For my project on Relena Darlian, I looked on the Net for articles about her, and then I proceeded to the library and looked for books about her. There were a multitude of written materials about her and almost all of them were wrong.

       There was a book that said she was a whining hypocritical brat. But she isn't. Maybe she used to whine when she was little, but I have never seen her do it.

       And there was a book that said she was going to bed with Cousin Dorothy and all the gundam pilots. This is utterly ridiculous, and besides, it isn't true. Cousin Dorothy would not go to bed with M. le-quatrieme because she stuck a hole in him. And M. le-troisieme would not go to bed with Cousin Dorothy because she stuck a hole in his little friend. And Cousin Dorothy did not even meet MM. le-deuxieme and le-cinquieme until after the war was over, and I do not think M. le-cinquieme or M. le-troisieme really met Relena Darlian to talk to until then either, but I will need to check.

       (In the absence of certain knowledge as to the preferred things to call the gundam pilots in California, the style of L3 has been used. Le-quatrieme was the one with sickle-sabres, and le-deuxieme was the disappearing one with the 'lite Batman impression. Le-troisieme had a suit built by Dekim, so it had a Very Big Gun, because Dekim and his son Trowa were very impressed by Very Big Guns. My brother says that they were compensee-ing for something. M. le-cinquieme is the one who was my parfait gentil chevalier.)

       And there is a book that said Relena Darlian was a marionette for Duc Dermaile and then Otousama. But if she was a marionette for Romefeller, they would not have been scared of her and invaded her land. I was a marionette, and Dekim did not shoot me until I thought I would be more like Pinocchio, only not as much of a jerk.

And there was an article that said that she did not know what she was doing and got lots of people killed. But I thought everyone said that she was trying to get people to see that some ideas were important enough to be worth getting killed over, especially if lots of people would get killed if you didn't have the ideas. And she nearly got killed herself lots of times. Romefeller nearly killed her, and Anne nearly killed her, and Milliard Peacecraft nearly killed her, and M. le-premier was going to kill her, only he watched the people listening to her speech and decided not to after all, and told her so later.

       And there was an article that said she makes silly speeches that do not convince anybody. But they convince me of what she is talking about, and I have said that she convinced M. le-1er not to kill her when she was not even talking to him, so I conclude that it was a silly article that does not convince anybody.

       But there was also an article written about her and the school in Cinq, by Ms. Lebak. That one was a very good article. It said many things about the school and about Relena Darlian. But it did not say anything about Relena-nee that I did not already know.

       Because of these factors, I have determined that it would serve no use to base part of my project on previous literature, and will instead do it based on personal interviews and recorded appearances.

       For the literature search part of the project, I looked on the Net for information about Marimeia. There was a lot of it but it didn't inform much.

       There were many pictures of her from last year, and rumors when they thought she was going to take over the world for Dekim. But they did not say much, except that many people are not sure if she is really Treize Khushrenada's daughter or not.

       Then Marimeia and I went to the big downtown library together yesterday to look for articles and stuff.

       Papa was surprised to find Commander Sally and Mr. Chang there on Saturday instead of Shani, but Commander Sally showed him a card she had that said that she counted as a member of the FBI and the local police, so Papa was not worried that she was not a fit person to look after me and Marimeia. Instead, he was worried that something had gone very wrong, but it was only Shani's broken leg and she should be able to go around on crutches today. So he said it was all right for them to come and take me to the library after Mass, and he would pick me up.

       Also Marimeia helped me look on the Net at the library, because she is better at it than I am. We found many articles that were supposed to be about where she came from. But Marimeia said most of them were wrong. She never got to meet her father, so he did not come to the colonies to visit her. And one of the articles said that her father was really Dekim or his brother or his son. Marimeia turned a nasty color. But it was in a silly magazine, because on the next page there was an article about X the Owl actually being a blue jay disguised as an owl in order to be on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. And then another issue of the magazine had an article about the problem of midgets getting trapped in a shuttle toilet and said that the government was keeping Marimeia in a jar in the basement and cloning her to use for something but they weren't sure what, so I knew that it was a silly magazine, and you are not supposed to believe silly magazines, because they say silly things that didn't happen, like aliens using Earth as a spaceport and taking time waiting for their flights to get Earth men pregnant. Also they say that Relena Darlian's father was assassinated by lots of people working together, or lots of people getting in each other's way, and that it was done by the colonies or by Zanzibar or something. Which is silly, because Marimeia's father told one of his tokusa to do it, and she threw a bomb in the window and it blew up and killed them.

       (Marimeia says that a tokusa is a colonel in English. But that does not sound right, because I was watching a movie with Papa, and a taisa was a colonel. So I think a tokusa would be something else, but I don't know what.)

       And besides, that was when Commander Sally and Mr. Chang came back over to see how we were doing, and I told them to tell Marimeia that you weren't supposed to believe silly magazines, and Commander Sally said of course not, you buy them to read the articles and laugh at them. And Mr. Chang asked if that was the infernal nonsense masquerading as news that had said that he was really a woman, so he looked at it and saw that it was the same magazine, so he said rude things about it for a while. Commander Sally said that she would be happy to prove them wrong by putting pictures of him naked online, if he would let her take them, and Mr. Chang sat in a chair and sulked at her. I did not know men sulked unless they were getting divorced.

       And most of the articles did not have any idea what happened to Marimeia either. A lot of them thought that Dekim had shot her dead. Some of them thought that she had gone back to the colonies, or was going to a boarding school in Cinq or Switzerland or somewhere, or that she was in prison. There was also an article with a fuzzy picture of Vice Minister Darlian with three other people, walking away from the camera. I thought one of them was Marimeia's niichan, because of the hair hanging down his back, and I knew another one was Marimeia, because I recognized the back of her hair and her folding wheelchair for traveling. Besides, I do not think Vice Minister Darlian knows that many red-haired children in wheelchairs. The article said that the article writer thought she had seen Relena Darlian out on a secret assignment-ation with mysterious people, but she was not sure if it was her or not.

       That one was real. Marimeia went out to go see a bad movie with her niichan and their friends, so none of them were mysterious at all. Mr. Chang saw the article and recognized Marimeia too, and he got angry because Marimeia and Vice Minister Darlian might have gotten killed, because they sneaked out without bodyguards. Marimeia explained that they were perfectly safe because her niichan was with them, but she wasn't quite sure what Anne would think about it so she has been waiting till now to tell her. Commander Sally said that Anne would probably start growing grey hairs, which is surprising, because Anne is not that old.

       Oh, and some people walked by just then and looked at the table we had all this out on and then at us, and looked very strange. But Commander Sally looked at them the way Mama looks at us when we are playing too noisily, and they went away.

       But I did find an interesting book, called "The Bartons of L3," which was all about Dekim and Marimeia's mother's family, and I wish I had remembered that was their name before I sent the selection process report in. It starts when L3 was being built and talks about them being a big important family there. Actually L3 is not a colony, like I thought it was. It is a piece of space where they park a lot of colonies together and have shuttle flights bunny-hopping from one to the other. Marimeia was very surprised I did not know that, and she hadn't mentioned it because it would be like telling someone that LA-rea is made up of Los Angeles and Long Beach and Cypress and Palos Verdes and Santa Monica and Pasadena and everywhere. Although I suppose that some of the people we used to live next to didn't know that, because they didn't go to visit Nana Jo every year like we did.

       The book did say that the Bartons were influential in peace talks just before the war, which sounded a little odd, because that was when they were building themselves a gundam and getting other people to build four more. But I suppose if I were going to drop rocks on Lisa's house and jump all over it with a giant robot, I would pretend that I really liked her, so she would be surprised. I hope nobody drops rocks on Lisa's house, because she would be sure to say that that was my fault too.

       Then one of the people who had been looking at us funny came back and took a picture with a flash, so Mr. Chang yelled and chased them out of the library, and so the library security people got mad at us and told us to go home and not come back until today. But it wasn't my fault. And when they called Papa to come and pick me up early, Commander Sally made sure to tell Papa that it hadn't been my fault, and that I might have my picture in the paper or something.

       (But we looked at the paper this morning, and it wasn't.)

       So we stopped literature searching, and anyway Marimeia would have had to go to her service for the eve of the Nativity of Mary in an hour anyway. I was surprised that they were holding the service so late, because Mary was born on the eighth, a week ago from last Tuesday, but Marimeia explained that back when the Catholic Church was running most of Europe they put the calendar ahead a bunch of days, like Daylight Savings Time, because they didn't want to have summer on into October. But it's silly to try to make the calendar fit the seasons, because they're all upside down once you go south of the equator anyway, so her church goes on counting holy feasts by the old calendar.

       I asked if that got confusing using different dates, but it is only for church. She asked if we used A.C. in our dates, and of course we don't, although you might not have known that, so it is just the same thing, only more so. Besides, it is convenient, because she gets to come and celebrate Pockromann with Relena Darlian.

       I asked what that was, and she said that it was our Pock. So I asked what Pock was, and Marimeia stared at me as if I had grown another head and said that it was Pock, of course, which didn't help much.

       Then Mr. Chang said "Isn't it called Esther here? The big ceremony in spring with the eggs?"

       So we all laughed, but I still don't see how anyone could be expected to get Easter from Pock. L3 uses very strange words.

       So when I got home, I went through the library catalogue and put a book on Marimeia's church on hold to pick up today after school. That makes two books and one article, and I think that is a very reasonable amount of literature to put into the project.

Bibliography:

Heyman, Janet: 197 March. Celebrity Spotlight. Tweens 184, p. 38.

Riordan, Margot: 197. The Bartons of L3. New Portland, L2-VO7465: Morrowind Press.

Ware, Timothy, and Philips, Stephen: 190. The Orthodox Church: Revised and Amplified by Stephen Philips. I don't know the rest of the publishing facts yet.