AnotherArchetype
patreon
132. Workbooks
🕑 Added 2025-04-03 19:49:44 +0000 UTCAzad had taken a handful of the dwindling food supply from the blue basket, and when I had asked him about what he was intending to do he said, “Major healing.”
“How are you going to do that?” I had asked, “You don’t have enough medical knowledge to fix everything properly, right?”
“I have ideas,” Azad had said, “It might take me a while to figure things out, so don’t disturb me. When I’m ready to come out of my room, I will.”
I had felt a familiar pang of worry about this.
“Can’t it wait?” I had said, gesturing to Xandra who had stood with one foot beyond the kitchen doorway, as if she were about to make a getaway herself.
“For what?” Azad had said.
“Xandra might be able to find you some medical textbooks,” I had said, “Or something else like that for you to get the information you need. Right, Xandra?”
“I could try,” she had said, “But my main goal is to get us more food and supplies. Lugging textbooks would take even more time.”
“Don’t bother,” Azad had said, “I know what I’m gonna do.”
Azad had winked at me and patted me on the shoulder as he passed me by. He stopped on his way out of the kitchen and saluted Xandra.
“Good luck on your mission,” he had said.
“Thank you, sir,” Xandra had said, saluting playfully back.
Azad had looked back to me and I had felt a little awkward about saluting, so I had given just a small nod.
“Burgee,” Azad had said, as if lightly scolding me, “C’mon…”
Xandra had started to giggle and I smirked, despite the deadpan look I tried to maintain. After a moment’s hesitation I had given a small salute too.
This, in turn, had caused Xandra and Azad to beam excitedly, like two kids who finally managed to make their parent do something silly. Right after Azad disappeared deeper towards the front of the mansion, and then I had heard the loud thumps as he ascended the stairs to one of the upstairs bedrooms. I hadn’t needed my heightened hearing to hear the bedroom door slamming shut.
“I know it’s still light,” Xandra had said, becoming serious, “But I want to get going. There’s a lot of supplies I want to get for us.”
Just like with Azad, I had felt a need to challenge Xandra on her decision.
“You don’t want to stay and rest a little longer? Or at least wait until it gets dark?” I had said.
“I like to keep moving,” Xandra had said, “Sitting around ain’t going to help things.”
Something about what she said had stung a little. Before I could figure out what that was she had said that had stung, Xandra threw a question back at me: “What are you going to do while I’m gone?”
“Think,” I had said, “And think some more.”
Xandra had hesitated just a little, as if intending to say more of what was on her mind before leaving. But whatever it was she had thought about saying stayed with her. With no fanfare at all Xandra had made her way out of the mansion, and back out into the dangerous world beyond.
It had been several hours since then. Azad hadn’t left the room he had picked out for himself. There wasn’t any sign of life or sound of what he was doing in his room, with the exception of steam eking out from the bottom of the door into the hallway. It was easy enough for me to discern with my heightened hearing that he was breathing steadily and using his power, generating the steam, and not simply taking a shower.
Like a moth to a street-light, I had found myself drawn to one of the few rooms in the mansion which hadn’t been completely ransacked; a children’s classroom.
There was only room enough for one child-sized table and two child-sized chairs as far as seating went. At the front of the ‘class’ was a whiteboard, which still had numerous markers capped side-by-side at the bottom. Upon entering, I had used the whiteboard eraser to wipe clean the board, which had been mired in all sorts of nothing-messages, names, and graffiti-style art.
A small plastic set of drawers in the corner had what I was looking for; lots of blank or square-spaced empty workbooks, as well as pens, pencils, rulers, and so on.
I set out the dozen empty workbooks and a handful of pens. Since the sinew-suit didn’t have pockets, I instead just pressed the pens against the left-pectoral area of the suit, and created enough adhesion there to keep the pens stuck to the suit. Then, rather than sit in one of the tiny plastic children’s chairs, and since there wasn’t an adult-sized chair in the room, I moved over to an empty section of wall and stuck my back against it. The adhesive quality of the sinew-suit was strong enough that my back stuck to the wall, keeping me off the ground. I crossed my legs, opened the workbook to the first blank page, and then started making notes. To someone walking into the room, other than seeing the somewhat sinister-looking sinew-suit on me, it would have also looked as if I were floating about a meter off the ground.
I was at the start of what was going to be a long stretch of intense thinking, planning, and strategising. The first workbook I titled ‘All the problems’, and had managed to create a very extensive list of all the problems past, present, and future to be concerned about.
The second workbook was “All the ideas”, where I let myself have free-roam to spitball one idea after another, trying to figure out the best ways to handle all the problems which I had jotted down in the first book.
The third workbook I titled, “All the solutions.” This book, unlike the other two, retained far more blank pages.
The more I wrote in these books, the more I realised just how much I had learnt since the day of the evacuation.
Topic headings included:
How the power has been shown to work.
Everything I know about the Pied Peepers, as well as Chellam.
Another title simply read: Xandra.
And another: Azad.
And this prompted yet more titles particular to people on my mind: Tiffany, Blain, Mikayla, Jay, Amar, Abigail Hoffman, Robert Hoffman...
I asked questions like, Who the heck was that Danny guy?
Danny had been the Canadian guy wearing the backwards cap at the Wedder Gorge facility. There wasn’t anything particularly significant about him, other than my own curiosity of how a Canadian man in his late twenties or early thirties would get roped into joining up with the Pied Pipers as a chef.
I was determined to not leave any stone unturned when it came to the people, places, and things I had seen.
I made a list of people I knew to be dead:
Reece, Christopher, Holly, Tommy, Beth...
And another list of people I was mostly sure might be dead, but also might still be alive:
Mike, Daniel, Adam, George...
The more I wrote, the more I felt compelled to write. None of this however was aided by the power except, perhaps, that I was able to maintain intense prolonged concentration without the aid of coffee or some other stimulant.
After nearly a minute of staring blankly at a fresh page, I finally worked up the courage to write down the title to a topic-list which filled me with dread.
A list of all the people I have killed.
It was a long list. Worse, I didn’t know the names of most of the people I had killed. Worse still, without tapping into the power, which I was confident would, if I chose to, let me recall memories far more vividly. But I didn’t want any of the power to influence my thinking, nor to get caught up in vivid memories which would distract from what I was doing with the workbooks. Without the use of the power, and using just my standard memory, which had never been particularly good, I wasn’t confident I remembered all of the people that were dead because of me.
There were all the Pied Piper officers that had been murdered at the abandoned factories. And the ones before at the World War Two bunker. And then there had been the girl at the Wedder Gorge facility who had transformed into a were-tiger, who I had killed with a single blow to the head.
Even as I wrote down what had happened, the foul smell of the were-tiger-girl’s brain, cooked from my bulbed and vibrating fist, flooded my head as if I were smelling it for the first time all over again.
But this was good. As much as I hated remembering, it was important to leave a mark, somewhere, so I didn’t forget the cost of my decisions. Actions taken, actions not taken. They all had consequences.
There were, thankfully, even more workbooks contained in plastic wrapping at the bottom of the plastic set of drawers. There were also blue folders filled with yet more paper.
Finally, after hours and hours of writing away at the workbooks, ideas for the future came to mind.
I had moved around the room a lot during this intensive period of remembering, self-studying, and strategising; I moved away from the wall again where I had stuck myself to the first time and had gone back to again, and again.
I stepped over the workbooks on the carpeted floor, walked over the small children-sized table in the middle of the room, and approached the empty whiteboard.
I uncapped a pen and wrote the words which had formed at the fore of my mind.
Everything I had done, was doing, and would do, was contained within the words written on the board:
THE ARCHETYPE PROJECT.
Comments
Mrs Cotton
I really like this chapter, thanks. I had forgotten about some of the characters mentioned in his lists so it’s good to bring them back to mind. Excited to see exactly what Project Archetype entails!
