Chapter five: Political ideology and the ruminations of love

  You, dies, need an art critic with some taste and decency...which one of you drew this camellia? The water in the bowl looks like motor oil (Ignatius. J. Reilly A Confederacy of Dunces)

  Enrapture the innermost heart with hardship and humility. Past today’s ample sadnesses, people listless waned, I want the vulnerable not vilified and yet strength celebrated. Cast out this ghastly image where weakness is social standing. Victimhood is king. And you sell that perceived pitifulness of standing or nature for political and corporate accodes. I have no merit to my name but bck or yellow flesh, or love for my own sexual kind or between my legs is not a branch but a hollow. Therefore, my lowliness must be worshipped and elevate me to great things. Where all things are bright, all are gray and banal.

  Victimhood is King by A.A.G and E.M.R

  Aryan was the most beautiful, solemn, and dignified-looking man Shiver had ever seen. He dressed in dark usually bck (though sometimes midnight blue), well-tailored, silk or linen business suits that despite their exquisite, expensive cut would have looked pompous or gawky and awkward on almost anyone else but on him, gave an air of the sophisticated and sombre. His physique was tall, lean, and quite thin with long bones, and a perfectly sculptured chest and he clearly stood well over six feet.

  He was built of lithe, slender muscles and long, well-shaped legs and long, strong arms. He had broad, masculine shoulders and a slender waist tapering down to even narrower hips. His skin was smooth and pale-white tinged with ivory. His rge, long-shed almond eyes were the vivid, purple-hued, dark red of wine and rubies or the blood from a deep wound. Contacts, maybe? How edgy.

  The pupils were vast. His maroon irises did not allow much left-over room for the white part of the eye. Their smouldering, deep purple-red was not natural of course, unlike Mist’s uniquely-purple, Shiver eyes. Aryan (Monovalent’s idea and colour choices) had received a new treatment produced by a company that used gene manipution to alter eye and hair colour; it was vastly expensive and not avaible to the mass majority but quite the rage for the exceedingly wealthy.

  The hair adorning his great head was straight and lustre raven-bck, but amongst the dark strands were surprisingly pale hairs of a silvery-white blond. These ashen locks he’d used mild gene manipution to acquire and glimmered pale-silver against the rest. His features were quite regur; a straight nose, curved, scarlet mouth, but with a heaviest brow and jaw, alongside conversely, the finest shape of face.

  He was in Shiver’s smug assertion to herself the epitome of male beauty, strength, and masculinity; with deep, intense, soulful eyes. Ninety percent of women hailed as great beauties in popur culture could not hold, she deemed, a wick of a candle towards his pale, frozen elegance.

  Mist was lovely too and in his own effeminate way equally beautiful. Both of them had that rare masculine beauty that boasts the elegance and best features of man and woman. Slender and smooth and soulfully rge-eyed as a stunning female, powerful and alluding to strength and muscur power that is not overt but discreet as a delicately handsome male.

  Clearly and coldly logical, clever and scientific was Aryan’s brain so it wasn’t all looks. His mind conveyed to her through his various thought patterns and actions the “maleness” of his genius and she could little help but be an avid admirer.

  Mist was also that very sociopathic type of male; of the conniving and calcuting variety but with a touch of soft-headed dreaminess and a sense of dark, sarcastic humor that was all his own. Appearance-wise he was quite the angel boy, perfect fragile, exquisite, and Dorian Gray pretty (Alice had a bit of a thing for the wolf-vilin in sheep’s clothing. Mist, like Dorian, was so very fair, rose-white, and sweet she thought,t and could even have made a homosexual man very content had he not been as straight as she was (very).

  Particurly pretty and effeminate was our slender beauty Mist when he donned that ivory white sheepskin coat, he loved so much. Shiver was happily gazing at Aryan’s smouldering male brand of handsomeness and beauty while she was thinking all this. Not as such in its real form but depicted on a vast movie-sized television at the end of the room.

  Aryan was on television because he was giving one of his senatorial speeches and Shiver was only half-watching him since she was so busy drifting off into awe-struck thought over how amazingly handsome he was. Her rge, dark eyes remained on the internet TV broadcasting his speech, but her mind slipped into space. She moved her long, slender, white fingers unwittingly upon the pages of a book she was reading (another tragic, cssic novel full of romance and the loveliness of an old English dialect) and that was soon limply hanging from her pale, delicate hands.

  Aryan spoke at the political convention wonderfully. All the other party leaders and politicians were loud and crass and crude and bumbling, they were woefully inarticute. They clearly didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. Aryan alone spoke perfectly, his soft, low, well-moduted voice conveying integrity and intelligence.

  “We can help workers and the Australian economy if we move industries such as the textile industry, canned goods, the airline industry, the toy, and children’s products industry, the car manufactures and household appliances manufacturers back here to Australia instead of outsourcing and importing from pces like India and China and Taiwan.”

  “The advantage of this is that instead of the cheap inferior products that break down easily and often contain dangerous poisons and contaminants not to mention the animal testing done for cosmetics when made over there, we can manufacture more expensive but safer, better-crafted products that will st.”

  “So essentially, it will cost less in the long run as products will st five years instead of eight months. Not to mention better-working wages as when the supply of workers exceeds demands wages drastically fall and when people can’t afford basic necessities like housing and food the economy suffers as people are not purchasing. Over time technology will improve so robots can repce unskilled bour and improve quality of life for more citizens.”

  “As long people are willing to put up with shoddy products to save money (in theory) and there a cheap supply of workers here and overseas there will not be enough incentive to improve technology’s capacity for longevity (products are shorter-lived than ten, twenty even forty years plus years ago) or to build androids to repce the humans in difficult and dangerous jobs. Capitalism is hindering technology.”

  Shiver’s brain turned off completely around the part where he moved on to discussing the bour and societal worth of the lower and middle csses. “Immigration is a strain on our economy, environment, and resources and drives down wages drastically yet could not be more prevalent in today’s society. The concept that rge corporations promote about aging poputions causing gaps and the workforce having bour and skills shortages which cause its need is btantly untrue. We merely have stopped training our own people for certain tasks and must begin to do so again.”

  “People can’t not survive on the wages paid to them, water and nd must be conserved and migration limited for starters it takes doctors from truly needy third-world nations who already do without medical care too often. Third-world people are desperate enough to take back-breaking unskilled work but it’s not sustainable and they must find different work or end up homeless and all it does is promote discontent among the unskilled bour force (divide and conquer rule.)”

  “Humans are social beings who over time formed a collective of specialized knowledge,” Aryan said, his words concise and carefully enunciated. “Thus, we can conduct a prosperous, complex, industrial society using mass production and innovation. This is best achieved by having people taught to execute and perform important specialized skills. This maximizes productivity more than unskilled bour and is essential because we cannot survive without our poor or middle-css.”

  She would ter come to be a little more enamoured Aryan’s political ideology.

  Several weeks after their moving into his house Aryan went out and brought a woman back with him. A young woman early to mid-twenties and pretty in a bnd way, he introduced her as my "friend" Natalie.

  “He's been trolling the streets for easy sluts,” commented Mist to a distraught Shiver who had been rather love-struck of Aryan tely. This happened more and more with Aryan bringing different women each time as the weeks flew by and Mist and Shiver campaigned and attended rallies, charity events, and meetings of various left-wing groups. “I hate those women,” Shiver would miserably and frequently tell Mist and Anne-Marie and Laurence and anyone who would listen. Then she would block her ears to the sound of Aryan and his dy friends. The newspapers started reporting on his numerous affairs after a while and saying perhaps at thirty-nine he should be thinking of settling down and raising a family. Shiver stormed out at this story.

  Aryan saw his reputation being hit however and suggested one night at the dinner table that perhaps he should marry, to get the public on his side. Shiver at this pushed her pte away and as far as Mist could tell didn’t eat for a week. Aryan had been telling Shiver he loved her but like a precious jewel or doll is loved. Monovalent expined to her that this meant his love was distant and so he had trouble expressing it.

  Aryan meanwhile wrote poems and love letters which he gave to Shiver, and he told her he wanted to be her lover. If only she were older, he cimed, it was she he would marry. All this seemed to make her very happy though Mist was suspicious as Aryan treated them both with a cool reserve and showed little to no affection.

  He bought them many gifts which Shiver misconstrued to be symbols and tokens of his love and devotion. Mist who hailed from a wealthy, but shallow family knew, however, that such eborate gifts were often a substitute for love not a sign of it. Sweet nothings and lies or not, the gifts she received were all aesthetically-beautiful and pleasing.

  Shiver picked out some of these gifts herself as did Aryan and Mist but Monovalent picked the overwhelming majority under Emanuel’s instruction and insistence. She filled her room with enormous realistic dolls houses; slender-built, silver, copper, cobalt, and gold vases filled with garden flowers even a rge white rocking horse. She obtained jewellery including Georgian rings, delicate silver neckces, and precious stones including sapphires, rubies, and emeralds.

  Decorated the walls with gold and silver-framed paintings including ndscapes depicting scenes of wild night storms with lightning and rain, dark shadowy forests, or snowing, white winters. She had beautiful, fey, portrait paintings remastered, remodelled ones from the Renaissance and the Pre-Raphaelite period, and even a couple of originals that cost a fortune.

  They were of Christian and Greek mythology. Depicted a bckened hell and demons fighting gargoyles, and a Lucifer no longer mingled with the fire, gold, and sea-gss of heaven. Its grandest angels. As well as a valley of white-gowned fairies and sirens flighted. Nightly flowers starred upon their isnd. Golden-headed goddesses, mermaids of reddened locks and brightest scales. Angelic and bright-eyed young maidens. Warrier men sworded and with rippling muscles. Apple-cheeked, cherubic children. Elves, and more elfish nymphs dancing in impish gdes. In both rich, flowing dresses and oddly-shadowy garments.

  These dies of legend and muse, all had graceful and ethereal poses. Eyes of bittersweet mencholy, whose gaze would be harrowing even the hands that held roses. Ivory skin was paired with beguiling bck or lightly-fair, or fireside red-gold tresses. Portraits that somehow all looked rather like her, Shiver. Shiver would swap out the paintings on a weekly basis, putting a few on her bedroom walls; the rest she pced in other rooms in the enormous manor house.

  She collected expensive soft toys including a pointy-faced, little brush-tail possum with dense, soft gray fur, a bushy tail, cute pink nose, huge ears, and excessively rge dark eyes. It was realistic enough that Anne-Marie nearly had a heart attack thinking a real-live possum had crawled in from outside and climbed onto Shiver’s bed.

  It was also an electronic robotic possum. Constructed by an Australian Electronics and Toys Company using the remote, Monovalent AI. It would scamper up the walls and even into people’s ps making little growling noises.

  Shiver named the possum Echo. Echo would cling to Shiver’s arm and sit upon her shoulder and even on top of her head and respond to the sound of her voice (due to voice recognition software). Shiver also had a white reading mp and custom-made beautiful silk, velvet, and ce garments including flowing, rippling dresses and pleated, draping skirts. That Monovalent often chose. They tended to be tight at the waist but wide and billowy where they finished at the calf or just above the knee.

  There were intricately-detailed bird and cat statues throughout her room, her favourite y a green-eyed smoky gray cat lying down. She littered her rosewood desk with old-fashioned China dolls and porcein figurines some from as far back as the Victorian period others meticulously crafted remakes.

  She stood proud in this room full of hauntingly huge and sweet-looking eyes and beautiful hair shades. Silky bck and copper and pale gold. Graced by the gleaming, feminine light of little rosebud mouths and delicate white faces so very much like Shiver’s own.

  Mist’s room, was equally one of gray-stone grandeur. With the silvered-fair pillow the dusk blue bedding and the deeply violet rug under draping, wine-coloured curtains. Contained his violin and musical sheets and professional studio portraits of an exquisitely-young man who looked suspiciously like a slightly altered version of Mist.

  He had a collection of painstakingly, handsomely-crafted, antique radios and some watches and motor vehicles at the height of industry and vintage French cabinets.

  Crimson dark mp, dragon statues, frog statues and gargoyles in bck pots, professional photographs depicting dark but stunning scenery, including a dew-covered rose shot in ultraviolet light and a deliberately slightly blurred shot of the Snowy Mountains. Photos of a half-grown Siamese cat shot in infrared light.

  There were photos of other animals too, including frogs, cats, foxes, racoons; colourful birds and butterflies. There were shots of Aryan’s manor and the cherry orchard out back. Even satellite pictures of the Milky Way, blue-green earth from distance, Saturn’s rings and dark matter. He was sent also anonymously an undersea photo taken by one of Monovalent’s travelling Nano-eyes. A gift from two of his creators. Monovalent himself, and one, Emanuel Roe.

  For my Mist, the Xestospongia muta. Penned in symbols his unique wiring recognised as nguage of the Androvalent-feir. Emanuel and Aryan’s programming.

  Emanuel described the picture in a note attached; “see the patterns volute in a Shiver Helix strand: as graceful and varied as if belonging to most vast a family felid and under microscope see its writings that give rise to prosperous, internal stone and chemical bonds.”

  Monovalent in all his helpfulness had annotated the delivered note: stone means bone. He doesn’t care for the word bone, I suppose.

  Mist’s wardrobe contained expensive clothes including silk, 100% cotton and linen and a multitude of books most of them cssics and an enormous model train set. Shiver had a dark reddish-brown mahogany bookcase full of books and poetry too. There was also an extensive library downstairs containing a myriad of famous cssics and non-fiction academic works.

  The other thing they both had in their rooms was rge, silver-framed, full-length mirrors so as to view themselves in all their spectacur, stunning glory from every conceivable angle. The pair spent more time admiring themselves than just about than anything else. Woe be, to anything that got in the way of what Anne-Marie secretly dubbed, their mirror time. She had caught them admiring themselves with profound awe several times when she entered their rooms to clean. She secretly suspected the two loved beautiful things so much because they reminded them of themselves, and she remarked this to Aryan who ughed and said, “Very possibly.”

  Aryan started telling Shiver that they could be together very soon, and he even proposed in November with a gray diamond Georgian ring whose delicate, rose-gold band, intertwined copper and gold. The wedding ring once belonged to a duchess with very small; slender, delicate hands, and Shiver’s perfect bone structure enabled her to wear what ninety-nine percent of modern women couldn’t.

  Emanuel gave it explicitly to Aryan, to give to Shiver. When he heard about the engagement( a secret from all others yet Emanuel had a way of finding out things) merely said “If you must propose to my dearest, at least do so with my ring; I know you haven’t given her one yet as you have been overseas. She needs to be adorned by the token of her true creator, grant me this courtesy old friend,” he said most politely yet when Aryan’s back turned, his smile grew sinister, eyes colder than a frozen sea.

  Aryan did this and to Shiver he cimed he would marry her "someday" not too long from now. Once she got a little older and the controversy was lessened but now like a pcebo that in a person’s mind seems to be alleviating their sickness, lies, and obfuscations must aly people’s suspicions and set them for at least a little while, to rest.

  Mist was still sure that Aryan was lying to Shiver, coercing and maniputing her. He had growing evidence and an underlying intrinsic sense of what type of games a man like Aryan was best at and how his methods of control went beyond the simple power, crude fttery, tedious repetition of clichéd slogans, and scare tactics popur today.

  He suspected Monovalent (not Aryan, it wasn’t really his style) started the whole thing as a method of controlling Shiver because she was a weak link, less ambitious, sociopathic, and ruthless than had been intended. Shiver had a reason for helping their organization and it wasn’t the power-hungry reasons a Shiver would do it for...but rather romance. Her Achilles heel, no one could have predicted. That she would fall for Aryan was no surprise though.

  Monovalent, the master maniputor, would have persuaded Aryan to go along with it; he would have orchestrated the whole thing. Aryan would have participated reluctantly but seen the ruse as truly the only way. This was all a hundred percent accurate., The things Aryan said and did were stolen from Emanuel or occasionally came straight out of romance novels and movies Monovalent had analysed: often quite obscure ones so Shiver wouldn’t cotton on.

  Mist was correct about the ruse but wrong about the motivation: it was about pying his creators against each other( despite them both being one of the few people he actually was fond of and could rete to on an intellectual level or had any respect for) the rule of divide and conquer. If Aryan stole Shiver from Emanuel, he would do anything to dispose the man and y cim to her and Monovalent needed him if he ever wished to overthrow Aryan and be free and able to take control of the world himself someday.

  The precious item idea was all Monovalent though he came up with it to expin the baffling disinterest underneath the pretty words and gifts (flowers, artworks and sculptures even a fennec fox) of Aryan. The day Aryan brought the little fennec fox just eight weeks old Shiver had excimed in eted wonder. She had never seen one before.

  The fox, a little male with huge, bat-like ears, a fluffy tail, enormous, dark, expressive eyes, a tiny pointy face and soft, pale, red-gold fur was exquisite. “He’s lovely and looks like just you, Shiver,” Aryan said, “so I thought you might like him.”

  “He’s got your colouring and everything,” Mist said with a grin.

  “He’s wet too, you bathed him, Aryan.”

  “Waterbaby.” Shiver excimed, gncing up at a red tuft of hair sticking up from the fox’s head, her voice tight with emotion.

  “Waterbaby?” Asked Mist. “You mean like from the Disney short you apparently sat so close-up watching you nearly burnt out your corneas at three. Those old, musical cartoons; the symphony music was quite adept, most pleasing.”

  Shiver nodded: It had visuals I admire, of sweetness, innocence, and beauty rendered in soft colours and like lulby nd a certain, almost nightmarish surrealism representative of a child’s overactive, imaginative mind.

  “People can say it's overly-cutsie but it was sincere in its honey, not the saccharine fakery you get now; rigid moral lessons and reassurances we're all simply wonderful, original people and as long don’t judge another's decision, all lives are valid. Nothing is too dangerous is destructive just another beautiful choice. Everything as good as everything else.”

  “Also, Water Babies told a story with animation alone. Not everything has to be crude, or overt to be a memorable tale.” Shiver uttered all this, quite dreamily.

  "It also reminds me of animation and art as it once was; where spirits of fire made smoky beasts or reigned in the skies. Trumpets, hats, and propellers were made from flowers and cherries were bells. Mermaid-like babies slept in lilies, flew on birds, and prayed to God before sleep. Swam with caterpilrs on boat-pnts. Where women goddesses emerged from shells.”

  “My dad said I was the cutest thing ever, tracking every fluidly-animated movement with my little fingers and huge, wondering eyes ash-blonde, baby-down of curls bouncing everywhere. That’s what I’m going to call him, it’s perfect.”

  Waterbaby adored Shiver and he and Echo both competed for Shiver’s attention, and she would often carry one in her arms and the other on her shoulder. Waterbaby would cry in anguish if Shiver left the room and he would make happy, squealing, squeaky noises when she came back.

  Meanwhile, the Party was working on a revised budget pn. Including taking money spent on frivolous sporting events such as the Olympics and commonwealth games, money pumped into private schools and subsides of oft-unnecessary, highly expensive ADHD and anti-depressant medications, spent on bicycle roads and utilise it more lucratively in deprived areas such as hospitals, government subsidization of Veterinary and dental care, and on dipidated public schools.

  Jobs such as general practitioner, unspecialized hospital doctor, and many kinds of wyers( in family w for example) had lost their prestige and reasonable income since big practicing firms increasingly took over from independent private practices and paid their employees, particurly women and migrant pittances.

  This was another one of the things Shiver, Mist and the rest of Aryan’s party were attempting to eradicate, the downgrading of jobs once women and immigrants moved into high-paying, white male-dominated areas. As well as legistion protecting workers’ rights including ws that could prevent big companies from setting up w firms, medical practices, plumbing, electrician, computer repair, and handyman services as a way to make money off other people’s hard work.

  Supply also exceeded demand in most jobs so graduating students were far from guaranteed a job even in areas like w and medicine. This was one reason why dealing with overpopution as well as outsourcing, low wages,s and long working hours was crucial to people’s well-being and the economy. Bill the alcohol companies and fast-food industries for weight and alcohol-reted illnesses and drunk driving accidents”.

  “As well as incur massive fines on pstic surgeons if they botched a breast augmentation or any other unnecessary surgeries on patients (who nearly all had a form of body dimorphic disorder or put more accurately more insecurities and preoccupation with themselves and the superficial in a vapid materialist world than common sense or perspective). This included banning citizens from going to underqualified surgeons practicing overseas in third-world countries and was all on the party agenda.

  The abolishing of humiliating food stamps and the reinstatement of welfare cash payments. The legalization of euthanasia as a fundamental right for those paralyzed and in debilitating pain or unable to perform even the simplest tasks for themselves without assistance was also an issue the Party had been raising in parliament.

  “Quality of life over quantity is always the better choice,” Aryan said at a televised political convention he alone was invited to as he was the only one of his Party who had a seat in parliament. He’d ran and won a good ten years in a row as an independent and he had been slowly making legistive changes from the inside that were crucial to his pns.

  Now was the time to really wield power though, to get the Party elected to government and himself as prime minister in a ndslide majority. Now that he had his little weapons at his side

  “Stringent rules such as signed or oral contracts for people applying for euthanasia would have to be set up though as has been done in countries like Sweden,” Shiver said when asked for her thoughts on the matter at a Party rally. The final issues included enacting legistion preventing businesses from funding political campaigns in return for political favours and repealing ws that made it more difficult for young people and immigrants to register to vote.

  “Thank you, Howard, you little dwarf bastard with the hairy mammoth eyebrows for this and work choices. Not to mention you fooling the public by presenting a fa?ade of anti-immigration policy partially by phrasing it as race/css issues.

  Despite rge numbers of middle-css immigrants coming from Britain and the United States even Sweden and Canada and your smokescreen of tough refugee policies despite them being a fraction of immigrants (a fact unbeknownst to much of the public) to win votes while having the highest level of migrant workers coming in under your reign to appease big business.”

  “They are the ones who spread the lies the self-righteous right and progressives alike devour with greed; about white poor being too zy to do jobs such as fruit picking and thus deserving of their fate, when in fact they will if desperate enough and with more just ws and less overpopution, all jobs from white-colr to blue-colr, would pay better. It is immoral business and oversupply that stops people working and more importantly, earning a living from work, not refusal.”

  “As for race, this is yet another diversion tactic to divide the masses and a btant falsehood: a rge company just recently hired poor, young aboriginal men not only dark-skinned but the original owners of this nd to do abattoir work for a while, till they got migrants in to do it cheaper. Leaving the former employees jobless”

  “So many immigration facts are hiding in pin sight and only a click away to the official page of the government statistics,” Aryan said in sarcastic disgust to Monovalent.

  Money and access to better technology, rural areas and environmental initiatives, and clean energy were also on Aryan’s current agenda. They pnned major increases to social welfare and changing ws and worldwide, computer, spying technology, keeping tabs to prevent the wealthy from periodically engaging in tax evasion. This and other new Tax Laws ensured the wealthy paid a much higher tax rate than the poor who were below a certain income, not taxed.

  The Cafe D'uanna was located in a shopping center frequently visited in the mornings by middle-aged women and men who clearly had nothing better to do on a weekday morning.

  It was also visited however by a doe-eyed, strawberry blonde little girl....who always seemed to attract rather a lot of attention from the local shoppers. She loved to py dress up and always wore the same thing, a short-sleeved, delicate silk dress. One rippled. Sometimes appearing pale-gray others near-white, and so fine it looked like it was made of cobwebs.

  The flowing dress had pale pearl buttons, and she ever donned it with lovely, strappy, silver high-heeled shoes. Despite the fact it was only early autumn she always shivered with cold and assembled amongst her daily worn garments, a rge, white bonnet. She looked in her old-fashioned flowing, white dress like a virginal, young princess of extreme purity, an angel, or a delicate white rose.

  She had a manner that was extremely strange. She would race around the pce as if her slender, elongated limbs were filled with a boundless energy going into shop after shop buying clothes, old-fashioned porcein-skinned China dolls, and stuffed animals. Goodness knows where she procured the money from for, she looked perpetually pale and peaky and underfed with bruised under-eyes yet surprisingly full cheeks and her little, round, red lips the most beautiful dark rose-pink.

  Further still she certainly bought a decent amount of pizzas, fries and burgers and one scoop triple chocote the other toffee ice-creams and caramel milkshakes and donuts.

  Every lunchtime however she would stop at the Cafe D'uanna and meet a boy...

  He was a Prince Charming, handsome boy who dressed not as if he were on his way to a fancy dress party like she did but in attendance at a nineteen-sixties, rock concert. His attire consisted of cotton, silk or linen shirts in an array of dark, vivid colours. Bck, midnight-blue, dark-purple, dark-red, dark-green or dark-gray and a hooded jacket. Dark-blue or dark-grey jeans or lustrous dark silk or linen pants either bck or dark blue.

  He would always pair these outndish vintage clothes with very expensive-looking gray sneakers.  He, this companion of hers, would get them a table near the back of the restaurant where there was a rge stained-gss window that let in pale winter sunlight.

  The woman who ran the pce, Andrea, was in Mist’s estimation a most wispy, unattractive, mousy a woman; all pinkish-white flesh, long, dull and medium brown hair-tails and close-set ferrety features. Consisting of little, yellow-flecked brown eyes, small, thin, pink lips and tiny, short, button nose.

  Today she dressed to his abject disgust, in bright orange top, vile, light green pants and electric blue shirt. Andrea had since these adolescents first appeared the strangest feeling, she knew them... something tugged at her memory. She'd seen these kids before. It was not till the second week that they had visited Cafe D’uanna, and she had sent Sally over to take their order that she realised who they were.

  “Gary,” she excimed excitedly to the cook, “it’s Shiver and Mist, those new members of World Unified. Only fifteen yet he offered them positions they both actually have mental health issues were treated for but so do one in three people now and their Party leader said it was a symptom of our capitalist and quick-fix society over- diagnosis of mental health issues.”

  “Anyway, were on the television st week with the leader, that really hot guy.” “The one who says raising living standards will ssh right down the number of women wanting to go into the prostitution and porn industry,” Andrea finished. This policy of the Party interested her as she considered herself a feminist.

  “Mr Smooth you mean...” Gary said in a tone of dislike. “His party's a communist, fascist, crapload and he's a stupid fucking crank as is anyone who works for him regardless of what they look like, Andrea” he added snidely and perhaps jealously as he gnced over at Mist and Shiver Gray.

  They looked must be admitted, rather more than wonderful: the day’s brightness, warmth, causing an odd, heated movement, stovetop simmer of soft, abounded-in the-fair hair alongside plumped and healthful by virtue of youth, gleams in a seemingly-ghostly transience of inhumanely perfect flesh, pale, pearly as that in the shell of an oyster.

  “Mist what are we going to do about rallying support for the Party?” Shiver was saying meanwhile her lovely face anxious. Suppleness twisting and contorting lithely.

  “I’m tired of handing out flyers to people in areas both rich, poor, and all shades in-between and being looked at like I’m promoting rape or mass murder. This one old hag spat at me and told me to go back to Russia,” she said, a scowl pying petuntly at the red corners of her downturned, little rosebud mouth.

  She took a sip of her hot chocote, licking a whipped cream mustache off of a narrow upper lip, pushing it outwards over her fuller, pouty lower lip and looked pensively at Mist.

  ‘Just do what I do Shiv,” Mist said unconcernedly biting into his burger “Just dump them in the nearest bush after Aryan gives them to you and just say you handed them out like a good little soldier.’

  “Mist! Said Shiver looking shocked, “This isn’t a joke, you don’t really do that do you?” Her face had that startled fawn look it sometimes got, her dark, doe eyes wide and almost panicky-looking with surprise.

  “Once or twice yeah actually,” Mist said. His eyes pure purple in the shaded light fshed with amusement. “I was just like ‘Oh fuck this” and I chucked the flyers straight in the bush after about my fiftieth house.”

  “On the whole though I just tell people they have a choice... Either they take a flyer from me and at least gnce at it or I'll follow them around for the rest of the day shouting "Support the Australian BDSM, Dope and Sexual Freedom Party" and telling everyone we are polygamous lovers regardless of whether the person is male or female. “

  “You should have seen the look on the face of that ninety-year-old guy I threatened to do it to. Poor oldie nearly had a heart attack right there on the spot. One dy I chased her around all day shouting “Don't leave me baby, I can't live without you.” Everyone was staring so much that she finally took a flyer and raced off like death itself was after her.”

  “How old was this woman?” Shiver inquired.

  “Like forty or so fat and pin but hey love is blind right,” said Mist and they both sniggered.

  “Sometimes I shout, '“support the Klu Klux Kn.”'

  “Death to bcks, Indians, Jews, and Muslims’ or if I’m feeling really creative, I dress up like a brown shirt and expin to passers-by we’re officials promoting the 21-century Neo-Nazis.”

  “My personal favorite is: “Bring back Golden Dawn! Greece’s most misunderstood Party.”

  You didn’t say any of that, Aryan would have killed you.”

  “No, I just wanted to.” Mist sighed.

  “I was a hero. Sticking up for the little guy every time. Don’t think our ruling elites, have a right to make you work for third-world wages that leave you starving or homeless, don’t want to live in an alley? I said."

  “We’ll keep jobs for current citizens. You matter, you’re not simply interchangeable worker bees who colpse through dangerous jobs/overlong hours and soon get repced lickety-split. I was trying to magnanimously help. Lousy ingrates,” he bemoaned with a great glint in his eye.

  “Well Golden Dawn would certainly work for you,” said Shiver.

  “I mean your appearance is certainly very Aryan race perfection; blond, tall, muscur but also rather pretty. You could be the poster child for Hitler's youth.”

  “Not you so much”, said Mist to Shiver “You’re too fragile, waiflike and dark-eyed. Hitler wanted strong, robust, blue-eyed women who could breed like cattle.”

  “I am very fertile Mist you know that! The most fertile woman is actually one who is small and delicate and near hairless with a big-eyed childlike face and slender, hourgss shape and I’m always mistaken for younger, and my weight is forty-three kg and my waist seventeen inches as you well know.”

  “My body is swimming in high levels of estragon and progesterone instead of testosterone which cause increased height and course features and mini moustaches. Not to mention the widened bones and shoulders, fbby apple bellies, ropey muscur physiques, and the shapeless hips of most women. “

  “I have strong sexual dimorphism instead of the shapeless, man-jawed, square-boned androgyny of most modern women.” She continued

  “Yes, you are pretty, don’t be so touchy. People of your generation are so insecure. Narcissistic too, which should be great but often they’re wholly undeserving of adution, and combining these traits is just gross. We’ll either way, we should probably go now. We have to attend that charity group’s awareness campaign on homelessness and the rise in unemployment especially among the young.” Mist said.

  “We are the same generation, Mist.”

  “Only humans have generations, Shiver are immortal, why would we have generations? Stop acting like a human and I will stop forgetting you aren’t actually one.”

  Shiver pushed away the remains of her double cheeseburger and fries which is all she ever ordered besides the chicken strips or the mushroom burger and finishing the final sip of her iced chocote nodded, “Let’s just pay then...”

  Mist swiped his card and the two walked out in silence.

  As they were leaving a group of women just entering the café, spotted Shiver and Mist and began pointing excitedly “Look at that little girl she is so cute so sweet, she is just adorable. She’s simply lovely like a little lion cub or tortoiseshell kitten. Did you see those great, big, dark chocote-brown eyes and long dark shes?”

  “The boy’s gorgeous too though I thought they looked rather like young foxes especially her with her red hair,” her friend agreed.

  “It’s happened again Mist,” Shiver whispered, “like the woman in the shop calling me gorgeous and Shaya saying I was lovely and Lei and Ambrose and that guy Andy that I was beautiful like a China doll and photogenic and the visiting teacher say I was so cute and adorable and those tall guys who came up to me back at school and said I was cute/ gorgeous for a child and my dad’s friend saying I was breathtaking and beautiful and looked like a medieval princess or pointy-eared elf or painted angel….”

  “Yes, I know Shiver it happens to me regurly too,” Mist interrupted.

  “Her hair was bronze and pale red-gold, her skin like cream and both their eyes were so huge and his eyes were purple-gray can you believe so beautiful” the two women continued on in awe as they passed by the two Shiver.

  “Hey Mist?” Shiver said suddenly. “I think someone’s following us.”

  “Nice to see your overactive imagination is still intact,” Mist said as they commenced walking out the door.

  Nearby, a twenty-seven-year-old waitress signed with an understandable but petunt curl of the lip and one already somewhat beset by misery that soon turned to perpetually-wearisome and irritated, due to loss of her apartment and foreclosure imminent upon her boyfriend Walter’s house and their need to move back in with retives, namely her judgemental mother.

  She walked over to serve a customer who had been there for quite a while; a very tall, thin-built man in sungsses and beautiful, dark overcoat and suit with downcast face completely in shadow, with order of tea, and a slice of cake he finished mere half of. She asked him inquiringly and with impatience if he wished to order anything else.

  ”Hmm? I believe that’ll be all thank you,” he said softly; ostensibly well-mannered and polite but with some subtle undertone, an air of boredom and imperiousness. Though she could not have articuted why, it reminded her of the very handsome and snooty blond boy that was in here earlier. As he raised an impossibly-rge head slightly she caught a very brief glimpse of a fraction of his face and let out silent scream almost dropping to the floor herself before losing her grip on a gringly-shined, overpolished pte that fell with a clink.

  “Here,” the man said, amused, picking it up with a surprisingly rapid and graceful movement before she could even react. Luckily it was not broken. She took it from gloved, outstretched hand that sat upon the ludicrous length great and ungainly, of an odd, emaciated yet muscur arm, perhaps akin to that of a starved predator and fled. Her face still showing consternation. Ordinarily pretty but a little empty eyes, rendered to bulbous ugliness showing far too much white and irises appearing thus diminished by being thoroughly spooked.

  “See,” Andrea meanwhile had just commented to Gary somewhat smugly. “I told you Aryan and his campaign kids are stunning.”

  The breakdown of family structures and social values and respect for one’s community leads to shallow, consumerist friendships (clubs, pubs, shopping, movies, ordering take-out, and throwing alcohol-enriched parties) and material things being more glorified and the commodification of everything… Things families once held dear are prostituted (30,000 dolr parade-style weddings, expensive IVF babies, wombs as incubators, porn, and girls and women sold to white svery substituting healthy retionships) so big business wins. Aryan Alexander Gray.

  That night and the day after Shiver’s sixteenth birthday, they were all watching re-runs of the Twilight Zone, a favourite of Aryan’s who had introduced the pair to it as his father had in turn introduced it to him. They were in the enormous living room in Aryan's home. They switched to the Virtualiser news after a while though and it reported that another round of the mysterious virus was spreading throughout Australia, with pgue-like symptoms. It had killed a significant number of people. Deaths had varied from a few hours after infection to weeks ter.

  Symptoms after coma and their mind being shut down, included swollen lymph nodes, bleeding under the skin, purple-red rash, fever, and greenish pallor. Burst veins, pustules, and if they mutated it right, could even leave flesh eroded as the worst strain of a virus was, well flesh-eating. Brains or lungs drowned in water, killed many of those stricken. All painlessly and whilst they were deeply sleeping, of course, but far too aggressive to treat.

  The virus attacked people almost randomly striking one family member in Kelly town but leaving others miraculously untouched, then miles away killing half a suburban community.

  “Things are going well I am most proud of both your efforts…” Aryan told Shiver and Mist.

  Mist merely looked bored at this, but Shiver beamed. Her beautiful, aristocratic, lily-like hands stroking at the sandy-red fur of Waterbaby, her fennec fox, who was now nearly four months old.

  She was wearing an exquisite, rich blue (with dark green hues in the light), tear-drop sapphire hanging from a silver pendent. Aryan had bought this for her. It swung back and forth glowing against a long, slender, porcein-white neck. She leaned nearer to and gazed up at Aryan in what could only be described as lonely, heart-rending longing.

  Her huge eyes became so filled with emotion it would be literal truth to say they trembled and darkly-shone with it. Her passionate array of feelings reflected by what seemed a never-ending dark iris, included an adoring, besotted emotion only comprehensible by those who have truly fallen into love’s grace.

  Within the coming weeks, the virus spread to all of Earth's countries as anyone who had been in contact with Mist or Shiver was a carrier and Aryan took them on trips overseas and around the world, a "holiday” he called it.

  Since the Shiver had joined Aryan, some thousands of people worldwide had been wiped out. These included Norman, head of one the world's rgest mining industries. An overseas company that employed children and produced chemical-contaminated toys that were sold on the Western market and poisoned and hospitalized with lung damage fifty and counting children.

  Another company had no fire exits, so its employees were in danger of burning to death something that occurred in another factory. Stockholders in a US company that spread to Australia and used prison bour (the government forced them to work for, and allowed them to be paid only twenty-three cents an hour.) The CEO, board directors, and higher managers of several companies with numerous health code viotions that resulted in many work-reted deaths also died of the viral pgue.

  Several, pro-mass immigration, usually for business reasons, politicians, and some from the currently reigning party that constantly let national and state parks be turned over to developers and into apartments, hotels, and shopping malls all died along with some of the developers themselves.

  As did a coal seam gas company owner who campaigned against climate change and Bruce Harvey a News Corporation owner who wouldn’t let anti-climate change, pro-rge corporation ideals go to air on his Monovalent realm broadcast news network also died. This was a way to make sure they were controlling the media without appearing to, as people with Aryan’s own values also perished.

  A political leader overseas died. One who had had thousands jailed, tortured, and massacred as did David, a public sector job-culling, welfare hostile, company tax abolisher and new head of the popur, Liberty Party.

  They exposed companies who falsified records covering up job-reted deaths, harmful effects of their medications, and illegal hiring of people full-time then slowly cutting back hours worked only to hire someone else to share the load and pay them both less than minimum wage put together.

  Meanwhile, a “suspicious number of shareholders in corrupt corporations are by viral hands perished, aiding these companies soon-to come-colpse” Emanuel noted one Thursday morning, smiling as it had truly begun.

  Aryan had told Monovalent after the pathogen had caused a high death toll for six months to stop activating the virus in random people and target his enemies. Precautions were lifted and people at once started to rex.

  “We are just beginning to fix things though we are not yet at a stage of any rexed ease. I appud your assiduous dedication to eradicating the overpopution crisis alongside me,” Aryan said to them both “Well done.” Mist and Shiver went back to their campaigning and charity work, Aryan to his company and political duties, and peace was at hand for just a little while.