An Average Day at Laminax

Chapter 1

I have been working for Laminax for about three years now. Nothing has seemed to change, and all the days seem the same. I have a basic schedule. Wake up, have my breakfast, have a shower, get dressed, start my car, drive to work, do everything that I need to do there, drive back home, have dinner, take another shower, go to bed, and repeat. I work as a Senior Researcher at Laminax's Houston branch, one of their major and most financially successful of Laminax's U.S branches, with the Los Angeles, Phoenix, Honolulu, Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis, Miami, Anchorage and New York City branches following close behind. In all those cities I mentioned, Laminax has headquarters built within the city. You might expect the job title Senior Researcher to be something major or important, but no. As it turns out, I'm just as important as a Junior Researcher would be due to the work that I do here. All I have to do for this job was write down notes, analyse and write down information from tests and experiments, update the Bestiary files whenever I could, and pray to God that nothing bad happens to me. I was born and raised in a small, typical Midwestern town that was named Cambridge City in the state of Indiana. It is a one hour's drive away from Indianapolis. Growing up, I was a child prodigy of sorts, and was known as the 'smart kid in town,' and nothing else, not my full name, Oliver Henry Davidson, just 'smart kid' or 'smartie' to the other residents of the town. During my childhood, adolescence years and now, I was shy and quiet and had no friends, preferring to spend time by myself in the towns public library, burying myself in classical literature and science, chemistry, math, and biology books to pass the afternoon by, while the other kids from school were playing sports or video games. My parents were happy with each other at one point of their lives, before they divorced when my and James were 10 years old. My mother was working as an office receptionist in a nearby town, and my father was a truck driver.

After the divorce, my mother took a flight to Atlanta, Georgia to pursue a certain career to satisfy her desires, leaving my father to raise me and my twin brother, James, on his own. As my father was a long-haul truck driver, I never really had the chance to spend time with him, or even see him. He often hired babysitters to look after us while he was away until me and James turned 12 years old. James is the polar opposite of me, which is not something you'd expect from twins. He was loud, athletic and a bit egoistical, I must say. In the afternoons, he would take his bike to his friend's house where he would stay there until it was dark, while I was in the library, reading the fascinating philosophical works of Socrates, the intriguing poetry of Homer and the works of Isaac Newton. During a school project in the 10th grade, we had to research our parents heritage and ancestry. As it turned out, I had a mix of English, Welsh, German, Scottish, Norwegian, Danish, Irish, and Jewish heritage on my father's side, though I had little information from my mother's side. My father told me that my mother's grandmother was a Greek immigrant who moved to Chicago with her also Greek husband, and also that she had a daughter who would end up marrying a Polish-American man from Milwaukee, who would end up having having my mother, and raising her as an only child, so I added that into my project last second. My father had relatives living close to us, in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Kentucky, where he was raised. Before my parents divorce, we regularly attended our churches potluck, which my mother would bring souvlaki and pita bread to the event, using a recipe passed down to her from her grandparents, and was usually a hit at the potluck. After my mothers move to Atlanta, we stopped going to potlucks altogether. 

After I had graduated high school with a near-perfect GPA, top scores on my SAT, and a short stint in my high schools STEM club, I paid for a plane ticket from Indianapolis to Boston with the money I earned from my part-time job at a pizza place, a move from the Midwest to the Northeast coast. Shortly after arriving in Boston, I managed to get into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After four years of that, I graduated with a degree in biology. During my time in Boston, I came up with a system where if I finished all the things I needed to do for MIT, I took personal days off to travel to nearby places. I went to Cape Cod, Providence, Long Island, Hartford and even New York City a couple of times. Another thing I did during my free time was lounge around in my dormitory, mainly reading and walking around campus.  After I graduated, I called my dad about it, and he seemed mildly happy about it. I can still remember the small, awkward phone call we had: