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Tales for a Dark Night
This might put some of the second generation bits into context. It's the story - or at least a version of the story - of the most famous event in Timeshifter history, which is the destruction and rebuilding of the multiverse. The kids are nearly fourteen here; this is not long after Audra, Fabian and Jakob get married. Thies, the little miscreant, is three going on four - he's Falda and Piet's younger brother. Alex and Frances have a younger sister the same age, Emma, who is asleep. (Thies should have been, but he's just like his father that way.)
The story, like all good stories, was told on a dark and stormy night.
Really. It was pouring outside, a cold freezing downpour that was blowing horizontally in the wind, trees knocking against buildings, scraping their gnarled fingers against the picture window of the small brick house.
The living room was filled with toys, clutter and the warm scent of pizzas.
Stephen McFarlane had graduated seventh in his class at Princeton. He had been through the destruction and reassembly of the multiverse; he had travelled through time, fought in an incarnation of World War Two that he was certain even Hitler had never intended, and acted as a high-level liason to a branch of the CIA that even other branches of the CIA did not know existed. He had seen magic performed; he had seen time folded and bent to the will of its bender, and had done some of the bending himself.
All of this had left him stunningly unprepared to handle four young teenagers and two three year olds.
Jennifer was supposed to do this, he grumbled. But Jennifer had gotten sick, and rather than tell Anthony and Emily to cancel their date night, he'd volunteered. Stupidly, as it turned out. Feeding them had apparently killed a whole forty-five minutes.
"I'm bored." Falda complained, picking idly at the rug as she lay on her stomach, kicking her feet in the air and nibbling at a piece of pineapple pizza.
"Wanna go up to my room?" Alex grinned.
"Fuck off, Donovan." Falda flicked a piece of pineapple at Alex, hitting him in the forehead.
"Stop that." Stephen replied tiredly, yawning. "If you two don't cut it out I'll send you to your room."
"Yeah, send me to her room, uncle Stephen." Alex leered, running his hands through his dark curly hair in what he figured was a suave gesture. "I won't mind at all."
"Listen, you little prickstain …"
"Falda! Alex!" Stephen barked. "Behave."
The two children fell silent, Falda's blue eyes glaring daggers at Alex, and Alex trying to deflect them with a smile.
"Uncle Stephen?" A young girl with long curly dark hair and a worried expression in her deep brown eyes poked her head in from the kitchen. "There's a police car in the driveway."
As if on cue, there was a knock at the front door. Stephen muttered darkly under his breath, trying to choke down his worry, and peered through the window. Two dark blue uniforms hovered on the doorstep.
"Someone call 911 from this location?" one of them asked brusquely as he opened the door.
"Uh, not that I know of, did any of you children call 911, you'd better not have?" Stephen glared over his shoulder at three silent, shocked faces.
A soft voice commented from the corner. "The phone's off the hook."
Stephen turned. He'd forgotten Piet was even there, he'd been so quiet. Piet looked up from his book, pushing his glasses up his nose, and nodded toward the phone on the table. The light on the base unit was lit red.
"Hold on a second, officers." Stephen sighed, running down the hall and upstairs.
Nothing in the spare room …
Nothing in the kids' rooms …
Nothing in the office…
A small face peered out from inside the master bedroom closet; two blue eyes, an impish grin, a halo of blonde hair.
"Phone." The boy chirped, holding up the handset for Stephen's inspection. "Buttons."
"Come here, young man." Stephen scooped him up, carrying him down the stairs. "Officers, I think I've found your culprit."
"I'm booooooored." Falda whined. "I hate this place."
The wind had picked up, whistling around the house. The rain was getting harder, pelting the windows, bending the grass on the lawn nearly flat.
"Scared?" Alex jeered.
"Hell no."
"I am." Frances piped up quietly, huddled under a blanket on the corner of the sofa.
"I wish mom and dad and daddy had let me go with them." Falda sniffed. "This sucks."
"Falda, they're on their honeymoon." For some reason the idea of this made Piet blush furiously.
"So? I won't look."
Stephen came back into the room, looking a little harried. "There." He sighed. "At least the little ones are sleeping. What do you kids want to do?"
"Go home." Falda complained.
"We could watch a movie." Frances replied helpfully. "Something funny would be nice."
Suddenly the room was plunged into blackness. Frances shrieked, diving under the fluffy blanket she was wrapped in; Stephen swore, flicking the lights uselessly.
"Alex, touch my leg again and I'll beat you so hard I'll find your teeth in dad's pot plants in our garden." Falda growled, scrabbling away from Alex's hands in the dark.
"Just trying to be there for you in your hour of need, baby."
"Get bent."
"Stop it." Stephen grumbled, his head falling into his hands. "Just stop your bickering and let me think." How the hell was he going to kill an hour and a half with no power? He wasn't a babysitter, damnit. He was a teacher. He couldn't work without a lesson plan.
Suddenly it occurred to him.
"Be quiet and listen." He spoke up. "And I'll tell you a story. A good one, not a little-kid story."
"Is it true?" Falda asked curiously, leaning back on one of the large pillows.
"One hundred percent true."
"Is it scary?" F rances' voice trembled.
"A few parts are. But it's not too scary. And it does have a happy ending." Stephen leaned back on the sofa and thought for a moment. "Do you ever wonder about your parents? Piet, Falda, did you ever wonder how Jakob met your mom and dad? Did they ever tell you?"
"Daddy said they met in Amsterdam, in a club." Falda commented.
"That's right. But there's more to it. Alex, Frances, do you ever wonder why your dad hates Germans so much? Or why he gets so protective of your mom?"
"I don't know." Frances admitted thoughtfully. "He never said. He doesn't talk about that part of his life, before we were born."
"I'm not surprised." Stephen chuckled, and began.
"It all started with the banquet. Anthony had been Number One for a year, and there was this celebratory banquet, to commemorate. It was also a secret surprise party for Emily - he was going to ask her to marry him that night." Stephen offhandedly tossed a box of tissues in Frances' direction, detecting a sniffle. "And everything went fine, until the final dance of the evening. Which was, as I recall, Gershwin. 'They Can't Take That Away From Me.'"
"Dad hates that song." Alex commented.
"Of course he does. Now I should explain that for the past few days there had been some strange power fluctuations around the guildhall. Lights flickering and going out randomly, things powering off, strange things in the power grid. But we thought the computers were working on it, and so we figured it was nothing to worry about. But during the final dance of the evening, we discovered just how wrong we were." He cleared his throat. "I suppose I should mention that the other important thing happening that night was that someone was getting a number. They were going to make Danielle Hansen Number Five. There hadn't been a Number Five for a few months, because the person that had the position before - someone by the name of Joshua Everett - had defected and turned bad, giving himself the title of Number Minus One and basically creating chaos and disorder before he'd been caught a few weeks before that night. That had happened, and everything was winding down.
"Suddenly, the lights went out, and one of the light fixtures caught on fire. Jack screamed 'everybody get down now' and then all hell broke loose. Electrical fires, things falling. And then the Multiversal Integrity Alarm went off. Which means everything had gone to hell.
"What had happened was that those energy fluctuations had caused a systems overload - enough energy had been diverted through the system to be able to forcibly shift everything into a single timeline. That was never supposed to happen. The safeties had all been turned off. The backwash from the overload caused the guildhall to be at least seriously damaged. And all of us fell backward through time - into that single timeline, back three days."
He had their full attention now, he could sense it; four pairs of eyes fixed on him intently. Smiling slightly to himself, Stephen continued.
"We all fell different places. I remember just grabbing on to Jennifer and Sarah - who wasn't any older than Emma and Thies at the time - and being terrified, and then about a half minute later I was sitting by the side of the road in Geneva, Switzerland, bruised and still in evening clothes. Pretty much everyone had the same experience. Except your father, of course, he always had to be different." Stephen nodded toward Falda. "Apparently he fell right into your dad's lap. What went on from there in Amsterdam where he landed I won't repeat, except to say that it seems Donnelly has the morals of a fleet of drunken sailors on shore leave, and apparently does not believe in taking things slowly, either."
"Um, sir?" Piet interrupted. "A fleet of drunken sailors times no morals is the same as one drunken sailor times no morals. One would have been sufficient."
"Yes, yes. It's an expression, Piet." Stephen chuckled dryly. "You're just like your mother."
"I know, sir, people say that all the time … but please go on, sir, if you would."
Stephen continued. "Anyway. We were all different places. Audra was in London. Anthony was in Berlin. Ross was in Wapakanetta, Ohio … Jack was in Paris. Now Jack, because of the Prophecies, knew what was going to happen, or at least that it might. He managed to control his fall through time - with Allanna's help - and he fell further back. To prepare things, for what was coming,"
"W-what was it like?" Frances whispered.
"It was terrible. It was all Josh, of course. He'd planned this from the beginning. Josh had managed to fall even further back - because of the computer program, he'd designed it that way to create a shift for himself just before the blowout - and ingratiated himself with the Nazi party near its inception. He worked his way up to the right hand of Hitler himself, which of course made him the logical choice when Hitler was killed in an accident to take charge of the Party. But he started twisting it to his own ends. He'd found some proof somewhere that Hitler had been Jewish, and started burying the Nazis' anti-Semitic propaganda - really most of their propaganda. He even changed the name of the party from the National Socialist Party to the Rammstein Party, eventually."
"Why?" Alex asked curiously.
"Well, it kind of went along with his new propaganda - the anti-timeshifter propaganda." Stephen took a drink of his soda, wetting his throat. "Have any of you heard of the Rammstein Air Force base in Germany?"
"Yes." Piet nodded.
"There was an accident there. Do you remember that? What happened?"
Piet leaned forward thoughtfully, adjusting his glasses again, his pale face washed out in the dark. "Um ... there was an accident … in 1988. August 28th. Three fighter jets crashed into each other during a precision drill … and forty people were killed, lots more were injured. Sir."
"Very good. So Josh's political platform was that because nothing was done to prevent this by the timeshifters - nothing was planned, nothing was able to prevent it, and no one even tried, either - that this made them evil, bad, conspiring against the good German people to twist things to their own image. The forty people that died were practically canonized. And being a timeshifter was a crime, punishable by death. And death usually meant the Wurstfabrik."
"What does that mean?" Falda interrupted.
"Sausage factory."
Her eyes grew even rounder. "They turned people … they didn't. They didn't … did … they?"
"They did."
"Holy shit." She whispered, rocking forward and hugging her knees, still staring at Stephen.
"They did the same to gays, transsexuals, lesbians … anyone they considered sexually deviant. This was apparently because the purpose of life was to populate and expand the party, and gay people were going against the party's platform. Anyone who was foolish enough to speak out against the party got the same treatment. Unless of course they were lucky. Then they just got "rehabilitated". But they disappeared, in any case."
"So why's the Chief so protective of Mrs. Chief?" Falda interrupted again. "I mean, yeah, he hates Germans, cool, that makes sense, and he hates Josh, that makes sense too. But what's with Mrs. Chief?"
"Emily was destroyed in the explosion." Stephen replied quietly. "Completely. As it turned out someone had tampered with the computer program. She was eliminated completely."
"That's impossible." Alex shook her head. "She's here now."
"Yes. Because your father was able to overthrow the Rammstein government, and eventually the Guildhall computers came back on line. They weren't completely destroyed, they were just damaged … eventually things were repaired enough for us to go back. That's why they have automated repair routines. And then we started fixing things. Because that's our job, you know. Weren't you listening in temporal algebra when we talked about energy and chaos theory?"
"Falda's fault. She was distracting me." Alex grinned, dodging the pillow she threw at him.
"Energy can never be created or destroyed." Piet spoke up quietly. "That's the first law of thermodynamics. So she was still there, just in a different form. And as he undid the events that shouldn't have happened, she eventually came back. After events were undone enough to reach that critical nexus point, I mean."
"Very good, Piet." Stephen nodded approvingly.
"So what happened with that?" Falda pestered. "How did he restore Mrs. Chief?"
At that second, the lights came back on; appliances in the kitchen began to hum, and a key rattled in the lock.
"That's another story for another time." Stephen stretched, yawning. "I do want you to pay attention in history class this year, after all."
The front door opened; Anthony and Emily entered the room, peeling off wet coats and holding hands.
"It's terrible out there. Did you kids have a good time?" Emily chirped, kneeling down before her son and daughter to hug them.
"Oh, mom." Frances threw her arms around her mother, sobbing.
"What happened, honey?"
"I - I'm just - so glad you're here." She replied fiercely.
"What mischief have you been making, Stephen?" Anthony chuckled, stroking Frances' shoulder.
"I was just telling them stories you seem to have forgotten to mention." Stephen replied mildly, stretching. "The power went out. What was I supposed to do?"
"I see." Anthony sat down on the sofa, helping himself to a now cold piece of veggie pizza. "Educating the young?"
"I mean, I suppose I could have given them all German lessons." Stephen smiled wickedly.
"You could have done that." Anthony replied evenly. "But I'm very glad you didn't."
The story, like all good stories, was told on a dark and stormy night.
Really. It was pouring outside, a cold freezing downpour that was blowing horizontally in the wind, trees knocking against buildings, scraping their gnarled fingers against the picture window of the small brick house.
The living room was filled with toys, clutter and the warm scent of pizzas.
Stephen McFarlane had graduated seventh in his class at Princeton. He had been through the destruction and reassembly of the multiverse; he had travelled through time, fought in an incarnation of World War Two that he was certain even Hitler had never intended, and acted as a high-level liason to a branch of the CIA that even other branches of the CIA did not know existed. He had seen magic performed; he had seen time folded and bent to the will of its bender, and had done some of the bending himself.
All of this had left him stunningly unprepared to handle four young teenagers and two three year olds.
Jennifer was supposed to do this, he grumbled. But Jennifer had gotten sick, and rather than tell Anthony and Emily to cancel their date night, he'd volunteered. Stupidly, as it turned out. Feeding them had apparently killed a whole forty-five minutes.
"I'm bored." Falda complained, picking idly at the rug as she lay on her stomach, kicking her feet in the air and nibbling at a piece of pineapple pizza.
"Wanna go up to my room?" Alex grinned.
"Fuck off, Donovan." Falda flicked a piece of pineapple at Alex, hitting him in the forehead.
"Stop that." Stephen replied tiredly, yawning. "If you two don't cut it out I'll send you to your room."
"Yeah, send me to her room, uncle Stephen." Alex leered, running his hands through his dark curly hair in what he figured was a suave gesture. "I won't mind at all."
"Listen, you little prickstain …"
"Falda! Alex!" Stephen barked. "Behave."
The two children fell silent, Falda's blue eyes glaring daggers at Alex, and Alex trying to deflect them with a smile.
"Uncle Stephen?" A young girl with long curly dark hair and a worried expression in her deep brown eyes poked her head in from the kitchen. "There's a police car in the driveway."
As if on cue, there was a knock at the front door. Stephen muttered darkly under his breath, trying to choke down his worry, and peered through the window. Two dark blue uniforms hovered on the doorstep.
"Someone call 911 from this location?" one of them asked brusquely as he opened the door.
"Uh, not that I know of, did any of you children call 911, you'd better not have?" Stephen glared over his shoulder at three silent, shocked faces.
A soft voice commented from the corner. "The phone's off the hook."
Stephen turned. He'd forgotten Piet was even there, he'd been so quiet. Piet looked up from his book, pushing his glasses up his nose, and nodded toward the phone on the table. The light on the base unit was lit red.
"Hold on a second, officers." Stephen sighed, running down the hall and upstairs.
Nothing in the spare room …
Nothing in the kids' rooms …
Nothing in the office…
A small face peered out from inside the master bedroom closet; two blue eyes, an impish grin, a halo of blonde hair.
"Phone." The boy chirped, holding up the handset for Stephen's inspection. "Buttons."
"Come here, young man." Stephen scooped him up, carrying him down the stairs. "Officers, I think I've found your culprit."
"I'm booooooored." Falda whined. "I hate this place."
The wind had picked up, whistling around the house. The rain was getting harder, pelting the windows, bending the grass on the lawn nearly flat.
"Scared?" Alex jeered.
"Hell no."
"I am." Frances piped up quietly, huddled under a blanket on the corner of the sofa.
"I wish mom and dad and daddy had let me go with them." Falda sniffed. "This sucks."
"Falda, they're on their honeymoon." For some reason the idea of this made Piet blush furiously.
"So? I won't look."
Stephen came back into the room, looking a little harried. "There." He sighed. "At least the little ones are sleeping. What do you kids want to do?"
"Go home." Falda complained.
"We could watch a movie." Frances replied helpfully. "Something funny would be nice."
Suddenly the room was plunged into blackness. Frances shrieked, diving under the fluffy blanket she was wrapped in; Stephen swore, flicking the lights uselessly.
"Alex, touch my leg again and I'll beat you so hard I'll find your teeth in dad's pot plants in our garden." Falda growled, scrabbling away from Alex's hands in the dark.
"Just trying to be there for you in your hour of need, baby."
"Get bent."
"Stop it." Stephen grumbled, his head falling into his hands. "Just stop your bickering and let me think." How the hell was he going to kill an hour and a half with no power? He wasn't a babysitter, damnit. He was a teacher. He couldn't work without a lesson plan.
Suddenly it occurred to him.
"Be quiet and listen." He spoke up. "And I'll tell you a story. A good one, not a little-kid story."
"Is it true?" Falda asked curiously, leaning back on one of the large pillows.
"One hundred percent true."
"Is it scary?" F rances' voice trembled.
"A few parts are. But it's not too scary. And it does have a happy ending." Stephen leaned back on the sofa and thought for a moment. "Do you ever wonder about your parents? Piet, Falda, did you ever wonder how Jakob met your mom and dad? Did they ever tell you?"
"Daddy said they met in Amsterdam, in a club." Falda commented.
"That's right. But there's more to it. Alex, Frances, do you ever wonder why your dad hates Germans so much? Or why he gets so protective of your mom?"
"I don't know." Frances admitted thoughtfully. "He never said. He doesn't talk about that part of his life, before we were born."
"I'm not surprised." Stephen chuckled, and began.
"It all started with the banquet. Anthony had been Number One for a year, and there was this celebratory banquet, to commemorate. It was also a secret surprise party for Emily - he was going to ask her to marry him that night." Stephen offhandedly tossed a box of tissues in Frances' direction, detecting a sniffle. "And everything went fine, until the final dance of the evening. Which was, as I recall, Gershwin. 'They Can't Take That Away From Me.'"
"Dad hates that song." Alex commented.
"Of course he does. Now I should explain that for the past few days there had been some strange power fluctuations around the guildhall. Lights flickering and going out randomly, things powering off, strange things in the power grid. But we thought the computers were working on it, and so we figured it was nothing to worry about. But during the final dance of the evening, we discovered just how wrong we were." He cleared his throat. "I suppose I should mention that the other important thing happening that night was that someone was getting a number. They were going to make Danielle Hansen Number Five. There hadn't been a Number Five for a few months, because the person that had the position before - someone by the name of Joshua Everett - had defected and turned bad, giving himself the title of Number Minus One and basically creating chaos and disorder before he'd been caught a few weeks before that night. That had happened, and everything was winding down.
"Suddenly, the lights went out, and one of the light fixtures caught on fire. Jack screamed 'everybody get down now' and then all hell broke loose. Electrical fires, things falling. And then the Multiversal Integrity Alarm went off. Which means everything had gone to hell.
"What had happened was that those energy fluctuations had caused a systems overload - enough energy had been diverted through the system to be able to forcibly shift everything into a single timeline. That was never supposed to happen. The safeties had all been turned off. The backwash from the overload caused the guildhall to be at least seriously damaged. And all of us fell backward through time - into that single timeline, back three days."
He had their full attention now, he could sense it; four pairs of eyes fixed on him intently. Smiling slightly to himself, Stephen continued.
"We all fell different places. I remember just grabbing on to Jennifer and Sarah - who wasn't any older than Emma and Thies at the time - and being terrified, and then about a half minute later I was sitting by the side of the road in Geneva, Switzerland, bruised and still in evening clothes. Pretty much everyone had the same experience. Except your father, of course, he always had to be different." Stephen nodded toward Falda. "Apparently he fell right into your dad's lap. What went on from there in Amsterdam where he landed I won't repeat, except to say that it seems Donnelly has the morals of a fleet of drunken sailors on shore leave, and apparently does not believe in taking things slowly, either."
"Um, sir?" Piet interrupted. "A fleet of drunken sailors times no morals is the same as one drunken sailor times no morals. One would have been sufficient."
"Yes, yes. It's an expression, Piet." Stephen chuckled dryly. "You're just like your mother."
"I know, sir, people say that all the time … but please go on, sir, if you would."
Stephen continued. "Anyway. We were all different places. Audra was in London. Anthony was in Berlin. Ross was in Wapakanetta, Ohio … Jack was in Paris. Now Jack, because of the Prophecies, knew what was going to happen, or at least that it might. He managed to control his fall through time - with Allanna's help - and he fell further back. To prepare things, for what was coming,"
"W-what was it like?" Frances whispered.
"It was terrible. It was all Josh, of course. He'd planned this from the beginning. Josh had managed to fall even further back - because of the computer program, he'd designed it that way to create a shift for himself just before the blowout - and ingratiated himself with the Nazi party near its inception. He worked his way up to the right hand of Hitler himself, which of course made him the logical choice when Hitler was killed in an accident to take charge of the Party. But he started twisting it to his own ends. He'd found some proof somewhere that Hitler had been Jewish, and started burying the Nazis' anti-Semitic propaganda - really most of their propaganda. He even changed the name of the party from the National Socialist Party to the Rammstein Party, eventually."
"Why?" Alex asked curiously.
"Well, it kind of went along with his new propaganda - the anti-timeshifter propaganda." Stephen took a drink of his soda, wetting his throat. "Have any of you heard of the Rammstein Air Force base in Germany?"
"Yes." Piet nodded.
"There was an accident there. Do you remember that? What happened?"
Piet leaned forward thoughtfully, adjusting his glasses again, his pale face washed out in the dark. "Um ... there was an accident … in 1988. August 28th. Three fighter jets crashed into each other during a precision drill … and forty people were killed, lots more were injured. Sir."
"Very good. So Josh's political platform was that because nothing was done to prevent this by the timeshifters - nothing was planned, nothing was able to prevent it, and no one even tried, either - that this made them evil, bad, conspiring against the good German people to twist things to their own image. The forty people that died were practically canonized. And being a timeshifter was a crime, punishable by death. And death usually meant the Wurstfabrik."
"What does that mean?" Falda interrupted.
"Sausage factory."
Her eyes grew even rounder. "They turned people … they didn't. They didn't … did … they?"
"They did."
"Holy shit." She whispered, rocking forward and hugging her knees, still staring at Stephen.
"They did the same to gays, transsexuals, lesbians … anyone they considered sexually deviant. This was apparently because the purpose of life was to populate and expand the party, and gay people were going against the party's platform. Anyone who was foolish enough to speak out against the party got the same treatment. Unless of course they were lucky. Then they just got "rehabilitated". But they disappeared, in any case."
"So why's the Chief so protective of Mrs. Chief?" Falda interrupted again. "I mean, yeah, he hates Germans, cool, that makes sense, and he hates Josh, that makes sense too. But what's with Mrs. Chief?"
"Emily was destroyed in the explosion." Stephen replied quietly. "Completely. As it turned out someone had tampered with the computer program. She was eliminated completely."
"That's impossible." Alex shook her head. "She's here now."
"Yes. Because your father was able to overthrow the Rammstein government, and eventually the Guildhall computers came back on line. They weren't completely destroyed, they were just damaged … eventually things were repaired enough for us to go back. That's why they have automated repair routines. And then we started fixing things. Because that's our job, you know. Weren't you listening in temporal algebra when we talked about energy and chaos theory?"
"Falda's fault. She was distracting me." Alex grinned, dodging the pillow she threw at him.
"Energy can never be created or destroyed." Piet spoke up quietly. "That's the first law of thermodynamics. So she was still there, just in a different form. And as he undid the events that shouldn't have happened, she eventually came back. After events were undone enough to reach that critical nexus point, I mean."
"Very good, Piet." Stephen nodded approvingly.
"So what happened with that?" Falda pestered. "How did he restore Mrs. Chief?"
At that second, the lights came back on; appliances in the kitchen began to hum, and a key rattled in the lock.
"That's another story for another time." Stephen stretched, yawning. "I do want you to pay attention in history class this year, after all."
The front door opened; Anthony and Emily entered the room, peeling off wet coats and holding hands.
"It's terrible out there. Did you kids have a good time?" Emily chirped, kneeling down before her son and daughter to hug them.
"Oh, mom." Frances threw her arms around her mother, sobbing.
"What happened, honey?"
"I - I'm just - so glad you're here." She replied fiercely.
"What mischief have you been making, Stephen?" Anthony chuckled, stroking Frances' shoulder.
"I was just telling them stories you seem to have forgotten to mention." Stephen replied mildly, stretching. "The power went out. What was I supposed to do?"
"I see." Anthony sat down on the sofa, helping himself to a now cold piece of veggie pizza. "Educating the young?"
"I mean, I suppose I could have given them all German lessons." Stephen smiled wickedly.
"You could have done that." Anthony replied evenly. "But I'm very glad you didn't."
no subject
I don't believe that chaos=evil; that would be silly, given my background. Thus I'm still at a disadvantage. But I can suspend disbelief for the sake of the story. It still might provide some confusion, because it's such an unnatural paradigm for me that I have to keep reminding myself of it. But that's okay. I have that problem with pretty much every story with a villain. That's why superhero comics drive me up the proverbial wall, and why I'm so adamant about not having any villains at all. Not even in my superhero comic book.
On the bright side, I'm very much in the minority in this viewpoint. So please leave me to my usual struggles and don't let it affect your storytelling style, because other audience members probably won't have the same complaint.
Oh yes, one more thing: you failed to mention why Josh turned villainous. Is that a story for another day?
no subject
Stephen's got to have a few up his sleeve for babysitting purposes, after all.