Chapter Two: Breakfast? Revenge for two please!

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Mishiida Alexander

Aiszar Garrison

“Humanity hates the straight-forwards, to suffer at the hands of hypocrites.”

Chapter Two: Breakfast? Revenge for two please!

It is easier to hate those who express their honest opinions as well as reservations without any fear, for it gives one a reason to retaliate appropriately. The retaliation might be in the form of social sanctions, physical harm, or emotional retribution. Yet what one overlooks most of the time is the fact, that by opening up the deep insides of their hearts, those speaking out, are actually showing how they have nothing to hide. If there is one person that could and should be trusted, it is the one who has the guts to expose their selves to the backlash, for they can live with everyone as an enemy, but not a questioning conscience.

On the other side of the spectrum is the sweat talking hypocrite; the appropriately honest, or perhaps, conveniently dishonest. Such people often talk about things that please the listener, with the listener seldom realizing their real designs. Or perhaps the listener does realize them, but overlooks the fact, for it is easier to drink poison from the hands of a mesmerizing beauty than lose your head to a filthy butcher. Much of the goodness of societies has been lost to charismatic leaders with agendas seldom exposed, until the end when the battle has already been lost even before a single shot has been fired.

However, none of it is to suggest that a straight-forward person could be the best friend to have either, for if the straight-forward person hates you, there is nothing one can do about it. But at least with a straight-forward person one is always aware of which way the camel is going to sit. It is better than being blind-sided. And what would exemplify this contrast better than the life story of the one person who is standing right in front of us.

“Good morning Princesses! You are late,” Jackie exclaims in his usual calculated banter style, as the two couples arrive for the breakfast, accompanied by the kids.

“Oh C’mon you pig, we are not thinking of food all the time,” and Corbett returns him the favour.

“It’s not about food you fasting monk,” Garcia junior continues, “It’s about the agonizing wait you put me through every day, especially when this is the exact time the breakfast is served without fail.”

“Who told you to wait here,” Hayley chips in, “Why don’t you just come in to our cabins? Are you a shy girl?”

“Oh wow! Now how am I supposed to know what you guys get up to in your cabins,” Garcia quips, “After all, I am not the one who’s married, at least not for the last ten odd years.”

“Yeah, as if that would have made you any sweater, you bitter lemon?” Alex quips as he helps Mishiida into her chair, before making himself comfortable on the one next to her, “Fifteen odd years and I reckon that girl, what was her name again; yeah, Shivoni Vienna; she’s perhaps still sulking in a corner of her mansion.”

“Yeah you vicious serpent, you finally got me with that one,” Garcia quips as he smirks and grabs his glass to take a sip of the apple juice, “Tell you what; you don’t look like you are going to die anytime soon.”

“I so wish that is true my friend,” Corbett exclaims as he takes a sip of his drink.

“You know; I have a really weird premonition,” Garcia continues as he takes a bite off his toast, “We may have won the war, but there’s a galactic legend, that one small band of Tyrene assassins is still out there, looking for the five of us, under oath not to rest until they get us.”

“That’s just rubbish,” Alex shakes his head, “Don’t tell me you believe that!”

“I don’t know,” Garcia quips as he looks at Corbett, “What do you reckon?”

“I would say it’s just that; a galactic legend,” Corbett replies, “I’ll only comment after I have finally met that band, or not met them at all!”

“I tell you buddy, revenge is sweater than this juice,” Garcia comments as he raises his glass, as if to toast.

“And who would know this better than you,” Mishiida joins the conversation finally, her own voice weak, but her communicator well and truly up to the task.

“Uncle Jack, we have heard a lot about you, and how you avenged your friend,” Alishiida joins in the conversation as well, “Could you please tell us your story as you know it?”

Her question stops Mr. Garcia’s hands in their act as he takes a deep sigh. A brief moment of silence he lets go, before replying, “Joe was not just my childhood friend, but he was like my brother. I grew up without ever having seen my mother alive, but his mother gave me as much love as she gave it to her own son. I was like their family, and they killed them both.”

“Who killed them?” Zenander asks.

“Club of Gods!” Garcia replies.

“Club of Gods! What’s that?” a surprised Zenander asks.

“It was a secret society of the most powerful global families,” Garcia replies, “Their money ran world economies and financed election campaigns. Their whims and fancies determined who came to power across the globe, and what policies those who came into power adopted.”

“Wow! That sounds scary,” Zenander quips with a shudder.

“Sir Alfred Whittington, Sir Richard Aldridge, Mr. Humphrey Jarvis and Miss Shivoni Vienna, the four members invited me to join their club as my power, clout and influence grew,” Garcia continues with his story, as he munches on his toast, “But things went sour soon after, and they tried to kill me. Unfortunately, their hired gun ended up killing my friend Joe first, and the news of his death caused the demise of his mother.”

“Oh my god, that is so horrible,” Alishiida almost cries out.

“That’s not all,” Garcia continues, “They tried to kill me again, but ended up killing my ex-girlfriend, while I survived with minor injuries.”

“That’s bad! Did you go to the cops?” Zenander asks him this time.

“There was no evidence to implicate them directly,” Garcia answers his question, “But that is not all! They tried to destroy my business, eliminated some of my key men, while a few barely survived countless attempts on their life.”

“So what did you do then?” Alishiida’s asks excitedly.

“I had to first secure my business interests, before I could start to retaliate,” Garcia answers her query as we listen intently, like we don’t already know what has happened, “But once I had stabilized on my feet, I took them out one by one.”

“Who was the first one?” Zenander doesn’t know, but we know it was Sir Richard Aldridge.

“Richard, the mining, oil and gas tycoon; I realized much later that he had been the one calling the shots all the time, but once I did, I made sure he was the first one to pay back too,” Garcia informs him, “There’s something I learned way back, about competitive marketing, from the Chinese; if you can’t beat your competition in quality, flood the market with cheap knock-offs and destroy their base. And that’s what I did. With my arms business taking off at a universal level, money was no longer a problem, and I bought competing businesses. Then I flooded the market with cheap alternatives; low in quality, but dirt cheap to buy. This ensured that his products remained on shelf, while mine sold out.”

“Did you lose money?” Zenander inquires.

“I did!” Garcia confirms his fears, “I was running close to bankruptcy in spite of my growing businesses, but no one outside my closes circle knew this. But I also knew, with his products not selling, yet the cost of production remaining consistent, Richard’s businesses were also bearing the brunt.”

“So did he collapse first,” Zenander asks excitedly, perhaps expecting it was so easy.

“Not so easily,” Garcia explains, “He realized what I was doing, so he dropped the prices of his products. And that’s when I surprised him again. I stopped the flow of my products into the market, letting his products produced at higher cost sell at dirt cheap prices, to compound his loss. And once his initial lot was sold, and he couldn’t have afforded to sell new product range at the same price again, I re-launched my products with almost par quality, and a bit cheaper price. This once again stopped his product sale, but made sure I didn’t suffer any further loss.”

“Was that enough to save you from bankruptcy,” Zenander asks, as Alishiida seems to be a bit lost in all this conversation.

“It wasn’t enough on its own, but I had another plan too,” Garcia continues, “As soon as the demand for my products had gone up, I stopped selling my products on open market, and put them on the black-market. With the demand for them high, I was able to recover not only my production costs, but also a big chunk of my previous loss. But all this meant that Richard’s products were once again left on shelf. Soon enough he had lost enough money in the market that his businesses had to file for bankruptcy.”

“And then you killed him?” Zenander asks innocently, almost hoping the answer would be negative.

“No! I didn’t kill any of them, for then I would have been no better human being than them,” Garcia’s words give some relief to Zenander’s anxiousness, “Destroying them might have been a part of my personal revenge battle, but it was indeed doing a lot more good for humanity, for it was setting humanity free of their treacherous greed that had reduced democracy world over to a mere joke.”

“So who was next then?” Alishiida asks, appearing almost to have lost interest in a boring tale with no action involved.

“Sir Alfred Whittington,” Garcia however answers her query, just as he finishes his last piece of bread, “My treatment of Sir Richard Aldridge made him over-cautious, and he overcorrected. I would spread rumours of buying out competing businesses, and he would go ahead and buy them first to outsmart me. Having blocked much of his fluid cash in takeovers, I then set up my own fresh businesses and flooded the market with par quality product with slightly cheaper pricing. Having already overstretched his resources, Alfred was no longer in a position to compete with me without taking up finances from the market. And that’s where I got him.”

“What do you mean?” Zenander asks.

“I had not only recovered my money from businesses I had established to outdo Richard, but was also making money from my arms business,” Garcia continues, “So I put a big chunk of my money into financial market, from where Alfred borrowed at extremely high interest rates. So effectively he was not only competing with me in the market on the one hand, but whatever money he was generating, I was getting it back from him as interest. Soon enough he had neither money nor resources left to keep funding his businesses. The shock he received when it was revealed that the major company financing his businesses was my company, was to be seen to be believed. I publically took control of his businesses, denting his moral even further. As for the rest of him, the corporation’s law took its toll.”

“So he was destroyed too,” Alishiida quips, as if summing up the long story short.

“Yep, and next up was Mr. Humphrey Davis,” Garcia quips in reply.

“And you destroyed him too,” Zenander asks, as if trying to get a short answer, which we know, luckily it is.

“I didn’t have to do too much with him,” Garcia exclaims as he gives him the quick answer, “I just started partnership talks with one of his competitors, and the news made him suffer a stroke. His kids couldn’t run his businesses once he was paralysed, and his empire withered away.”

“So Miss Shivoni Vienna was the only one left to take care of then, wasn’t she?” Zenander asks.

“Yes! I married her,” Garcia replies and then adds, “And then divorced her the next day.”

“That’s still a world record for the shortest marriage, isn’t it,” Corbett quips laughing.

“Nah, that’s not true,” Garcia quips back, laughing.

“She’s never really moved on from you,” Hayley comments as she gives a hard stare to Corbett for laughing, perhaps a bit hurt that it was a woman who was treated like that.

“Well, I made sure I gave her the best time ever, as long as she was my wife,” Garcia however seems remorseless, “The next day I was not ready to live with her, and she was not prepared to leave me at any cost.”

“You destroyed a lady,” Hayley is indeed incensed, that we can vouch.

“She is the female version of the devil,” Garcia however has a justification, “I only kept her interested in me because I wanted to keep the ‘Club of Gods’ weak, but had you been a part of that club for even once, you would know she was the worst of the lot. Human beings were no more than filthy worms for her. Her whole public persona was a fake masquerade that hid a very sinister heart. She had active interests in drug mafia and underworld, and you don’t even know how many hits on honest men and women she had called. I am glad I stopped her!”

“But, it still feels so bad,” Hayley however insists.

“That’s only because you are not thinking beyond the fact that she is a woman,” Garcia replies to her reservations, “And besides, human history is full of stories of evil treacherous women. Men are not the sole caretakers of devil’s work, and women are not all made of gold.”

“Maybe you are right, but I don’t know,” Hayley exclaims as she gives up on the argument.

“Besides you are forgetting one thing,” Garcia exclaims, “She wasn’t the only woman in my life, and the one other that was, there would be none in this universe who wouldn’t vouch for her saintliness.”

“True indeed,” Corbett quips as he puts his arm around Hayley, trying to relax her a bit.

“She changed you completely, didn’t she?” Alex comments as he leans over at the breakfast table, looking deep in Garcia’s eyes, whose expressions immediately turn to grief, eyes moisten, as he looks away and then down. He puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out a locket. Inside it is a picture each of him and his love; Siyesta, the Elithecian girl. Zenander and Alishiida immediately rush around him to have a look at the picture.

“Wow! She’s so beautiful,” Alishiida exclaims, “Could you please tell us about her?”

“Not now,” Garcia however turns down her request.

“But please, please, please!” Alishiida however is insistent.

“OK! But a bit later,” Garcia exclaims as they all get up from the breakfast table, and we follow them.

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