the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

[Friendship is Magic]

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,
an uninteresting tale of a physician.




"Stop giggling Ramsie or we're gunna get caught!"

The streets of Leidenheim are brightly lit tonight for the opening night of the Convention of Science. Academics from practical to theoretical fill booths colorfully displaying modern marvels, peacocking the latest time keepers wrought in brass instead of tin or the pamphlets discussing latest breakthroughs in the physics field when it comes to measuring light and space. It promised to be an exciting event with the up and coming Sprekhlem brothers debuting their latest advances in pyrotechnics and manipulation of dyed smoked.

From craftsmen, to researchers, old money to new, just about everyone in the city had come out to the bracing winter chill to fill their eyes with dazzling inventions and breakthroughs in science. A sea of woolen pea coats, frocks, and skirts sparsely dyed flooded the roads with undulating crowds of fascinated attendees. Among this sea, a set of giggling children bob and weave between the legs of their elders, joined by their palms.

"Ramsie, Ramise are you okay?" The younger of the two children who led this crusade for discovery looked over his shoulder to his older sister who stumbled to match her brother's pace. Between the part of her hat and scarf, the apples of her cheeks  beneath her eyes took on a splotchy red.

"I'm okay Eli, I'm okay," she replied breathlessly, laboring for each wheezy breath. Inside the bundle of scarves and wooly coats a tiny chest squeezed lungs that worked out of time to her heart. Elias wouldn't know this; though not many five year olds would. In his mind, the best cure for a cough was an exciting night on the town in the dead of winter. After all, all the posters said "Turn Woe to WOW with Just One Sprekhelm Rocket!" And Ramona, though three years his senior could not argue with the very compelling evidence.

"Better than stupid penmanship right Ramsie?" Elias called over his shoulder like a proud adventure's leader as he twisted them through the crowds. "A-are you sure Momma won't be mad," Ramona replies meekly, too soft to be heard over the low roar of the crowd. At home, their nursery beds were stuffed with pillows and calligraphy exercises were left half finished upon the desks. It would be at least another hour before Mr. and Mrs. Haaist realized their children's escape into the night.

Each inhale of cold air filled the girl's lungs with sharp pangs of ache and eyes with blurry spots that should be strings of lanterns lining the streets. Even so, her giggles bubbled over her throat with unbridled glee and excitement. Above them, missiles screeched into the air leaving pluming clouds of vibrant smoke in their wake, terminating in loud POPs and BANGs. Elias squealed, and hurried his charge through the crowd. "Don't worry Ramsie, don't worry, we're gunna see it for you okay!"

Ramona only heard pieces of the promise; sound had begun to bleed into the gnawing ringing that dominated her ears and head. Each step began to feel less and less heavy, as though the ground had been replaced with loose, fluffy clouds instead of cold cobbles. Lanterns bled into blurry spots of gold struck between towers of woolen tail coats and fine skirts that were themselves like colored trees. The city and festival melted into a weightless forest of dyed fabrics, golden lights and the deafening sound of her blood pulsing in her ears.

There was a sharp pain to the back of her skull, and she remembered nothing else.

---

The Haaist household is a relic to older times and older customs, growing more and more outdated as the walls of creeping ivy grow more dense, broken up by pockets of window panes. An apothecary burst from the side of the building, all glass, lined condensation that perpetually kissed the windows and escaped in wispy fog from a chimney top.

The residents were not much different than their domicile. Mr. Haaist was a lean and short man with blonde hair and a jaw that might have been strong once before age had moved in. He was not an unkind father, but nor was he terribly doting either. Dinners at the Haaist residence were typically overseen by silence and Mr. L.Haaist who took to the task with stoic dignity. Mrs. Haaist in comparison was a lean and hawkish woman, a severity found in the bone of her face. Her voice tended to come flighty and with an anxious waiver that increased in any duration of time spent outside, which attributed to the very little time she spent outside the walls of her home and business. Mrs. Haaist proved to be the warmer of the parents, often filling empty air with inquiries as to her children's health and her husband's work in the Greenery.

Elias Haaist, the youngest of the family was not terribly grateful for the effort. Youth took to Elias Haaist like an infection; despite hours in front of the vanity his dark hair was always a tussled mess by noon, and he had an aversion to suspenders with stockings.  As the dismal ceremony of eating commenced, Elias Haaist made it his personal goal to make his sister break her straight face by placing any sort of instrument he could into his nose or mouth (sometimes multiple things) before the adults became wise.

Though these days, Elias was unable to fulfill his quota of mischief.

After the incident at the Convention of Sciences last month, the eldest Haaist had been forbidden from leaving the confines of her room. Lengths of white lace made for curtains topped with silver bells closed off a bed big enough to  drown in. The space was comfortable, made to enticing for long stays with little expense paid when it came to the bookshelf that dominated an entire wall or wide mouth of an open window for vicariously enjoying the outside.

From her room she could hear the faint clinking of dishware and the quiet murmurings of her mother as she laboured under the duty of carrying on a conversation. If she closed her eyes and held her breath, Ramona could transport herself to her place just left of Elias, and right across from her mother. If she stilled herself enough, she could feel the texture of the chestnut table under her fingers, and the cool kiss of silverware in her small fingertips. It would make for a comfort much like her room; hollow and without a sincerity she was too young to understand she craved.

The ache of loneliness would be eased when her mother would arrive with her supper, Elias trailing along behind like it was a visit to the zoo. Mrs. Haaist made it her sacred duty to spoon feed her bedridden child, and fill precisely an hour (or until the clocktower struck eight) with meandering small talk and the regular interrogation as to her health.

"How are your foxes, my little lamb?" Her mother's voice came with warmth as she dabbed a bit of soup from off the daughter's cherub cheek. "They are swift, Momma. I wrote thirty eight lines today in Lamordian, Darkonese, and Tradescommon."

"Thirty eight? Do you hear that, sweet Elias? Your sister managed thirty eight lines of three different languages. How many is that in total?"

"One fourteen momma," Elias replied, exasperated as his attention was torn away from the book he investigated. "Momma, when can Ramsie come outside again? I really want to go sledding befo--" Mrs. Haaist's voice came like a whip crack. "Next winter, Elias. Your sister is very weak and must have her rest. Now, fetch me the blue bottle and spoon for Ramona's evening dose."

The children share a cautious glance from the side of their eye, and the question was never brought up again in Ramona's presence. And nor did she go sledding with Elias next winter.

[Friendship is Magic]

As months turned to years, Ramona Haaist grew fluent in the unspoken language of her household. She knew by the weight of the stride and the groan of the floorboards who walked through what hall, and what time it might be as a result. At nine o'clock sharp the Haaist household would finish their breakfast, and would separate into their own corners of the house. Mr. Haaist would go to his Greenery, a large, glass shed in the back of their villa that was perpetually fogged with condensation. Mrs. Haaist would sit in the sun room with little Elias, who would be taught his sums and letters and basic chemistry. At noon there was a break, and the Haaists would congregate (except for the sickly Ramona who was largely forgotten for the majority of the day) in the living room to share a meal and listen to Elias play piano.

Elias Haaist, while a boy of mischief and unsaitable restlessness, was a natural at the ivory keys. The lithe reed of a boy looked out of place at a grand piano, with his stockings mismatched and his suspenders halfheartedly clung to boney shoulders. He could play with such passion and energy that would never pass in any classical recital due to the liberal license he took with the pacing and sounds. It was during this hour of play that Elias would speak to his sister through long and meandering tunes of youth and discovery; a joyfulness that resounded through the hollow, stale bones of the Haaist residence that breathed life and elegance into the household. Music was the language of their relationship, and though Elias Haaist would know precious little of his older sibling. He poured his heart and soul into every note on the notion that through this alone he might coax his Ramona from her room.

Ramona's lungs had not made the improvements despite the cocktail of medicines and rainbow of tinctures she took every morning, and so her participation in the daily rituals of the Haaist household was handled vicariously in her own quarantined  section of the home. To call Mrs. Haaist overbearing would be a gross understatement; she loved her daughter so very dearly; she named her after her own great grandmother. There would be no risks when it came to the eldest Haaist's health, not as long as Mrs. Haaist had a say in it. Of course Ramona did not know any better than to dutifully accept the ever changing prescriptions and cautions from her wise and educated mother.

But she did know better than to play the perfectly obedient child. In the hour that Elias Haaist spoke to his sister in the long, winding melodies of his piano, Ramona Haaist would slip through the lace curtains cloaking her bed. Overbaring parents made for sneaky children, and she was no different. She would slip down from the height of her tall bed, and slither between the lace without a sound or sigh from the floorboards beneath her feet. The old bones of the house gave no betrayal of her escape, and if it did, it was hidden under the blanket of Elias's musical soliloquy.

Being the educated people that they are, the Haaist household's study was humble, but full in the eyes of a child barely tall enough to see over a desk.  The haunting and melodic tunes of the piano echoed like a somber reprise inside the lonesome library, covering the sounds of shuffling feet and stolen books. In the quarantined years of her youth Ramona proved to be a voracious reader; filling the lonely spaces of time with chapters of any title she could peel off the shelves. From fine literature to dry medical handbooks and indexes on medicinal herbs, Ramona would read it all. She clung to each stanza, each paragraph, each verse with a desperation to experience, even if vicariously, a life outside her own.

In the passionate, ringing tunes of Elias's piano and authors of the books who spoke to her beyond time and space she found company that eased the bleak reality of her years as prisoner to her own frail health.

------

Late into the small hours of the morning, the Haaist residence mills in a sleepy haze of eerie stillness. Blustering winds outside the home purchase the occasional groan of the buildings old foundations to break the layer of silence. In the quiet, the rasping of Ramona's breath sounded thunderous and offensive; though in reality it only traveled as far as the confines of her bed. Three tocks into the new day, and the eldest Haaist girl was wide away, staring at the dark yawn of the high ceiling. Insomnia was a trained condition; in the stillness of the morning in that she would know some longer hours of freedom outside of that purchased by Elias's noon-time recitals.

The silver bells that hung from the top of lace curtains encircling her bed sat harmlessly at a height too far to reach. They were sinister little things, traitors that would sound the alarm if the prisoner tried to make an escape. Ramona had learned early on what would happen if the bells sang in the middle of the night, and so she became very fluent in the art of silence. Holding the rasp of her breath in her lungs, she would gingerly coax the lace in convincing ways to keep the silver bells from tattling on her motions. The particular way she'd shift her weight and rock the momentum of her footfalls became as natural as the rasp to her breathing, and soon Ramona became attuned to every minute detail of her house.

She knew to avoid the center-third step of the stairs because it would always squeak. The pattern of ivy marked with a sea shell on the rug in the middle corridor toward the library would let out a reaching groan if stepped on. The larder door was always locked, but the key was kept under the teapot next to the range.

With such extensive mental maps, Ramona grew comfortable with the process of escaping her bedroom for a few hours of free roaming at night. Comfort grows complacency, and complacency reaps carelessness. Sometimes, there'd be an error, and a bell would sing it's delightful sound through the emptiness of the home.

It always began with a deep creek of the wooden panel on the left side of the master bedroom. The pause would take approximately half a beat before the lace curtains around her bed would sigh from a door being thrown open in the dead down the hall. Somewhere between then, her heart would worm it's way up to her throat, blocking any sound from her lungs. In the precious seconds of dread and fear, Ramona could feel the room dissolving under the deafening sound of her heart beat in her ears.

"Ramona, Ramona, sweet lamb mine," Her mother's voice carried shrill and frail through the darkness. The kind tone came with a sharpness like a sour note. An old heavy robe encased the hawkish form of Mrs. Haaist as she moved like a ghost possessed, heralded by the sighs of the old bones of the house as she moved to her daughter's room. "Ramona, what are you doing up so late, dear lamb?"

What should've been comforting only made for a dryness in her mouth that made it hard to swallow her fear. No matter how much time she took to prepare an excuse, she would forget it by the time her bedroom door was opened in the dark. Ramona would fumble through sentences like the words were too many for her dry mouth to manage. It wouldn't matter in any case. Mrs. Haaist knows best, and only Mrs. Haaist alone.

"Ramona, sweet lamb. Is it a fever? It must be a fever." Mrs. Haaist peppered on diagnosis in the dark, cold fingers touching her neck and moving hair from her brow to consult her temperature. Not that it mattered. Mrs. Haaist knows her darling daughter, and the blind examination through the dim night was really just to ensure her daughter was really still there. She already knew the prognosis. "It's your throat again isn't i?" The question came like a fine silver needle that struck sharply into Ramona's belly that grew to an aching pain the delicate sound of bells chime in the darkness.

Mrs. Haaist peels tinctures and syringes from her bag, cotton swabs and silken rags slick with oiled medicines and sour tonics. It didn't matter the light was low and the hour small; Mrs. Haaist knows best. Sometimes the injections would hurt, the leeches pull too much, the oiled rags, suffocating. Other times, Ramona would search the yawning darkness of her bed and take herself to the last chapter of latest book she read, inserting herself into a high fantasy far away from the sour affection.

Never did she protest. Not anymore. It was easier to trust. No good daughter questions the wisdom of her mother.

After all, Mrs. Haaist knows best.

[Friendship is Magic]

The tailor's shop in Krezek is a wide open space that reeks of dye and tanning acids. Colorful strips of fabric lie about here and a few arrangements adorn stands like showy floral arrangements. Light was plenty, ideal for working on a garment well into the night with no regard for time. Ironically, there was no mirror to be found readily on the hop floor, and so Ramona Haaist stood stooped behind a tall and wide dresser considering her finery.

With age, Ramona Haaist had grown like a weed and one frail limbs had become stronger, her skeleton filled out with healthy flesh and blood. When she touched the soft skin of her cheek she wondered if her cheeks were still pudgy and eyes still hollow from a self induced state of insomnia. Around the corner she could hear murmurings of her company as they idly chatted together in polite patience for Haaist to settle on an outfit. Their presence did not come as a reassuring one, instead the low murmur of her voices only threatened to return a raspy edge to her breathing.

Pale gold lace clung to the branches of her willowy form like cheap tapestries thrown over old balconies. The fabric was stiff to move inside of, and still smelled vaguely of the soft powders used to cover up the stink of dye. Without a mirror, Ramona was left to imagine what her narrow and gangly form might look like inside this swaddle of lace and silk. The color reminded her of the dress she wore on her first day of primary school.

Even years after the event she could recall very clearly the pale canary yellow dress and white chemise, the white stockings and the stiff brown shoes her father had bought just for the occasion. She remembered the green ribbons she tied into her lengths of honey hair, and the various braids she put her hair through before deciding on something loose and flattering for the length. When she heard she would be attending primary school with the other youths at the tender age of thirteen, Ramona had spent weeks preparing the day. So had Mrs. Haaist, who fretted over every small affair and had a list (oh, how she loved lists), for all of the necessary care and medicines for her daughter.

It was an exercise in patience for Ramona, but one she endured gracefully as to not threaten her chances of real freedom outside her home. Deep in her heart she craved to speak a language with her mouth and not the unspoken one she had with the old Haaist residence. She wanted to write love letters and encoded notes of gossip, not about quick foxes and how they jumped over lazy dogs. Her head was filled with dreams of friends she might make; other young girls she would invite over for tea that they might speak gravely on important things over goat cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

They would never come, though, not for lack of trying. Her fashion sense was fine, neither offensive or trendsetting. Her hair was kept and her mannerisms polite, though her voice struggled to keep pace if the conversation lasted terribly long. Despite all her planning and preparations, Ramona Haaist was as bleak and dull as as the grey seas far off to the coast. Conversations about popular books never lingered long and most children, even teachers, seemed to regard her with a distracted glossy eye. While she was never treated poorly, the loneliness made for a deep, bitter pit in her heart.

As Ramona pulled herself from her brooding, and back to the Krezek tailor's shop, she runs her hands along the folds of stiff lace. She found some small level of comfort in the touch, and the preconceived notion that today would be no different than before. Gathering her nerve she lifts her chin and rounds from the crook of the shop into the main show floor light.

An Ezrite stands there, blonde and utilitarian, swaddled in crisp whites and iron cuirass. Like this Ramona noted the severity of her dour expression and patient frown, the tight means by which she braided her hair and found a sort of kinship with how out of place the Acolyte looked inside of the shop. Kolette measured her passively, and after a pause, remarked on how she'd never seen the Lamordian's face before. Anxiety bubbled a heat from her gut that foamed up her chest, around her lungs and toward her throat. As the Acolyte began to make a mild remark as to her unfamiliarity with fashion, the other Ezrite came out from around his corner of the shop.

Victor Kaverin had a rough face that would age poorly, half of it numb and the other half inclined toward a patient frown and the moderate usage of profanity. He was the sort of person you would cross the street to avoid, and certainly not the type you'd expect to see in a church, let alone a devote. His rough visage was enough to make her timid heart skip a beat, and drum with renewed speed as she hung off his formulating opinion. The pale gold dress inflicted Victor with a pregnant pause, staring on in a silence only broken by an effortless sigh that in and of itself, was an expression of fondness. "Ramona, you look..."

She hung suspended in the moment, and anxiously she filled the silence with her insecurities and hesitations that almost sounded like apologies. The Ezrites were patient through it, and Victor concluded his thought. "It looks good."

Ramona thought briefly of her pale canary dress from primary school's first day, and looked down to the pale gold lace that draped off her form. When she looked up she saw the rapt attention of the two Ezrites. Perhaps they would not be invited over for tea to gravely discuss matters of import over goatcheese sandwiches, nor would she write them secret notes to palm between desks, but this company here and now was a fine substitute.

[Friendship is Magic]

"Ms. Haaist, I need you to get these records filed into the new cabinets."

Manila folders made for a tall layered cake of bureaucracy and book keeping took quarter on an already cluttered desk. Dr. Harginer was a little grey man with wisps of snow white curling out from the temples of his slicked back hair. Decades of his trade stooped his shoulders to a perpetual slouch that wrinkled the stiff linens of his fresh clothes. He spoke in a voice that was far stronger than he looked. "Using the A-D-E classification system. You're familiar?"

Ramona blinked rapidly, and then her head followed suit in several dumb nods. Internship at the Luvitte Hospital was suppose to be her first real steps into the medical field; a drastic life changing milestone in her career. Instead of soaking up the experience of surgeons in the operating theater or working triage in the vestibule, Ramona Haaist had been assigned the front desk. Intake, check-ins, out take, record keeping, coffee fetching, and sometimes cleaning, the year of practicum at Luvitte's was far from anything she'd hoped to be doing in a hospital. The staff were kind and not at all malicious, but with Ramona's condition they had decided it would be much safer to let her earn her University's credits with work at the desk.

"Ah... Yes. Of course, Doctor. I'll get them done."
Night shifts were always quiet at the Luvitte hospital; tucked on the far edge of the city they stood more as the first stop for travelers making it past the bogs outside or as a glorified bandage station for the scouts who minded the roads that wound through the bog. The promise of silence and mild excitement, (as well as the patient reassurance of Mr. Haaist) is what finally coaxed Mrs. Haaist to let Ramona participate in the practicum in the first place.


Ramona couldn't tell you why Leidenheim had scouts, or what their business was minding the winding passages through the bog; much less what their business was in the treacherous wetlands in the middle of the night. They were always groups of twelve or so, spry young men mixed with older variants who had long lost their cocksure attitude. She could recognize most of the crews of men, but this crew, she could not.

Seven and a half men bled into the hospital's foyer and with them they brought their wailing and cries. Translucent violet mushroom ears protruded from the neck like fractal crystalline gills, that coloring seeping deep into once pink flesh like rotting bruises. One man's screams were more muffled, he had trouble speaking around the wide, silken mushroom caps that had claimed half his mouth and face.

The smell was the worst part. Blood, piss, and the sickeningly sweet rot of natural decay.

Nurses and doctors poured into the foyer to investigate the sound and they, like Ramona, stopped cold in their steps as they drank in the seven and a half men who tangled their fungi-kissed limbs together like a wretched rat king. In the stillness, it felt like time had stopped on this agonizing second of chaos so that the hospital could medicate themselves in dread.

A flurry of motion as nurses hurried the scout troupe to triage, the pitifully few doctors on staff fumbled with long, avian masks to protect their faces, while Ramona stewed in the wretched sounds of wailing. Even if she cared to listen, the pleas for succor and relief mixed with the hurried, firm instructions of the medical staff into a symphony of crisis.

"Ms. Haaist, you will turn away any other patients, we are putting a quarantine up in tria-"

The sound of wrenching followed by the tell tale sound of sloppy piles of bile hitting the floor interrupted them. Somewhere in the triage, Dr. Harginer was swearing and the nurse left Ramona to her front-desk. As she sat there, alone in the lobby now sullied with mud and blood and phosphorous violet spores, she swear, she could see something moving.

Fungi spores shifted in the blood and bile on the tile floor; infantile like motions, easily dismissed as a shudder from a breeze. But there was no breeze inside the lobby.

In the muddled wailing down the hall, Ramona recollected where she'd seen it before. Her legs moved before she did as she sprinted out of the lobby toward the source of the chaos.

Inside was a contrast to the still halls of the hospital; nurses tried to restrain writhing bodies to linen beds while their cohorts tried sedatives to quiet the infected. The whole room was choked in the senses of agony, violet, and dread. There wasn't enough doctors for the entire team and three of them were busy trying to disentangle the one and a half men from the messy union of corpse, flesh, and fungus.

Ramona grabbed the sleeve of a passing nurse, who turned to glare at the interloping Haaist over the top of the cloth mask over her mouth and nose. "Ramona. Get out."

"B-ut I, I can help, I know what-"

"Out. We've already lost one of the staff, and we are not losing another. Go pull an address for Director Luvitte and get him here, if you want to help."

In moments she was spirited outside the room back into the hall along side an occupied stretcher. There laid a man, or what was left of one. Dr. Harginer was hard to recognize; his mouth worked like he was talking, but the only thing that came was an uncomfortable amount of saliva that dribbled down past the amethyst fungi growths protruding from his neck and shoulder. Bile and spores coated his labcoat, dissolving fabric and flesh to make a more suitable bed for spores.

Fixated on the macabre , the young secretary read the dying doctor's lips.

"Clockwork. Ezra. Morninglord. Lawgiver. Hala. Mother. Please. Anyone. Please. Help. Why won't you help?"

Her focus started to blur, drunk on misery and despair.

"Help. Please. Ezra, Our Lady of Mists. Please spare me," he pleaded as the fungi spores continued engorge themselves on his flesh, writhing in languid comfort in the warmth of his blood.

"Goddess please. Clockwork be damned. Make it stop." Each word was fragile and thin.

"Please, someone. Help."


The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Ramona Haaist knew this phrase as fluently as she knew the measure of her breath and the exact one hundred and eighty eight point nine centimeters of her height. It was a phrase so ingrained to her being her heart beat could be measured by the syllables. There was nothing special or miraculous about jumping foxes or lazy dogs; it was no prayer or hymn dedicated to some cosmic power. The phrase was used by children and linguists to better their foundations of writing and language. It would herald no miracles, no succor or boons.

Instead, it would rally the nerve of the young Lamordian secretary who, amidst the chaos and agony heard the turn of phrase and found resolve.

There was nothing special about Ramona Haaist; she was no miraculous saint, nor was she a prodigal physician of uncommon skill. She was as special as the brown foxes and lazy dogs; yet in the empty hall where there was no Ezra, no saints, no doctors, she would be someone.

Ramona turned to the supply closet behind her and plucked one of the long, avian plague masks from the locker.

"On the count of five, I'm going to be someone," this came as a promise, not to the dying man, and not to the Clockwork or cosmic powers, but to herself. Numbers washed away her anxiety and apprehension, replaced with mental images of botany guides and procedures, lists that did away with doubt in favor of duty.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

[Friendship is Magic]

Interlude.

Elias awakens in a tangle of limbs and silk sheets. From the wide, tall window, a slice of light cuts through the dreary room to land squarely on the young man's face and encourage him awake. Outside the clock tower chimed eleven in the morning where the people of Leindenheim were already well on their day of errands, business, and leisure. His sister, Ramona Haaist would likely be in class right now, some how finding interest in dusty tombs and dissecting amphibious creatures choked on formaldehyde. The mental image was enough to rouse Elias out of the tangle of his host's arms and out of bed. Clothing, books, bottles, the occasional pipe scatter across the floor, as limp and messy as the boys who had fallen haphazardly into bed together. It had been a good night; Rory was always good company when he wasn't bawling about something.

"My head hurts," he didn't recognize the sound of his own voice when it leaked from his throat. He caught his reflection in the full length mirror across from him; Elias Haaist had grown like a weed, a tall and wiry young lad with his mother's eyes and father's mop of mouse brown hair. He looked dull. A pitiful shade of hair adorned his baby-faced chin and jaw, more scruffy than dignified. The white around his grey eyes were bloodshot and tired, heavy under the weight of the day and its expectations. The warm kiss of light that sliced through a part in the curtain touched his arm, reminding the youngest Haaist of the nagging headache and pains that bled into his spine.

Slowly he hunts through the underbrush of the room, plucking clothes that may or may not be his from the mess. Elias moved like a miasma of exhaustion and phantom pains, struggling to wield enough will to put on his trousers. The memories of the night before were mixed somewhere in this fog that cloaked his thoughts, and though he tried to recall them they drifted just out of reach. There was something he could take for that at home. Twisted up in a sweater he found a bottle meant for pills and with it a sudden burst of enthusiasm. The glass phial held two orange pills that made a pleasant sound when he rattled the container between his fingers.

"Felt my hammer, Clockwork's kind today," he spoke through his grin as he shook the little pills into his mouth. His tongue worked the familiar oval shape between his back teeth. The crunch almost sounded as good as the bitter, nauseating taste he came to enjoy as much as a hug from an old friend.

Rory stirred in his bed, peering at Elias through half-lidded eyes. He was shorter than Elias (though most people were) and furrier too. The pale light of mid-morning fell on him like a curtain, making his flesh seem to glow on its own. "Hey. Did you just take my Swing?" The youngest Haaist was busy experimenting with the new slackness to his shoulders and arms, rolling out his joints to shake them free of dust. "Don't shake about it Roar, I'm heading back home. I'll lift you some out of the Green," Elias spoke of stealing pharmaceuticals out of his parent's practice like one might discuss picking up more eggs at the store. He threw his mop of mousy hair in a bind to disguise its unbrushed state, and fought with his tie to make it seem straight. The disheveled look was debonair and charming. Rory watched him from the bed with too big, too wide blue eyes and soft apple cheeks--

Overcome with sudden fondness, the young man bend low and placed an affectionate kiss on his sleepy partner. "Don't give me that face eh? I'll get you something pretty while I'm out," enthusiasm and charisma came as easily as his sharp smile. Elias didn't stay to hear what Rory had to say, already stepping out the door and into the street. Winding, claustrophobic streets were bright and full of light and activity of bleakly dressed Lamordians going about their day. He joined them as if he had business doing so, looking like someone who never caught a break since his partying the night before. But his attention was on the fantastic shapes and things he saw going on in front of him; his own private spectacle of colors and sounds that played to his personal symphony.

As he walks down the street he lifts his fingers, the maestro to his private fantasy as his digits delicately dance through the air along with his loose movements. Of course the rest of the neighborhood stared at Elias wall-eyed and bewildered as the boy carried on down the street singing an out of tune key and waving his arms about. Elias on the other hand would not notice anything out of the faces that burst open like cocoons with swarms of butterflies that take to the sky, directing the wind. Sound tasted like ribbons of sweetness and lightning.

The Haaist Residence frowns at the youngest Haaist as he came home, its foundation stooped under the weight of its thatching and mouth open to receive the young man home. Mr. Haaist would be busy with house calls this morning, Ramona was drowning herself with anatomy textbooks, leaving only Mrs. Haaist as the lone keeper for the sleepy home. "Momma! Momma I'm home! I'm feeling a little under the weather so I'll just tuck on into bed after I get something. The purple triangle's the one for nausea right?" His voice carried throughout the house on the wings of the multicolored dove-butterfly hallucinations he brought in with him. The old house creaks under his feet- wait, where were his boots? Right, he left them at Rory's. Elias giggled to himself as he helped himself into the kitchen.

At the table he saw the smiling, doe-eyed stare of his mother, seated like a crooked tree. "I lost my bottle of orange again so I'll take another of those too," he explained, paying no mind to how still Mrs. Haaist was, or how she had no plate in front of her. He rifled through the cupboards without his mother's chiding as to where he'd been all night and how his evening with Alyssa went and the typical lecture that came when he lost his medicine. Mrs. Haaist sat there quietly as Elias stared at labelled medicine bottles. Letters moved in front of his eyes, refusing to ever stay in one place long, making the process of hunting down his fix take even longer. He was starting to get agitated with the chore, the noise, the lack of noise from his mother.

"Alyssa was fine by the way. We had a great time. Really just, great, you know she has thirty seven different shades of lipstick? Thirty seven! I just call it red and be done with it personally," his voice filled the empty air as he selects a few bottles from the medicine cabinet, and helps himself to their contents for breakfast.  The orange bottle still eluded him though; but he found it soon enough in the grip of Mrs. Haaist. "Oh, there's my oranges, you had it the whole time! Of course you did Momma, silly, silly mother," Elias curled around his mothers cold form, and wrestled with her stiff vice on the bottle. "Now, now don't... be like that, just give me... yes! Thank you, mother."

The youngest Haaist smiled to the corpse of his mother, the reality unregistered as he popped another orange pill.

[Friendship is Magic]

Mrs. Lenore Haaist was a tall and skittish woman, who spoke with a fragile shrill tone coupled with avian, twitchy motions of her limbs as if manipulated by a sigh of wind. Not even Mr. Haaist could explain what trauma occurred to his wife early in her life to make her so weary of their waking world; it was a wound that had gone untreated and rotted into a constant state of paranoia teetering on the verge of hysteria that was only manageable in the familiar prison that was the Haaist residence. For all the flights of her nature, no one could contest Lenore Haaist's brilliance. Where Mr. Haaist was a natural green thumb and modern agriculture came to him with ease, Mrs. Haaist was a savant pharmacist. In the academical fields, Lodrick Haaist and Lenore Ostner shared the same spot atop every botanical and pharmaceutical study as if they were one in the same docent.  When the announcement of their marriage was made, it was met with relieved sighs and toasts given with a resounding, "Finally!"

With the sudden death of Mrs. Haaist, Mr. Haaist secluded himself to the crushing humidity of his Greenery. A marvel of modern botany in its own right, the Greenery was a humble sized stable constructed entirely of frosted glass panes, lined with copper pipes that bled hot steam and cool mist into the tiny atmosphere. Out of season fauna blossomed year long under the special heat lamps, kept in tidy rows of pottery all labeled with colored shapes instead of numbers or letters. Blades of leaves poured over the ledges of their enclosures, threatening to spill out into neighboring pots or over onto the floor. The Greenery proved to be a claustrophobic community of plant-life that refused to be domesticated, even when kept in this modern factory of botany.

The reality of this never bothered Mr. Haaist, who brushed through the foilage of his personal caged forest like one might slip through a crowd of friends at a party. In the silence he sat alone with his garden with his thoughts of his late wife, and that was all he wanted for in his days of grief. Outside the world turned on without the gardener or his wife, as it seemed time itself had forgotten to attend to the secluded greenhouse. Ramona Haaist, however, the eldest of the Haaist children had not made the same error. Following the news of her mother's passing she had immediately withdrawn from school and returned home to handle the family affairs.

When her health permitted her, she would sit in the Greenery with her father who did not show any acknowledgment of her presence. He busied himself with doting on his green children with rags and spray bottles of alchemical mixtures. In the silent company of her father, Ramona found inches of courage and comfort, of which she used to arm herself for the daunting task ahead of her. Her mother's desk was a wytchwood make, and though it was old it was well maintained and cared for. Files and folders lined the surface and drawers with meticulous meaning behind where they were placed and how they were colored.

Glass tinctures and eye-dropper bottles caught the light of the heat lamps, setting brilliant reflected light cast onto the desk that awaited the pharmacist that would never return. It felt wrong to sit here at this desk, the furniture felt too big and while it looked familiar and worn, it was not Ramona's hand that wrought those worn patches into the wood. It was true, while it was her mother's desk, that did not make it her place to sit in the wide backed chair before the old writing desk. The eldest Haaist made quiet work of dissecting the organization; there were years worth of research notes, instructions for medicines both proven and debunked, patient record files, personal notes, the family medical records. Somewhere in all this would be her mother's will and instructions for the household, and she might have noticed the folded envelope tucked between two surgical manuals if her fingers hadn't stopped on the family records.

It's ill advised for a patient to look at their own medical file, especially one as sick and feeble as Ramona; at least, that is what her mother always said. We have a certain degree of bias toward the people we maintain a personal relation with, and few things we are as personal with than ourselves. This makes it difficult, her mother said, to be objective in deciding treatments. Even so, as Ramona gently leafed through the Haaist's years of medical history, she made a note of how the script slowly changed over the years. Tidy, crisp lines of text began to fall crooked and awkwardly placed. Lines of lettering became less confident, more erratic and even the notes, once tidy bullets of complete thought became fragments of intellect sandwiched between half conceived hypothesis.

In this unsteady script she read, as over time, what had once been declared as an acute chronic illness was dissected and reconstructed over and over, growing more dramatic and more severe as symptoms were sewn together to form some abstract illness wrought from paranoia and guilt. This was the case for all the Haaists; Mr. Haaist had a condition with his eyes, that would be fixed by shining a specific shade of light directly into them for extended periods. Elias Haaist, well his temperament was far too erratic, something to soothe an imbalance of his humours in his brain, to fix a hyperactive child who had the romantic temperament of a Dementileuse instead of a stoic and focused Lamordian. Yes, for that, a bit of laudanum cut with this and that for a mild sedative and focus enhancer.

And Ramona Haaist; so adventurous in her youth, such a trouble maker. Her mother designed in her notes that it was his penchant for mischief that often made her lungs crackle with fluid, threatening to drown her precious daughter. It was here that speculation became rampant hypothesis done on unfounded theory and conjecture with the echo chamber within her pages. That medicines were wrought from paranoia and theory that were more likely to do the harm it was intended to prevent. The later entries are really only that; entries of lunacy and rambling of a paranoid old woman, desperately searching for means to bring her estranged children back to their perfect little home.

Ramona sat back in the wide backed chair that was much too big for her, the furniture threatened to swallow her whole as she sat with the spinning revelation of her late mother. Absently, she tried to reference the sweet memories of her mother and her doting care with the raving mad scientist she had just read of. This gentle, kind, patient woman, this mother who would feed her sickly child soup, who color coded the medicine bottles for her son that could not read straight lines, who hewn together her garments and spent hours brushing out the messy tangle of her hair that it would be tamed to braids--

A wave of nausea hit her stomach and swiftly she rose from the maw of the desk and writing chair, shoving the log book into her waistcoat. Not even the hallway was spared from the suddenly crushing atmosphere of dread that choked the air from the space. Dim grey light slanted in through shuddered windows, striping the walls of the residence with shadow and light like the bars of a cell. With the absence of this prison's warden, there was no need to silence the hurried footsteps of her pace down the steps, to avoid the creaky floorboards or sprint past open doors. Ramona might have enjoyed this freedom more if she hadn't made straight for her coat and bag by the door.

She hadn't thought of how long she'd be out, or where she'd go, only that she needed to be anywhere but here. I will be right back, she thought to herself. I will be right back to sort this out, another promise she made that would go unfulfilled.