Welcome to Lake Lewisia

The VPN service came highly recommended, but the location list still gave him pause, populated with city names he did not recognize and no countries whatsoever. But he selected one and went on with his browsing, thinking no more about it until the ads started to change. In the midst of his podcasts and streaming videos, he now heard about at-home cauldron conditioning services and restaurants catering to those on a strictly dream-based diet, all piped in from somewhere that started to sound rather appealing.

When she heard that hungry ghosts had tiny mouths that would never let them satisfy their bellies, she suggested milkshakes with straws. When told the etymology of “tantalizing,” she asked if someone couldn’t have simply hand-fed Tantalus the fruit that always slipped beyond his reach. If the metaphors and morals underpinning such legends were lost on her, she maintained that the collaborative remedies to suffering were equally lost on those around her.

Lewisia will be observing Mapless Mondays for August, a program brought to you by unknown forces and the survey corps. During this time, street names will be unknowable, building numbers will become invisible, and GPS will tonelessly inform you there is an unspecified road condition ahead. The library has set up informative displays on other methods of wayfinding, and local shops and restaurants are prepared for the increase in foot traffic from those hopelessly turned around in normally familiar spaces.

The old world was littered with the uncomfortable, unyielding edges of glass slippers and glass caskets, always intended to preserve their user just as they were without room for growth or change. The glass throne, likewise, looked for a ruler who was light and still and careful enough not to shiver the delicate panes of the construction that both gave them power and rendered them powerless. But she thundered through her quest, big and loud and well-appointed with steel-toed boots that had been properly broken in before her journey ever started, and destroying it was as much about an errant kick as it was about a deliberate liberation of the kingdom.

Kim pulled up short as he walked into the candy kitchen, confronted with the image of his partner with the long gray beard of an ancient and venerable sort, and asked, “Was there another accident with the preservatives?” With a rueful smile half-covered by beard, Jamil pulled at the edges of the facial hair, revealing it was only a fake one hooked around his ears, as he said, “The candy beard is kind of a work in progress.” Then he took a large and fuzzy bite from the end of his beard, which did not so much dissolve like cotton candy as crackle apart like facial puff pastry threads, making a tremendous, if tasty, mess.

The Community Cryptid Count approaches, so make sure you are ready to help contribute to scientific research and learn about the environment around you while reporting through our easy-to-use app or website. There is still time to pick up a starter kit for first-time counters, which has information on how to spot cryptids in your environment, along with helpful tools like binoculars, lightweight camouflage hides, and night vision cameras. Remember, while feeding stations and water sources can be a great way to attract all kinds of wildlife to your backyard, do not use traps or lures that can harm cryptids or disrupt their normal habits and range.

Periodically, scientific papers were written on the changes to taxonomy, driven by advances in genetic testing or imaging or asking locals about their environments, that saw plants and animals shuffled around like so many chairs at an over-large and fractious family reunion. Like palms going to stand with their grassy cousins instead of true trees despite outward appearances, like jellyfish and guinea pigs, familiar creatures sometimes informed us that they had been something else all along, and we had to rewrite our story of the world. Sometimes, we were those creatures, revealing ourselves at last to those willing to look.

“Are you sure grimoires are allowed to have glittery unicorn stickers?” she asked, poking at the spiral notebook with one fingernail. Before she could flip open the ratty cover and see whatever spells had been inscribed on the wide-ruled paper within, her guide slapped her hand away. “There are few more dedicated to the potential of magic than a middle school girl, nor many as vengeful, and neither fact is contraindicated by a love of sparkly stickers.”

Local river spirits recently learned of the concept of streaming and were very distressed to know they were so behind on something related to their habitats. As such, they have been working overtime to provide free streaming music to the community, ranging from traditional drowning ballads to experimental cave metal. So please don’t be alarmed when your faucets, showers, and toilets start serenading you, as we are still working on explaining to them acceptable streaming platforms and the downsides of broadcasting on every moving water source.

His paintings, found several years after his death in a nearly ruined garden shed heavy with the remains of a dozen species of bird nests, were classified for many years as a lost lineage of the abstract art movement. It was not until historians and museum preservation specialists began investigating with UV lights that the glowing blue truth was revealed. His subjects, and the distinctly avian features noted in his only surviving self-portrait, suddenly seemed as obvious as the beak on one’s face.

"Ugh, I don't know how you stand it, getting shots all the time," her coworker said when she mentioned a sore arm following a flu shot. "I'll take my chances with a few days of the sniffles," he insisted, and she smiled and shrugged and changed the subject. She had grown up with the looming threat of chimera pox and slime head infection and other such maladies that made one inclined to suffer the occasional jab as an alternative.

There was a long-established tradition of dressing in ceremonial garb, modeled after a deity of choice, and using song, and dance, and other, more pharmaceutical enticements to summon that deity to possess their mortal vessel. As it turned out, the method worked quite well for any extraplanar entity, divine or otherwise, including fictional creatures from the collective dreaming, of which the modern world offered a particularly broad selection. The cosplayers were informed by their non-costumed friends that they had a really excellent time at the convention, though they had no memories of their own to confirm it--just several coveted awards for Best Canon Reenactment.

“You don’t play fair,” the boy protested as he held up his scorched palms, suddenly looking both much younger and much older than the teen he had been posing as. The girl shrugged her shoulders, resettling the battle jacket she had borrowed from her aunt so that the barbed wire epaulets sat squarely again after the boy had once more attempted to grab at her despite her protests. “I play by the rules,” she corrected, thinking that cold iron had a remarkable effect on all manner of assailants, fae or otherwise.

Join us for The Bard By Any Other Name, a performance of Shakespeare’s best-known plays from any world but this one. A collaboration between the English Literature, Drama, and Temporal Sciences departments at the community college, this project retrieves lost folios from alternate timelines and parallel universes and performs them for us on this plane of existence. This year’s production is The Dogs of the North, a history from a universe in which a viable Northwest Passage was discovered centuries earlier by a sailing crew of the so-called Elizabethan Sea Dogs.

She had found the wardrobe at an estate sale, and she had lived on little more than ramen for a year after what she paid for its ancient, oaken bulk, and she had not regretted a penny or a brothy bite. Somewhere around that one-year mark, the first tender shoot of new growth popped up on the corner of one door, unfurling tiny, luminous leaves. By summer, it had branches that spread along the ceiling of her little bedroom, studded with the green beginnings of acorns, and the doors opened onto a lush forest, washed in golden light, that she had not yet been quite brave enough to enter.

One could hear the voices from blocks away, but only upon reaching the long northern wall of the factory and the row of slightly stunted landscaping trees it overlooked would the source become visible, in all their multicolored, squabbling majesty. The congress of birds, perched on railings and ledges and branches, met to discuss those matters which concerned all avian kind. That morning, a delegation of songbirds made their case against the local outdoor cat and pleaded for intervention by the corvids.