Randal
I guess it’s ironic that a human was the one to start the Grove. I didn’t care much about that. It all just came down to doing what had to be done, for everyone. If all the other ‘norms’ wanted the mutants out then dammit, I would take them out. If it stopped more kids like Kris getting killed, then I didn’t care if it was conceding to the bastards of the world.
Kris was my baby brother, even at 25. He was a good kid, always tried to do his best. Always tried to help people, even when it was stupid. And he did a lot of stupid things. He was a good kid, yeah, but I never said he was smart. He wouldn't go underground about his mild psi-ability. It was barely more than most of the TV psychics had – hell, sometimes I felt more psychic than he was - but it was his. And Kris was always proud of what was his, wasn’t he? But I guess we all were. Kris got killed at a press interview five years ago. He pulled his little ‘So what am I thinking?’ trick on the wrong guy.
But a death can open eyes too. I got what Dave would have called a one size fits all Diva-Goddess boot to the head. As long as the mutants and the humans that hated them were together, people would get killed. So why don’t we get them out of there? So how did I get from ‘get them out of there’ to a mutant intentional community?
Um…well… don’t tell anyone this, but I was drunk off my ass when I said it. When I woke up the next morning, Dave remembered something I must have spouted off about and that’s how it started. I was a dotcommer when Kris was shot. I was admittedly really freaking rich. I got the idea about three months later and pulled out to move to Texas. The guys all thought I had picked up some kind of eccentric urge and that I would come back soon. The company went under less than a month later. Maybe Kris wasn’t the only psychic in the family.
Texas. Who would have thought? But the land we built the Grove on is nice, really gorgeous if you’re into woods and deer and all that. A lot of the people we attract are. Yes, it is hotter than hell in the summer, but it’s really nice during the three weeks of fall, winter and spring. We’ve got a sheltered valley out in the boonies, plenty of land for the houses, the gardens, the trails that lead off into the middle of nowhere. A lot of the psions seem to like those. I guess that after the cities they used to live in, the country is soothingly quiet.
We try to keep everything pretty low key. No big buildings, no lasers flying through the air. No one really knows about us. To the locals, we’re just another bunch of holdover hippies and Jr-Yuppies out trying to get back in touch with nature. In some ways, we are that. We do keep things as close to natural as possible. We’ve started using permaculture to work with the natural patterns of growth – Teri’s idea. We use a lot of the natural resources – you’d be amazed what you could eat from your backyard. We only have a couple of major buildings on the land, only a few cars for the whole group of us. We keep things environmentally friendly, but that’s not the motivation. We keep people safe here. We give mutants a place to go when the outside world gets too harsh for them to handle. There are a lot of us now, close to 40. We started with 5. The word is getting out, we’re growing. I’ve gotten emails from a group in upstate New York and two in California about starting up similar communities.
I started this out as my own personal quest, but I think we might be starting to change the world.
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