1. House Spectronic. You like gold lame trousers, sparkly unicorns and serious Science. Your dorm has glitterballs. The glitterballs have lasers in. House Spectronic hold a yearly dance-off to showcase their movement-based mathematical notation and are generally into stuff like that.
2. House Jectibor. You are an arch-rationalist who believes that sorting people into different groups based on arbitrary personal characteristics is at best pointless and at worst a dangerous type of segregation promoting the formation of divisions and filter bubbles. House Jectibor campaigns for the abolition of Houses and also organises midnight trips out to get drunk on cheap cider in the hills.
3. House Oraculorum. You have ear hair of over 3cm in length. It can be used to tell the future, if burnt in the correct sort of vessel. You didn’t know that? Welcome to House Oraculorum! Members of this house take a joint vow of secrecy about the future and have a tendency to pass exams with top marks and make large lottery wins.
4. House Quotusal. You do not have any particularly unusual characteristics. You can sort of recognise yourself in most broad definitions of personality types. You have no particular loyalty to people who are just like you. You still need somewhere to sleep.
5. House Vellilarum. Mainly notable for having only one member at any one time, House Vellilarum is reserved for budding dark lords, criminal masterminds and/or lone psychopaths. Occasionally other people are sorted into House Vellilarum, but after a few days the House typically reverts to having one member again and a small hush bonus is paid to the cleaners.
6. House Beddagorg. Relatively few people know about House Beddagorg, because members rarely make it to classes. Those in House Beddagorg can typically be found in bed, which is their natural habitat and from which they are rather loath to be removed.
7. House Buggeroff. Did you ask to be sent to the sort of school that does sorting and dorms and suchlike? You most definitely did not. You’d rather be at the sort of school that you go home from and maybe go out to a gig in the evening or something.
8. House House. You are a house. Quite why you are interested in attending classes rather than hosting them is a bit of a mystery, but top marks for ambition. House house is often the biggest house, in terms of volume and mass at least.
0331 Minutes
-0331.1 Those before the next one
–0331.11 Those that additionally come after the previous one
–0331.12 Minutes partly out of sequence or of unusual shapes
—0331.121 Those coming back around again to the next one once more
–0331.13 Those threaded through time, coming back as themselves again and again
-0331.2 Those underlined in some way by historians
–0331.21 Minutes of the death of kings
—0331.211 Those in shadowed sickrooms
—0331.212 Those on the battlefield
—-0331.2121 Those unattended by a horse
–0331.22 Those minutes surrounding the birth of twins or the fulfillment of prophecies
–0331.23 Those containing the first tiny sign of some disaster
–0331.24 Those during which the ink dries on the signatures of peace treaties
-0331.3 Those pertaining to music or literature
–0331.31 Of songs
–0331.311 Those minutes that are the best minutes of their respective songs
–0331.312 Those minutes that are only minutes of said songs
–0331.32 Of art or sundry things
–0331.321 Those minutes when you see something that you cannot later unsee
–0331.32 Of literature or film
–0331.321 Those minutes when sense swims up out of the dense morass and breathes and sinks back down once more
–0331.322 Those in which everything changes
–0331.323 Ends
-0331.4 Minutes of unusual length
–0331.41 Those emboldened by the addition of a leap second or two
—0331.411 Minutes stuffed full of leap seconds as a gift for lovers of time to open on New Years’ morning
–0331.42 Minutes that have been time-dilated into flabby lumps of spaceship time
–0331.43 Those spent falling off a cliff, receiving terrible news, in unusual ecstasy or being a bit bored
–0331.44 Those minutes inhabited by malfunctioning time machines
-0331.5 Minutes that have been forgotten
–0331.51 Those in which nothing happened
–0331.52 Those in which things happened that no-one saw
–0331.53 Those attended by too few elephants
–0331.54 Those in which things happened and people saw them and which subsequently those people successfully joined the foreign legion to forget
–0331.55 Quotidian minutes in the lives of the long dead
–0331.56 This minute, many years from now
400g butter, 1 pinch salt, 2 mangoes (peeled), that fish your mother warned you about, 300g flour, 10 cl viking piss, 1 tbsp baboon shavings, the lichen that grows at the end of the world, an unfamiliar horse, 70 candied violets, gold leaf to taste, 2 tbsp Antarctic snorting water, a bay leaf, a pumpkin that is shaped a little bit like a bottom, 4 cups gin, the winner of the 100m sausages, an egg, a spoon, 80g of that bubbling blue potion from that TV show where someone is totes doing Science, 5g ground parthenon, the moon, 20 cl eau de toilet brush, 400g of those bits of the frog that the witches always put in the bin, balls, eye of aye-aye, Macbeth’s hat, ½ pinch fairy dust, lighly roasted rat rectums (< 0.1%).
1. Hi its 2100 here. Congratulations on ur new baby! Dont forget, u need to get them an IP address before u leave hospital. Otherwise under the illegal immigration act 2086 ur car is legally obliged to take riders without an IP address to the nearest detention centre.
2. Hi, still 2100. Come to the local truck factory this weekend, we are seeding the consciousnesses of 80 new trucks from individually mapped chick brains. It is so cute when they cluster round mother factory and honk for their first taste of biodiesel!
3. Hi its 2100, u will have to wait to use ur car it is updating to fix a critical vulnerability in the code governing vehicle speed past adverts from ur key sponsors. Or I dunno u can use w/o updating but u might get hacked on the motorway.
4 Hi its 2100 again. I dont know what ur objecting to this is correct international English as specified by the 24th Edition Oxford International English Standards.
5. Hi, guess when? Anyway following the communities act 2097 ur toaster is legally obliged to provide relationship advice. Try it out! U can sue ur toaster if it tells u to stay in a bad relationship so it will probably tell you to leave the bastard whatever u say to it.
6. Hi, 2100. Yes I know. Anyway u dont want to go out today, there r gangs of pensioners in robotic exoskeletons on the streets and they have jailbroken them which u need to do to get them to go up stairs properly but it also means they have no prohibition on trampling ur tender unprotected flesh underfoot.
7. Hi u know when it is. I just wanted to add, u cant go out today anyway, ur door is waiting for a message from ur key sponsors to download and ur no 1 key sponsor is offline right now bcos its connection is being held hostage by hacked mining robots. But u should definitely go out tomorrow bcos u need to do something patriotic to top up ur citizenship points. Have a nice day!
1. That more travel locations were accessible to the sort of guests who occasionally drop giant icebergs in the heat
2. That white would come into fashion again, specifically so that some of the other continents yes I’m looking at you North America and Europe could be a bit more admiring and stop making comments about being jilted at the altar and/or left on the continental shelf
3. That others would learn to look beyond its icy and frozen exterior and see the awesome fossil jungles beneath
4. That penguins would shit less and snuggle more
5. To not be so bloody cold all of the time
1. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. Someone tells you that you are the only person who can save this world from disaster. It turns out that this is a thing that the inhabitants of that world find hilarious to say to inhabitants of your world, for some reason. You go home feeling a bit grumpy.
2. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. It is quite nice. Sometimes you still go on holiday there, although generally only on day trips because of the difficulty of exchanging currency.
3. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. At least you think you have. The two worlds are so similar that you cannot tell the difference. It is possible that the old woman operating the portal is a con artist.
4. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. You meet the parallel-world version of yourself and sleep with them. You cannot decide if this counts as masturbation or not.
5. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. It has a strain of influenza that is slightly different from our version. You bring it back into our world, causing a global epidemic that kills fifty million people.
6. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. You discover a huge conspiracy by the cognoscenti to keep the parallel world secret, because you can get really good cakes there and nobody wants them to run out.
7. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. The parallel world just beside our own also journeys into you. You become doomed to spend the next few billion years as an honorary universe. It is a little uncomfortable, but you think you might get used to it.
8. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. It smells repulsive. You return to our world and warn the next person in the queue that they might not want to go in there.
9. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. The inhabitants are charmed by your unusual skillset for a human and you get invited to all the best parties.
10. You have already journeyed into a parallel world just beside your own. You made the outbound trip somewhere around January 1, 2016. I would have thought you’d have noticed by now. There’s still time to go back, if you can find how you got in in the first place.
Those who have seen it all and generally twice; those who are fearless and steadfast and dead; those who once tried to organise a pissup in a brewery but decided in the end that it was not ethically justifiable to prioritise one brewery over another; those who only want the love of everyone forever and ever; those who are in love with facts; those whose grasp of the facts extends only to facts that agree with their worldview; those who are oddly forgetful; those who will believe anything that gets them elected; those who know one large thing only; those who went into politics out of a vague sense that it is what people like them do; those who dance around questions; those who absolutely agree with you no matter what it is you believe; those who are perpetually nudged away from disaster by a cadre of fretful underlings; those who plunge into disaster with a gleeful laugh and emerge from it somehow covered in mucky glory; those who know how the sausages are made; those who like how the sausages are made; those who are pioneering a new form of sausagemaking in which sausages poot fully-formed from the rear of a magnificent unicorn.
1. Take the next left, twice around the block, up the stairs and knock gently.
2. Three times around the block and wait until Monday. There stops here on Monday at dawn. Make sure you’re awake or you’ll have to hang around for another week, and the coyotes come on Tuesday at dawn so you might not want to be waiting then.
3. You see the chap with the phone? Follow the chap with the phone. He’s going there. He’ll duck into a supermarket at one point and come out of the staff entrance with a different coat on, so be ready for that.
4. Here is a book about there. That is probably the safest way to get there. Should you get a little too deep into the book and find yourself physically there, page 48 discusses a book there about here, which you might be able to use to get back.
5. Go three thousand years backwards in time and kidnap your own grandmother, who you will find is also a time traveller; persuade her to take up town planning and deposit her in 1840, dressed as a gentleman, from which you may be assured she will be able to get home on her own in time; and make sure that she designs in a left turn just ahead of where you are now. Then come back here and take the next left.
6. Dig three hundred metres straight down. Follow the cave as far as it goes, enlarging any openings as required. You may wish to trail a red string behind you if you have friends and relatives who will come looking for you. When you reach the statue, turn the left ear and do not touch any other part. Descend. After the cave-in, take the next left. It may be helpful to have the nuclear launch codes on hand, just in case.
7. Go to the nearest hardware shop and purchase a hook on top of a tall enough pole. Turn left and carry on until you are in a good enough place. Raise the pole above your head and wait. They will come and get you eventually, if you wait long enough.
8. You are already there. One day, when you are no longer there but have come at last to here where you thought you were, you will come to realise this, and it will haunt you for the rest of your life.
9. Oooh, you don’t want to go there. Try redefining here as there instead. All you will need is a letter ’t’ and some word glue.
10. Actually, you can’t get there from here.
8440 Mythical Beasts
-8440.1 Those that appear like normal beasts, but with some special power or feature
–8440.11 Those that can speak
—8440.111 Those who can be found dispensing choice wisdom to travellers who look a bit like protagonists
—8440.112 Those who speak or sing only when unobserved
—8440.1121 Those whose capture is the key to untold powers
—8440.1122 Those whose capture leads only to melancholy
–8440.12 Those that are unusually shaggy
—8440.121 Those whose mythical power is largely based around avoiding shearers and/or hairdressers
–8440.13 Those appearing only in mirrors
–8440.14 Those holding up the sun, moon or sky, ferrying the dead, or employed in other god stuff
–8440.141 These who could really do with better pay and conditions given that they get all the god responsibilities without any of the god benefits like smiting and worship
–8440.15 Those that are unusually attractive
–8440.16 Those who began their lives as entirely usual creatures, but had the misfortune to be swept up in someone else’s story and get all mythologised
–8440.17 Those that hang around the makers of myths, moving small objects around, snuffing out lights and generally performing the more quotidian sort of miracle in the hope of being noticed
-8440.2 Those that are scaly or flappy
–8440.21 Those that are born in fire
—8440.211 Those that additionally sneeze, fart or perspire fire
–8440.22 Things that are driven from villages with pitchforks
-8440.3 Those that have an unusual number of something
–8440.31 Heads
–8440.32 Legs, limbs, tentacles, protrusions or similar
–8440.33 Eyes, ears, teeth and suchlike
–8440.34 those that might rather be termed collectors
–8440.35 Mythical beasts of porn
-8440.4 Those that are part one animal and part another animal
–8440.41 Part animal and part human
—8440.411 Those in which the top or front part is human
—8440.4111 Those where the human part has to keep telling the animal part to sit
—8440.412 Those in which the back or bottom part is human
—8440.4121 Cases where this arrangement runs counter to expectations, e.g. landfish or giant ants with buttocks
—8440.413 Those who are arranged some other way
–8440.42 Part animal and part some other animal
–8440.43 Part human and part some other human
—8440.431 Frankenstein’s monster
-8440.5 Those that are of an unusual size
-8440.6 Those that appear in the metamyths that mythical beasts pass amongst themselves when gathered around certain special fireplaces
-8440.7 Those of a vegetable nature
-8440.8 Those normally living in the deep oceans, the poles, the upper atmosphere, in space, or in the human brain
1. Nicholas Hawksmoor, or for that matter any other currently-deceased architects
2. Carnivorous earpod vines
3. Shark whisperers, if your route takes you past the sea
4. People who are currently being the protagonist in an action film
5. Any of the four commuters of the apocalypse, particularly War, who has a tendency to cause fights to break out
6. Killer robots, particularly if they are labelled as such
7. Upwardly mobile buddleia bushes
8. Anyone who is asleep and having a dream that they are on a train, in case that you should find yourself only a figment in their dream to be snuffed out when they wake
9. Other trains which have decided to try and get a seat on this one for laughs
10. Negative people; that is to say, those made of antimatter where it may well be that accidentally brushing legs with them causes a planet-obliterating explosion. Feel free to sit next to people who are merely a bit down
11. Anything that admits to having an insatiable appetite for human flesh
12. The great god Pan; in this case it might also be wise to get off at the next stop too