Evan Cross.

Let me tell you about Evan Cross.

There was this meeting. This important meeting. We're 21, just out of school, and we had this important meeting. The time was counting down. 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 10, 9, 8. 5, 4, 3. Needless to say, he didn't show up. So I was left to carry it by myself. Ordinarily, fine, that's usually my job anyway; his is to stand there and look pretty. But when you're in a meeting with the bosses of a big hot-shot company, trying to sell a product, it helps if you have the guy who actually knows anything about the product, to talk about the product. The product that you're trying to sell. The one you're trying to sell to the big company with lots of money.

I try not to be bitter about that day.

His face when he finally showed up, I try to focus on that. On that hopeful look on that youthful face. Little did I know it would be gone in a matter of years. I try not to be bitter about that day, because business-wise, it turned out to be a pretty good thing, and it did make Evan extremely happy. On that day however, I was angry. Oh I was so, so angry. Anyway, that was the day I met Brooke.

A couple of years later, we hit it big. Cross Photonics. It's just a name of course. Evan did the tinkering, I do all the actual running of it all. Evan Cross has never been anything without me. It's safe to say, I've warmed up to Brooke by now. We're friends, but we're not friends. She keeps him grounded at home, keeps him functioning enough to work and generally live, and I hassle him about deadlines and meetings and about how his latest obsessions with random spikes of magnetic interference is only going to irritate me if he doesn't find a way to make money out of it, and fast, because we couldn't keep running on one idea forever. It's a good dynamic.

Or at least it was.

It takes all of three days after Brooke is killed by a bear (in an abandoned building, I had questioned, why would a bear be in a building?), for Evan to disappear. He left me a letter of course, claiming something about magnetic spikes and dinosaurs. I was pretty furious.

He didn't reappear for two weeks, and when he did, he appeared with a hopeful look (and one I couldn't understand at that). He'd reappeared with a scraggy youth covered in bruises, and British, I later learnt. That was the day I met Mac Rendell.

Not that I knew his name at the time, I couldn't care less. I was too busy putting Evan in his place. He said he wanted to give him a job, and I made sure he knew that the role Evan gave him had better be equal to his skills. I didn't see him for a few years after that, well, I did, but after a while I erased that scraggy youth from my mind; it only made me angry.

It took half a year for 'the special project' to become noticeable to me. I fired the entire finance department after that. How could they have not noticed all that money disappearing?! Evan damn Cross. The next group hired were made to sign silence contracts.

It only took weeks after the official creation of 'the special projects' group for Evan to take off once again. It was really getting old at this point. But he comes back, as he always does. And in another act that was getting pretty old, he doesn't come back alone. This time he's being trailed by a young woman, who he introduces as Toby Nance. She'll be on the special projects he says. She's here to help him with his magnetic interference investigation he says. He told her about the dinosaurs and she was willing to believe him, he says. Quite frankly, all I could wonder is why she looked more like some sort of punk than a computer geek.

But my first impression was wrong (I never said that), and it turns out that Toby is quite the computer genius herself. And over the years, we became friends. Mainly because the only time I would ever see Evan was in the TANK. I know, he gave it a name. And of course, Toby is always there too. Sometimes I wonder if they're related.

The last straw came when Evan went out hunting dinosaurs and came back with a pretty redhead talking about dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, the dinosaurs bit turned out to be true. That didn't make me any less angry about it.

I'd allowed myself a fraction of hope that this might be the end, that he might have discovered what he was looking for, and leave it alone. I hate being wrong.

And when Evan and the redhead left the building again, followed by the punk nerd and the scraggly youth (who wasn't quite so scraggly anymore), I told myself that if he returned with anyone else (and especially if he returned with a dinosaur), I was quitting.

I fleetingly wondered if I was dealing with a genius or Ned freaking Stark.