Insanity runs in the family. No, not my blood relations. My real family. I looked over my shoulder at the lady waiting in the bar. Valeria. My best frenemy, my worst nightmare and my favorite person. She’d been working with everyone and their cousins for as long as I remembered. The foremost researcher into oh so many things. She was one of the most brilliant minds in the universe. And my family wanted her silenced. I donned my hood as I walked in. It wasn’t for being inconspicuous, actually it generally had quite the opposite effect. No, it was a simple way to keep cameras from catching my face. A voice in the back of my mind told me to keep to the shadows. I called that one Gertrude, because it reminded me of the lady in charge of my old orphanage. Always telling me that I could be great if I just wasn’t so over-the-top to my lifestyle, to how I moved, and how I walked, and how I acted around the parents looking to adopt a kid. I didn’t much care about Gertrude’s opinion back then, and I didn’t much care about my own Gertrude’s voice now. It didn’t make it go away, though.
Confidently entering the place, I walked up to the bar next to Valeria and raised a finger. The attractive bartender walked over to us. “Hello,” he said in a sultry tone, “What can I get for you?”
Before I could speak, Valeria said, “Whisky neat for me, and she’ll be having a vodka soda.” Then, turning to me, she added with a faux-flirtatious grin, “That’s right, right?”
I shook my head, but my voice replied, “Precisely.” My grin was just as flirtatious as hers, and just as fake.
The bartender nodded. “So, you two, like, know each other?” he asked as he poured the whisky.
“Better than either of us’d like, probably,” I said to him, equally flirtatiously, but slightly less fakely.
Valeria laughed. “And yet, not enough in all likelihood,” she added as she picked up her whisky. She, like me, was slightly less false in her flirtatiousness with the bartender. WE were still both faking it, he was attractive and all, but not really either of our type. Too hipster for my taste, and too beefy for hers. That said, he was normal, which really was important for both of us.
“True enough,” I said to her. The vodka soda was placed before me and I took a sip. We sat in relative silence, drinking, until the bartender left. “I take it you know why I’m here,” I said to her.
Valeria shrugged. “To kill me, I presume?” she said, then took a sip of her whisky.
I chuckled. “Only if all else fails.” Taking a sip of my own drink, I continued, “I like you, Valeria, you know that, right?”
The voice in my head that I call Frank, after my first kiss, complained at me about how gay I was acting. The guy had been a dick back in high school, and he was still a dick stuck in my head as he was. But, try as I might to force him out of there, he’d found some kind of foothold. He wasn’t as loud or complainy as Gertrude, but when he did complain, he just served to piss me off.
“I know. Well, at least sixty percent of you likes me,” she joked. She was about right. It was closer to sixty-four percent, but she didn’t really know the extent of the voices, nor did I want her to. No one really did.
“My boss thinks you’re planning on talking. Or, well, more specifically, writing some academic paper on us.” My face and voice and speech were all cordial, even pleasant, but the implications of those words were far from it.
She waved me off. “Don’t you worry so much. I’m writing my dissertation on a different kind of secret, underground society. No mentions of your friends or their creepy practices.”
That got me curious. “Which one?” I asked.
“One of the Big Three,” she said, “But I can’t tell you more than that. Don’t want one of you scooping me, after all.
I shook my head. “We’re not dumb enough to go after the normies, you know that.” I leaned in. “You also know that they’ll hit back, hard.”
Her reply was entirely predictable. Valeria was one of the most brilliant minds I’d ever seen, except for her sense of morality and her common sense. “Probably, but I’ve got friends in many places. I should be able to survive the fallout.”
I nodded. “I hope so.” And I did. I may have my own issues with her, but Valeria was good people, normally. I continued, “Well, in any case, I need you to sign the thing saying you aren’t talking about us.”
“Of course,” she said, and sighed on the dotted line. She didn’t even bother reading the thing. She knew I was being honest about what it said, and I knew better than to lie to her.
The bartender wandered back over and saw the papers. “I see, so this was a business thing,” he said with a completely honest flirtatious grin towards Valeria. I almost felt bad for him, getting attached to that monster. “Will you two be wanting anything else?”
I waved my hand over my glass. “No thanks, I was just about to head out. V, on the other hand, will definitely have another.”
“You know me too well,” she replied, looking me in the eyes.
I smiled. “For once you and every bit of me agree on something,” I joked.
“Thank heavens for little victories,” she snarked back.
I nodded. “And hey, I know we’re not exactly friends, but if you need anything after the stuff goes down…” I let my voice trail off. She knew well enough what I meant, and it wouldn’t do to air too much of our dirty laundry in front of the horny hipster beefcake.
Valeria nodded. “Of course. I will. And if you ever want to do anything without the rest of your family…” She, too, trailed off knowing better than airing dirty laundry before the about-to-be-one-night-stand.
“I know,” I said. Steve complained at me, talking about how important family was. He’d been my old foster brother, after I finally got out of the orphanage. He was a good kid, except for his weird obsession with drugs and family. I always figured he’d watched one too many of those cheesy movies and figured that the family that was neither our blood nor our choice was our true family. He stuck with me, both encouraging cocaine use and telling me to stick with my family. It was an odd combo, but I can never tell why someone decides to stick with me while someone else doesn’t. Standing up, I nodded a goodbye to the bartender, and headed right out the door. I didn’t have anywhere else to be that night, but I certainly didn’t want to be stuck listening to the two of them flirt awkwardly for the first hour or two, then drunkenly and brazenly for the next. Literally anything sounded better than that.
Taking a stroll down U Street, I decided to see an old friend in Georgetown. Taking the subway out to him, I knocked on the door to the slightly rundown looking townhouse. Someone other than Jimbo opened up the door. An attractive thirtysomething gentleman in a full suit. He looked like he’d just gotten back from something big. “Is Jim here?” I asked with a smile.
“Sorry, Jimbo’s got something or other with his normie friends. Who’re you?”
Mary, my paranoid college friend who smoked too much weed but turned out to be more right about her conspiracy theories than wrong, warned me not to trust this random guy, because he was one of ‘them’. I barely held in a chuckle, because of course he was one of the enigmatic ‘Them’. He was a friend of Jim’s, who was definitely secretly involved in running the normie world, in some way. He was always very vague about which of the Big Three he was a part of, but I figured it was one of them. I smiled at the man before me. “I’m Tal. I mean, Talia. Jim used to say I could visit whenever, as long as I never asked any questions or wanted any answers.”
The man laughed. “Sounds like Jim. Name’s Ismael, come on in.”
Mary once again warned me about entering. I once again ignored her. Ismael turned and asked, “So, how’d you end up meeting Jim?”
I raised my eyebrows. “That sounded suspiciously like a question.”
“That’s ‘cause it was one,” someone shouted from the main room.
Ismael shook his head. “Ignore her. Alice just hates that Jim’s the only one of us who actually likes her.”
I smirked at him while I entered the main room. “Well, knowing Jim’s taste in people and not knowing yours, I think I might end up liking her. And hating her. Simultaneously.”
Ismael nodded slowly. “I see,” he said, “So you met Jim through Madame Aragon.”
I laughed. “Who?” I asked, feigning ignorance. Ismael didn’t catch onto the falsehood of my confusion, but Alice did. She simply smirked at me silently.
“I suppose that basically could describe most of Jim’s odd friends.”
I nodded. “It does. And since I didn’t know he wasn’t here, I clearly don’t know him through his normie friends.”
Ismael grew slightly confused. “You see, I know why I call them normies. Why do you, I wonder?”
I laughed. “Depending on who I’m talking to, normie means a lot of different things to me.”
Alice looked at me, as though looking into my very soul. If she could actually see my soul, she’d undoubtedly be confused to find it split as it is. People are confusing things normally, and my family was doubly so. Unfortunately, dear Frank decided he needed some new material, so he began to encourage a multi-facetted encounter. I hoped that she just had one of those looks, that these folks were mostly normal. As the expression on her face changed, I realized that they weren’t. I also realized that she appeared to not hate the idea, which somehow made me even less comfortable.
Looking over at Ismael, I saw that he noticed the same change in expression in Alice. He looked curiously at the woman. “What’s wrong, A?” he asked her.
She smirked knowingly at me. “Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.”
I mentally yelled at Frank to shut the hell up, but what was done was done. There was no salvaging this scenario. “Really?” I asked her.
Alice laughed. “I mean, it’d never happen, but it was cute,” she replied.
“What did you see? What are you talking about?” Ismael asked us both, clearly lost.
Alice waved him off. “He’s smart, but lacks certain, refinements. Certain skills.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re better at weirdness than I am, so what?” he asked.
I shrugged. “So, she knows more than I’d like, and is holding it over me.”
“To be fair, I also know far less than I’d like, but that’s because you’ve got the strangest defense mechanism.” Then, she thought a moment and added, “If it is one…” she trialed off, clearly pondering the implications of it not being purely a defensive shield in my mind.
I smiled friendlily as my old roommate Josie told me to kill her before she said anything else. Josie was a psychopathic and psychotic piece of work, that I honestly have no idea how I survived a full year rooming with. That’s college, though. Alice continued, “In anycase, you lack certain, let’s call them elements of your, uh, personage, for the tertiary to enact such an event.” She was being very vague for no real reason, but I went along with it.
“What about the secondary?” I asked her, a flirtatious smirk crossing my face. I figured she meant that the ‘third person’, Ismael, was interested in men.
“Assuming the primary remained prepared for such a scaled down event.” She raised her eyebrows as well.
Ismael figured out what we were talking about. “You know, you can just say I’m gay, no need for the runaround.”
I smiled to him. “It’s a bit more complex than that,” I began.
Alice interrupted, “In that case, Ismael dear, would you mind getting us some alcohol? I believe we both may end up staying the night.”
Ismael groaned. I looked curiously at Alice. “Are you certain? You barely know me.”
Alice shrugged as a smarmy grin grew across her face. “Well, Jim should be back by morning, and I would hate for you to come all this way to visit and not see him.”
“But I’d hate to be alone all night,” I replied.
Ismael groaned even louder than before. Alice chuckled and responded, “Well then, we best do something about that.”
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