"It's a convoluted story, you had to be there."
    "Dress is informal, except for Lisa," he added.
    "Good, 'cause I only brought jeans." I hadn't been expecting to attend any formal events during my stay.
    "I figured as much. Just so you know, she will be formal, because she's always formal, but this is not to be taken that you should be formal, nor should you feel underdressed."
    "Very well then. I will attempt not to feel underdressed." I felt a nibble of curiosity as to what this evening would consist of. I didn't come close to imagining the way it turned out. It was... interesting.
    I showed up at the house, as requested, around seven. The building did look like a Dark Shadows set from a distance, but it had been well kept up, and I could see signs of recent repair work. Very nice looking, on the whole, and lacking the artificial, tourist-attracting gloss that wrecks so much of New England. It looked like the people who lived there cared about it. I rang the doorbell, which played a little tune. Marshall answered it and invited me in.
    The front room was full of exquisite antique furnishings. Lisa waited there; there wasn't much mistaking her. She wore a vintage Victorian dress that fit the room perfectly, though it looked new, seeming to float over her invisible flesh, around the starkness of her bones. I assumed she had made it herself. A slight sheen across her shoulders turned out to be her hair, which was also translucent, very long, and combed forward.
    We exchanged introductions. I'd had forewarning, and didn't do anything embarrassing, like flinch. And after living with Scott for a couple months, very little fazes me, to be honest. Nahal peeked around a corner for an instant; Marshall called him out to be properly introduced, after which he disappeared again.
    "That might be all you see of him. He'll come back out when we actually start to eat, he's just a little shy around strangers."
    "I have a cat that behaves the same way."
    "Tea, coffee?" Lisa inquired.
    "Coffee if you've got some, that would be great. Thank you."
    She bustled off toward the kitchen.
    "This is a really nice place," I remarked, looking around the room. I'd tried to come with no preconceptions, but I was still somewhat startled.
    "Yeah, we managed to get it fairly cheap, because it had gotten hammered in a hurricane in '79. It was sitting for a couple years, it was a pain putting it back together, but Steven's really good at that sort of thing. He'll be down in a few minutes."
    I nodded.
    "Oh, just so you know what you're dealing with," Marshall went on. "There's myself, and Lisa and Nahal, Steven. And, ah, then there's Valerie. I don't think you're going to see Valerie."
    "Should I know why not?" I wasn't sure where the boundaries lay for polite inquiry in this situation.
    "Valerie lives up in the tall tower." He hesitated. "She's an uncontrolled telepath."
    "Ah. That must be fairly difficult."
    "She's an uncontrolled projecting telepath. Anyone who she can see, knows every thought in her head."
    I winced at the thought.
    "You can understand why she keeps to herself...."
    "Absolutely."
    "She has some mild pickup as well, but... it's not an ability that you can comfortably carry around in public."
    "No, that's very true." It was a rather depressing thing to think about.
    Lisa returned. It was hard to read her, due to the invisibility of everything except her bones and the pupils of her eyes, but her voice is very expressive, no doubt deliberately cultivated. We chatted for a while about mundanities like the weather and what the Castleview was like. It was clear that she was nearly desperate to have a normal conversation with someone, and she went to great pains to be the perfect hostess, refilling my coffee at every conceivable opportunity. Understandable.
    Nahal made an appearance eventually. I hadn't had a chance to notice before, but his feet were two inches off the ground at all times. He was also somewhat clumsy, due to the constant, slight gravitational repulsion field around his body. Every time he reached for his fork, it moved away from him, and he had to grip it tightly. He certainly seemed determined not to let recalcitrant matter defeat him, though. I found myself wondering if may be he could get into the space program or something later on.
    Then Steven came down, a tall, thin young man without an ounce of fat on his body. Muscles showed everywhere, even on his face, and something seemed to have affected his cartilage as well, for his nose was smaller than it should have been and his ears were slightly recessed, giving him on the whole a rather disturbingly peculiar appearance. Gills ran along his neck, and his hair was wet.
    "Sorry I'm late, I had to go check out the construction site."
    "Were you over there again?" Marshall sighed.
    "I have to see," he said simply.
    "Are you building something else here?" I inquired.
    "Not here, on the next island over, the Mariner Corporation is putting up a research center, a small thing."
    "Oh."
    "You ever heard of the Mariner Corporation?"
    It rang a faint bell, but I shook my head, since I couldn't remember where I'd heard of it, why it should sound familiar.
    "They do oceanographic research, among other things. They've got this base that they're setting up out there, it looks really cool, so I've been swimming around it," Steven explained, grinning. "Just to check it out, and stuff."
    "Cool." I seem to have picked that up from Phoenix Talon. Wish I could get rid of it again.
    Steven was also one of the most fidgety people I've ever seen, which tended to make me more jittery than usual as well, though I tried not to let it bother me. He looked younger than Marshall and Lisa, maybe 24 at the most. Conversation eventually swung around to Boston and the recent events there, since news had made it this far up the coast. Steven asked a lot of probing questions about the Fenway incident, Promethean, the parade. I gave them the newspaper version. As dinner went on, I kept catching him staring at me. I figured that he had recognized me. Oh, well.
    I was listening to Nahal's enthusiastic description of... something, I couldn't quite follow his rapid-fire, heavily-accented speech, interjecting the occasional "Uh-huh," and "Wow," as seemed appropriate—whatever it was, it seemed important to him—when I noticed Lisa's glare at Steven, which seemed to work for a while. The next time I caught him at it I met his eyes with a direct look of my own, just to let him know that I had noticed. After that his glances were still frequent, but shorter.

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