So what happened was...

The following is a fictional blog entry by an Elf called Luca, who, as of December 2010, has taken up residence on Earth in the hopes of evading his past. His entries are all tagged LucaDafeldr for ease of viewing, should you wish to catch up on goings-on.

Interesting day today. Randon, Nia (R's sister), Dani and myself were in Colwyn Bay this afternoon. (This is a different town to the one I usually refer to as town. This one is a little further along the coast.) It was one of those really sunny days when you think 'Ahh, winter is finally behind us' and then it reverts to rain and hail shortly thereafter.

There's a lot of good graffiti in Colwyn Bay, which is why we were there - on a pilgrimage in search of photo-worthy examples. We somehow had three cameras between us - is there a collective noun for a group of photographers?

We were paused at a drawing of a happy cupcake - Randon was borrowing my camera, so all three but me were engrossed in what they were doing. Possibly they wouldn't have noticed had they been otherwise anyway; it was the touch of magic I felt, I knew, and the very same one I've been pondering on for weeks. The smell of grease and bubblegum. The shivery sensation spreading from where it tapped me on the shoulder.

When I looked round there was a young boy standing in the mouth of an alley across the street. He was pale and curly-haired and was wearing a shirt and waistcoat, and trousers, which altogether was the smartest dress I have yet seen on a child in this world. He was also regarding me with a small smile. But, having gained my attention, he then turned away and dashing back down the alley.

"I'm just going to check down here," I said to the others' backs, meaning for graffiti, before following.

The boy was long out of sight, but the alley came out shortly enough into a back lane. To the left it ran on downhill; to the right it came to an abrupt halt at a stone wall, ten feet high and topped with railings, upon which the boy was perched like a monkey. A young woman stood beside him, a relation judging by her face, although her attire fitted the times better.

She wasn't smiling as she looked down on me. Her face was hard, but she looked poised to run away, standing as far back as she could with one hand clutching the railing as if to hold herself there.

"Are you a Warden or aren't you?" she demanded.

"I- No," I answered. "I'm not."

(Some of you may remember from my entry on the 3rd March that the Wardens are the people who enforce Earth's ignorance of other worlds, removing illegal residents like myself in the process.)

"I told you!" the boy said, delighted, when the woman visibly sagged in relief. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

He was lowering himself over the railing as he spoke and had in moments spidered his way back down the wall and, leaping off, approached me without the slightest lingering caution.

"Hello," he said. "My name's Calligan and that's my sister, Lyleira. What's your name?"

Once Lyleira had joined us by a safer route it all came out. It was Calligan's magic I had detected in town late February and they had since been watching me watch out for them and wondering if I could be with the P.W.E., sensibly. Lyleira had her own magic, too: that of truthtelling. So if I said I wasn't a Warden then I wasn't, or at least not as far as I knew, and I would know that, wouldn't I?

"It's a type of synaesthesia," she said, in explanation. "If you'd been lying I would have seen yellow. Since you were telling the truth I saw blue. It might sound weird to you but it works."

"I can cheat the arcade machines with my magic," Calligan put in. "It's really awesome but I'm not allowed to do it very much."

I like meeting new people, don't you?

- Luca