About The Scarlett Kite
Hi! I'm Scarlett Kiteway, I'm 20 years old, a journalism student in Perplex City and this is my blog all about the excitement over the search for the Cube. I'll be keeping track of what the media over there is saying about it, and maybe a little bit about my life as well!
Previous Month
Friday, March 31, 2006
Coming home
Category: story, 05:10 PMI'm on my way home. It feels wonderful, like the air is singing. I've put down the roof of the little car and I can taste spring in the air. I've only come 60 miles or so since I left this morning, but just the idea of home is filling me with happiness. The city! My own house! My bed! My friends! I feel like I can hardly remember the city anymore, or who I was when I was in the city. It's been a long journey.
But it'll be a shorter journey coming home. Claire Castille, who's made several forays in the surrounding area, has given me directions which should cut a lot of time off my travels. And since I won't have to keep stopping to examine strange rock formations, collect soil samples or look for clues of which way to go next, I should be home in about two weeks. Home. Every time I write it, it makes me happy.
I've mailed my friends and family to tell them that my time at the Tanraga nature reserve is coming to an end, and that I'll be back soon. They're so excited to see me, too! Even Brede sent me a note back saying that he's looking forward to seeing me. I am so looking forward to picking up with my normal life again. A part of me just wants to forget that any of this ever happened, just wants to go back to being Scarlett again.
But I know that's not going to be possible. With what I know about the city now, I won't be able to look at anything in the same way again. I've been trying to think of what I'll do when I get back, after I've seen my friends and had my favourite sundae at Whipsmart, of course. I'm not sure who I can tell about what's happened to me, or if I can tell anyone. Maybe Brede? I'm not sure. I was thinking maybe Kurt would be a good person to talk to - but after all the illegal things I've done, I don't know if he'd have any sympathy. Besides, he has a new girlfriend now (he sent me a picture - she's cute) so maybe he doesn't hang out with Violet so much anymore. And Violet? I don't know. I know I can't talk to my father, not after what I found out at Viendenbourg, so maybe I can't trust her, either. I'll have a lot to think about over my next few days of travelling.
It's going to be weird being so alone over this journey. But at the same time, I'm looking forward to it, too. It's been quite difficult to keep my suspicions about Claire to myself all this time, and to ask questions without seeming too curious. Still, this morning as we were packing up my stuff into the car, I managed to put your questions to her, at least as far as I could - she and Allain have already made it pretty clear to me that the family legends are for them alone. Like you suggested, I started off by talking about her father, asking her whether she wanted me to let him know they were safe. She smiled and said that "wouldn't be necessary," that she's found her own way to do that.
I knelt down to check the car's tyres.
"And what about 'V'?" I said. "After everything you've said, I'm worried he'll come after me."
She looked down at me, then carried on tightening the bindings on my trunk as she spoke.
"I can't deny that's a possibility," she said. "You should be careful. Don't tell anyone my name. Don't tell anyone you met me. Don't tell anyone where you've been."
"But what if he does come to find me?" I said. "What should I do? Can you tell me anything about him? What he looks like? What does 'V' stand for?"
She stood away from the car, hands on her hips and surveyed her work. She breathed out slowly.
"Yes," she said, "I suppose you need to know. At least what I know. I only met him three times. He's in his mid-30s, with dark hair. He looks like a thousand other guys you might meet. As for the name, 'V'. Once I heard someone else - someone who's dead now - call him 'Vadik'. Like the shadow-wizard in the story. It's appropriate for him. And as for what you should do if you ever meet him: run. Just run."
"And how," I tried to sound like a naive child, like I couldn't restrain my curiosity, "how did he come to be after you? What did you do?"
Her face clouded at that.
"You don't need to know. It's enough to tell you that I was involved in a robbery, that I wrote some code for him which enabled him to subvert one of the most advanced security systems in the world. But the robbery went wrong. We never got our hands on the target."
"What happened?" I said. Id my eyes very wide, raised my voice a little higher in the register.
She shook her head. "Someone else was there. I don't know who and I don't know why. But to do what they did, they must have been a better programmer than me. That's not a large group."
She thinned her lips and wouldn't say any more.
I hope that's helpful to you. To be honest, I felt chills just asking about this V, or Vadik. I know you need this information, but I'm hoping that's the end of my involvement with this end of the investigation. Right now, I'm just looking forward to getting home.
Friday, March 24, 2006
A favour for you
Category: story, 07:16 PMI'm sorry to have been trickling this story through to you over several weeks - as you know, I have extremely limited key access here, mostly only a few minutes a day. I suppose it's been helpful in one way, though. Some of you have emailed me to tell me that you think you know what Claire's crime was, that she was working with this "V" to steal the Cube. The truth is, I've suspected this myself. She hasn't said anything, and I don't want to push her, but I can't think of another crime that's been committed in the city in the past four or five years that would mean she felt she couldn't go to the authorities, even if her life was in danger. A couple of things she's dropped into conversation have also led me to that suspicion.
But I can't ask her directly. Over the past few weeks I've come to understand how precarious my position is here; I came out here hoping to reunite a son with his mother, and I've done that, and I'm proud. But now I want to go home and I think if Claire felt I threatened her, and Allain in any way she wouldn't let me do that. I don't think she's violent, not that. But it'd be easy enough to cripple our car, or my key. And it's not like there's a bus home.
So, I'm planning to be here for another few days. If you can think of one or two questions I could ask without arousing suspicion, I'll be glad to ask it. But remember that my key access is very limited - if you send dozens of emails I won't be able to get them all in time. It seems like many of you talk to each other, so if you could perhaps discuss it and then send me one email before next Friday, that would be best.
In any case, I should finish up telling Claire's story. There's not much further to go and much of it has come out in conversation over the past few weeks, while we've all been living and working together here in Anjsbourg. Claire and Allain have discussed whether he could go home too, when I do, but Claire says that would be too dangerous.
"I'm afraid," she said, one evening at the end of a long dig, "that V would find you. He'd try to use you to get to me. He might... he has no scruples. I'm sorry." She looked over at Allain, who was stretched out on his cot in the tent. "Maybe we could make you a new identity? Maybe Scarlett could help with that?"
Allain sat up, looked at me, grinned, and shook his head.
"Not yet," he said, "I'm tired of running for now. Besides, we've got work to do here, right?"
And it's true, they do have work to do here. Claire knows she can't stop what's happening at Viendenbourg by herself. But there's an old family legend - that the full story of what happened during the war has never been told - that something was lost, something very valuable, something precious. That part of the secret lies buried under the ruins of Anjsbourg. It might take years but she is going to stay here to try to find it and, for now, Allain is staying too.
Friday, March 17, 2006
Claire's confession
Category: story, 02:07 PMI said: "What do you mean 'what our family did at Viendenbourg'? I don't understand."
Claire Castille sighed and looked down at her hands again.
She said, in a voice so low I could barely hear her: "What did he tell you?"
I shook my head, still puzzled.
She spoke again: "What did my father tell you?"
I think I understood then, before she even explained it to me properly. But my voice spoke, even while my brain raced to the conclusion of the story.
"He told me a great wrong had been done to your family, at Viendenbourg. That you were sacrificed to save the city. I saw him crying while looking through the evidence in the military archives, and that was because of what had been done to you. He told me that he wanted to achieve justice."
Claire looked at Allain, then back at me.
"We do," she said, "we do want to achieve justice. We need to find out the truth. But the family legend is not that we were sacrificed. We were complicit in what happened at Viendenbourg. Our family was destroyed, but we were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of others. I suppose," she took another swig from her mug of tea, "that he was crying because he knew that. Because of guilt. Which we still feel after all these generations. That's why we have to know what really went on there."
She took Allain's hand and held it between hers. She smiled at him.
"And that's why I told you to stay away from your grandfather. Because I couldn't bear him to know that someone is trying to do again at Viendenbourg what was done in the past. And what we think was done here, at Anjsbourg." She looked back at me. "I don't know for certain. All I have to go on are some fragments of information, some family legends, and some information I found at the Viendenbourg base. But I think we might find the answers here, in the ruins of Anjsbourg.
"And there's something else as well." She sighed again and smiled a strange, wistful kind of smile. "Allain, I can't go back to the city. If you want to go, I can't go back with you. Because someone's after me, and if he finds out where I am he'll come, and he'll find me, and he'll kill me." She smiled again. "This probably sounds crazy, like a paranoid woman gone mad from too much time by herself, but I'm afraid it's true. I worked on a job in 267 - an illegal job, I sometimes take them on to fund our Viendenbourg research - but this one went bad. The man who employed me has eliminated the two others who worked on the job with us and I'm certain he'd come after me if he could."
Allain, who had been silent all this time, his eyes half shut against the sun, suddenly stirred. He bit his bottom lip, ran his hand through his hair and said:
"Who? Who is it who's after you? We can find a way to stop him."
And Claire Castille smiled again and said:
"He's a shadow, a figment. You could never find him. I only ever knew him as V," she shook her head, "and that's no help at all."
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Fun Surprise
Category: web, 09:23 PMI've got a special treat for you today! Mind Candy has given an exclusive advance Wave 3 card to Game Daily, including a special code for solving it and getting points. It really sounds like everything is gearing up for the release of Wave 3, which I understand is coming very soon now. :-)
Friday, March 10, 2006
Claire tells her story
Category: story, 05:54 PMClaire Castille is a small woman. It was that I noticed, when we were sitting in her small tent by the excavation site, our hands wrapped around tin cups of tea. She looks thinner than she did in Major Castille's photographs, her hands almost bony but with strength in the sinews of her arms. She has a fierce determination to her, too. And she couldn't stop looking at Allain. I noticed that - as she made the tea, as we talked, as we walked from her temporary tent back to her more permanent base - she just kept looking at him and smiling. He was smiling, too, the widest smiles I've seen him give since I've known him, I think.
There was so much to ask her to explain, but I thought that could wait. The first evening, I left Allain and Claire sitting looking through the photos on his key - of him at college, him with his grandfather, him rowing in the college crew - and her asking for explanations of every normal, ordinary everyday thing he'd done. I walked outside the large tent and sat a little way away, climbing up a collapsed marble awning to get a view across the empty city. I looked up at the stars and wondered who the last person before us was to stare at the stars above this place. The night was very still. In the distance some animal was calling in long, loud whoops and another of the same kind returned the call. I pulled my knees up to my chin. I sat there like that for a long time.
And the next day, Claire Castille told us her story. Allain was worried at first - we'd been moving for so long that I think he felt afraid to stay still. But Claire said she'd been here for months, that she's been scanning the area regularly for signs of life and she's been the only human being here the whole time. I think she was a bit concerned about how easily we'd found her, though - she and Allain have been talking about putting up proximity alarms around the whole city.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I ought to let you hear Claire's story as she told it to us herself.
"I'm a software expert," she said. "But I expect you know that." She smiled at Allain. It was morning. We were sitting on a ridge overlooking the city sipping our morning tea. She ran her hand across her forehead. "I suppose you also know that I've been involved in a few things I might have done better to stay out of. That doesn't matter right now. But I'm good at what I do. Very good, in fact." She looked down at her hands and smiled. "I have been called a genius, but it wouldn't be for me to say.
"In any case, a bit more than a year ago, I was offered a job. It was a fascinating position, working for the military at the place you know as Viendenbourg. Among other things, they wanted me to work on developing and maintaining an innovative kind of security system they have there - I think you've come into contact with it. When I accepted, all they told me was that I would be working to protect the development of classified technology. I didn't need to know anything else, it wasn't my area.
"But," she smiled, "that wasn't enough to stop me wanting to find out what was really going on. You've been to Viendenbourg, you've seen the facility there, you've seen how they operate. I did my job very well, maybe too well - the external security system seemed unbreakable, and so people became a little bit more lax about internal security. I was able to track communications inside the base from time to time, and so found out about what was going on, about what they were doing in that long building with the sound of drilling coming from it. And what I found out horrified me."
She paused, took a sip of tea, and looked out across the ruin where there was once a city. When she continued to talk, she didn't look at us, but carried on staring at that empty place.
"I don't know everything. I never got inside that building. But I know something. They're digging something up there. I don't know what it is. But they're trying to put together something that's buried there, or recreate something that was made a long time ago. And after I learned that, I knew I couldn't stay there. Allain knows why - it's because of what our family did at Viendenbourg."
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
New York PCAG Tournament
Category: me, 05:50 PMI've just gotten these pictures from Mind Candy - they're from the PCAG tournament in New York. How very exciting! Congratulations to Gabriel, the winner! (They tell me he's the one in the first photo being presented a trophy from Andrea at Mind Candy.)
It makes me a little sad to know I'm so out of the loop on what's happening with all of you and in the city, but I do think what I'm doing here is important. Just this morning I was feeding berries to an owl with a broken wing, and he looked at me with his giant, wise eyes, and I realised again how very rewarding this experience has been, even if I do miss home a bit from time to time.
Friday, March 3, 2006
Signs of Life
Category: story, 04:17 PMWe could hardly believe what we were seeing. The tents looked so incongruous in this dead, decaying city that it almost seemed that we must be looking at a hologram or a movie. We hadn't seen any sign that human beings had been here in the last 200 years - no tracks, no garbage, nothing. And now, this.
Of course, we were excited. Claire Castille had led us all this way - perhaps she was inside one of these tents right now? But what if it was someone else? We felt grateful that the solemnity of the place, its haunting emptiness, had made us walk softly, speak quietly. There was no way to know who was inside those tents.
So, we waited. Allain signalled to me that we should take shelter under a collapsed balcony where we could sit relatively comfortably with a clear view of the entrance to the tents between some fallen slabs of marble. We waited. And waited. The sun was low in the sky. Some bats flew out of the awning of the colonnade opposite us. We waited some more. Darkness came. We wrapped our coats more tightly around us and took turns napping. Morning came. No one had come, and no one had gone. We shared some water and energy bars and talked, quietly, about what to do next.
At about 7am, we decided to creep quietly toward the tents, to listen and, if we heard nothing, to try to look inside. We crept. We waited. Three mice scuttled across the cracked bottom of the empty pool. We couldn't hear anything. We waited. Allain crept up to the entrance to one of the tents and looked inside. He beckoned to me. The tent was empty of people. We both slipped inside.
We looked around us. This tent was clearly someone's home. It was laid out very neatly, very precisely. An army cot was set up in one corner. Military-style fatigues were folded in a set of canvas shelves hanging from the centre of the tent. There were boots, a mirror, wash gear and a selection of survival supplies: about two years' worth of iron rations, we guessed, solar water collectors, first aid kits and useful-looking knives in multiple sizes. We thought about taking something but decided against - we didn't really need anything else, and we didn't want whoever was living here to come looking for the person who'd stolen their stuff.
Moving quickly, we checked that the second tent was empty too and then took a look around it. The second tent was more interesting. It looked like a centre of operations. An enormous plan was pinned to a table with pins stuck in it, shaded areas and printed notes on sticky flags. There were several trunks - locked and too heavy to lift, but on the evidence of some items we found in a small daypack there had been some serious collection of archaeological samples here. Each was neatly labelled with a printed tag. Fragment of vase, circa 45BC. Bowl of spoon, circa 20BC. Carved flower maze, circa 70BC. In one corner were tools, kept in excellent order.
Allain examined the plan. He looked up at me. I knew that he'd been hoping to find his mother, Claire, waiting here. It didn't make sense to me, though. Why would Allain's mother be here on an archaeological dig? When she was running from the army and some other mysterious threat, why would she take on such a task? And how could she have come here? We'd seen no sign of a vehicle - this looked to me more like a military operation; someone had been dropped here and would be picked up later. Still, Allain was smiling.
"Someone," he said, "is excavating. In a pattern. Very meticulously. This is a plan of the old city of Anjsbourg. I know where they are."
I looked at him. I wanted to tell him to be calm, to be reasonable. That he shouldn't expect to find his mother here, that it might just be a dead end.
"Let's go and see then," I said.
The site of the dig we were aiming for was about five miles away, around the circumference of the city. We could have walked straight across and made the journey a little shorter, but it wasn't worth it for the risk we'd be spotted. We walked quietly. By the time we arrived at the right location, it was almost midday.
At first, we couldn't see anything. A line of broken houses. A long high wall, still miraculously intact, overgrown with moss, with an archway through into a tangle of thorns which might once have been a garden. We almost missed it. But Allain made us stop and wait and listen. And we heard the quiet sound of digging, just behind the wall.
Moving slowly, we made our way to the arch in the wall and peeked round. A woman was digging, down in a long trench, working very carefully with a trowel, excavating what looked like a subterranean mosaic wall, brushing it with a paintbrush to remove loose dirt. As we watched, she stood back to admire her work and ran her upper arm across her forehead. Before we could move, she turned round.
It was Claire Castille.
She looked up, squinting against the noon sun and saw us, saw Allain. She started, as though an electric shock had run through her. And she held out her arms toward him, and he scrambled down the slope to embrace her.