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It isn't long before you're emerging out of the cramped, rubble-laden streets of what was surely once a vibrant shopping district and into a wide, flat area, which gradually declines away to form a shore. Grey-green water sluggishly undulates against fossilized garbage and half-dissolved, dessicated plastic. Saint Dismas Youth Shelter, the orphanage where you spent the first few years of your life, actually happens to just be eight city blocks from here. The 'beach' was about half this length back then, but all the refuse has never stopped compounding where the weak currents of the undercity collide.
You don't remember much from those early days, but you remember the same stagnant air you're breathing now, and you remember the stale stink of decaying trash neutralized by the brine of oily saltwater.
You didn't really get to know this area, or the other parts of Old Charlie for that matter, until you came back ten years ago to find your real father, Reginald Black - one of the last things you did before being approached by <span class="mu-r">The Jabberwocky</span> for work as a 'consultant'. You knew your mother had died in a riot just four months after your birth, you'd been told that when you were still young. Later, you would use your unique abilities to learn a everything anyone could possibly know about the incident... But you recall even now had not a single one of those details mattered. None of them made you feel any better. It didn't make you feel more in control. So you forgot. You let go of all those details, dates, names, faces, and facts. You just let yourself forget, because it truly didn't matter. To forget is something you rarely permit yourself.
Perhaps therein lies the karmic irony of your father's condition when you finally tracked him down. Early onset dementia. It's been really, really slow. You haven't decided if that's a blessing or not, yet. He's still lucid the majority of the time, still funny. Full of stories about being a forger and smuggler for the Stone Sump Prowlers, a gang on the North side of town that's long since disbanded. Criminal predisposition appears to be a heritable trait in your case. But he is losing pieces. He has early onset dementia, and it's been a decade. He's already lost some big ones. As you tread towards the water's edge, scanning the garbage for signs of Silas' magical invocation, you can't help but think that all of this trash is to blame for your dad's decline. Tons of poor losers down here in Old Charlie start to sunset around sixty or seventy, and it's usually the same drawn out affair. Most people know it's because of... Well, everything around you, basically. The chemicals. The strange and adaptive molds. Most of all, the microplastics. They're practically foaming out of the gills of the fish and crab that people catch down here. Other stuff too, you're sure. Aluminum, mercury, probably way more exotic stuff too.
>Cont'd
