So, in the interest of internet security, I am not putting up a picture of my toddler son for all and sundry to see. Instead, I'll use an icon of the most famous Clark out there when talking about mine. Just pretend he's three and lighten his hair a bit.

Dear Bob,

So things got busy and I haven't updated you since the end of freshman year. I haven't been back to Detroit since I left to come here, so that's a win. I graduated the bachelor's program with two degrees - Astronomy and Astrophysics - and a minor in Mathematics. Still here for my doctorate in Astrophysics, though.

Went by my high school again for their Alumni event, which was kind of neat. My friend Anne turns out to be right down at UCLA, so we're in the same general area. That was kind of neat, but I only ever get out there for her birthday. Different lives and all. Not much spare time for anything but school and TAing, anyway, though I still D&D of course, and I'll Warcraft a bit when someone gives me a gift subscription.

And then there's the big change. I have a son now. Clark. Three years old. His mom dropped him off with me just this morning. Didn't even know I had a kid, and now he's three. She took off, no idea where, and said she couldn't take care of him anymore so it was up to me now. I can barely afford to take care of myself, but I'll figure it out. We'll manage.

First person I told was my adviser. Big help but I'm not sure it wasn't also a big mistake. He pointed me in the right directions for a lot of things I needed and didn't know how to ask for or find. But now I'm a single dad in his eyes first and a genius astrophysics graduate student second. I'm not sure that's a bad thing, really, since he's the guy who's going to have the most say on how heavy my course load and TA work is, but I think he sees me as being more irresponsible than he had before and I'm not. This wasn't in the plans, and it would have all been a lot easier if it happened a few years later, but I didn't do anything wrong.

Next I talked to the co-chair of the Astronomy Club and told her I wouldn't be making meetings for the immediate future. She asked why, and I said it was past my son's bedtime, and she asked what son?, and I said the three year old I was just given custody of, and she said huh and hung up the phone, and I don't think she likes me as much anymore. Probably because I just dumped my half of the co-chair responsibilities back onto her with no warning.

I don't feel too bad about it, though, because Clark's a lot of responsibility, too, and I didn't have any warning about him, either.

-Zack


[ooc: This is a public insane journal entry that Zack actually wrote on Insane Journal, so if anyone has a character who might know what insane journal is themselves and know Zack's username (or how to find it since he has 'sonora academy' listed as one of his interests so he can be found by other alumni), they can respond in character.]

Dear Bob,

So things got busy and I haven't updated you since the end of freshman year. I haven't been back to Detroit since I left to come here, so that's a win. I graduated the four year program with four degrees - two magical (Arithmancy and Astronomy), and two muggle (Astronomy and Astrophysics), and a minor in Mathematics. Still here for my doctorate in Astrophysics (muggle) and Arithmancy (magical), though.

Went by Sonora again for their Alumni event, which was kind of neat. Anne's also right down at UCLA, so we're in the same general area. That's kind of neat, thought I only ever get out there for her birthday. Different lives and all. Not much spare time for anything but school and TAing, anyway, though I still D&D of course, and I'll Warcraft a bit when someone gives me a gift subscription. And of course I've got my webpage up now, the one about the Alien Conspiracies, so other people who have had encounters have a place to discuss what we know of their plans.

And on that note, I have a son now. Clark. Three years old. Dropped on my doorstep with a note saying 'they almost found us' so I took him in to keep him safe. Nice kid, even if he is a half-alien and I can't understand a word he says. He mostly speaks some alien tongue that was never on Star Trek. Looks human enough, so I'm passing him off as mine.

Let me tell you, being a single dad makes people treat you different. But I'll write about that in a public post. Later. Right now, I need to find us some food. Clark's asking for juice again.

-Zack

I'm nearly done with my first year of college. It's been a whirlwind. Caltech offers both magical and mundane courses, and one of the very best Astronomy departments in the world, and I've packed my schedule as full as I'm allowed to. I got all As during my first semester. I miss Sonora a bit, especially the relative quite of the Alderaanian dorms, but it's really great to get formal classes on the science and math end of things for a change.

I also joined the astronomy club (they're all mundanes, so I haven't told them about the aliens at Sonora, but I will if it ever looks like another invasion is likely), and I found a group to play D&D with.

I suspect the snitches are still toying with me. They may be upset because I didn't join Quiddich here. But the magical portion of CalTech has enough players to not need me like Anne Alderaan did. Real jocks, too, here on sports scholarships. I'm just not that good. Besides, I'd rather be playing World of Warcraft with my roommate. The snitches are displeased. Just this morning, they turned the milk in my minifridge sour and melted my ice cream. I assume it was the snitches who were responsible for unplugging the fridge.

But other than the snitch persecution, college is going great. I've got two study days now, and then exams, and then I'll be done with my freshman year. I managed to find a summer TA job, so I'll be staying here over the summer and taking a few bonus classes that come as a perk of the job. I'll get to keep TA next year, too, so that'll cut down on room & board costs, too. Plus the full tuition scholarship is really nice.

My goal is to never set foot in Detroit again.

Alright. So, GreatestJournal is dying, so I moved over here to insanejournal. It's name hits a little to close to home, but we'll just ignore that, okay? Great.

So I've just finished copying over most of my entries. There's gotta be an easier way to do it than how I just did, but I'm not feeling the need to figure out the intricacies of open source online journals. I only had 14 posts anyway. Unfortunately, I lost my cool icons in the transition, so I left out the post talking about them. I'll see if I can find backup copies on my computer, but I don't think they're there anymore. I'm pretty sure I'm down to just Spock again.

Anyway, while I'm here: Big year coming up. Seventh year. I graduate at the end of it. My plan is to go into college for astrophysics afterwards. Gotta get on those applications soon, I guess.

Plus, the biggest news of all . . .

I'm the new HEAD BOY!

I'm back from my boarding school. Great Maker, but I hate Detroit.

Nick's being a brat about letting me back into my own room (we share). Unfortunately, there was no special camp for him this year so he's here the whole time I am. Though, once it started getting really hot, he abandoned our stuffy little oven and took over the floor of the living room. I'm not complaining though (except it's freaking HOT in here and the computer is NOT helping).

Anyway, when I got back, the house was a mess. There was more beer than food in the fridge and the pantry was like nobody but me ever went into there. I had to toss some stuff that expired a month after I left for Sonora, and the shelf were pretty much empty otherwise. I asked Mom for the food stamp card and she turned it over. There wasn't enough on it to really restock properly, even with her employee discount, but I got what we needed immediately.

And I tossed the beer.

Dad was seriously not happy about that, but he'd lost his job while I was away and I figured when he was providing something to the family, then he could complain. Until then, no alcohol and one job application a day. The really scary thing? He listened to me. Either he's way more afraid of my exceptional brain than he's ever let on, or I am going to be an amazingly good disciplinarian if I'm ever a parent. Or he was hungover and just wanted me to stop shouting.

So, yeah. Pantry, groceries, beer, Dad, what else? Oh, right. The house was a mess. Literally, I mean. I don't know how these people lived with it like that. Dad and Nick are slobs, but Mom should have kept the place in better condition. I spent two days cleaning and the apartment is NOT that big. I wanted to send the whole lot of them to detention and that's when I realized my Prefectly duties turned me power-mad. Maybe that's why Dad listened to me. I was using my Prefect Voice of Doom. That gives a +10 bonus to intimidate checks.

I did refrain from handing out detentions, though. I did warn that if I caught any such messes developing again while I was home, I was only going to cook for myself and Mom would be cooking for everybody else. Dad and Nick are now well trained to put their trash in the bin and even Mom gives me wary looks when she puts something down for a minute. It's kinda funny. I mean, think about it. I'm this scrawny nerd who isn't even five feet tall yet (I will get there, I swear, I'm so close) and they're my parents and Nick is like four times my weight. Well, two and a half, at least. And I'm holding them all by their stomachs. Or maybe their tongues. Stomachs don't much care what food tastes like.

Since I got home, I've wanted to buy a new processor and video card for my computer because I can't play Oblivion on it with its current specs. Unfortunately, the good video cards and processors are expensive and the parents can't even pay for the apartment without government subsidies. So I have to buy it with my own money which means I need to earn my own money. My usual income has been smaller than normal because most of my clients are at that camp with Nick and most of the others already dropped out or graduated. I needed a new crop of clients.

First, I hung around Coffey Middle to get the summer school crowd there, but the assignments were so easy and boring that I gave up the middle school and starting loitering around the high school. High schoolers are more likely to have money to pay for homework services anyway. It worked pretty well and I was only about a hundred dollars shy of the computer upgrades I wanted when I got busted.

Fortunately, the Detroit cops aren't as smart as me. They picked me up as 'a suspicious person' and they searched me, but all they found were sheafs of looseleaf paper, pencils, pens, compasses, rulers, graph paper, and a library card. When they questioned me, they seemed to think I was a drug dealer or something. Now, if they were the education board looking for cheaters, they'd be on to something, but the police came up empty and had to let me go.

My mother picked me up at the station and assured the officers that I am 'a good boy' and explained that I was at the school because I 'tutor kids in my free time'. I think they believed her, because it matched with what I'd been trying to tell them, and the contents of my backpack sort of supported the claim. Plus, I might have cried a little bit, which is hardly the behavior of a hardened criminal. All the same, I think I'll wait a few days before going to the school again. Or maybe I'll just skip the RAM upgrade and see how Oblivion works without it. I meet the minimum requirements there already.

It was the weirdest thing. Now, my school was attacked by aliens, so I know about weird, but this . . . it was weird.

My egg donor watches soaps. It's not something I'm proud of. Actually, it embarrasses me a lot. Especially when I walk through the living room to start making lunch and two people are making out (sometimes more than making out) on the screen. Okay, yes, nearly sixteen here, but still. It's my mom who's watching it. And it's a soap.

Anyway, it was Days of Our Lives today when I walked through. Normally I would not know Days of Our Lives from Some Other Stupid Soap and I didn't today either. But today I asked which one it was she was watching.

And then I put off lunch so I could go to the Days of Our Lives website. And sure enough, there it was under cast credits.

Paul Simon Tellerman. The Groundskeeper at my school. He's an actor.

Huh.

Small world, isn't it?

Pity he's a soap opera actor, otherwise it would have been really cool.

Another summer. I'm now fifteen. I'll be going into fifth year, which is a big deal in the boarding school world. There's a big exam at the end of the year and you're definitely past the halfway mark. I've worked it out, in terms of Detroit public schools, too. I'd be going into my junior year next September. I think I'm glad that I'm not because I'm still under five feet and under a hundred pounds, so I'm total bait at the high school. But I wonder sometimes if maybe it would have been better to stay in the normal curriculum. My school's kinda artsy, and they don't really do a lot of hard science, and I'm not going to be able to take AP calculus. I wonder if I can get into some kind of exchange program. I mean, I am a genius.

There's seven years at the boarding school, so it's going to be an extra year before I get to college, too. With the skipped grade, I should have been able to make it college when I was still seventeen. It works different here, though, and your school year is based on age not prior education, so I lost what I'd gained by jumping ahead in third grade.

Anyway, Detroit isn't as oppressive this year as normal. This is mostly due to the fact that Nick is going to be away for an entire month. It'll be like I have my own room until July 12th. He left a day before I got here, so it's perfect. I didn't have to see him AND I didn't have to miss very much of the time he was gone. It's going to really stink when he gets back though. But I am not thinking about that. I have a month Nick-free.

I don't mind the presumed genetic donors. They don't bother me much and while the egg donor still can't cook worth anything, I've tried a few dishes which turned out decent and she's letting me make meals now. If I didn't know any better, I'd suspect it of being a lifelong plot to trick me into doing the cooking, but surely she and the sperm donor wouldn't have put up with such wretched food for fifteen years just so I'd cook for three months a year.

Besides, it's really not that different from what we do in one of my weird classes (no, not home ec), which is why I'm as competent as I am, and there is no way they could have anticipated I'd go to a school that taught that.

At any rate, the donors are rather impressed with me that I'd volunteer to cook of my own free volition (either they don't realize how much in my own favor this arrangement is, or they are bedazzled by my culinary skills after such a long acclimitazation period to the maternal unit's failures) and have made an effort to improve their relations with me. For example, if I walk into a room, my father might say, "Hello, son," instead of making a caveman like grunt as was his norm prior to this year.

Had I known it was Mom's cooking that was deforming their intellectual capacities and verbal skills so terribly, I would have become Betty Crocker's most devoted acolyte ages ago.

And since I'm doing the cooking, I get to do the grocery shopping, so between the food stamps, Mom's employee discount, and the lack of all of that going into frozen dinners and beer, we are actually starting to have something resembling food in the kitchen now. Dad's not so happy about the absense of beer, but since he doesn't need it to wash down the taste of char, he's not complaining too loudly.

Well, I've got the easy part of my character done for this summer's campaign. Doug said I had to be a dwarf, gnome, or halfling, which I think is kind of unfair because just because I'm short, shouldn't mean my character has to be. But Gnomes are cool, so I didn't argue too much about it. I'm going have him be a sorceror. It just seems appropriate, you know. What with me be a wizard at all things academic and all.

I decided I'd give a nod toward 'gnomish' names and give him Dimble as one of his names (Gnomes have really quite a lot of names - their mom gives them one, their dad gives them one, their grandparents give them one each, etc). The rest of his names, though, I'm going to use to give tribute to folks and important stuff at my school. So the character's name is (take a deep breath): Dimble Aladren Silver Heindrich Wright Organa Welsh Baxter Craven. I'll call him Ash for short.

Anyway, he's 54 years old (he's a gnome, so that's not as old as it sounds), 47 pounds, and 3'7". (So, yes, I am taller than him.)

First set of attribute rolls came out low (one of the rolls was three ones and one three) with a net attribute modifier of 0, so I got to reroll. Second roll went better, so my stats are (after doing the gnome adjustments):
Cha 17 (+3)
Con 16 (+3)
Dex 14 (+2)
Wis 11 (+0)
Int 11 (+0)
Str 9 (-1)

His feat is combat casting.

Tomorrow, I'll figure out what spells and equipment he's getting.

Make your own avatar.

Hey, Bob,

I'm back for another summer. Nick was actually almost decent to me when I got home. This is probably because I wrote his history term paper for him and he's still short ten of the dollars he owes me for that.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you all know that my Headmistress fought off the aliens and escaped, so she's back at the school where she belongs now. I was really glad to see she was all right. Toby Venus, her assistant, helped break her out.

Not much alien activity this year. I guess Headmistress Marnett really scared them off. Maybe even did some sabotage to their ship while she was a prisoner. There was a brief scare early on, but that just turned out to be the librarian's cat. This invasion force seems to have been successfully turned away by the forces of Earth, so we should be alright unless they come back in greater numbers next time.

Anyway, I'm supposed to meet Doug at the game store later to talk about the new D&D campaign he's starting up, so I'll talk to you later.

-Zack

Date:	2006-01-23 14:57
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	worried

Second year is over and I'm back in Detroit. I hate Detroit. The only good thing about Detroit is my computer. Which is, by the way, horribly outdated now. I'll need to upgrade tomorrow. But today, GreatestJournal gets an update. So. Hi. I'm back. I've been back for, oh, thirty minutes. In that time, Nick has already proved to be more annoying than I remember, my room (which I share with the aforementioned annoying Nick) has proved smaller than I remember, my parents proved as harried and dismissive of everything I say as I remember, and the available snackfood is as non-existant as I remember.

I also measured myself. I'm taller than I was when I left, but not by much. Three quarters of an inch. I blame the aliens for the difference being so small. I nearly froze to death because of the cold ray they focused on my school for so long. I got a cold, too. I haven't figured out yet if they were alien germs or just normal ones. It seemed like a normal cold, though the remedy they give at private schools was somewhat unusual. I felt like steam must have poured out of my ears after I took the medicine. It is possible the aliens contaminated the infirmary stock. I know it was compromised during the first attack. Then, when they finally turned off the cold ray, they replaced it with a heat ray, and I nearly had a heat stroke. These are not optimal conditions for growth. At least there was sufficient food, which is more than I can say for here. I don't anticipate much growth over the summer either. Best I can hope for is probably crossing the line to hit four seven. I'm approximately a quarter inch short below that.

Oh, I should probably explain the aliens. Earth is under attack. For reasons unknown, they seem to be focussing their assault on my private school. I have theories about that, but I don't want to put them down here where anybody could read it. The problem is, everybody's denying it. The teachers, the alumni, the other students, NASA, the government, the press, everybody. No, 'denying' is too strong a word, unless directly questioned. Complete non-disclosure. Not a word about the alien invasion at all by anybody. The Headmistress herself was abducted, and still nothing. Just "Professor Bulla will be Acting Headmaster until Headmistress Marnett returns."

I'm really kind of worried about her. I mean, I don't know her really at all, but she's like my principal and she always seemed nice at the feasts, and she's been abducted by aliens and they're probably performing all sorts of tests and tortures on her and nobody's even acting concerned. It's just wrong. They should at least give a cover story that lets us be worried about her. 'She's been kidnapped' would do, I mean, that's basically what happened, except that it was done by the aliens. But no. They were just vague about why she was gone, and that's a tip off right there.

Anyway, I need to go. Mom's calling for dinner. Lean Cuisine, tonight, the turkey special. Yippee. I think I've gotten too used to private school fare. Detroit sucks.

Date:	2005-04-05 15:32
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	blah

Got an icon. D'you know just how few decent pictures of Spock there are on the web? Very few. I might fiddle with it later when I'm on my computer instead of the public library computer, but for now I've at least got an icon at all.

Hey, Bob,

I guess as my first journal entry I should say something introductory, so, hi, I'm Zack. Zack Kravmir Dill, if you what to get all formal and legal about it. Just Zack. Not Zackary, Zachary, Zachariah, or any variation thereof. Zack. Zachary Dill was my grandfather. Middle name is my mom's maiden name. It's Russian. Last name is Dill. Not Pickle. Dill. Alright, I've got on for a full paragraph about my name, so I think I can safely move on now.

My only brother's name is Nick (Nick Kravmir Dill, for my other grandfather, Nikolas Kravmir). More often, I'll probably be referring to him as 'the idiot' or 'that rat bastard'. My parents will be referred to in this journal as 'Mom' and 'Dad' or 'those carbon based lifeforms responsible for donating to my genetic code' on occassions when I'm in a particularly unforgiving mood. Okay, that's the obligatory family paragraph.

As for hobbies, if you can call life-consuming activities that occupy my every waking moment 'hobbies', I'm a certifiable geek and I do Magic. To expand upon my geek-hood, I'm brilliant, I read textbooks for fun (particularly science ones), I know I fit inside a middle school locker through personal experience, and I do other people's homework. Magic is self-explanatory, but on a related note, I also play video games (Neverwinter Nights is my current favourite), read sci-fi/fantasy, and watch Star Trek religiously. So, yeah, I'm a nerd.

I guess that's it.
Zack