Troubles of Faux

CHAPTER 1.3 || THE FAUX GIRL

She looked to the sitting room. One of the indigenes at the table was staring directly at the Professor with tautened face. She could hear the sheer anger in his voice.

"Folks, folks..." the Professor had begun when the murmurs had grown so loud and the pressure of the crowd was on him. He pushed his arms out as an indication of personality defense. "Listen to me, listen!"

Apparently, the Professor was even more respected than she'd initially thought. Because as soon as he'd lifted his arms to speak and utter a defense, the crowd gradually began to fall silent. Gradually, murmurs filtering here and there, until the whole place went dead. And all eyes on the four-eyes mustache man. Even Jenrette was looking to him for answers. At least she'd get it from him as Jeryl had refused to speak.

"Listen up, friends, listen."

Silence. Complete silence. Even in that silence, Jenrette could feel the strong tension in the hearts of these people; the anger, the will to act which if they did, would not be in her favor, the burning feeling of a hate she didn't understand. Terin could be...well, Terin. But why did they hate him so much?

"For the past decades, we've been under the strong influence of the Vaux Nation. Those people couldn't care less about the society. They leave us to fend for ourselves, and demand tributes from our hard-earned labor. They rule us with a merciless hand, trample on those that would so much as threaten them with a mere pin. This had been going on, and on, and on, and we've lost friends, families, neighbors, and valuable icons in our state. And they're just there chilling in the Vaux Grounds, spoiling themselves with wine and women while we lavish in anguish and their brutal rule. Ten years ago, the Bloids, daring revolutionists with common interests banded together to put a stop to this. We hatched our first plan, studied it for two years, and then carried it out."

The Professor paused. He lowered his head for a moment, letting the grave silence sink in to everyone's mind, letting their subconscious understand the severity of what he had said and probably what he was going to say next. For Jenrette, this was all new, but unsurprisingly so. She'd witnessed the cruelty of the Vaux first hand.

"But we failed," the Professor continued, raising his head back up. "I remember how many of our friends died that day because the plan didn't work. We underestimated the Vaux, and we lost hundreds of followers. After that, we grieved. And even some of us who couldn't handle the pain of the grieving, passed on as well."

Slowly, the Professor nodded. "After an event like that one would think we would've given up and lost numbers...and followers. But it only grew, and it gave us strength to start again. And so, eight years ago, we began the search for a new way. Nothing," she shook his head vehemently. He had already even begun to move. Jenrette believed that he was now confident, having the entire audience at his grasp. "Nothing we planned ever looked good. We tried, and tried, and tried, not willing to risk another massacre, or worse, complete extinction. We even gave up trying two years ago. Never once finding a path to take, a hope to anchor on, a plan that would have the slightest opportunity to succeed."

Then the Professor turned to look intently at someone. Her. "Until I stumbled on a Faux. Renna Faux."

The murmuring began to grow again, but the Professor didn't waste time to quelch it before it got out of hand. "I met Renna Faux by accident. I didn't even know she was a Faux. We were in a bus, and she was looking really sad. And then I asked her why she was so down." The Professor turned to look at the audience again. "She mentioned she was afraid for her daughter. That Vaux had her locked up in the grounds and tortured her. She didn't give me a reason, but she said it lasted for a few years. She never saw her daughter, but when the Vaux guards would pass by her to check up on her, they would mock that her daughter was having the best time of her life. A suffering untold, she said."