Mystery Lake

[28] Discovery

Eugene practically inhaled a mug of what looked like blistering coffee and scarfed down several of the nearest available cookies before picking up a thin book with dark brown and light gold ornamentation along the spine and cover and flipping through it.

"That lake has several unofficial names in a variety of native languages, depending on who claims it. It's not in any public records. But the name that comes closest is Lake Chelabrin. This is one of the few resources that I can find. Lake Chelabrin is mentioned, dating back to the early 19th century. What happened to Alice and the six of you has been rumored for quite some time. The legends about it coincide with the Fountain of Youth. That was one of the things that I passed along to Alice and wrote up for her. But this text goes into the oldest namings. I can't pinpoint the original name or whether it comes from the Ottawa language or Potawatomi. But the meaning is… 'the death place'."

Now that would have been the one crucial piece of information Roxy wished Miranda or Alice had known and shared. If Duncan came to Joel's door at an early hour to ask if he wanted to go to the death place, then there was no way in hell that he and Jess were tagging along. In that situation, it was also unlikely that Barry would have been the driver. Maybe the whole prospect of this trip falls apart and none of this ever happens. Would that have been so terrible?

They'd be back at the dorms, finishing up their first episodes of whatever Jess recommended, with a little bit of action, a dash of comedy, and plenty of cozying up with air-popped popcorn. The shower scene never would've happened. At least not like that. But it didn't need to. Right?

What about Barry? As Chiara, she'd made so much progress towards a steadying confidence that Joel had never imagined she'd reach. But she had also been placed at the base of an immense mountain she needed to negotiate, and that wasn't just a euphemism for boobs. A brand new life, they had all been dumped, splashed, shoved, and smashed in which they honestly had no idea what to do with. Even Ross, who clearly needed the reset button, was in just as deep.

What about Miranda? That gleeful little girly smile on the pier felt precious. Joel definitely would have preferred it if it hadn't occurred while they were standing at each other's dinky level in clothes they'd never even considered wearing before. Maybe, in some version of events, Duncan gets the kind of personal evidence he really wants about the stuff that this wacko death lake can actually do. And only those who want to be changed wind up so burdened. How? Not the point. But they lug a jug of those stashed, secured two gallons back to campus, and by noontime, Joel is already free of thinking about what this little trek even meant.

Then he hears everyone talking about a busty new co-ed with Duncan's unmistakable look of contemplation dancing cutely across her features. Maybe this Barry still winds up dunked a little and the new girls take a resolute step towards better lives. She didn't need to get directly involved in all this. In some alternate version, maybe even Ross and Joel wind up as buds without Alyssa splattering her issues all over the place. But you don't ever wind up with the ideal version you wish.

What about Roxy? She didn't have to be Roxy. That girl was a mistake. She never needed to exist. Just camp out, never have a problem. Chill happily with Jess. Moderate Alyssa's craziness. Let Chiara and Miranda be happy in their new skins. Layla and Brock would be happy either way. All Roxy ever accomplished was toothpaste her guts into a pair of crazy pants, make dumb lewd jokes, smooch the wrong person, get creeped on by some asshole, and be horribly traumatized by events she hadn't even begun to process. None of it sounded like a win for her or anyone else.

Death place lake. If only they knew. Of course, the ominous mention also triggered a vast flurry of whirling concerns about what the hell that meant for them. Fortunately, Eugene didn't leave them hanging for too long, as he flipped through the book in front of him and picked up on the thought.

"You're in no danger, any of you. Immediate danger. That's not a friendly name, but it's not a deadly warning either. It's just what happened there. Now, this section is lightly expanded on in folklore. Have any of you heard of a fairy type known as the Asrai?" Eugene kept his eyes down on the book, barely glancing around the table. None of them had.

He presented a few sketches from the book of what appeared to be a diminutive, stylized mermaid. Light applications of color to the design radiated a sharp azure glow, like the cinematic suggestion of water reflecting in a cave but confined to a humanoid form. A golden shimmer danced across her lower fins. Her hair was reminiscent of seaweed but splattered with bright green paint. The depiction wasn't at all horrifying, but there was something inhumanly unnatural about it, like a computer generation plopped into the real world. They waited for Eugene to continue his explanation.

After turning the book around a few times to check where he was and then reading further, Eugene continued, "The Asrai exist at an interesting intersection of stories about tragic romances where fishermen find beautiful women and want to take them home with them. Often times, it's about keeping her in human form. Selkies and their sealskins. I can detail that aspect of the folklore if you require context."

Layla was obviously fascinated by this and all the images and snippets Eugene shared, but the others were tense with the uncertainty of what the heck this lake meant. Miss Triton backed off to let her son hold their attention while she tidied up the unused, extra, and emptied portions of their snack.

"The Asrai are intimately tied to bodies of water. They seem to have a delicate, fragile constitution and can't be out of the water for long. They prefer the night. Oddly enough, they share certain similarities with trolls and other dark, fairy-tale types. Those creatures are transformed into… or back into frozen stone. If you take one of the Asrai away from their familiar shores and watery homes, they don't dry up. They melt… Turning into water."

It was a lot of detail, but Eugene still sounded like he was dancing around the point. Roxy urged him on without it seeming like a desperate shove.

"It's unclear from what I can find if these fairies, once transfigured, will ever return to their former form or if they are just now water. But the details of this lake are unmistakable. There is no lake, not really." Eugene puffed a long breath with his hand blocking the spittle. Roxy absorbed that as much as she could. She both understood what he was getting at yet felt completely mystified. He had to spell it out.

"Lake Chelabrin is made of dead or undead fairies. It contains more of these creatures and their remains than I can possibly comprehend. At the same time, there is an addendum that they may not be dead so much as just sexually smashed together, trapped as if one big...umm, orgy party happened and never let up."

They jumped into a big wad of fairy-fuckfest corpses. Jake fell into that natural, unnatural vat of fairy shit. He dunked poor Barry in that watery goo. Joel got splashed with that melted mass. Thinking back, she tried to remember if any of it got into her mouth. It did. She fucking swallowed the remains of horny fairies. That managed to feel more disgusting than her fledgling swallowing efforts in the shower. No fucking wonder all sorts of dark and horny creatures were after them; they splashed around in a mass sex grave.

Roxy gently put her drink to her lips as a brace to keep it all down. Just managing to hold the bare minimum together was hard enough. She saw the others in her peripheral vision before gradually checking in on them.

Chiara clearly had the greenest gills of the whole group, as if she had accidentally consumed fairy bits as well, and all of it was about to return from her system. She swallowed roughly and haltingly breathed a few times but managed to keep it all down, especially with a little assistance from her cup as well. Maybe brain parasites would have been a preferable alternative.

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The others weren't jazzed about this news either. Miranda's pale countenance bordered on Alyssa's pallor. She wobbled slightly but quickly got support from both sides to prop her up. Granted, her support from Roxy and Ross wasn't the steadiest bookend. Scrutinizing Ross, Roxy had to wonder if it was the corpse part or the sex part of this folkloric explanation that bothered the vampire boy the most. He and Mira took the deepest, most sustained plunge into all that. Strangely enough, they hadn't run into anything specifically weird. Layla, that weird shifty business. Chiara, seeing the headless Hollow. Jake… Well, there was the kielbasa.

Only half of them had encountered peculiarities after the splash zone. Considering Joel's meager exposure, she couldn't make a connection between the amounts of liquid. Sexed up corpse liquid. And results or side effects. She swallowed a little bit, but surely not as much as the others.

Thinking back, she struggled to properly visualize the moment when Barry went into the water. He got soaked, and he should've been coughing up the water, spitting it, and getting it all in his nose. But she couldn't seem to remember if that had happened. It was such a small detail that she didn't even think about it. When Jess went in, Roxy would have expected that poor Jess would be sputtering and spitting up lake water as they came ashore. But that wasn't what happened either. They got drenched in typical fashion, and there was plenty of water around their faces. It should've soaked in.

She hadn't been the closest observer of Layla's plunge, but that time it seemed like her face was specifically avoided. Like it was beading off the same way as old Scotchgard ads with rolling orbs of liquid. Why hadn't she noticed this weirdness before? Blame it on too much weirdness from spontaneously changing sex. The same trend occurred with the last two to jump in. The only outlier... was herself.

When Alyssa splashed her, a good portion of it caught her right in the face. She definitely swallowed some measure of that lake water. She attempted to spit it out, but it practically felt like it clung to her like glue. So what? The skin had pores with all sorts of medical mumbo-jumbo. Probably one of them had to have a cut somewhere on their body, especially with Barry's usually dry skin. But what if they didn't, and it was just her? What if she was the one who had ingested dead and horny fairy juices? Fuck...

Eugene's mother laid her hand over her mouth and asked her son, "That's awful, just awful. All those fantastical creatures. Do you think it's just a mass grave, a battlefield, or a ritual?" That last note brought a shiver through Roxy that seemed to echo and resound as if it were trembling in stereo. She had a hunch about which, if the feeling came from her companion.

Her son sighed heavily and replied, "I can only guess. It's clearly an awful place. I wish I could have warned Alice not to talk to her students about it. I don't know why she seems to have been so reckless and cavalier about it. Her experience wasn't all sunshine and roses. Nothing like what you've told me, but still not the kind of thing you would go recommending to everyone you meet. Strange. I'll pass along a carefully worded update via email, and we can go from there. Otherwise, what do you think, mom?"

She scrunched her eyes at her son. "First of all, I'm not letting this group leave until they've had a much nicer evening than the day of trials I can see in their eyes. They're staying for dinner and, at least, the night. After that, they're welcome, as long as they need a place to figure out this lake and whatever else. The ladies definitely need some pointers. Are you all on spring break?"

Miranda hesitantly confirmed that with a little nod before glancing around at the others. "Yes, it is spring break. But we're not really together as a group. We just happened to be traveling together out of curiosity. And because I sold this as a fun little day trip to see a quirky lake mentioned in folklore and maybe change my life and..." She trailed off.

Roxy cleared her throat and picked it up. "We're together, bud. Doesn't matter how we started out this day. Doesn't matter how we feel about each other in the positive or the negative. We're together now. I'm not presuming that we have to feel exactly the same way about this crazy day. But we've yelled, cried, made mistakes, and stood together against evil forces. Our lives will never be the same again." She placed a supportive hand on Miranda's shoulder.

Of course, she knew Ross would be the most challenging link in this sentiment. It was dangerously close to yelling Kumbaya when she doubted that some of them would want to spend much time together after this incident was over.

Ross amended, "We're not together. We're just stuck in the same situation right now." He didn't churn out that statement with harshness or rancid bitterness. He simply spoke as if he were making a necessary correction. Roxy didn't fight it. She had sheltered joy and idealism now, sheltered by herself or by her friend inside. It was probably a good idea to mention her pal, who might have been what the bastard was latching onto. Not that it was really any of their business, but it had the hallmarks of possession.

Who was she? Who was her friend? A fairy princess? Some sort of royalty-to-be, like the fucker suggested? Had she actually accidentally inhaled a fae princess? She wasn't going to process her through her kidneys and bladder, was she? She seemed to remember that was the plot of some science fiction comedy episode on Jess's list to watch more of over the break.

Another question occurred to her, but she didn't have a good segue. Roxy nodded at Ross' assertion, "Of course. Thrown together. Put through a really crummy situation. More than just that awful lake. I was wondering if there was anything in your resources about fairy lifestyle matters. Umm... see, you mentioned death, but also the little death. There's a strange... exaggeration of some sensations with... that sort of thing from an altered perspective. And it's been suggested that the… Pleasurable aspects are part and parcel of a certain fairy creature experience..." Ross wasn't going to like that second part, but there wasn't much she could do about it. She kept her focus on Eugene, even though the old lady seemed to be more sympathetic to the peculiarities of what she was inquiring about. So many fancy, smart girl words dribbling out of her brain...

Her request and explanation took the long road with starts and stops, but the guy worked out her intentions, flipping through several pages of the book in front of them until he came to a certain section.

"I have something in that regard. It's hard to parse what can be considered canonical because certain judgments of original folklore were eventually integrated into the Judeo-Christian tradition, stripped of certain original meanings, and also received transplanted contexts. The clergy were the first recorders of folklore traditions, so they were biased. Creatures are made more angelic or devolved into demons. Because it's a living oral tradition with limited permanent records, it's more of a feel for what was probably the original intent. What stories do people continue to tell in folklore? The, uh, depicted fairies were quite sexual. There was one section I read recently where lady fairies experienced an overwhelming expression of feeling that left them half paralyzed and permitted...group interactions that took advantage of that state. Yeah..."

With all they had witnessed this day, it didn't surprise Roxy that there was fairy shit that assisted in gang-bang attacks.

The old lady shook her head and commented, "A lot of awful bastards in the fantastical world, I'm afraid."