I blinked a couple times to clear my vision before looking around.
Cage, I was in, yet another, cage. Why couldn't people just learn that I cages don't work on me and stop trying to put me in one?
I stood up from the cot I had been lying on and walked around, getting a feel for my newest terms of confinement.
"This is impressive, it's even more so than the solitary confinement cell at the HMH. There people freaked out when I broke the cameras and they rushed in without really thinking about it. Here, there aren't cameras, so I'm sure none of you would rush in without thinking if I broke something. You wouldn't know!
Wait, you would know because there are at least three people listening to me talking right now. The alpha lady that I made a fool of, Chase, who I made a bigger fool of and the dragon, who I made a fool of by distracting. I do make a good distraction, though. Who wouldn't want to pay more attention to the person who stuck swords in their back? No one, that's who. Dragons have thick skin, I remember, but even they can feel it when someone digs a pair of three foot swords into their backs.
Do you want to know how I know you're all listening? I know you're listening because I've been drugged. Nobody gives someone a drug to make them talk more without listening to what the person's going to say. This does feel weird, though. I didn't even talk this much when I got bored in solitary confinement and was telling stories to Bambi.
I know! I'm going to tell you guys some stories. The one about putting tracking beacons on squirrels and rabbits are over told. I like the part about trapping a werewolf in a hole that wasn't big enough for him to shift in, but it has the same problems as the other ones. Maybe I'll just tell you about some of my escapes from when I was younger.
Is this cell intended to make me go insane? I don't think it will work, I'm use to the white
There was this one time when I stuffed a bunch of pillows under my blanket and climbed into the ventilation shaft that someone was stupid enough to place right above my bed. Then I crawled to the front door and just walked right out. They put cameras facing the door after that.
Are you guys planning on giving me food through that little metal door? It looks about the right size, one inch high and if I had to guess about a foot long.
Another time I snuck away during lunch time because they were letting us eat lunch outside. I climbed up a tree and because all the trees were really close together I jumped from one tree to the next. Really difficult if you think about it. I probably could have broken something easily.
Did you guys know that I can't light anything on fire? And even if I did, lighting the padding on my cell on fire sounds like a horrible idea. That could get me killed. You should put padding in here it's much more comfortable.
When I was little,maybe seven or eight I was being guarded by a lady because at that point in time they realized that I needed a guard. She was trying to be nice and gave me streamers to play with. Nice thick cloth streamers that wouldn't break if I got them caught on one of the trees. I convinced her to let me play with them outside and, pretending to play with them, I tied her to the tree more securely than a tree is tied to the ground.
Why don't I get a separate room for a toilet? And a sink! I'm a girl, I want a sink.
I once spent a whole week creating a fake trail leading to a lake. On this trail I left pieces of my clothing and I even trailed blood on it from when I fell down and skinned my knee. Then one night I snuck out my window and followed the trail about half way before breaking off and running somewhere else.
Are there really not cameras in here or are they just kind of small, Because I don't think it's smart to not keep an eye on your prisoners.
For my tenth birthday I decided that my birthday present to me was going to be that I would lite the HMH on fire. It burned to the ground and forever after they were more careful about where they stored their emergency matches.
Do I eventually get a blanket or are you just going to keep it warm in here at night.
When I was fourteen I decided that I would see if all those stories about girls being able distract guys were true. Guess what? They are. Poor guy...
Can I have an actual bed? The cot is not going to be comfortable. In fact, it might just be my motivation to get out of here."
"Where are the dragon kits?" a voice said over an intercom system.
"That's weird, where are the speakers in here. Are they in the lights? That makes sense, you could just hide them in the lights and I would never find them."
"Where are the dragon kits?" the voice asked again, sounding more irritated this time.
"I don't want to talk about that, it makes me sad that I'm not with the cute little guys. Oh, I know! We can talk about the dangers of leaving chloroform where small children can reach it. It took the HMH three tries to put it somewhere were I couldn't get it. Even then, when I was planning on breaking into the castle I figured out the code to the safe. Grace is a very vain person."
"Who are you?" asked another voice curiously.
"You know exactly who I am! I've made it very obvious, if you don't believe anything that I'm saying then you're just stupid.
I'm going to need to go see the Hollywood sign when I get out of here. I'm sure it's not that impressive but it's just weird to go to Hollywood and not see the sign. I wouldn't be able to call myself a tourist if I didn't go to see the Hollywood sign. Everyone has to go see the place where dragons, elves, nymphs and werewolves live and they have to see the Hollywood sign. I think I've seen the place..."
"What are you doing here?" the same voice asked.
"Is that Chase talking? You sound funny when your voice is magnified so much. That's..."
"What are you doing here?" Chase asked again, enunciating every word.
"I don't know. I tried to leave, you guys are the ones who dragged me back. Perhaps I'm here because I kidnapped what you already kidnapped and cost you guys millions of dollars.
Do you ever think about how immoral it is to kidnap babies, cut them off from everything that they love so that they can stay kidnapped and then sell those babies to strangers? Human trafficking is illegal for a reason..."
"What are you?" a female voice asked with a purr that sounded like it was supposed to be persuasive.
"I'm your worst nightmare. Someone who cares about what you put small children through.
I think I would kill myself if I was forced to do the same job that you guys do. I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about all the families that I'd ripped apart or the children who could have had a better life if they'd been left alone and the relationships that the matched pair will always have. You know there are probably some douche bags out there who take every chance they can to rub it in the face of their match that they paid thousands of dollars to have them and then there are others who will just be sad because they didn't even get a chance to get to know their match the normal way."
"That's not what I mean and you know it," the female voice said again, "what species are you?"
"You know my species. It's written on my file. Are you guys done asking questions because I'm starting to run out of things that I don't care if you know. Eventually I'm going to end up sitting in a corner reciting the ABCs and counting to a million and back until the drug wares off.
Did you know that when I was little I always thought my dad would come save me. It was logical for him to come save me, he had every single time I'd ever needed him. When my mom packed her bags and left while he was gone. She just left me. I was a baby, maybe two, and she left me thinking that my dad wouldn't be back for a couple more days. Somehow he knew, though. He knew and he came back five days early to find me sitting in a dirty diaper and getting into the bananas that were always sitting on the counter.
Every time I ever scraped my knee, the time I crashed my bike and when I fell out of a tree, all those times when I would be crying on the playground because another kid threw sand in my face, every time I was called a nerd or a geek, my dad was there to make me feel better.
Sometimes I miss him so bad, but when the nymph told me that my dad still goes to the same tree everyday at noon to cry, I couldn't go see him. There was no reason for it, he's my dad, but I felt nervous and a little bit afraid. Would he look at me and think that I'd failed him somehow, think that I wasn't trying to get back to him every day that I was gone. I don't even know if I would recognize him if I saw him and I'm afraid that I would look at him and he wouldn't feel like my dad anymore. Even if I did recognize him, he wouldn't be the same person that I left reading on a park bench to go talk to the tree and find out why she was sad. That person is gone as surely as the six year old that relied on her father so heavily.
That's what living in one of your HMHs did to me. It made me afraid to even try and go see my dad. Afraid to go see the man who loves me enough to go to the place where I last was and cry that I wasn't there anymore. Afraid to see the man who is still waiting for his baby to come home, and wishing that he could find me.
You guys ruin people and destroy families. You're greedy and selfish and you don't care that the people you take had people who loved them and people that they loved. I could see it if you only took kids who were in abusive homes, places where no child should live, but you don't because you don't care. You don't care that my father loves me more than anything else in the world. You don't care that I never would have been hurt. You don't care that you took me away from everything that was good."
Silent tears had started to stream down my cheeks as I looked up at the corners of the room.
"Even when I got out and tried to go back to my dad because he loved me you dragged me back and threw me in yet another cage. Cage after cage, guards and tracking beacons, security cameras and microphones, bars on my windows and a door that locks automatically after ten, I grew up with that instead of in the care of someone who loves me. I would have been better off if you guys had left me but nobody cared because they could make money off of me."
I was starting to get angry now and tears were pouring down my face but I couldn't stop talking.
"That's all that you guys really care about, money. The first thing that was said when I broke the baby dragons out was that Alice would be mad because they were worth a million dollars each. It wasn't, oh no, they could get hurt. No, that would mean that some of you had compassion, but all you cared about was that you were losing money."
White mist had started to come out of the walls as I talked and I could feel it starting to make me drowsy. Knowing that I only had a few more minutes of consciousness, I made my way over to the cot and laid down, all the time talking, forced to by the drug in my system. My words turned into an indiscernible jumble of words about honor and right and wrong and I felt a flash of triumph go through me. They didn't want to listen to me anymore and I hadn't told them anything useful. The dragons were still safe.
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A/N As always, I reserve the right to change this.