After Childhood's End

[yinyangwizard]

All childhoods must, at some point, come to an end. Magically induced ones end more abruptly than the regular kind.

Abe no Seimei wakes with a start. Not that he was sleeping until now. He was...what exactly was he doing before he found himself here? And where is here, anyway? Who is that person off to his left?

He leaps back from the stranger, leaves crunching under his feet, and gets a defensive spell into place - all before he quite realizes that he's done it, or that the stranger he's reacting to is just as startled as he is.

Comments

[yinyangwizard]

"'Borrow' bees?" Seimei asks. He has only the vaguest idea of what the term means, and that idea is drawn solely from context. "Does she...take control of them? Extend her senses with them?"

[margolotta]

"Both," Margolotta says. "She sends her mind away with them, controlling them only very gently. She has a special sign she holds while she is borrowing, to indicate to people she is still alive."

[yinyangwizard]

"Oh! You would be surprised at how many mages have to take such measures when they go into a trance," Seimei says with a chuckle. "Or maybe you wouldn't. Watch out up ahead, by the way - my little friends say there's some sort of burrow under the ivy."

He would rather avoid having either of them turn an ankle in it.

[margolotta]

"Oh," she says. "The infamous demon bunnies, I suppose."

[yinyangwizard]

"Possibly. Although there's no one home at the moment."

And Seimei has an odd memory, or a fragment of one: crouching behind a rock near the Caribbean inlet and whispering to someone: "K'sho! No pirate boats!"

He shakes his head to clear the cobwebs as they reach the ground-covering ivy that conceals the burrow. He picks out a path around it.

[margolotta]

"I wonder where they have gone?" Margolotta asks, almost idly, as she picks her way among the underbrush.

[yinyangwizard]

"Or why they have gone, but I cannot say that I'm sorry to see them go." This little walk in the woods would be more troublesome if the demon bunnies were still around.

[margolotta]

"They might have gone to where they are far more trouble," Margolotta muses.

[yinyangwizard]

"I hope not! Although that is, unfortunately, quite probable." Seimei sighs. "I wonder if anyone has seen them in the Labyrinth."

Seimei hasn't, although he's run into a number of more dangerous (and bizarre) things there.

[margolotta]

"Well, then I pity the world they end up in," Margolotta says.

[yinyangwizard]

"They could end up in a world where the local fauna is a lot nastier than they are, and wind up as prey for something," Seimei points out. "In which case it would not be a terrible thing at all for that world."

Then, Seimei supposes, one would have to pity the demon bunnies.

[margolotta]

"Oh dear," Lady Margolotta says. "Yes, I suppose the Tall Blue People World would be able to deal with them."

[yinyangwizard]

"Is that a world you've visited?" Seimei asks. "Or, perhaps, one you've seen on the television here?"

They have some interesting programs in Milliways. Like the soap opera with the giant squid.

[margolotta]

"Neither," Margolotta says. "There used to be a few people here from that world."

[yinyangwizard]

"Goodness. It must have been a while ago."

Lady Margolotta, it seems, has been a regular at Milliways for longer than Seimei.

[margolotta]

"Yes, a few years," Margolotta says. "This place is very persistent."

[yinyangwizard]

Seimei chuckles. "I gather that for you, Milliways turns up frequently and by surprise."

[margolotta]

"Not so frequently, but often surprisingly, yes," she says.

[yinyangwizard]

"That's not the case for me, but I understand that my situation is by no means typical," Seimei says. He would venture to guess that Lady Margolotta's situation is more common as far as Milliways guests are concerned.

"Actually...the last thing I recall, before we found ourselves in the woods, was sitting down by the fireplace with a cigar and some Scotch." He remembers that he hadn't lit the cigar yet. Beyond that, things get very murky. "What is the last thing you recall, lady Margolotta?"

[margolotta]

"I was coming in with a book," Margolotta says. "I wonder where that got to; I am rather fond of it."

[yinyangwizard]

Seimei surpresses a chuckle. It's not that Lady Margolotta's concern over a lost book seems silly to him. Just the opposite: it's the sort of thing he'd be worried about too.

"What is it called, and what color is the cover?" Seimei asks. "If I see it lying about, I can make sure it gets back to you."

[margolotta]

"It's a brown leather cover with faded gold ornamentation," Margolotta says. "The title on the spine is just TotBSS-IV, which stands for 'Transactions of the Bonk Science Society Volume Four', which was too long for the spine."

[yinyangwizard]

"Are you a member?" Seimei asks. "Of the Bonk Science Society, I mean."

[margolotta]

"A non-contributing patron," she says. "The members are mostly Igors."

[yinyangwizard]

After the briefest pause, Seimei says, "Forgive my ignorance, Lady Margolotta, but what are Igors? A clan? A species?"

(Yes, sort of, and also yes, sort of.)