![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptWhen I get up in the morning, the first thing I usually do is turn on my monitor and see what sort of new things appear in my e-mail boxes, what laughs I can get out of m cartoons, whether or not this fansubbing group has completed another episode, and the definite dose of daily Discordian droppings collected and archived by D.R.T.. Mind you, that's not to say that these dropping are foul, putrid, or otherwise dungworthy. They are more like the dried buffalo chips that provide fuel to fires on the frontier of the mind. They make you laugh, they make you think, they make you wonder who's connected to the Matrix and who isn't.
After that, it's usually a shower and breakfast, then off to class or work, as the day decides. Since it's winter, it's really cold out in the morning. There are occasional snowstorms as well, and this morning was a really bad one. It was bad enough that for minute, I was completely surrounded by the stuff and couldn't see where I was going.
So when I stumbled out of the snowstorm this morning, naturally my first thought was that I had gotten turned around somehow and was in a different part of the city than where I needed to go. All I had to do was find my bearings and a landmark, and I'd be okay.
Fifteen minutes later, after some fruitless wandering, I realize that Alice wouldn't know the place. It's like Wonderland joined up with the times. Or maybe she saw the place through her eyes, and I'm seeing it through mine. Either way, I saw a squirrel yakking on a cell phone about the latest music videos. Some things, even in the Negaverse, never change.
Since the place looked a bit like the metropolises in storybooks, I wandered into a coffee house nearby. Let me tell you, I have an idea what the zoo animals feel like. Within a minute, I'd drawn everybody's eyes. The crowd was pretty normal - foxes, bears, wolves (God, a lot of wolves), cats, dogs, that sort of thing. The waitress was a pleasant raccoon who knew what chai was and got me a good-sized glass for a little bit of nothing. At least the money's good here, although they think of the hairless wonders of our presidents as a stage behind evolution. They said they keep it more out of nostalgia than anything.
So, armed with chai, and more than a few curious stares, I asked directions. Actually, the first thing I asked is "Where the hell am I?" But the response was as if I were home. Names apparently don't change too much here in Wonderland, either. That said, the college in my world wasn't here. So it wouldn't matter whether I had class or work, the places I needed to go didn't exist. Apparently, there had been a problem getting the college set up, and instead, the other University, the one in Lansing, had risen to prominence while mine had simply never happened. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the sports team's name might have been an indication of what types of students they would have. At best, it probably would have been a private university.
Since I had a captivated, or at least interested, audience, I asked about some simple things - food, lodging, work. (After all, I didn't have a whole lot in my wallet, and I wasn't really sure that my checking account had made the transition to here.) The response was a little less than encouraging. Food and lodging, sure, but work could be a problem, since I wouldn't necessarily have the right papers or forms on file. I pushed my luck a bit and wondered what I'd need. Turns out there's an ID card I needed. That's right - a national ID card. Who knew that I'd stepped into fricking Animal Farm?
I wondered whether that meant the next step would be government agents appearing to take me away for experimentation, but the Negaverse doesn't follow all the storybook conventions, only the ones it wants to. That made it a bit more unpredictable than Subreality, and thus, a little more dangerous. As things were, I was hoping to find another snowstorm to get home in, but the weather forecast said that things would be sunny for at least a week. So much for good plot devices.
Thus, stuck as a human in an anthro world, I was definitely amused by the rabbit in the White Suit who went running by, trying to assure his wife that while he was late, he would be home for dinner and the kids' play recital. I saw him close his phone and then start strolling. When he got to the end of the block, there was another rabbit right there, and I'd have the censors on my head if I repeated what I heard from those two. Perhaps Wonderland is a little too much with the times.
Thus, without knowing if my house would still have me, and without the generous amounts of computing that the University offered to me, I was in a bit of a fix on how to catalogue the whole thing. Luckily, I still had my notebook. So I started taking notes. Mind you, as I'm doing his, I'm drawing stares from anybody else who's nearby. I even got one of the kids to scream in terror when she looked at me. I scared off another couple when I asked for directions to the nearest sandwich shop. The ewe who gave me the directions looked a bit visibly shaken herself.
So I'm a walking hallucination now. May as well play the part. The sandwich shop wasn't too far off, either. When it's lunchtime, you go eat. Especially when you're stuck in Wonderland. I did my best to look like one of the locals and listened in on the conversations - all the same stuff that goes on out here - politics, business, their women. Luckily, they served carnivores, so I could pick up something that looked like a roast beef sandwich, tasted like a roast beef sandwich, but was definitely not a roast beef sandwich (believe me, I knew it wasn't). It was filling, and the chips were good, too. By now I'd seen a whole lot of species around, so I figured that whatever had happened to us that made us anthro had split us all off into whatever we wanted to.
After being chased from the shop for "making the customers nervous", I saw a sign that pointed toward the library. Something clicked in my head and said that if I wanted to get to know the place, the library would be a good place to go. I wondered why I hadn't thought about it before, and started on my way.
The librarian was helpful. She understood, perhaps better than anyone else who was there, what had happened. She was old enough to have seen another human come wandering through he place, not too long ago in her memory. I suppose that mentioning she was definitely related to the dragon family might be helpful. Never one to pass up a joke at my own expense, I asked if she were named Alice, which netted my a look of recognition and a chuckle. No, not Alice, apparently, but some guy by the name of Lewis. Apparently, though, the place isn't the one he wrote about in those books, so she stopped the retort before it got started.
I asked on a lark whether or not they had books on how I could get back to my home dimension. She checked the collections - normally, I would have thought that would have been worth a laugh and an "Of course not." Then again, they had seen someone else, and he got back well enough. The search results, however, were disappointing. No books, even with related searches, on methods of dimensional travel. Very little in theory or magic on it as well.
I tried a decent Judy Garland imitation, but it went nowhere. Our last resort was that on he north end of town, there was a house that supposedly had strange things happen in it. Well, okay, the librarian said that I should come back to her place, and that we could try opening up a portal from there. She said that her relatives were decently skilled magicians in their younger days, and that between the bunch of them, they might actually have a practical way of getting me home. Considering that amount of weirdness I had absorbed already, without too much strain (admittedly, it was all resting on the premise that at some point, I'd simply wake up and realize that I still had to go to work today, or that I'd find some other portal back to localized reality), I was ready to go for it.
Now would also be a good time to mention that her relatives play House Rules Parcheesi as well as Calvinball as their favorite sports. But they were the best shot I had of walking out of this new universe intact. So when I described the situation to them, they all nodded as if they'd heard it a hundred-thousand times before. They favored the plan that left me wandering in the Dark Forest as opposed to creating a blizzard of their own. Someone else made a note about taking the Xanth effect into account so that I went back at the right time as well as the right place. They complained, but realized that the only way they could control that was the blizzard idea.
Lucky me. And don't think for a minute that I wasn't arguing with them about my own health and well-being. But finally, we hammered out a plan, and the dragons took me someplace far enough north where they would still have the snow they needed to make things work. After a few wingflaps, I was definitely lost again. I stumbled toward a blob I saw in the distance, thinking it was one of the dragons, and managed to get myself into a wind-sheltered alcove outside of one of the campus buildings. I made a quick check for time and authenticity of dimension, and then gave my thanks to the dragons who brought me here, which naturally drew some strange looks from the people around me.
I was back to being a weirdo in my own culture, rather than an oddity of someone else's, and somehow, it felt good to be home again. Although I've got a sneaking suspicion that somebody followed me through, because I heard someone laugh when I gave my thanks...
After that, it's usually a shower and breakfast, then off to class or work, as the day decides. Since it's winter, it's really cold out in the morning. There are occasional snowstorms as well, and this morning was a really bad one. It was bad enough that for minute, I was completely surrounded by the stuff and couldn't see where I was going.
So when I stumbled out of the snowstorm this morning, naturally my first thought was that I had gotten turned around somehow and was in a different part of the city than where I needed to go. All I had to do was find my bearings and a landmark, and I'd be okay.
Fifteen minutes later, after some fruitless wandering, I realize that Alice wouldn't know the place. It's like Wonderland joined up with the times. Or maybe she saw the place through her eyes, and I'm seeing it through mine. Either way, I saw a squirrel yakking on a cell phone about the latest music videos. Some things, even in the Negaverse, never change.
Since the place looked a bit like the metropolises in storybooks, I wandered into a coffee house nearby. Let me tell you, I have an idea what the zoo animals feel like. Within a minute, I'd drawn everybody's eyes. The crowd was pretty normal - foxes, bears, wolves (God, a lot of wolves), cats, dogs, that sort of thing. The waitress was a pleasant raccoon who knew what chai was and got me a good-sized glass for a little bit of nothing. At least the money's good here, although they think of the hairless wonders of our presidents as a stage behind evolution. They said they keep it more out of nostalgia than anything.
So, armed with chai, and more than a few curious stares, I asked directions. Actually, the first thing I asked is "Where the hell am I?" But the response was as if I were home. Names apparently don't change too much here in Wonderland, either. That said, the college in my world wasn't here. So it wouldn't matter whether I had class or work, the places I needed to go didn't exist. Apparently, there had been a problem getting the college set up, and instead, the other University, the one in Lansing, had risen to prominence while mine had simply never happened. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the sports team's name might have been an indication of what types of students they would have. At best, it probably would have been a private university.
Since I had a captivated, or at least interested, audience, I asked about some simple things - food, lodging, work. (After all, I didn't have a whole lot in my wallet, and I wasn't really sure that my checking account had made the transition to here.) The response was a little less than encouraging. Food and lodging, sure, but work could be a problem, since I wouldn't necessarily have the right papers or forms on file. I pushed my luck a bit and wondered what I'd need. Turns out there's an ID card I needed. That's right - a national ID card. Who knew that I'd stepped into fricking Animal Farm?
I wondered whether that meant the next step would be government agents appearing to take me away for experimentation, but the Negaverse doesn't follow all the storybook conventions, only the ones it wants to. That made it a bit more unpredictable than Subreality, and thus, a little more dangerous. As things were, I was hoping to find another snowstorm to get home in, but the weather forecast said that things would be sunny for at least a week. So much for good plot devices.
Thus, stuck as a human in an anthro world, I was definitely amused by the rabbit in the White Suit who went running by, trying to assure his wife that while he was late, he would be home for dinner and the kids' play recital. I saw him close his phone and then start strolling. When he got to the end of the block, there was another rabbit right there, and I'd have the censors on my head if I repeated what I heard from those two. Perhaps Wonderland is a little too much with the times.
Thus, without knowing if my house would still have me, and without the generous amounts of computing that the University offered to me, I was in a bit of a fix on how to catalogue the whole thing. Luckily, I still had my notebook. So I started taking notes. Mind you, as I'm doing his, I'm drawing stares from anybody else who's nearby. I even got one of the kids to scream in terror when she looked at me. I scared off another couple when I asked for directions to the nearest sandwich shop. The ewe who gave me the directions looked a bit visibly shaken herself.
So I'm a walking hallucination now. May as well play the part. The sandwich shop wasn't too far off, either. When it's lunchtime, you go eat. Especially when you're stuck in Wonderland. I did my best to look like one of the locals and listened in on the conversations - all the same stuff that goes on out here - politics, business, their women. Luckily, they served carnivores, so I could pick up something that looked like a roast beef sandwich, tasted like a roast beef sandwich, but was definitely not a roast beef sandwich (believe me, I knew it wasn't). It was filling, and the chips were good, too. By now I'd seen a whole lot of species around, so I figured that whatever had happened to us that made us anthro had split us all off into whatever we wanted to.
After being chased from the shop for "making the customers nervous", I saw a sign that pointed toward the library. Something clicked in my head and said that if I wanted to get to know the place, the library would be a good place to go. I wondered why I hadn't thought about it before, and started on my way.
The librarian was helpful. She understood, perhaps better than anyone else who was there, what had happened. She was old enough to have seen another human come wandering through he place, not too long ago in her memory. I suppose that mentioning she was definitely related to the dragon family might be helpful. Never one to pass up a joke at my own expense, I asked if she were named Alice, which netted my a look of recognition and a chuckle. No, not Alice, apparently, but some guy by the name of Lewis. Apparently, though, the place isn't the one he wrote about in those books, so she stopped the retort before it got started.
I asked on a lark whether or not they had books on how I could get back to my home dimension. She checked the collections - normally, I would have thought that would have been worth a laugh and an "Of course not." Then again, they had seen someone else, and he got back well enough. The search results, however, were disappointing. No books, even with related searches, on methods of dimensional travel. Very little in theory or magic on it as well.
I tried a decent Judy Garland imitation, but it went nowhere. Our last resort was that on he north end of town, there was a house that supposedly had strange things happen in it. Well, okay, the librarian said that I should come back to her place, and that we could try opening up a portal from there. She said that her relatives were decently skilled magicians in their younger days, and that between the bunch of them, they might actually have a practical way of getting me home. Considering that amount of weirdness I had absorbed already, without too much strain (admittedly, it was all resting on the premise that at some point, I'd simply wake up and realize that I still had to go to work today, or that I'd find some other portal back to localized reality), I was ready to go for it.
Now would also be a good time to mention that her relatives play House Rules Parcheesi as well as Calvinball as their favorite sports. But they were the best shot I had of walking out of this new universe intact. So when I described the situation to them, they all nodded as if they'd heard it a hundred-thousand times before. They favored the plan that left me wandering in the Dark Forest as opposed to creating a blizzard of their own. Someone else made a note about taking the Xanth effect into account so that I went back at the right time as well as the right place. They complained, but realized that the only way they could control that was the blizzard idea.
Lucky me. And don't think for a minute that I wasn't arguing with them about my own health and well-being. But finally, we hammered out a plan, and the dragons took me someplace far enough north where they would still have the snow they needed to make things work. After a few wingflaps, I was definitely lost again. I stumbled toward a blob I saw in the distance, thinking it was one of the dragons, and managed to get myself into a wind-sheltered alcove outside of one of the campus buildings. I made a quick check for time and authenticity of dimension, and then gave my thanks to the dragons who brought me here, which naturally drew some strange looks from the people around me.
I was back to being a weirdo in my own culture, rather than an oddity of someone else's, and somehow, it felt good to be home again. Although I've got a sneaking suspicion that somebody followed me through, because I heard someone laugh when I gave my thanks...
