"Are we crashing a party?"
“No, of course not! Everybody's welcome at a party. And we had to throw one for our first visitors. Come on, come sit with me once you've gotten something to eat."
"So where you guys are from? You said you still have a whole town, right?"
"Well, a small town. Only a handful of families and a few out-of-towners who got trapped there. Widespot is about ninety miles down the old river road to the south, right at the spring."
"That can't be right. I grew up about fifty miles further south than that, and there's definitely not a town called Widespot along the way. I'd know. I took a bus home every other weekend last year.”
"We didn't think there was anything for two hundred miles north of us. A lot of things have changed."
"I guess a town springing up out of nowhere isn't too weird to believe, considering. So everyone woke up together?"
"At about the same time, yes. It was as though we'd all just fainted in our homes for no good reason one evening, or maybe one morning. With the power being out, some of us thought it might be some kind of natural disaster until we started exploring and realized all the roads but the one along the river dead-ended a few miles out of town. I guess with those monsters so close you wouldn’t know if the roads up here do the same. And -- there's not really a delicate way to ask this. None of you seem to be expecting."
"Uh, we're all pretty young and most of us haven't known each other for very long. We have plenty of time for, like, rebuilding society or whatever..."
"All of our young people over a certain age who weren't already pregnant woke up with morning sickness that day."
"Oh! No, that hasn't happened here. Thank goodness; we've got all the medicine in the student health center, but the closest thing we have to a doctor is Sara, who used to be an EMT after school. One sec. --Hey, Sara! Cliff! You need to play buffer, Hugh and Andy are fighting again and I'm busy! --Sorry about them."
"Don't worry about it. So what did happen here?"
"Well, ten of us woke up all at once late last summer. We were sort of -- not a group but a web? Siblings, housemates, housemates' siblings, that kind of thing. We thought we'd all missed a mandatory evacuation order or something, and we decided to stay put until somebody came back for us. After the first few days my brother and his fiancee and their fiance -- they were just friends then, this was like a week after they met -- anyway, they realized that the livestock on LGU's test farm were about to starve to death in their pens, so we all started taking care of them, and we figured we might as well try to save the crops too, and that kind of distracted us for a while. The animals are fun but a farm is a lot of work.
"Then the first of the newbies woke up, and that's when we realized something else was going on. We still don't know where everybody's coming from. Nobody ever sees them, I don't know, materialize or whatever. We don't ever even find them still asleep; they're always wandering around campus by the time anyone realizes they're here. And the newbies all remember attending freshman orientation last fall, but nobody ever remembers seeing any of them there and they never recognize anyone else either. It's the weirdest thing.
"Anyway, before anybody was ready to hike all the way to Pleasantview, my brother and Sara -- they weren't with Cliff yet -- anyway, they headed for that who-- uh, hotel just over the bridge because they were looking for a private spot to have, um, privacy, and that's how we all found out about those horrible moaning corpse things. They don’t seem to cross the bridges, so since then we've stayed on this side of the river, and we've kind of just been living our lives? I mean, there's not really anything else to do. Of course there's been all kinds of, like, interpersonal drama, and the flu went around a few months ago, and everybody misses running water. And since we didn’t really do that well with the farm last year, we're all sick to death of the pine nuts the frat figured out were edible. But I think we're still managing to have fun, you know? I try to make sure we are, anyway."
"If this party is anything to judge by, you're doing a great job of keeping everyone's spirits up. ...Our hometown had pretty much decided this was some kind of mass alien abduction, but things are so different here I'm not sure that still makes sense."
"My brother and Cliff and Sara are convinced that the universe is a simulation and we're somebody's science experiment. They think it's great that they get to advance scientific understanding just by existing. Cliff and Sara are bio majors, though."
"They grow 'medicinal herbs' for 'research.' Oh, if you want any, Sara'll share if you ask her -- you saw her earlier in the blue skirt -- but don't try Cliff, he's kind of a grouch if he doesn't know you. They've also got a couple of greenhouses full of, like, actual medicinal herbs -- witch hazel and St. John's wort and that kind of thing -- plus another with stuff like orange trees, if you need any of that? And I've got to show you the test farm next time you're here! We can give you all kinds of seeds or, I don't know, piglets or something if you want them. It's lucky you showed up before spring. And maybe you could bring some of your neighbors here as, like, guest lecturers, if anybody wants to teach us anything? Or you guys could lecture yourselves; I don't know what kinds of things you know yet."
"I'm sure Daytona -- she's our de facto mayor these days; she was a state assemblywoman when all this happened -- would be happy to coordinate any kind of exchange you want to set up. But please don't offer her any drugs, honey; she won't take well to that."
"But there's no assemblywoman named Daytona."
"Daytona Beech. She's been elected six times. We're a backwoods district; most people don't pay attention to us."
"I won the lottery for a volunteer internship in the Assembly last summer. There's no Daytona Beech. You're ninety miles south of here, right? That should be twenty or thirty miles northwestish of Belladonna Cove -- you've got to be in Ramir Patel's district."
"I've never even heard of a town called Belladonna Cove."
"...Huh. I'm going to have to ask my brother about this; maybe he'll come up with some kind of theory besides the simulation thing.”
"I'll have to ask our neighbors, too. The Weisses are very intelligent. They'd probably love to come up here and lecture on astronomy and beekeeping. Well, anyway, if you want to write Daytona a letter, we'll carry it back. And I know I'd be happy to share what varieties I have in my kitchen garden, too -- nothing very exotic, but I grow some wonderful heirloom asparagus."
"Asparagus? Uh...thank you."
"Thank you, too, Ida Juana. You've been very kind to us, and LGU seems like a very inclusive place."
"Sure! The only good thing about all this is that we're starting over. I'm a poli sci major. I want things to be better for people than they used to be, and I'm sort of in charge for now just because the alternative was pretty much Andy at first -- he's my fiance, I love him, but I don't think there's anybody on campus he hasn't picked a fight with at one point or another and that's including Gerry, who woke up the day before yesterday. Or maybe JoAnn could've run things, but she didn’t want to. Anyway, for now I get to organize things however I want. I'm drafting a new constitution in my spare time and everything; it's so much fun."
"That’s a wonderful attitude. LGU is lucky to have you."
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