Author's Note: Due to the fact that I was recently asked to write the script and novelization for a very exciting game that is currently in pre-production, I will be dropping back to posting fanfiction every other day rather than the every day rate I have been trying to keep up with. I may occasionally post chapters of smaller pieces like 'A Spot of Tea' or 'Summer Shorts' on off-days, however.
On that note, today we begin to get answers. Happy reading!
Tim awoke to heated whispers. Peeking out through his eyelashes, he found Charity and her mother both on their feet and squared off against one another. He couldn't quite make out their words, but the expressions they wore left him with no doubt that they were having a nasty row. As he watched, the younger woman said something that made the elder pale and then quickly flush. Before he even realized that her hand was rising she had smacked the impertinent mouth that had dared to offer her sass.
Charity stood stock-still for a moment, her fists clenched, her head turned to one side from the force of the blow. Now, finally, their voices rose so that he could hear them. "I didn't want to do that, Charity," her mother's voice trembled with anger, "but you need to remember what this is about. Not revenge, as you so...so callously stated, but about making a better world for you to live in."
"And how do you expect me to know that this new world of yours is better than the old one that you never let me experience for myself?" a half-whining snarl replied.
"It will be. Trust me, it will be." There was a zeal in her tone that Tim had learned long ago to take as a warning sign. "Remember what your father died for, Charity; so that you wouldn't have to live in such an unkind world as exists now. That is why we have to keep going; that's why we can't stop. Understand?"
Charity wiped her eyes and sniffled. "...I understand, mother," she murmured, something accusatory lingering in her tone. "I understand."
"Good." Raising her hand again, her mother patted her reddened cheek gently. "I'm going to go get some sleep, and then...New Madrid. All right?"
"Okay," Charity ducked her head.
"You'll watch our...visitors...in the meantime?"
"Yes," she nodded, taking the gun. "I'll watch them."
"That's my girl." The older woman turned to walk away, then paused and looked back. "...He'd be so proud of you right now. I want you to know that."
"...Thanks, mom. I know."
When they were alone, Tim dared to open his eyes fully. Charity saw him, and raised a finger to her lips to keep him quiet. Out in the main cave, footsteps died away; a moment later there was silence. She glanced into the other chamber, then came back in with a superior look on her face. "...You want to know what's going on here?" she asked him unsteadily.
His jaw dropped. "Well yeah, but..." But it shouldn't be this easy, he frowned. You're not even going to make me work for it? That's...that's too simple.
"But why would I tell you?"
"...Yeah. I mean, you're not going to kill us right afterward or anything, are you?"
"No. If I was going to kill you, I would have done it already. Besides...that would make me like her, and I don't...I don't want to be like her." She sniffed again. "And it doesn't matter anyway, what you do and don't know. It doesn't matter because we're all screwed after what she's done."
"What exactly has she done?"
"She's...look, it's easier to start from the beginning, okay?"
"I-" I need to know what she's doing and how, he bit back. The why was important, yes, but it could wait until after they'd put a stop to the what. Evidently, though, it couldn't wait in Charity's mind, and right now keeping the girl talking was what really mattered. "...Okay."
She sighed. "She'll never forgive me for talking to you, even though it isn't going to make a real difference, but...you deserve to know, I think." She seemed to be talking more to herself than to him, but he let her go on. "You didn't ask for this any more than all those millions of others she's hurt did; the least I can do is make sure one of the innocent people caught up in her plan knows why they had to suffer."
"...I would appreciate that," he ventured when she appeared to have finished. Part of him wished that Dick was awake to verify that this unimaginable stroke of luck wasn't a dream, but he was still leaning against the wall with his eyes closed and a pinched expression on his face. Be faking it, he pleaded. We don't have time for me to repeat her story to you so that we can act.
"Hold on." Rising, she checked the larger cavern once more. Settling down again, she lowered her voice until he had to strain to hear her. "...I'm sorry, daddy," she muttered. "I'm sorry, but...you always said I should do what was right, didn't you? And this…she's gone all wrong, daddy. All wrong…" Then, still speaking at a low volume, she began. "My mother's name is Dr. Tracy Rae Collins. Except she wasn't a doctor when she met my dad..."
Charity's parents, it transpired, had met while attending one of the nation's more prestigious universities. Tracy Collins had been a newly-minted graduate student aiming for a doctorate in seismology; Jerome Symon was a post-doctoral researcher in applied physics. They met not in the lab or the classroom, but at the American Red Cross, where both donated as much of their limited spare time as they could.
It didn't take long for them to discover that they shared a burning passion for helping people in need, particularly those who had suffered in disasters, whether they were natural or man-made. Once that was established their relationship progressed quickly, and they married less than a year after their first date. Jerome finished his schooling and got a job that allowed him to support his wife while continuing to pursue his humanitarian efforts on the side; Tracy plugged away at her doctorate and gave out long after-dinner monologues on how there had to be a way to predict earthquakes and save lives. Overall, they were happy with one another.
Jerome had a knack for building things, and that talent plus his education led him to develop a number of simple technologies for use in large-scale crises. He invented many of them on the side, and thus held the patents in his own name. By selling them for a combination of hefty sums and promises that the items would be produced and somehow gotten to the people who needed them the most, he built up a hefty bankroll by the age of 40. Some of the extra money he earned with his weekend tinkering went into his next project, but most of it ended up in the coffers of relief organizations that he supported.
Tracy didn't mind. By that time she had quit teaching to take a position in seismic risk assessment with a private firm, and was making plenty of cash herself. Her job took her to the scene of great quakes past and present, and with every new assignment her resolve to find some way of predicting the next temblor hardened. Families torn apart, towns flattened, local economies ruined; all of those things shocked her. The only thing that startled her more, she disclosed to her husband after a repeat trip to an extremely active and extremely poor region of the planet, was the attitude of the developed world towards the affected communities.
Relief funds and supplies had poured in after the previous disaster, of course, but that had been little more than a band-aid on a bone-deep cut. Most of the money had never reached the people it was intended for, instead being diverted in the receiving nation's capital or laundered through such elaborate networks that only a tenth of the product that might have been procured ever made it to the front lines. Although the victims in this case had received enough of the basic necessities to survive, no one had seemed to care about how they were supposed to live. The few mental health workers who had come last time hadn't stayed long, and little or no effort had been made to restore the economy, which had been limping along on its own as best it could. As a result, the local population had been even less prepared for the second seismic disaster of the decade than they had been for the first. A culture of despair, she cursed, was the only thing flowering in the new rubble.
The only positive outcome of that trip, Tracy believed, was the stroke of genius she had had as she'd picked herself up from a particularly violent aftershock. They could measure pressure along fault lines and look at historical data to say whether or not a region was due for another quake sometime in the several hundred or thousand years, she knew – it was what she did for a living. Where the problem came in was predicting when exactly that release would occur. A high-pressure fault might sit for millennia without producing anything more than a faint rumble, and the species could hardly evacuate every seismically active area of the planet 'just in case'. As the screams of the terrified and the wounded echoed in her ears, a two word answer had come into her head; why wait?
Why wait, indeed? If she could figure out a way to remotely trigger quakes in high-risk areas, they could be scheduled and planned out. The local people could be temporarily evacuated, saving both their lives and their psyches. Governments could not only arrange the proper amount of supplies beforehand, but could actually work the estimated costs of each quake – which would be much lower with no search and rescue needed – into their national budgets ahead of time. The money saved could be put towards repairing local infrastructure before the area's inhabitants were let back in. It would be, Tracy thought, a watershed moment in disaster relief.
Jerome agreed, and agreed furthermore to help. Abandoning all of his other side projects, he put his mind wholly to the task of triggering earthquakes from a safe distance. The solution needed to be compact, as it would have to travel to some of the most rugged areas on earth, but it also had to be powerful enough to shift billions upon billions of tons of rock. Five years into the project he quit his job, giving out the excuse that he wanted to dedicate all of his time to his charity-focused work and his newborn baby daughter.
Tracy's nightly diatribes against the bureaucracies, corporations, and wealthy individuals who let the quake-displaced citizens of less-developed countries become refugees or sink into poverty, meanwhile, grew more and more incensed. Disgusted once he saw the high prices at which some of his life saving inventions were being sold by purportedly 'people-oriented' companies, Jerome didn't take much convincing to fall in line with his wife's opinions. More determined than ever, he redoubled his already extraordinary efforts.
Then, when Charity was three, he'd done it. Through careful questioning of old colleagues in a variety of fields, Jerome had managed to put together a device no larger than a roll of paper towels that did everything he needed it to. Not only did it draw its power from the earth itself – the only engine powerful enough to drive it – but it also transformed the magnetic and geothermal energy it collected into pure force. That force was then applied to the materials around what he dubbed the 'compacting sphere', which shoved the ground or air's component atoms so close to one another that not even hydrogen could get through.
As amazing as that breakthrough was by itself, the real marvel was that the prototype was effective within a range of two hundred yards. The principal idea was that one could form the force field around the sphere and then widen it, which Tracy assured him would cause earthquakes if it was done in the correct areas. The side-effect, Jerome quickly realized, was that one could create domes of protection or isolation over cities or other important areas. If the system didn't need to be easily portable, there was really no limit to the size of force field one could make.
Once he discovered that, he hatched a scheme. When Tracy had gotten her earthquake-timing plan recognized and started up, he would patent the technology the program was using. Then he would sit on it, producing the spheres himself and selling them only to fund his own humanitarian efforts. By cutting out the middle man, he hoped he could get the vast majority of the proceeds from his life's work to the people who needed it most.
But Tracy's efforts didn't go as well as they expected. She didn't dare explain how she planned to cause earthquakes – the technology in question was the sort of thing that would get them both locked up for the rest of their lives, they were sure, if they didn't prove from step one that it had been developed for peaceful purposes – and her zealotry for the idea turned many people away. A few of her fellow scientists agreed that, in theory, it was a good thought, but she was unable to hold onto their support when she refused to say how she would put the it into practice. Most, though, were disgusted as soon as the words 'cause earthquakes on purpose' hit their ears. It sounded like little more than a super-villain scheme, and rumors began to swirl that she was becoming unstable.
Despite the initial resistance, she was certain that sooner or later the geophysical community would come around to her way of thinking. With that hope guiding her, she used her job to access many of the key areas she had mapped out as prime for preemptive shaking. No one at the many borders she crossed ever questioned the strange-looking little machines she carried, which she always listed simply as 'seismology equipment'. With Jerome's careful instructions to guide her, she installed dozens of compacting spheres around the globe without anyone ever suspecting a thing.
Five years into the creation of her network, the hammer fell. Although she'd become more careful over the years about who she discussed her idea with, new national security protocols landed her file squarely in the 'undesirable' drawer. She was let go, her credentials revoked, her name blackened, and her whack-brained project hypothetically dead. Had she not had half a decade of preparation, it might have truly been the end of it. As it was, though, there was just one more sphere she wanted to put into place, and Jerome could get her to where she wanted to put it.
While Tracy had been out globetrotting, her husband had been making early moves towards launching the relief organization he intended to fund with his impermeable domes. Given that background, it wasn't a stretch for them to draw on their substantial personal funds and put together a small cargo plane worth of humanitarian supplies. They flew overseas and made the long trek into the middle of nowhere on the credit of their good deed, bringing Charity with them in the hopes that she, now eight, would begin to understand not only the scope of the problem her parents had been tackling their entire lives but also the importance of working towards a solution.
She had gone along willingly, just happy to have both of her parents around for more than a few weeks at a time. She could remember, she shared quietly, the day they 'went on a hike' together. It was a dangerous area, and the villagers had tried to get them to take a guide, but they'd refused. Late that morning she had watched as her mother buried the last of the compacting spheres several feet deep in a sunlit hillside, her face beatific as she patted the dirt back into place.
"I thought she was an angel in that moment," Charity whispered drily, almost choking as she remembered. "She was so beautiful, and...and I believed that what she was doing would save so many people. So many innocent lives..." She ducked her head. "It might have, to be fair. If people had given her plan a chance, it really might have. But they didn't listen, and then...and then...
"And then dad got sick, and no one would help. No one from outside could get to us, and the villagers were afraid – they said he'd been cursed by something in the hills, said he'd committed some unknown crime against the spirits of the mountain – and refused to help. Mother says it was encephalitis, but they...they pushed us away. They isolated us, and he...he died." She paused. "He died, and then mom lost her goddamn mind."