Consider this reminiscence a follow-up to Arthur’s last post, in which he introduced my old roommate Tes and our friend Morgane.
| 9:10 PM | me: I was looking through the journal I kept at that time. |
| short4tesla:I remember your journal! | |
| 9:11 PM | me: My first impression of you is rather amusing now. |
| short4tesla: *grin* You probably thought I came on pretty strong | |
| 9:12 PM | me: That’s a nice way of putting it. |
| short4tesla: I didn’t know if you were scared of me or if you were just quiet. | |
| 9:13 PM | me: It may have been a little of both at first. |
| short4tesla: Ha! | |
| me: I suppose things really got interesting with the trip to Innsmouth. | |
| 9:14 PM | short4tesla: FIRST trip |
| me: Of course. You were looking for a good place to climb. | |
| 9:15 PM | short4tesla: And found the cave with the weird writing on the wall. When you said “I’ve seen this before” it was like something out of a movie. |
| 9:16 PM | me: Yes. Sort of like your idea to wait around past dark to see if anyone would come back. |
| 9:17 PM | short4tesla: Hey, it’s not every day you make it to Innsmouth when there’s going to be a full moon. That’s what you thought one of the drawings meant. |
| 9:18 PM | me: I couldn’t argue with your logic then and I can’t now. Somehow we were able to occupy our time in Innsmouth until nightfall. |
| 9:19 PM | short4tesla: We were lucky in a lot of ways that night. |
| me: True. And so was Morgane. | |
| 9:20 PM | short4tesla: Right. We saw those guys in robes with the weird hopping walk dragging her into the cave. |
| 9:21 PM | me: And you leapt from our hiding place and demanded that they let her go, since it was obvious they would take demands from 5-foot tall female college student they’d never seen before. |
| 9:22 PM | short4tesla: 5 foot 1 and I totally knew what I was doing. |
| me: Apparently Morgane knew what she was doing too, since she was able to take out one of the people holding her. | |
| 9:23 PM | short4tesla: And once they saw that we weren’t afraid to swing heavy sticks at their heads, they took off. Wait – you got one of them with a crotch shot, didn’t you? |
| 9:24 PM | me: It took a few swings to get my aim right. Anyway, they didn’t put up much of a fight. |
| 9:25 PM | short4tesla: So, we ask Morgane if she’s all right and she’s all panicked and says she needs to get to the beach for her skin. |
| 9:26 PM | me: Later, of course, we learned what she meant, but it was quite baffling at the time. |
| 9:27 PM | short4tesla: So we follow her to the beach and she finds her seal hide or whatever, and then we see something coming from the water. |
| 9:28 PM | me: Two or three somethings. For months afterward I wished the moon hadn’t been so bright. I still don’t like thinking about them. |
| short4tesla: Let’s just use Morgane’s phrase: froggy folk. | |
| 9:29 PM | me: Associating them with something mundane helps. But even though I was repulsed and scared I was also fascinated, maybe even jubilant. They were proof that this obscure branch of folklore I was studying was astonishingly real. |
| 9:31 PM | short4tesla: That must be why you seemed so dazed when we were trying to tell you we needed to get the hell out of there. |
| 9:32 PM | me: Probably. But got the hell out of there we did. |
| short4tesla: And yet all three of us were crazy enough to go back. | |
| 9:33 PM | me: Which is, of course, a story for another time. |
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