April 14th, 2987

Weather: Sunny f/16

Mood: Good

Music: Joni Mitchell – People's Parties / Same Situation

Sup, diary.

Well, the band's on hiatus, or at least, Death is temporarily out of it. Turns out he was roaringly drunk last night, however that works. He won't say it, but he regrets what he said. Anyways, with Charlie the unkillable Chancellor gone, he doesn't have much reason to stay. Fuck, I had completely forgotten that he was here to kill somebody. He left me his number for whenever Sue and LSP and I wanted to jam. It's not going to be right now, I can tell you that, diary. If anything, he should have had more time to learn how to hold his liquor.

Sue and I are probably going steady. Glob, I hate it when I can't tell. I have seduced queens, married a princess, been the love-slave and scullion of a wizard, and at least one religion worships me as a minor sex god in their fupping pantheon because I taught that thing to that priestess. I should, like, be able to tell if we're going steady.

We haven't had a date. I define a date as something where you could potentially go Dutch. It's an important hoop to jump through, the first time the waiter asks you "together or separate," because there are four options* and which one ends up happening tells you a lot about the dynamic your relationship might have. It really sets the tone. It's also very important to discretely notice how much the other person tips.

*The fourth option is to dine and dash.

But we've had two outings (not counting the time in the Wasteland with J.D. and the ghost), and they both went, like, really well, and… you'll see.

So the first outing was talking for hours about love and heartbreak and falling asleep together on a couch. If it had followed a first date I'd be ready to declare it "going steady" right there.

The second was this morning.

We woke up. Now, I'm operating on the following sleep schedule: I go for days, sometimes hallucinating because I can't fucking sleep, finally I hit the bed like a ton of bricks and get a few dreamless hours of restless sleep, and so on.

But we both woke up on that same couch around nine-thirty, and I had just dreamed about my apartment in Saint Michaels, Maryland. (Why couldn't I think of "Saint Michaels" earlier?) I haven't dreamed since… it was before I started this volume. Sometime in volume seventy-six, I think, assuming this is seventy-eight. I'd need to see my bookshelf to know for sure.

I felt fantastic before I opened my eyes. The left side of my face was up against Sue's arm, and I think I must have woken her when I moved my head.

The first thing I noticed was that she was awake and looking at me pleasantly, if a little blankly. Part of her face was still red, but the swelling had gone down and her eye was fine. The second thing I noticed was that we were both still in little more than nightshirts and chain-mail chausses over tights, and there was a surgical kit scattered on the floor from where she had tried to stitch my foot.

I gave a look that said "follow me," and got up off the couch. In all actuality, my joints felt like shit from the battle, but I used a little magical assist.

Now, I could have floated the whole way, but I haven't slept this long in months; I'm not going to squander all this energy.

So she followed me and we snuck into the garrison kitchen, where I asked her what she wanted for breakfast. Thankfully, she turned out to be a woman of simple tastes, and I managed to make bacon and eggs without burning anything. We sat down at the kitchen table, her with the food and me with about six smallish tomatoes. She looked with interest as I sucked one and then another till they were grey. I threw them over my shoulder into the trash without looking. She turned back to the bacon and devoured three strips in about three seconds.

We ended up in her dorm room, where at about nine one of us had the idea to go shoot some pictures together.

She showed me her camera that she was issued in photography class. I guess she bought it out at the end? Anyways, it's a recent knockoff of one of the old prewar Olympus cameras, with the battery pack and everything. I don't know why anyone would reverse-engineer one of those, but okay. I took the lens off, looked through it. It looked cheap. Believe me, I can tell.

"Do you… get good results with this?"

"Eh. They had better lenses in the photography building."

"Next time I run home I'll take the lens off my old OM-2."

"Oh, I couldn't!"

"Nonsense. The shutter on mine rotted. I might have a telephoto and some wide lenses for that kind of camera too. I totally insist."

So I ran up to the third floor to get my camera. The one I chose to bring with me from home was a pre-war Praktica that I've rebuilt over a dozen times. I actually snuck into the candy kingdom and cut a strip off of PB's drapes to replace the shutter curtains once. It wasn't the best fabric for the job, but it was after the first divorce…

Then there was the film. Now, in the old days, they had machines that made film cheaply and quickly. I think they have one here in the photo department, but it must be in bad shape or something, because Sue had said before that the film is hit or miss. The wizards make film too, but their film is a little… different. It all has spells on it, and with the cheap stuff you never know what you're going to get. Sometimes you take a picture of a wall and there's a splotch in the print where you can see clean through the wall. Sometimes you get one where everyone's clothing turns invisible. Other times you see spirits, auras or those weird extradimensional dudes that you can see if you have wizard eyes. (Thank Grod mine mostly went away after I stopped seeing Ash.) Other times it just doesn't turn out. Luckily you only have to develop magic film in a potion of lemon juice and orichalcum powder. I guess it's equal parts alchemy, chemistry and conjuring, although the three, like, sorta fade into each other if you really get into the stuff that's involved.

The best film is, I reluctantly admit, the stuff Bonnibel makes in her lab. I got her into film photography back in the day. She did a chemical analysis on some film I had from the Iowan Imperium, said "I can improve this," and a month later she was exporting the stuff.

Hers has colors like the old slide film if you shoot it right, bizarre-ass colors if you shoot it wrong, and it doesn't need developing at all; you just peel it apart in the darkroom and you end up with a positive strip and a negative strip.

I had two rolls of Candychrome, a roll of Magic Roulette no. 9, and some black-and-white film from Iowa that was in my freezer for centuries.

I gave Sue one of the Candychromes and some of the black-and-white and shoved the rest of the film in my pocket; we'd divvy it up later. For her part, Sue pulled out some of the university film and gave two rolls to me. Equal exchange, I thought. We'd probably have split the bill evenly if we went out right now. You know, I guess there are a lot more than four ways it can go when the waiter asks you "together or separate."

So then I put on my sunhat and we went outside.

That day we went up way into the mountains, taking pictures of birds, trees, the campus from high above, and each other, laughing at each other's jokes and getting that feeling that teenagers call love and I call hormones mostly. Maybe there's no difference, and when you're in it you sure don't feel like there is.

We came to this place about one o' clock. I'd know if I'd been wearing my watch from Simon. There was a perfect, evenly-spaced circle of trees in the middle of the forest, with a clearing inside. That means one of, like, three things. Either some guy thought it would be cool and planted trees in a circle and then cleared out the middle, and not too long ago, either, because there were no saplings or anything in the clearing, or there's a magic spell on the forest to make it grow that way, or this is one of those places.

Those places uniformly suck butt. There are like, three or four primal planes in the dimension we inhabit. There's the material plane, like we all live on, there's the Nightosphere, where people go if dad likes them, supposedly there's a good-aligned version of the Nightosphere that's made out of clouds and shit, and lastly there's Fairyland.

Man, fairies suck butt too. They steal your children and replace them with little fairies that grow up, fuck you up and go off trailing chaos in their wake, not necessarily in that order. Time doesn't pass the same in their plane, so if you get pulled there, you could spend what feels like a day there, and come back and find that there's been a nuclear war and a sexy pink fascist made of sugar rules most of America. Seriously, I've met people who've had that experience.

If this sounds like some Mother Goose bull-dunk, it's because it totally is. People have known this forever, it's just that people don't listen to their mothers and what starts as a warning turns into a happy little bedtime story by the third or fourth generation.

Well, whenever there's a ring of mushrooms or trees or something, it's very possible that you're in one of those places that exist in both planes, here and in Fairyland.

So naturally my first response was to walk right in and start taking pictures. There was this old stone well peeking through the high grass in the center of the circle that looked really cool, and I walked right up to it

Sue must not have known about fairies, because she didn't seem to think anything of the ring of trees, and she came in too. A minute later smoke started pouring out of my camera. I opened it up and the Magic Roulette film was turning to some kinda gas right before my eyes. It looked cool, but that stuff's not as cheap as I make it sound, so I was kind of mad. Then I put 2, 6 and 8 together and decided that maybe we better get out of the fairy ring.

"Sue," I said. "This is not a good place. I'll explain in about five minutes, but first I need you to do as I do. Come on, let's back out of here slowly."

"Got it," she whispered.

Suddenly, a motherfucking fairy appeared. You're probably imagining a sprite, with little wings and a cute little hat. No, this is Final Fantasy boss material type-a deal. She was tall, slightly translucent and unbelievably attractive, with cheekbones that shouldn't be physically possible (probably aren't, in fact), eyes that glowed with their own light, and platinum hair that floated all around, defying gravity without getting all frizzy like mine would if I let it float around. She had a sword and not much else. In old stories, the fair knight (and let me say, I'm as fair as they come) tends to mistake the fairy for the Virgin Mother of God, whatever that means, and I can see how.

Actually, she kinda looked like… Joni Mitchell. Which is probably the same thing, don't get me wrong.

"There's nane that comes to the circle-wood, but leaves for me a wad," she recited in a sing-song voice, faintly Scottish-accented, that managed to sound both ethereal and unbelievably annoying. I felt oddly like I knew the other half of the rhyme.

She went on, "Either rings or kirtles grene, or else thir maidenhead."

Yeah, I knew that. It's from an old ballad that I found in one of my textbooks. It's not quite verbatim, but it's close.

She lept forward with superhuman grace.

I turned to run.

After a few paces I stopped dead in my tracks. A deathly chill had gone through me, and I looked down to see a huge translucent sword sticking out of my stomach and clean through my shirt.

"Shit," I said, and then I realized that I couldn't feel anything but the chill, no pain or anything. I looked where I was standing and realized that I was just outside the circle. Her sword seemed to get even more translucent when it passed outside the ring and seemed completely immaterial too.

She didn't seem like she could leave the circle herself, because she stabbed me two more times in the back, but I stepped out of her reach and turned around.

"Hssssssss," she said, leaning on the invisible wall with both hands. She looked far less beautiful and graceful now, as though she'd faded too in every way when she approached the edge of her universe.

"Did that sword do anything?" I asked.

"Just you wait, mortal child," she sang, and waved goodbye in the most irritatingly precious way possible.

I flipped her off, and Sue tried to stab her with a knife, but she vanished, and I stopped Sue from entering the circle.

I lifted up my shirt. "There's no wound. Her weapon was harmless outside the circle, but probably deadly inside. Sue, I could have fucking died. There needs to be warning signs or something."

"Indeed, friend."

So we went back and told Sir Howell. He looked at the two of us, still mostly in what we woke up in, with cameras around our necks. He looked from one to the other and chuckled. He knew the score.

"Fairyland, huh? dark business. Really chaotic and dark business with no good way around it. In the old days, must be seven hundred years now, when I was just a probational knight, the university was under threat from them. We rode into a fairy circle a mile wide in the plains at the foot of this mountain range. That was their staging ground.

"But then," he went on, "we never found the other side. We rode three days and four nights and at dawn on the fourth day, we found their city. They surrounded us, killed the old General of the Order and took us a short distance into the forest—no more than five minutes at a stroll—and there we were in the fairy circle again."

"And yet we are still here," Sue said.

"Our recent ex-chancellor announced at the next meeting of the university council that he had solved the problem. They asked him how; none of them could believe it. He stammered something about how he hired the wizards, but we all knew that that was made up on the spot. I have no clue how he did it.

"Well," he went on, "thank you for bringing this to my attention. We may have a serious problem and I want to inform Steven right away."

"Steven?" I asked.

"Yes, you know," Howell said, looking up from where he was lighting a stick of Nag Champa. "He talks about you often."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Chancellor Foxham."

Then we went to my dorm room and developed the film we'd shot.

The Candychrome turned out to be a little overexposed, so we got some weird colors, but there was a great one Sue took of me sitting under a tree about to bite an apple. The apple had turned bright pink, almost Peebs' shade of pink, and somehow the color kind of bled to my face and I looked almost human.

Sue took the ones we liked off to the photo department to get enlarged, and I sat here and wrote all this down.

Now I feel like laying down for a minute… Oof, I don't feel good at all.