Going up the ladder is never fun. First of all, it’s claustrophobic. The ladder is inside a metal tube, like an old fire escape outside a building. You start climbing, and you keep climbing until you find a hatch.

The thing is, the hatch is never in the same place. Sometimes it's a short trip, sometimes it's long. Sometimes it's really long. Once a Hex Club president was up here for 120 years. He was really old when he came back, and all his Hex Club members were long gone.

So that's the first reason going up the ladder is never fun. I just know Sniffy is going to make a mess of things while I'm gone.

"Awww... you're such a cutie!"

The Winward Spinnerette was in my lap. Making a kind of buzzy rattle. Purring?

"You like that, don't you? Yes...."

I was combing it out with a paddle brush. It seemed to be mostly made of hair.

"And such long arms. Soooooo beautiful."

Like a starfish made out of hair. Five long arms, all coming together in the center. Some kind of barnacle structure at the center, maybe for its eyes. Didn't seem to be a mouth on the underside.

"What? You want to get up? Ok, but only in the room. You can't go outside, ok?"

The Winward Spinnerette slinked out of my lap and onto floor. It shimmied across the carpet, up a chair leg, and onto the table. Grabbing at things like an octopus.

"Well you're quite a climber, aren't you? I should give you a name. Winnie? Too on the nose?"

Winnie was sliding across the table, fluidly, around my laptop. Knocked over an empty cup.

"Hey, you be careful, little buddy!"

And pulled itself up to the open window, and slipped out.

There was a hair in my smoothie at the Spoonbender today. I pulled it out slowly… smoothie dripping off it onto the table. I pulled it more and it kept on coming, getting longer and longer. How much hair was in my smoothie? Was it MOSTLY hair?

I pulled on that hair for 10 minutes and finally realized it was coming out of the bottom of the cup. I followed it back to the kitchen at the Spoonbender and the whole place was full of hair. A hair explosion!

The Spoonbender has a hair hex.

I finally found a hatch. There's a puff of air when you open it. Like leaving a submarine.

"Hello submarine breath!" It's the helpful Secretary of the Dead at the reception desk.

"The already dead, and the someday dead. Present company excluded. How can we help you today?"

"One of our members removed a Winward Spinnerette from its natural environment."

"Ohhhhhh, well that won't do at all, will it. Just a moment..."

The Secretary tapped its teeth with a pencil for several minutes. It then continued tapping over its beak and carapace and skull, knocking spider eggs and bugs from its patchy black hair.

"Vice President Horlix will see you soon. Please take a seat."

It was a hair hex, alright.

"Hairs in the cafeteria!"

"Hairs in the gym!"

"Hairs in the bandroom!"

"Hairs in the restrooms!"

Ewww. Well, somebody was going to have to start pulling on these hairs, but it wasn't going to be me. Because I already knew the source of this hex.

All these hairs led to just one person. @Hessian Burning. And his creature.

There were a lot of hairs to follow at Psyhigh. Long blond hairs, long brown hairs, short black hairs, all along the walkways and the gardens and the commons outside the cafeteria. All you had to to was start pulling and you'd find more and more.

Soon I was grabbing up great handfuls of hair. It led me right to the Psyhigh Equine and Livestock Facility on the far end of campus, next to the woods. And the Future Psychic Farmers Jamboree was in full swing.

Cotton candy, corn on a stick, invisible dogs on leashes. Pie baking contest, pie eating contest, a contest for breeding the biggest rabbit, the goat spelling bee. The rodeo was in the evenings, but in the arena today...

"It's time for the Tractor Pull, everybody! 10 minutes in Leadbeater Arena"

A tractor pull, eh?

I think there's still cuttings of my mom's hair and nails in the reliquary.

"Well, boys will be boys!" Vice President Horlix chuckled. The scales covering his shoulders and neck shook up and down and clinked together.

"But, there's clear rules in the bylaws. Why have them if you're not going to enforce them?"

Vice President Horlix leaned back in his chair and put one of his three legs up on the desk. It was a big scaly claw.

"There was a time," Vice President Horlix began, "when poaching critters from the Hexen Zone was rampant. School kids, milkmen, housewives, lawyers... everybody wanted one. They don't last long in the light of day, and mostly just cause mischief while they're in it. But the zone was getting depleted, and the Hexen Zone began to die. "

Vice President Horlix grabbed what looked like a rotting carrot from his desk, brought it up to his mouth, and belched flame onto the fat end. Then he put the skinny end in his mouth and inhaled, held it for a minute, and blew the smoke out of his giant nostrils.

"So we needed to put the kibosh on that. Made a rule, added some scary stories, invented a religion... Didn't take long at all to get things back in balance."

The smoke smelled like a dried up lake full of dead fish.

"Nowadays, when some enthusiastic kid takes home a souvenir, we make sure everybody knows you're not supposed to, and it's real bad, but we'll let 'em get away with it with lesson learned."

"So, I'm free to punish him however I see fit?"

"Just don't be cruel. Make him remember it, but nothing nasty."

"That's right! Pull!!!!"

I was directing the tractors at the Future Psychic Farmers Jamboree Tractor Pull event. Instead of the giant iron cakes those tractors usually pull, I had them pulling hair.

"Pulllllllll!!!!!!!!"

Giant swaths of golden brown hair, braided together like massive ship's ropes. The tractors were pulling them from the woods, spinning thousands of individual strands into mighty braids with their elaborate hitches.

The tractors were belching fire and diesel smoke, their oversized rear tires spinning in the dirt.

"Pullllllllllllllll!!!!"

From my seat in the announcer's booth I saw the spindrels grow. Narrow at the point where they connected to each tractor, then wider and wider as they got to the forest. They looked almost like giant starfish arms, radiating from a central body hidden in the woods.

I was just able to say into the mic ""Uh, tractor drivers?" when then arms became alive, swinging high into the air above the arena, lifting the tractors up and slamming them down into ground, again and again. Then they swung into the bleachers with what was left.

It was a good thing the Tractor Pull was not a particularly well-attended event.

Choppers landing on the football field. Tanks moving through the streets.

In an effort to control the now giant Winward Spinnerette, the National Guard has moved onto campus.

"Doesn't Psyhigh have its own defenses?" you might ask. "With all of the super powered kids on campus, isn't there some special team to respond to these kinds of emergencies?"

You'd think so, right? Early on, the school did have such special teams, led by legendary Psyhigh students like Loretta, the Corn Girl; and Time Ray; and Sizzle; and Tobias the Totality Boy. But a study was done and it turned out that in situtations like this, super-powered teams of psychic youth ended up creating even more destruction than traditional military action. Ever since, there's been an agreement to let the military handle monster-sized events.

"Everyone, move out to the way. Go to your pre-assigned safety bunker containment units immediately," squawked the loudspeakers.

The National Guard was moving in a battery of extremely high tech weapons--huge radar dishes, laser cannons bristling with electricity, heated rollers the size of school busses, giant robot barbers with blades for hands.

The crashing and thrashing sounds were getting closer. It may have just destroyed the gym.