----- Original Message -----
From: "Eris Reddoch"
> During another hour of driving along the convoluted coastal highway you
> pass several more small beach/inland villages. Sometimes the villages
> are clearly older fishing villages and at other times the villages were
> mainly fishing villages, but are now there mostly to service the estates
> along the beach and inland up the hills.
>
> Finally, Lysia slows down and turns to the right, away from the shore,
> driving up a smaller side road into the hills overlooking the ocean.
> Here the land is rolling hills with small valleys between them. Small
> groves of trees are interspersed with vineyards and fruit orchards
> growing on the sides of the hills. You can see large mansions back away
> from the road surrounded by stone walls...and probably more modern, and
> less visible, security measures.
>
> Lysia turns off the road at one of them, and stops the car in front of a
> closed gate of what looks like wrought iron metal bars with "House of
> David" written in an arch of metal along the top of the gate. A
> security monitor and call box can be seen on the stone post holding up
> one side of the gate.
Lysia spent about fifteen minutes of the trip retelling the story of the
grav-car crash that killed her parents and left her alive when she was
thirteen... She seems oddly distant about it, like she's describing
something that she watched second hand or in a theatre rather than actually
happened to her. The details she uses to describe the failure of the
passenger side hatch and her last images of her mother before she was pulled
out of the vehicle at 500 metres are particularly chilling.
When she's done she gets quiet for a moment, and then starts pointing out
details of the countryside, a vineyard, Tally Isham's summer cottage,
details that only someone intimately familiar with the details of the land
would know.
"Ahh," Lysia says looking at the gate, "this brings back a lot of memories."
"Morg re-did the lights I see," she remarks to no one in particular, "the
flowers look nicer too since the last time I was here."
She checks the glove compartment quickly to see if the remote is inside but
it's only a half hearted search. Lysia really doesn't believe it would be
that easy. After a moment she reaches over and thumbs the intercom on the
post and looks right at the camera, most of her features carefully obscured
by her hat and glasses.
Lysia Jezebel David
