The Interview

We sat down for a chat in the smoking room. Although the air was clear, after the ban, they kept the stags heads and antlers, and the soft leather seats; it was a non smoking smoking room now.
In the main hall the dancers were pounding the floor while the yachties (stripped of their dayglo yellow dungarees) clapped and stomped their beers on the much dented tables that ringed the floor.
She was being friendly to me. I tried to tell whether it was a strain or mask she enjoyed slipping on, but she was to good at it for me. She always smiled when she said my name, and made positive noises when I made any movement beyond the strictly unavoidable.
We had only just sat down and already I had finished more than an eighth of my pint. First spilling a little while walking from the bar (on my trousers? I convinced myself not to look), then I drank a little to stop myself from spilling more when we forced our way throughthe air lobstered faces that cirlced the incipient 'highland fling' that brought the all these pleasure cruisers to this hideaway mooring.
When we sat down I took a long gulp, dropping the pint below the 7/8 level, while she smiled the kind of welcoming smile I was sure the tour guide skippers would have tried when those pay-by-the-week crewmen first clambered on board their yachts.
"Why did you want to come to GlynDower?" She asked me.
"You invited me" Sprang up, but I fought it down. She had said 'want' and the invitation wasn't enough to answer that.
"In your earlier blog posts it seemed like you wanted to give up this life." She didn't say 'of lycanthropy' out loud. We kept it to ourselves in company.
"But you still invited me." I answered, accidentally sounding snidely triumphant.
"We though you should have a chance to see what we were like."
"And now?"I didn't ask her.
I didn't want to hear what answer she would give.

The Flying Werewolf of Level 17

Flying back on Virgin airlines, playing Tetris on the back of seat screen, I pressed a button and a polite woman brought me a glass of red wine. It was dark except for the screen and I was wrapped in a clean blanket I would never wear again.

Before I had left India, I had updated my CV with the new Microsoft qualifications I had gained, and posted it on all of the major job sites. My phone was switched off in my pocket, but I knew that there would already be messages waiting for me from the recruitment agents at home.
Comfort in the present and excitement for the future; who could ask for more?

Aside from those messages from the agents, there was the email I had already read: the one someone sent me after reading this blog.

Thankyou for that, by the way, all feedback gratefully received. I still haven't decided how to reply to you yet, so I hope you don't think it's rude of me to blog about it first.

It seems an awful lot like an invitation to stop being human.

Perhaps it would be going a little far to say stop. You read my blog after all, and you sent me an email too; so if you really are as friendly with this colony as you claim, perhaps they arent so bad.

I do have free time at the moment too -- not having a job -- so what do you think they would say to a visit?

Mail me again with the details if that sounds ok, and either way (all of you) please feel free to leave a comment.

Death on the Stream of Consciousness?

This place would be the perfect setting for a whodunnit. Twelve of us here from the first world on a trip to India, eleven men and one woman. The plot practically writes itself. The victim (An Irishman?) is stabbed in the Bazaar; No witnesses come forward.
Was he trying to find a prostitute (N.B. the guy who complained that he got a urinary tract infection, and wasn't sure how), or perhaps some of the group secretly knew each other from the past (They had met in WoW)?

Stephen The narrator could be trying to find out what happened. Perhaps suspicion could fall on an instructor? Was the instructor having an affair with the female student but needed to keep it quiet in case he lost his job?

Computer logs would be clues, but how trustworthy could they be? Hey, Stephen Could be the son of a dignitary, a British ambassador, that was just passing time on the course while his father finished his assignment; would give a great perspective on the investigation when the foreign office got involved.

And of course, the monkeys that run around here would give plenty of local colour. Perhaps one could Stephen a students backpack or sunglasses, which would throw suspicion on an innocent party? And the clue could be recovered during a trip to the Monkey Temple?

"Hey Stephen" Kamal looked a little hurt "You have paid for this course" He gestured to the whiteboard he had been writing on. "You should not be wasting it by staring out of the window, please."
"Sorry" My face flushed and I dropped my head "I was miles away".

Memory Dump

Question 7 of 42
You are studying for an MCSA exam in Shimla, northern India. You wake up at 3a.m. in your hotel room and find that you have fallen asleep revising questions on your laptop, which is still powered on. The lights are off, but you have been woken by the sound of a fight between a pack of stray dogs and the troop of monkeys that inhabits the town. How would you best resolve this problem(choose one)?

Options:
A)Transform into a wolf and go out to fight the monkeys on behalf of the dogs.
B)Transform into a wolf and go out to fight the dogs on behalf of the monkeys.
C)Write an entry for your blog and then go back to sleep.
D)Go down to the bar and talk to the other people on your course.

Answer:C

Rationale:
A)The question states that you are in a hotel room, making getting outside difficult whilst transformed.
B)A wolf most closely resembles a dog, therefore the monkeys are unlikely to side with you, making this option dangerous.
C)The original problem was being woken up, and this answer is the only one that ends with a solution.
D)There's also always an obviously wrong answer too. The question states that it is 3a.m. You should have gone down to the bar at 8p.m., like you agreed too, instead of watching HBO. Now it's too late, go back to sleep.

The Escape

"...But the car came back,..."one of the women in the group had taken over "...Beeping its horn and flashing its lights...".
I was squeezing my fingers and scrunching my toes, trying to keep the blood flowing .
"...until the fenders were touching and he was ramming her car!".
It was going to frost over that night and I prayed that this would be the last story. It was fifty feet to the nearest cover, and that cover put me on the wrong side of the reservoir to get home.
"And that's when she realised. He wasn't trying to hurt her. No, he was trying to warn her..."
Perhaps I should have run when I first got my bearings, but something in me recoiled at being seen.
"...the man she could see in the rear view mirror, rising from her back seat, with an axe!".
The group applauded and hooted praise for a few seconds, and I braced myself to run before the coldness numbed me too much.
"Who's next?" asked an eager voice.
"Another? I'm too cold" Murmurs of agreement went up, and along with small complaints, the campers torchlight began to be dimmed as they clambered inside their tents.
I took the noise of zips going up as my cue and ran in a crouch towards the nearest set of trees.
"Goodnight everybody" Got passed around until "G'night Jim-Bob" got met with groans, then silence.
They didn't seem to hear me leaving.

The Tribe

Down by the waters edge there was a human, howling. He was flinging his arms up and then beating them on the ground, spinning from side to side as he let out a two tone cry; first deep and booming, then stepping up to a middle-pitch that made his howling crack with strain.
As I drew closer to him he began to glow with an odourless light, like the moon, and the strength of his howl dropped down low. He changed it into a hard and forced rhythmic panting that was taken up by a circle of humans I hadn't seen even just seconds before. Their faces and arms seemed to be rising up from the earth around the main chanter, their huffings mirroring his own.

My wolf-self had no reservations, it was time to go, not in panic so much as a sense of unwelcome when other more hospitable options were waiting. I fought it back and struggled to keep my feet from starting. Even though I couldn't understand the man I was watching, the shadow of my human-mind seemed to be shouting out some recognition at the sounds.

I stalked down behind a bank of earth, just a few feet away, but out of site of the man, and made the wolf sit so I could listen. Before I had made any progress, I felt something, like the sense of once still water flowing, and the human thoughts became more than just shadows, they started to fill themselves in with flesh.
In a moment I recognised the sensation I felt; it was the brain inside the wolf shifting its form into human. In panic I tried to will it back, but too late realised it was the human brain that was afraid the consequence, and my attention to its worries only helped it grow. I gasped in shock when my skull started cracking, and reared back on my haunches as a cry of pain morphed itself into a ripple of jawbone that sent my chin flying while my snout dissolved before me. My paws flew up by themselves like birds and spread their span with hairless tendrils that splayed out as they retreated to a dizzying length, supported by pale and overlong limbs whose knees seemed broken and bending.
I fell back against a tree and let out a sigh. I was human again.
"And My! What big Teeth you have!" I recognised the mans' voice, but with my changed ears it clicked as a reedy falsetto.
I could hear the voices of the others on the far side of the ridge, laughing and rustling in their sleeping bags, and I could see the light from their torches shooting up in the air.
The mans' voice called out again, but low and growling: "All the better, to EAT you with!!!"

Stirring the air by the reservoir

Last time I was out, the cold lay on the trees, huddled except for the slight churning of the days heat, still drifting out of the reservoir. As a human it would have passed unnoticed, but as the wolf the warm breeze smelt like hand pressed wine, left breathing. All the life of the day, one of the last before the start of the new-years spring, had left its sweat and flavours in the water.
Something in the scent made me break an informal rule I had against howling. I sat back on my haunches and drew in a corner of air to shake with a mellow tone that seemed to make the starlit ripples change the patterns they were tracing.
Sometimes when I had howled in the past, it had set off dogs in the far distance. They took up the call in pitches of their own, carrying it farther than I could hear or ever want to go. Later, as a human, I would worry that the howling might make other people nervous or come looking for the wolf, so somehow I had managed to train myself not to do it. By and large I found I could influence the wolf if I really had to.
Last time, when I howled, there was only silence for a while. The dogs must all have been sleeping, guided as they were by the early sundown, while I still went by the clock. After a moment though something made me start and skitter back as it tried to respond.
Haaaugh-oW-Ughhh---O---ooo. Like a plague victim or roadkill that should have died a long time ago, it seemed to spell only danger to the wolf, and I looked around frantically to see the source.
There, on the other side of the reservoir stood some misshapen creature. Waving tentacles and shedding thick sloughs of skin, seemed to be calling back to me across the water. The wolf was all set for running, but despite its fear, and my human concern, I started around the waters edge to get a closer look.