All About Evan
Jun. 28th, 2015 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evantualityThis is a work in progress. Last update: January 12th, 2016
Evan Friave-Goodlace. My parents figured two last names precluded a middle name.
In a big old house in the outskirts of a city in Alberta, Canada on January 23rd, 2007. My parents were snowed in after a big storm and had to wrangle my sister -- who was five years old at the time -- while my mother was giving birth. A friend of theirs who had some midwife training made it over in time to lend a hand, but my mom is a very do-it-yourself kind of person at the best of times. Both my sister and I were born at home, and I don't think that's entirely because my mom didn't want to risk having a nonhuman infant in a human hospital.
I've heard her and my dad joke that each of us kids were born in the room we were conceived in. I haven't ever asked what room I was born in.
My mom is Kay Friave. She's where I get my hair, and a few other more distinctive traits. She used to be a landscaper and renovator, basic manual contract labour for a company in the city, until my sister came along and dad was making enough money that she could stop working. The rest is sort of complicated... she's also a fire elemental, and I've never entirely gotten a straight answer on the logistics of it, but I think she plays at being human pretty regularly. Except for teaching me how not to burn the house down, she's always looked and acted no different than anyone else's mom, I guess. I can tell she's not but I can't quite tell you why or how. It took me a few years when I was little to sort out that there was a meaningful distinction between what we are, and what humans are, beyond the basic fire stuff. She's very old, and she won't tell me how old, but once I pried it out of her that she doesn't ever expect to die.
My dad's a complicated mess too. His name is Aaron Goodlace, and he has technology he really shouldn't. Once when I was seven I was messing around with his computer setup and managed to activate this big mirror I'd been curious about forever... leaving out the details, it was a portal to somewhere. I never got to sort out exactly where it led. The other side looked like some sort of private fitness centre-cum-workroom in steel corrugate, but the PCs were just wired together in a simple closed LAN, and the tech I didn't recognize wouldn't work for me.
Anyways, my mom swears that I'm a solid 50% human so I suppose his secrets run some other direction. He started up a technology security company before I was born and it's done very well; he's a bigshot CEO now. I suspect he cheats. That'd be about right; he's pretty much been encouraging me to game the system since before I could walk.
I know they've been working on a side project together for years -- it ties in somehow to my dad's work, but they've been trying to build a safety network for other supernatural people. They started out just in our city where mom has connections, but I think they've branched out. We get a lot of nonhumans through, and they would both spend long periods of time away from home when I was little. I honestly don't know as much about their work as I should, I think. I haven't asked. I'm not much of a people person.
Cassie. My elder sister. If I'm the black sheep of this family of extraverts, she's the sheep that has somehow managed to light itself on fire... pardon the metaphor.
Ugh. I don't like talking about her much. We don't get along very well, and I don't really understand her -- she looked out for me when I was little but she's held it over my head ever since, she's the first person who ever called me a nerd, but she also gave me good advice when I was trying to figure out how to approach this one girl. Cassie's a hard person to deal with.
You should see her and mom go at it. She infuriates and baffles dad, but she and mom will lock horns for days -- weeks, even. I actually haven't seen her in a while... she eloped with this dragon, which drove both dad and mom up the wall, and this may not be a charitable thought but I suspect that's a good proportion of the reason she chose to do it. She chafes, I think: mom and dad both have their lives well in order and their reputations in the community, and I think she feels competitive.
I'm going to a reasonably good college south of the border, so I'm living in a dorm. It's a big old brown sandstone building out of the seventies and it shows: forget private bedrooms or bathrooms, I share my sleeping space with one roommate, John, and a communal bathroom with the whole floor. We've got a kitchenette that we share with another pair of roommates, which according to our history-major RA, is a positive privilege compared to other dorms from this era. I don't know why I would ever use it. We've got cafeteria passes as part of tuition and I'm not some sort of home-made aficionado.
John is a smart kid. He's a year older than me and sometimes I think it seems like he's seen some stuff, but he's got this good-natured sort of happy-go-lucky air about him. He's got a weakness for movies out of the eighties and nineties, including some truly awful romantic comedies. He's thinking of majoring in film, which is a fierce waste. He's got a keen mind, even if he hides it behind what my sister would call 'doofiness'.
I avoid the other two who share our kitchen. They seem to enjoy each others' company, however, I do not think I would have much in common with them. Their forms of leisure seem to fall in the direction of the campus gym.
Student, full-time. I'm fortunate in that I got a full scholarship and don't have to work, and my parents are pitching in for any extra costs I end up needing covered. I don't tend to advertise to classmates that I don't have to work: too many of them seem too exhausted for that to net me anything other than jealous disdain.
Write a full physical description of yourself.
Oh, Lord. Let me grab a mirror...
I'm maybe five foot six, hundred and forty or so pounds. Is that skinny? I don't quite have my dad's build. My hair's a muted pale reddish and it's sort of fine, I guess. My mom's a redhead and my dad's blonde so I suppose that was pretty much a given, with all those recessives. I've got brown eyes. I don't wear glasses; apparently I've got appallingly good genetics for eyesight, despite the fact that my dad's blue-eyed. He's getting a bit farsighted these days so I suppose I've got that to look forward to. I don't really have any scars or tattoos, and I'm not sure I'd get any given the chance. I dress in jeans or slacks mostly, t-shirts for casual days and button-ups when someone's going to be judging me by how I look.
My face is sort of squarish... I've got a bit of a nose on me. My eyebrows sort of arch? I don't know, this is weird.
Upper middle class solidly. Frankly, by now my parents are rich. They're new money but that doesn't mean much in a province of oil magnates.
Physical weaknesses? Do you define lack of physical strength as a weakness specifically? I'm sort of scrawny, I'm told, which is fair enough given I don't work out. I don't have any allergies that I know of or chronic conditions, although I get viruses just like anyone else, and I've sprained my ankle twice and once broke a finger. Well, that may not be entirely true: I once broke out in full-body hives while out camping when I was little, and we never did figure out what caused those.
Right-handed. I suppose I am not especially sinister.
You know, everyone functions under the impression that their voice is deeper than it is. You hear your own voice partially through transmission via your own skull, so you get more of the low frequencies transmitted straight to your auditory bones than the high ones. Moreover, recordings aren't generally much more reliable: very little non-professional audio equipment has high enough fidelity to be much use.
In short, I don't properly know. What an awkward question.
Uhhh... hmm.
'I suppose', I suppose. I like to think I ask 'why' a lot, when others wouldn't think to ask. That may be vanity speaking. I know I use 'fair enough' when I want to gracefully concede a point, even when it's not entirely applicable. I don't know if this counts, but I've been told on more than one occasion that I use big words.
Four dollars and fifteen cents, a note I wrote myself about getting my physics notes back from Bradley, my wallet, and my keys.
Now, how would you expect me to know what other people think is strange about me? I'm reasonably self-aware, but I think I'll need to call in some outside help for this one.
John, my roommate: "He moves my stuff! I'll get home and all of my books will be all over my bed. But Evan's a good guy mostly! He sometimes does my laundry, he says it's because it gets too smelly. Sometimes he'll wash the colors with the blacks, though. My nice Ghostbusters shirt got a ton of green lint all over it one time. Actually come to think of it, that might have made it better! Uh... he does that pen-clicky thing a lot when he's doing his homework. and he's really hard to talk to when he's studying."
(for reference, I don't "move his stuff". When his things end up on my side of the room I'll put them back on his, and I always pile them very neatly, thank you very much.)
Kay, my mother: "Hey, kiddo, what's this for? ... oh, hah! Seriously? Alright, cover your ears. Covered? Good.
"He's always, always hated it when you interrupt him in the middle of a project, but he's got a really specific way of showing his disapproval. If you make a nuisance while he's busy he'll cut you out till he gets to finish with whatever he was doing. Like, when he was little and you tried to take away his legos for dinnertime? He wouldn't talk to you till he got his hands on those legos again.
"Or are we talking bigger picture, here? About half the time he won't meet your eyes when you're talking to him; it's hard to tell when he actually heard something you've said because he'll give the same generic lukewarm mm-hmm either way; he fidgets when he's working on a particularly snarly problem.
"But oh, he lights up when he's learned something new. Or better yet, when he's cornered you to be a captive audience for questioning. I've watched him go right through people like that: he had a science teacher in junior high who was his best friend for about a year, and I'm not even exaggerating. We had to invite that man over for dinner once, just to get a read and make sure he wasn't some sort of creeper. Turns out he was as confused as we were. The thing was, the guy used to be a college professor before he went into early ed, and so he had a college-level understanding of scientific concepts as well as a remarkably effective way of getting ideas across to kids, so whenever Evan wanted to pick someone's brain he was the go-to guy. But I'm getting off-task again, aren't I?"
Aaron, my father: "Evan? Oh, he's got lots of tics, but I won't list off the ones he had from the time he was knee-high. Mostly, that look, the one right there, he wears it like a poker face, but you can tell by the way his ears perk up that he's angry or embarrassed. He's got a great pout, too, and the boy always clips the tags out of his clothes. Memorises the laundry instructions, don't you, son?
"He's got his good quirks, too. Does his laundry, does his homework--and then some--and he's good at seeing a bigger picture. I used to worry that he'd get bogged down in the details, but you give him a little time and he always comes back to the point he was trying to make, which is important when you're trying to lead people to your point of view. He actually listens, too, which means out of all of the family, Evan's got the upper hand. He's a real charmer, too.
"Oh, I am too allowed to wink at the interviewer! She seems nice? Your new girlfr--? Oh come on now! I'm happy to answer any other questions!"
Private. I grew up in a repurposed old farmhouse on a little acreage on the outskirts of my city. My sister was too many years older than me to want to spend much time with me if she had any other option -- I was born after she was already in kindergarten. I didn't exactly get play-dates with other kids my age, at least until I was old enough to realize that most kids can't crawl into the fireplace for fun, and some of why.
I suppose it's a good thing that I was never all that inclined to be sociable to begin with, or I'd probably have ended up just about as attention-crazy as Cassie. But I had my parents, sometimes one, sometimes both, and I had our big dog, and our cat. I was happy enough.
That's a really hard thing to pinpoint. I've thought about it and it's hard to get temporal markers on anything before school started. I remember being young enough to ride on my dad's shoulders, though, which means I must have been younger than four or so. I was sitting on his shoulders as he walked through the stand of trees out back of the acreage and petting his hair, thinking it wasn't as nice as the cat's.
I'm in my second year of college. Technically I've had a year less education than most kids my age: I skipped grade three. I was already reading and writing at an advanced level. I remember wanting to make them skip me all the way to five, but to be fair, being two sizes smaller than my peers probably would have netted me even more grief.
In any case I'm headed for a comp sci degree, and I should achieve that in two years. I think at that point I'll know for sure whether I want to get my Master's in the computer sciences, or try something else out for a while.
No, it's been terrible, a total slog.
Oh, Lord, forget it, I don't do sarcasm well. There have been times that I've gotten impatient with the pace and I can't say I've ever been a fan of the social aspect, but for the most part, I've always enjoyed school. I know, that's blasphemous for a young person to say, but you get out of it what you put into it, don't you?
At the worst school is busywork, but at best, years when I had a teacher who could keep up with me, it's been my respite from everything else. I like the challenge of mastering the material, even the stuff that isn't my favourite, like history. I never did as well in the 'soft' classes, but getting a B in art is hardly a black mark as far as I'm concerned.
There's no one place, of course. That's ridiculous. Oh... wait.
I see: you're expecting me to say 'school'. Which is true enough. Most of my knowledge and a good deal of my practical skills come from classes, but isn't that true of most people of my age and class? After all, we're there eight hours a day and have been, in most cases, since we were five or six. So yes, I have learned most of my skills through the wonder of public school, supplemented, of course, by the internet. Wolfram Alpha is a remarkable resource for self-teaching.
On the other hand, that hasn't been the whole of my education. Public schooling has been very abysmal in terms of keeping up with computer technology as it's developed -- still no computer courses in junior high, only the most generic ones in high school -- and that's a major oversight in our current world. My dad got me started on the track of teaching myself how to navigate and really understand computers, and he's still the person I check with first when I've got a question about network architecture or certain kinds of theoretical models. I know there are things he knows that he's not telling me, but those I'll eventually sort out on my own. He still doesn't lock his computer room very securely.
There are other things, too. Naturally, I've learned everything I know about how to control and use some of my more innate skills from my mother. Those lessons are not ones you would find in any public classroom.
****Skip this one until I can go look up someone appropriately obscure to be Evan's role model. XD****
My most contentious relationship was with my sister, Cassie. She couldn't seem to decide whether she wanted to be my defender and champion or be my tormenter. Or, maybe, those two things dovetailed: maybe she didn't want anyone else picking on me so that she could? No, honestly, I think she was just bored, and she took it out on me. She'd bait me to do things and then make fun of me when I couldn't, but would seem really incensed if I ever could. Other times we'd play great games of lets'-pretend, or she'd even try and come play with my toys and make up great plays to keep me entertained.
I mean despite all that, when I was really little I looked up to her. She was the only older kid I had much contact with and she was energetic, gregarious, she'd have friends over -- and she was better with her powers than me, which really made me want to learn. I think I always knew she was more sociable than she was, but I used to try and hang around with her and the friends she brought home from school. She's always better when she has her friends around her, she seems really in her element, she thrives on the attention. By the time I hit about ten and she was fifteen, though, we'd begun to have very little to do with one another. I'd figured out how to sidestep her torment, and really, both of us had figured out that we didn't have much in common, temperamentally.
My mom was a stay-at-home mother, for the most part, except that sometimes she'd head out of town for a week or a month on things I was never really told about. I think I drove her a bit nuts. By the time I came around Cassie was at school, and she went from this insanely energetic child who wore her moods on her sleeves to, well, me. I remember a lot of misunderstandings. She'd think I was upset about something when all I was doing was working on a problem. She'd try and get me excited about going out and doing things outdoors, and would be sort of nonplussed when I either didn't want to, or just didn't show much enthusiasm. On the other hand I remember really enjoying the times we were getting along, particularly when she was teaching me things. I learned a lot of my humour from her, and I accredit her with a certain degree of my pragmatism. I think by the time I was in school for a couple of years she'd sort of sorted me out and knew to sort of tone it down, and I know when I was a teenager she found me to be a relief. Ultimately, I'm quite comfortable with our relationship.
My dad worked a lot, and I think he felt about as strongly about his work as he does about us. He would work late, and sometimes work weekends, and it was quite a long a transit from our home to his work. I was always very excited to see him in a way my mother never got, due to just how ubiquitously she was around and he was not. My favourite times were earlier on -- for a while when I was young, he could work from home a couple days a week. I suppose after a fashion he was a puzzle to me, and one that I was always excited to get a chance to sort out. Of course, he'd cut his teeth on Cassie too and I think he was fairly excited himself when I turned out to be more inclined towards learning. He taught me basic math before most of my peers could count to fifty, and he taught me about computer networks not long after that. He worked hard to keep feeding me puzzles and problems, keep one step ahead of me to keep me running at full speed. On the other hand, he has this enraging sense of humour -- I think he tries to prod me socially in the same way he's always managed to intellectually, and I get this feeling that he takes some joy in watching me squirm. His sarcastic streak confused me a lot as a child, and sometimes made me think he was mad at me when he wasn't.
Both of my parents... well, one of the last big talks Cassie and I had was about mom, and about how strange it is that she is what she is. It infuriates Cassie, I think: she said mom doesn't take us seriously, that she's just playing a game, and that dad's just as bad. The thing is, I don't think she's entirely wrong... at least in that both of them have a very different perspective than most parents. I am almost certain that we are not our mother's first children, just... from things she and dad have said to each other over the years when they thought I wasn't listening. But at the same time, Cassie sees the worst of them because she goes out of her way to fight them. I've seen the way they've looked at each other, our parents that is, and I've seen real fear and concern on their faces when they've thought Cassie was in real trouble. They may take the long view, but I'm not sure that precludes real care.
An astronaut. An astrophysicist. There was a period of time during which my dad convinced me that being an accountant was all about using math to make money, and so I wanted to be an accountant for a while. To be fair that is essentially the job, but the math is all very simple math...
There were a lot of things I wanted to be, but none of them have specifically stuck. Computer sciences isn't to work me towards a particular job, but because I truly enjoy the subject matter. Ultimately, I think it matters less to me what I end up doing as a career: I just want to be the best in my field at whatever I end up doing.
Reading, of course. Anything I could get my hands on, up to and including my sister's Babysitter Club books until I got made fun of for that. I did read my sister's diary once, which is less interesting than you would think.
Building things. I liked blocks and engineering kits, bottle rockets, later more complicated rockets... a lot of the time it came back to blocks, though, because there's something fascinating about taking generic pieces and turning them into something functional or interesting. I think my mom hoped for a while that I'd end up having the same kind of fun with home improvement projects that she does, but painting and sanding are dull.
I had, and still have, a propensity for walking. I may not be muscular but if I need to I can walk all day. I would head out back of the acre and walk some of the trails through the aspen forest regularly when I was a kid. I even had a few favorite climbing trees. I could see our house from one, the downtown core from another. Nothing is quite as nice as the kind of quiet you get when there isn't another human for half a kilometre in every direction. That, I miss: being close enough to some degree of wilderness that you can simply disappear for an afternoon.
Yet another question that forces me to guess what other people thought of me as a child. Honestly, every child thinks of themselves as normal, and everyone else as having 'personality traits', don't they?
I suppose in retrospect I was about the same as I am now. Quiet, inclined to my own company, curious, studious. Even-tempered? Compared to Cassie, certainly. I suppose I was fairly self-centred, but again, what child isn't?
Popular? No, never. Not even in nerd circles.
In retrospect a lot of that was my own doing. Apparently I was pretty timid around other kids when I first started school, and I think over the years that morphed into a kind of indifference to them, once I sorted out they were no threat. Thinking back, I recall what must have been overtures of friendship... but I only ever really had one or two other kids I'd choose to spend time with in any given year, and I've never been good at staying in contact with acquaintances outside of our context of acquaintance.
There were a couple of years where this was almost a real problem, but any incipient bullying stopped when I got into grade one and it turned out my sister was a particularly popular and secretly kind of vicious fifth-grader. I'm still glad of her help back then.
The kids I did spend time with, though, they were kind of a mixed bag. Mostly other outcasts. From grades three through six it was a kid named Flynn, who loved Disney movies and could recite whole movies from memory, but was sort of a spaz in the classroom. I liked him because he could just keep vomiting up factoids for days, and he liked me because I actually listened to what he had to say. I still wonder about him, actually: he came from a really poor family and his parents were... well, they left something to be desired as parents.
That was sort of the pattern, though. In junior high I was friends with the school whipping boy; in high school I fell in with a rather insular group that'd known each other for years. That suited me: I was sort of the free agent who came and went as I pleased, but they always seemed happy to have me join them. I had them out to the acre on a couple of very memorable instances, actually. I'm sure that contributed.
Hmmm. Shortly before my eighteenth birthday. At a New Years party, with a girl from the group I just mentioned, Chelsea.
Neither of us had any idea what we were doing, it was an embarrassingly bad kiss. We sorted that out later, however.
That's a remarkably personal question!
If you must know: no; when I was nineteen; with Chelsea.
I can't think of a time when I wasn't aware of what I was. I may not always have had control over it, but I was always aware that fire was a -- a friend, or something. Or, no, that's not right -- fire was comfort, like being curled up under a big duvet when it's forty below and blizzarding outside. I remember crawling into the lit fireplace when I was little, shoving the logs aside and curling up for naptime. Come to think of it I probably ran up quite a bill in toddler clothes.
I think more pertinent was when I realized what I wasn't: that is to say, that I wasn't like everyone else. I learned early that you don't set your toys on fire, but it took a lot longer to sort out that it was okay to play with fire around family and some of our friends but that around other people I had to hide it and never speak of it. I remember having trouble with that one.
I have had a very sedate go of things, thus far. If you're expecting high drama, mine is not the life to look to. In the interests of completeness, however, I will take a swing at these.
Well, and now the question I've got for you is 'most important' in what regard? Being born was fairly important. Going to school for the first time was fairly pivotal. I don't think I would be who I am without a long progression of pretty mundane events. I suppose if you forced me to pick one, it would be when my mom finally sat me down and told me I was old enough to start learning how to use my elemental skills. That's the only knowledge I can't really get anywhere else, anywhere other than her, so if she had decided not to teach me, I'd pretty much just be up the creek in that regard. Fire isn't really something you experiment with.
My dad, in the blatant ways. He's directly responsible for me deciding to go into computer science, I think, since you can trace my fascination with computers back to the games we used to play when I'd be excited to have him home after a long absence. Looking back, he was implacable in trying to mould my inquisitive tendencies into a truly directed scientific approach to learning. I don't know if he did it for that reason, or because it was his way of relating to a somewhat reserved child, but either way, I'm thankful.
Skipping a grade was something. I also graduated salutatorian of my class in high school. The guy who got valedictorian only edged me out because they took extracurriculars into consideration, the duplicitous bastards.
Hmmph. Ask me this question again in ten years and I'll have a more interesting answer, I'm sure. I'm just getting started.
Oh. I... hmm.
Listen, I'll come right out and say it. I am not good at reading people. I never have been. I don't know if I'm just not wired for it, or if I haven't learned the skills or what, but... yeah. The point is, the girl I mentioned a handful of questions up? I made stupid mistakes with her. I can see it in retrospect, but at the time, I totally failed to notice that when we'd talk, she'd be talking as much in subtext as in clearly-stated information. I missed a lot of the things I think she was trying to tell me, and in the end, I think she left me because I failed to pick up on those signals.
I can pick apart the nuances of a mathematical proof until the cows come home, I can understand and work out the loopy knots that ill-written code sometimes ties itself in. I regret not giving her enough credit to consider that she had as much complexity to her as the things I study. I regret screwing up our friendship by failing to pay attention.
Ugh. I hate this.
You know how kids are pretty amoral before they start to develop a wider social awareness? When I was just sorting out that I could cause things to light on fire with just a little bit of effort of will, maybe when I was six or so, there was this squirrel running around in the back acre. I used to watch them a lot, the squirrels and the groundhogs...
So I was watching it, and thinking about the new skills I had, and I lit that squirrel on fire. I don't even remember why I did it, I just kind of wanted to. My mom didn't even stop me, and she was right there. I remember smelling cooked meat and not connecting it to what I'd done until the poor thing stopped running and fell over.
I didn't use my elemental skills for a while after that.
Clean as a whistle. Ugh... though I'd probably have a charge of animal cruelty if anyone really knew about that squirrel thing. And, you know, if charging six-year-olds was a thing.
Also, what is with that aphorism? Whistles aren't clean. They're full of dried spit. Ew.
Oh, this is silly, but...
When I was in elementary school, my sister was charged with coming to pick me up after school and taking us both to after-school care on the couple of days a week when mom was regularly busy. One day she didn't show up -- I don't even remember why, she probably just forgot. Anyhow, after waiting for thirty minutes and brushing off teachers when they asked, I figured I'd just take myself to after-school care.
I was like, eight, and used to getting a ride home. I had a bus pass and there was a bus stop out front of my school where my sister and I would get on to take us to after-school care, and, being eight and inexperienced, I thought that there must only be one bus that stopped at that stop.
I ended up in the downtown core, no idea where I was, no idea how to get home, my phone's battery dead. This was in November or something, when it gets dark at about four in the afternoon, so to make things even more fun it was snowy and pitch-black. I remember being so scared that I hid in the back of the bus and cried and cried. I thought I was going to get in so much trouble, or that I was going to get eaten or abducted or something. It didn't really occur to me that as a kid with power over fire and dubious control, I was probably more a threat to anyone who might abduct me than they were to me...
In any case, when the bus got to the station at the end of its line, the driver finally noticed the red-headed eight-year-old who was still huddled in the seats at the back. He was a really kind guy, he took a solid half hour after his shift ended to help me charge my phone and call home and let my parents know where I was, and he waited with me while they came to get me.
Well, that bus thing was pretty embarrassing at the time...
I can think of four or five times where I answered questions wrong in class that seemed mortifying at the time, but honestly, most of my really wince-worthy moments have had to do with social missteps. None of them stand out as the worst of the worst, and I kind of am not keen on digging back through them right now.
Probably so thoroughly botching things with Chelsea, although to be fair that was not a single event but a series of small failures. I think, with that in mind, I would have been more aggressive about seeking out the top schools for my program. In part I chose the school that I did because it also had the program that Chelsea was going into. It's an excellent school, don't get me wrong -- but I should have shot for the cream of the crop.
When I was about fifteen, I won a province-wide robotics competition with a team of classmates, and we got shipped down to a robotics conference in the States. Winning the competition by itself would have been enough to win a spot in the top five best memories: it was a serious competition, not a feel-good science fair, and for the most part I was competing against kids older than me. But the conference itself was incredible: it had some of the foremost minds in the world in the field of robotics, and then in the evening we got stashed in our own hotel room.
I didn't grow up with a lot of friends and I didn't often get the chance to have things like sleepovers. At the time it felt totally wild to be away from my parents for a whole four days, much less be allowed to determine my own bedtime and order from room service. We actually got in trouble for that last, but it was a blast. Those kids ended up being my friends through the first couple of years of high school, till they graduated and left for university.
The squirrel thing was pretty bad.
Actually... no. When I think about it, there's something else. I try not to think about this one that much because it really has nothing to do with me.
Part of my parents' business is helping out other supernatural folks who are having a hard time integrating. The thing is that not all nonhumans, ah... well, not all of them are what we would consider good people.
There was a therianthrope from somewhere in South America who'd decided to immigrate up here because she'd lost her home down there. I don't know what exactly happened there, but something else followed her up. She showed up at our house one evening, in really rough shape. I must have been about six. I remember thinking she looked like a man I'd seen on the news the other day who'd fallen down a shale slope in the Rockies. My parents sent me to bed early. After a while they put her in the spare room next to mine. I didn't know this at the time but my mom stayed downstairs, on guard.
My room and the spare room have almost identical windows, right next to one another, and I woke up I don't know how long into the night to something scratching at mine. I went to see what it was and there was this face -- all I remember now was these teeth, these curling teeth that spiralled up from its bottom jaw, and this nose that sort of looked like a leaf-nosed bat's. I remember staring as it opened my window. I don't know why I didn't call my mom then, I think I was scared stiff. I tried to hold the window down but it pried it up like I wasn't even there, and crept into my room. It asked me where the therian was. I barely understood it, it had a really thick accent.
I thought I was very clever, then. I'd caught on that I needed to get my mom but suspected if I ran for it this thing was going to do something terrible, so I told it I'd show it where the therian was, and led it out of my room. I was a few steps in front of it, closer to my parents' room, so when I pointed at the door where the therian was staying and it looked that way, I bolted for my parents.
It was just dad in the bedroom and I realized my mistake and started screaming my head off for mom. Dad grabbed me so I couldn't run back out when he realized what was going on, but I remember the sound of mom pounding up the stairs and a bunch of screechy noises -- in retrospect probably screams -- from the spare room.
My mom came out a while later and brought me and dad to Astren's cavern. I don't know what happened to the therian. I didn't ask. I don't think it was good.
I like to think I don't break the world down into such simplistic categories. I prefer to think of myself as realistic and pragmatic.
Mediocrity. I can cop to that.
It's hard to believe in the gods offered by human religion when they seem to be so unaware of so many things. The dragon gods I might be more inclined to believe perhaps might have existed at some point, given that even the dragons admit that their gods must be either dead or sleeping to have failed to intervene in the spread of humanity for so long.
Even then, it's hard to believe in the idea of gods when your mother is dubiously immortal. If she's a god, we're all in trouble. (Sorry, mom.)
Government is a carnival show, which makes it hard to really believe in either team. Too much of it is spin and no substance, and too many people buy in to the incredibly simplistic party system as the best of all potential options, or vote reactively rather than proactively. The whole system is deeply flawed, and when faced with trying to choose the lesser of a small handful of evils, I find myself enervated. I mean, how can you get behind a system where corporate bodies fund campaigns? Or voting systems and techniques refuse to keep up with modern technology? I mean, we're still using first-past-the-post which is long since an archaism.
It's alright, I guess. I don't get the to-do around it. Have it if you want to, don't if you don't. I don't really want to hear about it either way.
I don't think I could kill and I would strenuously avoid any situation that might put me in a position where I'd have to. I think most cases of sentient creatures killing one another are unforgivably barbaric, although I can admit that in most cases the person doing the killing probably thinks that they're doing something necessary.
Of course, intent can be used to justify any number of sins. We should, as a planet, have moved beyond war as a conflict resolution strategy.
I'm on the fence about capital punishment. I think it can be argued for in certain cases, but killing someone is such an irreversible act. You had better be damn sure the person who the state has decided to put to death deserves it, or that blood will be on everyone's hands.
Evil is such a contentious word, but I do agree that there are things people can do (not just human beings, mind) that are so egregiously terrible that they earn the moniker. Off the top of my head: murder and rape, particularly of children.
Less toweringly awful but still completely evil: the perpetuation of systems that intentionally and systemically exploit other thinking beings, particularly in ways that result in mass misery or death. (I'm thinking of things like religious inquisitions, in which sincere beliefs were used to justify horrific killings, or corporations going to third-world countries and stripping them for resources knowing full well that they're causing local and global suffering on an immediate and long-term scale. The ongoing destruction of the Amazon would fit into that.)
Digging a little deeper on that: the knowing and willful abuse of power over those who have no recourse to defend themselves.
This is an interesting line of thought. I'm going to have to pursue it more later.
Not especially, no. I expect that long-term compatibility has more to do with a combination of luck and perseverance, and that the infatuation that most people would consider 'true love' is nothing more than a hormonal trick intended to guide us towards pair-bonding behaviors.
Part 1: The Basics
What is your full name?
Evan Friave-Goodlace. My parents figured two last names precluded a middle name.
Where and when were you born?
In a big old house in the outskirts of a city in Alberta, Canada on January 23rd, 2007. My parents were snowed in after a big storm and had to wrangle my sister -- who was five years old at the time -- while my mother was giving birth. A friend of theirs who had some midwife training made it over in time to lend a hand, but my mom is a very do-it-yourself kind of person at the best of times. Both my sister and I were born at home, and I don't think that's entirely because my mom didn't want to risk having a nonhuman infant in a human hospital.
I've heard her and my dad joke that each of us kids were born in the room we were conceived in. I haven't ever asked what room I was born in.
Who are/were your parents? (Know their names, occupations, personalities, etc.)
My mom is Kay Friave. She's where I get my hair, and a few other more distinctive traits. She used to be a landscaper and renovator, basic manual contract labour for a company in the city, until my sister came along and dad was making enough money that she could stop working. The rest is sort of complicated... she's also a fire elemental, and I've never entirely gotten a straight answer on the logistics of it, but I think she plays at being human pretty regularly. Except for teaching me how not to burn the house down, she's always looked and acted no different than anyone else's mom, I guess. I can tell she's not but I can't quite tell you why or how. It took me a few years when I was little to sort out that there was a meaningful distinction between what we are, and what humans are, beyond the basic fire stuff. She's very old, and she won't tell me how old, but once I pried it out of her that she doesn't ever expect to die.
My dad's a complicated mess too. His name is Aaron Goodlace, and he has technology he really shouldn't. Once when I was seven I was messing around with his computer setup and managed to activate this big mirror I'd been curious about forever... leaving out the details, it was a portal to somewhere. I never got to sort out exactly where it led. The other side looked like some sort of private fitness centre-cum-workroom in steel corrugate, but the PCs were just wired together in a simple closed LAN, and the tech I didn't recognize wouldn't work for me.
Anyways, my mom swears that I'm a solid 50% human so I suppose his secrets run some other direction. He started up a technology security company before I was born and it's done very well; he's a bigshot CEO now. I suspect he cheats. That'd be about right; he's pretty much been encouraging me to game the system since before I could walk.
I know they've been working on a side project together for years -- it ties in somehow to my dad's work, but they've been trying to build a safety network for other supernatural people. They started out just in our city where mom has connections, but I think they've branched out. We get a lot of nonhumans through, and they would both spend long periods of time away from home when I was little. I honestly don't know as much about their work as I should, I think. I haven't asked. I'm not much of a people person.
Do you have any siblings? What are/were they like?
Cassie. My elder sister. If I'm the black sheep of this family of extraverts, she's the sheep that has somehow managed to light itself on fire... pardon the metaphor.
Ugh. I don't like talking about her much. We don't get along very well, and I don't really understand her -- she looked out for me when I was little but she's held it over my head ever since, she's the first person who ever called me a nerd, but she also gave me good advice when I was trying to figure out how to approach this one girl. Cassie's a hard person to deal with.
You should see her and mom go at it. She infuriates and baffles dad, but she and mom will lock horns for days -- weeks, even. I actually haven't seen her in a while... she eloped with this dragon, which drove both dad and mom up the wall, and this may not be a charitable thought but I suspect that's a good proportion of the reason she chose to do it. She chafes, I think: mom and dad both have their lives well in order and their reputations in the community, and I think she feels competitive.
Where do you live now, and with whom? Describe the place and the person/people.
I'm going to a reasonably good college south of the border, so I'm living in a dorm. It's a big old brown sandstone building out of the seventies and it shows: forget private bedrooms or bathrooms, I share my sleeping space with one roommate, John, and a communal bathroom with the whole floor. We've got a kitchenette that we share with another pair of roommates, which according to our history-major RA, is a positive privilege compared to other dorms from this era. I don't know why I would ever use it. We've got cafeteria passes as part of tuition and I'm not some sort of home-made aficionado.
John is a smart kid. He's a year older than me and sometimes I think it seems like he's seen some stuff, but he's got this good-natured sort of happy-go-lucky air about him. He's got a weakness for movies out of the eighties and nineties, including some truly awful romantic comedies. He's thinking of majoring in film, which is a fierce waste. He's got a keen mind, even if he hides it behind what my sister would call 'doofiness'.
I avoid the other two who share our kitchen. They seem to enjoy each others' company, however, I do not think I would have much in common with them. Their forms of leisure seem to fall in the direction of the campus gym.
What is your occupation?
Student, full-time. I'm fortunate in that I got a full scholarship and don't have to work, and my parents are pitching in for any extra costs I end up needing covered. I don't tend to advertise to classmates that I don't have to work: too many of them seem too exhausted for that to net me anything other than jealous disdain.
Write a full physical description of yourself.
You might want to consider factors such as: height, weight, race, hair and eye color, style of dress, and any tattoos, scars, or distinguishing marks.
Oh, Lord. Let me grab a mirror...
I'm maybe five foot six, hundred and forty or so pounds. Is that skinny? I don't quite have my dad's build. My hair's a muted pale reddish and it's sort of fine, I guess. My mom's a redhead and my dad's blonde so I suppose that was pretty much a given, with all those recessives. I've got brown eyes. I don't wear glasses; apparently I've got appallingly good genetics for eyesight, despite the fact that my dad's blue-eyed. He's getting a bit farsighted these days so I suppose I've got that to look forward to. I don't really have any scars or tattoos, and I'm not sure I'd get any given the chance. I dress in jeans or slacks mostly, t-shirts for casual days and button-ups when someone's going to be judging me by how I look.
My face is sort of squarish... I've got a bit of a nose on me. My eyebrows sort of arch? I don't know, this is weird.
To which social class do you belong?
Upper middle class solidly. Frankly, by now my parents are rich. They're new money but that doesn't mean much in a province of oil magnates.
Do you have any allergies, diseases, or other physical weaknesses?
Physical weaknesses? Do you define lack of physical strength as a weakness specifically? I'm sort of scrawny, I'm told, which is fair enough given I don't work out. I don't have any allergies that I know of or chronic conditions, although I get viruses just like anyone else, and I've sprained my ankle twice and once broke a finger. Well, that may not be entirely true: I once broke out in full-body hives while out camping when I was little, and we never did figure out what caused those.
Are you right- or left-handed?
Right-handed. I suppose I am not especially sinister.
What does your voice sound like?
You know, everyone functions under the impression that their voice is deeper than it is. You hear your own voice partially through transmission via your own skull, so you get more of the low frequencies transmitted straight to your auditory bones than the high ones. Moreover, recordings aren't generally much more reliable: very little non-professional audio equipment has high enough fidelity to be much use.
In short, I don't properly know. What an awkward question.
What words and/or phrases do you use very frequently?
Uhhh... hmm.
'I suppose', I suppose. I like to think I ask 'why' a lot, when others wouldn't think to ask. That may be vanity speaking. I know I use 'fair enough' when I want to gracefully concede a point, even when it's not entirely applicable. I don't know if this counts, but I've been told on more than one occasion that I use big words.
What do you have in your pockets?
Four dollars and fifteen cents, a note I wrote myself about getting my physics notes back from Bradley, my wallet, and my keys.
Do you have any quirks, strange mannerisms, annoying habits, or other defining characteristics?
Now, how would you expect me to know what other people think is strange about me? I'm reasonably self-aware, but I think I'll need to call in some outside help for this one.
John, my roommate: "He moves my stuff! I'll get home and all of my books will be all over my bed. But Evan's a good guy mostly! He sometimes does my laundry, he says it's because it gets too smelly. Sometimes he'll wash the colors with the blacks, though. My nice Ghostbusters shirt got a ton of green lint all over it one time. Actually come to think of it, that might have made it better! Uh... he does that pen-clicky thing a lot when he's doing his homework. and he's really hard to talk to when he's studying."
(for reference, I don't "move his stuff". When his things end up on my side of the room I'll put them back on his, and I always pile them very neatly, thank you very much.)
Kay, my mother: "Hey, kiddo, what's this for? ... oh, hah! Seriously? Alright, cover your ears. Covered? Good.
"He's always, always hated it when you interrupt him in the middle of a project, but he's got a really specific way of showing his disapproval. If you make a nuisance while he's busy he'll cut you out till he gets to finish with whatever he was doing. Like, when he was little and you tried to take away his legos for dinnertime? He wouldn't talk to you till he got his hands on those legos again.
"Or are we talking bigger picture, here? About half the time he won't meet your eyes when you're talking to him; it's hard to tell when he actually heard something you've said because he'll give the same generic lukewarm mm-hmm either way; he fidgets when he's working on a particularly snarly problem.
"But oh, he lights up when he's learned something new. Or better yet, when he's cornered you to be a captive audience for questioning. I've watched him go right through people like that: he had a science teacher in junior high who was his best friend for about a year, and I'm not even exaggerating. We had to invite that man over for dinner once, just to get a read and make sure he wasn't some sort of creeper. Turns out he was as confused as we were. The thing was, the guy used to be a college professor before he went into early ed, and so he had a college-level understanding of scientific concepts as well as a remarkably effective way of getting ideas across to kids, so whenever Evan wanted to pick someone's brain he was the go-to guy. But I'm getting off-task again, aren't I?"
Aaron, my father: "Evan? Oh, he's got lots of tics, but I won't list off the ones he had from the time he was knee-high. Mostly, that look, the one right there, he wears it like a poker face, but you can tell by the way his ears perk up that he's angry or embarrassed. He's got a great pout, too, and the boy always clips the tags out of his clothes. Memorises the laundry instructions, don't you, son?
"He's got his good quirks, too. Does his laundry, does his homework--and then some--and he's good at seeing a bigger picture. I used to worry that he'd get bogged down in the details, but you give him a little time and he always comes back to the point he was trying to make, which is important when you're trying to lead people to your point of view. He actually listens, too, which means out of all of the family, Evan's got the upper hand. He's a real charmer, too.
"Oh, I am too allowed to wink at the interviewer! She seems nice? Your new girlfr--? Oh come on now! I'm happy to answer any other questions!"
Part 2: Growing Up
How would you describe your childhood in general?
Private. I grew up in a repurposed old farmhouse on a little acreage on the outskirts of my city. My sister was too many years older than me to want to spend much time with me if she had any other option -- I was born after she was already in kindergarten. I didn't exactly get play-dates with other kids my age, at least until I was old enough to realize that most kids can't crawl into the fireplace for fun, and some of why.
I suppose it's a good thing that I was never all that inclined to be sociable to begin with, or I'd probably have ended up just about as attention-crazy as Cassie. But I had my parents, sometimes one, sometimes both, and I had our big dog, and our cat. I was happy enough.
What is your earliest memory?
That's a really hard thing to pinpoint. I've thought about it and it's hard to get temporal markers on anything before school started. I remember being young enough to ride on my dad's shoulders, though, which means I must have been younger than four or so. I was sitting on his shoulders as he walked through the stand of trees out back of the acreage and petting his hair, thinking it wasn't as nice as the cat's.
How much schooling have you had?
I'm in my second year of college. Technically I've had a year less education than most kids my age: I skipped grade three. I was already reading and writing at an advanced level. I remember wanting to make them skip me all the way to five, but to be fair, being two sizes smaller than my peers probably would have netted me even more grief.
In any case I'm headed for a comp sci degree, and I should achieve that in two years. I think at that point I'll know for sure whether I want to get my Master's in the computer sciences, or try something else out for a while.
Did you enjoy school?
No, it's been terrible, a total slog.
Oh, Lord, forget it, I don't do sarcasm well. There have been times that I've gotten impatient with the pace and I can't say I've ever been a fan of the social aspect, but for the most part, I've always enjoyed school. I know, that's blasphemous for a young person to say, but you get out of it what you put into it, don't you?
At the worst school is busywork, but at best, years when I had a teacher who could keep up with me, it's been my respite from everything else. I like the challenge of mastering the material, even the stuff that isn't my favourite, like history. I never did as well in the 'soft' classes, but getting a B in art is hardly a black mark as far as I'm concerned.
Where did you learn most of your skills and other abilities?
There's no one place, of course. That's ridiculous. Oh... wait.
I see: you're expecting me to say 'school'. Which is true enough. Most of my knowledge and a good deal of my practical skills come from classes, but isn't that true of most people of my age and class? After all, we're there eight hours a day and have been, in most cases, since we were five or six. So yes, I have learned most of my skills through the wonder of public school, supplemented, of course, by the internet. Wolfram Alpha is a remarkable resource for self-teaching.
On the other hand, that hasn't been the whole of my education. Public schooling has been very abysmal in terms of keeping up with computer technology as it's developed -- still no computer courses in junior high, only the most generic ones in high school -- and that's a major oversight in our current world. My dad got me started on the track of teaching myself how to navigate and really understand computers, and he's still the person I check with first when I've got a question about network architecture or certain kinds of theoretical models. I know there are things he knows that he's not telling me, but those I'll eventually sort out on my own. He still doesn't lock his computer room very securely.
There are other things, too. Naturally, I've learned everything I know about how to control and use some of my more innate skills from my mother. Those lessons are not ones you would find in any public classroom.
While growing up, did you have any role models? If so, describe them.
****Skip this one until I can go look up someone appropriately obscure to be Evan's role model. XD****
While growing up, how did you get along with the other members of your family?
My most contentious relationship was with my sister, Cassie. She couldn't seem to decide whether she wanted to be my defender and champion or be my tormenter. Or, maybe, those two things dovetailed: maybe she didn't want anyone else picking on me so that she could? No, honestly, I think she was just bored, and she took it out on me. She'd bait me to do things and then make fun of me when I couldn't, but would seem really incensed if I ever could. Other times we'd play great games of lets'-pretend, or she'd even try and come play with my toys and make up great plays to keep me entertained.
I mean despite all that, when I was really little I looked up to her. She was the only older kid I had much contact with and she was energetic, gregarious, she'd have friends over -- and she was better with her powers than me, which really made me want to learn. I think I always knew she was more sociable than she was, but I used to try and hang around with her and the friends she brought home from school. She's always better when she has her friends around her, she seems really in her element, she thrives on the attention. By the time I hit about ten and she was fifteen, though, we'd begun to have very little to do with one another. I'd figured out how to sidestep her torment, and really, both of us had figured out that we didn't have much in common, temperamentally.
My mom was a stay-at-home mother, for the most part, except that sometimes she'd head out of town for a week or a month on things I was never really told about. I think I drove her a bit nuts. By the time I came around Cassie was at school, and she went from this insanely energetic child who wore her moods on her sleeves to, well, me. I remember a lot of misunderstandings. She'd think I was upset about something when all I was doing was working on a problem. She'd try and get me excited about going out and doing things outdoors, and would be sort of nonplussed when I either didn't want to, or just didn't show much enthusiasm. On the other hand I remember really enjoying the times we were getting along, particularly when she was teaching me things. I learned a lot of my humour from her, and I accredit her with a certain degree of my pragmatism. I think by the time I was in school for a couple of years she'd sort of sorted me out and knew to sort of tone it down, and I know when I was a teenager she found me to be a relief. Ultimately, I'm quite comfortable with our relationship.
My dad worked a lot, and I think he felt about as strongly about his work as he does about us. He would work late, and sometimes work weekends, and it was quite a long a transit from our home to his work. I was always very excited to see him in a way my mother never got, due to just how ubiquitously she was around and he was not. My favourite times were earlier on -- for a while when I was young, he could work from home a couple days a week. I suppose after a fashion he was a puzzle to me, and one that I was always excited to get a chance to sort out. Of course, he'd cut his teeth on Cassie too and I think he was fairly excited himself when I turned out to be more inclined towards learning. He taught me basic math before most of my peers could count to fifty, and he taught me about computer networks not long after that. He worked hard to keep feeding me puzzles and problems, keep one step ahead of me to keep me running at full speed. On the other hand, he has this enraging sense of humour -- I think he tries to prod me socially in the same way he's always managed to intellectually, and I get this feeling that he takes some joy in watching me squirm. His sarcastic streak confused me a lot as a child, and sometimes made me think he was mad at me when he wasn't.
Both of my parents... well, one of the last big talks Cassie and I had was about mom, and about how strange it is that she is what she is. It infuriates Cassie, I think: she said mom doesn't take us seriously, that she's just playing a game, and that dad's just as bad. The thing is, I don't think she's entirely wrong... at least in that both of them have a very different perspective than most parents. I am almost certain that we are not our mother's first children, just... from things she and dad have said to each other over the years when they thought I wasn't listening. But at the same time, Cassie sees the worst of them because she goes out of her way to fight them. I've seen the way they've looked at each other, our parents that is, and I've seen real fear and concern on their faces when they've thought Cassie was in real trouble. They may take the long view, but I'm not sure that precludes real care.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
An astronaut. An astrophysicist. There was a period of time during which my dad convinced me that being an accountant was all about using math to make money, and so I wanted to be an accountant for a while. To be fair that is essentially the job, but the math is all very simple math...
There were a lot of things I wanted to be, but none of them have specifically stuck. Computer sciences isn't to work me towards a particular job, but because I truly enjoy the subject matter. Ultimately, I think it matters less to me what I end up doing as a career: I just want to be the best in my field at whatever I end up doing.
As a child, what were your favourite activities?
Reading, of course. Anything I could get my hands on, up to and including my sister's Babysitter Club books until I got made fun of for that. I did read my sister's diary once, which is less interesting than you would think.
Building things. I liked blocks and engineering kits, bottle rockets, later more complicated rockets... a lot of the time it came back to blocks, though, because there's something fascinating about taking generic pieces and turning them into something functional or interesting. I think my mom hoped for a while that I'd end up having the same kind of fun with home improvement projects that she does, but painting and sanding are dull.
I had, and still have, a propensity for walking. I may not be muscular but if I need to I can walk all day. I would head out back of the acre and walk some of the trails through the aspen forest regularly when I was a kid. I even had a few favorite climbing trees. I could see our house from one, the downtown core from another. Nothing is quite as nice as the kind of quiet you get when there isn't another human for half a kilometre in every direction. That, I miss: being close enough to some degree of wilderness that you can simply disappear for an afternoon.
As a child, what kinds of personality traits did you display?
Yet another question that forces me to guess what other people thought of me as a child. Honestly, every child thinks of themselves as normal, and everyone else as having 'personality traits', don't they?
I suppose in retrospect I was about the same as I am now. Quiet, inclined to my own company, curious, studious. Even-tempered? Compared to Cassie, certainly. I suppose I was fairly self-centred, but again, what child isn't?
As a child, were you popular? Who were your friends, and what were they like?
Popular? No, never. Not even in nerd circles.
In retrospect a lot of that was my own doing. Apparently I was pretty timid around other kids when I first started school, and I think over the years that morphed into a kind of indifference to them, once I sorted out they were no threat. Thinking back, I recall what must have been overtures of friendship... but I only ever really had one or two other kids I'd choose to spend time with in any given year, and I've never been good at staying in contact with acquaintances outside of our context of acquaintance.
There were a couple of years where this was almost a real problem, but any incipient bullying stopped when I got into grade one and it turned out my sister was a particularly popular and secretly kind of vicious fifth-grader. I'm still glad of her help back then.
The kids I did spend time with, though, they were kind of a mixed bag. Mostly other outcasts. From grades three through six it was a kid named Flynn, who loved Disney movies and could recite whole movies from memory, but was sort of a spaz in the classroom. I liked him because he could just keep vomiting up factoids for days, and he liked me because I actually listened to what he had to say. I still wonder about him, actually: he came from a really poor family and his parents were... well, they left something to be desired as parents.
That was sort of the pattern, though. In junior high I was friends with the school whipping boy; in high school I fell in with a rather insular group that'd known each other for years. That suited me: I was sort of the free agent who came and went as I pleased, but they always seemed happy to have me join them. I had them out to the acre on a couple of very memorable instances, actually. I'm sure that contributed.
When and with whom was your first kiss?
Hmmm. Shortly before my eighteenth birthday. At a New Years party, with a girl from the group I just mentioned, Chelsea.
Neither of us had any idea what we were doing, it was an embarrassingly bad kiss. We sorted that out later, however.
Are you a virgin? If not, when and with whom did you lose your virginity?
That's a remarkably personal question!
If you must know: no; when I was nineteen; with Chelsea.
If you are a supernatural being (i.e. mage, werewolf, vampire), tell the story of how you became what you are or first learned of your own abilities.
I can't think of a time when I wasn't aware of what I was. I may not always have had control over it, but I was always aware that fire was a -- a friend, or something. Or, no, that's not right -- fire was comfort, like being curled up under a big duvet when it's forty below and blizzarding outside. I remember crawling into the lit fireplace when I was little, shoving the logs aside and curling up for naptime. Come to think of it I probably ran up quite a bill in toddler clothes.
I think more pertinent was when I realized what I wasn't: that is to say, that I wasn't like everyone else. I learned early that you don't set your toys on fire, but it took a lot longer to sort out that it was okay to play with fire around family and some of our friends but that around other people I had to hide it and never speak of it. I remember having trouble with that one.
Part 3: Past Influences
What do you consider the most important event of your life so far?
I have had a very sedate go of things, thus far. If you're expecting high drama, mine is not the life to look to. In the interests of completeness, however, I will take a swing at these.
Well, and now the question I've got for you is 'most important' in what regard? Being born was fairly important. Going to school for the first time was fairly pivotal. I don't think I would be who I am without a long progression of pretty mundane events. I suppose if you forced me to pick one, it would be when my mom finally sat me down and told me I was old enough to start learning how to use my elemental skills. That's the only knowledge I can't really get anywhere else, anywhere other than her, so if she had decided not to teach me, I'd pretty much just be up the creek in that regard. Fire isn't really something you experiment with.
Who has had the most influence on you?
My dad, in the blatant ways. He's directly responsible for me deciding to go into computer science, I think, since you can trace my fascination with computers back to the games we used to play when I'd be excited to have him home after a long absence. Looking back, he was implacable in trying to mould my inquisitive tendencies into a truly directed scientific approach to learning. I don't know if he did it for that reason, or because it was his way of relating to a somewhat reserved child, but either way, I'm thankful.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Skipping a grade was something. I also graduated salutatorian of my class in high school. The guy who got valedictorian only edged me out because they took extracurriculars into consideration, the duplicitous bastards.
Hmmph. Ask me this question again in ten years and I'll have a more interesting answer, I'm sure. I'm just getting started.
What is your greatest regret?
Oh. I... hmm.
Listen, I'll come right out and say it. I am not good at reading people. I never have been. I don't know if I'm just not wired for it, or if I haven't learned the skills or what, but... yeah. The point is, the girl I mentioned a handful of questions up? I made stupid mistakes with her. I can see it in retrospect, but at the time, I totally failed to notice that when we'd talk, she'd be talking as much in subtext as in clearly-stated information. I missed a lot of the things I think she was trying to tell me, and in the end, I think she left me because I failed to pick up on those signals.
I can pick apart the nuances of a mathematical proof until the cows come home, I can understand and work out the loopy knots that ill-written code sometimes ties itself in. I regret not giving her enough credit to consider that she had as much complexity to her as the things I study. I regret screwing up our friendship by failing to pay attention.
What is the most evil thing you have ever done?
Ugh. I hate this.
You know how kids are pretty amoral before they start to develop a wider social awareness? When I was just sorting out that I could cause things to light on fire with just a little bit of effort of will, maybe when I was six or so, there was this squirrel running around in the back acre. I used to watch them a lot, the squirrels and the groundhogs...
So I was watching it, and thinking about the new skills I had, and I lit that squirrel on fire. I don't even remember why I did it, I just kind of wanted to. My mom didn't even stop me, and she was right there. I remember smelling cooked meat and not connecting it to what I'd done until the poor thing stopped running and fell over.
I didn't use my elemental skills for a while after that.
Do you have a criminal record of any kind?
Clean as a whistle. Ugh... though I'd probably have a charge of animal cruelty if anyone really knew about that squirrel thing. And, you know, if charging six-year-olds was a thing.
Also, what is with that aphorism? Whistles aren't clean. They're full of dried spit. Ew.
When was the time you were the most frightened?
Oh, this is silly, but...
When I was in elementary school, my sister was charged with coming to pick me up after school and taking us both to after-school care on the couple of days a week when mom was regularly busy. One day she didn't show up -- I don't even remember why, she probably just forgot. Anyhow, after waiting for thirty minutes and brushing off teachers when they asked, I figured I'd just take myself to after-school care.
I was like, eight, and used to getting a ride home. I had a bus pass and there was a bus stop out front of my school where my sister and I would get on to take us to after-school care, and, being eight and inexperienced, I thought that there must only be one bus that stopped at that stop.
I ended up in the downtown core, no idea where I was, no idea how to get home, my phone's battery dead. This was in November or something, when it gets dark at about four in the afternoon, so to make things even more fun it was snowy and pitch-black. I remember being so scared that I hid in the back of the bus and cried and cried. I thought I was going to get in so much trouble, or that I was going to get eaten or abducted or something. It didn't really occur to me that as a kid with power over fire and dubious control, I was probably more a threat to anyone who might abduct me than they were to me...
In any case, when the bus got to the station at the end of its line, the driver finally noticed the red-headed eight-year-old who was still huddled in the seats at the back. He was a really kind guy, he took a solid half hour after his shift ended to help me charge my phone and call home and let my parents know where I was, and he waited with me while they came to get me.
What is the most embarrassing thing ever to happen to you?
Well, that bus thing was pretty embarrassing at the time...
I can think of four or five times where I answered questions wrong in class that seemed mortifying at the time, but honestly, most of my really wince-worthy moments have had to do with social missteps. None of them stand out as the worst of the worst, and I kind of am not keen on digging back through them right now.
If you could change one thing from your past, what would it be, and why?
Probably so thoroughly botching things with Chelsea, although to be fair that was not a single event but a series of small failures. I think, with that in mind, I would have been more aggressive about seeking out the top schools for my program. In part I chose the school that I did because it also had the program that Chelsea was going into. It's an excellent school, don't get me wrong -- but I should have shot for the cream of the crop.
What is your best memory?
When I was about fifteen, I won a province-wide robotics competition with a team of classmates, and we got shipped down to a robotics conference in the States. Winning the competition by itself would have been enough to win a spot in the top five best memories: it was a serious competition, not a feel-good science fair, and for the most part I was competing against kids older than me. But the conference itself was incredible: it had some of the foremost minds in the world in the field of robotics, and then in the evening we got stashed in our own hotel room.
I didn't grow up with a lot of friends and I didn't often get the chance to have things like sleepovers. At the time it felt totally wild to be away from my parents for a whole four days, much less be allowed to determine my own bedtime and order from room service. We actually got in trouble for that last, but it was a blast. Those kids ended up being my friends through the first couple of years of high school, till they graduated and left for university.
What is your worst memory?
The squirrel thing was pretty bad.
Actually... no. When I think about it, there's something else. I try not to think about this one that much because it really has nothing to do with me.
Part of my parents' business is helping out other supernatural folks who are having a hard time integrating. The thing is that not all nonhumans, ah... well, not all of them are what we would consider good people.
There was a therianthrope from somewhere in South America who'd decided to immigrate up here because she'd lost her home down there. I don't know what exactly happened there, but something else followed her up. She showed up at our house one evening, in really rough shape. I must have been about six. I remember thinking she looked like a man I'd seen on the news the other day who'd fallen down a shale slope in the Rockies. My parents sent me to bed early. After a while they put her in the spare room next to mine. I didn't know this at the time but my mom stayed downstairs, on guard.
My room and the spare room have almost identical windows, right next to one another, and I woke up I don't know how long into the night to something scratching at mine. I went to see what it was and there was this face -- all I remember now was these teeth, these curling teeth that spiralled up from its bottom jaw, and this nose that sort of looked like a leaf-nosed bat's. I remember staring as it opened my window. I don't know why I didn't call my mom then, I think I was scared stiff. I tried to hold the window down but it pried it up like I wasn't even there, and crept into my room. It asked me where the therian was. I barely understood it, it had a really thick accent.
I thought I was very clever, then. I'd caught on that I needed to get my mom but suspected if I ran for it this thing was going to do something terrible, so I told it I'd show it where the therian was, and led it out of my room. I was a few steps in front of it, closer to my parents' room, so when I pointed at the door where the therian was staying and it looked that way, I bolted for my parents.
It was just dad in the bedroom and I realized my mistake and started screaming my head off for mom. Dad grabbed me so I couldn't run back out when he realized what was going on, but I remember the sound of mom pounding up the stairs and a bunch of screechy noises -- in retrospect probably screams -- from the spare room.
My mom came out a while later and brought me and dad to Astren's cavern. I don't know what happened to the therian. I didn't ask. I don't think it was good.
Part 4: Beliefs And Opinions
Are you basically optimistic or pessimistic?
I like to think I don't break the world down into such simplistic categories. I prefer to think of myself as realistic and pragmatic.
What is your greatest fear?
Mediocrity. I can cop to that.
What are your religious views?
It's hard to believe in the gods offered by human religion when they seem to be so unaware of so many things. The dragon gods I might be more inclined to believe perhaps might have existed at some point, given that even the dragons admit that their gods must be either dead or sleeping to have failed to intervene in the spread of humanity for so long.
Even then, it's hard to believe in the idea of gods when your mother is dubiously immortal. If she's a god, we're all in trouble. (Sorry, mom.)
What are your political views?
Government is a carnival show, which makes it hard to really believe in either team. Too much of it is spin and no substance, and too many people buy in to the incredibly simplistic party system as the best of all potential options, or vote reactively rather than proactively. The whole system is deeply flawed, and when faced with trying to choose the lesser of a small handful of evils, I find myself enervated. I mean, how can you get behind a system where corporate bodies fund campaigns? Or voting systems and techniques refuse to keep up with modern technology? I mean, we're still using first-past-the-post which is long since an archaism.
What are your views on sex?
It's alright, I guess. I don't get the to-do around it. Have it if you want to, don't if you don't. I don't really want to hear about it either way.
Are you able to kill? Under what circumstances do you find killing to be acceptable or unacceptable?
I don't think I could kill and I would strenuously avoid any situation that might put me in a position where I'd have to. I think most cases of sentient creatures killing one another are unforgivably barbaric, although I can admit that in most cases the person doing the killing probably thinks that they're doing something necessary.
Of course, intent can be used to justify any number of sins. We should, as a planet, have moved beyond war as a conflict resolution strategy.
I'm on the fence about capital punishment. I think it can be argued for in certain cases, but killing someone is such an irreversible act. You had better be damn sure the person who the state has decided to put to death deserves it, or that blood will be on everyone's hands.
In your opinion, what is the most evil thing any human being could do?
Evil is such a contentious word, but I do agree that there are things people can do (not just human beings, mind) that are so egregiously terrible that they earn the moniker. Off the top of my head: murder and rape, particularly of children.
Less toweringly awful but still completely evil: the perpetuation of systems that intentionally and systemically exploit other thinking beings, particularly in ways that result in mass misery or death. (I'm thinking of things like religious inquisitions, in which sincere beliefs were used to justify horrific killings, or corporations going to third-world countries and stripping them for resources knowing full well that they're causing local and global suffering on an immediate and long-term scale. The ongoing destruction of the Amazon would fit into that.)
Digging a little deeper on that: the knowing and willful abuse of power over those who have no recourse to defend themselves.
This is an interesting line of thought. I'm going to have to pursue it more later.
Do you believe in the existence of soul mates and/or true love?
Not especially, no. I expect that long-term compatibility has more to do with a combination of luck and perseverance, and that the infatuation that most people would consider 'true love' is nothing more than a hormonal trick intended to guide us towards pair-bonding behaviors.
