Chapters 5/13 and 6/13 Cracked Diamonds
Title: Cracked Diamonds
Rating: M
Warnings: Graphic Sexual abuse of a minor, rape, domestic violence, implied violence, implied m/m sexual relations, and death.
Summary:
Emma Frost learned at her mother’s knee that if a woman wanted to get anywhere, she was the only person with the power to make that happen. Telepathy was quite helpful to those aims, including the manipulation of men. Cleavage or cortex, both helped her make her own way, often by changing the thoughts of others. She wanted to rule the world, but it is a man’s world. By playing with the minds of everyone, she thought she would take over the world.
Charles Xavier disagreed.
An AU-verse in which Xavier and Magneto are tempered by a diamond’s views of supremacy, and not a Mengele’s, even if they didn’t quite figure it out.
V.
“William.” She’s an icy maiden, each ankle laced into stiletto heels that make her legs look like they grew forever, and the skirts of her white dress are pleated and full. The bodice is fitted, and he can see the glisten of golden cleavage, almost the same shade as his wedding ring. Marcy was at home, pregnant with their first, conceived before the honeymoon and unhappy that he had asked her to leave her work at the Senate building as an aide. Oh, Elsa is gorgeous, one slender leg crossing over the other as she slid into the chair across from him. “How is your wife?”
“Marcy is fine.” How could he think about Marcy as his lust is rising and that woman is smiling at him? “How is Sebastian?” Her husband, a prominent businessman, he had met perhaps three times total. The man had not impressed him, but then again, he had barely the chance to meet him privately. Elsa brokered her husband’s money into his little research project, one that had grown from mild funding from the Central Intelligence Agency’s curiosity about the paranormal and into it’s current physical curiosity about mutants. The government allowed him his study and Elsa’s money allowed him the new microscopes, to convince high-level scientists to work for him. It allowed him more leeway with ethics, he supposed.
“Sebastian is no longer with us.” Indeed, the ring that had shone on her finger no longer adorned it. “How is your project?”
“I’ve found ways of identifying anti-bodies in blood that make identification of mutants, dormant or active, far more easily.” He could feel the elation of his discovery stretching his mouth from side to side, and she was smiling, demure and joyful across from him. “I have successfully managed to trigger mutation as well.”
“You have?” She’s smiling at him, and one of those pale hands, manicured with such a light polish is curled around his arm. Marcy didn’t polish her nails, but she keeps them short and neat. A doctor has no business with long nails, she says, and she had earned that right. One of the first women graduates to be certified by the American Medical Association from her class, Marcy’s smile had caught him in a military hospital in Korea. Elsa’s nails are lethally long, sharp against the skin of his arm, and barely breaking causing drops of blood to bead along his forearm as she draws it up and hugs her fingers around his. “Congratulations, Captain Stryker.” He feels something, like the urge to tell her more, those eyes are always so friendly, and kind, and she was after all, so helpful against the communists, the mutants, and what harm could come from telling her more about the experiments?
“I think that there are a greater concentration of mutants in blood type Rh, and O, both positive and negative, but it is impossible for me to get a large enough sample. I think that in a population of those outliers, you would be far more likely to find those mutants,” and Marcy would glare at him here, for spitting out the words. She doesn’t agree with him on this hatred of mutants, and he’s disciplined her for that before. He loved her, but a woman needed a strong hand, keep her in her place, especially with her education. He wondered at her family, letting her take so many classes. Elsa knew her place, worked as her husband’s hand. “ and I think that high doses of radiation will trigger latent and dormant mutation.”
Her smile is a lot more icy, and Elsa’s manicure feels like nails through the soft tissue of his hand. William feels himself stuttering. It is as if she wants more information, far more than he has to give her, and it is tugging at him, gripping at his stomach to give that information to her.
“You think that radiation causes mutation, sir? If radiation causes mutation, then those living near nuclear power centers, for example, are far more likely to have a dangerous mutation, than others?” William likes that she gets this. “Mutants could be created by the government, by the communists, to be used against us? Us American patriots?”
“EXACTLY!” Other patrons in their little café are starting to look at them, his outburst, and the table shaking from where his hands clapped against the metal of the table. Their glasses jump, one of the waiters stopping by to refill the water, condensed coolness on the glass in the shadow of the trees. The leaves are turning, and Marcy is due in a month, at Thanksgiving.
“Would you like to order, Mr. Stryker?” The waiter is standing there, pressed shirt and pants, holding a notebook and a pen that will be tucked into a black apron. “Ms. Sleet?”
“What are today’s specials?” Elsa is asking, the waiter leaves with their orders, his for a glass of red wine, he actually hates the stuff, but ordering beer at this café could hurt him politically. Coffee will be for later, following the dinner, when the darkness in the sky that threatens will become night, truly. “You were saying something?”
“I agree with you that the mutation can be caused. If nothing else, what happened in Cuba, the moment our two fleets turned away from each other, that was the proof of mutants being a security problem, making the world unsafe for us normal human beings.”
There comes the waiter, with his wine and her cocktail, something with grenadine, and she’s smiling. A sweet smile, which echoes her drink as a sickly pink confection, painted across such a gorgeous face.
“I think that they’ve already started, that Russia has created mutant agents, has recruited them.” His voice has lowered, and she’s leaned in towards him, her cleavage a long arc of flesh down the dress. “I know that one of the researchers in the Manhattan Project survived, and afterwards he could make any small item that he wanted in his house, come to his palm.” He snorted. “That was error. With trial and error, Elsa, they will have us, those mutants, and we will breed them. The question is, do we use them, or do they use us? And if we use them, can we stop them?”
She laughs at him, a tinkling laugh, and the diamonds around her wrist sparkle in the twilight as she draws her hand from his, cradling her chin in her hands and she continues to laugh before stumbling into speech.
“Bravo, Captain Stryker.” Bravo. It echoed in his ears, a headache full of spikes developing behind his eyes and poisoning the wine in his glass.
VI.
It’s not the best day for this conversation, but the injury is healing, and if he checked himself out of the hospital with a nudge to the minds of the nurses, doctors, and administrators, it wasn’t because he was bored. They had told him that there was very little left to do for him, and Charles had already lost the use of his legs. Mild telekinesis was useful for that, hiding that the wound was still healing, that he needed help.
Getting on with it would be time appropriate, Charles had made three successful phone calls, and he could hear Alex pulling into the driveway with the take out from the pub. It wasn’t that he did not trust Sean to pick up dinner; instead it was that he had not quite trusted him with his car. Moira’s leaving had meant that her company car was no longer something that they had access to, and he had let the staff take all of the household cars when he was closing up the house to leave with Raven for England.
His Austin-Healey BN7 was only borderline legal, here in the States. He was positive that the only reason that he was allowed to keep it was that he had placed pressure on the minds of those Customs’ agents in charge of his return to the United States. The CIA’s intervention could not have hurt his cause. It had smarted, leaving the BN7 in a lean-to near the now destroyed research facility, just for the days that he was there with Erik, working with Hank and Raven. When they had gone together to find mutants, the BN7, his lady-love, was what he had brought to the front of the facility. There were agents fawning over her, and Erik had raised an eyebrow.
“Ostentatious of you, Charles.” He could still hear the words in the air, a subtle rebuke. Charles remembered the temptation to dance through Erik’s mind and how he had only indulged himself in the wrap of Erik’s emotions around him. He could still bring that echo up, amusement tinged with disdain all flavored in Erik. Such a strong mind that Erik had, a mind that had still sung with the fingers of that steely woman, her disturbance of Erik’s mind pulling forward memories of his childhood, memories that didn’t always make sense.
“Raven said that when I saw the car, it was as if I had fallen in love.” He had bought her on a whim, and while he could only drive her on the weekends in Oxford, she had been well kept. His stepbrother would have enjoyed her. Cain always had loved a skillfully built combustion engine. “It may be money that could be spent elsewhere, Erik, but it’s spending that I love.”
“It hums.” Erik had a hand on the steering wheel. He had swung into the car during their conversation. “It likes you, the metal does.” Erik was the second driver, and until he had allowed Alex to take her into town to pick up dinner, the only other driver of the BN7.
He would have preferred Hank, whose skill as a pilot was undeniable, but the car would not suffer Hank’s elongated limbs without mutual pain, and Charles would rather neither be tortured. It was something barely relevant, but as he took the lift in the library down to the first floor and out and across into the foyer, he could not let that out of his mind. He’d never drive the BN7 again.
“The man behind the counter at the pub was friendly.” Alex was commenting to Sean, who had apparently rode shotgun in the sports car. “Can you believe what he said about the Professor?” That he actually used to control people accidentally? It had seemed so out of control, and the woman that he remembered so vaguely, that fiercely ordered mind had seemed like a godsend
“He was right about that, Alexander.” He used the full name to throw Alex off kilter for a second, both of the boys turning to watch him wheel across the foyer. Sean moved away from Alex, and behind his chair, moving them both towards the kitchen. “I manifested as a passive telepath when I was very young, Alex.” He could hear Hank clattering around the kitchen, putting out places for them, making sure that both Charles and Hank would have the space to fit around the kitchen table. “That means that I could hear others’ thoughts, the surface thoughts, emotions, and that, before I was able to talk. He should remember when I began to manifest as an active telepath.”
“Why?” Hank had turned to them when they’d entered the kitchen. “Why would the man behind the counter at the pub remember that?”
“I manifested in terror, Hank.” Charles could remember that very well. “I made my stepfather save my stepbrother and I from a laboratory fire.”
“He wouldn’t have done it anyway?” Sean questioned, and Charles was shaking his head. Alex would understand, prison having honed what the loss of his parents and his younger brother and the following foster care had created. A boy was built of the metal, the man of the smelting and the sharpening of life.
“No.” The fire had killed his stepfather, freed him and Cain, and Raven could never know the true meaning of the terror that he and his stepbrother had had of Curt. “Anyway, I managed to broadcast my terror all the way into town. The fire brigade had left for the mansion before the housekeeper had managed to call for aide. It meant that the laboratory burned, but the house was safe.”
“So that’s why half of the sub-basements are marked as unsafe?” Alex asked. “Fire and water damage?”
“Structurally they are safe.” Charles replied. “However, they will need to be cleared. That’s part of the reason that we are sitting down together tonight for dinner. I have some things to bring up.”
“Would this have something to do with Amelie D’Amidou?” Sean asked. “I know that my parents didn’t care that I was a mutant, that I have skills, and hers didn’t, but there was another case on the news this morning.”
“Oh?” He fought the itch to merely read it from Sean’s mind.
“A family tried to drown their daughter.” Sean snorted. “Eight year old girl. She had gills, Professor.”
“It was in the New York Times.” Hank poured water into each of their glasses, and the dinner is dished from each of the carryout containers onto the plates.
“I see. I’ve received several calls from parents that Erik and I had talked to while searching for the team that we put together for the Agency.” Charles knew that these words were more important. “I’ve returned three of them, and they’ve all asked if I knew of a safe place for the children.”
“Professor?” Hank was watching him. “Are you thinking about making this more of a haven?”
“I was thinking about a school, Hank. A school for mutants.” He gulped in air, trying to force it down his throat through pure will. “Three students will be arriving this week. I know that we didn’t talk about it?”
“You are inviting strangers here.” It was an unhappy Alex, staring at him. “Bad enough that Magneto knows where we are, but now there will be strangers here, in our haven.”
“Havok.” He knew that he would have to explain the rest of it fully. “One of the children is a boy, and he can emit beams like yours, from his eyes. His mother says that he could control them until a man took him. The only reason she found him again is because her husband made a comment to her, that his boss was ‘seeing what the freak could do.’” He had heard her voice, her worry through the phone. She had been staying with her sister three states from her husband, having broken into the facility, and stolen her son from them. “I cannot in good conscience allow something like that to just happen when I can help.”
“I agree with the Professor on this.” Hank was rumbling softly. “Perhaps this wouldn’t have happened,” his arms were running the length of his body in indication. “If I had come here as a teen ager, not letting the demons of my mind control my body.”
“Alright.” Alex had concurred. “Beast’s right. Bad enough being a teenager, but a mutant like us? I remember puberty and manifestation. That wasn’t fun.”
“What are we going to need?” Sean asked. “It’s not like the majority of the house is ready for occupation.”
“Three new empty bedrooms, preferably close to the rest of us for now.” Charles knew the next step. “I’ll pull out the blueprints for the house, and we can start thinking about where to put people, and how. We’ll need certification for homeschooling. I have a PhD in genetics, and a Masters in physics and medicine. Hank’s skills with engineering and mathematics, we have teachers for the hard sciences. We are going to need teachers for literature, history, and languages.”
“I may know someone.” Hank was smiling, the white teeth almost feral in his blue face. “Her name is Diana, Diana Spencer. She has just finished her Masters program at Wellesley, and she is, I think, a bit like you.” Glasses were pushed to the bridge of his nose. “Professor,”
“Call me Charles, everyone!” It was an attempt to lower the tension in the room.
“We’re going to need a housekeeper, a staff. People who aren’t easy to scare. Sympathetic people.”
“Scott’s mother is interested in coming and staying, helping.” He remembered. “Alex, Sean, would you like to handle hiring?”
Rating: M
Warnings: Graphic Sexual abuse of a minor, rape, domestic violence, implied violence, implied m/m sexual relations, and death.
Summary:
Emma Frost learned at her mother’s knee that if a woman wanted to get anywhere, she was the only person with the power to make that happen. Telepathy was quite helpful to those aims, including the manipulation of men. Cleavage or cortex, both helped her make her own way, often by changing the thoughts of others. She wanted to rule the world, but it is a man’s world. By playing with the minds of everyone, she thought she would take over the world.
Charles Xavier disagreed.
An AU-verse in which Xavier and Magneto are tempered by a diamond’s views of supremacy, and not a Mengele’s, even if they didn’t quite figure it out.
V.
“William.” She’s an icy maiden, each ankle laced into stiletto heels that make her legs look like they grew forever, and the skirts of her white dress are pleated and full. The bodice is fitted, and he can see the glisten of golden cleavage, almost the same shade as his wedding ring. Marcy was at home, pregnant with their first, conceived before the honeymoon and unhappy that he had asked her to leave her work at the Senate building as an aide. Oh, Elsa is gorgeous, one slender leg crossing over the other as she slid into the chair across from him. “How is your wife?”
“Marcy is fine.” How could he think about Marcy as his lust is rising and that woman is smiling at him? “How is Sebastian?” Her husband, a prominent businessman, he had met perhaps three times total. The man had not impressed him, but then again, he had barely the chance to meet him privately. Elsa brokered her husband’s money into his little research project, one that had grown from mild funding from the Central Intelligence Agency’s curiosity about the paranormal and into it’s current physical curiosity about mutants. The government allowed him his study and Elsa’s money allowed him the new microscopes, to convince high-level scientists to work for him. It allowed him more leeway with ethics, he supposed.
“Sebastian is no longer with us.” Indeed, the ring that had shone on her finger no longer adorned it. “How is your project?”
“I’ve found ways of identifying anti-bodies in blood that make identification of mutants, dormant or active, far more easily.” He could feel the elation of his discovery stretching his mouth from side to side, and she was smiling, demure and joyful across from him. “I have successfully managed to trigger mutation as well.”
“You have?” She’s smiling at him, and one of those pale hands, manicured with such a light polish is curled around his arm. Marcy didn’t polish her nails, but she keeps them short and neat. A doctor has no business with long nails, she says, and she had earned that right. One of the first women graduates to be certified by the American Medical Association from her class, Marcy’s smile had caught him in a military hospital in Korea. Elsa’s nails are lethally long, sharp against the skin of his arm, and barely breaking causing drops of blood to bead along his forearm as she draws it up and hugs her fingers around his. “Congratulations, Captain Stryker.” He feels something, like the urge to tell her more, those eyes are always so friendly, and kind, and she was after all, so helpful against the communists, the mutants, and what harm could come from telling her more about the experiments?
“I think that there are a greater concentration of mutants in blood type Rh, and O, both positive and negative, but it is impossible for me to get a large enough sample. I think that in a population of those outliers, you would be far more likely to find those mutants,” and Marcy would glare at him here, for spitting out the words. She doesn’t agree with him on this hatred of mutants, and he’s disciplined her for that before. He loved her, but a woman needed a strong hand, keep her in her place, especially with her education. He wondered at her family, letting her take so many classes. Elsa knew her place, worked as her husband’s hand. “ and I think that high doses of radiation will trigger latent and dormant mutation.”
Her smile is a lot more icy, and Elsa’s manicure feels like nails through the soft tissue of his hand. William feels himself stuttering. It is as if she wants more information, far more than he has to give her, and it is tugging at him, gripping at his stomach to give that information to her.
“You think that radiation causes mutation, sir? If radiation causes mutation, then those living near nuclear power centers, for example, are far more likely to have a dangerous mutation, than others?” William likes that she gets this. “Mutants could be created by the government, by the communists, to be used against us? Us American patriots?”
“EXACTLY!” Other patrons in their little café are starting to look at them, his outburst, and the table shaking from where his hands clapped against the metal of the table. Their glasses jump, one of the waiters stopping by to refill the water, condensed coolness on the glass in the shadow of the trees. The leaves are turning, and Marcy is due in a month, at Thanksgiving.
“Would you like to order, Mr. Stryker?” The waiter is standing there, pressed shirt and pants, holding a notebook and a pen that will be tucked into a black apron. “Ms. Sleet?”
“What are today’s specials?” Elsa is asking, the waiter leaves with their orders, his for a glass of red wine, he actually hates the stuff, but ordering beer at this café could hurt him politically. Coffee will be for later, following the dinner, when the darkness in the sky that threatens will become night, truly. “You were saying something?”
“I agree with you that the mutation can be caused. If nothing else, what happened in Cuba, the moment our two fleets turned away from each other, that was the proof of mutants being a security problem, making the world unsafe for us normal human beings.”
There comes the waiter, with his wine and her cocktail, something with grenadine, and she’s smiling. A sweet smile, which echoes her drink as a sickly pink confection, painted across such a gorgeous face.
“I think that they’ve already started, that Russia has created mutant agents, has recruited them.” His voice has lowered, and she’s leaned in towards him, her cleavage a long arc of flesh down the dress. “I know that one of the researchers in the Manhattan Project survived, and afterwards he could make any small item that he wanted in his house, come to his palm.” He snorted. “That was error. With trial and error, Elsa, they will have us, those mutants, and we will breed them. The question is, do we use them, or do they use us? And if we use them, can we stop them?”
She laughs at him, a tinkling laugh, and the diamonds around her wrist sparkle in the twilight as she draws her hand from his, cradling her chin in her hands and she continues to laugh before stumbling into speech.
“Bravo, Captain Stryker.” Bravo. It echoed in his ears, a headache full of spikes developing behind his eyes and poisoning the wine in his glass.
VI.
It’s not the best day for this conversation, but the injury is healing, and if he checked himself out of the hospital with a nudge to the minds of the nurses, doctors, and administrators, it wasn’t because he was bored. They had told him that there was very little left to do for him, and Charles had already lost the use of his legs. Mild telekinesis was useful for that, hiding that the wound was still healing, that he needed help.
Getting on with it would be time appropriate, Charles had made three successful phone calls, and he could hear Alex pulling into the driveway with the take out from the pub. It wasn’t that he did not trust Sean to pick up dinner; instead it was that he had not quite trusted him with his car. Moira’s leaving had meant that her company car was no longer something that they had access to, and he had let the staff take all of the household cars when he was closing up the house to leave with Raven for England.
His Austin-Healey BN7 was only borderline legal, here in the States. He was positive that the only reason that he was allowed to keep it was that he had placed pressure on the minds of those Customs’ agents in charge of his return to the United States. The CIA’s intervention could not have hurt his cause. It had smarted, leaving the BN7 in a lean-to near the now destroyed research facility, just for the days that he was there with Erik, working with Hank and Raven. When they had gone together to find mutants, the BN7, his lady-love, was what he had brought to the front of the facility. There were agents fawning over her, and Erik had raised an eyebrow.
“Ostentatious of you, Charles.” He could still hear the words in the air, a subtle rebuke. Charles remembered the temptation to dance through Erik’s mind and how he had only indulged himself in the wrap of Erik’s emotions around him. He could still bring that echo up, amusement tinged with disdain all flavored in Erik. Such a strong mind that Erik had, a mind that had still sung with the fingers of that steely woman, her disturbance of Erik’s mind pulling forward memories of his childhood, memories that didn’t always make sense.
“Raven said that when I saw the car, it was as if I had fallen in love.” He had bought her on a whim, and while he could only drive her on the weekends in Oxford, she had been well kept. His stepbrother would have enjoyed her. Cain always had loved a skillfully built combustion engine. “It may be money that could be spent elsewhere, Erik, but it’s spending that I love.”
“It hums.” Erik had a hand on the steering wheel. He had swung into the car during their conversation. “It likes you, the metal does.” Erik was the second driver, and until he had allowed Alex to take her into town to pick up dinner, the only other driver of the BN7.
He would have preferred Hank, whose skill as a pilot was undeniable, but the car would not suffer Hank’s elongated limbs without mutual pain, and Charles would rather neither be tortured. It was something barely relevant, but as he took the lift in the library down to the first floor and out and across into the foyer, he could not let that out of his mind. He’d never drive the BN7 again.
“The man behind the counter at the pub was friendly.” Alex was commenting to Sean, who had apparently rode shotgun in the sports car. “Can you believe what he said about the Professor?” That he actually used to control people accidentally? It had seemed so out of control, and the woman that he remembered so vaguely, that fiercely ordered mind had seemed like a godsend
“He was right about that, Alexander.” He used the full name to throw Alex off kilter for a second, both of the boys turning to watch him wheel across the foyer. Sean moved away from Alex, and behind his chair, moving them both towards the kitchen. “I manifested as a passive telepath when I was very young, Alex.” He could hear Hank clattering around the kitchen, putting out places for them, making sure that both Charles and Hank would have the space to fit around the kitchen table. “That means that I could hear others’ thoughts, the surface thoughts, emotions, and that, before I was able to talk. He should remember when I began to manifest as an active telepath.”
“Why?” Hank had turned to them when they’d entered the kitchen. “Why would the man behind the counter at the pub remember that?”
“I manifested in terror, Hank.” Charles could remember that very well. “I made my stepfather save my stepbrother and I from a laboratory fire.”
“He wouldn’t have done it anyway?” Sean questioned, and Charles was shaking his head. Alex would understand, prison having honed what the loss of his parents and his younger brother and the following foster care had created. A boy was built of the metal, the man of the smelting and the sharpening of life.
“No.” The fire had killed his stepfather, freed him and Cain, and Raven could never know the true meaning of the terror that he and his stepbrother had had of Curt. “Anyway, I managed to broadcast my terror all the way into town. The fire brigade had left for the mansion before the housekeeper had managed to call for aide. It meant that the laboratory burned, but the house was safe.”
“So that’s why half of the sub-basements are marked as unsafe?” Alex asked. “Fire and water damage?”
“Structurally they are safe.” Charles replied. “However, they will need to be cleared. That’s part of the reason that we are sitting down together tonight for dinner. I have some things to bring up.”
“Would this have something to do with Amelie D’Amidou?” Sean asked. “I know that my parents didn’t care that I was a mutant, that I have skills, and hers didn’t, but there was another case on the news this morning.”
“Oh?” He fought the itch to merely read it from Sean’s mind.
“A family tried to drown their daughter.” Sean snorted. “Eight year old girl. She had gills, Professor.”
“It was in the New York Times.” Hank poured water into each of their glasses, and the dinner is dished from each of the carryout containers onto the plates.
“I see. I’ve received several calls from parents that Erik and I had talked to while searching for the team that we put together for the Agency.” Charles knew that these words were more important. “I’ve returned three of them, and they’ve all asked if I knew of a safe place for the children.”
“Professor?” Hank was watching him. “Are you thinking about making this more of a haven?”
“I was thinking about a school, Hank. A school for mutants.” He gulped in air, trying to force it down his throat through pure will. “Three students will be arriving this week. I know that we didn’t talk about it?”
“You are inviting strangers here.” It was an unhappy Alex, staring at him. “Bad enough that Magneto knows where we are, but now there will be strangers here, in our haven.”
“Havok.” He knew that he would have to explain the rest of it fully. “One of the children is a boy, and he can emit beams like yours, from his eyes. His mother says that he could control them until a man took him. The only reason she found him again is because her husband made a comment to her, that his boss was ‘seeing what the freak could do.’” He had heard her voice, her worry through the phone. She had been staying with her sister three states from her husband, having broken into the facility, and stolen her son from them. “I cannot in good conscience allow something like that to just happen when I can help.”
“I agree with the Professor on this.” Hank was rumbling softly. “Perhaps this wouldn’t have happened,” his arms were running the length of his body in indication. “If I had come here as a teen ager, not letting the demons of my mind control my body.”
“Alright.” Alex had concurred. “Beast’s right. Bad enough being a teenager, but a mutant like us? I remember puberty and manifestation. That wasn’t fun.”
“What are we going to need?” Sean asked. “It’s not like the majority of the house is ready for occupation.”
“Three new empty bedrooms, preferably close to the rest of us for now.” Charles knew the next step. “I’ll pull out the blueprints for the house, and we can start thinking about where to put people, and how. We’ll need certification for homeschooling. I have a PhD in genetics, and a Masters in physics and medicine. Hank’s skills with engineering and mathematics, we have teachers for the hard sciences. We are going to need teachers for literature, history, and languages.”
“I may know someone.” Hank was smiling, the white teeth almost feral in his blue face. “Her name is Diana, Diana Spencer. She has just finished her Masters program at Wellesley, and she is, I think, a bit like you.” Glasses were pushed to the bridge of his nose. “Professor,”
“Call me Charles, everyone!” It was an attempt to lower the tension in the room.
“We’re going to need a housekeeper, a staff. People who aren’t easy to scare. Sympathetic people.”
“Scott’s mother is interested in coming and staying, helping.” He remembered. “Alex, Sean, would you like to handle hiring?”