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31st Post

Posted 2 May 2016 at 02:47:49 EDT

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> Of all the children who had been returned from the portals, only one survived in the long term, though we didn't even realize it until years later. She had been stolen (or rescued) from us by a rogue technician shortly after return and was thus lost to us for many years. We finally found her in Estonia and kidnapped her from her adoptive family in the middle of the night. She was seven when we lost her and thirteen when we found her again.
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> We did a preliminary interview, and she seemed normal in every respect. Mind you, this was a girl who entered a massive, possibly alien, biological device called a flesh interface, disappeared from existence for several minutes, then returned encased in an amniotic sac, attached to a placenta via umbilical cord with enough LSD in her bloodstream to turn all of Utah in one massive orgy. Naturally, we expected some sort of mental changes, especially since every child who returned from the portals had showed signs of mental aberration. Then again, every other child had died shortly after return, so she was clearly something special.
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> But no, she was normal. Frustratingly normal. So we started prying into her past. She was reticent, but young and fairly trusting, and it wasn't hard to get information out of her. She said she was born in Brazil, which was correct. We had acquired her from a Brazilian orphanage where she had lived since infancy, the daughter of a dead prostitute and an unknown father. She vaguely remembered her time at the orphanage, and they were not very happy memories. She then began telling us about the first day she met her adoptive parents. But we wanted to know about the time in between, when she was in our possession, when she went into the portal and came back.
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> We asked what happened before she met her adoptive parents. She said she remembered a long, boring boat trip to come over to the Estonian islands. We asked her where she had lived before then. At this question, she grew distinctly uncomfortable. She said she didn't really remember. We pressed her. Her face began to twitch and shudder. This was the first time she had showed any sign of abnormality. We kept pressing her on the question.
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> "There was one summer," she said quietly. "After I moved out of the orphanage, but before I came to Estonia... When I lived with a woman who said she was my mother."
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> This was news to us. Our files had it that she had lived continuously at the orphanage. We asked her about the exact time, but all she knew that it was for one summer. This was curious, because she had been in our possession one summer seven years ago. The timelines matched well, but the events were entirely different.
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> We asked her to elaborate. She said that one day a woman had come to the orphanage saying that she was her mother, and the Americans who ran the place had made her go with the woman. They had gone to a crummy old house, and she lived there for the summer. As she said this, she began to sob. She said that she had forgotten all about this, that she hardly remembered it at all, that she didn't want to talk about it. "She wasn't my mother. I knew. Her face wasn't right. It wasn't a real face."
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