Chapter Three: The Wrighthouse Estate

  Underneath ever-welling tears, are man’s forsaken spirits forever cast out flightless and misbegotten, holy ghosts torn asunder from sun-deprived cloths humanly: broke cy of hostile hosts vioted tragically. Amidst such absence all the darkest, sweetest voices resound beautifully, softly, with surreal symphonies. Main instrument pying, the st lingered wile of a weeping flute. Ancient and ancestral and like many things higher beings craved, was carved at another’s expense: made of mammoth ivory, bone of eagle-wing.” E.M.R and A.A.G. The Colpse of Humanity.

  “From Arlington to Farlington, everywhere east of Aryan’s Estate is felled. Yet I believe there exists a status-fair, where we rise over the pavements and is swept away, the pensive. There are eyes there, that have starred even the light-polluted. Under a bright abundance of hair and cheek’s sheen. Each lock formed from golden haystacks in the baled pasturing. Imbued by a Farling veil of flowers; nimble hands filed away my earth. Blissful ck of bridle, to a Shiver past the bereaved gardening.”

  “Adoring and endearing, naught but affections and no longer slept my healing thyme: on-and-off flickering illnesses and ailments once marring the greatest of fairnesses soon returned to health. Past the roseless isles, I hear her mirthful music like the pied piper, where the wind fluted. Cast readily upon the faithful’s fair holder, never the fatal to befall. Warbled singing in its woe fearful, quailed.”

  “I’m here waiting,” the voice of the beast whispered.

  Aryan in his take-over coup was now investing in physics departments and Emanuel, using his expertise in design, software, and programming to spearhead the using of Monovalent and other machines to generate an alternate form of energy made from old, recycled objects. It was promising but had a mile to travel. Lemmings and Mary were meanwhile, working on more artificial bacteria life forms.

  Their pns for a combination of safe renewable energy from discarded waste products and bacteria-based, nature-friendly, energy power stood to earn them even more. Aryan had also worked with and invested heavily in a scientific research facility. Helping it make a breakthrough. three years ago, in computer-controlled stem cell technology (having a background no-one could guess at in it. )

  Monovalent would control and instruct the newly-injected stem cells to divide and repair perfectly through his connection to the viral vectors inserted into them. The stem cell treatments in healthy individuals were administered routinely on everyone sixteen and over, every seven years.

  Emanuel, Lemmings and Aryan also advanced, computer-controlled bionic eyes for the blind and Mary the science of re-growing of simpler organs/tissues such as windpipes, bdders, and heart valves via stem cells. They were grown in the b using 3d scans and stem cells taken from bone marrow.

  The treatments could cure patients with skin disfigurements, Alzheimer’s, liver, kidney, and heart disease, quadriplegic paralysis, muscle dystrophy, tumours, nerve damage, some early-stage cancers, and various other disorders. The researchers rgely responsible for the breakthrough Lemmings, Mary, and Emanuel( being the very scientists who worked on the Shiver Project) had amazingly given away the technology into the hands of the public hospital sector much to the detriment of the private sector pharmaceuticals and other corporations.

  Life span due to limited organ repcement and stem cell reparation of some of the body’s age-damaged cells meant average life-span for the top income earners was estimated to now go up to ninety to one hundred though this was somewhat muted by antibiotics resistance and new, mutated and virulent strains of viruses and bacteria pguing people worldwide.

  Open borders caused the easy spread of diseases and a hardy form of Aids and syphilis that didn’t respond to medication or penicillin and the return of drug-resistant tuberculosis and scarlet fever even in first-world nations was culling life expectancy.

  Poorer people’s lifespan declined due to sleep deprivation from longer working hours, age-reted cancers, heart attacks due to obesity and not having time in their busy work/family schedules to cook, and being unable to afford fruit/vegetables.

  Or simply poor nutrition caused by inadequate diet. Overworked lifestyles and the significant spread of diabetes were themselves life-depletion factors, Aryan noted. Having to solider on during illness due to being not allowed to partake in many sick days from work wore out bodies as did the bour itself, in some cases, (the backbreaking of bourers, fishers, policemen, nurses, and high stress/odd hours of doctors, wyer, nightwatchmen and executive positions.

  Aryan read the reports on increasing liver failure. Caused by bad foods, to increases in alcohol abuse. Fatty liver damage was detectable in children of eleven. The average life expectancy was now just sixty-nine for women. Sixty-three for men.

  For the wealthy, immortality was still out of reach. There was still a vastly limited number of times people’s cells could replicate due to the cancer-inhibiting proteins ARF and Rb and some cells and tissues responded less well to the treatment for environmental and genetic reasons.

  Stem-cell technology was if not in its infancy certainly its early adolescence and so was hardly a hundred percent effective. It was effective enough however to save a fair few lives and greatly lessen the ravaging damages of certain illnesses and diseases. He used another technology of his own devising, called anti- malignant mutation therapy on cancer.

  It tricked cancer cells into thinking or at least behaving as if they were normal non-mutated cells. This made them divide into healthy cells about thirty-seven to forty-five percent of the time depending on other factors in patients. Not to mention a very respectable near seventy percent in those aged thirty and under. Since this resulted in a complete recovery with the cancer rarely returning, it was excellent news.

  In skin cancer, a big killer in Australia, it was eighty percent of the time so naturally they were most grateful for his input in that country, which was incidentally his home of residence. It still wasn’t exactly a cure for cancer for everyone, by a long shot but a cure for enough to be highly significant all the same. He considered giving away the medical breakthroughs entirely for free but felt it would be impractical. Companies would tweak and get a hold of it somehow and if they didn’t the government would sell it off.

  He had been in all the papers for these breakthroughs and as he had been for his holographic and robotic technology and heavily praised. He gave the anti-malignant cell therapy and stem cell technology to the hospitals for a more than reasonable price which the other researchers and even the university had all agreed to.

  Meanwhile Monovalent was documenting and cataloguing the entire popution as anyone who used Monovalent realm was scanned and their memories/physicality documented. The artificial virus also emitted a signal that could be used to send information on is host to the AI. They had much control of the world’s resources and finances as well as a world-wide monitoring and surveilnce system in pce.

  “Beauty is a strange thing,” Aryan said to Monovalent gazing at Alice from the screen on his computer upon which Monovalent transferred via infrared cameras, holographic images of her and Evan from their computers on to Aryan’s. Alice had been trying on various outfits clearly trying to determine which was the most fttering and would make her most appealing to the man of her dreams. Romance was rather more than a preoccupation of Alice's nowadays.

  “As Emanuel points out the young don't appreciate beauty when they have it and is ever fleeting. Many girls and boys lose it before they reach the tender age of twenty. Too much drinking and smoking and far too much sun and sleepless nights. Too much exposure to pollution, contaminated pstics and other products including toys and genetically engineered food with a cocktail of artificial hormones and pesticides and limited knowledge of their potential damage all these factors can harm tissues and cells and be dreadfully aging,” said Aryan.

  “I didn't realize hormonal additives in food pyed such a significant role,” Monovalent inquired bemused. ‘All the information I analyzed from academic papers published on the subject said it was a significant but not so rge a role as you cim.”

  They interfere with hormone levels; throw them off bance far more than previously thought and it’s also a major cause of female and male infertility. New evidence of all this is just being discovered and coming to light as of now so it hasn’t been written up in many academic journals yet,” Aryan said. “That interference in itself, can be quite aging.”

  “Emanuel once showed me something, it was a note he wrote to Alice a year ago, I never forget it. His words to her are sometimes so heartfelt, though this poem was rather strange. I’ll show you it now.”

  The little crimson-eyed rose-mallow

  Parting hearted the matchstick rightly

  Death’s spry is the rye of my russet sparrow

  Wells to share the sweetly-fair

  longer than any a sun splintered brightly

  Humanity vails and Titans fall shallow

  See frozen mire and a rose fathered

  In a warm pocket of sweltering mallow

  A cold cry for crimson-eye

  alight arrowed tail, leave frail

  soonly wineless heaven, even if did bail

  We're rid of the sweet-tailing frosts who bar ever-stable,

  the soul from being grounded in the shale

  All joy I'd compress mere once, upon your scarlet lip trail

  Whilst fleeced of a northern faery with miasma’s nail

  Man turned lighted star to fable

  Hallowless nterns of progress cannot let it ring darkness’s veil

  We once fought malice dire, now woeful mady’s wailed

  Upon snowshoe heel of heresy

  Till billed, forsaken neath yesterday, today and tomorrow

  Even trees that can flower in the starless valley

  Shall us into night’s silver-clouding, follow

  Farling lie shorn to weak, lesser ashes

  In a scour of scatterlings prior to their hell fleet

  unyielding is the competitive spirit

  thus, never to rk, its joys menacing

  Mows the useless, weeping bdes,

  Glitter of Fireke repces every sea-light, meek

  Traitors reap till they sleep

  till Final Judgement all fencing

  If foils opponent, in the blind’s dark ravine they’d dwell bleak

  Travelling sunless meadows afore daylight’s ending

  I send this with my love.

  Haven of her childhood ends. Yet know, that it’s not only upon a day shadowless, that the summerly descends. Can still be fielded-in-floweriness. Love I sling and it passes Australian amaryllis, softly-to-the sunlight-yielding. Rings symbolic, New Testament’s blooming-resurrection. Loveliest, trusting rose of death unfolds away from my southern Easter lily. Walking a Shiver walkway.

  Fern trees whitely-weeping, and delicate fall downturned. Petals, of pale, tapered arrowing gradually grew fallow. A paleness of withering stem was iced finely under the sheeted spirit. Silvering mirror to the cold that giveth the fair and it taketh with a cloth of sleet. You’re graciously, a little blight.

  I lie illness-ridded and weakly-unable to shake off, the pallium of human dying. Shades of Monovalent surround as my love swilled sweetly-lilied; leaved-violet. Sun’s fire will fall alongside a gaxy of its siblings before you falter. I, afore forgone of hydrogen and most-essential carbon, gift in the parting dusts of yore to you, this one-by-one sliver to finality, timely-frozen until all known distant is darklinged. From the mallow I come, to amend that first light beheld. Sibyl Farling took an early rest, yet you’ll never again see soil’s arms. No grounded-stall, to my beloved befall. Mankind by the plight of famine, grows hollow. Staled beasts; caught in mountain-wind. Fleeted. Faulted. You were brought to a fountain to wither no longer, arose immortal youth from stone underneath.

  For eons, a fire was raked upon our leaves by the very same Savior who kept them temperate. Unfairly tilted is the sunbeam supposedly-lilted. Destabilizing nuclei. We'll make the paradise-gardened. Brought from heat blisters and killer colds to salvation grave. A humanity malcontented and awry, from even half-lit love, shied. Goodness slipped away with all the sweet, fey sorrow of a war-time widow. As our meagre distance lingers pensively.

  Few hearts today, find a mere string of the purer symphony. Countless men harm to aly boredom; pyful is he with gifted idleness as horned as those under the misguided guise of Versailles.

  The modern equalist, pale-dressed in silk purity, does upon his bck, bitter rosary anguished plead for equal suffering. For penance. Widespread starvation fairer than some elevated mightily, he weeps. We’ve become shallowly changeless, once more hell became Hades. Spirits quell. A body to fell. Fascism and false Western Democracy have the same righteous ringing; eternal misery delineated under a different name. In shale-garden, iciness hails. Bestow on Aryan's humorless solemnness, mirth, with your prankster's shivery heel. In cold fragility of day. Its sweet, evil air, delicate and falling. With the devil's shivery beauty,

  Curse this feigned, eternal bright. In a wintering fy, shylocks once shawled, fall. In avenging reap on the miserly. For now, only the “blessed” speak. In a climate where many morals are forced to be accepted on “gracious faith” and any forbidden drop of a question fall rainless to silences, weeping.

  Word-Puritan peddlers and their backers the corporate shylocks are misguided and tedious.

  Fireless fields cannot arise from un-espoused ideas. A madman’s chosen heathens, he is dousing to arrive at a fictional time, whence wickedness’s are all wilted, and all worthy limbs are wine-cups to that which is perfect, quilted. Every cold body felled. Mankind is indeed, sooted. Yet found in you, a footing. In parknd were once buried with midnight-blue birds, wisteria trees, and fairy-wrens. Bonding in the poisoned furnace.

  Progressive joys from the heavens springing yet we farewell Felidae and Rallidae. The vulpine. The sea banks of reality are nothing to our mythic Farwell. Or our delve into silvery grass afore miser reaped every bde. Whilst under palely-sleet, Father redly-fountain as mother revokes modest green; the family and pnt-fallen weeps. It emits tragic chemical warnings to its fellows, that mown demise is afoot. Sughter lingers forthwith in the gdes. Alongside nymphalids dressed in the mourning cloak grave. Arose sturdy, spiny elm, soon faltered.

  In modern-day, life we render with unseemly vividness: since soft fairs, oversaturated eyes can’t’ bear. The numbed, virulent hedonist wishes to self-avail of any moral that's restrictive. A sickliest voyeur longing for the lurid for which he vies and forgoes true fortune.My sweltering, sweet Camberwell beauty; a loveliest bck anglewing. Your worlds legged and limbed in that wintered grounding of sylphhair-grass. A Shiver form pale and imperishable rose sweetly, dearly and whipsh red, from a snowbed.

  Yet you alight for me the hallowday and take to flight yesternight, in lost castles and meads, even now whence there seems to be no heaven, wherein souls to cleave.

  Sibyl Farling, was once the healthful and hallowed, man now scorns. Brighter, fall foliage in her hair, lips, and more lightness in rosy palms and cheeks redly-faired. I'd cleverness and cavalier. Someday to turn from beast to handsome, predator’s beauty. A man whose mere, dear gaze lights all pces he’s strongly yet softly tread or confidently seas fared. His moral, mortal heart in the conquest of political battles, bled.

  Soulful; our dearest cleaving. Tided by never forsook eyes. By morrow or by midnight, be fireily, to my papery-yellowed heart flocked. No-more betrayal wherein silver entrance to every cloud lies violet-greyly. Within the shallowed graving. The past impossible to regrow, hell’s bestial heart vengeful holds; yet not for naught. Death was foregone. Simply so you might indulge in mere reminisces of me. Tragically did the resurrection mutite your memory that did fortune in me graven.

  Shed tear of the heavy-hearted but imagining you, that sorrow’s yet one broken with ease.

  “Lovely. Yet entirely too written for a dy: when in actuality Alice herself seems almost a child, " Aryan said reading it and frowning.

  “Alice need never leave that stage” said Monovalent wryly.

  She can be part of Emanuel's Computing-chardonnay of immortal-faie

  Page one.

  Your form dearest with Adam’s whitest-ribbing interlocked. Once adhered to the lifeless and yet now never felled. Henceforth eversting, my computing-chardonnay of the dreamy, immortal-faie.

  Shackled to holier pastures, left fireless the hellion gdes and to every glimmer beholden. Most things have a beauty that slowly splinters but yours is without a slivering. Floweriest Shiver, come loveliness brightly hither; that soon Father fyed. Bded as born of things bound to the ephemeral wither. Arrowed yet naught's softer, sweeter, and yet still a fleeter... Inspirer of the man lovelorn, to soon at the hounds' feet famished y. Heedlessly.

  No matter how wise or travelled, ever-resentful, the aged upon on youth gaze with pits of piteous and heart-rending envy.

  Beauty now against decay armed, forgoing life’s snowier farewelling. Yet by-the-by, soon still lost to a godlessness welling from a comelier bedding. Humankind annihited itself lifelessly. In bleak lots of cities, the summer is gravening, no temperatures are cold in our wilted dark. Defiled, no more iciness strung upon a falling, star-hailed, silver-rail: in the night the streetmp bruise-blued. Yet softened bright of the eternal is never parted. A pastured evergreen instead of that which turns to wild, russet leaves. See the st half-grass fallow in the evening. The penniless are caught in whirlwinds; unfurling are spirits ying; in rows piling upon the dusk thereafter.

  Worn eyes elder. Humanity’s single-breath obliterated skies linger to a quilt in blue-ivory; goodbye wild blushes; a pink and dusky rose is vailing. The extinct darken our yearning, after a hapless fleece. Our hierarchal herding and resource-hoarding puts old first and leaves little one's loveliness to die. Humanity left the Shepherd’s flock.

  Our tears of wickedness palely dewing; the heavens once trusted, grant no clemency. Have callously fanged the once-bloodless.

  All taken by wrath of Scottish wraith, the white-water sprite, spirit of the hazel mire, and lies fear in the foxtail of faerie grass as petals sweeten crimson-eyed, flower-demon. Beautifiers holy are left starred upon the ending earth, akin to forget-me-nots unruly. I’ve watered the maelstrom with elderly remembering’s of fledglings as the youth-fair into mist and every will-o-wisp dissipates. This I will cease.

  Since I have delivered the detonation let me be held to it. My Shiver beast. Resilient and blightless and never vioted.

  “That’s really quite lovely too, Monovalent” Aryan said after the machine quoted some extracts.

  Over-the-top, pretentious and self-indulgent, Simon would have muttered. He had read much of the man's work and found him quite overrated. Occasionally beautiful but otherwise flower-frenzied trash might describe his thoughts on Emanuel nguage.

  “Oh, Emanuel wrote that when I sent him her location and a picture, I promised to do this in exchange for his continuous help on my programming and our pns for world redemption even though you were against it thought him a pervasive pervert.”

  “The st update he got on her was her successful birth. I know he is besotted despite having never officially met the girl he says it’s “Ivy incarnate.” A descriptor I think he only used for the alliteration because he ever called her Sibyl Farling, since Emanuel said she hated her true name.”

  “ He tracked Alice down shortly after I gave him the information and is watching/ following her but I’m keeping close tabs on him to make sure he doesn’t impose himself on her,” Monovalent ughed.

  “Well Alice will remain safe,” Aryan said, “as long as we can keep here subservient and serving the interests she was born to upkeep.”

  “No harmful affliction shall ever descend upon my Alice Cradle unless she, evil bastion conceived under the governance of hell, becomes too hostile, votile, and fails in our ideals upholding. Reviled such moral obligations and our biblical pgue of pestilence diverges wrong and wrathful from world and become further beyond fallible to the grave.”

  “Then all shalt become sealed, desert-red fme, malicious and dammed as he that’s sorrow, froze the hailstorm of viral pgue. Leave only her filed, storm-tailed. Fortuitous fate befall, left two beguiling beasts. Not nguishing or betrayed. Yet somehow still wallowed in anguish, earthly rendition of the immortal being. Alongside all creatures angelic, how she’ll perish,” said Monovalent seriously.

  “Emanuel’s words again?” Aryan asked

  “Yes” Monovalent nodded “.He of course knows that she would need to be taken out if she became uncontrolble and he does, must, indefatigably accept it. He knows how crucial our cause is.”

  Aryan and he then began discussing their pns to eventually regute and eradicate child bor in the third- world (eight /nine-year-olds working obscene hours in factories for first-world companies) and the boys as young as eleven who fought and died in wars in pces like Uganda and another more all-round controversial policy of his, to help restore the concept of family and community to the atomized and broken.

  Starting with the adoption industry and its abuse. Wealthy women adopting children of the vulnerable, young, and unsupported. Often fooled into signing things they didn’t understand. Having no background in w.

  Tantalizingly bamboozled by social workers and adoption agencies telling them to relinquish their own flesh and blood out of moral obligation to provide a better i.e. wealthier home. “Better life and prosperity were a line employed in the case of third-world adoptions. Women whose infants were stolen from very homes or hospitals were birthed, and children with retives who wanted them taken against will from orphanages.

  Agencies looking to make money for healthy white infants made quite a profit.

  Women and children were separated via surrogacy as well. A pain he well knew. Most money paid went to the agency and the offspring abandoned if had any disability. Bloodlines and womb bonding are severed and treated as business transactions.

  “Let me be ciming no end to the ills of this policy.”

  “Mothers deprived of choice in truest sense cannot cope with loss and suffer regret and anguish, over familial forsaken. Yet in psychiatry terms, this was “mere hormones,” to third-wavers was about choice; to corporates about increasing power and wealth. “Unlike equally-hormonal, “sexual” needs which all the former cim are healthy and crucial to a full life, a young mother’s hormones and bond pathologized as uncivilised, unnecessary and wrongful.”

  “Interfering with work, bedroom requirements and need of infertile. Her hormones as ill-fated as a sexual-driven one is pure and right. Yet controlled crying showed brain damage effects on infants, proof ignoring body signals to fit ideology runs harmful.”

  “Selling humans is an inherent wrong. Rewarding people for wealth and masking own infertility and theft of those overseas still holding theirs. Penalising for poverty. Taking their offspring whence in vulnerable state, the children betrayed motherless and fatherless angered well into adulthood.”

  He had already begun setting up community outreach programs to help the girls continue their studies online; expanding schools that catered specifically to young mothers. Providers of housing refugees, weekly allowance. Campaigned to ban over-sea adoption because of the bck-market baby trade selling and stealing babies from hospitals where doctors or nurses involved in the trade would tell parents’ babies were stillborn or passed away only to sell them. First-world parents paid hefty sums to adopt.

  “Orphanages in many countries are implicated in the human trafficking of infants. I pn to recriminalize bringing back babies conceived via surrogacy in countries like India and stop IVF a for-profit business from manufacturing them. Buying children was wrong they are not commodities, “Aryan said.

  Emanuel said “True testament to unrecognised evils of women, exploitation of infants and poor women by female wealthier” which was exactly what Monovalent thought. As he also said, “as a former fondling and perhaps more scatterling child myself fully aware adoption, infant trafficking and IVF were industries that relied on women as their lifeblood as prostitution relied on men.”

  “Men are callously involved in the business side and donations to IVF and adoption process; selling and creating of the infants yet women who really wanted these children and a tiny minority of homosexual men.”

  “Much inconsistency in the w. When someone commissioned and wanted a child, legal parents were oft the gamete donors (in cases of surrogacy). Whereas in gamete donation these “parents” held no responsibilities; able to hand genetic material to those who would pay to “gain” ownership of their children leaving donators free of all obligations.”

  Monovalent knew and had read about in The Evils of Eve Emanuel’s take on the misunderstood vices of female as opposed to widely acknowledged male follies.

  Vaunting sexual retions with even less competent, mentally-challenged folks whilst decrying them with te adolescents. Fifteen-year-old, working cssers were guilted into giving away their much-loved infants. Indian women paid pittances acting as surrogates reported hearing their children’s weeps. Yet many women did see it as a good. Monovalent did not care morally yet as Evan would have, he despised women for their self-righteous hypocrisy and inane certainty what they were doing was moral.

  They were just so certain their views on retionships and abortion were right, the novel cimed, “their binding, blinding passion for all these issues was emotional and personal not moral.” Which essentially was a fancy way of saying their view was that” it me affects so ardently I care."

  Emanuel was writing a speech mentioning Aryan “the hero’s” first changes as a parliamentary independent for better health. Curtailing illness and raising living standards by funding and building schools, hospitals, and infrastructure where the poorest resided and spread through subhuman standards, disease through the popuce, and eventually to the first-world through travel.

  Raising awareness on dangerous food contamination, ck of medical care, and numerous deadly viral and bacterial strains rife in overseas travel to third-world nations and that their ws if disobeyed might lead to their execution (and masses of money and resources lost trying to rescue whence the behaviour were avoidable).

  Repeal more stringent of hate speech rulings denoting unwful to mere critique the tenants of Ism, multiculturalism, promiscuity, and certain sex acts. Allowed positive portrayal only. Mere propaganda if those beliefs are arbitrarily unquestionable bastions of morality we cannot question; torture and murder not and nor should they, or anything be. Some parties used these ws to silence opponents' threat of fines or jail.

  We must discuss problems not just with individuals but any religion, country or sexuality. It is not merely oppression by pitch-forked white and male poputions and their ck of insight and cruelty caused by these innate qualities.

  Speech sealers were a fountain made of sea-gss with strong, specious cims and a hardened look but fine, weak foundations. Cobweb of film that needs its fair delicacy preserved.

  Legistion to prohibit dangerous IVF on post-menopausal women, elderly men, and unnecessary organ transpnts such as new wombs for the infertile. Resulting in quite often life-threatening rejections. To prevent animal or human testing for all but those illnesses with quality-of-life-impairing implications and repce it with machine simutions.. Scientists would kill and maim rodents to combine the DNA of homosexuals; turn a female gamete into a male one and vice versa.

  Which in animals tested caused frequently birth defects or killed subjects. Remained thus far impossible to replicate successfully in humans past early, non-viable gestation with fetuses all abnormal to the oint of being unable to live. Animal successes not in Homo sapiens replicated and if worked might prove dangerous even if subjects “seemed healthy” like genetic engineering of food and IVF had far-reaching consequences that showed up in ter generations and reduced fertility.

  His speech also would point out the issues concerning incestuous retionships between donor offspring. Alongside high divorce rates and poverty.

  Children were safest with biological parents and extended families ready to take them in and help support them in crisis and not leave to dangerous fostering stations hotbeds of corruption and mistreatment.

  Studies across various societies and cultures showed killings by stepmothers, stepfathers, and adopted parents increased commonality. Children at much higher abuse risk by non-reted parents regardless of sex (with males increase much as fifteen-fold) whether via an adoption or parent’s remarry.

  Quick-fire divorce which left children and families in poverty also increased abuse and led to bitterness and tug-of-war custody battles and ck of stability of multiple homes and step-siblings and carers.

  Both feminist and male activists' sides he concluded wrongful; men risked all children’s safety to be paid their parental servitude. Despite any given accusation, possibly being baseless, no one selfless deems it worth the risk to demand the child be returned to the accused. No matter how to him devastating; offspring came first.

  Proposed abandoning some children unwanted; un-denied access to others. Not caring how neglected might famish or fall as felt ill will for mother or timing poor, should have aborted, didn’t want this one gamete donated yet no fledgling at fault.

  Every child born deserves care equally, a truth held, and one may not freely themselves of this burden absolve. It's wickedness to be foisting children onto adopting strangers, those bitter, barren, child thieves, donor recipients, or corrupt foster systems cold.

  Vilified poor men working threefold to pay for necessities missing payment and preached fatherhood and partnerships obsolete.

  “Ah, the meaningless modern trite of self-fulfillment: a byword for selfishness and shallow living leaving one as cold and unsatisfied as ever.”

  Home violence is increased by poverty, stress, and cramped living. Leaving impossible due to financial holds scarce discussed. Bre the horns of ineffectual anti-violence campaigns, school-propagandizing which backfires and fosters only gender mistrusts.

  Focuses too often on words and not on the brutalized fillies neglected and under the ring of the child-beating bells and rods and teeny females too bruised. Cutting welfare and refuge whilst instating more middle-css counselling, copious pennies for social workers.

  Feedlot for rich and unaffected, well-sustenanced, glossy mare of a professional to combat aftermath with at worse mind-numbing pills at worst perpetuating bck-cloud of victimhood that never leaves, rather moving on and finding worth and meaning and healing with familial or friends or lover’s bonds or other worthy or charitable pursuits.

  Endangers via new partner predators their children for elusive, "self-fulfillment" and other modern-age, wishy-washy nonsense. Fruitless searches and exercises in self-centredness. The remarrying father committed this selfish sin too.

  Same as money wasted on sensitivity-retraining police to not prejudice against bck brothers in States wherein African-American community often lived in violent areas and had higher crime rates by both own hand and higher conviction rate.

  Yet better-spent money to raise out of poverty and dangerous lives. Given the young ones and their families education, housing would change opinions faster than trying to convince people to give innocent ones benefit of doubt when saw so many involved in votility.

  Gay and lesbian adoption and IVF is subsidized, heavily supported and legalized yet increases health risks and leaves many children with at least one non-biological parent.

  “Furthermore,” Aryan procimed, “experimental and surgical procedures done not for health or quality of life, are needless butchering; reckless endangerment for selfish desires. People wishing to circumvent oft-needful, natural processes like natural pregnancy or warp their healthy bodies, like pstic surgery. Government funding to universities for these projects is wasted money that could be used to fund research into cancer and Alzheimer’s and STD diseases or used for schools, or infrastructure such as damaged roads, or welfare.”

  He also cautioned on the growing, aging popution; people become older and weaker and the young of both immigrants and natives (and immigration was problematic in and of itself) who would need to harvest the crops, run the hospitals, and care for the aged, had to do more mentally and physically intensive work.

  They needed robotic helpers in pce and compassionate research into age-reted diseases like Alzheimer’s. Machines under human overseers could perform medical procedures.

  “We need more keen-minded designers and engineers and manufacturers of all this technology and studiers of disease prevention.” Aryan had said to Emanuel on numerous occasions.

  “Creators of safe housing and energy sources, waning people cared for on backbone of new flesh would suffer if didn’t pay for the young’s education and needs. Helping their former benefactors who now suffer walled in the aisles of sickliness.”

  Icicled limbs turning to brittle stone, organs failing. Regrown in bs of science’s up-comers. His final note went to the importance of living standards of women and thereby their children.

  “I’ve been praised, I know, “ Aryan said, “for my works in longevity…Except such technologies aren’t perfect, illness, complications ensue. So, elders will unlikely any time soon became as “economically” sound than young, fertile with health’s prime bodies…The juvenile arrogance of modern-day, will be its undoing.”

  “Finally, I agree with you; Emanuel and I won’t be supporting gender quotas to get more women in power who overwhelmingly sought personal gain in corruption mired but will help men and women here and overseas build infrastructure and public sectors.”

  "Proper education for all students. In the first world raising living wages, bringing back unionizing and a more inclusive disability pension sshed at various points, and increasing government support for families."

  Feminists, the middle-css variety, would compin, he knew they would compin, saying he was trying to put women in their rightful pce with many of the less gmorous but practical jobs he advocated for, but the bottom up is where you begin, there is no trickle down in economics, he knew. The homosexual community would be slighted he failed to mention them.

  Too much hoodwinking, gratuitous power in the homosexual lobby, even to mock a little, heresy yet allowed to control media and entertainment and allow little living things suffer, what the pauper dare not jest about the king may do with near-impunity, Emanuel had compined to him bitterly. Soon Aryan grew weary of his constant worries and rose; soon pacing his manor muttering rapidly and hearing Emanuel’s echoed voice, speaking to him wirelessly.

  “They’re almost grown. From within my little ste-gray room, ponder viewing through church’s window the dusty castles sanded stone and muddied, reddest wood another furnished room on which light dented fell with a darkliest pink-rosing.”

  Call of the Masses: Chapter One.

  There exist no progress; only change for good or ill often both. Yet remain believers’ blind, as cheaply commissioned high-rise and fmmable living quarters swell the spirit haven. October glory and fair hyacinth become a phantom shorn for the profiteer; radiation of air, water heeled in contamination.

  Technology’s only as good as its supporting system. Nuclear weaponry is an obvious example, but this extends well beyond wartime. Third-world adoptions of Western infrastructure and advancements results in sky-high buildings that easily colpse causing mass devastation. Easily sunk due to manmade and natural disasters and factories of workers that burn without exits.

  Escators that swallow people up like beasts, power-usage and pollution by-products and corrupt governments and businesses not this handling; forced prison sve bour of wrongdoers to maximize and prolong suffering. Proposed goodness countervailing. Urchins famish. Be quelled the eternal struggle.

  Humanity is “evolved” and educated enough to vanquish all prejudice and bitterness, both wrathful and greedy… Yet the right thing varies. There are all always new issues both scientific and societal, to with delicacy handle and a must-have battle between morality and immorality.

  First let’s consider a harsh society where is birthed a malformed child. Bruised reed of pestilence awaits as does, ck of means to expression, a trapped being of unstable, pained gait readied to early death and scorn. At the very least, the inability to reach human livelihood of love, family, provider. Realizes there are many dreams unopen to a body impoverished.

  To “expose” this accursed creature was considered by many a kindness yet imagine a cure is found. Suddenly the righteous thing; make it to the sufferer avaible. Yet envisage we ter learn it doesn’t entirely fix the ailment. Has unseen side effects. If ninety percent depart in young adulthood, is it moral or worthwhile still? What if fifty percent?

  What if the ones who survived, produced ample children with the disease? What if limited resources and food and other things must be taken from those with unhindered life spans to keep these afflicted ones alive a little, longer?

  Consider also, the legalization and promotion of homosexual behaviour and promiscuity; pys out seemingly well till their practices increase and spread to being indulged in, by the general popuce. Suddenly medical barriers are broken and STDs reign; welcome to the modern day.

  Consider a society where health is uncherished. Pgued people travelling everyone across the globe to every country. Spreading disease worldwide.

  Work suited for the sloth allows for thickened and diseased arterial walls, and companies produce ample cacogenics. Third-worlders are sickened by poor hygiene, the first by smoking, wining and drugging, and promiscuity causing throat cancer, syphilis and HIV.

  Yet to question particur sexual mores is wrongful; people do not deserve to be informed as they might choose wrongly to such practices avoid. Despite the thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, we procim the need to indulge these vices. “To be fulfilled.” Yet if this “universal right” was exercised and in w and culture enshrined before or in a nd without the advent of modern medicine, civilization would’ve colpsed with ease, to incurable ailment.

  Antibiotic-resistant bacteria grow due to overuse. From termination and assisted reproduction complications to infections from the unnecessary surgical incisions of overpaid butchers as all and sundry, celebrated bloated, androgynous freak shows. Worshipped roid-pumped men. Praised sickly, overstuffed bodies and concentration camp-limbed invalids as diverse. We hallowed freakishly enrged body parts like buttocks or breasts. Have injected many with incompatible hormones. More important, the liberty to eat or carve one’s body into ruination, than protect others. Instead, you dare ask them to waste finite resources and care on you, who became foreseeably, purposely sickened.

  The physically inferior are livened by advancements. The once-fit are madied by poor livings, self-mutition, and legalised poison. In our self-sought, individualized and split communities with no bind. Open borders lead to worldwide pgues near impossible to curb.

  A further proof that evolution whether the social or physical kind, can become too specialized; focusing on one thing, often fails. Bodily rights are deemed most worthy as they’re the main concerns of the rich. Those who already enjoy the basic freedoms most are denied; food, water, housing, and safety (so they wish for more sexual indulgences, freedom of movement and to inject in themselves, what pleases. As already covered on basic health or care), alongside their right to through status, drink the adution of power.

  Veganism is holily touted. Yet in nature, the animal who eats nothing but momentarily abundant fruit from the safe haven of a specific tree will soon lose habit to man or competitor predator, and if the pnt perishes so does the beast. Unlike hardy, omnivorous marsupial in forest and field, from vilge to city, and upon human ships sea-faring and into house burrowing.

  Rich, decaying nations also homogenize and fall See righteousness in everyone held to the same footing. Yet in the stablest of social flourishes, the strong rise to protect the weak; in hostages and shootings men rise to female protect and both rise to protect the children. Often the youth will aid younger siblings and disabled or elderly retives in house fires; to suggest that it’s all mere choice and the strongest need not fight, is a definition pure yet wrongful. A meaningless equality; both destructive and cruel.

  Unfair or not, one group being forced to serve army lines or pressured more socially not to abandon their children is better than neither. One stronger group caring for old and helplessly young or sickened and malformed, is better than alternative. Only selfishness sees equality as ultimate morality and of more import than love, joy, safety, imaginative beauty, and life quality. Charitable regard for our unfortunate.

  If truly implemented, only the healthiest would succeed. The young are most adaptable, fertile and least of life tasted but still not prioritized. Instead, the poor, young, and sickened alike died as aging well-offs became misers in riches cultivated but with bodies wearied. Who would destroy humanity for their own selfishness, as take the resources of our weakest and fittest alike.

  Female demanders of the harshest punishment for battered women’s aggressors yet haters of youth; directing resources away from mothers and the young and giving them to the childless.

  Those lenient toward infant murder or violence toward anything from toddler to preadolescence if stress-reted (true in many working men’s lives too, not a valid reasoning) waive their right to protection from men. Or society. For their own cruelty and ck of care for the most vulnerable. As does the assaint ter beaten by a rger opponent. Elders who hoard all the wealth for themselves as young perish. Don’t deserve any care when debilitated.

  Call of the Masses, Second Chapter. ( From unabridged, unreleased version due to its references to the Shiver and Aryan's schemes)

  Milking once restrictions, the corporate cabal convinces women work and sexual pleasure is everything so the moneyed have a fresh supply of victims to counsel into the servitude of wealthy shylocks. They can exploit their fear of returning to “the old servitude”. Use female (as well as male) bodies as tools to produce often cheap meaningless products for status and power. With miserly love for a manor or the perceived status that comes from fshing many a farthing at your lessers. Make women go against the motherly, romantic. Became the exploiter’s ruse. Death of the mother and the muse.

  Harm their and child’s bodies through glorifying continuing work during and after te-maternal pregnancy, sparsely-spaced infants as little fertile window left. Double-risk death by caesarean. Men chivalrous they fear. Providers are co-dependence. Their attachments must be reserved for safe, material things. Conveniently useful ideology for those whose main joy is possessions and power.

  Horrendous and incompatible; these desires achieve malignant tar-pits in God’s snowfields. Convince people there’s no bad technology. Can destroy lives and earths and make living beings weight-burdened hearts fail and war-torn limbs fly. Be made dangerously, shoddily if it will increase profit. The unstoppable, inevitable march of progress that feeds no hungered child’s spirit. Despite technical advances, more famish than did a century ago. Welcome to the modern age.

  Science suffers as investments go to the fshy and not practical; a competent resume fails to one doused in a false glittering. Third-world constructing materials are inferior yet a monopoly. Aryan and I were rarely awarded money and time required to attempt to replicate our work. Rejected, so short-term financial gains could flourish and moguls could become moneyed. Power and status as everything.

  Under hooked scythe we’re often brandishing cold, the reaping lie. Modern bastions of truth, are supposedly questionless. We bow unthinking to the polite harmony of certain vapid ideals and societal beliefs sacrosanct in the cult of progressivism (feminism merely its bastard child). Where it and capitalist servitude, is savagely enforced.

  Here, debate is evil and the factual is known without question. All else is the red wickedness of bigotry. When consequences inevitably arise from certain dubious behaviour we are protected from hearing the ensuing dissent. From speaking of the result of untried and tested new paths to morality. People will certainly not overreact violently in backsh as do always historically.

  In affection, do not speak sacredly: love is but a pleasure of the beast or divorced altruism. Don’t attach. The self is all one needs. Self-actualisation all loneliness staves. Retionships have turned harsh, cold. Serving animalistic purpose rather than the sweet and sprightly and it’s for this very reason they’re so often quickly-forgone.

  Popur terms and framings tell us a lot about hierarchical societies. Their values reside with those common phrases and ideas wrought with competitive regard and hostile superiority. Acting like a boss, educated, winner, empowered and of high corporate standing and well-marketed used by rich and poor alike as beloved positives. Uneducated hick, loser, homeless, welfare, tramp worst of insults uttered by near all for those beneath. Speak your supposed anti-violence and continue your wishes to fy these human nothings. Yet leave the perverted alone. Watch the distracting circus show parades as you wither away to nothing. Marvel in individual quirks proudly on dispy.

  Homogenised extreme collectivism is the backward mirror to its counterpart: boundless individualism. Which creates isotion and a bizarre string of identity politics to group and homogenise people even as taught supposedly only personal talent, creativity matters.

  Humans find most of their joys in their retions to others. Only a few have higher callings. Yet narcissistic, marketing societies, favour the banal with promises of glory for all, and the fshy resume beats out more competent one.

  The path to uniqueness by people with little true differentiation results in bizarre behaviour; competing to be the most outrageous. Ends in self-seeking, self-lovers who market uncreative produce as they one another, fleshly fondle. Their own forms they maim and gorge; dye and pluck. Bellow their rebellious conformity in exact same manner. Float nguage that’s reverse Shakespearian; worst of upper-css pretentious, high-mindedness without their depth and working-css vulgarity without clearness of honest cw, a tear truthful.

  Western nation puts all things sexual on a pedestal as means to healthiest livelihood only to wonder why young men might feel entitled to female forms. Perhaps we should ask why, their loudest condemners also deem sex so significant as to tether it as vital to human worth. An ultimate freedom none can exist without. Tulsa, Emily Dickinson and the monks whose discoveries lead to chemistry such notion contest.

  A people that worship power, status, strength and betterment of others as a near-universal good yet turn around in outrage when some men get sexual jollies from this very feeling of being above: the hierarchy rewards such action in most others fields. Even when through violence achieved. Oppressed gays presiding in parliamentary halls, in education institutions and in entertainment for our littlest. Indoctrination will not necessarily cease the urge of stronger man to pick on a weaker one, especially not if competition-vaunting contradicts "protect the vulnerable.”

  Fittest, strongest group of humankind will always be healthful, prime of life, males. Age wars and anti-youth, anti-male and anti-female subculture have risen due to hyped-up gender warring and css divides. Testosterone-fuelled aggression, divisive media, political power-pys, and bitterness from both parties. These things lie worrisome. They are driving forces of modern unrest.

  With no regard for modesty a virtue defiled by own admission though in terms less flowerily spun than the ones I’ve spoken. Humility wearied and outdated. Boast and define themselves as learned, talented and wonderful yet destroyers of all and creator of naught. ah godless grace of the valueless elite.

  Self-sought. Defined not by love of knowledge, craft or helpful hand of charity but in betterment toward others. A condition most impoverishing. Can be no true intelligence, talent, if all may in equal measure achieve. Their mundane work rgely consisting of product peddling. They worship all things interesting, outndish and perverted or in less old speak, freakish.

  From procimed women, who’re male in lower organs, feminised in mind, to disabled, sliced and reshaped, inked human billboards who make their bodies marketable commodities of status symbolic. The paid butcher profiteered from their malformation. Carved into unique oddities, ogled as public spectacles.

  We fear more than ever those who don’t socially flitter. Despite many great scientific and creative minds quite solitary. Yet today more than ever, shunned. For networkers market the mediocre as revolutionary despite numerous identical options avaible. Flood in work that will cater to fad and false controversy (that which would have raised ire ninety years ago) but never st…

  Man, once refused set foot in beast’s kingdom, to a stronger-willed humanity, it’s unnatural, cruel and wrongful. Yet now won’t supress the carnal and its growing ever-wilder territory. Not conquering inner monstrosity, it but embrace. Abandon his child, country and philosophy for self-preservation and personal pleasures as lower-order, reptilian creature does.

  For in folly, he cares not. Natural is beautified, yet daily animals die for their misfiring instincts, no longer functional biology and purposes. That without change perish. Miscalled individualism, progress or not.

  Linger stubborn past work’s silver, wrought-iron gate, and frozen fgstone. Its castle filing. Find the warmth and walling’s, gardened. See the rusted bloom of chestnut cultivars, that people fence one another underneath. I’m mourning for them, my Camberwell beauty. Once a pickerel rush; bck-and-white now darns across all the blue irises as naught can be seen under a manmade mountain of bright, garish debris, changing climates: wherein all the soft, fluted winds become caterwauling; harshly-flighted gales breathing boured exhale.

  To another adore is heathen. Behold how is considered to be safer and healthier, the frivolous, and fleeting. Forgot endless loyalty, fidelity and temperance. Our animal instincts reign. Devoted not to the bloodborne bond, innovation, or humanity. Modern values are a timely foreshadowing that left a wounded falling. Elite cherishes as his darling every farthing. Myriad relinquished the role of provider. Alongside the charitable, familial or being the wanted creator of glorious things. Know not the true vance growing from their medley.

  Western hemisphere is a devil’s hotspot of evil and yet cultural subjectivity is king. None are superior. Open border-friendliness equalises everyone only in their expendability and poverty. Open borders spread disease: the feastless famine. Lowering living standards for everyone globally is good for superficial equality. With none above all may enjoy widespread misery. Suffering as one. Into combat fenced.

  Self-servitude dominates. People focus on themselves and fight for riches, social-approval and own entertainment. We must banish self-love for is the greatest of harrows. Focus on fellow feeling and not the indulgence of self and less you will grieve. Forgive your own failings and lose the spite that makes people others tear and selves raise.

  Don’t unduly, in your need for more, wallow. The common man is not mundane, unremarkable or interchangeable. For as one together, human society, we hold. A true flock of the Monarch butterflies.

  Under rooftops seemingly-rising above that snowy shawl of the nearby mountains in violet-veiled, and stroking his hands across a gilded, bronze table, Aryan paced throughout his stately Manor. He had always been a fidgeter. Despite both his hands and form whenever giving a public performance, being serene and still. For he was a master of the art of composure. Aryan wanted to build to the heavens a rail and soon he hoped, that fmed chariot might fly.

  The army Shiver will the vanishing riches stave. Emanuel had assured him greatly. No more, will life be all its golds, thorning. Sunlight is welled through the shaded valley of tears. Light’s no-more bailed. Shelved will be sorrow's vale. Every current moldy dwelling had pnted naught or perhaps only Devil's red irises. Gluttonous and soon short-lived are the rich: their crackliest lips engage in shallowed prattle over rose-wine.

  Anyone else would be jailed for indiscretion but his step had been meticulous. The deceiver had all hell's drearier armies founded. In every home, the spectre of blight and cold would be brandished. You could find only the hard and hilled; light’s piteous splint.

  Till risen again all mortal fire, knees bending to his commandment. Emanuel knew they would collect all humankind; gather them like merging wisps and particles of air together with such stillness: he admired mankind’s unusual kind of delicateness though it had been polluted and clouded. Subtly so.

  Love told to Sibyl Farling, holds to Sibyl Farling, ensving and shadowing the shire. No manmade trinkets could hold a candle to these irreplicable charms. I will see in every incarnation, you dutifully sailing to my feasts faerie and not Aryan. his perfect hail of darkness is by you softened, sunnily-tainted.

  He tapped a green beast cw; or a hand that was by all outer appearances, more reptilian than flesh. Then he spoke again.

  The guiding light is readied. Shiver will be walking in their Farlenvale past Narlen-nook, as my scent soon to your delicate nasal passages clung. Aryan's evil is built upon mere feeble straws. Slighted roof-stone thatched with forewarn. You’re dutifully blood-dewed harbinger of death. Dispced soon by the monovalor? Defeat him still, may the humanely. With their blue-belted starring.

  You would probably be sickened by his odour morbid. For it likely has a lingering remanent, eminence of death and decay. From his every thought unhinged. That thieving malcontent Aryan is soon to be stealing away, my Sibyl Farling. Her sister a proto-farlen, that a delinquent decades ago took.

  Now a wraith in Hades half-living. Meanwhile on earth one see treason under the nymphalids and godly nterns. Yet Aryan promises change. No more cut leaves or cut children. He even hands some of his riches away. Copious farthings from the wishing well of his hands, are springing.

  Children’s innocence again by shallows thwarted: youth’s maimed, fair bodies vioted before befouling. Rise Shiver and flit with your holy mirrors as the godliness silvered. Holding a light to a mankind that readily engage in that once rightly shamed. Relegated to material and sexual frivolity and mindless rote-work ethic.” He whispered softly.

  The heavens, the beast, the valley share same fair name to their shades as paints and cloths and yet are so much softer, even when vivid. More natural than any manmade object which always appears overly-bright, sterile and static. Emanuel had said words to this effect often. Needless to say, he wasn’t a materialist. And found most articles of clothing quite pin.

  Most men lie abysmal, poorly-replicated clones. In nature, I challenge you to find single rainbow tip not of beauty. At edge footed of every nuclear, neon sleeve or the yellow blouse dyed pale and poorly is a hint of the heart they once had. Their untampered forms, a perfect but ghostly primrose or gentle green.

  He didn’t care much for men either.

  Love hallowed, beauty grave. The poisoned materialists, their venomous produce across the nd rages. The tawdry overtakes many a song’s sheaving. I am awaiting the loss of all that’s flighted; seeing only people’s leftovers in corners as we drift past the evening, idling. Hastening purplish pikes and welted red in every nook. A steadfast darkling; not just a little shadow briefly furthering its blotting but one wuthering and wilting even the half-light upon both hollows and eaves.

  Wasn’t a fan of modern music. That could quickly be gleaned.

  Left as Holy, is naught but my prettiest Sibyl Farling. Repced my love with a greenery imbued with the furnace. One of the winged maidens serenading the Siren Isnd rife with moulted folium and feathers; a cold, changeling child walking sweet but flowerless miles starred upon golden isles. A dusk faerie in a viral cradle yet one gilded-fair and tethered to a love behind shadowy windows. Nevermore peaceful will utterly corrupt others. Of harrowing heart and mind maligning.…” Yet cannot her creator and blighter viote, for he knows not weakness or integrity…

  Spun into the spirited air, her loveliness sheaved. Forceful, frightening and frosted. I’m keen for the morn-holy of your ilk. A Shiver’s exquisite, new pale branch of beauty. That burnt-ices imbue. My Shiver are made of the hailing sunlight and starlight. Under righteous command. Frayed earth you must drab-braise lest come to pass the theorem of the merid yet least whence done by the Shiver-flier, it is a blissful spry. Certain to y worthwhile of mal-adoring. Somewhere lies Aryan’s heaven, sunnily-pilred yet he's also the pollution of universal matter. I’m wistful, our myriads of dreary transgressions, to be forgiven someday. My tender envisagement was also your harsh betrayal. Forgiven I pray, between now and the next seasonal turnings.

  Miss Sibyl Farling, he adored. In some wild, rich capacity. Aryan his opinion of, was direr. Though it tended to turn a little with the tide. They had been friends and colborators for some twenty odd years after all.

  Alice, who was now nearly fifteen and a ninth grader almost tenth, was looking very thin and slender and curved and cssically beautiful if she didn’t say so herself. She had finally decided on wearing a longish pleated skirt in a vivid teal blue-green to her new “special “school. It was pretty, not indecently short and made of a soft, fine cotton material and it went well with her bck, strappy sandals.

  She paired it with a dusky, dark rose-pink velvet coat with a hood and a midnight dark blue cotton blouse with a picture of a cat on it. Having decided she was finally ready to go to css. Today was special as a new boy was coming to the school and she couldn't wait to meet him. After all it could be him the one. She knew from books that love could strike suddenly and in expectant pces and really what could be more of an unlikely pce than this the Wrighthouse Unit for mentally disturbed adolescents?

  That she was even here, she reflected, was astounding in of itself.... She was a self-procimed outsider and proud of the fact but was far from disturbed. She had been diagnosed as an antisocial depressive for her poor grades, bizarre behaviour and avoidance of people and ended up in a mental institution of sorts. She had to admit she liked it rather better than regur school. Still rather be at home or dead even, she thought, but if I went via either of those routes, I'd never find him, she thought. I’ve already spent six months at home sick, and I’ve waited long enough.

  Alice had refused to go to school for the previous six months and instead stayed at home doing essentially nothing which was just how she liked it.

  She had hated her old school and was happy to stay in bed and read cssics or draw or watch movies on her computer all or most of the day. She did not go out much or see anyone besides the family but strangely this hardly bothered her. Alice did not like other people much and found characters in books far more engaging as companions.

  One day a doctor came to the house called in by her mother. He recommended she “catch up on her schoolwork at the Wright House Unit: a special institute for adolescent youths who'd dropped out of regur high school due to stress, drugs and mental health problems. Since she won’t willingly attend regur school, she can board at the institute during the week their set up for that and the nurses there can keep an eye on her.” The doctor said this to her mother in a "isn’t this convenient and practical," tone.

  “I’m sure you'll make lots of nice new friends,” the doctor then said with an indulgent and rather saccharine smile.

  “I never had any old friends,” Alice responded and had to bite her tongue to stop herself ughing at his shocked face.

  She deliberately remade her features into an expression of deepest despair and woe and watched his forehead crease with sympathy as he informed her that “she was a lovely young girl and would surely be very well-liked at her new school.” Evidently, he was not realising that Alice could care less what they thought of her as long as they all noticed how beautiful she was.

  There was also the remote chance he would be there. Her Prince Charming, the man she waited so long for.... he would love her, adore and appreciate her feminine, soft-spoken, and dignified beauty. He would be highly intelligent and have a lovely voice deep and quiet, be tall and intense and whisper to her of her beauty her specialness, words of eloquence would flow from his lips like poetry...But he wouldn't be all sweetness and light no way he would have an evil, cruel, nasty streak that was at the same time fun and mischievous and sardonically humorous. Together they would shut out the rest of humanity who Alice had no time for and enjoy all the beauty the world had to offer.

  The trees and the flowers, the sky and the sea, cssic literature and artworks, perhaps he will be a musician with a lovely singing voice or a poet or a brilliant scientist who will invent a drug that will stop me and him aging so that we may remain young and beautiful. He will be beautiful she thought to herself. Frozen in time in a state of perpetual perfection. My soul mate, my man out of a fairy-tale romance, she thought so reverently. I do not know exactly what he will be, but it will be something more than the typically empty vapid shells that most people are, of that, I am sure.

  “Maybe you'll at least try to make friends at this pce,” her mother pleaded also making the same mistake the doctor did of assuming Alice wanted friends. Like Evan, Alice detested the idea of friendship, had never had friends over, did not have an active social life, and despised those who did. Alice's mother didn't understand either her seeming ck of interest in the opposite sex or her ck of friends.

  She asked Alice again why she systematically rejected everyone who tried to make friends with her and simply politely declined whilst inside being (awkwardly bored and pitying of) the several boys who ventured to ask her out.

  “I don't have friends or want them,” Alice admitted “But I am interested you could even say enamoured with the idea of romance Mum,” she said. “Just not a mere boyfriend. I hate and disdain the very word. I rather like lover though it is a little old-fashioned.”

  The night before it was time to leave Alice clung to her mother tightly, her mother being the only person Alice had ever felt affection for her whole life as far as she could remember.

  “You have to be less dependent darling,” her mother whispered fondly, stroking her red-blonde hair.

  “Yes,” Alice said knowing in her heart that her love for her mother was nothing compared to him whom she so longed and waited impatiently for. He's going to be here at this pce, I know it, waiting for me. My true love the one who will give meaning to my life is coming she thought to herself. She then picked up her bag and headed out the door to where her father waited to drive her up there.

  Meanwhile, six months ago Evan Wiley had received his first message from Monovalent. It was a Virtual mail, and it expined the story of a man called Aryan and a group of scientists and two children who had been hybridized with a virus.

  Monovalent also communicated with Evan telepathically via their shared mental connection, His brain had been wireless hardwired to Monovalent's programming as had Alice's so they could communicate via wireless electrical impulses. or so Evan learned. Monovalent however sent a Virtual mail so as not to freak out the boy too much on first contact. It was soon established however that far from being freaked out by this occurrence, Evan found it intriguing as nothing had ever excited him before.

  He was informed in the Virtual mail that he was one of those children created with a purpose and now it was time for him to fulfil it. Biological warfare, a weapon to grant power to The World People’s Unity Party and eradicate all their enemies... Evan could really get on board with that.

  The very next day Evan and his parents were in the living room of the rge box-like mansion Evan called home. The huge house despite its status, high-tech gadgets and grandeur was ugly and unappealing or so he believed, wholeheartedly. The outside was painted neon white and it had a concrete garden stripped of all its trees, bushes and greenery. Evan was now refusing point bnk to attend his prestigious boys’ high school.

  The living room walls around him were sparking clean and white, the sofa pristine and white, boasting bright fairy-floss for cushions. Matching the duvets and equally candied pillows that were the garish adornments in his mother and sister’s pastel, pink-wallpapered bedrooms.

  The mansion’s immense hall was a poor man’s iridescence, shafted in manmade paint’s unnaturally bright-yellowing’s. With that cutesy fuzziness that Evan found to have the taint sickly of a canary trapped for fickle human amusement and blinding against bright-pink curtains and orange carpet.

  The games room led onto a wall coloured as if with clown’s hair and a sofa lined in the grimacing shade of his oversized lips. His dad’s room was a slightly pleasanter avocado-green yet the dining room leered pale and bluish as numbed fingers or medicine-tablet powder as did his father’s carpet and curtains.

  The rest of the house except the hall and Evan’s and his dad’s room boasted neon-white carpeting and hideous striped and flowery multi-colored curtains. Evan’s room had been lime-green once but for his birthday insisted his room be painted. Sea-green with the bedding indigo-blued though the ugly, infant boy-clothes coloured carpet and curtains remained the same.

  His mother said Evan’s darkly painted room was depressing. Evan said the rest of house was vulgar, tasteless and repugnant.

  The curtains in the rest of the house were a toxic mixture of ugly shades including brighter, lime green, canary yellow, light orange and of course his mother’s favourite colour, lurid, vibrant pink. Like the rest of the house, the curtains were a consequence of his mother’s dubious “choice” in decorations. The narrow aluminium windows gave the house a custrophobic atmosphere of suffocation.

  ‘You did so well st year Evan honey,” his mother was saying, “why are you failing now?”

  “I felt like trying st year” Evan said in a voice that was soft but highly contemptuous. ‘I wanted to see if I could come top and beat all the other boys, and now that I have, I don't need to bother anymore. I don't need to prove myself and as I have no intention of working it would be futile and a wasted effort to continue even attending now, I’m fifteen and don't have to.”

  “Actually, you have to attend till your seventeen, the rules were changed quite a while back,” his father said.

  “I know that” Evan responded, “but I’ve enrolled full-time at some music course and as that counts as education I don't actually need to attend an official high school.”

  “A music course?” His mother bnched her peevish, botoxed, and heavily made-up face white as a sheet beneath her orange-tan (a sight that made Evan physically ill). She was dressed in her usual skin-tight, neon pink pants; pastel pink high-heels, chunky brass-gold Tiffany’s jewelry, and a revealing garish top, this one lime-green. Hard to see a woman of forty dressing like a teeny-bopper with horrifically bad taste, Evan thought. Candy pink and lime green, she could not have picked two colours that go together less well.

  “What do you intend to do with your life son?” the father asked. “You can't go making a living off your violin,” he said trying to be reasonable.

  “I won't need to make a living,” Evan responded, putting derisive emphasis on the hackneyed phrase. “I’m going to become a part of Aryan Gray's Party, Unified Wealth Equities, otherwise known as Dear Leader’s, “People’s Unity Party” as soon I turn sixteen and am old enough to join. His closest employee, Monovalent, lives with him right in that beautiful gray stone manor of his and he's recently announced two more Party pces for two very special young people who will move in with him and be right at the forefront of the campaign when he runs for office. The young are the future voters and leaders of political change after all.”

  “How do you know you'll be able to rise up that high in the ranks of the Party? “ His father asked this calmly, trying to be reasonable.

  Evan looked at him with one of his direct, bnk, expressionless looks that never failed to make his father flinch. He then said with a scornful smile “I know because I’ve already been made the offer, and will be staying and studying under Aryan this next year while attending my mandatory music course.”

  The Wright House Estate turned out to be quite beautiful: an enormous mansion in vivid, dark -red, double brick with pale golden sandstone foundations at the entrance and directly beneath the dark-purple roof. Surrounded by huge oaks, jacarandas, and pine trees and trees with that wisteria hanging from them. Stone gargoyles leered out over the roof and little cherubs, and both cast strangely-shaped shadows upon the ground.

  It had a boathouse according to Lei with a sparkling sapphire blue river that you could see ships passing by on. Alice for the moment gazed at the little yellow and white frangipanis growing from the trees alongside white gardenias and roses white, dusky-pink, saffron, and red with sweet smell. Growing in the thorny green bushes that surrounded grassy trail leading into the pce. “Those are pretty, “Alice said pointing at the flowers. “Who does the gardening?”

  “An elderly dy comes twice a week,” said Lei with a shrug. “The roses were brought over from another country near a hundred years ago. They’re actually very old Heritage Rose Bushes but come now dear and I'll show you your room where you'll be sleeping...”

  Later, Alice y on her bed listening to the other girls in the room giggling quietly and having some sort of party and was gd she had declined their offer to join them and instead was pretending to be asleep her head whirling with thoughts.

  Well, I didn’t meet him today; she thought sadly. The males here are almost as bnd and vulgar as the girls. So loud, always shouting and swearing and smoking. I hate the smell of smoke and weed she thought distastefully. The teachers treat everyone like they were six years old she thought to herself. People generally seem to do this with troubled teens and those with so called "mental health" problems she reflected.

  The girl in the bed next to her was reading some trashy new novel with one-dimensional characters and mediocre plots, the kind of book that becomes a fad but is forgotten in a few years so thoroughly it’s as if it never really existed at all. Unfortunately, by then the moronic author has usually raked in a ton of undeserved money.

  Alice Cradle turned over in bed thinking of the beautiful descriptive nguage in poetry, in philosophy and from the great orators of the past and in all her favourite cssics.

  Evan, himself, enjoyed a particur novel in rge part due, to the main character’s philosophy which cimed the brilliant, intelligent, handsome and innovative like him should be somewhat exempt from the w especially in regard to ugly, mean-spirited, old ,worthless ndlord hags.

  I need to stay wild, mischievous, and free, and floating in the form of a spirit-waif. Beautiful, expressively dark-eyed, votile. Roaming out on wily, windy moors to attain for myself my tormented, lovelorn one,” she thought to herself sleepily. A heroine who willed herself to death for love… There is no greater honor.

  I want to be the creative, dreamy princess falling from the castle window. After finding out about the romantic betrayal by her intelligent, sociopathic, red-eyed commoner lover.

  Or I could be so loved it drives him to such madness, he digs me up. She pondered, rolling over onto her side.

  People could really narrate a story then; she thought I mean usually I prefer our time to the past. I do hate those who indulge in sentimentalising the past, but the inelegant often first-person prose of today’s novels is truly sickening. She closed her eyes and made a soft little sighing noise. The girl reading the book looked over but seeing Alice's eyes were closed and she looked perfectly alright if half-asleep, returned to her book.

  To say Evan surprised his parents the following morning by announcing he was returning to school would have been an unrivalled under-exaggeration. Fbbergasted, they listened as he coolly and cheerfully informed them in his lovely, high, clear, angelic voice as exquisite as those of the old, boys’ choirs, that he would be returning to school just not Sydney Boys High.

  Aryan was, according to Monovalent ill, and could not house him or Alice the other pathogen child for a while and since his parents wanted him in full-time education and he’d be living with them for the foreseeable future, he would oblige. Monovalent suggested the Wrighthouse alongside Alice as he could use his autism as a reason for attending there, and Evan applied.

  “You’ll get to meet Alice now at least even if you aren’t meeting Aryan,” Monovalent said. “Once you do meet him and come and work for us Evan, you will be like me, the best kind of weapon; one hiding in pin sight, known but never seen for its true self.”

  “I’ve picked out the pce,” Evan ter expined to his parents. “It’s called the Wright House School for adolescents and it’s for kids with various problems and reasons why they can't attend a regur school.”

  “Why on earth would you wish to attend a pce like that,” his father asked incredulously.

  One interesting character trait of Evan was his ability to ignore a question or statement that he deemed uninteresting or irrelevant, so he continued on seamlessly as if his father had not spoken. ‘I’ve applied today, and they have accepted me for next term, term three. Now it’s a five-days a week boarding school but it doesn’t cost anything, so I'll pack some stuff and head up on the train next week. I'll see you both over weekends and there's a rge complex up there, so I'll bring you back something for your birthday Mother.’

  Evan said all this very politely and despite his seeming indifference and cold attitude to his parents at all times, his mother was as always touched at the way he always remembered her and her husband’s birthday and never failed to buy them a thoughtful gift (usually, amazingly) something they'd had been really hankering for. His mother took this gesture to mean he really did care for them but couldn't show it effectively due to his autism.

  This however was not the case at all. Evan merely bought his family presents as a show of deference and politeness as they provided for him and for the moment at least, were essential to his physical wellbeing. He always knew what they wanted because he was a good listener and an attentive person in general.

  Evan deciding the conversation and consequently the matter at hand was finished simply left the room and hummed to himself quietly. He envisaged the way his parents' faces had gone from flummoxed at his announcement to indignant at his dropping out of the snooty boys school, to finally acceptance as this was hardly the strangest thing he had ever done. Evan did so many strange things how could they not be used to it by now?

  Evan meanwhile looked at his beautifully-handsome face in the bedroom mirror intoxicated with his own sheer loveliness before slumping down on his bed.

  A small smile now pyed on Evan's delicate, rose-red lips as he sat upon his bed and reached for his violin. Young Evan then proceeded to py with what Emanuel had called “meticulous precision,” a melody of a darkest mencholy. “It struck at one’s heart like a little thrum of lightening.” This coupled with how beautiful the song was, meant that if anyone but the stone-hearted Evan had been privy to hear it, they would have wept.

  The day Alice met Evan was the day Lei the head nurse informed everyone at the Wright House unit that they had to write a web journal. Lei expined this to them after their first couple of weeks at the unit. “We like to introduce this little exercise fairly early on but after having given you enough time to settle in and get to know the pce and each other. It’s for psychological reasons; we often find it to be a crucial part of your treatment. Basically, it’ll be a way to express your problems privately, you know get them of your chests,” she expined with a somewhat saccharine smile.

  As with almost everything nowadays, they were told they could use Monovalent rather than having to write by hand. Lei expined to them in detail how not too many years ago they “still had to write in those bck and yellow striped, bee-like exercise-books. “The old policy.” At the end of each week, Lei added, a teacher would “read them over to check their progress.”

  “That’s not private,” said Alice, “not if you’re reading them.”

  “Of course it will be private love,” Aidan, a tall, obese teacher with pale, pinkish skin, a snub nose, very blue eyes, and who was covered head to foot, in thick smatterings of brown freckles under long, bright red, hippy hair, and whose every movement bobbing his beard, said. “Because it’ll be confidential. As everything you tell your teachers/psychiatrists is.”

  Evan the exceptionally-beautiful blond boy who arrived two days ago was even more horrified. “An online journal? But that’s just the endeavor of a mediocre narcissist who has to stoop to the lowest common denominator.”

  Everyone gave him bnk looks.

  “It means someone who’s incredibly arrogant and stuck-up but also mediocre and can only feel important if he thinks other people find his excruciatingly tedious life as enthralling as he does,” Evan expined.

  No-one looked any the wiser after this simplified expnation.

  “Morons,” Evan muttered.

  Ambrose a chubby incredibly pin boy of thirteen, nearly fourteen, whom Evan despised, raised his hand. Ambrose was vastly overweight to the point of being obese. Round beer belly straining against clothes, gsses beneath thick, bushy bck unibrow.

  Tiny, squinty, watery eyes sat atop a rge, ft nose and big, thick-lipped blubbery mouth. He had a wide, fbby toad-like face and dyed fuchsia mop of greasy curls or so Evan described him anyway.

  “Yes Ambrose?” Beamed Lei. She liked Ambrose perhaps the only one who did.

  “I already have a realm daily-reenact,” he procimed smugly, “Can I use that? I’m sure you’ll find my nguage utilization and conveying of my emotions through the written word most proficient.”

  Alice made a being-sick noise. Evan coughed and said under his breath “pretentious, pretentious.” Lily, who was rather pretty (if your standards were low and human and vacuous) was to Evan's estimation, a bnd, small fifteen-years-old. One who dressed horribly, perhaps worse than his mother.

  He watched her rubbing long, sun-tipped (as they were called when you added that repellent lemon-colored garnish to the edges) crimson nails upon the cheap, salmon, orangey-pink folds of her mini-skirt. She put up one hand.

  God, that bright lemon-yellow top, its every stitch is garish, he thought. To some it was beautiful; a cheery little signal of youth and vibrancy (clearly thus to her) and with a fashionable if cheap cut. In your virtual dreams, better for this image pay was written upon it. She moved and dislodged a little smatter of dust from, in Evan’s humble opinion, a most unappealing, heavily applied foundation and makeup. Then said, “I think it’s a nice idea I have online virtual enactments too.”

  You would, he retorted inwardly in disgust. He didn’t say anything though. He did not want to get into a fight with her, the little bitch could be incredibly nasty in her stupid way, and he wasn’t looking for a fight.

  Lei ignored Evan and Alice and gave Lily and Ambrose an approving look, before telling them they could all return to their cssrooms. On the way back, Lily approached Alice. Ambrose joined them and began talking calling Alice pet elf (so adorable a nickname she thought) and telling her how ill he’d been as Alice nodded sympathetically. Yet was secretly as drawn to his torment that inspired his needful adoring of her as much as felt any compassion over it.

  Lily rolled her eyes and finally said, “shut up Ambrose you talk constantly, and I never get a chance to talk to Alice.”

  Ambrose then asked Alice to wait for him clinging to her arm and saying please, please stay. Lily snorted ‘why would she? She’s always trying to get away from you Ambrose.”

  “Yes, alright Lily, I was speaking to Alice not you” he said in an exasperated tone but left. Alice felt both relief and regret at avoiding those longing, puppy dog looks.

  “Are you going home tonight?” Lily then asked turning to Alice. Alice nodded wordlessly. “Oh lucky. Wish I could, hate this shitty pce,” Lily said.

  “It’ll just be Isabel and Ava and Evangeline and Ethan and Noah staying tonight. I am like so sick of them," Lily continued, you never stay over on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, you and Evan always get to go home wish I could.”

  Alice ignored Lily’s whinging partly because she was completely uninterested but also because it was all a btant lie.

  Lily loved being the centre of attention and having a whole group of friends and concerned nurses to fawn over her day and night at Wright House. She was even constantly sucking up to people there so everyone would love her. Still, she constantly compined about hating Wright House and how everyone there was a mentally-disturbed, third-rate bronzer and how she wanted to go back to regur school.

  She started telling Alice about her old school again, how “crap and totally hated it because the girls were like all sluts and fat bitches and were mean and like completely ignored her.”

  Her next school would be better more like Wright House, only a real school, not a like pretend one for “manic-depressives, regur depressive’s sociopaths, socially anxious cry-babies, bulimics, druggies and obsessive compulsives.”

  She loved her old group of friends from her st school though they were awesome. She informed Alice and she was even still in contact with them. Alice was bored witless. She fervently wished her Wright House friends were here now and weren’t all taking that stupid test so she wouldn’t be stuck talking to Lily in the first pce. Alice didn’t hate her Lily or anything really, she was okay(ish) but really spoilt, bitchy and irksome. “Alice?” Lily’s voice cut in sharply. Alice realised she was asking her something.

  “Do you want to join my Creator and me to get more people for yours? Then you'll get more say in were we go together in MV. We’re going to Paris at night this time," Lily inquired her cute face so soon to have its delicate features coarsened through age, drinking, te nights and disillusionment at a harsh, unjust world petunt.

  While her small hands still smooth and soft but with vulgar, sparkly-nail polish were idly plucking at her bright yellow top.

  Alice who was attempting not to go blind from looking at her horrible tan. Tans were only just fashionable again after years of paleness. Now it was the darker the better, till white girls made Middle-Eastern look pale; often a few shades below Indian or bck but always kept their light hair and eyes as a distinguishing feature.

  Her over-applied mascara had somewhat crumbled off. Trying to not faint as she smelt cheap deodorant, she didn’t answer. Yesterday, Evan had pointed out to Lily( completely matter of factly) that her make-up looked brighter and more garish to the eye because she wore way too much pink, lime-green and yellow and smothered herself in rosy-gold or light-dark tan

  Alice left her flesh alone and untouched, so a white skin's creamy undertone and glow was always shining through, especially on the hands, feet, forearms and cheeks and she kept her softer, pinker lips.

  Lily had looked highly offended, but Evan simply reminded her it was “only the truth,” shrugged and walked away.

  Another time she and Evan got into a disagreement about his junk food and soft drink addiction. Lily gave him her typical self-righteous healthy eating lecture. Evan then informed Lily, halfway through, that, "I kind of agree with the principle but can't be damned to apply it but also couldn’t concentrate on a thing you’re saying because that heavily-applied, skin foundation causes your rather prominent acne or “pimples” to shine like pink beacons and the effect is both nauseating and hypnotic.”

  Lily had got hysterical “That’s so mean Evan,” she whined tears in her eyes.

  “What you mean like when you told Ambrose the Atkins diet was great for fat-ass, zy people with no self-discipline,” Evan retorted his tongue dripping venom.

  Evan when Alice asked him why he brought up Lily’s acne as it seemed particurly callous had merely said, “She’s like everyone else great at doling out criticism not so good at taking it, the hypocrite. I mean when people say unfttering things to me, I just say something even more cutting back.”

  “I ignore it or cry if it’s really mean,” Alice had said with a little self-deprecating shrug. “Lily is always trying to pick a fight with people Evvy, I agree with you there. I mean all those snide little comments about people's eating habits and weight, including her so-called friends. She’s petty and self-righteous and gets hysterical if you argue back,” Alice conceded.

  “She’s also just pushy and spotty and talks and talks incessantly and never shuts up,” Evan had said sneering.

  The reason Lily was asking to friend Alice was that both Lily and Isabel saw it as their sacred duty to be the” social birds” i.e. be popur and liked by everyone, and that meant trying to make friends with everyone even a reclusive, like Alice.

  It was also a competition between the two of them to see who could have the most Virtual Realm admirers (an alternate name for Monovalent Realm) and see how many people wanted them to organize or attend their virtual party trips. She tuned out as she heard Lily say, “I’ll get it from you ter,” and then sidle off having spotted Scarlett on her way out to lunch.

  Scarlett was a big, gangly, broad-shouldered beast of a girl. Very tall, overweight and aggressive with a nose ring and dyed bright-blue hair naturally a muddy dark, Scarlett was very wide-boned with a thick, masculine face. She had bckly hairy, fat, goril arms, short, ft and wide nose, very big, square hands and feet, and massive broad shoulders.

  Her long, thin lips sat far beneath round, very wide-set, small yet bulging dull-grey eyes and long, rge, square chin. She’d nasty habit of shouting at people including Alice (responsible for coining though only in private compints to Mist, the charming description of her as a bckly-hairy goril) and even called her immature, dumb and babyish, once.

  She seemed to like Ambrose a lot for some reason though. Which everyone secretly knows is because he does the sleaze act on her, like anyone could really love her, Alice thought scathingly. People called her “dog,” “goril”, “hippo, white whale, fat cow, hideous, ugly as fuck, tranny, ogre, man and troll,” behind her back and occasionally to her face though less since she punched the st girl to say it.

  She’d slept with over twenty different boys (some tall, thin and even decent-looking much to Alice, Lily, Ava and Isabel’s chagrin). Far from ashamed boasted about it to everyone and talked about her sexual encounters in explicit detail as it made her feel desirable, loved and attractive despite all these boys discarding her like old, unwanted socks some of whom she had called, texted, followed around and virtual-mailed obsessively. With a couple it got to the point of stalking as over them cried mopingly “but he said he loved me… he told me ‘“I like really love you baby, we're totally meant to be.”’

  Alice started as Lily turned back and called out ughing to her “By the way Ambrose loves you…. He’s been going around telling everyone, do you know that Alice girl… Isn’t she just so pretty?” He even told his psychiatrist he’s utterly besotted and obsessed with you. He also confessed he’s the one who keeps calling your phone then hanging up and he’d kill himself if anything bad happened to you. He told me all this when he was drunk.”

  Alice looking embarrassed but smiled a little.

  “Don’t worry I told him Well she doesn’t like you; I’m sure she’d die first before dating you, Ambrose. God, he is a fat fuck. I also suggested maybe he kill himself out of his love for you so here’s hoping” she giggled don’t forget we are all hanging around the common room so come join me and my friends their quiet girl” she finished then hastened off.

  Isabel walked passed and called out hello to Alice but ignored Annie who was right behind her. In the distance, Alice could still hear Lily and Scarlett squealing about Lily making out with her “hot” new boyfriend. David was eighteen years old, six feet and a half, blue-eyed, muscur, and blonde. He was also repcing her dumped and left feeling rather despondent and bereft, ex-Oliver.

  “He’s just so totally hot,” Lily who was only four foot eleven herself was saying for the twelfth time. Alice csped her ears in pain at the sound of their shrill, shrieking voices. Scarlett was telling Lily that Ethan and Ambrose had “like sent a naked picture of Ethan’s ex-girlfriend (who turned Ambrose down) around the internet as revenge for breaking up with Ethan and refusing Ambrose and was almost expelled. That was what she heard on the rumour mill anyway.

  The pair’s voices rose even unbearably higher in combination with disgust, hirity, and scandalized fake sympathy. “Are you serious,” Lily kept shrieking,

  “Let’s go to the beach today Lil-flower and show off our new pink-and-yellow bikinis,” Scarlett was saying.

  The pair was hugging now (despite the fact they were constantly bad-mouthing each other behind the other's back). They were also debating star signs and what “significance they held for the future of them as an Aries and Pisces” and what “make-up eye-liner looked best and what is way too slutty.” Alice attempted to ignore the nauseating image as she walked towards the school grounds and Evan’s more intellectually stimuting company.

  Alice before her involvement with Evan and Monovalent (who had contacted her recently a little after he first messaged Evan) could have been said to neither like nor dislike people. They were just uninteresting and uninspired some morally reprehensible some not, but she felt nothing for them so weak-willed and petty compared to the precious characters out of her fantasy and science-fiction.

  She expressed great admiration for artists and cssic writers and scientists as revolutionary and “better than regur people more than human...” she said. Her mother had rather hoped this feeling might encourage her to pursue such careers and at brief point,s she showed interest and promise only to cim suddenly and bizarrely ‘It’s not my calling, I’m just not that good... and if I can’t be best who cares? And besides finding love wild and beautiful is the only thing that really matters to me”’ and retreat to the world of daydreams and idle artistic sketches. “Well what kind of an attitude is that sweetheart?” Her mother asked in despair.

  “You can't survive like that in this rough workday world.”

  “No sense, no common sense,” said the pragmatic, contentious father in disgust. Her strong, aggressive, five feet eleven alpha male (former beta) father was a votile, cantankerous economist. Though he loved his exquisite daughter he was not a protective cuddly-bear type father being a strict, belligerent disciplinarian prone to violence and who also did often holler and threw enraged tantrums over a dropped gss or his computer malfunctioning. He also had no time for Alice’s dreamy flitter-brained nonsense.

  “I just don’t want to work its degrading and horrible,” Alice replied listlessly at end of these long conversations about her future that never went anywhere.

  “Fine think of an alternative,” the father suggested once.

  “Well of course I knew you two wouldn’t understand you are ordinary and boring,” Alice had said.

  “Well, when you're living as a street beggar perhaps they'll pay you to be interesting,” said her mother sardonically.

  “Perhaps,” said Alice and went then to her room.

  In succession, she proceeded to draw a few sketches of herself as a winged human-cat chimera.

  She drew beautiful, emotive scenes and themes from some of her favourite novels, Cathy as a waif-spirit pleading to be let into to the window at Wuthering Heights, John Lidd and Lorna Doone by the ke, Prince Andrei when he first glimpses the bright beautiful Natasha Rostov, Sibyl Vane gazing at Dorian Grey whilst Dorian Grey looked at his own spectacur portrait. Gothic scenes from Gormenghast castle and its dreamy semi-heroine. All the realized heroines looked suspiciously like Alice herself and conveyed their longings as she did hers.

  Alice also sketched that gorgeous, cool, calm, and composed Evan she had a bit of an enamoured crush on. He was like Aryan and Emanuel and Monovalent a self-possessed collected Albert Speer or Caesar type both men with their special pce in history and whom, Alice found very attractive. He was someone with that kind of sociopathic intelligence that was not overtly violent and was remarkably resourceful at acquisitioning whatever they desired and a natural-born leader or someone who would be involved in great things.

  The celebrities, CEOs, politicians, high-ranking officers, army officials, and dictators of today were sometimes misguided defenders of the rgely debunked ideas of capitalism being either less of two evils or a way to ensure innovators were inspired and rewarded enough to create things to uplift all mankind. Other times they were just morally bankrupt and thus the cruder versions of this more refined sociopath, able to exercise their wilful cruelty and go forth with their ruthless ambitions. Revel in and use to their advantage, their at least indifference to human life. As long as they as sociopaths operated within the bounds of what was socially acceptable i.e. no murder sprees.

  Sociopathy as was so irritatingly-popur for pseudo-intellectuals to spout, “was a spectrum.”

  Emanuel himself wrote, “Many people are probably falling far closer to sociopathy than most believe and far further away from a genuine compassion and altruistic desire to ensure the best quality of life and least suffering for others.”

  “Sentimentality which sociopaths cked was a mundane individual’s saving grace as it rendered it more difficult for them to witness the suffering of others. Yet they were not caring enough to spring to action to prevent it. Yet sociopaths had the advantage of being able to stand back at a distance and see the hypocrisy and sentimentality most people were too mired in to see.”

  Alice had always been fascinated by the underappreciated beauty of men, male adolescents and young boys. As Emanuel would put into words, she sketched them as and felt them to be, creatures both slender muscur, and lithe. Their sinewy bodies of such graceful movement. They were like wild predators.

  She was a fan of Greek and Roman art and sculptures and all those paintings of male angels for this reason. She liked all Renaissance paintings of angels though. She had won an art prize recently in a contest for young artists and people at school and home all praised and loved her haunting, visual portraits but there was only money in modern art now which Alice utterly disdained.

  Later she would come to despise humanity even more, however, it took a while for the sweet, naive Alice to lose near all her vulnerability and lethargy and discover her virus abilities. Before she met Mist and Monovalent she was like a kitten living in a world of predators. A kitten that has not realised it has cws yet... it nature given powers of defence or to put it a more accurate way in her case, its science given defence mechanism.

  Alice had had hung out with outcasts and in-crowd alike in various settings even had them think of her as a friend. A few of them even been quite nice a weak, uninspired word that captured the banality she felt compromised such slightly appealing traits. Though most of them were quite appalling vacuous, bnd, and cruel and some even rather self-aggrandizing, a word Emanuel might have used to describe Aryan on occasion, though he at least had some cim to his self-congratution.

  All in all, though people always complimented and noticed her teachers/ strange adults fussed over her and boys and girls alike told her they wanted a chance to get to know her/talk her usually Alice had little, or no friends and people gradually drifted from her and her complete antipathy toward them.

  “Do you know Ambrose said I wasn’t loved enough,” Alice said to Evan. It was lunch break and they were eating Kit Kats, and salt and vinegar potato crisps whilst sitting upon Wright house’s grassy green grounds; sunlit rocks and rge oak trees casting shadows across their faces.

  They had met up after Alice had finally managed to shrug off the insipid Lily. The two had become fast friends due to not only there connection with Monovalent and Aryan but also their mutual disdain for everyone and everything.

  ‘He also asked me to marry him.”

  Evan sniggered “well he'd know all about being quote not loved enough end quote.”

  Alice frowned sadly ‘I knew you would understand Evvy…’ Ambrose had rather a lovelorn adoration and infatuation for Alice, and she responded, at least used him for such ego-boosting affections till had realised he was asking out every girl in the school behind her back at least once if not several times.

  Well except for Annie an unpopur and very pin, long-faced, chubby girl with a countenance only comparable to a horse. Her plump, red mouth was ugly, rge and very American; she had huge, twisted teeth, underdeveloped breasts, a too short, narrow nose, small, round, close-set light- blue eyes like little marbles and a ponytail of sparse, dull brown hair. She was also the one whom everyone made fun of.

  Alice and Evan would have been nice to her, but she was such a desperate-to-be-accepted sycophant they couldn’t quite face it, so ignored her.

  Before Evan arrived there had been Ambrose Luther Kliendefer. Sitting by herself as usual she heard a high-pitched, boyish voice with a keen earnestness and strong, self-assurance yet hint of self-mockery she found most attractive say.

  “I’m Ambrose Luther Kliendefer most hated resident here according to...Everyone I suppose. Do you mind if I take a photo of you for the commemorative yearbook I decide to make it a tradition here, now they converted half the special schools to adolescent care centres it can because a new thing.”

  Alice being from an academic, politically-minded family knew more recent governments had deals to pay developers and corporations millions to convert old public colleges and schools into "partially private-funded" universities and schools. They also funded Young Adult Counselling and Care Centres," for a growing number of children failing to grow up and leave the nest due to emotional problems and mental illness( not her mother said rolling her eyes, a cking job market).

  The companies who sponsored these pces were well known to receive more tax breaks and government funding, support than those who didn’t. With Aryan's Monovalent making offshore accounts all visible to his travelling Nano-eyes, this helped set in motion new, tighter tax evasion ws.

  Now illegal to sell in most first-world countries if you originated in one but didn’t contribute to any of their economies. Part of the end crisis and pay you country back program. For the free roads, police force, w courts, and things such as RDA and FDA standards and water safety commissions received even if paid for things like health and education privately.

  Corporates now had real incentive to use legitimate forms of taw-lowering. Were recipients of more business and support from parents and local suburban communities for helping this new generation do potentially better than the old one with their phinthropy.

  Alice then looked up into one of the most strikingly ugliest of faces she had ever seen yet with an oddly sweet and mirthful smile. It was an expression only seen on people in youth and had a hint of self-deprecating amusement in it. His ugliness that left her reeling a little at first then, oddly, she subsequently found him far more attractive than had he been more mundane even bndly pleasant of countenance. It made his appearance stark; striking the contrast of intense emotion with otherwise repellent looks appealed to the artist in her and she had a desire to sketch it.

  Alice blushed which left her nonplussed wishing bizarrely that he’d love her, noting the way he held himself with contempt yet had such an overpowering air of suppressed loneliness.

  She shook her head feeling suddenly very shy.

  Fair enough I’ll get a photo of you I promise. Oh, maybe I’ll take you off to Engnd or Paris, you’ll enjoy it there. There are just as many obnoxious idiots as here but the foods delectable and exotic and like you the ndscapes are beautiful and photogenic I would like to capture you.”

  The next day as the others cracked obscene sexual jokes in English css most of which Alice only slightly understood, she eventually asked "What does he mean?"

  Ambrose gnced up “he’s using crude metaphors to reference the masculine sexual relieving.”

  Well evident ck of eloquence in the word-py aside I’m ever astounded you don't need to complete third-grade English first to qualify for this course." He muttered to her ears only and Alice giggled.

  Noah, quite the slovenly one, was eating with his mouth open and Alice expressed disgust.

  To which Ava chimed in with “ At least he's not Ambrose."

  When the teacher expressed disappointment that Alice did not try harder with her work, and that her results were all over the pce ranging from very high to very low and asked didn’t she want to be intelligent and do well. Alice rolled her eyes before making the point the education system sylbus was hardly an accurate measure of intelligence.

  “I have to agree with her,” Ambrose said. “It may at times have some limited use in determining intelligence for certain yet is still a rather poor measure of intellectual ability.” He then whispered why do you underachieve? I know you rival my abilities intelligence- wise yet deliberately masquerade as far less bright in order to now draw attention to yourself and be left in peace.” he said astutely.

  At the same James who had been passing by said in mocking, sing- song voice to Alice "by the way Ambrose likes you..." Ambrose said with much contempt “James congrats, on use of your minuet abilities mentally to have found something actually true I do in fact have feelings for Alice.” Alice impressed by how he stood up for himself and proudly procimed his affections for her had given him a glowing look.

  Captivated by Alice’s angel-like Shiver beauty (well what romantic as Ambrose was oddly enough wouldn’t be) seemingly sweet demeanour and purity. At first strangely he used to tell in that oddly gentle, soothing voice with its hint of darkly pained tragedy of his that she was beautiful, and he had a crush on her but that he loved her ptonically which she found baffling

  Yet someone implied he had posted things on his live-re-enact that would deem otherwise and he soon began to speak of physical affection. He told her a month or two after their meeting “you are a creature of great beauty. If to me belonged you would be so precious, so delicate and pretty a China doll and I’d hold you in my arms, stroke your hair and caress you.”

  He then told Alice “I couldn’t be more besotted, so my darling please marry me”

  Alice ughed for it was well-spoken if clichéd; her heart secretly pounding and not too unkindly said she would think about it if he became rich.

  “Indeed” he said with a somewhat quizzical raising of his one eyebrow.

  Alice ashamed of her feelings for him would oscilte between standing up for him by pleading with the others to be kinder such as when one of the boys said he would give Ambrose a blow to the head to incur one of his strokes and proceeded to pretend to strike him for five minutes. Another told him to he was disgusting and to please go join a gym she said imploringly “Please don’t” the first time and “Stop that’s really unkind the second.” Even though she and Ambrose had had a falling out and she wasn’t speaking to him at the time.

  On the other hand, when he first said in css that when he travelled overseas, he would take Alice with him everyone groaned and ughed and made comments like “I think she’d be dead first, she rather die than go out with you,” and Alice insultingly moved her seat as far as away from him as possible.

  She had kept changing the name on the computer's rollcall list to read Rose and he and James and Ethan got into a fight about it, with Ambrose accusing them of “rewriting my name in a feminine form” and each denying and one remarking, "I’d call you it to your face Rose.” No-one suspected her, Alice.

  When they had all first teased her about hanging out with him, she had often said she wasn’t going to or just hadn’t been sure how to get off it and had once pinched her nose to make her voice high in a nasal fashion to intone mockingly “I’m Ambrose” to which one of the nicer girls said she was being to mean. Or when he said he wasn’t a betting man and Alice said he wasn’t any kind of man, and everyone ughed he begged her ter in a high tone not to say anything like that again.

  “Did you know what queen bitch did today?” Alice asked back in the present.

  “She was eating this giant cookie she offered some to everyone including me, and I said no cause I was feeling ill and also, she touched it. She said no-one would eat because it was too fattening, and we were all watching our figures then turned to that obese girl Rosalie. She then said well except you Rosalie, you have been eating my cookies like all fucking day. She was so embarrassed chubby Rosalie, saying how Lily the whingey kept offering it to her and I just felt so bad for her.”

  Evan nodded “our other Little Miss Popurity, Isabel, was no better she whispered she was hideous then got one of her friends to ask Annie how she could stand being such a human being no-one would ever love, and ter asked Sally how she could cope being a friendless freak and stood back, watching, smirking.

  Also, she told everywhere behind Ambrose’s back that far from going out with him she thought he must be the fucking fugliest person in the world, and she felt he should audition for that new show Society’s Losers.”

  “What a bitch,” said Alice. “God, I hate them all.”

  “Yesterday Scarlett the pin-looking hypocrite told Annie she looked like a horse. Then again Ambrose told me “’ not to tell Scarlett he said it, but he only pretends to find her physically attractive because she’s his friend and in fact thinks she’s ugly and looks like a man.”’

  Evan ughed. “Ava and Ethan when we were supposed to choose a partner for the field trip, said ‘“But miss, Sally has no friends.”’

  “Oh, poor Sally,” said Shiver. She rather liked Sally, Sally alongside Ambrose was one of the subdued, intelligent misfits with interests beyond the utterly mediocre, things such as politics, art, music or literature and that endearing outsider’s perspective Shiver liked to adopt as friends and a kind, quiet girl at that.

  She read in the library with Shiver, and they would discuss their books the cssic old-fashioned movies they secretly watched, their love of cute animals and interests in politics. They both liked art and drawing and painting a few times sketching ndscapes and faces and anime together. Sally’s father left when she was four and she and her mother had lived in poverty in a tiny apartment complex ever since while her dad meanwhile was happily remarried with a son by his new wife.

  Her mother though technically a victim was in Alice’s view quite toxic; obsessively controlled her daughter’s life not allowing her eat junk food or go out with friends or shop alone in case she got abducted. She maintained no such safety constraints on her own behaviour however, donning three inch, high-heels, low-cut blouses and tight little miniskirts or clingy jeans even to parents evenings. Bought over countless men often little more than strangers and giggled for them like a teenage schoolgirl.

  Sally’s mother also spoke of how men constantly honked and whistled at her whenever she walked down the street. “They do this,” Sally pointed out wryly groaning with embarrassment and shame “not because she’s as pretty and young looking as she thinks she is but because she unconsciously juts out her hips, butt and cleavage to capture their attentions. When she picked me up from primary school, she’d do it and once the other kids ughed and imitated her wiggling their own little butts,” Alice had a few derisive snorts combined with sympathy with Sally in regards to this.

  Aryan had said it was appalling how women and children in divorce were left with not enough to support themselves. He said however it was business and government’s fault not men like feminist cimed because they underpaid people and gave them pittances for child-support.

  He pnned to enact the one-wage rule which meant anyone with a full-time job should earn enough to support a family and rge families would be government subsidised. The government would purchase and build then provide houses for lower css individuals at very cheap set prices and would make obtaining stable work and owning property a fundamental right.

  “The most amazing thing about this pce” though, Evan said, “is that the adults; the teachers and nurses I mean aren’t any better. When Shaya heard Lily say Ambrose is coming to that end-of-year Christmas party, she’s organizing, she visibly groaned and said "Oh Ambrose? God he's not that really unappealing, weird-looking boy, isn’t he?"

  "Yeah, it’s that ugly, overweight Ambrose- pain in the arse," someone else gigged and was shushed, but indulgently.

  Alice nodded. “When Ambrose first talked of asking me out and Shaya overheard, she asked with a sarcastic ugh “do you think Ambrose is handsome Alice?” When I didn’t answer her, she ughed again.

  “Ambrose didn’t respond either and I all I could do was hot-tail it out of there without answering either one of them. Shaya was of course just calling him ugly in a nasty subtle way which made me feel so bad.

  What a slightly ashamed Alice didn’t inform Evan was that she had in fact snapped without thinking, “do I have to answer that?”

  And then Ethan not Shaya, had ughed and said, “No, you can take the fifth and no answers on the grounds I may incriminate myself.”

  We bonded over our love of cats, Brosey and me,” Alice was saying now in the present.

  “He takes such good care of his beautiful bck cat Python named so for his gorgeous emerald, green eyes. It’s a pity he smells so bad though because of his disabilities almost makes me retch sometimes but only right up close.”

  “Anyhow Ariel my beautiful Siamese cat is named after the Little Mermaid. After Alice in Wondernd and Pinocchio it’s my all-time Disney best. Though Bambi has loveliest animation and alongside Dumbo is sweetest and most heart-warming.

  "My cat Ariel has a pointy, pale face, these great, rosy-brown ears and all over little reddish stripes as is a fme-point named for Ariel's red locks. Huge, emotional, blue eyes and so cute, loyal, sweet."

  "She pys fetch like a dog, jumps up to hug my calf wrapping her forelegs around it and sleeps on my bed but she wouldn’t want to leave our home. So, when we join up with Aryan, I’ll have to leave her behind.”

  “My mother wouldn’t let me, or my sister have animals she thought they made too much mess,” Evan said.

  “Siamese used to be owned exclusively by royalty it was illegal for commoners to own one,” Shiver said proudly.

  “Also, Ambrose informed me he has pns to work in s…”

  “Yes, pns to work in a circus,” Evan interrupted. “Is that what you were going to say?”

  “What you mean in the freak show?” Alice said, embarrassed but amused. “No, I was going to say software engineering I just stumbled over the words a little, so the s sounded a bit like a c.”

  “Really reveals what you think about him though, considering circus freak jumped to mind so rapidly. Bit of a Freudian slip, I think. Show inkblots of him and ask what comes to mind and circus freak will be out of your mouth before you can say Ambrose,” Evan ughed.

  “In regards to the adults here,” he continued, “I just love how the teachers and nurses here insult the kids in their charge and even swear.

  “Public schools and institutions are a total anarchy without any government funding,” Shiver commented after a brief silence.

  “Remember when Ethan told Miss Allen to fuck off and she told him “Fuck off yourself, you little piece of rat-shit?” Shiver continued. “I also still can’t believe we have to share our Maths, English and Science books and take it in turns using the school’s two painting brushes in art css. We watch videos all the time so the teachers don’t have to be stuffed, you know, teaching us. People talk non-stop through css and throw things and text each on their cell phones.”

  “When anyone asks for help the teachers just snap read your friggen text-book, I guess no-one in public school gets anything even close to resembling an education anymore. None of the computers here work, either,” Alice finished.

  Evan nodded his silvery blond head. “The entire school’s falling apart literally. Yesterday a chunk of pster fell out of the wall and Aiden just said, “oh stuff it; this pce is a bloody hell-hole.”

  Evan prior to this start of this conversation had been waiting for Alice outside the residential building. “Are you going home tonight?” He asked her now.

  “No, Alice said. “I go home on Wednesdays, and I thought Tuesday was your day at home?”

  “No actually I stay or go home about fifty-fifty, depending on whether I feel I can’t stand my house or this loser hovel of spastic simpletons more,” Evan said grinning.

  “Did you hear them yesterday,” Alice wailed. “First, they were banging on about how Ambrose is always touching and hugging them, on account of he's such a perverted slime ball. You'd think if they hated it so much, they’d just stop being his friend.”

  Earlier in the day Mist who was off sick had left Alice all by herself in css with the others Alice had informed Evan of what transpired for amusement’s sake. “Today,” Alice, said, “they were discussing Ambrose (again).”

  “He's so fat and really, really ugly what with that hairy-caterpilr sleeping on his face- bushy unibrow over squinty little eyes and fat, fpping goldfish lips not to mention beer belly, his boobs are bigger than yours Alice, and yours are pretty big,” he said leeringly.

  “Man, it was great when Ethan asked if he was pregnant,” Noah continued on saying. Despite his supposed religious inclinations, he was crude, perverted and vulgar, Alice thought in disbelief.

  Lily soon chimed in “he also like lies all the time. Yesterday he told me, he um like shot a guy.”

  Actually, he'd told Alice this too: that he was a knife-wielding burgr who he'd shot in the leg Alice in turn had told Evan who ughed. ‘You didn’t possibly believe him did you Alice? I mean really, burgrs don’t even rob people at night much, they generally strike during the day when everyone's out.”

  “I know and of course not, I said to him, I'd call his dad and ask him about it. He said his dad didn’t know though, that he was out at the time.”

  “Oh, how convenient,” Evan said scathingly. “So, what did you do then” he asked still sniggering disdainfully.

  “I said I’d ask his mother,” Alice replied.

  “What about the police,” Evan said as his ughter subsided. “They had nothing to say about him shooting a man?”

  “Well, he said he got a caution,” Alice said her small, crimson, Cupid’s bow’ mouth turning downwards into a frown, “so I did ask him, see I told you I didn’t believe it.”

  Alice had listened as Lily described Ambrose’s test tall tales further; he cimed apparently that two of his online friends committed suicide.

  “They probably just wanted to get out of fucking talking to him,” Ethan suggested “so they like sent him a message faking their death.”

  Alice even ughed at this one. “He also said one of his ex- girlfriends is a murderer and that he like got drunk and ended up halfway across the bloody country (probably somewhere way out in the outback) and that’s why he was te for school this morning,” Lily said.

  “His lying’s bad enough but he hugged me once you know,” said Isabel looking scandalised “it was awful.”

  Isabel Rose Blitzer was s pretty half-child, if a bit pinkish. Chubby and very round-faced (an unfortunate feature that had left Alice nicknaming her Isabel Rose Bulldog). A bit thin-lipped but with silky, dark-brown hair. Her physique was plump in that charming youthful manner, face endowed with big, blue eyes and fairly delicate features rather like Lily (though as Lily loved to point out she was slimmer; a slender yet curvaceous girl).

  Also, like Lily, Isabel, was starting to lose the remnants of her childhood cuteness and to become another vulgar, trashy adult. She had also become more bulgy-bellied(modern gluttony and all) and her flesh had over these past few months unhealthily-reddened. Soon she might join the nd of modern, cynical women with their often-hardened features. Her straight, curve-less lips, bony chin, and slightly too big, peasant bones, Alice found quite unfortunate. Isabel also had subtle lines and a sun-damaged coarseness that comes from a stressful, smoking, heavy-drinking lifestyle and that unsophisticated cruelty etching itself on her little face.

  “Poor Bel! He hugged you?

  Or so they all excimed.

  “How did you bear it?”

  “I told him he was a total fat, fucking pig and to hurry up and like commit suicide spare us all his presence as we were sick of his high-pitched, bloody nasally voice. God, I hate his voice I just like totally can’t stand it when he talks or more accurately squeaks and the way he actually thinks were like his fucking friends.”

  Lily ughed yeah and “God he’s so ugly I feel sorry for his future kids if anyone would actually marry him that is. ”

  “It’s not just him, Annie thinks we all like her too. I mean I’m a nice person. A really nice person, not a bitch like Carrie for instance. You know that fourteen-year-old who stole Ava’s boyfriend. I mean I really always do try to be a good person,” said Isabel hastily.

  “All the year eights are bitches, losers, and motherfucking little mini skanks,” said Lily.

  “That Ambrose though I mean fuck I agree he’s just so like… really super fat and completely hideous, like a big, greasy, fat toad” Isabel continued her heavily plucked brows furrowing down in distaste. “He totally dresses like a farmer and is so annoying and like all that shit you kind of wish he would just die. He really asks to be made fun of.”

  “I mean hell, yesterday he actually asked me out. Me! I mean totally fucking gross! Any sane person would have to like die before dating him. Though he did py a song for me on the piano telling me how much he loves me and how beautiful I am which was nice.”

  “He deserves to be treated this way we should all like ignore him tomorrow and shit,” Lily nodded.

  Bastard, thought Alice pying and dedicating songs to me on the piano was supposed to exclusively our special thing because I was his muse.

  “Yeah, I’m nice too and like all that,” Lily continued, “People like him, bring it on themselves. It’s like Annie… I try to be nice to her, I even spoke to her when she sat next to me in css yesterday, mostly cause she just won’t stop following me around."

  "Seriously though she’s so like motherfucking irritating the way she goes on and on like talking all the time and there’s that long, horsey, ugly-ass face” said Lily in disgust. “She kept telling me how pretty she thought my hair was and asking did I like, want to come over to her house sometime. Yeah, as if Annie, fucking Luddite loser,” Lily giggled.

  Lily had asked Alice if she could go over to her house once because it had a pool Alice remembered, but she declined politely.

  “Sir,” Isabel called to the teacher “can we have a break?” The teacher didn’t even look up from the printed notes he was pretending to read in order to avoid teaching the css.

  “This pce sucks,” Isabel said. “This school’s like total bullcrap. They even never let us have breaks anymore not since we were gone for forty minutes on a five-minute break. If school wasn’t so bloody boring though…” “Where’s my weed… My edibles,” Isabel suddenly asked.

  “Here on the table,” said Lily.

  “Oh yeah my seven-year-old brother took my stash st week, little shit he even like stole my earrings once,” Isabel said. “I got the brat back though.”

  “I locked him in our broom cupboard until he was like sobbing his eyes out and crying let me out, let me out, please Bel I can’t breathe. He’s really custrophobic too so he’ll think twice before doing something like that again.”

  Isabel’s face had that expression stupid people get when they think they have done something very clever but have only succeeded in doing something nasty.

  Lily and Ethan both ughed.

  “God Bel you’re such a bitch…” Ethan snorted.

  “Like I am not I just don’t like people swiping or even touching my things or watching my shows. My stupid little sister’s not allowed to watch Sex Scandal that’s my show. Anyway, at least I’m not like that liar and fuck- ugly, tub of rd Ambrose,” Isabel spat out spitefully.

  “Hey, I have a theory on why Ambrose is so fat...” Ethan said suddenly. “He’s like Pinocchio only instead of his nose growing when he lies it’s his big, fat ass.” Once again, they all cracked up.

  “Well, my mum doesn’t want me going home tomorrow because she thinks I should stay over and work on my assignment instead,” said Alice to Evan after this cssroom torture. She picked at the wool of her rich, soft- purple cardigan with stubborn will stopping herself from a nasty childhood habit of chewing upon it and looked up at Evan from a sketch of beautiful old buildings like churches or manors and some indulgent, pastel portrait of herself as Persephone in captivity. Except the nd of the dead was structured like a zoo with the spirits caged.

  She also depicted herself as fallen angel by begging, angered despair beset and yet with faint hint she was of her fate, in denial: with littlest, insane smile creeping.

  Drew herself as a little mermaid and the swan-woman from the thus-themed fairy-tale. As a pnt-child chimera and a female made of machinery with lovely but oddly gssy look. Then finally as a demon worthy of being Lucifer's daughter.

  A creature of rge, pointy ears, dark curls of midnight-blue hair, richest eyes and rge, bck, batlike wings. Shiver was obsessed with her own beauty. She had also just finished surmising what happened during Evan’s absence and was now wrinkling her nose in an irritated fashion.

  “Nice portraits you should upload them for the fur-fuggers,” Evan commented.

  “Is that a combination-bastardisation of fur-fuckers and tree huggers Evvy? Also, beastlike and animalistic qualities in stories, poetry and mythology predate them, the fantasy already existed. They painted them too. Drew all the things I do. Fairies, angels, griffins, gargoyles and sirens.”

  “Chimeras and beast-men were in romances for eons, from the man who stole the wings of the swan-woman to marry her, to Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid and even the Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein and of course all those stupid vampire, angel, alien and werewolf love stories. Problem with fur-fags is they take it too far; from monstrous yet still clearly human, to cartoons and sexual anthropomorphism of animals.”

  Nice job with that saving distinction, so what will you do?” Evan asked curiously.

  ‘I’m going to go home anyway. I can work just as easily on my project there’ Alice said. She stretched a little; her long slender arms and equally long slender legs which were very well-proportioned for her small size twitching.

  “Oh, rebel girl,” said Evan sarcastically, “I’m so proud.”

  “Shut up” said Alice “you’re just pissed I’m leaving you all alone with the loser brigade. Enjoy Lily’s whinging, Isabel’s bitching and whining, Ethan’s petty nastiness, Ambrose the bi-sexual sleaze (Ambrose cimed to have dated another “boy” despite the fact bets were still on he had never actually dated anyone) and all there immense superficiality and stupidity. I’m personally incredibly gd to miss it all for a day.”

  “Yeah well at least I’m not the bi-sexual sleaze’s ex-lover,” said Evan with a maliciously snide snigger

  “I was never his lover” cried Alice looking humiliated. “He just informed me “’I agreed to be lovers”’ when I did not such thing and oh once he stroked and kissed my hair and held me.”

  “After you jumped his bones, you mean?” Referencing a very sexually repressed( due to her desire to be pure and bizarre fear of anything sexual and her unusual attractions) Alice, who as saying goodbye clung to Ambrose like a child. Someone she felt very safe with and he in return had pulled her into his arms. She had even twice cried and on numerous occasions pretended to be upset and frightened in order to entice him to speak in a soothing voice and comfort her by putting his arm around her and pet her shoulder reassuringly without having to admit her feelings for him.

  “He’s always touching me,” Alice snapped back indignantly “long before I did that.”

  “You and every other girl: seriously I saw Scarlett with her head on his shoulder and there are photos of him with an arm around Lily and one with him embracing Isabel and he cims on his blog he’s always hugging them, and they let him, what attention whores,” Evan commented

  “Oh, I’m sorry it wasn’t’ just a date, you two actually tied the knot, didn’t you?” Evan said, “so he’s your husband.”

  Alice gred at him vehemently, ‘I hope they stick you in the oven till you burn, just like the malevolent old hag in Hansel and Gretel Evan’ she said.

  “Don’t worry my lonely, lost, romance-less sleeping beauty said Evan. I’m sure your precious knight Ambrose will come rescue you from your tower again and sweep you into his fat arms if he doesn’t have a cholesterol-induced heart attack first.”

  The reason the two of them kept referencing fairy tales was because the other day they had discovered an old book of fairy tales in the school library and had been so bored they actually read them cover to cover.

  “God, I hate fat people,” Evan sneered, “they are so zy.”

  “That’s not very nice,” said Alice feeling bad the prior teasing of her about Ambrose forgotten. “It can’t be easy being overweight. I know I’d feel terrible if it were me as the fat kid, the butt of everyone’s jokes, appalling health you know he has muscur dystrophy and a genetic heart problem. He has been having on and off-again mini-strokes since infancy due to a genetic condition, is tired all the time, unattractive in appearance and wears ugly gsses. Oh yeah yesterday I could smell the chemical changes yesterday he had very strong sickliness hanging off him, he was quite ill.”

  Monovalent interpreted it as a slight artery build up and what you know he nearly had heart-attack when saw me earlier. Was having my own problems that day actually. I ate a lot of sugar cause I was so hungry. I could smell that sweet excess of it coming out through my pores, before our helper-bacteria absorbed and cleared it out.”

  “Oh yeah and he’s crushingly poor; family can’t even afford a computer so gave him that VR Com my parents bought me, kill me if they knew. Not to mention his clothes are so cheap, pid and farmer-like which everyone mocks him constantly about.”

  “Not to mention his mother barely notices he’s alive and his father made him skip grades, insults him calling him a freaky mental patient, Ditch, sick fuck, fat loser, and asking him how he can stand being such a failure at everything he does or tries.”

  “Gee you really get off on his disability and near deformity, don’t you? As well as over him living his whole life poverty-stricken, alone and unloved. Makes you feel such a super special thing; only who can save him, and he can in return love you more passionately, devotedly, needfully than any of the lowly normal could,” Evan said astutely to Alice’s indignant gasp.

  “You would never let yourself get that way fat I mean,” Evan countered changing the subject. “Ambrose is a disgusting pig all the fat fuck needs to do is go on a diet or exercise or simply stop shoving down thrice the amount of food his body requires daily.”

  Alice looked troubled but decided to let the matter of if it was Ambrose's own fault drop. Instead, she said why did you have to hurt him by pointing out he was grossly-fat though. I mean did you have to say directly to his face “You do realize how repulsively overweight you are don’t you?”

  “This may surprise you,” Evan said shrugging, “but often obese people don’t know. They lie to themselves and tell themselves that they’re not actually that fat, they’re just a little “chubbier” than others and rgely-built.”

  Alice sighed. “Ambrose almost looked like he might cry. He said his response to your query about his weight issues was ‘“yes, I did realize I'm fat. Thanks for pointing it out.”’

  “Which I thought was a pretty good attempt at taking an insult graciously on the whole.”

  “Really? He was crying?” Said Evan, “oh God what a wimp.” He then ughed.

  Alice glowered at him.

  “No, I said he looked like he might do and why do you have to be so mean to him all the time. I understand about doing and saying nasty things to the others they deserve it. Ambrose is pathetic though. I mean I hate him now because of what he did to me, pretending to love only me while secretly sleazing onto every girl here and telling her he loves her. You however were mean to him right from the start long before we knew he was such a sleaze.”

  As she was saying all this, the thought did linger in her head that every time Ambrose was bullied, mocked or derided by the others she was tempted to scream at him, “Stand up for yourself you spineless wimp: I hate and despise whipped men. This is even more the reason I don’t date you than your ugliness or fatness or even unfaithful ways. Men who crumble, simper and pander especially to women are the lowest of the low; show some testosterone- fuelled backbone. Don’t ask me with a hangdog expression if you can “caress me and stroke my hair and kiss me” expecting a no just do it!” Shiver was so emphatic she wouldn’t watch or read anything where the lead men were anything short of masculine, intelligent and powerful. Mentally Shiver disenfranchised any other men from their gender.

  “I am also the only one who told you he had such a wandering eye,” Evan pointed out revoking her out of her ruminations.

  “Yes,” said Alice “but did you really have to do it in css just before Miss Allen arrived by saying loud enough so everyone could hear “Oh Ambrose likes you Lily he was telling me about how hot you are and how is going ask you out if Alice says no.”

  “You needed to know the truth,” Evan said without any compassion in his tone.

  “And Ambrose only acts all nice around you too impress you anyway because you’re so gullible.”

  Alice flushed “That’s all well and good but you still haven’t expined why you’re always so cruel to him”.

  “He was always a desperate little sycophant, for one,” Evan replied scornfully. “Even to teachers and adult figures. Also, he thinks the popur brigade are actually his friends when they just hang around with him for someone to mock and to have as the butt of all their imbecilic jokes.”

  “Also, he never says or does crude things so you can hear it or in front of you because he wants to impress you. Finally, I actually like Ambrose or did. You’re the one who’s always hated him.”

  “I do not hate him” said Alice indignantly “or at least I didn’t used to. I’m the one who took that sign Ethan and Isabel put on his back off, the one that said “hi, I’m Brosy the next inceldom massacre waiting to happen or just forty-year-old virgin. I also got them to all to stop cracking jokes about how his ass couldn't fit through the door so we would have to get a new one. Or that nightly ritual where everyone in year ten would shout at dessert-time “Quick hide the cakes Ambrose coming”. I told them to quit asking him, so eight months pregnant Ambrose is it a boy, girl oh no, wait I know, twins?”

  “I even got Ethan and Noah to stop pying that game called “punch and kick the fat German boy (a.k.a Ambrose) till he cries or at least does all our homework. Ambrose had a concussion, bruises and a sprained arm because of it. He was called fat, ugly. unlovable and berated for years, including by his own dad hates him, his mum left, and he even attempted suicide when he was twelve and then I came, and my love and beauty saved him.”

  “ He was my friend first, back then none of the jerks would even talk to him it was just me and him. Then the other girls tried to take him off of me as they were jealous of how he adored and doted on me, and they still come over and act all flirty with him whenever he’s with me.”

  “No, you didn’t stop the mocking,” said Evan. “All you did was get them to stop saying and doing those things in front of you. Personally, I’m surprised you pulled it off guess despite everything most people like you."

  "Your sweet, diffident and shy, at least on the surface but I find myself wondering if they’d still think you so nice if knew you were stealing all their stuff. Doubt they’d still be saying oh Alice is so cute and sweet and innocent she even sticks up for that loser Ambrose. On that note I hear you still haven’t returned Lily’s ring or Noah’s bible or Ambrose’s math book, Ethan’s V-com or Isabel’s mobile phone.”

  “Why should I return them?” Alice asked. “They’re nasty little hypocrites and bullies they deserve to lose their things."

  “Besides, being nice to them means they continue to tell me I’m pretty, gorgeous, beautiful and have such nice hair etc. and call me elf cause of my pointed little ears and face. They keep trying to make me friends with me and flirt with me (ha ha) and they try get me to hang out with them and then I spy on them and report back to you.”

  “In regard to Ambrose…he was different before your arrival. He was bright and honest and didn’t lie, so rare today. He said he tells the truth as best he can which I believed. Also, when he speaks or blushes, he shows his feelings nakedly. Most people fake theirs.”

  “What do you care if he’s forthright you lie all the time,” Mist inquired, amused.

  “Not to people I find worthy, I’m forthcoming with them, or try to be.”

  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention Isabel or Lily can’t recall which, was trying to be smart with much pretentious opining (yet not even sophisticated enough to fully achieve that). Resulting in much hirity. She gave an impassioned speech on healthy attitudes toward intercourse, saying with so clearly-clever and enlightened teachings and oh-so-moral ideas ced with imperious and self-congratutory sarcasm, “How we must combat the frightening evil virus of teenage promiscuity.”

  “I asked her innocently, ‘“if she were aware one of its main side effects was STDs or viral infection so it kind of was a pgue,”’ and I think I stumped her cause she was stuttering about ‘“freedom and teaching youth’s protection”’ and so forth.”

  Well, considering the millions of infections yearly and thousands of deaths with ample, universal education for fifty almost years it clearly wasn’t working that well,”’ I said, and she nearly cried, Jesus.”

  “Better than Noah’s response though. Saying she is too young for love and her brain isn’t developed until twenty-five. Everyone told him of course, that this asinine, dirt-common, modern-held belief was so very true and deep. Young people are able to work, vote, drive, and go to war to die and all dangerous things but love is a step too far.

  “So, no way. Only wrinkled old people with their speed-dating, soap operas and dinner-parties and marketing jobs bring us such innovation. Only they, with their sophisticated, thirty-plus clubbing, refusal to settle down and constant whinging and compining, have the necessary maturity and wisdom.”

  “We should be partying and buying everything, to fuel funds into our corporate overlords including psychiatrists (who decided families bad, materialism good as they make money to counsel people’s lonely misery through therapy). Embrace polygamous sex without attachment. What? don’t want sex without love dies ? Too bad. Promiscuity it’s empowering take it.”

  ‘“I also asked him if this was the case, why people in the past married and had children much earlier yet stayed together much longer.”’

  “He hemmed and hawed. Stammered something about being forced to stay together by social forces and convention.”

  “Yeah, to some extent genius but there were many youthful-begun, happy marriages including my great-grandparents. Children are raised well in whole households, by so-called immatures. When people didn’t think despite their own gring fws, they were entitled to perfect partners who validate and entertain them like personal buffets.”

  This is the same overcompensating for being perceived as an intolerant Christen, as that Catholic psycho who thought what he calls “eight-month foetus” in the womb not a baby and cannot be referred to a such and if pregnant women are killed it doesn’t count, and she should be able to abort anytime.”

  Which except for deformities and horrible illness, is retarded. There’s no te-term abortion simply induced bour which is dangerous to both parties best left to emergencies and baby might likely survive if treated.”

  Carrying it an extra month or so when you had ample time to terminate earlier is not unreasonable; get over yourself feminists. Unless their saying they have the right to murder a viable child before it leaves the womb by literal termination and well, that’s disgusting and unconscionable and why killing you humans is the only way.”

  Evan ughed.

  “I have heard worse out of his mouth. He told me fetishes were part of the healthy, human sexual spectrum including bestiality. Who cares if some of the animals are killed torturously in the process, judging people, even animal-killers and viotors is wrong.”

  “Not to mention some real unhygienic stuff that makes butt-sex or not bathing for a year seem saintly and probably endangers all whom even shake the hand of these sickos.”

  Suddenly a spider (Alice hated spiders dreadfully) crawled onto Alice’s leg, and she screamed and leaped into Evan’s arms crying “Get it off, get it off” using the opportunity to touch him, bury her head in his long, beautiful throat and slim, yet broadened shoulder.

  Evan brushed the spider off contemptuously with a look of boredom and semi-disgust “They are revolting creatures yet really Alice, cowering like that is a little excessive don’t you think?” He didn’t push her off however as he would with anyone else and she disentangled herself seconds ter.

  “Speaking of Ambrose loving you, I heard you told old Brosy you hated him when he confessed or rather professed his love for you, and he informed you once again that everyone’s hates him when they first meet him, and you’d get over it,” Evan commented. Great work saying that though we all know you secretly love him.”

  “Without further ado, here are my, Evan’s, Transtion of Things Alice Has Said to Ambrose:”

  “I hate you”

  “What she really means: I love you, but I am too ashamed to admit it because you are bloody ugly, so I’ll be nasty instead to get your attention and combat my frustrations.”

  “Stop annoying me and kill yourself Ambrose.”

  “What she really means: I think it would be so amazing if you committed suicide for me and gave my worthless, banal life some meagre meaning.”

  Tears filled in Alice's eyes “God I can’t believe I said that… it was so petty. He’ll never want me again I mean he said he forgave me even before my apology but still.”

  “What was particurly fantastic,” Evan said ignoring her distress, “was how you said it in front of people and James was like yeah kill yourself Ambrose and he’s all distraught and ciming, “no I won’t kill myself” and then turns to you saying in an even more devastated tone “even over you.”

  “Ambrose and me, we had a bit of a thing Evvy, and it didn’t even go that well, we were always arguing, and besides he spreads rumours about me saying horrible things about Lily and Ava and the others and that I’m insanely jealous of the attention he pays them,” Alice said stamping her foot.

  Evan ughed loudly. “That’s because he likes you and wants to isote you to make you more dependent, he tried turning me against you, but I told him where to stick it. It is also pin wishful thinking”. “I still think it was priceless when Ambrose snapped at me "I'm a better match for Alice than you," when he was talking about his “wonderful photos” of this supposedly attractive female friend of his whose is in fact quite ordinary."

  "Well, I stepped in and said most of the people he considered attractive were vastly overrated and all were in fact dull-eyed barbies with vapid, soulless expressions and you with your cssically beautiful appearance and conveying of emotional depth were the nicest-looking girl I’d seen by far” Evan said.

  “Really,” said Alice. “You said that about me?” She looked touched.

  “Yeah, I really detest it when people call you hot or "cute" or pretty in a small and big-eyed, baby-faced, Bambi-like way. You’re so much more than that insipid description. Anyway, Ambrose naturally took my compliment the wrong way and babbled on about you being his muse or something, how his love and adoration for you was breaking him apart, he wanted to marry you because you’re were so perfect and I were a cretin idiot and not worthy, and all this annoying over-the-top bthering on till I finally said ‘‘‘look you can keep her okay buddy, I don’t want her.”’

  “Gee thanks Evvy,” said Alice somewhat sarcastically. “How noble of you.”

  She showed Evan the picture she had been sketching which was of Ambrose and she immediately proceeded to stab her pencil through his face saying, “why don’t you love me, you fat, ugly jerk?”

  “Maybe because you speak of him with such high regard like that? You told him he was a big, fat loser the other day and I have to say he looked a bit heartbroken after you said it.”

  “Well, he was sucking up to the drunken-partier brigade I got sick of it,” Alice replied petuntly.

  “I think he really does care about you Alice, even though he asks out other girls all the time and on the plus side they do always say no,” Evan said thoughtfully.

  “I know,” said Alice quietly but it’s just not enough.” She sighed. The two psed into silence for a while which Alice broke by saying “and besides he’s ugly,” which made them both burst into spontaneous ughter. ‘Not to mention his favourite colour is pink Evvy,” said Alice. Evan stared at her in stunned disbelief, “you’re not fucking serious?”

  “I am,” said Alice shaking her little head. “Yesterday he asked what my favourite colour was and told me his was pink and did I think that was weird.”

  “I said no then muttered under my breath sissy boy. I mean it’s no wonder he likes Isabel Rose Bulldog so much or its partially the reason. She is always dressing in pink, including those abysmal, pale pastel pink boots. Those bright candy-pink pants and matching tops with pink fairy princess scrawled across them, sparkly pink eye shadow and pink mini-skirts and even those neon pink short shorts,” Alice continued.

  “She shouldn’t wear so much pink it draws attention to her pink, pig-like complexion and her eye shadow empathizes how watery- pale and small her irises are by enrging the white of the eye,” Evan commented.

  “Speaking of Isabel Rose Bulldog she had the most fabulous temper tantrum st week. She stood right in front of the entrance to the cssroom and shouted this school sucks. She then proceeded to wave her arms in the air like a chimpanzee and shout “fuck off, fuck off,” to anyone who ventured near her including the teachers.”

  “None of us could get into the cssroom for over twenty minutes. Eventually, Aiden carried her off still kicking and screaming “fuck off, fuck off, you fat, hairy bastard,” it was fantastic. They have since upped her dose of Ritalin. She was also suspended for a day so that’s why she wasn’t here st Thursday, the night after your night at home.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this before that would have been priceless to witness,” Evan inquired with some indignation and disappointment.

  Alice shrugged “forgot I guess.”

  “So, what was your favourite colour? What did you tell Ambrose?” Evan asked.

  “Oh, I just said bck,” Alice said.

  “Like your soul you mean,” Evan said with a smile.

  He’s convinced I’m in love with him. Saying to me recently when I asked if he had been cheating on me with other girls, I know now he has (sort of) “I thought you might be in love with me or when I looked over at him yesterday and he said, ‘“you’re really smitten with me aren’t you, Alice?”’ And st week “oh, you don’t want me to hang out with my new friends or anyone else, you want me all to yourself because your so smitten.”

  “Well to be fair you are,” Evan said.

  I am not,” Alice sniffed sulkily.

  “Anyhow I think I’m going do some reading now Evvy,” Alice said.

  “Read what, may I boredly ask?” Evan replied.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe The Lord of the Rings I could use a good fantasy book.

  “Either that or I’ll read a book with a good sexy maniputor and murderer in it like Steerpike.

  “I also admire Dickens Louisa whose ruthless, pragmatic father could never quite drive dreamy, creative spark out of her. Same as my parents very boring and uncreative and want me to give all my dreams to have no love or depth and just live all dreary.”

  “Mervyn Peake does art and writes poetry in his books too, beautiful poetry,” she said ruminatively.’ He’s an artist as well his books are filled with his illustrations. His artworks are unique but definitely magnificent,” she finished her face raptured.

  She made to walk off and Evan called after her smirking “Don’t forget Monovalent is helping us hack Monovalent realm to delete everyone here’s Monovalent realm from their holographic computers. You know so they look like they kind of people who wouldn’t have the technology the lowest of the low.”

  Alice stopped, turned around and grinned. ‘Yeah, she said so they’ll look like friendless losers just like us only with lower IQs and uglier faces.’

  “We have accounts,” Mist pointed out.

  “Yes,” said Alice, “but we don’t use them the way they do.”

  “No,” replied Mist. “We use them better, to act out daydreams and fantasies they could never conceive of and to broadcast political views beyond their comprehension.”

  Shaya, the head nurse at the Wright House Convalescent Unit was stressed to the point of despondency as she rushed around trying to get the inmates prepared for the trip to the zoo. Every week they took the adolescents on some sort of outing to the movies or the park, even the Christmas lights.

  The kids with violence issues who usually stayed in separate residential quarters (presumably so they didn't commit mass homicides on all the quieter patients) also went and this meant they always went on these little outings with a whole team of nurses handy. This way anyone who stepped out of line could be medicated to a drug-addled stupor, pretty damn sharpish. Wrinkling her harrowed forehead, she ticked all the residents’ names off a list. “Carrie?”

  “Here.”

  “Oliver?”

  “Here.”

  When she got to Alice's name, she sighed, this was going to be difficult. Just yesterday to get out of another girl’s farewell, Alice insisted her mental illness was getting worse and that the world got more colourless and blurry every day and her “hallucinations” were causing her to be unable to tell fantasy from reality, so she needed to rest to clear her head.

  She had said all this with a completely straight, sweet face and big, innocent eyes as Alice as is the mark of a good liar, always believed her fabrications in the heat of the moment. She also lied (though Shaya didn’t know this) about having a heart condition, pregnancy (Evan as the father), or heart failure for amusement. Asking for operation donations or money for infant items and care. Monovalent made these heart-string puller profiles and accounts look completely legitimate.

  So she and Evan made up fake charities and scammed money they didn’t need off of people with their Monovalent Realm accounts showing Alice under different names looking wane, stricken, and ill. They cut off from their home allowance, snuck out on weekends during free time, and bought junk food, expensive clothes, jewellery, curtains, antiques, and bedding as in their words the Wrighthouse furnishings were vulgar and eye-burning.

  They both requested personal rooms and luckily three were still avaible. The others shared single-gender, seven-person bedroom dormitories.

  “Evan?” Shaya called finally.

  “Yes Miss?” Said Evan, with a bnd and impertinent little smile that Shaya knew just spelt mischief and mayhem and trouble.

  “Please go fetch Alice for me; we don't want to be te,” Shaya said. Five minutes ter they still hadn't returned, and Shaya knew she'd have to go find them. Alice attended approximately one in every five outings usually citing ill health as a reason for not going.  She had been examined by a doctor who said, “she was fine”. “Unless ziness and lethargy were an illness in which case he said with some wry humour, “she was terminally afflicted.”

  Shaya entered the room stepping over Alice’s mini-V-COM and where Evan was perched on Alice's bed.

  Alice's round and delicate little nose both rather small and soft yet full, not with that nasty, narrowed pinch of many woman’s or adolescent female’s diminutive noses (something Emanuel detested about them) was parked under a book with a slice of vanil cake, a choc-chip muffin and a bowl of chocote mousse next to her. She’d clearly begged them from the kitchens.

  The cafeteria dy Mia was much taken with that “beautiful little Alice girl” and equally “wonderful little boy Evan such cute little darlings.” Overdressed as usual was Little Miss Prissy Alice, in a pale-grey silk dress and strappy bck sandals and a dark navy-blue coat.

  “Come on Alice,” Lei said putting on a wan smile when really, she would have liked to throttle the girl; “you know you have to go on the outings there mandatory.”

  “I would but I’m allergic to fresh air and sunshine though,” Alice said seriously.

  “No-one's allergic to sunshine,” said Shaya calmly. “Now come downstairs dear.”

  “I'll come down to the foyer” said Alice solemnly,” but I shan't go outside, or I shall become very ill.”

  “You see Shaya,” Alice continued, “I think I have developed te-onset albinism, so the sun damages my super sensitive skin. If you don't believe me just look how pale I am, see look!” She held out a lily-white hand for Shaya to inspect.

  “You don't have albinism, Alice.” said Shaya, “Because your eyes are hazel-brown not pink, and your hair is strawberry blonde not white.”

  “Actually,” Evan chimed in, “Not all albinos have pale eyes and hair. Some have blue or even brown eyes. Look it up Miss, if you don't believe me.”

  ‘I don't need to look it up,” said Shaya sounding exasperated. “Because I’ve read Alice's medical records, and I know she's not an albino so just shut-up the both of you. Everyone else has been waiting on the bus for you two hooligans for near ten minutes now. So just hurry up and get on the bloody fucking bus.”

  Well, they did get on the "bloody bus" and sat together at the front of the bus as far away from the other residents as possible.

  It took forever before they got to the zoo, and it was one long heinous bus ride that involved listening to bad modern music which both Alice and Evan blocked their ears against. It also included hearing Ambrose make a moron of himself by requesting old or orchestral music (which Alice liked too but you didn’t admit that) and then telling the head nurse Lei about his recent dates in a fancy French restaurant. Evan snorted out loud at this and Alice elbowed him quietly repressing her own snorts as they leapt out of the bus in a frenzied manner.

  Ava for her part, had often informed Ambrose he would be too scared to even kiss a girl to which he replied after the st time she’d said that, that he’d entered her photo and info on a dating site which shut her up rather.

  An old dy when they reached the sidewalk was crossing the road, her frail legs trembling as she slowly but steadily walked. “I'll go help her, shall I?” Said Ethan galntly, striding toward her and saying self-importantly, “Need some help ma'am?”

  “No thanks,” she replied quietly.

  Ethan, a rather affronted look on his face walked back over to his friends. “Fuck, what a bloody stupid bitch.” he intoned. “Refusing my offer of help like that.”

  “Like what a total old… So ungrateful and shit,” agreed Isabel.

  “Hope you fall and die and go to hell you old fucking bitch!” Screamed Lily, loudly making a face at her.

  Evan turned to Alice whispering quietly “oh no Lil, why don’t you do us the immense honour of dying instead, then me, Alice and the old dy can party at your funeral.”

  “Children please,” Lei implored “stop that all of you.”

  “Hey, look, I think some ridiculously tall and thin old guy is following you, Lei,” said Isabel suddenly.

  “Yeah, you got yourself a secret admirer,” Ethan sneered.

  “He’s creepy…” Sally murmured. “His looks remind me of the bogeyman or slender man.”

  “Or the Grim Reaper,” Annie nodded. He’s so long, and real bony and makes no sound when he moves, and I can just tell there’s something really wrong with his face. Its shape is off… For a second it seemed he had no face at all and the way he just disappeared…”

  “I don’t see anything,” Evan said meanwhile.

  Lei told them all to hush and turned to Alice and Evan now her face stern. “Now we don’t want a repeat of st week…” She said. She was referring of course to when they had all gone to the movies, and everyone had been allowed to choose what they wanted to see. The bulk of the group saw some action thriller movie. The rest (all girls) saw a romantic comedy with a schmaltzy title.

  Alice and Evan however, decided to see a documentary/movie entitled History’s Most Notorious and Evil Rulers and then proceeded to shout throughout the entire thing; “oh no Nero, you were doing so well killing Christians and striking blows for equality and gay marriage and gender-bending.”

  “Hitler, Hitler don’t kill yourself we love you, our supreme overlord."

  “Hitler just wanted to align the entire world and make it a pristine snowfall; a hailing sea of pure white beauty”.

  More shrieks were soon heard.

  “Mao, Mao come back and make China great again, “and even, “You’re Russia’s greatest hero, marry me, Stalin,” shouted by Alice with a spectacur performance of real tears. It was fabulous until they got thrown out of the theatre by an usher still stifling sniggering giggles.

  A wilderness extinct is my Felidae, rose-breasted. Dwindling is possum brush-tailed, loveliest. You’re my humanly flint, fakery, the bower or “the folly of God”, curtaining the sun as it vails or is at least splintered. My flying fox, sugar glider, my ringed seal. The heavenliest finding, newly found. Between hour nearest and eternity, in dismal dusk and desert dust, love over-all-else reigning. Return to this bck willow my welcome swallow. As my now Shiver Flowerfile of The Lailear. (They that deign to others coldly-leave and y iller, in the devouring ilea). E.M.R