“It was here that it all came together,” Darla said. “There was much crying and fighting, but in the end, the outsiders were chased out of the mayor’s office.”

“Then who is that?” Simon asked, pointing at the far corner of the room, where someone sat on an oversized stuffed chair. While there were windows on three walls of the office, the office clearly cantilevering out over the columns, this being the center office, the corner where the man sat was dark. The only light that indicated that there was someone sitting there was through a red ring coming from the end of what could only be a cigar. The room smelt of cigar smoke. A thin film of it hovered across the ceiling. The room was neat. There was nothing out of place. The desk chair was pushed in behind the oversized mayor’s desk.

Darla looked as surprised as the rest of them to see someone in the office. “There should not be anyone here,” Darla said, clearly in surprise.

“That nobody is looking at us with a nefarious air,” Charles said, jotting down his words with a smile, as if he was proud that what he was recording was funny and interesting and would be entertaining when he finally managed to put this entire episode into print on that most amazing of days.

“Hello,” the unknown person who turned out to be a man with a richly deep voice said. The red ring on the cigar brightened as he took another puff and the heard him blow the smoke out in the silence of the room.

“The insiders and the outsiders have decimated each other until there was almost nobody left on either side,” Darla said. “Who are you? None of us would dare return to this site, for all the terribleness it has brought us.”

“You keep calling me a ‘nobody’”, the man said. “But clearly I am a somebody, as I sit in the former mayor’s office, enjoying my cigar, and waiting for the four of you to join me. I would offer you a chair, but it seems my secretary has not returned from her sabbatical.”

“You are the mayor?” Charles asked, eager to add details and flesh to his ongoing and yet terribly unimpressive story.

“Well,” the man said. “That is a rather difficult question on a number of fronts, the least of which being even if I was the mayor, would I admit it at this juncture? Fishs Eddy is embroiled in a vicious fight over its future, a fight, mind you, which the beautiful woman that you are travelling with has clearly chosen a side. A side, in case you have not known, which is contrary to the wishes of her mother and younger sister, both of which have been kicked out of Fishs Eddy on her whim, or her edict, I should say.”

“What did you say?” Simon asked.

“Do not make me repeat myself,” the man said. “We have much to discuss and only a few words left to discuss it before this entire shenanigans comes to a blissful end. Trust me, you will not want to be around when the final word is spoken. Darla, your darling sister, she is the leader of the insiders, those who destroyed the council and set the town into a civil war that has resulted in the destruction that you see today. While Darla does have a wonderful ability to organize and lead people, she lacks any foresight, what the older generation would call wisdom, to use that ability for an understandable common good. Instead, she makes up her own good which she believes will enable the town to take over the world.”

“Like the little mice,” Charles said, mumbling to himself as if a crazy person as he scribbled away at his pad, trying to capture the nuances and aims of the words spoken by the smoking man.

“Do not spread such lies,” Darla said, taking a step toward the man. He remained seated. As their eyes adjusted to looking into the darkened corner of the room, they saw that he was a rather large man, or a smaller man on a small chair. His legs were crossed and he wore loose slacks and a dinner jacket. He continued to puff on his cigar, which did not provide enough light to see his face. “I only had the best intentions of Fishs Eddy in mind when I led the people against the council. They created this monstrosity of a building to prove a point that we needed outsiders. We have survived for a long time without outsiders, and none of us thought that this was needed. Who are you? You were not on the council. I spent too much time in the council not to recognize one of its member’s names.”

“You wanted them to kick out all the outsiders,” Simon said. “What about mother and our sister? What about me for that matter? You were the one who tried to move us here. You were the one who said that the town was more inclusive now, it provided more people opportunities to get ahead in the town. You lied to us, to me?”

“It is not like that,” Darla said to Simon, turning around suddenly and moving closer to him. “I have always loved you and respected you. For all your self-deprecation and inability to see yourself outside of your protective shell, you always had more to offer. You did have a special ability, like the rest of us. You just never acknowledged it. Many times I thought that ability was the ability not to recognize your true gifts. But that would entail you have two skills, which we know is not the way Fishs Eddy works.”

“And what about Penelope?” Simon asked, now clearly confused by the strange turn of events. He was not sure who the bad guys and who the good guys were anymore. He also had no idea where the story was heading, or why it was heading in that direction. “She is an outsider and I love her very much.”

He did not look at Penelope, but he felt her melt near him. Darla grunted as Simon looked over at Penelope. She looked lovely in the light coming from the side window in which she stood.

“This is beautiful,” Charles said, scribbling madly into his pad. “This is one of the worst stories I have ever had the pleasure of being part of. When I get my hands on it, when I manipulate it, I will turn it into something so wonderful and beautiful, that none of you will recognize for what it was before. This I promise you.”

“I never knew you felt that way,” Penelope said.

“That is a lie,” Simon said. “Everything I ever did, I did for you. I waited for you for days outside, for you to come home. I obeyed your every whim. I did everything you wanted, to show that I loved you.”

“But you never said it,” Penelope said, rocking Simon to the core with such strange dialogue. “All it would have taken is for you to say, and be aggressive about it. To be a man about it.”

“But you know that is not who I am,” Simon said, acknowledging as was the case, that he was not a manly man. He was anything but that.

“I am not asking you to run the relationship,” Penelope said. “I only asked you to be upfront about your feelings to let us move beyond our petty games and into the next area of our relationship.”

“This is all very beautiful and meaningful,” the smoking man said. “But this was not why you came here, was it Darla.”

“No,” Darla said. “What that whore does with my brother is not relevant. I do have many ladies ready to assist him in Fishs Eddy when he is done with her. I came here to show them the seat of my power. To show them the plans we had lain that will allow Fishs Eddy to push the rest of the world in the right direction.”

“So you did want to take over the world,” Charles said agreeably.

“Again, listen, little man,” Darla said. “I am not about taking over the world. I am not a small genius mouse which such aspirations. I have simpler needs. I want to make the world a good place. I need the best people to help lead the world in that direction. That is what Fishs Eddy supplies. That is what Fishs Eddy, in its purest form, will supply. We must stop the brain drain. We must halt our children leading. And we must stop newcomers from joining and undermining our broader visions in the world. This is my ‘grand plans’ if you can call them that. This was what the entire council and Fishs Eddy was about to agree to before the construction on the City Hall commenced. It was not about stopping the outsiders, or proving that they were as good. I did not doubt that they were as good or better in some ways. What I doubted was that they had the ability to guide the world like we did. Fishs Eddy was given a gift, and we were destined to use that gift without reservation.”

“And that is where the council got in the way,” Penelope said, solving the mystery and ending the book. Only the book that Charles was writing needed to be many more words, so they kept talking.

The smoking man stood up, and they watched his darkened form against the wall, lit only by the red circle of the cigar approach them. There was a splotch of sunlight a few steps from his chair, and he walked into it. He was a very tall man, much taller than he had even appeared sitting in the oversized stuffed chair.

He walked with a cane which had been hidden from view. He did not lean heavily on the cane, but it did aid his left leg steps. When he came into the light, he appeared much younger than they had expected. He had a large shock of red hair, and an equally extravagant mustache. The rest of his face was shaved clean without stubble to be seen. He was meticulously dressed in a perfectly fit suit, not the type you would purchase off rack at a department store, but the type that are custom made for the businessmen of the world. He chewed on the cigar as he slowly ambled toward them.

“Ah, I know you,” Darla said. Simon wished his evil sister had said more. But that was all she said as the smoking man pulled out a shotgun and pointed it at Darla’s chest. She did not move but stared into his blue eyes. His eyes were almost colorless in their intensity. They were of a sky blue that if it was any lighter might have appeared white. Even with their limited colors, they looked like you can fall into them and never swim your way out of their colors.

The smoking man did not hesitate, and there was nothing anyone could have done. At least that is what Simon would tell himself later as he replayed the episode in his mind. The smoking man pulled the trigger on the shotgun and it made a huge exploding sound. There was a bright flash, and when Simon’s eyes caught up to the bullet, he found his sister with a grouping of holes in her chest. The shotgun pellets had penetrated her heart, and she had fallen dead before she hit the ground. The quiet thump that they heard when her body crumbled onto the ground was muffled compared to the shotgun blast that still reverberated in their ears.

Simon ran over to Darla’s body, while Penelope and Chares stood frozen staring at the man. When Simon looked up, he saw that the man had lowered the shotgun to his side.

“There is no room for supermen anymore,” the man said, shuffling back toward the seat, leaning very heavily on his cane to support himself.

“What did you do?” Charles yelled. He had dropped his pad, which was smattered with blood from the spurt after the shotgun pellets had struck Darla’s chest. “You killed her, you maniac!”

The smoking man did not turn around to respond. He continued to amble his way back to his chair. In his right hand, now in shadow, the still smoking shotgun swung with his walking pace. The scene was surreal. Simon could not believe that a moment before his sister had been speaking and breathing next to him. Now she lay on the ground motionless. Simon could not understand the turn of events. But it was before him.

“What did you do?” Charles repeated, more loudly this time and approaching the man who had sat back down.

“You will know the truth of it soon enough,” the man said. “I have called the rest of the characters into this room, and they will explain what happened. Whether they explain it to your satisfaction is not something I can control. Be thankful that it is over for today. For tomorrow, the entire world as you know it will be turned topsy-turvy.

Word count: 2,226

Word total: 47,954

Words remaining: 2,046

With day two of the Thanksgiving extravaganza, I didn’t get to write much yesterday. After a late-night video game session, I woke up (earlier than Steven and Doolies), and managed to write my allotment for yesterday. This leaves me with less than a day of writing to cross the finish line of the Marathon.

We stayed at Steven’s last night, and played Champions of Norrath, on Steven’s PlayStation 2 until three in the morning. We made it past Act II. I rolled a Cleric, which was not nearly as powerful as Doolies’s warrior. These games never do the magic users justice.

Yesterday was the unveiling of my Grandmother’s gravesite. The unveiling is a Jewish custom that occurs somewhere between a month and a year after burial. The memorial stone is covered with a white filmy material, and the rabbi says a few prayers before the closest relative, my father’s younger brother, removed the cloth. It was sunny but brutally cold yesterday in the openness of the cemetery.

Afterwards, my sisters and their monsters met back in my mother’s house for an afternoon with the Figatner family. I’m not sure if it was the traveling or the time change or just the end of the week, but Doolies and I were exhausted after the first hour with the monsters. They have this amazing power that saps our energy. We napped a few times during the day, before settling in to the huge dinner later in the evening.

Doolies and Steven are getting ready now, and we’re meeting Jennifer for brunch in the city. We leave on Monday to return to Seattle.