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Library [1.26]

Anemone was actually sulking that all her little green friends seemed to have gone away. She'd been having fun!

She got the coffee going, like a good library minion, before tying her hair up and getting out the cleaning supplies. After over two years of cleaning up after invasions, Anemone was very good at getting the most stubborn scuff-marks and bloodstains out of the floor.

The Fandom High Library is open, and the library aide is off somewhere cleaning up gremlin-residue. You may need to ring the bell for service.

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Cindy just gave him a look. "Ha ha."

Then paused as she took in his tone and body language. "Wait--seriously? I had been joking."

You know, there was a time when Cindy thought Mundies were mundane.

[Self: there is a reason for the update button!]

"Seriously," Henry said, watching her reaction and almost enjoying it. "Usually this is about when people decide I'm just going to keep lying and go find something else to do, by the way. It's like a variant on epilepsy. A unique variant on epilepsy. Stress makes it worse."

"Seriously seriously?" Cindy asked again before slumping back in her chair. "Why do I even let anything on this island surprise me any more?" she asked the room at large.

"So, what you're saying is that when you're under stress or there are lots of flashing lights, you hop to some random time and place?" she demanded. "I'm never letting you drive me to a concert without first taking your keys."

"That would be why I don't get to drive very often," Henry said, dipping to a more serious tone -- he loved driving and it could never really be in his life -- before regaining his lightness. "Nah, it's a little more unpredictable than that, but you have the idea. TV can set me off too, if I really stare at the screen. But sometimes one second I'm putting on my socks and the next I'm in 1998. Mostly I stay in my lifetime and in areas I know, but there's some range to it."

He spun idly in his chair. This was more than he usually explained, but it was easier to get it all out at once than to wait for the questions. "The strangest thing about the island is that I'm not all that strange for it, considering."

"Yeah, you're still not beating out the talking frog or any of the kids from other worlds," Cindy said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "Purely second-string strange for this place."

She idly wondered where being a Fable fit in to the mix, but quickly shoved that thought aside.

"Do you really think that doctor can help with this?" she asked. "Do you even know how or why it works this way? Is it really genetic?"

Edited 2010-01-27 17:19 (UTC)

"Somehow, I think I can manage not being as strange as a talking frog," Henry said dryly. "I might even be grateful to play second string. Anyhow, there's a geneticist back in Chicago I've been working with for a couple years. He managed to isolate the gene, tortured a couple dozen mice in the name of science ... no cure yet, but the guy at Hopkins is supposed to be working on it."

Not that Henry was excruciatingly hopeful on that point. But he'd been to a lot of doctors.

"Technically, it's a mutation, not inherited. Though my mom died a long time ago, so we can't be entirely certain. But you would think my father would have known."

"So you don't really have any control over it?" Cindy asked. "That's got to be a bitch to deal with. Puts a lot of extra strain on things, I'm sure."

She tried to sound casual, though her eyes were sympathetic. But Henry was a man with pride and she didn't think he'd want a lot of hand-wringing and 'oh noes' over this. "So this guy at Hopkins...? Some kind of suppressive gene therapy maybe? Now that it's been isolated?"

Henry shook his head. "I don't have any conscious control, but I think there has to be something subconscious? Otherwise, sheer luck would have put me in the middle of Lake Michigan by now. But yeah, gene therapy is the hope. Until that works, I'll have my vanishing act."

He smiled. "You're taking this pretty well, by the way."

"I could faint and demand a mint julep, but I've never been the fainting type," Cindy said with a grin. "Though you should have seen me after my first class. All the drinking and protestations of sanity you could have asked for. Like I said--still less weird than the talking frog. Made of felt."

She shrugged and gave him a bit of a wan smile. "I try to roll with things, you know? I mean, I watched you vanish. That adds a lot of credibility to your story."

Edited 2010-01-27 19:36 (UTC)

"We teach living puppets," Henry said, and had to boggle a bit. "Right. Moving on. And you'd be surprised -- some people are very good at denying what's right in front of them if it doesn't make sense. I appreciate an open mind."

Idly, and to take the focus off him for a moment, he asked, "What was the worst of it in your class?"

"Let's see, in addition to the frog who calls himself a muppet, I have Prince Arthur Pendragon, his sister Morgana, and Merlin all in my class," Cindy said, giving Henry a wry look. "And yes, they claim to be exactly who you think they are. There's Liir, who says he's from Oz, and my TA, Blysse, who can't really read or write, but her giant wolf friend will read things off the board for her."

Seriously, Henry. Second-string strange.

"The worst I have in the library is the girl from ancient Greece who hangs out with Homer when she's at home," Henry offered. "And Jono. His 'medical condition' means he talks right into your head."

He rubbed his chin. "We seem to have stumbled into the strangest place on the planet, or else I've gone irrevocably insane."

"Oh, Gabrielle? She's in my class, too. I don't have this Jono, however. Maybe next semester." She sighed and shook her head. "I haven't entirely given up on irrevocably insane, you know."

That Fandom was even odder than Fabletown or the Farm was something that Cindy was having trouble accepting, honestly.

"It probably helps that I know I'm not crazy about the time travel," Henry said. "If I accept that much is sane, it tells me that Gabrielle and Merlin and company and the frog probably aren't lying either. Though there is the theory this is all a very long hallucination."

"Or some kind of drug-trip flashback," Cindy said cheerfully. "I don't think I did any growing up, but I also think I'm teaching at a school that just got invaded by gremlins. I could, conceivably, be sitting in a corner, looking at my hands and whispering 'The colors!'"

"Oh, god, if this is the revenge of some bad acid somebody slipped me in 1985, I'll cheerfully kill my dealer next time I go back there."

He couldn't (and wouldn't), but this was just a way of talking anyhow.

"Uh-oh, DeTamble," Cindy chided with a grin. "Were you all young and rebellious before you took up the librarian mantle and life of books and ease?"

"I liked to enjoy myself," Henry admitted. "Not all of us got married right out of high school."

Also, he had an incurable and unbelievable medical condition, a drunk dad, and a dead mom. Something would have been wrong with him if he hadn't indulged himself in some way.

"I got through it on one piece."

Edited 2010-01-28 18:41 (UTC)

Or, you know, technically in high school, had such a concept existed in her Homeworld. But details.

"I am hardly going to take someone up for having fun," Cindy said with a laugh. "There's too little of it going around. And what's the point of being young if you can't have a little stupid fun while you can still get away with it?"

"That's true," Henry agreed. "I'm planning on moving into my second childhood so I have an excuse to start doing it again any day now."

"Oh, that sounds like fun," Cindy said, clapping her hands. "Let me know when you do. I'm looking forward to pushing people into mud puddles and cutting in line for the swingsets."

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Library [1.26]

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