Another breakfast, another day. So the food is a bit odd (really, who makes a stuff your own squash buffet?), but that's not so special in and of itself. No, what made this day different was that my friend wasn't there stuffing squash with me. I looked around for her a bit, and noticed her sitting in a corner, clutching a dark leather journal.
"Sup?"
...
"You okay?"
...
"What's that journal? I haven't seen you with it before."
...
That's when I noticed him, an impish little green man beckoning me. I tried to ignore him, but he was quite persistent. Finally, without moving, I asked him what he wanted.
"I know what your friend has there," he grinned.
"Do tell."
"You'll have to catch me first!" he cried, already bounding away from me. I chased and eventually found him bent down on his hands and knees in front of two statues of deer. When I tried to lift him up, he refused to budge.
"Bow to their majesties," he hissed.
Before I could ask him what that meant, a laugh like creaking wood came from one of the statues. Of course, they weren't statues anymore, but an elfin lord and lady. The lord smirked at my surprise, but I didn't back away.
"I take it you two are rulers of nature in Pittsburgh?"
"What is Pittsburgh to us?" replied the lord, "we reign over nature and everything beyond, which man dare not comprehend."
"Like the leather journal? What is it?" I pressed. He treated me to his creaking laugh again and shifted form into a deer. I followed him as he led me through corridors that I've walked a thousand times on campus. This time, they looked different. There were spiderwebs where there hadn't been any before. People were living in the cracks, and I had to watch out for things scurrying under foot. By the time we arrived back to where the lady and the imp were waiting, I had seen enough.
"I don't want to know what the journal is, do I?" The lady froze my heart with a smile.
"If I were you," cautioned the lord, as he and his lady reverted to stone, "I would return that journal to us as soon as possible."
I ran back to the cafeteria, but my friend was nowhere to be found, probably because an hour had passed and she had class. Then I recalled that I had class, but quickly disregarded that thought as irrelevant. I made my way to her math lecture, wrapped my hand in my jacket, and pulled the journal from her grip. She started to thaw from her trance. The imp appeared, grabbed the journal almost faster than I could hand it to him, and disappeared once more.
I thought that was the end of it. Unfortunately, once a Natural Being reveals itself to you, you are marked. It wasn't until a few days later that I discovered this fact. I was in class when visitors walked by, a female surgeon and an old man. My skin crawled, and even through the wall, I could feel them. I knew they had encountered the Natural Beings as well, and I knew they sensed the same of me. As soon as class ended, the surgeon's companion came up to me.
"My good doctor friend would like to speak with you." Well crap. I didn't really want to go with this strange old man, but I got the sense that no was not an option.
"My dear child. How nice to meet you," the surgeon gushed, "I'm Dr. Jen Cooper, and what's your name?"
"How did you meet them?" I asked flatly. Her smile shifted from falsely friendly to genuinely devious.
"I found a journal. It told me lovely things, until a slut of a doe and this idiot came to take it from me," she gestured to her companion. "She couldn't take it without my consent, but he could." Her grin widened. "He's my lackey now. And I got enough out of the journal to find my true calling."
I didn't like where this was going. "And that would be?"
"I find people, cut them up while their conscious and watch them try to put their organs back." Her eyes dug eagerly into me while she spoke.
"Why are you telling me this?" I tried to back away slightly, but the old man moved to block me. With nowhere to go, I slipped into a better stance. I wasn't going down without a fight.
"I'm telling you, because I want you to try to stop me."
"...what?"
"I love what I do, but human police just aren't enough fun. You've seen things they haven't. You know why I do it. You could make it fun again."
She and her lackey headed off, but she paused before going around a corner and out of sight. "By the way, I will be trying to kill you too, so watch out for that."
Crap.
[I could have sworn I posted this earlier. I had this dream a while ago. Oh well.]
No comments:
Post a Comment