Actually, ah... ah... ah.... CHOOO!!!

Oh no @Azura Kynold I think I have developed a seasonal allergy to shadows!! Sitting in piles of them and handling them all day I ah... ah... Choo! I guess it was just too much. The school nurse said I need to take a break. And Zertec. Ah choo!

But in answer to your question, @Azura Kynold, no, I found it's better if you don't talk to the shadows. It just complicates things.

Ah CHOOO!!!

@Shady Glen that doesn't seem too bad a way to live, actually. Being raised by people of your own kind seems to be a pretty popular method. You seem much more human and less... Eldrich than my shadows. Maybe it's all in how you were brought up?

Or maybe my shadows didn't start off human. Who knows. Only them, it would seem, and none of them have shown me much about themselves. I wonder if they're shy to tell me, or if they know that I just don't speak the language. Maybe they have been telling me, but I'm too dumb and human to understand. But somehow, even the one which I believe used to be attached to me communicates in that way too. Maybe it picked it up from them.

Is it rude of me to try and compare shadows to human beings? Maybe they don't want to be compared. Just because many of them stay attached to a human for their entire lives or behave similarly to humans doesn't mean they want to be like humans.

@Shady Glen that doesn't seem too bad a way to live, actually. Being raised by people of your own kind seems to be a pretty popular method. You seem much more human and less... Eldrich than my shadows. Maybe it's all in how you were brought up?

Or maybe my shadows didn't start off human. Who knows. Only them, it would seem, and none of them have shown me much about themselves. I wonder if they're shy to tell me, or if they know that I just don't speak the language. Maybe they have been telling me, but I'm too dumb and human to understand. But somehow, even the one which I believe used to be attached to me communicates in that way too. Maybe it picked it up from them.

Is it rude of me to try and compare shadows to human beings? Maybe they don't want to be compared. Just because many of them stay attached to a human for their entire lives or behave similarly to humans doesn't mean they want to be like humans.

I was attached once, @Azura Kynold. Fell out of a stroller at the park when I was young. They went home without me.

Raised by an old shadow couple hiding on the playground. They never had a little shadow of their own. Went to Shade School till I transferred here.

Now I'm freelance.

@Shady Glen as a freelance shadow, I take it you don't like being tied down quite so much as some others. By 'tied down' I mean attached to a person. It's only fair, really.

@Moira Angela I think that we should start asking shadows before haphazardly sewing them on. My third shadow was complaining about being attached to me for weeks... or, well, I assume that choosing to show me only destruction and pain for that time was in protest ... they aren't always clear with what they want. But obviously some can speak or type like the rest of us, so we should make sure to check . Have you been checking?

Shady Glen. Freelance Shadow. I flit around mostly at night.

These free range, local, organic shadows we've been using are really working out well. Since they were harvested right around the solstice they're especially long and feathery. They are in fact just about as long as they can be, technically speaking. I think they're going to look really nice sewn on in groups of threes and fives.

Just yesterday I sewed three on each heel for @Ninny Hendrix and it looks really nice. When she stands still, it's like black peacock tails, and when she runs it's like a cartoony black cloud is being scribbled out behind her.

The Shadow Sewing Circle is hanging out in the shady glen near the library pretty much every afternoon these days, so come by and check us out! If you're nervous about having extra shadows sewn on for the first time, we can always just use safety pins for you to try it out.

I wish I could tell you in words what the shadows have shown me, but I'm just a normal, psychic human and I can't convert these experiences into words. But I'll try, just once.

Yesterday, my fourth shadow showed me something like this:
A tree in hues of pink, the sky is dancing, armies fall as citadels rise, crumble, fade away. The trees sway in the breeze. It's cold, somehow, cold and delicious. The air is weak and trembles at your fingertips. You blossom like a flower. The air shimmers. The trees glisten. Oil oozes from your pores. Oil oozes from everyone's pores, but yours is most beautiful and cold. The air cries out. You raise an army.

That was nothing like it, but I tried the best I could without overstepping my bounds . There are some things that cannot be named or directly mentioned. I obviously left those out.

My second and third shadows don't often show me things, like the other three do, but when they do, they light up my mind with sensations that I didn't even know a human could feel until I felt them. They're the most beautiful, powerful and terrifying. I wonder who those shadows once were attached to.

As far as shadows go, I've decided that five is the limit. When you only have one, or only have your original one you don't realise it, but when you have five and none of them are quite right for how it used to be (we're all together now, though, inseparable) you do.

Shadows drain your energy. That's why many vampires and other powerful creatures of the night get rid of their shadows, and sometimes even their reflections, though I think that happens naturally to vampires so I should've picked a different example... but anyway, yes. Shadows are constantly sapping just the tiniest bit of your strength. Most people have never gone without a shadow, or had an extra shadow, so won't know this....

Don't worry, though. For normal shadows, the drain is so tiny that you don't even notice it, and most people live fine and beautiful lives never knowing. But don't think that the shadows are feeding off their hosts and never giving back!! It's a symbiotic relationship. The host (that's humans, aliens, animals, plants, anything living in light) gives the barest, barely noticeable amount of energy to the shadow, and in return the shadow keeps their memories forever.

And didn't you know? Nothing is truly dead until it is forgotten. And shadows. Don't. Forget.
--BeanBean

I'm really sorry to everyone who got one of the new cheap shadows sewn onto them last week, and I promise to do better research before buying more shadows in bulk. They were really super cheap - which should have been a red flag - but I didn't know they were coming from China.

I didn't know anything about the shadow sweat shop industry in China, and now that I do, frankly I think it's sick. They take young kids - sometimes as young as 8 or 9 - and remove their shadows by slamming them in doors or windows. Then they ship them off to buyers across the world. It takes the kids months to grow their shadows back and I hear it's really painful, like when you clip your fingernails too short.

So now I'm trying to find locally sourced, all organic shadows. In the meantime, though, those of you who got the Chinese sweatshop shadows, I really don't know what to do. We could remove them and send them back, but they'd just be sold off to somebody else, or worse, left orphaned on the streets, likely to be kidnapped by shadow traffickers. I think the best thing, really, would be to just keep them, though I know some of them have been causing trouble, as 9 year old Chinese kids are likely prone to do.