Mizar’s Generation 3 Recap, part 1

So, uh, hi there. According to Grandpa Sadr, I’m supposed to be keeping some kind of journal about my experiences as a Sim, and using this ancient program hacked together by my great grandfather to send it out to a relay satellite, which sends it off to some aliens? That’s what he told me. He said Mom was supposed to fill me in on the whole process, and seemed pretty mad that she hadn’t. I’d never seen him angry before. But he was pretty sick right before he died, so all he really did was glare at her. When I talked to Mom about it later, she said she never really believed any of that stuff about being descended from aliens. She pointed out that our family has had more than it’s fair share of eccentric and crazy, but that’s not the same thing. Other than our skin and sometimes hair color, there isn’t really anything different about us. Then she talked a bunch of science mumbo-jumbo that I didn’t really follow. She’ll go on and on about genetic mutation and behavioral modification and all sorts of stuff if you let her. She gets way too excited about it, if you ask me. But that’s Mom for you. She’s always excited about something, especially if it has anything to do with science or life forms. I’m just glad she experiments on her plants instead of on me.

I guess I am a little ahead of myself – apparently no one has been sending any “reports” for a long time now, so there’s a lot to fill in. It seems Grandpa stopped writing them around the time Grandma Jane started to act weird. This was even before my cousin Alfirk was born. Grandma was always pretty odd, I hear, and around the time Mom became a teenager, she became obsessed with exercise. She’d always been a fitness nut, but she started working out multiple times a day, in the middle of the night, not sleeping or eating much. There were other weird things, too; family members would catch her in an empty room yelling at nobody, no one ever knew why. Finally, one day she just disappeared. Uncle Sadr found her a week later, back in the family museum, dead, with the door locked behind her. No one knew for sure if she’d been back there the whole time – no one really uses the place. I guess Grandpa built it with the idea that we’d store family memorbelia back there, and maybe hold wedding parties – though of course that won’t happen now, given that it’s haunted by her ghost. Yeah, I know, most people don’t believe in ghosts. But there certainly seems to be something going on around the house at night, and sometimes we just wake up feeling weird, like someone’s sharing the bed, you know? And the computers and tv are usually turned on when we get up in the morning, even if we’ve shut them off before bed. Anyway, Grandma Jane’s official cause of death was starvation, and almost every night leftovers go missing from the fridge. At first we thought it was Alfirk, heh. He’s pretty chubby, must be an embarasment to his Military mom, who’s an astronaut and once won a prize for being as buff as she could get. But the disappearing leftovers kept on vanishing even after they moved out, so I guess it really is Grandma Jane’s ghost.

Anyway, that was a big family scandal, and Grandpa passed on the job of “reporting back” to my Mom and really threw himself into work. He was a world renowned surgeon, really good at it, and very well respected even though he had blue skin and a crazy wife. He was really personable, never said a bad word about anyone, and people trusted him with all their secrets. Uncle Wazn had hoped to write a series of expose books based on Grandpa’s knowledge, but he’d only tell good stories. Wazn finally gave up and joined the medical profession himself to dig up the dirt – wrote quite a few bestseller books on the subject. Uncle W has been unlucky in love (his “special friend” Marta has commitment issues and would never even be his girlfriend) but really successful otherwise – his nonfiction books are famous, and he’s painted some masterpieces, in addition to becoming a successful surgeon in his own right. He said every time he finished a book about his current area in the medical profession, he had to get promoted so he could write another book. Uncle W is seriously nerdy, but he’s funny and a real genius. I can’t get out of him for sure whether he believes the whole alien thing or not. He just says it’s up to me to make up my own mind, since I’m potentially the family heir. (I have 3 siblings, but they’re all still babies.) Wazn has got pink skin, not blue, so he was never in a position to inherit. Apparently the tradition is that the heir has to be the child that looks the most like great grandpa Izar. Frankly, I’m a little surprised they didn’t chose Alfirk – he has brown hair but otherwise he’s the spitting image of Grandpa. But then, judging from the portraits I guess Grandpa got Izar’s skin and hair but otherwise looked just like his mom. The blue seems to be the top priority. Like I said, we don’t know yet for sure who the heir will be for my generation – I’m stuck “reporting” because I’m the eldest – the twins and Schedar (yeah, he is partly named after Grandpa) can’t even read yet.

What else? Oh, I should clarify that Alfirk is Zosma’s son. He was kind of an accident that happened when she got too involved with one of her married colleagues – apparently the life of a pilot is pretty stressful and sometimes the life-and-death atmosphere makes them get a little crazy around one another. Or that’s what she says. So Alfirk was unplanned, and not officially acknowledged by his dad (she didn’t tell anyone who he was, as far as I know), but Grandpa and Uncle W helped raise him, and his Mom loves him a lot. He’s okay. Totally obsessed with chess. He and his mom moved out when he became a teen, shortly after I was born, but they come over a lot.

School tomorrow, so I’m going to bed. I’ll write more soon about the rest of the family.

You thought I was never actually going to post this, didn’t you? Better late than never, I hope.

In case it isn’t clear, Mizar is Talitha’s son. He’ll tell you a little about his dad in the next installment.

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