I walk up to the Blue Moon Ice Cream place, calling for Bluebird. I think I hear a chirping sound, or maybe that's the melting ice cream dripping from a forgotten cone on a plastic bench. Whatever the sound was, Bluebird doesn't appear. Walking in to the shop, I call out to a seemingly empty space of bright, good-looking things to eat:

"HELLO-O? IS ANYBODY HEEERREEE?" Not hearing an immediate answer, I eye the good-looking things to eat, which are looking more and more delicious in the apparant emptiness... 

Hahahaha, it's the building on the bluff. I'm so bad at drawing. You can't really tell, but the bluff is elevated above town and there's a road winding down into town.

You and HAB walk forward to the building. It is very tall and made of dark wood. It towers over you somewhat forbodingly. You knock on the door and can hear a bit of an echo inside. No one comes to answer the door. You and HAB sit on the steps and look up. There are some lion statues next to the steps.

Before too long, a large greyish-blue (whatever color it orginally was, you can't tell, as it's somewhat dirty) SUV drives up and around the building. Presently, a tall woman with a unkempt stack of grey hair, her arms full of books and bags, comes puffing on up. "Hello, hello!" she calls. "We'll be open in just a moment!"

She barges her way up the steps and shoves a bag laden with what appears to be a small blender into HAB's arms and a stack of books into yours. They are thick and heavy and appear to be adult mystery novels from some author you don't recognize. She hunts around in her purse and finally procures a key ring carrying a true mess of keys. She finds the right one, unlocks the door, then begins the process of opening the enormous wooden doors and shooing you both inside.

It's dark until she storms in and switches on lights that are lamps hanging from the cieling. The building seems to be an enormous library. Shelves stretch out in front of you and the woman who unlocked the doors makes her way to the librarian's desk and begins the process of stowing things behind it. She beckons you two over, and you make you way to her, carrying the blender in its bag and the mystery novels. She takes both of them from you and stuffs the books under the counter and places the blender on top of the coffee pot behind her.

"Hello, kids," she says breathlessly. "Welcome to the library. Go look around for a minute while I get some coffee into me."

Duitfully, the two of you enter the kid's section. There are some books by real authors that you have at in your home world:

Ronia the Robber's Daughter by Astrid Lindgreen

Tengerine by Edward Bloor

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

But there are some you're pretty sure don't exist at home as well. There are so many books it'd take more than one lifetime to read them all.

A few minutes later, the librarian stumps over, refreshed from the coffe and with her hair slightly more in place. "Well, I'd do the grand introduction into wonderland, but you've already caught me at my worst. You must be avid book lovers, both of you, if you waited for the library to open like this. What are your names? I'm afraid I don't recognize you."

You introduce yourselves and add that you're new in town.

Her smile becomes as wide as her face. "Oh, my, isn't that wonderful! And what lovely creative names, too. I picked my name as well. Call me Paige Turner," she says proudly. "If you need anything, I'm here. For absolutely anything, I promise. Even if you don't need books, I can give you anything! Would you like a cookie?"

You say yes, politely, and she leaves and returns with a small wafer for both of you. They're lemon flavored, but a little stale.  

Nah, I wanted to give you guys a bit of a break. Relax and find out some cool stuff, then come tell me. I love finding out cool new things.

It's a long walk down the bluff and into the far side of town. By the time you make it, your feet are aching, but it's still not too hot. Curiously, it still appears to be early morning. You haven't seen time pass in all your time here, you think. You wonder what day it is.

The farmhouse is a medium-sized home painted blue. There are white wooden shutters on the windows. A grey picket fence surrounds the rest of the large yard, which you presume is the farm. You walk up the gravel path leading to the house and knock on the door. No one answers. You and Savvy stand on the porch for a few minutes, conferring on what to do next when you hear a voice yelling, "Yoo-hoo!" from the side yard. You step off the porch and look around the corner of the house to find a woman in a sundress and a hat with loud yellow sunflowers on them. She's smiling at you. 

"Hi, girls," she says. "I haven't seen you before. Who are you?"

You introduce yourselves and then add that you only wanted to see what animals they had here.

"Some goats, mainly, but we have a few sheep and a good old horse. Want to take a look at them?"

You say, "Yes, please" and she pulls off her thick gardening gloves, tosses them at the direction of the porch, and laughs good naturedly when they miss. "Whatever!" she says. "I'll pick them up later."

She leads you two around back, past a few gardens, into a grassy and hilly area. "There's the sheep, down the hill," she says, pointing. The sheep are grazing contentendly near the bottom of the hill. She looks around and frowns for a minute. "I don't know where the goats are," she says. "Probably up to no good as always. Let's go look for them."

The goats turn out to be near the road, standing on their hind legs to eat off a small tree. Another goat is up a larger tree, contentedly chewing on leaves. A giggling comes from behind a tree. "Do goats giggle?" you ask. The giggling grows louder.

"Nah, I bet it's the tree giggling," she says mischeviously as the giggling grows louder still. Slowly and carefully, she creeps up to the giggling tree before she grabs something behind it that squeals. The giggler turns out to be a little girl, about five years old. She has the same curly black hair as her mother, but hers is neatly tied into lots of little braids which are held together with butterfly hair clips.

"This is my daughter, Mikayla," she says. "Mikayla, these two girls are The Novelist and Savvy,"

"Hi," she says, a little shly.

You smile at her and she smiles back widely. Her mother says, "Mikayla, go show them the horse."

"Okay!" she says and grabs both your hands before pulling you off in a seperate direction. At the other end of the property, she shows you a stable. "This is Dusty," Mikayla says excitedly. "He's our old horse. Sometimes Mommy lets me ride him, but she comes along too. She never let me ride him by myself." 

"The end of the world? Totally!" I follow St.Owl to the edge.

"I wonder if this is an alternate universe or something," I comment.

"Well, yeah! I mean, this IS the end of the world! In real life, the world is spherical." 

Okay... sorry if I'm missing something really obvious... is Blue Moon Ice Cream an inside joke? Because I'm new here and I probably wouldn't know.

Yes. Someone on Chatterbox several years ago mentioned Blue Moon ice cream. It's hard to find. I think it started in either Wisconsin or Michigan. Anyway over a year or more later, I saw it in our local Illinois supermarket. So I bought it and tried it! Long story . . . I brought it to a neighborhood block party. I was hurrying across a dark backyard to tell a friend I'd just put it out when I tripped on a lawn game and fell, gashing my leg and breaking my right wrist. (And I'm right handed.) I have not bought another bit of Blue Moon ice cream since that fateful day in 2014. So yeah, broken wrist or poison, blame it on the Blue Moon! (My mother never makes blue frosting because she says blue is the color of poison.)

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