Tabitha

The Excess Café was busy; there were five people sitting at tables, each at different tables, pointedly ignoring each other.  There were three people queuing at the counter, and the one that Lehar was serving at the moment was unusual.  The two behind her in the queue were just plain weird.  And then the door opened, and another person came in.
I was sitting in my customary table one row in from the window where I could see the street outside without being dazzled by the glare of the sunshine.  It was a beautiful day, wintry cold but clear, deep, blue skies as far overhead as you could see.  It made me want to stand outside, tilt my head back, and stare upwards as though I were forever falling into its blueness.  I could hear most of the conversation up at the counter as well.
"Can you burn the beans?" said the woman at the front of the queue.  She had stringy blonde hair poking out from underneath a knitted cap and was wearing some kind of smock that looked muddy.  It smelled worse though, and I was currently hoping that there was just mud on it.  "I like the beans to be a bit crispy, if you get me."  Lehar nodded, though I knew perfectly well she didn't get the woman.
"Tea or coffee?" she asked, her voice bordering on the insolent.
"Both, please," said the woman.  "In the same cup.  Milk for the tea, none for the coffee."
I almost turned round in my seat to stare at her then, and it was only by dint of great effort that I held myself in place.  I heard Lehar murmur something that was probably only borderline polite, and then the hiss of the hot water urn as she mixed the drinks together.
Across the aisle from me, the man at the table there turned the pages of his newspaper. It was an Arabic language one, but I think only I'd noticed.  I knew who he was and why he was here; like me he was waiting for the real customers to leave.
"Is there anything else?" asked Lehar, her voice lilting softly.
"Oh well, I don't really like to ask," said the woman and I couldn't stop myself from thinking So don't!, "but, well, could you run the sausage under the cold tap after you've cooked it?  Only I don't like them hot and greasy."
"She's in the wrong place, really, isn't she?" said a soft voice opposite me, and I opened my eyes and started.  If the plastic chairs weren't all part of the table to stop people picking them up and throwing them about I'd have shot backwards by a foot.  As it was, the whole table jerked with me and a little of my Assam tea spilled on the formica surface.
"Who are you?" I said, looking at the woman who'd come in most recently.  She had small, soft features like a child or a manga-character, a spray of freckles across her nose, and a turban wrapped tightly around her head.  Her skin was milky white away from the freckles, and her coat's high collar was turned up against the cold of winter.
"Tabitha," she said.  "You're the writer, aren't you?"
I openly stared at her now; there were no writing materials on the table in front of me, no dictaphone or its iPhone substitute, not even an interesting National Geographic with bookmarks of pictures that were inspirational or holiday locations that were aspirational.
"Who says?" I asked, my voice a little tight.
Tabitha didn't answer me at first.  Instead she started unwrapping her turban, pulling the long fabric away from her head with slow, steady strokes, letting it unwind at its own pace.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Dax had laid down his newspaper and was watching with professional interest.  Somewhere behind me I heard a male voice say, "I don't like seeds in my tomato, can you ask the chef to scrape them out please?"  As the turban unwound, a soft grey smoke emerged, smelling of the souk, of spices and heat, underlying notes of sweat and acrid tones of humans and animals mixing.  The smoke seemed to hang a little way above Tabitha's head, spreading out to form a quiet cloud over the whole table, me included.  I didn't need to sneak a glimpse sideways to know that Dax would be tensed now, wound like a steel spring, ready to act.
"I say," she said, her voice sounding as though it came from a long way away.  "I've met you before, on a road less-travelled.  You're Anna's friend."
"Anna has no friends," I said.  She could only be referring to Anna-Mix, and she was so many worlds of trouble that I'd lost count of all the reasons for not spending any time with her.
"Anna doesn't see it that way.  I have a warning for you, which is why I've sent you Tabitha.  Noura has found ink for her pen, and she will be writing in the book soon."
"And I must stop her?"  I couldn't have controlled the sarcasm if I'd wanted to try.
"No.  But if no-one stops her then we must at least know what it is that we're accepting."
There was a click, the sound of the hammer of a pistol being cocked.  My vision suddenly returned, though I'd had no idea that it had gone; I was no longer in a grey fog listening to a distant, but familiar voice, I was sat in the Excess Café with a woman called Tabitha wearing half a turban sat opposite me.
"I want a name," said Dax.  "Now.  Or I pull the trigger."
"Names are power," said the voice.
"These bullets are inscribed with the nine-thousand names of God," said Dax.  Somehow that was parry and riposte.
"...very well.  You may call me Djina, though the writer will remember me better as Violet."
Dax looked at me and I nodded.  I definitely did remember Violet.

Ms Angry's Tearoom

"It was supposed to be called Angie's Tearoom.  After all, she was Angela and she owned the place; she served tea and the occasional cake or toasted crumpet, and she threw people out if they asked for coffee.  She'd liked the idea of drifting around a room with little tables and chairs and clumps of people sipping tea from bone china and talking about the consequential things of the world since she was a little girl.  Her teddy-bear's teaparties had always involved dressing the teddy-bears up in suits and having them sit very upright at the tables while they discussed whether Britain should remain on the gold-standard or switch over to the Plutonium standard instead.  So when she was twenty-six and her best friend committed suicide in a public swimming pool in Loughborough she inherited a surprisingly large sum of money and decided to open her teashop after all.
The sign-writer apparently misheard her and didn't see any reason to question what he'd heard, so her tea-room, with the paint still drying on the walls and the new not yet worn off her tea-cups, became Ms Angry's Tearoom.
And the locals loved it so much she couldn't change it back without offending them all dreadfully.




*
She was staring morosely at the picture of Oswald Moseley that she'd hung on the wall of the little tea-room when three men in business suits came in and sat gracelessly down at a table.  One of them, whose face was acne scarred and a little more stubbly than she considered respectable, made a fuss of pulling his chair out, dragging on the thick-pile carpet like it was the hardest thing he'd ever had to do.  When he sat down, he bunny-hopped it back up to the table, as close as he could get it, and put both his elbows on the table.  Angela's heart sank.
She picked up three menus and approached the table with a measured tread.  Behind her, at the till, the waitresses trembled.  She offered menus to the other two men first, and then stared at the third man, holding his menu just out of reach.  He still tried to take it, and missed.
"This is a tea-room," she said firmly.  "It is not a bar, nor a dive, nor a night-club, nor some disreputable sordid hole of a place that you go to in the hopes of spending money on taking people away with you."
"Can I see the menu, love?" said the acne-scarred man pleasantly.  His voice had an accent that Angela was sure she recognised but couldn't quite place.  Perhaps it was Irish?  She lowered the menu so that he could take it at a stretch, which he did, and allowed herself a tight line for a smile.
"Alison will take your order," she said.  "There are no Eccles cakes left."
"Bloody good thing too," said one of the other men sotto voce as she left.  "Who the hell puts cheese in a sweet cake?"
Angela sat back down at her table, satisfied that she'd made her position clear, and let her thoughts drift away again.  She sat like that for three minutes before Alison, the luckless waitress assigned to that table, nudged her gently.
"They've ordered fourteen teas, miss," said Alison, dropping a little curtsey.  Angela stopped herself from smiling with pleasure just in time.
"Fourteen teas?  Between three of them?"
"Each, miss."
"What?"
"They said they wanted everything on the menu miss, except the Eccles Cakes."
"Which are off," said Angela automatically.  "Everything on the menu?"
"Which is fourteen types of tea, miss, two kinds of chocolate cake, and the sardines on crumpets."
"Is it Tuesday?"
"Yes miss."
"Oh.  That explains the sardines then.  Well, serve it to them, I suppose.  Ask them if they'd like the teas brought out one at a time though."
"Thank-you miss."
Angela turned slightly so she could see the three men at the table, and the acne-scarred man caught her eye and waved at her.  She blushed, and turned away again.  The cheek of it.
But why had they ordered all the teas on the menu?

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.

A cure for cheese

Laura slipped into her lab-coat, noting that again it looked like it had been part of a dark's wash.  Instead of being pristinely, gleamingly, white like Dominic's, hers was a kind of cheesy yellow shading to orange at the cuffs and collar.  She pulled it tight and sighed as one of the press-studs pinged off and vanished into a corner of the vestibule.
"Ah Laura, good of you to join us," said Dr. Watford as she came in with her lab-coat now buttoned askew to keep it properly closed.  He was a greying man with several major awards for biology and biochemistry, piercing grey eyes, and a handle-bar moustache that she hated.  "Dominic has just finished telling us about his week spent working with naphthalene derivatives and what sounds like a lot of washing of glassware."  Dominic hung his head, ashamed.  "Your turn, I think, to tell us about your week.  As I recall, you are attempting to sequence the genome for your cress?"
"Well," said Laura, wondering if this was how major scientific discoveries were always announced.  "I was supposed to be, yes.  But then I discovered the cure for cheese."
Dominic sniggered, and across the lab the new grad student, whose name might have been Helena, stopped moving and started listening intently.  Laura shrugged, looked directly at Dr. Watford, and said, "It's true.  I've discovered the cure for cheese."
"Very good," he said, as though she'd announced she had successfully tied her own shoe-laces.  "Where is the cure for cheese now?"
"In my lab," she said.  "I can go and get... it..." Her voice trailed off as Dr. Watford noticeably failed to smile.
"That can't be right," he said slowly, his voice deep and sonorous.  "None of the quarantine hoods are in use, I noticed when I came through earlier.  Surely you've not abandoned lab protocol and put a potentially infectious bacterial agent out unattended?"
"Well, no," said Laura.  "It's in the fridge."
"With the cheese perhaps?"
Dominic sniggered again.  He'd lifted his head, his earlier shame clearly forgotten and was paying close attention.  The new grad student had resumed collecting bits of glassware together.
"Er no.  It cured the cheese that was in the fridge, so it's now in a sealed petri dish with biohazard markings all over it."
Dr. Watford grimaced but nodded.  "It will do," he said.  "However, I can see that we need a quarantine fridge as well.  What happened to the cured cheese?"
"It was eaten."  Laura's voice was very small and she was staring at her feet now.
"I beg your pardon?"
"It didn't look anything like cheese any more," said Laura, wishing she didn't have to tell this part of the story, "and I wanted to know what had happened to it.  So I put it in a sandwich and sold it to some undergraduates.  Then I followed them around for three days, checking up on them."
"And what happened to them?"
"They seemed a little more popular than normal, and one of them started using mouthwash," said Laura.  "It was very boring, but they both survived, and they both said they liked the sandwich."
"How fortunate," said Dr. Watford, sarcasm almost visibly dripping from his words.  "Killing undergraduates, though not strictly against school policy, is likely to cause some problems for you.  Is this it then?  Do we now have the cure for cheese safely under lock and key?"
"No," said Dominic, staring out the window.  "No, we don't."
"Yes we do," said Laura, trying to see where he was looking.  "In my fridge."
"No, my dear," said Dr. Watford.  Domininc is pointing out that our grad student Helena is currently running across the quad carrying the cure for cheese.

Clementsy

The newspaper article was terrible.  Janet was so upset by it that she tore the page into even one-inch squares and stirred it into her porridge, and then ate it.  Twenty minutes later she went out and bought another copy of the paper so that she could read through the article again and wonder what had ever possessed her to talk to the interviewer in the first place.
The interview had happened in a coffee-shop that dated back to the late seventeen hundreds, and she'd been quite proud of herself for finding it and picking it for the interview.  The deep wing-back chairs were easy to sink back into and come across as a mysterious and deep thinker.  The ancient tables, though sticky beyond belief, conveyed an atmosphere of intellectualism.  The coffee – well, the coffee had been plain dreadful in her opinion, but she'd not wanted to ruin the interview, so she'd drunk it and pretended to like it, while despising the poor taste of the interviewer who apparently did like it.
"Your first review," the interview had said, slurping her coffee, "was perhaps not entirely positive."
"Not positive?" Janet had had to control herself not to scream. "The reviewer was a dyslexic illiterate nitwit whose only talent lay in stringing together insults and epithets from a thesaurus, presumably a big one with pictures and bright colours!"
"Your reviewer," said the interviewer patiently after writing that down, "was none other than Lady Agnes Scaggs, author of fifteen romance novels, twelve criminal fiction novels and three novels that are... perhaps of a somewhat delicate nature.  Her review dwelt at length on what she felt were the matricidal and homicidal overtones of your novel.  How would you answer her charge that you must have a deep-seated complex and mother-issues?"
"Scaggs?  Is she the one who writes about the talking horse that solves crimes?"  Janet had been distracted by that initially, but had eventually returned to the question.  "I have no mother issues, I have no bloody mother for that matter.  The syphilitic whore abandoned me, for which I'm very grateful, at the age of six, leaving me out with the empty milk bottles while she went on a whore-tour of Canada.  I'd prefer never to be reminded of her again, but my characters wouldn't be humans without mothers, so I'm forced to confront their relationships with their own mothers.  Not all of us write about the animals we've taken as lovers, you know."
The interviewer had been silent for a while as she scribbled to get Janet's words down verbatim.  Then she'd sat back in the chair, her face disappearing in the shadows, and said,
"Your second novel was considered by many reviewers to have Clytemnestric themes, which you, slightly surprisingly, referred to as 'no bloody tea, thank-you.'  Do you still feel that that was an appropriate response?"
Janet had had to look up Clytemnestra after that review, and while being annoyed for being made to appear stupid by the reference had not forgotten it since and was delighted to be able to answer the question.
"The themes of the unheeded warnings of the future are commonplace in my work," she said.  "So yes, I do think they were relevant, but as I said at the time, and I was misquoted, it's no cup of tea to follow those themes."
"Really?  They seemed rather facile to me," said the interviewer picking up a copy of Bride of Prejudice from her bag.
"That's the calexis," said Janet smugly, having no idea what facile meant.  The interview looked puzzled, so Janet egged her on.  "Do you have any more questions?"
"Lady Agnes Scaggs also reviewed your fourth book, Coathanger Abbey, which her family famously claimed brought on her heart-attack and subsequent death.  The book was found with a marker just after the now-infamous lesbian root-vegetable orgy between the staff and in-patients of the eponymous abbey."
"Good," said Janet.
"What?"
"Good.  I'm glad she's dead.  If you tell me where they buried the old bag I'll go over and dig her up and play drums with her femurs and her skull."
"How very Samuel Clements," said the interviewer.  Her face was drawn and pinched, and she slipped Bride of Prejudice and her tape recorder into her bag.  "I think that's enough questions really."  She left her card behind when she left, and Janet only now thought to find it in her own handbag and read it.
Patricia Scaggs.
"Oh bugger," said Janet.  The newspaper headline screamed at her as she stared at it: Novelist to desecrate society grave!  All of her treacherous words were there, listed, cited, and the audio-recording allegedy available online for readers to hear for themselves.  And they'd excerpted the lesbian vegetable orgy scene from her book.  It was clearly a defamation of her character, an assassination of heinous proportions.  Lady Agnes Scaggs was reaching out from beyond the grave, her wretched skeletal hand grasping Janet's throat and choking her out of this world!
"Dammit," she muttered under her breath and went out back to find the shovel.  She was pretty certain that Scaggs was probably buried in the nicer part of the churchyard.

Bounty Hunter II

"Tell me about this woman and her children, then," I said a little slowly.  I was wondering what was going on here.  Even Ma Dodd wouldn't intimidate the Sheriff into setting her boy up like this, no-one held a grudge against Dodd.  It's hard to hold a grudge against a guy who can't even reliably tell a man what day of the week it is.  "She been seen around these parts then?"
"I dunno," said Dodd, his face falling a little, sadness creeping in at the edges.  "I was just trying to find her, and I figured I'd go around and ask a bunch of folks.  She's mean, and she's mean to children too.  I figured people are bound to notice that."
Maybe, I thought to myself.  And maybe people who notice that are careful not to notice themselves noticing that; folks round here know what their own business is and are mindful to keep it that way.  Same as me, my business is my own, and I don't rightly like people asking deep questions about it, so I don't go asking any deep questions about anyone else's business.  And is that the kind of thing that lets a woman get away with stealing children?  I wasn't much sure I liked the kinds of thoughts that Dodd was bringing up.
"I think you gotta be mighty careful asking questions like that," I said.  I gestured at the house.  "Might be I can get you something to drink, Dodd?  Seems like talking's making me thirsty."
"Uh."  Dodd looked puzzled.
"Lemonade, maybe?  Your Ma lets you drink lemonade doesn't she?"
"Have you got Dandy-lion and Burr-dock?"  Dodd drew the words out like they were two words each, clearly liking the sound of them.
"Sure thing," I said.  I did too; not for me, but some of the visitors I got had old-fashioned tastes and liked the stuff.  I thought it made you wet the bed at nights, but that surely wasn't my problem if it affected Dodd like that.  "Sit yourself down while I go fetch."
When I came back outside Dodd was still standing by his car, so I hiked on down the path and handed him a tall glass with ice and a straw in.  He sucked the drink greedily, and he looked a little happier again when he took his lips away from the straw.
"Any clue what this woman looks like then?" I still wasn't sure I wanted to know, but I sure as hell wanted to know why Dodd had a Sheriff's badge and was asking questions of decent, god-fearing folk.
"She has children with her, but they're not her own."  Dodd sucked his drink a little more and I waited, seeing if he had anything else to say.  "She's mean to them."  Another slurp.  The straw rattled a little in the glass. "She's always cold."
Now that was a surprise.  The temperature out here in summer doesn't fall much below 70 and right now it was in the high 80s.  "How do you know she's cold, Dodd?  She telling folks that?"
"She's always wearing a coat," he said, sounding sly and proud at the same time.  "It's a long one, brown, and comes down to her ankles and up to her neck.  She's always wearing it.  She must be cold to wear a coat all the time."
"That's a mighty fine piece of thinking," I said, and despite the temperature a chill had just run all the way down my spine and was making me want to shiver.  I controlled myself, pressing my shoulders out and my chest forward, forcing myself to notice the sun beating down on me.  "Maybe she's got no other clothes though, Dodd."
"Hadn't thought of that," he said.  He sucked on the straw again, getting the last of the drink up.  Then he looked up, his eyes bright and a smile on his face once more.  "But then she's only got the coat and she'll be easy to find!"
"That's true," I said, nodding and holding my hand out for the glass back.  "You should go and ask people if they've seen the woman in the coat.  Tell them it's a brown coat, that'll help."
"Right!  Right!"  Dodd pushed his glass back into my hand and ran round his car, tripping and catching himself on the hood in his haste.  He righted himself and got in, and started her up on the first try.  He waved to me as he pulled away, and I waved back with my free hand.
"Holy crap," I muttered to myself as I turned back up the path to wash up the glass and wait some more for my parcel.  "Dodd's going looking for Clarissa Kay?  That can only end one way."

Gorillamumps

It was assault day.  At any other school it would have been illegal, but at the Gorillamumps Academy it was mandatory.  Even notes from your mother wouldn't be honoured on assault day, and anyone failing to turn up on the day would be best off never turning up again, as the punishments for missing assault day were arguably worse than asssault day itself.
There were some rules though; as Gorillamumps was the premier destination for the offspring of the world's mighty and powerful undead, there were rules about the amount of assault that was allowed, and the degree of the assault.  The zombie children could be assaulted as much as you like, but not assalted or in any other way attacked with salt.  Fire was also out, not just for them but also the vampire kids, the young mummies, and the Sporelets of the Creeping Mould.  It was also banned for the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, but no-one at Gorillamumps would admit to having met any of the Dark Young, so it was still a questionable point as to whether any were currently attending.  Skeletons, ghouls, Gelatinous Cubs and flame-efts were all fair target for fire, though if you were daft enough to attack a flame-eft with fire you deserved the consequences of your actions.
Nicky, an undine, stared at the piece of plastic in her hand and wrinkled her face again as she tried to understand the rules of assault day.  Little droplets of water splashed from her onto the plastic and trickled off onto the ground.
"Oh give it up, already," groaned Jermander, her vampire best friend.  He was dressed, as usual, like a New Romantic, having decided that the eighties was an iconic era and fitted somehow with his parents Victorian ideals.  He ran a hand through an impossibly stiff quiff and adjusted his lacy white shirt a little.  "It's simple, right?  On assault day we all try and kill each other with things we know won't have a big effect.  No-one's really supposed to die, but it's good training for after school when we go out into the real world and run the risk of discovery all the time.  Like, you're probably fine because you dissolve in a rainstorm, but for me, if I'm caught creating an army of pawns or influencing politics through blood, I might have to disappear for a few decades.  And no-one's going to just let me walk out of there, or trickle down a drain into the nearest body of fresh-water."
"But... but it's not like this in the films!" protested Nicky.  "In the films the humans all want to go the magic schools and join in!"
"You've got to stop watching that rubbish and start paying attention in lessons," said Jermander.  "You've failed every class you've taken so far.  We're only friends because our parents are neighbours."
"You're so mean!"  Nicky dropped the paper, giving up on trying to read.  She'd mastered about half of the alphabet, but the curvy letters all looked much the same to her.  The teachers felt she was lazy, the headmaster thought she was probably retarded and regularly told her so, and even her best friend was mandated.
"Look, what's your plan for assault day?  Maybe if you work out now what you're going to do you won't end up as a claim on everybody else's list."
"I don't have a plan," said Nicky hopelessly.  "What's yours?"
"Tridents," said Jermander looking pleased with himself.  "I did a bit of research and I reckon that most years everything's just improvised, which is a bit silly if you ask me.  I mean, that gives the edge completely to the Gelatinous Cubs, the Werewolves, and the Dark Young."
"Are there really Dark Young at Gorillamumps?"
"Absolutely definitely.  There's too many kids get admitted to the Mental Injuries Clinic each month for there not to be."
"Oh.  What's a clinic, Jer?"
Jermander ignored the question and got back to his tridents.  "See, a trident can pin the skeletons in place, pin down the mummies without hurting them.  Well, much.  The werewolves will be fine being stabbed so long as there's no silver or wolfsbane... by the way, did I tell you that I spotted wolfsbane growing the herbarium?  I reckon one of the teachers is going a bit rogue again."
"Again?"
"Dear Gods, Nicky!  Haven't you noticed?  It's like your Harry Plotless films, every year another teacher goes completely bonkers and murders a few students before someone works out what's going on and brings him to justice."
"Is that what happened to Dr. Pumpkinhead?"
"No, definitely not.  He just got a bit carried away with his barbecue and decided his own head would taste good."  Jermander stared at Nicky, remembering that sarcasm was something she had trouble with.  A bubble slowly rose through her face and popped at the top of her head, and he wondered how she ever remembered to breath.  "Anyway, Nicky, I've got myself some stashes of tridents set up and I'm going for the record this year.  The current record is by Miimelak back when the Frost Giants were allowed in Gorillamumps; he stamped on seventy-nine students and only two of them were disqualified for being actual kills.  I reckon I can do eighty with a bit of planning."
"I don't think I can hurt anyone, Jer," said Nicky plaintively.  She gurgled a little; instead of crying she just fell apart and splashed on the ground, and the gurgle was a fairly reliable indicator that that was about to happen.
"I thought you'd say that," said Jermander quietly.  "Don't worry, I've got an ice trident as well.  I figure that if I get you cold enough you'll be stuck in one place too, but you'll be fine when you thaw out."
"What?"
"Oh, just meet me here tomorrow," said Jermander.  "Assault day starts at nine, so let's get here for eight-fifty-five, yeah?"
"OK," said Nicky sounding a little more cheerful.  "Maybe tomorrow will be fun after all!  We're a team!"
"Yeah," said Jermander, smiling with his teeth.  "Now, what kind of trident do you think will stop a Dark Young?"