Psyhigh sure has some stinky catacombs. I've been in lots of caves, and maybe my standards are just a little higher than you here in the modern age. We used to have to LIVE in those things, so you can bet we kept them neat and tidy. It was my aunt Wilhelmina who first tied a bunch of sticks together with a strip of leather and started heaping the dirt into a pile. We didn't know it at the time but she had just invented the broom! They never did invent a dustpan by the time I got frozen, so there just ended up being piles of dirt and bones everywhere. But still, we had a sense of tidiness in our caves that seems to be lost on you people.

Of course one of the main things in the Psyhigh catacombs is the Spongiform Unimind. I will admit it is spongy, but also gooey, which is not really related in its name. I know that it is the great ubermind that holds Psychic High together in some way, but it didn't seem to want to talk. Spiffy took a sniff at it and didn't want anything to do with it, so we kept following the trail of @EmilyDH.

I'm not sure how many hours we traveled, deep underground, but just as my flamey torch was ready to sputter out, we sensed fresh air! The torch roared back to life and we raced around the final twists and turns in the tunnel, which led us to a remarkable discovery.

We found ourselves on an outcropping, overlooking a massive vista. There were mighty waterfalls in the distance, clear water pouring off cliffs, and mist lifting into the air, filled with rainbows. There were jungles on these cliffs, and wide grasslands in between, and swamps and murky rivers, and wasn't that a bit of desert in the background?

And in the sky, in the far distance, those weren't eagles circling, but pterodactyls! Flying up, up, up... near the ceiling of the tremendous cavern that contained it all.

Now, this is what I call living. Sure, you can stop by the 7-ll for an ice cream bar, or spend an hour watching somebody talk on You Tube, but have you ever just walked over and picked a strawberry as big as your head? And then fed it to a baby brontosaurus? These are things I didn't even get to do back in the cave days, and now here it all is, laid out for miles and miles, like a giant terrarium just for me.

Spiffy seems to have lost @EmilyDH's trail. Now I'm wondering, did we ever really have it? Emily's student ID was found up on the surface, in the hills. Why did Spiffy head this way? Maybe it was a different scent - the scent of something familiar - that caught his nose. Maybe it was this place all along, and not Emily at all.

We'll need to do a bit more exploring before we know the truth.

Maybe a lot more exploring.

I had prepared an essay on how the first socks were invented (I remember it like it was yesterday! It was the second Tuesday of the Ice Age), but I felt an immediate responsibility to investigate the disappearance and reappearance and redisappearance of @EmilyDH! I am sleeping on her bed, after all. @Ava Elisabeth was great to let me sleep in her room, but I'd hate to take a spot in the cave that rightly belongs to someone else.

So Spiffy my sabertooth tiger and I left immediately to find her. You'd think sabertooth tigers were part bloodhound, the way they sniff out a trail, and in no time Spiffy and I were hurtling through campus, trays flying in the cafeteria, scattering the teams and getting tangled in the nets at mind-volleyball practice, and scaring @Janitor Pete so much down in the boiler room that he bumped his head on a pipe!

The scent led us farther down the steam tunnels, till we connected to what must be the grotto of caves beneath campus. Just like old times for me and Spiffy! We're off to explore the catacombs.

Since thawing out from my glacier, the psychic guidance counselor has been giving me advice on how to assimilate to your modern society, and one of the things she suggested was a visit to a dentist.

I have some issues with dentists. And you would too if you had to visit a dentist back in the cave days. In fact, I went to the very first dentist ever! Bernie, the dentist. He had his own special cave and you had to go into the front and wait, even though he wasn't busy, because being the very first dentist ever he didn't have many customers.

Finally, when he called you in, you'd lay back on a rock.

"Are you comfortable there?" he would ask.

"No! I'm laying on a rock!"

After that he'd have you open your mouth and he'd look in, and stick his fingers around in there a little.

"Oh my, oh my.." he'd say.

"What is it, Bernie?"

"Well, you got a lot of teeth in there. Look at all those teeth. Wow! Teeth! Sharp!"

That was all that Bernie could do, because nobody had studied teeth yet. He was the first guy. But then the bill would come and it would be for a whole mastodon leg, which was a lot back then. Professional Services Bernie called it.

I'm glad the Psychic High School dentist trip is covered under my student insurance.

The main problem back in the cave days was boredom. We slept, we hunted, we gathered fruits and berries. At night somebody would try and make up a story around the fire, but there was nothing to make stories about, because nothing had happened yet. We'd all gather in the cave and somebody would put up two fingers to make a shadow and say "Hey look! It's bunny!" and that was considered a really good story.

Then somebody would throw a rock at their head and they'd fall over. When they stood up and yelled back and made a fist, that was a shadow too and somebody would say "Hey look! It's a dinosaur!" and that would be the second story. The first story with two parts. I was there for that.

There's such an amazing amount of knowledge and wisdom at Psyhigh. So many teachers, all in one place! In the old days, nobody knew anything. We were just giving things their very first names ever.

"Hey! What's that?"
"That's a, a Frimangy!"
"And that?"
"That's a Klurm."
"You're just making this up."
"Yeah? So?"

And then we'd start hitting each other. We weren't good at expressing our feelings, because we didn't have words for them.

You've really done a really god job with the place, considering.

For a while I was only comfortable sleeping in the closet. Though I've adapted pretty well to your modern, non-stone-age time, some old habits die hard, and sleeping in a dark, enclosed area like a closet was as close as I could get to my old comforting cave.

However! Even I'm not comfortable curling up next to that strange, flesh eating fruit creature that @Ava Elisabeth calls a pet. I've napped with mammoth and glyptodon and giant sloth, but never with intelligent carnivorous plant life. Guess the ice age kept the banana watermelon hybrids from getting up and walking around!

So, until such time as that @EmilyDH returns to claim it, I'm the proud resident of this high-tech space-age bed in Ava's room. It still feels rather exposed, like a Teratorn could just swoop down and carry me off at any minute! I'm sleeping with my spear.

Whoa! I picked up Spiffy from @Lucia Smith's Fae Fete and she was stuffed and happy on Fae Steak. She hadn't had a real meal since we got thawed, so it was v. nice to see her all dozy and purry again.

Back in the stone age, there were plenty of fairy folk and gnomes and kobolds running around, except they looked all different--it being back in the pre-mythology days. But even then, we knew that if you ate fairy food you might never come back! You'd end up in their spaceship or whatever.

Doesn't hold up for saber tooth tigers, though. They can eat whatever they want. Now Spiffy's all sleepy and curled up with me here in @Ava Elisabeth's closet. She even let me pick some bits of wing out of her teeth. So cute!!!! Thanks Lucia!

I LOVE your cafeteria! What a wonderful invention! I was getting SOOO tired of the whole Paleo thing. I mean, I might go back to it eventually, but I figure treating myself to the all-you-can-eat cake and gravy bar is an ok way to celebrate my unfreezing.

However, keeping Spiffy--my saber tooth tiger--happily fed is a different story. He's an off-leash saber tooth tiger, so if you see him prowling around the campus after dark, uh, you should prolly steer clear.

OOG MOOGA CHUK! DABA BOOLA OOG MOOGA CHUkkkk---ack! *cough cough* aHEM! Excuse me. Wow, boy do I feel better. Had a piece of ice caught in my throat. HACK!

I was just revived from my glacier a couple of weeks ago--me and my saber tooth tiger Spiffy. Where is Spiffy, anyway? Has anyone seen a saber tooth tiger wandering around? He's got a collar with a little piece of bone with the number of my cave carved on it. Though, gee, I guess that cave is long gone, and I haven't got a chance to put a dorm room number on it yet.

SPEAKING OF... since I just got to campus, I am still I need of a roommate! I was hoping to ask @Ava Elisabeth if things were working out with @EmilyDH, but seems like Ava has left campus on a fall sightseeing trip. Maybe I'll just sort of camp out in their room till somebody turns up.

Anyway, yes, I've been experiencing varying levels of intellectual ability since being defrosted from my glacier. Not that prehistoric peoples were "stupid." Well, not all of them, and certainly not me. But I do seem to have mastered your language pretty immediately, and have a range of other--

SPIFFY! DROP! DO *NOT* BITE DOWN! DROP THAT STUDENT IMMEDIATELY!

Well I just got melted out of my glacier and I feel great! Well, a little groggy still. And hungry. Boy oh boy am I hungry. Got anything to eat around here? Spiffy's hungry too--he's my sabertooth tiger, and I can tell he's MIGHTY hungry. DOWN BOY! DOWN!!!

Anywayz, after I got defrosted they said the best place for me to get up to speed on the modern world was here at Psyhigh. And hey - free food I don't have to hunt for, a roof over my head that's not covered in soot - sounds great to me!

The one thing they said to watch out for is that my sudden post-thawing intelligence might wear off. Obviously, I didn't have such a command of your language, or such mad Mario Kart skillz, back in the day. But somehow, after being awakened in your world, I have a mastery of these things!

The scientists don't understand it, but they do say it could be temporary. Any minute now I could start to... start... oh, I'm sorry, I seem to have lost my train of thought. Ah yes, as I was saying, uh... uh.. UG! UG MOK! UG MOK MOK YO!!!!!