What’s a size diff community without me spamming a bunch of old material for the Nth time because I write at a glacially slow pace? 
(Answer: a slightly less cluttered forum.)
Anyways, for those of you unfamiliar, here’s a story I wrote for the old SW Realm board, based around a prompt for fairy tale stories given the G/t treatment. Here’s my rendition of beauty and the beast. For those of you already familiar with it, I’ve actually gone and done some serious editing since I originally penned these chapters! (Mostly in regards to our titular beastly curse.)
First chapter below, all the rest I’ll link to on my site. It’s being rebuilt from the ground up anyways, so I guess I can consider reuploading all this as… fun?
“Did I tell you that they’re sending me to Bell Island?” Martin called from the hallway bathroom where he was doing a last once-over before leaving for work.
His daughter, Brooke, who was reading in the living room of her father’s Anacortes home, looked up from her book. “No. Where’s Bell Island?”
“Just east of Crane Island,” he said, now in the foyer as he gathered his things. “It should be a quick in-and-out, but I’ll have to charter a boat to get there. Probably be gone all day.”
Brooke nodded, brown eyes going back to her forensics textbook. Martin, her old man, was a private investigator often contracted out by the San Juan County police department to look into spurious goings on in their sleepy little corner of the world. Brooke had been raised in it, her mother having passed away when she was younger, and was fully committed on entering into the family business once she was done with school.
Though she wasn’t often privvy to the details of his cases, he had always, always told her where he was going and when he would be back… just in case. You never knew what trouble might find you in such a line of work. Dangerous situations happened.
“What kind of case is it?”
“Private client,” he said, looking for his keys. “Guy wants to know what his business partner is up to… I guess the man dropped off the map a few years ago and still owns half the company.”
“Yikes,” she said non-committaly. “You think he’s dead?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out.” With keys successfully located, he opened the door and stepped out. “I’ll be back before dinner,” he called. “Have a good day!”
She flatly returned the goodbye and promptly went back to reading.
…
Her father was not, in fact, back before dinner. That in itself wasn’t especially unusual, but what was is the fact that he hadn’t contacted her all evening. She picked up the phone and called the station, but the young detective on the other end of the line hadn’t heard from Martin since the day before. Brooke was beginning to worry, sitting in tense silence over her microwave dinner as she tried to convince herself that maybe his phone was just dead, or maybe he dropped it into the water while on his way over, or…
Her own phone buzzed then: a text message from an unfamiliar number.
Hi honey, looks like I’ll be staying on the island for a few days
Relief washed over her… for a moment. Brooke looked at the message again, feeling that the wording wasn’t quite right. Her father had never called her honey – and if he did, then he never did it in a text. Only partially satisfied, she started to get ready for bed, but sleep would be slow coming until the hamster wheel of thoughts stopped turning in her head.
School over the next two days kept her busy enough. Midterms were coming up, there was lab work to do, and her “side” job of answering the phones for her dad’s PI business distracted her from the fact that she hadn’t heard from him since that night. It all seemed like such a routine job – the guy was either there or he wasn’t, right? Eventually, Brooke sat down at Martin’s desk and began to do her own research.
Bell Island, she found out, was a privately owned piece of land in the middle of the channel and some acres in size. A wealthy, young, tech entrepreneur had bought and built on it some six years before, after his AI dev company, Orcasoft, launched a wildly successful IPO. 2 years ago, though, this entrepreneur, a certain Jack Ilyin, had taken an extended leave of absence and never returned, leaving his VP, Gary Patel, to run the show.
“Well this is interesting,” Brooke muttered to herself as she squinted at a headline showing up on the page of search results: Possible Orcasoft acquisition on the table. Google, apparently, was in talks with Mr. Patel about a buyout. But as Brooke suspected, a deal couldn’t be made until Ilyin could be tracked down – whether he approved or not was anyone’s guess at this point, but either way, the acquisition was dead in the water until they could get the man’s John Hancock on the dotted line.
Brooke sat back in the desk chair and thought. Certainly, she felt better now, knowing that this wasn’t some sketchy gray market activity going on. This was a high-profile business, run by high-profile businessmen – surely, then, the specifics of Ilyin’s apparent renunciation of society was a tangled mess of financial and legal complications that, truth be told, might be better hashed out in court.
Of course, that’s probably the advice her father was giving to Mr. Ilyin right now, but still… Brooke wanted to make sure everything was alright. She glanced at the time, remembering that tomorrow was saturday, and decided to call up a friend of hers at the marina.
“Hey Andy. So, my dad needs my help with a case, and I was wondering if you could give me a ride someplace in the runabout tomorrow morning…”
Read the rest here!
