Chapter 472: Ellen’s First Christmas

“I almost forgot about Ellen and Christmas,” I told my parents in my dad’s new office. “I talked to her about her past Christmases, and she doesn’t remember any. It seems her dad couldn’t exactly go shopping for presents. I know everyone on both sides of our family is coming to celebrate here this year since we have the room and space. I don’t think Crimilda ever had one based on what I knew about her life before bringing her home to live with Becky. We never had the money to do anything extravagant, not that we would have anyway. I don’t even have a clue what to do. I want both girls to know they are loved and have some pleasant childhood memories.”

Mom replied, “I think I can take care of that. Do we need to arrange for your harems to come with Skylar and Mary? Corwin said they seemed to pop in unexpectedly.”

“I can ask them to bring the harems along, but since you mentioned it, you will have to tell the head cook that she needs to plan to feed a few hundred teens, tweens, and adults, plus who knows how many infants and toddlers,” I joked.

“You mean we would go to one of your resorts if they visited?” mom asked.

I laughed hard, and so did dad.

Once we could both stop chuckling, we took mom to the stairs leading to the wine cellar.

“We have a wine cellar? We don’t even drink wine, except on special occasions,” mom said, with a questioning look on her face.

“Mom,” I started saying, “Dad, you gave me a hard time not knowing about the movie theater and bowling alley. I think we have many more rooms and places in this mansion than we even know. I’m pretty sure no one from our staff has been in this wine cellar. They have a room off this one with the meds where I’ve seen them get wine for cooking and meals. Alex said that some of these wines are rare at my bed and breakfast in Spain. He receives some because he grows their grapes. The stairs go down at least one more level. I should have gone exploring way before now, but I didn’t expect to keep finding we have more house than it appears.”

We decided to start at the bottom and work our way up. That turned out not to work as well as mom and dad thought.

When we came to the first door, it buzzed and clicked when I pulled the handle.

So far, I haven’t come to any electronically locked doors in the house. While it didn’t smell musty, and there was no dust I could see, this area hadn’t been entered regularly by anyone except whoever was maintaining it.

In front and to our right were long hallways.

The lighting came from LED light strips, yet another surprise. We headed to the right to the end of the hallway, only to find it turned to the left. While my parents headed down that one, I went back the other way. The hallways made a large square. On the outside wall, we found two doors. Behind each were what I can best describe as commercial kitchens. They connected into eating areas that went back toward the stairs.

In all, we found four kitchen and eating room setups.

We headed to the doors on the inside walls, starting in the back hallway. The door we opened into a hallway that went into what looked a lot like a guard room. Another identical passage left this room to the left. Mom tried to open the door at the back of the guard room, but it started buzzing and light flashing over the hallway we used to get into this room. Mom couldn’t open the back door until all the guardroom doors were closed.

That door opened into a large room with bunk beds four high. We counted one-hundred bunk beds. At the rear of the room was a large communal bathroom. It had a ten-head shower room, ten toilets, five urinals, twenty sinks, and twenty-five wall cabinets, with four baskets and a space to hang clothes. There were four of these large barracks-style areas.

Dad went to check out the door in the back corner of the sleeping area. That led up to a room that reminded me of the part of the harems where I serviced the women and girls fourteen or older. It had a section with thick cushions on the floor and pillows. Others were beanbags and couches.

A side door in the room led into a formal dining room that only sat twenty. The second side door was for a less-formal dining room that sat one hundred. Both had access down into the kitchen below. Using my implant, I found panels held closed electrically that hid stairs going up from the formal dining area. At the top were a guardroom, hallway, another guardroom, and another hidden door. Behind the door, we found an opulent sitting area, an exquisite bedroom, and a bathroom.

All the fixtures in the bathroom are made from blocks of gold, even the toilets. The vanities were carved out of chunks of white Italian Marble. The floors were mosaics made out of different marble slabs. The walls were these unbelievable designs made with rare woods like sandalwood, African Blackwood, Ebony, and Pink Ivory.

This bedroom looks much like Mary’s dad’s “sultan” suite at her house.

“All the furniture is made from Dalbergia wood. The wood is not even in the same category as those used on the walls and ceilings. From what I remember about rare woods, it is hard to work with and requires master artisans who have only crafted with that wood. I can’t even imagine how many years it took to get this out of India’s dense forests to craft this furniture. That toilet costs more than it would take to rebuild the parts of the house we already knew about before today. This area is insane,” dad said.

“You want to find out what is on the next level,” I asked.

Mom didn’t but came anyway. Her saying “fucking hell” was an understatement.

As we came out of the short hallway, we walked into what looked like an exotic car museum. In the corner was an elevator designed to raise them somewhere. We couldn’t resist the temptation to find out where.

Dad summed it well when he said, “Now we know why no one was assigned this garage door.”

“Is there a Batcave?” mom asked jokingly.

“David, sir,” a man dressed as a butler whom I had never met, and wasn’t an android, said. “It seems you began the extended tour of your mansion in the basement quite unexpectedly, I might add.”

To mom, he said, “Mrs. Jones, Mr. Wayne’s comic creators didn’t have the resources available to the previous owner of this estate, much less David. If you would kindly follow me.”

He led us out of the garage, into the house, into my study, and then through a nondescript door that I thought was a coat closet.

Of course, it is a damn hidden elevator. One made so that not even those like me could find it by removing all the house walls and floors.

Where he led us shocked the hell out of mom, dad, and me.

“I cannot even claim to have the computer knowledge of a five-year-old, but I have an affinity for numbers. Before a recent upgrade, the super-super-computer held one million CPU processing cores, a petabyte of ram, and an exabyte of solid-state storage. The previous upgrade was three years ago. I haven’t asked about new capacities, and I’m sure I don’t want to know,” the butler told us. “It is crucial to know that each component got made by hand to ensure no unwanted bios, code, or hardware is piggy-backed onto it. I can’t conceive of you needing such computing resources, sir, but they are here at no cost to you. What little they told me is that the power and cooling subsystems for this area are off the grid entirely. I can confirm that it isn’t a form of nuclear power and isolated from the rest of the property,” he told us before sighing.

He walked off behind one of the computer racks, returned carrying April, and told her, “Miss April. I’ve already explained that the elevator in your father’s suite got modified to permit your access. It is unsafe for you to enter here using whatever way you are getting in here. I will not assume responsibility for getting your clothes dirty or hurting yourself.”

“Mister Carver, el-e-vat-er is boring. I like the pole,” April told him.

He had a look of total confusion.

“Down, please,” April said.

She took us over to a rack of the computer gear, kicked the left corner, pulled on the cage door handle, and damned if it didn’t slide forward silently. All the cables and stuff were somehow pulled out from inside. In the hole between the two racks was a large open area. Cooling pipes and wires were going down into the floor. Sure enough, there was a pole coming down from the second floor. Around the room’s edges was a stairway with a metal mesh lattice facing out. At the bottom was a mat similar to those used for pole vaulting or high jump.

“Stairs only for April. Day-id, mommy, and daddy too big,” April said as she ducked into the opening.

“Hi, daddy,” Ellen said as she dropped from above, skipping the pole entirely. “Bye, daddy.”

Like that, Ellen was chasing a giggling April up the stairs. Ellen had to go on her hands and knees because she was too big now to walk upright on them. April teased that these were April’s stairs, not Ellen’s.

“Now that we have found yet another secret, shall we go to the main event?” he asked.

Not sure if that is what I would call monitors curving around three walls and the ceiling.

The room we walked into was at least twenty by twenty with fourteen-foot ceilings. The area looked like the smooth inside of a snow globe lined with monitors with a corner cut out.

In the middle was a chair that turned and leaned back. A keyboard was in a pocket on the back, but it had gloves as I had for my computer.

Before we headed back upstairs, the butler explained that wasn’t his role. He was primarily responsible for the security of the exotic car garage, the computer area, and the harem halls.

He didn’t tell my parents that he and those who worked with him came and went via the hidden tunnels.

Once we had dinner, dad had me take out one of the exotic cars so that he could drive one.

“Your mom will probably rape me for days on end, but you should tell Mary and Skylar that this insane mansion has harem quarters. I didn’t mention it then, but that part of the house must extend under Becky and Chrissy’s houses and push up against the lake. This place is monstrous, but not that big,” dad said while he drove around in the Aston Martin. “Do you mind if I take this to work? It isn’t classic or all that rare. No one would bother trying to steal it. A guy at work got one at a police auction and attempted to restore it. Man, that thing looks like shit. This one is the same year and model.”

“Yeah, sure. It isn’t like the cars are doing anyone any good by just sitting there,” I told dad.

I called Corwin, Skylar, and Mary. I told them what extras I found as part of my mansion. They were shocked. None of them even heard of anywhere set up to have up to four sultans and four harems in one place simultaneously. Well, one place other than the resorts that host the annual spring truce vacation. I called Becky’s grandmother and told her what I had planned. She said she would gladly arrange for Corwin’s brothers, sisters, and mom to stay in her house. We all knew that Corwin, Skylar, and Mary would be up in my room during their stay.

“David,” Bess said. “After all those years that Crimilda suffered at the hands of that witch and her family, I’m so happy to be able to do something. I’ve been at a complete loss about how I could compensate her for being complacent and not doing as I should. I was so focused on Becky that I didn’t pay enough attention. Ellen is in a whole other world altogether. Many in Ellen’s family feel great remorse about Ellen getting left alone to die out in those woods when her father got killed. David, she scares the shit out of them, just as her father did. They know there is no point in trying to apologize. Talk to Ellen. See if she would be willing to let those who are sincere hug her. There will be no strings attached. Few in her family know that based on lineage and how they determine their heirs, Ellen would be the head of their family if you had not adopted her. Unlike your children with any of the other elite families, Ellen isn’t your daughter by blood. You are not being allowed into the elite world is all that keeps her from taking her rightful position. I’ve talked with her at length, and she doesn’t want anything to do with her father’s family. Now she doesn’t have to worry about them continuing to come after her.”

I had to add, “Ellen hasn’t needed to worry about them coming after her since she was nine.”

“Why is that,” Bess wanted to know.

How can you not know? Did Ellen’s family hide what she did to the head psycho in the family?

Taking out my phone, I showed her the pictures of Ellen’s name burned, backward, into the eyebrows of the psycho bitch and all those she brought with her.

“Holy fucking hell! You know the stories people in the elite families tell and that you can’t trust a word any of them say, including me. Ellen has stories she has told Crimilda, but how can I believe them? Such things are too far out there,” Bess said when she got that what Ellen went through was not some made-up or an over-dramatized load of shit.

With all that done, I went to my “lair” to work on breaking down whatever crap I had decoded from the girl and woman at my foster care complex.

Interesting. All the data I have worked through so far got stored only on this system. These chips were made in a way that ensured the man-in-the-machine couldn’t get into it. Is that odd hardware routine something that would cause him what his equivalent to pain is?

I don’t know how I used my implant to rewrite this enormous parallel computer system to work how I had done the decoding in my brain. When Ellen came down to tell me it was time to get ready for school, I was watching forty-two chunks of data flash up on the hemispheric screen. Each would sit there for a few seconds before becoming an expanded block of random-appearing characters. Having all the data in RAM for the part it worked on significantly sped up the processing. The slowest portion of the process was writing it to the solid-state disks.

That system is not connected to any network or has any remote access that I can find. It can run through that data faster than I can in my head now that the information has outgrown what my brain can hold.

Both honors language classes spoke multiple languages at a high school level, but none were happy to find out that they would have to start doing grammar. It was no different from kids in the parts of the world where those languages get taught.

We were going to start after the Christmas break.

The gym classes got more enjoyable once the boy’s gym coaches got to know me better. Due to the temperatures and weather, we were usually in the gym instead of outside. All the students learned that if I started moving toward the solid core foam balls, they better stop doing something they know is unacceptable. The week before the Christmas break, the girl’s gym classes started playing volleyball in one half of the gym. The boys were working on increasing the number of pushups, sit-ups, and chin-ups they could do. Plus, they were running laps around the inside of the gym.

The gym class got very interesting. The boys were distracted by the girl’s tits bouncing all over the place. Some of the girls were watching the boys working out. We had boys running into someone who stopped to enjoy the view. About half of the girls got hit with a volleyball when someone spiked it because that girl wasn’t paying attention to the game.

For a while, we had a mom “appear” in the gym office to ask some bullshit question as an excuse to check up on me. With the girls used to me being there now, it wasn’t unusual for one to walk into the office nude or just in panties, to have me check a sprain or muscle cramp. Not surprisingly, the girls usually went to Marissa to have her help work out a cramp. I did it on occasion, but the girls said they were so relaxed when I got done that they wanted to take a nap, not go to their next class. My role was to be the one to hold a girl that needed a shoulder to cry on or have someone help them feel safe when they were feeling insecure. Sometimes they just wanted to chat while they got dressed. I was still a teenager. I could answer boy questions.

I will always have a towel between their bare butt and my pants.

On the Friday before the break, I was inundated with gifts. I got many pairs of silly socks, one ugly Christmas sweater that was loose on me, some trinkets for my desks, and Christmas cards. It was a half-day of school with a holiday party for the rest of the afternoon.

From that Friday to Christmas Eve, the girls and I spent time at the four foster care complexes. Most of the time, we helped the kids wrap presents they got for their friends and families. Each kid living here got a two-hundred-dollar budget to go Christmas shopping. They also made a wish list of things they wanted. They didn’t need anything but things like toys, books, and other items they wanted to be theirs, not something shared. The staff ensured each kid had the basics but didn’t go for frivolous things. They felt that no one needed cell phones or computers. Laptops and desktops were available for them, but there were rules about no laptops in the bedrooms. If they wanted to show someone their dick, tits, pussy, or asshole, there were areas designated away from the suites. We arranged with one of the elite families to get online with other kids who were into the same things. It was free to us, and none of the video streams got out anywhere they could be sent around.

We knew some kids here would find ways to have sex chats with men and women. Yuki arranged to have dozens of sites set up with a wide selection of the kids expected to be on those sites to watch whatever the kid wanted to do. All of the sites were heavily monitored and moderated.