((This is a story based in the universe of Anarchy Online, although its main character, Ken, will eventually cross over to other universes, other worlds, and meet plenty of other folks! To those who wondered where he came from though...well, here is the very start of his journey. Enjoy! :) ))
From Whence I Came
A cool breeze billowed over the grass beneath the crisp skies of a late May afternoon. The dandelions wouldn't blossom for another two months or so, but even then, this particular day felt unseasonably warm.
Beside an ancient oak tree, the one that had perpetually stood vigil over the lookout, sat two youthful men. One, his skin an ashen gray, long black hair carried aloft by the breeze. He rested against the oak tree's time-thickened bark, admiring the view. The other, skin a light caramel hue, brushed a hand over his own neatly-trimmed auburn mane, exhaling the kind of sigh one might expect from a man on the cusp of losing a lifelong friend.
"You're really gonna do it, huh? Just throw it all away?"
The gray-skinned man, slender by nature and with ears pointed as those of elves, turned his gaze toward his friend.
"Why not? What am I gonna do with my life here, huh? Work for my mom, get a nice cushy job behind a desk or something like that? That isn't for me."
"She's an archaeologist! You wouldn't be working behind a desk, you know. It's a hands-on thing. You'd be out there." His hand gestures out across the distance, toward the ruins.
"Working over old pieces of junk from ancient history just doesn't suit me. I mean yeah, I get it; it's important. Figuring out how people lived back then, learning what they were like...sure, I'd love to know. I don't want my life to be trapped in the past though." The gray-skinned man gently thumped his head back against the ancient tree trunk, eyes fixated on the view.
It truly was something, even he had to admit.
As the hill crested sharply not ten feet from the pair, the ancient city sat in the vastness beyond almost as if it were scenery in a painting. Two ancient rivers flowed toward one another, their pristine blue waters eroded through the millennia into the valley of green. Both tributaries coalesced into a single point to form one larger river, its waters sparkling with the early evening sun. The city must have been founded at the junction point between these three rivers, a triangle of moss-ensconced ruins all that remained into the present day. The circular basin of what may have once been a fountain, coated in thick mosses, stood at the triangle's tip. Further away from the tri-river junction arose spikes of weathered metal and rock, somehow spared the ravages of time, that jutted up to two hundred feet in the air. From these relics of a bygone era sprouted all manner of plant life, from ancient-looking trees to vertically-strung gardens of ivy and wildflowers that would no doubt blossom in the coming months. A flock of birds took flight through what must have at one point been a window, weaving expertly throughout the wreckage of the old world in their escape to the skies above. A grid of fissures criss-crossed through the ardent wreckage, trenches aligned in a pattern of what at one point had to have been streets. Some had filled with river water, others had stood empty for all this time, occupied by a cornucopia of plant life encrusted over what remains of the ancients.
All of this stood in the shadows, held in stark juxtaposition to the megalithic skyline rooted even further in the distance. Slivers of hyper-modern glass and neon lanced into the atmosphere, rising thousands of feet above the antediluvian ruins they had replaced. The urban center sprawled into the unviewable distance, its tumult scarcely visible at such a range. No doubt the lives of millions played out amid this fantastic menagerie of glass, technology, and molybdenum...but from where those two sat, not an iota of it was discernible. The centerpiece to this grandiose display of human progress dwarfed even the city itself; a structure that without hyperbole pierced the limits of the sky; a massive cable hewn from synthetic super-fibers drawn away from the Earth's crust, and into the heavens. A space elevator, one that terminated perhaps somewhere above the ionosphere, where the Earth ended and the cosmic ocean began.
All of this sat within their view, beneath that giant old oak tree.
"You might not want to get caught in the past but Ken, I don't want to be the past. I...I don't want you to leave. Just wouldn't be the same without you here."
The gray-skinned man's lips curled into the subtlest of smiles, the weight of his decision heavy on his heart.
"Oh c'mon Cale, you don't need me here to kick around. Besides, it's not like I'd never come back, right? I just want to spend a few years out there. Make something of myself, right? It isn't something I can do sitting here on my ass, stuck on Earth. Besides, where would we be if we never left Earth at all?"
"We'd be a lot happier, I think." Cale stared out over the horizon, eyes locked upon an object affixed with a crimson light, snaking its way up the orbital cable, speeding its way into the firmament, the elevator returning to the cosmos once more.
"Well I beg to differ. Think about it! If we never left, we wouldn't have found all the amazing things we did. We wouldn't have notum, we wouldn't have nanotech, hell we wouldn't even have Europa-Girl." Ken's slight laugh did little to brighten Cale's mood.
"I don't care about Europa-Girl, it's just a dumb old movie anyway. And notum? Tch, that shit's basically blood diamonds from space. What I care about is all the time we spent under this tree, growing up. Kinda feels like a waste if you're just gonna leave." Cale's funereal response had not been without impact to the gray-skinned man, who tried his very best to steel himself for the uncertain future he struggled to hold fast to.
"I get you, Cale. We did spend a lotta time here. Remember when we stole some wood and rope from the dig site and built a swing up here?" Ken's eyes darted toward his friend.
"And do you remember when your mum found out, freaked out, thought you swung yourself off the cliff, and called the police looking for you?" A modest smile spread across Cale's face.
"Ohh yeah, I remember that. She couldn't find us since we couldn't tie the damn thing up on the branch right, so we left it sitting there on the ground right by the edge; it looked like it snapped! Then we went out hunting for salamanders by the creek instead!"
"Least we found that real cute orange one, eh? What'd we name it?"
"Muddy Buddy."
The two laughed, shaking their heads...Ken's gaze turned skyward, toward the branch they had in happier days attempted tying the homemade swing to.
"What about that other time when we climbed up there, and found a family of squirrels? Eh? Remember that one?" Ken couldn't help but grin, knowing full well what had happened.
"That really really angry family of squirrels, right? The one that jumped on my face, chittering like it was insane, trying to claw my eyes out?" Cale snickered and clapped a hand over his face, the embarrassment from the whole experience rushing back to mind, made humorous by the passage of time.
"Annnnd you fell out of the tree, right on your back! Then if I remember right, you grabbed it off your face and threw it over the cliff!"
"Yeah yeah, I did! But c'mon, it was a flying squirrel!" He paused a moment, questioning his own dimming memory of the incident. "It was a flying squirrel, right? I couldn't see at the time, I've only got your word to go on." Cale chuckled, rubbing a hand beneath an eye, recalling the diminutive claws of the angry mother squirrel scrabbling over his skin in a fit of squirrely rage.
Ken shook his head, a toothy grin offered to his friend.
"I saw it get flung out over the cliff, then it did its little flying squirrel thing, with the flaps of skin under its legs and all. She caught her balance and caught the breeze on down. I'm guessing she climbed back up and got back to her babies once we got outta there."
"Yeah, well I was bleeding all over and had to get fixed up. So I guess the squirrel won that one, huh?" Cale bent over, eyeing the grassy, root-laden ground beneath his feet, picking up a small rock. He promptly threw the stone off the cliff, into the distance, as the wind whistled by.
"Goofy-ass Cale, lost the fight against a squirrel." Ken cracked another smile toward his old friend, and watched as the stone sailed toward some unknown resting place at the base of the hill.
"Yeah...goofy-ass Cale." He echoed Ken's lighthearted jab, the crushing realization seeping back into mind that their future as friends was still approaching its apparent end. "Ken...aren't you even going to tell your family about what you're gonna do?"
The gray-skinned man looked toward his friend, contemplating an answer, whilst he grabbed a rock of his own from out of the dirt, and tossed it off the edge. The sun had, by this point, started to dip beneath the horizon, staining the skies with a tangerine glow. In the distant city beyond, flecks of neon and light began to appear both inside and out of the myriad skyscrapers. Antennae blinked to life atop several of the buildings, holographic billboards and signage became more visible, and the occasional pinprick lights of vehicles streaking across the ground and through the sky in orderly meta-lanes became much easier to discern. A thin, orange light had begun to fade into view along the length of the orbital cable, stretching far into the evening sky.
"I don't think I'm going to. At least, not until I'm already out of here. Can you imagine the fuss they'd make if they knew? They'd never allow it!" Ken rested a hand against the tufts of grass that grew between the tree's roots, his gaze drawn earthward.
"Ken...you've got to tell them. If you just up and vanish, what do you think they'll do then? Huh? I've known your family a real long time; they're good people, and I don't want to see them hurt. Least of all not by their own son." Cale cast another rock into the dimming sunlight.
"It's not like I'm gonna vanish, Cale. I'll leave them a letter, a holovid, the works. There's no need to worry about them. Besides, I'll be back in just a few years! Get myself a nice frontier job with Omni-Tek, show 'em my skills, have an experience I've only got one life to get, then request a transfer back to Earth." Ken's face bore a hopeful smile, his eyes directed toward the setting sun.
"When you get back, I'm gonna expect a few beers and at least five great stories!"
"Oho now! Since when is it customary to have the guy returning from the long trip throw his own coming home party?" Ken laughed, giving a playful backhand slap at Cale's knee.
"Since now! You put me through years of having to put up without someone to rag on, you bet your gray ass I'm gonna have you repay me for it!" Cale's smile developed into a cheeky grin, his head shaking gently, eyes squinting as he glanced again toward the sun in its final moments above the horizon.
"Alright, alright...You got a deal then. I get home, we go down to Bernetti Bros, I get you the best three beers you ever had, and hopefully I'll have some first class stories to tell. Sound good?" Ken watched the sunset, the last rays filtering through the massive skyscrapers so far flung from their perch beneath the old oak tree.
"I'll hold you to it, Ken. Just don't let me down." Cale's voice trailed, his and Ken's eyes in firm study of the landscape beyond their childhood spot.
The lights may have flickered to life in the megalopolis beyond, but the true feast for the eyes had begun to take form over the ruined city caught between the three rivers. It was the phantom image of the burg as it had been in a bygone era, a reconstruction of the past projected upon the moss-choked wreckage visible during the day. There was little detail in the projection, the shapes and general framework of the city's ghost held aloft the decayed corpse of what some twenty seven thousand years ago was a major center of commerce, trade, and human life. Spectral edifices sprung forth from dusklit moss-crusted ruin, forming pillars of translucent glass and marble hewn from the fabric of antiquity itself. One of the high-rises seemed to be an enormous glass structure tipped at each corner by a spire of glass, with minor spikes forming a perimeter around the building's roof. Another building resembled a fattened arrowhead, and yet another had the curious shape of several honeycomb hexagons pressed together, and elongated skyward into a glass-stone-striped tower. These nigh-intangible structures, seemingly hundreds of them, tapered into invisibility as they approached ground level, allowing one to view the blending of past and present with perfect clarity, despite the setting of the sun. This monument stood each and every night as homage to the passing of the old world, and to all it represented to those living in the present. This was how humanity respected the ancient dead of Old Allegheny, with silence and light.
Ken and Cale watched in mute fascination as the world of night took shape for minutes at a time, soaking up the view that had been a constant to the both of them throughout their lives.
"I won't, Cale. I promise." Ken smiled toward his friend. "I won't let you down."