My HIST 105 TA not only reads Gaiman, but she reads fic! She had a copy of Sandman on top of her books this morning, and I asked her about it, which started a ten minute waste of the tutorial in which all four of us who had actually heard of Gaiman rambled on enthusiastically while the 18-year-old unenlightened majority stared at us.

We walked back up to the concourse together, after, and we bemoaned the expensiveness of Sandman tradebacks, and I mentioned that I pretty much only ever buy big tradebacks on vacation, and I mentioned Dexcon, and she had heard of Dexcon. And before I even mentioned fic she asked whether I knew if there was much Pratchett-fic out there that she just wasn't finding.

Heh. Every time I meet someone IRL who actually knows what fic *is* - it's a little like meeting a lost kinsman, like we're members of some vanished civilization and it's a big secret and still very cool that it happens apparently at random. During the summer dianahobart and I were in the student store looking at dresses, and talking about Dexcon, and the girl on shift in the store piped up with "Dexcon? In Toronto? In August" and it turned out to be Cascade.
Tragically I know that this is not the case, we are not all so refined and complex, it is only that the painfully awful majority of fandom does not go about exposing their cultural allegiances like that. ;)

Still. cool. :D