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Mad Hatter
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About Me
When I was 14 my mother and father got a divorce. Now, most parents say that it's not the fault of the child, in this case it was. It was a nasty divorce and I was the center of it. One night, I don't quite remember when, my parents were once again having another argument about me. I had enough and left.
Several years had passed and I was faring pretty well on the street. I met a couple of kids my own age and created my own street gang. We were pretty cool with the other gangs and ours had expanded to about 20. I learned on the go, stealing when necessary, bribing when things got tough, and killing when the tough got going. I was brutal when things went south. My victims often couldn't be identifies except by dental records, and even then not very often.
I was known for my sick sense of humor. I learned to control my emotions, often wearing a face that showed none, only my closest friends could tell my emotions by looking at my eyes. No one questioned my history, no one cared enough to ask, wrapped up by there own sordid pasts.
As to my name, well, it started about a couple of years ago, I began to talk to myself and laugh at the most inappropriate times. I started dressing in clothes of the darkest colors. Mostly with a whimsical nature, Thus I got the nick name “The Mad Hatter” I wore a hat reminiscent of the actual character, that I found in the dumpster. I Started talking in riddles and developed a slight sadist nature.
Not that it helped anyone around me, but their loyalty to me and our gang only added to my ego. I released the reigns on a few of the members of my gang in order for them to develop their personalities. By the time I was 26 I decided to hand over the gang to another person. I had grown bored with the constant monotony of the gang. Thus I bid them ado and traveled onward.
While traveling I developed an insatiable hunger for knowledge. All types of knowledge. Normal subjects like History, Art, Music, Sciences, and Math’s, and Literature. I also developed a craving for Mystical Subjects such as Potions, Spells, Druidism, Arithmancy, Herbology, Runes, and Charms, The True Arts. It was my trip to the Country of Romania that started my current adventures. I must confess this to you here and now while I’m somewhat sane in its entirety so you know what I went thru.
The Friday plane the Budapest from Istanbul was far from full, and when I had settled in among the black-suited Turkish businessmen, the gray-jacketed Magyar bureaucrats talking in clumps, the old women in blue coats and head shawls – were they going to cleaning jobs in Budapest, or had there daughters married Hungarian diplomats? – I had only a short flight in which to regret the train trip I might have taken.
That trip, with its tracks carved through mountains walls, its expanses of forest and cliff, river and feudal town, would have to wait for my later career, as you know, and I have taken it twice since then. There is something vastly mysterious for me about the shift one sees, along that route, from the Islamic world to the Christian, form the Ottoman to the Austro-Hungarian, from the Muslim to the catholic and Protestant. It is a gradation of towns , of architecture, of gradually receding minarets blended with the advancing church domes, of the very look of forest and riverbank, so that little by little you begin to believe your can read in nature itself the saturation of history. Does the shoulder of a Turkish hillside really look so different from the slope of a Magyar meadow? Of course not, and yet the difference is as impossible to erase form the eye as the history that informs it is from the mind. Later, traveling this route, I would also see it alternately as benign and bathed in blood- this is the other trick of historical sight, to be unrelentingly torn between good and evil, peace and war. Whether I was imagining an Ottoman incursion across the Danube or the Earlier sweep of the Huns toward it from the East, I was always plagued by the conflicting images: a severed head brought into the encampment with cries of triumph and hatred, and then an old woman- maybe the greatest of grandmothers of those wrinkled faces I saw on the plane- dressing her grandson in warmer cloths, with a pinch on his smooth Turkic cheek and a deft hand making sure her stew of wild game didn’t burn.
These visions lay in the future for me, however, and during my plane trip, I regretted the panorama below without known what it was, or what thought it might later provoke in me.
My first impression of Budapest, taken in through the windows of my taxi from the airport , was of a vast nobility. I would be staying in a hotel near the university on the east side of the Danube, in Pest, and had ask my driver to take me along the Danube before dropping my off. One minute I am traversing dignified eighteenth- and nineteenth-century streets, enlivened here and there by a burst of art-nouveau fantasy or a tremendous old tree. The next minute I am in the sigh of the Danube. It was enormous - I hadn’t been prepared for its grandeur – With three great bridges spanning it. On our side of the river rose the incredible new-Gothic spires and dome of the Parliament Buildings, and on the opposite side rose the immense tree-cushioned flanks of the royal palace and the spires of the medieval churches. In the midst of everything was that expanse of the river, gray-green. Its surface finely scaled by the wind and glinting with the sunlight. A huge blue sky arched over the domes and monuments and churches, and touched the water with shifting colors.
The hotel I was staying in was just off Magyar utca – Magyar Street, to you. I had gotten a map so I didn’t get lost, something I never wished to happen. After dropping off my bags in my room, I walked over to the University Library. The university was made up of impressive buildings, some of them an echo of the fine library I’d seen earlier, and I began to feel some trepidation when I headed for the library. A large classical hall bordered around the second story with statues. I stopped to crane up at then was able to read some of their names, spelled in the Magyar versions: Plato, Descartes, and Dante, all of the crowned with laurels and draped in classical robes. The other figures were less familiar to me, Szent Istvan, Matyas Corvinus, Janos Hunyadi. They brandished scepters or bore mighty crowns aloft.
The book I’d been searching for was, as far as I could tell, from Ages ago. Nobody that has ever studied it survived more then one year away from it before disappearing. The scroll was located in the bowels of the library somewhere in the catacombs beneath it. Several hours later, I found it. I was in the deepest and oldest part of the catacombs where torches had to be lit for light. I pulled my water out of my pack and took a long drink. Finding an ancient looking table I settled down to read the scroll.
The scroll was ancient and brittle, tied with a black ribbon. I untied the ribbon and began to unroll it. Ancient lettering was unraveled before my eyes and even in the torch light I could make out symbols belonging to the ancient Druids. My fingers ran down the parchment in an attempt to belong to the age of this writing. In my foolishness I had received a paper cut and I unknowingly bled onto the parchment.
I set the parchment down and began to root threw my rut-sack for a tissue, unaware of the parchment beginning to glow. As the light began to get brighter I gasped as I now became aware of my error. Certain documents should never be subject to any liquid or vocal reading. To do such things would awaken those documents and the catastrophe emanating from it could very well kill you, transform you physically or mentally, unlock an ancient spirit, or awaken one. You never know, but it will probably kill you outright.
I began to grab everything on the table and jam it into my rut-sack, as I turned to run for it I was pulled back toward the scroll and I nearly did get away yet my balance was off and I fell back towards the scroll and sucked in.