Story Time

[X4.1] The Sock-Eating Dryer

The dryer’s siren song blared through the house, bouncing off the walls and piercing my ear drums from every conceivable direction. I peered over the top of my book warily at the machine, second-guessing the evidence at hand.

Ugh. I didn’t want to get up.

After a moment, I sighed and resignedly placed my book aside. I grabbed the laundry basket and filled it to the brim with pleasantly warm and soft clothes.

I began closing the door of the dryer when a sickening feeling overwhelmed me. I hesitated a moment before pulling the door back open and sweeping the inside of the dryer with my hand.

“Hmph,” I muttered irritatingly as I closed my hand around a stray sock and pulled it back out to join its companions.

I took them back to my bedroom to give them a nice, hard folding. I had nearly finished when what could be called the beginning of my crisis arrived: I had an unmatched sock.

My mouth contorted from the annoyance of the situation. I ran a brief search and rescue operation that involved retracing my steps, briefly searching the dryer again, and doing cursory scans of the hamper to ensure it hadn’t just been missed in the initial step of doing laundry in the first place.

Nothing.

“Whatever,” I mumbled and resigned myself to keeping the sock in hopes its solemate found its way back somehow.

Weeks passed without giving it another thought and the time came at which I couldn’t keep putting my laundry off. I reluctantly sped through the whole song and dance number and was finishing folding when it happened again: another lone sock.

But this had me utterly bewildered. Did I just discover the missing match to the sock I had been keeping separate in my top drawer? Or did I lose yet another sock to the mysterious caverns of the automatic drying cycle?

I sighed and dumped all the socks out and began counting.

Eighteen.

So I am missing another sock.

“On the other hand at least every sock I have is paired now,” I said aloud to no one in particular. I sighed again and shrugged, scooping them all back into the dresser and committing myself to not being irritated over this again. This is a good thing. Karmic balance and all that.

Another couple weeks passed. Another load or three of laundry was completed. This time I counted the damn things as I loaded them in, like how a schoolteacher counts kids as they load and unload from the bus on a field trip to ensure no one gets lost.

And wouldn’t you know, I managed to lose one of the little twerps. You think they’d fire me for this by now.

“Okay, this is BULLSHIT,” I shouted at my walls. They were great listeners. No so good for suggestions, though, so I did the only thing a man on the edge could do.

I took the house apart from top to bottom. I flipped mattress, threw cushions across rooms, upturned every rug, swept every corner, I even stuck my damn head straight into the dryer to try and see with my own eyes that they weren’t just stuck somehow, not able to fall out on their own.

As I craned my neck around the dryer in my spastic frenzy, I slowly realized my hair had begun standing straight up, drawn towards the back of the dryer. Like static cling on speed. I waved my hand through my hair and it stuck right back up. I tried again and actually had a hard time pulling my hand back from my head.

I quickly backed the hell away from the dryer and shined my flashlight directly towards the back of the infernal beast. I couldn’t see anything, but I could now hear a low hum emanating somewhere up the ventilation shaft.

I pondered for a brief second of tearing the dryer from the wall and smashing the entire southern portion of the house to smithereens with a sledgehammer, but common sense got the best of me.

Well, maybe. I called a mechanic.

In the two days between the call and the appointment, that small hum had become an bothersome thrum. Every time I passed by the laundry room, I could feel the hair on my body prick up and that sick sense well up inside the deepest parts of my gut.

I had to move my cat’s litter box out of the laundry room because she refused to enter the room. Which meant she had to relieve herself elsewhere, which was not a pleasant experience for any of us.

Finally the mechanic showed up, fully two hours before I expected him. Which is to say still about three hours late. He looked as stereotypically surly as one could possibly hope from a laundry repairman.

I showed him to the laundry room and explained the problem. He nodded, feigning interest as he rifled around in his tool chest. He pulled out what looked like a miniature gas mask and stuck it over his face, looping some small hoses over his ears and connecting in the back.

“W-what is that?” I stammered.

“This?” he asked as if I’d asked him what the color blue was. “Ah, this is standard equipment for this manufacturer, buddy. Nothing to worry about.” He waved it off with a smile and a wink and I just nodded and gave a questionable thumbs up.

He entered the room and starting tinkering around with the machine, babbling on and on about how great his little boy was doing at his public school – he placed fifth in the spelling bee and has seven gold stars or something. I don’t know, I tuned him out pretty quickly.

Then he shouted out a, “Just as I expected!” rather triumphantly. He waved me in and pointed at a small, black vortex embedded and pulsating in the back of my now-exposed wall.

“And what you have here, my friend, is a minor temporal anomaly,” he said proudly, gesticulating wildly.

“A temporal anomaly? In my dryer?!” I asked, flabbergasted.

“Happens all the time with this model, to be perfectly honest,” he shrugged.

“Uh, sure. And what are the effects of this, exactly?”

“Um, increased magnetism, possible space-time displacement that could result in missing items and the such. You know, pretty much what you explained,” he replied matter-of-factly.

I gritted my teeth. “Yes. I do.”

Two socks, at one time separated but recently rejoined, sidled up to one another on the cobblestones.

“Gary!” the first one said to the other.

“Jamie, is that you?” it said, astounded.

“In the cloth! How did you get here?”

“I think it was a hole in space-time or something ridiculous. You?”

“Same. Small multiverse, eh?”

“And a damn strange one to boot.”

“Indeed. Speaking of boots, I am freezing out here. Let’s try and find a pair to get out of this cold. What do you say?”

“Lead the way, my friend.”

(Source: formspring.me)

[MOD2] While Asleep

This was a submission I made for Machine of Death 2 that didn’t get chosen because it’s kinda crappy!

“There! I told you it was there!” shouted Jacob. He pointed down at the red blip on his console and hopped around enthusiastically. He smashed his palm into a large blue button overhead, and the metal visor shielding the cockpit of his ship slowly slid away revealing the dark, rotating mass of the black hole looming before them. On the outskirts of the swirling arms slowly being sucked into its event horizon, a small glint reflecting the nearby white dwarf shimmered off a panel of glass.

Jacob stood on his toes to get a better glimpse over the console. “It looks like it’s already in a degrading orbit,” he said matter-of-factly. “Can we get any closer, Z?” he asked, turning to his companion.

Zeram’s eyelids blinked quickly over his solid black corneas. He shook his slender, scaled head tightly and typed a few quick strokes with his four fingers into a console located on his left armband. “No further,” said a computerized voice emanating from the ship’s speakers.

Jacob sighed and nodded. He looked back out the window at the ship floating on the outskirts of the event horizon and squinted his eyes. He put his hand to his chin in thought and quickly turned back to Zeram. “We can use the quantum teleporter!” he said emphatically.

Zeram stared straight at Jacob and typed, “Not the mission.”

Jacob rolled his eyes. “Z, how often do you run across an alien spaceship in the middle of nowhere?” Zeram continued staring at him and Jacob looked away sheepishly after a few moments. “Don’t give me that look! You know what I mean. So… How about that quantum entanglement, huh?” He nudged Zeram in whatever passed as a gut for the Dilaxians.

Zeram tilted his head in thought and nodded and typed, “Okay.”

“Then let’s do this!” Jacob replied and an enormous grin came over his face. He popped his hand back up to hit the blue button and the visor expanded back over the cockpit.

The two shipmates headed into the midsection of their ship, where their antiquated quantum chamber resided. Jacob headed to the console and began typing in the necessary spacial relation algorithms to allow them to accurately target a position inside of a much denser gravitational field. He finished quickly and waved Zeram over to double-check the results. Zeram scanned through the equations meticulously for a number of minutes before tapping a few lines on the screen and staring disapprovingly at Jacob.

“Ah, crap,” Jacob muttered. “I see it. Errors in the orbit calculation in relation to the gravitational field. What would I do without you, Z?” He sighed to himself and fixed the few lines, as Zeram nodded his head in approval.

“All right, then! Off we go!” Jacob smiled. Zeram grabbed a tall, thin helmet from the far wall. Jacob pulled a heavily modified helmet off the wall for himself. Jacob’s head being much rounder and wider than a standard Dilaxian head, a number of changes had to be made to Jacob’s helmet in order to interface properly with his human physique.

They pulled the helmets over their heads. Jacob looked over to Zeram and gave a thumbs up. Zeram nodded in return and typed into his armband, activating the quantum chamber.

The world swam before Jacob’s eyes and melted away, revealing the cold, dark interior of the mystery ship. He took his time looking around to get his bearings. Tiny track lights wound their way through the silent, metal corridor and a slowly blinking red light flashed above their heads. He looked to his left and saw Zeram walk towards him.

Zeram typed into his armband and the ship’s voice echoed in Jacob’s head, “Your mission. Your lead.” While Jacob generally enjoyed the feeling of being in two places at once, he had long since decided that he was opposed to the idea of any voice other than his own echoing inside his head. He shook off the quiet discomfort and nodded at Zeram, then began walking down the corridor on the right.

They passed a handful of rooms illuminated with dim, blue light, but there was nothing warranting further investigation. As they were heading towards a large entryway, the ship began to shake, sending the two crashing against the wall. The lights in the rooms they passed flickered off.

“This ship might be closer to the event horizon than I thought,” Jacob said aloud. “Are we sure this place is stable?”

Zeram punched some keys into his armband and tilted his head for a moment before nodding to Jacob. “For now.”

They continued down the corridor through a set of large doors and entered into a wide, open chamber. The blue lights overhead were dim, but provided more visibility than the corridors. The walls were lined with what looked to be dozens of cylindrical pods, each with a window at the top.

Jacob wandered over to one of the pods. On the front was a small panel display that flashed the words ‘WHILE ASLEEP’. It stood a head taller than he was, and he had to go up on his toes to peer inside. He strained to see through the murky, white haze inside. He squinted his eyes before seeing a small face staring back at him. He let out a strained yelp and fell backwards onto the floor, quickly scrambling back up to his feet.

“Problem?” echoed the voice in his head. Jacob looked over to Zeram and nodded his head in the direction of the pod he’d looked into. Zeram walked over to the pod. Being taller than Jacob, he had no trouble looking inside. He stood in front of the pod for a few moments, tilting his head halfway through. When he was done, he typed into his armband.

“You?” came the voice in Jacob’s head. He nodded in return.

“It looks like my species,” Jacob replied quietly.

Zeram walked to the next pod and looked inside, and continued on down the line glancing into ten separate pods. “All you,” the voice said to Jacob. “WHILE ASLEEP.”

Jacob turned his head to the ground and muttered to himself, “What is this place?”

Zeram reached the end of the first line of pods and disappeared around a corner. A few minutes later, the voice in Jacob’s head beckoned him to follow. He found Zeram in a brightly-lit room blanketed with diagrams and equations haphazardly strewn across a few desks and walls.

Jacob sifted through some of the papers, most covered in complex equations with large sections crossed out or scribbled over or left half-finished. “What is all this?” he said, looking around. Zeram shifted some papers and found a small console embedded into one of the tables.

Jacob ran over and shoved his way in front of Zeram. “I know this,” he said. Soon a large panel in the wall slid away revealing a visual display. “Bam!” he said enthusiastically as a bright user interface lit up on the display. Jacob quickly dissected the interface and started playing a video.

A tired, middle-aged man with tousled, graying hair, a patchy, thick beard and small, oval glasses appeared on the screen. He was in the same room that Jacob and Zeram were in now. He cleared his throat before beginning to speak.

“Phase 25 trials completed today. There were, once again, no changes in the results of the subjects,” he said happily. “My hypothesis on modifying the Fate Equation has continually proved correct, no matter the subject matter or the environment.” He paused for a moment, staring into the recorder. “The evidence is overwhelming at this point, but I have one more idea. A great idea. I’m going to start working on it tonight, and hopefully I will have more promising implementation details in a few days.” He smiled a tired smile and the video ended.

Jacob stood transfixed. “He… He looks like me, too. Have you ever seen another one of my race before me, Z?” he asked the Dilaxian. Zeram shook his head and Jacob bit his lower lip. “Let me try to find something from an earlier time period.” He flipped through the interface with incredible speed and another video began playing.

The same man stood before them, but his complexion was much cleaner, his hair well-trimmed and his face shaved. He held a small, steaming cup in one hand. “Now that I’m away from those ingrates, I can finally start Phase 1 of my trials,” he started enthusiastically, taking a sip of his beverage. “My copy of the Machine’s Fate Equation was sloppy and my handwriting is atrocious, but I can piece it together. If Raymond knew I’d copied it off him, he’d have had my head instead of just having me exiled. But these tests will go a long way in proving the true reach of the Machine. Raymond may be content to live in ignorance, but understanding the full extent of the Machine’s abilities is the only way we can truly prove its infallibility.” He placed the cup down on the desk and the video stopped.

“Machine?” the voice said to Jacob. He shrugged at Zeram and flipped through the interface again before finding another video. This one started abruptly. The man had his glasses in his hands and his eyes were faced down at the table as he began to speak.

“It never changes. No matter what I do, no matter which part of the Equation I change, the result remains the same.” He stood still for a few moments before sighing heavily and lifting his head up toward the ceiling and chuckling quietly. “These were the results I was expecting all along. But… I suppose I was expecting some variation. Part of me wanted to believe that there were kinks in the Machine’s armor, waiting to be exposed. But even without them, these results speak to the nature of the Machine. Those who doubted it back on Earth are going to have a hard time saving face when I get back. I just need to find a way out of my exile. I need to buy myself more time…” He trailed off at the last word as it seemed to spark a new thought in his mind.

“This guy is annoyingly vague in all these videos,” Jacob said.

“Private,” the voice in his head replied.

“Yeah, you’re right. I guess the idea of someone else snooping around in his files was kind of outside his realm of thought,” he said sheepishly, then continued searching the interface for more videos.

The next video began playing and the man was back to a more disheveled state. “I’ve plotted a hyperbolic trajectory through the black hole near the white dwarf Erlendine B. While this won’t necessarily give me extra time, it will, in theory, allow me to slow down my own passage through time. When I come out on the other side, those who exiled me from Earth will be gone. I can return without interference and spread my knowledge of the Machine, make the people understand its power,” he stopped and chuckled. “The final trial will be the nail in the proverbial coffin for anyone who–”

The display blanked out and the room went dark for a few seconds before the familiar track lights lit up around the room’s periphery. Jacob banged on the console for a few seconds before letting out an irritated grunt and pounding his right hand on the table in frustration. “It’s not coming back up,” he said, shaking his head.

The ship groaned and lurched beneath their feet, sending Zeram to the floor. Jacob held onto the desk to keep his feet as a batch of papers slid off and fluttered to the floor. The room faded out of view and Jacob saw his own ship for a brief second, before the other ship reappeared. He looked around and saw Zeram getting back to his feet.

“How much longer do we have?” he asked.

Zeram shook his head and typed. “Short,” the voice replied.

A low moan echoed through the corridors. They looked at each other before Jacob broke out of the room running in the direction of the noise. He passed by a number of doors and stopped, trying to pin down where the noise had come from when he heard it again two doors down. He entered and found a man pinned to the floor by an overturned bookshelf. He scrambled into the room and yelled out for Zeram to follow him.

“Hey, are you all right?” Jacob said to the man lying on the floor as he tried to gain some leverage on the bookshelf. He moaned again and opened his eyes, looking in Jacob’s direction.

“You…” the man said quietly. “You came back,” he said smiling.

Jacob stopped pushing at the bookshelf and looked down at the man incredulously. He began to open his mouth when Zeram ran in and the two of them managed to get the bookshelf back into its upright position. The man writhed on the floor a bit, books sliding off on either side of his body as he struggled into a sitting position. He appeared to have nothing more than bruises, however.

“Him,” Zeram typed and pointed at the man.

“You’re the one from the videos,” Jacob replied. “You’re the same as me.” He reached his hand down and helped the man get up to his feet. Zeram found his glasses on the floor and handed them to him. One of the lenses had cracked and popped out of the frame. The man sighed and tried to wear them, squinting one eye and then the other, before finally dropping them back on the floor.

“What do you mean I ‘came back’?” Jacob finally asked the man from behind. The man spun around to look Jacob over, sizing him up and down, examining him.

“How long ago did this one find you?” he said, pointing to Zeram.

“How do you… What does that even have to do with what I’m asking?” Jacob said, clearly agitated.

The man turned to Zeram and asked the same question, “How long ago did you find him?” Zeram tilted his head and stared the man in the eyes. “Not the talkative type, I see.”

“If you’re really the same species as I am, you wouldn’t be able to hear Z anyway. Our ears can’t pick up the frequency of his voice. He can understand you just fine, though,” Jacob stated.

“I figured as much. So how doeshe communicate to you?” the man asked.

“Our ship has a translation system. He types into his armband and the ship tells me what he’s saying,” Jacob replied. “It’s a bit rudimentary and he has to be very terse with his phrasing, but it works for our purposes.”

“Interesting,” the man replied. “Where did you learn to speak English?”

“What does…” Jacob started saying, shaking his head. “When I woke up, there were a lot of things I intrinsically knew. Language, science, math and the like. I don’t remember anything else,” Jacob responded.

“Hmm,” the man pondered and turned back to Zeram. “Back to the original question: Do you know how long ago you found him?”

Zeram typed into his armband.

“He says that without knowing your units of measurement, there’s no way to do a meaningful conversion,” Jacob said. “Not in quite so many words, though.”

“Hmm,” the man said, bringing his hand to his chin. “That is indeed a bit of a conundrum. It appears the last surge knocked my computers offline, as well.”

“That would likely be the result of your ship’s orbit quickly degrading into the event horizon of the black hole you’re currently orbiting,” Jacob said curtly. “I’m surprised your ship has any power left at all.”

“I’ve only maintained the systems I need for my research on the Machine,” the man responded quickly.

“The one from your videos?” Jacob pried.

The man paused before replying. “Yes,” he said, pausing again. “It has been the focus of my research for the last half of my life.”

“Equation”, echoed in Jacob’s head as Zeram finished typing.

“The… what did you call it? Fate Equation?” Jacob asked.

“Yes,” the man said with a heavy sigh. “The algorithm the Machine uses to provide its results. Many people scoffed at the results, despite them being proven time and time again. I have been attempting to put the argument to rest once and for all. That’s why my final trial was completely unlike the ones that came before.” He started walking out the door and motioned for them to follow.

“Fate is such an indecipherable thing. Do you know why I’m here?” the man asked.

“Um,” Jacob thought back. “A bunch of ingrates exiled you?”

The man laughed loud and hard, pausing to catch his breath when he was through. “That is indeed what set me on this path. They didn’t agree about the ends justifying my means, or that the ends in this case were even a necessity. Foolish of them, but nevertheless, I meant more specifically: Why am I near this black hole?”

“You were looking to get back home,” Jacob replied. “I get the sense that falling into the event horizon wasn’t on the agenda.”

The man let out a low grunt. “To say the least.”

“Er, sorry,” Jacob apologized.

“I made this maneuver for two reasons. One was to remove my enemies back home without the need for useless confrontation,” the man responded. “The other was you.” He led them through a wide doorway into a large hangar where two smaller spacecraft were parked.

Jacob’s throat tightened. “This is like the ship the Dilaxians found me in.”

“Well, that wasn’t quite part of the plan, either” the man replied quietly.

“How long was I here with you? Why don’t I remember this place?” Jacob asked desperately. “Why did you send me away?”

“You need to understand the nature of my trials and of the Machine,” the man said. “It predicts exactly how a man will die.”

“WHILE ASLEEP,” Zeram sent to Jacob.

“The phrases on the pods,” Jacob said softly.

The man lowered his eyes. “Yes. ‘WHILE ASLEEP’,” he replied. “That is the judgment the Machine passed down on me.”

“But the kids in those pods…” Jacob started.

“Are also me,” the man cut in. “You are also me.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” Jacob said, resting his hand on the wall.

“The trials were my attempts to trick the Machine into predicting a different fate for an individual. To see to what length one would have to go to break the Fate Equation. But as I predicted, no matter what I changed, the result always remained the same,” the man replied triumphantly. “But the people on Earth don’t care for hard-won facts and pages and pages of proofs. They only respond to visual stimuli. So I decided to try one last thing before going home.”

“I’m older than the others,” Jacob suddenly realized. “The one I saw in the pod was just a kid.”

The man nodded in return. “Before I entered my trajectory, I loaded one of the clones into one of these ships on a higher, reverse trajectory. The idea being that when we both finally met as our trajectories crossed, you’d have gone through lesser time dilation, and be an older and more suitable host.”

“A suitable host for what?” Jacob asked.

“Me, of course,” the man replied cooly. “By transferring my consciousness into your body, I could show up back on Earth having not aged a single day. I would store my current body in stasis to prove the transfer happened. That’s the visual stimulus to capture their attention. The coup de grace would be when I took the test and the result was still the same. No matter what these people have thought, there would be no disproving the Machine’s power after that.”

“You bred me so you could take over my body?” Jacob said, taken aback. “Did you ever stop to think that it was already occupied?”

“Trust me, this has been a great debate for many decades back home. The mere fact that I was exiled for this practice should paint a pretty clear picture of which side of the fence I belong,” the man replied casually.

Jacob began to reply, but the man put his hand up and cut him off. “But even though fate has led you back here, I’ve already lost my chance. The power systems for the main labs are all offline. There’s no possible way for me to perform the transfer even if I wanted to. No harm will come to you here.”

“Very reassuring,” Jacob replied.

The man chuckled and continued. “The real root of the problem with clones is that they need to be grown in realtime, otherwise a whole host of issues arises with tissues not being fully developed, organs growing incomplete or missing completely, or the body just falling apart completely within days. My last batch of trials started roughly 12 years ago,” he said, stopping himself. “The equivalent of 1/7th of a human lifespan in somewhat more tangible terms,” he added, nodding to Zeram.

“In contrast, you look to be around 20 years old now. I sent you out only a few weeks ago before I entered the gravitational field of the black hole, but it would appear you’ve been gone for the equivalent of many years,” the man finished, captivated.

Zeram began typing furiously into his armpad and the voices ricocheted around Jacob’s head madly. He waited until Zeram was done before beginning to talk. “Z says they found me light years from this place. This is the first time he’s been anywhere near here. Sounds like your trajectory calculations were a bit off.”

“My one fatal flaw,” the man laughed. “I fear my desire to resolve my life’s work caused me to miss some errors in calculating my very close orbit to the event horizon.”

Zeram began to type but he stopped when Jacob quickly said, “Don’t say a word, Z.”

“I came in too steep and was never able to escape. I spent too much power compensating at the end, and had to shut down nearly all of the systems onboard the ship. The degrading orbit is slowly taking care of the rest,” the man finished.

Then he started laughing. Slowly, at first, then faster and louder until he was on the brink of tears. “I just realized,” he said, wiping away the tears. “I spent my entire life in defense of the Machine’s results, and here I am about to be torn apart by a black hole.” He sighed deeply. “And ‘WHILE ASLEEP’ sounded so nice.”

Jacob began to speak but the ship rocked back and forth again, knocking them all to the ground. A siren began blaring and a loud hiss echoed through the hallway.

“What is that?” Jacob yelled over the siren.

The man laughed again and raced down the hallway. Jacob looked over at Zeram and shrugged and ran after the man. He led them back to the large chamber containing the pods. The lights in the room were out and the displays on the pods were off.

“The failsafe has triggered,” the man said. “There isn’t enough power to keep them online, so it put them in stasis. They’re asleep. They’re all asleep,” he said, laughing.

“How much time, Z?” Jacob shouted.

Zeram punched a few keys on his armband then responded. “None.”

“The life support system is offline,” the man said to no one in particular. “The oxygen will slowly dissipate and when it gets low enough, I’ll pass out.” He grinned widely. “For all intents and purposes, I’ll be–”

The ship rocked again. It quickly melted away from Jacob’s sight, and he and Zeram were back in the quantum chamber. They slowly pulled their helmets off and stored them back on the wall. They walked back silently to the cockpit. Jacob raised the visor to get a clear view of the only human ship he’d ever see, floating closer and closer to the event horizon of the black hole.

[X3.1] What secret is Pop Secret keeping from all of us?

My Explorer slowly crept up the long, semi-paved driveway at my father’s old cabin. The seven-hour drive was as boring as ever between the stark blackness of the night and the spreading canopy of the North Woods, but the rarity stemming from seeing the family was always worth it. The car slowed to a stop, packing down the thin layer of snow that had begun collecting as a small storm passed through.

I looked over at my wife who was sleeping quietly with her head against the window, a balloon of condensation expanding and contracting on the window as she took her small, deep breaths. I sat and watched for a few seconds before reaching over and nudging her a few times.

“Hey, Margie. Hey,” I said, pushing her shoulder. Her eyes fluttered and she sighed deeply rising into a more proper sitting position. She had trouble opening her eyes so she just squinted at me through the darkness.

“We’re here already?” she said as she yawned.

“Already? Sure is nice when you have a magical teleporter to get you from place to place.” I yawned reflexively.

“Mmhmm,” she mumbled in agreement and smiled.

“Yeah, well, let’s get inside. It’s goddamned cold out here,” I said, opening the car door. She followed and we spent a couple minutes fishing our luggage out of the back and walking it up to the cabin proper. Before I even knocked on the door, my mother pulled it open with a beaming smile.

“Dereeeeek!” she squealed and locked me in a vice. “I’m so glad you came!”

“Hi, Mom,” I said, embarrassed as always, trying vainly to break free. “It’s good to see you, too, apparently.”

Margaret waved and smiled. “Hi, Beth.” My mother looked over at her and hesitated a smile before finally releasing me from her hold. She gave Margaret a light hug and a peck on the cheek.

“Hi, dear, how was the trip?” my mother asked.

Margaret stuck her thumb out at me and smiled. “You should ask the Transporter.”

“Ha ha,” I replied sarcastically. “Can you please let us inside? I’m pretty sure I’m on the verge of losing a couple toes here.”

“Oh, goodness, of course!” my mother replied. “Come in, come in!” She ferried us inside and closed the door behind us. The fireplace was raging and giving off a rather blessed heat. I almost asked my mother to open the door back up a crack.

“What’s with the fire?” I asked. “Trying to collect some insurance money or something? There are more exciting ways of demolishing a cabin, you know.”

My mother forced a chuckle. “Oh, Derek. One minute you complain of how cold it is and the next you’re too warm! It’s a little more reasonable in your room. You know where it is?”

“Unless you’ve been redecorating…”

She pushed me in the back and Margaret followed alongside me. Before we were out of the room, my mother quickly shouted, “Oh! Margaret! When can we be expecting your father?”

Margaret paused for a moment to collect her thoughts, still not fully awake. “Oh, of course. He’s, um… He’ll be here tomorrow morning.”

My mother breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good to hear. I was worried he wouldn’t make it!”

“No need to worry, Mrs. Washburn. He wouldn’t miss this for the world!”

We walked by the kitchen on the way to our room and I spied my father and brother talking softly at the table. As we passed, they both stopped talking to look at us quietly.

“Uh,” I stammered and waved. “Hey guys.”

My father rose from his chair and smiled. “Derek! Glad you made it, son,” he said as he walked over and embraced me.

“Hey, kid,” my brother nodded from his place at the table.

“Matt,” I nodded back. “Anything interesting happening?” I asked them. I saw my father glance over at Margaret inadvertently.

She noticed it, too. “Ah, I’ll take the luggage the rest of the way, Derek. You catch up with your family! Good to see you again, Reggie, Matt!” She waved and smiled, leaving before I could retort.

I took a chair and sat at the table, noticing the palpable silence in the air. “Sooo…” I began. “Uh, you guys still going out hunting tomorrow?”

The two glanced at each other in some kind of battle my brother apparently lost. “Oh, yeah. Of course. As soon as the Colonel gets here,” he said with a smirk.

“Ugh,” I moaned. “You guys can’t call him that when he gets here, you know. Please don’t embarrass me in front of Harland. I’ve already been through so much just to marry Margie…” They laughed in unison.

“You should’ve known what you were getting yourself into,” Matt replied, still chuckling.

My father pat me on the shoulder. “He has a point, you know.”

I sighed and nodded. “I know, Pop. It’s worth it, though.” He smiled and pat me once more on the shoulder.

“Why don’t you go help her unpack. You’ve had a long drive, you’re probably pretty tired,” he said.

I nodded and mumbled some minor obscenities under my breath. “I’ll see you guys in the morning,” I waved as I left slowly. They stared me out the door and I could hear some low mutterings coming from the room as soon as I was out of view. I found the room with Margie inside. I gave her a quick, tight hug and a happy kiss, then flopped on the bed and passed out for the rest of the night.

I awoke to the sound of car doors slamming and lots of women talking loudly in something akin to what I imagine sonar sounds to a bat. The sun was struggling its way through the windows, tiny, haphazard streaks around the room. The snow had continued falling through the night, frosting the windows and piling up unchecked on the outside corners of the cabin.

I swaddled myself in the blankets from the bed and peeked out the window. It was difficult to make anything out through the frosted glass, but I could make out Margie’s father, his bleach white hair blending into the snowdrifts surrounding the cabin. He was surrounded by the rest of my family and Margie, all chattering away and helping him carry his luggage inside.

I considered getting up and helping, but I was in no real state to see Harland. The man was damned proud and nearly disallowed his daughter from having any dealings with me whatsoever. Thank God she’s more stubborn than he is. He eventually caved and we were begrudgingly married. He’s since warmed a bit more to the rest of the family. Myself excluded.

I plopped back down into the comfort and warmth of the bed and dozed back off into blissful slumber. The next thing I remembered was Margie yanking the pillow out from under me, placing it over my head and sitting down on it, calmly telling me that it’s “time to wake up” and something about “wasting the day”. I struggled but finally flipped her off the bed, ready to curl back up. But she grabbed onto the comforter and in one deft move flipped it completely off the bed, exposing me to the cold bleakness of the outside world.

“Agh, what is WRONG with you?!” I pleaded.

“Come ON!” she replied. “Your mother and I need help making dinner!”

“Dinner? It’s like nine in the goddamned morning!” I argued.

“It takes a LONG TIME, okay?!” she punched me in the arm.

I finally relented and slid out of bed. I hopped in the shower and took a nice, long draw of that wonderful hot water. I finished up and dressed, passing my hands through my hair a few times to flatten it out, calling it good enough, and walked out to the kitchen.

I found my mother panicking and Margie trying desperately to calm her down.

“But they NEED the rope!” my mother said frantically. “What if someone gets hurt? How will they carry him back?”

“Can’t they just-“

“The snowfall last night has made the footing much worse. You can’t carry a man on your back. Without rope, how would they get him back? What if someone gets hurt?!” she screamed quickly.

Margie, exasperated, turned and saw me and mouthed the word ‘finally’, motioning over to my mother expectantly.

“Mom? Hey, Mom!” I yelled tersely while grabbing her shoulders. “What’s going on?”

She whimpered and pointed at the drag rope on the counter. “They forgot their rope. They need their rope,” she mumbled. I glanced over at Margie, who had crossed her arms and was biting her fingernails, and back to my mother.

“All right, I’ll take it to them,” I said, hiding my annoyance. Growing up with my father had forcibly enrolled me into Hunting 101 and many successive classes. I never took a liking to it, but it would be easy enough to track them in the snow and help out, if needed.

My mother thought about it and struggled between shaking her head and nodding it, but finally nodded vigorously in agreement. “Yeah, please take it to them, Derek. I’m just a worrier. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. You’re right,” I replied, turning to Margie. “Can you help me get all my gear out?” She nodded and followed me back to our room.

“What was THAT about?” she asked after we closed the door. “I’ve never seen Beth like that! One minute we’re skinning potatoes, the next she’s hyperventilating about a rope!”

I sighed deeply. “I don’t know, I’ve never seen that, either. But it should be easy enough to find the guys out there. You two going to be okay here by yourselves?” She nodded hesitantly and frowned. I smiled and kissed her. “You’ll be fine. How long ago did they leave?”

“Maybe thirty, forty-five minutes?”

“Easy. They won’t be that far out, and the game out here tend to come precariously close to the cabin for no good reason, too. Another reason why they won’t be too far. I’ll be back before you know it!” I proclaimed loudly, zipping up my bright orange parka. I gave a thumbs up and we walked back to the kitchen.

“They won’t be far. I’ll be back soon, Mom,” I told her, taking the rope from the counter. “Nothing to worry about!” I said smiling. She smiled and wiped a tear from her eye and hugged me.

“Be safe! I’m sorry for making you do this,” she said softly.

“No apologies,” I said sternly, pointing my index finger at her. “I’ll be back,” I attempted my best Arnold voice before walking out the back door.

The tracks were ludicrously easy to follow. The snow stopped falling earlier in the morning, so it was completely fresh and untainted. I was actually a little bit disappointed. I made my way through the woods in no time at all. After about twenty minutes, I heard a gunshot nearby and headed in that direction, oblivious to the seemingly obvious stupidity of heading in the direction of a gunshot.

Then I heard someone scream and my slow trot became a full-on sprint.

The voices got louder as I got closer and I could hear my father yelling loudly. I finally got close enough to see them. Margie’s dad was on his knees on the ground. My father was pointing his shotgun at him with my brother at his side. I stopped dead in my tracks and hid behind a tree.

“Look, Sanders, you control your destiny here,” my father said loudly. “Where do you have to go? Who is going to save you? You’re at our mercy out here and we only have one-“

“Fuck your demands and fuck you,” Harland said, spitting at my father’s feet. “No matter what I do, I’m a dead man. I should never have let my daughter marry into this farce of a family.” The spit glistened brightly in the reflection of the Sun through the trees. His white hair was tousled from what must have been an earlier fray and his hat and gloves lay strewn across the clearing they had entered.

“Dad, I hear he keeps the recipe on him at all times,” Matt said calmly. “That’s the best way to prevent it from ever being stolen, right? It makes sense! Let’s just… Just knock him out and search him!”

My father turned to Matt and slapped him. “You know what we came out here to do, son. It’s too late for second guessing and changing the gameplan.”

Harland laughed a hearty laugh. “Case in point.”

My father snarled and turned the gun back on Harland. “You have one last chance to just hand it over like a gentleman and die like one, too.”

“Go to hell, asshole,” he exclaimed.

“I’m sure I’ll see you there,” my father said, aiming the gun.

Against all reason, I jumped out of my hiding spot and ran towards the clearing. “Stop this!” I yelled so hard that my breath must have looked like a locomotive running towards them. I caught my father off-guard and he swung his gun away from Harland. Matt turned and saw me and his mouth twisted in aggravation.

“Derek? Get the hell out of here!” he shouted.

“Get the hell out? Are you fucking KIDDING ME? What in the glorious hell is going on here?!” I demanded. “This is my wife’s father! OUR GUEST, if you haven’t forgotten.”

“You don’t understand,” he said shaking his head. “You don’t understand anyth-” he started as the shot fired and pierced his ribcage. Matt stammered and fell to his knees, a dark red splotch spreading across his chest. He fell face-first into the ground, the soft powder rising up around him in an airy dance before falling back slowly to the ground.

Harland had a smoking pistol in his hand and laughed maniacally, turning the gun on my father.

“YOU SON OF A BITCH, SANDERS!” my father screamed, aiming his gun back at Harland.

Two shots echoed through the clearing followed by eerie silence.

Harland dropped his gun to the ground and fell to his side. “The herbs and spices,” he sputtered. “Die… with me…” he said, tapping his head. He chuckled and let out a long sigh as his chest spilled out onto the unspoiled white snow.

“You… You popped the Colonel!” I shouted and ran up to my father. His right cheek had a deep cut from the bullet that grazed it. “Are you… are you okay?” I asked, unsure of what exactly to say. He stared straight ahead, breathing heavily.

“Oh, shit, Matt. Oh, fuck!” I yelled and ran over to his limp body. “Matt! Hey, Matt! Wake the fuck up, you asshole!” I shout, shaking his body, tears forming in my eyes. “Open your eyes!”

“Stop that,” my father said under his breath. “He’s gone, Derek. You’ve…” he hesitated. “Everything is ruined,” he finished, gritting his teeth on the last word.

“What the fuck are you talking about?! What were you doing out here? What the hell happened?!” I shouted.

“Unless…” my father muttered, ignoring me. He walked over to Harland’s corpse and started unzipping the chicken magnate’s jacket.

“What the hell is going on, Pop?!”

He continued to ignore me and dug through Harland’s pockets. I heard something crumpling and my father pulled out an old, tattered piece of paper. His eyes lit up. “This is it,” he said breathlessly. “This is finally it.”

He flipped it around and started reading. His eyes quickly dimmed, his smile faded completely. “What… what is this, you son of a bitch? Sanders, what the HELL is THIS?!” he screamed and threw the paper to the ground. He raised his fists and began slamming them down on Harland’s body, screaming unintelligible words. I tackled him and wrestled him to the ground, avoiding elbows and fists until he finally stopped struggling.

“What is going on, Pop?” I say quietly, exasperated.

“11 salts and butters,” he laughed to himself. “How the hell do you make chicken with only salts and butters?” He laughed longer and louder and soon he was laughing so hard he was crying. “I can work with this. I can do this. This isn’t for nothing.”

He got up on his hands and knees and turned over to me, a dead serious look in his eyes. “Derek,” he said. “We can never talk about what happened here. Do you understand?”

“Are you out of your goddamned mind, old man?!” I replied, befuddled.

“Listen, Derek!” he said.

“Pop, this-“

“I said, LISTEN!” he shouted and I shut up. “This was a hunting accident. They were positioned across the clearing firing at the same buck. They hit each other in crossfire. It was a complete accident.”

“Pop, I-“

“It was an accident, Derek,” he said with finality. “We take this secret with us to our graves.”

(Source: formspring.me)

[x2.1] standing on a cliff

It’s a weird feeling looking down at a cloud. When you’re looking up, it feels like a wall or a barrier trapping you below, keeping you on the ground, separating you from the heavens. From above, it becomes just another part of the landscape, an ephemeral sea; the mountains pierce the sky as solitary islands, clouds lapping against them like waves. I wondered what it would be like to traverse a cloud on foot, the billowy drifts wafting around my feet like an old dirt road behind a speeding car.

My left foot shifted and a few loose rocks cascaded into the abyss below. I closed my eyes, leaned my head back, and breathed the thin air in slowly. I opened my eyes toward the unbounded sky above and saw nothing but clear, dark blue. Such a different sky from what you see in the city. I turned my gaze back down to the sky below.

A gust of wind tousled my hair, pushing me back slightly and knocking me off-balance. A tinge of anxiety gripped me as I struggled to regain my balance, somehow forgetting how to coordinate my brain and feet. My heartbeat quickened and my breaths shallowed as I held my arms out to my sides, steadying myself. I stayed that way for a few seconds before I felt enough courage to straighten back up.

I chuckled to myself, thinking of how ridiculous this must look: A man about to jump from a cliff, afraid that it wouldn’t be on his own terms. Afraid that his final thoughts would be, “Well, this sure isn’t how I wanted it to go.” Afraid.

I took another deep breath and looked down below. A break had formed in the clouds, giving a glimpse at the earth below. The mountainside ran straight down as far as I could see. Dark green forests of fir trees stretched for miles in every direction, cut by a tiny blue thread of river. The river eventually pooled into a bright, blue lake bordered by a small handful of cabins and tiny piers. A white smokestack leaked into the sky from one of the cabins, a small sign of life.

Life. I couldn’t do it. This wasn’t right. I kept my eyes focused below and slowly backed away from the edge. A wave of relief permeated my body with each backwards step. This was definitely the right decision. His promises were bullshit, anyway. He would never let her go. I could find another way. I had until tonight, anyway.

My progress was abruptly stopped by a large, solid object. “Rick, Rick, Rick,” a deep voice said in disapproval. My heart stopped and I froze in place. “You know what this means, don’t you?” He grabbed me by the shoulders and slowly spun me around. He was a big man, nearly seven feet tall and just as wide as any of the trees around here. He was dressed in a fine, dark suit. Sunglasses hid his eyes but I could feel their menace all over my body.

If I wasn’t afraid before, I sure as hell was now.

“M-Mark,” I stammered. “This… This isn’t what it looks!” I said splaying my right hand out against the horizon. “This isn’t something a man can just, can just up and DO. You know?” He raised his hands off my shoulders and gave me a half grin.

“Of couse, Rick. Of course,” he said, patting my right shoulder with his massive paw. “But I have a schedule to keep and you remember the deal. Eye for an eye and all that,” Mark replied coolly. “It’s her or you, hero,” he said, raising his hands and taking a few steps back.

I bent over and turned my head down in disgust, placing my head in my hands. “I know,” I mumbled. “I KNOW!” I slammed a fist into my quad. “God DAMMIT!”

Mark tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. “If you need a little motivation…” he trailed off. He pulled a mobile phone from his suit pocket, flipped it open and hit his speed dial. I could hear it ring a couple times before the other end was answered. “Get me the girl,” he said. He knelt down to meet my eyes and placed the phone next to my ear.

“Rick? RICK?!” A sobbing voice cried on the other end.

“Sarah…” I said quietly, turning my eyes from the phone subconciously. “Sarah, are you okay? They haven’t hurt you?”

“Rick, what is going on? What have you done this time?!” This time. Every time. I guess there never was a good time for me. For us.

“Sarah, this-” I started, but Mark pulled the phone back and flipped it shut. “N-NO!” I yelled, balling my fists and jumping to my feet. My clenched teeth ground together as I breathed heavily through my nose. “Why?! Why is this the ONLY solution?! How does this even make SENSE?!” I screamed. Mark stood silent, eyeing me through his sunglasses. He placed the phone back in his suit pocket.

“You brought this on yourself, my friend. If you look back through your life and your decisions and can’t come up with the answer, then there never was another solution,” he replied softly. My fists relaxed and I let out a deep sigh and bobbed my head. I couldn’t possibly respond to that. That’s one truth I can’t reason away.

“Rick,” Mark said, stepping forward. “Let me save us both the trouble.”

Before I could react, his enormous hands were pressing down on my shoulders. I inched closer and closer to the edge of the cliff, pebbles careening over the edge at an increasing rate. I couldn’t stop or slow him down. I couldn’t even speak. I just eeked out a serious of strained grunts with each passing second.

“Better luck in your next life, friend,” he said as he lowered his stance for one final push.

***

I sped through the clouds, faster and faster towards the ground. There was no billowy dust rising behind me, no barrier to break my fall, no brilliant white sea to swim away through. The air ripped around my body, trying its best to slow me down, but only delaying the inevitable. I wanted so badly to close my eyes, to not see the ground rising up to meet me head on, but something kept them forced open. I didn’t want to die afraid. I could at least give that to myself.

A high-pitched scream shook my entire body. Within a split second, my body hit something soft. I hadn’t stopped moving, but I had stopped falling. My fingers sunk deep into soft bristles. I looked down to see huge feathers, each as big as one of my arms. I looked forward in disbelief to see the massive eyes and beak gliding effortlessly through the air.

An eagle? A giant fucking eagle? Of all the…

Oh, Tolkien, you lovely bastard.

I held on for dear life as we descended at a much more reasonable rate for a human being. My brain sloshed around in my head and I couldn’t make sense of what was happening, but I felt I had a second chance. Maybe this time, I’d be able to set it right.

(Source: formspring.me)

[x1.2] sink atlantis

Our airship blasted out of the water with a sharp jolt, shedding water quickly and disorienting me for a few seconds. Outside was a veritable fireworks display of heavy artillery trading back and both between the mothership and the remaining Human Coalition forces. The constant blasts from both sides flickered in the night sky, acting as a strobe light illuminating the battlefield, slowly revealing the deadly dance the two sides were entangled in. I watched as our two sister airships broke free of the water and lined up in formation beside us.

The Coalition ships on the water were employing a massive barrage of concussive blasts on Atlantis with no apparent effect, the limit of Humanity’s current technological achievements rearing its ugly head in its final hours. Atlantis responded in kind with a mixture of laser- and kinetic-based weaponry which was dealing far heavier losses to its mortal opposition. A few of the Coalition ships managed to maintain their magnetic barriers which shielded against the light-based laser weapons, but couldn’t stop the slower, projectile-based shells from the turrets lining Atlantis’s underside.

As our airship arced further into the darkening sky, a large Coalition warship exploded sending a huge fireball skyward and giving us our first true glimpse of Atlantis. “Fifty miles wide” doesn’t sound large when looking at a map, but up close and personal, finally realizing this was a manufactured piece of technology, really brought it to a whole new level. The entire structure was circular, floating around a mile above the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters. A large spire jutted down from the bottom of the center, piercing the Gulf and making Atlantis look like a giant top.

This much we had already known about it. With Earth’s satellites down and most of the land-based Internet relays severed, it was nearly impossible to transmit data from one place to another, so there was no good imagery of Atlantis. As we rocketed up past its lower shell, we finally laid eyes on its upper surface.

All along the edges of the entire structure were giant towers spaced a mile apart, linked via glowing blue channels. These channels spun and spun further into the very core of the upper disk where they converged into one large caldera brimming with blue light.

As we circled the perimeter, the towers themselves began to light up one by one, the blue channels widening and brightening in response. The caldera went from a simmering blue to a brightness equal to the Sun in a span of seconds.

I shielded my eyes as a gusting wind gained momentum outside, working our small ship’s inertial dampeners to their full potential. Moments later, a massive wave of white light erupted from the caldera and into the sky, lighting the entire battlefield, dispersing clouds, and turning the dark night into day. A shockwave emanating from the blast hit our airship, killing our power and sending us hurtling wildly towards the surface of Atlantis.

We braced ourselves for the impact and I watched as the surface spiraled closer and closer until we smashed into the ground, the windows exploding into tiny pieces of shrapnel and the entire cockpit of the ship collapsing into itself. I blacked out for a few seconds, but regained consciousness and slowly climbed out of my seat.

I ran up to what was left of the cockpit and had to turn my head away in disgust. There was nothing and no one that could be salvaged up there. I saw movement from the back and saw Reg slowly lift out of his chair holding his head, his wild, white hair encrusted with red. I rushed over to check his wound. It was fortunately nothing more than a bad bump and I gave him a reassuring pat on the back. It was a boon he survived as I don’t think I’d be able to do this alone.

We grabbed our helmets and packs and kicked madly at the crumpled side door a few times before it fell open. As I walked outside, I saw the stream of light emanating from the caldera seeping into the upper atmosphere, beginning to encompass the entire globe. I stopped short and Reg ran into my back and started to complain before he looked up to the sky.

The reports were right. The Atlanteans had been making small-scale strikes on our major cities for months, wiping out the populace and erecting small-range biodomes of a breathable helium atmosphere for their extraterrestrial dinosaur physiology. But that was just the precursor for this, the real attack.

They’re planning to terraform the entirety of Earth and eradicate all of those who are indigenous to this planet.

I held my breath close. We only had one shot at this. I looked around and didn’t see our sister ships. I held onto the brief hope that maybe they weren’t affected by the EMP, or if they were, they landed close enough to their target zones to still be effective.

Surprisingly, the surface was organic. I expected it to be a metal of some sort, but it felt like walking on a worn mountain path. I looked around our surroundings and saw the large opening a hundred feet off. We quickly made our way over to the entrance, moderately aware that there was no noticeable resistance on the surface, in stark contrast to the underside of Atlantis.

I approached the door looking for a handle of some sort and, finding none, attempted to kick it in with little to show for it. Reg tapped me on the shoulder and directed my attention upward. Only when I looked up did I see the root of the problem: The advance forces that had taken our cities were all ground troops, built for mobility, and that typically wound up being various types of raptors or other dinosaurs that were roughly human-height. It hadn’t crossed my mind in a long while that there are plenty of other, larger species involved in this war. But it would sure explain why the only noticeable markings were a good fiften feet off the ground.

So I tried the only thing I could come up with on short notice. I grabbed my pack in both hands and swung it up into the air near the markings on the door, hoping beyond hope that it was an automated sensor of some sort. A small rumble shot through my feet and we were met with the slowly grinding gears of the door sliding open. I nearly forgot to catch my pack on the way back down. We slowly shuffled through the entrance.

It felt like we were in the middle of a South American jungle. The humidity weighed down on us like a heavy blanket and all the walls and floors were damp. The walls were lined with earth and the ceilings hung in great leafy filaments. There were no real hallways as the floor was covered with all manner of trees and shrubs and other flora. It made a lot of sense for them. I just hoped it would make sense for us.

I pulled a small tablet from my pack which contained the approximate area where the controls would be located. It was roughly a half mile from our current position, not bad all things considered. But whether it would be a straight shot or not we had to find out on our own.

I began to walk and was promptly dumped on my ass as the entire floor trembled beneath my feet. Did they simulate tectonics in here, too?! No, that was something from outside. Perhaps the Coalition had finally been able to accomplish something meaningful in the defense of Humanity. Or maybe one of the other teams had managed to find the surface resistance we didn’t. I got back to my feet, trying not to think of the latter, and made my way through some hanging vines with Reg right behind me.

We walked for nearly half an hour towards the destination, slowly making our way through the wilderness of their helium jungle. We had yet to run into any resistance or even seen another being on the ship. I supposed it was possible it was unmanned and controlled remotely, but it seemed foolhardy of them to entrust their entire trump card to fate.

We were making our way through a grassy clearing when we finally found our resistance. I heard something like a branch snap followed by a loud grunt and spun around in time to see a large, armored triceratops bearing down on us. His horns began to glow as I grabbed Reg and sprinted towards a large rock-like structure in the middle of the clearing, ducking behind it just as two big bolts of laser tore through the ground behind us.

Reg pulled his blaster out of his pack and circled around to the other side of the structure, yelling and taking shots to draw our enemy’s attention. I dropped my pack to the ground and grabbed some grenades from the strap around my chest and looked out at the clearing. Reg had succeeded in drawing him in the other direction and the triceratops now had his back to me.

I raced out from behind cover as Reg flung a smoke grenade into the clearing. I flipped the infrared visor down on my helmet as the smoke filled the clearing, disorienting the triceratops. “An old man once told me,” I yelled, sliding in front of the triceratops, “that Dodongo dislikes smoke!” I stuffed the grenades into his mouth and ripped the pins out. I scrambled back to my feet and dove towards Reg as the grenades exploded through the dinosaur’s skull, rendering him inert and slamming me into the ground.

I peeled myself up off the grass as Reg ran over, a wide grin plastered on my face. Reg ran over and reached his hand down to help pull me up. I grabbed it just as I saw a great, white horn emerge from his chest, dripping purplish blood. His grip on my hand loosened as he looked down at the horn protruding from his ribcage. He tried to take hold of it but the triceratops shook his head and flung Reg away, roaring loudly and bringing up its heel to stomp on my head.

Not given time to mourn, I hesitated a moment to recollect myself and was only barely able to spin out from under the triceratops’s heel. Reg’s blaster had fallen to the ground and I managed to grab it and unload multiple shots into the triceratops’s exposed belly, ripping gaping holes open and spilling his entrails onto the ground.

I stared at the corpse, breathing heavily for awhile before I dropped the blaster and ran over to Reg. He was breathing shallowly when I got there. I went to speak and put his hand up and shook his head, smiling. “Since when was I an old man?” he sputtered. He handed me his pack and nodded his head and smiled at me before he lost consciousness forever. I struggled to swallow and breathe for a few minutes as I sat on the ground, alone.

I collected myself and got back up to see I had more company. All the commotion had attracted quite the crew, but they were being more cautious now that we had dispatched a couple of them. I counted one more triceratops, two stegosauruses, a tyrannosaur and three raptors, all heavily armed.

I didn’t stand a chance.

But as luck would have it, no one stood much of anything. A faraway explosion shook the ground lightly and the entire ship began to tilt. It was slow at first and I took advantage of the confusion to duck into the clearing’s neighboring tangle of forest. The tilting then grew much faster, sloping down from 5 to 75 degrees within the span of about ten seconds. I grabbed the trunk of a tree and wrapped myself around it as I watched the dinosaurs slide through the clearing as if they’d been slicked up with oil.

This could only mean one thing. One of the other teams had succeeded in blowing the first control center and disabling part of Atlantis’s internal anti-gravity mechanics.

The tilting finally stopped around 80 degrees and began to correct itself. We had expected there to be some redundancy in their systems, though, and knew that no less than two control centers being taken offline would do the job. My job, now. The dinosaurs in the clearing were long gone, and I was able to clamber my way uphill as the tilting slowly corrected itself.

Reg’s body was gone, as were the blaster I had dropped and my own pack. I couldn’t find the table in Reg’s pack, so I was flying blind, now. But I remembered the general direction I had to head and we were nearly there already. I pulled myself slowly up through the clearing, faster and faster as the angle flattened out.

I burst through the other end of the clearing, which ended in a steep drop. I tumbled down the slope and skidded to a halt just outside of another, smaller clearing. This one, however, was filled with blinking lights and consoles and what looked to be actual technology.

It was also filled with dinosaurs.

There was no time to play it soft and loose, now, so I search for the only weapon I had left. I set Reg’s pack on the ground and pulled out a small cluster of cube-like objects. I began to set it up and flip some switches when I heard a loud grunting noise behind me and a laser blast buried itself in the ground next to me. I stopped still but managed to sneak the cube cluster into my palm as I turned around slowly, raising my hands.

I was surrounded by a group of four dinosaurs, all with weapons trained on me, and all heavily armed. “Clever girls,” I said as I turned to face them. Their faces did something akin to souring at my words and the stegosaurus who appeared to be their leader bellowed some words and their weapons began to power up.

I took a breath and activated the cube cluster, praying to every God I could conjure up. The cluster emitted a low hum and a light blue bubble quickly expanded from its center. The dinosaurs all began gasping and choking, their weapons falling from their hands. The stegosaurus wildly slammed its tail into two of the other dinosaurs and smashed his head into a nearby tree trunk while flailing and attempting to escape the suffocation. The others just fell to the ground, unable to breathe any further.

While the Coalition had a hard time of stopping the Atlantean incursion, they had managed to procure certain pieces of their technology when they were successful. One of these was the biodome, the small-scale terraforming device that was employed to cover a ten- or fiften-mile radius on the surface. What I held in my palm was a single-sized serving of the biodome, tuned to create a human-breathable oxygen atmosphere with a radius of 100 feet and a lifespan of about 30 minutes on a good day.

A trump card, indeed, but this was its first real test in a non-oxygen atmosphere. I think I’d consider this a success.

I grabbed on of the dead dinosaur’s laser blasters and headed into the clearing. I saw a mass of tangled wires and electronics. Looking around at all the various consoles and connections, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. This was vastly different from the technology the Atlanteans employed on Earth.

I tried to imagine what the other team must have done in order to disable their control center. And that’s when I realized: It’s the same as we’ve always done. I leveled the blaster at all the blinking consoles and organic cables and let loose with my finger trigger.

The ground below me rocked back and forth, knocking me to the ground as the electronics exploded in cascading fury. The interior lighting of Atlantis went dark and I felt that sick feeling in my stomach. The kind you get when you’ve reached the pinnacle of a roller coaster and are about to drop back down to Earth.

Atlantis was sinking from the sky.

(Source: formspring.me)

[x1.1] escape the cafe

The rain outside patters gently on the windows as I wait for my order to be filled. Despite the rain, the streets are teeming with people on errands. The streets are always busy. The barista calls my name and I spin around and grab my Grande Hot Chocolate, the perfect drink for a cold winter day. I find an unoccupied table and flop down in the chair.

I take a short sip of my steaming beverage and my tongue is burned slightly by the heat of the liquid. I don’t particularly care. I set the cup down and rub my hands together for warmth, then lean back and stretch my arms, stifling a yawn. I hate mornings.

That’s when the earth shakes and the air cracks. The cafe’s patrons stand in silence, each trying to reconcile it in their heads. There wasn’t enough time before it happened again, though. Closer this time. Before anyone had a chance to react, it was already on top of us.

The windows explode and I barely avoid a face-full of glass by ducking my head. My ears dulled, I vaguely hear screams seemingly in the distance. My breath quickens and I slowly glance outside. There are no longer people on the street; several large, metallic cylinders are speared into the pavement. Flashing lights strobe around a few circular holes on their outer hulls.

“Spa-,” a man near the door stutters, not quite wanting to believe what he’s seeing. “Space dinosaurs!” Panic permeates the cafe. The patrons and baristas are all trying to make their way through the tiny doors that are the only noticeable exit.

They all have the wrong idea. The dinosaurs have been doing this long enough that they know how predictable we as a species have become. There are only a few exits for any given building and few humans are able to exit any other way. They just stand at the entrances for easy pickings - no need to demolish buildings and lay waste to the territory they want to claim.

The sound of people’s panic is only challenged by the sound of laser-based weaponry. The more the weapons fire, the less panic there is. I’m kneeling near my table, underneath the windows. I can’t be seen from the entrance, but it’s only a matter of time before they sweep the building for stragglers. It’s a modern blessing that they decided not to destroy our internet from the get-go; it’s enabled anyone who actually wishes to survive to be able to read up and learn various space dinosaur survival tactics.

Rule #1? Let ‘em get the other guys first.

The pods they fly down in are one-way devices only meant to hold small squadrons of two or three soldiers. That’s usually more than enough to handle any modern building while they wait for the main force to enter the atmosphere and take position over the city. Fortunately, this also means that it’s not impossible for a smart and strong-willed human to survive.

These dinosaurs, being of the space variety, aren’t actually from Earth. They look like our dinosaurs and sound like our dinosaurs, but that’s about where the similarities end. They don’t breath our atmosphere so they need to wear special suits while they attack. After they conquer a city, they’ll erect a special biodome that terraforms the surrounding areas into a livable and breathable helium environment for themselves. But until that happens, it’s one of the only advantages humans have.

Both the lasers and the screams have almost completely died down by now. I spot one other person, a young man barely out of his teens, ducking down behind the counter. Our eyes meet and I can see he’s not afraid. I reach into my back pocket and pull out my butterfly knife and nod to him. He produces a small hunting knife of his own and signals back.

We both slowly move forward, keeping behind cover, to get a look at the exit. Bodies are piled all around it, making it difficult for our enemies to gain entrance. There are only two outside our building and they seem to be cajoling each other with various tales of space conquest and not actually clearing the building. As as an added bonus, both of their backs are turned. They’ve gotten complacent and it disappoints me a little.

My companion and I sneak our way to each side of the exit. We glance outside, then look back at each other. I hold up three fingers and slowly count down to zero. We jump through the exit, knives in hands, and onto the backs of the space dinosaurs waiting outside.

My knife skills haven’t come fully around yet, and I make an awkward first swipe at the breathing tube connecting the dinosaur’s helmet to his helium supply. It gives him a second to spin around and I nearly lose my grip. My second swing hits home and severs the tube, releasing helium hissing into the atmosphere. The dinosaur thrashes and lets out a low scream, but slowly succumbs to our nitrogen and oxygen and stops moving.

My new friend has managed to easily fell his target, as well. I start walking over to him when a laser blast screams past my ear and hits him straight in the chest, ripping it apart with explosive force.

Shit, a third! I should have been more careful.

I quickly somersault behind the body of one of the downed dinosaurs, searching for its weapon. I hear a few more laser blasts, but they’re all off target. I hear the loud stomps as the dinosaur comes closer, looking for me. I can hear its breath a few paces away as a few more searching blasts hit nearer and nearer.

Bingo. My hand finds the laser blaster and, with a couple heavy tugs, frees it from the dead dino’s grasp. Another laser blast misses my head by a half a foot. He’s finally found me. Too late for him, though. I spin onto my back and point the laser at the dinosaur’s visor.

“Today, you DINO in Hell!” I shout as I pull the trigger, shattering his visor and exposing him to our Earthly elements. He collapses as he suffocates and I lie on my back trying to gain my own breath back.

I only give myself a few seconds. There will be more nearby and I have a long way to go if I want to find freedom.

(Source: formspring.me)

Is everybody okay?

The next thing I know, the wind is whipping around my body. My eyes come into focus and I see the ground rapidly rising to meet me. I try to let out a scream, but I can’t force enough air out of my lungs. A familiar green glow zips past me and I begin to slow down. My descent grows slower and slower until I lightly fall on my face in the dirt below, the scream finally hitting my lips weakly.

“Are you okay?” Zoey asks, zipping around and sizing me up. “I would’ve warned you, but there wasn’t enough time. We were probably a few hundred stories up in that building, so that’s where the portal opened up on this side, too…” she trails off.

I roll over onto my back and prop myself up on my elbows, taking a few deep breaths. I look up in the sky and the Sun burns brightly into my eyes. I shield them with my hand and spy the portal hovering there, a dazzling display of color flickering across its face.

“What… happened?” I croak. My mouth is dry and my stomach churns remembering the chaos I’d seen before I slipped through the portal.

“You created a paradox, Jason,” she says seriously, flying right in front of my face.

“A pair of ducks? You lost me, lady,” I reply.

“Ugh,” she groans. “PAR-A-DOX,” she mouths. “When something contradicts itself.” I nod my head slowly, pretending that I understand what she’s saying, epitomizing the very thing I fail to understand.

“You need to understand how the Multiverse works. Each universe is just a branch of a branch of a branch of another universe, every thought and action that happens spins off a new universe in a new direction. The Multiverse sits on top of it all, managing each universe in turn.

“In order to manage it effectively, the Multiverse controls and makes very basic copies of consciousnesses and mass so that when a new universe is created, it can immediately come into existence as its own individual entity. With an infinite number of decisions to be made at any point in time, you can save a lot of time and space by only tracking the changes in each universe from the point at which the decision was made, and sharing that decision point and everything before that time between all of them.

“When we travel between universes, it’s infinitely possible that we’ll end up in a place that shares an originating branch with your own universe. We can more or less do anything we’d normally do, without any real consequence. Our originating universe continues to maintain our state for us and the two universes coordinate, in a sense, to maintain an equilibrium between themselves. There’s just one exception,” Zoey explains.

“Interacting with ourselves? Physically?” I say, cocking my eyebrow. “That didn’t come out quite right…”

Zoey smirks. “But you’re on the right path. Think of two points on a graph. It’s easy to track them when they’re apart, but when they overlap exactly, how can you tell which is which? How do you even know there are two of them? When you hit yourself, the other universe didn’t know what to do with it. It couldn’t tell which of you was the real you and it couldn’t rectify the error. So it set about taking itself apart trying to find where the fault lies in the system…”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I sit back up and wave my hands in a stopping gesture. “You’re telling me I just destroyed an entire Universe?” I feel sick.

“I don’t quite know if destroyed is the right word,” she thought out loud. “It still exists. It’s just in the middle of decomposing itself to find a root cause it can never resolve.” She frowned. “This actually happens millions upon millions of times a second on a much smaller scale in every Universe. Usually it’s not difficult for it to find the problem and correct itself,” she sighs. “But in this case, there is no solution. It will have to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. It will eventually stop unwinding itself looking for the problem, but it will take billions of your own years. At that point, it’ll start all over again, and will probably reach the same point it had when we, um, ‘intervened’. If it’s any consolation, anyway,” she says with a thin smile.

“Consolation,” I chortle. “Right. So I didn’t REALLY just murder billions of innocent people-“

“Billions of humans, anyway. Who knows what other worlds and other species existed in other parts of the Universe,” Zoey points out.

I sigh. “Jesus Christ,” I mutter. “And what about my own world? You said the two coordinate, so shouldn’t mine be having the same problem?!” I end with a frantic shout.

“I wouldn’t have expected that observation from you,” she replies, shocked. “I… don’t have an answer for that. But based on the fact that you appear to still have all your atoms in place, I think your universe is fine, for one reason or another. Maybe because you yourself are still fine. Maybe it’s a fifty-fifty chance between which one will end up obliterated if it’s not both.”

I stare up at the portal dreamily. My eyes widen as another realization hits me. “But if that Universe is tearing itself apart, and you can’t close portals…” I fire off.

Zoey puts her hand up. “Paradoxes were the first thing they trained us for. One universe cannot directly affect another universe when it goes critical, and a paradox is contained entirely within the universe in which it happens. It’s just one of the many failsafes the Multiverse has in place. And rest assured that I am really, REALLY dumbing this down for you. There’s a lot more to it, a lot of edge cases, a lot I probably don’t even know. But we’ll be safe.”

“Failsafes like letting a universe be destroyed for a mere brush of the hand? Sure…” I sigh and stand up, patting the dust from my pants. I look around and my breath holds in my throat. I hadn’t even noticed our surroundings.

All around us lie cracking and crumbling ruins of iron and concrete. Shells and skeletons of buildings arch into the sky, most of them failing to reach far enough, littered with jagged ends and twisted parts. Rubble is strewn across the entirety of the visible landscape. The atmosphere itself is a dusty brown and red and the Sun beats mercilessly down from above. I can’t see a single green plant for the life of me, and I finally realize it’s actually a little difficult to breathe.

“What the hell happened here?” I mutter breathlessly.

Zoey flies up a few dozen feet and scans the surroundings for a few minutes before offering me a reply. “It’s like this as far as I can see. War, maybe? There’s literally nothing left but rubble,” she shouts from above.

“Great. So now I’m two-for-two. What are the odds we actually find a world that doesn’t end up destroyed?”

Zoey zooms back down and glares at me. “This isn’t your fault. Whatever happened here, this was caused by someone else. Luck of the draw, I guess. But when you have an infinite number of dimensions, you have to be prepared for anything to happen.” She surveys the landscape again. “Sometimes people make certain choices that lead to their downfall.”

“Tell me about it,” I mumble.

Zoey glances at me from the corner of her eye. “But sometimes something happens to a group of people that is completely out of their control.” She shrugs. “Hmph. It’s all idle speculation, anyway. Unless the rubble can talk, we won’t find out what happened here.”

I sigh and nod. “So what do we do now? How am I going to get home?”

“I’m still trying to figure that one out,” she replies softly. “It’ll be a few hours before I have the energy to portal us out of here again. We might as well look around,” she continues more loudly, flying off into one of the ruins, leaving me to myself.

I look around at the collapsing effigies of this civilization and an unsettling feeling washes over me. An infinite number of dimensions with a kid that only seems to know a quarter of what she’s talking about. I’m never making it back home.

What should happen next?

A paradox!

I spin around the sidewalk mumbling to myself. “Eenie, meenie, miney, moe,” I say, and start running with Zoey keeping pace at my side. We pass by row after row of sleek white trailers, seemingly without end. The monotony is finally broken by seemingly familiar flashing red and blue lights coming up from behind.

“IT IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO STOP FLEEING, JASON MCGRADY,” a robot voice chided.

“What the hell?” I conjecture, turning my head but not slowing my pace. We’re being trailed by what looks like a low-gliding helicopter with no propellers. It’s as big as a small office chair and painted various shades of white and black. The red and blue lights are mounted on either side of the front face that must contain a speaker or something to project the sound.

“So, um, do you think we should stop?” Zoey shouts to me.

“Not on my fucking life!” I shout back and quickly turn around a corner past a column of trailers and then turn again at the next intersection. The hovercopter doesn’t miss a beat and continues following silently behind.

“PLEASE SLOW TO A STOP, JASON MCGRADY. IT WOULD PAIN ME TO PAIN YOU.”

“Yeah, and it would pain me to be shot by those assholes back there, too!” I yell back. I see a few lights turn on in trailers as we pass by, spying eyes through curtains watching what is probably this world’s version of COPS. I’ve become that guy. Great.

“THIS IS YOUR LAST VERBAL WARNING, JASON MCGRADY. PLEASE HASTEN YOUR COMPLIANCE IN STOPPING.”

“I think it might be in our best interest-” Zoey started before I cut her off.

“My best interest is NOT BEING ON THIS GOD DAMNED WORLD, Zoey! If I’m stuck here, I’d rather not be stuck with its last-class citizens behind whatever passes for bars around here!”

“THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING SHOT, JASON MCGRADY. THERE WILL NOT BE ANOTHER.”

A bright red beam of light appears across my periphery. And just as quickly, a potted tree about five yards ahead explodes into a towering inferno, knocking me face-first into the nearest trailer.

“Jesus Christ,” I mutter as I allow myself to slide to the ground.

“THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION, MR. MCGRADY,” the hovercopter voices. It spins toward the trailer with the burning tree and a small hose appears above its shell. It douses the tree with white foam and retracts the hose. A slip of some sort of orange paper is shot at the trailer’s door, sticking with a light thwap. “I APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, RANDALL BRENDENMOOR. PLEASE ACCEPT THIS I.O.U. FOR ONE POTTED PLANT AT ANY OF OUR ASSOCIATED NURSERIES DOWNTOWN.”

I manage to pull myself back to my feet by the time it’s spun back around. I don’t see Zoey anywhere and deep down inside I kind of hope she wasn’t accidentally obliterated by the beam of light from earlier.

“PLEASE PLACE YOUR HANDS IN FRONT OF YOUR PERSON, JASON MCGRADY,” the hovercopter commands.

I hesitate and then move my hands in front of my body. A solid blue light immediately wraps around my hands, tying them together. I test the strength of the bonds and can’t get a budge out of them. On the bright side, they’re far more comfortable than the police handcuffs back home; they’re not digging into my wrists and there’s no pinch from the loose chains against my exposed skin. I resign myself to this one comfort.

“PREPARE FOR TELEPORTATION TO THE INTERROGATION UNIT, JASON MCGRADY.” I’m not quite sure how I should prepare for any kind of teleportation, so I mostly ignore the message. I still can’t see Zoey anywhere, which bothers me a great deal. She’s my only ride home, if there’s even a remote possibility of it at this point.

I glance down the sidewalk and see a dark shadow in the corner of one of the trailers. It’s one of the men who was shooting at us through the portal. He has his wrist up to his mouth, likely voicing what’s become of me. Whether this is a win or a loss for them, I don’t know. I hope they’re losing big, though.

My eyes are suddenly filled with purple light for a few seconds. When it’s over, I bend over and throw up all over the floor. I feel like my organs are all making their best effort to simultaneously expunge themselves through my mouth. I dry heave for a little while longer before I start to calm down.

“It looks like you haven’t teleported in quite some time, Mr. McGrady. We do apologize for any discomfort,” a kind but stark tenor replies from all around me. I finally look up and see that I’m in some kind of small room. All the walls are dark black, a contrast from all the white I’ve seen recently. I’m the only person in the room, sitting in a hoverchair similar to the one at Bernard’s. Its light blue glow is the only light in the room. I hear a click and a whirring noise and the liquid I expelled all over the floor slowly dissipates away.

“Where am I?” I reply hoarsely, still not quite cognizant of my surroundings.

“You’re in Interrogation Unit C, Mr. McGrady. You’re not being charged with anything, although attempting to flee from an AutoCopTer is probably not the wisest decision you’ve made recently,” the voice reflected. “We received an incidence report at Residence 2107B owned by Bernard McGrady, your cousin. You appeared to be the only person in the trailer at the time where the reports indicate that there were numerous metallic projectiles expelled with traces of some rather archaic propellants.”

“Archaic enough to kill me,” I chortle.

“Hmm. We have notified Bernard of the disturbance and he has agreed to teleporting here to help demystify the situation. However, we also have one other visitor that might make matters a little muddier.”

“And who would that be?”

“That would be you.”

“And how exactly can I be a visitor to myself? You gonna clone me or something?”

“You see, the interesting thing, Mr. McGrady, is that somehow there are now two of you roaming this great, wide world. We have strict regulations in place to ensure that even clones are given unique genetic traits separate from their master and from each other. Otherwise we’d run into this exact situation far too often: How do we tell the original from the copy?” the voice mused.

“So you think I’M a clone?” I stand up straight off the chair. It doesn’t hover back into the ground like the previous chair, so I’m still afforded some small bit of light. I realize now that my hands are also no longer bound.

“I don’t know what to think of you, to be perfectly honest. Your clothes speak of days long past and your accent is unique in its own right, among other traits I’ve noticed. But we’ll have it all sorted out shortly, I’d hope,” the voice says.

“Okay, look, I’m going to tell you something, and I know you’re gonna think I’m crazy, but please just hear me out, okay?” I move towards a wall and feel along the edge. It’s rough and matted so it doesn’t reflect the blue glow very well.

“Of course, Mr. McGrady.”

“Okay, so… Um,” I chew on my fingernails a bit, composing myself. “So, I’m not from here, you know? From this planet. But I’m not an alien! I am from Earth. But not this one? Something about causal rotating, god, I don’t remember. Anyway, look. Your me is the right version of me you need and I just want to go home, back to my Earth.” I sit down on the floor with my back against the wall.

“Your Earth?” he responds inquisitively.

“Man, I fell down a well, I got locked inside, and some magic moth lady with green light broke me out and took to me to another dimension or some whacked-out shit. And now dudes are chasing me trying to kill me and I don’t want to be here. I don’t even want to be there, truth be told. I didn’t ask for any of this!” I pound my fist on the floor.

“I told you I’m not a MOTH!” a voice whispers below me.

“Zoey?! Where the hell are you!” I shout aloud.

“Who is Zoey?” the voice asks.

“She’s the stupid little-” I begin.

“Shh, don’t say a thing!” she whispers harshly.

I pause and take a breath. “Look, what’s going to happen when the other me gets here?” I attempt to change the subject. “Are we both going to be pointing at each other saying, ‘No, he’s the fake! Kill HIM!’ while Bernard points a gun at us?”

“Hah, nothing so barbaric, I assure you. We’re going to weigh your story against his and try and determine who is the original and who is the copy, or whatever else you or he might be. And speak of the devil.”

There’s a moment of silence and I feel a tickle in my armpit climbing up my collarbone. Zoey finally pops her head of my collar. “Phleh! Do they have deodorant where you come from? Hexal!”

“Where the hell have you been!” I whisper angrily. “I figured you were zapped out of existence by our friendly neighborhood cop.”

“I see you take me for a fool. Hmph! Nevertheless, I am here and I’ll help you out if I can,” she replies quietly. “I’m going to lay low for now, though.” I nod my head and she disappears back into my shirt.

“Mr. McGrady, are you ready to meet yourself?” the voice echoes again.

“Sure, whatever,” I wave my hand in the air.

A bright purple light fills the room and dissipates. The walls themselves begin to glow with a light blue to illuminate the area. And then I see me. Or what I assume I’d look like if I’d managed to go to college and get a job and you know, be an all-around success. The antithesis of myself, really. He stands a tall and fit six-foot one, is clean-shaven, and wears what looks like the bastard child of a Star Trek uniform and a three-piece suit. Overall, he is incredibly handsome and composed and he intimidates the shit out of me.

He takes a few seconds to get his bearings before locking his eyes with mine as I sit on the floor. I see the look of confused convulsion come over his face as he tries to figure out who and what the hell I am. “Well, you certainly look like me,” he said without a trace of my fanciful southern accent. It feels really weird.

“Yeah, on a really bad day, right?” I reply, standing up. He doesn’t look too amused.

“So who are you exactly? I haven’t commissioned any clones. And no doubt I wouldn’t commission one that would end up in your… state,” he says, raising his eyebrow on the last word.

“Yeah, well, I AIN’T no clone, buddy,” I reply. “I’m me the same as you are you. I already explained this to Mr. Voice up there, but I’m not from here.”

“Not from here?” he asks.

“Ugh, do I really have to go through this again?” I put my hand to my head and walk closer toward him. “Look, I’m from another dimension or something. Another Earth. I don’t belong here and I KNOW this already. If you’d kindly let me out of here, I’d be on my damn way and out of everyone’s hair soon enough,” I respond.

“Intriguing story, to be sure, but our scientists have already disproved the multiverse theory. Not buying it at all,” he replies unflinchingly.

“Well I’m not SELLING it, it’s the damned truth, you stubborn asshole!” I lash out. He backs up a step. “Oh, what’s this? Fancy-pants future me is scared of little ol’ loser me? Well, looks like I do still retain some sort of edge on this Earth!”

He raises his hand pointing a finger upward. “I’m ready to leave here, Pennington. I’ve seen enough,” he says, backing away.

“One moment, Mr. McGrady,” the voice replies.

“Ooh, seen enough, have you? I bet you haven’t seen enough of this!” I sprint forward, my right arm winding backward.

“WAIT! JASON, NO!” Zoey yells out. My stomach tickles as she struggles free of my shirt and into sight. The familiar purple glow begins to form as the other me starts to teleport out, but not quite fast enough. My fist connects with his lower jaw and smashes it good and hard.

Then the floor starts to melt. Or puddle. Or something. All I know is that it’s no longer a solid object beneath my feet. The purple glow surrounding the other me explodes into a million colors and he’s nowhere to be found. I collapse onto my hands as the floor waves back and forth beneath me.

“Oh no, oh no, OH NO!” Zoey shouts. “How could I have been so STUPID!”

The walls shatter out of existence exposing the massive city outside. If the trailer park was large, this was was about a hundred orders of magnitude larger. Hundreds of massive skyscrapers pierced into the night sky higher than anything I’ve seen on my Earth, blazing with hundreds of different colors of blinking lights. The sky is dark but clear and I can see the Moon above, but a large, curved chunk is carved out of it for some reason. Below the skyscrapers are thousands upon thousands of smaller buildings, all with their own light arrays and signs. The transit system is filled with hovering and flying objects moving along at ungodly speeds without any seeming regard for each other in a giant chaotic web of light. From the look of things, we’re about 200 stories up.

As I continue to gawk at the scenery, it all begins twisting and distorting. Vehicles simultaneously blink out of existence, explode at random intervals and implode at others creating a cascading fireworks display across the sky. Massive chunks of buildings vanish into thin air. Anything they were supporting is now falling down quickly, exploding, or disappearing themselves. More than one building is floating UP into the sky before joining in the illumination of the night sky. The chaos around me is only magnified by the fact that the sky itself has begun to distort and tear. I don’t even know how to describe the sky tearing, only to say that what lies on the other side is not blackness. It’s filled with an allotment of colors I’ve seen and some I sure as hell haven’t.

The roof and the entire rest of the building above me disappears as the floor continues to waver back and forth. My left leg and arm are partially suspended through the bottom and I try to figure out how to stand back up. “What the fuck is going on!” I shout out to Zoey.

“No time for that!” she yells back. “This could be close.” She zooms down underneath my face. I can’t hear her over the noises outside, explosions coalescing into white noise and random screeches and loud bangs from every direction. A veritable orchestra of glass and metal grinding into each other. I see her slap her hands on whatever solid portion of ground she can find. A familiar low and then loud thrum echo and a bright green flash emanates from below.

And then the ground below me disappears. I can see through to the core of the planet as it spins faster and faster, shedding its mass into a thin line trailing out into nothingness and vanishing. I fall directly into the portal as the orchestra continues around me in all directions, the universe ripping itself to shreds.

What should happen next?

you could totally go off on a tangent about the space time continuum.

I walk up the steps to the trailer and twist the handle to open the door. It’s either locked or jammed because it doesn’t fully turn. Wonderful. This doesn’t make any sense because, stumbling drunk as I might have been, I could never have locked the door behind myself as I went outside. Bernard didn’t even trust me enough to give me a key, and seeing as how his nearest neighbor was a good number of miles away, there wasn’t exactly a great need to worry about security.

I continue to shake the handle back and forth to no avail. I pound the palm of my hand into the door and cuss in a fit of anger. I just wanted a damned sandwich! Was that so much to ask after half a day at the bottom of a god-forsaken well?

“Do we have a problem, here?” Zoey asks from behind me.

I roll my eyes and take a couple of seconds to compose myself before turning to answer her. “No, Zoey. There’s no problem. The door’s just locked for some reason,” I shake my head.

“For some reason? You didn’t leave it that way?”

“I don’t even have a key and it can only be locked WITH the key, so…” I shrug my hands. I turn around and give the handle another rattle for good measure.

“Argh, okay. I’ll solve all the world’s problems for you, human,” Zoey says as she buzzes up to the door. She presses her tiny hands up against the door, whispers a few words I either can’t hear or can’t understand (likely both), and a low thrum sounds on the other side of the door. After a few seconds, the noise escalates and becomes a loud boom and pockets of air and green light blast through the cracks in the door frame.

Zoey rubs her hands together and claps. “And there we are. Care to get your food so we can get on with this already?” she says impatiently.

“Yeah, geez, I’m real sorry that my need to eat to survive is cramping your style there, lady,” I say under my breath.

“What did you say?” she replies.

“Do you even require food? What does a sprite do to gain energy? Your little magic spells or whatever must have some cost, right?” I reply, deflecting the question.

“I have my ways,” she says, turning up her nose. “It just works, all right? Are you going to complain?” Clearly not something she wants to discuss.

I shake my head and begin to turn the handle before stopping abruptly. “One other thing, actually. How is it you know English? You keep saying ‘your world’ to me, and I’ve never heard talk of magic moths before. I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around this one.”

“I’m sure that’s not a unique experience for you,” she scowls. “Okay, fine. It just so happens that I have the unique ability to distill most languages into their base components and reconstruct them into any other language with a high amount of accuracy and efficiency,” she recites.

“You sound like a damn text book,” I reply, grasping the door handle. I turn it and the door opens easily enough. I’m honestly a little relieved, but I give Zoey a rather unimpressed look to maintain that suave style I like to pretend I have. I would’ve figured something out, given enough time. I suppose it pays to be able to magically explode things on a whim, though, if the need ever arises. Though I also suppose that if I were in possession of such a power, that the need would arise more often likely is necessary.

I hold the door open and put out my right hand. “Ladies first,” I reply.

“Hmph,” she replies and buzzes inside. I follow in after her.

“WELCOME BACK, MISTER MCGRADY,” a bubbly, computerized voice echoes over my head as I pass through the door frame. I nearly piss myself.

“What the fuck is this?” I say aloud, scanning the trailer.

The inside of the trailer looks a far cry from how I left it. Bernard had bought the thing in the mid-80s and had kept it parked in the same location since then, as far as I was aware. No upgrades, no additions, no renovations. Looked like any dumpy trailer you’d seen in any number of Cops episodes, with its brown and orange trim on all the seats and cupboards, its dark, ill-lit orange light bulbs accentuating the trim as best as it could.

But this. This is different. There are no drab, 80s-style earthy pastels. Everything is sheer white and chrome. Bright white track lighting lines the entire interior ceiling and there are a good number lining the floor as well. All the wooden cupboards have been replaced with sleek counterparts that looked like some kind of industrial plastic. A couple of white, floating chairs hover in the corner, and even the bed is lined with what look like white linens. It’s the fucking iTrailer.

I turn around in the door frame and look back outside. Instead of the comforting, vast expanse of desert I came from, I see rows and rows of white cylindrical objects, glowing with similar lighting as the interior of my trailer. A small walkway strikes right through the center of each row, intersected by more walkways beyond each trailer. I run outside and down the steps to get a better look, and sure enough, my trailer looks exactly the same. A giant white cylinder with no windows and sterile-looking white lighting accentuating nothing. A few of the trailers had some plants or shrubs in what I assume was an attempt at sprucing things up, but otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between any them.

I run back inside. “What in the hell is going on?!” I shout at Zoey, ignoring the bubbly computer voice welcoming me back again.

“Oh,” Zoey starts quietly, her eyes growing wide. “Oh no…”

“This had better be damned good,” I say, subconsciously clenching my fist.

“So… I might, um… how do I say this,” she hesitates, looking off to the left and chewing on her bottom lip. “I might have accidentally rotated our causal pathway in a direction that might have accidentally caused an inadvertent intersection in space-time that might have accidentally brought us to a parallel reality?” she says so quickly that I barely catch half of the words.

“Look, Zoey, I have no idea what on Earth-“

“This may not even be your Earth anymore, actually,” she interrupts.

“-you just said,” I trail off. “Not MY earth anymore? What does that even… This is not good for my brain,” I say, sitting down cautiously in one of the floating chairs. The chair sways a bit as I lower myself in, finally setting into a semi-solid position as the floor underneath the chair begins to glow yet another shade of white. I take my eyes off Zoey and watch the chair suspiciously, not quite trusting it to not flip me on my face like a poorly-strung hammock.

“Magnets,” she remarks. “It’s held in place by a series of magnets below the floor and in the chair itself,” she continues, zooming over to study the chair. She buzzes back and forth looking at all the various components. “Based on how it’s moving, I’d also assume there might be some weaker ones in the walls to keep its horizontal integrity in check a bit.” She flies over and starts inspecting the stark white panels on the walls.

“Of course. Magnets,” I mumble to myself, waving my arms in fake surprise. I lean back in my magnetic chair and roll my neck and sigh. “So what can I do about this? What can YOU do about whatever this is?” I ask after a few minutes of thoughtless silence.

“Well, that’s the other small problem. Without knowing exactly where we were going, I have no way of knowing where we are,” she said quietly. “And without knowing where we are, I can’t properly rotate our way back. We’d most likely just end up in another reality, and another reality, and another reality after that. The odds of finding the way back are infinitesimally small.”

“Wasn’t there a TV show about this? With that guy who had his dick eaten off in that 3D piranha movie?” I think out loud to myself.

“TV show? I don’t know what that means, but I suppose parallel universes wouldn’t be an uncharted concept for any reasonably technologically advanced society. I’d be a little disappointed in your world if that wasn’t the case!” Zoey responds.

“Yeah, okay, I get it. Earth is full of big, dumb apes compared to the brilliant and tiny people from wherever you come from,” I respond, agitated.

“I come from Earth, too, actually,” she remarks. “Just a different one.”

“A different one. And so you got to my inferior version by doing this, uh… This…” I strain for the words and spin my hand in a counterclockwise motion.

“Causal rotation?” Zoey offers.

“Sure. That. So you’ve done it before, yeah? So how is it, exactly, that you ‘accidentally’ caused it this time? I would hate to think these kinds of mistakes are commonplace for your people.”

“Eheh,” she responds turning her head away. “Well, I wasn’t entirely ‘trained’ in causal rotation.”

“Wait, so you-“

“But, I mean, it’s not like it even REQUIRES real training! You just have to have good spatial recognition and an aptitude for manipulating chronitons. Sure, you also should probably have a good grasp of relative cosmological heterogeneity, but that’s something you can’t really pick up until you’re out in the field, anyway,” she continues without a single breath taken.

“Naturally,” I reply. “So you’re just some dumb kid who stole a magic wand to go romping about the universe or something.”

“There aren’t even any wands involved! You have no idea how any of this works!” she screams back.

That’s when I notice the gloved hand in the doorway out of the corner of my eye. It’s seemingly floating in the doorway, attached to no tangible body. I motion over toward it and Zoey turns around. We watch the fingers wiggle, and then the whole hand retracts out of sight.

“What the hell was that?” I whisper, as if it could hear me.

“Well, the portal is still open in your world. I never learned how to properly close them,” she admits. “Though, they do close once enough energy has been expended. The more you push through a portal, the more energy it requires to keep open, so they can stay open for quite awhile if just one or two people are using it.”

“So, wait… What? What does all of that MEAN? Can I go back?!” I respond, jumping to my feet. The hover chair lowers and the lighting below dims.

“I only learned one-way portals. Once you go through, there’s no going back,” she shakes her head glumly.

“One way? How is that at all useful?!”

“You don’t ALWAYS need to keep a portal open. It’s easier not to have to hold both sides open at all times, especially if you don’t need to return quickly or pass materials back and forth,” she conjectures. “And usually you know where you’re going, so you can easily get back with another one-way portal later!”

“Easily, uh huh. Not so damn easy for me, though!” I shout.

“I didn’t intend-” she starts when we see another appendage coming into view through the doorway. After a few seconds, a tall man in a dark suit and sunglasses fully appears in the doorway. His shoulders are broad and his dark hair is slicked back to a nice sheen. He has a rope tied around his waist. He looks around slowly getting his bearings before he sees us.

He begins to reach into his suit and I assume he’s going for a gun, so I do what any reasonable man would do in this situation. I jump at him, screaming like a crazed madman and crash my shoulder into his gut, hurling him backwards. He disappears as soon as he hits the threshold of the doorway, and I flail and fall down the steps with his mass not there to hold me back.

“I thought you said that there’s no way to get back through a one-way portal!” I yell.

“Look, I don’t know exactly how they work! He had a rope around his waist,” she says to herself as I make my way back inside. “Maybe it requires a complete absence of matter at the horizon before it considers something to be fully ‘through’ the portal. I guess I never really though about that with much depth,” she continues mumbling to herself.

Gunshots rattle through the trailer. The bullets ricochet off all the flat, hard surfaces and I duck to the floor and cover my head, as if that would make me less of a target. “They’re shooting guns through the portal!” I yell to Zoey.

“Guns?” she replies.

“WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!” I shout. After a few seconds the ricochets had ended and I figure it’s as good a time as any to get the hell of out of Dodge. “Follow me!”

I jump up and barrel through the doorway with Zoey zipping along beside me. I look for a way to close or lock the trailer, but there isn’t any obvious means of sealing the doorway behind me. I kick the side of the trailer and yell in frustration.

“GOODBYE, MISTER MCGRADY,” the computerized voice responds, and a cover quietly slides across the opening, finally resting with a muted hiss.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I mutter and sigh.

“So what’s the big plan, Boss?” Zoey asks nonchalantly.

I look around and see nothing but rows and columns of trailers. No matter where we go, I was going to get lost in a god-damned hurry. What a fine mess I’m in.

What should happen next?

You feel something swim by your leg

I rouse slowly and blink my eyes a few times. I’m not quite sure how long I’ve slept, but it’s difficult for my brain to wake up in this state; my eyes are acting like they’re expecting the glaring rays of sunlight to be snaking their way through my retinas, and they’re not quite sure how to react to waking up in total darkness. One of my legs has found its way back down into the water which is doing wonders for my body temperature. My entire body has cramped up trying to find a comfortable position on the cross, so I decide to hell with it, and jump down into the water to stretch and move around what little I can.

I raise my arms over my head and yawn long and loud. I feel like doing a few squats, but the top of my jeans are almost dry at this point, so I cross that off the list. Instead I settle for standing in place, rolling my shoulders and neck a few times to help release whatever tension is left.

It’s at this point I have the odd sensation that something has brushed past my leg underwater. As with any unseen phenomenon, the body doesn’t quite want to believe that whatever happened actually happened, and my body is stupefyingly average. I stand there, frozen still, waiting for it to happen again and validate my initial sentiment. In hindsight, it’s kind of dumb to stand like a deer in headlights when something unknown and probably terrifying beyond all imagination is bearing down at you from any direction in complete darkness. But I give myself a proverbial pat on the back for my naïve stoicism, anyway.

After a few moments when nothing is breathing down my neck, I begin to bend down to feel around a bit. I remember that I’ve actually started drying off, however, and withdraw for the moment. I fall back on just feeling around the water with my feet and kicking around the water a bit. I don’t feel anything other than rope coiling in the center of the well and a few loose rocks. I stand still for a few more seconds, listening to my heartbeat and the sound of my breath, before shrugging it off and starting to clamber back up the cross to get out of the water.

And then I feel it again. Of course. Now I know I’m not crazy, at least. Or any crazier than I think I’ve already become down here. This time my body reacts appropriately, having been given the same stimuli a second time. I scramble up to the top of the cross and raise my legs out of the water as far as I can. Whatever the hell is down there, it’s gonna have to chew on rope and wood before it gets my beautiful flesh.

I hear a small splash followed by an equally small buzzing noise. All my mind can think is that I’m about to be attacked by some kind of deadly subterranean wasp as the buzzing quickly closes the gap straight to my face. I hear a sound like a light bulb turning on before my eyes are greeted by a blinding green glow. My hands race to cover my eyes, which only serves to knock me off-balance on the cross, causing me to fall through one of the openings. My back is flat against the wall while my legs hook over the edge of the cross, my ass hanging straight down nearly to the water. I try flailing a bit but it’s futile and I soon give up and wait for doom to meet me head on, closing my eyes as tightly as possible. If I’m going out, I’d rather not give some terrifying hell-beast the pleasure of seeing the growing horror in my eyes as it scatters my entrails to and fro.

I can see and even feel the green glow becoming brighter through my eyelids. My breath quickens and my heart pounds throughout my body. The buzzing continues to whir in my ears and I can hear whatever it is darting back and forth across the well.

“Who are you?” a high, but quiet voice queries. I don’t make a sound or even move. This is clearly just in my head. I’ve already come to terms with my love triangle between the rope and the cross and accept the fact that I’m moderately insane, so hearing a random voice in my head is not surprising in the least.

“HEY, listen!” the voice says, much louder. I feel a sharp pang between my eyes, which jolts them open. “You. Yes, YOU! WHO-ARE-YOU?” it says slowly, enunciating each word clearly. The voice is emanating from a tiny person with wings. And when I say tiny, I mean no bigger than a small dragonfly. Female, I would guess based primarily on the attitude, but secondarily on the covered breasts and long hair that are typical of the gender. She wears some kind of Amazonian attire that covers her well enough, I suppose, and is probably pretty comfortable. The striking difference between her and her human counterpart would be that her entire body glowed a bright green hue. I’m still not quite sure that I haven’t just entered a new realm of delusion, but I reason that it can’t be detrimental to reply.

“Uh,” I start eloquently. “Jason McGrady?” For some reason that comes out as a question as if I’m attempting to answer a question in elementary school but I’m not quite sure I have the right answer.

“Okay, Jason. Good. Now, why are you down here, exactly?” she responds, hands on hips.

“I fell?” I continue, still unsure of my response.

“Fell? Down this well?” she asks, skeptical.

I shake my head rapidly in a physical attempt to clear it. “Well, I guess I kind of… half fell? Um, there’s… There’s a rope…” I trail off. I don’t have much mobility, being stuck in the position I am, but my left arm is able to find the end of the rope that I’d used to tie the cross up. It just so happens to be the frayed end that had been cut. I hold it up for her to see, not really considering that she might not even know what I was trying to get at.

“This was cut,” she responded immediately, a little shocked. “Humm,” she pursed her lips. “Interesting, indeed, Mr. McGrady.” She went quiet for a few minutes afterward, possibly thinking intently on something. She zipped up and down the rope and looked over the cross a bit. Her glow allowed me to see a tiny bit of my handiwork, which did not please me one bit.

“So,” I break the silence. “Are you like some kind of firefly or moth or something?”

“Ugh, really?” she replies, whirling around to face me so I could see her scrunching her tiny face. “I’m a SPRITE, stupid human.”

“No offense, lady, but the only sprite I know comes in a green metal can.”

“We’re of no relation, I assure you,” she says sardonically.

“I think I picked that one up,” I say, scratching my chin. “So, what does a sprite do for a living, exactly? Just, chill at the bottom of wells?”

“Hmph,” she replies and zips off to investigate something else, ignoring me.

“Oookay,” I breathe out. It’s getting uncomfortable stuck the way I am, so I start squirming back and forth trying to loosen myself out. I’m reasonably certain it only makes things continually worse the more I move. My new little friend notices me struggling and stops to watch with what appears to be an amused look on her face.

She flies over and props a tiny hand on the underside of the cross. “May I?” she asks. Before I can respond, a bright green flash pummels my retinas and I splash into the water. She’s knocked the cross onto the other side of the well, which is pretty impressive given that it’s probably a hundred times her size. I regain my footing and stand up, ringing out the bottom of my shirt.

“What was that?” I ask, still a little blinded.

“What?” she asks, already not paying attention to me again. “Oh, that. It’s only funny watching someone be pathetic in short bursts. If that had gone on much longer, I might have actually had to feel bad or something.”

“Right,” I respond. “So now that we’ve established, uh, I guess why I’m here? Um, why are you here, then?” I continue, finally gaining more control of my faculties. “In fact, you were underwater! How does that even work? Were you there the entire time? Is there a way OUT of here?!”

She senses my urgency starting to build and gives me a modicum of attention. “Look, why I’m here is my business, though this rope-cutting and well-covering and attempted homicide does bother me a bit,” she starts, pausing for a few seconds while she thinks. “As for getting out of here, my means would definitely not work for one of your stature, oh mighty human.”

“Look, I really just want to get the hell out here, okay? Just put all this bullshit behind me. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m not even an important person! I just want to go back home,” I reply, exasperated, heaving a long sigh to drive the point home.

“Tch,” she sighs. “Have it your way.”

She rockets up toward the ceiling of the well with a glowing green tail like a streaking comet jutting out behind her. The darkness allows me to see her faint glow all the way to the top, but not quite well enough to see what the hell she’s doing once she gets there. All I know is that a few seconds later, the cover of the well cracks loud enough that I need to cover my ears. My body reacts on its own and I’m quickly using the cross as a meager means of shelter, the intersection of the pieces of wood a modest helmet to ward against potential brain damage. Another loud crack ping-pongs across the walls and the first pebble drops harmlessly into the water. A bright flash of green light preempts the final crack which unleashes a shower of rocky debris upon the bottom of the well. Whatever she’s done acts like the atmosphere burning up an incoming meteor as most of the pieces are no bigger than gravel pebbles. That doesn’t stop one or two larger pieces from scoring glancing blows on the side of my head, of course. When I finally open my eyes, it takes a second for them to adjust to the daylight streaming in through the hole at the top.

I hear the eminently familiar buzz screaming toward me and turn to see my sprightly champion right in front of my right eye. I jump back a little at the suddenness of it all and she laughs mockingly. “There, done! Reeeeally hard,” she says, feigning being tired before twirling around and buzzing back off to look over other parts of the well.

I rise up out of the water and shove the cross over to the other side of the well. “Yeah, all right, Little Miss Magic Powers. But I still can’t escape up 40 feet of sheer rock,” I reply, motioning to the sides of the walls.

She again stops what she’s doing, and even though her back is turned, I can feel her rolling eyes judging me. “You know, I’m doing an awful lot of work for you here. What’s in this for me? What can you, Mr. McGrady, do for me?”

“I can dance a jig or sing a song or fold you some origami, I don’t know, anything you want! Just get me up there!” I point to the sky angrily.

“Done,” she replies immediately. She zooms over and grabs a couple tiny handfuls of my shirt and I’m soon blasting through the air. It’s only a few seconds before we’ve escaped the confines of the well, but she continues to rise further upward. We’re about 100 feet off the ground when she says, “This good for you?” and I can feel her hands starting to loosen their grip.

“You know what I meant!” I scream at her and she grins maniacally.

“Of course.” She reasserts her grasp and flies me quickly back down to the ground, only dropping from me from around five feet up. I land on my ass on the cracked and withered land below. The first thing I do is spin around and kiss that gloriously dry ground full-on. That mouthful of dirt tasted like the sweetest cake I’d ever had, but my stomach growled in retaliation and I finally remembered that I hadn’t eaten in god knows how many hours. I struggled up to my feet and began lurching towards Bernard’s trailer.

“And just where do you think you’re going?” the sprite calls after me.

“To get some damn food, do you mind?” I reply, continuing my walk up to the trailer. A split-second later, she’s in front of me with a hand pressed on my chest, stopping me from moving. “I guess you do,” I mumble to myself.

“You just promised me you’d do anything for me if I got you out, and it looks to me like you’re out. Now it’s time for you to own up to your end of the bargain, Jason,” she replies.

I straighten up and brush the dirt off my arms, regaining a little bit of composure. She was right, I did make a promise, even if it was in desperation. “I don’t intend to back down from my words, uh…” I realized I didn’t get her name, but she picked up on it.

“Zoey. Just call me Zoey,” she replies.

I nod. “Okay. Well, Zoey, I don’t quite know how the sprite metabolism works, but as a human, I need some damned food in my stomach. Can I at least do that before doing whatever it is you have in mind?” I ask pointedly.

She takes a couple of seconds to decide, but finally lets her hand up so I can pass. “Just make it quick,” she says as I pass by into the trailer. “We still don’t know who did this to you or where they might be.”

Good point.

What should happen next?