15 February 2000

I had a lovely Valentine's Day. Matt had 70 tulips sent to me at work, though we were both slightly confused by the flower people choosing to send them in two separate bouquets of unequal size and non-matching colors. (One bouquet was obviously intended for Valentine's day, consisting of twenty tulips - ten red, five pink, and five white, and the other was a bunch of fifty orange tulips.) The Valentine bouquet is very pretty, and the bunch of fifty looks quite impressive on our table, even if the only thing I had that was big enough for the whole bunch was a juice pitcher.

I'd arranged to have a bunch of balloons delivered to Matt at work, along with a small teddy bear wearing a pair of boxer shorts that almost match a pair of Matt's - white with red hearts on them. Matt seemed pleased, at any rate. He says he knew something was up when the receptionist called him up to the desk, and as he came up the last flight of stairs, he noticed a gaggle of office people standing around. Heh.

Because of the texture of its "fur" Matt called the teddy bear an "oatmeal bear." Over the course of the evening, the bear shook its behind at me, did a couple of little kick-dances, mooned me (the boxers come off), kissed both of us goodnight, walked all over us, bapped me on the nose a few times, and used my arm as a playground slide. I think Matt likes it.

The MeadeHall was pretty intense last night. Jeff's naive girl-character Temire slipped sideways into the ether, and my mage, Zoya, spent most of the evening trying to talk her out, with the assistance of Glossaria (Zoya's librarian, who helped cast the spells necessary for Zoya to communicate with Temire) and K.T.'s vampire-hunter Nacheyla, who was standing by with an ether-sword (which I teased her looked an awful lot like a light-saber to me) ready to pierce the fabric that divided the two planes in case it seemed that Temire was stuck.

Luckily, I managed to talk Temire back through to the correct plane (somehow, she's been falling through her own reflection for weeks, and hasn't bothered to mention it! Foolish girl!) just in time for her to rematerialize in the middle of a fight.

The long-absent MoonDancer (played by the often-absent Braz) had returned, but with a distressing turn of events - he remembers none of us, and he's lost the skills, abilities, and restrictions that were native to his race. (Yes, I'm being deliberately vague. Suffice it to say that he appears to have turned from a being of somewhat impressive power into a simple human.) Trying to bring out those inherent powers, Jaret (Matt) had engaged him in combat.

Temire, because Jeff can't do a thing simply if it can possibly be complicated, rematerialized in the middle of this combat, taking a punch meant for Jaret square on her face. With instinctive reaction, she stabbed MoonDancer. (At least she's got reactions now.)

So Zoya, still breathing hard from her efforts to help Temire, succumbed to the urging of her god (did I mention Zoya had been recruited as a priestess for the ex-Hall-patron-now-god Erdian a while back?) and healed MoonDancer. Which was odd, because healing isn't a normal part of Zoya's spheres - I can only assume that Erdian was taking a direct hand in things, using her as his vessel.

So he was healed, and we explained that it wasn't the norm for us to attack visitors, but that we thought he might have actually been the person he resembled, his memory suppressed for some reason. By then, we'd run over our time by almost an hour, so we agreed to let him stay in the Hall and finish healing while we look in to the mystery.

When we mentioned at the game this weekend that there were online journals in which he was mentioned, Mike asked for URLs. So yesterday morning, I mailed him three - mine, K.T.'s, and Matt's. Yesterday afternoon, he started poking around.

I could tell he was reading this journal backwards, because every now and then he'd laugh and read something outloud that had amused him. I must say, it was an odd sensation, knowing that he was sitting just on the other side of the room, reading what I had written. But then, I can say from experience that it's a slightly odd sensation to read something that has been written about yourself, so I suppose we're even.