LSTV - Harbingers of Change - 2 (Patreon)

The city Samira had lived in was named San Aurelio, a sprawling coastal metropolis that sat along a wide bay with mountains rising inland and a dramatic skyline. The city was a blend of palm-lined boulevards, towering skyscrapers, a thriving entertainment industry, and crowded beaches all connected by the silvery thread of a monorail.

The penthouse was located in Pacific Promenade, the beachfront district, in one of the luxury high-rises that overlooked Aurelio Bay and the Santa Estrella mountains. Mira didn’t inherit any memories of the place, so she probably hadn’t visited her fiance’s home before. That tracked with her background, even if she hadn’t been afraid of him for good reasons.

Mira slowly took in the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up the entire exterior wall of the living area. Mason’s taste in furniture was a bit bland. The living room had a large entertainment center and a large L-shaped black leather sofa in front of it, but little else in terms of decor aside from a glass coffee table and some generic wall art.

“Is it all like this?” Mira asked as she left herself into the kitchen. The refrigerator held a partial six pack of beer, sparkling water, and some condiments. The appliances looked untouched and there was still a manufacturer's tag inside the oven. It seemed that Mason had not been the type to eat at home.

“There’s a bit more life in the bedroom,” Adra sighed. “However, yes. He kept to his hobby room, for the most part, which I emptied out before I left to pick you up.”

Hobby room? Ooooh.

“Was there a wall of Polaroids in there?” Mira asked out of morbid curiosity. “Like in the movies?”

Adra scowled, looked away, crossed his arms over his chest, and pouted. Oh no, there had absolutely been a stalker wall of secret Cece pictures!

She was a bit sad that he’d gotten rid of it before she could see. She’d never gotten to see a Crazy Wall in person, but the odds were good that it wouldn't be as interesting as it was on screen. Not to mention, the pictures would have been an invasion of Cece’s privacy and possibly gross to boot. It was for the best that Adra had already destroyed the evidence of his host’s surveillance activities.

Mira tucked herself into his side to comfort him. She was much shorter than him in this life and the top of her head fit perfectly under his chin. “We can make it a guest room or into storage,” she said.

Adra relaxed as she stroked his sides with her chin braced on his collar bone. He rested a hand in the small of her back and his shoulders dropped back down to a normal level. “I’ve converted the room to storage, for now,” he said at last, looking down at her. “Come see where I’ve put your things.”

She consented to be shown around their walk-in closet and didn’t comment on the fact that the bedroom was missing a mattress when they passed through it. The closet was the size of a normal person’s bedroom. It was divided into two zones by a long marble-topped island lined with drawers and shelves. Adra’s side of the closet looked like it had just survived a purge; lots of empty hangers and shelves.

Mira’s side of the closet was equally sparse, which she hadn’t expected given how well dressed her host was in all her social media pictures. However, when she searched her memories, she realized Samira treated her wardrobe like an emergency fund. If she needed cash then she would sell anything that she’d already been photographed in. She probably didn’t own any clothes that weren't from this season or more than a few pairs of shoes. Her jewelry collection, aside from her grandmother’s legacy items, was limited to a few solid basics that she could mix and match.

“I can tell that this life is going to be a different kind of challenge,” was what she said out loud.

Still, having depth perception again was nice, so she could hardly complain. Anyway, this explained why Adra had been a bit quiet since he’d gone to Samira’s parents’ house to get her things. Samira’s whole life had fit into a single large suitcase. Mira was used to her host bodies having pitiful histories, but even she couldn’t bear to look at this.

She really had been spoiled as Violet. Bertram Coventry would have never pulled this shit. She was glad that he’d gotten to spend his twilight years fishing and chasing grandkids. Some people didn’t deserve to be parents and having him for a basis of comparison made her even angrier at the Bellamys.

“What do you know about the conservatorship?” Adra asked. He approached her from behind and slipped his arms around her waist. “I’ve never been troubled by such a thing before. I have not had reason in the past to care about human law beyond theft, murder, and the like.”

“Well, let’s just say that they’re almost always nearly impossible to get out of even if you aren’t a young woman with no higher education and a history of drug abuse,” Mira sighed. “It might be different here. Case law varies from world to world and even from region to region within a single world. Our best bet might be to go through with the wedding and petition the court for a guardian change if my father tries to keep control of my money—assuming I have any left. Samira only knew that her grandmother left her some money, not how much or where it's being kept. It’s entirely possible he’s already spent it and the conservatorship is so that she’ll never find out or have legal recourse against him.”

“I could kill him,” Adra offered. He sounded like he’d already been thinking about it. “He’s not an important character in the book. We can do without him.”

“Maybe,” Mira said, although she took a moment to seriously consider it. “Not until after the wedding, though. The last thing we need is for an uncle or cousin I don’t know to inherit control of me. Samira’s father is actually one of the saner, less impulsive members of his family and her mother would go bankrupt within a year.”

They were interrupted by Adra’s phone making a noise. He pulled it out of his back pocket and scowled at it. “We’ve been ordered to appear for dinner with your parents,” he reported and showed her the screen. It was a terse text message from ‘FIL’ that read: Bring Samira to the house tonight for dinner @ 8.

There was no matching text on Mira’s phone so, evidently, Mason was expected to have full control of Samira’s schedule.

“Oh?” Mira asked. “I thought we were supposed to go straight to their house. It’s still morning.”

Adra smirked as he replied, typing with one hand. “I may have implied to your mother that the doctors were very busy and we probably wouldn’t get loose until well after dark. We’ll have time to find you that salon.”

Samira’s memories of her mother weren’t as bad as those of her father, but Helena Bellamy was one of those bitches who didn’t like other women. Even her own daughters were competition for male attention, insofar as she was concerned. She got a not-so-secret thrill whenever she saw her middle child’s appearance suffer. They were not the kind of mother-daughter duo who could have a girls’ day out or spa visits, so Samira would have known better than to look to her mom for help when her dad cut her purse strings again. If she showed up looking like she just came away from a hospital stay, then Helena would feast on her humiliation.

Not on Mira’s watch. She immediately began looking for the nearest full-service salon on her phone.

Six hours later, Mira felt like a race car after the pit crew got done with it.

She’d found a luxury salon and spa within a few blocks of the penthouse. Adra dropped her off with a kiss on the cheek and some of his shadow matter hidden in her sleeves before he took off for another mysterious errand. He wouldn’t say what, but he had the shifty and uncomfortable look he got whenever the subject of his host’s private activities came up, so Mira had to assume he was still cleaning up the evidence of all the ugly and embarrassing things that Mason Dietrich had gotten up to and so she didn’t pry.

The spa offered a package called ‘The Overhaul’, which included a 60-minute signature facial, massage, hair cut and color, a full mani pedi, and light makeup.

She was a new woman by the time Adra found her waiting in the lounge with an iced vanilla latte and fresh highlights. He smiled and his gaze softened when their eyes met and he came over to brush a gentle kiss across her forehead. “You look more relaxed,” he said, leaning over her and bracing his weight on the back of her seat.

“They gave me a massage and a glass of champagne,” Mira confessed.

She’d accepted it mostly to see if Samira’s body would crave more, but it turned out her palate hadn’t been trained to enjoy wine so it just tasted sour with a hint of bitterness from the bubbles. The alcohol taste was too prominent for her to enjoy it, despite the wine having a decent bouquet. She’d already suspected that Samira didn’t drink by preference. This just confirmed it. The girl’s social media often showed her holding the same drink all night as the ice slowly melted. So much for her role as the supposed family addict.

Adra wrapped a lock of her hair around his index finger. “I like this,” he said, admiring the play of light on her refreshed color. She’d decided to wear the same cherry cola color. It was still new to her and the rich color warmed up her features. Samira had a classic bombshell pinup look, aside from how thin she was, and Mira had always enjoyed being a redhead.

“Did you finish your business?” she asked as he helped her up.

“Some of it,” Adra with a flicker of bitter resignation. He glanced in Mira’s direction to share his sour look. “He’s been a very busy person.”

Ew. She’d have to ask again later when they were in private what all Mason had been up to.

Adra took out his wallet and withdrew a matte black card that he handed over to her. It had her name on the back when she flipped it over to look.

“That was fast!” she said, tucking the card away.

“They had a printing machine on site,” Adra agreed. “I wanted you to have access to our funds as soon as possible. If nothing else, I have excellent status with the bank. Take this too.” He handed over the little shopping bag he’d been carrying and Mira found a new smartphone inside, in an unsealed box. “It’s already been set up with a new number under my account.”

She frowned and looked back up at him. She could tell, just from the packaging, that it was a newer and nicer model than the one she already had, but her current phone seemed perfectly serviceable. If it didn’t need replacing for obvious reasons, then that left a short and ugly list of potential reasons that weren’t obvious. “Do you know something about my phone that I don’t?”

Adra grimaced. “No, but this body came with far too much knowledge about how these devices can be suborned, tracked, and disconnected remotely. Given the business with your finances, I don’t trust that man not to do something similar to your phone if he realizes he can no longer control you through other means.”

“Hmm,” Mira gave a thoughtful hum as she pulled out her original phone and started flipping through the apps. High technology settings like this, aside from the space-age dramas, all had more or less the same kind of tech and software. The names might change, but the interfaces hardly ever did. That meant the kind of malware accessible to a mean old man who probably couldn’t even save a PDF by himself should be easy to identify—there it was.

Mira found the family tracker app amongst her other apps, not even hidden in a subfolder within a subfolder. Sure enough, it was active and transmitting her location. She looked a little more and found a whole raft of ‘child safety’ controls on her phone that were being controlled from her father’s device. Adra’s hunch had been right on the money. It didn’t look like he could use her phone to listen in on her conversations if she wasn’t making a call, but she powered it off anyway.

She probably should have realized that herself, but she was still struggling with the slow, awful drip of Samira’s history of quiet, doomed desperation. It was distracting.

Maybe they should just kill off the father. She didn’t like to resort to murder this early in a new life, or at all if she could possibly manage it, but this man was systematically destroying his own child for no good reason that she could understand. She could see the pattern already and it was only too familiar. Samira was not a naturally wretched person. She was in a position where she owned nothing and anything she got for herself could be taken away without notice or cause, but she had still had found ways to float herself through the periods when her so-called guardian left her to drown.

Given her druthers, Mira liked to take her time with that kind of villain so that he ended up trapped in the same horrific cycle that he’d forced his daughter into. She didn’t always get her way, though. Sometimes men like that needed to be neutralized before she was able to give her host full justice. She’d gotten lucky with Madame and Andrei. They’d delivered themselves into her open, waiting palm through their own hubris.

Well, it wasn’t that lucky. People like that always tried their luck until it ran out so she’d known that all she had to do was be patient and wait for them to fuck up.

‘Not yet,’ she told herself. She’d just gotten here and they still didn’t know how this world would be changed by the reformation of Mason Dietrich. It had only been a few days. She couldn’t rush and, if any part of her was still Samira the way part of her had still been Violet in her previous life, then she wanted to spend some time focusing on her own welfare and build up what those people had torn down.

She was starting to understand the flavor of this particular world. She always landed in a melodrama of some kind, but there were different subspecies of drama and her original thought about this one was shaping up to be true. She had transmigrated into a Soap Opera. All the components were there; the plucky underemployed heroine, multiple overbearing tyrant CEO love interests, families that preyed on one another, the mother with cancer, and the whole stalker situation.

The problem with Soap Opera worlds was that there would always be a new problem as soon as you solved the old one; the whole genre was defined by sudden logic-defying twists and turns. If she killed off her abusive father then his even-more-evil twin would take over his life before anyone figured out he was dead or, worse, some impossible-to-contain bit of evidence would slip out and Mira would find herself having to deal with a murder charge.

That would be manageable in a world with magic, but right now she wasn’t even sure how Adra was coping with the negligible mana to draw off in this world.

Note: This is taking place in an alternate history United States of America, so we're going to have some slightly different place names.

For example:

Faux USA - Alleghania, Capitol - New Columbia (notable cities: New Oranje, Jersey, San Aurelio)

Faux Canada - Cascadia, Capitol - New Westminster

Faux Mexico - Anahuac, Capitol - Atempan