Daria: Chasing Wormtrails. A Daria of the Milieu Story. Chapter Three
DISCLAIMER: Daria is the creation of Glen Eichler and is the property of MTV Viacom. Worm is the creation of John "Wildbow" McCrae. The Coadunate Galactic Milieu was the creation of Julian May and belongs to her estate and heirs. I own none of these except my original characters.
OK, they've got it, Daria said to herself. She felt a flash of resentment at Reverend Allworthy for scooping the Oakleys out from under her. She knew it was irrational, but she had it anyway. She stepped into the women's room to collect herself, then drove back to her bread and breakfast. She told herself that she'd done the right thing. It took her just over an hour and a half to make her way back to where she was staying. Her landlady was not happy to see her return so late but forgave her after Daria explained that she'd been to evening church services with a family of refugees. She went up to her room, and set her laptop on the writing table, and powered it up.
She checked her e-mail. Her editor had asked her to check in to see what sort of work she was doing in Wilmington. Daria replied by saying that she'd been to the refugee camp and had taken a family around Wilmington, finally bringing them to an evening church service. She sent her a message but told her that she doubted that she'd hear anything from her until morning.
In the meantime, I've got a story to write, she told herself. She began writing about her adventures with the Oakleys. It proved more difficult to write than she thought it would. She found herself writing from three angles and two drafts, neither of which she was satisfied with. When she was done, three hours had gone by. She checked her e-mails again and called it a night.
Her discovery of her possible Earth Bet counterpart continued to bother her. Was Cynic another Daria Morgendorffer, or was she somebody else? She'd already decided that she didn't have enough evidence to prove it one way or another. The only thing she could do was to download the trading-card image from her phone to her laptop and resolve to upload it onto Parahumans Online. She figured she owed the other Daria that much.
By that time, it was early in the morning. She knew that she needed to proof-read what she'd written. She might even need to re-write her story, but she decided to put that off until daylight. She washed her face, then fell asleep.
She dreamed. Despite the fact that she was bone-tired when she finally crawled into bed, the next morning she remembered scenes where she was running, exchanging blows with other Parahumans, leaping over abandoned cars, dodging falling buildings, a brief moment of intense pain, followed by a scene where she was lying in a hospital bed.
She woke up and was relieved to see that there was a small overhead light instead of the LED panels she'd seen the few times she'd seen in hospital rooms. Thank God for that. She briefly wondered what Hell her Earth Epsilon counterpart must have gone through, looked at the clock and the time and thought Yikes! Time to get up!
She quickly showered, put on a little make-up, dressed, then dashed out to the refugee camp. She had to park much further away than the day before; the parking space she'd used yesterday had been taken.
There was a crowd outside the entrance: a mixture of gawkers, local functionaries, and some religious types no doubt hoping to save a few souls. There were also a couple of local news vehicles; Daria wondered what that was about. She showed her press credentials to the guard and passed through the check-point.
A clutch of what Daria guessed were human Milieu functionaries stood in a cluster just beyond the check point. One of them, a gray-haired girl with a pixie cut caught her attention. The gray-haired girl caught her staring at her, then smiled. "I know you!" she said. "You're from Lawndale! You used to know my older sister."
Daria stopped and stared at the girl. She probably met her sometime back when she attended Lawndale High, but it took a moment to place her.
"Chrissy Griffin. Am I right?" she said. Chrissy was Sandi's little sister.
"Hey, you remember!" said Chrissy. "So what are you up to?"
"I'm a journalist," said Daria. "I'm interviewing refugees from the other Wilmington. What about you?"
"Well, I'm interning with the Proctorship," Chrissy replied. "We're here with refugee resettlement and disaster relief."
Chrissy's expression changed to that of someone who'd just had inspiration. "Say, Daria, I just got here," she said. "Know anything Wilmington?"
Oh, yeah, Chrissy was meta-psychic. Young Metas were as harnessed to the nascent Human Polity as the Wards were supposed to be to the Protectorates on Earth Bet and Earth Bet. "Just what I found out from Wiki and from driving around town yesterday," said Daria. "I also found out some stuff about the other Wilmington."
"No kidding, how did you do that?" said Chrissy.
"Well, I started interviewing a couple of the refugees and offered to drive them around town," said Daria. "I listened to the older woman's comments while I drove to where her house and her old workplace were."
"So how did that go?" said Chrissy.
"In hindsight I'm not sure that I should have done it. Seeing a town where you'd lived all your life and finding out that every trace that you'd ever been there has been obliterated was a worse than a punch to the stomach," said Daria. "About the only thing that I'm proud of was that I got Mrs. Oakley and her daughter to a church service last night. I hope that the preacher can do something for her."
"Don't be too hard on yourself," said Chrissy. "You had good intentions and something good might come of this."
"I hope so," said Daria. "But you know about how the road to Hell is paved."
"No I don't," said Chrissy.
"With good intentions," said Daria. She wanted to look for the Oakleys. She hoped that the church people had brought them back here.
Chrissy looked at her with something that looked like exasperation. "Daria, you might have made a mistake but it's not irredeemable," she said. "There are social workers here, you know. People like me except with more experience. And maybe that church preacher did them some good. We can handle it."
Daria took Chrissy's reassurance that the Oakleys were in good hands as permission to go wander around the camp. She wasn't sure the younger Griffin sister was right.
She soon found the reason for the crowded parking zones and the media trucks. Someone had set up a podium. Despite her journalist's credentials she wasn't able to get close to the podium but someone had set up several remote monitors to show who was speaking.
A dark-skinned man with black curly hair peppered with gray onto the platform. A chyron underneath his image identified him as the Mayor of Wilmington.
The camera flipped back to the head of the refugee camp, a nebbish Daria didn't recognize, and he thanked the mayor for coming over to the camp.
"And now, I present the Mayor of Wilmington, Mr. Thurgood Kingston!" he said. There was a round of applause from the native Wilmingtonians present and scattered clapping from the Wilmingtonians from Earth Bet. Daria suspected that the Earth Bet Wilmingtonians probably had reasons to be cynical about their city government.
The mayor stepped up to the lecturn, looked over his audience, and began speaking.
"Ladies and Gentlemen!" he boomed.
"You have been through trial and tribulation." That they have, thought Daria, except that the horrible thing is that the people back in the other Wilmington had almost certainly gone through far worse.
"I shudder at the devastation you left behind you and I cannot conceive of the heartbreak and loss that you all have been through."
Daria still considered herself a cynic, but after listening to the Mayor's speeches, she had to conclude that he was good. He was charismatic. He didn't leave any piles on the podium like many pre-Intervention politicians would have. After less than a minute of listening to the Mayor talking, Daria decided that before the Great Intervention, this man would have gone places—possibly to North Carolina's governorship, possibly even to the White House. At least if he could overcome the bigotry and political corruption that had plagued Earth Politics before and just after the Milieu's spaceships had appeared in Earth orbit.
"We welcome you home, our brothers and sisters!" he said.
"You are Wilmington!" he boomed.
"WE ARE WILMINGTON!"
And he had them. Not just the Wilmingtonians native to this Earth, but the new arrivals from Earth Bet. "WE ARE WILMINGTON!" they echoed. It became a chant, and at that moment Daria decided that the new arrivals were going to be all right.
-(((O-O)))-
She found the Oakleys not long after the Mayor's speech.
"Good!" she said. "I'm glad you got back here all right. I was a little worried."
"We got home safe, Miss Reporter," said Mrs. Oakley. "Reverend Allworthy and the people from the Temple of Grace helped us. One of them drove us back to the camp. Thank you for taking us to that church."
"And they've got a Sunday school!" exclaimed Candida. "They say there's lots of kids my age."
"Glad to hear it," said Daria. And she was glad. If she wasn't jumping-up-and-down or going-cartwheels glad for the Oakleys, she was glad that somebody in this town was helping them find their footing in what must be this strange new world.
"So what are you going to do, Miss Reporter?" asked Mrs. Oakley.
"Interview Reverend Allworthy, if I can," Daria replied. "Talk to other refugees. Talk to the local social services and see how they're doing."
"Did you ever find out about Cynic?" asked Candida.
"Not yet," said Daria. "I thought I heard that a couple of people in the shelter worked for the Protectorate. I'd like to ask them if they knew Cynic." I've got about as much chance of that as I have becoming Queen of the Planet, thought Daria, but I'm going to try.
"In any event, I want to upload that image you showed me onto our Parahumans Onlineboard," she added.
"So you're cool," said Daria.
"I'm cool," Candida replied.
"Good to see you both," said Daria. "I'll catch you later."
-(((O-O)))—
Daria still had an interview with Reverend Allworthy to arrange. Still, she was in a good mood. I think my story's written, she thought. She decided that it was time to take a break and go for a walk. She left the camp and took a walk.
The refugee camp for Wilmington was a lot smaller than the sprawling camps set up for the refugees from Brockton Bay. Of course those had been set up to handle thousands of people while the Wilmington Endbringer shelter only brought over several hundred. The camp occupied an outlying city park and Daria decided to go exploring.
She passed through the gates of the camp and started walking. 30 minutes later she found herself at the edge of a large pond. It was the sort of pond that many communities set up for beauty or sometimes for fishing. This one looked occupied; she watched as a couple of creatures briefly raised their heads above the water, took deep breaths, then submerged again, their long leathery tails trailing as they went back underwater. No, these weren't indigenous, she thought. They were Sea Dragons, both of one of the member races of the Coadunate Galactic Milieu.
The Sea Dragons were a mostly-Coadunate race of amphibious reptilians that superficially resembled certain lizard species. Despite their acceptance of the Milieu's precepts, they still had traces of their bloody-minded mindset as well as a tendency to ignore inconvenient rules and regulations. Like local ordinances that prohibiting diving and swimming, Daria thought with a grin.
She paused to watch them and see what they were doing. She quickly discovered that there was more than one in the pond. The Sea Dragons surfaced, then dipped, then swam, then dipped, then surfaced again. Before too long they got bored and walked onto shore. Daria wondered if the pond had been stocked with perch or catfish and how many fewer of them there were now.
One of them walked over to her. Humans and Sea Dragons had difficulty speaking each other's' languages, so communication was going to be awkward. This one seemed to have something strapped to—his—chest. Good, it was a voder box. That made things a lot easier.
Good morning," said Daria.
"Greetings," said the smaller of the two. Daria had met a couple of Sea Dragons while she was in the Social Service Corps. She knew just enough about Seas Dragons to know that they often recognized each other by the patterns on their skin and that the smaller one had broader pelvis than the other and was probably a female.
"Greetings, human," the Sea Dragon replied, using the voder on its torso. It stared at her for a time. Many Sea Dragons were telepathic. If not, it probably was wondering if it could identify her by sight. Or by smell: Sea Dragons had a far better sense of smell than most humans.
"Miss Morning-Villager," said the smaller Sea Dragon. She knew this one; Ms. Beach, as Daria called her, had been a Coercer with the Magistratum who'd been assigned to investigate a murder case that had occurred in a village near where Daria and her team had been working.
"Ms. Beach," said Daria. "Greetings."
"What are you doing here?" asked the Sea Dragon.
"I'm a journalist these days," said Daria. "I'm writing a story about the humans that just crossed over from Earth Bet."
"We're investigating the new arrivals," said the Sea Dragon. "We're trying to determine if any of them are what some of them are what you humans call Capes."
"I've only met a couple of the new arrivals," Daria replied, "but neither of the ones I talked to qualify."
The other Sea Dragon made a noise that Daria interpreted as a Sea Dragon-ish way of saying "Whatever."
"I've got a question," said Daria. "Did anybody working for the Earth Bet's United States Parahuman Response Team cross over in the shelter?"
"You know we would not respond to your question if any of them did," replied the male Sea Dragon.
"Certainly," said Daria. "At least if any of them were Capes. But I'm not asking about Capes. I'm asking about clerks, office managers, troopers, and other Protectorate personnel."
"You know you should not expect an answer to that question either," said the female Sea Dragon. "But why do you ask?"
"I know that the Magistratum is trying to living humans on Earth Bet have counterparts on this one," said Daria.
"Go on," said the Sea Dragon. Aha, I've got your attention, thought Daria.
"I think I have a lead as to the identity of one of Earth Bet's Capes," said Daria. "A female youngling from the other Wilmington showed me one of her Cape cards, a Cape with a remarkable biography."
"And I presume you have a theory as to who that Cape's counterpart might be," said the female Sea Dragon.
"I believe I do," said Daria. "The Cape's alias is Cynic, and her image and biography are similar to mine. I believe that she's my counterpart over there."
"What's her status?" asked the female Sea Dragon.
"I believe that Cynic is an inactive Cape," said Daria. "She was severely injured and has retired from active cape work."
"And how would we benefit from it?" asked the female Sea Dragon.
"It might open up other lines of questioning to obtain information," said Daria. "People who knew Cynic might give you names of other Capes in the Protectorate and their powers."
"So what would you like as a reward for your suggestion?" asked the female Sea Dragon.
"Ideally, I'd like to meet Cynic," said Daria. "But I doubt she came over to this Wilmington. If not, I would like to meet any of her former friends and associates."
The female Sea Dragon stared at Daria for a long while. This human's motives were almost transparent. She was definitely curious about this Cynic person—if he or she actually existed. She was unsure if she did.
Many humans liked to think that they were clever and devious. The Morning-Villager woman was more clever and devious than most. She decided that the human's suggestion might be worth pursuing. Even if the Redactors found no trace of this Cynic person, the information such questioning might obtain might be worth having.
"We'll get back to you," the Sea Dragon said to Daria.
-(((O-O)))—
Daria walked back to the refugee camp and ate lunch. She managed to score an interview with Reverend Allworthy: the preacher had not only had someone drive the Oakleys back to the camp after the service the previous evening, but her and the church elders had decided to open up a program to help displaced people from the Wilmington of Earth Bet find housing and jobs in this one. To her, this was a living faith, not the sort of hateful sectarianism that used to prevail on AM radio bands until the turn of the Millenium.
Daria thanked him for the interview. She found the Oakleys: Mrs. Oakley was talking to a couple of church women while Candida was playing with a couple of the other refugee children. Daria said goodbye and was drinking ice tea when her cell phone gave the beeping noise she'd set for text messages. She opened it and read it with wonder. It read "Be at the parking lot outside the gate within the next ten minutes—Beach."
Daria tossed what was left of her tea and headed for the front gate. A human Magistratum trooper was leaning against a borrowed Wilmington city police car.
"Ms. Morgendorffer?" he said when Daria waved to him. "I'm your ride."
Daria got in, the car pulled away from the curve, and drove to downtown Wilmington.
About half an hour later, Daria arrived at the city police headquarters, was escorted over from the parking garage, then was handed off to a couple of Magistratum officials who searched her, then made her go through identification procedures for a visitor's badge. Daria and her new badge were then escorted upstairs to an interrogation room. Her escort knocked on the door and led her inside.
There was a woman sitting at a table wearing a rumpled pant-suit that Daria recognized as a style that came from Earth Bet. The woman looked at her, her mouth fell open in astonishment, then said "Daria, is that you?".
"Yes and no," said Daria. "I'm Daria Morgendorffer, but I'm the Daria Morgendorffer who grew up on this Earth, not the one from Earth Bet. By any chance did you know my counterpart? I'd love to know more about her."
-(((O-O)))
Author's Notes: First, a note for Daria fans. In the Daria of the Milieu universe, Chris Griffin of Lawndale was born female. She's also metapsychic. Her brother Sam may have had a crush on Quinn Morgendorffer, but he's over it.
Regarding the Galactic Milieu. Julian May's canon Galactic Milieu had five member races prior to the induction of humanity in 2083: the Lylmik, the Krondaku, the Poltroyans, the Simbiari, and the Gi. I padded it with two more: the Wee Dee (As they're popularly called) and the "Sea Dragons." Humans are not the only candidate race in this series: so are several species of cetaceans. In fact, it was a dolphin, not the canon Remillards, who organized the great metaconcert that led to the Great Intervention in 1990 (Over twenty years earlier than in May's original series).