You are being far too hard on yourself. I know you used to give a lot of your time to homeless kids via that church program. When you were outed and kicked out of the program for being yourself that did NOT, and I repeat NOT, devalue what you had done for those kids. Neither the church nor their program deserved you. The kids didn’t care that you were trans, what mattered to them was that you cared about them.

“So according to Melissa, we’re meeting her here and she’s giving us a spare key to the theater,” Aleah informed as she turned left into a parking lot behind what looked like the shadiest building in the city. That’s a lot coming from me, by the way. Woodcrest had seen its fair share of ‘shady’ buildings, with one of my favorites being an old record store that housed a pallet of cocaine in the back room. I guess at some point the police realized that a vinyl record store was a little bit out of place in a college town. I wondered what kind of drugs this shithole was hiding.

“ It is about half hour to Todd's office so we'd better get going.”

Their heels clicked on the kitchen floor as they went to the garage. They took the Marauder. It was more professional.

Todd's law office was in Southfield along the Lodge expressway. The pulled up at quarter to 11.

As they walked in. The guard looked up. “ Good Morning, Miss Reid.”

 
Introduction: This story is the third, the penultimate, in a series within a series. The overall series is the “Cynthia Chronicles”. This story is directly connected to “Simoné and the Second Time Around” and “Marti and the Doppelganger”. The latter left many unanswered questions. Some of those will be answered, some probably not. There are many references to previous stories in the series. If you are confused by some of them, just put it off to my senility. The Cynthia Chronicles takes place in a universe very similar to ours. Unfortunately, it might be too similar.

For any who read “Myrna and the Genetic Disaster”, this is the same story, only with the political rantings and scientific explanations removed. There may also have been a few edits and additions.

This is the ninth part of ten or maybe eleven. I had considered reorganizing the last few chapters of the story as there is quite a bit of skipping around and going back and forth in time. I decided the heck with it and left them as they were.

Ronnie and her mother discuss the past weekend, especially, how good it was for everyone. The raccoon family continues to learn about their new environment. Their neighbor is a bit upset with them. They’re innocent..

 
Introduction: This story is the third, the penultimate, in a series within a series. The overall series is the “Cynthia Chronicles”. This story is directly connected to “Simoné and the Second Time Around” and “Marti and the Doppelganger”. The latter left many unanswered questions. Some of those will be answered, some probably not. There are many references to previous stories in the series. If you are confused by some of them, just put it off to my senility. The Cynthia Chronicles takes place in a universe very similar to ours. Unfortunately, it might be too similar.

For any who read “Myrna and the Genetic Disaster”, this is the same story, only with the political rantings and scientific explanations removed. There may also have been a few edits and additions.

This is the eighth part of ten or maybe eleven. I had considered reorganizing the last few chapters of the story as there is quite a bit of skipping around and going back and forth in time. I decided the heck with it and left them as they were.

The girls take a short road trip to Chico, California to visit Rhonda and her family. There is a lot of bonding.

“Why isn’t Shawn at the DEM house?” Aleah asked curiously as we pulled into his driveway. The trek down the long stretch of pavement was smooth and involved only a slight turn, leading us easily onto the parking space just in front of the house. Shawn’s house was big, really, really big. So big in fact that if he ever wanted to move out, all he’d have to do is move his stuff to the other side. To be perfectly honest no one was certain what Shawn’s dad did for a living; Mr. Derringer was as mysterious as he was dangerous I supposed.

What you don't know, can be taught to you.

Galen slowly came to, his head aching from being punched by a gun. At first, it was just lights and movement. Over time, though, everything became clearer, the voices piercing. Finally, Galen fully came to, headache and all, but otherwise alive. He tested his ears and eyes, just making sure that they didn’t cause a concussion. Everything checked out, so then he focused on where he was. He was in some office room. It looked abandoned, the paper scattered around and the shattered computer monitors on the cracked and water-damaged desks.

What do you wear if you don't know who you are?

With little else to do other than wait till it’s time to take my medication I thought I’d finish writing up the story of my life. So far as it goes that is.

My job in Chichester was with an existing four-person research team. This was very much an ‘on the quiet’ part of Sally’s group of companies. My task was to add a wider perspective of views to reports that the others were compiling for her. She’d told me that once I’d gotten my feet under the table so to speak, I’d be given my own projects to work on. This made me feel both proud and slightly scared at the same time. Sally had put a lot of faith in me so it was now up to me to not let her down.

On the way down to Sussex, Sally briefed me about the other members of the team. They had all been poached from large financial institutions in London or from Academia. They were enticed by London sized salaries and being able to live in the Sussex countryside.

Is finding out who you are like winning a prize?

I heard two loud mechanical ‘thuds’ as Aleah threw the van into gear and rumbled down the GAT driveway. As we emerged onto the street I cast a wayward glance at Leina who was busying herself with her phone. I glanced at the screen silently but couldn’t make out what she was doing. I shrugged and looked toward the window, observing the world as it blew by.

“Do you want to ask me something?” Leina asked. I looked back, she’d set her phone on her lap, hands crossed over it, her gaze fixed directly on me.

“Okay,” Aleah sighed, pacing back and forth in front of the couch. Beside me I distinctly heard the sound of Kari flipping through her book, probably ignoring the world around her, as usual. “I hate to actually be productive today, but we need to find Audrey. We have…forty seven hours to get it done, so we need to think. What do we know about Audrey?”

“Oh, her favorite show is Power Rangers,” Leina interrupted. “She absolutely loves it. When we were kids playing pretend she would be the pink ranger.”

“And that didn’t raise any suspicion?” I stared at her.

Stepping over to the table where Leina, Aleah, Courtney, and Lauren sat, I dropped a thick folder onto the surface and opened the cover.