Dear Diary: Camping

Year 331, Twelfth Age
Leaffall, Day 9

Deary Diary,

Well, I'm back. Dad decided that the whole family needed to go camping. Didn't even give us time to pack, just threw a few things in the cart and drove us out of town. And for NO REASON. The zombies were almost done cleaning up the house by the time Mom got home, and he didn't even stay around long enough to hear about Mrs. Fluffblossom next door.

Okay, so... I tried to summon a ghost back on Friday, and she trashed the house. Stupid ghost. So I called up a few zombies to help me clean up, which would have been fine except apparently the ghost wasn't gone yet. So the ghost kind of possessed one of my zombies and took off with it. In it. Whatever. And, of course, it staggered right past Mrs. Fluffblossom, who was probably trying to get close enough to see what all the noise had been without actually looking like she was spying on us. (She totally was, though.) So Mrs. Puffblossom starts screaming, and then the ghost steps out of the zombie and into her. So now the zombie is just standing out there on the sidewalk, and Possessed Mrs. Puffblossom goes racing off into town.

...And then Mom gets home and finds zombies cleaning her house. "Her" house, like none of the rest of us live there, right? But everything's pretty well put together, so mainly Mom's just yelling at me to get the zombies out of there, and then Gladwin walks in. She just looks around, says, "Huh," and then goes to her room and closes the door. Mom finally sits down at the kitchen table, and the zombies are finishing the last bits of cleanup, and that's when Dad walks in, looks around, and says: "Everybody in the cart. We're going camping."

Which... I can't even. Two days, Diary. Two days, in the woods, with my family. My face is sunburned, the back of my neck is one giant bug bite composed of many smaller bug bites, my ankles are itchy, my feet are sore, and my best black-and-red robe is torn up and stained with dirt and grass. They didn't even let me bring Fluffy, the one person in the family who might have actually enjoyed it. It's a good thing she doesn't need to eat, 'cause they just left her in the back yard. No crystal ball to watch my shows on, no mystic tomes to read. "Family time," Dad kept saying with a kind of manic gleam in his eye. "It'll be good for us. Get in the cart." So we're out there in the forest with nothing more than the clothes on our back, a deck of cards that's missing the Queen of Flames and the Jack of Shadows, and Mom keeps trying to get us to sing.

Necromancers don't sing, Diary.

Necromancers. Do. Not. Sing.

Not even if you tell them that they don't get to have cider with the rest of the family unless they sing. Not even then.

Then dad spends the rest of the time trying to get me to go out hunting with him. "Learn how to survive in the wild, son. There are roots and berries all through these woods, and if we can catch a couple of squirrels we'll have stew!" Yeah, no. I know Dad was a big deal in the outriders in his youth, and I know he wishes I could be more like him, but I'm not. And I've got more important things on my mind. I'd honestly prefer to just sit around the campsite and watch Gladwin play unwinnable games of solitaire.

Anyway, he finally did pack everything back up and take us back home, but... well, my weekend's gone, Diary.

The only upside was that I forgot to excant the zombies, so the house was really clean when we got back.