Donner's speech jived nicely with her plans and Luna seized the opportunity to make her thoughts known by tossing a file folder to the wooden tabletop. Within were pictures of golden objects and Georgia playing with them. Earrings and her mother’s shoes. She had a vial of non-toxic gold nail polish all her own.

“Luna, I am not interested in conditioning your cousin to hate her last name.”

“We start with the nail polish,” she said. “She uses it all the time. On her nails, on her dolls, on paper. She paints with it. I want her to hate it so much she throws away an entire bottle of it. She’s got a whole shoebox full. I want to see it in the garbage.”

“What did I just say to you?”

“This isn’t enough to make her resent her last name, of course. This is merely the first step. I’m thinking necklaces. The gold ones. She likes to wear them and I bet I can make them heat up or shock her.”

He squinted at her in the low light and said, “There’s something wrong with you, do you know that? I’ve thought about it before but this proves it. Why in the world are these the life choices you’re making?”

“Who can say? It’s like the murderer. You said no one tried to see it from his perspective and that's true, but what if he had no reason? What if he wanted to and did it? And what if that was the whole point for him?” She slammed a small fist to the table. “If he can do what he wants, why can’t I? I want Georgie Porgie to hate her last name and dammit I’ll make it happen!”

Eyes rolled. “While I admire both your determination and creativity, I can’t say I agree with the pursuit. But,” he stood from the chair and moved to stand over the table across from her. “She is your cousin, not mine and I will agree that she is insufferable. I suppose if I think of it as training it will be tolerable.”

“Whether you approve or disapprove doesn’t matter to me, but I will accept your intelligence and insight, comrade.”

Hands were shaken and further planning commenced. Added to the table were figurines, representative of Georgia and her gold. She hoarded it like a dragon.

“I thought of putting a spider in the shoe box,” she told him. “But I think that wouldn’t be specific enough.”

“Hm.” Agreement. “She would become wary of it, yes, but also all unknown boxes. If you carried it far enough, she might be afraid to open birthday presents, but that is not your focus is it?”

“Not this round,” Luna affirmed. “So, I want to scare her each time she uses the nail polish. Make her spill it. Put it on things she wouldn’t want it to get on. I think that should be enough if it happens a few times.”

“We will have to move quickly to another object,” he observed, “of gold. The jewelry, as you said, is a prime target for escalation. If we remain on the paint, she will fear that specifically and not the color itself. Leading her to connect it all with her name will be harder to achieve.”

“One step at a time and I was thinking I could make a point of it being gold. Like, ‘you got gold polish all over the floor, I’m telling Ant,’ and ‘that gold necklace shocked you, didn’t it?’ so she knows it’s the gold.”

He nodded slowly. “Eventually the word itself may cause her to flinch, which is the ultimate goal.”

Ant woke her soon after and no further plans were detailed except that they would commence OGGG beginning the following day. Or, that was the plan, until Luna improvised by shocking Georgia as she stroked a golden star sticker on a paper she’d brought home.

“Gosh, did that gold star hurt you?”

Georgia scowled as she stuck the harmed finger in her mouth. It wasn’t enough to make her cry, but this first test was a success. It was easy to round up the mist and direct it. She had to think about what she wanted to happen and demand it. There was some resistance in the force, it did not like to be disturbed, but it put up no real fight as air was charged and sticker rippled. The current of electricity flowed like water, the tiniest of droplets, from Luna to the plastic and then to Georgia’s pudgy pink finger.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“That is enough,” Donner warned. “Move too quickly and she will suspect. She must have no idea it isn’t a series of coincidences. If she begins connecting you to the incidents the attack may be ruined and the outcome completely different. Rather than fearing gold she will blame and fear you. Remember what I said about fear in this household? It is your greatest enemy. They must never fear you or you will find yourself in the hands of strangers and there is no guarantee that they will treat you well or even decently.”

Later, after she’d been put to bed for the night and lay awake, she asked him why he was so convinced the Golds would send her away.

“Because they are human,” he told her, “and humans are predictable creatures. If they are threatened, they have various ways of dealing with it and in this case, they all involve removing the threat from their lives. Do I think they will murder you and bury your body in the backyard? No. Even if they did, I’m convinced you would claw your way back out and scare the crap out of them in the process, giving your Uncle a heart attack as events unfolded. The problem is that death is not all life has to offer. What they would do is send you away, to become a ward of the state as I said before. Orphanages are not what they used to be, group homes they are called now, but believe me when I say that they would not put you somewhere pleasant when you are suspected of causing harm to others. Whatever you do must be done in secret.”

He stayed far from her in her mind that night, walking off whenever she approached him, not that she tried very hard to keep him around. If he didn’t want to talk that was fine; her mind was ripe for exploration and truth be told she didn’t know much about herself. The day-to-day life of Luna Rysing, the name she saw on her birth certificate, was basic at best.

By this time, she’d looked through the entirety of the house in which Ant & Ungle lived except for the basement because it was locked and the attic because that door was locked, too, and yet she couldn’t find the hidden food that Ungle had to have. Now that she knew magic, she would be able to get into those places, but she doubted he went that far to hide snacks in the house.

So, she didn’t feel like waking herself up to retread the house and chose instead to traverse the halls of her mind. There were a great number of cracks and cobwebs, signs of decay beyond the skeletons who didn’t even bother to hide in closets. They hung around the water cooler, silent and still and she got the feeling that if she wasn’t around, they would be going on with business as usual; the moment she showed up they froze. What their business was she didn’t know. Their name tags were worn and stuck inside their rib cages.

“You could at least keep the place clean,” she told them to no reply. “If you have time to stand around and gossip you have time to dust. I thought I made it a point to keep dust out of here. Ever heard of a broom? Anyone would think you were raised in a barn.”

Into the office, full of gray felt partitions separating computers and their mice from one another to prevent procreation, she went.

The door stood open behind a group of skeletons in the gray carpeted hallway, so she assumed it was where they came from, but though stocked with supplies like printers and a fax machine, no work appeared to have been done in decades. Stacked trays were empty of paperwork and every pen she tried was dry.

Over the intercom, a male voice with a British accent talked about some guy named Stanley and she wondered if he was employee of the month or something because it was clear that no one deserved that title around here, and if he was, she was going to need to speak to the manager. She needed to do that regardless because the place was a wreck. The farther in she went the worse it got. The first room was okay enough, it presented well, but through a door and down another hall proved the lack of proper management. When she got to the Boss's Office, as read the tarnished plaque on the door, there was still no one to be found. No secretary to leave a complaint with or anything.

Luna felt she should have expected it. On the way, there were knocked-over potted plants growing wild and redundantly untamed down the stairs and up the walls. It was obvious that those skeletons on break were all that remained of the staff, but it was a long walk back so rather than return she took an exit.

“You wouldn’t believe the state of the office,” she told Donner. “If I ever go back there it’d better be cleaned up. Hardly anyone there and no work done.”

His response was a grunt. Still depressed then.

He wouldn’t say it, but she could tell. He was all upset about the idea of her getting tossed out by her blood relations, which meant he had some experience with it.

“You could tell me. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

He didn’t though. It wasn’t so much about her; it was that he’d never told a single soul and he planned to keep it that way. His life, his past, was his business and he rarely thought of it. History like that was best left forgotten. Its sole purpose was to propel him ever onward and it had done well. Everything was well.

Until it wasn’t.