Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Microstory 2107: Freedom at Risk

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As it turns out, the people who helped me with my new identity in this mystery city are a married couple, and they have a daughter. According to them, she’s very irresponsible and hard to deal with. That’s not what I experienced when I met her, and I didn’t get the feeling that she was just manipulating me. My first thought was that the parents haven’t been giving her much attention, because they’re so busy making IDs. As a result, she doesn’t do the chores, because where they live is more her house than theirs, and she doesn’t personally care about that stuff. They basically want to come home to everything being done after spending a string of days in the city away from her. They hired forced me to supervise her, which I did, even though I really didn’t want to. I made sure that she mowed the lawn, completed the laundry cycle, vacuumed the carpet, mopped the hard floors, and made dinner. The daughter didn’t even push back. She just rolled her eyes, and completed the tasks. I helped her out, because I felt like it was too much for one person, and it felt really weird just standing there, barking orders at her. A lot of it involved things that I do for my real job, and I get enough of that stuff there, so I wasn’t ecstatic about the extra work. Here’s the first issue, and it pales in comparison to the real problem, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The first thing is that they were so pleased with my work that they now want it to be a regular thing. So after my eight-hour shift as a janitor, I have to drive out to the outskirts to this new second job? I’m going to be exhausted every day, and annoyed about the whole thing. But I could deal with that. When I was waiting for Cricket and Claire to find me in Moderaverse, I spent twenty years without much of anything to do. So I’ve had it pretty good, working a little harder now isn’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. No, the real problem is that this girl isn’t even their daughter.

The first clients that they had in this business were reportedly themselves. They’re cagey about how they got started, which is understandable, but my guess is that they used to work for the DMV, or social security, or something else along those lines. You don’t just jump into this kind of thing without having any frame of reference for what people might be looking for. I don’t think they lived around here for their original lives. After they came this way, their second client was a couple who were trying to escape the law for whatever reason. They needed IDs for themselves, and their very young daughter. At some point, the ID makers came to find out that she wasn’t their daughter either. They had kidnapped her, and instead of contacting the authorities, the ID makers just essentially kidnapped her for themselves. For years, the girl didn’t know where she originally came from, and she still doesn’t have any details. After years of school counseling, and mostly introspection, she figured a few things out, and made some memories resurface. All she knows now is that the parents who she has been living with aren’t her real parents, and nor were the people they took her from. She has not yet tried to get out of this situation, or find out where she came from, but it’s made her less interested in doing these chores, or anything for these people, really. Now I’m in a real pickle. I obviously have to save her, but doing so puts my own freedom at risk. I suppose I’ve already decided to intervene, no matter what ends up happening to me. The two of them have never expressed interest in reading my blog before, but they definitely know about it, so there’s a chance that they’ll read this after it automatically posts later tonight. I’ll have to figure out what to do by then, and put a plan into action. I’ll let you know how that goes, unless I die, like I said before. But just know, whatever the supposed cause of death, it was murder.

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