The weekend came and Rebecca decided to take a ferry over to the penninsula.
There was something about the occasional ferry ride that cleaned out her head
after a dull week; quietly chugging across the calm water of the Sound, she
felt like work and home faded into a tedious fantasy. She liked to buy herself
an overpriced coffee from the concession stand and look out through the window,
thinking herself at the beginning of an adventure, pretending she didn't know
what would be waiting when the ferry docked at the terminal on the other end.

Taking in her coffee in slow sips so she wouldn't burn her tongue, she squinted
out toward the bow of the ferry into the indefinite grey haze ahead. It would
be a while yet before she could make out Kingston's buildings. The shapeless
fog was hers to mold with her imagination. She closed her eyes after another
slurp of coffee, envisioning an ancient seaside village with a wooden palisade,
the villagers milling around the shore, taking boats out onto the water and
mending fishing nets. Then the ferry's loudspeakers announced the approach of
Kingston and instructed the drive-on passengers to return to their vehicles.
She opened her eyes, and Kingston's small-town tourist kitsch bloomed faintly
through the fog. Bec finished her coffee and threw the styrofoam cup away.

She jostled her way down to the bottom level of the ferry with the other foot
passengers to wait for the ferry's arrival at the pier. An old man at her elbow
smiled and gestured for her to go ahead and she smiled in return, in spite of
herself. Bec didn't usually like interactions with strangers, but this one was
so unintrusive and unexpectedly pleasant that once she safely made her way onto
the pier, she turned back and thanked him.

"Well," said the old man, "You had such a sober face, I thought you needed a
little something to cheer you up."

Bec struggled for a moment, but couldn't think but to thank him again.

In Kingston she couldn't think of anything she wanted to do in particular, so
she stopped at an ice cream shop at the waterfront and bought a scoop of
pistachio on a waffle cone. She sat down inside the shop, peering reflectively
out the window at the smattering of people outside.

At home that evening Rebecca sat in front of her computer. Lucy was out for the
night and wouldn't complain that the phone line was being used. She was
browsing FanFiction.Net for any new Galatea Greenthorne stories, but the
pickings were slim this weekend-- not that she had expected much, since she'd
just checked three days ago. Most of the new material was half-finished, and
garbled, apparently written by people with the grammatical grasp of an eleven-
year-old. The few good contributers she knew had only tacked on short additions
to stories in progress.

It had been a while since she had added a story of her own. Almost all of her
Galatea stories included her own special invention, a sidekick character that
never existed in any of the books named Harth. She knew that in spirit, Galatea
was independent and too much of a lone wolf to adventure long with any one
companion. But somehow Bec couldn't help inserting herself into Galatea's
adventures, imagining how she would have reacted to the betrayal of her patron
elf lord Sorlathen, or the discovery of the mythic lost Lake of Innsfer. So she
dreamt up the stalwart Harth, straightwoman to Galatea's clever quips, always
ready to defend her heroic friend when the situation took a turn for the worse.

Bec tapped her fingers lightly at the keyboard without pressing any of the keys
down. She felt a story stirring in the back of her head. Maybe it was time to
put Harth back into action. She chewed at her lower lip and opened her word
processing program, then started to type about the seaside village she imagined
today on the ferry.

She glanced at the system clock at the bottom of the screen when she heard the
front door open. Lucy was home, and it was 1:38 AM. Lucy was always out late
with one of her stupid friends; Bec especially hated the one who'd always mess
around with her Galatea Greenthorne figurines on the book shelf in the living
room. He kept putting them into stupid suggestive poses. Bec finished typing
her last sentenced and clicked back over to FanFiction.Net to upload her new
story.