Welcome to Lake Lewisia

The Haven of Marguerite County Visit the LL Community Center on Dreamwidth.org

[lakelewisia]

It is a common enough experience to grieve losses in another parallel dimension or a hazily remembered past life, and there are ample resources available for counseling to cope with these feelings. But sometimes we may read or watch something in which we are so emotionally invested, perhaps for years at a time, that we experience those strong emotions, even when it wasn’t from a cursed tome or enchanted mirror but ordinary books and shows. The community health center, in cooperation with the library, will now offer group therapy sessions on managing grief* over fictional worlds and people for when the story ends but our feelings don’t.

*Also offering sessions on healthy anger management against writers, producers, and major media corporations.

[lakelewisia]

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.

[lakelewisia]

“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.

[lakelewisia]

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.

[lakelewisia]

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.

[lakelewisia]

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.

[lakelewisia]

This evening will be a micro full moon, meaning the moon is at its greatest distance from Earth, and this will have some unusual impacts on local life in Lewisia. We particularly ask residents to exercise caution and restraint, should they come across any seemingly lost puppies around town. Some werewolves find their transformations are affected by the micro moon, and they are unlikely to appreciate anyone cooing over their temporarily diminutive wolf forms, however well-meaning their would-be rescuers are.

[lakelewisia]

The former mermaid had an informal circuit of regional aquariums she visited through the course of the year, and she did so for more than just her own pleasure. While there were others who performed daring rescues of selkies, wishing fish, and sea monsters inadvertently swept up into the aquarium system, she found there were also plenty of aquatic animals who otherwise liked their current lives. She served as a rolling messenger for them, ferrying greetings from homesick cephalopods and adventurous pinnipeds to her counterparts around the world who could whisper into waves and tap out Morse code on tank glass.

[lakelewisia]

Rushing out of doors to escape danger, clad only in a white nightgown, might have been gothic and romantic, but it wasn’t very practical. And whatever else may be said about her for having taken a job as a nanny in a house notoriously haunted and (only slightly less notoriously) unoccupied by any children, she was nothing if not practical. From her first night in its seemingly empty halls, she slept in heavy-weight flannel pajamas--with good, deep pockets--with a pair of slip-on shoes at the bedside, and she didn’t plan on fleeing from threats, whatever her attire.

[lakelewisia]

It seems an unusually large number of dads returned to Lewisia for Father’s Day (they just flew in, and boy, are their arms still tired), and the sudden concentration of fatherly energy has exerted a strange influence over us all. The hardware store reports a shortage of various supplies on account of the sheer volume of questionably planned DIY projects started over the weekend, and the fire department has responded to numerous incidents involving first-time grillers whose attempts at barbecue chickens went a-fowl. There are also unsubstantiated rumors of a plague of compulsive punning, but that’s probably just someone’s idea of a sick joke.

[lakelewisia]

The product recall and subsequent class action lawsuit seemed, on the surface, unrelated to the sudden rash of what were reported as very specific thefts. The manufacturer had promoted the line of refrigerators as always offering the freshest foods and eliminating costly waste from spoilage. Little did the buyers know that it contained a small portal cluster that connected them across space-time to those freshest foods whenever they opened the door, even if the foods were technically located in someone else’s fridge.

[lakelewisia]

Tripping and falling into immortality was typically a challenge to a person’s faith, all religions having something to say about the supposed inevitability of death, but she had grown up decidedly pagan. Her faith had been placed in the sun and moon and mountains and rivers, which changed without dying, and so she counted herself among their ranks as just another natural phenomenon. The environmentalist activism was a later but logical addition: while others talked of preserving the natural world for future generations, she quite selfishly wanted to keep her old gods around as long as she lived.

[lakelewisia]

The class on documentary photography proved more popular than expected, with many expressing a desire to understand more about the fundamentals of a good shot, so the library will be debuting two new recurring courses. In Captured!, a local cryptozoologist with thirty years of fieldwork will teach the technical skills and the instincts needed to get shots in the midst of action, from a mothman in flight to a child’s first bike ride. At the other end of the spectrum, Ring Lights for Wraiths takes traditional portraiture techniques and adapts them for getting the good side of all but the most photo-averse subjects, from abominable snow people to zombies and beyond.

[lakelewisia]

Bouncing around on the combined sugar of Pixy Stixs and fairy cakes, the little girl proclaimed, loudly and often, her intention to eat nothing but fairy food, until something overheard and started getting ideas. Her parents had never been so happy to see a door-to-door salesman, nor so ready to part with good money in exchange for snacks and boxed meals with names like Elf Snaps and Unicorn Loaf. The relief of being able to satisfy her demands was such that they entirely failed to notice the salesman's pointy ears and pointier teeth, and they certainly forgot to read the very fine print on the packaging before handing it over to their child.

[lakelewisia]

It was a tiny hitchhiker, making its way to a safer place, one it had gotten glimpses of in others, like the host who carried it now. It had been pure chance that the hitchhiker had been picked up, the happy meeting of two strangers with a shared town in their family history, one close and one far removed. It wasn't easy being a virus meant to infect the telepathic, out in a world where people barely heard their own thoughts, let alone those of others, but in Lewisia, it too would belong.

[lakelewisia]

For those who have embarked on the path of changing their bodies, whether for reasons of gender, species, or ancestral curse, the changes are often incremental, invisible from within their own daily perspective, and may feel frustrating as often as joyous. The Perennials Club is a support group for those who are slowly growing, more mighty trees than seasonal flowers, to find community and understanding from their peers while looking to nature for inspiration and encouragement. Meetings are held Thursdays at the Lakeside visitor center and are open to all, from those taking their first dose of HRT to those who have been shedding the scales of their cursed serpent form for centuries.

[lakelewisia]

Folklorists had made efforts over the years to formally document and preserve the tales and songs that originated in Lewisia or developed in unique ways once in the region. The Book of the Nightingale captured the lullabies spoken and sung over the beds of sleeping children, offering warnings about and promising protection from distinctly Lewisian dangers and foes. Apart from the usual concerns about drowning in the lake, offending house spirits, and trusting dishonest cheesemongers, a significant number concerned themselves with warnings about the temptations of seductive aspen trees, a fact which continued to baffle scholars to the present day.