Miss Understood | Annabelle and The Bully within Null Paradox

Null Paradox | Annabelle, Seth, and The Bully

Annabelle’s strange relationship with The Bully started at one of Seth’s all-night poker card games.

As Seth’s card dealer, she made it a point to know everything about everyone. Part of it was for Seth–he’d made it clear when he first interviewed her that he wanted to know exactly who everyone was at his Game Nights, what they did during the day, and most importantly, who they socialized with.

The other part was that she wanted the same information that Seth did for her own reasons.

Then, one night, The Bully started showing up well after everyone else had left.

 

Null Paradox | Annabelle and The Bully

Little by little, Annabelle grew closer to The Bully by sharing a helpful observation here and there, all seemingly in an innocent way.

She also learned about The Bully’s interest in her math tic. It clearly enticed him. So, with carefully placed flirts, she fed him more. She started counting the steps that she took while walking past him. After each card game, she would take the deck of cards and place them in order while observing The Bully.

His intrigue in her was clearly growing.

After a few months, she boldly started following him after he left one of his late-night meetings with Seth. He knew she was following him and wondered how he could help her make another bold step. His motivation was simple: he wanted answers from her and knew only one way to extract them. He laid a careful trap for her by leading her randomly through the city during their late-night-cat-and-mouse game, trying to get her to a location where he knew he’d be left in peace with her.

But then he got thrown. Twice.

Annabelle walked up to him on a seemingly random evening, explaining what they were both doing for Seth and proposing a détente. 

It’s amazing what you can achieve by telling the truth.

To his surprise, her disarming charm and boldness reignited an internal debate about the ethical implications of his own methods–a dilemma within himself that he thought he had successfully set aside a long time ago.

 

Null Paradox | Miss Understood

Over time, The Bully concluded that he both loved and hated Annabelle–loving her because she was also playing a multilevel game with Seth, but hating her because he felt like he wasn’t entirely in control when she was around.

On the other hand, Annabelle hated The Bully because of his well-known methodologies for gaining information. She thought it was cut and dry with him. But since starting to work with him, she’d begun to wonder if she, along with most people, misunderstood his motivation. Or was this a a bizarre case of Stockholm Syndrome?

That’s where Annabelle’s song Miss Understood comes into play. What The Bully thought was an unintentional side effect of working with Annabelle, his internal debate about using psychological torture to gain information, was very intentional by Annabelle. While she needed his help, she also enjoyed giving him some pain.

And that, friends, is how Annabelle realized she had the same dilemma as The Bully. Were her methods of gaining information any more ethical than The Bully’s?

More about the recording and release of the song Miss Understood soon.

 

Annabelle |  One

Like most Null Paradox characters, Annabelle and The Bully live in the same multiverse.

Physicists describe the multiverse as an object that contains all possible universes. At its core, the Null Paradox multiverse is the same, but how we navigate the infinite permutations of each universe within the multiverse is different.

In Null Paradox, we perceive life as a series of tiny hops from one universe to another stitched together to create the life the characters experience. This is facilitated by a machine briefly described in the first book (Gertrude & Grace), which plays a more significant role in the upcoming second book (Victoria & Seth).

 

Here’s the tricky part | Zero, One, and Two

The Gertrude, Grace, Victoria, and Seth that you read about are technically the primary ones. “Zero” is appended to their names to reduce confusion, as in Victoria Zero. The adjacent universe has a Victoria One. And so on, for all of them.

But Annabelle and The Bully are different.

 

Courtesy of my work with images AIs, here’s a glimpse of Annabelle and The Bully. This image is based on photographs of Caroline and Zach playing the role of Annabelle and from a photoshoot I did at the Fair Lane Manor, the home of Henry and Clara Ford in Dearborn, Michigan.