Day 57,

Is this what a hangover feels like?

Feeling better now.  I owe Lin one.  Both for the headache relief and for helping me pull myself together enough to not embarrass myself or, by extension, Cass in front of James on the ride back home this evening.

Last night is admittedly a bit of a blur.  When I heard “get together with friends” I was picturing an evening of four or five people gathered in someone’s house swapping stories, catching up, maybe playing a game or two of whatever constitutes social party games around here.  Instead I was led twenty minutes or so out of the Village down the beach to join a dozen or so people singing, dancing, and drinking around a bonfire until the small hours of the night.

The drink of choice was a tooth achingly sweet fruity concoction.  Going just by the bonfire and starlight it could have been either pink or orange.  But that sweetness (exacerbated by some miscommunication with the villagers present regarding my concerns with wanting to maintain a clear head for the telling I was supposed to give) led me to not realize it was alcoholic until I had already consumed far too much of it.  Or something similar in effect to alcohol at any rate.

I’m not entirely sure what story I ended up going with for the telling, but I’m pretty sure I went off script at one point and tried to do part of it in song.  A good singer I am not.  At least the gathered friends seemed to enjoy my performance.  Then again, by that point in the night they probably would have been entertained by semi-coherent rambling as long as I was enthusiastic enough with it.

At some point during the night it consciously registered that I was under the influence, as it were, and whatever festive mood I’d been swept up in evaporated and I began low-key freaking out while applying all my conscious effort at not showing it.  I pretty much stopped talking and started constantly second guessing every action I took, no longer having faith in my own judgement.  Eventually I excused myself and started slowly making my way back to the library, terrified the whole way that I’d trip over something or run into something or be seen stumbling around at night by some villager and gain an unsavory reputation.  In hindsight, that’s probably an exaggeration of how impaired I actually was or even looked, but that’s how it felt.  At some point I fell asleep after lying in bed irrationally fretting that my reduced motor skills would somehow translate to me choking on my own tongue and/or saliva in my sleep.

To my embarrassment, Lin and Cass found me in bed in the morning.  Not really thinking things through, I’d left the hidden room door open so people could find and help me if something happened during the night, but also locked the archive door out of reflex, rendering that moot.

As it turns out, Lin was the one with the spare archive key from back when she used to wake up the old archivist most mornings.  She said that she’d been meaning to return it for a while now but, as with many long procrastinated tasks, only ever seemed to remember when she was in the middle of something else and not in a position to actually do so.  And that’s how Cass got let in after being stuck waiting in the library entry room long enough that she was in the process of attempting to improvise a lock pick (with what neither of them will tell me) when Lin arrived to take a look at my missing books theory.

I’ll save myself the added indignity of a detailed recounting of the conversation that immediately followed my waking.  I did learn the name of the drink after describing it to Lin.  Well, sort of.  The actual name she told me I’m having trouble transcribing, which tells me that it’s something locally specific enough without an analog to anything in my memory that it’s not “translating” for me.  Apparently it’s also sometimes referred to as “fairy juice.”  Lin was quick to add that it’s not actually made from fairies, it’s just liked by them or something like that.  Also, fairies are a thing because of course they are.  Another thing on the “I’ll need to look more into that later” pile.

Fortunately, I’m far from the first person Lin’s attended to after over indulging in the stuff on their first exposure to it, although from her reaction it sounded like even by that standard it sounds like I’d had a lot.  In hindsight, the comments the other party-goers made about being impressed how fast I was drinking the stuff should have been a red flag.  Not my fault it goes down like liquid candy.  My half-growled “Don’t even start” toward Cass after Lin left to go get supplies from her place was met with an exaggerated look of put-upon innocence.  Followed a couple minutes later by an observation that had she been there she could have told me what the fairy juice was before I got myself into this state.

I had too much of a headache to dispute her.

After what felt like far too long Lin returned with several medical mixtures and beverages.  The first one she told me to drink made me vomit into the bucket I hadn’t noticed her carry in until she thrust it in front of me at the last moment.  Apparently this was the intended effect.  And a reminder that I’m not entirely dealing with what I had conceptualized as “modern medicine.”

 After that was a small dose of what was explained to me as a sort of general purpose anti-inflammatory and a large glass of a ginger-tasting liquid that I was instructed to drink slowly over the next hour or two to help settle my stomach.  I’m still not totally sure how much all of that helped and how much was placebo and folk remedy, but I’m not going to argue it.  We’ve got spirits and magic rings and floating islands.  For all I know ibuprofen might literally grow on trees here.

I’m just glad no one came in needing anything today.

Once I was semi-functional we got around what Lin originally came for and started going through the reference lists I had compiled.  On the one hand, most of what Lin read when she frequented the archives more often were the story anthologies but it was mostly historical records and writings about the nature of supernatural phenomenon and entities (as opposed to just passing references to them) that I can’t seem to find, so she couldn’t comment definitively on them.  On the other hand, there were one or two volumes that she remembered seeing that we tried looking for and couldn’t find, so that’s a place to start trying to track down.

While we were at it, it also occurred to me that we couldn’t find any reference to Pat’s voyage to the edge of the world or to Priscilla of the floating island, both of which seemed like important – or at least interesting – enough things to write down.  The voyage at least seems to fit the profile of records that have gone missing.  Priscilla seems a little stranger to omit.

I think what this is really coming down to is that I need to stop putting off talking to Pat and Theo about this.  Or meeting Theo at all for that matter.  Lin and Cass attempted to give me some encouragement about that, but Lin’s description of Theo as “a grump perpetually in a bad mood” while also being someone all the guards look up to for being one of them longer than anyone except maybe Pat has been alive was not exactly comforting.

But anyway, by that time it was near late enough to leave and I was feeling better enough to not make James suspect that he’d apprenticed his daughter to someone who went out to a wild party and spent all day nursing a hangover.

Seriously, need to get more clarity on the nature of foods and beverages in the future before consuming them.