"Hi, Ma!" Scout called as he opened the front door of his house. In response to his call, a head with a face like his but more feminine and a bob hairstyle looked around the kitchen doorway. She smiled when she saw him and said "Oh, hi, sweetie! Where are your brothers?"

"Uh…" Scout stammered as he tried to think of a good reason. He couldn't tell her they had been fighting again. They said the next time he did that, he wouldn't see the light of day for at least two weeks. "They, uh… they're playing baseball out on the field."

"Oh, that so?" she asked, and went back to work on making breakfast. Safely assuming the conversation was over, Scout went over to the fridge and took a look inside. "Hey Ma, is it alright if I have a Bonk?" he asked, pulling out a soft drink labelled 'Bonk! Blutonium Berry".

"Of course, honey-" "Sweet! Thanks, Ma!" he said as he closed the door and began to open the tab. However, he stopped when he found his mother standing in front of him. "You can have one once you tell me what the boys were up to."

"But Ma, I told you, they-" he stopped short as his mother's unconvinced frown descended upon him. "They weren't- I mean- they was- what I'm sayin' is-" He looked up and once again met with his mother's frown, and knew that there was no point in trying to change her mind. "They were fighting again, weren't they?" she asked him.

Scout looked at her for a bit, then slowly nodded. At this, she gave a cry of frustration and sank down into a chair. "Why don't those boys listen to me? I told them not to go out fighting anymore!" She slumped into her chair and buried her face in her hands, as she emitted small sobs. Scout feltso bad for, that he almost didn't have the heart to ask her about the bat.

But he did anyway.

"What? Why do you want it?"

"Oh, um… I thought it would help me with my battin'."

"Hmm. Guess ol' Sandman just *sniff* isn't doing the job, huh?"

Scout sighed as he looked over to the living room. There, in a trophy case that his mom had bought for him on his 10th birthday, lay his most prized possession, the Sandman bat. It was a classic wooden bat, and he had loved it from the first day he saw it. When he was playing baseball with his team, he didn't use any of the other bats, just Sandman.

Unfortunately, in recent years, it had hit so many balls that the top started to split. He taped it back together with black duct tape, but he didn't want to risk destroying it. So he stuck it in the trophy case, vowing never to allow his favourite bat to be destroyed.

He looked away, and looked back to his mother, who was drying her tears. He reminded himself that she had bigger problems, with her eight sons to take care of and no husband to support her.

Thinking of this reminded him of something he had wanted to ask her for a while, but that he had never gotten around to. He pulled up a chair and sat down next to his mother. "Ma…" he began, "what happened to Dad?"

She looked up and stared at him, with a surprised look in her eyes. "Why do you want to know?" she asked him as he shifted uncomfortably.

"Just… y'know, I wanna know what happened. Why he isn't around anymore. Did he… die?"

She dried the rest of her tears and stood up, then told him "Follow me." Uncertainly, Scout got up and followed her. She led him into her bedroom, which had a double bed and a wardrobe in the corner. Everything else in the room had something to do with cosmetics, so he mostly paid attention to the bed and wardrobe. However, this time he couldn't, as his mother was heading towards the mirror cabinet. She proceeded to open some drawers, searching for something, but not urgently.

Finally she found what she was looking for in the bottom cabinet. She pulled out a yellow envelope with the word 'Paris' written on it in fancy cursive and closed the drawer. She stared at the bulky envelope for a while, and it seemed like hours before anyone spoke, as the memories within that envelope came flooding back.

"So," Scout began, breaking the silence, "what's in there?"

Broken out of her daze, his mother turned to look at him and held out the envelope. "This contains pictures of my trip to Paris, fifteen years ago. I had divorced from my first husband, having just had my seventh child-"

"What?!" Scout exclaimed, almost dropping the envelope as she handed it to him. He was the eighth child, and the second youngest was almost three years older than him. "Yes," she responded, "you weren't born to John."

"But... how?" Scout and his brothers had long heard stories from their mother about their father, John Basil. But now it seemed that he was not really his father. "I mean, what the freak? How was I born then? You didn't marry twice or nothin'!"

"No," she confirmed, "but I did meet someone."

She motioned to the envelope, and Scout, realising he hadn't opened it, practically tore it open, desperate to know the identity of his true father.

He pulled out the first envelope he saw and came out with a picture of a beautiful French sunset in Paris, with the word 'Paris', once more written in cursive, residing in the corner. In the picture, there were two smiling people, a man and a woman, standing side by side. The woman Scout recognised as a younger version of his mother, but the man he did not recognise.

He wore a white, short-sleeved shirt, covered by a pinstriped red vest. On his lower half, he wore a pair of red business pants and a pair of fancy leather shoes. His most interesting aspect, however, was what he wore on his head.

He wore a facemask, with holes for eyes and the mouth. It was very strange that someone should have been wearing this out in public, and with such casual clothes to go with it. Of course, underneath the mask was the face, and although he couldn't see much of it, it still unnerved him and made him shudder. It was like the eyes were staring straight into his soul and he could almost hear this man's voice in his mind, whispering darkly and mercilessly, 'I'm coming for you.'