Started 1/25/2022
== Disclaimers ==
1. While this starts before the main character is 18, no sexual situations begin until after he turns 18 and thereafter has to move to an apartment for the summer on his own. All other characters are over 18 as well, all subsequent characters are college-aged or older.
2. If you're not comfortable with the mind-control sub-genre, relax, it's a fantasy with some magic, there's nothing forced here, and I hope the ideas play out with some happy-fun aspects.
3. All names are completely invented. Remember, in a world with 8 billion people, if you're one in a million, there's 8,000 people exactly like you.
== Chapter: A Messy Childhood ==
The term 'prolific' typically describes authors or poets, composers or performers, and sometimes chefs. I humbly beg you consider my alternate definition: My life. I'll shed some color, you can decide.
My name is Kevin Kuiper. The below is, more or less, my life story. Some parts are pretty old so you're going to have to remember or imagine a time when phones were attached to walls.
Growing up, I never knew my father. I didn't even know his name. Mom would only ever say that she didn't know his name either, and that some things "Just happened."
In any sane universe, given her rampant alcoholism, I'd have been taken away.
If so, I could have had foster parents and a normal childhood.
Instead, my mother's on-again off-again functional alcoholism translated to her having various jobs as physician's assistant, paralegal, short-order cook, and accountant's assistant, which made sense because although she was a drunk, she was really damn smart.
Her career path was a sequence of jobs that required either daily attendance or some plausible excuse. Since she used excuses fast, she had to move on.
I have vague memories of being super-young and reasonably well cared for - she read to me, played games, encouraged my storytelling and science explorations (though visits to the park were sometimes stumbling on the return trip).
The happy-drunk lady that was 'mom', who cared for me, I ended up caring for when she 'fell down' a bit too often. This made life more and more unreasonable as time passed.
We lived in a crap-den apartment above a busy college bar, so sleeping through the night was more of a life skill than most people have to acquire. It got loud after 3 pm, and there was no way it was good for studying or reading if I had to concentrate.
Silicone earplugs were vital.
My mom introduced me to the public library when I was in kindergarten, and with her permission/urging, I went there directly after school. In those days, we kids just walked around the town with no one watching, because no one was. We were kids, part of the landscape. It wasn't until later that people obsessed about exactly where their kids were every second.
Library closing meant I had to leave by 8:30 pm, or earlier if certain busybody librarians went prowling looking for who I was attached to. I figured out what their schedules were, though, and sought out other places to spend my time.
Did I mention we were in a college town?
The college library, the "Kale Center", was a complex of several interconnected buildings instead of being just one. Some time in 2nd grade, I found a student ID card on the ground outside the Gaston pub where we lived, and it turned out it opened the door to the almost-always empty Mathematics library. From there I could get through the Cartography Library, and then to the Economics Library (each of them had names but who cares, everyone called them Kale-math, or Kale-econ, etc.).
Less populated ones were better, but I stuck around Kale-econ since the student union bistro trashcan was next to the library door.
I ate a LOT of dinners at Kale-econ! Students don't eat all the food they order, and I was damn hungry a lot of days. I wasn't dumb, though, I packed out my trash and left no traces. The bar downstairs had a kitchen and I could get food there sometimes but I had to be cagey about it, and some cooks were cooler than others.
In 4th grade, I started seeing (to my great surprise) someone as short as me walking the Kale hallways. She was a small person, in those days called a dwarf or a midget. I watched her enough to copy her walking gait (oddly stiff-hipped) in the mirror at home, and, with some extra sweatshirts and a stagecraft wig I co-opted (stole) from the theater department, the resemblance was good enough I got away with it!
This ability to blend into a college-aged crowd and yet keep to myself meant I was seldom bothered, though I was whispered about, I could tell that much. Sometimes some student would help me with a door or whatever, which had the added benefit of not having to get out my (lost/stolen) access badge.
To say my schoolwork didn't suffer from these adventures and time spent reading irrelevant books would be a lie. Sure it suffered. But, I read a ton of other stuff that ended up benefiting me in odd ways later - based just on whatever seemed interesting at the time.
At the end of the semester, the second semester after I got into the Kale-econ, I found there was magic in finals week: beautiful free stuff, everywhere!
It wasn't just furniture and clothes that people threw out behind apartments, it was books and papers and supplies, too. They just dumped them in the trash cans - in libraries, behind the greek houses, dorm dumpsters, everything. I brought a lot of it home to either my mother's applause or condemnation, and it didn't matter if she yelled, she usually let me keep the stuff I grabbed because I defended it and she was tired.
Some of what I got was moving-out Found Greatness. We got new furniture, cookware, silverware... and I got BOOKS! I liked books. Sometimes I'd read the same one a Third Time (even though I remembered it) just for the experience.
Something else I got and treasured, though only in semesters after that: class notes.
Most college students take notes. The quality of these notes (upon my wide survey) is highly variable. Good or bad in legibility, cogent thoughts, diagrams, doodles, and how-to specifications, it didn't matter. I sought them out because I could find out what was being said in those classrooms I couldn't get into.
I got to be a connoisseur of notes. After a while, a glance would tell me if they were useful or not, a subject I cared about, etc. Some even smelled like pee or beer, so I had to watch for that, too.
So, that's how I spent my childhood. I didn't go out and play with other kids. We didn't get along. They were always talking about stupid crap and yelling and screaming and running for no reason, and I didn't get that.
It was almost like they didn't have to clean up their mom's puke at night.
Plus, importantly, our apartment wasn't near them anyway. Our bar was a mile or more away from anything like a house (dorms, student apartments, sure, but not houses). Even if I'd had a friend and they were reasonably close, I couldn't keep a bicycle. Behind the bar, they'd always get stolen or wrecked, no matter how I disguised them or locked them up.
So, I just couldn't go over to other people's houses, except for special occasions maybe.
Instead, I lived my life in this set of odd hangouts, wandering in and out of libraries and with my adopted gait and costume, I could walk around campus mostly unobserved. That freedom let me do what I wanted, knowing I had the home-bound shame of an alcoholic mom that would give me huge spankings if I did the wrong thing or got in a fight at school or anything.
In my regular school, though, they asked stupid questions, ones I'd figured out long ago. I just stayed quiet and mostly answered incorrectly to keep them off my back. I figured out early, no one likes a smarty-pants kid. And, getting too many right answers meant having to do more work.
Calculating what homework to do and how many to get wrong, I carefully maintained an average in lower-middle tier status.
If someone found out I was smart, they'd want to talk with my mom.
