Editing City Series:Volume5b Chapter20 (section)

===Rosetta’s Journal===

It is currently 11 at night. I am in bed. I am feeling better and a few important things have happened so I think I will write about them. I woke up at about 9 at night and got my heavy body moving so I could get dressed. I was hungry so I went to the kitchen. My master descended from the second floor and told me I had slept all day long and that Lady Beretta went to the Missel mansion on the outskirts of the city. He also told me Paris had been completely blocked off and no one – even Lady Beretta – could get in.

He apparently had work to do in the storeroom so he left after telling me to call for him if I needed anything. I sat in the kitchen chair for a long while. I did not do much other than drink a few glasses of water.

It must have been around 10 when someone arrived at the back door. I opened the door thinking it might be Lady Beretta but it was a stranger in white clothes. His long blonde hair was pretty. He was middle-aged and looked somewhat tired. He had distinctive almond eyes.

“Do you need something?” I asked him.

He let out a sigh of relief when he heard that.

“Please save my child.”

Hearing that I Ajoutered the child in his arms. It was a blonde girl wearing white. She had been shot in the stomach and her clothing was stained with blood. I took the child and placed her on the kitchen countertop to heal her. Then I turned back toward him.

Except he was no longer there. I Ajoutered that spot to figure out what happened and I saw a single male Fantasmé Renard collapsed at the back door. He was dead.

I recalled the legend that those foxes could transform into a person just once in their life.

I looked back to the kitchen countertop and saw the Fantasmé Renard child that Lady Beretta had named Mallette. The brown fur of her stomach was stained with blood and she was barely breathing. I could see the same color on the stomach of the father collapsed at my feet.

I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I do know I cried. I went to my master and received some healing tools and a sewing kit. I removed the bullet from Mallette’s stomach and sewed up the wound so she would not die.

I wrapped a towel around her stomach and placed her in an empty cardboard box to sleep. Then I vomited a little bit. I had so many reasons for that. Lady Beretta’s absence. My exhaustion. The nausea from my period. All the blood I had just seen. And the death of Mallette’s father – Phillip.

Lady Beretta had once told me the Germans would go hunting in the Boulogne forest for fun so was that what happened here? Does that mean all the Fantasmé Renards other than Mallette had been killed? There had been two other children named Jean and Jack. And there had been a mother named Beretta. Were they all dead?

Mallette is currently sleeping in the cardboard box under my bed. She is alive. After vomiting and drinking more water I buried Phillip in the garden.

Is this what it means to lose someone? For them to die? What will Mallette think when she wakes up? She is the same as me right now.

She no longer has her family with her. What will she do when she wakes up?

I do not know. I do not know what I will do either.

Everyone else knows what to do. My master is working on the Lourd de Marionnette so it is ready to run – probably for Lady Beretta’s sake – and Lady Beretta went to Sir Phillip’s home.

But I have nothing to do. I am starting to feel jealous of the gun sitting on the bedside table. That gun has no will of its own. It is a simple device. But that is enough to give it purpose. Even if that purpose is to harm people.

Now I am feeling sad.

Why isn’t Lady Beretta with me?

I know I am being selfish but there is still so much I want to ask her. I still haven’t learned how to use a comma. We were so busy during our trip I never managed to ask her about that.

I understand it indicates a pause for breath much like a period but I don’t ever see anyone put a comma at the end of a sentence.

But why not? Is a period meant to indicate the end of one idea? But the paragraph break already exists for that purpose. There is no need to further confuse things by creating a punctuation mark with the same function.

Why do two punctuation marks exist that both indicate a pause for a breath?

They have a saying in Aerial City – London: “No one needs two of the same word.”

So shouldn’t the comma and the period be combined into a single punctuation mark?

Ellipses. Em dashes. Questions marks. Exclamation marks. Parentheses. Tildes. They all have different meanings. Only the comma and the period mean the same thing. So why have both of them?

I do not know.

But answering this question is not my job. And it is not very fun either. Come to think of it I have not had anything to eat. I must be hungry so that is enough of this.