I Am Completely Serious

Ginger tea hurts. I don’t recommend it.

-

The Magician, sitting at the table with a book on coin tricks, happened to be looking up when they passed the door. She laid it down and tapped on the tabletop. “My, my.”

The Goon grunted something interrogative. She and Pat were trying to nap on the couches; Pat had taken the blanket, and the Goon had the pillows, one behind her head, the other in her fist in case she needed to throw something.

“Did you see that man with the nasty little mustache? That was Enzi Hant, the Prime Minister of Utsekin. He is an evil dictator.”

Pat looked up with drowsy interest. “Seriously? What’s he done?”

“Assassination of political opponents, sponsoring terrorists in the little republic next door, genocide of tiny peoples whom anthropologists haven’t lived with. Some little chemical weapons projects. The population of Utsekin is under twenty thousand, his talents aren’t exactly stretched. I assumed he was low on everyone’s lists; I wonder why he’d need to come here now?”

Pat asked, “How come you know this shit?”

The Magician smiled and stroked a picture of a coin in her book. “I like to know about little kings. It makes me feel secure.” The Goon pulled the second pillow over her head.

There is a square house arranged in three rings – the rooms along the outside walls, a red-carpeted hallway, and the inner rooms. There are small alcoves set into the inner walls in the hallway. One has a clock in it. The others are empty, and every time the clock strikes, something will come out of one of them somehow, and move in circles around the hallway for an hour until its shift is over and something else comes out. There aren’t twelve alcoves, there are maybe five or something, and anyway the clock strikes thirteen once a day. Usually that happens after midnight, not after noon.

The monster that comes out at eleven at night is the patchwork girl. She’s shaped like a human, not like a rag doll, though she’s underweight and you can see the wire ribs that keep her shape pressing out against her worn cloth skin. If you punched them she would dent.

Her patches look from a distance like they might once have been all different colors, like you’d expect with a patchwork girl, but actually they’re all pretty much the same shade of dull yellow; some of the fabrics have patterns in them, little flowers or ducks in darker or lighter yellow and brown, but in general she’s just yellow. All the patches are different shapes – some are round and some square and some star-shaped or triangles – and a lot are velvet. She has a coat or robe down to her knees on, the belt untied and bouncing along after her, and it’s made of the same stuff as she is.

She always skips instead of walking, and when she skips you can hear her squeaking. She’s probably filled with that styrofoam stuff like they use in crane machine dolls. That would explain why she holds her shape so well, too.

Her hair is just a yellow patchwork veil, attached at a single point at the center of her scalp. It’s not sewn on very well and sometimes gets twisted around in front of her face. She does notice when this happens, and tries to push it back, but when she moves it’s just a gesture – when she pushes her hair back it’s more to be pushing her hair back than because it bothers her that her hair’s in her face. So sometimes the veil stays in her face for a while before she gets it fixed. She giggles more than usual when she’s pushing her hair back.

She’s always giggling. It seems like she does talk a little sometimes, but she never stops skipping or giggling for anything. She’ll seem to raise her head a little to you when you talk to her, though it’s hard to tell because she’s still skipping, and she’ll gasp something out, like, “- yeah, I *know*, well -” And then she’ll collapse into giggles again and wave at you because she can’t help it, something about it’s funny. If you ask her something, she will seem to be amused that you don’t know already, or that you even care. If you’re scared because you can’t find the door or because of the tree or something, you’ll get the idea she thinks it’s absolutely ridiculous to be scared. If you are, it won’t reassure you. She probably wouldn’t really notice if you followed her around for her whole hour – she might look back over her should and wave sometimes, making you think she wants you to come up to her, but she won’t have anything to say if you do. She might wave at you again when it strikes midnight, and she goes back into an alcove and is gone.

You know that she’s never, ever going to do anything other than skip in circles and giggle, until she finally gets torn apart by someone who’s angry she doesn’t answer questions. She can’t do anything else. But still, she somehow seems very dangerous.

Her boyfriend had schizophrenia and had some sort of evil, twisted personality that would come out often — she could tell when this happened because he changed his font color.

-someone on GAFF

-

“And so,” said the Magician, “Begins the requiem for Prime Minister Haz. Such an *inspiring* sound.”

She paused, and added gently, “You’re supposed to say, “I don’t hear nothin’.”"

The Goon said, “Don’t start with me today.” She looked carefully in both mirrors and over her shoulder as she switched lanes – hoping to provide a salutary example for her colleague, maybe, Jessica thought. The cars moving past seemed unusually loud and fast, and Jessica’s head hurt.

The Magician, stretching out in the back seat, looked smug and comfortable – she had probably had a bad day once or twice in her life, but preferred not to let it get around. “Oh, come now, humor me. Do you not know what a requiem is, is that it? Do you think it has to do with goths?”

“I said don’t.”

Rooms tend, when they reach a certain stage of cluttering, to become occupied by the Chairs that No One Should Sit In. They insinuate themselves close to the doors, gathering piles of papers in their seats in an attempt to pass themselves off as genuine office equipment. They may later, once secure in their position, begin to eat the paper, though this has never been observed firsthand; they may also make more of it. The lights tend to stop working properly once a Chair has moved in – and if they were not flourescent before, they become so.

The Chairs are always black or brown, and often naugehyde. They have headrests, but they are positioned badly, and sometimes spin all the way around. They are set low to the ground with seats that are tilted inwards and backwards in ways that subtly bend the laws of physics – it is impossible to draw an accurate image of the Chairs as seen from above. It is, in fact, very difficult to position oneself above the chairs, as their structural peculiarities become contagious after a certain amount of time, making other furniture in the room too unstable to climb on. In particularly extreme cases, the occupants of Chair-infested rooms have been known to stick cardboard under all four legs of a table. It is assumed that the Chairs are attempting to bring other things down to their level; there is evidence that they are a type of mushroom.

The inexperienced will sometimes, upon the introduction of children to their workspaces during a particularly hassled moment, feel the urge to clear off a Chair and tell them to sit in it and wait. The child will be reluctant to do so, not being able to see to the bottom of the chair, and if forced will become surly and throw up in a car fairly soon afterwards, and possibly, if exposed for long enough, bring home a C later in the week and refuse to talk about it. It is not clear what benefit the Chairs derive from this interaction, but as they all do it at least once in their lifespan, it is assumed to be important.

There is only one proven method for removing a Chair, and that is cleaning up the damn room.

When they do obituaries for people who have done something big and important, the fourth paragraph or so starts, “It all started with [a story his five-year-old daughter told him/an idle thought during a TV show/a slight sports-related urethra injury/other innocuous things, I'm tired right now, okay].” I was reading one today and not totally paying attention, and thought the “it” in “it all started” meant the guy’s death, like the “casual comment made by his wife” set off a disturbing chain of events that culminated in the discovery that his life had been meaningless, and he declined, shattered, into a state of gray apathy fading into a dry death indistinguishable from any other moment.

Haha, that Junichiro Tanizaki sure was a funny guy. OMGWTF. I actually couldn’t remember what that acronym meant for a second just now.

So what do you think, is it really in character for the Imperial Wind Dragon to *help* bury the Mad King alive? I’m still thinking he might back off and leave the mafiosi dude to it, not dirty his talons and all.

“The truth is, Red,” Marsowen said confidentially, leaning closer to Scarlet, “I really don’t like you much.”

Scarlet’s first impulse was to say, Well, I guess I’ll just have to live with that – but abruptly he realized that that was something like exactly the opposite of what Marsowen was saying.

He dropped to the floor just in time to avoid the pointy clockwork ferret jumping at his ear.

So meta-data is data about data, which is the copyright page. And meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, which is supposedly what philosophy class was supposed to be about, except it was mostly the guy saying “but we don’t *know* that this podium can’t think” and people looking at the podium.

But I still don’t know what the hell a metamorph is. Or Meta Williamson. Maybe Meta Williamson, in some ineffable way, physically indicates the properties of some other Williamson somewhere else, so that when someone who’s been to Meta Williamson one day stumbles upon this place, they will realize that Meta Williamson was nothing, only a marker leading them to the true Williamson, where they will experience a Williamsonness that mundane meta-reality has never before offered them. There will probably be a McDonalds.