MEET THE MELODY MAKERS
A Guide to the Key Players in the Barrington Family Empire

FAMILY TREE: SOLANGE ROSE BARRINGTON is the Matriarch of the Barringtons, a family known for their extraordinary musical gifts. Known as Rose, she runs a global empire, Global Arcade Associates. She has had a long and illustrious career and life as a singer and perfumer and has developed the family business. But all is not well in the global Barrington home. Rose is about to retire and turn over her empire. A conflict of epic proportions is developing among her descendants, over the secret wealth and power amassed by the family and wielded by Rose herself.

Her eldest son is HENRY BARRINGTON, who is married to LILY BARRINGTON, a musicologist who has secretly taken on the mission of unearthing dangerous secrets about the family's past. Henry and Lily are the parents of the Star, RACHEL BARRINGTON. They live and work in the United States and run the American side of the family business. Henry is a musician turned inventor. His creation is a new computer device called MEND: Musical Encode/Decode Device.

Rose's second son is JACK BARRINGTON, who is married to MARIE BARRINGTON. Jack is a financial wizard, and is known to have taken unwise risks with the family fortune. Jack and Marie are the parents of the child ODETTE RAE, a known child genius. One of the family's best-kept secrets is the 21st-century engineering of Odette Rae's birth, accomplished in order to further family "work" roles as senders and receivers of secret musical vibrations. Jack and Marie live and work in Paris and run the Paris side of the family business. An Arcade on the rue de Vaugirard is the center of their operations.

FAMILY ARCADE: A bewitched location full of the living presence of past and present family members, each with her or his own entanglements. The family business began there; and the rue de Vaugirard is the location of the Arcade where Henry has placed a display of dancing, musical dolls. The dolls' likenesses are pictured on MEND's special keys. But the Arcade is even more powerful: it has a secret way of transmitting information wirelessly to the MEND software, allowing a read out of Lily's discoveries about the family.

MEND: The access code to this dangerous global mechanism is the notated version of the family melody by a family member in the 21st century. MEND's software program is like nothing anyone has ever seen before, as it works through the dolls in the Family Arcade, which can be "read' like musical notation by the family member who represents, in this century, a child of the Middle Ages.

ODETTE RAE: The child Odette Rae has begun to dance a Hopscotch pattern on the sidewalk in front of Jack and Marie's headquarters in the rue de Vaugirard, as the church bells of Paris ring. She is dancing the living presence that is emanating from that place. She places all of the districts from which she hears the church bells ringing into her Hopscotch tabulation, and then enters the data about the sequence of the dolls that dance on the Arcade in her secret notebook. Perhaps knowing, perhaps unknowing, she is rewinding in linear form the musical pattern that circulated through the village of Vaugirard in the Middle Ages, finding and bringing to life the source of the family's power, reading the network with her feet. On this same Arcade, Odette Rae suffers a hit and run accident which renders her comatose, unable to send or receive data.

NOTEBOOKS: After Odette's accident, Jack needs help deciphering Odette's secret musical language. He sends Lily a copy of Odette Rae's secret notebook, which contains the data from the child's dance. Unknown to Lily, a number of governments, the United States among them, are seeking the notebook in order to gain access to the powerful information contained in MEND. This information will not only form the basis for an espionage trial, but will also lead Lily into a trap.

STAR: At 19, RACHEL BARRINGTON is perfectly poised to become a world Star. She is a beautiful young woman. Rachel convinces her grandmother Rose to join her on stage at Carnegie Hall, for what will be Rachel's debut performance and Rose's dramatic farewell. This move is dangerous for Rose. Rachel intends to premiere a new song that she plans to release on CD and DVD. Rose's alliance with Rachel on stage gives a 'sign" to many of Rose's business partners and descendents that a secret musical code, spelling out layers of encrypted information about the Barrington family, is about to be found in Rachel's song. This A-list event will cost Rachel her life.

CHARLES HOBBES: A cousin of Solange Rose, Charles works with Marie Barrington on e-commerce trading projects of the family. Charles has worked with Henry on the making of MEND and all the software components of its operation. He needs the family signature melody and final cadence to access this powerful software. He is fighting with Henry over the last update. Charles is an unsavory character who will do what is expedient with anyone, in order to get the power he needs.

MELODY: The Barrington family melody, an ancient Carthaginian tune that varies every century until the original theme is plainly heard and written down by a family member who is able to hear it. The melody has been kept secret for centuries, in a manner that has served to protect the world from its awesome power. When the melody is finally revealed, it will expose the internal workings of a people who consider themselves "chosen". We will discover at last their private inheritance scheme of "talents"!

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: Top Secret Barrington Files are hidden here and have been purposefully hidden from Lily's inquiry, until the day when the melody is to be heard. The Library of Congress is also the site of the virtual reality/game that Henry's MEND device enables all Member players to enter.

MAP: A map, hidden in secret files at the Library of Congress, shows the old village of Vaugirard, and contains secret musical encryptions providing documentation of the last time the family theme was recorded. The code is very valuable, as it can be read with huge global significance regarding how and when the family theme will be heard again.

MISSING: A Faberge egg with an updated musical encryption of the secret map of the Barrington family musical melody, showing the present- day arrondisement/districts where the old Vaugirard village map existed. Finding the egg is very important to determining the future leadership and hierarchy of the family when Rose retires.

TRICK PALACE: The mainframe of the MEND software program. Trick Palace provides the network for the entire Barrington family heritage as an ethernet wireless scheme. It connects Odette Rae's dance, the music of the Middle Ages, the moving dolls, and the secret map, in a single program. MEND reads this program and is dependent upon members of the family finding the most updated encryption of their hierarchy. Using Trick Palace software, MEND contains a global tracking system for multiple cities, allowing those who use it to locate each other at any time. Access to MEND requires a different musical cadence for each century. Rachel has tricked her killers into thinking they have it, but in fact only Lily will be able to find it. Lily will accomplish this Mission Impossible task by entering the final passage in the Trick Palace, allowing herself and others to uncover the Barrington's secrets and become part of the Barrington Family empire.

MIRABEL: Everyone in the family is descended from the family line of a child, Mirabel, known to have been of sinister repute. Mirabel lived in the 14th century; and upon his death a secret musical map was created, detailing the family inheritance.

MOTIVE: Family members in the present have very different reasons for needing the information contained in the map - just as they have differing strategies for untangling and processing the information. Among these strategies is using MEND. The access code to MEND is time sensitive; the hidden scheme must be revealed in time to be effective. Family members are engaged in a global fight about gaining control of MEND and the Trick Palace software.

PROTAGONIST: Lily Barrington, haunted by mounting questions about her family's past, goes to the Library of Congress and finds secret files which reveal that her family is related to a child known for sinister acts in the Middle Ages. With the use of her husband Henry's invention, MEND (musical encode decode), Lily is able to decode a secret musical map that spells out very pivotal information about the hidden location of a missing Faberge egg that contains the family encryption. Lily does not realize that family members are eavesdropping on her MEND findings and using a software program for MEND called Trick Palace; nor has she access to the memories of her own past that might make her aware of the motives of others and her own grave danger. In order to succeed, she will need to recover her own memories, as she reveals and moves on from some shocking revelations about the breeding plan for the empire over the centuries.