Have you ever looked at something and immediately realized you were going to love it? It hits you right in the chest with feelings you weren’t expecting and definitely didn’t ask for! Like, the first time you saw the abandoned shrine on Pomegranate Way, up on the hill, with the knotted ivy and the moss lingering on the stony statues of sages and dogs and the biggest tree you’ve ever seen, and you’ve seen some big trees before, and you just know that you’re going to be able to call up what you’re seeing like it’s a picture for the rest of your [i]life?[/i] Or when you’re a kid, darting from street light to street light on your way home, singing “Blow Ye Winds” to yourself because everybody knows that ghosts can’t [i]get[/i] you while you’re singing, and you’re really looking forward to being home, and you look up the slope and see the moon, nestled in the branches like a nest, and honestly that’s probably where we get the word from, and you’re just like, [i]oh,[/i] and you stop singing and put your hands in your pockets and stare in awe as the wind shakes the trees and the moon slowly drifts along, and then you go home and think so hard about the moon that you end up engaging on Fortitude’s first LUNAR EXPEDITION from your bedroom, only eventually you realize you never left at all, but the cardboard box was an amazing moon rover. Like that. That’s what seeing supporting characters is like.

It’s also like the glow around menu options when you select them, pulsing and saying [i]pay attention to me[/i] but the pulse is their heart talking to yours, but because they’re not me, they don’t know how to tune their heart like a radio to send transmissions clearly so all they can do is send out: [i]is anyone listening? pay attention! is anyone listening? pay attention![/i]

So of course I notice her. And I notice Dulcinea, and suddenly I am caught in the terrible jaws of a FRIENDSHIP QUANDARY, because I want to immediately sit down and figure out who this straw-haired girl is and why I haven’t seen her around before and what her name is and if she wants to hang out so I can figure out why she’s going to be an important character! But also, friendships are important to maintain, and I am basically Dulcinea’s best friend forever. And only friend? She’s kind of a shut-in, and she keeps telling me we’re not friends, and without her heart (most of the time) I can’t tune in properly to tell her that we’re totally friends. I’m friends with basically everybody, except for jerks and creeps. And Dulcinea isn’t either of those things! Usually!!

And ignoring a friend so that you can shovel more sweet nuggets of friendship into your mouth is the kind of thing that proves you don’t deserve to have that friendship in the first place! So there’s nothing for it: I’m going to have to duplicate myself.

It’ll be tricky. I don’t even know where I could get a copier machine at this hour! And the one in the Archives is way too small, I’d be left with a Rinley head ([i]again[/i]) or a Rinley butt, and that’s only useful if I’m trying to trick someone into a cunning trap! Like, the bad guy’s looking for me, and they see my tail nooooot quite tucked in behind a tree, so they creep up with their chainsaw gun and when they peek around the tree, surprise! It’s my butt! And I’m up in the tree dropping a fishing net on them, and when I pull off their mask, it turns out to be..... Principal Entropy??? And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for my butt! Then, when the sheriff takes him away, I’m allowed to keep the chainsaw gun because I was a responsible citizen, which I then use in only the most responsible manner at a chainsaw gun range. But this is not a situation in which having a spare butt would be useful! So it has to be a Rinley-sized copier machine, and I need to have good paper, too, because if there’s a paper jam then the Rinley that crawls out will be in endless torment and want to fix herself with my skin, and I need my skin for a lot of things, like sunbathing, and swatting mosquitos, and getting scritches, and holding all my gross guts inside me where they can’t try to escape (except for that cheating appendix, who I’m keeping an eye on). So that wouldn’t be any good.

And I can’t stomp so hard I tear in half, either, because then I’d have to hop over to both of them and be like, hey, ignore that I only have one eye and one arm and one leg, I promise I’m not one of the dread Fomorians, and then Dulcinea would lecture me about how symbolism works whether you want it to or not, and the straw-haired girl would probably be too distracted by my resemblance to the Fomorians to become my friend, and would just want to hang out as long as I could curse her enemies, though I can’t imagine she has a lot of enemies and oh hello Dulcy I guess we are going into this Sideways now!

(Here in Fortitude, we call little alleys like this Sideways, cause that’s short for Outside Ways. I think that’s neat!)

“The sun’s broken?” I gasp! This Glass Dragon business goes all the way to the top! Literally!! “Of course, that’s the connection,” I say, smacking my fist into my palm. “Dulcy, have you ever heard the story of the [b]Glass Dragon[/b]? Because, storytime!”

[hider=Open At Your Own Peril.][hider=You Know What This Is.][hider=Last Chance, Phoe. I Mean It.]Once there was a [i]grad student![/i] But this grad student was getting her Doctorate in Witchness at the Bleak Academy! So she came up to the Headmaster with a thesis proposal that she work with local artisans and unethically sourced labor to create a [i]glass dragon[/i] capable of destroying the world, or at least a facsimile world in a controlled environment, and the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy signed the approval slip along with the Faculty Board of the Bleak Academy, and so the grad student came to Town in order to make her thesis project in Witchness!

She optimized it for hating the world by reading the news to its temporarily separate glass ear every day, and for shooting laser beams out of its eyes with a specially designed optical array, and then she added a glass furnace where its stomach should be so that it could barf molten glass over anybody who tried to stop it! And she made sure that the labor was unethically sourced by entering into a relationship with her craft provider [i]and not filling out a conflict of interest funding report,[/i] just like she’d told the Headmaster she was going to do!! So when she finished the project, they shared an [i]evil[/i] kiss and then the grad student pushed the big red glass button on her glass remote to activate the glass dragon, and then it [i]exploded![/i]

So obviously the glass dragon is back and it is breaking the sun by staring at it, when everybody knows that only eagles are allowed to stare at the sun without proper protective goggles! If somebody doesn’t find the remote and push the button again, the sun’s probably going to stop [i]being a sun,[/i] Dulcy! Which is why we are going to go on a quest to [i]find that remote![/i][/hider][/hider][/hider]