Ah, memes. And ah, summer. Ever since returning to the Underground Base last week, Emu, A-MOD and I haven’t been worth much. A-MOD’s spent the last week puttering in the furnace rooms, Emu’s constantly visiting the fridge and pestering the butler, and I spend my days generating memes like these.
Hopefully we get out of our ruts soon. We’re running out of pipe wrenches, paper, and food …
You remember the book I was talking about? This is a picture of the character Mrylin, drawn by my sister Katie. I thought I’d show off her artwork.
Squee! Fanart! Thank you ever so, Madam!
“But … but Author, that picture’s not—I mean, my mouth shouldn’t be that bi—”
“Shut up, Mrylin, it’s beautiful.”
Unfortunate accidents with exploding inkwells are … unfortunate.
You can stop laughing now, A-MOD. I know my hands are still blue.
Dark Tails and Darker Trades
At most colleges, April is a dreadful month. Caffeine sales rise, bags under the eyes grow more prominent, and light pollution skyrockets as more and more souls pull all-nighters and wear their sanity down to rags writing term papers and senior theses.
Not so much at the Institute. Yes, you’ll find a lot of midnight candles burning. Yes, everyone inhales coffee. Despite that, the mental health level remains stable and tempers stay amazingly even as well. “A miracle!” some say, accrediting our energy to our love of knowledge. Who needs sleep when you have the ambrosia of Aristotle to revive you? When Plutarch’s wisdom flows through your veins to keep you from anemia?
Friends, I hate to disillusion you. We’re not as erudite as all that; we just know folks in high places. –So to speak.
Let me explain. Back in the 1850s, soon after the Institute of Higher Education came into being, several squirrels witnessed several academics lose their heads. They had pity on the suffering men after watching the students dance hornpipes on their books while warbling “Molly Do You Love Me”, and once the students had come back to themselves, both squirrels and scholars agreed to work a trade. In return for the collegians’ neuroticism, the squirrels would siphon off some of their infinite energy. Surely, the squirrels reasoned, a little extra craziness would do them no major harm.
Of course, foresight was never a squirrel’s strong suit.
160 years later, when I first arrived, I couldn’t help notice something funky with the wildlife. While I walked from class to class, strange patterings would echo in the trees above me. Small black creatures with abyssal stares would watch me through classroom windows. Some mornings I’d find even acorn shards spelling out odd little messages on my windowsill.
Apparently the “trades” still go on; madness goes to the squirrels, mojo to the students. Over the years, though, the squirrels make the deal less out of the goodness of their hearts and more just to feed off the insanity. They love it. They breathe it. They are it.
All the upperclassmen assure me that the squirrels can do no harm. If we let them be, grant them our mania, and let them gnaw their half-eaten hot dogs in peace, everything will continue smoothly.
Maybe I shouldn’t worry… . Still, the eerie falsetto voices that waft across campus in the dead night hours make it hard to sleep.
“Won’t you tell me, Molly Darlin’,
That you love none else but me?
For I love you, Molly, darlin’,
You are all the world to me.”
On Chocolate and Geiger Counters
Apparently, just going to the Institute doesn’t make you smarter. Sure, I know how to mix paints and psychoanalyze my roommate and solve world hunger now, but at the same time I get stupid ideas like “Oh! Sure! I can leave Emu alone in the library for twenty minutes!”
To be fair to him, he has been relatively well-behaved in the last few months. People have come and knocked on my door a few times this semester to ask why on earth there’s an emu playing the ukelele at midnight and terrorizing the dorm mother’s tone-deaf dog, but since I don’t let him bring his ukelele or his banjo up Institute Hill to campus proper, why not leave him unattended?
When I got back, I found the bloke gorging himself on unusually rich chocolate cake.
“Emu, what …?”
“Oh! I’m crating nefarious energy!”
I had no idea what he was talking about either.
“This guy in a lab coat and a pair of goggles came up to me and gave me cake so that he could break the quarter quantum loop of science or something. It sounded cool, so I told him I’d write a song for it, and he said that if I did I’d lay golden eggs for the rest of my life!”
Yes, the Institute hasn’t given me omniscience, but it hasn’t made Emu much smarter either. A-MOD and I are now trying our best to make him stop glowing bioluminescent green.
Whoever gave my emu radioactive cake, I will find you.
Allow me to bring attention to something I should have mentioned a long time ago …
A few months back, a small link titled “DeviantArt” appeared in the sidebar of the blog. At the time I didn’t really mention it, since it didn’t have much in it that any of you hadn’t seen in my posts. Now, however, you’ll find a plethora of images and thingamies there, not only from the Society but also from Nokathair and … other places. All the same, most of the pictures there are a little prettier than the doodles here, and are certainly worth a look.
(“It also gets updated more often.”
“A-MOD, shush!”)
doctordemocritus asked: Ms. Pendrey, you have frequently mentioned an underground base, and I was wondering if you had any advice as to how one should go about aquiring one. Are there real estate agents for this sort of thing? Or, if I must custom build, do you know any good secret base designers?
Acquiring a base? Certainly. I have one major piece of advice, first off—something I wish I had known from the first: never seek an agent or designer. Ever. I made this mistake several years ago, when I first started looking for a place to live, and soon found out that all the secret base estate agents are oily men who will only shake your hand while wearing rubber gloves and a gas mask. They also make you sign contracts written on microfiche. Without a magnifying glass.
None of the designers were much better. The one I spoke to had an obsession with garlic floral arrangements, collapsing floors and pools of sharks.
Expect bloated prices, too. If you prefer to keep your arms, legs, firstborn son, or soul … probably best to look somewhere else.
I ended up doing everything myself: much cheaper, more satisfying, and perfectly customized. I’d highly recommend taking this tack.
First, you’ll want to find a location. I did some digging and found out that a certain part of the American Wilderness had lots of rumored caves and large rock fissures. Bancroft and I went to scope out the place, and after a couple weeks discovered an underground spring and cave complex. It worked very well for my purposes and we only had to battle an army of mutant fish to win property rights. —But that’s another story.
With research and legwork, lots of options open up for bases, most of which won’t cost you anything. Get creative. Here’s a couple ideas:
- Abandoned mine shafts
- Subways
- Sewers
- Maintenance tunnels
- Warehouses,
- Extinct volcanoes
- Condemned mental institutions
- Library basements
… The list is endless.
Once you’ve found a place, you’ll have to remodel and refurbish. You’re very rarely going to wander into a cave and discover a lair with working electrical, hot and cold running water, a fridge, and a lifetime supply of peanut butter. If you do strike upon such a place, get out immediately because the evil overlord who owns it will probably come back soon. Never get between an evil overlord and peanut butter.
In the more likely case that you’ve found an old, dusty, decimated rubbish heap, the broom and the hardware store are your friends. —As are minions for doing the grunt work. Or if you don’t have those, mutant fish do nicely.
Hopefully that helps. Good luck, sir; your base is at hand.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
barefootintherain asked: Dear Quinn- While pursuing your higher learning have any other Dens of Insanity arisen? Anywhere you go seems as though it would promise adventures in maddness. Sincerely, a tea drinker
Dear Tea Drinker,
Madness? Certainly. Perhaps not the type of madness you mean, though; most of our attempts at re-establishing the Base at the Institute of Higher Learning haven’t gone so well. We now know Campus Security and the Dean’s Office on a first-name basis.
I mean, I have my hangouts from last semester—the Tea Nook in the library or the coat closet in the Student Union come to mind—but the others have taken a little more time to find their places. So far, we work it out like this:
A-MOD spends most of his time either with me or among the library’s lesser-known shelves. If anyone finds him, he stops them from screaming by helping them find the books they need. Lots of my classmates recognize him as the Bookbot now.
(“But of all names … why that one?”
“Get used to it, A-MOD. We can’t all be ‘Conan the Librarian’.”)
As for Emu … special case. After the Frozen Toad scare (please don’t ask), the faculty hasn’t looked too kindly on him. Most of the time we make him stay in the dorm room and act like a throw pillow. That works pretty well. Right now he …
uh …
Blast, where did he go?
Hourlies Day
(Tumblr despised the size of the piece so you’ll have to click here. Foolish Tumblr. It should know better.)
On February 1, artists everywhere post hourlies: comics that catalog the waking hours in the life of a person. I thought it would be a fun exercise.
… A week later, jury’s still out. A-MOD thinks it was much too ambitious. I don’t mind; it turned out relatively well.
Emu wishes I hadn’t caught him eating those beads.
