Morgan stares at Tom for a while. His irises and his pupils film over with yellow gold.<\/p>\n
Tom recoils.<\/p>\n
He remembers Mr. Loggins. He remembers the man on top of him, he remembers the words, he cannot hear them, he did not hear them, he refuses to hear them, but he remembers <\/i>\u2014<\/p>\n
The blood drains from Tom\u2019s face.<\/p>\n
He skitters back. He pushes himself along the ground away from Morgan and stops with his back against a slender tree.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s supposed to help you,\u201d he explains, frantically. \u201cIt\u2019s a hat for helping<\/i> people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hat falls off of Morgan, who is upside-down. The wind carries it back in Tom\u2019s direction. Morgan regards Tom for a long moment, but he doesn\u2019t speak.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s to help you achieve your potential,\u201d Tom says. \u201cI was going to be a science adventurer. Maybe refine the world or empty Hell or something. Stupid, stupid Tom.\u201d<\/p>\n
He stares at his fingers. He can\u2019t remember how many he\u2019s supposed to have.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not an ophidian world-inheritor,\u201d he clarifies. \u201cMy DNA is totally human. So there\u2019s that! Hey, is there even anything in<\/i> . . . I mean, what is<\/i> Hell, actually, did you ever think about that? Like, is it an ectoplasmological phenomenon, or an epistemological state? I mean, Hel, obviously,\u201d he says, correcting his pronunciation to refer to the Norse afterlife instead of the British one without actually sounding different in any audible respect. \u201cBit of a bone-head, sometimes, haha.\u201d<\/p>\n
He gives Morgan a frantic smile. He claws his hat up off the ground. He puts it on. He staggers off.<\/p>\n
He doesn\u2019t like the house in yellow, with their yellow eyes and their yellow hats.<\/p>\n
Sometimes at night when he is just about to complete some grand invention \u2014<\/p>\n
Some brilliant and awful design \u2014<\/p>\n
He will look up from his work and see them and their yellow House standing around him in a creepy circle. Morgan. Fred. Lirabelle. Veronica. Sometimes even Paul. (Paul is not a member of the Keepers\u2019 House. He is simply trying to fit in.)<\/p>\n
They will stand. They will stare. This will creep Tom out. He will forget what he is doing. He will say, plaintively, \u201cPlease stop that. I am trying to work on this \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019ll flail it about.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese words and numbers,\u201d he might say. Or \u201cthese thingummies!\u201d<\/p>\n
This dismisses them. They dissipate! They slip off gracefully into the halls.<\/p>\n
They honor his wishes, when he asks, but they creep him out anyway; and he has yet to hear them speak.<\/p>\n
They are the worst.<\/p>\n
They are definitely <\/i>the worst. They are almost the worst. They are . . .<\/p>\n
They are definitely his least favorite thing to come out of sticking his magical hat on random people around the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth, he is pretty sure of it, until he understands what it is that his hat has made of Sid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Morgan stares at Tom for a while. His irises and his pupils film over with yellow gold. Tom recoils. He remembers Mr. Loggins. He remembers the man on top of him, he remembers the words, he cannot hear them, he did not hear them, he refuses to hear them, but he remembers \u2014 The blood […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"series":[47],"class_list":["post-5043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-storm-that-saw-itself-chapter-2","series-the-storm-that-saw-itself"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Hat_2_noBG1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5043"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6161,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5043\/revisions\/6161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5043"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=5043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}