[And now, the conclusion. I would have finished this a month ago, but for mid-semester papers and all like that. Sorry!]

Whew, that seminar was boring as fupp.

So there we were, me and J.D. (That's the Alpha of the coyote-man pack we ran into.) I was about to kill him, he was about to kill me. I was pretty well armed and armored, and I could have spent all morning fighting the whole pack and might have won, but they could have just as easily over-whelmed me and torn me limb-from-limb.

Wasteland skirmishes, by the way, are a lot like snowflakes-every one is unique, but most aren't interesting to tell about. But it never got to the skirmish-ing part, because Sir Sue had an interesting plan. I'd even say a weird plan, but that word has a bad aftertaste right now. A weak plan, as that one alien girl used to say...

She snuck off, using some kind of ninja skills that run in her family. Sneaking isn't easy when you're wearing plate armor, even the vanadium-steel kind, so I, like, give her major points for that aspect. Then she knocked over a big pile of scraps in the direction of the Alpha. Unfortunately, I had just run towards the Alpha, and anyways, the landslide was placed so that it would cut off our retreat.

A symbolic, harmless Stevie Nicks-style landslide, this weren't. (That's the past tense of "ain't", by the way. I ain't- I weren't- I ain't done been. My mother would legitimately pop me in the lip if she heard me talking like that.)

So in that split second, I looked at the mountain of scrap metal coming towards me, then at my enemy. I saw a new light in his eyes, a rather ordinary, decent, regular-person kinda light. So instead of just running, I grabbed him under his arms and made like Tom Petty in Learning to Fly.

Meaning I jumped straight up in the air about ten feet. So really, not a great analogy.

I'd expected that I wouldn't have the energy to fly. It was worth a try, and I might have been able to survive being crushed by the scrap metal, so it wasn't entirely stupid. Instead, the expected weight was nowhere, and I managed to lift me and the coyote-man into the air effortlessly. Scrap metal ran under our feet like a river.

When the landslide had stopped, there was Sir Sue, looking sheepish behind where the pile of scrap had been. How did she look sheepish while wearing a closed-face helmet? It's all in the shoulders.

So I set the big old idiot down on level ground. Oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Now, in an old-fashioned story, he'd swear his life to me because I'd saved him. In a modern story, he'd try to kill me, because, like, the scorpion and the fox, right? Re-uh-lism.

This is real life, so it had to be something way the hell stranger than either, right?

"Thou art she!" he yelled, while grinning as sincerely as a predator can-literally ear to ear, too.

"I be-eth the who, now?" I'd had experience with that kind of talk before. It's tiring.

"Thou art kin to King Simon!"

"You know Simon?"

He roared giddily in my face. "Please, thou art a member of our pack now! Thou mayst, no, thou SHOULDST call me "thou!" Thy scent was preserved with many others in our ANCIENT records from the days of CHAOS! We all know it!"

"Wait, what? And please, less shouting."

He brought it back home for a second. "Art thou not Marcya Semyonovna Petrikova, heir to King Simon?"

"Simon was my..." I let the natural word come out, which isn't easy when you've been catching yourself for hundreds of years. "...my dad, yeah. I didn't know he made up one of those Russian names for me, too."

He started barking again. "There will be a feast this night! It will be great! GRAND! And it will be for thee!"

Oh, jeez, I have to say no, I thought.

"I, th-th-thy princess,"-I said, with great reluctance, hoping that was the right word-"am unfortunately here on business. However, I can accept your offer of a feast-" I looked at Sue, and she shrugged again; "-soonish?"

"We will await that day in honour, our Queen." Queen, that was it, I thought. Well, that's nothing new.

So I thought that the fun part of our journey was over. Hoo boy, I was wrong. Well, Sir Sue took off her helmet and cautiously approached where J.D. and I were talking. Because she's part of "my pack," J.D. had to formally give her permission to use those old-fashioned pronouns, the "thee" and "thou" and all that. It's how they show that they trust someone, I guess. Culture, dude.

Then Sue let it slip that we were going to the haunted library.

Two things happened: For one, as soon as it sunk in that the "obstacle" was a ghost, my guts felt like ice, because I can't fight ghosts. It's one of the vampire things, and not one of the made-up and stupid ones like not entering a house uninvited.

It boils down to this: I literally can't harm a ghost with any physical weapon. It's like, I don't have an A.T. field or something. No, that's stupid, this is real life, not Evangelion. At any rate, I don't have a soul, so I'm powerless to fight creatures that are made out of pure soul. A witch explained it to me once.

But they can harm me plenty, so it's usually a losing fight.

The second thing was that J.D. got excited. And I thought he'd been shouting before. He ran around wagging his crooked tail, shouting "We will hunt with you! Ye willt be our COMPANIONS of the HUNT!"

So we had to let J.D. come with us. His pack were creeping back out, because they'd scattered after the landslide, and they formed a sort of loose crowd around us as we left the junkyard.

The city, whose name escapes me, was like any Middle-American ruins, but Sue told me that she was doing her honors thesis on urban archaeology, and kept pointing out things I'd never noticed about these places. Those poles at the street-corners? They used to have these things called "traffic lights" suspended from wires at the top, that told you when it was safe to drive. I might have seen something like that once, but it's been so long ago...

But as we walked towards the end of town that had the library, I had to own up to the fact that I, like, couldn't perform our mission.

"Oh, you expected to fight it with your sword?" she said. "I'm sorry, I gave you the wrong idea. With a supernatural foe like this, we always use magic."

"I um... like, I can do all the standard vampire things, necromancy and conjuring and all that, but I don't actually know any offensive magic. I mostly win fights by turning into a giant wolf or by sneaking around and shanking the guy in the back."

I barely noticed that J.D. enthusiastically approved of what I was saying.

"You're starting at the beginning," Sue said. "It's to be expected." She handed me a thin ancient-looking black book with gold letters on the cover: "CODEX MAGICARUM CARLI."

"Be careful with it," she said, "I think that's one of the older copies; maybe even the first one. We haven't gotten around to making more of them in ages. There's this attrition, you understand. People don't like to give them back."

I rubbed my finger over the letters. "CODEX MAGICARUM CARLI," I muttered under my breath. Hell, even I know that means something like "Carl's Magic Book." And here's the problem: magic books are usually 99 percent bunk. I've read a bunch of them, and usually they're just a mess of philosophy and shit and not a single real, useable spell. The Enchiridion, the Book of Zohar, White Stains, the Necronomicon (all three of them)... it's always the same.

But then I opened it. And there was written, in clear handwriting quite like mine, simple and clear instructions for making a fireball with your mind. And that was the first page. This was the real shit.

"Sue, this is incredible," I said.

"It's just the basic one, too," she said. "Wait until you read Necromancy For Non-Majors. We get in trouble with the Wizards for maintaining our own magic library, but Sir Howell says, and I quote, 'it's totally cool, man, chill.' Besides, the Master likes him. I think they used to date."

That is an image I will never have out of my head. Giant muppet gorilla-man slash three-eyed zen-master dude. It's fucking great. I wonder what they talked about...

So we got to the library at noon.

I actually had to take my helmet off and use a little folding parasol, because it was getting hot in there, but we made it there somehow. I spent most of the walk learning the basic spells, which are easy as fuck. I was still nervous, thinking about fighting a ghost. It's been the one thing that I just don't do.

But hell, it was day, and ghosts are weak before nightfall. Also, I'd just learned this cool magic arrow spell that's meant specially for the undead, and Sue had reluctantly agreed to let J.D.'s pack help out, as long as I did most of the work.

I didn't feel like I needed to be nervous, I just was.

The library was a tall, squarish building with ton and tons of windows, some shattered. Sue had keys to the massive, old-fashioned Yale padlocks that held the main door shut.

"Not that it's necessary," she said. "Nobody in the city will go near it."

"We are not afraid!" bellowed J.D. "We just think we will die if we go in there! Not afraid!"

"You don't have to come with us," I said.

The effect was massive. J.D. started jumping up and down like some kind of... weird puppy that likes to jump up and down. "We must follow the queen!" he bellowed, and his pack started barking "the queen, the queen!"

Jeez, these people aren't going to take it well when I leave, are they? I thought.

Inside, it was pretty typical. There was a receptionist's desk, a few empty bookshelves, and a grand staircase leading up to the second level. Dust blanketed the ground, except a six-month-old track leading to the staircase, which, unless I've gone totally blind, was made by two people, pulling a small cart, round-trip. One of them had a limp on the way back. I told Sue as much.

She had her helmet off by then, and she like, gave me a look. "Don't get cold feet," she said, but I think she was more jealous that I have tracksense. It's not even a vampire thing. I learned it from one of the last five Native Americans in the world.

We all went up the stairs, and found ourselves in a dark, long area with tons of bookshelves, all about half-full. We crossed this room and entered an even darker corridor. I guess the dogs hung back for whatever reason, but we didn't really care enough to notice, or at least, I didn't.

"You might want to put your helmet on and get ready for battle," Sue said. "When we encounter the ghost, I'll run past it and collect the books we need while you distract it."

"That's the plan?"

"Yes, what else would it be?"

Anyways, I put on my helmet and rested my hand on the sword-hilt. I imagined that I was feeling like Saint George of Ingland felt before he fought that dinosaur and founded the Yoo-Kay.

We went a little further down the corridor.

And suddenly it was roaring in my face. We'd walked right up on it, because it was transparent and the sunlight was only barely filtering into where we were. It was a ghost with a beard and some kind of skirt, barely five feet from me, and it was swinging a ghostly battle-axe.

"Och! I will nay allow talking in this library," he barked with a Scottish accent.

Okay, I thought, so it's a Scottish librarian ghost. Cool.

So I fired the magic arrow spell, and the damn thing dodged it. I found myself thinking momentarily of Leaf. What the dip does she do if things dodge her arrows? I'm a sword-and-axe person, so I'm out of my depth.

I immediately had to dodge the ghost's axe, which he swung sidearm like a total amateur.

I came back up and fired again. He was barreling at me full speed, so he had no time to dodge. It made a hole through him, which seemed to hurt, but didn't re-kill him.

"Och! I keep this library alive after the war, I work my fingers to the bone and don't even stop when I'm dead, and this is how ye thank me?"

"What?" I asked, doging another sloppy axe swing.

"Ye knights," he said, pronouncing the "k", "always coming and stealing my books! I will nae hae nae more of it! You die now!"

"I'm new to this. I'm just-" I said, and I paused to mutter the last word of the spell that would coat my hands in magic fire, "-I'm just paying my tuition." I got inside his swinging range and punched him in the throat with a flaming fist, which seemed to hurt a lot, naturally.

"Ye hypocrite! Ye are in education and ye do nae respect the library," he shouted, throwing down his axe, which vanished, and balling up his fists.

"I'm still-" dodge "-I'm still working some things out!" I said, getting him with a right hook as I said the last word.

"Well, chew on this, mate!" He swung and I had to dodge. "I would hae given ye the gawdamn books a century ago if ye'd asked! Tell Ol' Charlie he can suck my-"

There was a blinding flash of light, which was excruciating to me even through the visor of the helmet, and I guess it hurt him as well. When my eyes healed from the lesions the light had caused, I could see Sue, through the librarian, struggling to hold three books under one arm while managing to work an old-fashioned camera with a massive flashgun on top.

"No! Flash! Photography!" I managed to shout through clenched teeth, while dodging a wild left haymaker from the ghost.

"What?" she shouted.

"I'm a vampire, dammit!" I shouted, trying to get a punch in,

"Oh, right. Sorry!"

The Scotsman decided that fists weren't working, so he called his axe back into existence in his hands and stepped back to bring me into swinging range.

I tried to cast a spell that would give me some kind of astral weapon. I miscast three times before getting it right, dodging his axe all the while. A shiny, translucent staff appeared in my hands, and I wacked him in the head with it, several times. It turns out it's not a magically effective weapon, it's just a magically appearing weapon, so I just pissed the highlander off more.

This went on for minutes and minutes, each minute dying like... like a single petal from an autumn rose. No, shit, that sounds dumb. The minutes seemed to be hours, as he kept trying to kill me and I kept casting more and more spells.

Once he got me with his axe, which, of course, passed right through me on the slant. The way ghost weapons work is, little bits of them keep phasing into the mortal plane, and when that happens inside your body, it cuts little channels that should normally be fatal after a while.

I imagine it did do some internal damage, but it should have healed, right? It would take a lot to kill me.

So I got rid of the dumb staff and managed to shoot him a couple of times in the face, but he kept healing.

"Och," he said, as he healed the hole from the last arrow, and began with another wild swing, "this is taking too fookin' long."

"Agreed," I said.

"Um, you know I can make him go away, right?" Sue asked from the other side of the Scotsman.

"Oh," I said.

"Nay!" he said.

"Cover your eyes," she said.

I did. She fired the flash a couple of dozen more times, I guess. I don't know if it just incapacitated him or caused him so much pain or annoyance that he just left, but he was nowhere to be seen when I uncovered the visor of my helmet.

At this point, James Dean or whatever he's called showed up again, with his entire pack. There were so many of them that they blocked the corridor with their stinking, slobbering bulk.

They all shouted things to the effect of "We heard fighting! We will help! YES!"

I had to tell them they were too late.

"Didst thou die? Didst thou win? What happened?"

I gave them a look, a look I'm sure Simon had had to give them many times.

I tried to sleep on the plane back, about an hour after we'd bid the devil dogs farewell. I couldn't get in a wink.

And then, hours into the flight, I almost managed to. And then I remembered I had a quiz in Inglish Literature in the morning.

No sleep for me, then.

But the quiz went well. You can always think of something valid to say. That's just how Inglish classes work, I guess.