The old ARC building had been made into a museum before she was born, and she had spent more time there than she had at home. Every day, after she got done with all her schoolwork, she would get on her bike and ride the twelve blocks to the museum. She didn't have to pay to get in, and the guards who worked the night shifts didn't even ask her for her ident-card anymore. They knew who she was. She'd stay for hours after closing, she had her own set of keys to let herself in and out.
Spending 8 hours a day inside a museum wasn't exactly normal, but then again, she wasn't exactly a normal girl. She didn't like people and crowds – they made her nervous. She dressed strangely, had funny eyes, dyed her hair, loved to read, preferred old music and older films, took things apart just to put them back together again, spoke with a stutter, and walked with a limp. The stutter she'd had since birth. The limp she'd gotten at nine, when a very irritable juvenile eustreptospondylus decided to make her leg into a chew toy; all the modern medicine in the world couldn't replace the chunk of muscle she'd lost or put her femur back the way it was before. She knew all about the creatures and the anomalies. It'd been a part of her life before she was even born. Her mum had kept going to work whilst she was pregnant until their boss, Liz Lester, threatened to have her confined to bed. She even had her own pet – an albino archaeopteryx that she'd raised from an egg, named Roma.
Filling her knapsack with the books she'd finished, she slung the strap over one shoulder and looked in the mirror.
Tall, slender, a little gangly, with pale skin and eyes that didn't match – the left one was brown, the right one was blue. A shag of fluorescent blue hair only just reached past her ears, currently tucked back under a well-worn fedora with one of Roma's pearly white feathers stuck in its band. Converse high-tops with no laces, stockings striped in blue and green, purple tartan skirt, graffiti-plastered t-shirt, pinstripe waistcoat, necklace of soda can pull-tabs, and Scrabble tile earrings – F and U, five points and a concise stammerer's guide to efficiently dealing with the world. She had an upturned nose and slightly pointed ears, which her brother always said made her look like an elf. Cool with her. Elves were awesome. Which he wouldn't know, because he didn't read Tolkien.
Whistling a good-bye to Roma, she walked outside, trotting down the steps. Photos of their family – her parents on their wedding day, herself and her brother in varying ages, of extended family and friends of the family who were more family than friends – lined the walls, real photos, not the false holo-images. Outside, her bike waited, chained to the fence. Winding the chain around her waist like an improvised belt, she pedaled her way down the drive towards the Anomaly Research Centre Museum.
The building was haunted. It was a well-accepted fact by anyone that worked in the anomaly project. And why shouldn't it be? If there's such a thing as dinosaurs in London and holes in time, why not ghosts in the museum as well? Leaving her bike chained outside, she unlocked the back door and went inside. The entirety of the building was left as it originally was, nothing added, nothing taken away.
Holding her bag over one shoulder, she made her way through the hallways – the ones that were staff only, no visitors – to the library. Sometime before the ARC had been relocated, one of the sublevels had been converted to a library, for purposes that nobody really knew. She liked to think it was because her grandfather was just that awesome and had known that one day he'd have a granddaughter like her, that didn't like people and needed her own safe haven away from all the noise.
As she came down the steps into the soft-lighted library, she could hear someone reading aloud – Gerard Manley Hopkins.
"As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces."
She limped 'round the corner of the stacks to see the reader, sitting at the table with the book open in front of him. "H-hey," she said softly. She'd found that loud voices, bright lights, and quick movements disturbed the ghosts that still lingered in here. But that was just fine for her. She didn't move that quick and hated speaking loudly, too.
"Hello, Altaira."
"I fff-finished those b-books," she told the ghost, taking said books out of her bag to replace on the shelves.
"There's some more waiting for you. Might I suggest you start here?" He drifted over, passing through the table so that his image wavered slightly for a moment, then came into clearer focus. Ghosts weren't silvery spectres, or airy things that drifted about moaning. They still looked like themselves, just not quite as solid, a little hazy around the edges like a Polaroid that hadn't quite developed all the way, and if you stared at them really, really hard, you might just be able to see through them, a little bit. But they didn't like that overmuch.
There was an illuminated fish tank set into the wall as large as a coffin, with a single lone gold koi swimming happily around its bubbler, long whiskers lending it a wise appearance. Her favourite seat in the house was there, a squashy, enormous beanbag just beside the tank, where she could see the shadow of the koi on her book pages when it swam past.
Taking up her book, she hobbled over to sink down in the beanbag, opening it up to the first pages. Before she started reading, the ghost came over to sit on the floor across from her. "Happy birthday, too."
She smiled. "Th-th-thanks."
"Two more years to go now, dragonfly. Still won't change your mind about field work?"
"N-n-nope! I c-can h-hardly sss-say B-B-Bar-ronyx, and th-that's an easy one," she replied with a smile. She was joining the new ARC the moment she was eighteen, no two ways about it, but she was going to be the head of IT, no field work for her. Nope. She was perfectly comfortable with her books and machines.
"Well, then you've got more sense than I do. But don't ever tell your mother I said that," the ghost replied, his handsome face twisting slightly at the thought of ever telling his daughter that she was right. Then he smiled at her, and when he did, she understood why her grandmother had loved him so much. "Didja swat your brother for me when you got home?"
"A-Always."
"That's my girl. And make sure to tell the rest of them I said hello. Since they're all too afraid to come down and see me themselves."
"I-it's not you, it's mmm-me, Grandda. Th-they're afraid of looking at sss-so much c-compressed w-w-wisdom. Mmm-might go bl-blind from mm-my sheer awesomeness. A veritable fff-fount of w-wisdom an' awesomeness, I am."
He laughed uproariously at that, falling over onto his back and holding his sides. "Oh, my God, you are so your father's daughter," he chortled. Sitting up, he smiled at her fondly once more. "I'll leave you to your book now. See you later." Just like that, he just sort of faded out of view, shimmering out of sight like a mirage that'd dissipated.
Leaning back into the beanbag, she started reading.
'My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.'
No, Altaira Dale Cutter-Temple was not a normal girl. She was the granddaughter of Connor and Abby Maitland on her mother's side and of Nick and Claudia Cutter on her father's side. She'd seen her first dinosaur when she was still learning to walk. She came to visit the ghost of her grandfather in the cellar/library of a museum and talked about classic films and poetry with him. Anomalies were a part of her life as much as ghosts and books. In two more years, she'd start working in the ARC, just as both her parents did and her grandparents did, too. She would work under Liz Lester, with the few people that she did call her friends – the Anderson triplets Gideon, Victoria, and Connor, brother and sister duo Danny and Gemma Becker, Sarah Quinn, and of course, her younger brother, Leonard Anakin Cutter-Temple. And whenever things came out bad for her, she knew that she could always come down to the library and talk to the ghosts.
Life for her was strange, but it was certainly good.