I can't wait any longer for paradise. I've told you once, I'm not going to tell you twice -- Fleetwood Mac, Save Me
A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Category: Writing

Fiction: Winnie-the-Pooh and Geocaching 2

We start drifting a little from the way we originally told the story here because I couldn’t figure out how to make the original sequence of events make sense, but I assure you I have captured the overall gist of it.

In Which Evelyn Returns to the Hundred Acre Wood, and Piglet Almost Meets a Muggle

A day or so later, Evelyn once again decided to go for a scooter-walk to the Hundred Acre wood. And before long, she came to the home of the Piglet. Evelyn knew it was Piglet’s house the moment she saw it, because it was a beech tree, and because it was next to a sign that said, “TRESPASSERS W”, and because Piglet was standing in front of it, sweeping the dust from his front step.

“Hello Piglet,” Evelyn said. “I’m Evelyn. I know you are Piglet, and you’re Winnie-the-Pooh’s friend.”

“Hallo, Evelyn,” said Piglet. “Pooh Bear told me all about your Expotition. It sounded like quite the grand adventure.”

Evelyn thought that Piglet sounded rather sad, as though he were very sorry to have missed the Expotition. In fact, Piglet was mostly of the opinion that the very best sorts of grand adventures were the ones that were already over and done with so that everyone could enjoy a pleasant Pooh Hum about them.

Evelyn said, “We could go on our own Expotition if you like. And you could find the treasure yourself.”

“Hm,” said Piglet. “I suppose if it’s an adventure, I should go. But are we likely to meet any Heffalumps on the way? Because I very nearly met a Heffalump once, and I shouldn’t like to repeat it if Pooh isn’t about. It’s so much safer with two, you know.”

“I don’t think we’ll see any Heffalumps,” Evelyn said in a breezy sort of way. “But we must be on the lookout for Muggles.”

“Oh dear,” Piglet said in a worried sort of way. “Are Muggles terribly ferocious?”

“No, no, Piglet,” said Evelyn. “Muggles are what Geocachers call people who don’t know about Geocaching. You have to be very careful not to let a Muggle see you when you find a geocache, because they don’t know the rules.”

“Well that’s all right then,” said Piglet, and so he and Evelyn and Red Zoomer set off, past the six pine trees, and toward the little spinney where Pooh had once failed to catch a woozle, and over the river, and at long last to the shady spot quite near the North Pole.

Evelyn showed Piglet how they had to search. Piglet looked under stones and between sticks and had just spotted the treasure jar inside the knot-hole when a rustling sound came from beyond the clearing. “Muggles!” Piglet shouted, and hid himself in the knot-hole at once.

But Evelyn just laughed. “Look, Piglet,” she said. “It’s your friends Tigger and Roo.”

And so it was. That morning, after Tigger and Roo had their breakfast of malt extract and tea cakes, they had gone out for a bounce in the woods, and by chance had happened upon the little shady spot just as Piglet had found the treasure. Piglet poked his head up out of the knot-hole, and in a very cautious voice, asked, “But are they muggles?”

“I’ll check,” Evelyn said. “Hi Tigger, I’m Evelyn. Do you know about geocaching?”

Tigger, being that sort of tigger, puffed out is chest and said, “‘Course I do. Catching geodes is what Tiggers do best!” and to demonstrate, he bounced straight up into the air, snatched something, and presented it to Evelyn. “See?” he asked.

It quickly became clear to Evelyn that Tigger had confused geodes with cicadas, for there were rather a lot of them this year. Evelyn leaned down close to Piglet and whispered, “I think they might be Muggles, Piglet. You know what that means.”

Piglet did not know what that means, and said so, but Evelyn smiled and said, “It means we get to teach them all about it!” And so she did, explaining to Tigger and Roo all about Geocaching, and how to follow a map, and how to search for treasure, and how they could trade something if they found it. Roo thought this was all terribly exciting and began pointing all about at every crook and hole and shadow on every tree and begging Tigger to climb up and look. Tigger, who had learned his lesson about climbing trees, was rather nervous about the prospect, and contented himself to searching just the branches that were below bouncing height.

Piglet climbed out of the knot-hole and made a grand show of searching as well, because he thought it would be rather impressive if he pretended not to know where the treasure was, and then just sort of found it in a casual sort of way. But he left it too long, and little Roo bounced into the knot-hole and found the treasure himself. Piglet was greatly disappointed by this, but Evelyn game him a knowing sort of wink, which made him feel better about the whole thing.

Evelyn helped Roo open the jar, and they all looked at the many small treasures inside. Evelyn suggested that Piglet should choose first, as he was the first one to join the Expotition. Inside the jar, Piglet found a Lego figure that looked just like himself, and he thought that it was so perfect that maybe someone had left it there just for him. Evelyn agreed that was a very likely thing, and asked what treasure he was going to leave in its place.

Lego Piglet“I hadn’t thought of that,” Piglet said. “I suppose I could leave a haycorn.”

“I don’t know, Piglet,” said Evelyn. “It could be a long time before the next person finds the Geode Catch, and the haycorn could be spoiled by then.”

Piglet, who was starting to feel a little peckish, was relieved to hear that. So instead, he checked himself all over. As it happened, Piglet was wearing a brand new sweater, or jumper, depending on your localization and what sort of stone Harry Potter found in your area. And it came with a very splendid extra button. As Piglet – having the wrong sort of fingers for buttoning buttons – never buttoned the buttons on his sweater, or jumper, to begin with, he didn’t imagine he would need a spare. Evelyn agreed that a pretty button was a very good sort of treasure, so Piglet traded it for the little Lego Piglet.

Next, it was Roo’s turn. Roo had a few marbles in his pocket, and he traded them for some marbles that he found in the jar, and if you could tell the difference between the marbles he started with and the marbles he ended with, you have a keener eye than I do, but Roo was happy with the trade.

Tigger key
Turns out Disney did make a fancy collectible Tigger-themed decorative key , but this feels truer to the original intent.

Finally, it was Tigger’s turn. Tigger’s first thought was to take the very button that Piglet had just left, but Evelyn suggested it might be more fun to leave that for someone who didn’t know where it had come from. So Tigger dug down deeper in the jar and found a Tigger-shaped key. “A Tigger key!” he exclaimed. “Why, this is the most tigger-riffic treasure I’ve ever found!” and in trade, he left one of his extra springs, feeling that with his new key, he was entirely bouncy enough without it.

Afterward, everyone wrote their names in the log book. Piglet, of course, could write his own name. Roo could not, but insisted on trying anyway. Tigger, after insisting that name-writing was what Tiggers did best, and then fumbling with the pen several times because pens are not a good fit for Tigger-paws, conceded that, “Tiggers don’t like using pens,” and let Evelyn write it for him as he spelled his name out for her: T-I-GG-R.

Once the cache was safely put away, Tigger and Roo bounced happily off into the woods to find whatever locks they could try Tigger’s new key on, and Evelyn climbed aboard Red Zoomer to see Piglet home and perhaps have a little lunch, because she had never tried haycorns before. But just as they were passing the six pine trees, a passing squirrel dropped a nut into a pile of dry leaves and it made a little rustle and Piglet, who had been thinking in a very thoughtful sort of way about the day’s adventure, was so startled that he suddenly shouted, “M- M- Muggles!” and ran all the way home.

Fiction: Winnie the Pooh and Geocaching As Well

The other night, my daughter asked me to tell her a story. I made her do the heavy lifting. Here, after some editing, is the first part of what we came up with.

In Which a Visitor comes to the Hundred Acre Wood to teach Winnie-the-Pooh about Geode Catching

Evelyn and Red Zoomer
She tells me she would’ve needed to call it something else had it been slow.

Quite a long time ago – it may have been last Sunday or perhaps even Saturday – there was a little girl named Evelyn. And once day, Evelyn decided to go on a Scooter Walk. So she got her scooter, which she had named “Red Zoomer” on account of it was very fast, and also red, and she set off for the Hundred Acre Wood. By and by, Evelyn came to a house in the forest with the name “Sanders” written over the door in large gold letters. Now, of course, Evelyn could read very well, so long as she limited herself to sight words like “is” and “as” and “the”. But “Sanders” was a different matter entirely. But she gave the matter a little think, and it occurred to her that she certainly couldn’t read the name “Sanders”, and she couldn’t read the name written over the door, so, logically, that meant that the name over the door must be “Sanders”, which meant that Winnie-the-Pooh lived under it. And so it was.

Evelyn had always wanted to meet Winnie-the-Pooh, of course. Her brother Dylan had once told her all about the dangers of entering a bear’s house uninvited, so she knocked firmly on the door.

Winnie the Pooh Lived Under the name of Sanders

Winnie-the-Pooh had just finished his mid-morning snack, and had been preparing for his late-morning snack when he heard the knocking. As it was quite an unusual time for a visitor, he called out, in a cautious voice, “Who’s there? Are you a friend?”

“Someone’s friend in particular, or just generally sociable?” Evelyn answered. Because she always tried to be a friend, but on odd occasions she had been know to bite someone, particularly if they wouldn’t share the crayons. But never hard enough to leave marks.

“Are you a friend of Pooh Bear?” asked Pooh, though he was starting to develop his own suspicions.

“You’ll have to ask him,” Evelyn called back. “We haven’t met yet.”

Pooh rested his head against his paw and thought about this. And for a bear of very little brain, this was a difficult question. Now, the way Pooh saw it, it was generally best for someone to be a friend, because friends tended to say very friendly things like, “Would you care for a small smackerel of honey?” So he nodded to himself and called out, “Then I suppose you had better be,” and flung open the door.

“I’m Evelyn,” Evelyn said, by way of introduction. “And this is my scooter, Red Zoomer.”

“Ah,” said Pooh. “You must be my very good friend Evelyn.” He leaned in conspiratorially and whispered, “Is Red Zoomer a friend as well?”

“Oh yes,” said Evelyn, “Red Zoomer is a very good friend who hardly ever topples over and drops me on my face.”

“Well that’s all right then,” said Winnie-the-Pooh. “What brings you to the Hundred Acre Wood today?” asked Bear. “I don’t suppose you came to invite someone to lunch?”

Evelyn laughed. “Actually, I came here to go on an Expotition. I know you are very famous for your Expotition to find the North Pole, and thought you would like to go with me.”

Winnie-the-Pooh was always pleased when someone remembered his discovery of the North Pole, and so he almost agreed immediately, but it occurred to him first to ask, “Will this Expotition be searching for any of the fiercer animals, such as Jagulars or Woozles?” Because while Pooh was quite obviously the bravest bear in the Hundred Acre Wood, he shuddered to think what one of the fiercer animals might do to his new friend Evelyn. To say nothing of Red Zoomer.

Once again, Evelyn just laughed, “Silly old bear. This Expotition is to find Treasure.” And she said it just like that, with a capital letter and everything. She quite likely would have said it in italics as well, but being a very small child, she couldn’t stretch her fingers far enough to press control-I.

“I see,” Pooh thought. “Would this treasure happen to be of the edible sort?”

“Possibly,” Evelyn said. “You never can tell with geocaches.”

Bear considered this. “Begging your pardon,” he asked, “But what exactly is a Geode Catch?”

“It’s a treasure,” Evelyn said, carelessly. “You follow a map to find it.”

“And how quickly does the map move? Will we have to run?”

Evelyn showed Pooh her phone. Or rather, the phone she had borrowed from her daddy. “This is a map,” she explained. “The X shows us where the treasure is.”

“So we look for the X?” asked Bear.

“We look for the spot,” Evelyn said. “The X shows us where the spot is.”

“Will the X be joining us here, or will we meet it along the way?”

“Silly old bear,” Evelyn said. “Come on. You should bring some treasure too.”

Now, Pooh was confused. More confused. “I thought we were finding treasure at the spot.”

“Yes, but if we take the treasure, we should leave something else for the next person to find,” Evelyn said.

So Pooh reluctantly collected one of his smaller honeypots, and then Pooh Bear and Evelyn and Red Zoomer set out to follow the map to find the spot. Evelyn made a grand production of directing the Expotition this way and that, past the six pine trees, then south toward the little spinney where Pooh had once failed to catch a Woozle, and over the river, stopping only long enough for a single game of Pooh Sticks. And as they walked, Pooh thought of a little hum about their Expotition:

Bear and Girl set out one day,
They went for a walk in a usual way,
What did they seek? A Geode Catch.
Where will they find it? A wooded patch.
Over and under and around and through,
Went Girl and Bear. Oh, and Red Zoomer too.

At long last, Evelyn and Pooh came to a shady spot, not far from the North Pole. “Aha!” Evelyn declared. “This is the spot.”

“I don’t see a spot,” said Pooh. “I don’t even see an X.”

Evelyn pointed to the map. “The map says that we must search.” And so they did. Evelyn immediately started looking underneath leaves and up trees and between blades of grass. Pooh walked around in circles several times, and then searched inside his footprints. But after several minutes, he had found neither spot nor X, and so he sat down beside a fallen log to have a think. And as the ground was rather uneven, he set his small honeypot in a knot-hole in the log to hold it steady.

A geocache
Picture for demonstration purposes only

“Now,” said Winnie-the-Pooh, “I always think better when I have had a small something.” So he reached for his honeypot inside the knot-hole on the log. To his very great surprise, however, what he found was an entirely different jar.

He studied it carefully. “There is something very unusual about this knot-hole,” he said. After a moment of panic, he looked again, and found his own honeypot still safely tucked in the hole beside the other jar. “Perhaps,” he thought, “This is the sort of knot-hole that often contains two honey jars.” And so he opened the new jar. “Oh bother,” he said. “No honey.”

“Pooh!” Evelyn exclaimed, “You’ve found the treasure!”

“Have I?” asked Pooh. “I thought it was a jar.”

“It is a jar,” Evelyn said. “The treasure is inside.” She showed Pooh how inside the jar was a tiny book and a collection of small baubles. Pooh found that among the things inside was a very nice pencil eraser. Pooh, of course, had very little use for a pencil eraser, but this one happened to have his own face printed on it.

Winnie the Pooh erasers
Evelyn came up with this all by herself. It seemed likely that such a thing existed, but I’m not aware of either of us having seen one before.

“What a lovely eraser,” Pooh said. “It looks almost like it was made for me.”

“Maybe it was,” Evelyn said. “Maybe someone put it there hoping you would be the one to find it. You can have it if you like,” she said, “If you have something to leave in its place.”

To Pooh’s very great relief, it was plainly obvious that even the smallest of honeypots would not fit inside the jar. But as it happened, the previous day, Pooh had found a very pretty stone by the edge of the stream, and as luck would have it, he was carrying it with him that day. Evelyn agreed that a pretty stone would be a suitable sort of thing to leave as a treasure. So Pooh deposited his stone in the jar, and in return, he took the eraser. Then Evelyn showed him how they were supposed to write their names in the little book to let everyone know they had found the treasure. First, she wrote her name, “EƲ3LŲN”. Then she helped Pooh write his name. Evelyn did not know how to spell “Pooh”, and Pooh himself only had a very general notion of it, so they wrote “P.B.” for Pooh Bear, and left it at that. After, they closed up the jar and tucked it back inside the knot hole.

“Did you have a good Expotition, Pooh?” Evelyn asked.

“Oh yes,” answered Bear. “I so wish my friends could learn all about Geode Catching as well.”

“Well maybe they will,” Evelyn said. “Now, I’m getting kind of hungry. Let’s go have a small smackerel.”

And so they did.

Fiction: A Magic Carpet Ride

Anyway, here’s the punchline.

The pain was short-lived in that the concept of time had ceased to exist. It was, for the same reason, eternal. Zeke became aware of his own existence again in a void. There was nothing he could see, nothing he could hear, nothing he could feel, nothing he could smell, and nothing he could taste.

No, that wasn’t right. He could taste something. Strawberry lip gloss. Roxy was kissing him, and with that knowledge, his sense of touch returned. He was able to get his eyes open, but his brain was still scrambled from being stunned. He tried to ask a question, but what came out was closer to, “Flarb?”

“Vital signs are normal,” Lieutenant French said. “You were out for about five minutes.”

“Are?” Zeke asked. That was a real word, at least. He tried to remember how his hands worked.

“We’re definitely not on our Earth,” French said. “We’ve lost comms to Unified Space Command, and there’s no sign of the Sally Ride.”

Instead of trying to speak, Zeke managed to raise his eyebrows into what he hoped was an expression that conveyed the obvious question.

Roxy gave him an apologetic look. “Sorry,” she said.

Doctor Waller explained. “We patched into the phone network. Your mother’s number isn’t in service. Obviously, it’s been a few years, so it’s possible she changed it?”

Zeke tried to sit up, forgetting that he was strapped down. Roxy released the straps, and he tried to sit upright, failed, and slumped sideways. “Muh?” he asked. They followed his gaze to the viewport. The blackness of space had been replaced by blue skies and treetops.

“I didn’t anticipate that. Probably should have,” French said. “Our relative position changed when we jumped. I guess we’re lucky we ended up somewhere safe.”

“Maybe not just luck,” Waller said. “We know that the exotic matter is triggered by certain brain patterns, and it seems like it’s linked to a self-defense reflex. Possibly his subconscious influences exactly where we land. It might even explain why the universes he was drawn to resembled works of fiction from his memory. If that’s true, it might even be possible for him to learn to control it unassisted.”

“Where do you find a teacher for that?” St. George asked, sarcastically.

Zeke finally found his voice. “So where are we?”

“It seems pretty normal,” French said. “I think we’re in New York. Or whatever the equivalent of New York is in this universe. This looks like Central Park. Probably a good thing the cloak turned on automatically. I need to take some readings and adjust the calibration. And you’ll need a few hours to recover before we try again. It might help if you can figure out whether this universe maps to anything you know.”

St. George nodded to Mon’a. They produced a knit cap and pulled it down over their forked ears, then put on a pair of sunglasses to conceal their eyes.

Zeke tried to stand up and stumbled. Mon’a caught him. Zeke blinked a few times. “I remember now. Where I saw you before.”

“This is our first meeting.”

Zeke shook his head. “Not you-you. Your… Your actor I guess. I couldn’t place it because of the eyes. But a bunch of years ago you played the leader of a gang of underprivileged street toughs who befriended an Asian-American senator. Y’all were recurring characters in the last season before he became vice-president and the show ended. I liked that show.”

“Quite,” Mon’a said.

The six of them cautiously emerged from the hatch of the invisible space ship. The sun was shining, the air was sweet, the weather, pleasant. The crowd was sparse in this section of the park; no one seemed to take much notice of them.

“Keep a low profile,” St. George said. “Be on the lookout for…” He took a deep breath, mentally preparing himself. “Hijinks.”

“Hijinks?” Waller asked.

“Hijinks. Think about what kind of TV shows are set in New York. It’s basically fifty-fifty whether it’s a crime show or a zany sitcom.”

“That’s actually a good point,” Zeke said. And then he stopped talking, because he, among with the other four humans, stopped in their tracks to stare wide-eyed at a group of people a few yards off.

“It appears this universe has open contact with non-terrestrial life,” Mon’a said. “I do not recognize the species.”

St. George leaned toward Waller and said, sotto voce, “Okay. I didn’t really believe this whole TV Show Universe thing until right this minute. I think I owe you ten bucks.”

“I want to ask. Can I ask?” Roxy said, excitedly.

The members of SPACOM 3 quietly exchanged glances at each other. “We probably should go if we can,” French said. She was clearly struggling to show scientific detachment. “It would help with my measurements.”

“Quite,” Mon’a said.

“With your measurements?” St. George asked, skeptically.

“Yes, sir,” she said, stifling a giggle.

“Okay, go,” he said to Roxy. She skipped ahead.

“Excuse me,” she asked the four-foot tall creature. It turned its large, furry, orange head toward her and regarded her with large, googly eyes.

“Yes?” it asked. The inside of its mouth was flat black except for a tongue that looked painted-on, and it had no visible throat.

Roxy took a deep breath and with a broad smile, asked, “Can you tell me how to get, how to get to…”

Fiction: Mile Marker 24

It’s funny how ideas evolve. When I first had the idea that this is based on, the twist wasn’t even a twist. It only occurred to me a good twenty years after I first had the idea that Gabe wouldn’t explain his true nature to Dorothy from the outset. Now, I think it’s a fun reveal, though I’m not sure if it will really play out well as a full story – there’s obviously a big change in what kind of story you’re telling if you spend an extended amount of time believing it’s one kind of story and then it turns out to be a different kind. But me, I like things that transform into other things; I was brought up on a diet of kids shows about dudes who used magic swords to turn into Conan knock-offs and trucks that turned into robots. So, let’s see how it goes.

“Sorry, what?” Gabe asked. He glanced at the clock.

“Edgy. Distracted. I said you were edgy and distracted. Like the way you got distracted just now, ten seconds ago,” Dorothy said. “If you don’t want to help me study, you can just… I take that back. I need you to help me study.”

“Yes. Right. Sorry. Trigonometry. The cosine of the arcsine of x is the square root of one minus x squared,” He said. He looked at the clock again.

“Yes,” Dorothy said, “Except that it’s history. Are you okay?”

“Sorry,” Gabe said again. “Sorry. I… Can’t really explain.”

“Complicated?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, instead engaging in some kind of staring contest with the clock. “It’s okay,” Dorothy finally said. “Believe it or not I’m getting used to you. I know you’ll keep me out of trouble. Stay on the straight and narrow. Don’t break the rules. Don’t mess up the universe.”

Gabe looked down at her with a start, as though seeing her for the first time. “Don’t break…” he started. His face fell. With a faraway look, he quietly said, “There is no who we are but what we do. There is no us but what we choose.”

Dorothy dropped her pencil. “What was that? Where did you- That was me.”

Ignoring the question, he said, “I’ve been teaching you the wrong thing.”

She stood up, confrontational. “I wrote that. Part of it. Only it’s not done yet. How did you know that?”

“I’ve been keeping you out of trouble,” Gabe said. “I should’ve been helping you choose what trouble to get in. I need to get into some trouble right now.” He snapped back into focus. “You need to call emergency services. Right now.”

“What?”

“There’s been a car crash on route 170, near mile marker 24.”

“How did you- When?”

He looked at the clock. “About four minutes from now. You don’t have to tell them that part.” He reached into his pocket and took out a small gray square. Dorothy had seen it before, but only in brief glances; he’d always made a point not to call attention to it.

“How do you know? She braced for his usual “It’s complicated.”

She didn’t get it. “The same way I know about your poem,” he said. “I’ve read it.” He opened up the square like a compact and poked at it intensely.

Dorothy didn’t understand. “They have poems that haven’t been written yet in heaven?”

He looked up from the object in his hand, surprised. “Heaven? Oh. Oh! No. Look, when I told you I was your guardian angel, I didn’t mean it literally.”

He looked back at the clock. Not a lot of time, but he gave her a second anyway. “I’m from the future. About a hundred years. I am going to get in a lot of trouble for telling you this. Might not get see you again. But this rule is worth breaking. You need to make that call, and you need to make it right now.”

“But-” Dorothy tried.

Gabe tapped on the device in his hand, and then, quite unexpectedly, he put his hands on her shoulders. She looked at his hands in disbelief, then poked him with one finger, verifying that he was tangible. “Where I come from, you finished that poem. You finished it, and you called it Mile Marker 24. After the place where your stepsister died in a car accident. Make the call.”

He picked up her phone and put it in her hand. Reflexively, she took it and fumbled, trying to dial. “You can-” she tried

“Yeah,” Gabe said. “Not supposed to, but I can. I have to go. I don’t know if I can help, but I’ve got to try. If I…” He didn’t know how to finish.

Dorothy had glanced down at her phone as the call connected. Her eyes flicked back up just in time to catch the edge of a flash as Gabe vanished.

Fiction: On My Way

Another thing I wasn’t planning. SPACOM 3 was just supposed to be a cute cameo in a story that was mostly about Zeke’s struggle with the existential nature of living in a teen drama, and whether it was morally acceptable to date a fictional character. But I had so much fun writing them that I figured what the heck.

Lieutenant French tightened the straps holding Zeke to the partially-reclined chair in the middle of the drop ship, then placed the trigger in his hand. It reminded him of the buzzer from the quiz bowl game show he’d done back in high school. That had only been a couple of years ago, but it felt a lot longer.

“When you push the button, it will trigger a phased energy discharge. It’s based on K’lap’rr stunner technology, so there’s no chance of permanent damage, but it will stimulate the same part of your brain as a near-death experience. If our theory is correct, that should trigger the exotic matter particles.”

“Cool, cool,” Zeke said with a bravado he didn’t feel. “I shoot myself and hopefully it zaps this space ship back to my home with all of us inside. Or maybe it just zaps me personally back home, and I get to enjoy the view from geosynchronous orbit very briefly.”

“Low-Earth Orbit,” French corrected. “Geostationary orbit is much farther out.” She winced as it set in that this was not a helpful response.

“Why do I have to push the button myself?”

“We talked it out with Doctor Abermarle, and…” She wobbled nervously. “We’ve taken every precaution, and the theory is solid. But this is uncharted territory, and there’s no absolutes. Given that, we decided that it ultimately had to be your decision.”

Mon’a leaned uncomfortably close and coldly said, “As we are not enemies, it would be… Awkward for any of us to be the direct agent of your demise.”

“We’re coming with you, to who knows where,” St. George said. “So it’s not like we don’t have skin in the game.”

“Well thanks,” Zeke said. “And despite my sarcastic tone, I actually do mean that. You didn’t have to come with us.”

“Based on the fact that you were able to travel to Sparrow’s Folly twice while you were in your car, but the times you jumped outside of it, you ended up somewhere else, we believe that the exotic matter in your brain is influenced by a surrounding ferromagnetic field,” Lieutenant French said, “We’ve altered the internal magnetic field of the drop ship based on the precession of your unique quantum signature. If the theory is right, that should send you to your own universe. But there are constant terms in the calculation we can only estimate, so it may take us a few tries to calibrate it.”

“But that also means it might be hard for you to go home afterward,” Zeke said. “Why take the risk?”

“It’s your sunny disposition,” Doctor Waller said, standing up from the flight controls.

“No it’s not,” Zeke said.

“No it’s not,” St. George agreed.

“That is not the reason,” Mon’a added, dispassionately.

Waller shrugged. “Okay, it’s her sunny disposition,” he said, pointing a thumb at Roxy.

“What can I say? I’m cute as a button.”

“And you’re taking all this very well,” Waller said. “Most people on this version of Earth take a while getting used to the space ships and the aliens.”

“You get a lot of aliens in Sparrow’s Folly?” St. George asked.

“Once in a while for the Halloween episode, but otherwise, no,” she said.

“You are unperturbed by the prospect that your metaphysical nature derives from a work of fiction relative to your partner.” Those familiar with Mon’a’s speech patterns could tell this was a question.

Roxy shrugged adorably. “I’m nineteen. I think it’s pretty normal for a nineteen-year-old to think she’s the center of the universe. I just happen to have documentary evidence that it’s literally true in my case.” She squeezed Zeke’s hand. “I got your back, jack. Now or never. Ready?”

“I feel like I could stretch this out a little longer,” Zeke said.

“Just lay back and think of home,” she told him.

“Or failing that, somewhere nice. One of those fun beach shows,” St. George said. “Nothing too murdery. Try to avoid kaiju.”

“No zombies,” Mon’a said, neutrally.

“I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks.” Zeke sighed, and put his thumb on the button. “I hope this doesn’t hurt,” he said as he pressed it.

Then the entire universe was pulled inside out through a microscopic hole in his brain.

 

Fiction: Domo Arigato 1

Dipping once again into the pile of “Stories I meant to write decades ago,” this is actually an idea I had way back in the ’80s, but it took several decades for the key element of the climax to come to me. Now, the material is maybe a little dark given how young I was at the time, but keep in mind that I had just come off of Captain Power. Also, the original idea was a jukebox musical, but that doesn’t translate well to prose.

Rick set Lauren down on the couch and checked her eyes. They’d already turned gray. Fine silver lines had started to trace paths along her temples. “Who is she?” Daryl asked.

“A friend,” Rick said, “But not for long if we don’t do something.” He found one of the two android weapons on the table where he’d left it earlier, took out the power rod. “This is how they did it. They call it a sillicizer. It changes organic matter into…” He trailed off.

Everyone else just watched in confusion as Rick crossed to the time machine and opened a panel on STEVE’s housing. He placed the silvery rod into a test tube mounted to the inside of the panel and closed it. “STEVE,” he said. “Use your sample analyzer to invert the molecular structure and create a reversal agent,” he ordered.

STEVE looked up at him with no expression from the rounded screen. “An-na-na-na-lyzing,” the computer stammered. “Scan process will ta-ta-ta-take one-one hundred trillion cycles. All cir-cir-circuits busy.”

“She’s getting cold,” Daryl said, checking Lauren’s pulse. “Do we have that kind of time?”

“No chance,” Rick said. “I have to go back. They must have an antidote.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Casey said.

“She saved my life. I have to do something. Besides, we can’t just leave her here. If she changes, she could–” His eyes moved around the room, landing on the bin of parts. “I have an idea. STEVE, prime the time machine.”

“Un-un-un- Error. Circuits are busy. Do you w-w-wish to cancel the current job?”

Rick looked flustered for a moment. “Oh. Okay. Right,” he said. He walked around to behind STEVE, opened a different panel, and started rapidly hammering on a keyboard inside.

“What is it?” Casey asked.

Rick kept typing. STEVE’s image vanished for a second then reappeared. “Circuits r-r-ready. Starting time machine warm-up.”

“The professor was a genius,” Rick said. “STEVE is amazing, even by today’s standards. But he’s still an ’80s computer. Single threaded, single tasking. He can only do one thing at a time. But when I rebuilt him I used a modern CPU to run his program in a virtual machine. So I can add a simple task scheduler to run multiple jobs in parallel. It’s a little bit of a kludge, since STEVE’s program doesn’t have any access to the task scheduler, but it should work for now.”

STEVE’s eyes followed Rick closely as he returned to the parts bin and began quickly plugging pieces together. A coil of wire. A large bar magnet. A wah-wah pedal. “What are you doing?” Casey asked.

“I’m going to threaten them,” Rick said. “I’m going to march right into the robot headquarters and make them give me the antidote.”

“I thought you said they took over the whole world,” Daryl said. “You can’t just take them on.”

“Not a lot of choice,” Rick said. He stepped close to Daryl and looked down at Lauren. “I’ve got something they need. Something they’ve waited a long time to get their robot pincer hands on. Hopefully I can make a deal.”

“T-T-Time machine ready,” STEVE chimed.

Casey shook her head. “Don’t do this. It’s too dangerous.”

Rick kissed her cheek. “I have to do this.” She frowned, but looked over to Lauren on the couch and gave a grudging nod.

She slipped off her ring and placed it in the socket on the time machine. Rick did the same. As the time machine started to light up with purple energy, Casey returned her ring to her finger. Rick instead slid his into a clip on the device he’d built and pressed down the pedal. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “If that’s not enough time…” A quick glance at Lauren confirmed that she was changing rapidly.

Casey struggled to find a response. “Stay safe,” was all she could choke out before a violet ribbon stretched out from the emitter on the time machine to Rick’s ring, whisking him twenty years into the future.

Fiction: SPACOM 3

Colonel St. George rubbed his temples and sighed. “Let’s try this again. Two days ago, you interrupt my lunch to tell me things you shouldn’t have any way of knowing. Then, this morning, you somehow manage to break into one of the best-protected installations on the planet. And you’re telling me that you knew how to do that because of a television show. Have I got that right?”

Zeke laid his head on the table in frustration. He hadn’t expected this to be easy, but plowing on through blind faith wasn’t getting him anywhere. “I get that it sounds dumb,” he said. “But come on. Didn’t this already happen to you guys once?”

St. George shot a glance to Doctor Waller. “Any idea what he’s talking about?” Waller’s shoulders twitched in confusion.

Zeke sat up, processing. “That hasn’t happened yet, has it? Okay. That helps.”

“Now you’re saying you’re from the future?” Waller asked. He’d been playing the “good cop” role so far, but he sounded frustrated. Which was fair, given how long they’d been at this.

“No, definitely not the future,” Zeke said. “I told you. I’m from a parallel universe. Or whatever. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. Well, I mean, I am, I guess. But not that kind of scientist. The normal kind who doesn’t study wormholes and aliens and parallel universes.”

Waller nodded and sighed. “And in your universe,” he said, almost, but not quite completely suppressing a skeptical tone, “We’re a TV show.”

“That’s creative,” St. George said.

“Ted, you have to admit, some of the things we’ve been through make a lot more sense as ratings stunts,” Waller said. “Like the time-”

St. George silenced him with a glare. “Not in front of the suspected alien agent.”

“See, this is what I mean,” Zeke said. “If I knew exactly where we were in your storyline, I could prove at least some of what I’m saying by predicting the future. But you won’t tell me anything. Do you still have the Klepton truth machine? You could plug me into that and it would tell you that I’m telling the truth.”

Waller shook his head with what looked like genuine sympathy. “There are some forms of mind control that give it false readings. Maybe you really do believe what you’re saying, but you’ve been brainwashed. Or, if you’re telling the truth, how can we know it will even work on someone from your universe? From your perspective, this is all fiction, isn’t it?”

“Again with revealing sensitive information to the weirdo,” St. George said, exasperated.

“Maybe at first, I guess,” Zeke said. “But I’ve been living in a teen drama for two years now. I am totally over any sort of prejudice toward the ontological nature of someone’s plane of existence. You should hear who we elected president.”

“Let’s pretend I’m humoring you,” St. George said. “How did you get here?”

“Car crash,” Zeke said. “Two years ago, I was driving up 40 in a bad storm, and I lost control and went into the guardrail, and when I woke up, I was in a hospital in a small town in Rhode Island surrounded by a cast of quirky, attractive, quick-witted characters that I recognized from the hit basic cable teen drama Sparrow’s Folly. I spent two years trying to figure out a way to get home. I tried interfering. I tried not interfering. I tried just driving back to my own house, and I do not want to talk about how that went. Then, six weeks ago, I tried going skiing. And the ski lift broke and I very nearly died, and now I’m here. Well, a few other places first, but here eventually. I’m simplifying. Fortunately, that whole incident where everyone in Columbus lost three hours was still in the papers, or else I’d never have figured out where we were.”

“And this doesn’t seem a little hard to believe to you?” Waller asked.

“Well sure,” Zeke said. “I realize that the most rational explanation is that none of you are real and this is all a coma dream. But that’s not an actionable hypothesis even if true; I can’t just will myself out of a traumatic brain injury, can I?

“So, assuming this is a real world and I am really doing the things I think I am, I wandered around town until I found that diner where you guys hang out, and when you blew me off, I wandered out into the woods and found the ventilation shaft you used when you needed to sneak the Jindro out of the base. And I was expecting you to catch me right away, but I was hoping I’d be able to dazzle you with my inside knowledge.”

“This was a bad plan,” St. George said, wryly.

“That’s fair,” Zeke said, depressed. “But you must know I’m human by now. You get those Precursor bio-scanners in season three. Can that detect that I’m from a parallel universe? I can’t remember if it ever came up.”

“There is something unusual in your scan,” Waller conceded. “But we don’t know what it means. We’d need to compare it to something that we could confirm was from a different universe.”

Zeke had an idea. “Ooh, what about a portal token? SPACOM 5 could send you one of those.”

St. George and Waller exchanged a long look, silently arguing something. St. George conceded. “SPACOM 5 was lost, presumed KIA. I’m not even going to ask how you know about them.”

Zeke lit up. “You don’t know!” he almost shouted. “That’s it. That’s the thing. I can help you. I need a piece of paper. I hope I remember this.”

Another silent conversation, and Waller slid his notepad across the table. Zeke started writing furiously. “SPACOM 5 is alive. Well, mostly. They’ve probably lost a couple people by now. They got out before the supernova. The Precursor device was a portal into luminous space.”

“Luminous space?” Waller asked.

Zeke kept writing. “It’s a parallel universe. But the usual kind, not a TV show universe. They call it that because the vacuum energy is different so empty space glows and the stars are black. And yes, I know that doesn’t make sense. There’s a running gag where any time someone tries to explain it, they get cut off. Here.”

He pushed the notepad back. Waller studied it. “This is the language of the Precursors,” he said. He pointed to the first line. “This is their name for Earth.”

Zeke nodded, excitedly. “And the second one is the dinosaur planet where you found the weather machine. I think that should be enough for you and Lieutenant French to work out the math. They’re not just names. They’re coordinates. The names tell you where the planet is.”

St. George gave Waller an expectant look. He nodded. “That’s possible. We have some fragments of other Precursor planet names. Samia should be able to work out an algorithm to translate.”

“I want to make a deal,” Zeke said.

“A deal for what?” St. George asked. “And what does this have to do with SPACOM 5?”

He pointed at the third line. “That’s the name of a Precursor outpost. That’s where you find the second portal. The one that lets you contact SPACOM 5. I am just giving that to you, no strings attached. Save you a couple of months, maybe save some lives. You scan a portal token, figure out how to tell if someone is from a parallel universe. Hopefully you start trusting me.”

“What about the deal,” Waller asked.

“I want your help. I want to go home. Or back to Sparrow’s Folly. Or ideally, back and forth to either one whenever I want. Occasional vacations to that kid’s show where everything’s made of candy.”

“Why?” Waller said. Simultaneously, St. George said, “I love that show.”

“Because I know another name. The big one. The Precursor home planet. Look, you guys give all the planets serial numbers and that’s great for you, but I can’t remember a single one of them, so I can’t help you with which ones are good and which ones are bad. But I can remember the ones with names. I can skip you all the way to the end of the series without you spending years wandering around hyperspace looking for clues and accidentally waking up Cthulhu or Space Godzilla. At least one of those happens. Depends on how literal you’re being.”

Fiction: Unbent

I was surprised to find I had another piece of this in my head. It’s… Still not great, I think. But I’m trying a new thing where I go ahead and write things instead of agonizing over them in my head for thirty years. So here.

Wind.
One branch bends.
Unbroken.
Another breaks.
Falls.
But remains
Itself.

Dorothy crumpled the paper and threw it in the trash. Then she took it out again and carefully flattened it. She sighed.

“Knock-knock.”

She looked around, surprised. “Gabe?” she said to the empty room.

He stepped through the closed door. “How did-” she tried. “What did-” she tried again. Every question she wanted to ask felt stupid in light of the material reality of him. Or unreality, as the case may be.

“How did it go?” he asked. “The audition. That was yesterday, right?”

She wasn’t done with trying to interrogate him, but she let him distract her anyway. “Understudy,” she said. “Just as much work but less scary. They cast Anna, though. Rebecca Gibbs. I guess it turns out she always wanted to be an actress? She’s not ant good at it, but she’s popular.”

“Congratulations, I think,” he said. He seemed slightly distracted, looking around her room with a curiosity Dorothy couldn’t quite parse. He walked over to the window and looked out. “Nice view,” he said. “I like the tree.”

“Why did you knock?” she asked.

He looked down at her desk. “I thought it might make you uncomfortable if I just bamfed into existence in your bedroom,” he said.

She blanched at the thought. “So you can just do that, show up here whenever you want? What if I was naked?”

He blushed impressively. “I wouldn’t. We have… There’s procedures. Your privacy and autonomy are completely protected. Mostly. As much as we can. It’s complicated. And mysterious. Sorry. Did you write this?”

He was looking at the poem. Suddenly self-conscious, she reached through him to snatch it off the table, crumpled it again, and threw it in the can. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I came to check on you. Make sure everything worked out okay. I know I got you in some hot water the other day. That was careless of me.”

She looked away. “Anna still thinks I’m weird, but I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. And then there’s her friends.”

“Oh?” Gabe asked with a tone of surprise that wasn’t entirely convincing.

Dorothy rolled her eyes. “Don’t play dumb. Someone brought a six-pack. And they got caught. It would’ve been pretty bad for me and Anna if we’d been there. You knew.” It wasn’t a question.

“It’s complicated,” he said. “Nothing’s set in stone, but some things have more wiggle-room than others.”

“How?” she asked. “And why me? What’s it to you?”

“It’s…” he struggled.

“Complicated?”

He sighed and started pacing. “Thing is, most people’s lives just sort of work themselves out. There’s nature and nurture and genetics and free will and externalities and internalities and a million little nudges and mostly it all just balances out and people sort of tumble into the space the world has made for them, and that’s fine. It’s like… Skiing.”

“Skiing?” Dorothy asked, lost.

“When you’re halfway down the mountain, maybe technically you could change your mind and go somewhere other than the bottom, but it would be a lot of work, and you’d probably fail, and besides, the bottom was where you meant to go in the first place.”

This did not help Dorothy make sense of what he was saying.

“But anyway. There’s a flow and most people just go with it. But some people more sort of… Don’t. They’re slippery. It’s like skiing and… Actually that metaphor doesn’t go anywhere. The point is that you’re different. You’re… Slippery.”

“Why?”

Gabe shrugged. “Don’t know. It’s complicated. And this time I mean that it’s so complicated that I don’t understand it either. Some times those million little nudges line up just so, and instead of you falling into the space the world left for you, the world falls into the space you left for it.”

She shook her head. “What is this, some kind of Campbell thing? I’m the chosen one and I have a great destiny to fulfill?”

He raised his hands defensively. “No, nothing like that. Kinda the opposite. You don’t have a destiny. You’re a free agent. That’s why I’m here. When a person could do anything, there’s some incentive to make sure they do the right thing.”

“What does that mean?” Dorothy asked. “What kind of incentive? What’s the right thing, and why does anyone care about me? I’m nobody.”

Gabe took a quick, sharp breath. “You’re not nobody. You could do so much. You could change the world. So…” he looked around uncomfortably. “Do a good job at it, maybe?”

“How?”

He smiled. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re a good person. You just need the occasional nudge to make sure you don’t forget that.”

The smart speaker chimed out a dinner bell. “This isn’t the end of this conversation,” Dorothy said.

“I didn’t imagine it would be,” Gabe said with a smile. “Have fun. Live your life. Learn your lines. You’ve got this. And if you don’t, I’ve got your back. In a vague and mysterious sort of way.”

He stuck one hand in his pocket and gave her a jaunty wave with the other one, then popped out of existence. Dorothy waved her hand through the space he’d occupied. This was going to take a lot of getting used to. With a deep sigh, she headed downstairs to dinner.

Ten seconds after the door closed behind her, Gabe winked back into existence. With a guilty glance over his shoulder, he stepped to the wastepaper basket, reached down, and very carefully picked up the crumpled poem.

Fiction: The Saints and the Poets

This is a piece of a plot bunny that has been bouncing around my head for about thirty years and I am finally willing to commit a bit of to written form. You’d think it would be less clunky after all those years, but I guess if I could make it flow quite right, I would’ve written it down a lot sooner. It’s mostly inspired by High Concept Sit-Coms, so I tried to keep it shallow and, despite tremendous mental pressure, avoid profanity.

“Will you please trust me on this? Don’t go. It’s a bad idea.”

“Why would I trust you?” Dorothy asked. “I’ve known you for all of ten minutes. She’s family. Technically.”

“Yeah, but which of us seems more inherently trustworthy?” Gabe flashed an exaggerated smile.

“Well what do you have against it? We’re just going out to have some fun. You’re acting like they’re plotting some kind of heist. Do you-” she shook her head. “Do you know something?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Gabe said. “But I would really like it if you trusted me. Trust is important, don’t you think?”

“But this is weird. You know that, right? That what you’re asking is weird? I’m being asked to hang out with, ahem, The Cool Kids, and you, who I don’t know from Adam, is telling me assassinate my social life for mysterious undisclosed reasons and–” Dorothy felt the sudden weight of unwanted attention and looked around. “Why are people looking at me?”

Gabe glanced around, nonplussed. “Oh,” he said. “You didn’t realize. Sorry. I thought you did. They think you’re talking to yourself.”

“What?”

“Yeah, they can’t see me.”

She set her water bottle down. “What are you talking about?”

A guilty expression spread across Gabe’s face. “Okay. This isn’t going well. I can’t actually explain, but I can show you.” He paused and held up his hands in a warding gesture. “You should brace yourself so you don’t overreact.”

He held out his hand in front of him, then slowly moved it toward where she’d set her bottle on the table. He extended one finger toward it as if to push it over. Then, in a slow, smooth motion, passed his finger straight through the bottle.

Whatever bracing Dorothy had done wasn’t sufficient. She let out a little yelp, drawing even more unwanted attention before she could stifle herself. Through clenched teeth, she whispered, “You’re a ghost?”

“I’m not a ghost.”

“Then I’m crazy.”

“You’re not crazy. I can prove that. Maybe. But, um…” he nodded over her shoulder.

Anna. Dorothy hadn’t thought there was still a “worse” things could get. “Oh. Um. Hi?” she tried.

“I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt,” Anna said. “But ‘my step-sister is a schizo,’ isn’t a good look for me.”

With a sour expression, Gabe said, “Ooh. Ableist much?” He stood up and walked over to Anna. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re really hot. But that’s not a good look.”

“I.. Uh…” Dorothy struggled.

“Drama club,” Gabe said.

“Drama club,” Dorothy repeated, surprised.

“Drama club?” Anna parroted.

Gabe walked through Anna and another table of students and pointed at a poster on the wall, too far away for Dorothy to read. “Audition,” he called out. “Thursday.”

Having no other choice, Dorothy decided to run with it. “Drama club,” she said again. “There’s an audition Thursday. I… I thought I’d try out. I was practicing.”

Anna’s eyes narrowed, suspiciously. “You? Drama club? Isn’t that a little ESFP for you?”

“I’m… Broadening my horizons.”

“What’s it for? The audition?”

“Our Town,” Gabe shouted. “Be right back.”

Dorothy glanced over just in time to see him futz with something in his hand, then he simply vanished. Anna looked her up and down, lingering on her pinafore. “Okay, fine, I find that broadly plausible. Show me.”

“Excuse me?”

“Show me what you were practicing.”

“Why?”

Anna rolled her eyes. “Just do it. Let me see how big of a fool you’re going to make out of yourself, so I can decide whether or not to disown you.”

“Um…” Dorothy stammered.

Just then, Gabe reappeared behind Anna, walked through her, and held up a script. “Eyes here,” he said. “Forget everyone else, just look at the script, don’t think about the extent to which your entire social existence is in existential peril.”

It was more than she could process, so she did as she was told. “​I can’t,” she read. “I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize.”

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened them. “So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look…”

A hush fell around her as she recited Emily’s goodbyes to Grover’s Corners, but Dorothy stayed focused on the paper in front of her and didn’t notice. Even Anna seemed hypnotized by her delivery, though Dorothy couldn’t see it with Gabe between them. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it-every, every minute?” she finished.

“No,” Gabe said, filling in the corresponding part, “The saints and poets maybe. They do, some.”

“I’m ready to go back.”

When Gabe lowered the script page, Dorothy finally noticed that every eye in the cafeteria seemed to be on her. She blushed and reflexively brought her hand up to her face. “What?”

“Wow,” Anna mumbled. She struggled for a second and had to physically shake herself to recompose. With exaggerated nonchalance, she said, “Yeah, that’s passable I guess. I, uh. Tell you what, I’ll go with you. It’ll look good for college, right? Wait. Thursday? Crap. Never mind. I’ll take care of it. I got to go find Jimmy.” She turned and stalked away.

The rest of the room slowly returned to normal business and Dorothy turned back to the lunch table and sat back down, befuddled by what had just happened. “What was that?” she whispered through clenched teeth.

“They liked it. You impressed them. You really don’t appreciate how gifted you are,” Gabe said. “You’ve got a power in your words. Someday, they’ll be your own words, but Thornton Wilder will do for a start.”

Dorothy pieced it together. “Thursday,” she whispered. “You committed me to something Thursday. Anna too. So we can’t-”

“There,” Gabe said, smugly. “See? No social assassination required. I got your back.”

“What are you?”

He cringed. “Really can’t explain. If it helps, just think of me as your guardian angel.”

Fiction: To Tell The Tooth

I didn’t actually intend to post this, but it’s my birthday and I don’t have anything better to post, so here you go.

Sprix picked at the dirt around the base of a tree, found a twig, and gave it an experimental bend. It snapped. She discarded the pieces and poked some more. “I don’t believe you.” Cam said.

Sprix flexed a new twig and grimaced as it folded easily. She cast it to the ground. “I manifested ex nihilo before your eyes,” she said. “So either I am what I say I am or you’re having a psychotic break, and… Oh.” Her expression suddenly changed from frustration to sympathy and she put her hand on Cam’s shoulder. “I know it’s been a rough year. But you’re going to be okay. You’re not going crazy; you can trust your senses. You can trust me.”

Cam shrugged the hand away. “I can trust the weirdo in the theme park costume who says she’s a fairy godmother? Sure.”

Sprix moved on to another tree and started poking through leaves. Cam reached up, snapped the tip from a low-hanging branch, and offered it to her. Sprix slapped it out of her hand. “Don’t do that!” she said. She cast a quick side-eye toward the base of the tree and, through clenched teeth, said, “It has to have fallen of natural causes. Gift. Of. The. Forest. Gift. How’d you like it if I snapped off a bit of you for alchemical purposes?”

Cam took a step back. Sprix had not done anything so far that read as even mildly threatening. In fact, she gave off an aura of safety that defied explanation. It took effort to think about the fact that she was certainly dealing with someone who was… unwell. Who she’d followed out into the woods. Alone. Without witnesses. What was she doing?

“Besides, I wasn’t always. I’m working my way up. Used to be a tooth fairy.” She crouched by another tree and toyed with several more sticks.

“I’m sorry, no,” Cam said. Something was holding her back from reacting as strongly as she intellectually knew she should, but this was still a bridge too far. “There’s no such thing as the tooth fairy.”

Sprix looked up at her with a squinting look of condescension. “Then what happens to the teeth?” she asked. She dropped most of the sticks she was holding and continued turning the others over in her hand.

“No, really. I’m not giving you this one. I have children,” Cam said. “It’s the parents. It’s me. I’ve done it. There’s no magic elf-”

“Fairy,” Sprix interjected with a surprising venom in her tone.

“Fairy,” Cam repeated, hands up. “They go to sleep, we sneak in, we take the tooth, slip a couple of bucks under the pillow. No magic. No,” she cleared her throat, “fairy. It’s us. We take the teeth.”

Sprix seemed pleased with the stick she was holding and stood up. “Then where are they now?” She pinched the twig between her fingertips and gave her wrist an experimental snap. The twig slipped from her fingers and hit Cam in the chest. Sprix cringed.

Cam felt her face fall. “What?”

“The teeth. Where are they now? Two kids, forty teeth. Where are they? You didn’t just chuck them in the trash, I assume?”

“I, uh…” The question didn’t just catch her off guard. Thinking about it caused her active distress. “I…”

Sprix smirked. “I’ll tell you. Just like you said. They go to sleep, you sneak in, you take the tooth, slip a couple of bucks under the pillow. Then you go about your business, get distracted, set the tooth down, probably in a drawer on the nightstand, tell yourself you’ll find a place for it later… And that’s the last you ever think of it, because some, ahem, weirdo in a theme park costume slips in and takes it when you’re not looking.”

“What about the money then?” Cam asked in spite of herself.

Sprix had turned back to the leaves and detritus, looking for a new stick. “The nice thing about money is that it’s fungible. Would you even notice if there was an extra quarter in your purse the next morning? Would you question it if a dollar bill randomly showed up in the lint trap the next time you did a load of laundry?”

Cam tried to process the question, but her brain didn’t want to. “I… Um…”

Sprix tried more sticks with increasing frustration. “It’s okay. I get it. Your mind is blown. That’s all right. I’ll erase your memory when I’m done and you can go back to thinking you’ve got a secret horde of milk teeth you’ve somehow misplaced and that isn’t even slightly weird or creepy.”

That snapped her out of it. “Wait, what?”

“All part of the service.”

“I don’t consent to that,” Cam said.

The words stopped Sprix dead in her tracks. “You will,” she said. When she saw Cam’s expression in response, she backpedaled. “Sorry. That wasn’t meant to be a threat. Well kinda. Actually no, definitely not a threat. Thing is, you can feel it, can’t you? Your brain doesn’t like this. Most humans aren’t wired for exposure to magic. Either you will adapt, or it will get worse, and most people don’t adapt. Eventually you will decide that it would be more comfortable to go back to living in a world that behaves according to rational, scientific laws, and you’ll be okay with me editing myself out of your memory to make that work. Simple.” Then she head-butted the nearest tree in frustration. “Or it would be if I could find some decent wand-wood. Chestnut is great, but the American chestnut tree has been functionally extinct for close to a century.”

Then Cam surprised herself. Her brain didn’t like the magic stuff. That fit. But it could grab on to a simpler, rational, concrete, idea. Like the fact that the American chestnut tree had been functionally extinct for close to a century. “Actually, I can help with that.”