Chapter 11: The Parathing

It may seem a bit strange for a couple who lives on a beach to take a beach honeymoon, but Sunlit Tides is a tropical island and very different from Storybrook County's beaches. For one, the sand is whiter and the water a different shade of blue.

But most importantly being away from home gives Heath and Bianca precious time alone together away from their careers and families, and the freedom to simply skip stones or stare out over he water.

The moment Bianca realizes she forgot to pack her birth control pills.

Back in Storybrook County, Shelly is learning that making nectar isa lot harder than she imagined.

Elliot gets his first stage gig.

Juggling with fire batons and knives is great, but his fans, mostly female, come to his shows to gasp and coo over how limber he is.

On the evening before his father's scheduled return from his honeymoon, Farrell becomes a young adult.

When he arrives home, Heath heads immediately to visit his sons. Seeing him pull up to the house, Shelly rushes to greet him, and get some gardening advice.

As he's speaking, Heath realizes Shell has become mesmerized by his hand gestures, and, knowing the power they have, he folds his arms over his chest and continues, "Try using fish as a fertilizer."

"Fish? Eeeew."

Heath laughs, "Farming isn't a pretty job, Shelly."

"I want to stay here," Farrel says, stopping his brother before they reach his father. The plan was that he'd return to their father's house once the honeymoon was over, but Farrell has grown attached to his room above the barn here.

"Sure thing," Elliot says amiably, "We have plenty of room. And I like having you around."

Elliot can tell from Shelly's expression that she's going to have words with him later about letting Farrell stay, but he's not backing down. 

Heath takes Farrell's announcement that he intends to stay with Elliot well enough; he was prepared to keep his strange genius son in his house forever if need be, but if Farrell is happier with his brother, then he's happy as well. And with the changes going on his life right now it's probably for the best. Before he leaves, Heath delivers his own news; Bianca is pregnant.

Once Heath has gone and Farrell is back to his workbench in the barn, Shelly takes Elliot aside. "We have to live with your retarded brother? He was supposed to go back with your father!"

Elliot sighs, "Shell, Farrell isn't retarded, okay? So don't say shit like that about him. And he's my brother, I love him and I want him to stay. When we get married, he'll be your brother too. So, get used to it, Shell. He's family, our family. If you can't accept that..." Elliot leaves that sentence unfinished. He loves, he really does, and would never want to lose her. He doesn't expect her to love Farrell the way he does, but if she can't deal with him being in their lives...

"Okay," she says, a little reluctantly but realizing that trying to get between the brothers is a losing gambit, "He doesn't get in our way or anything. I can live with him here. But, I'm drawing the line at taking him to Champs les Sims with us."

"Actually..."

Shelly rolls her eyes, "You already invited him, didn't you?"

"He asked if he could come along, there's some old burial ground or something he wants to see there. It's not like this is a honeymoon, Shell. It's a business trip for you to check out how they run their nectary. Farrell will be off doing his own thing, we'll hardly even see him."

"See, I told you it would be like he wasn't with us at all," Elliot says as he and Shelly spend some time sightseeing in the Champs les Sims market before they head out to the nectary. As soon as they arrived Farrell went off on his own, just as his brother had predicted.

Farrell stands in the center of the circle of standing stones at the top of old Celtic burial mound. It is of historical interest, so he wasn't lying to Elliot when he said he wanted to visit it, but it's not he main reason he wanted to come along on this trip. There are some things Farrell would rather not get his brother involved in. 

But as he stands here with his eyes closed, Farrell feels...something. An...energy? of sorts. Not like the jolt he felt that time he electrocuted himself while working on one of his projects, but not entirely unlike it, either.

He hears someone moving around him, so Farrell turns and opens his eyes. "Hey," he calls out. Normally, Farrell never speaks to strangers, but this one has glowing wings, and he needs to be sure he isn't hallucinating.

"Farrell!" the winged stranger greets him with a hug. "Areyouherenow? Youmustbe or I wouldn't seeyou. Is Aouregan withyou?" His words come out in a rushed jumble, and Farrell has a hard time sorting them out.

"I don't know you," Farrell says, "And I don't know any Aouregan, either."

"Oh," the stranger sighs, his excitement deflating visibly, "You told me this would happen, thedaywemet, but I never could get my mind around it. Whatwasityoucalledit? A para...parasomething."

"Paradox?" Farrell asks.

"Yesthatwasit! You do remember!"

"I don't remember," Farrell says, "I just deduced what word you were looking for. Who are you?"

"Moth," Moth says, "We were friends. Orwewillbe. Or we werebefore, onceuponatime, and nownot but willbeagain." Moth sighs and scratches his head, "The parathing confusesme. You willbe my friend, won'tyou, Farrell?"

Farrell's mind has been busy making sense of Moth's nonsense. Not an easy task. "You're saying we met before, In some distant past?" he asks.

"Ithink I'm not supposedtosay," Moth says, "I can't remember allthethingsyou told me. It was a longtime ago."

That was answer enough. Farrell smiles to himself, taking this conversation as confirmation that he will one day successfully complete the project he's been working on, and travel through time in more than direction. "Who is Aouregan?" he asks.

"Mortals usedtosay this is her burialmound," Moth says, "Butshe isnot here. The onewho rests here lived long before. Aouregan was her servant, her descendant. She left something foryou, inside."

"This Aouregan left something for me inside an ancient burial mound?" Farrell asks.

"Here, takethis," Moth says pouring shimmering dust from his hand into Farrell's, "Manypeople comehere, take things. But not whatis protected by magic. Youneed this to find whatis leftforyou."

And with that, Moth takes flight, disappearing into the sky.

Curious to find that which was supposedly left buried for him here, Farrell enters the ancient tomb. The dust Moth had poured into hands left a shimmering coat over his fingers, and as he touches the stone panel on the wall, it glows, and a secret door is revealed.

Magic? Farrell wonders, or something else. He hopes there's enough residue of the dust left on his fingers for him to get a sample to analyze once they've returned home.

 Whatever it is, it sets off a reaction with something buried in a hole on the floor, sending beams of light into the air as Farrell approaches. Unafraid, Farrell thrusts his hand into the dark hole...

And comes out with a glowing ball of...something. He can't tell what it is for sure, but he has an intuition that it is the fuel he's been seeking to drive his unfinished time machine. Had he traveled into the past and given this to Aouregan, whoever she, to leave here for him to find in the present so he could make his first journey back in time? That would be a paradox...

Farrell pays no heed to the piles of gold and jewels strewn about the burial chamber, but the bottle of nectar placed on the altar here does catch his attention. "My beloved Farrell" the label says, "May we meet again in time"

Beloved?

Elliot and Shelly spend their day tasting various nectars at the nectary.

"Have you learned anything useful?" Elliot asks.

"Too much nectar makes me dizzy," Shell answers with a hiccup.

Elliot takes her back to their hotel room to sleep it off.

Farrell had gotten far more from his trip to the old burial mound than he could have ever imagined, answers to questions he hadn't asked, and more puzzles to solve. He can only hope his real mission here, infiltrating the Landgraab Chateau, is as fruitful.

The firetraps protecting the front door seems like an unnecessarily showy security strategy. Somehow he imagined MorcuCorp would be more subtle.

And more effective. Disarming the traps guarding the rear entrance seems a little too easy, and Farrell remains wary as he enters the uninhabited estate, rumored to be a storehouse for MorcuCorp's ill-gotten plunder from around the world.

And, more important to Farrell, the place where they keep their old files, records of their research from before the days of computers and digital storage. He's not sure what he's looking for exactly, but searches for anything with his mother's name, or even anything that seems to be related to her genetic research. What he isn't expecting while he's rifling through an old trunk full of crumbling documents is an ancient tome bearing the name 'Brannon'.

Farrell had already learned more about his father's family than Heath had ever known just by researching online, but this book goes even further back than the ancestry websites were able to go, deep into history, so far back as to be unbelievable, because who would be keeping records before mankind developed writing? No, this must be folklore of some kind, Farrell decides, with all its talk of fairies and dragons. 

Yet, there was Moth...Farrell hasn't quite decided what exactly Moth was with his shimmering wings and seeming immortality, but he cannot deny what his own eyes saw or the truth of what he found buried in that old mound. Farrell slips the old book into pocket; he will need to spend more time with it than he can spare while he's trespassing here. He does note one name as he closes the book, the first name on his supposed family tree, his first recorded ancestor, Ametair.

As he's leaving, an old artifact left out on a side table catches his eye. The old burial mound with its standing stones is depicted along the bottom of the disk, with lines radiating outward, pointing to what looks like a pond, like a map. Farrell quickly takes a rubbing of the ancient disk, planning to follow the map and see where it leads.

At the end of the trail sketched out on his map, Farrell finds a very small pond, hardly more than a puddle, nowhere near the scale drawn out on the old relic. But the deep depression in the land indicates that this pond was once much larger. And the large stones placed at its center...something about the way they are arranged tells him they are no natural formation, but set here to cover something.

Even if he'd had the forethought to bring explosives, Farrell doubts he would have been allowed to carry them on the plane. It shouldn't be too difficult to get the ingredients he'd need cook up something with enough explosive power to remove the stones, though. As Farrell kneels to try to gauge how much he'd need for the size of stone he'd need to remove, he hears a tiny but familiar voice by his ear. 

"Thisplace is home to an ancientandpowerful undine, and she is protected here by her dragon. Takecare what you dohere!"

Moth flutters away before Farrell can ask him more questions about this supposed undine and her dragon, or about the information in the tome he stole from the Landgraab Chateau. 

Though he's not daunted at the thought of facing creatures from ancient mythology, Farrell is having second thoughts about using explosives here. He's too close to town to detonate anything without being noticed, and he's already broken into one ancient tomb and one private estate. Getting the attention of local law enforcement would be a decidedly bad idea, no matter how tempting this mystery is.

Farrell meets up with Elliot and Shelly that evening in the market; they leave Champs les Sims tomorrow.

Though he's only had a few shows back in Storybrook, Elliot's skills as mime has earned him the adoration of the French public, most especially the women, who call his name and squeal as he walks by.

The local media have also been trailing him everywhere, taking pictures and noting everything he does, everyone he talks to, for their newspaper articles. Elliot longs to be back home, where it's his father who gets all the attention.

__________________________________________

Heath and Bianca's trip to Sunlit Tides was from an alternate save. I haven't used the town much since I got it, so I wanted to spend a little time with it. And when Bianca got pregnant almost immediately after Elliot and Farrell moved out, I wanted to do a snippet of their honeymoon where she forgot her birth control. 

Of all the fairies I've ever had appearing in any of my legacies or my Summerdream story, Moth is the one who most needed to be made an SN fairy. Anyone who has read my previous legacies and/or Summerdream will know who the undine and her dragon is. =D

Farrell is the third Sim in my legacies to breach MorcuCorp's security measures around the Landgraab Chateau. Seriously, they need to step up their game and stop leaving important documents lying around unguarded...