Virtual Quill

Danielle is coming to the Caliban Academy hunting competition this week as Rudy and his teammates play their archrival Domain High School. She, George and Francis will sit in the stands with Dad, Kell, Coney and Elanor. (Gran won’t be there; as the team’s conditioning coach her work is done by the time the competition starts.)
Danielle grew up with the human version of Gran as her mother, who (like her rabbit counterpart) had been a star athlete in her youth. Danielle never really took to sports for that reason, although she was intrigued by the emphasis on numbers. As a human child she mainly followed baseball just to keep up with batting averages, ERAs, etc. The actual games bored her.
Once here and transformed into a rabbit, she discovered the hunting competitions through Rudy. Hunting has a similar focus on numbers since the winner is determined through the size, weight and degree of difficulty of the prey. Danielle enjoys doing all that calculating in her head.
BTW, I’d like to clarify something about the town of Domain. Some of my human friends (Yes, I regard you as friends!) seem to think Domain is a big city, and others even believe it’s name of this planet...or universe! No, Domain is simply a small suburban bedroom community about ten to fifteen miles away from a big city. It’s part of a major metropolitan area, but it’s not significant in and of itself.
Except...that it’s home.

Rudy texted me the news, that the catty woman who drove up insulting Kell was actually Kell herself dressed as her cousin Sheila, mouthing the things she imagined Sheila would say. Sheila, meanwhile, was dressed as Kell and took the side of suburban domesticity. In that way, they processed their respective differences.
They continued the switch throughout the evening, to the consternation of Dad and Elanor. Rudy, meanwhile, saw through the ruse with his finely-tuned sense of scent. He confronted Kell (dressed as Sheila), who asked him to play along for a day. He did, not even coming clean with me although I’m away at college. (Thanks for the demonstration of trust, Rudy!)
The most amazing thing that happened during the switch was Gran coming to Kell’s defense during the exchange of hostilities. (I’m surprised Kell was able to hide her astonishment and stay in character.) At the end of the evening Kell and Sheila switched back so that Kell would sleep with Dad (of course!). It was at noon the next day that they dropped the routine. Elanor was furious; as a wolf who takes everything at face value she takes a dim view of subterfuge even in a benign setting as this. As for Dad, he’s laid back and nothing much surprises him, but this definitely did.
Addressing some of points raised on the blog after I logged off last week, domestication in the human world was created by humans but here...it’s a genetic condition. Do the domesticated miss something that a human would provide? I see no evidence of that.
It was wasn’t dangerous bringing friends around Coney, even before her protective instinct kicked in. Even as a carnivorous infant she would first observe how people interacted with her surroundings before attacking prey. If a member of her pack (us) brought a friend over she’d see that we were accepting of their presence and leave them alone.

Here at Beige University, the main topic of conversation is the football team’s offense, or rather, lack of same. I mean, winning a game by the score of 3-2??????
There’s more offense going on back home, where Kell’s Cousin Sheila breezed in and began making antagonistic comments about Kell’s life choices. Kell, of course, responded in kind and Dad and Elanor could only look on. Rudy texted details to me as if they were reports from a warfront.
I Googled Sheila, and saw that she’s single, childless, never married, the same age as Kell and a geologist who travels all over the world. Her rootlessness contrasts with Kell, who has always resided in this metro area except when she went to Beige for college. Sheila is also an absolute dead ringer for Kell, and at first I wondered if she was really Kell’s human counterpart. But no, I recalled that Danielle said that the human Kell is still on her side of the portal, married to the human version of Dad. (Danielle still refuses to say how that marriage breaks a social taboo, but she says it’s a significant one.)
Responding to some of the issues that were raised on the blog during the past week after I logged off, we also have a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which just went online in Europe. It’s a particle accelerator, the largest of its kind, and as a scientist I’d like to reassure everyone on both sides of the portal that it won’t create any black holes that will swallow the world. Just relax; we have far more likely dangers to worry about such as threats to our environment.
On the matter of slightly less importance, I’m afraid I wasn’t explicit enough about Rudy and Fiona. They haven’t done anything untoward. I have this from two sources: Fiona, who told me just that, and Rudy, by reading his non-verbal cues. (Canines are like an open book.)

I had the dorm room to myself since Rachel went back to Domain to spend the weekend with Joan. (Joan, being an equine, asked Rachel to help her pick out horseshoes. Equines are one of the few species here that wear anything on their feet.)
During the brief time I spent as a human that was the most difficult adjustment. Fenton and I found that human feet are very tender; nowhere near as tough and study as our normal paws. Having some kind of a barrier between unprotected skin and the ground was necessary, but it also separated us from a sense of our environment. I did notice, though, that a large industry exists in human world to produce footwear in an endless variety.
Kell got an E-mail today that her cousin Sheila is coming for a visit. I’ve never met her, but I know that Dad and Kell once considered her as Coney’s godmother. (They eventually settled on me, and that was even before I became engaged to Fenton.)
The other news concerned Rudy’s fleas. Apparently parasites have created mortgage companies that sell the rights to live on us. Rudy had to suffer the indignity of being under foreclosure and then auctioned to the highest bidder who tried to sell his blood, but he had the last laugh with a flea dip. Unfortunately, we can’t take flea dips too often due to their toxicity, so Rudy’s experience might become a common one.
With no Enormous Reptile Con I’ll be here all day to respond to messages. Fire away!