2646. The BIRS

Okay, so remember how, a couple points ago, I had to go to the ridiculous trouble of teaching the others music just to have an excuse for not getting my taxes in on time? Remember how Durbe also promised to help me with my forms, since he's the only one who really knows how to fill them out? Remember all that? Well, guess what.

I got audited anyway. And it was not an experience I intend on ever repeating.

Basically, what happened was that I claimed Hector as a dependent on my form (because he is), but I didn't indicate that I'd had a child since my last filing (because I haven't). Apparently, this seemed like a discrepancy to the BIRS; the possibility of cloning must not have crossed their minds. I mean, if I'd known that telling the truth was actually going to get me in trouble, I would've lied. At least I'm not going to make that mistake again.

Anyway, one day I get a knock at the door of my room, and my sixth sense told me whatever was out there wasn't good. It almost seemed like there was some kind of evil aura filtering through the space under my door. But I'm one of those people who does the exact opposite of whatever I'm told to do, and that applies to my sixth sense and conscience, as well. So, despite the terrified screaming of my intuition, I sauntered over to the door and pulled it open.

I'm not really sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't a pasty nerd covered in freckles sporting a clipboard and a pocket protector. I still felt the evil presence, but I had no idea where the heck it was coming from, because the mayonnaise-colored Barian in front of me looked more like the captain of the intergalactic chess team than some fiendish agent of The State.

He looked down at his clipboard and asked if I was Vector, of the Barian Emperors. I asked him if he was f***ing kidding me, everyone on this planet knows who I am! He, annoyingly, was unfazed and told me in a dull monotone that "it's just standard procedure, sir" before asking the question again. Too short on patience to play games with him, I curtly confirmed and he scribbled something on his clipboard. He then introduced himself as Sargas, a senior agent of the Barian Internal Revenue Service. He said there was an inconsistency in my forms and that I was now under investigation.

Feeling bold in the face of Sargas' utterly non-threatening appearance, I made a rude gesture, told him to shove his investigation somewhere where the suns don't shine, and slammed the door.

Satisfied with my spectacular handling of the problem, I turned around and started to head back towards my desk, probably intending on throwing out all the important paperwork and leaving the irrelevant stuff, like I usually do.

He was there. Sargas was sitting at my desk, with his tax papers spread all over the surface.

Now, I know that doesn't sound like much, since Barians have the ability to teleport. But the walls of the palace are made with a special crystal compound that makes it impossible for portals in the overlay network to pass through them.

So I stood there, this creeping unease building up inside me, wondering, how the hell did he get into my room?!

Sargas didn't seem aware of the fact that he'd magically poofed behind my desk in defiance of all the laws of physics... that, or he was just completely indifferent to everything, whether it was me or the way the universe was supposed to work. It was f***ing unsettling. "Are you ready to begin?" he asked, but the way he said it wasn't even creepy or anything, it was just flat, and that's the scariest part. I can't really explain it, but something about him, about the blotchy grey freckles that spread over his sickly skin, or the glassy, pale eyes that rolled around languidly in his sockets like a fish's, just disturbed me to my core.

Sargas spent the next twelve hours relentlessly poring over all of my financial records, interrogating me with ruthless blandness until I felt I would literally, actually die if I didn't escape. It was kind of like every time he asked me how much income I got from X source, he sucked a little bit of life from me. I could feel my originality draining away, and by the time I started to think that being nice to people might be a good idea, I knew I had to get the heck out of there.

So I struggled to drag my consciousness back from the mire of dull number-crunching, and as I pulled free, I flipped the desk. Tax papers flew everywhere, but suddenly Sargas was gone. Vanished without a trace.

Sometimes I wonder if the audit even happened at all. There was no physical evidence that Sargas had been there, and the only clue that anything had even occurred was my overturned desk... and a stack of magically corrected tax forms. The others think I'm crazy (as in actually crazy, not my usual), but I am willing to swear on anything you want that a BIRS agent was in my room. Honestly, it keeps me up at night.

Knowing he's out there, somewhere, being impossibly bland, swallowing up the life force of the universe like a black hole, freaks me the hell out.

And Nasch, who is the ultimate root of the problem because he's one of the reasons I messed up my forms in the first place, is getting a point.

2647. Play-dates

Now, I haven't tried actually supervising Hector since that last... incident. Any time I need him out of my hair, I tell him to get lost, so for a while I had no idea where he went during the day. He always came back in time for dinner, though, so it wasn't much of a concern. I mean, I wouldn't be concerned even if he didn't, because I'm not some kind of worried parent or anything… that would be sappy and stupid.

But a couple of weeks ago, he started coming back a lot later than usual. Like, hours later than usual. The kid's smart enough to fend for himself, but I was honestly intrigued. Given his weird hobbies, I figured he was out planting some secret garden or something and tried to forget about it, but one day he came home after ten at night and I just couldn't contain my curiosity anymore.

So, yesterday I told him to get lost, per usual, but when he left the palace, I used my special ninja skillz to follow him. After twenty minutes or so, I found myself in Nasch's territory, the part of the city around the palace that he has direct control over: the infamous Naschville.

Now, I wasn't afraid of getting caught or anything; there's a pastry shop smack-dab in the middle of Naschville that makes the best energy-strudel ever, so I'm in and out of there all the time, usually carrying purloined strudel, and nobody's ever caught me. But I was kinda miffed that my clone was running off to my worst enemy's territory without telling me… at first, I was afraid he'd betrayed me in favor of "Uncle Nasch."

Turns out, it was worse.

Eventually, we came to a cute little house, and Hector bounced up to the door and rang the bell. After a few seconds, a little Barian girl with suspiciously familiar green hair answered the door, and Hector skipped inside. Now, I make it my policy never to mingle with the commoners, especially Nasch's commoners, so I really didn't know where I could have recognized that girl's hair from. Then, suddenly, it hit me.

It was Merag's hair. The exact same shape, just green instead of blue. Once I realized that, I actually remembered seeing her in the palace a couple of times; Nasch apparently had some kind of special fondness for her. I couldn't remember her name for the life of me, though.

Anyway, I was totally p*ssed that Hector was fraternizing with Nasch's little favorite, so I flew home in a rage (but not before grabbing some strudel) and prepared to give him a serious whooping. I had all kinds of fiendish plans in mind, but when the little rat actually came home, he was so darn happy that my brain, already sort of mushed after the audit, short-circuited and forgot everything I wanted to do to him. I did, however, let him know that I knew exactly what he was doing and that I was less than thrilled, which is sort of its own punishment. Hector practically worships me, so he gets all depressed if I even hint that I'm disappointed in him. It's kinda funny.

Anyway, he realized that the jig was up, so he spilled everything, including the stuff that I didn't really care about. He told me how he met Iris (that was the girl's name) after getting lost in the city one time, and they became instant friends, and now he goes over to her house practically every day to play... it was a little sickening, honestly. But I knew I couldn't really do anything to put a stop to this behavior short of actually watching him all day, so I forcefully reminded him that any clone of mine getting chummy with one of Nasch's people would be a terrible embarrassment to me and told him to practice extreme discretion.

For some reason, "Hector" and "discretion" don't go well together.

Remember how news spreads fast on Barian? Well, either Hector or Iris must have spilled to somebody, because the very next day everyone from Merag to Alito is stopping me in the hallways, commenting on how cute those two are together. Even Mizael said it was cute! MIZAEL! I mean, seriously! What the flying f***?!

Of course, the only one who didn't think it was cute happened to be Nasch. He seems to be of the opinion that I am trying to use Hector to pollute Iris' innocent mind, which is completely ridiculous. There are a billion different better ways of doing that, assuming I'd even want to. I don't know why the heck he thinks I do, but I've noticed that Nasch gets a little paranoid when I'm around his people. Again, dunno why, but he's still getting a point.

2648. Dress-up

Now, that last point was pretty embarrassing, but it's nothing compared to this one. I swear, if there had been a black hole for me to crawl into when it happened, I would have. Heck, I would have done almost anything to avoid the shame, but it's too late now, and I'm pretty sure I will never hear the end of it.

It all started on a normal day; I was getting ready for "work" (even within the quotes the term is used loosely), and there was another useless meeting scheduled, so I drank about ten more cups of energy-coffee than usual before telling Hector to get lost and heading for the library to feed Bingo. The little guy must have been feeling peckish, because he didn't even touch the second death-row inmate I brought for him. See, Nasch was starting to notice that servants and other such expendable Barians were disappearing at a slightly-above-usual rate, so I had to resort to feeding Bingo people that no one would miss.

Anyway, we were in the middle of the meeting (this one was devoted to discussing whether the word "Barian" should always be capitalized regardless of its position in a sentence), when suddenly we started hearing this strange growling sound. It was quiet and only happened once or twice at first, but as the meeting wore on, the growls started getting louder, longer, and more frequent. It got to be so bad that Durbe had to ask Mizael if he'd smuggling in Tachyon with him somehow. Turns out that he had, but the dragon wasn't the one making the extremely-distracting sound.

Finally, Nasch stood up from his seat, looking slightly embarrassed. "I think we should-" he began, but was suddenly interrupted by another menacing growl. "...take a lunch break," he muttered, cheeks red, and I realized that what had been growling was his stomach and proceeded to laugh my head off.

So we all filed out of the meeting room with half-hearted promises to pick up exactly where we left off in about an hour. Merag suggested that we all go somewhere together for lunch, and everybody else agreed, eventually forcing me to join them by promising me the right to pick where we went. Now, normally I would have come up with something really mean or hilarious, but I was starting to get seriously hungry, too, and if MY stomach started growling right after I spent ten minutes mocking Nasch, I'd never live it down. So, I hastily went with the first thing that came to mind; the pastry shop in Naschville with the really good strudel. It's also a deli.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw when we got there.

The first strange thing was that all the women who are usually supposed to be behind the counter were standing in a circle in front of the door, cooing and squealing at something. When we entered the shop, they all hurried back to their spots and dipped their heads out of respect to our authority. We now had an unobstructed view of the source of the excitement, and I felt like fainting, running away, killing myself, killing someone else, blowing something up, writing emo poetry, running around in frantic circles, or melting into a puddle of shame and congealing on the floor. All at the same time.

Hector and Iris stood together in the middle of the shop, but that's not the issue. Iris was wearing some kind of weird plastic set of toy armor, and Hector… oh Don Thousand, do I have to say it?

He was wearing a frilly, shimmering, sparkle-covered bright pink DRESS. Complete with a pink tiara nestled firmly in his bluish hair and a pair of sparkly fairy-wings (also pink) taped over his own.

Nasch, f*** him, was the first to laugh. He laughed and laughed, with malicious ferocity, and after a few seconds, everyone else joined in. Even Durbe couldn't hold back his chuckles, and Mizael snickered so loudly that Tachyon started copying him by making strange wheezing noises.

I have no idea what my face looked like at that point, but I must have been pretty scary, because Hector opened up a portal and disappeared. I felt like doing the same myself, but the others wouldn't let me; they trapped me there and forced me to have lunch with them, laughing about the "pretty princess" for HOURS. I was so desperate, I even suggested finishing the meeting just to get them off the subject, but to no avail.

Merag, whose kindness I rarely appreciate because it's never directed towards me, finally told them to knock it off, saying that there was nothing wrong with kids playing dress-up and that Hector's feelings had probably been hurt. The less-jerky Emperors (meaning Durbe, Alito, and Girag) eventually started agreeing with her, saying that they felt kind of bad and would apologize to Hector later. Nasch, however, stated that since Hector looks exactly like me, what he was really laughing at was the idea of me in a dress, and then the whole vicious cycle started up again.

So, yeah. Honestly, I'm not sure why I don't just kill him now. It would certainly make things easier. And, as it turns out, that embarrassing debacle wasn't even the end of my problems.

2649. Runaway

It was pretty late by the time I got back to my room after that, sometime around two in the morning, actually, so I decided to go to Hector's room and make sure he was okay... while hopefully getting him to swear revenge against Nasch for this insult.

He wasn't there. Confused, I tried looking in all the hiding places someone his size could fit into, but he just wasn't in the room. I ran and checked the library, but he wasn't there, either, and the gardener hadn't seen him all day. At that point, I realized that, for the first time, he was actually missing.

I eventually decided that my pride could not get any more thoroughly thrashed, so I grudgingly asked Merag for help. She has this nifty ability to sense other Barians no matter where they are, but it takes a lot out of her. Therefore, she said that the price of this particular favor would be quite steep, and it was; she made me grovel at her feet and praise her beauty, which I only did because I didn't want to lose the significant investment of my time and resources I'd made by creating Hector. Even so, it took me two days to actually grit my teeth and do it, by the end of which time my troublemaking clone still hadn't come back.

Turns out, Hector was actually somewhere on Earth, hiding out in the middle of a big city. We Emperors are the only Barians with the ability to teleport between dimensions, but the uncivilized homo sapiens that populate that disgusting ball of dirt are so beneath us that none of us have ever deigned it necessary to go there. Thus, I was not relishing having to teleport there to chase after my misbehaving clone, but nobody else wanted to go, and Nasch said it was my responsibility to look after Hector, anyway, so there was really no getting out of it.

The last time any of us even observed Earth from our own world was… a lot of years ago, and back then, they were still living in tents and riding camels, so I honestly wasn't expecting the city that I ultimately found myself in to be so bustling. The buildings were all packed together, much like the city on Barian, but they were kind of rectangle-shaped and only ten stories at the most. There were strange pathways between buildings where horses pulled people along in carriages; every once in a while, some strange machine would come rolling down the street on its own, making all kinds of ear-splitting noises, but these were few and far between (thank Don Thousand). However, the most immediately annoying aspect of the city was the humans that crowded the sidewalks, moving constantly forward like a school of fish and jostling me around so much that I randomly kicked one of them in the shin out of sheer frustration.

The man started screaming at me, calling me a "dirty Irish" and motioning towards some big burly guy dressed in all blue with a funny hat and a big stick. I really wasn't in the mood for a fight, since Barians can't use their powers on Earth, so I beat it. Once I was sufficiently far away from funny-hat man (whom I heard referred to by a seedy-looking bum as "da fuzz"), I stopped for a minute to inspect my own reflection in a shop window. My original reasoning was that I had to know what my human form looked like so I'd be able to find Hector, but once I actually saw myself, I kind of forgot about that.

For some reason, my human form looked a lot younger than it should have. My hair was pretty much the same, but it was bright orange, ridiculously so, and I was wearing really strange clothes: a white button-down shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, with black pants that cut off just below my knees, long grey tubes of wool called "socks," weird black laced shoes, and some grey wool thing with no sleeves which I found out later was called a "vest." I honestly didn't understand why I was wearing so much clothing since it was getting pretty hot, so I took off the shirt and vest but was forced to put them back on when some lady screamed and I had another run-in with da fuzz.

Merag had told me what street to find Hector on, but in the chaos of my multiple high-speed chases, I forgot completely, so I ultimately ended up wandering around aimlessly, hoping to run into him. I was surprised that I was actually able to read the words on the signs, but that didn't help me figure out what any of them meant. By the time I got to Broadway (which isn't very broad, if you ask me), I'd had a little… incident… that left me rather beat-up, and I was so tired that I kind of just flopped down onto a bench and sat there until another "fuzz" told me to move. I was about to give up entirely when I was suddenly approached by a man with a magnificent moustache, who asked me if I still had any copies of the Times. I asked him what the heck he was talking about, and he said he'd seen me hawking newspapers earlier in the day but hadn't had any change at the time.

Sensing a breakthrough, I told him that the newspaper boy he'd seen earlier was actually my younger brother, and asked where he'd seen him last. The mustachioed man was all too happy to give me an address, so I ran back through the streets (which I was getting pretty good at navigating by that point), scanning the crowds for orange hair.

The curiously blue sky was starting to get dark by the time I spotted him; he had his hair mostly hidden under a grey wool cap, and he was dressed in a similar fashion to me, though instead of a vest, he had a black jacket that was probably even hotter than my multiple layers. He was standing under a pole with a candle on top, surrounded by a couple of human boys, holding bundles of paper and shouting "Extra! Extra!," looking thoroughly ridiculous.

Using my ninja skillz, I snuck up on him from behind and pulled him into a nearby alley, whereupon I gave him a good spank and asked him what the heck he was doing. I hate to admit it, but I felt… kinda bad… I mean, he started tearing up and whimpering, like a scared puppy or something. A little less harshly, I asked him what happened, and he suddenly pulled me into a hug and started sobbing into my shoulder. "I - I was just playing with Iris," he whimpered, "and we were playing a game where the knight has to rescue the princess… I was the knight, b- but after a couple of times, Iris said she wanted a turn at being the knight, too, so I… it wouldn't be fair if she didn't have a turn…" He sniffled. "But then Uncle Nasch and everybody else started laughing at me, and you looked so scary, so I… I decided to run away and never come back!"

I pushed him off of me and rolled my eyes. "Well, if you're never coming back, then you should quit whining and get back to selling papers."

Hector let out a cry and grabbed me again, wrapping his arms around me so hard that I had trouble breathing. "I'm sorry, Daddy!" he cried. "I wanna go home! I promise I'll never run away again!"

That was exactly the reaction I wanted, but I made a show of considering. After a while, I told him if he used some of his paper money to get me some food (I hadn't really eaten much at lunch), then we'd go home. We ended up eating some gross slimy thing called "oysters" that I will never, ever eat again before teleporting back to Barian World, where Hector received many apologies from the other Emperors… except Nasch. So he's getting a point for that, and for the "incident" that happened to me before I made it to Broadway:

2650. I Stepped Out Into the Street and Got Run Over by a Trolley

At least I think it was called a trolley, from what the humans around me were saying. Somebody called it a "streetcar," but the specifics don't matter as much as the fact that it hurt like the dickens.

I am never going back to Earth again if I can help it.

Author's Note: Sorry for the really long chapter, guys. And the random 1800s New York. And Sargas. Fun fact, his name actually means "seizer," so I thought it fitting for an evil tax man.

I actually got a lot of Hector suggestions this time… I guess that means at least some of you like him? I honestly wasn't initially planning on including him this much, but he's starting to grow on me. Now I'm kind of getting sad that he's going to grow up soon… *sniff* Sorry, I need a minute… *runs off*

Hector: *smiles adorably* Thank you to Girl with the Fireheart for 2646, FANatic Guest for 2647, Charolette Ink for 2648, Don Thousand for 2649, and The Little Black ROse for 2650; it wasn't a truck, exactly, but a trolley's close enough, right? Anyway, I had lots of fun, and I made a new friend, so thanks, everybody! If you have any more suggestions, please give them to P.I.-san. Pretty please?