Teasery Goodness The Second

[Bob Schroeck]

One burger and most of the fries later, I had determined several
additional things about my latest stop.

First, like the vast majority of the worlds I had visited, this
version of Earth had no metahumans. I'd been hopping from
timeline to timeline for at least a hundred and fifty years,
probably more, as best as I could determine. (A few of the
worlds I'd visited seemed to exist in a timeless "eternal now" in
which duration was an entirely subjective thing. And to be frank
I still couldn't be sure just how many months I'd spent training
the Sailor Senshi, thanks to Usagi playing at silly buggers with
both time and my memories there at the end.) Unfortunately,
after all those decades I *still* had no clue why Homeline and a
handful of other universes were the odd men out when it came to
true metahumanity. I resolved to spend some time discovering
what this world might have in common with all the others, if I
were here for more than a couple days.

Second, among the divergences from Homeline was Sunnydale itself.
I'm a California boy, born and bred, and even if I *am* from L.A.
I'm not so self-centered that I don't still know the rest of the
coast. Sunnydale sat on the same patch of land as Santa Barbara
back home. Not precisely -- its town center was maybe a mile or
so from where Santa Barbara's was when I left, and the city
limits were a good deal smaller. Which was because it only had
about one-sixth the population of Santa Barbara, best as I could
recall. So not really a straight analogue, even if it *did*
still have the same area and zip codes. Likewise, what had been
Santa Barbara County back home was Sunnydale County here.

The geography was a bit different, also. Again, if I were
remembering right, the north edge of Santa Barbara ran right up
against a line of mountains and chaparral, including a big
national forest. Here, though, there was a wide, broad desert
between the city and the mountains -- the one I'd landed in.

Usually geography doesn't vary *that* much between versions of
Earth, so that was pretty weird. Especially since the rest of
California seemed to be more or less unchanged. I wondered if
maybe the tether-thing had something to do with it.

The weirdest thing about Sunnydale, though, was that the paper
had a 4-page obituary section to match its giant economy supply
of cemeteries. And not big obit articles, but the usual one- or
two-column-inch, tiny-type "thus-and-so died, services at J.
Random's House of Embalming on Tuesday" things. There was the
usual variety of causes, including the gonzo ones that, if they
make it into the paper at all, offer the careful reader the
opportunity for guiltily inappropriate laughter. In this case it
was an accident with a barbecue fork.

So I laughed. When I read the first one, that is.

By the fifth, I wasn't laughing any more.

By the tenth I was frowning.

And when I finished the obits, I swore in every language I knew
plus a couple I didn't. According to the paper, in the previous
week at least fifteen people -- none of them connected to each
other in any way that I could determine other than residency in
Sunnydale -- had all died from neck wounds inflicted with
barbecue forks, evenly split between "accidents" and "gang
violence". Another half-dozen or so had been victims of "animal
attacks". And several more had been coyly attributed to an
unspecified "neck trauma".

Bull-fucking-*shit*.

I should have known when I saw how darkly-aspected that tether-
thing was.

This gods-be-damned town had *vampires*.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.