[ Based on a true story ]
[ Because why not? ]

I am very much a fan of penguins. I am also very much a fan of "very," as in, it is very funny when English teachers get worked up about the various "very" taboos. Other words I like are "thing," "nowadays," and "sinister."

Nowadays, I am a very sinister English teacher, so of course I can say these things.

But I can say I'm an English teacher—even if I was not an English teacher—because I'm also a fiction writer.

Sometimes I rubber-band between nonfiction and fiction mid-sentence, mid-prose. For example, I could say I'm a sorceress who has seven cats, casts summons spells, and likes water with ice, and in a short story's space, that suddenly becomes true, even though only two out of three of those facts are correct.

They tell me to write about what I know.

There are too many degree-minted fiction writers for the mainstream populace; too many writers, writing about knowing things. But that's how I started teaching college.

I fell in love with teaching by accident, only because it was a necessity.

"Why else get a degree?" a Person of Significance asked.

I'm a fiction writer, so it's my favorite when I tell a lie to tell the truth.

The generation of English teachers before us would call that "truth with a capital T," so we ought capitalize Truth. Yet the English teachers after us will want to call it "truth with a lowercase t," since they will be desensitized by lowercase i's:

"i hate homework,"

"i have a pet cactus," and,

"i like to write 'nowadays' at the beginning of every paragraph," to give examples.

Many educators think the lowercase i is an unfortunate side effect of text messaging. I don't see it as unfortunate, perhaps due to my love for text messaging; or it's possible, I'm just a fringe thinker.

I feel like a real sorceress when I fancy myself a fringe thinker.

Sometimes I wonder, what would a fringe thinker of the penguin race do?

This is my version of What would Jesus do, and it should be read as such.

If the fringe penguin thought of taking a fringe route on her migration to the sea, her genes wouldn't live very long. That's why, even though us autistic people made the Internet, our society shuns us. Our fringe genes means we will destroy an entire race of penguins, and that's never good.

The logic might be faulty there.

Now I don't think I'm at risk for killing any more penguins than I already have killed; the statistics are in my favor.* The only penguin decimation I should experience in my life has come and gone, during a Dungeons & Dragons game from my mid-20s.

While my college friends were out on dates, I was eating pizza on a Saturday night, rolling dice. That might be why I didn't stay close to my college friends.

I played a changeling sorceress who summoned penguins from the Positive Energy Plane. She called upon penguins to radiate healing energy on wounded comrades. This was after we tried to convince the cleric to heal; but he had no interest in Cure magic.

So my witchery summons of sun-powered penguins had to do the trick.

Then ten character levels later, I learned to Plane Shift, unlocking the vast interplanar realm.

So I thought it'd be a good idea to pay the Positive Energy Plane penguins a visit. I'm a responsible sorceress, after all.

Sadly, only the fringe penguins wandered lonely through the Positive Arctics. The society of penguins who'd I summoned over the years had slowly died out from my disturbance.

Before deciding, Those penguins aren't real, consider black holes.

If it's true that black holes are a two-dimensional plane—where information is compressed into a singularity, a tiny dot—that's just one example of a scientifically explainable point in our universe where two-dimensional information is real.

So combine this with the following points of reasoning:

(a) a Dungeons & Dragons character sheet is two-dimensional; and

(b) our reality is more than likely a simulated reality in another universe;

Then one could argue whether the murder of penguins in this reality, or the Dungeons & Dragons reality, is really any different.

This logic is always faulty, yet I make a case anyway.

I cannot deny the potential it's True. So I'm waiting for what's true and what's True to simply become what's true, to simplify my over-thinking.

We only want to live simply, so inevitably, I'm sure that's what we'll all have to do. That's where technological advancements are headed.

But has anything felt simple since the century turned?

Where is the True Positive Energy Plane, and how can I get there?

*The statistics aren't actually in my favor. There's no reasonable statistic for random penguin murder.

♦

First draft: September 2018

Word count: 825