Hey everyone, Paradigm of Writing here with a brand new chapter of Syrenet, Chapter #28: Political Poker Policies. Last chapter, Pit has been picked - well, volunteered - to become the next commander of the Beta Squad in Syrenet due to Marth's injury, and Corrin has made the executive decision to have the team go and seek out the Council of Thirteen in Detroit, where Shulk and Syrenet has already had some past. The next two chapters, so this one and 29 are going to be focused entirely on Corrin, Snake, Robin, and Mac, as they haven't had a lot of time to shine this arc whereas Midna and Roy, the former especially has catapulted up to the forefront. Review replies!

SeththeGreat- I was worried about not having Marth killed as it was this huge cliffhanger, but you assured my thoughts. As you are fully aware, none of the characters here have amazing mental stability, which I suppose reflects myself at times, but this is definitely extreme, however the situation they're all in is quite extreme. And interesting you say Roy is jealous, I haven't actually been writing that as the angle - trying to work out this relationship is quite difficult, it's been a mess - but good on you for that. Corrin and Shulk are my favorite two characters in the story, so naturally, I love their relationship.

Guest- Quite a short review from you, but happy to see you're still here! I still actually find the Claus chapter one of the weaker ones in the story, and last chapter I felt was weak too, man, we are totally different on thoughts! Thanks for the congratulations, my hard work is starting to actually mean something I think.

CrashGuy01- Hey, you reviewed! Man, I've missed your thoughts and inputs. And gah, I hate to tell you, but no, that voice is not Fiora. If there's anything that isn't ambiguous in this story, it's her fate. She's dead as a doornail.

Mr. Squirtle6- You know I never relent on the gas, lol. You cried? Man, that's intense, gee I didn't think anyone would cry! I suppose I say thank you? And man, your favorite chapter on the entire site? There's a lot on this website, and for you to say that, I may start crying, my god man thank you. Arc 4 is going to devastate me, let alone the readers.

Metroid-Killer- Man, two for two on the emotional thing! And your favorite as well? Huh, I suppose I'm not seeing something. Corrin may be my favorite character in existence, and I don't mind saying that. Pit is one of those characters who thinks he can actually do something and when he gets there... well... And no, I didn't answer your Amber question because it's a secret. Let your mind think whatever you want.

Enjoy Chapter #28: Political Poker Policies, which is going to be styled the same way Damaged Dinner was.


"You're drunk," Snake says sardonically, arms crossed over his chest as he's hanging out underneath a glowing neon sign, face shadowed in 70's fluorescent purples and pinks, the other an umbra of the moon. Behind him, Robin and Mac remain silent as the FBI director's figure is quite literally blocking the door.

"Wow, your observational skills are amazing, Mr. Karlo! How long were you in school to tell me that?" slurs Corrin, the silverette currently holding onto one beer bottle and a cigarette in the other.

"You smoke?" Robin pushes Snake out the way, a look of displeasure crossing her face. The whole day has been a mess in her mind. Marth wounded, half the Syrenet crew suffering from PTSD, Corrin drinking her sorrows away, and all Robin can give is a gentle hand. She's never felt more useless in her entire life and it's starting to sicken her.

"No," Corrin retorts. "I don't."

"Then what is..." Mac furrows his eyebrows together.

"Do you do anything other than complain about other people?"

"I beg your pardon Madam President, I-" Mac blinks.

Corrin waves his words away with a dismissive hand, guzzling a long sip from the beer bottle. A pool stick is clutched in her other occupied hand, her face flushing with sweat. Beads roll off of her forehead onto the carpeted floor of the motel, an ugly darkening olive green pattern with what looks blood stains. At least, to Snake that's what they resemble.

It's proven by the afternoon's proceedings that taking a plane to Detroit's airport is not safe, as it seems the rebels know of their plans before Syrenet knows their own. Corrin demands that the compound be packed up, a few shoddy cars are bought from an underhanded dealership and then the crew goes on the road. They're halfway to their destination of Detroit, Michigan, cooped up somewhere on the fringes of Illinois, eleven people in a motel where the sweat smell is abounding, the snoring is louder than the usual thunderstorms, and tensions are high. Marth is flown by helicopter to one of the hospitals in Detroit, and Ike is gone ahead with his best friend to make sure the trip is a success. Corrin's phone rings at around nine that evening as Ike tells the gang that their injured soldier is put back into medical care.

With Roy napping, Midna out firing weapons in the motel's strange addition of a shooting range, and Pit going to look over the technological failures of the Automatic Army, it leaves Corrin wanting something more than being cooped up in her room and reading. She has no idea how he does it, Shulk that is, where the blonde can sit up against a wall, open up a novel, and read. It is what the Alpha Commander says he'll do, clutching a bottle of tequila close to his chest. The man will sit in his room in solidarity, turn on Lucas's AI disk, and chat about god knows what. Doing some perusing, Corrin decides that there's nothing on the TV - soap operas are a bore, she dislikes action and superhero movies with a passion, and she's not in the mood to watch The Notebook on reruns - and goes to the motel's local bar. Things are different in Illinois, she presumes.

Though sleeping in rat infested homes is not high on the bucket list of President Corrin Etch, she decides it's for the best. There's so many more lives at stake now, and it'd be impossible for any Midwestern rebel scum to track them to some hick housing. Halfway through her third beer, Corrin laments going to take a nap on the billiard table when an idea hits her brain. She dials Robin's number, tells her to demand her, Snake, and Mac's presence in the bar or face a pink slip when the entire ordeal is over. She's got some fun up her sleeve.

"Grab a stick," she says to Snake, nodding at the rack over by the corner. The positioning of the balls on the pool table are already in place, and Corrin has the cue ball set up perfectly. All that the game is needs is participants and she's against playing games by herself. She's the president of the United States of America; a title like that demands company.

Snake sighs, scratching at his brow. He walks over and grabs the largest one, hefting it in his hand as if it were a rifle. Robin shakes her head in dissent, a tight frown forming on her face.

"I shouldn't," Robin says.

"What do you mean?" Corrin narrows her gaze. "Grab a pool stick."

"Last time I've played a pool stick was in college and I don't want to relieve that experience."

Corrin marches right up to the vice president, grabbing her by the collar of her buttoned up dress-shirt. The smell of alcohol is heavy on her breath, and Robin's eyes go wide as saucers. "Grab a pool stick or I'll find a new vice president on the morrow."

Robin does dutifully as she's told, hoping to drown out the smell of Jack Daniels and Coolers' Light with the smell of sulfur, smoke, and ash. Corrin turns her head to look at Mac, but before she even gets a word in, the secret service agent is already grabbing the chalk cube and dousing the white tip in blue powder. The president's heart elates; she can't scarcely believe it, they listened to her! She's wondered for hours on end why it seems like no one in her group is following her orders without question. It's always someone talking back to her or saying 'no', even when it is as harmless as playing pool! She thought about poker, but that involves gambling, and there's a few Benjamin Franklins she is unable to afford to lose. A few is putting it quite mildly, but what her administration doesn't know won't hurt them.

"Mac gets first shot."

That piques the secret service agent's eyebrows up, but he nods, sighing. He goes over to the front of the pool table, eyeing the cue ball, guising his angle. Corrin watches his lips move, as if he's speaking to himself on where he thinks each ball will go, and she decides that if her hired muscle does not take a shot in the next five milliseconds, she's chucking the pool stick through his trachea.

He lines up the stick, moves it back with his right hand, and glides it forward. CRACK! The cue ball slams into the '1' and the balls disperse. It is a rainbow gliding over emerald leather, and into the leftmost upward pocket falls the nine ball. "Got one!" he exclaims.

"Yes, we all saw," Corrin says, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "What do you want? A medal?"

Snake clears his throat up from where he's sitting, leaning up against the bar stool over in the corner. "Nice job, Mac. How about I get 1-4, Robin gets 5-8, Mac gets 9-12, and Corrin, you take 13-16."

"But I want 1-4! I'm the most important one after all!" Corrin stomps her foot childishly, sloshing beer from the bottle. She grabs the cigarette from the ashtray, taking another long puff, coughing her lungs up with black tar. She hates smoking. Damn Link Collins and his idiosyncrasies. Great, a drunk politician. You should smoke, it helps keep the knife steady, Madam President. I loathe you and everything that you resemble.

Snake locks his jaw. "Well, I suppose that you can have the numbers one through four, Corrin,"

"That's what I thought!"

The pool room / bar is empty except for the four of them and the bartender. Mac eyes him over in the corner, and the two lock eyes. He averts his gaze, as the bartender's left is covered up by an eye patch, and on his right eye, a white rippling scar goes down from forehead to right nostril. The other bar stools and tables are quiet, napkin dispensers empty with pallid sheets of paper spilling onto the carpeted floors that reek of bronchitis coughs and mucus and smoke and sulfur. Mac is trying his best not to puke. The din sound of a swinging ceiling fan drowns out all other thought, the perpetrator hanging over the bar as the chain dances. A chain dances, a song plays over the loudspeaker, something by an artist named Dolly Parton, and Mac is beginning to feel strangely lightheaded.

"Your turn Robin," Snake finishes his shot, the cue ball falling into the hole. "Damn scratch..."

The vice president leeches herself off the wall, where she swears it is sticking to her back as if it is an eon of dried gum plastered everywhere. Corrin lowers the beer she had been taking a sip from and places it in on the table. She takes a seat while Robin lines up her shot. "Hey, Robin, tell me about the story of you in college."

It causes the woman in question to pause. "What about it?"

"I've never heard it before."

"I'd rather not talk about it-"

"We're all friends here, aren't we?" Corrin's eyes flash dangerously, and she clenches the cigarette between two shaking, pale fingers. She inhales, exhales, and a trail of broken dreams and white smoke follows. In the vapor, the president can see deserted dance halls and smashed records and amber eyes in the fumes. "You tell me this story, I'll tell you a story."

Robin's gaze averts back to the table, lining up her shot, smacking the cue ball. The '5' smacks against one of the corners, falling into one of the middle holes. She rights herself, face mirroring pride. She may be the least useful person in the Syrenet group - at least in her mind she finds herself rather unspectacular - but she plays a mean game of pool. Then, to Corrin, "If I'm going to tell you this story, I'm going need a drink. Can you do gin and tonic?" she shouts at the bartender. The bartender nods dutifully, going to make the drink of the maiden's choice. Robin sits down on a stool next to the bar, taking the drink with an heartfelt expression on her face as the grizzly man hands it to her. She sips through the martini straw, delicate and slow like a good old lady of her prestigious name.

Corrin rolls an eye. "I'm waiting, Robin,"

"It's a story that requires a lot of alcohol..." Robin snaps back, and she swirls the glass with her straw. The dink-ding of the ice cubes against the glass rattles on the wall panels, and the sound is louder than she expects, which causes her to stop. "And I don't exaggerate when I say that."

"Oh trust me, you never exaggerate anything," Corrin snorts.

Robin takes another sip, letting out a satisfying gasp. "Man, that hits the spot," and she sets the drink down next to her as the president goes for her shot, misses, and cusses a great deal that'd bother her in any other situation other than a game of billiards. "Anyways, this takes me back to when I was twenty-two, and damn wasn't I gorgeous..."

"She sounds like an entirely different woman, eh?" Mac teases Snake, nudging him in the ribs. Snake smiles, and takes his turn.

"Yeah, yeah..." he says, ignoring the brunette.

"And now, well, look at me," Robin says breathlessly, clutching one of her buttoned up sleeves. "I look like one of those powered women in the eighties and nineties... I mean, women shoulder pads? Who would think of anything that stupid? But I digress..."

"Can you just get to the story?" Corrin whines. "I'm gonna fire you for being boring just as easily as I can for disobedience."

Robin purses her lips. This is the strangest she's ever seen Corrin, and she's seen thousands of nights where the president is in a situation that is certainly not advantageous, but she doesn't like to bring those up either. "I got accepted into Harvard, studied law like everyone else who goes there, and succeeded with being at the top of my class at twenty-five. It's the things I don't discuss about those years at that school that I generally don't talk about," she eyes her glass of gin and tonic as if the story is playing around in the brownish amber liquid. She takes another sip. "As you very well know, I like to pride myself on my Christianity, but I don't really let that interfere with these political policies and whatnot. I agree to have a husband, be a virgin until you're married, and all of that good stuff. Well, you can thank pool."

"Thank pool for what?" Mac leans up against the pool table.

"If you'd stop interrupting her, perhaps she'd be able to get to it," Corrin snaps, her gaze seizing him up as if he is a meal. It seems that the billiards game halts to a stand still as the other three are enraptured in Robin's telling of how pool is a game designed by the devil himself.

The vice president keeps her eyes staring up at the haze of the lights above in the ceiling, for if she is to pass her gaze elsewhere at the occupants in the room, she's afraid that all will be given for her efforts is judgment and disgust. "One of my classes I took my junior year is an advanced level course in Psychology, down the humanities path I had taken. Our teacher, the effortlessly stunning and beautiful Douglas Jay Falcon, in that order entirely, was a man who knew he looked good. Tight-ass jeans that showed his hips and butt... a smile that made Elvis Presley look like child's play, and a voice that makes Morgan Freeman want to find a new job..." Robin presses a hand up against her cheek, expression that of undeniable happiness, and Snake's heart burns slightly.

"It sounds like you may have a had a thing for this Mr. Falcon," Mac notes, chalking up his stick.

"You are at amazing at understanding your surroundings," Corrin says, finishing off the beer bottle. "You were given two ears and one mouth for a reason. Shut up."

Mac's face flushes, and he opens his mouth to retort, but Robin steamrolls over him before any damage can be done. Bottles will not be thrown on a night like tonight, no siree.

"It is known at school that our graduating class had been a little bit too destructive for our own taste... and we loved drinking," Robin snickers to herself, eyebrows furrowing together as if she had a secret she couldn't share. "So, one day, we're all down at one of the bars and hangouts during exam weeks... it must've been finals, and it had been Mr. Falcon's exam we had all taken. Everyone loved him, and I'm a liar if I said I didn't either..." Snake's eyes narrow dangerously together, all to Corrin's bemused face. "We all wanted a piece of that perfect ass, I swear. Mr. Falcon wasn't all that much older than all of us, ten or twelve years I think. So, I'm twenty-two, he's thirty-four and we're all swooning. He comes down to the bar that evening; he was known to join us on nights where we went partying, but would stop once we broke out the weed..."

"It sounds like you haven't always been the angel we thought you were," Snake makes a face, but it is Corrin's glare that silences him once again. For shit's sake, she just wants to hear what happened and it is as if everyone is trying to piss her off again. Back to everyone not following her orders, and it is starting to get on her nerves and really piss her off.

"We decided to turn our game of billiards to a game of strip billiards, if such a thing has even existed," Robin giggles, and her face turns bright pink. "I've never been so stupid in my entire life, but we get Mr. Falcon to play along. All us ladies, and the gay men there loved watching him strip himself out of his jeans and dress shirt... taking off his shoes, a hat... oh his body was luscious..." her voice rises up to new heights, and Robin's eyes display ecstasy.

"She needs another drink," Corrin tells the bartender, who goes to make a second gin and tonic.

"So you all got shit faced drunk playing a game of pool that caused you all to take your clothes off, and the psychology teacher got involved. I fail to see the awful point in all this," Mac frowns, and he resumes to continue playing the game that the others had forgotten entirely about.

Corrin doesn't know how to feel with the statement that comes out of his mouth. "I'm surprised that with you and Midna fucking every chance you get that you are incapable of seeing where this story is going..." and she shakes her head, ignoring Mac's surprised expression. She knows she just swore so liberally, and thing she's trying to get herself away from, but sometimes drastic times calls for drastic measures.

She detaches herself from the conversation as she goes over to grab another drink from the bar, instead opting for a margarita on the rocks, extra salt, and a few more limes than usual.

There's a storm approaching. Thunder bellows out over the White House, high above in the squalls where the gray clouds battle. Jeweled fingers tap against a windowsill, eyes scanning out over a dominion covered in a feeling of solemnness. Queen Corrin of the House Etch, rightful president of the United States of America and the commonwealths of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam, only human being of her own kind, and protector of the Constitution - titles, oh the titles - stands in her room, perched high above the streets of Washington D.C, a god in her own eyes, a god feared by the tiny people down below.

Corrin likes that mental image, and sitting in this dinky bar with all of these depressing folk are not doing her any favors. She's upset that she's actually found herself interested in Robin's nocturnal activities as a youthful young adult who didn't know her right foot from her left. What should be the most important is her! Everyone needs to talk about her. She loves when she's the center of attention; she's craved its approval ever since she discovered what microphones were, public speaking, and the right to privilege. Her father's looming glare is enough for her to decide that she'll be the one to knock down the system and become a ruler of an entire new kingdom forged in fire and battle. No matter how many people she steps on the way up is not her concern, the warning lights are always flashing and people need to be aware when their time is up; people need to know when they're not needed, wanted, or sought after so their end isn't grim with seven bullet wounds in their heart in a dark alley.

Cloud never learns, Corrin laments. She misses him, deep down. She has no idea where's he vanished to, and if he's dead, who did it or why. Part of her wants to believe that he's in Manila on a grand vacation, with shades and his arm linked around some woman who keeps him happy and lets him screw her whenever there's a moment to make love. It hits her in the face like a wet glove that she's unhappy, Corrin is, with her marriage. Cloud Gladwell and Corrin Etch rise themselves on a higher pedestal than everyone else, but she can't admit that she has faults to his face. She can't say without a heavy heart that she loves the blonde senator for everything he's worth and everything he's not. It is like swallowing a vial of poison without an antidote, and she suffers it all until one day someone will press a muted, cold barreled gun to her forehead and demand she share every secret she's ever lied about.

When that day comes, as Corrin can feel it bristling on her skin like an electric current that causes all the hair on her arms to come to a standstill, there'll be the sobbing and gnashing of teeth as the silverette queen who has worked for so much in such a short period of time will watch as green fire consumes it all and she spirals down, down, down.

As Corrin breaks out of the stupor that is her self thought, she looks over to see Robin completely bright red in the face. "He asks me to go back to his place, and being the drunk silly girl that I am, I agree. And then I did it, lost my virginity, and then Mr. Falcon flunks me because I didn't do the positions 'properly'," Robin accentuates this by making air quotes.

Snake claps the pool table with a hand. "That son of a bitch! The two of you have sex and then he decides to make your life hell because he could? I'd punch him straight in the face!"

"Settle down there tiger," Mac claps the director on the back. "I'm sure Miss Wyndel can survive without you riding to her rescue."

The brunette's face flushes pink, pulling at his collar. Robin downs the rest of her second gin and tonic, and she hops off the barstool.

Corrin rolls her eyes. That's all her entourage seems to do, either act entirely too depressed for their own good or make wise crack jokes at everyone else's expense. That's what she surrounds herself with: jokesters, pranksters, fools and diehard idiots. She snorts into the empty beer bottle as Mac, Snake, and Robin all continue their incessant banter on god knows what. That storm is still approaching, in the back of her mind, honest with rains that will weep over the halls of the souls left behind. No one will hear them, no will hear as her storm lolls over the earth, destroying all in its path.

"You'll never amount to anything major," her father tells her one evening as he's dying, holding her hand with a wrinkled one, eyes that have lost all of their hope, and her heart sinks when she realizes that her family has never loved her, least not like this.

Her father's words - the ever so mighty powerful man who is the patriarch of the Etch family - ring in her head like the bells rung with a city under siege, a dead king, or a wedding. I don't mistrust you because you're a woman. I mistrust you because you're not as smart as you think you are. Any presidential candidate who must say 'I am the president' before even winning the election is no true person who deserves to rule. Corrin's lips turn back into a cruel smile, and she almost wants to laugh at the absurdity of her father's words. He didn't even get to die of old age but of air bubbles in his veins. Where does he lie now? A body sinks into the dirt of one of the cemeteries somewhere up north, a location Corrin forgot, a location Corrin does not care about anymore, or perhaps a location she's never cared about, but it's all water under the bridge. All he is now, that's all he is, all that remains of the fearful, roaring lion that is Corrin Etch's father is ashes, and blood seeping into the soil.

It leaves a nasty taste in her mouth. No parent is supposed to watch their child die. All children have to watch their parents meet their ends, it is something that the pattern of life must follow if sanctity and normalcy is continue. Corrin's mother still draws breath somewhere in a nursing home, but she doesn't visit. She's too busy to actually care, and it's not like her mother ever did. Her brother and sister, siblings of hers that she's forgotten their names of, die in a plane crash over the Atlantic. Corrin mourns their fate, their brother moreso than her sister, and that's all because her sister is a vicious cunt who pulled her hair braids, played with her dolls, and thought she had been so superior to the silverette purely on the principle of age.

"And what remains of us now..." Corrin whispers to herself, digging her nails into her arm, pale flesh welting up red at the drawl of pain. "A crippled mother with amnesia and a woman descending into madness... and despite that I'll keep the name alive. The name will stay alive..." she says over and over again. All that matters is the end is her image, her perfect mental image.

There are people in her life that Corrin has been fond of, but has not ever necessarily liked. Three blondes come to mind; three blonde men who have succeeded in making her life a living hell. Link Collins, Cloud Gladwell, Shulk Roberts... their names linger on her lips like long lasting kisses that taste of wine and strawberries and the spray of summer.

Link's face is twisted in a sadistic, cruel smile, the rivers of dried blood clinging to his face as he spits up poison and wine, still dressed in his beautiful golden red embroidery. His eyes are alit like a fire, burning and consuming, and there's no soul in them. Cloud is next, with strands of hair as gray as the northern snows, and there are drops of blood trickling out with a timed precision. Where did her lovely husband go? Shulk, oh sweet Shulk, is last, and the sight almost makes Corrin vomit on the floors. Her precious baby boy - he's not my baby boy, she tells herself, he's not my child, but I feel responsible - is a figure with a neck bent far to the right for what is considered normal, eyes wide open, staring at a blue death filled with nothingness, blood lacerating his throat. However, his mouth is open, as if he is in the middle of speaking someone's name, and a chill slides through Corrin's body as she can practically hear the name.

Fiora.

It's Fiora, it has to be, Shulk speaks no other name.

"But what harm could Fiora Roberts' ghost to do us that we haven't already done to each other ten times over?" Corrin asks the Alpha commander one evening before all of this Syrenet madness with Roy and Link and Detroit and Chicago and Midwestern rebels began. It is a moment when Shulk is denying his existence on this planet while his wife is buried away in a grave somewhere, six feet deep with sagging skin and eye balls that are shut forever.

"Everything," Shulk says, hands wringing her neck. "Everything!"

"You trust me?"

"Now and always, Madam President."

"I love you..."

"I've never loved you. I've always hated you," Shulk snarls. "Damn you, Madam President. Why... why must you exist so?"

"Fiora would approve of our relationship."

"You don't know what Fiora would like. And you don't know what I would like either..."

"Hey, Corrin! You okay?" Snake calls, and Corrin reels back, knocking the beer bottle to the floor.

"Dammit," she hisses, dropping off of her bar stool to clean up the mess.

"Leave it!" Mac says hurriedly, rushing over to her, as the president is down on the carpeted floor that reeks of people from Illinois, reaching for the glass with her bare hands. Red copper stains have always been a pretty accessory, Corrin finds one evening after Cloud slams the front door to the house in anger, and when Shulk does not pick up her phone calls.

"I need to clean this up... I, I can't..." Corrin looks at Mac helplessly, but she backs away, standing up and rubbing her forehead.

Robin has had a third gin and tonic by this point, and she goes over to her comrade, guiding her to a different seat under the light. "Water, please," she instructs. "And I think that's enough for one night, Corrin. You've been drinking like crazy ever since we got here, and I think it's enough now."

Snake brings up another two stools so he and Mac can sit. "Mac ended up winning, though I don't think you actually care about that."

"I just wanted to someone play with me..." Corrin whispers.

"We appreciate that," Robin says soothingly, rubbing her back. "Do you have a headache?"

"I'd imagine I'll have one by morning if I don't have one now," the president gives the ghost of a smile. "Man, how are we supposed to present ourselves to the Council of Thirteen if we can't even have a night to ourselves without endangering each other?"

"We can always turn back and go to D.C," Snake offers gently.

"No," Corrin's throat closes up at that suggestion. "That'd make us look like cowards. It's already being stated on TV that we can't protect Syrenet let alone the entire country. Foreign dignitaries would laugh in my face if we went back with the tails between our legs. That's the problem with this system. I can't nuke the rebels to hell and back because that'd be casualties with civilians and citizens who only asked to be kept out of harm's way."

"Thank you," Robin takes the glass of water, handing it to the president. "Here, drink that," After Corrin takes a hearty sip, the silverette's body visibly relaxes. "So, what did you think of my bar story?"

"I say that you're a whore," Corrin chortles, which Robin actually chuckles at, which is surprising. It must be the inebriating mood she's put them all in.

Mac's face reflects feigned innocence. "Hey! Robin is more than that."

"You need to learn how to take a joke. You're always so tightly wound up."

"Well, as a reminder, since you've calmed down, you've got to upend your part of the deal. I told my pool story, so I need a story from you. A promise is enacted upon, as you very well say."

"Yeah, so stop stealing my punch lines," Corrin quips.

"You've got one for us?" Snake settles on leaning up against the bar, prompting for another beer.

The president sets her glass of water down, searching her head. She's known Robin and Snake for nearly fifteen years, and there's nothing she truly hasn't shared with them. Her deepest, darkest secrets have been spilled over tenfold to her comrade in crime, and the director has just as much dirt on her as the nearest drug kingpin... so what could she say that no one else has ever known before? Shulk isn't with them - she should've invited him, that would've made things ten times easier, she's always relaxed around him - but she's not focused on that. It must be something to do with Cloud.

Thunder rumbles outside, followed by the pitter pat pitter pat of rainfall. It's raining. Corrin decides immediately that Cloud must be gone, he must be dead, and it hasn't truly sunk in until just now. It is as if her husband, the poor old dead Cloud Gladwell - as if the deer would ever match toe to toe with the viper, Corrin smirks to herself - is making his warning call. "Try and stop me if you can," she thinks, as if the lying, whoring ex-husband can somehow hear her. "I am the storm, I am the one who brings the fire, the rain, the snow, the storm, I am president and you're nothing but a corpse."

She swirls the straw around in her glass of water, staring at the ice cubes. They're so fascinating.

"I don't think anyone knows, truly knows, that I once was a mother."

It is a bombshell. Snake chokes on his drink, coughing and having to turn away his head so he can finish hacking at the ice cube lodged in his throat. Mac raises an eyebrow, mouth parted halfway open, unable to speak. It is Robin, with her frown, and her eyebrows that are burrowed together so deep a garden can be planted within that paints the picture for Corrin. No one is able to predict this, which is perfect, absolutely perfect.

"And when was this...?" Robin places a hand on Corrin's leg.

"Long before I met you." Corrin takes another sip of water, and Snake recovers from his lapse in being able to breathe. "Cloud and I met in college, as you know. Well, I've always wanted children, but as of late, and with my age not being the same beautiful ripe twenty-four anymore, he and I gave up. That is after we're elected as a senator and president, but we did have the possibility of being parents once."

Snake's eyes sadden imperceptibly. "Did you lose the child? Like..." a lump forms in his throat. "Like Fiora?"

"No," Corrin says, melancholy in her voice. "Fortunately. I had her in a usual nine months; a painful nine months, but nine months all the same."

"Is the child dead?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Not to your knowledge?" Mac's voice is bitter, as if he is looking down on the president with disgust. "How would you not know where your child was?"

Corrin looks at the secret service agent in the face directly, her emerald eyes showing a range of emotion that is all flooding at him in one line, a stream that is unending of conscious thoughts and unconscious actions. "Soon after our child was born, Cloud and I got involved in the political spheres of this world, I met the colleagues I have now, and the child become too much. Neither one of us were able to take care of her."

"Her? You had a girl?" Robin asks.

"Yes. Samantha," and Corrin's voice cracks. "She was beautiful. Dark hair, as my natural roots were brown when I was younger. My green eyes. Her laugh, her laugh was the best sound in the world."

"And where's Samantha now?"

"I said I don't know. Cloud and I put her up for adoption along with a definitely generous sum of money for whomever would wish to pick her up and adopt her. Though Cloud and I technically could've raised her ourselves, we chose not to. Getting a nanny and maids and a service to take care of her would be just as depriving of having parents if we left her alone to just myself and him. With adoption, since she was so young, her new parents could be her parents, her parents would be different from Cloud and I, happily, and then that was that. We checked up on her status a few times early on, but one day I just forgot to ask. I forgot to care. Last time, Samantha was going through this boy phase at ten years-old, constantly getting in trouble and fighting guys who'd make fun of her. She got sick with the chicken pox and I haven't heard anything else nor tried looking it up," Corrin has tears in her eyes by this point, and so does Robin. "What kind of awful person am I for denying this child who's only thing she had ever done in my life was be born?"

"You can't put all of this blame on yourself..." Snake wraps a hand around her side, pulling her tighter to him.

"It's the price for all that's happened to us," Corrin looks down at her hands. "Detroit breaking away from the union. Fiora. Link Collins. Oklahoma City. Roy's injury. Cloud's disappearance. This afternoon... all of it is the price I've been forced to pay because I couldn't love my own child, because I couldn't be a mother to the only offspring I've ever had. I can't even imagine what she looks like. She might be dead, in prison... a drug addict!"

Robin purses her lips, taking Corrin's hand in her own. Mac's broken the floodgates by this point, and he's crying alongside with the two women. "Corrin," the vice president urges, so the silverette viper can look at her closest friend in the eyes. "Your daughter could be entirely normal. She could have a husband, a child, live in some metropolis city with a white picket fence house and commute nine-to-five as some secretary. Or she could be in Hollywood doing movies. Hell, what if she was working for some government agency! Wouldn't that be something?"

Corrin sniffles, wiping at her nose. "I- I suppose it would..."

"Maybe when we have time to settle all of this down, perhaps you could try and find her again?" Snake offers.

"But I wouldn't have time. Reelection is soon and..."

"Sometimes even things like political status need to come second to family, if I may say so, Madam President."

The silverette nods, squeezes her eyes shut, and lets more tears fall from her face. Mac, Snake, and Robin in unison surround her and hug her, arms holding her tight in an embrace. Corrin's body shudders and shakes as she cries, and it is odd that the bartender hasn't spoken a single word, but she's not bothered by that anymore.

She's really glad that she sends the phone call out to Robin on threatening to fire her closest advisors.

She's more glad that they decide to actually show up.

A storm is coming, Corrin can feel it.

Why?

Corrin is the storm everyone should fear.


Darkness consumes him.

Silence. Quietness. What is this pain? What is this storm that crackles in the sky? Heat lightning is beautiful, he'll give it that, but that's all.

Darkness consumes him; darkness is part of him. It comes from every pore. It unleashes out of every crevice he can find. The sewers are nasty and smell of week old fecal matter, but it is here he calls himself home. It is an awakening spot, a place where the old and useless and unwanted come to die and never see the sun come up.

The Council of Thirteen sits above in their gilded chairs. He hears their conversations go on and on, droning on matters like taxes and financial plans and a desolate military with no one to back them. There's more buzz, that some dignitary, that some silver haired queen is coming with her lords and ladies to partake in ambassadorial discussions. He is unable to hear any more.

The rage he feels causes him to murder a council member in cold blood.

It is an easy task, truth be told. Moving the body so no one can see it, however, is arduous, even for the perfection of a machine that he is. The jewel sees all, the fingers he has on his body burn all, and the man is a living representation of rejected life, a life let to die. Back to the matter on hand, the council member screams and thrashes in the invisible grip. A blackness that comes from the sewers, taking the rat like the scum the member is. Knives. Blades, glistens in the dark. All inconsequential.

It is messy. It is extremely grisly, and he vomits in the back of his throat, swallowing it down as God's perfection does not let idle things such as vomit lead their life. The next day, this man, this specter, this inhabitant of the sewers joins the Council of Thirteen as if he's been there his entire life. Well, he has had a life. Once, he is a human, broken and incomplete, flesh that feels all yet does not understand complexities. A man who only sees a single light at the end of the table for himself and lets everything else fall to the wayside.

Then he meets her, the wicked seraph, a flaming sword guarded by steely diamond eyes. He loves her, he wants her, and he even lusts her in a way that is not explained by usual sexual terms. He is unsure what this person is doing willingly down in his domain, but he relents in his pursuit. A leviathan's jaw has less horsepower than the extension of his reach.

A slit throat. Blood that drips off of gloved fingers, matching the hue of his hair. The whispers against the stone, the sounds of Internet bits and bytes that flood the airspace where hallucinations come and go.

All of this is incapable when he is a human, only stopped by the barrier that God does not want some men to see the grandeur of things in life.

But, when that seraph walks down into the domain of sewage and umbra and callousness, he is elevated. A paragon in his own right, a disposition of glee plastered on his face. This silver maid sounds enough to be rousing for him, a curiosity to see others who call themselves devils and demons and gods in their own right. Only one matches his creator, his seraph, his cherub who guards the gates.

He does not know when his life began, there isn't a date. It is an elixir of life that floods through his blood that is the rousing wake-up-call. It is the iron rod between the cerebral lobes in his brain that make him realize that the world spins counterclockwise because the world itself is an entity that does not follow the rules of time and space. The world is a god in its own right, but he is greater than that of the world.

It is his fourth awakening, and it has been a long time since he's been up and bustling about. Three years is a long time playing in nothing but sewage water. Sewage water, rats, the clomp of pedestrians above, and the dark thoughts circling in his brain.

His interactions with the outside world are brief, miniscule, unrelenting in his approach. There's the blonde. He's forgotten this stranger's name, in a world similar to his own, where there's a seraph standing in the picture. Another encounter in a world doused entirely in white, through the head and eyes of an all seeing Icarus, a man who flies and touches the stars without ever taking off.

A mother. A warm kindred heart is his favorite encounter, with the world exploding in a shower of glass and darkening spots in the sky. Cackling. Vinyl records. Ballet, an opera, the Nutcracker swipes down, the copper flows, and he cheers. The cityscape has changed since he's been human, and the star ways bathe red in blood as he views the world through a kaleidoscopic lens that filters the black and white from color.

The fourth awakening is a hurricane. No one sees it coming, yet no one questions him. Even with the cyber body, even with the lost long riches embroidered elsewhere in his domain, no one questions it.

Does fear inspire the same devotion as love? He is unsure. He's always wondered if that'd ever garner him an answer, but he's been all too entirely unsuccessful in his approach on this matter. It doesn't really bother him, all bow to their rightful lord, god, and devil in the end, as the stars proclaim in heavenly supernovas the coming of his charge.

The monster of Detroit opens his eyes.

The monster of Detroit breathes.

The monster of Detroit awaits.

Syrenet is his elixir.

Syrenet is his freedom.

Syrenet is his enemy.


This is my new favorite chapter, no doubt. Which may get overtaken by the next chapter and a few chapters in Arc 4 that'll blow your socks off. But that was Chapter #28: Political Poker Policies, yet our protagonists did not play poker! How dare I! But, in all regards, Robin has had a shifty time as a young adult, Corrin did indeed have a kid once upon a time, and now there's this elusive monster in Detroit who has been reawakened because of Syrenet... because of course.

Any takers onto whom this elusive person must be? Is Corrin at the end of her wits? Did you have a favorite line of the chapter, as I can pick out plenty, but it is somewhere in this 1k section of the monster.

On the topic of next chapter, next chapter is Chapter #29: Council of Thirteen. It'll be the longest chapter of the story, by far, as it will be a 15k chapter. I'll take about a week and a half to write it (something I've never done before, as this chapter had been written in one sitting - 7PM to 11PM - and it's for a reason). It'll be five 3k sections with Corrin, Robin, Snake, and Mac, the same four of this chapter, and as the title suggests, the Council of Thirteen. Though there will be a couple more really lengthy chapters in Arc 4 to come, none will be as long as the 15k that I'm planning to write. I can't wait to have it out for you to read!

Thank you so much for reading this chapter. Please review, I'd love to know what you thought! I can't wait for you all to read Chapter #29: Council of Thirteen, which I plan to have out before the end of the month somehow, and if not, not later than the first weekend in March. I love you all so much! Bye!

~ Paradigm