《Beyond Fermi's Paradox》Family

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2006, 20th January

Paris, France

Lionel Bellone silently inspected the carved globe in his hand, even as his vehicle moved along at a pace far too slow for his liking.

These suburbs were far too populated.

The driver kept nervously glancing at him through the rear view, as if he couldn’t sense his gaze.

Lionel was hard pressed to remember his face from the sea of faces that served him.

The vehicle halted in front of his destination.

He exited onto the pavement, and a sea of people parted before him, for no reason they could discern.

He walked up to the first floor of a red bricked building, it’s porch lit by a warm yellow light, and pressed on the doorbell.

A man with silvery hair that looked to be in his forties answered the door.

His eyes wrinkled, then a warm smile broke across his face as he saw Lionel.

He placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Come in, my son.”

Lucien Bellone, the surviving eldest of the Bellone family, lived a fairly modest life, choosing seclusion unlike his son.

His home, too, was warm and welcoming, all wooden furniture and stacks of well worn literature, illuminated by yellow light.

Lionel entered, and instantly, the temperature dropped a degree or two, the shadows growing more prominent.

Lucien sighed. In his mad rush to the top of the food chain, his son had abandoned most semblances of humanity by the wayside a long time ago.

“You almost never come to visit. How have you been, Lionel?”

“You have a granddaughter.”

Lucien froze in his tracks, then sank down in a seat across his son.

Lionel silently slid a photograph across, of a girl with straight, dark hair, stormy expression, staring at the camera.

“Her name is Lucia.”

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Lucien blinked several times before looking up at Lionel.

“Named after-”

“Yes.”

Lucien pored over the photograph some more, trying to spot features that he recognized in himself and his son, as grandparents are wont to do.

A suspicion dawned over him.

“She looks… rather old, in this photo.”

“What do you mean?”

“She looks at least eighteen. You’ve concealed her from me all this time. Why would you tell me about her now?”

“She’s only properly joined the family now.”

Lucien’s fears were confirmed.

Letting his face sink into his hands, he groaned.

“What have you done, Lionel?”

His son’s expression remained impassive and he rose from his seat.

“Lionel.. Where is she now?”

The other man pulled the globe from his pockets, setting it down on the table.

Lucien inhaled sharply.

“I sent her away.”

“Where?”

“If I tell you, are you going to see her?”

“Shouldn’t I see my grandchild?”

“There’s nothing to see there yet.”

“What does that mean?"

“That child is weak. She’s impulsive and hotheaded without the power to back it up. She will probably die within-”

“You can’t keep blaming yourself for Anais.”

The conversation ground to a halt between the two of them and they regarded each other in stony silence, before Lionel spoke again.

“I don’t blame myself.”

Lucien sighed and shook his head.

“I do want to see her, Lionel. I understand why you really sent her away. But she’s my granddaughter.”

Lionel paused for a moment before answering.

“Iceland. She’s with the Draugr for now.”

Lucien nodded his head in acknowledgment, and they parted ways.

Lionel sat back in his vehicle, mired in contemplation.

“Take us back.”

But he was not referring to his own residence, and they pulled up in front of the residence he had allotted for Lucia and James.

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He walked in, alone.

Walking up to his daughter’s room, he could smell expensive perfume, faded by days gone by but sharp enough to his senses still, hanging in the air.

He walked into a perfectly, almost painstakingly organised room, with barely a corner out of place.

With the only oddity being a notebook, laying beside a laptop, laying there as if thrown in haste, and left behind.

Leafing through its pages, he found a perfectly accurate reconstruction of the sphere laying heavy within his pocket.

Several scrawls written in a hasty hand, struck through, filled the following pages.

Evidently, Lucia had taken initiative, but she did not know what the globe was, could not possibly know, and had approached it from a fundamentally flawed angle.

Something within his chest; was it disappointment?

From someone he expected nothing of?

Lionel put the notebook away as it was, and without disturbing anything else, he examined the room.

There was no merit to knowing Lucia, who she was, but Lionel felt an old urge he thought was long lost to him.

Then he buried it, and made his exit once more.

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