12-24-2019, 12:31 PM
December 24th, 2019. 9PM. Saint Antoine Estate, Loyal Valley, Gardavasque
Dawn Marcourt-DeFarge was living very comfortably for the first time in her life. At fifty, she had finally come into her own as a C-level business executive and political insider. She was one half - the better half, to be sure - of one of the most envied younger power couples in the Gardavascan city of Loyalty. Thanks to her ambitious HILIT workouts and her strict nootropic diet, she was in peak physical shape. As CTO and Chief Ops at Saint Antoine Cellars, a family-owned winery with a reputation for quality and production, she graced the covers of a handful magazines such as Biz and AgWeek. Thanks to her savvy negotiation skills and bold risk-taking, she had been able to move Saint Antoine beyond their wheelhouse of fine cabernet and merlot into extensive agricultural real estate and vast water rights holdings, years ahead of the devastating droughts and wildfires that would decimate other wineries in the Loyal Valley.
These days Dawn never wanted for anything in terms of wealth or power. She had successfully leveraged her connections to secure an influential and lucrative position chairing the finance committee of the Gardavasque’s reigning political party, the Conservative Christian Capitalist, or C3 Party. As much as this was a powerful position, it was also an extremely tough job few people wanted. She was in charge of the agenda for raising funds to re-elect a notorious conman who had fallen into office due to a perfect storm of voter apathy, clandestine foreign influence, and an unfortunate swing of the pendulum in a nationalist direction after decades of progressive gains in Gardavasque. The C3s were elitist and thoroughly corrupt, but had somehow managed to fool, cheat, and connive their way into office by exploiting the uncertainty of a slowing global economy and by huffing one last lingering gasp of the false promise of colonialism that in fact never existed in Gardavasque, save for a few poorly-acted Telenovelas.
But none of this bothered Dawn; she was an unfailing pragmatist, and it had gotten her far in life. Even her husband Jordan DeFarge, the heir apparent to Saint Antoine, respected her enough to attempt to keep his affairs brief and discreet. He didn’t know she knew, of course; she knew he needed his distractions to keep him occupied. Because he had grown up surrounded by wealth and power, he took everything for granted. Not Dawn. She was used to having to set traps for opportunities and then snatch them at precisely the right moment. By all outward measures, she had arrived at what seemed to be her personal zenith. Yet, deep in the unspoken confines of her heart, she knew her decades of careful plotting and adroit management of egomaniacs, all she had worked for, might one day be sacrificed on a moment’s notice.
“Merry Christmas, Darling.” Sensing the just right moment had arrived, Dawn took her husband’s delicate glass of port and set it aside. She found him handsome and sweet and perhaps a tad sophomoric, in that way that someone’s maturity was limited by never having to overcome any sort of adversity. She loved him passionately, if not wholeheartedly, as one might love a labradoodle, if they weren’t tasked with cleaning up its shit on a daily basis. She reached behind the sofa to retrieve an exquisitely wrapped gift as he peered into her eyes, the firelight dancing around them with an intimate glow.
“Oh, are we doing this now?” Jordan smiled. Well, in that case, I have something for you too. He reached up to the mantle next to the antique clock to retrieve a her classic solid blue paper gift bag with glittery silver colored handles, tips of white tissue peeking out of the top.
“Open yours first.” Dawn said.
He gingerly unwrapped the box and then refolded the gilt paper, allowing it to lay flat on the coffee table even though it would only be thrown into the recycler later. Inside the medium-sized box was a small clear glass case with a bottle.
“What is it?” He asked. Rather than answer with words, she simply grinned a devilish grin they both recognized as her foreplay face and looked at the box with anticipation or apprehension or both. Jordan examined the glass case first. It appeared to contain an antique smokey amber bottle roughly the size of his thumb filled slightly more than half way with a dark thick liquid and cork stopper at the top. The label on the front read “Introducing: Laudanum. Each Fluid Ounce Contains 40% Alcohol, 47% Grain Opium, Tincture. 10¢. Beware: POISON!” He looked at her, wondering what motivated such a fascinating yet darkly peculiar idea for a gift. She raised her eyebrows and looked back at him.
Dawn could not contain her exuberance any longer. “Laudanum,” she purred. “It’s an elixir from a bygone era. Many artists and poets would get high on this and create amazing works of art or write award-winning novels. It was like a secret ingredient that unlocks your inner genius.”
“Oh wow!” Jordan said, genuinely impressed, but still unsure as to why this gift. “Laudanum.”
“It’s such a beautiful name for a drug,” Dawn grinned.
“Did you want me to…”
“Oh good God, no! It’s an antique. And by the way, it’s technically illegal, so be careful where you show it off. No, Babe, I wanted you to have it for inspiration. For your poetry. I wanted you to have something you could have at your desk to unlock your inner genius,” Dawn meant this genuinely, but from the look on his face, she could tell she was more enthusiastic about the idea for the gift than he was.
“I love it.” He kissed her. “Now yours.” Jordan reached for the blue paper gift bag. Inside the gift bag was a box wrapped in plain white tissue paper. At first she supposed it was a box of chocolates because it was about the same size and weight, and rattled in a similar way. As she unwrapped the tissue, she was stunned speechless. “It’s Geno-Mix. Your DNA test kit.” She continued unwrapping, trying to form a plausible lie about how to get out of sending in a specimen of her spit to some lab.
“Oh wow. Look. It’s… Well, isn’t that something.” She knew she couldn’t pretend to be happy about it, but she was careful to keep a lid on her anger. By this point she had begun to wish it were a box of chocolates.
“You don’t like it.” Jordan may have been obtuse, but even he could sense this was not having the desired effect. Dawn just kept staring at the brightly colored box with cartoonish chromosomes smiling ridiculously at her. Jordan began to sell it. “Babe, I know your background is something you are sensitive about. I know there is a part of you that is so determined to make a name for yourself. This amazing ambition, this drive you have, it’s one of the qualities I love most about you. Don’t you ever wonder where it comes from? I can tell some part of you is striving to make someone proud somewhere, somehow. And no matter how much I tell you and my family tells you how accepted you are, we can see that it just doesn’t seem to be enough. I just wanted you to feel connected to, well, whomever your people are.”
Dawn took a breath, aware that her voice tended to raise with the combination of port and agitation. “Oh, Babe. I know you are proud of me. And I know who my people are. Well good enough anyway. I don’t need some dumb spit test to tell me who my people are.”
Jordan wasn’t going to give up easily. “But think about the medical side of it. You know, like like cancer and stuff.”
“Cancer? What does cancer have to do with anything?” Dawn was incredulous. It was a ridiculous argument, and she thought Jordan should know better.
“Yeah. Since you’re adopted, you don’t know what your risks for certain conditions might be.” He knew she disliked it when he brought up her being adopted, he believed it was because it offended her sense of egalitarianism and being an equal partner in the marriage. In truth, there was much he did not know, and Dawn intended to keep it that way.
“Jordan, there are just so many security risks with this kind of thing. And there is no way to guarantee Geno-Mix won’t release my private information without my consent. We have political enemies, both inside the party and outside C3. Didn’t you ever think of that? I don’t want my genetic material being put into some database somewhere and then some ridiculous story leaked all over Slugline or Gossip.Com.
“Look,” Jordan countered, “We are both getting older. Don’t you think it’s important to be proactive about any kind of preventative care we should be getting? I’ll do it too if you want. I got myself a kit. Come on, it’ll be fun.
“Fun! Jesus, Jordan. You haven’t given this a hot minute of consideration at all.” Dawn could hear her voice getting louder. She found herself mentally plotting how to get out of the room, a habit she had when she felt anxious. Never mind she was in the safety of her own home. “I’m not comfortable with doing the test. I’m sorry… and that’s all there is.” She set the box on the sofa and crossed towards the door leading to the kitchen.
“All right! I don’t want to fight you about a Fucking Christmas gift. Fine! I just. Come here.” He held out his arms, offering an embrace either as a peace offering or a temporary distraction, she wasn’t sure which. Dawn stopped her exit and turned back to face Jordan, without accepting his arms. “I’m sorry. I didn’t anticipate you would react so strongly.” Their tension began to dissipate surprisingly quickly. “I just want something for you that all our money can’t give you.” The words hung in the air like a fog. Jordan could sense a rare tearful moment between them coming on. “Family.”
Dawn, realizing she had gotten touchy with this raw spot being rubbed, finally relented and embraced her husband of ten years. “I appreciate the thought, but no thank you. I have all the family I need.” For just a moment, they shared a warm and genuine sense of oneness.
Just then her PearPhone lit up as an email, apparently spam, had been received. But it made a vibration that Dawn recognized as definitely not spam. She checked her email over Jordan’s shoulder. This particular message was one Dawn was not eager to get. It contained bits of coded text embedded in what, to an untrained eye, would appear to be a fairly cheesy and forgettable sales pitch. The ad copy had a slightly awkward fluency, as if it were composed by someone whose first language was not Romanx, the language spoken in Gardavasque and neighboring countries. “Congratulations You Won Complimentary Juice Extractor. To Request Special Timeshare Offer, Call Sunrise Holidays Today. This Offer Only Good For 48 Hours.”
Dawn Marcourt-DeFarge was living very comfortably for the first time in her life. At fifty, she had finally come into her own as a C-level business executive and political insider. She was one half - the better half, to be sure - of one of the most envied younger power couples in the Gardavascan city of Loyalty. Thanks to her ambitious HILIT workouts and her strict nootropic diet, she was in peak physical shape. As CTO and Chief Ops at Saint Antoine Cellars, a family-owned winery with a reputation for quality and production, she graced the covers of a handful magazines such as Biz and AgWeek. Thanks to her savvy negotiation skills and bold risk-taking, she had been able to move Saint Antoine beyond their wheelhouse of fine cabernet and merlot into extensive agricultural real estate and vast water rights holdings, years ahead of the devastating droughts and wildfires that would decimate other wineries in the Loyal Valley.
These days Dawn never wanted for anything in terms of wealth or power. She had successfully leveraged her connections to secure an influential and lucrative position chairing the finance committee of the Gardavasque’s reigning political party, the Conservative Christian Capitalist, or C3 Party. As much as this was a powerful position, it was also an extremely tough job few people wanted. She was in charge of the agenda for raising funds to re-elect a notorious conman who had fallen into office due to a perfect storm of voter apathy, clandestine foreign influence, and an unfortunate swing of the pendulum in a nationalist direction after decades of progressive gains in Gardavasque. The C3s were elitist and thoroughly corrupt, but had somehow managed to fool, cheat, and connive their way into office by exploiting the uncertainty of a slowing global economy and by huffing one last lingering gasp of the false promise of colonialism that in fact never existed in Gardavasque, save for a few poorly-acted Telenovelas.
But none of this bothered Dawn; she was an unfailing pragmatist, and it had gotten her far in life. Even her husband Jordan DeFarge, the heir apparent to Saint Antoine, respected her enough to attempt to keep his affairs brief and discreet. He didn’t know she knew, of course; she knew he needed his distractions to keep him occupied. Because he had grown up surrounded by wealth and power, he took everything for granted. Not Dawn. She was used to having to set traps for opportunities and then snatch them at precisely the right moment. By all outward measures, she had arrived at what seemed to be her personal zenith. Yet, deep in the unspoken confines of her heart, she knew her decades of careful plotting and adroit management of egomaniacs, all she had worked for, might one day be sacrificed on a moment’s notice.
“Merry Christmas, Darling.” Sensing the just right moment had arrived, Dawn took her husband’s delicate glass of port and set it aside. She found him handsome and sweet and perhaps a tad sophomoric, in that way that someone’s maturity was limited by never having to overcome any sort of adversity. She loved him passionately, if not wholeheartedly, as one might love a labradoodle, if they weren’t tasked with cleaning up its shit on a daily basis. She reached behind the sofa to retrieve an exquisitely wrapped gift as he peered into her eyes, the firelight dancing around them with an intimate glow.
“Oh, are we doing this now?” Jordan smiled. Well, in that case, I have something for you too. He reached up to the mantle next to the antique clock to retrieve a her classic solid blue paper gift bag with glittery silver colored handles, tips of white tissue peeking out of the top.
“Open yours first.” Dawn said.
He gingerly unwrapped the box and then refolded the gilt paper, allowing it to lay flat on the coffee table even though it would only be thrown into the recycler later. Inside the medium-sized box was a small clear glass case with a bottle.
“What is it?” He asked. Rather than answer with words, she simply grinned a devilish grin they both recognized as her foreplay face and looked at the box with anticipation or apprehension or both. Jordan examined the glass case first. It appeared to contain an antique smokey amber bottle roughly the size of his thumb filled slightly more than half way with a dark thick liquid and cork stopper at the top. The label on the front read “Introducing: Laudanum. Each Fluid Ounce Contains 40% Alcohol, 47% Grain Opium, Tincture. 10¢. Beware: POISON!” He looked at her, wondering what motivated such a fascinating yet darkly peculiar idea for a gift. She raised her eyebrows and looked back at him.
Dawn could not contain her exuberance any longer. “Laudanum,” she purred. “It’s an elixir from a bygone era. Many artists and poets would get high on this and create amazing works of art or write award-winning novels. It was like a secret ingredient that unlocks your inner genius.”
“Oh wow!” Jordan said, genuinely impressed, but still unsure as to why this gift. “Laudanum.”
“It’s such a beautiful name for a drug,” Dawn grinned.
“Did you want me to…”
“Oh good God, no! It’s an antique. And by the way, it’s technically illegal, so be careful where you show it off. No, Babe, I wanted you to have it for inspiration. For your poetry. I wanted you to have something you could have at your desk to unlock your inner genius,” Dawn meant this genuinely, but from the look on his face, she could tell she was more enthusiastic about the idea for the gift than he was.
“I love it.” He kissed her. “Now yours.” Jordan reached for the blue paper gift bag. Inside the gift bag was a box wrapped in plain white tissue paper. At first she supposed it was a box of chocolates because it was about the same size and weight, and rattled in a similar way. As she unwrapped the tissue, she was stunned speechless. “It’s Geno-Mix. Your DNA test kit.” She continued unwrapping, trying to form a plausible lie about how to get out of sending in a specimen of her spit to some lab.
“Oh wow. Look. It’s… Well, isn’t that something.” She knew she couldn’t pretend to be happy about it, but she was careful to keep a lid on her anger. By this point she had begun to wish it were a box of chocolates.
“You don’t like it.” Jordan may have been obtuse, but even he could sense this was not having the desired effect. Dawn just kept staring at the brightly colored box with cartoonish chromosomes smiling ridiculously at her. Jordan began to sell it. “Babe, I know your background is something you are sensitive about. I know there is a part of you that is so determined to make a name for yourself. This amazing ambition, this drive you have, it’s one of the qualities I love most about you. Don’t you ever wonder where it comes from? I can tell some part of you is striving to make someone proud somewhere, somehow. And no matter how much I tell you and my family tells you how accepted you are, we can see that it just doesn’t seem to be enough. I just wanted you to feel connected to, well, whomever your people are.”
Dawn took a breath, aware that her voice tended to raise with the combination of port and agitation. “Oh, Babe. I know you are proud of me. And I know who my people are. Well good enough anyway. I don’t need some dumb spit test to tell me who my people are.”
Jordan wasn’t going to give up easily. “But think about the medical side of it. You know, like like cancer and stuff.”
“Cancer? What does cancer have to do with anything?” Dawn was incredulous. It was a ridiculous argument, and she thought Jordan should know better.
“Yeah. Since you’re adopted, you don’t know what your risks for certain conditions might be.” He knew she disliked it when he brought up her being adopted, he believed it was because it offended her sense of egalitarianism and being an equal partner in the marriage. In truth, there was much he did not know, and Dawn intended to keep it that way.
“Jordan, there are just so many security risks with this kind of thing. And there is no way to guarantee Geno-Mix won’t release my private information without my consent. We have political enemies, both inside the party and outside C3. Didn’t you ever think of that? I don’t want my genetic material being put into some database somewhere and then some ridiculous story leaked all over Slugline or Gossip.Com.
“Look,” Jordan countered, “We are both getting older. Don’t you think it’s important to be proactive about any kind of preventative care we should be getting? I’ll do it too if you want. I got myself a kit. Come on, it’ll be fun.
“Fun! Jesus, Jordan. You haven’t given this a hot minute of consideration at all.” Dawn could hear her voice getting louder. She found herself mentally plotting how to get out of the room, a habit she had when she felt anxious. Never mind she was in the safety of her own home. “I’m not comfortable with doing the test. I’m sorry… and that’s all there is.” She set the box on the sofa and crossed towards the door leading to the kitchen.
“All right! I don’t want to fight you about a Fucking Christmas gift. Fine! I just. Come here.” He held out his arms, offering an embrace either as a peace offering or a temporary distraction, she wasn’t sure which. Dawn stopped her exit and turned back to face Jordan, without accepting his arms. “I’m sorry. I didn’t anticipate you would react so strongly.” Their tension began to dissipate surprisingly quickly. “I just want something for you that all our money can’t give you.” The words hung in the air like a fog. Jordan could sense a rare tearful moment between them coming on. “Family.”
Dawn, realizing she had gotten touchy with this raw spot being rubbed, finally relented and embraced her husband of ten years. “I appreciate the thought, but no thank you. I have all the family I need.” For just a moment, they shared a warm and genuine sense of oneness.
Just then her PearPhone lit up as an email, apparently spam, had been received. But it made a vibration that Dawn recognized as definitely not spam. She checked her email over Jordan’s shoulder. This particular message was one Dawn was not eager to get. It contained bits of coded text embedded in what, to an untrained eye, would appear to be a fairly cheesy and forgettable sales pitch. The ad copy had a slightly awkward fluency, as if it were composed by someone whose first language was not Romanx, the language spoken in Gardavasque and neighboring countries. “Congratulations You Won Complimentary Juice Extractor. To Request Special Timeshare Offer, Call Sunrise Holidays Today. This Offer Only Good For 48 Hours.”
<t>Our Noblest Motive is the Public Good </t>