Carl Liene Ch. 01

DISCLAIMER: ALL CHARACTERS HEREIN ARE OVER THE AGE OF 18. I do not condone any abuse of any kind IRL, and everything herein is just fantasy. Do not attempt to re-enact anything you read here.

The worst part about moving was having to get used to things all over again. Carl was a homebody at heart. He had a natural tendency to sort of settle in wherever he was, and over time make wherever he was more and more of a home. In a way, he thought, it was probably a product of having moved so many times. Carl had had to get used to getting used to new things, and making a home out of wherever he wound up.

Of course, this would be no different. A new house in a new place. Make new friends in the space of a year, knowing you'd one day never see them again, and some day you'd have so many old friends you could never keep in touch with all of them. In a way, it was easier to imagine every year or two he was just going on holiday somewhere new -- an extended holiday where you never went home. Easier than accepting that he had no home, nowhere to go back to, nowhere to ground him.

It wouldn't have been so bad if he had had a strong relationship at home to keep him grounded, but that had been missing for most of his life too. The Liene family was not particularly strongly knit. His parents were academics. Carl was, definitively, not. That wasn't to say that he had struggled at school, quite the contrary. When your life was so nomadic you had very few attachments, which left a lot of free time for school work. Indeed, having moved through so many schools, Carl had learned the hard way the benefit of putting in extra effort to make up for what was lost in translation.

They weren't just academics, though, but busy ones, dedicated to their fields. That left very little time for a child who had very little supporting them outside of the home, so naturally, the internet filled that role. The internet, despite its vastness, its depth, its ever changing nature, had been far more of a structured constant in his life than anything else -- and far more dependable. Indeed, Carl's over-indulgence in the internet from a young age, as well as the maturity the hardships of such a life brought, had led to very early awakenings for the young lad.

That, at least, he had in common with his parents. The family of three spent much of their days, wherever they were, glued to a pc monitor (or laptop in his mother's case)... albeit Carl for far different reasons. The limits of his discourse were on the myriad debates regarding pornography, written or drawn, which a lonely teen with nothing else to do can be so easily drawn into.

Now well past eighteen, Carl could have left "home" whenever he wanted. College was beckoning. However, at his parents' request, he had elected to move with them one last time before shipping off for higher education. He was enrolled in online pre-college courses which would allow him to skip the first year of his degree, and promised to be far easier being done from home, but deep down he knew the reason was his parents didn't want him to leave yet -- especially as they knew he probably wouldn't come back.

This, he had realized quite quickly, was their big gesture. This was their big last-chance "have a relationship with our son" moment. They were going to try to make up for 18 plus years of varying degrees of neglect with... well, that was yet to be seen.

"Too little, too late," the more jaded part of him whispered, as he stared out the back window of their car, trundling behind the moving truck through sweeping hills and forests to the middle of nowhere.

He knew very little about where they were actually going. Each subsequent move had diminished his enthusiasm for new surroundings. It was supposed to be an old house with a lot of wild flora around (which interested his botanist parents no doubt, though he doubted they would ever pry their eyes away from a PC screen to look at any). They had driven for more than an hour from the last town, though, so wherever it was, it was pretty remote.

The whole drive they hadn't really spoken, beyond a "do you want anything" while they filled the car's tank and went into the station for a few things. He had been tempted to get out and talk to the delivery truck drivers for a bit as they filled their truck, but eventually his diffidence won out. A life of being alone leads to being very comfortable being on your own, and he was happy to sit in the silence of the back seat scrolling on his phone. After all, those Discord channels wouldn't browse themselves.

---

Carl was roused from his apathy rather quickly when the house itself came into view. Cresting a hill, it rose in front of them as if out of the ground. It just kept growing, and growing, taller and taller. The spire became a tower, the tower a small deck, then three more floors below it grew wider and wider. It was a country estate home... no, more of a small mansion. There was a real majesty to the location. Trees and hills wound together like a patchwork sheet, clumps of woodland intermingled with grassy knots as far as the eye could see. Although a homebody, Carl could well appreciate a beautiful view.

A small part of him, the adventurous young boy still locked inside somewhere, was whispering in his ear ideas of wandering and getting lost in the woods -- finding ancient mysteries, lost secrets. Archways and old stone circles, faery rings... That sounded nice. Even just a quiet walk through the woodlands sounded very... peaceful. He could use that. He wasn't sure how much his comfort had factored in to his parents choice of home, but at least it didn't look like he'd be suffering here.

As they pulled up, the deceptive scale of distance hit home. The house truly was massive, even bigger than it had looked before. It had seemed tall compared to the surrounding trees, but now he could see just how tall the trees were! The top spire towered above them, and spaced in the hills around at regular intervals were stone monolith statues. A quick look at his watch confirmed his suspicions -- it was a massive sundial.

"Give us a hand unpacking will ya Carl?" his dad shouted back from the truck as the movers opened it up, revealing the tightly packed cardboard boxes he had grown so used to filling and emptying throughout his life.

Dutifully, he took one box and then another atop it, toeing open the front door as he made his way up the lengthy, spiralling footpath. Inside, the roof towered above, as if the place had been built to house a creature much larger than them. He mused that he could easily be sat on someone's shoulders and not be able to reach it. To think there were another two floors and a tower above this!

"Where should I put them?" he called back out the door, and listened as his voice echoed again, and again, in the cavernous rooms.

"Just by the stairs for now" his dad replied, as the movers came in behind him, putting their boxes down.

He waited to grab a specific box, one he recognized from the drawings all over it by a certain Carl age 6, the first time they had moved. Inside were many of his most prized possessions. He asked one of the movers to grab the box behind it which contained his PC stuff and to follow him, before setting off to pick a bedroom. Despite the size of the home the rooms were quite few. The second floor had four bedrooms, although the smaller one was undoubtedly supposed to be for guests or a young child. The mover put his box down in the hallway and Carl thanked him before taking a look around.

The bedroom which backed on to the side of the house had a huge, curved set of windows which looked out on the sunset. He wasn't much of a morning person, but that evening view was going to be worth it he was sure.