Chapter 387: Sondarm Christian School Visit; Inside

Tuesday, July 3 to Saturday, July 21, 2007

I wrote an email to the Principal of the Sondarm Christian High School, introducing myself then saying:

I believe the antagonism from some elements of the Christian community toward me and/or God's Guardian Angel is mostly caused by unfamiliarity. Resurrection is unknown in modern times, and as far as I am aware, the Guardian Angel is unknown in all times. People fear the unknown, and fear often leads to worse emotions and actions. I wish to reduce the possibility of future problems by making myself better known. I would like to make myself available to interact with the Christian community in a suitable venue. I propose that your school and I jointly organize a meeting to start this familiarization process.

What I have in mind is that on a day that is convenient to you, my parent(s) and sister(s) (depending on availability) and I will attend a meeting that you will have invited your students and their families to; past students and their families too if you wish.

We would spend a few hours socializing in a way you are certainly more experienced at organizing than I am. I do have one suggestion for the process, which I describe on the next page.

I'm aware that you will incur costs for this, which I will happily reimburse you for.

I gave my contact details and some date and timing suggestions, then the closing salutation. On the next page I wrote,

ART STORE SUGGESTION

I feel that a Question & Answer session would be too formal and not ideal for allowing people to get to know me as a person. I would like a process that permits casual, personal interactions, ideally through an activity that breaks the ice and gives us something to talk about.

It just so happens that I would like to buy some pieces of art. I am living in a different home now than when I was abducted by the Department of Homeland Security, and my new home's artwork doesn't suit my taste. I want to buy some pieces that appeal to me, but my resurrection was only a month ago and my shopping in public still causes too much fuss.

I suggest that your students display their artworks and I will 'shop' for any pieces that appeal to me. That will give us something to talk about as my family and I walk around the room, and I'll hopefully pick up some pieces I enjoy. Other members of my family might do so too.

I think I need to make a few points explicit:

First, I am not judging an art competition, as I am singularly unqualified to do that. Consequently, I won't be picking exactly three 'winners', but however many I like the look of. I hope to find several pieces so I can rotate them every few months to keep my appreciation of them fresh.

Second, as is usual in stores, I would expect to pay for what I take home. I would like to be generous in support of young talent, but not so generous as to spoil them (aren't all artists required to suffer?). How much to pay is a judgment that I would appreciate your input on, but what I have in mind is a payment of $1,000 per piece, payable to the student responsible. If more than one student contributed to a piece I choose, then I'll have to rely on your school's help (maybe their art teacher?) to apportion the money fairly. I know $1,000 is likely to be too much commercially, but my family believes in giving back to the community and I'm feeling even more altruistic in this life.

Third, I know nothing about judging formal quality in art (brush techniques, etc.). I will be choosing works based on nothing other than their subjective appeal to me. It is certain that many people will question my taste. I don't mind my being laughed at for my taste, but I would like the students to know that if they think their 'better' work was passed over so I could buy an 'inferior' work, then they could be right. They shouldn't take any personal slight from my having an entirely different and uneducated idea of what "better" means to me.

I see from your school's website that it has art classes - hence the above suggestion - but I am unable to discern how many of your students take art. If the number is very low then the 'shopping' experience would not take long enough to be worthwhile. With my suggested "Art Store" example to illustrate what I have in mind, if you don't have many art students then I am sure you could schedule other similar socialization activity/activities to occupy the remainder of the time, with due regard to the purpose of our visit.

^

The school's Principal called back a few days later to say that his school's board thought it was a great idea, "But $1,000 per piece is too much. Even $100 is more than they would expect."

"I don't mind overpaying by a factor of ten. I do want to be generous and that sounds roughly what I was aiming for. My parents have raised me to believe in supporting the local community. I don't know whether you remember, but the first settlement deal we did with the Government a year ago had us giving Benton County three times as much as we wanted for ourselves. The Government stupidly kept throwing more money at us so the final numbers were different, but the original amount is what we thought was fair." There was no chance of him not remembering that, as it was a local legend, if not a national one. Chances are that he lived in the county, so he'd definitely remember it, and quite appreciatively too.

We agreed on the rest of the details, and shortly thereafter the school sent out a newsletter to their database of addresses. They reproduced the core of my letter and my "Art Store" suggestion, putting a cover page with it to specify the date, which was a couple of weekends away, time, place and other necessary details, such as asking high school students to deliver two pieces each, with younger students one piece each. There were quite a few Art students - which I already knew from Nevaeh - and the one or two pieces from each student was the Principal's judgment for the best size for the 'store'.

Having warned Nevaeh in advance, I sent the Guardian Angel to her bedroom one night to choose which of her pieces she should submit, telling her, "God knows my mind inside out, so the angel will be able to pick which pieces I like the most." The Principal's instructions included the submitters having their names on their works so I didn't need to see her pictures to recognize them in the 'store'; I just wanted to make sure that she submitted pictures that I liked. I'll be buying one of them and I'll have to hang it at home because Nevaeh visits two or three times a week. We could get away with her visiting so often because Nevaeh had several parentally approved new girlfriends who were easily capable of justifying her absences from her usual social circle during the day. Her parents didn't have a clue that their daughter was having orgies several times a week with "the evil Mark Anderson". She'd even been able to stay overnight once. I'd like to say that it'd been for a sustained orgy, but it was even more depraved than that: the girls spent most of the time talking fashion. Nevaeh's interest in fashion is even worse than Julia's (shudder).

My offer to SCS created many articles in the paper and a very emotial debate via letters to the editor. A lot more people wanted invites to meet marvelous me, while many other people thought I shouldn't be allowed near defenseless schoolchildren. Unknown to them, the latter group's position did have some merit, as part of the reason for my visit was so I could find more beautiful Christian girls to seduce. The school had quite a moderate Christian stance, according to their website, and the Principal had no problem dismissing the calls of the people who wanted the event canceled. Attendance wasn't compulsory so people who didn't like it could simply stay away. He did talk to me about the risk of the angel running amok and killing people, but that was easily countered with, "It's an angel..." etc. I'm sure you know the crap I'd use.

The Principal asked me about extra demand. Apparently there was a LOT of extra demand, far more than they could accommodate. It was my first 'official' engagement outside my home and it was looking like thousands of people from the local community wanted to come, and God knows how many from the national community.

I told him, "Packing a hall with ten thousand people would totally defeat the purpose of my coming. You look after your students and their families, and the unrelated people can wait for another occasion. If it works well I'll arrange several similar events over the summer." It was clear that we would have to use a lot of police and our own security to control the expected protestors and gatecrashers.

I called the Chief of Police to politely request his help for the event, then put him on to Paul so they could start planning it.

A subset of the Galloping Ninnies were among the groups that called for the event to be canceled; their "call" coming from a new "caller", the previous one no longer capable of that function. I was pleasantly surprised to see how small the group was that the call was coming from. [[After not having seen any comeback from their vitriol spewing during their lifetimes, what had happened to the Ninnies' preacher had made many of that congregation aware that yelling moral judgments at me wasn't the risk-free, posturing, look-good-for-each-other game they'd thought it was. They'd known that the angel killed people, but they'd NEVER thought that it might attack THEM! Most of them did not have the courage of their convictions - having neither courage nor, often, any real convictions, because churches like the Galloping Ninnies' appeal to weak-willed people looking for security and validation - so they found reasons not to participate in public opposition to me or my SCS event.]]

Many of the public were scared of the angel. "Is it safe for children to be around the dangerous Guardian Angel?" was a hot topic. Several points decided the majority of the public's reaction:

1. The Guardian Angel had been exceptionally careful with the children in the riots outside the Anderson home.

2. I interacted with people every day and no one had been attacked just because they'd been near me. "My angel isn't a wild beast; it's a highly intelligent servant of God, for goodness sake. Why would you think a servant of God would ever attack innocent children?"

3. The victims of the angel had ALL deserved it by threatening me. Some people argued that death was never deserved, but it was inarguable that there'd been some degree of deservedness. Kids standing around hoping I bought their pictures would be about as undeserving of death as you could imagine.

4. People were curious. They wanted to meet me, my letter hadn't been noticeably Evil, and the event was happening in the middle of the day in a school, so it seemed as boring and safe as you could get, although some people suggested that it should be held in a church for the extra safety that'd give everyone. Sheesh!

Being staunch Ninnies, Nevaeh's parents weren't in favor of the event and didn't want to attend it. They didn't make their opposition public, but they quite strongly didn't want to be among the participants, even though they qualified as all their children went to Sondarm, other than their eldest who had just graduated from it. Their negativity was mostly because they objected strongly to my lifestyle and didn't want to be associated with me in any respect.

Only Nevaeh and her younger brother argued in favor of going. Nevaeh wanted to go for the obvious - although not mentioned - reasons, and the younger brother was just curious. The oldest boy didn't want to go because he had better things to do than go to boring school, and Grace only wanted to do things that were bad, according to Nevaeh.

#8: <Maybe we should use the same strategy on the delicious looking Grace that we used on Nevaeh, except pretending to be the Devil instead. We could have LOT of fun with that, haha.>

Our plan for her parents refusing was for Nevaeh not to make a fuss, but to quietly go anyway. Doing that wouldn't do her any real harm, as sneaking INTO a school function is hardly a terrible crime. The event was going to be a success and she'd be $1,000 richer, so her parents wouldn't have anything much to complain about afterward. But as it happened, the massive public interest in the event convinced her parents that they should go themselves. It didn't really matter either way, but I was pleased by the implication that they weren't excessively negative, inflexible people.

The Williamses and Ava wouldn't come, to avoid rubbing our unusual lifestyle in people's faces. If there's one thing Christians hate, it's people with unusual lifestyles (actually, there are many things Christians hate).

[I can't resist a small scientific justification for that unfortunately largely true joke. There's a great deal of research being done these days on how people think. Neurologists, economists, ethicists and many other "-ists" are involved in the studies (I learned about it from Vanessa, in one of her many little educational sessions with me). There's a common Game Theory experiment called the "Ultimatum Game" in which person A is given a pile of something worthwhile (usually money for adults, or candy for children). Person A decides the proportions to keep for himself or give to Person B. Person B can then "Accept" (both of them keep what they've got), or "Reject" (both of them have to give it back to the experimenter). If Person A allocates the money 50/50 then Person B will "Accept" all the time, but if Person A keeps 70% or more, then Person B will "Reject" increasingly often, even though Person B ends up with nothing that way. One of the strong results of these experiments is that religious people (of any religion) are slightly fairer in their allocations when they are Person A, but are FAR more likely to punish when they are Person B.]

Somewhat to my surprise, all the Anderson family volunteered to go. My letter had implied that some of them might not because I'd expected them to be bored by the idea. This scheme had only come up because I wanted to get into Nevaeh's panties, and it was a boring part of the scheme too, but Mom said, "We rarely get to see you operate so we're looking forward to it."

Carol was always going to be with me, so Donna was the only other uncertainty. Before I'd talked to the family about it, I'd hoped Donna would want to come because I wanted her involved in as many of my schemes as possible. I'd learned a huge amount about people from participating in Julia's schemes, and for the last year or so Donna had been mature enough to deliberately learn about people - a couple of years previously, any learning she did seemed accidental. Donna's emotional maturity was improving in leaps and bounds, and I was enjoying her company more and more these days. I'd rather thoughtlessly not realized that OF COURSE Donna would come. From the instant I mentioned one aspect of my plan, she was begging to be allowed to participate. Neither wild nor any of our domestic horses would keep her away.

On the day, we all dressed conservatively- my terrible clothes and exposed ankles nearly brought tears to Julia's eyes, as this would doubtless be televised nationally - and headed off in convoy with our rather large security detail, as some of the protestors had been very strident. They were Christian, so "strident" was de rigueur for them.

The event unfolded pretty much as I expected. I'll skip most of its description as being too obvious and boring: Protestors, crowd, speeches, looking at a lot of pictures I wouldn't want to look at once let alone live with, etc. There were three TV cameras allowed in the hall, and the room was packed with so many people that moving around was awkward.

As soon as we arrived, I insisted that we walk around the outside of the hall next to its walls. This puzzled my security but they knew I was the boss. After the circumnavigation, I'd proximity sensed all of the crowd who were inside the hall within twenty feet of the walls. I had identified several - for the lack of a better word - "idiots". They'd been identified by their having the wrong emotions, mainly hatred, strong fear, and way too much nervousness for the situation. When I'd identified a suspicious person with proximity, I'd checked him or her with a sight blob. The density of the crowd sometimes made sight blob searching them tricky, but the crowding did make patting them down easier. They might feel something, but they were often being jostled by other people and there's nothing to see from an invisible pat down. The suspicious people earned the label "idiot" because most of them were carrying eggs, two each in a cut-down egg container in one of their pockets or handbag. The remaining idiots seemed to be unequipped: tactically and probably intellectually.

There were metal detector systems on the main door that our guards and some policemen had been manning from when the doors opened, so I wasn't much worried about guns, and I was even less worried about eggs.

There was no one hiding in the rafters, there being no rafters. I searched the stage with proximity and a sight blob, and there was nothing untoward there. No explosives under it, for example. Our security would have checked all that stuff anyway.

When we completed our circuit I staged the usual cellphone theater to tell our security there were egg-throwers and to leave it to the angel to do something appropriate and non-fatal about. We entered the hall from the door farthest from the stage, with me in the front of our party. By the time we'd walked down the middle of the hall, I'd proximity sensed everyone. Theoretically someone might've luckily dodged my sweeps, but that was very unlikely, especially not from my last sweep as it covered a 50-foot wide rectangle down the center of the hall.

We arrived on the stage without incident. We sat in a row to one side while the Principal gave his introduction to me.

When I stood up and walked toward the mic, one of the Idiots stood up yelling "NOW!"

#16: <We'd better be careful in case they're Holy Eggs blessed to send us back to Hell.>

The egg-equipped, intellectually-unequipped idiots jumped to their feet. They were spread out in the seating area in front of the stage - there were so many people and the artworks had to be displayed too, so only the front half of the audience had seats - so eggs came at me from all the frontal directions. Half of the idiots threw too hard and broke their eggs before they'd left their hands, which annoyed their splattered neighbors.

Immediately after their first half-volley, they reloaded and fired again. At about that time they noticed that the first eggs hadn't behaved in quite the manner they'd expected. They were circling in a halo-like effect over my head, the second volley of eggs joining them. I looked up in faked surprise, then chuckled to myself.

I used NP to grasp every egg-thrower, holding their feet to the floor where they were, pulling their hands down by their sides, and holding their upper-arms and backs of their necks so firmly that the idiots couldn't turn, sit, or even budge. And last but MOST importantly, I blocked their mouths and held their jaws shut. The idiots could now only grunt and twitch, rather than the boringly pointless and annoying crap they'd certainly otherwise be inflicting on everyone.

The crowd was just starting to react with fear, so I quickly and loudly said into the mic, "If someone throws bacon and tomatoes we'll have the makings for a tasty meal. At the risk of hamming it up, are we getting a Home Ec demonstration as well as an Art show?"

It wasn't my usual standard of humor, but it did break the tension. The eggs floating around my head, my casual attitude and the idiots being immobilized and silenced stopped the situation getting out of control. The non-appearance of the Guardian Angel probably helped the most though, otherwise the crowd would've almost certainly run screaming from the room, the adults no doubt badly injuring many of the precious children.

I flew an egg toward every baddie, hovering it about two feet above their heads. I tilted all their heads back, and everybody expected to see the eggs smash of the throwers' faces. That calmed people down because the retribution was very minor and aimed only at the offenders. My cellphone floated up to me and a message appeared on it. I told the hall, "The angel just typed a message on my phone. It says: 'Not strip them because children here. Not smash eggs because messy. I will take their money and put them outside.' It sounds like the entertainment will be over shortly folks."

Four of the idiots were two married couples, the men being the throwers and the women providing very temporary, verbal support. There were five other men by themselves, so nine idiots in total. Nine times in sequence, a wallet or purse lifted high above each person, had its cash removed, and the wallet/purse was returned to its owner. The cash accumulating in a pile high in the air too, so everyone could watch the process with fascination.

Meanwhile, some cops had tried to intervene. The big problem they had was in working out how to do that. One of them tried to catch a wallet as it was being removed. Not being able to accelerate his hands with 1,000 g's, he missed.

Two of the cops approached me, one of them instructing me, "Stop it from taking their money."

"I don't have the authority to order God around."

#2: <Nevaeh thinks we nearly can though.>

"It's your angel."

"No it's not; it's God's angel. Give it up, officer. Angels don't consider themselves subject to our laws and they certainly don't consider themselves subject to my or your orders. It said it was going to take their money and put them outside, and that's what it's going to do."

When the last guy's wallet was processed, the bundle of cash burst into flame. I had it in a large box so the smoke and ash were contained. Once the flames had died down, which only took a few seconds, the smoky box led the way out of the hall, followed by each of the idiots. They were held immobile, so all they could do was grunt and squirm as I lifted them up vertically, rotated them to be horizontal, then floated them down the length of the hall and out the front door. People's mouths were open in astonishment.

All the eggs followed the idiots too. When they're outside on the grass, they're going to get their just desserts, specifically an egg pudding. [[The expression is actually spelled "just deserts" having the same linguistic root as "deserve", but that joke cracked me up so I couldn't resist.]]

I waited for the remaining unequipped baddies - four more people whose proximity reading seemed extremely angry - to do anything, but they didn't [and continued not to do so, for the whole meeting].

I made a couple of jokes, apologized for the fright everyone had got, explained a few things about how the angel protected me but only against people who misbehaved, and I conveyed a very casual attitude to defuse the tension. I anticipated the obvious questions that'd be on people's minds and provided the answers unasked, and generally just chatted in a relaxed manner. I took the opportunity to make a couple of "I don't know how people can go against God like that"-type comments.

A reporter and some others who'd followed the idiots outside came back in and informed the crowd what had happened to the egg throwers, which relieved the audience further.

After a while the tension was gone, and I was able to get the meeting back on track. I would've preferred to have not had that crap, but it'd been relatively painless.

I introduced my family to the audience. I used a several-minute long "Get To Know Us" micro-family history as an excuse to insert many jokes and loving references. Giving speeches with thirty two minds helping is trivially easy. I don't have even tiny symptoms of nervousness anymore, and saying nice things about my family couldn't be easier.

Dad unexpectedly commandeered the mic to make a humorous reply for a couple of minutes, then the Principal said a few things about the picture-shopping process; stuff like people should stay where they are and listen to us as we walked around, rather than everyone in the hall try to follow me around.

Because we'd said that liking pictures was a matter of personal taste, my family split up to look around the hall. We could work the crowd better that way. Donna stayed with me because she didn't want to buy any pictures and didn't want to miss any of the action.

There were too many pictures for me to spend more than a few seconds looking at each of them, thank God because most of the pictures weren't to my taste at all. That was probably my fault, but that doesn't negate my point. There were also statues, textile creations, and other types of artwork. Early on in my walk around the hall I came to a bronze of a father and an approximately ten-year old son standing on the tip of a rocky peak they'd just hiked up, judging by the packs on their backs and hiking clothes. To my eyes it conveyed an emotional closeness between the father and son very well. For some unobvious reason - my not being a father or ten-years old - that pulled on my heartstrings and I whipped out my checkbook as soon as I saw it, praising the guy who'd made it. He liked my praise, but he loved my check.

He told me that he'd worked from photographs and I seriously considered commissioning him to make another with my girls as the subject. I'm sure I would've been happy with the result, but I'd probably be even happier getting an acknowledged expert to do it, so I made a mental note to do something about that. [And did. One of the advantages of being rich is being able to order my staff to create a shortlist of suitable artists, I reviewed some of their work, picked the artist whose style I liked the most, then commissioned him to do what I wanted. Money was no object. I got a fantastic piece out of it, which I kept on my desk in my study. My getting a bronze of my girls naturally resulted in their wanting one of me. I just wished they'd let me keep my clothes on for it and hadn't displayed it where they did. Julia insisted it was for advertising purposes, as I was fully Mark and therefore very cute-assed and rib-cocked by then.]

I'd previously always assumed that Christian girls would be a frustrating waste of time as girlfriends, but it'd turned out - judging from Nevaeh - that when you've got God on your side they lay back and open their legs very quickly. They consider themselves deeply honored, which is an excellent attitude. So I had my eyes open for any more Nevaehs. I'd known that none of them would equal her beauty, but I did see several that interested me. I didn't do any flirting, getting of phone numbers, or ANY of those types of things. That'd be a bad thing to do with their Christian parents already fearful of me and my being filmed for TV. This was mainly a PR exercise with a couple of side benefits, one of which was its being a scouting mission to collect a few good looking girls' names. There'd be opportunities for follow-ups later, including asking Nevaeh to help me with that. I proudly expected her to be surprised, and then to help me seduce as many of her schoolmates as I wanted, as she was taking to her new role in life very enthusiastically.

It was only the art students whose names I could easily get because their names were on their works. My getting anyone else's name required our being introduced, which I'll get to when the meeting becomes more mixed up later. Art is a much better school subject than I thought because it had a disproportionate number of female students. Whether that inequality was usual across the country, or the result of SCS's artistic males having better things to do today than attend this meeting, I didn't know or care.

The three paintings I bought were purchased more cautiously than the bronze. I didn't purchase any of them on my first pass around the hall, although there were several paintings that I stopped and talked to the artist for much longer than normal. I made a second pass to make it look like I was seriously considering my first-pass favorites, and I eventually decided on three of them, including one from a somewhat overacting Nevaeh. I played my part too, asking her how she pronounced her unusual looking name.

I was meticulously careful to suppress all typical male behaviors with anybody during this meeting, especially with Nevaeh. Her parents weren't going to see ANY hint of interest from me when our clip appeared on TV, which it almost certainly would. Given a choice of which of my four check-handing-over clips to broadcast, it'll be the one with the big-titted beautiful girl that all the networks will select. [Appearing on national TV gave Nevaeh a big thrill. She'd been getting a lot of thrills recently.]

Mom and Dad bought one piece; Carol two, one of which was a weird textile wall-hanging thing, so God knows what she was going to do with it. Using it for the horses' doormat at the stables seemed like a good idea to me. I smiled at her and said, "Good choice," which was true, I just didn't say what it was a good for.