How did I become immortal? A series of lucky accidents. Of course, you've got to be ready to take advantage of life's opportunities, but I wouldn't say it's because I'm smarter or better than anybody else. It really just comes down to dumb luck.

The fundamental secret to my immortality is the nectar, or ambrosia, or elixir, or whatever you want to call it. There's always just one place in the world at any one time where you can get it. Right now it's the Handymart down the street from school. They also have excellent baklava.

Being immortal comes at many costs. I’ve outlived everyone I know, except for the handful of other immortals I’ve met along the way. And filing away so many memories takes awhile to get the hang of.

But maintaining immortality also means taking the necatar, or ambrosia, on a regular basis, so you need to have a line on a steady source.

The Handymart is closed for renovation. The sign says they’ll be open again in a week, but I’m due. The elixir has a way of presenting itself no matter what—it seeps in through the cracks of our continuum like spring water, or oil, or gold. I’ll need to find its new source soon.

I’ve had a hard time locating the new nectar source. Being immortal is usually pretty breezy—there are only certain ways we can be killed, which are pretty arcane and generally known only to us. But deprive us of the elixir for long enough and we’ll turn to dust. Which is why I’ve been stopping by every corner store and gas station in the tri-cities area and checking for it. So far, still no luck.

Maybe it’s the jitters—or the withdrawal—from missing the juice, but can you hear that infernal ticking? I live in Greenwich Dorm and I’ve never noticed it before, but I swear it’s getting louder every day. And it’s driving me nuts!!!

The Handymart is closed down. The sign said they'd be back in a week, but now the whole place is emptied out. Usually when the source of the ambrosia of immortality shifts from one location to the next they hand out a flyer, or at least a business card with a phone number scribbled on it, or longitude and latitude coordinates. Not this time. They closed in a hurry. Something is up, obviously.

I realize I'm a stupid sitting duck, standing out here in front of the Handymart with my mouth open, fists on the glass. Whoever shut this place down knew exactly what made it special, and who it was important to. I'm probably getting photographed by some private detective right now. But working for who?

I pull up my hoodie and make my way down an alley, walking at speed but starting to feel my age for sure. How much longer do I have without the nectar? Why isn't it presenting itself? Like a kindly abuela coming up and telling me I NEED this special Fanta flavor she has. That's happened before. I AM OPENING MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSE NOW! PLEASE HOP INTO MY HAND, OH ELIXIR!

Still no luck. I'd go back to the dorm but that horrible ticking would put me completely over the edge. I see a crow fly under the sun, just above a tree that looks like an ankh. That's a good sign--a hieroglyphic inscription I remember well. Crows. What about that kid on campus who used to be a crow? @gavcrowleys I believe. He's been kind of weird lately. WeirdER. But when you're opening yourself to the universe, you should take any sign you're handed, I guess. I'll need to introduce myself, and see if he can help me locate the source for the nectar I so badly need.

Yesterday I had said to myself, "Wow, nothing is really happening. Maybe things really have changed."

...Of course I had to jinx it. So, yesterday I found myself in the middle of town with no recollection of how I had ended up there. On my hands and knees, I look up to see there was a girl in front of me. Her eyes widened and she pulled out her phone and took a photo of me before running off behind a building. Alarmed, I get up and run after her just to find she's completely vanished. I'm pretty shaken up, naturally, since suddenly I'm in town and some rando woman is taking photos of me. For all I know, she's probably with Ellipsis. So, I come out of the alleyway, and a man approaches me asking me if I'm alright, and if I need to find something. Apparently I was walking with that girl as if we'd known each other, and suddenly I just collapsed.

At this point, I'm super freaked out. Do I have memory loss? Did Ellipsis or the girl do this to me? Some sort of memory-loss-trick-thingy? I don't have any explanation right now. I hope I didn't do anything bad, or embarrassing to the public. I need to find this girl again.. All I really recall is that she had long ombre hair. I guess when you randomly turn up in a place with no memory you don't really look at the fine print.

Aaaanyway... Another equally as weird thing happened almost immediately after, as I was walking back to school. A student, I presume, approached me and started to explain their immortality, and if I happened to know where some sort of "nectar" was. At first, I took it as some sort of bird joke (calling me a hummingbird or something) but then I saw that they were completely serious. I love being helpful, call me a pushover, so of course I told them I'd help them out, try to find some places this "nectar" could be at, see if I could find some other immortality links, things like that. They thanked me, and told me their Psyhigh username, @Rayla Tibbets if I remember correctly.

Still don't fully understand how this immortality juice works, they didn't really give me ALL the details. I'll work with them however I can. I told them to go check that shady corner store a few miles away from the school, The Honeypot, to see if maybe they had it and just forgot hand out "hey come to our store 4 nectar" cards. The shopkeep - Ronica I believe her name is - has apparently been alive for a long while, and doesn't look a day over 50. Whenever I go in there she constantly confuses me for her grandson and starts telling me stories from 1800s, or something.. Maybe she'll help you out? She's either immortal, or she's crazy. Take your chances.

Weird things have been going on, and not just to me. Somehow, that's a little comforting.. in a bad, strange way.. Agh, I'm trailing off, but I'm on the hunt, Rayla. Even if I'm not immortal or whatever, I'll help out.

I'm in my dorm at the moment, however. Daylight Savings sucks. 4 PM feels like 6 PM, makes me way too tired too fast. Still thinking about that girl.. how I can't remember things. I wanna blame this on the school somehow, for making me weird in the head, beckoning me deeper into the psychic wormhole. Makes my stomach do flips when I think about it too long. I'll update you all if anything happens this week. But..

Ugh.. Does anyone else hear that obnoxious ticking?! I nearly tore my entire dorm apart looking for the source, but I found nothing. I hope this isn't the universe trying to foreshadow "my time running out" or something.. I heard the story about the broken clock, but does a broken clock continue to tick? ...Geez, this post is long. Might as well end here.

Getting more confused every day,
"Gav" Crowleys.

I live up on Tarot Heights. Yes, it’s a big house, with a pool, and gardeners and a statuary. I get asked that a lot. And sure, you can come over and check it out. Anytime!

It is what you’d call “old money” I guess. A lifetime contract. Lots of lifetimes, really. Greyhound racing, limestone futures, spices, cinnabar and honey. Unguents.

Honestly I feel kinda self conscious about all the wealth. My greatest hope is just to learn a skill and be useful somehow to this world.

Today is my 438th Rebirthday.

Before you say anything, I know exactly what you're thinking; I've been around too long not to. Your brain is going wild trying to rationalize this, and your erratic thought process might even follow the 5 Stages of Grief (or in this case, Mindfuck.)

Denial: "You can't be that old! This must be a typo." Sorry to burst your little reality bubble, but no. Technically, I'm 455 years old, if you count the 17 years of normal life before I was resurrected, but if that makes your head hurt too much, just ignore it. "Rebirthday" isn't a mistake either, but a play on words I thought was hilarious a couple hundred years ago.

Anger: "Why would you mess with the laws of nature like that? What's dead is meant to stay dead!" If it makes you feel any better, I didn't ask for this. I was minding my own business at the bottom of a river, lungs filled with murky water and glassy eyes staring up at the ripples, when some witch decided I could be useful. She brought me back via black magic to be her apprentice. After a few years in a secluded cabin where she taught me all she knew about the supernatural, the w(b)itch just vanished, leaving me to fend for myself.

Bargaining: "Okay fine, you're the victim here, whatever. But do you have to keep existing as something so unnatural? There's no reason stay like this." Well, actually, I've got a couple of genuine reasons. First, dying, regardless of any technicalities, goes against my innate survival instincts. At a fundamental level, I don't want to. Second, when the witch who resurrected me disappeared, she left all of her magical responsibilities to me. Neglecting any of these, which range from trivial (caring for adopted supernatural creatures) to crucial (regulating demonic and spiritual contact,) could disrupt the very balance of this dimension. So, yeah, I'd say my sticking around is pretty important.

Depression: "I can't even be mad anymore, that sounds like a really sad and lonely existence." I don't need your pity, and I'm not some delicate flower that wilts at every sign of adversity. I have an extraordinary amount of power at my fingertips and am able to change the world, two things I could only dream of when I was an little girl roaming the Scottish moors.

Acceptance: "..." This is the one thing I can't tell if you're thinking. I've heard that Psychic High School is a haven for kids who don't fit anywhere else, and I hope I can belong here too. Everywhere else I go, I can never stay for long before whispers of "freak" and "witch" and "necromancer" start following me around, but maybe here I'll be understood.

The Ambrosia of Immortality is mine again. At least for now. @gavcrowleys's tip panned out and I was able to procure the elixir that bestows eternal youth. This time it's in the form of those little wax bottles called Nik-L-Nips. You know them--you bite the tops off and they're filled with "juice?" In this case they are filled with a thick, golden honey, and when it touches your tongue it's like waking up from a dream. You can feel every nook and cranny of your awareness filling back up with the boundless power of existence. It'd been almost too long since my last dose.

The bodega is called The Honeypot. The woman at the counter has a name tag that says Veronica, and after I say the magic words (and the accompanying series of complex finger gestures) she reaches behind the Swisher Sweets and pulls out a dusty 5-pack of Nik-L-Nips. She slides them to me across the counter, and I slide back the ancient coin we use for these transactions. She takes a moment to look at the coin to make sure it's the real deal, then throws it into the register with the nickels and dimes.

"Been here long?" I ask.

"Lo siento, no entiendo."

I could reply in Spanish (one of the many languages I've picked up over the years) but I'm sure she'd be just as evasive. One of the rules of the immortality racket has always been not to ask where the juice comes from, or why. The story goes that once upon a time the source was controlled by an unscrupulous immortal who forced all the others to do their bidding in exchange for the potion. Eventually there was a war, and ever since, the source of the ambrosia has been hidden, and it can only be purchased as I've just done. Don't ask, don't tell. Everybody's happy.

Which is part of the reason we immortal types usually steer clear of each other. As in "living on different continents" clear. We might see one another at an airport, or a train station, but it's considered bad form to acknowledge it.

So why are we all starting to turn up at Psyhigh? Just this week I've seen @Alessia on the school grounds, giving off that glow that we can see in one another. And then there's @Amenamapet Ra, captain of the rowing team. This is highly unusual, and combined with the funny business of the sudden, unannounced change in availability of the elixir, it's enough to make the newly invigorated hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Are you in salt?”

That’s what all the distant relatives ask me when we meet at reunions. Salt is a big piece of the family business, though we are highly diversified. Natron, palm wine, cedar oil, bitumen and resins. Some newer upstarts have gotten into industrial chemcals, like formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, methanol... but they are looked upon with suspicious, kohl-lined eyes.

Another branch of the family took to specializing in ancient weapons. Bagh naka, Mubuchae, Maduvu, Nyepel. Only of interest to collectors, but they do have the added feature of being the only weapons suitable for the delicate and complex ritual of taking the life of a fellow immortal.