What was strange to her, and still fascinated her, was how many things could be going on in the corporate office, while their true business was happening elsewhere, all around Centralia, and increasingly pushing across the borders, the family looking to partner with more stable countries to expand their shipping facilities.
This was something that Helena had tasked an entire department with figuring out, as it required contracts with foreign governments, deals with her own government, plus a ton of oversight. It was something her father had tried, and failed, to accomplish.
Before his retirement, her father had set up the company in the most decentralized way he could come up with to keep revenue growing. Each of the departments had a head who was responsible for that department, this person able to make calls that would normally have to run up the chain of command.
This left the board free to managing overarching issues, and it created a scenario in which Helena didn’t have to stress as much about day-to-day operations. She could keep her vision on the future, while letting those most qualified to monitor intricate details manage their own departments, which in a way operated as sub companies at times.
It had been a genius maneuver on her father’s part.
A knock at the door grabbed her attention. “Ms. Knight,” Bryan King said as he peeked his head in. “The board is ready.” Bryan was a thin man, wearing a nicely pressed blue suit and tan leather shoes.
He smiled briskly at Helena.
“Great,” Helena said as she followed him through a corridor with high ceilings, chandeliers at the top, pictures of some of her relatives hanging on the walls, all of them in golden frames.
There were two doors at the end of the space, one led to the rest of the office, the other to the boardroom.
Helena approached the door that led to the boardroom, smoothed her hands over her outfit, and took a deep breath.
“Thank you,” she told Bryan, who stood off to the side now, his hands crossed over the front of his body.
Helena let herself in, which was something she told Bryan she preferred to do. As the other board members stood, she took no time in asking them to have a seat. After clearing her throat, Helena Knight was all business over the next hour.
Only briefly, while one of the members was talking, did it cross her mind that the three people living at her home would be surprised to see Helena in this setting. This led her to think momentarily about the double life she was living, how dangerous it was, and how much she enjoyed doing it.
The risk was greater than the reward, but she wasn’t in it for a trophy anyway.
Once the meeting concluded, the board members stood, each one filing out individually.
“Mr. Moonstar,” Helena said, smiling to the mustached man, who was trim and wore a tailored tweed suit. “Can you stick around for a moment?”
“As you wish, Ms. Knight,” he said, waiting for the others to leave.
“Please, sit,” Helena told the man, who liked to be called “Dick” and often fit his nickname.
“May I ask what this is about?”
“I’m very well aware of how DM Enterprises benefits off the people who choose to ship with us,” Helena said, her pupil starting to spin. “But that’s not what I want to discuss. I know that you don’t go over every contract that comes through our shipping division, that we have a head manager for that, but I also know that you are good friends with him, and that you have paid him bonuses over the last seven quarters to encourage companies to use your shipping supplies.”
“That is correct,” Dick told her, fixated on her eye as Helena continue to speak.
“You know this is technically a violation of board protocol.”
“I’m aware.”
“But that’s not what I’m after right now, what I would like to know is why? Aside from monetary gain, what’s the reason that you’re going behind my back and doing this?”
“Debt,” Dick said, swallowing hard.
It was weird to watch people make confessions as they were hypnotized, especially when one part of them was actively resisting what they were saying. Richard’s eyes were suddenly red, and he kept sniffing, licking his lips, his body trying to override what he was saying and experiencing.
“And what type of debt are we talking about here? Gambling? Investment?”
“Investment debt,” he finally said.
“So one of the companies that you made a deal with, a group known as Fang, what did they order from you? What did they promise you if the deal went through? You may be wondering how I know all this, but rest assured that I have checked my sources several times now, and I have a team of people working on this as we speak. I should also say that at the end of this conversation, you will forget that we’ve spoken at all. But we can deal with that part later. For now, I want to get back to my original questions: what did they order from you, and what did they promise you if the deal went through?”
“They didn’t order anything,” he finally admitted, “but they did pay me.”
“Good, write down the sum here,” Helena said as she turned her pad toward Richard. He wrote down a number that was higher than Helena had expected, and once he was finished, he turned the pad back to her.
“This number was agreed-upon if I could keep the contracts coming, but now I cannot because of the stop order that you put in…”
“It wasn’t a stop order, as I said in the meeting, we just want to re-examine how contracts are made. That’s all.”
“I understand,” Dick said, nodding.
“Since you aren’t going to remember any of this, I’m going to tell you how this plays out next,” Helena said firmly. “You will not be invited to the next board meeting. But you will not be terminated from the board, at least not yet. You will contact me once Fang contacts you to ask for advice due to their shipping resource being cut off. You will feed all this information to me, and no money will exchange hands with the Knight Corporation. In fact, you will take all the money that they pay going forward, although I don’t think they’ll be paying for a while at least, considering they’ve already paid you this amount. Is this understood?”
“It is, Ms. Knight.”
“Your work here will be instrumental in bringing down an organization that is trafficking children from other countries into Centralia. Now, you don’t need to know any of that, but you will learn a few things as you grow closer to the Fang organization. You will pay close attention to their hierarchy, you will keep active notes on what you have observed and pass them on to me if they ever let you into their inner circle.”
“As you wish, Ms. Knight,” Dick said.
“I’m glad we could come to some agreement here, Mr. Moonstar, ” Helena said as she started to pack up her things. “Glad indeed.”
Chapter Six: Just Out Heroing and Shit
(Vigilante Justice is really starting to live up to their name!)
Sam sat across from Ozella in a bustling diner near Helena’s home. Like many of the places that surrounded the Amor District, the diner was same same but different, “same” in the sense that it looked like all other diners, but “different” in the fact that it was three times the price, the clientele consisting mostly of Centralia’s elite.
It was Helena who suggested that they go to the joint, her assistant already calling in a reservation, which Sam found to be a little ridiculous. A reservation at a diner? He’d never heard of someone doing that before, unless they were trying to throw a birthday party or something.
Diners were so plentiful in Centralia that if your favorite diner was packed, there was usually another diner within a two-block radius that was equally priced, and they probably had the same menu too.
Leave it to Helena to find an exclusive place.
Since it was so fancy, Sam thought about using his daily power-up to switch out to something other than smell, but he ultimately decided against it, eventually settling for toast.
He hadn’t experimented with switching his p
owers enough, and figured he’d do it at some point, likely with Ozella’s guidance.
Sam pretty much had his olfactory epithelium under control at the moment, mouth-breathing like he was practicing CPR, his focus on keeping his nostrils shut. He recalled the time that William Bottorf the duplicator had shoved two earplugs up his nostrils.
Maybe that would be a way to eat without activating a different power… he thought as he watched Ozella enjoy a bowl of oatmeal, with green eggs and ham on the way.
As always, Ozella was nice to look at. The geeky statkeeper wore a white blouse at the moment, unbuttoned in the front, her blouse tucked into a green and red plaid skirt, her trademark red leather backpack on the seat next to her, a yellow dingy hanging from one of the zippers.
While she ate her oatmeal, she perused her Book of Known Variables, occasionally setting her spoon down, picking up a pencil and making adjustments.
Sam had been watching her do this for the last several minutes, wondering why she went to so much effort when she had figured out the secret of the book. He had yet to speak to her about it. Sam wasn’t the type to immediately call someone out, but it seemed tedious, and Helena had asked him to say something.
Sam figured he would bring it up, trying to keep things as nonchalant as possible. “You know, you probably don’t need to really adjust people’s stats anymore now that you have, you know, figured out a different way to use the book.”
“A different way to use the book?” Ozella asked.
“Ozella, you can write a question in the book and the answer is presented to you. That’s basically what you have been doing, right?”
“It’s one of the things I’ve been doing, but it doesn’t always give me a straight answer.”
“I’m not knocking what you did before, you know, keeping so many details on everyone, I just think that this is what you should be focused on.”
“Just writing questions?”
Sam thought for a moment. “No, not just that. Things like what you did with the power-up is also really cool. I just think you have unlocked the secret, and now that you’ve done that, that’s what we should be working on.”
“You want to work with me on my own power?” she asked, absolutely no hint of animosity in her tone.
“I would love to,” Sam told her. “That’s how we should use this. I mean, the power-up thing is genius. I keep saying this, but it really is. You know it’s genius, we all think it’s brilliant, but you could, in a way, be our detective.”
“A detective,” Ozella said, bringing her pencil to her mouth for a moment, chewing on the eraser.
“Yeah,” Sam said, realizing he had hit on a point that could be expanded upon. “That’s exactly what you could be like. And it would be incredibly helpful to us. Dinah’s healing is already so damn helpful. And I don’t know what we’re going to do with her…”
“Real form?” Ozella asked, finishing his sentence.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Her real form.”
Dinah started to fade into existence. Nude as always, the blue woman was next to Ozella, her hair in a side ponytail. She looked at Sam for a moment, and placed her hand behind her neck, smiling at him.
“It looks like she’s flirting with me,” Sam said.
Ozella turned to look at Dinah, telling her to knock it off under her breath. Dinah merely shrugged and continued to gaze at Sam.
“Anyway, let’s not let Dinah distract us,” Sam said as the waiter came by and filled Ozella’s cup of tea. He also filled Sam’s water, the waiter coming just a bit too close to Sam’s sniffer.
Even though he was mouth-breathing at the moment, Sam got a small whiff of the man’s scent, the waiter’s history coming to him in an instant.
It was his second job. He had already worked another job overnight. He was a single father, his wife killed in an exemplar incident. Sam felt bad for the guy, but it also gave him an idea, two ideas actually.
“All right,” Sam said as the man left. “I have a couple things I wanted to suggest, but let’s start with this. You see our waiter?”
“Yes, a man named Roger Fortune,” Ozella said, a dazed look flashing across her face. “Interesting…”
“Okay, so you are seeing a little bit about his personal history, right?” Sam asked.
“I am. It’s too bad what happened to his wife.”
“Killed by an exemplar; at least from what I could smell.”
“Something like that,” Ozella said.
“Okay then, that’s our first little detective mission,” Sam suggested. “Let’s figure out who killed his wife and bring them to justice.”
“By just using my notebook?” Ozella asked.
“Exactly. You know the guy now, or at least you’ve seen him, and let’s just see what happens. Ask the book questions, see if you get answers.”
“Okay…” Ozella said, turning to a blank page. “What would you ask it first?”
“‘Who killed Roger Fortune’s wife?’ Try starting with that. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Okay,” Ozella said as she wrote the question.
She looked up again at the waiter as he approached with her green eggs and ham. Sam wished he could have green eggs and ham, but eating meat always gave him the history of the animal, even if he tried to do it with his nose pinched shut, and eggs, while more bearable, had a certain smell to them that was overwhelming.
“What is it?” Sam asked, focusing on his mouth-breathing again as the waiter left. “Did it tell you something?”
He didn’t know if “it” was the right term for whatever was communicating with Ozella, but whatever it was, the entity had proved helpful thus far.
Ozella nodded. “The killer’s name is Jimmy Vela.”
“Did it tell you anything else about him?”
“No,” Ozella said as she shook her head. “I didn’t really ask anything else.”
“Okay, so it can answer questions,” Sam said, running his hand along his beard stubble. He had been meaning to shave, but there were more interesting things to do as of late, like trying to be a hero and shit.
“What if I write ‘Where does Jimmy Vela live?’ That could give us the answer we’re looking for…” Ozella suggested. “We could poke around there.”
“Yeah, write it. Let’s see. As it stands right now, if we can simply ask your book questions and get answers, the sky's the limit. We could solve anything. We would be able to track down anyone too.”
“That would be super helpful,” Ozella said as she ignored her green eggs and ham, focusing instead on what she was writing. She looked up again, in a way that reminded Sam of one of the northern Centralia gophers that his parents always had to deal with on the family vineyard.
“Well?”
“The Book says it doesn’t know, but that a good place to start would be a restaurant called Blue Lagoon.”
Sam immediately fired off a message to a telepathic answering service, asking where Blue Lagoon was located. He got a response almost instantaneously. “Okay, the Goa District.”
Sam was very familiar with this district, mostly because Zoe’s middle name had been borrowed from the district, which was a place that her mother had done business when Zoe was young.
And boy, had Sam heard those stories—Zoe’s hard upbringing, living with her grandmother, her mother out smuggling and eventually being killed. There was a point in her life that Zoe had wanted to change her middle name, but she decided as she grew closer to twenty that she would keep it, to remind herself never to get into the same type of business that cost her mother her life.
“Ask it why it’s giving us the Blue Lagoon as an answer.”
“Sure,” Ozella asked, and Sam watched, albeit upside down, as she wrote the question, ‘Why Blue Lagoon?’ in her notebook.
Ozella laughed, immediately bring her hand to her mouth, her cheeks flushing red.
“What?”
“The book is a little snarky,” she finally said. “Kind o
f like Zoe.”
“What did it say?”
“It said, ‘go find out yourself.’”
Sam grinned. “All right, once you finish your green eggs and ham, let’s go figure this out.”
“There was another thing you said that you wanted to try,” Ozella said.
“Yes, there is, but let’s hold off on that for a moment and focus on this. Now what other questions could we ask it?”
“Maybe we should find out more about why this man named Jimmy Vela killed our waiter’s wife. Maybe that will help us better understand his motives, or if it was somehow accidental. Let’s start there…”
“We could be at this for a while,” Sam said, looking at her food. “Just go ahead and eat first, and then we can take a trolley over there, and ask more questions in the trolley. Deal?”
“Deal. And later, you can eat a better meal. Something better than toast.”
“How?”
Ozella smiled at him. “I have an idea, don’t worry.”
***
“That’s it, show me that one again,” the photographer told Zoe. “Good, good,” he said, licking his lips as he snapped another picture. “Perfect.”
Irony or not, Zoe was dressed as Tiger Lily, the second-generation Centralian wearing tiger print boy shorts, and an open blouse tied in the middle over a sports bra, her black hair tucked behind a headband with tiger ears attached to it.
It felt good to be wanted, and even though she knew the photographer was paid to make her feel like she was the most beautiful thing that ever existed, this didn’t bother Zoe one bit. As she turned to him, hiking her ass up, the boy shorts just barely covering her ass cheeks, Zoe looked over her shoulder at the camera and blew it a kiss, finally feeling like herself.
Or at least the version of her that she liked to show to the world from time to time.
“This is so great, better than our last session together,” the photographer assured her. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but keep doing it!”
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