The Elementals - The Ice Princess

Chapter 14

"Whoa!! What is all of this stuff?" Alexander says as we walk into the 'control room.' The room is not terribly large but it is filled with electronic gadgets and gizmos. Almost all of the walls are lined with shelves that have various electronic components on them. Most of them look like they were scavenged. To be honest, this looks like a hoarder's paradise. I knew my dad loved to tinker with things, but this is a bit excessive. At the front of the room is a large control panel with several monitors attached to it. The monitors are almost the size of the flat screen television that dad put downstairs. It's a 42" inch plasma that barely gets watched. He spends most of his evenings tinkering with things and I spent most of my time studying, doing homework or reading fairy tales. When we're not doing those things, we are playing cards, talking or he is trying to teach me something sciencey.

I run my hand across some of the wires that run up the wall. They are everywhere, the ceiling, across the floor and up most of the walls. Alexander and I carefully step over them as we make our way to the main panel, the biggest one at the front of the room, where my dad is sitting staring at a screen. When we get there, we can see it's some kind of screen for monitoring the weather. It appears to be some kind of radar with many different colors on it.

"Da.." but before I can ask a question, he raises his hand and shushes me. He is intent at staring at the screen. "Take a look." he says. Alexander and I both lean in a bit closer and share a quick glance. My dad is acting pretty weird. I am a bit embarrassed by it. I can feel my face getting flushed. "There is another one." he says. He looks a bit worried at having said that.

Alexander seems more focused on it than I am. He is staring at the screen. "Do you see it?" my dad asks. I take another look to see what the fuss is about but am still unable to see what their looking at. "I don't see anything dad."

"Watch carefully in this weather pattern. You're going to see them blip."

"Blip?" asks Alexander, so I don't have to. "Watch! There is going to be one or more black dots appear in that weather pattern." he says touching the blue blob on the screen. "This is how I can track when and where they coming." "I've never seen so many in one place. This isn't good."

"What's not good?"

My dad looks over at me, smiles and comes out of his techno trance. "Nothing, he says. It'll pass."

Before I can press him on it any further he asks ""How was breakfast?" and gets up to walk towards a large table that sits just off to the side of his control panel. On it are a few maps, atlases and blueprints. He gathers all of these up and moves it to large drawer at the bottom of the control panel. He motions for us to sit down not seeming to care all that much about our response to the breakfast question. "We should talk I think." he says. "I imagine you have a lot of questions."

"Umm yeah, you could say that." I tell him sarcastically.

"Ok. Shoot kiddo. I will try to answer your questions the best I can.

"Where are we and what is this place?"

"This," he waves his hands around at this room "is work. This is where I do most of my research and am able to keep tabs on all of the weather related phenomenon that I need to know about to keep you safe. There are computers that measure for things like precipitation, ones that measure for disturbances in the earth, like earthquakes and tremors using seismographs. I even have sensors that measure various levels of ice in the ice caps and the levels of water in oceans and the great lakes. All of this is important to me. Whenever something big happens, I know that there is an issue and something that could lead to you being harmed."

"Where exactly are we?"

"You don't recognize this? I used to bring you here when you were younger with your mom. She knew we needed a place to go in case something happened and we need to leave the house in a hurry. So we set up here. In fact, she helped build and design most of this. Her expertise in the weather, especially the cold was instrumental in our lives. Without her, none of this would have been possible. We wouldn't be able to track weather anomalies and you certainly wouldn't be as safe as you are right now."