lusamine desjardin | d4 | fin

lusamine desjardin
district four
female

(content note: institutionally sanctioned child abuse/unethical experimentation, graphic animal violence in the paragraph beginning with "Even monkeys [...]".)

That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did...
You deserved it.¹

"Well, I've certainly been impressed by your qualifications and experience today." Lusamine smiles at you, her perfect white teeth nearly sparkling under the fluorescent lights. "Love ya, Lana." She blows a kiss towards the receptionist as you hand your forms in to her. "Before we come to a final decision on your application, I'd like to guide you on a tour of our campus. We want you to see for yourself how Aether can be a good fit for your career."

"That would be great! Thank you." You offer her a gracious smile in return as the two of you step out from the office building. The island really is beautiful, you think - not for the first time - as your eyes squint against the sunlight shimmering on the lagoon; just one more point in its favor in the mental pros-and-cons checklist you're making in your head. Well, assuming you got the job. Lusamine had seemed impressed, as far as you could tell, the minute you'd begun talking about your research work, but surely an up-and-coming institution like Aether might have dozens, even hundreds of applicants just as qualified as you were.

Well. Your research work was a point in your favor; she'd mentioned - perhaps as mere flattery, but perhaps with genuine interest - that she'd rarely had a candidate who could speak with such passion and at such depth about their thesis. Said thesis was a rigorous analysis of variance on the various training methods of the most prominent Career academies of District Four. That was another point in your favor. Third was your volunteering experience with young children. You'd worked your way through college with tutoring, with teaching surfing lessons; you loved being able to help children, and year after year the children had delighted in your guidance. That was what had first drawn you towards Aether, you think - you had wanted to be a schoolteacher before realizing it didn't pay enough of the bills, and Aether's job announcement had proudly proclaimed scientific, evidence-based practices to cultivate the growth of all district children. You would be able to work with the kids that bring you joy, as well as the science that you love and could make a good living from.

You run through that mental checklist again before your nerves can take hold of you and trip up your words, with Lusamine beginning to make small talk with you as the two of you cross the winding road between the office and a taller, grander building capped with an elegant dome. You hadn't particularly expected to be interviewed by the CEO herself when you got here this morning, although in hindsight you supposed a small startup like Aether wouldn't really have teams of dedicated recruiters and human-resources folks to go through like the large company your previous interview was at.

"Our mission statement," she declares when the two of you finally reach the foyer of the main building. "A rescue home and a research facility that is committed to being a nurturing and enriching environment for our children's development. You see - these are, by and large, children that are orphans, or that come from abusive homes. Children with frigid mothers who never gave them the love they needed when they were infants."

Even monkeys cannot survive, you recall from your studies, when they are brought up without love. You'd had nightmares for weeks, after the class where your professor had described in vivid detail how the poor isolated rhesus monkeys had taken to chewing at their own fingers, starving themselves to death, or in one case, after giving birth, crushing their own baby's head². You almost give a shudder now, imagining those monkeys, but you look at Lusamine's beaming smile, and push the images out of your mind.

The first room you enter is a playroom, brightly colored and filled with toys. There are clumps of children - about four or five years old, at your best guess - gathered loosely around each of the toyboxes throughout the room. Nearest you when you enter are two kids swerving toy carriages around each other on a road-printed mat. Some of them look up when they hear you and Lusamine; others seem oblivious to the well-dressed stranger who had entered alongside their "Mommy".

"Momma Lusamine will protect all these children with my love." The two of you come to a stop in front of a young child in a dress building a tower of blocks. "Isn't that right, Tammy?"

Tammy doesn't respond, preoccupied with placing another yellow brick on the teetering tower already taller than their shoulders. Lusamine tries again. "What have I said before, Tammy, sweetie?"

You watch the encounter, hands shoved firmly in your pockets, the clock on the wall ticking past a few more seconds as Tammy finishes balancing the brick. Lusamine kneels down, her long, manicured nails glinting as she reaches her hand out, gently cupping Tammy's chin and forcing them to face her.

A lock of Lusamine's long hair whips around and smashes into the middle of the tower; you wince as the entire column comes clattering to the ground, pieces skittering in every direction across the hardwood floor. Tammy covers their ears and bursts out crying, trying to wriggle out of her grasp to pick up one of the blocks.

"There, there," Lusamine coos as they continues to struggle away from her. "It's okay, dear. Sweetie, give Mommy a hug and you'll feel all better." Their crying has become the faintest low whimper by now, their body stiff and tense and continuing to bend away from Lusamine. You stand, rooted to your spot, feeling just as frozen as the child as Lusamine lifts them up onto her shoulder and wraps them in her embrace. "There, honey, all better. Now be a good girl and say hello to the nice researcher."

"Hello," Tammy mumbles as they slide down Lusamine's body and slump to the ground. "Hello," you respond, forcing out a warm, genuine smile to the child as you try to puzzle out the knot of uneasiness in your chest - whether something of the situation is amiss, or if it's just your anxiety again running circles in your stomach. "Good girl, Tammy," Lusamine continues to coo. "Good girl. Next time we get it right on the first try and we can save all this trouble." She gestures around at the scattered blocks.

One of them has rolled between your feet. "Don't worry about it." Lusamine waves her hand dismissively when you make a motion to fetch it, then turns toward the door on the far end of the playroom. "Come on. Let's take a look at some of the older kids - that's when we really start the training."

The door leads into a long hallway that reminds you of your old middle school. Rows of frosted glass doors, all labeled with classroom numbers, line one side of the hallway; corkboards covered with posters stretch over what little wall space remains unoccupied by wide windows looking into the rooms. The other side, Lusamine notes, are laboratories, storage space, and other miscellaneous offices.

"See, we basically begin from scratch," Lusamine continues as you reach a door labeled Gymnasium, "with children as young as they are when they first come to Aether, well - they start off with a body, a face, a set of limbs, but we're the ones doing all the work in here," she taps the side of your head in demonstration, "to construct a person. And that's one way of seeing the work we do here at Aether - we're researching the best way to take that base, and build a person out of it."

In front of you when you walk in is a child, about ten or eleven years old, trident in their hands and staring down at the blood trickling in little rivulets from three holes in a training dummy's chest. They're whispering something to themselves, their voice so quiet you can't make out what they're saying, before another child's voice cuts across the room - "Mommy, I won! I won today!"

"Oh, that's amazing, dear," Lusamine exclaims, clapping the child on the back. "I knew you could win, you just had to try harder. Now no more childish tantrums about training, okay?"

"They weren't -" they begin, but Lusamine interrupts them. "You feel good now, don't you? You're proud of doing well today. It'll make you feel even better if you put in more effort into your training from now on, and less time going digging for things to be upset about." The child swings their arm back and forth, the tip of their sword lightly dragging against the ground, and nods.

"Mommy cares about you, you know, and mommy gets so sad to see you upset. You don't want mommy to be sad, do you?" They shake their head. "Good boy."

Lusamine turns from them, and the child runs up to their classmate, who is still staring at the holes in the dummy's chest and the fake blood running across the floor. "Come on!" they bark, giving them a shove and making the other kid nearly stumble over the dummy. "Get back in there! You don't want to lose your dinner privileges again, do you?"

The touch of Lusamine's hand, gentle across your shoulder, nearly startles you, and you tear your focus away from the two children now racing each other towards the equipment room in the back of the gymnasium. "Training's hard," she explains to you. "Every child will feel discouraged sometimes. It's important that we ignore them when they're sulking, and praise them when they're compliant. It's just like training an animal. If you give them attention when they're acting out, it only encourages the problem behavior. This way, they'll learn that they're happiest when they do what they're told."

As you head out of the gymnasium, you notice for the first time the sticker chart taped to one of the doors, lines of brightly colored flowers or gold and silver stars dancing across its smooth surface. "That's this class of trainees," Lusamine gestures towards the kids inside as she catches your gaze. "We reward them with stickers for their good work. You can tell right away who our star students are, and which children need a little more incentive."

The two of you walk for a long time, after leaving the gymnasium. Down the rest of the hallway, up two flights of stairs, and across a wide glass hallway warmed by the afternoon sun. "Our goal at Aether is to offer these poor, helpless children the tools to succeed in this district. The so-called academies nowadays focus on brute force and operate selfishly, running purely on profit. Here, our research feeds constantly into improving our subjects' outcomes; although we are young, the District Four Coalition of Academies has already reported us as averaging third on their overall evaluation and number one in our graduates' satisfaction scores, with Aether-trained citizens beginning to take up prominent roles in many industry sectors of Four." As the two of you near the laboratory, Lusamine directs your attention to the awards she speaks of, hung prominently on the surrounding walls. "One day, we will be the gold standard that everyone aspires to."

The lab is a massive space filled with racks of test tubes and rows of machines, half of which you don't even recognize. There are two people in the lab when you enter; a nurse at the far corner carefully mixing something from a dropper into a vial of clear liquid, and a teen of around fourteen sitting on top of an exam table, swinging their legs against the plastic side. They freeze, hands falling to their sides as soon as they spot you and Lusamine; with a small glance of acknowledgment to the teen, Lusamine turns to the nurse and introduces you to him.

This is where the experiments take place, Lusamine explains to you. Where Aether is constantly striving for improvement, for higher efficiency, for better results. The large and well-aerated fish tank near you, filled with tiny bell-shaped jellyfish and labeled Carukia nihilego, is one of the most recent experiments - breeding the jellyfish had proved surprisingly difficult, but preliminary tests with its venom had been yielding hopeful outcomes.

"Is it gonna hurt?" the teen asks the nurse, who is drawing a syringe from the vial and making his way over to them. "Only a little," comes the reassurance. "But be a good girl for me, won't you?" The teen bites their lip at the response, but remains silent as the syringe goes in and the nurse wheels the table to the side, both of them disappearing behind a doorway and a machine with a mess of wires.

"That's our RKS System." Lusamine points to the machine. "One of our biggest projects to date, aimed to increase resilience and adaptability in subjects exposed to it. Unfortunately," she sighs, "it has continually been put on hold due to many difficulties."

Lusamine asks if you have any questions, as you head back to the office together. You have many questions, half-formulated at the tip of your tongue, but you stick to your safe ones, ones like what would a typical work day be like for me and what is your favorite part of working at Aether, the kind of questions anyone might come up with if you asked them for advice on this part of an interview. Lusamine brings up salary and benefits first; it is a respectable sum of money, and far more than you have heard from any other research facility. As you enter the office, Lusamine exchanges a look with the receptionist, and declares -

"Congratulations! Now that everything checks out, I am so pleased to tell you that we've decided to hire you at the Aether Foundation!" She opens her arms wide, and it takes a moment to register that Lusamine - that the CEO of such a prestigious foundation - is offering you a hug. You close your arms around her in return, the brief contact leaving the scent of Lusamine's flowery perfume across your skin. "Well, we've already talked salary and benefits on the way here, and I'll send you a formal offer letter within the next couple business days."

"How long," you ask slowly, "will I have to make my decision?"

"We would like to have a response within the week, although of course we can negotiate if you're waiting on any competing offers. If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to reach out; otherwise, please just know that we would be so excited to have you on board as we continue our research into human development."

"Oh, Lusamine is just so nice, isn't she?" The receptionist gushes at you as Lusamine exits the office. "You can just see how much passion she has for helping people. I've been working here for four years, and I can honestly say she's been just like a mother to me. You'll love her, I'm sure of it."

¹The Narcissist's Prayer, original source unknown.
²The monkey experiments were real .