“Keep me?” Jupiter grinned and cracked his neck. “If you hadn’t noticed, people tend to run from me and die anyway, if you want to be a man and face it. That is fine with me.” he tossed the matches on the table and grabbed another of the bottles that set on the counter. He pushed his thumb forward and the top of the bottle snapped off with the lid. It was tricky to do but if you pressed on the cap just right, it happened from time to time. He poured the vodka in his mouth chugging it, like Popeye with a can of spinach, watch out Brutus, you need better insurance.


Jupiter inquired politely. “So I guess you have an x gene?” The woman answered his question with her eyes lighting up like fireworks, with excitement over the cocky man. He was well informed to, he knew who the order was and even that they wouldn’t let a member just get taken away. Maybe one of his hoods had a room at the sanctuary; they had been betrayed by their open door policy before.

The man replied and nodded with too much confidence. “I age things rapidly and still their vitality with a touc...” His sentence was caught off as Jupiter caved in his face knowing what he needed to know. Apparently he had to be alive for longer than the brief contact it took to knock half of his body threw the wall. The woman, he thought was a mutant as well, she had a slightly pinkish sheen to her body, that was native to no people he knew of, but it was subtle enough to be mistaken for a sunburn…how ever it was November in New York. Nobody was sunburned this time of year, particularly that high up the leg.

The woman went to bolt and Jupiter tail flung her back down on the couch. The last of the burning bodies had stopped screaming and Jupiter set down on the sofa next to her, grabbing her wrists possessively. “You want to live?” Jupiter asked with acidity in his voice that said this was a threat and not a question. The woman nodded and Jupiter smiled. “Good.” He took a deep breathe. “Tell me, why you all were harassing the wood nymph over in eight oh eight.” He recited a nickname for the semi rough neighborhood

June 10, 2009

I remembered being in a van when I woke up. I remember feeling drugged and woozy, and then hearing and feeling a crash. I think the van may have rolled or maybe if it didn’t, it felt like it did. I had the man who took me on top of me, his blood smearing my face, and I just screamed and screamed before a boy saved me from the man. If there was another man, I do not remember, but maybe there was.

I went back to the crash site, I remembered what the buildings looked like enough to be able to describe them to someone and get directions. It happened just inside the city limits in the east end of the city. The van, of course, was long gone, and so were most of the clues.

Something did stand out, though, and caught my attention. There was a bent up license plate on the side of the road. I don’t know whether it came from the van, or if it was from some other unfortunate accident, but I grabbed the plate. I also found a crumpled looking folder that had my name on it, that was practically destroyed by the elements. If there were any papers inside, I think they have been destroyed.

All I could do for a few moments was stare off, when I got there, though. My brain started to click and I saw glimpses of the incident that happened to bring me into New York City. The man put chloroform on a cloth and slapped it over my mouth, I think, because I blacked out for awhile. He then drove me across country from Michigan to New York, and I think he was intending to take me to the old man of my dreams, who’s face I cannot remember.

Then the incident with the boy happened, and I was free. The boy took me to a school where there were a lot of younger people, and a kindly old healer I think they called, “Doc-Prof.” I was so frightened, though, that I am sure everyone thought I was crazy, because my powers were out of control and things were happening so fast.

I accidentally hit a girl in the face with one of my powers, but I don’t remember. She was a pretty blonde girl, about 13 or 14, it looked like. The young man who saved me was a little older, and had animals with him. And then there was this bald man, kind of attractive but forlorn looking. He chased me down, and then things went black from there. I slept for a long time, maybe weeks, maybe months, before I woke again with more unfamiliar faces surrounding me.

After they gave me some clean clothes to wear, I stuck around long enough to get some of my strength back, and then I left. I walked through NY from there, lost and kind of scared. By the time it was dark, the day I left, I was hungry and thirsty, and so very tired, so I looked for a place to rest my head. That is when I found this special old house.

The thing about this house is that there are so many hiding places for little things, like stuff I collected from the crash site, and other things. I have hidden what I could find in one of the vents, but I doubt that I can find much off of things.
The question on my mind is never going to be answered, is it? As much as I want to go home and hug momma and poppa, I know I have to be here until I can confront whoever it is that is looking for me. I need to take my life back and become something more than a frail piece of porcelain, I need to find something to live for. It has been ten years since I saw all of my friends get killed by the gunman who took me, and ten years since I became what I am that I hated so much.

Now I have to rely on my powers, the ones I never wanted because they made me into a freak and I hated freaks. Irony seems to be best served with a slap in the face and a rude awakening. I suppose I deserved to become a mutant, because I was so mean to the ones that I saw before it happened. I was angry for this happening for awhile, but now I see how wrong I was, and how pigheaded and stupid the hatred was, when we were all born human beings, but some of us grow up to be something more.

I am angry that I was taken from my home, but not anymore about being a mutant. I am angry that my friends were all killed just to get to me, and that the only way I can see them now is to go to the various cemeteries around Kalamazoo. I am most angry for the nightmares that have accompanied this whole thing, the faceless old man with the needle, the fruitless search for him…

Maybe I should just let them take me, next time, maybe that would be the only way. But they scare me too much to do that. They could come any day and try to take me away, and there isn’t much I could do to stop it from happening.

The woman looked honestly puzzled and he wanted to kill her right then, but she had a moment or two more to go. A chance to say something to buy her a few more minutes, she had better be useful and fast. Jupiter collected both of the woman’s wrists in one hand and looked at his fingernails on his free hand. Bored with her thought. She took the hint and realized he wasn’t a patient man. A glance anywhere in the room would tell her that.

~~“We run all through eight oh eight, if there is someone being bothered it is either for money or territory. If it someone in particular, a she, a nymph no less, well the boys are rowdy.”

Jupiter shook his head. “The boys are dead.” He took a breathe. “and unless you tell me who the man with the scars is, you’ll be dead soon too.”

~~Her eyes went wide and she shook her head in fear. And tried with no hope of succeeding to get away. “We don’t have a scarred man, don’t kill me for something I can’t tell you! Please take me to the Wooden girl, hell, take me with you, I got no where to go! Take me where ever you like.” Came the whore’s sultry plea. ‘if you are Order, you are from the sanctuary and they take care of mutants. I’ll stay there until you find your scarred man, just don’t kill me for not knowing about someone I can’t know.” She gasped as she started to cry. “Please Mister.”

Jupiter dropped her hands and shook his head. “get to the sanctuary on your own if that is what you want to do.Quit hooking and respect yourself.” He stood up and crossed the room, pulling the door off its hinges. “if I find out you are a lie, I’ll find you and take back my mercy.” He walked down the hallway and went back to his bike sitting in the hallway unbothered. He set down and started the motor in the hallway and proceeded to speed down toward the stairs.

July 2, 2009
Remembering...

I think I may have found a lead. I went back to the crash site again and sat there for awhile. I thought back to the day I arrived in New York, and remembered what the man who set me up looked like. He claimed to be a private investigator, and he drugged me. He was a very ugly man, bald, kind of fleshy and muscular with a big chin. The man on top of me was dead, his eyes were ice blue and he was more, scrappy looking than the man who said he was a PI.

Back in Kalamazoo, he had asked me to meet him at Pioneer Park to discuss the investigation I was paying him to do about this whole situation. My momma and poppa didn’t know I had hired him because they didn’t want me to leave the house or the greenhouse. But I did anyways.

It was cold. I hate winters now because the snow hurts if I am not bundled up enough. I remember how I burned with the cold, even though it was only November, and the place he had me meet him at, the park, used to be an old cemetery, where the first people to settle in the city had been buried, and the place gave me the creeps.

Gilmore… He called himself Gilmore, and I had hired him maybe a month or so before he took me away from my home. Maybe if I look in the newspapers again, I will find this Gilmore. I know if I see his picture, that I will recognize him.

After a wild ride down some stairs, he returned to the street and back to the house. He realized that If Dryad did return there still he left a bunch of bodies strewn about one of the few places she had established a home. And so after he returned and cleaned the place hoping she would still come back to a familiar place, he gave up on the house and once more by the trees, he resolved that he would simply have to find her. and unfortunately for her, that meant finding clues and the only clues he had access to were at the sanctuary all through her things…if he was going to do it, he was going to do it thoroughly.

First he took another shower in her room, not wanting to miss her return if she did. She still wouldn’t know where his room was. Once he was clean and the water ran long enough to get any blood out of the bath, he started to search and compile her things. Once he found every last scrap of anything she wrote on he started to compile it into a timeline, one it was in a timeline he started through it piece by piece. He retrieved a notebook once, he realized there were good clues, and He took notes. And slowly put together the information there was to be had.

He made notes about her family, he noted Kalamazoo once he realized she wasn’t just saying it for fun, but possibly actually lived in a place with the name. He resolved to go find the license plate once he was done, and if she hadn’t returned. Would he find where or what she was looking for before she did? He hoped so, how grand would it be to sit on a pile of her problems and them at her feet?