Kneecappings

"What happened to that stagnant Undine?" asked Bastulia as she and Jermander walked towards their next class.  Jermander looked sideways at her, his eyeballs sliding far enough round in his head that he could see the details of the edge of his eye socket quite clearly.  Bastulia didn't look back at him, focused on gliding softly above the ground, seemingly just throwing the question out there as casual conversation.  Jermander didn't believe it for an instant.
Bastulia was a baseline-adjusted Ancient of Mu-mu and claimed that this explained why she floated permanently two inches above any solid surface, and that she was compelled to ignore all base things and spend her time involved only in higher thoughts.  Jermander hoped that this was true, as most of his thoughts when he saw her were really quite base.  She was stunningly attractive, literally so, and when she turned a corner without sufficient advance warning people would faint and collapse as they saw her.  Jermander rather liked watching people collapse as he approached, even if it was because of who he was with.
"Nicky?" he said, trying to sound equally casual.  "I don't know, I think maybe she spent too long out in the sun and just evaporated.  Don't you see her in your swimming lessons?"
Bastulia pouted at him.  "They're not going well, you know!  Water's just a little bit too solid, I can't seem to sink into it properly and splash about like everyone else.  And... well, it's wet, isn't it?"
"Isn't that why you go swimming with the undines though?"  Jermander had, like just about every other male and lesbian female at Gorillamumps, tried to find a way to spy on these swimming lessons, and had been easily defeated by the geases laid around the swimming complex.  "Can't they shape the water around you so you can practice?"
"Meh."  Bastulia made a gesture with a hand indicating her dislike for the idea.  "It's not like it's a skill I'll ever need.  How come you don't go swimming?"
"Mostly the running water thing," said Jermander.  "I can't cross running water, it's a family thing.  I'm fine with holy symbols, use holy water as aftershave, and love garlic, but running water just does something to my feet and I can't get over it.  So swimming's only really useful for the ocean or swimming pools, and my country's landlocked."
"You should come to my lessons."
"I tried!"  The words were half out of his mouth as he realised what he was saying and he desperately cast around for an explanation.  "I... I..., look, this is kind of embarrassing...."
"You can tell me," Bastulia said, stopping and looking into his eyes.  Jermander hoped this counted as a connection and not just mesmerism, which he also had trouble controlling around her.
"I said that maybe I should go to your lessons as well... because undines aren't running water!"  He smiled at her, aiming for self-deprecating while cheering himself on inside his head.  "I said that we had similar aversions so it might make sense to help each other overcome them."
"Well, that should be alright, shouldn't it?"
"They said that the undines didn't like the idea," he said, truthfully.  "They're a bit edgy around vampires apparently."
"Oh.  Well, that's a shame," said Bastulia turning and starting to glide forward again.  "That might have been a bit more fun."
They walked and glided on in silence for a few seconds, with Jermander wondering how to restart the conversation again, and then Bastulia spoke.
"But no, your Undine friend isn't at my lessons.  I thought maybe she had a problem with me because I've been talking to you."
"No!  No, no problem," said Jermander quickly.  "I honestly haven't seen her lately, I thought she was hanging out with the other undines more."
"That's curious," said Bastulia.  "Do you think we should tell anyone?"
"No," said Jermander flatly.  "This is Gorillamumps.  Students disappear from time to time, and that's just part of the learning process.  I mean, last month, Mouldyvort got staked by that Pirate Captain and the school barely acknowledged it."
"Yes," said Bastulia slowly, "but the Pirate Captain did say it was an accident.  He didn't know that Mouldyvort was hiding in his room, and he did have a wooden leg."
"It's still a death," said Jermander.  "And that young mummy, two months ago, who got all unravelled playing netball."
"Yes, that was gruesome in a dusty, smelly kind of way," said Bastulia.  "There's not really anyone to apologise to in that case though, is there?"
"They did put up a nice little memorial stone in the Garden of a Thousand Deaths."
"All student deaths?"
"Uh-huh."
They had arrived now at the Old Stone Lecture halls and workshops complex.  Bastulia looked up at the ancient stone building and shivered, possibly a little dramatically.  Jermander liked the way she moved when she shivered though.
"What class is this?" she asked.
"Kneecappings," said Jermander, holding up two lump hammers.  "Want to borrow a hammer?"

Blistermas

"I'm cold," said Nicky, and when Jermander looked at her she was looking a little bit opaque.  Being an undine, a magical creature made entirely of water, this suggested that she was near freezing point.  Jermander shrugged.
"It's Blistermas, Nicky, it's bound to be cold.  Especially here at Gorillamumps, the campus has psychoactive weather you know.  Why don't you put a heater in?"  There were very few undines at Gorillamumps, but the clever ones – that is, all the ones that weren't Nicky – carried small electrical heating elements with them in the cold weather.  Like the element of an electric kettle they could dip them into their bodies and heat their water up quickly.
"I know the campus weather is psychotic!  I experience it nearly every day.  What other campus has regular sunshine to the point of inducing a drought?"
Jermander shrugged again, not really interested in correcting Nicky or pointing out that psychoactive weather reacted to the students' unconscious expectations.  The regular parching heatwaves that Nicky experienced were a consequence of everyone's dislike for her.
"Why are we out here?"
Jermander actually groaned, and since he was a vampire it was an impressive, deep, resonant groan.  "I told you Nicky, three times already.  It's Blistermas, and Old Man Vinegar does his rounds tonight.  If he finds anyone sleeping who hasn't left him a gift out he gives them Herpes.  I want to see how he does it.  I want to find out how he manages to get round so many people in just one night."
"Franchise."
"What?"
"It's a franchise, Jer, that's how he does it.  My uncles have been running the undine franchise for years now."
"A franchise.  So there's lots of Old Men Vinegar then? And... wow, that's why you don't have Herpes, isn't it?  I wondered how you'd managed to avoid it all these years."
"I don't understand," said Nicky.  "How did I manage to avoid what?"
"It's ok," said Jermander.  "I get it now.  So who's the local franchisee then, do you think?"
"Can we go in yet?  I'm cold!"
"No!  I want to find out who the franchisee is.  They must have the vials of Herpes all year round, they must have to keep them somewhere safe.  This is potentially useful information, Nicky."
"I can get you vials of Herpes from my uncles," she said, sounding sulky.  "We don't have to sit up here on this roof in the cold all night."
"It's not the same," said Jermander, though he was wondering if Nicky's uncles might not be a good back-up plan.  Do you think it's a student or a teacher?"
"Did you leave a gift out?" asked Nicky.  "You could just put paint or something on that.  My uncles hate it when undines try and booby-trap their Blistermas gifts."
"GPS tracker," said Jermander.  "But this is more fun, trying to catch Old Man Vinegar in the act."
"But it's co-o-o-o-old!"
Jermander was going to reply, but while he was thinking about what to say there was a distant crack and purple lightning licked the underside of the clouds.  Then there was a small sonic boom that rattled the tiles, and an ancient Rolls Royce Silver Phantom screamed from a silver portal and roared down to the campus grounds like a dazzling meterorite.  It levelled off just above the playing fields, and came to a halt at the door of the dormitory block.  There was another sharp crack as air rushed into the space where Jermander had been a second before and a whiff of the charnel house, and Jermander had turned into a bat.  He fluttered his wings and launched, accelerating downwards towards the car at a speed that would have ripped the wings off a normal bat.
"Don't leave me!" yelled Nicky, but she was too late, she was alone on the roof.
As Jermander whooshed past the car, not slowing down in case the franchisee saw what he was, he was gratified to find he'd timed things just right and the franchisee was getting out of the car, a sack in one hand that rattled as though it contained many glass vials.
"Myrilla Chinchilla!" he whispered to himself, realising too late that he was travelling too fast amongst the erratically-laid-out buildings of Gorillamumps.

Memento Mori

"I've got an app for that!"
Jermander looked over at Nicky, who was supposed to be doing their Poisons homework.  He harboured a slightly guilty hope that she would accidentally absorb some of the poisons that they worked with so that he could hang around with the cooler kids at Gorillamumps without his mum getting upset, but despite her natural klutziness, her trouble with the curvy letters of the alphabet, and her obsession with Harry Plotless films she seemed to be able to avoid poisoning herself.
"Got an app for what?" he asked, hating himself for talking to her when he was supposed to be solving horror-dimensional equations with pan-Lovecraftian coefficients.
"The book-thingy, here, says that this is a Memento Mori, and I've got an app for that already!  I don't need to make this poison!"  Nicky looked thrilled with herself.  She was an undine, a creature made of water, and when she was happy like this she threw off rainbows in random directions.  Jermander, a vampire, was not terribly keen on them as they burned his skin a little if they hit him.  He pulled his cloak around himself and regretted, not for the first time, that bats were incapable of directed thought about higher mathematics.
"A Memento Mori is a reminder of the transiency of life," he said, shuddering slightly as memories of his childhood came back to him.  "Father was very keen that we understood that when we were growing up, he always said that being creatures of unlife we needed to know what effect we would have on the lesser classes.  Well, actually, he always called them scum, but that's a bit de trop these days.  So anyway, whenever one of the estate workers died, whether they were shot in the back by some idiot who can't tell the difference between a grouse in the air and a man on the ground, or fell into the combine harvester when Father was playing jokes on people, or just caught a bad chill one winter which turned into galloping pneumonia and drowned them in their sleep, their bodies would be brought up to our house for a three-day vigil.  Which meant, really, that we'd have this dead body on the kitchen table for three days."
"How horrible!" said Nicky, her mouth hanging open and dripping slightly.  "How did you eat?"
"We just piled the bigger dishes on the body, and tucked the rest around," said Jermander.  "Except for the combine harvester guy.  We think he got quite a bit eaten actually, so we stuck some chicken carcasses in the coffin with him."
"Oh wow," said Nicky.  "I don't think I could eat a Memento Mori.  I'd chip my teeth."
"You've got teeth?"  Jermander's eyebrows disappeared into his hairline with surprise.  "I thought you filtered krill or something?"
"I have teeth for special occasions," said Nicky brightly.  "They're shiny!  But I'd definitely chip them on this app.  It runs on my phone, you know?"
"Let's see?"
Nicky passes her phone, a slightly corroded black smartphone with a scratched glass touchscreen and little colourful stickers on the back.  Jermander peered at it, and tapped hestitantly at the screen, eventually finding the right icon and bringing it to life.  It purred happily, a bell dinged and donged, and then the screen filled up with information.
"Oh right," he said, reading quickly.  "This is just a death-clock, Nicky, not a Memento Mori. It tells you when you can expect to die, based on your online data."
"When are you going to die then?"
"I'm already dead," said Jermander.  "I'm a vampire.  This thing expects me to have stopped trending on Twitter by the end of February, and to be... oh!  Staked through the heart, apparently, by the end of the century.  That's a tad brutal!"
"It says I've died three times already," said Nicky in a small voice.  "It said that voided the warranty."
"You're not dead though."
"That's what I keep trying to tell it!"
There was an awkward pose, broken finally by Jermander.
"The poison can't be a death-watch though.  Where's the text book?"  Nicky pushed it over, glad to be away from it.
"Oh right, this potion is just intended to force you to relieve parts of your life again, until you've moved on from it.  It doesn't actually kill you, but it looks like it'll hurt a lot."
"What should I do with it then, Jer?"
"Drink it?" suggested Jermander sitting down and sighing as he looked at his paper.  The Lovecraftian variables were writhing around and trying to hide.

Undine

I light the candles in the bathroom and press Play on the CD player: Mahler's first symphony breaks the silence. I have filled the bath with warmed mineral water, which Undine adores. I disrobe and hang the dressing gown on the door, a dark shadow against pale wood. I step into the bath and lie back.

The water flows around me and over me, climbing up my body and embracing me. Finally it reaches my lips and pauses, and slowly solidifies. The water gathers shape and sensation, firming against me. Undine holds me.

"I thought Undine was a woman," I murmur, my mind hazy and my sight dim.

"Love takes whatever shape it needs."

My love is in every drop of water.