POTATO MOON, Part 41: “Questions Without Answers” by Miriam Rocke

The Potato King frowned.  “What are fanfiction writers?”

Jakob mooed, meaning either “How do you know so much about freaking
werecows but haven’t heard of fanfiction?” or else “ow ow ow can we
please get back to the POINT before I DIE.”

Edwood said, “Let me explain.  No, there’s too much.  Let me sum up.”

“And why would they care?” Bela yelled from the forest where she had
been wandering around in a flurry of feminism and another flurry of
small fluttering white insects she’d creatively decided to call
snowflies.  She was petulantly put out at not actually being there,
since for one thing, her beloved Edwood was there, and for another,
they were talking of things they weren’t going to mention to her, and
for a third, everything was supposed to be about her anyway, and for a
fourth, she was getting a headache trying to shout that far.

“Huh?” Edwood hollered back.

“I’m not there to have glorious sparkly sparkles with the man –”
(Silence, for as long as it takes to mutter “okay, okay, he’s a
vampire, not a man, whatever”.)  “–I am destined to sparkle the rest
of my life with, in books and movies and especially in fanfiction.  If
he and I are apart, how can there be fanfiction?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of slash?”

“Of course I have.  I went to school, and we learned all about
punctuation marks.  See: ,.:;?!$#()-/\[]!”

Edwood marveled at Bela’s ability to vocalize the unvocalizable,
which, rather like pronouncinge thee silente e in variouse peskye
wordse, he had been unable to master.

Jakob gave a cranky desperate moo.  Or possibly mooe.

“Enough,” said the Potato King.  “There are more pressing matters at hand.”

And indeed, Edwood realized, his hands were indeed pressing at Jakob’s
matters.  “Whatever,” he said eloquently, and began to milk, his long
elegant cold fingers wrapping around Jakob’s heat–

“Moooooo, dammit.”

— and relieving him of the death sentence, blithely evading the bad
romance-novel parallel that was threatening to come, no pun intended,
up.

“What the heck is this stuff?” Edwood asked as he milked, because it
certainly wasn’t anything like the milk one could get from the local
grocery store, if one weren’t a vampire and therefore not in need of
milk, though the substance Jakob was producing was certainly cheaper,
at least in terms of money if not dignity.

Jakob mooed that it was rice milk, you idiot, what else would a
lactose-intolerant werecow produce? but the Potato King wisely
refrained from translating.  Either that or he was pondering how to
turn rice milk into a suitable potato topping.

At last the ordeal was over, or at least that part of it was.  But
then Jakob felt himself start to change, and try as he might to
control it, as with many other things in his life, he was unable.

The change was as agonizing as the rest of his life, except physical
rather than emotional.

Both Edwood and the Potato King stared unblinking down at him (though
in truth the Potato King was unable to blink any of his eyes).
“Jakob,” Edwood squeaked finally, “what the hëll?”

Jakob sighed, looked down at himself, and gave a pathetic honk,
sounding kind of like “Aaawwwwk.”  There was a strange echo from
behind him.  He turned waddlingly around to see a mirror image of
himself.  Still black and white, still with the mournful emo eyes, but
instead of the graceful (okay, lumbering) form of a noble (okay, kind
of common-looking) cow, he saw a rather small penguin.

“There are two of you,” Edwood said redundantly.

Well, that was new.

Jakob made another noise that, wisely, remained untranslated, as it
was not fit for a gentleman (or, in his case, a
gentle-were-thing-that-right-now-was-a-pair-of-penguins, but that was
too much of a mouthful.)