No Response To The Novel Chapter Yet =/

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:34:00 GMT

Feeling Kinda Down Today But No Reason Why Really...

I've Noticed Nobody Has Commented On My Novel As Such Yet Apart From The Recommendation To Try Another Site, Greatly Appreciated As The Comment Was, Not Exactly What I Was Looking For...

No Sign Of The Phantom Mouse Either That Appeared On Friday Night And Disappeared Soon After... Find It I Will... Hmmmm

I Hope Someone Reads My Tale Soon, It'd Be Bogus To Think That I've Written Something So Awful That People Avoid It =/

Toodles...

Mr Beard.

The Raven Effect - Chapter 6

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 09:58:19 GMT

Roman contacted his employers and made them aware that he had secured the services of hired help to apprehend the girl they were looking for. In order to ensure that they could be trusted, checks were ran thoroughly on the girls with every government agency in the whole of North America, every underground system which they could get a hold of, and (somehow) even their details from back in Scotland were checked though no questions were asked. The Polyamourous Group had their hands in every major authorities back pocket, and considering they invested money in all law enforcement and government agencies from the America to Asia and all in between, no questions were asked as to why the information was required.

“Good work Benedicto; you have proven yourself to us and completed your task. Make sure the girl is returned to us with no harm and you will be guaranteed a 5-figure sum of your own, completely tax-free. We will call you with further instructions. Oh, and had it not been for your incompetence in letting the girl go free in the first place, we would have considered a massive wage increase… better luck next time” said the voice on the other end of the phone before the connection was cut. Clearly irritated at that remark about his incompetence, Roman slammed the phone down on it’s receiver and launched into a tirade of foul language and aggression which had been previously not in his nature.

Let me give you (the reader) a detailed but relevant insight into the man that was Roman Benedicto, so that you can understand why him becoming ill tempered at such a snippy comment was out of the norm.

Roman was a mild mannered man, coming from a hard working family in Cameron, North Carolina. His mother and father met at a policeman’s ball in 1956 where Lucas (his father, aged 21) was a newly promoted sergeant and Melina Stellone (his mother, aged 19) was the reporter assigned to cover the event for a small-time newspaper. After she had conducted an interview with the ‘man of the moment’, they got talking and were surprised to learn that both of their families had came to America from Italy at the same time at the beginning of the 1930’s before the 2^nd world war broke out, though Maria came from Bergamo and Lucas from Turin.

They became good friends at first, their love of all things Italian, art and literature helped to grow a solid friendship and it was clear to see that both families were in celebration of their union when they began courting in the summer of 1957. It didn’t take long for their love to blossom into a serious thing and soon after the winter of that same year, they had admittedly fallen deeply in love and were to be married, expecting their first child, Roman. Things were starting to go perfectly for the newly married couple by the time their first son came along in the spring of 1958, Roman had been promoted to Chief and Melina had become a sub-editor in the National Advertiser, a big player in the media scene, issuing publications throughout the entirety of Northern America.

The couple would go on to have another child, Paolo, in the winter of 1962 on the 4^th anniversary of their marriage, and even though you would expect the brothers to fight like cat and dog, Roman immediately took his little brother under his wing and the two were inseparable throughout their childhood, always getting up to some kind of mischief and creating the most out of this world tales to try and dig themselves out of trouble. Not that Lucas or Melina believed the stories, but it showed what a great imagination the boys had and as they grew older, the tales became more in-depth. After Paolo graduated from high school and Roman was in his final year of university, there was an unexpected celebration for Lucas and Melina were to become grandparents to young Dianne Carmen Stellone, Paolo’s daughter, just as the 80’s rolled in. They had not seen this coming and were not even aware that Paolo had been in a relationship with a girl, let alone got her pregnant, so when they eventually met Karen Torrance and her family, it was easy to see that there would be tension, with Karen’s parents blaming Paolo for making their daughter impure and disowning her, and the Benedicto’s slating the Torrance’s for not only keeping from them the news that they were to be grandparents, but for being despicable parents by putting so much stress on the head of Karen who, at nearly 8 months pregnant, needed support from everyone around her, not bickering between the man she loved and her family.

Not long after the meeting, Karen was moved in with Lucas and Melina for her parents had made her homeless to try and punish her. She made a bold and brave decision to cut off all contact with her family and felt indebted to the Benedicto’s for taking her in and being the kind of parents she wished she had. They told her not to be silly and tried re-assuring her that once her child was born, her parents would be swarming around her with love and affection at the thought of a new addition to the family. Sadly this didn’t happen because not only had Karen’s’ family thrown her out to fend for herself, they had secretly upped and moved home without telling her, so when she did go in to hospital, her parents were nowhere to be found. To make matters worse, the doctors had identified complications with the baby and predicted that there was only a 50% chance that young Dianne would make it, and sure enough there was a problem… Whilst Dianne had been born healthy and smiling like she didn’t have a care in the world, Karen started to feel drained (as you would expect considering that pregnancies aren’t a walk in the park by any means) and fell asleep as Dianne lay in her arms. The doctors left mother and baby to get some rest as it had been a long night for all concerned with Karen being in labour for close to 19hours. When they went back to check on her and found Dianne screaming the place down, they noticed that Karen’s position hadn’t changed at all and wasn’t responding to anyone calling her name. The doctors’ hit the emergency siren and the room was filled with nurses, doctors and the surgeon who gave Paolo his daughter and closed the door. It didn’t take long for Paolo to figure out something was wrong and he walked in the room as the doctors were charging the defibrillator. He let out an almighty scream and begged the doctors to save his girlfriend, to save the mother of his child and as they ushered him out of the room, he saw the blanket being raised over her face and knew at that moment she had left him and Dianne, going on to a new world above them. He never came to terms with that day and it was noticeable that he felt fully responsible, even though the doctors explained that internal bleeding was the cause and he could not have done anything to prevent her passing. Paolo ended up moving back to his parents’ house and they helped him to raise Dianne, though in actual fact, they completely raised her and he was forever distant to her as she grew up, instead calling her grandma and grandfather, mom and dad.

Lucas and Melina decided to take a trip back to ‘the old country’ and celebrate the fact they had been married for 23 years but never been back home. That trip turned into tragedy as the plane they were taking to Turin on the morning of July 18^th 1991, crashed soon after takeoff at Heathrow Airport in London due to a fuel tank explosion (or so the police report had said). There were no obvious signs of sabotage, and numerous investigations went on for a period of 5 years without ever finding out what really happened or what had caused the fuel tank to explode. A tabloid newspaper in the UK claimed that an English right wing extremist was scheduled to be on the flight but had been detained at the airport after he was spotted handing out leaflets promoting violence against coloured immigrants and those who were not loyal to the royal family, but after a public enquiry there was thought to be no connection between these incidents.

After learning of their parent’s death, 29-year-old Paolo and his ten year old daughter Dianne moved in with 33 year old Roman who had set himself up as a Private Investigator and was worth a fair bit of money considering the money he made and the seemingly never-ending workload he had. Paolo took his parents passing hard and fell in with the wrong sort of people, becoming involved with heroin and cocaine dealers as both a runner and abuser, though he wasn’t exactly what they would call ‘a sound investment’, meaning that the kind of money he owed them was hitting the kind of figure that meant you would be working for them until your 70’s before you had paid it all back. Realising that Paolo was in over his head, Roman managed to get the money together and gave his brother the money to pay off his debtors but this wasn’t satisfactory to them and they ended up wiping out Paolo with a nicely placed hatchet in the spinal cord.

They then turned their attention to Roman, considering he knew who they were and clearly had a lot of money if he could pay off a debt of approximately $25000 for his addict, deceased brother. Roman had been offered a chance to work under a new company in pharmaceuticals called The Polyamourous Group under the condition that he moved to a suburb outside of Toronto called Condor Canyon. Given that he had become a father now to Dianne since her father had been killed and mother had died during birth, Roman wasn’t too keen at first on taking the position in Canada as prosperous as it was both financially and in terms of building a future for his niece, but considering he knew of the danger he was now in and the fact he didn’t want to see the end of his lineage in his lifetime, he agreed to take them up on the offer. Within a week he had fully moved to Condor Canyon and not a day too soon, for news filtered through from his former estate agent in Carolina that the house he had just sold was blown to smithereens in a midnight explosion, presumably from the same people who had killed his brother. Roman had a lucky escape and could tell the tale, that was all the proof he needed that Canada was perhaps the best place for him, though now he had to face up to the responsibility of being a parent of sorts, to his young orphaned niece Dianne.

It was around the time that Dianne turned 18 in 1999 when she got a job working for The Polyamourous Group in one of their medical facilities in town on the recommendation of her uncle. She was employed as a filing clerk and would be responsible for the transportation of medical records from one department to the next, storing a backup of these files on the servers and issuing regular security checks via the off-site security team on anyone who requested documentation for a patient. Life was beginning to run along nicely for the Benedicto’s as Dianne was making quite a name for herself with the accuracy, precision and amount of work she completed ahead of deadlines and it was done flawlessly; Uncle Roman was also doing well for himself and had been promoted just a few months back to the position of ‘National Security Chief’ which meant that he worked from home and at the press of a button, he would be able to launch any of the security teams throughout the whole of Canada and America when the request came through from head office.

Roman only had to make 3 calls in 5 years for security teams to clear up any situations that could have become critical and a national disaster, mainly at nuclear plants owned and operated by The Polyamourous Group. Other than that, he was paid a princely sum of $250,000 a year to stay at home, ensure that security protocol procedures were up to date with each new piece of technology that was used by the company and running background checks on all employees before they were offered contracts.

By the time of his 46^th birthday in 2004, Roman had been sent overseas to roll out the new plans for security in the European branches of the company. It was extremely short notice for him to up and leave, I mean when you get up and out of bed in the morning to find 2 of the North American CEO's (Chief Executive Officers) sitting in your lounge with suitcases packed up containing your clothes, you start to wonder what the hell is going on but, like the kind of person he was, he swallowed any anger at the fact that The Polyamourous Group had let themselves into his house without permission, using a key he never knew they had. You could do anything to Roman, attack him, steal from him, break into his house, wreck his car and a number of other things, but for some reason he would never react.

What was supposed to be a 3 month training exercise ended up becoming a near 4 year project, thus fuelling the inner anger because at a time when he was supposed to be there as a guardian to his niece, he was in actual fact separated by 3447 miles approximately (5546 kilometres) as he was sitting in The Polyamourous Group’s world headquarters in Aberdeen, Scotland whereas Dianne was in Condor Canyon, just outside of Toronto. On March 10^th 2008, Dianne called him at his hotel in Aberdeen, saying she was scared (but wouldn’t say why despite asking her multiple times) and that she just wanted him to come home. They spoke at length for some 15minutes or so but all Roman could get out of Dianne was that something had happened at work and she was going to be in serious trouble even though she was wholly innocent. Roman told her not to worry and he would be home as soon as he could but that may end up being a few weeks away, Dianne wasn’t too pleased at this but reluctantly accepted that her uncle was an important man for the company and was only a week or so away from meeting thee owner in person, something nobody from the American chapter had ever done in over 40 years. They said their goodbyes and that was the last he heard from her that week.

Roman’s loyalties were split because the company had rescued them both from certain death in North Carolina so many years ago but at the same time, Dianne was his niece and felt like the daughter he never had. A bold decision was made and Roman returned home on March 15^th, with the permission of the chairman, Sir William Kelly. After explaining the situation, Sir William had pretty much decided for Roman he was to return home saying that as much as he loved his job, his primary thoughts and concern should always be on his family (a concept that Roman had never managed to grasp, hence why he had never been married and was not a father).

It was upon arriving home though that he had happened to find out that Dianne was not as innocent as she had pleaded. One day as he was cleaning out the attic, he found a box filled to the brim with folders of photocopied documentation of new procedures, tests and medical treatments that the company were secretly testing. As he confronted Dianne, she claimed that she had stored them there some time ago because the files were supposed to be destroyed. The kind of information in these files was the kind of information that would prove The Polyamourous Group were doing things both illegal and immoral, going against the pure and wholesome image they projected for themselves. After reading the files himself, Roman wasn’t sure what he thought about what he read or what he would do because either way someone was going to end up getting fired. If he defended his niece, one or both of them would be fired, but if he turned her in and the paperwork, she would definitely be fired.

The moment of truth came and his boss called him in for crisis talks (considering he was still head of security for the companies’ North American chapter) and a breach in security had been reported. After much discussion and a return of the ‘stolen’ documents, Dianne was demoted to working in one of the delivery warehouses where she would be required to load and unload vans with boxes of stationary, a real slap in the face considering she was in contention for a promotion to take charge of her own lab and hire her own team for research and testing to be done on a new form of drug which was going to be used to better the quality of life for those suffering from schizophrenia and post traumatic stress disorder, based on a theory created originally from Zander Valentine some 21 years ago, which even to this day was still way ahead of it’s time.

Dianne had been waiting for the right time to expose The Polyamourous Group and that, she thought, had came in February 2008 when she joined an anti TPG website where activists were complaining about the number of co2 emissions that were being used by the company flying owners and board members around the world for meetings seemingly every month. She began to speak with a particular person under the codename of Big Red, who also felt that there was something going on behind the scenes that could expose The Polyamourous Group. After a number of weeks, she met with Big Red at a public library in Annsdale on March 25^th, bringing with her the original copies of the files she was forced to return to her employers when she was demoted. With a surprising look after viewing the files, Big Red turned to Dianne and asked her where she had got these files, in a voice she remembered from her past; it belonged to Zander Valentine (they had spoken quite regularly over the course of January and February when she was being touted as the person to advance his research on PTSD and bring it in to the new millennium). The company had used him as a decoy to try and find out if she had been telling the truth about how much she actually knew about their secret dealings, stupidly she had walked directly into their trap but Zander gave her a chance to escape. She declined and tried to grab the files but Zander knocked her onto the ground and told her she couldn’t expose the company because of the power they held on all government agencies and the media, but she did have a chance to escape and try to evade them for as long as possible. Realising that he was right and that he was trying to help her, she ran off and fled town, heading back to Condor Canyon, packing up her things and left town without a word said to her Uncle Roman.

Zander gave the files to his assistant and she was then exposed as a traitor, resulting in Roman being suspended on April 1^st for 4 weeks. The way it was viewed and perceived is that he had known about what was going on with Dianne, refused to deal with it and had protected her. They did not want to lose him from the company because of the contributions and changes he had made, but they needed to make an example to anyone who felt that they could try to hamper the company and it’s perfect media image.

I’d like to take a few moments and tell you a little bit about the condition Roman suffers from, just to help you understand what it is and how anyone would be able to identify some of the symptoms involved. We all know that when inner-rage builds up inside without a release eventually there is going to be an explosion and a vast amount of suppressed anger will be unleashed. What most people however do NOT know is that it can eventually cause Intermittent Explosive Disorder (I.E.D). This is more explosive than rage and even more common for people to experience than rage. It is an aggressive overreaction to everyday stress, and can be distinguished from normal anger by its severity, its controllability (or lack of) and the frequency of these periods. Anger attacks of this scale can harm your health and social life, as well as many people around you. One of the main reasons that people experience this level of aggression is because they are suffering on some level from abnormal activity of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Serotonin is basically a chemical messenger that aids communication between many areas of the brain that affect emotional aspects of a person's nature and controls the signals omitted from your brain that regulate sleep, appetite and provoke mood swings.

Now that you have a brief understanding of I.E.D, I’ll get back to the story. Roman had received a phone call from the personal assistant to the chairman, calling Roman incompetent and giving him an un-necessary dressing down for something he could not control (Dianne going on the run). When Roman finally snapped and the I.E.D took over, he flipped out and actually ended up torching his own home, paid for by the company. He vowed that when Dianne was returned to him, together he and she would make the company pay, once and for all.

Hoots Mon, There's A Moose, Loose, Aboot Ma Hoose

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 23:56:48 GMT

It's nearly 1am and I'm on red alert because not half an hour ago, I found a mouse near our fireplace.

ARGH!!! *scared, like uberly*

Kat and I have possibly tracked it down to the underneath of an armchair and her expertise suggest it's been there a wee while because she has spotted a few droppings.

We have turned said chair upside down hoping that the only way out is up, so fingers crossed, mouse-gate will be over soon.

I'll update the blog if I ever make it through the night.

A Very Scared Bearded Man

o.O

Return of the Beard

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:01:24 GMT

It's been a long time since I was on livejournal... back in the days when myspace was the hip thing and nobody knew what bebo was. I felt out of touch on those sites and want to come back to the place i kinda felt safe i guess.

Anyhow...

I'm thinking about putting up some random parts of the novel i've been working on lately but not entirely sure if i want to... I mean it'd be great if i could get anybody's opinion on the piece i display but then i need constructive criticism too, not just praise... idk...

A lot has changed in the last 5 years since I used LJ but it still makes me smile to know people have carried on it's tradition and keep writing. To those people, I salute and pin them with a badge of honour. Keep up the good work.

Until next time, you've been reading The Bearded Files...

Toodles =]

xx

Neil McBeard

No Response To The Novel Chapter Yet =/

The Raven Effect - Chapter 6

Hoots Mon, There's A Moose, Loose, Aboot Ma Hoose

Return of the Beard