skepticgirl_1 | high achiever, don't you see? baby, nothing comes for free

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cindy moon

high achiever, don't you see? baby, nothing comes for free

I was going a little out of my mind with ideas and stories and no real outlet for them. So when the posting popped up that someone was asking for writers to work on a new independent publication, I seized on the opportunity. Who knew? Maybe it would end up as a paying job and I could get myself out of the home. I was being picky on that front, I knew, but there were so many choices that I was being denied, just by being in Darrow itself, that I wanted what power I did have to be exercised exactly how I wanted it to be. No burger slinging jobs for me, only something I loved.

There was a light rain drizzling down as I made my way to the coffee shop, so my hair was a bit frizzed despite the now damp hoodie I had on over my shirt. At least my trusty boots were made for walking in the rain and my messenger bag, carrying vital notebooks, was waterproof.

I scanned the crowd of coffee and sugar addicts that had been drawn to the warmth and caffeine through the rain. There in the back I saw an Asian woman surrounded by books and papers. Yup, that pretty much matched the description plus the image I had in my mind. I don't think I would trust any reporter who didn't have a full desk.

I grabbed myself a double chocolate mocha with whipped cream to drown out the taste of coffee, which I was still getting used to, and headed over to the table.

"Hi?" I said. "Cindy?"

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"That's me," Cindy chirped before she had a chance to glance up, skimming over the last paragraph that she was poring through before looking up to find Lois (presumably) standing in front of her with a coffee. "Lois, right? Come, join me, have a seat… and feel free to shove aside any papers in your way." Cindy chuckled, her cheeks slightly reddened as she tried to figure out the best way to move all of her research aside, stacking pile on pile and hoping that her memory would come through later when she went through to take inventory of all she'd skimmed.

Now that Lois was here, Cindy's interest in delving further into Kagura's history took a back seat. Ever since she'd shared with Karen the idea of starting up an independent publication, Cindy had been growing increasingly excited about the prospect of having something of her own. Breaking through the constant onslaught of network news was undoubtedly going to be difficult, but Cindy liked the idea of getting to explore the stories that were actually of interest to her, instead of blindly following M. M. Madison's whims, which were more sensationalist than anything, much of the time.

Making ends meet financially was going to be a sticking point, but with Darrow freely offering all a salary stipend, it seemed like the ideal sort of city to start out in.

"I'm so glad to meet you, and super excited that there are more people interested in kicking off an independent publication. Tell me a little about yourself — where are you from, what's your life story? And why take a chance here instead of working for the Times or the Guardian?"

"My whole life?" I chuckled as I slid into the seat she indicated. Already I liked her, jumping into the big questions that mattered instead of wasting time on small talk. That was the way a reporter had to work. My friends back home would have called it nosy and balked at the questions first, but instead they made me feel immediately comfortable.

I took one stack of papers and turned it sideways, setting it atop another stack of paper, just so I had enough room to set my cup down and lean my arms against the table. There was no reason to disturb Cindy's work too much with my presence and she was clearly elbow deep in something. My eyes skimmed over the language on the top page of one stack, but it was upside down to my view and I couldn't catch much.

"I come from Metropolis, most recently. I'm an army brat, so we moved around a lot. But when we got to Metropolis, I kind of immediately and accidentally impressed the editor of the main paper, The Daily Planet. He had this side project, specifically for high school kids, a smaller online title that occasionally got inserts in the main. The Daily Scoop. So he put me on the job and I got some ground breaking stories that I can tell you about. I wish I had copies here, but I have some stories I've been working on that I can email you. Anyway, I'm seventeen and, honestly, what established paper is going to take a chance on a kid who's been here only a couple months? Especially a non-native, I'm sure you've noticed how much they like us. I'm experienced in something small, something that's got a lot to prove. And I want to help you prove that there's more to Darrow than what the big names show."

I shrugged a little and spread my hands wide. "There you go, life story," I said before grabbing my coffee for a comfort sip.

It was funny, the way Cindy's memory worked. She could recall almost every page that she had read since middle school, whether they were the lines of a comic book or the dense text in a biology textbook. Recalling didn't come with comprehension — one of the reasons why Cindy's memory hadn't been as much of an asset in math as her mother might have hoped, though it was good enough to skate her by where memorizing formulas was concerned.

Sometimes Cindy wished that it'd been the other way around, that she had the ability to immediately problem solve, to empathize, rather than regurgitate content. But, insofar as she had some kind of asset to her name, she'd adjusted many of her habits to make the most of it. The conversation with Lois immediately got committed to paper — not verbatim, lest Lois decide she rather back out of the whole situation, but bullet points here and there. A diagram of sorts. It ensured that Cindy wouldn't forget the next time around.

Though, given the mentions of Metropolis and The Daily Planet alone (and the name Lois, for crying out loud), Cindy didn't think it'd be easy for this story to slip her mind.

"You know, I would have pegged you for older. But yes, seventeen sounds like it'd be a disqualifier for most," Cindy admitted with a wiggle of her pen. "Which is unfortunate, because otherwise the fact that you've moved around a lot and lived in different areas makes you a great asset where reporting is concerned. Being an outsider, not as much of a hurdle as you might think, as long as you don't mention it in every other sentence. For now, my day job's still at the Guardian. Though that might change if we ever develop a paid subscription model, because at that point the contract's kinda — well, that's a tangent for another day."

Cindy placed her pen down, resting her chin against the back of her hand. "I'd love to see your stories, of course. But more than that, I'm curious to know what your passion points are. Say you've got creative direction of this soon-not-hypothetical paper of ours. What are the first stories you'd pitch to the editor?"

Oh, wow, I didn't realize she would be taking notes on me. I didn't even really think of this as an interview, but maybe I should have. I realized that she was under no obligation to take me on, but I preferred to let my work -- both on paper and on foot -- speak for me rather than my outward appearance. My life story didn't exactly seem like the thing résumés were made of, but I guessed that it did make up my whole person. And being a reporter wasn't just a day job that required you to be good from 9 to 5. You had to be on point all the time. You needed to have passion.

This was the first time that I had been interviewed, but also the first time that anyone had ever told me that moving around so much was a good thing. It was something that I had definitely come to terms with. As a little kid, it had been harder, knowing that no one really liked me because they didn't know me. But getting older, I cared less and less until it wasn't a factor to me at all. I hadn't realized that it worked to my advantage, the way Cindy said. I nodded when she talked about contracts and paid subscriptions, but I really didn't know anything about that. I just wanted to write. Let everyone else take care of the business.

I sat up straighter when I was given the opportunity to talk again. "Well, of course everyone's going to want to do something on how this place works. I was working with another girl to try and set down the facts of what we know about everybody to determine if we could find some kind of pattern. That's not concrete yet, though. We don't have facts; that's just something on the back burner. More so, I want to do more stories on the superheroes that are in the city. I think they deserve more credit than what they're getting, but also I think people need to be more aware of the darker parts of what's going on in this city. I walked in on a drug ring the other day, for crying out loud. And kids with mechanical tentacles? More people need to know about that. Anyway, I'd also like to run something on the big happenings. You know, the yeti stuff, for example? It feels like most Darrowians want to move passed that really quickly, but we need some in depth research on that, maybe finding a cause or another trend. I mean, there's a yeti out there and has anyone pinpointed where exactly he is so we avoid him?"

She liked this kid.

"If you wanted, you could probably talk to that new congressperson to see if she's got access to actual records of who's been here from the outside," Cindy said, wiggling her fingers a little in deference to the mystique of the city. "But yeah, that was one of the first things that had popped to my mind as well when I came. There's definitely some trends, even if you only look at the sample of people who are here from the outside today. Like, there's a pretty strong likelihood that multiple people who know each other or have some kind of indirect connection can show up together in the city. Six, almost seven billion people in my world, and somehow in a population of hundreds from the outside, I happen to have met two people? And have alternate ties to two more? Definitely not random. Also lots of North American representation, fair amount of European." She waved her hand, then jotted down a few more terms and topics that Lois had touched on.

With a grin, she leaned over and brought out some of the notes she had been taking down on Kagura, which included some civilian-shot photos of the yeti. (And some were pretty high fidelity for being amateur shots — smartphone technology had really advanced since Cindy went down in that bunker.)

"But yeah, you're right. There's so much crazy stuff that goes on in this city, and it all kind of gets brushed aside, like 'oh, stuff happens in Darrow.' Mainstream news outlets don't bother trying to get down to the bottom of anything, and lord only knows that our Mayor seems to be nothing more than some kind of figurehead or pawn. No one could even track down where in the government the idea beyond those bionic birds — were you here for that? — even started from. Personally, I'm a bit more intrigued by the criminal side of things than the weird natural phenomenons, but the two kind of go hand in hand. Weird stuff happens, and then someone always has to be an opportunist and try to take advantage of it."

My eyes lit up with interest when she mentioned the congressperson. I had kind of assumed, given how everything worked in the city -- the general feigned ignorance to events, the mundane running of the city seemingly without emergency plans for freak occurrences, my own relatively easy settlement into the city-run children's home without question -- that the higher ups were all Darrow natives without any desire to investigate or share their information, especially not with some nosy, non-native kid. But if there was someone on our side in there, that was definitely a contact I needed to exploit. Er, talk to.

"You know four people here?" I boggled, too surprised to phrase my question correctly. She knew what I meant, of course. That seemed like an awfully high number, a suspiciously high number, and I had to wonder why she got to have connections but I couldn't even find a single person who had been to Metropolis. "I can't even find people who know my city."

I shook my head at her question; I wasn't here for the bird things, but it was so recent that I had heard about it a lot. "But yeah, there definitely is a connection there, I think, between the evil doers and the weird stuff. Like I said, kids with mechanical tentacles. Where did they get that tech? Who was helping them? In my experience, sixteen year olds don't have the resources or the drive to do something like that without guidance. And that KIRIN thing? Wow. I mean, wow." I couldn't even imagine what those poor people had been through, and then to have it just fade away like it was no big deal, like watch dog groups didn't immediately need to be set up or new laws passed.

"I only knew one of the four to any extent worth mentioning," Cindy repeated, holding her hand out in a staying motion, "but I have ties to another three in that... I knew alternate versions of them, you could say. Like one of them is a guy I knew really well in my world, except he's a lot younger. And another one of them lived a different history than when I knew her in my world, but she's definitely still some variation on a theme. Same name, same appearance, you know." Cindy hoped that she wasn't giving too much away about her companions, but speaking of them only with gendered pronouns seemed safe enough. She could keep their names to herself, could keep their identities under wraps.

Until if and when it ever became appropriate to share them — which was not at all her decision to make.

"And there might be even more people who could plausibly be from my world, but that I can't easily play three degrees of separation with," she went on. "People who obviously know about New York, who might even have lived in a version of New York with the same President of the United States, and so on. Lots of people are from the United States. So there are clearly indications that things here aren't completely random."

Her lips quirked slightly at the mention of the Cephalosquad. Cindy needed to be careful not to give away too many details of that incident, having been there personally, but it was definitely the sort of news that would have been noticed by people like the two of them — people who were looking for the strange and inexplicable.

"Yeah, there's definitely some kind of shadow network, you could say, that's funneling funds into the wrong hands. Hands who'll use it to exploit something, or someone, and never in the favor of those of us from outside. Kirin's Horn is the worst such group that I know of, far outstrips the local gangs. Hydra's another."

Huh. I knew alternate versions of a person was not the same as knowing that person at all, but it struck me as unfair all the same. I wanted to have connections here, ones that were already formed on some level rather than needing to be created and cultivated. I wanted someone who recognized my city and could talk to me about things that were familiar, made sense. Not that I didn't like the friends and acquaintances that I had made here already, but there was something to be said for having common ground.

I did notice too that Cindy wasn't using any names, which was a little weird but also not? She might not have been thinking about it, but I was curious nonetheless.

I nodded a little as she continued. It did strike me as odd that there were a lot of people here who knew some place like New York, who had some common baseline, but everything else could weave away so drastically. Or that we were all so very white, for the most part.

"Hydra sounds like something out of Worlds-- Uh." No one knew about Worlds War 3 around here. I had to get with the program. "A video game, back home. Is that some kind of creature? Because I'm bad a the mythology thing that evil organizations seem to love."

She was quick, which Cindy liked. Inquisitive, which appealed as well. Honestly, Cindy wasn't thinking about holding those who wanted to be involved with her publication to some impossible standard — it seemed to defeat the whole purpose of what she was trying to accomplish, which was to write about what people were interested in, rather than what they would be paid best for. That was the problem with working for a large publication. Attractive though the audience reach was, Cindy rarely had the opportunity to dive deep into the topics that she wanted to.

Even a brief, casual conversation like this felt more rewarding in any number of ways.

"God, I wish I was still caught up with all the latest video games. Maybe if this paper really gets off the ground," Cindy said, trying to keep the conversation sociable. "But yeah, a hydra is a mythological creature. You've probably heard some kind of reference to it before, if the myth exists in your world — cut one head off, two grow back in its place. Most known in my world thanks to Disney's Hercules, I suspect, or maybe the fact that we're all somehow required to learn Greek and Roman mythology in elementary school would have extended that knowledge just as much. Who knows. Anyway, it's definitely an aspirational sort of name for the group that exists. The hope is naturally that any one of their agents can get caught and eliminated, so to speak, without the core organization itself faltering or weakening in any way. Individuals are dispensible."

She pursed her lips, leaning back in her chair. "Which feels pretty heartless to me, but I guess that's kind of the nature of a villainous organization. The potential gains outweigh the morality."

I chuckled and shook my head. "Honestly, I wasn't really into it for the game play," I admitted. "I have a friend who was being bullied-- Well, back up. A company was doing experiments on high school kids through the game, testing some new tech to make this kind of hive mind? So this group of kids wanted my friend to become one of them. Or, one with them. So we had to fight them in the game and out of it, to challenge them. And then, after that all settled, I used it to talk to one of my friends who lived far away." I fought back the beginnings of a blush that wanted to pinken my cheeks. "It was a hologram set up, so it was more realistic, like talking face to face, than texting or talking on the phone."

I felt a pang again, of disappointment, of honest anger, at the fact that the city's controller(s) had taken me from my world just as I was about to meet SmallvilleGuy, face to face. It wasn't fair that that very second had to be the one when my life changed.

I cleared my throat and shook my head slightly, moving on from the memory. "But, anyway... Yeah, that sounds a little familiar. And also very creepy and heartless, I agree. But it makes it kind of easier to realize where to focus your attack. Why bother with taking out the heads? You know they're not the threat. Just distract them while you go for the throat. Or, er, body. I mean, if we're taking this kind of literally, which people seem to do. So what's their M.O.?"

"Wow. That sounds... incredibly familiar. Did you hear about the whole Dremblydrop thing that went on in Darrow? Hive mind driven by a game — albeit a physical, athletic game rather than a video game. Video game sounds even scarier, considering how much time you can sink in those things," Cindy said, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head at the thought. If Dremblydrop was able to get people into such a fervor, Cindy could only imagine what a game would do to a malleable mind.

It made her wonder if there was something similar that could be dropped into the government, which seemed even more dangerous than rallying up a mostly younger set of kids.

"But yes, anyway, as for Hydra," Cindy went on, breathing a deep sigh and rolling her eyes. "It's the most clichéd story in the book. World domination. Turns out that indeed, sometimes people just want power and they don't care what it takes to get it. And it ends up spawning a lot more creativity than you'd necessarily expect."

I shook my head, eyes widening slightly because I hadn't heard about this. I had heard about Dremblydrop, in passing, but I had never been a sports person and just the name had turned me off the idea. At least baseball and basketball sounded relatively normal; dremblydrop sounded like the name of a talking toddler toy designed to drive parents crazy. Now I wish I had paid more attention to the sport.

Then again, given the way everything worked in Darrow, someone would have happily told me all the rules and the history and the current rivalries, but they wouldn't ever mention the mind control aspect. Because this entire city's native inhabitants were mind controlled, in my book.

"World domination?" I echoed, skeptical. "But how can you dominate the world when you believe that the world consists of one city? Or-- Do you mean Hydra's from outside Darrow? And it came here?"

"The whole believing in only the existence of a single city's pretty murky to begin with," Cindy pointed out with a slight wave of her hand. "I would say it's more... avoidance of the topic than anything else. You've been to some of the neighborhoods that closely resemble immigrant neighborhoods in outside worlds, right? Where much of the population don't seem to be native English speakers, and so forth. You can tell that there's culture coming in from elsewhere, and sometimes you'll even catch a native talking about 'the old country,' they just can't seem to be bothered with the details of it."

It really was something to head down to Darrow's tiny equivalent of Koreatown, little more than a block or two, and feel practically like she'd been transported to her grandparents' social circles. Except no one could actually talk about specific towns or cities. So hard to find a good doenjang jjigae, she could remember one old woman lamenting.

But any mention of Seoul or Busan was met with blank stares.

"Anyway, there is a Hydra in my world, probably others. Can't say for sure if it's those same folks who started it here, or if Darrow was inspired to come up with a good knock-off, or what," she added. "Maybe it's a mix of both, with native Darrowians being recruited by someone on the outside. But the methods seem similar enough to the Hydra I knew."

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high achiever, don't you see? baby, nothing comes for free

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