Welcome to Gaia! ::

I found Emerson Thweatt skulking in the dark hole of a room he called his home, lurking in the dank shadows and following me with moon-pale eyes ringed with dark circles. Emerson, I quite decided, had not found any occasion to encounter the sun for some time. He looked like a ghost of a corpse as he counted poker chips in his slender, bony hands, still dressed for the sleep from which I had woken him. He counted the chips by touch alone, knowing the quantity by the height of the stacks.

There must have been, at one point, a sunny, happy, child Emerson, but this person had long gone. The man who had replaced that boy was too thin, too quiet, too much like a nocturnal gecko with huge, round eyes that if you glanced at him sideways seemed to move independently. He had soft hair the color of a dark brown bear, and needed days to work up a five o'clock shadow on his smoothly boyish skin. He looked much younger than he was, except for the lines that marked him around the eyes and mouth and nose. A casual bystander might have thought him twenty and a drug addict, which was a truly fair and accurate assessment of how he looked, but not who he was.

He sat across from me with his knees up behind a green-surfaced poker table, in the dealer's chair. I remained standing between him and the door. I did not want any piece of his gambling operation, not even the courtesy of one of his chairs. The only illumination was a single hanging lamp with a reddish glass shade, the incandescent bulb casting a bright white on the table that made Emerson look all the paler. The rest of the room was shrouded in varying levels of darkness. It was very hard to see anything in there.

I announced myself to him simply with, "I have business to discuss with you," and he watched me and played with the chips in his hands, the plastic markers chittering against one another. "It has come to my attention that you are using me as yet another one of your ghastly bets."

He said nothing. His face did not so much as twitch or move, the mark of someone with a real gift for poker.

I was not unsettled by his silence. "I demand you stop," I said to him, my chin high.

At that, he finally unfolded like an origami spider, putting down his chips and reaching for a deck of cards. He spread them out on the table in one fluid motion, the cards nearly perfect in their spacing. Emerson Thweatt, gambling lord and master, shrugged as if he had no choice in the matter.

This was hardly amusing and I asked him if he had heard me, to which he sagged his shoulders and said finally, "I didn't ask for this." His voice was barely a whisper and I had to lean forward to hear him.

"I didn't ask for it either," I pointed out.

His eyes swept across the semicircle of cards on the table, eyebrows knitting together with some stressed emotion. He touched one of the cards. "It was a misunderstanding." He seemed to be in his own world, oblivious to me, until he asked, "Would you bet on the number and suite of this card?"

"I would not bet on anything and I would thank you to not make me the subject of your gambling," I maintained.

He continued, "What if I turned up this card?" and revealed to me the four of diamonds, his other hands still holding on the hidden card he had selected.

"That changes the odds," I answered flatly, out of sheer annoyance with him.

"You can't change Death's odds," he said cryptically, and turned over another card. Two of clubs.

I switched to a different tactic and said rather loudly, "I would like to make a business proposition."

He swept the cards aside at once and gestured for me to join him at the table.

"I'm listening."

As per the term of my agreement with Emerson, I won the house's share in the form of gambling credit (good only in Emerson's hotel room) which satisfied Emerson's need to control the pointless finances and my need to deprive him of anything substantial. What he did not foresee was that the winning bet, placed by James Taylor, was also me. "I'm really not sure about this," is what James Taylor had said when I accosted him after his bread run.

"The way I see it," I countered, "Grey is my legal guardian and you are her husband, thereby making you my legal guardian as well."

"As your guardian, should I really be encouraging you to gamble?" he mused aloud.

"If I am fixing the outcome, is it really a gamble?" I countered, and James agreed, I think because he was impressed by my setup and reasoning.

He did make it a point to assure me this was a one-time arrangement. "I'll not be contributing to the further delinquency of a child," he informed me, and in truth I was a little impressed by his straightforwardness in our dealings. None of the underhanded tactics his wife fed me, just flat-out honesty and integrity. I realized there was more to this particular man than he let on, and had there existed more records from the time period he was born and grew up in, I would surely have known the full truth of who he really was. As it stood I held only the facts he was a nice man and Grey's husband, distantly related to a former United States President, and good at baking. James Taylor, an enigma. I would solve him, somehow, but for now it was enough to use him to win all the money.

While it was of no use within the confines of the hotel, the substantial sum I acquired did have its uses in the outside world. There was a bit of every currency (Emerson did not discriminate) and I could now, if I so chose and was legally permitted, enter into my own dealings and make my own purchases. I considered this windfall as I stood on the porch of the house I had bought via Reginald. A good modern Victorian with cream walls and brown trim and hardwood flooring, two stories plus attic and basement, enough bedrooms for a whole family, easy-maintenance gravel landscaping and quiet neighbors.

It was really too bad I would never live in it. I had my house, but I would continue on in my hotel room, which was a wholly sufficient domicile for the time being. I had fulfilled none of the bets completely except for James' wager of "decision to be made Monday in the evening." I had chosen a home, but not to live in. Thinking on it, Emerson really had been very clever in his wording of the bet's premise. Just not clever enough to take advantage of it the way I had. I locked the door of my house, legally owned by Grey and James Taylor, and left it for the roaches and spiders.

In which Ylaine's secret is revealed just a little too quickly for her comfort and she unintentionally puts Irelia in a coma.

I was roused early in the morning by shouts from my doorstep. The walls between the rooms were soundproof, but, for obvious reasons, the doors were not. Usually there was an unofficial noise curfew around ten-thirty when people stopped carousing in the hallways and caroused in the lobby or bar or dining hall instead because when you lived for so long with so many other people, a little bit of respect went a long way.

I am what might be considered a light sleeper, accustomed to silence in the night, and while I am capable of sleeping through the noise of people shuffling across the carpet in the hallways, shouting is entirely a different matter. Even a moderate conversation has the potential to wake me, provided it is being conducted on or near my doorstep.

I opened to the door with the intention of spewing my ire on the sources of this commotion, vitriol on the tip of my tongue, and emerged into a scene of some chaos.

There lived so many people in this building that I could hardly be expected to know all of them, but by this point I could recognize and place most of their faces. Not so the frothing lunatic in the hallway. Tall, thin, grey streaked through his hair and with a goatee better suited to a comic villain, the man was a total stranger. The only clear thing was that this man was in a paranoid frenzy, eyes darting every which way, muscles jerking and twitching erratically. "I won't let you! Keep away from me!" he kept screaming, flailing his arms to keep everyone else at a distance, or ward off an imaginary swarm of bugs. In his state, it was hard to discern if he was in fact experiencing reality. Had I been a little more cogent I would have been able to compare his features to those of every man in my database matching his physical parameters to determine his identity, but in my mildly sleep-addled state I managed only dull confusion.

The lunatic was boxed in all both sides by residents I did immediately recognize, chief among them Harry and Brahim Falali. There was also a girl who could have passed for Grey's younger and prettier photographic double, standing behind Harry so she was protected from the wild-eyed man. Having come out my door in the middle of this, I was not so protected.

I was the perfect target -- the only target within reach who was not a big, burly man weighing around two hundred pounds. I had time only to blink and then he was lunging at me, trying to use me as a hostage or just push me aside to escape into my room. I never found out which because before the lunatic had the chance to finish his attempt, Harry and Brahim were on top of him, struggling to keep him down. "No!" the man shouted, straining to get free. "I have to-- I have to--"

"Ylaine! Get inside!" Harry shouted at me, and I would have replied back that I did not follow his orders, but to my considerable shame the only thing I could manage was a dazed mumble so indistinct even I was not sure what I was attempting to say. I did step back, not into my room but at least a bit further down the hallway where I was less likely to get hit by a stray limb. Two of the other residents piled on top of the lunatic to help Brahim and Harry. Harry reached an arm towards Grey's prettier double. "Jack! Give me the syringe!"

The girl, Jack, fumbled with a needle and managed to get it into Harry's outstretched hand without accidentally injecting him. I was finally able to form a complete sentence and demanded, "What is going on here!" but nobody heard me. While Harry tried to uncap the needle, the lunatic writhed and screamed and knocked loose Brahim's turban. I am sure I must have gasped, but as no one could hear my angry question, the audibility of my gasp was lost even to myself.

At Harry's barked orders, they managed to stretch the lunatic's arm out and inject him. The effect was nearly instantaneous. The lunatic went almost completely slack. "Okay, boys, ease up on him," said Harry, and the strong-arms retreated. The girl who had held the needle stepped up and leaned over the stranger.

"Hey, Lars, hey there. Can you hear me?"

"Easy there, Cap'n. It's jes me an' Jack, we're not going to hurt you."

All of this happened, and I was still staring at Brahim Falali. I have no idea where Jalloun was on that evening, but what became immensely clear to me was that while Brahim and Jalloun might have been twin brothers, they were in no way identical. Not any more.

Brahim's face was a twist of scarring, deformed and ugly, the shape and angle indicative of a blast pattern. (This I knew, yet I was unable to identify the lunatic. Sometimes the uselessness of my knowledge astounds me.) He had undergone surgeries to repair the most major damage, but his face was still markedly uneven, one cheekbone higher than the other, one side of his mouth pulling downwards like a stroke victim, the socket of his left eye missing some of it's partner's defining features. There was very little hair left on that side of his head, and what little remained was patchy scraggles.

I could not speak. I left the hallway quietly while the others fretted with Lars the Captain. (Halk, I figured out later. Captain Lars Halk.) The only one who noticed my departure was Brahim, and he quickly re-covered his face with the cloth of his turban, his eyes refusing to meet mine in his shame.

The chaos of the hallway drifted away now that the fighting was over. I slid into bed and closed my eyes, returning to sleep.

In which Ylaine is introduced to Jace, resident freak and bully in Level Two at the Liberty Center, and loses her most precious possession.

"I won't go back," I told Sam, and as usual, I meant it. He looked uncertain.

"I don't know that you have a choice. Isn't schooling mandatory?"

I sighed. Sam could be so obtuse sometimes. "Under certain governmental jurisdictions, yes, it is. But the Triumvirate has no mandatory schooling laws and leaves those decisions in the hands of legal guardians barring praetorian intercedence." Practically verbatim from the Triumviral legal code, what little of it actually existed.

"Reginald wants you to attend," Sam was quick to point out.

"He is not my legal guardian, and while I am aware of the restrictions placed upon me by Grey, the agreement was that I may seek out my own educational arrangements."

Sam waited, expecting me to continue, but I have never been in the habit of expositing based purely on the expectation of information.

"Do you have a plan?" he finally asked.

~ ~ ~

The General Educational Development test, known popularly as the General Equivalency Diploma or General Educational Diploma, is administered according to national standards in the United States and Canada. Comprised of five sections, over twenty versions of the test are in circulation at any point in time to help catch cheaters. I knew the answers to all of them, plus those versions no longer in circulation.

It was brilliant and simple. I had everything I needed.

Except my wig.

I despised the term wig for my hair, though that's exactly what it was. I felt the term both demeaned the fine craftsmanship and classed me with a group of impostors in whole company I was not comfortable. I was one of them, truly, but I had no wish to be mistaken for such. It was a desperate reach, but of my own desperation I am infinitely forgiving.

I readied the forms I needed to take the GED and sat on my bed with them, dressed but unmoving. I could go and take the test, but I did not want to. I needed my wig for so many reasons. By this point, I had missed four full days of school and Reginald was hounding me for an explanation. I refused to give him one. "Don't tell him a word," I ordered Sam, who instead fed Reginald lies about me being under the weather. I refused to allow Reginald even to enter my rooms. He begrudgingly accepted my terms and Sam's explanations.

I sat alone in my room on the bed all day with those papers, until I had missed a fifth day of school and the testing centers were no longer open. Sam found me exactly where he had left me earlier that morning. He was worried. He was always worried, but this time with a sense of more urgency than the usual worrying that underlaid his thoughts and actions.

I could have bought a new wig, of course, but it was the principle of it, and I think on some level Sam knew this, for he said to me: "Why don't we go back to the school and track down this Jacoba." Unfortunately, Sam was missing the second principle I refused to violate.

"I refuse to go back to that hovel and beg for my hair back with my proverbial tail between my legs," I said. "I will not give her that satisfaction." Nor, on an equally important note, would I risk anyone seeing me without my tresses. The only people who knew about my deformity directly were Irelia and Jace, and I could only imagine what Jace might have told the other students. No, I told myself, the whole thing was utterly unacceptable.

"I could go and try for you," Sam suggested, sheepish and lacking confidence. I pahed at him to further demean his proposal and said he would never be able to do it. If I was capable of bullying Sam, surely Jace was capable of it, too, and unlike me she would initiate such behavior without regard for the best interests of her target. I bullied Sam for his betterment. Jace bullied people for the sheer sadism of it, of this I was sure.

"We could send someone else, then," said Sam, desperate to show me that I was not alone in this struggle.

"Oh? Who?" I replied, mostly hoping to shut Sam up as his arguments were generally groundless optimism.

"Harry."

I considered this. Harold Lindsay was a lout and a boor. He was about as refined as a pig covered in chimney soot. He had bad manners, an untrustworthy appearance, and his morals were questionable at best. In short, utterly without redeeming quality. But he liked Sam and they were friends, and he was rather fond of that useless vestige of capitalism, money. Even though he had no love for me, these were both points in his favor.

I had Sam bring Harry to me, since I was unwilling to risk running into a lurking Reginald in the hallways, and I gave him my proposition: "Go to the Liberty Center, locate Jacoba Rebecca Darnell, and retrieve what she took from me using whatever means necessary."

"Twenty thousand," Harry said to me, a high number as he did not like me, but I was good for it and I agreed. He seemed taken aback at this and promptly countered, "Twenty-five thousand."

"We have already agreed on twenty and we have a witness," I immediately pointed out, indicating Sam. Harry was annoyed by this, since while I was able to get Sam to lie to Reginald about my health, we both knew Sam would never lie under oath without a truly fantastic reason for it, and this little transaction hardly constituted such.

So I paid him half up front, gave him Jace's description and the school's hours, and waited.

He returned my wig to me in the bag which he had found it, all wrapped up and coiled and tangled, and I might have complained but I was too shocked at his success retrieving it -- and in one piece, no less. I had fully expected it to be shorn up by a pair of scissors or something equally terrible, in which case I could have shorted Harry the second half of his payment and maybe sued the Liberty Center or Jace's family. (Gambling was a lucrative source of cash, but as I could adequately represent myself and thus negate legal fees, I envisioned the court system as an equally lucrative alternative.) I paid him the remaining ten thousand and received the bag from him.

I considered his story of the easy retrieval skeptically. "She was just carrying it around with her? Whatever for?"

Harry only shrugged. "You just paid me to get it. I never pretended to be a member of Investigative Services. If you wanted explanation, you might've tried Ed Autry. Not that he'd do it for any sum a' money now that he's a C.E.O." (Never mind that impersonating a law officer was exactly what Harry had done.)

"He's not a C.E.O., he's a Vice President," I corrected, taking the wig from the bag. It was in need of a good washing and brushing, no doubt. The mere thought of my most precious possession in the hands of that child was abhorrent, and then it had passed from her hands to Harry, of all people. He was little better. "I am disappointed."

Harry only rolled his eyes. "I did exactly what you told me to." He seemed not to care much about customer satisfaction when he had fulfilled his end of the bargain.

"Yes, but I might have liked it if you'd needed to do a bit of dumpster diving. Spend some time around your own kind."

Harry was so thrown by this that it took him a moment to flare up with indignation. "Yl-aine!" he shouted, looking crossly at me.

"What?" I smirked, holding my wig up so the full length was displayed, looking for any signs of tampering. Jace was not living up to my mental expectations.

"You could at least say 'thank-you'!" Harry said, exasperated.

It was my turn to be shocked. "Whatever for?" I asked. "I paid you. I fail to see why I should have to verbally indulge you as well."

Harry hissed through his teeth. "See if I ever do you a favor again, missy."

The sheer idiocy. "I paid you! That does not constitute a favor."

"Whatever," spat Harry, throwing up one hand as he stormed out. I scoffed after him. Not a single redeeming quality on the brute, not a one. But I had what I so desperately needed. I waited for the door to close behind Harry and I smiled. I was whole again.

In which Reginald hatches a plan.