College Visit!

So as one of you knows, I'm on a college visit to the far off and strange land of Minnesota. It is so far off and strange that we saw snowflakes this morning at the hotel - something that would never happen in Wisconsin. All the natives act surprised, but I'm onto them. This place is odder than it seems.

So I've done a bunch of stuff whilst here at the college I'm visiting. I've done the requisite tour and information session, I've gotten a sweatshirt (I'm wearing it now) and blue and gold rugby socks (unfortunately, I'm not wearing those). The normal stuff.

I'm on an overnight stay, though, so beyond the normal stuff I've also hung around with college students all afternoon, evening, and night. They're fun. We walked the forest trails on campus, hung out with some freshmen, and I learned some choreography for a volunteer dance troupe. Belly-dancing lessons, even only three weeks last year, came in handy. I more or less fell in love with the place.

Then the evening happened, which was interesting until it got late and I went back to my host's dorm room.

Also - I discovered a new allergy, and decided on substance-free housing after seeing students on their way to and from various parties. There are stories behind both of those comments. However, it's late, I'm super sleepy, and I've an interview in the morning, so they will wait for another day. Maybe once I'm actually attending a college.

A Picture Prompt Post

So Jasper, the blogger of the writing blog The Critical Psychopath, is doing a monthly writing prompt now. Which is awesome, because it's been all of a day and I'm already in withdrawal from Camp NaNo. The first prompt came out today, and because I have nothing to do (except tutor people in math, but that's not exactly the most time consuming thing), I wrote and finished the piece today.

This was the prompt:

Midnight by Delano-Laramie

This is the result:

Everyone knows that the city is a strange place. Whenever visitors arrive, they stop and stare, jaws dropping like flies and eyes wide as saucers. They tell everyone they meet - be it fellow tourist or hapless native - that the place is completely different, like nowhere they've ever seen. The citizens of the city are used to this, although they pretend otherwise,  and claim that every generation of outsiders is worse than the last. There is truth in that claim, though, although few are old enough to really know it from experience. The city has grown stranger as the years passed, and does so still, so that what it is now is worlds different from what it was at the beginning of the day. 

Everyone knows that the city is a dark place. Which isn't to say that there is no light. The city itself is full of light, stars captured from the heavens and placed on every street corner, stranger sky-beasts glowing and pulsing in lanterns, or following children on leashes, signs flickering and calling for someone to enter. Everything in the city has light, to make up for the sky without a sun. The sun itself has not been seen in centuries - or perhaps it is seen all the time, a single star in the night sky that has yet to be captured. No one is sure about this anymore.

Everyone knows that the city breeds stranger people. No true denizen of the city will blink an eye at people who have extra arms, or extra eyes, or fewer fingers, than might be considered normal. (In the city, there is an average of two and a quarter eyes, eight and a half fingers fingers, and two and a third arms. Normal is relative.) No one will look twice at a person who glows brighter than the stars in their glass prisons at every corner, except perhaps to call them over so as to read a bit of news by their light. Some people have scales. Some have fur, or feathers. Some people are ten inches high. Some people are twenty feet high. The city welcomes them and creates them all, and few ever want to leave.

Everyone knows that the city is impossible. It harvests stars and constellations. (Capturing the Great Whale, which can only be seen from the star Betelgeuse, was the biggest haul ever; tales of the catch are still told, a part of the city's legend). It is an island that is only in the same place twice if you have a rooster feather in your hat and throw a pinch of salt in the air before you look for it. It exists on a planet that has been mapped, and studied, and photographed into a static oblivion, yet cannot be found by someone who doesn't know where it is. It grows and changes by itself, it seems, or by the machinations of some strange race that lives in the sewers, or by those of angels, or maybe it is an angel. Every person who's ever gone to the city with evil intent towards it, or even simply wanting to study it, wakes up in the middle of the ocean, alone, floating on a piece of drift wood. At least, the ones that are found.

Everyone knows that the city is alive. If a person manages to find a quiet spot on the street at some point, and simply stands there, listening, they will eventually feel a low, slow vibration, through the soles of their feet. Not a pulse, but the rush of life beneath. The pulse is so huge and ancient and slow that there are holidays to celebrate it, every ten years when it rumbles beneath the pavement.

No one knows the city, though. It is unknowable, ineffable. It is a force unto itself, a vast, living thing that ebbs and flows with the lives of the people within. It is itself, and knows itself truly, and therefore nothing and no one else can. It is known about, but unknown.