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Summer

I didn’t figure out that Elsewhere University was anything other than a place filled with shivery-but-ultimately-harmless traditions until I’d already started my second year.

It wasn’t anything too exciting - I stumbled into the wrong part of the library, came out and realized I hadn’t missed my afternoon classes after all. I went to class, came back to my dorm room, had a panic attack, and went on with my life. Oh, and I changed my safename. I think I ended up going through half a dozen in the next few weeks, trying to find one that didn’t actually mean anything to me. (I remember Toucan was one of them, though I think I got anxious over what if it somehow offended the crows.) Sunny was the one I stuck with that year, mostly because my TA for Intro to Statistics sat me down and told me to just pick one so he’d know who to give the assignments back to.

I already knew most of the lore by then. I’d thought it was just fun bits of knowledge, traditions and legend-building, but I’ve always collected that kind of thing. After that initial panic (having made sure the horseshoe was securely over my doorway, and stuffed salt packets in all my pockets, and turned my underwear inside-out, and written and deleted several emails to my parents) I remembered that according to everything I heard, Bio majors didn’t usually interact much with the Fae. I’d actually been disappointed by that, back when it was just a story not quite close enough to touch, but it was a comfort now. So once I’d settled on my new safename (and stopped side-eying my poor roommate), I caught up with my assignments and moved on, just a little bit more careful than before.

I fell in love with lab work that year, and on the advice of a professor shifted into the tiny Molecular Biology concentration. Elsewhere University doesn’t do much research, but there’s lab space available for fourth years doing a thesis, and you can use it earlier if you have a Prof willing to supervise and sign off for you. The Molecular Genetics professor was full of ideas for what I could do with the reagents left behind in the fridge and one big freezer, and between us we managed to get me an internship the next summer, to stay and start on my own project.

I spent those months sharing a tiny apartment in the next town over with an English major going into her fourth year. (I don’t know why she was staying for the summer. I asked, but she gave me a different answer every time - she needed to hang teardrops on the rainbow, or count crow’s teeth, or find the door out of the laundry room. After a while, I stopped asking). In the mornings she’d drive us both into the university, and in the evenings I’d either wait for her in the library (always near the front) or I’d take the single late-night bus that ran from the university to the middle of town.

That bus isn’t safe. My parents knew that, though their concern was about other humans - other students, maybe, and me alone at the bus stop after dark. The ones that come by while you wait for the bus are dangerous, yes (especially the ones who only look human until you look away and see them out of the corner of your eye, and the ones who whisper into your ear and aren’t there when you turn around, and the ones who offer sweetly to let you sleep on their couch so you don’t have to ride all the way home in the dark (and maybe some of them were really human, or at least real offers, but it’s never safe)). I’m more concerned about taking the right bus and not the carriages pulled by horses that snort smoke, or the mockup of a bus that I almost got one night before I realized that the steps were wood and the driver had no eyes.

I think they get bored over the summer.

You’d think that I would have been safe during the days. I thought so. Everyone knows about the Fae and Bio students - and even if I wasn’t the kind of Bio major who’d be interested in studying the Fae anymore (a bit too macro-scale for me), I was surrounded by machines and chemicals, and in a science that focuses on breaking things down to their smallest parts and seeing how they fit together. Nothing that the Fae would want anything to do with, nothing that they’d even be able to mess with.

Except.

Except that my project involved mutating one specific gene (that we had samples of left over in the freezer), growing it in a lab strain of E. coli (also left over in the single -80°C freezer), and testing it to see whether it still worked. Except that as tiny as my lab was, I had to run up and down the building and into the next one to get to the machines I needed. Except that for all that it was tiny and for the sake of knowledge, I was still taking life and changing it, just a little. I think maybe that was close enough to what They do, some of them, to catch their interest.

Or maybe it was just that it was summer and they were bored. I wasn’t stupid (or brave) enough to try and ask.

It was a surprise the first time I left agar plates incubating on the counter overnight and came back to find bacterial colonies in colours that I’m pretty sure the human eye can’t normally perceive. Or when I had to run halfway across campus to stores and then go right back once I opened the package because my DNA purification kit was full of tiny white pearls. Or when I was walking back from the autoclave in the next building over, I decided to cross the greenspace instead of take the tunnels, and I met something that bent nearly in half to meet my eyes and offered to make sure my water was really pure.

(I declined. Politely. I’m not that stupid).

(…Then again I did keep the pearls, so maybe I am.)

I cried some nights. My roommate wasn’t much help. We were off campus, so I’m almost sure she isn’t a changeling (or wasn’t then), but it became clear pretty quickly that what I’d taken for English-major dreaminess mixed with a bit of EU oddness was in fact almost entirely EU strangeness in a way that meant while I didn’t feel unsafe sharing a room with her, she wasn’t much help in talking about how scared I was. I couldn’t tell my parents - they wouldn’t have believed me, but they would have believed that I was so stressed and upset that I was starting to believe the school traditions and encouraged me to take a year off or transfer somewhere closer to home.

I still don’t know why I didn’t do that. I guess I was just too stubborn, or maybe it’s that I’ve always preferred making the best of what I have to leaping into a new situation. Kind of silly in hindsight, but I did get through it in the end, so maybe it was for the best.

And I did get through it. I asked one of the engineers for help and got a box with iron corners to carry samples and reagents in when I had to leave the lab. I made sure everything was stored in some sort of machine - fridge, incubator, whatever - or at least a metal cupboard before I went home for the day. I talked to my godmother (Wicca, and had suspicions about EU even before I went) and got thin iron chain sewn around the hems of my lab coat - heavy, but safer. And I started reading poetry to the crows.

Things settled down when the rest of the students started coming back. I had gotten as far with my project as I was likely to get, and my supervisor (still acting oblivious, but she didn’t say anything about the failed plates or when the iron showed up everywhere) and I agreed that working over the school year would be a bad idea, since she’d be too busy to supervise and I wasn’t ready to work entirely on my own. It’s like second year again; I’m aware of the Fae around me, but they don’t pay me any particular mind and I don’t bother them. Classes have gotten harder, but I like my roommate this year, and she has her own protections to add to the room - she’s a pre-veterinary student, so I think some of them are in return for favours. My safename this year is Delta - maybe a little too on-point, but I think it fits.

I’m going to apply again next year. I think I’ll try to get summer housing on campus though - the bus takes way too long.

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