Since they didn't have any luggage, something that still seemed very strange to Jon, they simply parked the mini-van in longterm parking and hurried off towards the terminal. Linda seemed absolutely convinced they were going to be late for their flight no matter how many times her husband informed her the departure time wasn't for another hour. Jon was steadily calming down and wrapping his head around the idea he was apparently getting three extra weeks of vacation. I really dodged a bullet! I guess everything is going to work out fine.. He was about to try and subtly ask his dad for some details about where this free vacation was taking place when he skidded to a halt. There, wearing her favorite green jumper (though considerably more stretched out in a certain place than it used to be), jeans, and an old reliable pair of sneakers was his newly blonde best friend, Karyn Black.
"Karyn, what are you doing here!?" Jon asked in confusion.
"Uh, Jon-boy," Karyn replied, obviously confused by Jon's confusion, "you asked me to come along like a month ago, remember? The package your dad won had those two extra slots so you and Zoe both got to bring a friend."
"Right, right," Jon agreed, his mind whirring. Karyn didn't hear the wish for something interesting so I guess she always remembered whatever changed. Speaking of, he wasn't sure what was weirder, the fact that Karyn was now blonde and much bustier, or that none of his family were commenting on it. He shook the thought off and tried to focus on not acting too weird. He could fill Karyn in on the stone's role in this vacation when they had a moment alone. He laughed awkwardly and turned to Zoe asking, "so I guess Athena should be here soon then?"
Zoe just scowled at him and stomped her combat boot dangerously close to his toes. "No, her parents wouldn't allow her to come, dickwad, stop rubbing it in! Stephanie's coming instead." Stephanie Wright was also one of Zoe's friends but not her best friend like Athena Devries; honestly she tended to fade into the background and Jon kind of forgot about her sometimes. In any event she was probably the least goth of the goth clique, wearing dark clothes and painting her nails black but otherwise eschewing the pasty makeup, dyed hair, and more extreme outfits the rest of them went for.
Luckily for the cause of avoiding giving his mom an aneurysm, the girl in question arrived. She wore a plain white tee with a small tear at the hem, an old jean jacket and dark pants she was starting to get a little too tall for; Jon couldn't help but notice the normally taciturn girl had a tentative smile on her face as she thanked Zoe again for inviting her along and he couldn't help think that she actually seemed more excited for this trip than Zoe was.
"Hurry up everyone!" Linda Gibson pestered, ushering them towards security, "paradise awaits!"
In her hidden laboratory, powered and warmed by the harnessed volcanic power of her island, Kalea Beufort smiled and puffed on her cigar while absent mindedly groping her own breast with her left hand. Her body was simply marvelous after all and she couldn't help indulging a little when she was in private. Still, the majority of her gargantuan genius was focused on the streams of information coming in on a bank of monitors on the wall. Through hacking security cameras, placing spies, deploying nearly microscopic surveillance bots and good old fashioned social media snooping, her staff were tracking each and everyone of the nearly 200 guests coming to her island. Some had been surreptitiously enticed, others selected by chance, but all of them would have a part to play in her games.
She focused on the LAX feed, where the Gibson family were boarding the first of their seven connecting flights, coach of course. The proto-typical family of lower-middle class suburbanites... Kalea mused while smiling. Just another henpecked husband and put upon wife stumbling through middle age, bound together by inertia and the kids.They weren't, for the moment, very remarkable, but that would soon change as the Gibsons were unknowingly the keystone guests for phase one of her plans. Eventually most of her guests would be involved in one way or another, but it would start with the Gibsons and she couldn't wait to see which way they jumped.
Waving her hand, she briefly flicked through a few other incoming visitors. Jenna Fairfax from South Carolina with her bridesmaids on an extended bachelorette party trip, Gus and Geoff Oakly, a pair of plumber brothers from Toronto who thought they'd been hired to fix the resort's pipes, the poor widowed Princess Eleanor looking to get away from the palace and the papparazzi, Tatiana Olev, the bratty 19 year old daughter of a Russian oligarch and Robert Isaacs, the English professor she was having an affair with, boy genius Leonard Drullers, also from Lakeview like the Gibsons, who thought he'd won tickets in a chess competition, Hilde von Bremen, a German instagram model looking to get tons of pics on Fibranche's perfect beaches, and on and on. So many different playthings were about to be in her grasp and she had to bite her lip from the excitement.
She glanced over at her greatest invention, I mean, MY HUSBAND's invention, she corrected herself. At the moment it appeared to be a large silver-grey cylinder with tubes leading out to two different large pods, currently closed. When active, Beufort's Outstanding Overpowering Brain Switcher, would glow with electric blue energy and open up to reveal the control panel, but for the moment it sat there waiting, just like her.
