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A foreword:
Zynthia lived by three words:
Might makes Right.
These words were tattooed across her back, at the base of her neck. She had wanted to put them somewhere where the letters wouldn’t get stretched out as her muscles grew. It was either the back of the neck, the collarbone, or the tailbone. She didn't want to give people a third reason to stare at her chest, and she wasn't a fan of the “tramp stamp”, so to the back of the neck it went. Plus, she imagined the impression it would make if that were to be the last thing people saw of her as she stepped through the saloon doors of a bar, the victor of a vicious brawl, spitting out a tooth into a corner, right before she triumphantly shrugged on her leather jacket. The idea tickled her.
She had tried to make that scene a reality. Plenty of brawls were won, plenty of teeth were lost, plenty of leather jackets were shrugged on, triumphantly, but she couldn't find a bar with actual saloon doors. You know, the ones: they open at the top and bottom, part in the middle, and swing whenever someone walks through them. Impossible to find, except in the movies.
Apart from this fantasy, Zynthia believed in strength, that is to say, power. She believed that those with power are right, and have the right to wield that power, and only continue to wield it for as long as they are right to do so. When one loses power, it is because they are overpowered, that is to say, they are wrong compared to their opponent. If someone abuses their power, it is only natural that the abused rise up and destroy their oppressor, which proves the right, powerful, and the powerful, right. A lion is strong compared to a zebra. Claws, muscles, teeth, and cunning allow one beast to topple another. Prey cannot hope to eat its predator due to the fact that power belongs to one and not the other. If fish ate birds, one would have to concede that power was given to the fish, as claws are to the lion, and that it is only proper for birds to die for the sake of fish, as fish are to die for the sake of fishermen
Zynthia was a fisherman, a lion and a bird-eating fish all in one. She was casting a line, stalking her prey, and poised to leap out of the water. She was on the job and ready for action.
She stepped out of her car and shrugged her leather jacket on over her tattoo:
Might makes Right
---
Edit: The rest of what could be called Chapter 1:
---
Her target was in the house, a single inhabited island secluded in a sea of rural farmland. No neighbors for miles. She could make a racket without being observed, which was much to her liking. She strode right past the “No Trespassing” sign, and up to the house, which was a good tenth of a mile from the road where she had parked.
She had searched the house, “cased the joint”, before she had even left the car. She knew only one person was home, and was ever going to be home, as the house clearly had only enough accessories to accommodate a lone inhabitant. No wife. No kids. Not even a dog. Nothing but a garden to keep the old man company. This was also ideal.
Zynthia kept her guard up, since, omniscient as she was, she was called in for a reason, and that reason usually meant having to deal with dangerous, potentially unstable individuals. She had spied a double-barreled shotgun during her scouting, a gun which was now, thanks to her trespassing, legally eligible to be used against her, but that wasn’t what she was worried about. Worried? We should not say “worried”. Zynthia does not worry, she is only, merely, concerned. Zynthia was concerned because of what she couldn’t see. She could see all of the outward, physical weapons that could be used against her, but she couldn’t see the inner weapons, which were the panic-stricken lengths that the prey would go to in order to avoid capture. People rarely panic well. A shotgun in the grip of a reasonable thinker is surmountable. A spoon in the hands of a desperate man is cause for hesitation.
This wasn’t just any old man that needed a visit from just any young bruiser, this was someone who had leaked a secret. And not just any old secret, but the Secret. The last two weeks were spent tirelessly cleaning up the loose ends that this man had left lying around. If he were left to his own devices, he would only create more trouble. It’s likely that, after this, the case wouldn’t even be closed. Perhaps he has people buried underneath his garden, people with families that need to be tracked down and interrogated. Perhaps the neighbors, miles away, are in on it too, requiring similar visits to be paid. A job like hers is sometimes, quite literally, never done.
Her job is to clean up the mess that other people make. She is a Janitor. Whenever somebody leaks the Secret, her job is to find everyone who knows about it and clean them up.
As she approached the house, she thought that she might be better received if she swapped her leather jacket for something that properly announced her authority in these matters. Her uniform was officially supposed to be an ankle-length royal purple duster, which was not something you wanted to wear whenever you were trying to keep the Secret. It was usually only worn in full among gatherings of the Knowing. Galas, official meetings, ceremonies, things like that. Out in the “real world”, it was generally disguised in some way, compacted into a bandanna, a ring, a belt, a cap. Her royal blue duster was currently relegated to a purple fuzzy skull on the back of her leather jacket. Disguised uniforms are always necessarily purple. She popped her collar and the skull unraveled, falling down past her knees and slithering up her forearms. Before she took two more steps, she was wearing her full uniform. She rolled up her sleeves tight against her biceps in order to show off her arms.
She reached the door, knocked, and after a brief shuffling of feet, the door opened. He was exactly as she expected him to be. Old, male, grey-headed, sunburnt, stooped over, intimidated, and bewildered at the sight of this gigantic woman out in the middle of nowhere. After some evident confusion, he made up his mind, and stammered out a “Can I help you?”
“Mr. Dales, do you know who I am?”
This simple question doubled the old man’s confusion, whose first action was to look around, an outward action that revealed an inward search of the mind. How did this ogre of a woman know his name? Why was she here? What is she wearing? Do I have debts that need to be collected? Am I in trouble with the government? The Mafia? Finally he returned to the question he was asked, and turned his gaze upon the woman in the duster. Did he know who she was? Certainly not. He could never have forgotten an Amazonian like that. But was that the point of the question? Was she asking, instead, “do you know what I am?”
That is, in fact, what Zynthia had intended to ask. She had dressed in her official uniform because she had hoped that he would recognize her in her official capacity, but not be so acquainted with her exact role of Janitor. She had gathered, from the countless interrogations performed on the “loose ends”, that Mr. Dales was a third-generation inter-dimensional. His grandfather had been an Enforcer, and had served loyally to the end. The grandfather had a son, whom he did not officially acquaint with the Secret, but whose supernatural abilities had emerged by means of his genetics. He managed to keep the secret well enough to avoid detection, and died peacefully of old age. Mr. Dales was the son of that father, and the grandson of that grandfather. This man represented all that was left of a family tree that started out strong, but withered due to lack of water. This grandson, himself a grandfather’s age, almost made it.
Zynthia made an educated guess that this third-generation would have only heard stories of what the purple duster meant, what it represented, and of the Secret it hid. She had hoped that she would be recognized as a friendly guide that was here to tell this old man about his father, and his father’s father. That he would think that she was there to guide him to fulfill his destiny, to help unlock his latent ability and fully claim his birthright.
That is not, in fact, what he thought. Instead, he panicked.
The door was slammed in Zynthia’s face. Not a problem. She easily flattened it with a kick. The old man was seen darting into the kitchen. His shotgun was in his bedroom, which was to the left, and then the last room on the right. What was in the kitchen? A knife? The phone? Both of these things were true, and yet, that is not what the old man grabbed. He had grabbed a spoon. Zynthia hesitated.
What the old man did with this spoon was not to wield it like a knife and go for the eyes, but merely hold it to his chest with his back up against the sink, wild-eyed and frozen. The spoon was decorative, made of marble and traced with gold. Why had he grabbed it? Zynthia did not want to spend time thinking about it. Her prey had already made one move, and she did not intend for him to make another. She took a single, broad, step across half of the kitchen and grabbed his head in both hands. She entered his mind, which began the Walk.
The Walk is where the real janitorial work begins. It involves walking through the memories of a subject, erasing that which needs to be erased, and planting new memories to fill in the gaps. Suppose that you see a tail slither out from under the skirt of a pretty girl, just for a moment. You’d likely think your eyes are playing tricks on you and disregard it immediately. What is more likely, that this girl has a tail, or that you need some coffee? For those that do not Know, it is the latter. In those cases, a Janitor is not needed. You will clean up your own memories and never even mention it to anyone ever again, except maybe to poke fun at yourself, or to explain to your boss how tired you are, so that you should get the rest of the day off.
But what if you see something a bit more impactful than that. What if you’re mugged by a kid with a knife, who then opens up a portal to Singapore to make his escape? That will likely stay with you for the rest of your life. When that criminal is caught by the Enforcers, they will call for a Janitor to do a Walk. This Janitor will see you, through his memories, track you down, grasp your head, and alter that memory for you. If you’ve told other people about that event, which you probably have, those people will be paid a visit as well. If you’ve written about it in a diary, you will lose that diary for one or two days while the techs back at the lab do the physical alterations.
This old man is not someone who has seen something. He is the source of the leak itself. Stopping up the leak, in this case, would mean to kill him. If he was young, he could have been taught, trained, and raised to be an Enforcer. His crimes would be forgiven. Unfortunately for him, it was too late. His brain was solidified, unreceptive to the alteration process, which was a prerequisite for the training. There was no such thing as a jail that could be used to keep these people in, for they would easily break out, due to the nature of their powers. The only option for these sorts of people is death. Before this, though, the only thing left to do was to browse through his memories and see if he had made any other messes that needed to be cleaned up.
What Zynthia saw was fog. Most people usually have fog in their memories, but not usually this much. When you’re doing things you do regularly, like driving to and from work, you usually zone out, except for when someone cuts you off and causes you to slam on your breaks. This zoning out creates fog. This man’s whole life was thick fog. His latest memories, those of herself through his eyes, were clear, but almost everything else was obscured. There were fragments here and there, mostly of his own garden, the store where he did his shopping, and one in particular of the spoon he had grabbed, but that was it. No context to give meaning to the ideas. Occasionally the fog would lift to reveal a shape here or there, but everything would fade before too long. Perhaps the man suffered from Alzheimer's. She couldn’t work with so little to go on. The techs at the lab would have to deal with this one.
He had almost made it.
She ended her Walk and let go of him, but not before “closing up”, which meant paralzying everything but his eyes and his lungs. She raised a button on her sleeve to her mouth and spoke:
“Harvester, this is Zyn”
“This is Harvester. Go ahead”
“I got him, but he’s completely fogged. Heavy memory loss. We’d need techs on this one”.
“Understood. Did you make a mess?”
“Broke a door.”
Collateral damage was discouraged. Replacing a door is hard to do without leaving evidence behind. Replacing a memory is easy by comparison.
“Better than the load-bearing wall you collapsed last time”
“Well, I am still here…”
“Don’t be. Collect the leak and bring him to HQ. We’ll handle the physicals for you”.
Physicals meaning the door, the footprints from her boot, anything that could have left a trace. Male Janitors usually handled that. Female Janitors usually did Walks and tech work. Within the hour, the door would be replaced with an exact replica, all traces of her visit would have been removed, and the old man would be dissected and his memories meticulously sorted through by the techs back at HQ, who were far better at Walks than she was, but also more wimpy. They would get back to her if they found anything.
She opened a portal to HQ. Within two hours, she would be back in her Ford Mustang, her formal uniform relegated to a fuzzy skull on the back of her leather jacket, looking for that bar with the saloon doors.
I've always liked writing. I used to take the commuter rail to work, so I'd spend the combined 1h 30m on my tablet, writing up a story inspired by a dream I had. I couldn't sleep tonight, so I wrote the first page of a story involving this character I've been developing in my head for a while now. This character lives in the same universe as those inspired by my dream.
The genre of this character's story is something like science-fiction / fantasy / detective. I don't know what to call it, and it's probably not even apparent from just this small page here, since nothing really happens other than a minuscule glimpse into the mind of this character. But now the ball is rolling, and the character has taken her first baby steps, which will, I hope, motivate me to write more out of a sort of paternal instinct.
Let me know your thoughts and if you want to see more, or if you don't. If you want to see some of my train-writings, I can make that happen too. I haven't looked at them in years, and I'd probably cringe.
The genre of this character's story is something like science-fiction / fantasy / detective. I don't know what to call it, and it's probably not even apparent from just this small page here, since nothing really happens other than a minuscule glimpse into the mind of this character. But now the ball is rolling, and the character has taken her first baby steps, which will, I hope, motivate me to write more out of a sort of paternal instinct.
Let me know your thoughts and if you want to see more, or if you don't. If you want to see some of my train-writings, I can make that happen too. I haven't looked at them in years, and I'd probably cringe.
Zynthia lived by three words:
Might makes Right.
These words were tattooed across her back, at the base of her neck. She had wanted to put them somewhere where the letters wouldn’t get stretched out as her muscles grew. It was either the back of the neck, the collarbone, or the tailbone. She didn't want to give people a third reason to stare at her chest, and she wasn't a fan of the “tramp stamp”, so to the back of the neck it went. Plus, she imagined the impression it would make if that were to be the last thing people saw of her as she stepped through the saloon doors of a bar, the victor of a vicious brawl, spitting out a tooth into a corner, right before she triumphantly shrugged on her leather jacket. The idea tickled her.
She had tried to make that scene a reality. Plenty of brawls were won, plenty of teeth were lost, plenty of leather jackets were shrugged on, triumphantly, but she couldn't find a bar with actual saloon doors. You know, the ones: they open at the top and bottom, part in the middle, and swing whenever someone walks through them. Impossible to find, except in the movies.
Apart from this fantasy, Zynthia believed in strength, that is to say, power. She believed that those with power are right, and have the right to wield that power, and only continue to wield it for as long as they are right to do so. When one loses power, it is because they are overpowered, that is to say, they are wrong compared to their opponent. If someone abuses their power, it is only natural that the abused rise up and destroy their oppressor, which proves the right, powerful, and the powerful, right. A lion is strong compared to a zebra. Claws, muscles, teeth, and cunning allow one beast to topple another. Prey cannot hope to eat its predator due to the fact that power belongs to one and not the other. If fish ate birds, one would have to concede that power was given to the fish, as claws are to the lion, and that it is only proper for birds to die for the sake of fish, as fish are to die for the sake of fishermen
Zynthia was a fisherman, a lion and a bird-eating fish all in one. She was casting a line, stalking her prey, and poised to leap out of the water. She was on the job and ready for action.
She stepped out of her car and shrugged her leather jacket on over her tattoo:
Might makes Right
---
Edit: The rest of what could be called Chapter 1:
---
Her target was in the house, a single inhabited island secluded in a sea of rural farmland. No neighbors for miles. She could make a racket without being observed, which was much to her liking. She strode right past the “No Trespassing” sign, and up to the house, which was a good tenth of a mile from the road where she had parked.
She had searched the house, “cased the joint”, before she had even left the car. She knew only one person was home, and was ever going to be home, as the house clearly had only enough accessories to accommodate a lone inhabitant. No wife. No kids. Not even a dog. Nothing but a garden to keep the old man company. This was also ideal.
Zynthia kept her guard up, since, omniscient as she was, she was called in for a reason, and that reason usually meant having to deal with dangerous, potentially unstable individuals. She had spied a double-barreled shotgun during her scouting, a gun which was now, thanks to her trespassing, legally eligible to be used against her, but that wasn’t what she was worried about. Worried? We should not say “worried”. Zynthia does not worry, she is only, merely, concerned. Zynthia was concerned because of what she couldn’t see. She could see all of the outward, physical weapons that could be used against her, but she couldn’t see the inner weapons, which were the panic-stricken lengths that the prey would go to in order to avoid capture. People rarely panic well. A shotgun in the grip of a reasonable thinker is surmountable. A spoon in the hands of a desperate man is cause for hesitation.
This wasn’t just any old man that needed a visit from just any young bruiser, this was someone who had leaked a secret. And not just any old secret, but the Secret. The last two weeks were spent tirelessly cleaning up the loose ends that this man had left lying around. If he were left to his own devices, he would only create more trouble. It’s likely that, after this, the case wouldn’t even be closed. Perhaps he has people buried underneath his garden, people with families that need to be tracked down and interrogated. Perhaps the neighbors, miles away, are in on it too, requiring similar visits to be paid. A job like hers is sometimes, quite literally, never done.
Her job is to clean up the mess that other people make. She is a Janitor. Whenever somebody leaks the Secret, her job is to find everyone who knows about it and clean them up.
As she approached the house, she thought that she might be better received if she swapped her leather jacket for something that properly announced her authority in these matters. Her uniform was officially supposed to be an ankle-length royal purple duster, which was not something you wanted to wear whenever you were trying to keep the Secret. It was usually only worn in full among gatherings of the Knowing. Galas, official meetings, ceremonies, things like that. Out in the “real world”, it was generally disguised in some way, compacted into a bandanna, a ring, a belt, a cap. Her royal blue duster was currently relegated to a purple fuzzy skull on the back of her leather jacket. Disguised uniforms are always necessarily purple. She popped her collar and the skull unraveled, falling down past her knees and slithering up her forearms. Before she took two more steps, she was wearing her full uniform. She rolled up her sleeves tight against her biceps in order to show off her arms.
She reached the door, knocked, and after a brief shuffling of feet, the door opened. He was exactly as she expected him to be. Old, male, grey-headed, sunburnt, stooped over, intimidated, and bewildered at the sight of this gigantic woman out in the middle of nowhere. After some evident confusion, he made up his mind, and stammered out a “Can I help you?”
“Mr. Dales, do you know who I am?”
This simple question doubled the old man’s confusion, whose first action was to look around, an outward action that revealed an inward search of the mind. How did this ogre of a woman know his name? Why was she here? What is she wearing? Do I have debts that need to be collected? Am I in trouble with the government? The Mafia? Finally he returned to the question he was asked, and turned his gaze upon the woman in the duster. Did he know who she was? Certainly not. He could never have forgotten an Amazonian like that. But was that the point of the question? Was she asking, instead, “do you know what I am?”
That is, in fact, what Zynthia had intended to ask. She had dressed in her official uniform because she had hoped that he would recognize her in her official capacity, but not be so acquainted with her exact role of Janitor. She had gathered, from the countless interrogations performed on the “loose ends”, that Mr. Dales was a third-generation inter-dimensional. His grandfather had been an Enforcer, and had served loyally to the end. The grandfather had a son, whom he did not officially acquaint with the Secret, but whose supernatural abilities had emerged by means of his genetics. He managed to keep the secret well enough to avoid detection, and died peacefully of old age. Mr. Dales was the son of that father, and the grandson of that grandfather. This man represented all that was left of a family tree that started out strong, but withered due to lack of water. This grandson, himself a grandfather’s age, almost made it.
Zynthia made an educated guess that this third-generation would have only heard stories of what the purple duster meant, what it represented, and of the Secret it hid. She had hoped that she would be recognized as a friendly guide that was here to tell this old man about his father, and his father’s father. That he would think that she was there to guide him to fulfill his destiny, to help unlock his latent ability and fully claim his birthright.
That is not, in fact, what he thought. Instead, he panicked.
The door was slammed in Zynthia’s face. Not a problem. She easily flattened it with a kick. The old man was seen darting into the kitchen. His shotgun was in his bedroom, which was to the left, and then the last room on the right. What was in the kitchen? A knife? The phone? Both of these things were true, and yet, that is not what the old man grabbed. He had grabbed a spoon. Zynthia hesitated.
What the old man did with this spoon was not to wield it like a knife and go for the eyes, but merely hold it to his chest with his back up against the sink, wild-eyed and frozen. The spoon was decorative, made of marble and traced with gold. Why had he grabbed it? Zynthia did not want to spend time thinking about it. Her prey had already made one move, and she did not intend for him to make another. She took a single, broad, step across half of the kitchen and grabbed his head in both hands. She entered his mind, which began the Walk.
The Walk is where the real janitorial work begins. It involves walking through the memories of a subject, erasing that which needs to be erased, and planting new memories to fill in the gaps. Suppose that you see a tail slither out from under the skirt of a pretty girl, just for a moment. You’d likely think your eyes are playing tricks on you and disregard it immediately. What is more likely, that this girl has a tail, or that you need some coffee? For those that do not Know, it is the latter. In those cases, a Janitor is not needed. You will clean up your own memories and never even mention it to anyone ever again, except maybe to poke fun at yourself, or to explain to your boss how tired you are, so that you should get the rest of the day off.
But what if you see something a bit more impactful than that. What if you’re mugged by a kid with a knife, who then opens up a portal to Singapore to make his escape? That will likely stay with you for the rest of your life. When that criminal is caught by the Enforcers, they will call for a Janitor to do a Walk. This Janitor will see you, through his memories, track you down, grasp your head, and alter that memory for you. If you’ve told other people about that event, which you probably have, those people will be paid a visit as well. If you’ve written about it in a diary, you will lose that diary for one or two days while the techs back at the lab do the physical alterations.
This old man is not someone who has seen something. He is the source of the leak itself. Stopping up the leak, in this case, would mean to kill him. If he was young, he could have been taught, trained, and raised to be an Enforcer. His crimes would be forgiven. Unfortunately for him, it was too late. His brain was solidified, unreceptive to the alteration process, which was a prerequisite for the training. There was no such thing as a jail that could be used to keep these people in, for they would easily break out, due to the nature of their powers. The only option for these sorts of people is death. Before this, though, the only thing left to do was to browse through his memories and see if he had made any other messes that needed to be cleaned up.
What Zynthia saw was fog. Most people usually have fog in their memories, but not usually this much. When you’re doing things you do regularly, like driving to and from work, you usually zone out, except for when someone cuts you off and causes you to slam on your breaks. This zoning out creates fog. This man’s whole life was thick fog. His latest memories, those of herself through his eyes, were clear, but almost everything else was obscured. There were fragments here and there, mostly of his own garden, the store where he did his shopping, and one in particular of the spoon he had grabbed, but that was it. No context to give meaning to the ideas. Occasionally the fog would lift to reveal a shape here or there, but everything would fade before too long. Perhaps the man suffered from Alzheimer's. She couldn’t work with so little to go on. The techs at the lab would have to deal with this one.
He had almost made it.
She ended her Walk and let go of him, but not before “closing up”, which meant paralzying everything but his eyes and his lungs. She raised a button on her sleeve to her mouth and spoke:
“Harvester, this is Zyn”
“This is Harvester. Go ahead”
“I got him, but he’s completely fogged. Heavy memory loss. We’d need techs on this one”.
“Understood. Did you make a mess?”
“Broke a door.”
Collateral damage was discouraged. Replacing a door is hard to do without leaving evidence behind. Replacing a memory is easy by comparison.
“Better than the load-bearing wall you collapsed last time”
“Well, I am still here…”
“Don’t be. Collect the leak and bring him to HQ. We’ll handle the physicals for you”.
Physicals meaning the door, the footprints from her boot, anything that could have left a trace. Male Janitors usually handled that. Female Janitors usually did Walks and tech work. Within the hour, the door would be replaced with an exact replica, all traces of her visit would have been removed, and the old man would be dissected and his memories meticulously sorted through by the techs back at HQ, who were far better at Walks than she was, but also more wimpy. They would get back to her if they found anything.
She opened a portal to HQ. Within two hours, she would be back in her Ford Mustang, her formal uniform relegated to a fuzzy skull on the back of her leather jacket, looking for that bar with the saloon doors.
