Hey this school is really great! My roommates are @Jerzi, @Ami C, and @Hallie Green, tho Hallie hasn't been the same since the last Invocation of the Aliens. Have you been to one of those? I went late to the first one and had to stand way in the back and all I could see was the strange green light. The humming sound was really loud.

Speaking of, have you met @Terra, or @The Wayfarer? I want to meet them because being just a regular earthling I'm eager to meet students from other planets and I heard they know about that stuff. Meeting people from different backgrounds is one of the great opportunities Psychic High School offers.

I learned a lot talking to that nice old man @K.K. Foxhart at his table in the cafeteria. His real job is working at a movie theater but he’s on sabbatical pursuing his hobby—tracking galactical anomalies! Whatever those are. He had lots of cool stuff he said I’d need for the upcoming cataclysm like a silver Reality Coherence Blanket, Quantum Refracting Contact Lenses, and a little device he calls the Hide Me Find Me which he invented himself and says it will help me find what I’m looking for. All together it cost me $20 but I got a commemorative Tappan Zee Minotaur bag with it so that’s cool.

I'm starting to get the hang of the Hide Me Find Me -- the little device that @K.K. Foxhart sold me. As near as I can figure it's a cross between a time-domain reflectometer and a semiconductor curve tracer, tuned to the psychic bands. It's got a little pointer and if you see me stomping around campus with my head down that's what I'm looking at. When I point it toward the Children of the Infinite Void shanty town, it gets droopy. For most people on campus it just kind of waggles around vaguely. But when I sneak up around @Terra and @The Wayfarer it starts acting really weird and then says SEGMENTATION FAULT in red LED.

I asked @K.K. Foxhart about it and he wouldn't really answer my question but wanted to make sure I made it to the upcoming Happy Apple Festival. In Happy Apple Valley. I told him I'd sure try but then he insisted I buy a ticket from him, so I did. You should too!

I was doing my homework on the bus and happened to have the Hide Me Find Me on my knee when the little needle started going crazy, waving like nuts to get my attention. I looked up and we were at a stop in front of the Triple Moon Motel—one of those cheap dives out on Interstate Avenue at the edge of town. I packed up and got off the bus to check it out.

The needle was spinning so hard it couldn’t pinpoint anything, so I’m kind of wandering aimlessly in the parking lot when I hear this gruff snuffle behind me.

“Hey, kid. Do me a favor? There’s twenty bucks in it for ya.”

The voice—and a peculiar musky odor—were coming from an old white van with tinted windows. I couldn’t see in, and of course my intuition was saying not to make deals with strange men in vans in front of cheap motels.

“Uh, wut?”

“I gotta check in, but I... I got a condition, ya know? I can’t get to the desk. Here’s my credit card. Go check me in—tell ‘em I’m your dad or something. Bring me the key and I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

If the Hide Me Find Me hadn’t brought me there I would have run.

“Thanks, kid,” he said, and took the keys from me with a dark and hairy hand. I still couldn’t see his face, but his hot breath smelled like hay. He handed me back a twenty.

“See ya around,” he said, and rolled up the window.

“I’m just a simple guy trying to make a simple living.”

The Tappan Zee Minotaur sits in his cheap motel room. The place is saturated with his musky odor.

“So I do these shows, but something always goes wrong. Trouble seems to follow me.”

I didn’t see any reason for the cuffs. I was hanging out near his tent at the Happy Apple Festival, and when things went crazy he was as confused as everybody else. I got him out of there in the Squad Pod and whisked him back to his motel. He’s a mess.

“So you’re going to take me in? At this point I don’t even care. I’m probably safer back in the cooler.”

Extradition and deportation is the usual course for illegal cross-dimensional immigration like this, in the absence of malign intent. In this case, the Minotaur was just a pawn in a much bigger game. Witness protection might be in order.

In any case, my own cover might be blown. If anybody saw me walking the Minotaur to the Squad Pod they’ll know I’m not really a clueless student, but Kimball Star, Interplanetary Secret Service Agent.