Tuesday 23 April 2013

OFUDisc Chapter 7


That night, Class Two's dormitory was home to twenty young(ish) women, one (invisible) anthropomorphic personification – and one piece of clockwork.

"It's not fair!" Esme Something declared stridently from where she lay, ticking softly, on her bed. "The paperwork asked what you wanted to be brought back as, right? Well, I wanted to be in the City Watch!"

"Don't blame you," Tisea murmured, and Saphie nodded in agreement. They were both Vimes lusters (although Saphie also had other tastes), and Phoebe found it hard to keep herself from nodding along. Esme... probably would have scowled, had her face been anything other than the sort with numbers.

"So I put it down, and what do they make me? A freaking timepiece!"

"You may have meant... what you said," Raen said quietly, cleaning her nails with a butter knife (a substitute for the daggers she hadn't been allowed to bring), "but what you wrote..."

"... was just 'Watch', I know," Esme finished in a disgusted tone. "I didn't know they'd take it like that!"

"Should've been more careful, then," Nenya murmured. "Words are important, you know."

Wednesday 17 April 2013

OFUDisc Chapter 6


"She called herself Llama," Phoebe explained quietly as the girls walked to their next class. "Said she was the anthropomorphic personification of insanity."

"And she's a student?" Penny repeated. "I wouldn't have thought they'd allow that level of... well, okay, there's you, but..."

"So where is she now?" Liliac asked, looking over the class. "She sounds like my sort of person."

Phoebe shook her head. "I can't see her unless I'm on call," she said. "See, I just put the Death of Fangirls thing in the notes, but hers is her species. She's on the job all the time."

"Must be nice to be able to skip class, though," Cazzie mused. Phoebe smiled wryly.

"Apparently she's still required to go," she pointed out. "All the work, none of the social perks..."

Friday 12 April 2013

OFUDisc Chapter 5


The first thing that began to bother Phoebe as she settled into the first class of the day was the anxious look some of the students were giving the door. All right, everyone was looking across occasionally, wondering who the teacher would be (they were back in Unseen U, so it could be Rincewind – or Ponder), but a few of them – Phoebe noticed Kai, Yukimona and Maligna Chiroptera, all three of them vampires – looked particularly concerned, as if they could see something the others couldn't. Probably they can smell garlic or something, she mused.

The second thing, and this really got to her, was the empty seats. They were doing her head in. She counted six, which made one for each of the four deaths so far – Esme, Becky, Kisheara and Tindomiel – and, oh, the last one was probably where Penny's absent friend Vemi would have sat.

That's only five, a treacherous corner of her mind told her. What about the sixth?

She decided she must have miscounted. Let's see, one, two, three and four... five.

And the one by the window?

No, she'd done that one. Try again, though, starting there. One, two and three, four, five.

This time you missed the one in the front row, the little voice told her, but she firmly ignored it. There were no mysteries here.

Sunday 7 April 2013

OFUDisc Chapter 4


Breakfast the next morning was a subdued affair, provided 'subdued' is an acceptable synonym for 'insane'. The brochures (which Phoebe had read as well as anyone, ie, she'd looked at the pictures) had promised an all-you-can-eat buffet of regional specialities, and the promise had been spectacularly fulfilled. Unfortunately, the students hadn't quite got the hang of the OFU teaching methods, so were rather incautious about what they ate.

"It looked perfectly normal!" Kisheara explained. "How was I supposed to know it was dwarf bread?"

"The bit where you hit yourself over the head with it might have been a hint," Phoebe muttered as she swung the scythe. Kisheara shrugged.

"By the time I realised my skull was cracked it was a bit late. So what happens-" A miniature sea-chest covered in creepers – Sam Vines, Phoebe thought – leapt from under the table, and Kisheara was gone. Phoebe started to walk back to her friends, the crowd moving unconsciously out of her way (although the various vampires gave her worried looks). Then there came a long scream, and she span round to see Tindomiel throw a coffee mug onto the floor and run straight through the Class 2 dining room's fifth-storey window.

The Death of Fangirls was waiting for her when she hit the ground. She listened to the girl's complaint – "How could I possibly have known it was Klashian coffee?" – then swung the scythe and left her for the newly-manifested camel-hair bag to take care of.

Tuesday 2 April 2013

OFUDisc: Chapter 3


The arrival of Ponder Stibbons had not, Phoebe suspected, gone the way Ridcully had hoped. Half a dozen students had jumped the young Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic, with one of them – the incredibly-named Lucy2 "Diamanda2" Tockley2-Stibbons – screaming "Husband! Husband!" all the while. Nenya Gabriel, being the oldest human class member, had taken the opportunity to sneak out in search of refuge (or just possibly, as she commented later, in search of Rincewind), but had walked straight into an Administrator. His appearance had calmed things down some, although Saphie had taken one look at him and collapsed in a dead faint.

So Day One of OFUDisc classes had clattered to its end, and the students were set to walking to their quarters. On the way, shortly before they left Ankh-Morpork, a girl named Becky had committed suicide – at least, that's what Phoebe understood it to be called when you trip over, knock three trollish market stalls through Chrysoprase's front window... and then go inside when invited. When Phoebe had picked her up, she had seemed confused: "This wasn't supposed to happen!" she'd exclaimed. "I'm meant to be the main-" And then she'd been eaten by a battered-looking medical case. Such is death.