, your lesbian privilege.”

“Lesbian privilege?”

“Yuh-huh,” Steff said. “Lesbians have an established cultural identity. I’m bisexual. I’m a member of an invisible minority.”

“Whatever, trend whore,” she said, and stomped away.

“Who was that, anyway?” I asked Steff.

“Don’t even know,” she said, shrugging. “But I feel like we should introduce her to Shiel. Froshes who just discovered feminism are just a special kind of adorable.”

“What the hell was all that privilege stuff about?”

“Oppression Skirmish,” Steff said. “As a transgendered bisexual half-breed non-human, I win at losing.” She grinned wickedly. “I don’t actually give a shit about who has what privilege… it’s an ogre-eat-human world, chicky.”

“Not that I’m not happy seeing you, but as long as I’m working here, I am working,” Amaranth said. “Did you guys want to buy something?”

“Yeah, we thought we’d get cookies all around and then go to the concession stand to get some soda,” Steff said.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have lemonade?” Amaranth asked, tapping the big plastic cooler on the end of the table and smiling at me.

“Ooh, yes please,” I said.

“Oh, don’t,” the blond guy said. “We fucked it up and used like way too much sugar.”

“You guys don’t know my Mack,” Amaranth said. “Two?”

“Yes, please,” Two said.

“Yeah, I’m going to stick with Plan A,” Steff said. “If you two clowns think it’s too sweet, it probably qualifies as an illegal elixir.”

Amaranth gave us two cups. I let Two fill mine, because she made a whole big production of it. It was just a little spigot with a button, but… well, she acted like she was a hostess pouring tea or something. We got a bunch more of Two’s cookies and some fudge brownies and chocolate dipped pretzels, and then we settled up. The crowd had begun to reluctantly filter back towards the stands, as the break was almost over. Amaranth and I shared a long, lingering kiss… which led directly to me finding out how much of the crowd had not departed, and how much of my “oh fuck, don’t stare at me” reflex was still left.

“Been a while since I’ve seen you turn quite that shade of purple,” Steff said as we trudged back. She and Two had insisted on carrying all the food, along with my drink. “Feels like old times.”

“I hope not,” I said. “I’d like to think I’m past a lot of that stuff. I’m just not used to getting a full-on, sitcom-style catcall from the audience.”

“Meh, it’s a bunch of drunks and townies,” Steff said. “They’re just excited to see a celebrity.”

“A what now?” I asked, jarring myself as I missed the last step in the set in my shock.

“Careful, hon,” Steff said. “A celebrity. You were a passing item on the national news… what do you think that means for the local? Anyway, I’d bet money that’s part of the reason Dee didn’t want to come out tonight. She’s probably trying to avoid scrutiny.”

We made it back to our seats without me taking a worse fall.

“What were the names of the guys we were watching for?” I asked Steff as she and Two distributed the goodies around.

“I didn’t catch the other guy’s name, but Blake was the kind of portly white guy,” Steff said.

She flipped open her program and showed it to me. The entire block of names from the first round had shrunk, now listing a bunch of names under the heading “Eliminated”, and the chart for the second round of fights had filled itself in, including the listing for a heavy armed fighter named BLAKE, with a little representation of his flail and armor.

“Whoa, how’d I miss that?” I asked, holding out my hand and feeling the very weak enchantment on the paper. It was only tenuously bound, and wouldn’t outlast the evening… but of course, it didn’t need to.

“This is good lemonade,” Two said. “They made it like I do.”

I tried mine, and found that she was right. It was just like drinking candy.

The bouts in the second round were more serious, and some of them were captivating in their own right, the way the fight between the bearded Blake and his tall, dark opponent had been, so we mostly left off the game of cheering both sides on. Two kept it up, of course, though since there were only two people on the field at a time it was a lot less constant.

“Hey, that guy might be related to you,” Two said to Steff, when a fighter named Johnson came into the ring.

“Uh… I don’t think so, sweetie,” Steff said. “I don’t remember any seven-foot Argentis at the family barbecue.”

“Johnson’s a pretty common last name,” I said. “It’s right up there with Jones or Smith.”

“Smith is my creator’s name,” Two said.

“What was his first name?” Steff asked.

“Mister.”

I don’t think either of us really knew what to say to that, so we didn’t say anything.

In a way, the Blake fight was disappointing after having seen him warm up against an opponent who was his equal or possibly even his better in talent… it had been a close enough fight that the impact of luck could not be discounted. His first opponent in the second tier was a reedy-looking guy with an iron staff I hadn’t even noticed in the elimination round. Blake took him out quickly by faking like he was going to swing wide, and then pretty much punching the head of his flail straight ahead. The ball glanced off the iron shaft but still caught him in the stomach.

It wasn’t an immediately fatal wound, but it dropped him to his knees, and I closed my eyes to avoid seeing what happened next.

“Messy,” Two said as the roar of the crowd slowly died down, and I heard her chomp a pretzel.

Even with the worst of the fighters eliminated, a lot of the battles were going like that… one clearly outmatched combatant being eliminated, and the other advancing to the next round. The other fighter we were looking out for, the swordsman, proved to be named Tomaso. He was matched up with a short, stocky girl in gold armor, wearing a helmet with one of those scrub brush-like crests on it and wielding a battleaxe.

“Uh, Mack?” Steff said.

“Yeah, I know, it’s him,” I said.

“Take a good, hard look at the other one,” Steff said. She flipped her program around to face me. “Or just read ‘em and weep.”

BANKS LABELLE.

“I think that’s Puddy down there,” Two said. “I’m not going to cheer for her.” Her face scrunched up, her eyes tracking back and forth as she thought it over. “Well, a little, to be fair. Go, Puddy.”

An otherwise routine student senate session was turned on its head Monday night by the arrival of newly elected senator Suzune Hoshinotama, known in the Imperial Republic as “Sooni”, a “kitsu-yokai” (roughly, “fox creature”), from the island kingdom of Yokan. Dressed more like for a night out on the town than an evening of voting on student activity fee proposals, this foxy young frosh was turning heads from the moment she walked through the door, even before she was announced as the new hall representative, over all of Harlowe Hall.

“Of course, I was both surprised and honored to be chosen to represent my hall and all the diverse peoples within it,” the newcomer told me, after the meeting. “I simply showed up at the planning session with a few little ideas to raise, and the next thing I knew, the other seven senators were clamoring for me to accept.”

I rolled my eyes. Oh, right. They’d been clamoring. She’d walked into the meeting with no idea what would happen, had she? I wondered how she reconciled these modest words with her confidence about the outcome in logic class… she probably didn’t bother to, come to think of it. She was saying the words that went with her role.

The traditionally apathetic Harlowe senatorial delegation has not been known in years past for clamoring for anything. Last year, few of the non-human senators even bothered to turn up for meetings, instead relying on the block-voting rules, which allow their hall rep to vote in their stead. This year, all of them turned out to wish their champion well.

It was clear those “few little ideas” she raised at the meeting excited them. Her pet issue? Equal rights for all races, an issue that’s already become a hot button on campus these past few weeks.

This bronze-skinned co-ed is no stranger to fighting for equality, having begun the fight back in her homeland of Yokan. There she’s done much to advance the cause of the mikos, members of an underprivileged underclass. After her tireless campaigning on their behalf, her family’s company instituted a special scholarship that allowed three individuals to attend classes here, so that they might avoid the future of exploitation or menial labor that would await them otherwise.

First… mikos? Second… how in the hell had she managed to turn buying people to use as fashion accessories into a noble fight against exploitation? If there were such a thing as a ring of protection from hypocrisy, she had to be wearing one.

“I brought them here so that they could experience a life free from the discrimination that they knew back home,” Sooni told me. “What kind of example would it set if I did not use whatever influence I have to fight against the discrimination we see here?”

Of course, opinions differ as to the extent of the discrimination in a republic with legal protections for all intelligent beings, and on a campus that has been open to non-humans for decades, and offers numerous special accomodations, perks which have raised some resentment among the majority human students.

When I asked her about this, Sooni smiled an exotically mysterious smile.

It could not have been any more obvious that he’d been drooling over Sooni’s perfect tits the whole time he’d been talking to her. “Foxy”, “bronze-skinned”, “exotically mysterious smile”…

I felt a sudden, fierce urge to punch Mr. Angstrom.

Hard.

“Certainly there has been some progress made, but I think the question you are asking is how much racial intolerance is acceptable before it becomes acceptable.”

Phrased that way, it was certainly something to think about, and Senator Sooni wasn’t short of other pithy (continued)

Yeah, she was full of pith. Kai must have been up all night writing lines for her.

Maybe she should have written the article, too… this gripping prose was the best the journalism program had to offer?

I couldn’t help but notice that he did things like use “fight” twice in the same sentence… and “underprivileged underclass?” It also seemed like he just dropped commas in wherever he felt like it… like there was no actual rules regarding their use… like he was just in love with them as a punctuation mark, or something. He seriously needed a better editor.

I knew the Gazetteer was a student paper, but did they seriously just run any article that some hack with a copy of Power Word: Perfect handed to them?

Instead of going on to the rest of the article, I scribed off a copy to take with me. It was yesterday’s article I was really interested in.

It didn’t take long to find a way back to the previous edition. The article was listed on the front page, though it wasn’t nearly as prominently featured as the profile of Sooni had been.

Lost And Found Student’s Friends And Neighbors Speak Out
by Kent Angstrom, staff reporter

Hundreds turned out on Friday to demonstrate over the brief disappearance of a student from Harlowe Hall, but little is known about the student at the center of it all, Miss Mackenzie, who is also known by the human name Mackenzie Blaise. Perhaps understandably, she was not available for comment immediately following her miraculous rescue, by students in the school’s delving program.

Evidently, there was a fancy new spelling of “attempted murder” that I hadn’t yet learned.

The rumors about her are legion, of course. She was already well-known around campus when the first students from Harlowe showed up, outside the administrative building Friday morning. Her antics and outbursts in the dining hall helped make a name for herself before classes even started. She had organized a walk-out in a history class, some say because the instructor, elvish professor Ariadne Einhorn was biased against her and others say, because she was biased against elves. Another incident about which the details are unclear in a class with Professor Arim Goldman led to a complaint lodged against the thaumatology lecturer, though university officials have declined to comment on the details.

Goldman had got in trouble over me? I’d had no idea. Maybe it was time I started reading the paper more often.

Who is this student who inspires such divided opinions among everybody she meets? It helps to understand that she is, through no fault of her own, demonblooded. Contrary to some rumors, it is not likely that she is a full demon as such individuals have no legal rights as humans…

As people, asshole, I thought. It wasn’t just humans who had rights in the Imperium. Seriously, who the hell vetted this stuff?

…though for privacy reasons the exact nature of her ancestry has not been made available. We can surmise that she is most likely half or quarter demon. To get a more complete picture of her parentage, as well as her personality, one would need to go straight to the source.

On Sunday, after having been dodged by her for the past two days, and failing to locate mirror information for her, this reporter headed into Harlowe Hall for a face-to-face chat.

Unfortunately, neither Miss Mackenzie, nor her roommate were anywhere to be found, but there was no shortage of others, who were willing to share a few words on the subject of Harlowe’s most famous frosh.

A two-headed girl, who declined to identify herself, claimed to have witnessed her bathing with and drinking toilet water, but when questioned further, she said that was just “what [she'd] heard.” Perhaps a bit more credibly, no less than three residents of the fifth floor told me that the active bisexual, either had stolen or was in the process of stealing away their partners.

Others had high praise. Duleeya, an elf of color…

Oh, shit… I hoped Dee was more tolerant of cultural faux pas than Viktor was. Never mind the butchered spelling, he’d called her without using her mother’s name. I was pretty sure that was still a death sentence, down below. I didn’t think Mr. Angstrom had to worry for his life, but I couldn’t imagine what this would do to her resolution to embrace surface life and what it had to offer.

Well, she wouldn’t hear about it from me.

…said that the student in question’s behavior was “…consistently in line with what [she] had been given to expect of surface peoples, perhaps exemplarily so.” Celia, a nagakind, stressed how forgiving she can be. Fiji, a southern mermaid, told me that Miss Mackenzie’s reputation as regards her colorful social life is greatly exaggerated in some respects.

“People act like every time she’s shut up in a room with another girl or girls, that means crazy, sexual things are happening. That’s just not true. She doesn’t have sex with everybody that she spends time alone with, and you shouldn’t listen to any rumors that say that she does, because that’s all they are, is rumors.”

With so many contradictory impressions, I decided to go straight to the source that would know best: her somewhat notorious best friend, Cirydwen “Puddy” Banks-Labelle. The two met as roommates, though they mutually agreed to switch rooms when their relationship started to become more serious.

Assuming he’d done a better job with it than he had with her first name, I’d just learned Puddy’s last name. Since she’d registered as a non-human, it hadn’t been on the roommate sheet I got over the summer.

I wasn’t too surprised to see her face-saving account of her moving out. She couldn’t say that she’d moved out to be with her girlfriend when they were on the rocks, as far as I knew, and she didn’t want to admit that we’d “split.”

“We realized we needed some time apart,” Puddy recounted. “Things were just getting crazy, and we both had other lovers. Right now we’ve decided to focus on our friendship while seeing other people.”

(Note: such polygonous relationships are more common among other races than humans.)

“Polygonous?” Really, Kent?

“The thing you have to realize about ‘Mack’ is that she’s really pretty naive. No matter what you expect from a demon, she’s an innocent at heart and is very susceptible to other people’s desires. I don’t think she ever really got out and lived much before she came here. Now she has a lot of ‘friends’ around her who don’t really have her best interests at heart, who would use her for their own purposes or pleasure. It breaks my heart to see her doing it, but what can I do? She’s her own person. She has to make her own mistakes.”

Was she saying that Miss Mackenzie, or “Mack”, as she’s called, was a tool of others in the protest debacle?

“I’m not in a position to say. But there’s more going on there than it seems.”

Right. She wasn’t in a position to say because she didn’t know, because she wasn’t a part of my life. Wasn’t there any kind of fact-checking involved in the production of this article?

Puddy was tight-lipped on this subject, but she was more forthcoming about other things, such as Mack’s love of collectible toys from the popular children’s show Meck Knights. She spoke with a friend’s fond familiarity about Mack’s many foibles, including her tendency for comic pratfalls and attention-getting stunts.

“I almost died when I saw her walk into the lunchroom in her underwear,” Puddy said of an incident many readers will remember. “That caused some dissension even among our own little group. Amaranth put her up to it. That was the start of a really unhealthy dynamic, I think.”

Well, she was the expert on unhealthy dynamics, wasn’t she? Fucking hell, this was pissing me off. I could see why Ian had been surprised when I walked into class all smiles, and why he’d been so hesitant about telling me about the article once he realized I hadn’t seen it.

Amaranth, one of the two cereal nymphs currently in attendance at M.U., has been spotted holding hands with the elusive infernal. I asked Puddy to elaborate on the “unhealthy dynamic.”

“I don’t think it’s good for somebody to be that attached to a nymph,” she explains. “It can really skew their perspective on a lot of things, and effect their judgment.”

Puddy hastened to point out that she has no problem with nymphs, as well she wouldn’t, being part hamadryad herself.

She was particularly critical of Mack’s other friends when the subject of the closely-contested election for student senator came up. Though the races for individual senate seats rarely catch much attention outside of their own halls, the fifth floor women’s side had managed to generate a few ripples on the ether when the first poll resulted in a rare tie. In a surprising turn of events, the second balloting also resulted in a tie, which was resolved when Mack publicly ceded to her friend and rival, Sooni.

“She gave the election away,” Puddy recalls. “Gave it away. I don’t just mean the resignation at the end. She had it in the bag, but she got sloppy. When I tried to tell her that, well, it caused a bit of a rift between us for a while. Her other friends were giving her some bad advice. I tried to straighten her out. She should have won. She would have, if she’d listened.”

For all her acerbic criticism, Puddy insists that she and Mack are still good friends and that she will always be there for her. It’s touching to see that this young woman who will no doubt face a long, hard road during the next four years can inspire this kind of loyalty and support.

On the floating page, the words seemed so innocuous, but in my mind I heard Puddy saying them in a cozening voice as she put an arm protectively… possessively… around me.

I shuddered.

Puddy insists that she and Mack are still good friends and that she will always be there for her.

I could hear her saying that, too.

Friends.

It had been such a dangerously attractive word when I’d first arrived… and it still was. Even as I recoiled at the memory of Puddy’s touch on my body… on my life… I wanted to reach out to her. Still friends. She’d thrown out her stash, after all, which showed that she was trying to change. She was getting better.

I shook it off. Maybe Puddy really could get better. I hoped that she would. Until she did, I needed to stay away from her.

I skipped over the last few bits dealing with Puddy, not wanting to subject myself to any more of her words even at this far a remove. I scanned down the page until I saw the other name Ian had mentioned, that of my other self-proclaimed “best friend.”

Sooni, Mack’s aforementioned opponent, painted a similarly mixed portrait of her. Describing herself also as Mack’s best friend, she acknowledged her faults while graciously forgiving them. She describes with fondness Mack’s enthusiastic fondness for the aforementioned children’s show as well as more sophisticated, high-quality Yokanese animation aimed at a more mature audience.

“Every Sunday at five a.m., she is out of bed like a lightning bolt and running for the TV. Some weeks she does not even remember to get dressed, she is so excited.”

She also downplayed the rumors that their campaigns had been heated, including vicious attack posters and even one magic-charged brawl that had raged up and down the hallways on both sides of Harlowe.

“We are friends as well as rivals. When our competition threatened to tear us apart, I wanted to concede for the sake of our friendship but she would not let me. She would not let my nobility of spirit stop Harlowe from getting the best representative available.”

What does Miss Sooni have to say about Mack’s reputation as a swinger? Has that affected their friendship, as it did with Puddy?

“She had been interested in me from the beginning, but I did my best to brush away her affections and focus on our friendship. She is persistent, though, and after being worn down, I have consented to be taken on a date in Enwich this Friday.”

What the fucking hell? Where in her comic-addled brain had she got that idea from? Even if I’d had any interest in spending the weekend with her in some suite with a bathtub big enough for two people, or whatever she had in mind, Friday was my date with Steff.

Well, if she’d managed to imagine that I’d asked her on a date, then she’d have to imagine me actually going on it with her.

If the fox-eared young woman feels uncomfortable at being courted by such an aggressive suitor, she covers it well. She’s coy about what she expects to happen, or how far she’ll let it go.

“We’ll see.”

Oh, yeah, she’d see, alright.

The article went on, but I’d read more than enough. My mind was full of conflicting emotions… well, just rage, really, but going in so many directions that it managed to be conflicting all by itself.

The Leightons taking the opportunity to trash me wasn’t surprising in the least. What was surprising was that their obvious lies had made it into the finished article.

Could Jenkins do anything about that, I wondered? Would it even be worth pursuing? I didn’t know how these things worked. It couldn’t hurt to ask. I’d make a point to mention it to him. If nothing else, maybe it would give him another card to play against the school.

Who the hell had accused me of stealing their lovers? The only person I was involved with who wasn’t “polygonous” was Ian, possibly, and he hadn’t been dating anybody from Harlowe before me. Had Angstrom just made a bunch of shit up, or had others taken the opportunity to smear me?

Sooni’s posturing and preening was also predictable, but it burned me to know she was being depicted as saintly for bringing the nekos when really she’d probably just thrown a tantrum until her daddy said she could take her favorite toys to school.

And how the hell was Science Princess more sophisticated and mature than Mecknights? She had a freaking baby for a sidekick. If that didn’t tell you everything you needed to know about the show’s target demographic right there, I don’t know what would.

It was maddening, even without the business about us having sex on Friday. I didn’t even bother making a copy of the article, I just waved it away. I’d spent way longer than I’d meant to, anyway. It was time to go upstairs and find the others.

For the first time ever, I was looking forward to my weapons class… and not just because I’d get a chance to talk to Gloria. I really wanted a chance to hit something with my new pitchfork.

Though, under the circumstances, maybe it would be better if I took Steff’s advice and switched partners. I wouldn’t want Gloria to think I was mad at her.