2.23 – On the Road Again

Thomas’s PoV

Chloe told me everything.  It was…a lot.  And it all culminated with her stealing 42.8 trillion simoleons from a company in an effort to bankrupt another company.  The funny part?  It was working.

After we left Egypt we stayed on the road.  It wasn’t like the other times where we’d drive for a few weeks, a couple months, then crash somewhere for a year.  No.  This time we stayed in the van for a good eight months.  Maybe we spent a few consecutive nights in one town, but never longer.  Now I had two siblings on the run.  One for being born and the other for stealing 42.8 trillion simoleons from an international company!

That’s not exactly true.  No one knew Chloe had stolen the money.  No one had any idea where it was, but she was never linked to the crime in any way.  But I wasn’t taking any chances.

It was a big crime.  Made international news.  Repeatedly.  “MorcuCorp!  The Company that Sank Overnight!” was a headline I saw many times in multiple languages.  And the only lead anyone had was that the money was there one day and gone the next.  Without a trace.  They were calling it the Perfect Crime.

I made Chloe swear to donate it all to charity the first chance she got.

The thing went on for months, but, eventually, MorcuCorp had to declare bankruptcy.  That, in turn, hurt their investors.  And, just like Chloe had predicted, Landgraab Labs’ DNA-OD program had a gigantic portion of its funding cut.  Finally, after months of legal bitching, DNA-OD got shut down to save other projects.

I never told Chloe about my little involvement with that.

Funding’s one thing, but Dr. Sabrina Funke was pretty damn good at getting funding for her pet projects.  She’s one of those people who’re really smart and also really good at talking to people.  And not just talking, but getting people to do things for her.  Charisma.  Dr. Funke’s got that in spades.  But I picked up a few things from my mom.  Some pointers, a military jacket, and a lot of big-wig contacts.

So, I notified a few of my mom’s old colleagues, anonymously, of course. Some weren’t only military meat-heads.  After all, you had to be brave, strong and smart to be an astronaut.  I just let ‘em know that some experiments were going down at the Landgraabs Laboratory in Sunset Valley and the funding had been cut.  And that someone else had the money to save the Labs from bankruptcy if they complied to a few conditions.

They were quick to agree.  Landgraab Labs did a lot of weapons research, after all.

And that’s why we were headed to France.  It was a nice, neutral ground to talk business.  I’d have to buy a suit.

---

I’m sure that we can all agree that Chloe is Chaotic Good.  But I’ve always seen Thomas as Lawful Good, and I hope I’ve given you a glimpse of that here.  🙂

Thanks for reading!  ^_^