Uno and Fog: Mementos

“Could your mother actually be following you?”  The Fog is sorting through the pictures, documents and assorted materials that were in the box.

“I don’t think so.  Some of these pictures were taken in a setting that I would have noticed her.”

“If she looked the way you remember.”

“True,”  I thought about how the red envelope had been left, “whoever it is, they’re good at avoiding detection.”

The Fog starts flipping over the pictures to see if anything was written on any of them.  There wasn’t anything,  I had already checked.

There were individuals that were good at avoiding detection of course, some that were invisible, some that just made people ignore them like they weren’t there, or shape shifters.  The governments of the world spent a considerable amount of time recruiting (pursuing) and persuading those types to work for the government.  As well as spending a considerable amount of time figuring out ways to counter them.

That level of persuasion could get extremely nasty, there were stories of some totalitarian countries that held families hostage to insure compliance.  Some of the big tech companies supposedly had some of these individuals doing corporate espionage, and a couple of the paparazzi were rumored to be stealthy endowed.

Which seemed like a waste of ability, but then there were many that thought that anyone that was gifted that didn’t go into the military or law enforcement was a waste.

Despite people like me being encouraged to join law enforcement or the military in some capacity, most avoided it, most avoided showing off their abilities ever.  You never knew how someone would react.  Some people hated the endowed, others had a stalker level of worship (Sharp Cheddar experienced a lot of that, being thin, blond and young made her a magnet for creepers, even with skin the color of a bad spray tan), others just harbored resentment.

Every now and then there was a sports scandal about someone not being normal, but where did you draw the line?  It was easy to see that the guy able to lift a tank wasn’t normal, but what about a motorcycle?  Or heal maybe a little faster, dodge better than others, or it took more than one person to tackle them?  There were people that used probability to indicate if someone’s career was improbable, but I remember an old statistics class from college that taking thousand people doing coin tosses, and removing the half that lost, that after ten or so tosses you would have one person that had won every single toss, even if the chance of that happening to any single person at the start was only one in a thousand

There were sporting events involving extraordinary people and some made a lot of money doing that.  There were rumors that somewhere in an old soviet block country there were blood sports involving supers.

The Fog grabs one of the flash drives, scans it and then looks at its content, there was film, both digital and analog that had been digitized on the drive.  Science fairs, trips with my father to Europe, sporting events.  Birthday parties.  All of which made me uneasy.

Someone knew an awful lot about my life.

The next drive was worse, it had scanned news articles.  The first articles were the usual stuff that schools or organizations publish.  My name listed with other children, graduating classes, members of sports teams, or getting school awards (even one for attendance).

Then there were the articles about Uno.  Despite keeping a low profile there were articles about me and The Fog.  The first hostage situation where I had acted.  Trashing a couple mobsters and their homes, a drug lab the two of us had raided and burned to the ground, muggings we had stopped, robberies we had intervened on, an art robbery we had stopped involving Screaming Meanie, the first obviously endowed individual we had fought.

The subsequent fights with him, and his sister Mental Meanie, which thankful was a reference to her violent instability and not her abilities.

All of that a more.

It was a digital scrap book of my deeds, of both of my identities.  It would have been fun to read all of that again, except for the context.  I hadn’t kept any mementos of this kind.   One of the ways people like me get outed is keeping a trophy room of some kind.  Keep nothing, and no one can accidently find anything to connect you to your alter ego.

Someone knew who I was.

And wanted me to know.

“It would be safe to assume that whoever it is, they know about both of us,”  The Fog stated, he sounded surprisingly calm.

“You think?”

“No reason the get snarky,” The Fog stated, “if they wanted to expose us they could have.  There’s not been an attempt to blackmail us either.”

“Yet.”

“No, I don’t think they will, they obviously want you to search for your mother.”

“Been there done that and never found her.”

“Still we should see where this leads.  Someone wants you to do that, either because they want you to actually find her, or they think that with you looking under rocks, you will stir something up.”

“That’s not necessarily to my benefit.”

“Granted, but its the only way we have of finding out who is behind this and why, we follow the thread we’re given and see where it leads, and who is pulling on it.” He pulled out the flash drive and set it aside.

“Fine, we might as well start with the key.”

The Fog picked up the rosary and looked at it carefully, “Any chance it fits something at the home you grew up in?”

“Maybe, but I doubt it, you know my father had everything of hers removed when she left.”

He nods, “then we need to go look through her things.”

I sigh, we’d looked before and hadn’t found anything.  “We can fly down there this weekend.”