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Something’s wrong. 

Once Star had the thought, it was impossible to shake it. It didn’t mean it was real, he reminded himself with the weight of some months of therapy. It meant that he was functionally a horse and once he got it in his head that something was wrong it was like the world was ending, right up until he’d managed to thoroughly distract himself. Someone had once described horses as couches with anxiety. It turned out that being able to become bipedal didn’t solve the problem, it just turned you into a bar stool with anxiety instead.

Deep breaths. He took a glance out the window to try to keep an eye out for Dom and immediately startled and jumped as an invisible shape wreathed in fire went past.

A djinn, he attempted to convince himself. Not a portent or an omen. Invisible, wrapped in flame and smoke—that was just a normal djinn. Probably no big deal. 

“Do you need to stand on the bench?” the barista called. “People normally sit on that.”

“I’m letting my feet enjoy the seat too,” Star shot back, but he forced himself to sit back down, closing his eyes and counting to ten, forward and backward.

What if he’s dead?

Star sounded, even to his own head, like a pet whose owner was a half hour late in feeding them. He knew it, but couldn’t stop worrying. He was the one who had told Dom to meet him downtown in the Valley, and even though the track was also in the Valley, things happened to people all the time. Although technically still part of the city, regular policing didn’t really happen down in the Valley all that much. Easy to turn a blind eye and let the monsters take care of each other. And downtown was, if not the worst part, pretty dangerous.

It was too early for vampires. Lycanthropes could turn at any time they wanted, they only had to do it on the full moon, but it was unlikely that they’d grab some random jockey. But even on a pleasant and sunny fall afternoon, there were all kinds of dangers down here that someone could walk into, especially if Dom was in a hurry and not watching where he was going…

“CBT, the not fun kind,” he reminded himself in a mutter, drawing an amused glance from the incubus barista. He should think through the worst outcome, the best outcome, and the most likely outcome. 

Worst outcome: Dom was dead, his body dragged away, Star would never see him again and Star would be forced on a journey of vengeance and discovery which revealed a whole conspiracy in the seedy underbelly of Branwin, Ontario’s Uncanny Valley.

Best outcome: Dom walked through the door right now. Star looked hopefully at the door, then scowled when the only person walking through was a human college student looking excited and nervous to be in the Valley at all.

Most likely outcome: Dom was held up by something, possibly something problematic that they’d have to deal with, but was otherwise fine and would be here soon.

It didn’t exactly make him feel better, but he at least felt a little less on the verge of panicking. Ok. Well. If Dom was held up, or missing, or whatever, he could at least try to find out.

Another attempt to contact Dom went to voicemail, so he called the racetrack instead and asked to speak to Halle. Halle was a gargoyle who came with the old station the track was built around. She had awakened back when Valefication had dragged the building down with it—the newly-formed Valley had altered the geography around it, with the gate between worlds at the nadir. The track had originally tried to hire her on as security, assuming she was watching over the place, but she was—as she put it—constantly distracted by the cute horsies, so she ended up instead working in the stables while horses (or similar mounts permitted to race in the magical leagues) were there. She never left the site, so he could reasonably assume she’d know if Dom had.

“Halle here,” her gravelly voice came over the line. “What?”

“Hi Halle, it’s Star.” A long pause. He added, “Son, That Ain’t Right.” Every racehorse had a registered name that had to be completely unique from every other racehorse in the world, and Star, when he made the offer to Dom to race together, had picked that one. However, in practice, all the horses had people nicknames that people used instead. Star was one of about seventeen Stars who had come through the track in the last year alone, but the only Son, That Ain’t Right. Also, he thought, the only Star who could introduce himself on the phone, which probably should have given Halle a clue right there.

A noise of dawning understanding. “Ohhh. Star. What’s up?”

“I’m trying to get in touch with Dominic. He’s late to meet up with me,” Star said. “He was at the track last I talked to him. Said someone had asked to see him?”

“Yeah, it’s the weirdest thing,” Halle said. “I thought you were already here, talkin’ to him.”

His blood, which already resembled ice water, chilled further. “…A copy of me?”

“Turned out not to be an exact copy. Probably just another kelpie.”

“I’m a nix.”

“Yeah,” she said. “A kelpie.”

Most brook horses were just slight regional variants of each other anyway, so Star let it go. “He was meeting another kelpie?”

“Naw, the kelpie was there with someone else. I can’t…” pause. “I can’t remember what they looked like. There was a nightmare being brought in at the same time and she was so fucking gorgeous.”

“Cool,” Star said, strained. “So Dom was meeting with another kelpie and a stranger you cannot recall the details of. Is he still there?”

“Naw, he left like twenty minutes ago. Have you tried phoning him?”

“That’s great, Halle,” Star said forcefully, “talk later.” He hung up just as the door jingled again, and Dom walked in, waving to him and coming over.

Relief rushed in, but was tempered a moment later with suspicion. Dom looked sleepy, maybe even a bit drunk, as he flung himself down across from Star. “Hi,” Dom said. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Something came up.”

He smelled wrong. Off. Like magic, Star decided, as he tried to sniff Dom without being too overt about it. Like he’d been spritzing a magical cologne all over himself. Not glamour, which would be normal if a fairy was manipulating him instead—unless the fairy were a spellcaster—but actual magic. 

“So who was the meeting with, anyway?” Star asked casually. “You turned your phone off and didn’t keep me updated.”

“What meeting?” Dom asked. “Hey, let’s get coffee. Then you were going to introduce me to Dandelion, right? Like you offered?”

[Leave a suggestion in the comments!]

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For a moment, Star thought about blowing them both off. After that therapy session, the number one thought in his brain—which he tended to think of as ‘his little walnut’ at the best of times—was just running. Fleeing. Escaping. To where or from what didn’t matter.

But even as the urge built in him, it drained away. Not all of it, but the idea of disappointing his current two most important people in several entire worlds definitely outweighed the desire to flee. 

Star huffed a breath. Dandelion could wait. They lived together, more or less. It wasn’t like they wouldn’t see each other later today, and he was in no state after therapy to focus on lyrics and composition. Even the thought made him squirrelly.

Still, even if he was in love with Dandelion and they were friends and roommates and all those other things, Dandelion was also his boss several times over and had say over Star’s entire life. Not that he’d abuse it, but it still was important to be polite.

With that in mind, he typed:

I cannot possibly work on lyrics right now. Bad therapy session. Well, it was a fine therapy session, I guess? It did therapy things that I mostly got out of, but now I must run. I must become the wind. I am desperate to get into my bright red 1985 Toyota (AE86) Corolla Sport GT-S and spin around corners as I flee my own self-consciousness. I feel the need. The need for speed. You know I’m no good at lyrics anyway. Say hi to the sex machines for me. Love you. Bye.

He had found that if he buried honesty in among absolute piles of bullshit, it was impossible to differentiate from the steaming mess around it.

Dandelion sent an answer nearly immediately: ??? You hate cars. Sure, I’ll tell Adrien and Caoimhe you said hi.

Star did hate cars. There was nothing worse than being surrounded by cold metal while allowing said metal box to transport you somewhere, not when you were a fairy horse. But that was Dandelion and the rest of their band, the Merry Gentry, sorted.

That just left Dom, then, and Star hesitated over this one. He wanted to see Dom, and he wanted to run. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to get on the racetrack, though. Maybe he did need to do something outside of his norm, spend time with the same people but not doing the things they liked best. He couldn’t think of anything, though. 

Whatever. He’d decide on the go. He resumed walking, crossing the street and eyeing the Humanburger chain longingly. Legally, it wasn’t human meat, so he ordered from there sometimes, but it sure tasted like the real thing.

Maybe he wouldn’t get that right now, not if he was planning to meet up with a human right after.

Ignoring his grumbling stomach, Star decided to phone Dom instead of texting back. It rang a few more times than usual, and Star was about to hang up, but Dom answered in the nick of time.

“Star? Hey, man.”

“Hello, Dominic, my good man,” Star said. He wondered briefly if he was laying on the charm a bit too thick thanks to his inexplicable nerves. “I received your digital message and wanted to let you know I’m totally aaaaaaaamenable.”

“Great!” Dom sounded a little quizzical, if still enthusiastic.

Star licked his lips. Yeah, it was too much. “But I’m not feeling like hitting the track today. Why don’t you come down and meet me, and we can get a coffee together, maybe do… something else… I haven’t decided what, I was thinking of rolling a dice and fleeing with you in a random direction. Maybe talk about stuff like.” He didn’t say ‘our relationship’ by the skin of his teeth. Not when he hadn’t asked Dom out. “Whatever. Go bowling. Or to karaoke. Orrr we could go back to my place and watch a movie.” Wait, time out. “I could introduce you to Dandelion.” He hadn’t meant to say that.

“Your sidhe lord? Is that okay?”

“He’d love you.” Mayday. His mouth was still going. “Coffee first though, I need some.”

“Do you,” Dom asked, like he was doubting it more and more as this conversation went on.

Well fuck him. Star did need coffee. “I’m going to Beanheadings. Meet me there?”

“The monster cafe? Sure, okay,” Dom said, a little hesitant. “I’ll be right there. I’m at the track right now and someone asked for me right before you called, so give me, uh, twenty?”

“Twenty is acceptable. I will see you anon.”

Star hung up and put his face in his hands, breathing hard, then tossed his phone back into his hated pants pocket and began to run.

He started on two feet, feeling his muscles reach and clench, but it wasn’t enough, and he veered onto the road, transforming as he went, hooves pounding the pavement as he ran between cars. It wasn’t an unusual sight down in the Valley and nobody honked.

It was enough to turn his traitor brain off for a while, though, to become nothing other than speed and movement, a flow of intention from his head through his neck through his back through all four of his legs, and he made it to the heart of the Valley’s downtown, and thus to Beanheadings, almost too quickly.

Star tossed his head, considered not stopping, just carrying on, but he’d made plans, and that was like giving his word, so he transformed back, shook himself head-to-toe, and headed in.

Beanheadings was always a bit quiet during the day; although human friendly, it had attracted a large amount of monstrous clientele, to the point that they’d extended their hours from closing at midnight to being open round the clock. It was a lovely, large place with visible rafters and lacquered tables; over the menu board was a mounted model of a head: a handsome but rough-looking freckled man with wild braids, a cup of coffee to its mouth. That was a copy of the real head of Kearney Dillon, the dullahan bar owner. Star had met the man himself a time or two—he’d shown up when the band had first come here because he was a bit leery of a sidhe on his property, though Dandelion had of course won him over.

Star headed up to the counter, checked out the incubus barista, and almost forgot what he was there for. He got himself a coffee and a carrot muffin, then sat down to wait.

And waited. And waited.

When a half hour had passed, he tried phoning Dom, but the call went to voicemail at once, and he didn’t get a call or text back. He tried again at forty minutes.

Maybe Dom was blowing him off, Star thought discontentedly. Or maybe traffic was bad, or his visitor had held him up. Star could wait more, or… well, what?

[Leave a suggestion for Star in the comments!]

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I am the Nixie Son, That Ain’t Right. I’m immortal, more or less. I can get killed, and I can definitely get captured, but I won’t age, and I won’t die from the curse of mortality alone.

In my human form, I’m five foot eight, which was average at best even in the 1780s, when I first left my herd to travel the fairy realms and from there to the human world—in the times we could manage it when the barriers thinned, before the gates broke them together. That height’s still average now. I have thick blueish-green hair to my mid-back, which I usually wear gathered up in a loose half-pony. My eyes are gold, but they absorb browns easily. Yeah, most people think they’re brown. I have an equine nose because of course I fucking do, and a soft mouth that can look sarcastic, or extremely warm. It always looks sensual. Yes, even in my horse form, it looks sensual. Emotions and attitudes are rarely reflected in my entire expression, because I have a tendency to look strained and sarcastic when put on the spot. I—

“Okay, Star,” Dr. Winslow said, her mouth tight and her brows drawn down. She drummed her nails against her notepad, which she’d stopped taking notes on about two sentences into Star’s speech. “I’ve also read that book. Maybe the most honest part about that whole speech is that you’d memorized the opening well enough to riff on it.”

Star pulled one of those strained, sarcastic faces that he’d just lampshaded. “A weirdly accurate book for one written a good decade before humans even knew vampires were real. And… yeah, maybe. I don’t relate to that fucker, though,” he added hurriedly.

“You are a supernatural being in a rock band.”

“Celtic rock. And I’m just the bassist. Lestat would never,” Star said airily. “But I don’t see how it matters. You say my history as a fairy is probably the origin of the problems I’m having now out in the human world. Are you sure you aren’t just curious?”

Dr. Winslow tsked slightly, which was a habit of hers whenever Star tried a blatant redirect. “We’re all built off our past,” she said. “Do you think that your feelings of being adrift, bored, lacking purpose has nothing to do with yours?” She flipped her notes back a few pages. Star wished she wouldn’t. “You’re a race horse. You’re in a band. You read books to talk about at book club, and run tabletop games for your group of friends. But you’re the one who pointed out that everything you do is for someone else. You don’t feel like any of these hobbies are about an inherent interest that you have, right?”

“I still like them,” Star protested, as if he hadn’t been the one to bring the problem up originally. As if he hadn’t been the one to seek therapy (at Dom’s suggestion, admittedly). He knew he should be cooperating. He didn’t like feeling this way. But therapy was like being saddled up. Impossible not to inhale as deeply as he could to try to keep the girth from tightening. 

“So we need to find what’s blocking that sense of—” Her timer beeped, and she sighed. “That sense of being able to do things for yourself. Of course we need to get into your past. I was hoping you’d give me some things to think about so we could discuss them at our next meeting.”

It’s not like Star wanted a rider to fall, even if they were on a saddle rather than stuck directly to his back. It was just impulse, instinct. That fear of being controlled so fully. “I’ll try to find a way to put it into words for next meeting, then.”

“Your own words, this time?”

“Sure, maybe,” Star said, reluctant to commit. “But I think that means our time is up?”

“If I didn’t have another client right after you…” Dr. Winslow shook her head. “Your insurance went through already, so you can just head on out. I’ll see you soon.”

Star hopped up, stretching. He was fully dressed, out of respect for the good doctor, and the clothes already felt like they were rubbing him raw. He was not a being designed to wear clothes. “I’ll see you soon, Dr. W.”

He headed out in a bit of a hurry, trying to shake the uneasy sense of being known, closing the door behind him a little too hard. His therapist’s office was in an old building on a street just at the edge of the Valley—far enough away from the center of the valley and the gate to the other world that the magic energies weren’t too thick to be comfortable for a human like herself to spend a lot of time in, but close enough that she was able to specialize in Otherworldly creatures: vampires, lycanthropes, and witches mostly, but she’d said he wasn’t her first fairy, either. 

Star began to walk downhill out of habit, heading back into the comforting aura of the Valley even as he hauled out his own cell phone to turn the ringer back on. 

There were two texts waiting — one from Dominic, his human jockey, asking if he wanted to get coffee and maybe to go for a run that afternoon, and one from Dandelion, his liege lord, boss, and the frontman of his band, asking if he wanted to hang out in the apartment and work on some lyrics… also that afternoon. Couldn’t do both, of course.

He rubbed a hand over his face and muttered into it. “I’m too popular. I’m hot stuff. I’m desperately in demand.” He wasn’t sure which he should go to—or if he should blow them both off. Dr. W would probably ask him what he wanted to do, which he didn’t know, and suggest he work on something fun for himself if he didn’t have a clear answer.

[It begins with a light, introductory segment!
Comment below with your suggestions for Star. 

For example, should Star:
> Agree to meet up with Dom this afternoon?
> Or make plans with Dandelion for this afternoon?
> Think about (something specific)
> Or plan to do something else: Go to the library?
Go see a play? Go to a movie? Go shop for (something)?
It’s yours to decide, just describe in the comments.]

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After a whole year off, we’re finally back — our (usually) yearly Halloween “Interactive” Fiction begins tomorrow! It’ll be spooky, queer, and a whole lot of fun!

How it works:

• On October 1, I’ll put up the first section of a story.
• By no later than 3 pm PST the next day, please leave a comment to the post with a suggestion to help the protagonist. Generally, this will be an action or something for them to consider.  (i.e. a post goes up on Oct 1 —> You have until 3 pm PST on Oct 2 to comment).  You can always just +1 other people’s ideas if you like what they’ve said!
• The next section of the story will get posted between approximately 4-8 pm PST on the next day.
• We repeat this every day through October! Please only leave suggestions on the most recent post — if we’ve already moved on, I won’t be able to fold the suggestion in.
• The story will climax on Halloween, and then I’ll put up a wrap-up post to chat about the story!

Aim suggestions at the protagonist — you can’t tell the villain to surrender, but you can tell the protagonist, “Beg the villain to surrender.” If suggestions contradict each other I’ll pick either the one most people have suggested or the one the character is most likely to do.

This game only works if people participate, so don’t be shy! That said, don’t feel that you have to comment or follow along every day: it’s OK to hop in and out as you like. If you don’t want to have to remember on your own to come back every day, you can put your email in to “Get Email Updates” in the page footer, and you’ll receive an email every time the blog is updated with a new post. (You can always unsubscribe if it ends up not working for you! I don’t update all that often outside of the Halloween event, so there won’t be any spam.)

For a visual idea of how this works, take a look through the Halloween IF archives.

This year’s story:

We’re doing a return to the Uncanny Valley, a setting we often use for our Halloween “Interactive” fiction! You do NOT have to have read any of the previous Uncanny Valley stories. It will be totally standalone (not a direct sequel to anything), and world information/etc will be given totally freely. Expect:

• Urban fantasy — fairies, vampires, were-dogs, demons, and witches!
• Lots of puns (for example, a witch’s bakery called “Loaf Portions”). 
• Our world, but that got introduced to magic in the 90s.
• Some spookiness.

The protagonist of our story will be my first truly nonhuman protag for one of these: a handsome singing shapeshifting brook horse named Star (short for “Son, That Ain’t Right”). Star appeared very briefly in a previous Uncanny Valley story as a tertiary character but, again, you do NOT have to have read that. There’s nothing from it that I’m gonna assume a reader knows. But if you did: get hype, weird horse-man is back.

If you DO want to take a look at the other Uncanny Valley stories, they’re these ones:

• • Uncanny Valley by Meredith Katz (2017)
  • A Little Night Magic by Meredith Katz (2019)
  • That Which Lingers by Aveline Reynard (2021)

KICKOFF COMMENTS

To get us kicked off, tell me a type of monster you’d really like to see appear. These should be suitable to an urban fantasy world (so not like, Cthulhu. That jerk always tries to take over any story he’s in) but other than that I just wanna hear about it! I will try to fold in any that you name (though any that would require a lot of research will likely be cameos as I won’t have the time to do the in-depth research required fyi).

The Fine Print
I reserve all rights to this work. If I eventually get this published in any form that requires me to take this version down, I will send copies of this online version, with comments left intact, to everyone who contributed suggestions, if I am reasonably able to get in contact with them.

> Go to Day 1