Apologies for the lateness of this post! I got a new computer today and have been drowning my time in a lot of Bioshock Infinite!
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When
Kendra had been younger, her mother had read her The Hobbit. When Kendra had
been younger, she had decided that Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins were both women –
mentions of beards and hairy feet notwithstanding. Despite strenuous
objections, her mother eventually relented. But it was not the rather amusing
mental image of a tall, stacked mature woman brushing her hands through her
long silvery beard that stuck in Kendra’s mind for her stay in the hospital.
When
the dwarves and Bilbo had stayed at Rivendel (or Rivindel, or however you
spelled it) the narrator had taken a moment to opine on how it was easy to
write about terrifying, unpleasant, or dangerous times. Adventures filled whole
books – and those could last as short as a single day. But try to describe a
single week of having a good time, and it rapidly became impossible.
For
Kendra, if she were to write a novel about the half a month she spent in the
hospital and the two weeks she had spent bopping back to physical therapy, she
would have just been able to write two sentences involving the occasion and
left it at that.
It.
Sucked.
And
they weren’t even grammatical sentences.
Bijay –
in his guise as one of the nurses – kept careful watch, but Adder’s death and
the attention drawn by the police had given Crichton a bit of a scare –
apparently, he didn’t want to make his innocent and law-abiding façade take a
hit in any universe or any version of the past, lest he be forced to stay there
for reasons unknown. That meant that while she did wake up every time someone
walked past her room, and she tried to brain one of the nurses when she changed
her IV – no one had figured out how she had gotten a club in her hand so quickly.
But
most of the time, she spent it bored.
Bored.
Bored. Bored. The kind of bored that seeps into your bones, which couldn’t be
cured with anything short of a bullet to the head or a change of venue. She
watched TV shows, and read books, and even played a bit on her laptop – all
while keeping her immobilized arm immobilized and taking a nearly continual
spray of drugs – some to fight infection, some to speed the healing, some to
just make her suffer.
When,
finally, she was released, she came back home and found that her parents had
invested significantly in…security.
Which
replaced boredom with frustration, which to Kendra was not an improvement!
“How am
I supposed to do anything with my friends with this?” Kendra used her good hand
to rub at her neck. The new necklace that she sported was a little long, and at
the bottom was – rather than a gemstone or a bit of pewter – a small plastic
disk marked with a C and a U.
“Easy!”
Mom smiled and tucked the disk under Kendra’s shirt. “See?”
“But…you
can use your freaking phone to track me! Like I was…a...a…a pet!” Kendra tugged
the necklace back out from under her shirt. “It’s humila-“
“Kendra,
you were almost hacked apart by a machete.”
That
voice had been Dad – who had been sitting in a nearby chair, reading the
instruction manual to their brand new Cordine and Ulysses security GPS tracker.
He closed the manual and looked over at the two of them, his eyes serious
behind his glasses.
Kendra
found it remarkably hard to argue with that. So, while she went to high school
and found herself in a curious position of having far too many people caring
far too much about everything she said, and yet no one actually seemed to want
to sit with her during lunch or group with her in groups. She always got into
the dreg groups – the ones with the people who never did any work and just let
the rest of the people carry them.
The
only people who did sit beside her at lunch were Jessica – who treated this
entire thing as incredibly exciting and encouraged Kendra to enjoy the
attention and the drama that it allowed her to access – and Theresa – who worked
her hardest to try and pretend that nothing had happened at all. It made for
some surreal conversations…
“I
think you should try and get your hooks into Marshal. Let’s be honest, he’s
cute, and someone is going to notice how heroic he was-“
“He…was
kind of heroic. Sort of.” Kendra tried to cut in, but Jessica continued forward
like a machine.
“-and
sweep him up!”
“Did
you guys hear about the new library section they’re adding in?” Theresa said.
Jessica glared at her, but Kendra – who was kind of eager to get away from the
whole ‘machete dude’ topic that had been hanging over her life for the better
part of a month – grabbed onto the change in topic with both hands.
So,
between the shambles of her social life, the indignities of having to wear a
GPS tracker everywhere…Kendra didn’t think she would have had time for meeting the
other Immortals.
She was
wrong.
The
Immortals – Nef and Bijay and...actually, none of the other Immortals were eager to get her back together
and ready to fight. But Nef and Bijay were the ones she knew the best, so they counted for more.
“Crichton
is just marshaling his forces…” Nef said, leaning over a table in the Denny’s
that dominated the corner of two of the busiest streets in the town. “Mortals
are somewhat useful in these issues, but he is also sending out feelers to
other Narcissists.”
Bijay –
who sat right across from Kendra – leaned in to speak, but before he could,
Kendra held her hand up.
“Let me
guess, people like Adder, who think they’re traveling through dimensions,
rather than changing the past?” She asked, smiling slightly.
“Coffee?”
The waitress asked for the fifteenth billionth time – she made circuits
throughout the Denny’s at a rate of one revolution per minute, and it was
starting to get on Kendra’s nerves.
“No
thanks,” Nef said. She somehow managed to look normal and calm, as if she had
never lost a loved one in her life. Kendra didn’t like to think about that.
When
the waitress went on, Bijay took the conversation back up again, saying: “Yeah,
though, that’s just about what the Narcissists believe.”
“Good
name.” Kendra shuddered, remembering the insane light in Adder’s eyes.
“Still,
we need to start thinking about how we’re going to strike back, if we want to
get some peace for a while.” Nef leaned back in her seat. “Bijay, you’re the
only other person in the group who is interested in doing anything beyond a
defensive action…did you have any actual ideas?”
Bijay
grinned, but before he could say anything, Kendra raised her hand. The two
other Immortals looked at her, and Nef gestured to her, as if to say ‘go ahead,
you have my blessing.’
Kendra
asked the obvious question: “Why am I here, then?”
“You’re
new and got a reason to want revenge.” Nef nodded.
“I
think you’ve got promise.” Bijay added. Then, grinning, he murmured. “And you’re
pretty cute…”
Kendra
turned bright, bright red, but nodded. Bijay, seeing that it was his chance to
explain his plan, laid it out.
“We
need to hit Crichton where it hurts, and we need to tie it into his life, so he
can’t just ripple away from it without losing something he’d rather keep.”
Bijay rubbed his hands together. “I have two candidates, and a way to tie the
events together. But I’m thinking that if we each take a part of the plan, we’ll
weave it more into the world’s events and really get it to stick.”
Kendra
nodded. That seemed like a pretty good way of doing it.
Then
Bijay explained his plan, the full plan.
Nef
nodded. “I’m in. I can handle the hijacking.”
Bijay
glanced at Kendra, who was cupping her face in her hands.
“Kendra?”
“We…”
She paused. “We are the good guys, right?”
Bijay
grinned, his face so disarming and cute that she almost forgot her own
question.
“We
are.” He paused, just fractionally. “Kind of.”
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