Lawrence sat on his studio, isolated from everything and everyone. He had received the reply from his co-worker with the somewhat fixed code and some mistakes pointed out here and there. They were mostly aesthetic or organization problems, which could be solved in a few days. After that, he could re-send it back to his friend and he'd handle everything else.
One of the main issues he faced as a programmer was that he was self-taught. That wasn't too bad on it's own, but it warped greatly his sense of "obvious" while programming. His other issue was that he only knew few languages, and most of them were web-page oriented. But his co-worker could help with that.
Lawrence had met him five years ago, back when he was starting his business as a freelance programmer. He had posted a curriculum on several sites for beginners, but as he soon found out, nobody wanted to employ a sixteen-year-old with practically no experience and, moreover, no proper education. He had seriously considered dropping it after three to four months of not getting a job, which was around the time Gato found him on the net, and offered to take jobs for him and edit his work for fifteen percent of the pay until he could become independent. Soon he would find out his co-worker had a whole business on that theme: taking in newbies, showing them the basics for a fair amount of the profit, and recommend them when they finished their "course".
Lawrence had liked Gato a lot, so he decided to stick with him instead and help him run the business. In exchange, he got a discount from fifteen to ten percent, and Gato would occasionally redirect some of the newbies and put them under Lawrence's guiding (for a price, of course).
All in all, his business associate was important to him.
He opened the site Gato had invented for the business. It was called Prisma, and while it wasn't on the level of other big sites, it was nice, and comfy, and over all beginners-friendly. Opening his mailbox, he found the edited files with a message pointing out what he had wrong and how he could avoid making the same mistake again.
He opened his laptop, tapping it's keys with rhythmical thud-thud. It was time to work.
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He finished maybe a couple of hours later. By that time, the noise coming from the living room told him his new housemate had waked up and was watching the TV.
He went downstairs to find Mika laying in the sofa, with a bag of popcorns and a bottle of Cook Cool on the floor. She was wearing one of Lawrence's furry pajamas (a carrot-printed one) which Lawrence didn't see fit for wearing in front of a member of the opposite sex, but it was better than running around with nothing but a towel.
"Hey. You ask before grabbing a thing from my fridge" he scowled her.
"I was hungry" she replied paying him no mind. She grabbed a bunch of popcorns, shoved them on her mouth and downed it all with a slurp of Cool.
"You do know that is junk food, do you? A week of nothing but those and you won't fit in that pajama."
"So what? I'll get a bigger one to wear."
He sighed. This girl would need some education before they could even work together, let alone actually doing something big.
He stood between Mika and the screen, ignoring her "hey!" of protest. He turned down the TV, and sat on the ground facing her.
"What was that for?"
"Listen, I know I told you you could live here, but I said nothing of doing as you pleased" he said. "There are basic rules you have to abide if you're going to share the house with me."
"Buuh. Rules are boring."
What are you, nine?
"Rules" Lawrence said as he stood up from the floor, walking around her. "Rules are the foundations of society. As someone once said, order without freedom is tyranny, but freedom without order is simply anarchy. And, as hypocritical as this might sound coming from a Villain, there are some rules that must be followed no matter your alignment."
He wasn't sure why he felt like he was making an evil monologue, but he carried on nevertheless.
"And as such, there are some basic rules you need to obey if you want to stay in the comfortableness of my house."
"Awww..." Mika pouted again (for some reason she felt like she was eight instead of eighteen). But nevertheless she nodded and sat in the sofa. "Alright, I'll follow your rules. With my own conditions." Why, what a faithful minion she was shaping up to be.
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"We'll see. Now, these are my rules: First, if I tell you something is an order, you do as I say. The only exceptions are if I'm doing it against my own will, or you are to be hurt while carrying on my orders. Is that clear?"
"Uhm... Sure? I've got to say, that's less bossy than I thought." She looked quite surprised, but at least she looked satisfied.
What did she think? That Lawrence was some sadistic tyrant of sorts?
"Second" he said, clearing such thoughts out of his head. "You will follow the basic rules of coexistence. If you dirty it, you clean it. If you break it, you repair it. If you take it, you put it back on it's place. And to get something you have to ask me first unless I say otherwise. Understood?"
"Yeah. Alright, that I can do too."
Well, at least she understood the prospect of an ordered life.
"Cool. Finally, you can't act on your own in relation to committing crime. And stealing and killing, or otherwise attacking unless provoked is completely out of question too."
She caressed an nonexistent beard for a couple of seconds, before agreeing. "That's fine. You're the mind and I'm the muscle, I get that. I bet you have some big badass plans already."
As a matter of fact, he had none. But letting her think he was some kind of evil genius wasn't going to hurt.
He was actually surprised Mika had accepted his rules so easily. Was she more mature than what he had originally thought? True, he was offering her free lodging and food, but she could ask for a lot more. He was employing her in a sense, after all. So, maybe he could share a percent of the profit he earned?
But he was getting ahead of himself.
"And what are your terms?"
"I want a castle."
So far for her being mature.
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"This is dark and slimy. I don't like dark and slimy places" Mika's voice echoed in the very much dark and slimy basement of Lawrence's house.
"Well, you'll have to make peaces with it." He followed behind her, holding a flashlight in a hand and a bunch of keys in the other. "We're here." He stopped in front of a sturdy, iron gate that looked like it was taken from a medieval dungeon.
"What are we doing again?" Mika seemed to dislike the idea of going inside such a suspicious place, but then again so was Lawrence when he first saw the room.
"Testing out your skills. You told me you have an offensive meta-ability, right? I want to see what you're capable of."
"Do we really have to do it in here?"
"Unless you want to do it on the backyard where everyone can see you doing crazy stuff" he answered without even bothering to stop. Instead, he took one of the keys and slid it inside the keyhole, turning it to a side. A smooth click was heard, and with the sound of rusted metal rubbing, the gate opened.
"Welcome to my real basement" Lawrence said as he threw away the keys and turned on a switch. Immediately, lamps hanging from the floor lit, lightening what every married man in their forties would recognize as a sanctuary.
There room itself was probably half the size of the living room. The brick walls were a little eroded but otherwise in perfect state, not as much as a single crack in any corner. The floor was probably made out of polished cement, with some old rugs tossed here and there. But what made the room so heartwarming wasn't that.
There was a TV mounted in a wall. Five deluxe sofa chairs with everything from adjustable height and lean control to a massage option stood in front of it, like heaven itself inviting you to come in and sit on them. In the middle, a portable fridge was set to cool any beers (or stronger drink) one might desire. It was, in other words, heaven for the lazy.
"What's this? It looks like a place for boring old people" Mika said. That ignorant fool, how could she even say such things? People would kill to have a place like this beneath their basement!
Lawrence sighed. He couldn't expect Mika to understand. She had been living in an orphanage most of her life. Of course she had no appreciation for truly good things.
So, instead of scowling her for her lack of culture, he decided to explain the origins of the sacred place.
"You see" he threw himself in one of the sofas, gesturing Mika to do the same. "This little piece of heaven dates from a long, long time ago..."
"Ew, you're starting to sound like an old man" she said. Lawrence ignored the vein popping on his forehead. He reached for the portable fridge, where he found around thirty-odd bottles of Heikenkin. Good, very good. He took a rusty old lime from a nearby coffee table, popping the cap off the bottle with a satisfying sound. He gulped the content of the bottle, rejoicing in the feeling of the cold beer going dowm to his stomach and refreshin his mind. This calmed him nice enough as to continue with his story.
"As I was saying, this place dates from a long time ago. My great grandfather had just married. Not with my great grandmother, not yet. But anyways, they built a nice little house to live happily ever after. Which they did, until she found out he was cheating her, not with my great grandmother either."
"Wow."
"Yeah, he wasn't the best guy around. But anyways, the funny thing is that, for some miracle, she gets to keep the house. Then, she remarried (with my grandmother inside) and the new guy quickly set to expand the house. He had two children already, and with a third halfway there, it would've been rough to fit them all in the tiny house."
Lawrence paused. He took another sip of the bottle, enjoyed himself for a second seeing Mika completely entranced by his story, then continued.
"And then he found this space under the basement. Apparently, it had been a mistake made by the original builder of the house, and he threw a layer of cement and bricks over it to cover the whole thing up. Great grandmother knew nothing about the place... And he figured it was fine to keep it at that. So instead of filling her up on the giant secret room under the house, he turned it into this heavenly sanctuary that it now is... Then he passed the secret to his daughter's husband, who put his grain of sand and maintained and improved the room. And then he passed the knowledge to his son, who passed it to me. I don't use it that much, but sometimes it's nice to let myself forget everything and relax for a bit."
In fact, he would usually use the basement to vent out some of his identity crisis. But he wouldn't say that out loud.
"Back to the point, though" he stood up, downed the rest of his beer, then moved the furniture to leave a wide space in the center of the room
"Let's get to business, shall we?"