Toys
Fear has always been a game which would blow my mind away, the whole landscape being wrecked and an apocalyptic atmosphere becomes reality as the whole world is thrown to hell. However some characters are open to interpretation of what you think they are, and here is one of the elusive father Harlen Wade who was responsible for the whole project and even though he was very concerned for his daughter, the whole impression is still one of a man with dual personas to his daughters. Hopefully you enjoy and if you disagree, you're welcome to give your version.
Harlen would always remember the time when his baby girl was born. He never missed one single sight of his beloved child since the birth of his first daughter down to the very second and last, but the whole happy occasions had one major difference. He was the perfect image of a father, one who was full of success and one who changed worlds.
He was obsessed.
The developments he came up with, the inventions and the fame and trust of the people of Fairport and the world-wide community may thank him for improving warfare and lives to secure breakthroughs, but it wasn't of God that Harlen Wade wanted, no.
It was all for him.
Fame, fortune, and even the largest corporation who hired him would not satisfy. Even the things that he gave his daughter Alice was not enough for her, and he knew it…but love, it was something he had but couldn't give to his other daughter, he didn't even want to call her by name. She was a Toy.
Toys were meant to be broken, he had told Alice and her sister. For him the reason of putting his youngest in the Wade Elementary for the Gifted spoke volumes of the success he wanted, more than the older sister who was unaware of her existence….Harlen was thrilled to lead separate lives for his daughters, one would be the toy who was a dream, the other would be subject to the harsh reality that slapped her in the face.
He wanted to gain power.
Breakthroughs, scientific facts all became dull to him that he tuned out everything that gave meaning. Nothing stood between him and work, and that was all he asked for, yet he was so blind, blind in the sense of the horrific distinction he convinced himself of his daughters. She was still a Toy, no matter what he put her through: the experiments, the testing of her abilities, he wanted to see how much she could take before she broke…but she remained strong, much to his delight she would carry on and defy the world, resisting as much as she could and drive the men and women insane. However, that dream of power and future good for Man deteriorated and dwindled with the passage of time.
Now he lived to see her suffer.
Toys endure, no matter what the consequences of suffering. He remembered how she never held her children, how he would instinctively act as a player of the toy and not as the role model father he had given to Alice, he wouldn't tell her a single thing about it. He snatched it away, like a preying wolf taking her children into the darkness and soon feelings came back at her crying eyes bawling over the loss as she struggled with doctors and guards to hold her own creation once more. Whenever she talked to him it was one of fear and soon he became scared to look upon her own face as he shrouded himself in his office thinking about what he was doing and how could he explain to his older sister what was going on inside the very company she was proud of serving. When he came home he always put on a smile for Alice who would smile in return, but he never said anything about her.
He regretted.
Toy or no toy, he wanted to keep her going. Even when the men and women above eventually told him that delays and further results are discontinued because of what he had put her through, nothing convinced him to not pull the plug on her now. But eventually he conceded, and he cut off his own daughter's life and took the fame and what little dignity of a father once had to Alice.
Eventually he had enough. The scientist who ruined his most prized toy and possession devoid of love and happiness he gave Alice was left to rot in certain failure, fame and fortune faded off from his eyes as the world simply discarded his idea of psychic users and scrapped it…like the other failures he couldn't take it. It was HIS ideas, HIS will to discontinue the experiment, so they would have to do what HE wanted and not they. The experiment would end when he said it, and he went to the sacred Vault, like some cannibalistic ritual he opened the doors to let the monster he created out….
Even if Harlen never felt any love, he had an urge to help his own child and the sane parent came back to him to ask him to restore what little he had left.
Too little, too late as he sank to his knees in shame around the flames that surrounded him. The toy-maker had been consumed by his very own toy.